Fear

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 Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  At that moment the child is absolutely open to what the parents have to say and they may never have another chance like it. Handled properly and treated with respect, the conversation that ensues can be one of the most important conversations in the lives of each adult and child. Parents need to speak honestly and from the heart. This is their time to tell the child the moral principles that they believe in, not abstractly or in fancy language, but as simply as they can. They should say what they believe and show him how they’re acting in accord with these principles. First they need to tell him honestly that his perceptions are on target, that each adult is indeed in trouble, that they’re both worried and sad about what’s happening. Both are giving it their full attention. They need to explain that marriage, like all human relationships, has good times mixed with difficult times, laughter as well as tears. They should make absolutely clear (assuming it is true and it usually is) that children are one of the joys of marriage. And they can tell him that whatever the deficits are at this moment, balance is what matters. Each parent hopes and fully expects to pull through. That was the substance of Gary’s father’s important and long- remembered message to his son. Please note that a good parent doesn’t criticize the other parent. Quite the opposite. They go out of their way to protect the child from feeling he needs to take sides or that there are sides. Nor do they tell the child that mom and dad are staying together to protect him and his siblings. Such martyrdom is not a gift. They’d be giving the child a painful and heavy burden; imagine feeling responsible for your parents’ years of unhappiness together just because you were born. As an aside here, I should mention that the “don’t criticize” rule of behavior given to parents after divorce—for example, if you don’t fight in front of the children, they will be spared further harm—is good advice but insufficient. It certainly helps children to not see their parents act out like marionettes in a Punch and Judy show. But fighting and taking sides after a divorce has a fundamentally different quality than fighting and taking sides within an intact marriage. After a divorce, open disagreements are normal and expected. The marriage is over and presumably you divorced because of serious differences. People need to try to get along, but tensions are inevitable. And the child has a right to know why his parents divorced. In an intact marriage, disagreements are also normal, but the structure of the marriage itself contains them and makes them safe. Arguments have a beginning, middle, and end—because the important goal is to protect the marriage. It’s a critical part of the child’s education to learn firsthand how arguments can be resolved without threatening the integrity of the family.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Calcaterra Then I flip the pen toward Camille. “You’re up.” She gently slides it from my grip and, with the confidence of a maestro, scrawls her name beneath mine, and then Cherie follows her lead before she heads back home to her young family. “Now that you both determined you won’t return to your mother’s care,” Ms. Davis says, looking at Camille and me, “you need to begin planning how you’ll live on your own as soon as you turn eighteen. The state only covers your foster care costs until then, unless you go to college.” “College?” I asked. “Granted, that comes with its own challenges—in fact, I have yet to see a foster kid go to college.” “What? Why?” “Well, think about it: It’s tough to hold down a job and make rent when you’re working hard to study. In any case, we’ll start teaching you how to live independently. Then, hopefully, one day you can make it on your own.” I glance at Camille, who’s giving Ms. Davis a look of daggers. After she leaves, Addie stands aside to let Camille and me pass from the kitchen. “Will you be joining us for dinner?” she says. “No thanks,” we call behind us. We close ourselves in Camille’s bedroom, and I stare up at her ceiling. “I don’t know how to feel,” I confess. She collapses with her head next to mine on the pillow. “Me neither.” Then as if on cue, we turn to each other and burst out laughing. We laugh so hard we begin to hyperventilate in tears until we roll off the bed, making two bony thuds on Addie’s floor. Eventually, I’m able to compose myself enough to mock our three full days of social workers and legal talk. “Congratulations!” I declare. “Now that you’ve just dumped your mother, you’ll be homeless again at eighteen . . . if you survive until then!” Camille wipes her tears and folds her arms across her bust as Ms. Davis is apt to do. “Listen, girls,” she says with fake empathy, “really, you don’t stand an icicle’s chance in hell. Just try not to end up a drug addict, an alcoholic, pregnant, a prostitute, or in jail.” “Like your mother!” I wail. That night Camille kisses me on the cheek and smooths my hair behind my ear. “What are you thinking about?” I sigh. “Rosie and Norm. Tomorrow after school I’m going to ask Addie if we can call them.” “I’m worried about them, too . . . but this is your day,” Camille says. “Do you think our birthday girl is going to get her wish?” I smile. All weekend we’d been trying to stay out of the way at our temporary foster home while also racing against Ms. Davis’s deadline to get the affidavit completed and signed on time . . . but through all the chaos, my sister remembered that today I turned fourteen.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  Oh get me out of here, get me out of here, please someone help me! Oh help me, please help me. Oh God oh Jesus ! “Is there a corpsman?” I cry. “Can you get a corpsman?” There is a loud crack and I hear the guy begin to sob. “They’ve shot my fucking finger off! Let’s go, sarge! Let’s get outta here!” “I can’t move,” I gasp. “I can’t move my legs! I can’t feel anything!” I watch him go running back to the tree line. … I think he must be dead but I feel nothing for him, I just want to live. I feel nothing.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They grow sad when talk turns to marriage. As a result, many young men from divorced families are immobilized. When the woman says “now or never” many stand silently at the door, waiting for a push, or they close their eyes in terror and jump. Sometimes they run away or play for another delay, trying to keep open an escape door for as long as they can. I was intensely curious about Larry’s marriage and decided to be blunt: “Tell me about your marriage. Is it working out as you hoped?” “If I tell you about Grace, you’ll think I’ve gone soft in the head.” “Try me.” “She’s a bright, caring, and sweet woman who has made us a home that I never dreamed I would have. It amazes me every day that something like this could come from a family like mine. Or that it even existed anywhere. She goes out of her way to make me park my work at the door, to calm me when I come home frazzled when this or the other structure is not going to hold and the foundation we okayed is going to come crashing down into the canyon. She has brought love and laughter into my life.” I was very moved by his poetic description and marveled once again at his transformation. “What kind of husband would you say you are?” “Certainly not a perfect husband. We have our ups and downs. I have a temper that can flare. When it does, I’m stubborn and mean. I have a terrible habit of getting caught up with work and forgetting to call. Look, you know what I have to go on. I keep saying to myself, ‘Do it better, do it right, don’t mess up.’ I try. I try every day.” He smiled. “She’s a generous woman and she makes allowances for dumbness.” “What would you like to change if you could?” I realized that this blunt question might throw him off balance but decided to take the chance. Larry looked out the window for a full minute without speaking. Turning to face me, he gave an answer that I will long treasure, one that captures the continuing emotional constriction and fear that so many of these young men feel but have a very hard time talking about. They are ashamed and lack the words. He said: “I have a difficult time showing love to my wife, even telling her that I love her. She complains that I don’t show her enough affection. I’m aware of that. And I try to change it. But I can’t because of my parents’ marriage and divorce. I feel almost cursed. Sometimes when Grace comes to meet me here at the office, I want to jump up and hug her—but I can’t.” Of course, women have complained since time immemorial that their men have trouble expressing tender loving feelings.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After a few days I took a turn around the block with Phil. Accustomed to daily exercise, I now experienced an aching restlessness which mingled with the pain of my bruises and bones. I couldn’t make my limbs comfortable, and had to get out. It was a bright, blowy tea-time. Already people were coming home, the traffic was building up at the lights. The pavements were normal, the passers-by had preoccupied, harmless expressions. Yet to me it was a glaring world, treacherous with lurking alarm. A universal violence had been disclosed to me, and I saw it everywhere—in the sudden scatter across the pavement of some quite small boys, in the brief mocking notice of me taken by a couple of telephone engineers in a parked van, in the dark glasses and cigarette-browned fingers of a man—German? Dutch?—who stopped us to ask directions. I understood for the first time the vulnerability of the old, unfortified by good luck or inexperience. The air was full of screams—the screams of children’s games which no one mistakes for real screams as they blow on the wind from street to street. If there were real screams, I found myself wondering, would it be possible to tell the difference, would anyone detect the timbre of tragedy? Or could an atrocity take place whose sonority was indistinguishable from the make-believe of youngsters, their boredom and scares? I had never screamed in my life. Even when the three boys had laid into me I had uttered only formal little oaths, ‘Christ’, ‘God’ and ‘Oh no’. There was a lot of time to fill, but I hardly did anything useful. Mainly I closed the curtains and watched Wimbledon, alternately alerted by a breathtaking rally and soothed by the drowsy putterings of Dan Maskell, like some rich stew left bubbling all day long over a low flame. James brought me videos from the rental shop, as well—not the bath-house freak-shows he usually offered, but charming old films to make me feel better. On his day off—which was drizzly, the covers were on at the Centre Court—we sat and watched The Importance of Being Earnest together. Michael Redgrave and Michael Denison were such bliss, so brittle and yet resilient, so utterly groomed and frivolous, dancing about whistling ‘La donna è mobile’ … Afterwards James told me his theory about Bunbury and burying buns, and how earnest was a codeword for gay, and it was really The Importance of Being Uranist. I had heard it all before, but I could never quite remember it. Charles’s books were lying around, of course, and James picked them up and showed curiosity enough to make me feel ashamed that I was not getting on with them. ‘What’s it all like?’ he wanted to know. ‘Rather wonderful in parts—when he’s having adventures and things. Other bits are rather—earnest.’ ‘You must have read all of it by now.’

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  At Christmas, the shelter workers invite us kids to help them decorate a Christmas tree. Rosie, now six, gently takes my hand and looks on with a shy smile when Santa arrives carrying a sack on his shoulder. The shelter director encouraged me to make a wish list, so I asked for new Mad Libs game pads and Highlights magazines to share with Rosie and Norm. As the gifts are being handed out, he also tells me to write a list of books appropriate for seventh grade, and he’ll sign them out of the library for me. I jot down a dozen Landmark history books to read to Rosie, and a couple Judy Blumes. I figure, why not load up? You don’t have to pay at the library. Then a few months later, in March of 1979, Cookie returns to the shelter and announces that she’s registered us back in school and rented the top unit in a duplex in Ronkonkoma. She drops us there and takes off immediately, which suits Rosie, Norm, and me fine: After having lived in the shelter for a few months, the three of us are so used to having friends around that every day after school we invite the neighborhood kids to our house. But the fun’s over one afternoon when Cookie decides to come home, taking me by the hair and dragging me into her bedroom. Our friends tear down the stairs and outside as Cookie grabs a belt then rips off my shirt. She lashes my back, over and over. I try for the door but end up huddled in the corner, and as she takes a break to regain her grip on the belt, I start fighting back. She fights for her breath as she hurls the belt and screams, “The more you fight it, you skinny little whore, the longer it’s going to take! You have boys over, you stupid slut? This is for your own good. You want to end up pregnant? Who’s gonna take care of your baby? Huh?” she demands. “Me?” When she’s finished, she drags me to my room by my arm and tosses me inside. Quickly I put on a different shirt and shimmy down the back of the house, running out of the yard, dodging the commotion on the back porch as the neighbors point her to where I’ve gone. All one-hundred-eighty pounds of Cookie come heaving after me, and again she takes me by my hair and tugs me back to the house. “Take off your jeans and your top,” she says. I glare at her. “Take off your fucking clothes, you whore. Rosie, Norman,” she says, “I want you to see what happens when you try to run away.” I make eye contact with Rosie, who’s looking on in fear as Cookie spins me so that my back’s facing her. I stiffen, hearing her arm rise high in the air. She whips me . . . and whips me . . .

