Excitement

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 The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I left her there and went off to swim all by myself, going against the waves with clean strokes of my arms, thrusting my chest forward and head on. The following Saturday, I could scarcely conceal my impatience to see my parents leave. The long Sabbath lunch seemed to me to be literally endless, and I could barely stand it as I watched the kids receiving their weekly pocket money. As for Aunt Maissa who had come with her sad nun’s face to swell the crowd, she drove me nearly insane. Finally, however, the house was silent. Once the door had closed on the last of them all, I leaped from the couch where I lay trying to read, and feverishly began to do my best to make our dining-room tidy. Actually, I limited my efforts to kicking all stray shoes beneath the furniture and stuffing the clothes just anyhow into the sideboard. On the table, I spread again our Friday night’s white tablecloth and set two chairs side by side. Then I left the door ajar, so that Ginou need not wait till I came and opened it, thus she would avoid being seen by any of the neighbors. But it was still too early and I was so impatient that the time seemed to go by very slowly. So I went back to the couch and again tried to read, but in vain for my eyes somehow failed to come to grips with the text. All the joys that I was anticipating were too illicit, too new, too mysterious, too rich in promises. Furtively, she knocked twice on our door, then understood and walked in without further ado. I rushed to meet her and found her already in our foyer. So I closed the door, slamming it as if to cut us off from the world. Nobody would be able to know that we were there together, just the two of us. She carried in her hand a notebook, all wrinkled from being rolled tightly, and she now put it on the table. As soon as she noticed the two chairs, she sat down hurriedly. So I said, without waiting any longer, without even stopping to greet her: “Let’s get down to work!” I sat down on the other chair, as if our job were an urgent one, as if our unaccustomed presence here required immediate justification. All our comradeship that we had experienced in the sunlight and that had always been so uncomplicated had now vanished. It was indeed as if we were meeting for the first time. As I undertook to explain to her the main themes of Racine’s tragedy, Phèdre, I could hear my own voice in a key that was several tones lower than usual, a baritone that sounded almost husky. Meanwhile, she remained silent, trying to take notes with a bit of a pencil that had a copper ring around it and badly needed sharpening, the wood almost completely covering the lead.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I wanted to go out toward men and thought I could help them. For myself, my decision was certainly a happy one: I immediately felt better. ~ 4. THE CAMP ~ All through the long day’s journey the worn-out springs of the old truck passed on to us the smallest bumps in the road. We had left Tunis almost gaily at dawn, with rucksacks on our backs, which reminded us of our youth movement excursions. The sharp air and the warm sun were just as promising then, and when one of us burst into a marching song we all joined in. I was lighthearted as I left, for I had left nothing behind me. The evening before, Ginou had yielded to the last of my arguments and admitted that we were not made for each other. I must confess that I had indulged in some histrionics for a quarter of an hour as I tried to find in my heart a pain that was not there. But I had to leave her hurriedly in order to pack my bag and had no time to think more of it. Ten minutes after our departure, I was already singing with the others, standing in the wind, full of the healthy impression of having volunteered for a great adventure. At the first alarm, however, we stopped singing. Aircraft appeared suddenly from behind the hills and crossed the road in a streak firing their machine guns, sometimes quite insistently. Lying in a ditch we waited for them to be gone before we resumed our uncomfortable positions, tightly packed against each other. The men joked and bragged to hide the anxiety which grew in us as we moved further south. The landscape became more and more rugged with eroded purple rocks, thorny vegetation and cactus, and the atmosphere of a silent Western movie. At last the truck entered the bed of a dried-up oued and jogged and bounded over the white stones of the river bed. At the far end of the oued, the camp appeared in the middle of a circle of chalk cliffs, like a big white hole surrounded by red bushes. Above, on the ridges, there were a few meager bushes with tiny mauve blossoms. A long line of men stood waiting by the kitchen, and the cook was filling each bowl in turn like an automaton. There were tents of coarse canvas all around the edge. With difficulty, the truck climbed into the hollow and stopped. The men looked at us and, when they saw we were only a new contingent of workers, took no further notice of us. Dusty, silent, and motionless on the parched earth, they looked like hungry locusts. My companions no longer had the courage even to pretend and were silent.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Which when she had said, they put off all their garments and refreshed themselves by the fire. And after they were washed and noynted with oyle, they sate downe at the table garnished with all kind of dainty meats. They were no sooner sate downe, but in came another company of yong men more in number than was before, who seemed likewise to bee Theeves, for they brought in their preyes of gold and silver, Plate, jewels, and rich robes, and when they had likewise washed, they sate among the rest, and served one another by order. Then they drank and eat exceedingly, laughing, crying and making much noyse, that I thought that I was among the tyrannous and wilde Lapithes, Thebans, and Centaures. At length one of them more valiant than the rest, spake in this sort, We verily have manfully conquered the house of Milo of Hippata, and beside all the riches and treasure which by force we have brought away, we are all come home safe, and are increased the more by this horse and this Asse. But you that have roved about in