Exposure Dread

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 Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  because the wiring in the building was so ancient. “Damnedest electrical system I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The manual must have been written in hieroglyphics.” I looked around, and it hit me that if you replaced the electric heaters with a coal stove, this squat on the Lower East Side looked pretty much like the house on Little Hobart Street. I had escaped from Welch once, and now, breathing in those same old smells of turpentine, dog hair, and dirty clothes, of stale beer and cigarette smoke and unrefrigerated food slowly going bad, I had the urge to bolt. But Mom and Dad were clearly proud, and as I listened to them talk—interrupting each other in their excitement to correct points of fact and fill in gaps in the story—about their fellow squatters and the friends they’d made in the neighborhood and the common fight against the city’s housing agency, it became clear they’d stumbled on an entire community of people like themselves, people who lived unruly lives battling authority and who liked it that way. After all those years of roaming, they’d found home. • • • I graduated from Barnard that spring. Brian came to the ceremony, but Lori and Maureen had to work, and Mom said it would just be a lot of boring speeches about the long and winding road of life. I wanted Dad to come, but chances were he’d show up drunk and try to debate the commencement speaker. “I can’t risk it, Dad,” I told him. “Hell,” he said. “I don’t have to see my Mountain Goat grabbing a sheepskin to know she’s got her college degree.” The magazine where I’d been working two days a week had offered me a full-time job. What I needed was a place to live. For several years, I had been dating a man named Eric, a friend of one of Lori’s eccentric-genius friends, who came from a wealthy family, ran a small company, and lived alone in the apartment on Park Avenue in which he’d been raised. He was a detached, almost fanatically organized guy who maintained detailed time-management logs and could recite endless baseball statistics. But he was decent and responsible, never gambled or lost his temper, and always paid his bills on time. When he heard that I was looking for a roommate to share an apartment, he suggested I move in with him. I couldn’t afford half the rent, I told him, and I wouldn’t live there unless I could pay my own way. He suggested that I begin by paying what I could afford, and as my salary went up, I could increase the

• From City of Night (1963)

  In a small clearing surrounded by the tables and benches, a line of six young males danced the Madison: without touching—making it legal. With the man, I stand purposely toward the back of the bar, expecting that he wont want to stay. But already hes suggested we sit and have a drink. The people on the bench move closer to each other to make room for us, welcomingly (their bodies can touch more intimately). The Madison ends. The youngmen disperse into the bar. The jukebox is rocking, sounds monotonous but exciting: African-drumming, jungle-moaning; the insistent beat-beat: sexually, primitively: the sound of this world, I think, not the moody sounds of jazz—but that monotonous pounding of cannibalistic music wearing at your senses.... From somewhere, lured by the jungle sexsounds—a dark Latin queen rushed frenziedly onto the small clearing of the dancefloor: beach-hat with lurid dyed feathers, red-polka-dotted loose-sleeved blouse tied at her stomach, white knee-length beachpants glowing purplish in the light, a gaudy gold butterfly pinned to her hip, several bracelets—beaded, multicolored, on her long brown arms. Dark body gleaming, thin and sinewy, she twists, grinds—lips parted, teeth gnashed. In convulsed, savagely rhythmic movements, accompanied by guttural groans, she writhes the reptile body, contracts it suddenly—simulating a woman’s orgasm. She crumbles near us on the floor in a dark, sweating, panting, violently colored heap.... More than a dance, it has been a demand for Recognition of her mutilated sex. I look at the man, and his eyes are staring down at the table. Face shiny with perspiration, eyes almost demented: wide-blackcentered—the queen removes her hat and passes it along the crowd, collecting money—making comments as she moves still writhing; dishing the women flagrantly, insulting the men with them; calling the lesbians “mister,” the fairies “miss”; camping openly with the masculine hustlers, withdrawing her hat abruptly (“I’ll take it out later in trade, honey”)—subtly choosing those from whom she will demand recognition—and she is carrying it all off Triumphantly: her woman-act so exaggerated, so distorted, so uncompromisingly brutal in its implied judgment, that this crowd, hypnotized by her, momentarily sucked into her immediate world, responds mechanically: As if buying away her scorching-eyed judgment of them, they acknowledge her with the coin dropped into the feathered hat. She approaches us. And she passes the hat before me—withdraws it quickly with a wink and a kiss—and I breathe in relief at having expelled her implied judgment. But she leans over the table, extending the hat toward the man. He doesnt move. His eyes, rising slowly from the table where they had remained throughout the queen’s dance, meet hers. Pale-gray, they intercept the demanding look of the queen.

