Embarrassment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Other boys, and even adult men, had shown interest in her since, but she never reciprocated; the prospect of physical intimacy repelled her. I asked her to recall a time when she felt sexual pleasure in her body. She blushed. “I can’t think of one,” she said. What about arousal? The color in her cheeks deepened. “I haven’t explored any of that. I just want to get through my classes and do my work. And it’s hard to open up to people. It takes a lot of effort.” I could see that for her it did—our conversation proceeded in fits and starts; she was perhaps the least voluble of the girls I met. Then I asked, “We’ve really only discussed boys. Have you ever felt attraction to other girls?” Again, Lizzy’s face grew pink, but this time it seemed to be with pleasure. “I have this really good friend,” she admitted, and then, for the first time in our conversation, she laughed. “I kind of like her both ways, you know? It’s like I’m balanced on the edge. There’s just something . . . amazing about her.” She laughed again, her smile lighting up her face. “I can’t even put my finger on it. I’ve never met a person where I’ve felt . . . it’s just there.” Lizzy had never personally known anyone who was gay, but she’d read about homosexuality on the Internet, specifically in fan fiction: original stories penned and passed around online by devotees of popular books, TV shows, plays, movies, or pop songs. The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey famously started out as fan fiction based on Twilight. Harry Potter has eighty thousand fanfic stories on one site alone. A fan fiction story based on The Hunger Games had, at this writing, over two million views. Fan fiction may “cross over” between worlds or genres, so Harry Styles, for instance, might lose his Direction and find himself in Middle Earth. It also often includes erotic, typically same-sex, canoodling (presumably) never dreamed of by the characters’ creators: Mr. Spock gets with Captain Kirk; Holmes with Watson; Batman with the Joker; Hermione with Ginny. Women and girls are the largest creators and consumers of fan fiction. It’s hard to say why, then, the overwhelming percentage of its sexual encounters are between men. Maybe it’s because women are still underrepresented in mainstream media, and so are less compelling as characters. Or maybe writing about male bodies liberates women from the judgments about appearance, behavior, or assertiveness that typically freight their sexual exploration. Whatever the reason, fan fiction provides a form of freedom to young women: it’s generally without commercial motive or viability, a corner of the media from which, with few exceptions, no one is profiting.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “The problem, my Poor Little Rich Girl, is money, moolah—not that you’d understand,” and he ruffled my hair and smiled with fond exasperation, his eyes supplicating heaven for patience. I didn’t feel spoiled; I felt neglected. Nor did I choose to step into the role he was holding up for me. I took his hand and said, “But I do understand,” and I did. Then, out of a reflex of good manners, he cocked his head to one side speculatively. “But tell me, Baby Doll, what are you looking for in a man? What kind of sex? Start with that.” “Sex?” “Do you like being screwed—we call that being browned, and the person is a brownie queen.” When I looked embarrassed he politely turned philosophical. “That’s more European, of course. It’s your Continental gentlemen who like to brown each other. We Americans are better known for giving blow jobs. Are you a suck queen?” The pink velvet felt as rough as wool under my legs. “Can I ask a dumb question? Do you actually blow?” “You suck, silly.” Tex turned away to hide his laughter, but his skinny back started quaking and then he was sobbing into his hands the way my Texas grandmother did, a big country woman who’d weep with merriment. I smiled in mild resentment at the wonderful joke I’d become. “You suck, silly, but”—he wiped away his tears—“ooh-ee, I needed that!” Suddenly serious on a downbeat of breath: “But gently, not like a Hoover. The main thing is plenty of spit. The juicier you make it, the better they like it.” He straightened his tie fractionally and flicked a glance at the street. “Will you listen to me, teaching you, and you just jailbait, how to service peter, and me not even a chickenhawk. That’s what we call the young stuff—chicken. Honey, I’ll have to give you a demonstration one of these days; I can’t believe how naive you are.” He sang out the rhyme and gave the impression he was as pleased by his own worldliness as by my innocence. “Me, I was never naive. Your mother was a born slut. That’s the name of my fragrance.” He dipped his wrist beneath my nose: “Born Slut. Like it?” Then he edged away from his extravagance. “Shouldn’t corrupt you too soon. You know the expression, ‘Today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition’?” It took quite a bit of explaining for me to grasp the thinking behind that one. Trade turned out to mean a heterosexual man willing to let a homosexual blow him. But the idea was that a “piece of trade” didn’t remain straight (that is, desirable) for long and soon was corrupted and turned into one more useless “nelly.” “But can’t two nellies go to bed with each other?” I asked. “Miss Thing,” Tex hissed, indignant. “And do what? Bump pussies?”