the country of Boetia, have lost your valiante captaine Lamathus, whose life I more regarded than all the treasure which you have brought: and therfore the memory of him shall bee renowned for ever amongst the most noble kings and valiant captains: but you accustome when you goe abroad, like men with ganders hearts to creepe through every corner and hole for every trifle. Then one of them that came last answered, Why are you only ignorant, that the greater the number is, the sooner they may rob and spoyle the house? And although the family be dispersed in divers lodgings, yet every man had rather to defend his own life, than to save the riches of his master: but when there be but a few theeves, then will they not only rather regard themselves, but also their substance, how little or great soever it be. And to the intent you may beleeve me I will shew you an example: wee were come nothing nigh to Thebes, where is the fountain of our art and science, but we learned where a rich Chuffe called Chriseros did dwell, who for fear of offices in the publique wel dissembled his estate, and lived sole and solitary in a small coat, howbeit replenished with aboundance of treasure, and went daily in ragged and torn apparel. Wherefore wee devised with our selves to go to his house and spoyl him of all his riches. And when night came we drew towards the dore, which was so strongly closed, that we could neither move it, nor lift it out of the hooks, and we thought it best not to break it open lest by the noyse we should raise up to our harm the neighbours by.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “Did you know Roy Rogers has a penis but Roy Rabbit doesn’t have one, even though he’s a boy bunny?” “Yes, I know.” “I told you, right?” “About a hundred times.” Fern said, “I flew one time when I was little, all the way to Birmingham, where my grandma lived. I got to sit on her hospital bed. Then she died. I didn’t see her dead. Only sleeping.” She was quiet for a minute, then she popped back up. “Do you know this song?” She twisted her hands upside down, making goggles for her eyes with her thumb and second finger. She started to sing. Into the air, Junior Birdman Into the air upside down Into the air, Junior Birdman Keep your noses off the ground. “Where’d you learn that?” Miri asked. “Natalie learned it at summer camp and taught it to me.” By the time Miri figured out how to make the mask with her hands, the plane was on the move, picking up speed. Faster, faster, faster, until they were airborne. Into the air, Junior Birdman. They were flying. She was flying. She thought it would feel different, more like the ride at the amusement park that pins you against the wall with centrifugal force. That ride was both thrilling and terrifying but so was this one. Once they’d leveled off she pretended she was on a train, except when she looked out the window all she saw was sky with a bank of fluffy clouds under the plane. Somewhere there’s heaven, she sang to herself. Because if there was a heaven, wouldn’t this be it? Separated from earth by white fluffy clouds. She half expected to see angels wearing flowing white gowns playing harps. She half expected to see Penny, tapping on the window of the plane to get her attention. If only she believed in heaven. “What?” Fern asked. “Nothing. I was just singing to myself.” “What song?” “Just some song I know.” “Teach it to me.” Somewhere there’s music How faint the tune Somewhere there’s heaven How high the moon “How high is the moon?” “Pretty high.” “How do you know you can hear music there?” “Because you can always hear music.” “That’s good. Isn’t that good?” “Yes, it’s very good.” —IT WAS a long trip. First they landed in Chicago, where they changed planes. Between Chicago and Los Angeles a fancy lunch was served on a tray. Miri couldn’t imagine how they managed to cook steak and French fries on a plane. The Parker House roll came with a pat of butter stamped TWA. She had never seen such tiny salt and pepper shakers. She thought about sneaking them into her bag but didn’t want to set a bad example for Fern. For dessert there was ice cream with a chocolate chip cookie. After lunch the stewardess handed out decks of cards. Miri and Fern played War until Fern’s eyes closed.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway. — We were all stoned (but I was more stoned than everyone) when we piled into Adrian’s green Triumph and headed for a discotheque. There were five of us sardined into that tiny car: Bennett; Marie Winkleman (a very bosomy college classmate of mine whom Bennett had sort of picked up at the party—she was a psychologist); Adrian (who was driving, after a fashion); me (head back, like the first Isadora, post-strangulation); and Robin Phipps-Smith (the mousy British candidate with frizzy hair and German eyeglass frames who talked all the time about how he detested “Ronnie” Laing—something which endeared him to Bennett’s heart). Adrian, on the other hand, was a follower of Laing, had studied with him, and could do excellent imitations of his Scottish accent. At least I thought they were excellent—but then I didn’t know how Laing spoke. We zigzagged through the streets of Vienna, over the cobblestones and trolley tracks, across the muddy brown Danube. I don’t know the name of the discotheque, or the street, or anything. I go into states where I notice nothing about the landscape except the male inhabitants and which organs of mine (heart, stomach, nipples, cunt) they cause to palpitate. The discotheque was silver. Chrome paper on the walls. Flashing white lights. Mirrors everywhere. The glass tables elevated on platforms of chrome. The seats white leather. Ear-splitting rock music. Call the place whatever you like: the Mirrored Room, the Seventh Circle, the Silvermine, the Glass Balloon. I know, at least, that the name was in English. Very trendy and forgettable. Bennett, Marie, and Robin said they were sitting down to order drinks. Adrian and I began to dance, our drunken gyrations repeated in the endless mirrors. Finally we sought a nook between two mirrors where we could kiss, watched only by infinite numbers of ourselves. I had the distinct sensation of kissing my own mouth—like when I was nine and used to wet a piece of my pillow with saliva and then kiss it to try to imagine what “soul-kissing” was like.