• From Educated (2018)

  The hall was lit by candlelight, which was beautiful, but it cheered me for another reason: I wasn’t wearing formal clothing, just a black shirt and black pants, and I thought people might not notice in the dim lighting. My friend Laura arrived late. She explained that her parents had visited and taken her to France. She had only just returned. She was wearing a dress of rich purple with crisp pleats in the skirt. The hemline bounced several inches above her knee, and for a moment I thought the dress was whorish, until she said her father had bought it for her in Paris. A gift from one’s father could not be whorish. A gift from one’s father seemed to me the definitive signal that a woman was not a whore. I struggled with this dissonance—a whorish dress, gifted to a loved daughter—until the meal had been finished and the plates cleared away. At my next supervision, Professor Steinberg said that when I applied for graduate school, he would make sure I was accepted to whatever institution I chose. “Have you visited Harvard?” he said. “Or perhaps you prefer Cambridge?” I imagined myself in Cambridge, a graduate student wearing a long black robe that swished as I strode through ancient corridors. Then I was hunching in a bathroom, my arm behind my back, my head in the toilet. I tried to focus on the student but I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture the girl in the whirling black gown without seeing that other girl. Scholar or whore, both could not be true. One was a lie. “I can’t go,” I said. “I can’t pay the fees.” “Let me worry about the fees,” Professor Steinberg said. —IN LATE AUGUST, on our last night in Cambridge, there was a final dinner in the great hall. The tables were set with more knives, forks and goblets than I’d ever seen; the paintings on the wall seemed ghostly in the candlelight. I felt exposed by the elegance and yet somehow made invisible by it. I stared at the other students as they passed, taking in every silk dress, every heavily lined eye. I obsessed over the beauty of them. At dinner I listened to the cheerful chatter of my friends while longing for the isolation of my room. Professor Steinberg was seated at the high table. Each time I glanced at him, I felt that old instinct at work in me, tensing my muscles, preparing me to take flight. I left the hall the moment dessert was served. It was a relief to escape all that refinement and beauty—to be allowed to be unlovely and not a point of contrast. Dr. Kerry saw me leave and followed. It was dark. The lawn was black, the sky blacker. Pillars of chalky light reached up from the ground and illuminated the chapel, which glowed, moonlike, against the night sky. “You’ve made an impression on Professor Steinberg,” Dr. Kerry said, falling into step beside me.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Only two countries had falconry exhibits in the Berlin exhibition. Germany won first prize for theirs, and the British Falconers’ Club came second. That bronze falcon I’d pulled from Gordon’s cupboard was their award. It had been sent to the club after the exhibition by Hermann Göring. Göring: Hitler’s right-hand man, commander-in chief of the Luftwaffe, the Jägermeister of the Reich, the man who’d set the Reichstag on fire. Falconry delighted him. It wasn’t only that he considered it the Romantic sport of ancient Teutonic kings. Hawks themselves were a natural elite, the perfect naturalisation of Nazi ideology: living paragons of power and blood and violence that preyed guiltlessly on things weaker than themselves. Göring’s portrait of his favourite hawk, a white gyrfalcon standing on a cliff, is utterly true to the conventions of Nazi portraiture: bathed in morning sunlight, its wings half open, the falcon stares coldly into the distance. And Göring had a trained goshawk, too: I had seen it stuffed and mounted on a branch in an American archive years before. It was a big goshawk in adult plumage, still wearing jesses and bells, its dry toes locked around a dusty branch. It was beautifully mounted. Someone had taken very good care to make it look alive. I stared into its glass eyes, chilled to the bone, and wondered if it was related to Gos. There was every chance that it was a cousin of White’s hawk, for the man who’d painted Göring’s gyrfalcon, the man who headed the Deutscher Falkenorden, who had arranged falconry’s state patronage and designed the Reichsfalkenhof, was Renz Waller. And he was the man who’d sent White Gos; the man to whom White had written pleading for another hawk. And who wrote back to him a few weeks later saying he would certainly try to ‘get for you a other passager Gos’. A new hawk! Full of excitement, White uncapped his pen and wrote Plan for a Passage Gos on the inside cover of his new copy of Bert’s Treatise. He mapped out detailed training plans, and they rang with new authority. ‘Watch her that night, keeping her constantly in motion,’ he wrote. ‘Have an assistant to take turns at this.’ But the new hawk was not to be. The day before it was due to arrive White was rushed to hospital with appendicitis – as if his body was rebelling against the prospect of another weary battle. The thought of the surgeon’s knife was a terror to him. ‘It made me feel cleaner in some obscure way,’ he wrote to John Moore after the operation. ‘I think I am brave and master of my soul after all.’ He had survived the crisis, and returned to his cottage. For a while he courted the night nurse, Stella, who had tended him at the hospital – but he thought her a wholly alien creature, and when he saw she might truly want him, he spurned her cruelly.

