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

  Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive. Ethan Canin insists that you should never write out of vengeance, while I tell my students that they should always write out of vengeance, as long as they do so nicely. If someone has crossed them, if someone has treated them too roughly, I urge them to write about it. Two of my students, in different sessions, decided to write about the switches that their parents selected from backyard trees and with which their parents used to beat them. Use these memories, I told them. They are yours. This should not have happened to you. Personally, I would write about this partly out of a longing to make sense of it all and partly out of vengeance. And this, I tell my students, may be as good a time as any to discuss libel. Libel is defamation by written or printed word. It is knowingly, maliciously saying things about people that cast them in a false or damaging light. This means that if you lived with a man who had a number of curious personal and professional habits and circumstances that his friends and clients happen to know about, and if these friends can identify this man in your work by these habits and circumstances, you should probably change the details dramatically.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Since it was illegal to ride in the back, anyone who heard us might call the cops. Mom told us the trip would be about fourteen hours if we took the highway, but we should tack on another couple of hours because we might make some scenic detours. We packed up what furniture we had. There wasn’t much, mostly parts for the Prospector and a couple of chairs and Mom’s oil paintings and art supplies. When we were ready to leave, Mom wrapped Maureen in a lavender blanket and passed her to me, and we kids all climbed into the back of the U-Haul. Dad closed the doors. It was pitch black and the air smelled stale and dusty. We were sitting on the ribbed wooden floor, on frayed, stained blankets used to wrap furniture, feeling for one another with our hands. “Here goes the adventure!” I whispered. “Shhhh!” Lori said. The U-Haul started up and lurched forward. Maureen let loose with a loud, high-pitched wail. I shushed her and rocked her and patted her, but she kept crying. So I gave her to Lori, who whispered singsong into her ear and told jokes. That didn’t work, either, so we begged Maureen to please stop crying. Then we just put our hands over our ears. After a while, it got cold and uncomfortable in the back of the dark U-Haul. The engine made the floor vibrate, and we’d all go tumbling whenever we hit a bump. Several hours passed. By then we were all dying to pee and wondering if Dad was going to pull over for a rest stop. Suddenly, with a bang, we hit a huge pothole and the back doors on the U-Haul flew open. The wind shrieked through the compartment. We were afraid we were going to get sucked out, and we all shrank back against the Prospector. The moon was out. We could see the glow from the U-Haul’s taillights and the road we’d come down, stretching back through the silvery desert. The unlocked doors swung back and forth with loud clangs. Since the furniture was stored between us and the cabin, we couldn’t knock on the wall to get Mom’s and Dad’s attention. We banged on the sides of the U-Haul and hollered as loud as we could, but the engine was too noisy and they didn’t hear us. Brian crawled to the back of the van. When one of the doors swung in, he grabbed at it, but it flew open again, jerking him forward. I thought the door was going to drag Brian out, but he jumped back just in time and scrambled along the wooden floor toward Lori and me. Brian and Lori held tight to the Prospector, which Dad had tied securely with ropes. I was holding Maureen, who for some strange reason had stopped crying. I wedged myself into a corner. It seemed like we’d have to ride it out.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  But I could tell that she had. The lady grew quiet, and for the rest of the trip, no one said much. As soon as she dropped us off, Dad disappeared. I waited on the front steps until bedtime, but he didn’t come home. THREE DAYS LATER, while Lori and I were sitting at Grandma’s old upright piano trying to teach each other to play, we heard heavy, uneven footsteps at the front door. We turned and saw Dad. He tripped on the coffee table. When we tried to help him, he cursed and lurched at us, swinging his fist. He wanted to know where that goddamn sorry-assed mother of ours was, and he got so mad when we didn’t tell him that he pulled over Grandma’s china closet, sending her fine bone china crashing to the floor. Brian came running in. He tried to grab Dad’s leg, but Dad kicked him off. Dad yanked out the silverware drawer and hurled the forks and spoons and knives across the room, then picked up one of the chairs and smashed it on Grandma’s table. “Rose Mary, where the goddamn hell are you, you stinking bitch?” he yelled. “Where is that whore hiding?” He found Mom in the bathroom, crouched in the tub. As she darted past him, he grabbed her dress, and she started flailing. They fought their way into the dining room, and he knocked her to the floor. She reached into the pile of kitchen utensils that Dad had thrown there, grabbed a butcher knife, and slashed it through the air in front of him. Dad leaned back. “A knife fight, eh?” He grinned. “Okay, if that’s what you want.” He picked up a knife, too, tossing it from hand to hand. Then he knocked the knife out of Mom’s hand, dropped his own knife, and wrestled her to the floor. We kids pounded on Dad’s back and begged him to stop, but he ignored us. At last, he pinned Mom’s hands behind her head. “Rose Mary, you’re one hell of a woman,” Dad said. Mom told him he was a stinking rotten drunk. “Yeah, but you love this old drunk, don’t you?” Dad said. Mom at first said no, she didn’t, but Dad kept asking her again and again, and when she finally said yes, the fight disappeared from both of them. Vanished as if it had never existed. Dad started laughing and hugging Mom, who was laughing and hugging him. It was as if they were so happy they hadn’t killed each other that they had fallen in love all over again. I didn’t feel like celebrating. After all he’d put himself through, I couldn’t believe Dad had gone back to the booze.