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  such to me appeared—so may I see it again!—a light coming o’er the sea so swiftly, that no flight is equal to its motion; from which, when I had a while withdrawn mine eyes to question my Leader, I saw it brighter and bigger grown. Then on each side of it appeared to me a something white; and from beneath it, little by little, another whiteness came forth. My Master yet did speak no word, until the first whitenesses appeared as wings; then, when well he knew the pilot, he cried: “Bend, bend thy knees; behold the Angel of God: fold thy hands: henceforth shalt thou see such ministers. Look how he scorns all human instruments, so that oar he wills not, nor other sail than his wings, between shores so distant. See how he has them heavenward turned, plying the air with eternal plumes, that are not mewed like mortal hair.” Then as more and more towards us came the bird divine, brighter yet he appeared, wherefore mine eye endured him not near: but I bent it down, and he came on to the shore with a vessel so swift and light that the waters nowise drew it in. On the stern stood the celestial pilot, such, that blessedness seemed writ upon him, and more than a hundred spirits sat within. “in exitu Israel de Ægypto,” sang they all together with one voice, with what of that psalm2 is thereafter written. Then made he to them the sign of Holy Cross, whereat they all flung them on the strand and quick even as he came he went his way. The throng that remained there seemed strange to the place, gazing around like one who assayeth new things. On every side the sun, who with his arrows bright had chased the Goat from midst of heaven, was shooting forth the day,3 when the new people lifted up their faces towards us, saying to us: “If ye know show us the way to go to the mount.” And Virgil answered: “Ye think perchance that we have experience of this place, but we are strangers even as ye are. We came but now, a little while before you, by other way which was so rough and hard, that the climbing now will seem but play to us.” The souls who had observed me by my breathing that I was yet alive, marvelling grew pale; and as to a messenger, who bears the olive, the folk draw nigh to hear the news, and none shows himself shy at trampling; so on my face those souls did fix their gaze, fortunate every one, well nigh forgetting to go and make them fair. I saw one of them draw forward to embrace me with such great affection, that he moved me to do the like. O shades empty save in outward show! thrice behind it my hands I clasped, and as often returned with them to my breast.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His eyes blinked and glowered and squinted and widened in mocking wonder behind the intense magnification of his glasses, but once denuded they lost all power of expression and seemed as pale and vulnerable as new skin under a bandage. Although he’d never traveled anywhere he was teaching himself French and of course German; he had pinned up photos of Berchtesgaden and the Riviera over his desk. He brewed espresso in a tin Napoletano that, when reversed, threw sputtering drops onto the glowing coils of the strictly forbidden hot plate, and he played over and over again his one record of Juliette Greco, the chanteuse beloved of the Existentialists, the waif who’d emerged out of the ruins of war with black eyes all pupils and lyrics all plangent, tough-guy sentimentality. Howie’s ties came from Charvet on the Place Vendôme because that had been Proust’s haberdasher. He and I shared the irregular, never-foreseen status of students too clever for afternoon study hall and too inept for afternoon sports. As a result we alone were free to spend those long vacant hours from two to six in the empty dorms or, when the weather was good, on walks through the baronial grounds of the estate. The weather, however, was usually polar and he and I then found our exercise in stubborn, smoldering debates about equality and democracy (I for, he against). I can still taste the bitter black coffee and hear the jolly accordion and sweeping strings of Juliette Greco’s accompaniment, music we’d have sneered at as polka-Polish or Hollywood-snythetic had it not been French, but that, since it was, we relished and hummed along to though neither of us was ever quite capable of translating the words (“Something … something … if you something I’ll always? Toujours? Is that toujours? Play it again”). Howie had a face only a medieval Japanese woman could have loved: perfectly round, pasty, just a wisp of fine hair above, below a dark, tiny dead rosebud of a mouth, the rudiment of a chin, like a child’s hand poking through a sheet, and those eyes, so arrogant and expressive with glasses, so myopic and defenseless without. “No, I don’t concede your point. Not at all,” he’d say, lowering his head so that the child’s hand poked farther out through the sheet and his voice, naturally high and nervous, took on a swallowed, subdued tone. “In fact,” he’d add, letting his features become beatifically composed, “I think you’re a fool.” I could hardly breathe. And yet, calling to me across the smoking valley sang a soprano telling me how exciting all this was, this verbal game that could at any moment take a nasty turn but that as of now remained a parody of spite. Until now I’d never known anyone my own age who was so willing to flout the bland convention that held that the normal unit of conversation should be the unfunny joke and the expected response a mirthless giggle.