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.

Page 52 of 79 · 20 per page

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She looked me over.‘You must take your drawers off,’ she said quietly - the door was shut fast, but Walter was audibly pacing the little parlour beyond it - ‘or else they’ll bunch, beneath the trousers.’I blushed, then slid the drawers down my thighs and kicked them off, so that I stood clad only in the shirt and a pair of stockings, gartered at the knee. I had once, as a girl, worn a suit of my brother’s to a masquerade at a party. That, however, had been many years before; it was quite different, now, to pull Kitty’s handsome trousers up my naked hips, and button them over that delicate place that Kitty herself had so recently set smarting. I took a step, and blushed still harder. I felt as though I had never had legs before - or, rather, that I had never known, quite, what it really felt like to have two legs, joined at the top.I reached for Kitty, and pulled her to me. ‘I wish Walter were not waiting for us,’ I whispered - though, in truth, there was something rather thrilling about embracing her, in such a costume, with Walter so near and so unknowing.That thought - and the soundless kiss which followed it - made the trousers feel still stranger. When Kitty stepped away to see to her own suit, I looked at her a little wonderingly. I said, ‘How can you dress like this, before a hall of strangers, every night, and not feel queer?’She fastened the clip of her braces, and shrugged. ‘I have worn sillier costumes.’‘I didn’t mean that it was silly. I meant - well, if I were to be beside you, in these’ - I took another couple of steps - ‘oh Kitty, I don’t think I should be able to keep from kissing you!’She put a finger to her lips; then pushed at the fringe of her hair. She said, ‘You will have to get used to it, for Walter’s plan to work. Otherwise - well, what a show that would be!’I laughed; but the words Walter’s plan had made my stomach lurch in sudden panic, and the laughter sounded rather hollow. I gazed down at my own two legs. The trousers, after all, were far too short for me, and showed my stockings at the ankle. I said, ‘It won’t do, will it, Kitty? He won’t really think that it will do - will he?’ He did. ‘Oh yes!’ he cried when we emerged at last together, all dressed up. ‘Oh yes, but what a team you make!’ He was more excited than I had ever seen him.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  “There was an awareness. I think we all knew,” said former porn actress turned iconic erotica producer Candida Royalle. “Wholesalers and retailers needed product. And so we were aware that it was our industry that was really fostering the development and expansion of the VCR.” Royalle performed in about twenty-five porn movies in the 1970s, before going on to create her own company, Femme Productions. She was paying particular attention to the advances in video technology, as they helped her carve out a niche in the adult market: erotic movies aimed at women and couples. The porn industry at the time doubted the potential for such films, yet today many producers and distributors cite “women and couples” as the demographic with the biggest growth potential. In a phone conversation, Royalle recounted to me how she realized that with this new technology, erotica no longer had to follow the same old patterns. “I had grown up in art schools. Nude modelling was not a big deal, even though I was actually very bashful, which one wouldn’t expect in this industry. I went looking for nude modelling and the agent asked me if I would consider being in an adult movie. I guess he probably called it a porno movie. I was horrified and insulted and I stormed out. But my boyfriend at the time, who was a musician, said, ‘Well gee, interesting. I think I’ll try it.’ He got a lead role in a very high-end Anthony Spinelli film called Cry for Cindy. “I went and watched what it was like and I was really surprised by the level of professionalism and the respect shown on the set. It wasn’t some little sleazy home job. It was a pretty decent shoot at the time when they used to spend money on them. So I was impressed. I was very much for free love and experimental sexuality and I thought, ‘Well you know this isn’t so bad. I don’t think sex is dirty or bad. The money is great. Why not? I’m going to try it.’ And that’s what I did. “But over time I became put off because I felt the majority of the films really were not creative. They weren’t sensual. They weren’t lovely. They didn’t reflect female desires at all or what sex really could be between people. And I began to get uncomfortable with being part of it.” The pornography-driven demand for new content opened up the possibility of greater variety in the product. Both with pornography and mainstream, media markets were fragmenting, giving people like Royalle a chance to find a niche and scratch it. The stag films, peeps and porn features that had preceded video all relied on an almost exclusively male market. New technology changed all that.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “I think she’s coming round now.” The voice was male and familiar. Slowly, as from a deep well, the memories came back to me. The lecture . . . John Jones . . . “Keep back and let her get some air.” To my right I could see a large scuffed brogue and an expanse of worn corduroy trouser. I knew that in a few moments I would feel embarrassed, but right now the world had shattered into separate, meaningless shapes, none of which seemed related to anything else. “Look, I think we’d better call it a day,” Mr. Jones was saying. I tried to raise my head, but it was pushed firmly down again. “I don’t think any of us feel like carrying on with the lecture. Does anybody know who this poor lady is?” “Yes, I do—she’s at my college. I can take her home. Karen, it’s Jane.” I peered up at her and tried to smile. She looked strange from this unfamiliar angle and I realized that she was alarmed. Gradually I began to be aware of the disruption I had caused. “I am . . . so sorry,” I muttered, as I always did after one of these attacks. “So sorry.” “For heaven’s sake.” Mr. Jones sounded genuinely astonished, and when I looked round at him, his large, kind face was creased with concern. “You didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just sad for you.” That was a bit of a change. I blinked uncertainly. “You still don’t look too good to me. How are you feeling? That was quite a long faint. Better get her to a