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  hands in defense, I kept clutching my coat closed, she realized it had no buttons. “This girl ain’t got no buttons on her coat!” she shouted. That seemed to give her the license she needed. She pushed me in the chest, and I fell backward. I tried to get up, but all three girls started kicking me. I rolled away into a puddle, shouting for them to quit and hitting back at the feet coming at me from all sides. The other girls had closed in a circle around us and none of the teachers could see what was going on. There was no stopping those girls until they’d had their fill.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I’d go behind the trailer and light them. I loved the scratching sound of the match against the sandpapery brown strip when I struck it, and the way the flame leaped out of the red-coated tip with a pop and a hiss. I’d feel its heat near my fingertips, then wave it out triumphantly. I lit pieces of paper and little piles of brush and held my breath until the moment when they seemed about to blaze up out of control. Then I’d stomp on the flames and call out the curse words Dad used, like “Dumb-ass sonofabitch!” and “Cocksucker!” One time I went out back with my favorite toy, a plastic Tinkerbell figurine. She was two inches tall, with yellow hair pulled up in a high ponytail and her hands on her hips in a confident, cocky way that I admired. I lit a match and held it close to Tinkerbell’s face to show her how it felt. She looked even more beautiful in the flame’s glow. When that match went out, I lit another one, and this time I held it really close to Tinkerbell’s face. Suddenly, her eyes grew wide, as if with fear; I realized, to my horror, that her face was starting to melt. I put out the match, but it was too late. Tinkerbell’s once perfect little nose had completely disappeared, and her saucy red lips had been replaced with an ugly, lopsided smear. I tried to smooth her features back to the way they had been, but I made them even worse. Almost immediately, her face cooled and hardened again. I put bandages on it. I wished I could perform a skin graft on Tinkerbell, but that would have meant cutting her into pieces. Even though her face was melted, she was still my favorite toy. DAD CAME HOME IN the middle of the night a few months later and roused all of us from bed. “Time to pull up stakes and leave this shit-hole behind,” he hollered. We had fifteen minutes to gather whatever we needed and pile into the car. “Is everything okay, Dad?” I asked. “Is someone after us?” “Don’t you worry,” Dad said. “You leave that to me. Don’t I always take care of you?” “’Course you do,” I said. “That’s my girl!” Dad said with a hug, then barked orders at us all to speed things up. He took the essentials—a big black cast-iron skillet and the Dutch oven, some army-surplus tin plates, a few knives, his pistol, and Mom’s archery set—and packed them in the trunk of the Blue Goose. He said we shouldn’t take much else, just what we needed to survive. Mom hurried out to the yard and started digging holes by the light of the moon, looking for our jar of cash. She had forgotten where she’d buried it.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  They came up with elaborate fancies, based upon the stories they had read. Some said that it resembled Pegasus, the horse that had wings. Others said that it was the twin of the wooden horse that brought destruction into Troy. They knew all about these animals from the old books. ‘I am very afraid,’ said one of them. ‘I am sure that there is an army inside the belly of this beast, waiting to destroy this city. Why can’t we find out? Why can’t we know?’ ‘He’s quite wrong,’ another whispered softly to his companion. ‘This is an apparition shaped by magic, just like the illusions created by conjurors at great feasts.’ So the company was besieged by various doubts and fears. This is the way of common people when confronted by something beyond their experience or