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Humbert is being too modest at the outset of Lolita when he says “it is only a game,” for it is one in which everything on the board “breath[es] with life,” as Nabokov writes of the match between Luzhin and Turati in The Defense. Radical and dizzying shifts in focus are created in the reader’s mind as he oscillates between a sense that he is by turns confronting characters in a novel and pieces in a game—as if a telescope were being spun 360 degrees on its axis, allowing one to look alternately through one end and then the other. The various “levels” of Lolita are of course not the New Criticism’s “levels of meaning,” for the telescopic and global views of the “plaything” should enable one to perceive these levels or dimensions as instantaneous—as though, to adapt freely an image used by Mary McCarthy to describe Pale Fire, one were looking down on three or more games being played simultaneously by two chess masters on several separate glass boards, each arranged successively above the other.34 A first reading of Lolita rarely affords this limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarming and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost. But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own terms derives from the discovery of a totally new book in place of the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has happily described the course of one’s own perceptions. What Jorge Luis Borges says of Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, surely holds for Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita: he “has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading.” ALFRED APPEL, JR. Palo Alto, California January 31, 1968 Wilmette, Illinois May 21, 1990

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Think of all the hotels they’re building.” “But it’s so far away.” “It is far away. I can’t deny that.” “My parents…” “I know. It’s hard to leave family behind.” “They’d never agree to let me go.” “But you’d have plenty of vacation time to come home and visit. And you could make it a two-year commitment, like going away to college, except instead of paying, you get paid. You’d make good money, too.” “But I wouldn’t know anyone.” “You’d know me. And Dr. O. And you and Jack would make new friends.” “Jack is 1-A. He could get called up at any time.” “Let’s hope that ridiculous war ends before then.” “Daisy—can I tell you something? You’d have to keep it to yourself. I mean it, no one can know. But if I don’t tell someone, I’m going to explode.” “You can trust me, Christina.” “I know I can.” Daisy waited for more. Christina finally bit the bullet and blurted out, “Jack and I are secretly married. We eloped to Elkton.” Daisy came out from behind her desk. “Oh, Christina.” She put her arms around her. “I hope you’ll be very happy.” Then, “You didn’t have to get married, did you?” Christina laughed. “No. And that doctor you sent me to…he fitted me for a diaphragm so I won’t have to worry.” “When are you going to tell your parents?” “I haven’t figured that out yet.” “Well, don’t say anything about Las Vegas yet. First, Dr. O has to make up his mind. But I have a feeling he’s going to do it, and I admit I’m kind of excited about going. I’m starting to feel like a pioneer.” A pioneer, Christina thought. The Wild West. She’d have to learn to ride a horse, she supposed. The idea of it made her giddy. DaisyChristina and Jack were married! She knew Christina had something on her mind but a secret marriage had never occurred to her. She should have guessed. Hadn’t she done the same at Christina’s age—running off with Gerald Dupree, né Dorfman, to Elkton? Gerald Dupree. What a name. And Daisy Dupree —even better. A fabulous name, she’d thought at the time, a name fit for a stripper, or, even better, a movie star, which made her laugh—the only good thing that had come out of her hasty young marriage, annulled two weeks after they’d eloped. But that was a lifetime ago. Gerry had been older, twenty-five to her eighteen. He’d been working for ten years by then, for the Stasio boys, number runners, then bootleggers. It was 1936, times were hard. She was a year out of Linden High School, where she’d won every award in the business program—for typing, steno, bookkeeping. She was lucky to find a job working as a secretary for an insurance agent in Newark. She wasn’t his número uno, as he called his longtime secretary, but he liked Daisy, admired her for her organizational skills.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  Roman held up sections of Miri’s hair. “Nice,” he said. “Some natural wave, but you’ll have to set the new cut in pin curls at night. Are you sure about this?” He was making Miri nervous. Was he trying to talk her out of cutting her hair? “Because once I start,” he said, “there’s no turning back.” “But how do you think it will look?” Miri asked, hoping for reassurance. He kissed the tips of his fingers. “Fabuloso.” Was that an Italian word? If so, did it mean what it sounded like? Either way, the decision was made. Mr. Roman picked up his scissors and, snip snip snip, the process began. Was she making a big mistake or would she leave the shop looking like Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun ? She stuffed two pieces of Fleer’s Dubble Bubble into her mouth, then blew bubbles so big they burst against her cheeks, until Mr. Roman told her he found such a habit distracting and not worthy of a lovely young lady. Under the dryer she read Silver Screen and Photoplay. Ava Gardner was on the cover of both. Two hours later she paid with her babysitting money, trying not to think about the Fosters. Would they approve of her spending the money they’d paid her for watching Penny and Betsy on a haircut, while Betsy was being treated for severe burns and Mr. and Mrs. Foster were keeping a vigil at her bedside? Was she a terrible person for thinking of how she looked when they still didn’t know if Betsy would live or die? She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she left the beauty parlor and at first wasn’t sure who it was. She looked older, but nothing like Elizabeth Taylor. She shouldn’t have let Mr. Roman use hairspray. She hated hairspray. She walked home without her hat, letting the cold winter wind whip her hair around. Before going inside she ran her fingers through it and checked herself in the mirror of her Volupté compact, a birthday present from Leah. That was better. At home she’d have to hurry to get ready. Frekki was picking her up at 11:30. She prayed Rusty wouldn’t hear her come in—anything to avoid an argument today. It was laundry day, vacuuming day—Miri was responsible for her room, which she’d cleaned last night. But just as she opened the front door Rusty was coming up from the basement with the laundry basket. Miri braced for the worst. “Cute,” Rusty said, barely looking at her, which threw Miri for a loop. This was so unlike the reaction she’d expected, it worried her. When she was almost ready, in her cashmere sweater and pencil skirt, Rusty brought her the strand of pearls her parents had given her on her sixteenth birthday. Pearls, even though Rusty’s father had lost his business and was working behind the counter for next to nothing at his friend’s bakery.