doctor?” that last, clearly, was addressed to Jane. “Definitely.” Jane sounded uncharacteristically subdued. “Do you think we could phone for a taxi?” I closed my eyes, mentally shaking my head. Sympathy, doctors, taxis—I could not take it all in. I must have tried to protest feebly, but nobody took any notice and I lay there gratefully, thankful that it was over, but feeling hugely tired. As we drove up the Banbury Road toward St. Anne’s and climbed the short flight of stairs to my room in the Gatehouse, Jane kept up a determined flow of chatter. The fright that I had seen in her eyes had gone, and she was now recasting the whole event in her usual ebullient manner. “I always longed to faint at school,” she said cheerfully as she opened the large window overlooking the college lawn. We could see students hurrying past in ones and twos, going about the business of a normal Tuesday morning. “I always thought it would be a sign of such sensitivity and refinement. I tried everything. Put blotting paper in my shoes, held my breath. Nothing happened. Not a hope. I’m just too horribly healthy.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Xavier’s classmate Emmett, on the other hand, who had been at the school since kindergarten (and would, by coincidence, end up at the same college as Xavier), was happy to trade on his cachet among white kids—in his own neighborhood, he never would have been seen as cool. Gangly, with heavy-lidded eyes, his hair styled in short twists, he often referred to himself as fundamentally “lazy”: too lazy to work hard at school, too lazy to make the first move in a hookup, and certainly too lazy to transform a hookup into something more substantial. “Practically everything is a joke to me,” Emmett said. “It’s just how I was raised. I suppress all my emotions and play everything off as funny. Some girls try to cuff me or be girlfriend and boyfriend, but”—he held his palms up—“I’m like, ‘No! No!’ And usually, girls know what to expect if they’re hooking up with me.” At seventeen, he had never gone on a real date (“Maybe once or twice something where we say we’re going to go get lunch and then we completely disregard that and go back to her crib”). Instead, girls from his school would hit him up on Snapchat, disconnected from the messiness and potential rejection of face-to-face contact. They’d talk and flirt, and by the time the weekend rolled around, the two of them—and everyone else in their social circles—knew it was on. Emmett had been with “a lot” of girls that way, he said, mainly at parties, after which he’d go back to hanging out with his friends, a small group of black guys who also attended his school. Most of the girls he’d hooked up with were white, partly because that’s who was in his community, but also because, that way, he was less likely to get attached. Usually, he was stoned at the time. “Making out with someone when you’re high is not enjoyable because you can’t really move your mouth,” he acknowledged. “But getting a blow job when you’re high, that’s like the best thing ever. So that’s also part of it—if you’re already set up with someone on Snapchat or whatever, you can skip all that other stuff.” When I asked whether he ever performed oral sex on a partner in return, Emmett actually gagged. “I guess it could be kind of disrespectful that I don’t, but, I mean, it’s, like, a lot to ask.” He paused, ducking his head. “No, no, it’s not a lot to ask. And I think if you’re in a relationship, I think definitely. But, like at a party . . . I also had a bad experience the first time I went ‘down there.’ It was when I was a sophomore, and afterward I threw up. It was just terrible.” At any rate, if he liked the girl, maybe he’d follow a hookup with a little Snap streak, but often he never checked in again and neither did they.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  The deciding moment really came when I spent the night with a woman, an office manager, who, I think anyway, had sex with me sooner than she wanted to simply to distract me from noticing the fact that her contacts were bothering her. It was very late, but I think she wanted to talk for a while longer, and yet (this is my theory) she hurried to the sex because the extreme intimacy, to her way of thinking, of appearing before me in her glasses was only possible after the less extreme intimacy of fucking me. Several times as we talked I was on the point of saying, since her eyes did look quite unhappily pink, “You want to take out your contacts? I’ll take out mine.” But I didn’t, because I thought it might have a condescending sort of “I know everything about you, baby, your bloodshot eyes give you away” quality. Probably I should have. A few days after that, though, I resumed wearing my glasses to work. My error rate dropped right back down. I was instantly happier. In particular, I recognized the crucial importance of hinges to my pleasure in life. When I open my glasses in the morning before taking a shower and going to work, I am like an excited tourist who has just risen from his hotel bed on the first day of a vacation: I’ve just flung open a set of double French doors leading out onto a sunlit balcony with a view of the entire whatever—shipping corridor, bay, valley, parking lot. (How can people not like views over motel parking lots in the early morning? The new subtler car colors, the blue-greens and warmer grays, and the sense that all those drivers are leveled in the democracy of sleep and that the glass and hoods out there are cold and even dewy, make for one of the more inspiring visions that life can offer before nine o’clock.) Or maybe French-door-hinges are not entirely it. Maybe I think that the hinges of my glasses are a woman’s hip-sockets: her long graceful legs open and straddle my head all day. I asked Rhody once whether she liked the tickling of my glasses-frames on the inside of her thighs. She said, “Usually your glasses are off by then, aren’t they?” I admitted that was true. She said she didn’t like it when I wore my glasses because she wanted my sense of her open vadge to be more Sisley than Richard Estes. “But I do sometimes like feeling your ears high on my thighs,” she conceded. “And if I clamp your ears hard with my thighs I can make more noise without feeling I’m getting out of hand.” Rhody was a good, good person, and I probably should not have tried to allude even obliquely to my Fold experiences to her, since she found what little I told her of Fermation repellent; her knowledge of it contributed to our breakup.