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  He made the promise, of course, and swore an oath that he would never reveal what she said to him. So she told him. ‘I have an angel that so loves me that he protects me night and day. He stands guard over my body. ‘Believe what I say. If he should see you touching me, for the purposes of love or of lust, he will kill you at once. You are still a youth, but you will be slain. But if you love and respect me in a clean and virginal way, then he in turn will love and honour you. He will demonstrate his joy to you.’ Valerian, guided by the grace of God, spoke softly to her. ‘If I am fully to believe you, dearest wife, let me see this angel for myself in all his brightness. If he is truly an angel, then I will accede to your wish. But if this is a trick - if you love another man - you can be sure that I will kill you both with this sword.’ Cecilia answered him at once. ‘The angel will appear to you, as you wish. But first you must embrace the faith of Christ and be baptized. Go to the Appian Way, just three miles beyond the city. Speak to the poor people who dwell there, and repeat what I am about to tell you. ‘Tell them that I have sent you to them so that they might take you to the secret abode of old and saintly Urban, where you are to have private conference with him for the good of your own soul. When you come face to face with this holy pope, repeat to him the confidence I have already imparted to you. When he has absolved you from your sins, then you will see the angel.’ Valerian followed her instructions faithfully, and travelled to the Appian Way. There, within the catacombs, he was brought into the presence of the saintly Urban. He told him Cecilia’s words, and at once the old man lifted up his arms in wonder. He cried for joy, and prayed through his tears. ‘Almighty God,’ Urban said, ‘Jesus our Saviour, the shepherd of the world and the begetter of all virtue. You have sown the seed of chastity in the body of the beloved maiden Cecilia. She obeys You in everything and works unceasingly for the greater glory of Your name. She has recently taken as her husband a young man as proud and fiery as a lion. But he stands before me now with the meekness of a lamb.’ There was a short pause after these words, but then there appeared before Valerian the figure of an old man dressed in robes of brightness; in his hands he was carrying a book printed with words of gold.

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

  If I’m going to read about a bunch of people who drive Volkswagens and seem to have mostly Volkswagen-sized problems, and the writer shows them driving around on top of the ice, I want a sense that there’s a lot of very, very cold water down below. I eventually want for someone to crash through. I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see. I want writers to plunge through the holes—the holes we try to fill up with all the props. In those holes and in the spaces around them exist all sorts of possibility, including the chance to see who we are and to glimpse the mystery. The great writers keep writing about the cold dark place within, the water under a frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole. The light they shine on this hole, this pit, helps us cut away or step around the brush and brambles; then we can dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks in it, and still not fall in. It can no longer swallow us up. And we can get on with things. A sober friend once said to me, “When I was still drinking, I was a sedated monster. After I got sober, I was just a monster.” He told me about his monster. His sounded just like mine without quite so much mascara. When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are. The secrecy, the obfuscation, the fact that these monsters can only be hinted at, gives us the sense that they must be very bad indeed. But when people let their monsters out for a little onstage interview, it turns out that we’ve all done or thought the same things, that this is our lot, our condition. We don’t end up with a brand on our forehead. Instead, we compare notes. We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words—not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Standing on the sidewalk, she held up the bone like a crucifix at an exorcism, and called down a curse on the entire Gypsy clan and their house, vowing that it would collapse with the lot of them in it and that the bowels of the earth would open up and swallow them forever if they bothered us again. The next morning Brian’s pogo stick was lying in the front yard. The neighborhood also had its share of perverts. Mostly, they were shabby, hunched men with wheedling voices who hung around on street corners and followed us to and from school, trying to give us boosts when we climbed a fence, offering us candy and loose change if we would go play with them. We called them creeps and hollered at them to leave us alone, but I worried about hurting their feelings because I couldn’t help wondering if maybe they were telling the truth, that all they wanted was to be our friends. At night Mom and Dad always left the front door and the back door and all the windows open. Since we had no air-conditioning, they explained, we needed to let the air circulate. From time to time, a vagrant or a wino would wander through the front door, assuming the house was deserted. When we woke up in the morning, we’d find one asleep in a front room. As soon as we roused them, they shambled off apologetically. Mom always assured us they were just harmless drunks. Maureen, who was four and had a terrible fear of bogeymen, kept dreaming that intruders in Halloween masks were coming through the open doors to get us. One night when I was almost ten, I was awakened by someone running his hands over my private parts. At first it was confusing. Lori and I slept in the same bed, and I thought maybe she was moving in her sleep. I groggily pushed the hand away. “I just want to play a game with you,” a man’s voice said. I recognized the voice. It belonged to a scraggly guy with sunken cheeks who had been hanging around North Third Street recently. He’d tried to walk us home from school and had given Brian a magazine called Kids on a Farm, with pictures of boys and girls wearing only underpants. “Pervert!” I yelled and kicked at the man’s hand. Brian came running into the room with a hatchet he kept by his bed, and the man bolted out the door. Dad was out that night, and when Mom slept, she was dead to the world, so Brian and I ran after the man ourselves. As we got to the sidewalk, lit by the purplish glow from the streetlights, he disappeared around the corner. We searched for him for a few blocks, Brian whacking at the bushes with his hatchet, but we couldn’t find him.