Grief

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 In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Apartment in Chicago You and your friends decide to get out of town, and you arrange a trip to Chicago. You left a broken phone behind, but this does not stop you from touching your pocket reflexively, wondering if she’s been trying to call you. Even through your grief, you appreciate the trip: you sleep on the couch of the sublet you rented together and only wake up because your friend Tony gently crab-claws your foot poking out from beneath a blanket. When you look around the room, all of your friends sleeping so close to each other, like kittens, and you want to curl into a pile with all of them. Still, you cry at meals, you cry in the streets. When you break off for small-group activities, you go with Ben and Bennett. You love them both, and mostly you love how they will not emote at you or ask you how you’re feeling. You go to the Art Institute of Chicago and spend a lot of time in two places: the Thorne Miniature Rooms and Ivan Albright’s That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door). Both fill you with a queer pleasure; both make you cry. One makes you feel immortal, godlike: as if you are a time-traveling spirit, hunched up in the corners of nineteenth-century English drawing rooms and sixteenth-century French bedrooms and eighteenth-century American dining rooms, watching the lives of the mortals play out in miniature dioramas. The other makes you feel small, as if you are prostrate before death’s flickering veil. Small, and then even smaller, and soon you find yourself paddling in your own tears, again. You hear something splashing about in the pool a little way off, and you swim nearer to make out what it is. At first, you think it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then you remember how small you are now, and you soon find that it is only a mouse that has slipped in just like you. “Would it be of any use, now,” you think, “to speak to this mouse? Perhaps he’s a Cuban mouse, come over during the Ten Years’ War.” (For, with all your knowledge of history, you have no very clear notion how long ago anything has happened.) So, you begin: “¿Dónde está el gato malo?” which is the first complete Spanish sentence you can think of. The Mouse suddenly leaps out of the water, quivering with fright. “Oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry, afraid you have hurt the poor animal’s feelings. “I quite forgot you didn’t like cats, good or bad.” “Not like cats!” shouts the Mouse. “Would you like cats if you were me?” “Well, perhaps not,” you say soothingly. “Don’t be angry about it. And yet I wish you could meet my cat; I think you’d take a fancy to it if you could only see her. She is such a dear thing,” you go on, half to yourself, as you swim lazily about in the pool, “and she sits purring so nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her face—and she’s such a capital one for catching mi—oh, I beg your pardon!” you cry again, for the Mouse is swimming away from you as hard as it can and is making quite a commotion. You call softly after it, “Mouse, dear! Do come back, and we won’t talk about cats!” When the Mouse hears this, it turns around and swims slowly back to you: its face is quite pale (with passion, you think), and it says in a low, trembling voice, “Let us get to the shore, and then I’ll tell you my history, and you’ll understand why I am afraid of cats.” It is high time to go anyway, for the pool is getting crowded with the birds and animals that have fallen into it: there is a Duck and a Dodo (Amy Parker’s “trusting, extinguished bird”), a Lory and an Eaglet. And among them, every stranger who has ever seen you cry in public is doing the breaststroke. You turn from their pity and lead the way; the whole party swims to the shore. At the water’s edge, the creatures and the strangers disperse into the streets of Chicago. When you arrive home, there’s a message in your inbox: “I’ve made a mistake.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  moved into a spacious home owned by relatives in the town of Milledgeville, in the center of Georgia, not too far from Atlanta. By 1940 the father was too weak to continue at his job. He moved back home, and over the next few months Mary watched as her beloved father grew weaker and thinner by the day, racked by excruciating pain in his joints, until he finally died on February 1, 1941, at the age of forty-five. It was months later that Mary learned that his illness was known as lupus erythematosus—a disease that makes the body create antibodies that attack and weaken its own healthy tissues. (Today it is known as systemic lupus erythematosus, and it is the most severe version of the disease.) In the aftermath of his death, Mary felt too stunned to speak to anyone about the loss, but she confided in a private notebook the effect his death had on her: “The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency, like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder.” She felt as if a part of her had died with her father, so enmeshed had they been in each other’s lives. But beyond the sudden and violent wound it inflicted on her, she was made to wonder about what it all meant in the larger cosmic scheme of things. Deeply devout in her Catholic faith, she imagined that everything occurred for a reason and was part of God’s mysterious plan. Something so significant as her father’s early death could not be meaningless. In the months to come, a change came over Mary. She became unusually serious and devoted to her schoolwork, something she had been rather indifferent to in the past. She began to write longer and more ambitious stories. She attended a local college for women and impressed her professors with her writing skill and the depth of her thinking. She had determined that her father had guessed correctly her destiny—to be a writer. Increasingly confident in her creative powers, she decided that her success depended on getting out of Georgia. Living with her mother in Milledgeville made her feel claustrophobic. She applied to the University of Iowa and was accepted with a full scholarship for the academic year beginning in 1945. Her mother begged her to reconsider, thinking her only child was too fragile to live on her own, but Mary had made up her mind. Enrolled in the famous Writers’ Workshop at the university, she decided to simplify her name to Flannery O’Connor, signaling her new identity. Working with fierce determination and discipline, Flannery began to attract attention for her short stories and the characters from the South she depicted and seemed to know so well, bringing out the dark and grotesque qualities just below the surface of southern