• From Educated (2018)

  could not be whorish. A gift from one’s father seemed to me the definitive signal that a woman was not a whore. I struggled with this dissonance—a whorish dress, gifted to a loved daughter—until the meal had been finished and the plates cleared away. At my next supervision, Professor Steinberg said that when I applied for graduate school, he would make sure I was accepted to whatever institution I chose. “Have you visited Harvard?” he said. “Or perhaps you prefer Cambridge?” I imagined myself in Cambridge, a graduate student wearing a long black robe that swished as I strode through ancient corridors. Then I was hunching in a bathroom, my arm behind my back, my head in the toilet. I tried to focus on the student but I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture the girl in the whirling black gown without seeing that other girl. Scholar or whore, both could not be true. One was a lie. “I can’t go,” I said. “I can’t pay the fees.” “Let me worry about the fees,” Professor Steinberg said. — IN LATE AUGUST, on our last night in Cambridge, there was a final dinner in the great hall. The tables were set with more knives, forks and goblets than I’d ever seen; the paintings on the wall seemed ghostly in the candlelight. I felt exposed by the elegance and yet somehow made invisible by it. I stared at the other students as they passed, taking in every silk dress, every heavily lined eye. I obsessed over the beauty of them. At dinner I listened to the cheerful chatter of my friends while longing for the isolation of my room. Professor Steinberg was seated at the high table. Each time I glanced at him, I felt that old instinct at work in me, tensing my muscles, preparing me to take flight. I left the hall the moment dessert was served. It was a relief to escape all that refinement and beauty—to be allowed to be unlovely and not a point of contrast. Dr. Kerry saw me leave and followed. It was dark. The lawn was black, the sky blacker. Pillars of chalky light reached up from the ground and illuminated the chapel, which glowed, moonlike, against the night sky.

• From Educated (2018)

  whatever “Ruby Ridge” was. He’d said it was a conflict. I searched my memory, trying to recall if I’d ever heard the words. There was something familiar in them. Then images appeared in my mind, weak and distorted, as if the transmission were being disrupted at the source. I closed my eyes and the scene became vivid. I was in our house, crouching behind the birchwood cabinets. Mother was kneeling next to me, her breath slow and tired. She licked her lips and said she was thirsty, then before I could stop her she stood and reached for the tap. I felt the tremor of gunfire and heard myself shout. There was a thud as something heavy fell to the floor. I moved her arm aside and gathered up the baby. The bell rang. The auditorium emptied. I went to the computer lab. I hesitated for a moment over the keyboard—struck by a premonition that this was information I might regret knowing—then typed “Ruby Ridge” into the browser. According to Wikipedia, Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly standoff between Randy Weaver and a number of Federal agencies, including the U.S. Marshals Service and the FBI. The name Randy Weaver was familiar, and even as I read it I heard it falling from my father’s lips. Then the story as it had lived in my imagination for thirteen years began replaying in my mind: the shooting of a boy, then of his father, then of his mother. The Government had murdered the entire family, parents and children, to cover up what they had done. I scrolled past the backstory to the first shooting. Federal agents had surrounded the Weaver cabin. The mission was surveillance only, and the Weavers were unaware of the agents until a dog began to bark. Believing the dog had sensed a wild animal, Randy’s fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, charged into the woods. The agents shot the dog, and Sammy, who was carrying a gun, opened fire. The resulting conflict left two dead: a federal agent and Sammy, who was retreating, running up the hill toward the cabin, when he was shot in the back. I read on. The next day, Randy Weaver was shot, also in the back, while trying to visit his son’s body. The corpse was in the shed, and Randy was lifting the latch on the door, when a sniper took aim at his spine and missed. His wife, Vicki, moved toward the door to help her husband and again the sniper opened fire. The bullet struck her in the head, killing her instantly as she held their ten-month-old daughter. For nine days the