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  We shot forward toward Mom, who screamed and jumped out of the way. Dad turned around and went for her again. It was a moonless night, so we couldn’t see Mom except when she ran into the beam of the headlights. She kept looking over her shoulder, her eyes wide like a hunted animal’s. We kids cried and begged Dad to stop, but he ignored us. I was even more worried about the baby inside Mom’s swollen belly than I was about her. The car bounced on holes and rocks, brush scratching against its sides and dust coming through the open windows. Finally, Dad cornered Mom against some rocks. I was afraid he might smush her with the car, but instead he got out and dragged her back, legs flailing, and threw her into the car. We banged back through the desert and onto the road. Everyone was quiet except Mom, who was sobbing that she really did carry Lori for fourteen months. • • • Mom and Dad made up the next day, and by late afternoon Mom was cutting Dad’s hair in the living room of the apartment we’d rented in Blythe. He’d taken off his shirt and was sitting backward on a chair with his head bowed and his hair combed forward. Mom was snipping away while Dad pointed out the parts that were still too long. When they were finished, Dad combed his hair back and announced that Mom had done a helluva fine shearing job. Our apartment was in a one-story cinder-block building on the outskirts of town. It had a big blue-and-white plastic sign in the shape of an oval, and a boomerang that said: THE LBJ APARTMENTS . I thought it stood for Lori, Brian, and Jeannette, but Mom said LBJ were the initials of the president, who, she added, was a crook and a warmonger. A few truck drivers and cowboys had rooms at the LBJ Apartments, but most of the other people who lived there were migrant workers and their families, and we heard them talking through the thin Sheetrock walls. Mom said it was one of the bonuses of living at the LBJ Apartments, because we’d be able to pick up a little Spanish without even studying. Blythe was in California, but the Arizona border was within spitting distance. People who lived there liked to say the town was 150 miles west of Phoenix, 250 miles east of Los Angeles, and smack dab in the middle of nowhere. But they always said it like they were bragging. Mom and Dad weren’t exactly crazy about Blythe. Too civilized, they said, and downright unnatural, too, since no town the size of Blythe had any business existing out in the Mojave Desert. It was near the Colorado River, founded back in the nineteenth century by some guy who figured he could get rich turning the desert into farmland.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  the carter and tortured him until he confessed; then he was hanged and his corpse cut down from the scaffold. ‘So you see, dear Pertelote, the real meaning of dreams. In the same book - in the very next chapter - there was another true story. Two men were about to pass over the ocean to a distant country, but the wind was against them. So they decided to stay in the city beside the harbour. Then, on the following day, in the evening, the wind had become favourable. The two men went to their beds in good spirits, in full expectation of being able to sail the next day. ‘But listen. One of these men had a strange dream. He thought he saw a man standing beside his bed, telling him to stay behind and not to sail. “If you leave tomorrow,” he said, “you will be drowned. There is no more to say.” The man woke and, rousing his companion, told him what he had seen and heard. He begged him to postpone the journey. But the fellow laughed and made fun of him. “I will never allow a dream,” he said, “to dictate my life. You must be joking. Dreams mean nothing at all. Men may dream of owls and apes and monstrous things. Men dream of events that have never been and never will be. But since I can see that you are determined to stay here and lose the tide, I must leave you. God knows I will miss your company, but so it must be. Farewell.” ‘So he took his leave, and went his way. Then it happened. I do not know how or why. Midway across the ocean the ship’s hull was breached, the crew and passengers drowned. There were other ships sailing with them, having left on the same tide, but they were undamaged. Therefore Pertelote, dear chick, from such examples you may learn that there is truth in dreams. I advise you not to ignore them. You do so at your peril. ‘I was reading the life of Saint Kenelm the other day. He was the son of Kenelphus, the king of Mercia in times gone by. Shortly before he was murdered Kenelm dreamed that he was about to be killed. He told his nurse about the dream, and she advised him to be careful and to watch out for traitors. But he was only seven years old; he was too young and too innocent to pay much regard to his dreams. But all came to pass. He was murdered by his own sister. It is a most terrible story, which I advise you to read. ‘Dame Pertelote my love, listen to what I have to say. The honourable Macrobius wrote a commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, in which he declared that dreams can foretell the future. Not all of them - I grant you that - but some of them.