• From Vox (1992)

  And anyway the things I think of go by so fast. And it’s not like all I do is come and come. Very often in the shower I remember some embarrassing moment, or some dumb thing I’ve said, and I curse it out, I say, ‘Get away from me, stinker.’ For instance, I might remember this time after I’d come back from a party when I was quite drunk, so drunk that I started to feel that I was going to be sick, but this person was in my bathroom, washing their face, brushing their teeth, humming happily away, and I moaned, I was leaning against the door, I knocked politely, I made these feeble scrabbling sounds, but this person had used the hook and eye on the inside because the latch didn’t work on that door, and he was just too pleased with the world to hear me, or thought I was joking, saying hello by knocking, and so I was sick on my own bathroom door.” “Oh, terrible.” “Sorry to be gross. Fortunately it was just the usual fruit punch. He was verv nice, he cleaned me up, he cleaned my door up, he took off my clothes and put me in a nightgown. Then of course later he drops me abruptly because I tell him to put his pen in his back pocket. But so, in the shower, the memory of that kind of thing will hit me and I swear at it to make it go away.” “I understand completely. ‘Git out of my shower! Go on!’ ” “Yeah, yeah. And I wash, too, in the shower. And I think of all the things I have to do. So the coming is just one item on the list. It’s not as if my life is wholly absorbed with it.” “Oh yeah, oh no, I know that. But—do you wash your hair before or after you come?” “Usually I get the nuts and bolts out of the way, and then I test the waters to see whether I do want to come.” “What color is your hair?” he asked. “It’s a light brown. It’s wavy. But it’s fairly short. What color is yours?” “It’s black,” he said. “So now tell me the things you have to do that you remembered last night in the shower.” “Oh, work things. Letters I should write—I should be writing them right now.” “No you should not.” “And I need to repaint the hall in my apartment. Ah, now I remember one of my sexual images from yesterday. The people before me put up this dreadful wallpaper, a kind of metallic wallpaper, with a design of a tree and a split-rail fence with a wagon wheel leaning on it, repeating over and over.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  And when they saw that the doors of the upper room were locked, they said, “He is only k relieving himself in the cool room.” 25 They waited [a very long time] until they became embarrassed and uneasy, but he still did not open the doors of the upper room. So [finally] they took the key and opened them, and behold, their master had fallen to the floor, dead. 26 Now Ehud escaped while they lingered, and he passed beyond the sculptured stones and escaped to Seirah. 27 When he had arrived, he blew a trumpet in the hill country of Ephraim; and the sons of Israel went down with him from the hill country, and he was in front of them. 28 And he said to them, “Pursue them, for the LORD has handed over your enemies the Moabites to you.” So they went down after him and seized the l fords of the Jordan opposite Moab and did not allow anyone to cross. 29 They struck down at that time about ten thousand Moabite men, all strong, courageous men; not a man escaped. 30 So Moab was subdued and humbled that day under the hand of Israel, and the land was at rest for eighty years. Shamgar Rescues from Philistines 31 After Ehud came Shamgar the son of Anath, who struck down six hundred Philistine men with an m oxgoad. He too saved Israel. Judges 4 Deborah and Barak Rescue from Canaanites 1 B UT THE Israelites again did evil in the sight of the LORD , after Ehud died. 2 So the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, who reigned in Hazor. The commander of his army was Sisera, who lived in a Harosheth-hagoyim. 3 Then the Israelites cried out to the LORD [for help], for Jabin had nine hundred iron chariots and had oppressed and tormented the sons of Israel severely for twenty years. 4 Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. 5 She used to sit [to hear and decide disputes] under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim; and the Israelites came up to her for judgment. 6 Now she sent word and summoned Barak the son of Abinoam from Kedesh-naphtali, and said to him, “Behold, the LORD , the God of Israel, has commanded, ‘Go and march to Mount Tabor, and take with you ten thousand men [of war] from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun.

• From Vox (1992)

  17 "No, in the end that seemed like too much trouble. I called from the living-room floor. First I worked myself up to a creditable state of engorgement, then I dialed the 800 number." "All right ..." "A woman answered and said something like 'Hello and welcome to Deliques Intimates, this is Clititia speak ing, how may we help you today?' She had a young high voice, exactly the sort of voice I'd imagined. Well, my fourteen-and-a-half-inch sperm-dowel instantly shrank to less than three inches. Which is the opposite of what was supposed to happen. I told her what I wanted to order, and she said the computer was down, but she would take the order 'by hand,' right? Why wasn't I enough of a leerer to come back with something insinuating? Just something basic, like 'Heh heh, honey, I hope you do take it all by hand.' But instead I just said, 'Boy oh boy, that must be a lot of trouble for you.' I gave her my address, my card number, and she said, 'I've got that, sir, now, is there anything else you would like to order this evening?' I said, 'Well, I'm torn, there is one other thing I'd like to get this person, just a pair of very simple panties, but I'm torn.' I said, 'Now you see the so-called Deliques minimes on page thirty-eight? You see those? Do you have the catalog there right in front of you?' She said she did. I said, 'Okay. I'm not sure I can tell the difference between these minimes and the so-called nadja pants on page, ah, forty-six. To the naked eye they seem identical.' She said, 'Just one moment,' and I heard her

• From Vox (1992)