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “It’s okay,” Norm said. He swallowed away his tears and he put his arm around me. “Now it’s my turn to take care of you.” Minutes later, we stopped in front of a sad-looking Victorian house. In the front yard were three cars, one of which was up on blocks and had no trunk or hood cover. Between the cars on the weedy dirt were bikes, skateboards, and wagons. Each one had something missing: a wheel, a seat, handlebars. “Time to go, kiddos,” Mrs. Brady said, and she stood at the open back door. “I want my sisters!” I cried and wedged myself against the backseat, refusing to leave. “Norman, help your sister out of the car. Now.” Mrs. Brady said. The real Mrs. Brady would have used humor, or maybe she’d bring brownies or cookies out to the car. This Mrs. Brady was all business. Norm, who was always pragmatic, said, “Ma’am, this looks like a bad place. And if Rosie doesn’t want to go, I think we better not go.” Mrs. Brady lifted her shoulders and huffed. The pink-faced driver got out of his seat, opened the other back door and lunged across the seat. He grabbed my legs and pulled while I kicked and screamed. Norm held on to me, a determined gritty look on his face. Once I’d slipped free of Norm and was left trembling on the ground, my brother scrambled out and picked me up. “We don’t have a choice,” he said. “But don’t worry, we won’t be here too long anyway.” At the front door, on the cement stoop, was a thin woman with stringy brown and gray hair. She wore black leggings and an oversized Popeye sweatshirt. In the same hand in which Popeye held his pipe, she held her cigarette. She looked us up and down, her nose and lips contracted as if we smelled, and then she dropped her cigarette on the stoop and stomped on it with her white canvas sneaker. This was something I’d seen Cookie do many times, although Cookie was fond of high shoes that made a horse’s clop-clop when she walked. “Thought you got lost,” she said. Her voice was like crushed ice. “This one took a little longer than usual,” Mrs. Brady said. “So these are the two, huh?” Her eyes were tiny blue pinpoints that she drilled into me for a second before drilling them into Norm. “This is Norman and Rosanne,” Mrs. Brady said. “Kids, meet Mrs. Callahan, your new foster mother.” “I want Gi,” I whispered. “I got you,” Norm whispered back. “They look too skinny to me,” Mrs. Callahan said. “I don’t want no finicky

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  toward secular life and the new model of moral agency— centered around an absolutely free individual whose actions bore an eternal and cosmic signifi cance— were covalent propositions. Th e individual was morally re- sponsible, and moral responsibility required freedom, from the stars and from social expectation alike. Th e chill severity of Christian sexuality was born not out of a pathological hatred of the body, nor out of a broad public anxiety about the material world. It emerged in an existentially serious culture, propelled to startling conclusions by the remorseless logic of a new moral cosmology. Th e discovery of the free will was not a circumstantial adjunct of early Christian sexual morality; it was an essential feature, determined by the deep logic of a moral order founded on sin and salvation. F O R N I C ATI O N : F RO M H E B R E W TO G R E E K Around the year AD 51 the apostle Paul arrived for the fi rst time in Corinth, the bustling seat of Roman power in Achaea. Th e city, once razed by the Romans but long since resurrected by its destroyers, was an impos-ing sight. In Paul’s own words, he came to Corinth “in weakness and in much fear and trembling.” Th e Acrocorinth, the sheer escarpment housing Corinth’s most archaic temples, dominated the views of the approaching visitor. Perched on its eastern summit was a temple of Aphrodite, looming over the town that sprawled toward the sea beneath her solicitous watch. As Paul entered the forum, he would have been confronted by the bewildering noise of power, commerce, and diff use piety that characterized urban life in a vibrant provincial town of the Roman Empire. Th e sanctuaries of the gods— Tychē and Aphrodite, Artemis and Dionysus— ringed the crowded T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  center of the town, hard by the merchants’ stalls and public offi ces. Th e haphazard accretion of religious monuments, and the tessellation of the sacred and the profane, belied the reverent balance and careful rhythms that guaranteed the gods their due honor. Into this enveloping cityscape of tremu-lous paganism crept a missionary with a startling message. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” We meet the community of Christians Paul founded in Corinth through the tantalizing but imperfect prism of the letters he wrote, some six years after fi rst visiting the city, when challenged by the unexpectedly fractious relations in a small apocalyptic movement. Word reached Paul in Ephesus that the Corinthian Christians were feuding, split on a range of mundane problems, from marriage and manumission to sacrifi cial meat. In the patient response of the apostle that has come to be known as First Corinthians, fi erce disagreement over proper sexual behavior lurches to the surface.