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Catch your breath.” When I recovered, Dad picked me up and heaved me back into the middle of the Hot Pot. “Sink or swim!” he called out. For the second time, I sank. The water once more filled my nose and lungs. I kicked and flailed and thrashed my way to the surface, gasping for air, and reached out to Dad. But he pulled back, and I didn’t feel his hands around me until I’d sunk one more time. He did it again and again, until the realization that he was rescuing me only to throw me back into the water took hold, and so, rather than reaching for Dad’s hands, I tried to get away from them. I kicked at him and pushed away through the water with my arms, and finally, I was able to propel myself beyond his grasp. “You’re doing it, baby!” Dad shouted. “You’re swimming!” I staggered out of the water and sat on the calcified rocks, my chest heaving. Dad came out of the water, too, and tried to hug me, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, or with Mom, who’d been floating on her back as if nothing were happening, or with Brian and Lori, who gathered around and were congratulating me. Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is “If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.” What other reason, he asked, would possibly make him do this? Once I got my breath back, I figured he must be right. There was no other way to explain it. “BAD NEWS ,” LORI SAID one day when I got home from exploring. “Dad lost his job.” Dad had kept this job for nearly six months—longer than any other. I figured we were through with Battle Mountain and that within a few days, we’d be on the move again. “I wonder where we’ll live next,” I said. Lori shook her head. “We’re staying here,” she said. Dad insisted he hadn’t exactly lost his job. He had arranged to have himself fired because he wanted to spend more time looking for gold. He had all sorts of plans to make money, she added, inventions he was working on, odd jobs he had lined up. But for the time being, things might get a little tight around the house. “We all have to help out,” Lori said. I thought of what I could do to contribute, besides collecting bottles and scrap metal. “I’ll cut the prices on my rocks,” I said. Lori paused and looked down. “I don’t think that will be enough,” she said. “I guess we can eat less,” I said. “We have before,” Lori said. • • • We did eat less.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The tall black girl with the almond eyes was sitting at the desk behind me. Holding up the sharp pencil she had jabbed into my back, she smiled the same malicious smile I’d seen in the playground. • • • I looked for Brian in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but fourth-graders were on a different schedule, so I sat by myself and bit into the sandwich Erma had made for me that morning. It was tasteless and greasy. I pulled apart the two slices of Wonder bread. Inside was a thin smear of lard. That was it. No meat, no cheese, not even a slice of pickle. Even so, I chewed slowly, staring intently at my bite marks in the bread to delay as long as possible the moment I would have to leave the cafeteria and go out to the playground. When I was the last student left in the cafeteria, the janitor, who was putting the chairs on the tabletops so the floor could be mopped, told me it was time to go. Outside, a thin mist hung in the still air. I pulled the sides of my lamb’s wool coat together. Three black girls, led by the one with the almond eyes, started moving toward me as soon as they saw me. A half-dozen other girls followed. Within moments, I was surrounded. “You think you better than us?” the tall girl asked. “No,” I said. “I think we’re all equal.” “You think you as good as me?” She punched at me. When, instead of raising my hands in defense, I kept clutching my coat closed, she realized it had no buttons. “This girl ain’t got no buttons on her coat!” she shouted. That seemed to give her the license she needed. She pushed me in the chest, and I fell backward. I tried to get up, but all three girls started kicking me. I rolled away into a puddle, shouting for them to quit and hitting back at the feet coming at me from all sides. The other girls had closed in a circle around us and none of the teachers could see what was going on. There was no stopping those girls until they’d had their fill. WHEN WE ALL GOT home that afternoon, Mom and Dad were eager to hear about our first day. “It was good,” I said. I didn’t want to tell Mom the truth. I was in no mood to hear one of her lectures about the power of positive thinking. “See?” she said. “I told you you’d fit right in.” Brian shrugged off Mom and Dad’s questions, and Lori didn’t want to talk about her day at all. “How were the other kids?” I asked her later. “Okay,” she said, but she turned away, and that was the end of the conversation. • • • The bullying continued every day for weeks.