  78 cleaned my door up, he took off my clothes and put me in a nightgown. Then of course later he drops me abruptly because I tell him to put his pen in his back pocket. But so, in the shower, the memory of that kind of thing will hit me and I swear at it to make it go away. " "I understand completely. 'Git out of my shower! Go on! "Yeah, yeah. And I wash, too, in the shower. And I think of all the things I have to do. So the coming is just one item on the list. It's not as if my life is wholly ab sorbed with it." "Oh yeah, oh no, / know that. But—do you wash your hair before or after you come?" "Usually I get the nuts and bolts out of the way, and then I test the waters to see whether I do want to come." "What color is your hair?" he asked. "It's a light brown. It's wavy. But it's fairly short. What color is yours?" "It's black," he said. "So now tell me the things you have to do that you remembered last night in the shower. " "Oh, work things. Letters I should write—I should be writing them right now. " "No you should not." "And I need to repaint the hall in my apartment. Ah, now I remember one of my sexual images from yester day. The people before me put up this dreadful wallpa per, a kind of metallic wallpaper, with a design of a tree

• From The Decameron (1353)

  [Footnote 228: _Mo vedi vu_, Venetian for _Or vedi tu_, now dost thou see? I have rendered it by the equivalent old English form.] The gossip, to whom it seemed a thousand years till she should be whereas she might repeat these things, took her leave of Madam Lisetta and foregathering at an entertainment with a great company of ladies, orderly recounted to them the whole story. They told it again to their husbands and other ladies, and these to yet others, and so in less than two days Venice was all full of it. Among others to whose ears the thing came were Lisetta's brothers-in-law, who, without saying aught to her, bethought themselves to find the angel in question and see if he knew how to fly, and to this end they lay several nights in wait for him. As chance would have it, some inkling of the matter[229] came to the ears of Fra Alberto, who accordingly repaired one night to the lady's house, to reprove her, but hardly had he put off his clothes ere her brothers-in-law, who had seen him come, were at the door of her chamber to open it. [Footnote 229: _i.e._ not of the trap laid for him by the lady's brothers-in-law, but of her indiscretion in discovering the secret.] Fra Alberto, hearing this and guessing what was to do, started up and having no other resource, opened a window, which gave upon the Grand Canal, and cast himself thence into the water. The canal was deep there and he could swim well, so that he did himself no hurt, but made his way to the opposite bank and hastily entering a house that stood open there, besought a poor man, whom he found within, to save his life for the love of God, telling him a tale of his own fashion, to explain how he came there at that hour and naked. The good man was moved to pity and it behoving him to go do his occasions, he put him in his own bed and bade him abide there against his return; then, locking him in, he went about his affairs. Meanwhile, the lady's brothers-in-law entered her chamber and found that the angel Gabriel had flown, leaving his wings there; whereupon, seeing themselves baffled, they gave her all manner hard words and ultimately made off to their own house with the angel's trappings, leaving her disconsolate.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We stopped at a gay coffee shop. As the youngest and quietest, I was pushed to the aisle, just beside the next table of straights, two couples on dates, slumming, I guess. I prayed for the guys in my group to calm down. But the presence of hostile, if mesmerized, heterosexual spectators made them hysterical. Morris leaned across the table and asked a “sister” huskily, “Like my lashes? Ronnie dyed them, said it’d give me definition.” “Honey, the only definition that fits you starts with Q and rhymes with—waitress, beer, please,” he shouted at an old tattooed man in white shirt-sleeves who worked the lobster shift. He looked at the waiter more closely. “Oh, you’re a waiter, not a waitress. Sorry, Dearie, I thought you were a Fish for a moment, there’s such a strong smell of Fish in here tonight, wouldn’t you say?” He was staring aggressively at the two girls beside me. “Can’t bear Fish or Fisheaters, smell like cans of old tuna.” The girls had stopped chewing their gum and were noisily sucking the ice melt in their Coke glasses. I smiled conspiratorially at them, as if to say, Aren’t these guys weird, but I noticed that they were looking back at me with open disgust. One of their dates said, “Some people are sick, real sick,” which touched off a volley of birdcalls at our table (“Are you sick? Who’s sick? You don’t look sick”) and a whole dumbshow of fever tests (palm on forehead) and tongue checks (“Say ah”). For the first time I’d crossed the line. I was no longer a visitor to the zoo, but one of the animals. My mother had just moved to downtown Chicago, to a brand-new high-rise along Lake Michigan, a place where the floors were raw concrete and had to be covered by wall-to-wall carpeting. Hers was gold, as were the sheer curtains woven with metallic thread, and the upholstered armchairs and sectional sofa. The windows were sealed shut; cooled or warmed air seeped in through vents. From the twenty-fourth floor I looked down on the older buildings and across to the newer ones. Their windows reflected the light or sank into shadow or glowed from within as the heavens turned, as a construction crane turned atop a rising tower or stood, dozing, inert against the night sky. Twenty-four stories below, over and over again a traffic signal gave its crude demonstration of spectrum analysis: red, yellow, green, and back again, a primary lesson sometimes imparted to the glossy hood of a car, sometimes wasted on the rain-slick pavement. Out of another window the winter lake at night, unheard behind glass, flickered with foam like the black-and-white television I kept on, sound off, for the wan company it provided, Sid Caesar doing a pratfall, Imogene Coca mugging.