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  she can’t breathe at all. When he lets go, she pushes her sunglasses up so she can get a look at him. Did she hope he wouldn’t be attractive? He grabs her hand. “I’m so glad to see you.” “I’m glad to see you, too.” The voice that comes out doesn’t sound like hers. “Can I give you a ride to the lunch?” he asks. Christina and Jack have a car, so do Henry and Leah, but Miri says, “Sure,” and walks with Mason around the block to his red Mazda RX-7. She almost laughs because Andy drives the same car. “I’d know you anywhere,” he says, “even with the hair.” “I’d know you, too, even without it.” He’s not really without it, just has less on his head, more on his face. He laughs. And just like that, she’s fifteen again. Except she’s not. — THEY’RE SEATED at different tables at lunch. She’s with Christina and Jack, Henry and Leah, four others. He’s across the room with Gaby and her handsome husband, their grown children and young grandchildren, and two men who were boys at Janet then, boys who helped rescue the trapped passengers. None of her old crowd is here. Suzanne lives in Seattle, married to a neurosurgeon. Miri tries to see her every year. Robo is divorced and has a gift shop in Westfield. Aside from two years at Boston U, she’s never left New Jersey. Eleanor is a professor of mathematics at Purdue, married to an economist. She hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet and didn’t laugh when, a few years ago, Miri mentioned the possibility. Some things aren’t funny, Eleanor told her. Miri and Mason steal looks at one another through lunch. Miri doesn’t blush the way Rusty does, but she feels her cheeks flush. She drinks two glasses of wine, too fast. It goes straight to her head. You go to my head... She must have sung that line out loud because the woman next to her, a daughter of the Secretary of War who was killed when the second plane crashed, says, “What?” Miri knows she sometimes sings a line from a song out loud when she means to sing it only inside her head. “I was just thinking of an old song,” she says. “Don’t you love the old songs?”

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  When she saw that her plane would be half an hour late, she relaxed. She was one of four students from Syracuse waiting to board American Airlines Flight 6780 heading to Newark Airport. Like her, they’d finished their exams and were going home for a break before second semester began. Kathy was the only girl among them, making her wish her roommate, Jane, had been able to come. She kidded around with the boys while they waited, bought a pack of Juicy Fruit and a copy of Silver Screen to distract her during the flight. The weather was nasty, but who cared? Her cousin Phil would be meeting her at Newark, and he’d promised to bring his friend Steve Osner. Not that she and Steve had talked about officially dating or anything, but he liked her—she could tell. There was definitely an attraction between them. Not to mention that sweet Happy New Year kiss. She wasn’t going to worry about the difference in their ages. Everyone knew that wives outlived their husbands. The plane had already picked up passengers in Buffalo and Rochester when it finally landed in Syracuse. Kathy boarded and was seated next to an older man, who introduced himself as Robert Patterson. When he asked what she was studying she hid her movie magazine, not wanting him to think she was some dumb girl. He was very friendly. Told her he had a son and three daughters. Told her he was the former Secretary of War under President Truman. Gads, Kathy thought, he was someone important, someone famous. He wanted to know her plans for the future. Said it was never too early to have goals. She was embarrassed. She’d never really thought beyond graduating from the college of home economics, marrying someone with possibilities and having a couple of kids. “I’m going to work for a food magazine,” she said, trying to impress him. Working for a magazine sounded glamorous to her. She’d have to live in New York. She was pretty sure that’s where the magazines had their offices. Or she could commute. By the time they began their descent into Newark, she had it all worked out in her head. She’d marry Steve Osner, work for a magazine in New York until they had children and live in Elizabeth, in the same pretty neighborhood as Steve’s parents, where the streets were named after poets—Kipling, Browning, Byron, Shelley. When she’d mentioned to Steve that she loved the names of the streets around his house Steve had seemed surprised. “Really?” he’d asked. “English poets?” Oh, well, the required freshman English lit course would fix that. It had been a bumpy trip, and she was starting to feel queasy. “I don’t like it when I can’t see the ground,” she told Secretary Patterson. He told her to focus on something straight ahead. Don’t look out the window. She figured he knew, being a former Secretary of War and all.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We came to know French truck stops with Italian espresso machines serving thick excellent coffee. We came to know the pleasures of Alsatian beer and boxes of peaches bought from farmers by the side of the road. We knew we were in France when the headlights of the cars turned from white to mustard yellow and the bread became delicious. We came to know the ugliest part of France, that badland near the German border where the roads are broken-surfaced meandering two-lane caravans and the French refuse to repair them, saying that the Germans get to Paris fast enough anyway. We came to know an endless series of cheap hostelries with two-watt lightbulbs and fly-speckled bidets (into which we peed because we were reluctant to trek out to the filthy hall toilet whose light only went on when you broke your nails turning the door lock). We came to know the more posh sort of campsite with indoor toilets and a bar with a jukebox blaring the Beatles. But most of the time (this being August and every burgher in Europe being on a camping vacation with his 2.5 children), we found the better campsites filled and had to pitch our tent by the side of the road (and crap squatting with the