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She rouses and the bell sounds loud in the bright room. It does not seem to concern her at all. Bells are among the most ancient of falconry technologies. For years I’d bought bells from Pakistan, hand-hammered from brass to a design of immense antiquity, but the one Mabel wears is American; modern, small and light, handmade from nickel silver. When she flies free it will tell me where she is. Bells were traditionally attached to hawks’ legs on tiny leather straps called bewits, but a tail-mounted bell is much better for a goshawk, for they have an invariable habit of shaking their tails when they land. You can stand with your back to a tree with a gos in it and trace its movements from branch to branch behind you through sound alone. But bells aren’t foolproof: their sound is dulled by wind and distance, and a motionless hawk is silent, so when Mabel flies free she’ll also wear a tiny radiotransmitter, and I’ll carry the receiver that picks up its signal over my back in a black cloth case. Even with these double precautions the thought of taking her off the creance fills me with dread. I had never lost a hawk. I’d never expected to. But once she is free, I’m convinced that Mabel will rocket away from me and disappear for ever. I’m even more certain of this when I fly her a few hours later. This time she doesn’t even snatch at the food in my glove, just flies straight past me until she’s brought down to earth. Disconsolate, I carry her back to the edge of the village playing fields. Stuart watches me approach, looks critically at the hawk. He rubs the back of his neck with one hand. His face, tanned and lined by years of sun and wind, is thoughtful and grave. ‘It might be the bell, do you think?’ I say. ‘Freaked her out a bit?’ He frowns. ‘It’s a new place, too. But she’s not ready yet, Helen. Not yet.’ He feels her breastbone speculatively. ‘She needs to come down more. She’s still too fat. You’re feeding her rabbit? Just rabbit?’ I nod miserably. He looks at me, considering. ‘Tell you what, Helen, come out on the hill with me tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’ll be going up there to fly the tiercel. We’ll get her out into the fields, away from streets and houses. She needs space.’ ‘That would be brilliant, Stuart.’ ‘I’ll pick you up at five.’ ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’ ‘She needs to come down a bit more, Helen.’ He was offering to help, and I was unprepared for how this made me feel. I’d flown scores of hawks. I’d taught falconry to beginners. I’d written papers on it, had lectured on its venerable history. But now I bowed my head before Stuart.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He knew what to do. He knew about goshawks and I did not. I felt weak with relief at not having to be an expert any more. There he was, rolling a cigarette, reassuringly calm and kind, a proper, generous friend; and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life. ‘Need to excel in order to be loved,’ White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved? White was triumphant: Gos had come a whole hundred yards on the creance, was ready to fly free: he could say truthfully now that he had trained a hawk. But something terrible was caught up in his triumph. For the first time since the hawk arrived White felt exposed. Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement. In his hawking day-book White began writing about critics and how he might ‘avoid the kicks which frighten me’. He felt it necessary to explain that his self-satisfaction was not egotism, but ‘actually a horrible surprise at being good at anything after having been so bad at living for 30 years’. And all the authoritarian figures in his life under whom he had lived in fear coalesced in his imagination into an elderly falconer with a waxed moustache who would read his book and consider him a fool. He knew he must explain to that man that what he had written was only the book of a learner. The words in his day-book read very like a prayer. May I hope that this book will receive the oblivion of those austringers on the one hand, and of those critics on the other, who realise that indifference and a supposition of non-existence sometimes are the most killing weapons. May I hope that some will realise that I am only a man. He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done. Stuart pulls off the road onto a farm track to the west of the city. The evening is warm, but there’s a torn-paper whiteness behind the sun that speaks of frost to come. I unhood the hawk. Her pale eyes stare out across a hillside of stubble and chalky till, at slopes cut with hedgerows crisped at their edges into shot-silk taffeta. She sees skeletal teasels and fencewires. Larks calling overhead.

• From Educated (2018)

  containing a right angle, anywhere, always. What I knew of physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often seemed unstable, capricious. But here was a principle through which the dimensions of life could be defined, captured. Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense. The misery began when I moved beyond the Pythagorean theorem to sine, cosine and tangent. I couldn’t grasp such abstractions. I could feel the logic in them, could sense their power to bestow order and symmetry, but I couldn’t unlock it. They kept their secrets, becoming a kind of gateway beyond which I believed there was a world of law and reason. But I could not pass through the gate. Mother said that if I wanted to learn trigonometry, it was her responsibility to teach me. She set aside an evening, and the two of us sat at the kitchen table, scratching at bits of paper and tugging our hair. We spent three hours on a single problem, and every answer we produced was wrong. “I wasn’t any good at trig in high school,” Mother moaned, slamming the book shut. “And I’ve forgotten what little I knew.” Dad was in the living room, shuffling through blueprints for the granaries and mumbling to himself. I’d watched him sketch those blueprints, watched him perform the calculations, altering this angle or lengthening that beam. Dad had little formal education in mathematics but it was impossible to doubt his aptitude: somehow I knew that if I put the equation before my father, he would be able to solve it. When I’d told Dad that I planned to go to college, he’d said a woman’s place was in the home, that I should be learning about herbs—“God’s pharmacy” he’d called it, smiling to himself—so I could take over for Mother. He’d said a lot more, of course, about how I was whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s, but still I decided to ask him about trigonometry. Here was a sliver of man’s knowledge I was certain he possessed. I scribbled the problem on a fresh sheet of paper. Dad didn’t look up as I approached, so gently, slowly, I slid the paper over the blueprints. “Dad, can you solve this?” He looked at me harshly, then his eyes softened. He rotated the paper,

• From Educated (2018)