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  And now he sounded like a little whining three-year-old, he sounded like a little baby, he was just like a little frightened baby. “Are you gonna cry?” screamed the sergeant. “Is that what’s gonna happen? Everybody, I want you to look at this, look over here, people, I want you to see the baby cry!” Everyone looked over to where the fat kid was. “Are those tears?” screamed the sergeant. They were all laughing now, laughing, rocking back and forth on their heels, their hands on their hips. “Cry!” screamed the sergeant. “Cry Cry Cry you little baby! That’s what we want, we want you people to cry like little babies because that’s all you maggots are. You are nothing!” The fat kid was now kneeling on the floor. His whole body was shaking; he had his hands against his face like he was praying. “I don’t want this,” he was saying. “I . . . I want . . . to go home. I want to go home.” He was saying it over and over again now, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.” He hadn’t even gotten there, it was the first day and he wanted to go home. And as he watched, the drill instructors, having had all the fun they could, slowly stepped back from where the fat boy was kneeling, laughing and scorning him, pitying him and cursing him, running back and forth screaming in the ears of the other young boys, cursing them and jabbing them again and again, until the whole maddening thunderous echo of cursing sounds and raging angry voices began to deafen his ears and turn his head around and around till he wondered who he was and what was happening and what was this place. “He’s not gonna make it, he’s not gonna make it!” screamed the short sergeant, almost dancing in front of them. “He’s not gonna hack it. He’s a baby. He’s nothing but a baby, ladies!” “He can’t even fit into his pants!” screamed the tall sergeant, laughing. “Yeah,” said the southern sergeant. “He’s nothin’ but a goddamned little baby and you know what we do with babies,” he said. “We kick ’em in their fucking asses and send ’em home. You people, you better listen up!” said the southern sergeant. “You are in Parris Island. You are now in Platoon One Hundred Eighty-one. You are in my platoon and if you people wanna be marines, y’all gonna hafta work harder than you have ever worked before in your lives and you are gonna listen to me and you are gonna do everything I tell you to do if you want to get your asses off this island alive and become marines you better listen to me.” It was beginning to get dark on the island. It had been a long day for him. It had seemed like a hundred days, a thousand days! The day had been endless.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  After years of prohibition and delay, executions were again taking place in the Deep South, and most of the people crowded on death row had no lawyers and no right to counsel. There was a growing fear that people would soon be killed without ever having their cases reviewed by skilled counsel. We were getting frantic calls every day from people who had no legal assistance but whose dates of execution were on the calendar and approaching fast. I’d never heard voices so desperate. When I started my internship, everyone was extremely kind to me, and I felt immediately at home. The SPDC was located in downtown Atlanta in the Healey Building, a sixteen-story Gothic Revival structure built in the early 1900s that was in considerable decline and losing tenants. I worked in a cramped circle of desks with two lawyers and did clerical work, answering phones and researching legal questions for staff. I was just getting settled into my office routine when Steve asked me to go to death row to meet with a condemned man whom no one else had time to visit. He explained that the man had been on the row for over two years and that they didn’t yet have a lawyer to take his case; my job was to convey to this man one simple message: You will not be killed in the next year. — I drove through farmland and wooded areas of rural Georgia, rehearsing what I would say when I met this man. I practiced my introduction over and over. “Hello, my name is Bryan. I’m a student with the…” No. “I’m a law student with…” No. “My name is Bryan Stevenson. I’m a legal intern with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and I’ve been instructed to inform you that you will not be executed soon.” “You can’t be executed soon.” “You are not at risk of execution anytime soon.” No. I continued practicing my presentation until I pulled up to the intimidating barbed-wire fence and white guard tower of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center. Around the office we just called it “Jackson,” so seeing the facility’s actual name on a sign was jarring—it sounded clinical, even therapeutic. I parked and found my way to the prison entrance and walked inside the main building with its dark corridors and gated hallways, where metal bars barricaded every access point. The interior eliminated any doubt that this was a hard place. I walked down a tunneled corridor to the legal visitation area, each step echoing ominously across the spotless tiled floor. When I told the visitation officer that I was a paralegal sent to meet with a death row prisoner, he looked at me suspiciously. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and we could both see that it had seen better days. The officer’s eyes seemed to linger long and hard over my driver’s license before he tilted his head toward me to speak. “You’re not local.”