weeds tickling our asses and the horseflies zooming hideously close to our assholes to alight upon the fresh turds). We came to know the Autostrada del Sole with its phantasmagoric Pavese auto-grills—Fellini visions of cellophane-wrapped candy, mountains of toys, barrels of silver-foil-wrapped panetone, gift-ribboned jam pots, and tricycles trailing streamers of lollipops. We came to know the Italian madmen who race their Fiat Cinquecenti ninety miles an hour, but always stop to cross themselves and drop a few lire in the collection box at a roadside Jesus. We came to know dozens of major and minor airports in Germany and France and Italy, because at that point in the day when the second round of beers wore off and my massive depression reared its ugly head once more (along with secondary symptoms of headache and hangover), I would panic and command Adrian to drive me to the nearest airport. He never said no. Oh he would become silent and act disappointed with me, but he never directly opposed any clearly stated wish of mine. To the nearest Flughafen or aeroporto we went, getting lost and asking directions a dozen times along the way. When we got there we inevitably found out that the next plane was not for two days, or that it was booked solid (Europa in August: tout le monde en vacances), or that it had left two minutes ago. And then there would be a bar at the airport and we would drink more beer and Adrian would kiss me and joke with me and grab my ass affectionately and talk about our shared adventure. So off we’d go again in good spirits for the time being. After all, I wasn’t entirely sure I had any other place to go.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I’ve always been religious deep down. I never wanted to hurt anyone, not even when I was drilling a tooth.” She kisses him. “Is it any wonder I love you?” “No funeral,” he reminds her for the tenth time. — NONE OF THEM KNOWS if Natalie will show up for his early birthday party, but at the last minute, she does. She brings fifteen-year-old Ruby with her, the youngest of her three children, each by a different father. She’s never seen the point of marriage. They stay in a two-bedroom suite at Caesars Palace, arranged by Christina. A car and driver are at Natalie’s disposal, delivering her and young Ruby to Miri’s house for Dr. O’s party. It’s a sunny afternoon, warm enough to set up the buffet on the deck. Eliza hits it off with Ruby Renso. “What exactly is our relationship?” Miri hears Ruby ask Eliza. Eliza answers, “Well...your grandfather is married to my grandmother. That must make us something-in-laws.” “Yes,” Ruby says. “Something-in-laws.” Before sunset Eliza and Ruby come to her. “Mom,” Eliza says with more enthusiasm than Miri has heard in ages, “Ruby’s invited me to Santa Fe for the summer.” “Actually,” Ruby says, “we live on a spread in Tesuque, outside of Santa Fe.” “Can I go?” Eliza begs. “Please...” Miri has to think fast. “Let me talk to Natalie about this and see what we can work out.” “Does that mean yes?” Ruby asks Eliza. Eliza says, “It means We’ll see.” “Great!” Ruby says. “At least it doesn’t mean no!” Miri laughs. So do Malcolm and Kenny. “She’s going to be okay, Mom,” Kenny says of Eliza. “I hope so,” Miri says. “At least we didn’t give you any trouble,” Malcolm says. “Right, Kenny? We were perfect children.” Ha! Miri remembers the pot plants in the closet, the acid trip to the mountains,

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Title : The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us Author: Bergstein, Rachelle ASIN : B0CL5HCDDV [image "Cover: The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, by Rachelle Bergstein." file=Image00005.jpg] Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. [image "The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us, by Rachelle Bergstein. One Signal Publishers. Atria. New York | London | Toronto | Sydney | New Delhi." file=Image00006.jpg] For my son Curtis and his friends, who make me excited about the future But here she had no children, no husband, and her mother was dead, no one was far weaker or far stronger than she, she carried her rage unknown, hidden, unknowable yet, she moved, slowly, under the arches, literally singing. —SHARON OLDS, FROM “VISITING MY MOTHER’S COLLEGE” The word police can fuck off. —MADONNA Timeline1938—Judith Sussman was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey1945—World War II ended1956—Graduated from Battin High School1959—Married John Blume1961—Graduated from New York University; gave birth to Randy Blume1963—Gave birth to Lawrence Blume; The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan1966—The National Organization for Women (NOW) formed1967—Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman1968—Richard Nixon was elected1969—The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo1970—Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ; Sexual Politics by Kate Millett; Women’s Strike for Equality1971—Freckle Juice and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t1972—It’s Not the End of the World and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing 1973—Deenie ; Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court; Fear of Flying by Erica Jong1974—Blubber ; Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal1975—Divorced John Blume; Forever ; the Vietnam War ended1976—Married Tom Kitchens in England1977—Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself ; It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein1978—Wifey1979—Divorced Tom Kitchens1980—Ronald Reagan was elected; Superfudge ; met George Cooper1981—Tiger Eyes1983—Smart Women1987—Married George Cooper; Just as Long as We’re Together PrefaceJudy Blume was my first. She wasn’t the first author I fell in love with, but when I was nine years old, she pulled me across another major milestone—she wrote a book that I wanted to hide from my parents. Just as Long as We’re Together , about three middle school–aged best friends and their musical-chair friendship dynamics, started with a sentence so intoxicating it might as well have come with a chaser: Stephanie is into hunks . Was I into hunks? I wasn’t sure. But I knew that I couldn’t put the book down. Stephanie’s parents were getting a divorce.