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  We were drinking beers, and the cold imperious Kay had turned bright red from drink: “Autumn Moon” became her new name. Then it was Betty’s turn to be teased. She’d made the mistake of complaining that she felt fat, though she carried no more excess weight than a cricket. Kay told us how she’d recently called an exercycle company in Detroit and, in Betty’s name, asked for a free demonstration. One afternoon while Betty was deep in her chemistry book, a big blonde in black high heels clomped-clomped up the wooden fire escape, rising into Betty’s view like a sea monster. “Are you Betty Wong?” she demanded. “Yes. ” “One minute please while I assemble the horse.” Before Betty could say ee, erh, san , which is one, two, three in Chinese, she’d been strapped, all eighty-five pounds of her, onto the weight-reducing demon. “That night,” Kay was saying, “when she asked me in tears how they’d come up with her name, I told her they go through the infirmary files and approach anyone who’s overweight.” The two other male guests were Chinese in white shirts, sober ties, and gray suits, smiling and nodding, knees together, hands to either side flat against the chair seat as though ready to spring up at any moment. Before long I’d grasped the underlying idea. The girls were supposed to have all the personality, but everyone, men included, was meant to be a “character”—Betty a cheerful but driven maniac; Kay the severe kidder, until she became “Autumn Moon”; the men polite and neat, but each harboring his secret though innocuous foible: gluttony for cherries, passion for Elvis. This jokey, satirical style was far more pointed than the mirthless Midwestern joshing I was used to, the flaccid wordplay, and the tiresome envisioning of dull improbabilities (“Wouldn’t it be really neat if the moon really was made of green cheese?”) For white Americans of that time and class and place, the only alternative to public joshing was intimate confession; we gave too little of ourselves or too much. But the Chinese students I met were guardedly friendly when alone and gleefully satirical in groups—but satirical of minor vices, none too close to the bone. We white Americans were grim psychoanalytic theorists, sure that sex (greedy sex, guilty sex) was our sole motivation, whereas the Chinese were capricious, artistic. Kay told me, “You always wear blue because you like blue eyes,” and it was perfectly true that the boys who attracted me—the boys I fell in love with, not the brunettes I lusted after—were blue-eyed blonds. Or she’d say, “You eat as fast as possible, like a badger,” or, “You always drawl out your yes when you really mean no,” or, “You rub your nose with the back of your hand like a cat.” Knowing I was being scrutinized flattered and alarmed me. Into the party burst a thin Chinese woman in her fifties, salt-and-pepper hair drawn back, black pants, black sunglasses, fingernails and lips unpainted.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I passed a can of tomatoes to Brian, who took out his pocketknife. When he punctured the tin, the contents exploded in his face, covering us with a fizzy brown juice. We tried a few more, but they exploded, too, and we walked home without having eaten anything, our shirts and faces stained with rotten tomatoes. • • • When I started sixth grade, the other kids made fun of Brian and me because we were so skinny. They called me spider legs, skeleton girl, pipe cleaner, two-by-four, bony butt, stick woman, bean pole, and giraffe, and they said I could stay dry in the rain by standing under a telephone wire. At lunchtime, when other kids unwrapped their sandwiches or bought their hot meals, Brian and I would get out books and read. Brian told everyone he had to keep his weight down because he wanted to join the wrestling team when he got to high school. I told people that I had forgotten to bring my lunch. No one believed me, so I started hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour. I’d stay in one of the stalls with the door locked and my feet propped up so that no one would recognize my shoes. When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food: apples, hard-boiled eggs, packages of peanut-butter crackers, sliced pickles, half-pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn’t like the pimentos in the cheese. I’d return to the stall and polish off my tasty finds. There was, at times, more food in the wastebasket than I could eat. The first time I found extra food—a bologna-and-cheese sandwich—I stuffed it into my purse to take home for Brian. Back in the classroom, I started worrying about how I’d explain to Brian where it came from. I was pretty sure he was rooting through the trash, too, but we never talked about it. As I sat there trying to come up with ways to justify it to Brian, I began smelling the bologna. It seemed to fill the whole room. I became terrified that the other kids could smell it, too, and that they’d turn and see my overstuffed purse, and since they all knew I never ate lunch, they’d figure out that I had pinched it from the trash. As soon as class was over, I ran to the bathroom and shoved the sandwich back in the garbage can. Maureen always had plenty to eat, since she had made friends throughout the neighborhood and would show up at their houses around dinnertime. I had no idea what Mom and Lori were doing to fend for themselves. Mom, weirdly, was getting heavier.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this. But about a month before my friend Pammy died, she said something that may have permanently changed me. We had gone shopping for a dress for me to wear that night to a nightclub with the man I was seeing at the time. Pammy was in a wheelchair, wearing her Queen Mum wig, the Easy Rider look in her eyes. I tried on a lavender minidress, which is not my usual style. I tend to wear big, baggy clothes. People used to tell me I dressed like John Goodman. Anyway, the dress fit perfectly, and I came out to model it for her. I stood there feeling very shy and self-conscious and pleased. Then I said, “Do you think it makes my hips look too big?” and she said to me slowly, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.” And I don’t think you have that kind of time either. I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don’t want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can’t fill up when you’re holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water—just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness. The emptiness destroys