  “It’s a fifty-caliber rifle,” he said. “Wanna try it?” I peered through the scope, searching the mountainside, fixing distant stalks of wheat between its crosshairs. The meatloaf was forgotten. We charged outside. It was past sunset; the horizon was dark. I watched as Dad lowered himself to the frozen ground, positioned his eye at the scope and, after what felt like an hour, pulled the trigger. The blast was thunderous. I had both palms pressed to my ears, but after the initial boom I dropped them, listening as the shot echoed through the ravines. He fired again and again, so that by the time we went inside my ears were ringing. I could barely hear Dad’s reply when I asked what the gun was for. “Defense,” he said. The next night I had a rehearsal at Worm Creek. I was perched on my crate, listening to the monologue being performed onstage, when Charles appeared and sat next to me. “You don’t go to school,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You should come to choir. You’d like choir.” “Maybe,” I said, and he smiled. A few of his friends stepped into the wing and called to him. He stood and said goodbye, and I watched him join them, taking in the easy way they joked together and imagining an alternate reality in which I was one of them. I imagined Charles inviting me to his house, to play a game or watch a movie, and felt a rush of pleasure. But when I pictured Charles visiting Buck’s Peak, I felt something else, something like panic. What if he found the root cellar? What if he discovered the fuel tank? Then I understood, finally, what the rifle was for. That mighty barrel, with its special range that could reach from the mountain to the valley, was a defensive perimeter for the house, for our supplies, because Dad said we would be driving when everyone else was hotfooting it. We would have food, too, when everyone else was starving, looting. Again I imagined Charles climbing the hill to our house. But in my imagination I was on the ridge, and I was watching his approach through crosshairs. —

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Bells are among the most ancient of falconry technologies. For years I’d bought bells from Pakistan, hand-hammered from brass to a design of immense antiquity, but the one Mabel wears is American; modern, small and light, handmade from nickel silver. When she flies free it will tell me where she is. Bells were traditionally attached to hawks’ legs on tiny leather straps called bewits, but a tail-mounted bell is much better for a goshawk, for they have an invariable habit of shaking their tails when they land. You can stand with your back to a tree with a gos in it and trace its movements from branch to branch behind you through sound alone. But bells aren’t foolproof: their sound is dulled by wind and distance, and a motionless hawk is silent, so when Mabel flies free she’ll also wear a tiny radiotransmitter, and I’ll carry the receiver that picks up its signal over my back in a black cloth case. Even with these double precautions the thought of taking her off the creance fills me with dread. I had never lost a hawk. I’d never expected to. But once she is free, I’m convinced that Mabel will rocket away from me and disappear for ever. I’m even more certain of this when I fly her a few hours later. This time she doesn’t even snatch at the food in my glove, just flies straight past me until she’s brought down to earth. Disconsolate, I carry her back to the edge of the village playing fields. Stuart watches me approach, looks critically at the hawk. He rubs the back of his neck with one hand. His face, tanned and lined by years of sun and wind, is thoughtful and grave. ‘It might be the bell, do you think?’ I say. ‘Freaked her out a bit?’ He frowns. ‘It’s a new place, too. But she’s not ready yet, Helen. Not yet.’ He feels her breastbone speculatively. ‘She needs to come down more. She’s still too fat. You’re feeding her rabbit? Just rabbit?’ I nod miserably. He looks at me, considering. ‘Tell you what, Helen, come out on the hill with me tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’ll be going up there to fly the tiercel. We’ll get her out into the fields, away from streets and houses. She needs space.’ ‘That would be brilliant, Stuart.’ ‘I’ll pick you up at five.’ ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’ ‘She needs to come down a bit more, Helen.’