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  First Table: Piety toward GodSecond Table: Justice toward Others1. Worship no other gods6. No murder2. No graven images (idols)7. No adultery3. No abuse of God’s name8. No theft4. Keep the Sabbath9. No lying5. Honor parents10. No covetingAccording to Josephus, then, the Baptizer’s call to repentance—tshuvah, in the Hebrew of later rabbinic idiom: “turn”—thus meant, precisely, returning to God’s commandments as revealed in the Torah. How radically new was this message? In the Jewish context presupposed by both Josephus and by the evangelists, it wasn’t. And the Baptizer’s emphasis on attending to the inner dimension of repentance (“cleansing the soul through right conduct” in Josephus’ phrasing) before the external protocols of atonement (“purification of the flesh” through immersion) is a stock theme in Jewish penitential tradition of all periods. However, John coupled his call to recommit to the Torah both to bodily purification and to apocalyptic warnings. Those who failed to heed his warning to repent, says the John of Matthew and Luke, will “burn with unquenchable fire”: “Even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit”—that is, the fruit of repentance in Matthew 3.8—“is cut down and thrown into the [apocalyptic] fire” (Mt 3.10).9 John’s message apparently had a major impact on Jesus. In all gospel traditions, Jesus begins his own public mission only after his immersion by John. And Jesus too, say the synoptic gospels, oriented his moral teaching by appeal to the Two Tables of the Law. Asked what were the greatest of the commandments, Jesus responds by quoting from the Torah, citing Deuteronomy 6.4 (the first line of the Jewish prayer the Sh’ma) and Leviticus 19.18. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”—eusebeia, piety toward God (Dt 6.4); and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—dikaiosune, justice toward others (Lv 19.18; Mk 12.29–31 and parallels). In Mark’s gospel, Jesus answers a question about inheriting eternal life by responding, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and your mother’ ” (Mk 10.19). Finally, like pious Jewish males then and since, Jesus wore ritual fringes—tzitziot in Hebrew; kraspeda in Greek—whose function was to remind the wearer of God’s commandments (Mk 6.56; cf. Nm 15.37–40, lines also incorporated into the Sh’ma). We can infer from all this that Jesus defined living rightly as living according to the Torah, as summed up in and by the Ten Commandments; that he defined sin as breaking God’s commandments; and that he defined “repentance” as (re)turning to this covenant.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Cherie’s at work, her boss wouldn’t let her talk.” The man at the cinema ticket counter has fat fingers and a slow pace. My eyes dart around the theater’s lobby as he paws our change out of his register. “Mister, can you hurry it up a little?” I tell him. He stares at me. “We’re going to be late for the show.” Finally, we sail past the popcorn concession and straight into the theater, in the far left corner. We sit through two viewings of Pretty in Pink , and I’m ready to sit through a third when Rosie stands. “Sit down!” I hiss. “What are you doing?” “Let’s get out of here.” “We can’t— Why?” “Let’s at least see another movie or something.” I glance around. “Well, hurry, so we can walk out with everybody else. Put up your hood and put down your head.” We link arms to hustle through the theater’s lobby, but the instant we turn the corner into the mall corridor, I see the worst possible thing: Nick comes running at us, accompanied by two mall security guards. As I yank Rosie into a semicircle spin, I spot Cherie a few steps behind them. Rosie and I race back into the cinema, down the aisle of an empty theater, and out the emergency exit. I push Rosie to scramble under a big metal garbage bin and then shimmy under next to her. “They’ll think we’re hiding behind something—not under something,” I whisper. “How do you know?” “Because I’ve done this before!” We lie there. It will be a miracle if the pounding of my heart doesn’t lead Nick right to us. Rosie rests her cheek on the cold pavement. “We have no control, Gi,” she says. Her return to using my nickname strikes me; softens me. “That’s why we have to get control, sweetie. We can’t let you go back with her. You’ll be fourteen in October, that’s only seven months from now. We have to get you emancipated, too.” “Where will I hide?” “With me up in New Paltz. I can rent a room in an apartment and we can live off campus.” Suddenly Cherie’s voice rings from the darkness. “Regina! Rosie!” “Close your eyes,” I whisper, near silence. “She’s with Nick.” It’s just like when I was four years old living in the Glue Factory apartment. I ran away, and Susan called out for me. “Regina! Regina!” I rose from my hiding place and ran into her arms, then she carried me out of the woods and toward the street, right back to Cookie. We ignore Cherie’s calls. We stay silent and still. Minutes pass. Cars pass. Rosie passes her hand to me, and I lace my fingers through hers. After quiet falls around us, we shimmy out into the night. We walk through unlit parking lots on Sunrise Highway until I find a phone booth on a dark corner. Camille picks up on the first ring. “Regina.” She’s crying.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I accepted war as a means toward peace where negotiations proved useless, in the manner of a physician who decides to cauterize only after having tried simples. Everything is so complicated in human affairs that my rule, even if pacific, would have also its periods of war, just as the life of a great captain has, whether he likes it or not, its interludes of peace. Before heading north for the final settlement of the Sarmatian conflict, I saw Quietus once more. The butcher of Gyrene remained formidable. My first move had been to disband his columns of Numidian scouts, but he still had his place in the Senate, his post in the regular army, and that immense domain of western sands which he could convert at will either into a springboard or a hiding-place. He invited me to a hunt in Mysia, deep in the forests, and skilfully engineered an accident in which with a little less luck or less bodily agility I should certainly have lost my life. It seemed best to appear unsuspecting, to be patient and to wait. Shortly thereafter, in Lower Moesia, at a