enough writers without the help of some friend or spouse. There are always a couple of rank beginners in my classes, and they need people to read their drafts who will rise to the occasion with respect and encouragement. Beginners always try to fit their whole lives into ten pages, and they always write blatantly about themselves, even if they make the heroine of their piece a championship racehorse with an alcoholic mother who cries a lot. But beginners are learning to play, and they need encouragement to keep their hands moving across the page. If you look around, I think you will find the person you need. Almost every writer I’ve ever known has been able to find someone who could be both a friend and a critic. You’ll know when the person is right for you and when you are right for that person. It’s not unlike finding a mate, where little by little you begin to feel that you’ve stepped into a shape that was waiting there all along. LettersWhen you don’t know what else to do, when you’re really stuck and filled with despair and self-loathing and boredom, but you can’t just leave your work alone for a while and wait, you might try telling part of your history—part of a character’s history—in the form of a letter.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  In her busy life, slide shows of trips to Mexico alternated with four-hand piano renditions of “Mister” Haydn’s symphony (“Thank heavens he wrote so many; we girls just adore him, he’s easy to count to and the bass part is good for beginners”). My father distrusted men and felt uncomfortable around them, but he came to life near a pretty girl. Annie counted as a pretty girl in spite of her skinniness and her professionally applied makeup, so in contrast with the faintest pink our local debutantes touched to their lips and then mumbled away on Kleenex. Although she could scream “Shit!” at nurses who force-fed her, she also knew how to ape the manner of the debs—or almost. Actually, Annie simpered and languished, whereas the debs were thrillingly alert to everything. I noticed the difference and I’m sure my stepmother did, but my father was sufficiently seduced to change his habits. He who usually stayed up all night and flooded the house till dawn with Brahms symphonies, who never spoke except to lecture (“You may have been wondering about the comparative advantages of long- versus short-term bonds”), now sat down at nine to eat a proper sociable meal with candlelight and conversation and even a bottle of vinegary wine he’d dusted off. “Just the tiniest thimbleful for me,” Annie said, overplaying it, I thought, since she lived on vodka. “I’ll stick with coffee,” my stepmother said reproachfully. My father called Annie “Young lady” and laughed at what she said. When he laughed, he cocked his head to one side and held his cigar away from his mouth. It gave me goosebumps to see his teeth—I suppose partly because they were so yellowed from tobacco, but mainly because his smile looked so fake. I knew geniality was a strain for him. He preferred solitude, and if he was forced to socialize he wanted to do it with employees. If he had to entertain equals, his idea of a party was a once-every-two-years blow-out for which the house would be repainted, bricks pointed, gutters cleaned, lawn rolled. Every room on every floor would be thrown open for white-glove inspection. Not a speck of dust lurked behind a single figurine, not a vase went without a bouquet, not a single blown-glass, kidney-shaped ashtray that wasn’t spotless beside its gaping “silent butler,” not a single lamp unlit, not a bathroom rack without its full rigging of guest towels. Outside, drinks were served and a band played and couples danced in a tent. For days in advance my stepmother would ask, “Do you think people will want a banana daiquiri? What if someone orders a Rob Roy?” “Let’s get all that,” my dad would say. “We don’t want to be caught short.” Just as Mormons stockpile their basements with canned goods and weapons in anticipation of Armageddon, my father’s approach to any festivity was apocalyptic.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “She covers the waterfront, poor dentureless crone, looking for seafood trade.” We stopped at a gay coffee shop. As the youngest and quietest, I was pushed to the aisle, just beside the next table of straights, two couples on dates, slumming, I guess. I prayed for the guys in my group to calm down. But the presence of hostile, if mesmerized, heterosexual spectators made them hysterical. Morris leaned across the table and asked a “sister” huskily, “Like my lashes? Ronnie dyed them, said it’d give me definition.” “Honey, the only definition that fits you starts with Q and rhymes with—waitress, beer , please,” he shouted at an old tattooed man in white shirt-sleeves who worked the lobster shift. He looked at the waiter more closely. “Oh, you’re a waiter, not a waitress. Sorry, Dearie, I thought you were a Fish for a moment, there’s such a strong smell of Fish in here tonight, wouldn’t you say?” He was staring aggressively at the two girls beside me. “Can’t bear Fish or Fisheaters, smell like cans of old tuna.” The girls had stopped chewing their gum and were noisily sucking the ice melt in their Coke glasses. I smiled conspiratorially at them, as if to say, Aren’t these guys weird, but I noticed that they were looking back at me with open disgust. One of their dates said, “Some people are sick, real sick,” which touched off a volley of birdcalls at our table (“Are you sick? Who’s sick? You don’t look sick”) and a whole dumbshow of fever tests (palm on forehead) and tongue checks (“Say ah”). For the first time I’d crossed the line. I was no longer a visitor to the zoo, but one of the animals. My mother had just moved to downtown Chicago, to a brand-new high-rise along Lake Michigan, a place where the floors were raw concrete and had to be covered by wall-to-wall carpeting. Hers was gold, as were the sheer curtains woven with metallic thread, and the upholstered armchairs and sectional sofa. The windows were sealed shut; cooled or warmed air seeped in through vents. From the twenty-fourth floor I looked down on the older buildings and across to the newer ones. Their windows reflected the light or sank into shadow or glowed from within as the heavens turned, as a construction crane turned atop a rising tower or stood, dozing, inert against the night sky. Twenty-four stories below, over and over again a traffic signal gave its crude demonstration of spectrum analysis: red, yellow, green, and back again, a primary lesson sometimes imparted to the glossy hood of a car, sometimes wasted on the rain-slick pavement. Out of another window the winter lake at night, unheard behind glass, flickered with foam like the black-and-white television I kept on, sound off, for the wan company it provided, Sid Caesar doing a pratfall, Imogene Coca mugging.