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  That night, well past midnight, a car pulls up in front of my apartment building carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. I’ve learned to ignore such disturbances—where else do they have to go? I say to myself. But on this particular evening I have someone staying over; I know that my neighbors next door have just brought home their newborn child; and so I pull on some shorts and head downstairs for a chat with our nighttime visitors. As I approach the car, the voices stop, the heads within all turn my way. “Listen, people are trying to sleep around here. Why don’t y’all take it someplace else.” The four boys inside say nothing, don’t even move. The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. I can’t see the faces inside the car; it’s too dark to know how old they are, whether they’re sober or drunk, good boys or bad. One of them could be Kyle. One of them could be Roy. One of them could be Johnnie. One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps for some forgotten reason. The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say something. I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can’t take me out, the four of them certainly can.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  In that last year of law school, I began to organize in my mind, with a frightening confidence, just how the book would proceed. There would be an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality, thoughts on the meaning of community and the restoration of public life through grassroots organizing, musings on affirmative action and Afrocentrism—the list of topics filled an entire page. I’d include personal anecdotes, to be sure, and analyze the sources of certain recurring emotions. But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary: the first section completed by March, the second submitted for revision in August …. When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled toward rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered the stories that my mother and her parents told me as a child, the stories of a family trying to explain itself. I recalled my first year as a community organizer in Chicago and my awkward steps toward manhood. I listened to my grandmother, sitting under a mango tree as she braided my sister’s hair, describing the father I had never truly known. Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered theories seemed insubstantial and premature. Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed. Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that—on the surface, at least—contradict the world I now occupy. After all, I’m thirty-three now; I work as a lawyer active in the social and political life of Chicago, a town that’s accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment. If I’ve been able to fight off cynicism, I nevertheless like to think of myself as wise to the world, careful not to expect too much.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Importance radiated off him, a buzz that filled the foyer. “Feel free to look around,” he said, and she couldn’t figure out why she’d need or want such an invitation until she realized the house was filled with incredible art, that guests were sticking their necks into corners and back halls and even upstairs to glimpse Fernand and Corinne’s acquisitions. A Basquiat hung outside the bathroom; a Julian Schnabel plate portrait dominated the dining room. People made an effort to speak English to her at first—Corinne, Serge, the German writer they introduced her to—but soon everything was a whirl of French, and she was left talking to Jake. They wound up in a sunroom at the back of the house, a room that filled and then emptied every few minutes as guests popped in to make sure they hadn’t missed any trays of food, buckets of champagne, seminal works of cubism. He said, “I’ve been studying his work online. Richard’s. It’s weird how many photos I didn’t even know were his. Like, famous ones. That triptych thing, I’ve totally admired that before. No idea it was Campo. And I saw one of you, I think. Yeah?” Despite the drink in his hand, he seemed soberer now than he had on the Métro. She wanted him to disappear. “Was I wearing a flowery dress?” “No, you were next to a guy—you were curled up next to someone in a hospital bed.” Fiona attempted to drain her champagne, although it hurt her nose when she swallowed. “You’re asking about private things,” she said. “It’s art, but I was there. Those were my friends.” “I—hey, I actually didn’t ask anything. I don’t think I asked a question.” “Fair enough.” “What were you afraid I was going to ask?” She thought. “You were going to ask me who that was, in the bed.” “Hey, do you want to sit down?” “No.” She looked at the group hovering in the sunroom door, but they were speaking French and hadn’t glanced her way. “Can I—listen, I just have one question, and it’s not about that picture, it’s about the triptych.” “Christ. What.” “Sorry! Sorry. Let’s find food.” She was stressed about things that had nothing to do with Jake Austen and his invasion, but he was a convenient punching bag. And so she stepped too close to him, spoke too loud. “That was Julian Ames.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Even with the five bunches of flowers her sisters had sent, the room reeked of something like a black stinging horse liniment I had smelled on a ranch once. That was the burn medicine, I suppose. I wanted to leave right away, just looking at that leg. But the door had hissed shut behind us, and Grandma’s face was rolling our way already. (Here time telescopes and gets slow, for some reason. I almost have to hold my head very still to keep from backing away.) She was so thin and pale you could practically see straight through her. Her lips were bluish and her hair had gotten whiter, so that her eyes, when the lids flickered open, seemed paler, as if she’d seen something that scalded her inside. Lecia walked right over to the edge of the bed like it was no big deal. Grandma opened and closed her mouth a few times like a fish, not saying anything. They had taken out her dentures, which sat on a napkin on top of her bed table. There were also those little white strings of spit running between her lips, and she had some yellow crust in the corners. Mother said that somebody really might have washed her up and put her teeth in, but she didn’t seem alarmed really. That put me off, because I could