• From Wild (2012)

  I could see that the road to Three Lakes had only recently become free of snow. Great gashes had split open in places across it and streams of melting snow flowed in wide gaping gullies along its sides. I followed it up beneath a dense canopy of trees without seeing anyone. Midafternoon, I felt a familiar tug inside me. I was getting my period, I realized. My first on the trail. I’d almost forgotten it could come. The new way I’d been aware of my body since beginning my hike had blunted the old ways. No longer was I concerned about the delicate intricacies of whether I felt infinitesimally fatter or thinner than I had the day before. There was no such thing as a bad hair day. The smallest inner reverberations were obliterated by the frank pain I always felt in the form of my aching feet or the muscles of my shoulders and upper back that knotted and burned so hard and hot that I had to pause several times an hour to do a series of moves that would offer a moment of relief. I took off my pack, dug through my first aid kit, and found the jagged hunk of natural sponge I’d put in a small ziplock bag before my trip began. I’d used it only a few times experimentally before I took it on the PCT. Back in Minneapolis, the sponge had seemed like a sensible way to deal with my period given my circumstances on the trail, but now that I held it, I was less than sure. I attempted to wash my hands with water from my bottle, dousing the sponge as I did so, and then squeezed it out, pulled down my shorts, squatted on the road, and pushed the sponge into my vagina as far as I could, wedging it against my cervix. As I pulled up my shorts, I heard the sound of an engine approaching, and a moment later a red pickup truck with an extended cab and oversized tires rounded a bend. The driver hit the brakes when he saw me, startled at the sight. I was startled too, and deeply grateful that I wasn’t still squatting and half naked with my hand jammed into my crotch. I waved nervously as the truck pulled up beside me. “Howdy,” a man said, and reached through his open window. I took his hand and shook it, conscious of where mine had just been. There were two other men in the truck with him—one in the front and another in the back seat with two boys. The men looked to be in their thirties, the boys about eight. “You headed up to Three Lakes?” the man asked. “Yeah.” He was handsome and clean-cut and white, like the man beside him and the boys in the back. The other man was Latino and long-haired, a hard round belly rising before him.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I looked absurd in the fashions of the day: the wide, swirling skirts, pert ponytails, and back-combed beehives. In 1961, the year before I entered the convent, my parents tried to entice me from my intended course by talking me into joining a young people’s group at the Birmingham Catholic Ball. It was a ghastly affair. Encased in a stiff brocaded dress with a skirt that stuck out aggressively, my feet squeezed into an agonizing pair of pink satin shoes with long pointed toes, I was hobbled. On the few occasions when I was invited to dance, and grimly quickstepped, waltzed, and fox-trotted with a herd of others, I felt like a prisoner going round and round the exercise yard. At one point my partner and I left the main room and for ten blissful minutes managed to escape. We weren’t doing anything unlawful; we weren’t smoking, drinking alcohol, or kissing—just sitting on the stairs and talking—but a friend of my mother’s pounced on me and frog-marched me back into the ballroom. I felt like a Victorian girl who had been compromised in some way. There had to be more to life than this. Of course, there were alternatives to the convent. Young girls were told that, within reason, they could do anything they wanted: they could study, travel, and have a career—until they got married. But even though I shrank from the appalling prospect of being an old maid, marriage did not look particularly appealing either, since most of the women I knew spent their lives ceaselessly cleaning, baking, and washing, chores that I detest to this day. When my father had business problems, my mother took a job and started an interesting career in the medical school of Birmingham University. I could see how she blossomed in this new environment, but the cooking and washing up still had to be done. By contrast, the nuns seemed remarkably unencumbered. They had no men to tell them what to do, ran their own lives, and were, presumably, engaged in the higher things of life. I wanted that radical freedom. I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in rock ’n’ roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent school girl, I was protected from the street culture and lived in a separate world from most of my fellow countrymen and -women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid lip service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I can remember none of the questions I was asked, but recall vividly the lurid set and my stunned horror at the unfolding nightmare. During the interval a scantily clad band played a song called “I Wanna Spend the Night with You!” Then Oliver Reed joined us, but he was so drunk by this time that he had to be almost carried onto the stage by the fourth guest, a hefty woman whose Mills and Boon best-sellers had made her a multimillionaire. Once settled in his chair, Reed was uncontrollable, and embarked on a fifteen-minute rant, which lasted until the show mercifully came to an end. The critics panned it, of course, and the BBC was forced to cancel the series after the second sin, which, I think, was covetousness. I particularly remember the brilliantly funny piece written by Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian, because her only kind word was for me: “a relatively sane ex-nun.” She noted her bewilderment that all the members of the studio audience had Scottish accents. Did the BBC think that lust was a peculiarly Scottish vice? If so, that would put an entirely new