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  asked. “I didn’t propose to you,” Dad said. “I told you I was going to marry you.” Six months later, they got married. I always thought it was the most romantic story I’d ever heard, but Mom didn’t like it. She didn’t think it was romantic at all. “I had to say yes,” Mom said. “Your father wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Besides, she explained, she had to get away from her mother, who wouldn’t let her make even the smallest decision on her own. “I had no idea your father would be even worse.” Dad left the air force after he got married because he wanted to make a fortune for his family, and you couldn’t do that in the military. In a few months, Mom was pregnant. When Lori came out, she was mute and bald as an egg for the first three years of her life. Then suddenly, she sprouted curly hair the color of a new penny and started speaking nonstop. But it sounded like gibberish, and everyone thought she was addled except for Mom, who understood her perfectly and said she had an excellent vocabulary. A year after Lori was born, Mom and Dad had a second daughter, Mary Charlene, who had coal-black hair and chocolate-brown eyes, just like Dad. But Mary Charlene died one night when she was nine months old. Crib death, Mom always said. Two years later, I was born. “You were to replace Mary Charlene,” Mom said. She told me that she had ordered up a second redheaded girl so Lori wouldn’t feel like she was weird. “You were such a skinny baby,” Mom used to tell me. “The longest, boniest thing the nurses had ever seen.” Brian arrived when I was one. He was a blue baby, Mom said. When he was born, he couldn’t breathe and came into this world having a seizure. Whenever Mom told the story, she would hold her arms rigid and clench her teeth and go bug-eyed to show how Brian looked. Mom said when she saw him like that, she thought, Uh-oh, looks like this one’s a goner, too. But Brian lived. For the first year of his life, he kept having those seizures, then one day they just stopped. He turned into a tough little guy who never whined or cried, even the time I accidentally pushed him off the top bunk and he broke his nose. Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you’re young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encourages them, she told us. That’s positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  vases and the old books with worn leather spines that I’d collected at flea markets. There were the Georgian maps I’d had framed, the Persian rugs, and the overstuffed leather armchair I liked to sink into at the end of the day. I’d tried to make a home for myself here, tried to turn the apartment into the sort of place where the person I wanted to be would live. But I could never enjoy the room without worrying about Mom and Dad huddled on a sidewalk grate somewhere. I fretted about them, but I was embarrassed by them, too, and ashamed of myself for wearing pearls and living on Park Avenue while my parents were busy keeping warm and finding something to eat. What could I do? I’d tried to help them countless times, but Dad would insist they didn’t need anything, and Mom would ask for something silly, like a perfume atomizer or a membership in a health club. They said that they were living the way they wanted to. After ducking down in the taxi so Mom wouldn’t see me, I hated myself—hated my antiques, my clothes, and my apartment. I had to do something, so I called a friend of Mom’s and left a message. It was our system of staying in touch. It always took Mom a few days to get back to me, but when I heard from her, she sounded, as always, cheerful and casual, as though we’d had lunch the day before. I told her I wanted to see her and suggested she drop by the apartment, but she wanted to go to a restaurant. She loved eating out, so we agreed to meet for lunch at her favorite Chinese restaurant. Mom was sitting at a booth, studying the menu, when I arrived. She’d made an effort to fix herself up. She wore a bulky gray sweater with only a few light stains, and black leather men’s shoes. She’d washed her face, but her neck and temples were still dark with grime. She waved enthusiastically when she saw me. “It’s my baby girl!” she called out. I kissed her cheek. Mom had dumped all the plastic packets of soy sauce and duck sauce and hot-and-spicy mustard from the table into her purse. Now she emptied a wooden bowl of dried noodles into it as well. “A little snack for later on,” she explained. We ordered. Mom chose the Seafood Delight. “You know how I love my seafood,” she said. She started talking about Picasso. She’d seen a retrospective of his work and decided he was hugely overrated. All the cubist stuff was gimmicky, as far as she was

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  We all started laughing, but it seemed funny only for a second or two, and then we stood there looking at one another in silence. I realized my hand was shaking so bad I could hardly hold the gun. • • • A little while later, a squad car pulled up outside the depot, and Mom and Dad got out. Their faces were grave. An officer got out also and walked alongside them to the door. We kids were all sitting inside on the benches wearing polite, respectful expressions. The officer looked at each of us individually, as if counting us. I clasped my hands in my lap to show I was well behaved. Dad squatted in front of us, one knee to the floor, his arms folded across the other knee, cowboy-style. “So what happened here?” he asked. “It was self-defense,” I piped up. Dad had always said that self-defense was a justifiable reason for shooting someone. “I see,” Dad said. The policeman told us that some of the neighbors had reported seeing kids shooting guns at each other, and he wanted to know what had happened. We tried to explain that Billy had started it, that we’d been provoked and were defending ourselves and didn’t even aim to kill, but the cop wasn’t interested in the nuances of