usually count on Mother to be at least as big a sissy as I was, and I was ready to bolt. Grandma’s hand kind of patted the mattress by her, and Lecia grabbed it right off. That made Grandma suck in her breath real suddenly, so Lecia dropped the hand and took a step back. Then Mother stepped in and smoothed her white hair back gently and asked how she felt. Grandma just started patting the bed toward Lecia again. She fixed that empty stare on Lecia as if she had just descended to the bedside from the clouds. She sucked in her breath hard again and said, “Belinda! Where have you been? Thank God, Belinda.” Then her voice got quiet again, and she went on and on about how she’d missed her and looked for her, and Lecia just played along like she was this person we’d never heard of. But for some reason this Belinda stuff put a cold corkscrew through the center of where I stood. It was even worse than seeing that stump all Frankensteined-up with black stitches and black streaks running up her crepey white thigh. Before we left, Mother threw a screaming cuss fit at the two doctors who’d done the mustard gas treatment. It was never fun when Mother raised hell in public, but in this instance, I almost welcomed it. After being shut down all day, zombielike, she seemed to descend back into her body. (Maybe, like the Greeks used to say, her ate suddenly filled her.) The doctors just stood with their coffee mugs, as if it didn’t occur to them to walk away.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Coming out, I noticed Grandma’s hand hanging down off the side of the bed in the back room. I tiptoed in. It was a small, musty-smelling room. Auntie kept a big white freezer packed with deer and squirrel and duck meat in there. The white iron bed, narrow and sagging, sat alongside the freezer. Grandma’s glasses were also on the floor, so I knew she was asleep. I thought to put the glasses on the nighttable, then at the same time maybe snitch her sewing scissors so I could spend some time cutting newspaper snowflakes or making myself a cootie-catcher back in the living room. Grandma’s eyes were mostly closed, sort of rolled up in her head so just white half-moons showed when I peered in. When I squatted down to grab the glasses, I could see that she’d spilled something on the lenses, something pink and sticky-looking, so the little red ants we called sugar ants were crawling over the glasses. The previous spring I had liberated all the ants in Lecia’s glass ant farm (I’d felt bad they were locked up), and had since been looking to snare some new ones for her. It had been a prizewinning science project. I was trying to figure out a way to shoo the ants off one arm of the glasses and trap them in a shoebox I found under the bed, when I noticed Grandma’s hand. It was curled partway open. The fingers almost touched the floor. And running in a track down the very white part of her arm was what I first thought to be a scratch or an eyebrow-pencil line. But the line was moving. I bent right next to her. Then I made out how she’d spilled that cough medicine or red soda pop on the inside of her arm, and the sugar ants were crawling up and down eating it off, and she didn’t even feel it. I don’t know if I thought she was dead or what. All I knew was her state at that instant was way more than I’d bargained for. I backed out of the room and went back to the living room. I sat with my back flat against the screen so I could feel Lecia’s vertebrae bumping against mine in a way I liked. I sat right there till Mother went in and found Grandma and started screaming.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  We never quite figured out her reasons for snubbing their offers. In one letter I found later, the old woman had explained to Mother that she was in the cotton business, not the petroleum business. Maybe she’d worried about getting bilked by some silver-tongued oil-company fellow, which bilking wouldn’t befit her status as a prudent Methodist widow-lady and lifetime member of the Eastern Star. Somewhere in her effects, however, Mother’s lawyer had found a letter from a Dallas oil baron. With Mother’s permission, the lawyer would “execute an oil lease” for this guy. That was the exact phrase. I also recall moving my index finger along a string of five zeros, but I’m damned if I can conjure the exact amount the letter laid out. There was a lot of other stuff, of course, but I just remember my index finger stumping from one zero to the next. I counted till it hit me that we were in the hundred-thousand-dollar range, just one zero shy of the million mark, that magic number that sent dollar signs flying through movie montages. Here , I doubtless thought, is the spotted pony I’ve run out looking for every Christmas morning. Here’s a garnet birthstone ring from the baby Ferris wheel in Gibson’s Jewelry. And since I lacked for charity, I also probably had an idea like the following: Maybe I can get to Disneyland and that lard-ass Peggy Fontenot can go screw. I ran through the house again then, calling out for Mother. What I found in her bathroom knocked the wind slap out of me. The big rectangular mirror over the sink had been scribbled up with lipstick of an orangey-red color. Somebody—Mother no doubt—had taken a tube of Mango Fandango or Kiss-Me Peach and scribbled that mirror almost solid, so the silver reflecting part came through only in streaks. In the sink there was a stub end of greasy lipstick. On the floor the empty gold tube lay like a spent shell casing on the fuzzy oval of yellow rug. I shied around it as I would a scorpion. A thin filter of fear came to slide between me and the world. Objects in the house started to get larger and more fluid. A standing lamp reared up at me as I came on it. In Mother’s bedroom, on the dresser mirror, I found the same lipstick scribbles done in hibiscus. The metal O of the tube had sawed through the silver surface. Other mirrors in other rooms held other lipstick colors—blue reds and mauves and pale titty-colored pinks, and that scary lipstick the color of muddy blood that Mother hardly ever wore because it made her look as pale and black-lipped as a silent-film star. I went from mirror to scrawled-up mirror till I found the shattered one in our bathroom, which I imagined she’d gotten to last. A round smashed place in the center was about the diameter of her fist.