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  And that’s pretty exciting, even liberating; by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be—as characters, as real people—human beings. They don’t have to be metaphors for wickedness and depravity or icons of conformity and docility. 11 They can be what they are . We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. 12 They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough. Toward the end of Stranger by the Lake , the police inspector confronts Franck as he leaves the beach for the day. Franck is, literally, trapped in the beam of the officer’s headlights, and as the conversation progresses the metaphor is sharpened even more. “Don’t you find it odd we’ve only just found the body, and two days later everyone’s back cruising like nothing happened?” the officer asks him. Later in this scene, Franck will be visibly overcome with grief as the officer asks him to have compassion for the dead man, begs him to have a sense of self-preservation. 13 But even in his grief, he is clear-eyed. “We can’t stop living,” he says. We can’t stop living . Which means we have to live , which means we are alive , which means we are humans and we are human : some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go. 11 . A cliché born of a necessary evil: the fight for rights. As with race and gender and able-bodiedness, the trope of the saintly and all-sacrificing minority is one that follows on the heels of unadulterated hatred, and is just as dangerous (though for different reasons). 12 . This type of characterization was useful during the fight for marriage equality in the United States, but its shortcomings are many. It is, for example, not an accident that people have had trouble wrapping their heads around Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white lesbian couple who starved their six black adopted children before deliberately driving themselves and their kids off a cliff in California in 2018.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Miriam continues, “First I started to feel the shaking again … It became more intense, but then it started to settle down on its own.” She is now beginning to self-regulate by moving through activation/deactivation cycles. “I felt some warmth starting in my belly and then spreading out in waves … That felt really good … I could even feel the warmth flowing into my hands and legs … but then my gut started to knot up. I started feeling a little sick, nauseous and queasy. I realized that I was thinking about Evan, my first husband. Actually, I saw a picture of him walking toward me. He was killed a month after we were married … I think that I never got over it … I couldn’t believe it happened … In a way I still don’t … I dream about Evan a lot. It’s always the same dream. He comes to me; I’m despondent. I ask him why he left me. He doesn’t answer me, but turns his back and walks away. I wake up wanting to cry, my throat is all tight, but I don’t want Henry to know. I feel so terrible; like there’s something wrong with me … I don’t want to cause him any pain.” “Miriam, I’m going to ask you to say something and notice what happens inside when you say the words. But remember these are my words. They might not mean anything to you. I’m only asking you to try them out and then just to notice how your body responds. Try not to think too much about it; just do it. Does that feel OK to you?” I say this not because it is true (or false) but so that the person can observe the effect the sentence has on their body sensations and feelings. She nods. “Yes, that’s OK. I’d like to do something about these feelings, these dreams, if I can.” “Ok, here’s the sentence: ‘I don’t believe it happened; I don’t believe you’re really dead.’ ” The purpose of this is to bring into consciousness the direct body experience of denial so that it can be dealt with. Miriam holds her breath and turns pale; her heart rate drops sharply, from about 80 to 60, indicating that the vagal immobility/shutdown system may have kicked in. “Are you OK, Miriam?” I ask. “Yes … but my guts are queasy and tight … like a cold hard fist … I feel sick again … It’s worse this time … but I think that I can handle it. I’ll tell you if it’s too much.” Wanting to reinforce her developing capacity to assess her capability to handle difficult sensations, I ask her, “What gives you that sense, Miriam, that you can handle it?” “Well, mostly I feel it in my arms and legs again. They still feel strong now, even if they’re shaky.” With her eyes still closed, Miriam starts to tremble visibly.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She knew I was lying, but she couldn’t control me or even convince my mother that I needed controlling. My mother had faith in me. She didn’t have faith in discipline. Her father, Daddy, had given her plenty and she had yet to see the profit from it. Daddy was a great believer in the rod. When my mother was still in her cradle he slapped her for sucking her thumb. To correct her toddler’s habit of walking with her toes turned slightly inward he forced her to walk with her toes turned out, like a duck. Once she started school, Daddy spanked her almost every night on the theory that she must have done something wrong that day whether he knew about it or not. He told her that he was going to spank her well in advance, as the family sat down to dinner, so she could think about it while she ate and listened to him talk about the stock market and the fool in the White House. After dessert he spanked her. Then she had to kiss him and say, “Thank you, Daddy, for earning the delicious meal.” My grandmother was a gentle woman. She tried to defend her daughter, but her heart was bad and she couldn’t even defend herself. Whenever she was bedridden, Daddy would read to her from the works of Mary Baker Eddy to prove that her suffering was illusory, the result of improper thinking. On their Sunday drives he boosted her pulse by going through stop signs and racing trains to railroad crossings. Once he scooped a