slant on the song “The Campbells Are Coming.” She concluded that she had always maintained that the sins of any show should be forgiven if it was live. But that was before she had seen Sin on Saturday. The experience convinced me that I could not make a career out of being a former nun—even a relatively sane one. I would have to find something else to write about. But what? After its demise, Sin on Saturday achieved a posthumous fame. Periodically, during a holiday season, it appears regularly in programs that show clips of the worst television programs ever made. And there I am, in a green silk dress, twenty years younger, walking onto the set behind Linda, with no means of knowing what was about to happen. A fortnight later, I was sitting in my flat desultorily reading Little Dorrit. My former colleagues had all returned to school, and though I did not really wish to join them, it was hard to find anything truly constructive to do. My current project was to reread the works of Charles Dickens, but it was difficult to work up any enthusiasm for the task. I still had no inkling of how I was going to spend the rest of my life, and knew that sooner or later I would have to find some kind of job. And then, as if on cue, the telephone rang, and yet again my life took a new turn. It was John Ranelagh, the commissioning editor for religion at Channel 4. He had seen my pilot film, The Body of Christ, and loved it.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  A few weeks earlier, I had been invited by the BBC to take part in a new talk show, which would deal in depth with the seven deadly sins. It was billed to me as a serious enterprise, and my publishers were excited by the idea. It would go out live in a prime slot on Saturday evening, and would give me a chance to show that I could talk about other things than being a nun. I would contribute to the very first program, which would focus on lust—presumably because my years of chastity gave me an interesting angle. But already Sin on Saturday was turning out to be very different from anything that we had expected. The cheery Scottish gentleman opposite me was the agent of many of the strippers in the room. He had asked me what my job was and why I was taking part in the program, and I had replied that I had been a nun and was currently unemployed. His eyes brightened; he had leaned across the table in his enthusiasm and asked me the question that I now wanted him to repeat. “Would ye be interested in doing an act called ‘The Stripping Nun’? “No!” he continued vehemently, as I gazed at him, flabbergasted. “I’m quite serious—I think it would go down wonderfully! You’d be great!” I replied that it was not quite the career that I had in mind.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  So I would go down the road from Adele’s motel and buy fourteen men’s magazines at a newsstand, and I would walk back and arrange them on one of the beds in her room, room 23, covering its objectionable pink and brown coverlet with a superior quilt of plush womanflesh. I would get a washcloth from the bathroom and drape it on the edge of the bed, as if to catch the scumsquibs that were imminent from my bloated factotum. I would make sure that I had stroked past the point of caring at the moment I adjusted my glasses. Immediately thereafter, I would hear Adele’s revitalized key in the lock. When, on the threshold of her own motel room, she caught sight of me inside, looking up at her with surprise, she would say, “Oh, sorry!” and close the door. It would not be too difficult for me to act flustered and embarrassed. I would genuinely be flustered and embarrassed. “I’m terribly sorry—one moment!” I would call loudly. “Sorry, sorry!” I would hurry outside, doing up my belt. She would already be on her way back to the office. “It’s my mistake,” I would say. “I think I was given the wrong key.” “No problem,” Adele would say crisply. “I’ll get a different room.” She wouldn’t want to meet my eye. “What I mean is,” I would hastily explain, “I think I’m in your room. The man said room twenty-four, but then when I looked at the key he gave me it said twenty-three, so I just assumed that it was the room I was meant to have. Obviously I was very wrong. But if you hang on thirty seconds I’ll be totally out of your room.” Adele would say, “That’s all right—you’re obviously already all settled in there.” She would make a little laugh. But I would be full of sincerity. “You mean the magazines? I can pile those up in half a second, really. I think that you should have the room you were meant to have, since it’s my mistake. I haven’t even used the bathroom. Well, no—I did use it.” I would put my hand on my chest. “This is mortifying.” Adele would reassure me. “Don’t worry about it, honestly. I’ll get a different room. You stay in that room, and I’ll get a different one. It’s fine.” But I wouldn’t want that to happen, of course. I would hand her my key to her room, the one I borrowed from the office while in the Fold. “Here’s the key to your room,” I would say. You get your suitcase or whatever, and I’ll get the right key for my room, and then I’ll be out of your room in two seconds. Okay?”