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "The third is the class of the age of reason; its vestments are blue; its ages are from twentyone to thirty, and both you and I belong to it. "The fourth class, dressed in reddish brown, is intended for those of mature years; it is composed of anyone over thirty. "These girls are either indiscriminately mingled at the Reverend Fathers' suppers, or they appear there by class: it all depends upon the whims of the monks but, when not at the meals, they are mixed in the two dormitories, as you are able to judge by those who are lodged in ours. "The instruction I have to give you," said Omphale, "divides under the headings of four primary articles; in the first, we will treat of what pertains to the house; in the second we will place what regards the behavior of the girls, their punishment, their feeding habits, etc., etc., etc.; the third article will inform you of the arrangement of these monks' pleasures, of the manner in which the girls serve them; the fourth will contain observations on personnel changes. "I will not, Therese, describe the environs of this frightful house, for you are as familiar with them as I; I will only discuss the interior; they have shown it all to me so that I can give a picture of it to newcomers, whose education is one of my chores, and in whom, by means of this account, I am expected to dash all hope of escape. Yesterday Severino explained some of its features and he did not deceive you, my dear.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And I was kind of suspicious that white people were really interested in seeing some Indians battle each other. I think it was sort of like watching dogfighting, you know? It made me feel exposed and primitive. “So, okay,” the sports guy said. “Are you ready to try again?” “Yeah.” “Okay, let’s roll.” The camera guy started filming. “So, Arnold,” the sports guy said. “Back in December, you faced your old classmates, and fellow Spokane tribal members, in a basketball game back on the reservation, and you lost. They’re now the number one–ranked team in the state and they’re coming to your home gym. How does that make you feel?” “Weird,” I said. “Cut, cut, cut, cut,” the sports guy said. He was mad now. “Arnold,” he said. “Could you maybe think of a word besides weird?” I thought for a bit. “Hey,” I said. “How about I say that it makes me feel like I’ve had to grow up really fast, too fast, and that I’ve come to realize that every single moment of my life is important. And that every choice I make is important. And that a basketball game, even a game between two small schools in the middle of nowhere, can be the difference between being happy and being miserable for the rest of my life.” “Wow,” the sports guy said. “That’s perfect. That’s poetry. Let’s go with that, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Okay, let’s roll tape,” the sports guy said again and put the microphone in my face. “Arnold,” he said. “Tonight you’re going into battle against your former teammates and Spokane tribal members, the Wellpinit Redskins. They’re the number one–ranked team in the state and they beat you pretty handily back in December. Some people think they’re going to blow you out of the gym tonight. How does that make you feel?” “Weird,” I said. “All right, all right, that’s it,” the sports guy said. “We’re out of here.” “Did I say something wrong?” I asked. “You are a little asshole,” the sports guy said. “Wow, are you allowed to say that to me?” “I’m just telling the truth.” He had a point there. I was being a jerk. “Listen, kid,” the sports guy said. “We thought this was an important story. We thought this was a story about a kid striking out on his own, about a kid being courageous, and all you want to do is give us grief.” Wow. He was making me feel bad. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just a yucker.” “What?” the sports guy asked.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Especially for a small-school battle. And most especially because I was a Spokane Indian playing against his old friends (and enemies). A local news crew came out to interview me before the game. “So, Arnold, how does it feel to play against your former teammates?” the sports guy asked me. “It’s kind of weird,” I said. “How weird?” “Really weird.” Yep, I was scintillating. The sports guy stopped the interview. “Listen,” he said. “I know this is a difficult thing. You’re young. But maybe you could get more specific about your feelings.” “My feelings?” I asked. “Yeah, this is a major deal in your life, isn’t it?” Well, duh, yeah, of course it was a major deal. It was maybe the biggest thing in my life ever, but I wasn’t about to share my feelings with the whole world. I wasn’t going to start blubbering for the local sports guy like he was my priest or something. I had some pride, you know? I believed in my privacy. It wasn’t like I’d called the guy and offered up my story, you know? And I was kind of suspicious that white people were really interested in seeing some Indians battle each other. I think it was sort of like watching dogfighting, you know? It made me feel exposed and primitive. “So, okay,” the sports guy said. “Are you ready to try again?” “Yeah.” “Okay, let’s roll.” The camera guy started filming. “So, Arnold,” the sports guy said. “Back in December, you faced your old classmates, and fellow Spokane tribal members, in a basketball game back on the reservation, and you lost. They’re now the number one–ranked team in the state and they’re coming to your home gym. How does that make you feel?” “Weird,” I said. “Cut, cut, cut, cut,” the sports guy said. He was mad now. “Arnold,” he said. “Could you maybe think of a word besides weird?” I thought for a bit. “Hey,” I said. “How about I say that it makes me feel like I’ve had to grow up really fast, too fast, and that I’ve come to realize that every single moment of my life is important. And that every choice I make is important. And that a basketball game, even a game between two small schools in the middle of nowhere, can be the difference between being happy and being miserable for the rest of my life.” “Wow,” the sports guy said. “That’s perfect. That’s poetry. Let’s go with that, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Okay, let’s roll tape,” the sports guy said again and put the microphone in my face. “Arnold,” he said. “Tonight you’re going into battle against your former teammates and Spokane tribal members, the Wellpinit Redskins. They’re the number one–ranked team in the state and they beat you pretty handily back in December. Some people think they’re going to blow you out of the gym tonight.