time when the capitulation of the Sarmatian princes allowed me to think of an early return to Italy, an exchange of dispatches in code with my former guardian warned me that Quietus had come back abruptly to Rome and had just conferred there with Palma. Our enemies were strengthening their positions and realigning their troops. No security was possible so long as we should have these two men against us. I wrote to Attianus to act quickly. The old man struck like lightning. He overstepped his orders and with a single stroke freed me of the last of my avowed foes: on the same day, a few hours apart, Celsus was killed at Baiae, Palma in his villa at Terracina, and Nigrinus at Faventia on the threshold of his summer house. Quietus met his end on the road, on departing from a conference with his fellow conspirators, struck down on the step of the carriage which was bringing him back to the City. A wave of terror broke over Rome. Servianus, my aged brother-in-law, who had seemed resigned to my success but who was avidly anticipating my errors to come, must have felt an impulse of joy more nearly akin to ecstasy than any experience of his whole life. All the sinister rumors which circulated about me found credence anew. I received this news aboard the ship which was bringing me back to Italy. I was appalled. One is always content to be relieved of one's adversaries, but my guardian had proceeded with the indifference of age for the far-reaching consequences of his act: he had forgotten that I should have to live with the after effects of these murders for more than twenty years.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  THE CHRISTIAN ACTS AND THE INVERSION OF ROMANCEOur most complete version of the diffuse lore that attached to the Christian apostle Andrew survives as a Latin epitome composed by the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours. In the preface to his summary of Andrew’s legend, Gregory concedes that some critics considered the stories of Andrew apocryphal, “on account of their excessive prolixity.” His avowed purpose in writing was to extract the miraculous pulp and to discard the unnecessary husk of the narrative. The story is none the better for Gregory’s literary surgery. But we can be grateful to have, in however brusque and artless an outline, the shape of this ancient apostolic legend in full profile. From Gregory’s bare summary we can reconstruct a rather elaborate episode built around a narrative trope that must have seemed deeply familiar to the original audience of the Acts. The apostle, shortly after arriving in the Roman province of Achaea, converts the proconsul Lesbius to the Christian faith. Then a slave, Trophima, the former concubine of the proconsul, turned to the apostle’s teaching and the sexual rigors that accompanied it. Her current lover, discomfited by the loss of his sexual companion, designed a plot to undo her. He went to the slave’s mistress, the proconsul’s wife, reporting, “Trophima has returned to harlotry, which she used to practice with my lord the proconsul, to whom she has again joined herself.” It was a well-laid trap, because to the proconsul’s wife this news seemed like a revelation: “No wonder my husband has left me behind and for six months now refused our marital rites, for he loves his slave!” So the wife did what any archvillain in a romance would have done: she had Trophima, newly converted to the Christian faith, condemned to the brothel.27 Trophima—slave, concubine—was no romantic heroine of the ordinary build, but she nevertheless found herself in the archetypal testing grounds of feminine respectability. In the brothel, she prayed continuously, and when eager customers came to her, she clutched a copy of the gospel to her chest. One day an unusually insistent client entered, and, while resisting, Trophima dropped the gospel. She cried out to heaven, “Keep me from suffering this pollution, Lord, in whose name I esteem chastity!” An angel appeared and struck the youth dead. Then Trophima, for what reason Gregory has omitted to relate, resurrected the dead young man, a sight “the whole city” rushed to see. The proconsul’s wife was killed by a demon in the public bath, a penalty for her persecution of Trophima. Nevertheless, a distraught nurse prevailed upon Andrew to resurrect the proconsul’s wife, which, in the very public atmosphere of the governor’s headquarters, he did. All were reconciled, miracles reported far and wide, newfound chastity saved.28

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I’m going to start you with the junior varsity team.” Instantly, I begin to structure my days around a full day of school followed by gymnastics practice until six thirty, then babysitting and housecleaning jobs. In study hall, while the other kids sketch the logos of Van Halen and AC/DC on their notebooks, I doodle Rosie and Norman in hearts and bubbles with mia bambina amore and je t’aime scribed around them. Any homework I don’t get done at school is a good excuse for me to maintain my privacy when I get home in the evenings. One night in early October, Addie knocks on my bedroom door. “You have a visitor,” she says. Cherie appears behind her in the doorway, and Camille pops her head out of her bedroom. “What are you doing here?” Camille says. “You never stop over without calling first.” Cherie looks at the ceiling as if she’s praying to save her last nerve. “Cookie was driving drunk and she got into an accident,” she says. “She left the scene, and the police were looking for her . . . and . . . she skipped town with the kids.” Camille asks, “Wait, I didn’t hear this part. What do you mean ‘skipped town’?” Cherie says, “I got a call from Cookie’s friend Jackie Sones. You remember her? She lived near us in Saint James.” “Jackie Sones—the one who moved to Idaho?” “Yeah,” Cherie says, clearly dreading what she has to reveal next. “She told me Cookie is heading out there so she can live in Jackie’s trailer and work with animals on a farm. So, with the kids, off she drove.” We walk out to the kitchen, where Addie gives us permission to call Ms. Harvey at home. “Girls, there’s nothing anybody here can do if your mother left the state.” “Oh, big shock,” I say, “considering how much you did to protect them while they were here.” It’s close to Halloween when Jackie Sones calls Cherie to tell her Cookie and the kids have arrived. “They stayed with Jackie a few weeks until Cookie found a bowlegged old man named Clyde who lives on a farm in some town called Oakview,” Camille tells me. “Let me guess, so she used her ways to convince him that he would be better off if her brood moves in.” We learn that, to maintain her part of the bargain, Cookie volunteered the kids to work as farmhands. They rise every morning to milk the cows, shovel horse manure, bale hay, and tend the crops. “I know how this works,” I tell Camille. “If they don’t step up, they’ll get beaten.” “Yeah,” she sighs. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” “Well, at least they’re in a small town. When we figure out how to fix this, hopefully it will be easy to find them.” She gives me Clyde’s phone number, which Jackie shared with her. I pop more quarters in the pay phone. A gruff, bothered male voice answers.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Epilogue IN LATE OCTOBER, the National Weather Service forecasts a “Superstorm”—a hurricane they’re referring to as Sandy. For the first time ever, the NWS sends a representative out to Long Island to prepare us county leaders and our first responders for how serious this storm will be. “Death and devastation,” they tell us repeatedly. “Your residents have got to take this storm seriously. The devastation won’t be because of the wind or the rains, but because of the storm surge. The topography of Long Island and most likely all of greater New York City will be changed forever.” “Do not let any of the kids leave your house,” I tell Camille. “There will be power outages and fallen trees and worse—in fact you all need to sleep in a part of the house that’s far away from trees.” The thousands of homes along Long Island’s coastline are extremely vulnerable . . . including mine. I lock it up and say a prayer, spending the next few nights at the county’s emergency management unit in Yaphank. The center is filled with the U.S. Coast Guard, New York Army National Guard, social services, police, fire chiefs, Red Cross, and swarms of other emergency response units. With them I stay up through the night as they work to protect as many Suffolk County residents as possible. We also figure out ways to keep communication lines open to the people who are in flood zones and refused to evacuate before it was too late. It’s a night of heavyheartedness that I’m certain will stay with me forever— we’re witness to the flooding that causes complete neighborhoods to be destroyed. It’s a harsh reality check as I hope that these citizens’ homes will be the worst thing that they lose. In the light of day, I join the team of emergency responders and leaders whose job it is to find emergency shelter, food, and supplies for the hundreds in the county who are suddenly homeless or without power. Now I’m working to put the lights back on for the very same community that, decades ago, did the best it could to keep mine from dimming. The National Weather Service’s dire warnings to our emergency responders

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Dumpster and the building’s back wall to create a bed. It’s probably been an hour when I open my eyes at the sound of her jalopy rolling down the street. I peek out around the corner and see the car turning in the direction of the bars. I wish these feelings were new to me—the hurt, anger, rejection from the emotional abuse, and the searing physical pain—but for all of the near-fourteen years of my life, this is the only consistent, predictable part of my relationship with Cookie. To me, feeling secure means the opposite of what it means to most kids. Children are supposed to find their greatest safety and comfort in the arms of their mothers. Instead, Cookie’s homecoming is our darkest danger, like the worst storm anyone can imagine. I brace myself and lock down my wits as she enters with a stir. We have no control over what comes next as the tension builds, then it’s as though the skies open up when she comes down on me in a rage. When she’s finished, she goes suddenly . . . leaving the devastation in her wake as the only evidence she’s ever been here at all. We’re always comforted to know she’ll be gone for a while—safe and content, as though it’s safe to step out into the sun after a torrid rain. And we recover fast, using our wits and will to stay together and rebuild our home. I walk into a quiet house. One of the kids has cleaned up the glass, and they’re both sleeping toe-to-toe on the couch. My heart swells as I kiss their cheeks good night, and whisper in Norman’s ear: “You’re a good big brother.” I rise and stand there watching them . . . then the tears stream down my face. Not for myself but for how powerless we are over what will happen next. After a minute I secure the front and back doors then head to the bathroom to try and soak away my pain.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Norm and I laughed. “It sounds like a big old man,” I said, and we laughed even harder. Gi made the macaroni and cheese, and the three of us sat on the living room floor eating the pasta and drinking glass after glass of milk until the entire carton was gone. Gi and Norm finished their meals first and were in the kitchen cleaning up while I still ate. When I was done, I placed my glass on my plate and stood to clear my dishes. With my first step, my glass fell and broke on the wood floor next to Cookie’s boneless face. My mother instantly jumped up and lunged toward me. She grabbed my hair and shouted, “You stupid little twat!” When she jerked my head back, I dropped my plate and that broke too. Gi and Norm ran into the room, and Gi pushed Cookie away from me. The fight that followed was so terrifying I could only see it as a series of frozen snapshots. There was broken glass; there was Cookie with her wooden-heeled shoe thrust into my sister’s back, and her face, and her arms, and her legs; there was blood covering Gi’s face; there was Cookie’s enormous body on top of Gi’s stringy one; there were words—Gi screaming and Cookie saying over and over again that she wished Gi had never been born; and there was Norm and me, both of us hollering, begging for Gi to stop fighting back so maybe our mother would finally stop beating her. “Please, can we have the games?” I whispered to my sisters, ignoring the social worker. “There are a lot of kids where they’re going, and there is no extra room for games,” Mrs. Brady said. My sisters gave each other a look—their expressions were so similar it was like watching only one of them in a mirror. Gi opened my bag and removed the games. Camille held Norm’s hand and Gi carried me to the car. She sobbed in my neck as her footsteps crunched across the gravel. There was a pudgy man with hair all over his face waiting at one car. At the other car, where Mrs. Brady put my and Norm’s Hefty bags, was a big pink-faced man. He opened the back door and let my sisters crawl all over Norm and me as they hugged and kissed us good-bye. Mrs. Brady got in the front seat and immediately put on her seatbelt. Her back was stiff as she stared out the front windshield. “Je t’aime,” Gi whispered in my ear, then she and Camille got out of the car. I reached up and felt my face, wet and slippery from sisters’ tears. Just as the man was closing my door, Cookie trampled out of the house like a