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As I pushed back the heavy glass door, I was confronted with a very different scene from the one I had just been imagining. The noise alone was an assault, as the unrestrained, babbling roar of four hundred students slapped me in the face. To encourage constant prayer and recollection, our rule had stipulated that we refrain from speech all day; talking was permitted only for an hour after lunch and after dinner, when the community gathered for sewing and general recreation. We were trained to walk quietly, to open and close doors as silently as possible, to laugh in a restrained trill, and if speech was unavoidable in the course of our duties, to speak only “a few words in a low voice.” Lent was an especially silent time. But there was no Lenten atmosphere in college tonight. Students hailed one another noisily across the room, yelled greetings to friends, and argued vigorously, with wild, exaggerated gestures. Instead of the monochrome convent scene— black-and-white habits, muffled, apologetic clinking of cutlery, and the calm, expressionless voice of the reader—there was a riot of color, bursts of exuberant laughter, and shouts of protest. But whether I liked it or not, this was my world now. I am not quite sure of the reason for what happened next. It may have been that part of my mind was absent, still grappling with my essay, or that I was disoriented by the contrast between the convent scene I had been envisaging and the cheerful profanity of the spectacle in front of me. But instead of bowing briefly to the principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor. This was the scene with which I opened Beginning the World, my first attempt to tell the story of my return to secular life. I realize that it presents me in a ridiculous and undignified light, but it still seems a good place to start, because it was a stark illustration of my plight. Outwardly I probably looked like any other student in the late 1960s, but I continued to behave like a nun. Unless I exerted constant vigilance, my mind, heart, and body betrayed me. Without giving it a second’s thought, I had instinctively knelt in the customary attitude of contrition and abasement. We always kissed the floor when we entered a room late and disturbed a community duty. This had seemed strange at first, but after a few weeks it had become second nature. Yet a quick glance at the girls seated at the tables next to the door, who were staring at me incredulously, reminded me that what was normal behavior in the convent was little short of deranged out here.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  If a pall of gloom had hung over my meeting with Dr. Piet, Jane treated the whole sorry affair as a tremendous adventure. She strode into the ward as if into a party, carrying a suitcase filled with my errant sponge bag, some clothes, a bunch of grapes, and a pile of novels. I glanced at the covers: John Updike, Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, and Iris Murdoch. They looked a little daunting. Jane waved aside my embarrassed thanks and apologies. “For God’s sake! It was a marvelous piece of luck for me! I feel enormously noble and resourceful, though it was really just a question of dialing nine-nine-nine and dealing with the Harts.” I winced. “How did they take it?” “They looked pretty aghast, I must say. Jenifer hopped from one leg to another like an anguished stork, and Herbert was put right off his supper. Pity, really. He’d gone to quite a lot of trouble with it.” She explained that she had made an impromptu visit, as she often did when at a loose end. Seeing that my light was on, she had let herself in through the kitchen door, as usual, to find Herbert concocting one of his elaborate late-night snacks in the dim light of the unshaded forty-watt bulb. He had greeted Jane with enthusiasm, knowing that she was a good cook, and asked her advice. Should he add a touch more oregano? They had chatted amicably for a few minutes, and then Jane had run up to my room, tapped on the door, and getting no answer, had peered in to see me lying unconscious on my bed. Jacob fortunately had slept through the whole business. “I’m afraid I didn’t do anything heroic, like trying to make you vomit,” Jane went on. “I tell myself that I was afraid of doing more harm than good, but really I was just too squeamish. I must say”— she grinned—“that it’s never dull knowing you.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Slowly, as from a deep well, the memories came back to me. The lecture . . . John Jones . . . “Keep back and let her get some air.” To my right I could see a large scuffed brogue and an expanse of worn corduroy trouser. I knew that in a few moments I would feel embarrassed, but right now the world had shattered into separate, meaningless shapes, none of which seemed related to anything else. “Look, I think we’d better call it a day,” Mr. Jones was saying. I tried to raise my head, but it was pushed firmly down again. “I don’t think any of us feel like carrying on with the lecture. Does anybody know who this poor lady is?” “Yes, I do—she’s at my college. I can take her home. Karen, it’s Jane.” I peered up at her and tried to smile. She looked strange from this unfamiliar angle and I realized that she was alarmed. Gradually I began to be aware of the disruption I had caused. “I am . . . so sorry,” I muttered, as I always did after one of these attacks. “So sorry.” “For heaven’s sake.” Mr. Jones sounded genuinely astonished, and when I looked round at him, his large, kind face was creased with concern. “You didn’t do it on purpose. We’re just sad for you.” That was a bit of a change. I blinked uncertainly. “You still don’t look too good to me. How are you feeling? That was quite a long faint. Better get her to a doctor?” that last, clearly, was addressed to Jane. “Definitely.” Jane sounded uncharacteristically subdued. “Do you think we could phone for a taxi?” I closed my eyes, mentally shaking my head. Sympathy, doctors, taxis—I could not take it all in. I must have tried to protest feebly, but nobody took any notice and I lay there gratefully, thankful that it was over, but feeling hugely tired. As we drove up the Banbury Road toward St. Anne’s and climbed the short flight of stairs to my room in the Gatehouse, Jane kept up a determined flow of chatter. The fright that I had seen in her eyes had gone, and she was now recasting the whole event in her usual ebullient manner. “I always longed to faint at school,” she said cheerfully as she opened the large window overlooking the college lawn. We could see students hurrying past in ones and twos, going about the business of a normal Tuesday morning. “I always thought it would be a sign of such sensitivity and refinement. I tried everything. Put blotting paper in my shoes, held my breath. Nothing happened.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Quite the lady, ain’t she, Pa?’ His cheek grew redder than ever.Father straightened, and looked me over, then gave a wide smile that seemed to pull, somewhat, at the corners of his eyes.‘Very smart,’ he said. ‘Your mother won’t know you, hardly.’I did indeed, I suppose, look a little dressy, but I had not thought about it until that moment. All my clothes were good ones, these days, for I had long ago got rid of those girlish hand-me-downs with which I’d first left home. I had only wanted, that morning, to look nice. Now I felt self-conscious.The self-consciousness did not diminish as I walked, on Father’s arm, the little distance to our oyster-shop. The house, I thought, was shabbier than ever. The weather-boards above the shop showed more wood, now, than blue paint; and the sign - Astley’s Oysters, the Best in Kent - hung on one hinge, and was cracked where the rainwater had soaked it. The stairs we climbed were dark and narrow, the room into which I finally emerged smaller and more cramped than I could have believed possible. Worst of all the street, the stairs, the room, the people in it, all reeked of fish! It was a stink that was as familiar to me as the scent of my own armpit; but I was startled, now, to think that I had ever lived in it and thought it ordinary.My surprise, I hope, was lost in the general bustle of my arrival. I had expected Mother and Alice to be waiting for me; they were - but so were half-a-dozen other people, each one of whom exclaimed when I appeared, and stepped forward (except for Alice) to embrace me. I had to smile and submit to being squeezed and patted until I grew quite breathless. Rhoda - still my brother’s sweetheart - was there, looking perter than ever; Aunty Ro, too, had come along to welcome me back, together with her son, my cousin George, and her daughter, Liza, and Liza’s baby - except that the baby was not a baby at all now, but a little boy in frills. Liza, I saw, was large with child again; I had been told this in a letter, I believe, but had forgotten it.I took off my hat once all the welcomes had been said, and my heavy coat with it. Mother looked me up and down. She said, ‘My goodness, Nance, how tall and fine you look! I do believe you’re taller, almost, than your Father.’ I did feel tall in that tiny, overcrowded room: but I could hardly, I thought, have really grown. It was just that I was standing rather straighter. I gazed around - a little proud, despite my awkwardness - and found a seat, and tea was brought.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But I was not allowed to remain on the sidelines. The college had appointed a new dean of discipline. For years Dorothy Bednarowska, my literature tutor, whose approach had been liberal and relaxed, had filled this post. The new dean was Emily Franklin, a large, bovine woman who, I learned with some astonishment, was only a few years older than I. Her pupils told me that she was a fine teacher, if a trifle dull. But despite her relative youth, Miss Franklin had no time for student protest and had decreed not only that there would be no change in the current gate hours, but that the gates would be locked an hour earlier. Furthermore, she had increased the fines for offenders, and as her pièce de résistance, a barbed-wire hedge had appeared, without warning, underneath the favorite climbing-in spot. The college was in an uproar. “Of course, this is quite absurd,” Mrs. Bednarowska said, drawing me aside one day in the corridor. “The silly woman is out of her mind. The virgin vote will be delighted, but it won’t wash.” “The virgin vote?” I asked. “Oh—the conservative wing on the college governing body,” Mrs. Bednarowska replied. “You know who they are! They’re not all virgins, of course, but they might as well be. Anyway, the point is, my dear, what is the Common Room going to do about this?” “We’re sending a deputation to the dean, asking her to reconsider,” I said, a little dazed by my tutor’s assumption that I would take the liberal line. Mrs. Bednarowska gave her characteristic yelp of laughter. “ That won’t work—though it’s very correct, of course,” she opined as she strode off with her curiously splay-footed gait to her rooms. What I had not realized was that, as secretary, I was expected to go with the president of the JCR to put our views to Miss Franklin. Maureen Mackintosh, a clever girl with masses of long red hair, was one of the most politically radical students in college, and I found her distinctly alarming. I always expected her to treat me with disdain, and dreaded lest she strike up a conversation about Vietnam and Cambodia, in which I would certainly not be able to hold my own. And what on earth was an ex-nun doing campaigning for students to spend illicit nights together? To my relief, however, Maureen seemed untroubled by my presence as we set off for Miss Franklin’s apartment. We sat together, side by side, on a sofa in the dean’s room, drinking tiny glasses of sherry in an atmosphere that was distinctly chilly, while the champion of the virgin vote sat with her back to the window, her cat, Smokey, purring noisily on her knee. “No more concessions!” she replied when we formally requested that the new measures be withdrawn and the wire fence removed. She repeated the phrase like a mantra at intervals during the ensuing discussion, almost chanting it in a strangely expressionless falsetto. “No more concessions!”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But life in London was very different. There I often passed churches that had been converted into warehouses, theaters, or art galleries. I even went to a dinner party in a flat that was cunningly constructed in the shell of a massive Victorian church: we sat under its rose window. None of the guests felt in the least uncomfortable about this sacred ambience; the ecclesiastical touches had simply been an amusing talking point. They had found it hilarious to ring the front-door bell and enter what had once been the church porch. Religion, it appeared, was quite risible. I noticed that I myself was reducing my convent past to a series of entertaining anecdotes. Hostesses often introduced me as an ex-nun, as though pulling a rabbit out of a hat: Look what I’ve got! Top that! My fellow guests might look faintly scandalized—“Do people truly do that anymore!”