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Then she turned her attention to arts and crafts. She bought yards and yards of colorful felt, fashioning it into splashy pendants to hang on children’s walls. Much to Judy’s delight, her local Bloomingdale’s agreed to stock them and they sold for $9 apiece. She made over $350 (around $3,200 in today’s dollars) before that enterprise got squashed by yet another malady, when her fingers started peeling because she developed an allergy to fabric glue. Another idea came to her soon after. Reading bedtime stories to her kids, she wondered if she could be a children’s book author and illustrator. She’d play around with words in her head—a little verse here, a mellifluous phrase there—and chuckle, imagining herself as the unlikely Dr. Seuss of suburban New Jersey. Her maiden name had been Sussman, she noted. Seuss, meet Suss. Was it a sign? Probably not, but Judy started jotting down her ideas anyway. They came alive in colored pencil with simple, homespun drawings. Okay, she conceded, maybe she’d need to work with an artist. But when she wrote, she felt the zap of something familiar from her girlhood: something electric and joyful. A distant, yet sacred, creative force welled up inside her. She wrote one story, called “You Mom, You?” about a mother patiently explaining to her two young kids that she had once been just a silly child herself. The tots—enthralled by their mother’s recollections, told in rhyme—are shocked by her playful history lesson. Judy was proud of her short manuscripts and bound them with brass fasteners. She started researching where she might submit them: small children’s book publishers and Parents magazine. One afternoon, she checked the mail and discovered a continuing education brochure from her alma mater, NYU. One class, offered on Monday nights, felt like it had been included just for her. It was called Writing for Children and Teenagers. Judy signed up and started riding the bus from Scotch Plains into the city every week. Even the commute down to the West Village was fulfilling. There was something about taking herself into Manhattan that seemed both delightfully grown-up and reminiscent of her unencumbered college years. Seeing the steel frame of the George Washington Bridge rise up from the road, the silvery skyline shooting out in the distance, it was like she was traveling to another world, one shimmering with artistic potential. In class, Judy was one of just seven students. The teacher was Lee Wyndham, a published children’s book author, syndicated reviewer, and Russian émigré who wore flamboyant hats with feathers. Wyndham took a traditional view of children’s literature—that all stories should have a good, clear-cut moral with no questions left unanswered in the end—but she also encouraged her pupils to play. Eager to find her own voice, Judy experimented with different perspectives, toggling between first and third person, and an array of narrative forms.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  For it was Carl, dressed in an old fifties-style football sweater and wearing a neat little multicoloured knapsack. He was pacing the stage in the same relaxed, homely manner with which he’d accompanied Zora to the gates of Wellington College, and he smiled prettily as he spoke, the complex rhymes tripping off his luminous teeth as if he were crooning in a barbershop troupe. The only sign of exertion was the river of sweat that came down his face. Doc Brown, in his enthusiasm, had joined Carl on the stage, and now found himself reduced to hype man, Yo-ing like Levi in the tiny syllabic gaps Carl left in his wake. ‘ What? ’ said Ron, unable to hear anything, not even Carl any more, over the roars and whistles of the audience. ‘I KNOW THAT GUY.’ ‘ THAT GUY ?’ ‘YES.’ ‘OH MY GOD . IS HE STRAIGHT?’ Zora laughed. The alcohol had done its work on all of them now. She smiled in a knowing way about things she did not know, and swayed with the beat as much as her footstool would allow. ‘Let’s try to get closer to the stage,’ suggested Claire, and in the last minute, following Ron’s unabashed elbowed course through the audience, they reached their original seats. ‘OH – MY – WORD !’ yelled Doc Brown, as Carl’s tape finished. He held up Carl’s right hand like a prizefighter’s. ‘I think we have  On Beauty a winner – correction: I know we have a champion – ’ But Carl released himself from Doc’s grip and jumped lightly off the stage on to the floor. Somewhere, underneath the cheering, you could hear the discontented boos of rival factions, but the cheers won out. The Creole boys and Levi were nowhere in sight. From all sides people clapped their hands to Carl’s back and rubbed his head fondly. ‘Hey – you don’t want your jeroboam? Brother’s shy – don’t want his prize!’ ‘No, no, no – hold my champagne,’ shouted Carl. ‘Brother got to wash his face, though. Too much sweat is too much.’ Doc Brown nodded sagely. ‘Well said, well said – gotta be fresh and clean. Ain’t no doubt. DJ, spin it for us in the interim.’ Music started up and the audience ceased being an audience and softened into a crowd. ‘Bring him over here,’ insisted Ron, and then to the class: ‘Zora knows that boy. We need him over here.’ ‘You know him? He’s very talented,’ said Claire. ‘I know him this much,’ said Zora, signifying an inch between her forefinger and thumb. Just as she said this, she turned and found Carl in front of her. He had in his face the elated buzz of the performer, just landed back in the plebeian world of his public.