the situation. He told Dad that the whole family would need to come down to the courthouse the next morning and see the magistrate. Billy Deel and his dad would be there, too. The magistrate would get to the bottom of the matter and decide what measures needed to be taken. “Are we going to be sent away?” Brian asked the officer. “That’s up to the magistrate,” he said. That night Mom and Dad spent a long time upstairs talking in low voices while we kids lay in our boxes. Finally, late in the evening, they came down, their faces still grave. “We’re going to Phoenix,” Dad said. “When?” I asked. “Tonight.” • • • Dad allowed each of us to bring only one thing. I ran outside with a paper bag to gather up my favorite rocks. When I returned, holding the heavy bag at the bottom so it wouldn’t split, Dad and Brian were arguing over the plastic jack-o’-lantern filled with green plastic army soldiers that Brian wanted to bring. “You’re bringing toys?” Dad asked. “You said I could take one thing, and this is my thing,” Brian said. “This is my one thing,” I said, holding up the bag. Lori, who was bringing The Wizard of Oz, objected, saying that a rock collection wasn’t one thing but several things. It would be like her bringing her entire book collection. I pointed out that Brian’s army soldiers were a collection. “And anyway, it’s not the entire rock collection.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Cut the low camp, bitch!” Chi-Chi barked furiously at Echoes and Encores, shoving the queen’s hand roughly away from her shoulder. “Im as much of a Lady as you are—and dont you forget it... Now swish your goddam nelly ass away and leave us alone!” To me, as if to reassure me that she is a queen: “Stick around till this mob clears, babe; I’ll party you like you never been partied before.” At the top of her voice—in order to be heard over the paroxysmal roar of the crowd—and safely away from Chi-Chi, who, because of her enormous size, would have had to struggle for minutes through the crowd to reach her—a startled Echoes and Encores confided to another queen: “That big queen over there—I swear, she must be a Mr America in drag!” “I saw her!” said the other, hollering too. “She might be the vice squad—you never know what those bastards will pull.” “Do you know?” hollers Echoes and Encores, forgetting about Chi-Chi “Those tourists over there thought I was A Real Woman!” “Thats nothing, honey,” said the other. “I was sitting in a car the other day with a daddy whod left his ole tired wife at the Roosevelt Hotel to be With Me—and we were necking up a storm—and a vice cop saw us and he says—guess what he says to your sister—he says: ‘A Pretty Young Lady like yourself ought to be at home this late in the evening, Miss!’” Seizing advantage of a break in the mob, I wrested myself from the bar. At the door, I saw Chi-Chi aim the fuck-you cigarette holder once more at the crowds outside, and I heard her roar loudly: “Hey, world!” 2 Outside in the chilly air, I felt suddenly whirlingly dizzy. Two hands of darkness threaten to enfold me. But I tell myself Im still completely sober—still not even nearly high enough. The moment of panic is followed by renewed dazzlement. I toss myself into the thickening crowds. Bodies are passed out in Jackson Square as if on a battlefield before the mop-up, empty hurricane glasses like mock tombs beside them. Occasionally one of the bodies will rouse itself to blow a horn or shout into the night, which is calm and still—a sky like dark ice—and the world so turbulent. A flurry of tourists like a band of wide-eyed children in the midst of this flowing river of drowning faces passes gleefully blowing horns, and I think: We’re trying to swim in a river made for drowning. And I feel harrowingly sober. At Les Petits, equally crushed: A queen in wilting drag, in withering eye makeup, was singing raucously: “Howre you gonna keep them down on the fawm—after theyve seen a New Wor-lee-eens queen?”... The same jangling, jangled crowds. Angel Face—wide livermouthed—is singing a blue jazzsong.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  It looked scraggly and freakish, permanently stuck in its twisted, tortured position, and it made me think of how some adults tell you not to make weird faces because your features could freeze. Mom, however, thought it was one of the most beautiful trees she had ever seen. She told us she had to paint it. While she was setting out her easel, Dad drove up the road to see what was ahead. He found a scattering of parched little houses, trailers settling into the sand, and shacks with rusty tin roofs. It was called Midland. One of the little houses had a for-rent sign. “What the hell,” Dad said, “this place is as good as any other.” • • • The house we rented had been built by a mining company. It was white, with two rooms and a swaybacked roof. There were no trees, and the desert sand ran right up to the back door. At night you could hear coyotes howling. When we first got to Midland, those coyotes kept me awake, and as I lay in bed, I’d hear other sounds—Gila monsters rustling in the underbrush, moths knocking against the screens, and the creosote crackling in the wind. One night when the lights were out and I could see a sliver of moon through the window, I heard a slithering noise on the floor. “I think there’s something under our bed,” I said to Lori. “It’s merely a figment of your overly active imagination,” Lori said. She talked like a grown-up when she was annoyed. I tried to be brave, but I had heard something. In the moonlight, I thought I saw it