—or would ply me with endless questions about nuns’ underwear or convent hygiene. It did not usually occur to them that the religious life could be anything other than a joke. “You really should write all this up, Karen,” they would say. “It’s such a hoot!” I was uncomfortable about this but did not know what to do. Rebecca told me that she tried to hide the fact that she had been a nun, and would ask her hostesses not to mention it. But that didn’t seem right either. I didn’t want to make those years a dark secret. After all, I hadn’t robbed a bank or been in prison. But neither did I want to get unduly heavy and ruin the party. Despite all my negative feelings about religion, I still felt protective about the nuns, and still felt sorrow and regret for a lost ideal. I still mourned the girl I had been, with her sense of high adventure, the hope and the crazy optimism that had led me into the religious life. None of this was suitable conversational fodder for a dinner party. So it was really easier to fob my guests off with a couple of funny stories and leave it at that. I realized that I scarcely knew anybody who was religious these days. There were one or two churchgoers at college, but they were not soul mates and I didn’t see much of them. It was odd to think how completely my life had changed. Just five years earlier I had been enveloped in a monastic atmosphere, and now I had swung a full 180 degrees and was living in a wholly secular environment.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I would contribute to the very first program, which would focus on lust—presumably because my years of chastity gave me an interesting angle. But already Sin on Saturday was turning out to be very different from anything that we had expected. The cheery Scottish gentleman opposite me was the agent of many of the strippers in the room. He had asked me what my job was and why I was taking part in the program, and I had replied that I had been a nun and was currently unemployed. His eyes brightened; he had leaned across the table in his enthusiasm and asked me the question that I now wanted him to repeat. “Would ye be interested in doing an act called ‘The Stripping Nun’? “No!” he continued vehemently, as I gazed at him, flabbergasted. “I’m quite serious—I think it would go down wonderfully! You’d be great!” I replied that it was not quite the career that I had in mind. The program was a catastrophe. I was on first with Linda Lovelace, who explained that she had done what she did in Deep Throat only because her then lover had put a revolver to her head and threatened to pull the trigger. I can remember none of the questions I was asked, but recall vividly the lurid set and my stunned horror at the unfolding nightmare. During the interval a scantily clad band played a song called “I Wanna Spend the Night with You!” Then Oliver Reed joined us, but he was so drunk by this time that he had to be almost carried onto the stage by the fourth guest, a hefty woman whose Mills and Boon best-sellers had made her a multimillionaire. Once settled in his chair, Reed was uncontrollable, and embarked on a fifteen-minute rant, which lasted until the show mercifully came to an end. The critics panned it, of course, and the BBC was forced to cancel the series after the second sin, which, I think, was covetousness. I particularly remember the brilliantly funny piece written by Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian, because her only kind word was for me: “a relatively sane ex-nun.” She noted her bewilderment that all the members of the studio audience had Scottish accents. Did the BBC think that lust was a peculiarly Scottish vice? If so, that would put an entirely new slant on the song “The Campbells Are Coming.” She concluded that she had always maintained that the sins of any show should be forgiven if it was live. But that was before she had seen Sin on Saturday. The experience convinced me that I could not make a career out of being a former nun—even a relatively sane one. I would have to find something else to write about. But what? After its demise, Sin on Saturday achieved a posthumous fame.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I am not quite sure of the reason for what happened next. It may have been that part of my mind was absent, still grappling with my essay, or that I was disoriented by the contrast between the convent scene I had been envisaging and the cheerful profanity of the spectacle in front of me. But instead of bowing briefly to the principal in mute apology for my lateness, as college etiquette demanded, I found to my horror that I had knelt down and kissed the floor. This was the scene with which I opened Beginning the World, my first attempt to tell the story of my return to secular life. I realize that it presents me in a ridiculous and undignified light, but it still seems a good place to start, because it was a stark illustration of my plight. Outwardly I probably looked like any other student in the late 1960s, but I continued to behave like a nun. Unless I exerted constant vigilance, my mind, heart, and body betrayed me. Without giving it a second’s thought, I had instinctively knelt in the customary attitude of contrition and abasement. We always kissed the floor when we entered a room late and disturbed a community duty. This had seemed strange at first, but after a few weeks it had become second nature. Yet a quick glance at the girls seated at the tables next to the door, who were staring at me incredulously, reminded me that what was normal behavior in the convent was little short of deranged out here. As I rose to my feet, cold with embarrassment, I realized that my reactions were entirely different from those of most of my contemporaries in this strange new world. Perhaps they always would be.