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If there was authentic dissent, it surely resided among those whose life condition exposed them to systemic exploitation. The high Roman Empire was a genuine slave society, consuming slaves as ferociously as any previous period, and perhaps on a wider, Mediterranean scale. Women accounted for at least half of the slave population, and they bore the brunt of sexual abuse. Without legal or social protection, they were devastatingly vulnerable. Sexual abuse was simply presumptive, and many slave girls probably experienced sexual initiation traumatically early. The slave woman’s life course was undifferentiated by the great threshold between childhood and marriage that marked the stages of a free woman’s development. Slaves in the house may have been more integrated into the rhythms of the free family’s life, but at the same time proximity meant vulnerability and close control. The slave’s public behavior could be seen as a reflection of the free family’s honor; “the morals of the mistress are judged by those of the slave girls.” Many slaves were owned in small numbers and surreptitiously sought companionship outside the home. In larger households, the slave staff may have offered its own opportunities. Rural slaves might have had the greatest chance of stability and privacy, but our ignorance of their lives is profound. When Leucippe was made a field slave, she was viciously threatened by the sexual advances of her overseer. Although slave marriages were afforded virtually no legal protections, slaves married nonetheless. We hear casually of “slave weddings.” Plutarch knew that a slave girl who was married would suddenly become more resistant to her master’s advances, but slave marriages were not protected under the adultery laws. Slaves were entirely cut off from their male relatives, and the surviving documents of sale are a chilling reminder that the slave family existed only at the master’s will.46 As blurry as our perception of the slave’s life is, the realities of prostitution are possibly even more obscure. Slaves haphazardly appear in our upper-class sources because they inhabited the same walls, because they inevitably intruded upon the daily affairs of their masters. Prostitutes, by contrast, represented “the most impure part of humankind,” and hence real consideration of their existence has been exiled from all literature with pretension to gentility. When prostitutes do appear in the sources, it is thus usually as a cipher for pure sexual indecency. Like the miserable creature whose unfortunate destiny is lost in the brilliant glare of Leucippe’s invincible sexual modesty, the prostitutes we know are mostly nameless, faceless distortions of an inconceivably brutal existence. But like slaves, prostitutes were in reality ubiquitous, and the sexual economy of the Roman Empire directly depended on the exploitation of their available bodies.47

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  But this revolution was only possible because, from very early on, the con- ventions of romance— above all the charged symbolism of female purity— had fully entered the bloodstream of Christian fi ction.  THE CHRISTIAN ACTS AND THE INVERSION OF ROMANCE Our most complete version of the diff use lore that attached to the Christian apostle Andrew survives as a Latin epitome composed by the sixth- century bishop Gregory of Tours. In the preface to his summary of Andrew’s leg- end, Gregory concedes that some critics considered the stories of Andrew apocryphal, “on account of their excessive prolixity.” His avowed purpose in writing was to extract the miraculous pulp and to discard the unneces- sary husk of the narrative. Th e story is none the better for Gregory’s literary surgery. But we can be grateful to have, in however brusque and artless an outline, the shape of this ancient apostolic legend in full profi le. From Gregory’s bare summary we can reconstruct a rather elaborate episode built around a narrative trope that must have seemed deeply familiar to the origi- nal audience of the Acts. Th e apostle, shortly after arriving in the Roman province of Achaea, converts the proconsul Lesbius to the Christian faith. Th en a slave, Trophima, the former concubine of the proconsul, turned to the apostle’s teaching and the sexual rigors that accompanied it. Her cur- rent lover, discomfi ted by the loss of his sexual companion, designed a plot ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  to undo her. He went to the slave’s mistress, the proconsul’s wife, reporting, “Trophima has returned to harlotry, which she used to practice with my lord the proconsul, to whom she has again joined herself.” It was a well- laid trap, because to the proconsul’s wife this news seemed like a revelation: “No wonder my husband has left me behind and for six months now re- fused our marital rites, for he loves his slave!” So the wife did what any archvillain in a romance would have done: she had Trophima, newly con- verted to the Christian faith, condemned to the brothel.  Trophima—slave, concubine— was no romantic heroine of the ordinary build, but she nevertheless found herself in the archetypal testing grounds of feminine respectability. In the brothel, she prayed continuously, and when eager customers came to her, she clutched a copy of the gospel to her chest. One day an unusually insistent client entered, and, while resisting, Trophima dropped the gospel. She cried out to heaven, “Keep me from suf- fering this pollution, Lord, in whose name I esteem chastity!” An angel ap- peared and struck the youth dead.