move. “Something’s there,” I whispered. “Go to sleep,” Lori said. Holding my pillow over my head for protection, I ran into the living room, where Dad was reading. “What’s up, Mountain Goat?” he asked. He called me that because I never fell down when we were climbing mountains—sure-footed as a mountain goat, he’d always say. “Nothing, probably,” I said. “I just think maybe I saw something in the bedroom.” Dad raised his eyebrows. “But it was probably just a figment of my overly active imagination.” “Did you get a good look at it?” he asked. “Not really.” “You must have seen it. Was it a big old hairy sonofabitch with the damnedest-looking teeth and claws?” “That’s it!” “And did it have pointed ears and evil eyes with fire in ’em, and did it stare at you all wicked-like?” he asked. “Yes! Yes! You’ve seen it, too?” “Better believe I have. It’s that old ornery bastard Demon.” Dad said he had been chasing Demon for years. By now, Dad said, that old Demon had figured out that it had better not mess with Rex Walls. But if that sneaky son of a gun thought it was going to terrorize Rex Walls’s little girl, it had by God got another thing coming. “Go fetch my hunting knife,” Dad said.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Hence, for Kristeva, poetry and maternity represent privileged practices within paternally sanctioned culture which permit a nonpsychotic experience of that heterogeneity and dependency characteristic of the maternal terrain. These acts of poesis reveal an instinctual heterogeneity that subsequently exposes the repressed ground of the Symbolic, challenges the mastery of the univocal signifier, and diffuses the autonomy of the subject who postures as their necessary ground. The heterogeneity of drives operates culturally as a subversive strategy of displacement, one which dislodges the hegemony of the paternal law by releasing the repressed multiplicity interior to language itself. Precisely because that instinctual heterogeneity must be re-presented in and through the paternal law, it cannot defy the incest taboo altogether, but must remain within the most fragile regions of the Symbolic. Obedient, then, to syntactical requirements, the poetic-maternal practices of displacing the paternal law always remain tenuously tethered to that law. Hence, a full-scale refusal of the Symbolic is impossible, and a discourse of “emancipation,” for Kristeva, is out of the question. At best, tactical subversions and displacements of the law challenge its self-grounding presumption. But, once again, Kristeva does not seriously challenge the structuralist assumption that the prohibitive paternal law is foundational to culture itself. Hence, the subversion of paternally sanctioned culture can not come from another version of culture, but only from within the repressed interior of culture itself, from the heterogeneity of drives that constitutes culture’s concealed foundation. This relation between heterogeneous drives and the paternal law produces an exceedingly problematic view of psychosis. On the one hand, it designates female homosexuality as a culturally unintelligible practice, inherently psychotic: on the other hand, it mandates maternity as a compulsory defense against libidinal chaos. Although Kristeva does not make either claim explicitly, both implications follow from her views on the law, language, and drives. Consider that for Kristeva poetic language breaks the incest taboo and, as such, verges always on psychosis. As a return to the maternal body and a concomitant deindividuation of the ego, poetic language becomes especially threatening when uttered by women. The poetic then contests not only the incest taboo, but the taboo against homosexuality as well. Poetic language is thus, for women, both displaced maternal dependency and, because that dependency is libidinal, displaced homosexuality. For Kristeva, the unmediated cathexis of female homosexual desire leads unequivocally to psychosis. Hence, one can satisfy this drive only through a series of displacements: the incorporation of maternal identity—that is, by becoming a mother oneself—or through poetic language which manifests obliquely the heterogeneity of drives characteristic of maternal dependency. As the only socially sanctioned and, hence, nonpsychotic displacements for homosexual desire, both maternity and poetry constitute melancholic experiences for women appropriately acculturated into heterosexuality. The heterosexual poet-mother suffers interminably from the displacement of the homosexual cathexis. And yet, the consummation of this desire would lead to the psychotic unraveling of identity, according to Kristeva—the presumption being that, for women, heterosexuality and coherent selfhood are indissolubly linked.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  In the locker rooms I'd been in, the white women always seemed embarrassed by their nakedness and wrapped towels around their waists before slipping off their underpants, but here most of the women were buck-naked. Some of them were skinny, with angular hips and jutting collarbones. Others had big pillowy behinds and huge swinging breasts, and they were bumping their butts together and pushing their breasts up against each other as they danced. As soon as the women saw me, they stopped dancing. One of the naked ones came over and stood in front of me, her hands on her hips, her breasts so close I was terrified her nipples were going to touch me. Dinitia explained that I was with her and that I was good people. The women looked at one another and shrugged.