• From Wild (2012)

  I nodded coolly, trying to conceal my ignorance. “I’m going to get ready for dinner,” I said, and ambled to the edge of our campsite. I pitched my tent and then crawled inside, spread out my sleeping bag, and lay on top of it, staring at the green nylon ceiling, while listening to the murmur of the men’s conversation and occasional bursts of laughter. I was going out to a restaurant with six men, and I had nothing to wear but what I was already wearing, I realized glumly: a T-shirt over a sports bra and a pair of shorts with nothing underneath. I remembered my fresh T-shirt from my resupply box and sat up and put it on. The entire back of the shirt I’d been wearing since Mojave was now stained a brownish yellow from the endless bath of sweat it had endured. I wadded it up in a ball and put it at the corner of my tent. I’d throw it away at the store later. The only other clothes I had were those I brought for cold weather. I remembered the necklace I’d been wearing until it got so hot that I couldn’t bear to have it on; I found it in the ziplock bag in which I kept my driver’s license and money and put it on. It was a small turquoise-and-silver earring that used to belong to my mother. I’d lost the other one, so I’d taken a pair of needle-nose pliers to the one that remained and turned it into a pendant on a delicate silver chain. I’d brought it along because it had been my mother’s; having it with me felt meaningful, but now I was glad to have it simply because I felt prettier with it on. I ran my fingers through my hair, attempting to shape it into an attractive formation, aided by my tiny comb, but eventually I gave up and pushed it behind my ears. It was just as well, I knew, that I simply let myself look and feel and smell the way I did. I was, after all, what Ed referred to somewhat inaccurately as the only girl in the woods, alone with a gang of men. By necessity, out here on the trail, I felt I had to sexually neutralize the men I met by being, to the extent that was possible, one of them.

• From Wild (2012)

  They had a trail name: the Three Young Bucks, which they’d been given by other hikers in southern California, they told me. The name fit. They were three young and buckish men. They’d come all the way from the Mexican border. They hadn’t skipped the snow like everyone else. They’d hiked over it, right through it—regardless of the fact that it was a record snow year—and because they’d done so, they were at the back of the Mexico-to-Canada thru-hiker pack, which is how, at this late date, they’d met me. They hadn’t met Tom, Doug, Greg, Matt, Albert, Brent, Stacy, Trina, Rex, Sam, Helen, John, or Sarah. They hadn’t even stopped in Ashland. They hadn’t danced to the Dead or eaten chewable opium or had sex with anyone pressed up against a rock on a beach. They’d just plowed right on through, hiking twenty-some miles a day, gaining on me since the moment I’d leapfrogged north of them when I’d bypassed to Sierra City. They weren’t just three young bucks. They were three young extraordinary hiking machines. Being in their company felt like a holiday. We walked to the campsite the store set aside for us, where the Three Young Bucks had already ditched their packs, and we cooked dinner and talked and told stories about things both on and off the trail. I liked them immensely. We clicked. They were sweet, cute, funny, kind guys and they made me forget how ruined I’d felt just an hour before. In their honor, I made the freeze-dried raspberry cobbler I’d been carrying for weeks, saving it for a special occasion. When it was done, we ate it with four spoons from my pot and then slept in a row under the stars. In the morning, we collected our boxes and took them back to our camp to reorganize our packs before heading on. I opened my box and pushed my hands through the smooth ziplock bags of food, feeling for the envelope that would contain my twenty-dollar bill. It had become such a familiar thrill for me now, that envelope with the money inside, but this time I couldn’t find it. I dumped everything out and ran my fingers along the folds inside the box, searching for it, but it wasn’t there. I didn’t know why. It just wasn’t. I had six dollars and twelve cents. “Shit,” I said. “What?” asked one of the Young Bucks. “Nothing,” I said. It was embarrassing to me that I was constantly broke, that no one was standing invisibly behind me with a credit card or a bank account.