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  day, a day so surgically clean and sharp that even the clouds looked like cotton soaked in alcohol. It was the ten-minute break between classes. The walkways, bordered with snow-laden bushes, were jaunty with red scarves flowing into the wind like blood the instant it’s drawn up the pipette. William was walking briskly ahead, his baggy khakis luffing around his legs. He was talking to himself, chatting up the wind. I was embarrassed, wishing my cigarette smoke would condense and turn into new friends or at least conceal me from the ones I already had. I looked back, as did William, and there was Annie, still in her slip, but on her knees in the snow, her mouth an oblong of grief, her hands raised and hyperflexed. She was crawling on her knees in the snow. I had to take charge. She should be hospitalized, but it wasn’t my place to do that; yet I could get her indoors, warm her up, dress her, try to calm her. Suddenly I saw her as my sister, not the hard tyrannical sister I actually had, but another waif. William had vanished. He’d left his door open and Annie and I returned to his room. Hours later, long after sunset, O’Reilly arrived, his nose inflamed from the way he kept clawing at the infected spot with his mini-nails, for he’d chewed them down nearly to the quick. His white hair was flying. He was wearing sandals in the snow. Nevertheless, he had an expensive silk-lined cashmere overcoat on, the sort a broker wears, but underneath he wore his embroidered cossack shirt, and a rope for a belt. He embraced Annie, whom I’d wrapped in William’s plaid bathrobe. He crushed her against his chest. The two of them stood there rocking back and forth for a long time. I didn’t know which way to look. My only feeling was embarrassment and relief, relief that I was no longer responsible. But O’Reilly said to me, “Okay, you can come over for your share too,” and he raised an arm and beckoned me to his side. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want love of this kind, love from a man who didn’t really like me though he professed he did, a humiliating love to promote “regression,” for O’Reilly subscribed to the theory that his patients must revert to infancy and grow up all over again under his benign tutelage. I preferred loneliness and pain. The wolf in me trotted away from the campfire, threw back a finely modeled head, and howled—but the sheep went to O’Reilly, because I didn’t know how to say no. Taken out of his office and spirited here, O’Reilly looked crazy and ill—puffy, disordered, breathing laboriously, reeking of bourbon. I was ashamed of him. Over the next few weeks, Annie stopped eating.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “I think she suspects her husband’s fooled around with me, but it suits her to look the other way. She knows they can count on me for loans, like for this abortion. They already have three kids. I like her and she knows it. We all go bowling together in Rogers Park when she’s not wore out.” “Then what’s the problem?” I asked briskly to cover my confusion. His novel way of looking at things was so human and unconventional. You could say he wore down the spikes of moral imperatives by holding things—dangerous explosive things—in his soft hands and turning them this way and that. At least right now, sitting beside me, he spoke of his cop, the wife, the abortion, the loans, the bowling evenings, with such domestic sighing familiarity that I took them all in the same way, his way, touched them all over in a friendly way. “The problem, my Poor Little Rich Girl, is money, moolah—not that you’d understand,” and he ruffled my hair and smiled with fond exasperation, his eyes supplicating heaven for patience. I didn’t feel spoiled; I felt neglected. Nor did I choose to step into the role he was holding up for me. I took his hand and said, “But I do understand,” and I did. Then, out of a reflex of good manners, he cocked his head to one side speculatively. “But tell me, Baby Doll, what are you looking for in a man? What kind of sex? Start with that.” “Sex?” “Do you like being screwed—we call that being browned, and the person is a brownie queen.” When I looked embarrassed he politely turned philosophical. “That’s more European, of course. It’s your Continental gentlemen who like to brown each other. We Americans are better known for giving blow jobs. Are you a suck queen?” The pink velvet felt as rough as wool under my legs. “Can I ask a dumb question? Do you actually blow?” “You suck, silly.” Tex turned away to hide his laughter, but his skinny back started quaking and then he was sobbing into his hands the way my Texas grandmother did, a big country woman who’d weep with merriment. I smiled in mild resentment at the wonderful joke I’d become. “You suck, silly, but”—he wiped away his tears—“ooh-ee, I needed that!” Suddenly serious on a downbeat of breath: “But gently, not like a Hoover. The main thing is plenty of spit. The juicier you make it, the better they like it.” He straightened his tie fractionally and flicked a glance at the street. “Will you listen to me, teaching you, and you just jailbait, how to service peter, and me not even a chickenhawk. That’s what we call the young stuff—chicken. Honey, I’ll have to give you a demonstration one of these days; I can’t believe how naive you are.” He sang out the rhyme and gave the impression he was as pleased by his own worldliness as by my innocence.