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  He was just fourteen and still at times a silly kid, especially just before lights out. We had half an hour (if you please) of “free” time after evening study hall before we had to submit to silence, a rustling, Argus-eyed silence (if Argus was a lonely, horny tribe of kids) intensified by wide-awake yearning. In that brief spasm of freedom before lights-out, competing radios would blare out, tuned to a dozen different stations, and pent-up athletes, sore from two hours of immobility at their desks, would explode into shouting football matches in the corridors. Toilets flushed, steam from showers crept out of the bathrooms into the unheated corridors. In one room five boys were sitting around in the dark lighting farts. One expert—fully clothed of course—was lying on his back, legs above his head, holding a lit match to the seat of his pants. A quick spurt of blue flame was his reward. The whole building trembled with the thundering of boys climbing up and down stairs or now shrieking in a water fight by the cooler. Heberto was also full of energy. Look at the vein pulsing in his neck, the aimless trills his long fingers are playing, the weird ululations hooting out of his mouth—until after the fact he invents an explanation of all this spontaneity by resolving himself into an airplane, the hoots modulating into the drone of jets, his flickering hands freezing into rigid wings, the ticking vein force-feeding fuel into the engine as he runs and runs, hysterical with youth, up and down the halls. After such an outburst he could be visited. I’d sit on his bed and watch him carve bits of balsa wood with an X-Acto knife. His eyes would dart up from his task. Everything about him was high-strung, tentative, off course. I never found out why he’d been shunted off to Eton in the middle of the year. The other newcomer, Howie, was my real companion, friend and enemy, someone whose room I couldn’t resist visiting though I didn’t want the other kids to see me going there. Howie had been a bleak, sit-in-a-stupor nihilist, he told me, but now he’d ascended to the discipline and heartlessness of the Nazi Party. A real Nazi. He’d written away for the “literature” of the American Renaissance Party and proudly showed me his foot-long library of books on race, the Aryan heritage, the Führer’s legacy, Communist lies about the “so-called death camps” and so on. He was almost as fat as he was tall.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Not yet.” Pause. “I hear you gotta warm ’em up.” “That’s correct.” “How do you do it?” I had read a marriage manual. “Well, you turn the lights down and kiss a long time first.” “With your clothes on?” “Of course. Then you take off her top and play with her breasts. But very gently. Don’t get too rough—they don’t like that.” “Does she play with your boner?” “Not usually. An older, experienced woman might.” “You been with an older woman?” “Once.” “They get kinda saggy, don’t they?” “My friend was beautiful,” I said, offended on behalf of the imaginary lady. “Is it real wet and slippery in there? Some guy told me it was like wet liver in a milk bottle.” “Only if the romantic foreplay has gone on long enough.” “How long’s enough?” “An hour.” The silence was thoughtful, as though it were an eyelash beating against a pillowcase. “The guys back home? Guys in my neighborhood?” “Yes?” I said. “We all cornhole each other. You ever do that?” “Sure.” “What?” “I said sure.” “Guess you’ve outgrown that by now.” “Well, yeah, but since there aren’t any girls around …” I felt as a scientist must when he knows he’s about to bring off the experiment of his career: outwardly calm, inwardly jubilant, already braced for disappointment. “We could try it now.” Pause. “If you want to.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I felt he wouldn’t come to my bed; he had found something wrong with me, he thought I was a sissy, I should have said “Right” instead of “That’s correct.” “Got any stuff?” he asked. “What?” “You know. Like Vaseline?” “No, but we don’t need it. Spit will”—I started to say “do,” but men say “work”—“work.” My penis was hard but still bent painfully down in the jockey shorts; I released it and placed the head under the taut elastic waistband. “Naw, you gotta have Vaseline.” I might be knowledgeable about real sex, but apparently Kevin was to be the expert when it came to cornholing. “Well, let’s try spit.” “I don’t know. Okay.” His voice was small and his mouth sounded dry. I watched him come toward me. He, too, had jockey shorts on, which appeared to glow. Though barechested now, he’d worn a T-shirt all through Little League season that had left his torso and upper arms pale; his ghost shirt excited me, because it reminded me he was captain of his team. We pulled off our shorts. I opened my arms to Kevin and closed my eyes. He said, “It’s colder than a witch’s tit.” I lay on my side facing him and he slipped in beside me. His breath smelled of milk.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library full of flowers. There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room. Consequently, for at least five minutes I went about—lucidly insane, crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight hunter—turning whatever keys in whatever locks there were and pocketing them with my free left hand. The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood. Speaking of bathrooms—I was about to visit a third one when master came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall behind him. The corner of a passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a scanty balding way, but still perfectly recognizable, he swept by me in a purple bathrobe, very like one I had. He either did not notice me, or else dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination—and, showing me his hairy calves, he proceeded, sleepwalker-wise, downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into the entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door, to peer out through a sunny chink as one who thinks he has heard a half-hearted visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring the raincoated phantasm that had stopped in midstairs, master walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall from the drawing room, through which—taking it easy, knowing he was safe—I now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly unwrapped dirty Chum, taking care not to leave any oil stains on the chrome—I think I got the wrong product, it was black and awfully messy. In my usual meticulous way, I transferred naked Chum to a clean recess about me and made for the little boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy—too springy perhaps for success. But my heart pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched a cocktail glass underfoot. Master met me in the Oriental parlor. “Now who are you?” he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a point to the northeast of my head. “Are you by any chance Brewster?” By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself. “That’s right,” I answered suavely. “Je suis Monsieur Brustère. Let us chat for a moment before we start.”