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  There was a long, awkward pause, and then he said, “Well I obviously didn’t know that. Thanks for letting me know. I’m going to get back and make sure that next tour is taken care of.” Then he drove off on the four-wheeler, leaving me to deal with the embarrassment and unease of everyone who had witnessed the odd exchange. But let’s take a moment to break this situation down. I’ll be clear at the outset that I think he behaved very badly. He reacted without knowing the full situation, treated me unnecessarily cruelly, and did so in a way that was embarrassing to him, me, and the people on the tour. Even if I was truly in error in this situation, giving him a fair reason to be angry with me, there were a lot of better and more productive ways to handle it. Considering it from His Perspective This is how to diagram the incident into three stages: The Precipitant The precipitant is simple (it usually is). I wasn’t where he thought I was supposed to be and there was no one to give the next tour. This falls solidly in the goal-blocking category of provocations. He wanted his guests to have a positive experience and starting a tour late because there was no one to run it was interfering with that goal. The Pre-Anger State His pre-anger state is a little harder to judge, but I’ll take a guess that he was stressed and a little anxious. This was both an active farm and a popular spot for families to visit on weekends, especially at that time of year. It got exceedingly busy and everyone had multiple jobs to do at a given time. That high level of stress likely put him on edge. He and the others on the farm also worked really long days on the weekends during the busy season, starting very early in the morning to set up before they opened and continuing well into the evening after they closed. I imagine he was fairly exhausted as well. The Appraisal What makes this situation most interesting, though, is the appraisal. It’s valuable to imagine how he thought about this situation and the people involved.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  Sometimes people shut down like this out of embarrassment over the way they acted during the argument. They might not realize it or even do it intentionally, but contacting the person they had the fight with means facing the situation again in a way that makes them uncomfortable. They are ashamed and self- conscious and avoidance is the path of least discomfort. By cutting off contact with you, they don’t have to revisit what they said or did. Sadness, Hurt, or Depression Sometimes, the lack of contact is motivated by deep feelings of sadness or even depression. Their initial anger has given way to now feeling hurt by something you did or said. It might not even be that you did or said anything specific, but simply the fact that you disagreed (or their interpretation of what that disagreement means) has led to some emotional pain for them. Contacting you would exacerbate that hurt so they are avoiding it. Discomfort with Conflict Conflict is difficult and it makes some people very uncomfortable and even anxious. When people shut down like this or avoid contact with you, it might simply be because they are trying to avoid dealing with something that’s very hard for them. Avoidance is a natural and common reaction to fear and anxiety so the distress they feel over the conflict encourages them to avoid the relationship. Passive-Aggressive Manipulation Shutting down like this might be motivated by a passive-aggressive attempt to hurt the person they are in conflict with. They know that cutting off contact with the person will hurt them and that is their intent. It might even be a way of gaining an upper-hand in the relationship, by sending the message that they don’t need the relationship. They want the person to apologize and even beg for forgiveness.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Don’t go,” she said in a normal hostessy voice, “I promise to be more amusing,” and she actually managed a beguilingly sociable smile, but then a high moan, an Algerian widow’s moan, started in the back of her throat and grew louder. William went white. He said, “You’ve spoiled everything,” kicked free of her, and headed out. Then we were all three out in the brilliant blue-and-white day, a day so surgically clean and sharp that even the clouds looked like cotton soaked in alcohol. It was the ten-minute break between classes. The walkways, bordered with snow-laden bushes, were jaunty with red scarves flowing into the wind like blood the instant it’s drawn up the pipette. William was walking briskly ahead, his baggy khakis luffing around his legs. He was talking to himself, chatting up the wind. I was embarrassed, wishing my cigarette smoke would condense and turn into new friends or at least conceal me from the ones I already had. I looked back, as did William, and there was Annie, still in her slip, but on her knees in the snow, her mouth an oblong of grief, her hands raised and hyperflexed. She was crawling on her knees in the snow. I had to take charge. She should be hospitalized, but it wasn’t my place to do that; yet I could get her indoors, warm her up, dress her, try to calm her. Suddenly I saw her as my sister, not the hard tyrannical sister I actually had, but another waif. William had vanished. He’d left his door open and Annie and I returned to his room. Hours later, long after sunset, O’Reilly arrived, his nose inflamed from the way he kept clawing at the infected spot with his mini-nails, for he’d chewed them down nearly to the quick. His white hair was flying. He was wearing sandals in the snow. Nevertheless, he had an expensive silk-lined cashmere overcoat on, the sort a broker wears, but underneath he wore his embroidered cossack shirt, and a rope for a belt. He embraced Annie, whom I’d wrapped in William’s plaid bathrobe. He crushed her against his chest. The two of them stood there rocking back and forth for a long time. I didn’t know which way to look. My only feeling was embarrassment and relief, relief that I was no longer responsible. But O’Reilly said to me, “Okay, you can come over for your share too,” and he raised an arm and beckoned me to his side. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want love of this kind, love from a man who didn’t really like me though he professed he did, a humiliating love to promote “regression,” for O’Reilly subscribed to the theory that his patients must revert to infancy and grow up all over again under his benign tutelage. I preferred loneliness and pain.

• From How to Deal with Angry People (2023)

  A few people pointed out something really important about situations like these, though, and it’s that we don’t actually know why Anne’s friend cut off contact. A lot of the responders assumed it was because she didn’t want the relationship anymore. Others assumed it was because she was immature, manipulative, or even wanted Anne to beg for her friendship. Those are all possible, but there might be other reasons too. Remember, anger can be expressed in a lot of different ways, and a person’s expression style might not be intentional or planned. It may simply be what they are comfortable with or what they learned was the best way to express. What’s Driving It? It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as Anne’s situation above. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the person just flat-out avoids you. They don’t respond to calls, emails, and texts, and they ignore you when they see you in person. Alternatively, maybe they have just pulled back on their involvement with you, but not cut you off completely. They might still respond to you, but it’s become increasingly impersonal and your interactions are largely superficial compared to how they once were. Their anger toward you has had long-term negative effects that derailed the relationship. But the cause might not be what you think (at least, it might be more complicated than seems obvious at first). Yes, it started with a disagreement that led to anger, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the reason they have cut off contact is just that anger. When people stop communicating the way Anne’s friend did, it might be because they are mad at you, or it might be something else. Quick caveat, though, that almost all of the research on this topic has looked at “ghosting” * in romantic relationships – where one partner abruptly disappears instead of ending the relationship – so we need to extrapolate from that to other types of relationships. Here are a few different possible explanations. Embarrassment Sometimes people shut down like this out of embarrassment over the way they acted during the argument. They might not realize it or even do it intentionally, but contacting the person they had the fight with means facing the situation again in a way that makes them uncomfortable. They are ashamed and self-conscious and avoidance is the path of least discomfort. By cutting off contact with you, they don’t have to revisit what they said or did. Sadness, Hurt, or Depression Sometimes, the lack of contact is motivated by deep feelings of sadness or even depression.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “You can say that the Silenskis, that model couple, were having their Sunday fight,” said Richard; his face very white, breathing hard, staring at Cass. Eric set his drink down, carefully; he wanted to run. “I’ll just say you had to stay in on account of the kids.” “Tell Vivaldo to take it as a warning. This is what happens if you have kids, this is what happens if you get what you want.” And, for a moment, he looked utterly baffled and juvenile. Then, “Hell, I’m sorry, Eric. We never meant to submit you to such a melodramatic afternoon. Please come and see us again; we don’t do this all the time, we really don’t. I’ll walk you to the door.” “It’s all right,” Eric said. “I’m a big boy, I understand.” He walked over to Cass and they shook hands. “It was nice seeing you.” “It was good seeing you. Don’t let all that light fade.” He laughed, but these words chilled him, too. “I’ll try to keep burning,” he said. He and Richard walked to the hall door. Cass stood still in the center of the living room. Richard opened the door. “So long, kid. Can we call you—has Cass got your number?” “Yes. And I have yours.” “Okay. See you soon.” “Sure thing. So long.” “So long.” The door closed behind him. He was again in the anonymous, breathing corridor, surrounded by locked doors. He found his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, thinking of the millions of disputes being waged behind locked doors. He rang for the elevator. It arrived, driven by another, older man who was eating a sandwich; he was dumped into the streets again. The long block on which Cass and Richard lived was quiet and empty now, waiting for the night. He hailed a cab on the Avenue and was whirled downtown. His destination was a bar on the eastern end of the Village, which had, until recently, been merely another neighborhood bar. But now it specialized in jazz, and functioned sometimes as a showcase for younger but not entirely untried or unknown talents or personalities. The current attraction was advertised in the small window by a handprinted, cardboard poster; he recognized the name of a drummer he and Rufus had known years ago, who would not remember him; in the window, too, were excerpts from newspaper columns and magazines, extolling the unorthodox virtues of the place. The unorthodox, therefore, filled the room, which was very small, low-ceilinged, with a bar on one side and tables and chairs on the other. At the far end of the bar, the room widened, making space for more tables and chairs, and a very narrow corridor led to the rest rooms and the kitchen; and in this widened space, catty-corner to the room, stood a small, cruelly steep bandstand.