man onto his hood and carried him at speed for several blocks, screaming, “Get off my car!” My mother was on her own with Daddy. When she started high school he forced her to wear bloomers—pink silk bloomers with ruffled legs. He’d brought several pairs home with him from a cruise to China, where they were still in vogue among missionaries’ wives. He badgered her into smoking cigarettes so she wouldn’t eat much, and when they went to restaurants he made her fill up on bread. She wasn’t allowed to go out with boys. But the boys wouldn’t give up. One night some of them parked in front of her house and sang “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.” When they called out, “Goodnight, Rosemary!” Daddy went berserk. He ran into the street waving his Navy .45. As the driver sped off Daddy fired several shots at a boy in the rumble seat, who ducked just before two bullets whanged into the metal over his head. My grandmother collapsed and had to be given digitalis. Daddy didn’t let it go at that. In full uniform he prowled the school parking lot the next morning, inspecting cars for bullet holes. My mother took off a few months after her mother died, when she was still a girl. But Daddy left some marks on her.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force. The first soldier steps back. The second one moves the wooden divider, waves the woman forward. The houses behind her now reduced to bonfires. As the Huey returns to the sky, the rice stalks erect themselves, only slightly disheveled. The shawl drenched indigo with sweat and rain. In the garage, on a wall of stripped paint, spotted brick underneath, a shelf hangs as a makeshift altar. On it are framed pictures where saints, dictators, and martyrs, the dead—a mother and father—stare out, unblinking. In the glass frames, the reflection of sons leaning back in their chairs. One of them pours what’s left of the bottle over the sticky table, wipes it clean. A white cloth is placed over the macaque’s hollowed mind. The light in the garage flickers once, stays on. The woman stands in a circle of her own piss. No, she is standing on the life-sized period of her own sentence, alive. The boy turns, walks back to his post at the checkpoint. The other boy taps his helmet and nods at her, his finger, she notices, still on the trigger. It is a beautiful country because you are still in it. Because your name is Rose, and you are my mother and the year is 1968—the Year of the Monkey. The woman walks forward. Passing the guard, she glances one last time at the rifle. The muzzle, she notices, is not darker than her daughter’s mouth. The light flickers once, stays on. I wake to the sound of an animal in distress. The room so dark I can’t tell if my eyes are even open. There’s a breeze through the cracked window, and with it an August night, sweet but cut with the bleach smell of lawn chemicals—the scent of manicured suburban yards—and I realize I’m not in my own house. I sit up on the side of the bed and listen. Maybe it’s a cat wounded from a skirmish with a raccoon. I balance myself in the black air and head toward the hallway. There’s a red blade of light coming through a cracked door at the other end. The animal is inside the house. I palm the wall, which, in the humidity, feels like wet skin. I make my way toward the door and hear, in between the whimpers, the animal’s breaths—heavier now, something with huge lungs, much larger than a cat. I peer through the door’s red crack—and that’s when I see him: the man bent over in a reading chair, his white skin and even whiter hair made pink, raw under a scarlet-shaded lamp. And it comes to me: I’m in Virginia, on summer break. I’m nine. The man’s name is Paul. He is my grandfather—and he’s crying. A warped Polaroid trembles between his fingers. I push the door. The red blade widens. He looks up at me, lost, this white man with watery eyes. There are no animals here but us. —

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  In that street, beside the lifeless person who was somehow more animated in stillness than the living, the perpetual stench of sewage and runoff that lined the gutters, my vision blurred, the colors pooled under my lids. Passersby offered sympathetic nods, thinking I was part of the family. As I rubbed my face, a middle-aged man gripped my neck, the way Vietnamese fathers or uncles often do when trying to pour their strength into you. “You’ll see her again. Hey, hey,” his voice croaked and stung with alcohol, “you gonna see her.” He slapped the back of my neck. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.” — This man. This white man. This Paul who swings open the wooden garden gate, the metal latch clanking behind him, is not my grandfather by blood—but by action. Why did he volunteer in Vietnam when so many boys were heading to Canada to dodge the draft? I know he never told you—because he would have had to explain his abstract and implacable love of the trumpet in a language he would falter in. How he wanted, as he claimed, to be “a white Miles Davis” from the backwoods and cornfields of rural Virginia. How the trumpet’s fat notes reverberated through the two-story farmhouse of his boyhood. The one with its doors torn clean off by a father who raged through the rooms terrorizing his family. The father whose only connection to Paul was metal: the shell lodged in his old man’s brain from the day he stormed Omaha beach; the brass Paul lifted to his mouth to make music. I remember the table. How I tried to give it back to you. How you held me in your arms and brushed my hair, saying, “There, there. It’s okay. It’s okay.” But this is a lie. It went more like this: I gave you the table, Ma—which is to say I handed you my rainbow cow, pulled out of the wastebasket when Mr. Zappadia wasn’t looking. How the colors moved and crinkled in your hands. How I tried to tell you but did not have the language you would understand. Do you understand? I was a gaping wound in the middle of America and you were inside me asking, Where are we? Where are we, baby? I remember looking at you for a long time and, because I was six, I thought I could simply transmit my thoughts into your head if I stared hard enough. I remember crying in rage. How you had no idea. How you put your hand underneath my shirt and scratched my back anyways. I remember sleeping like that, calmed—my crushed cow expanding on the nightstand like a slow-motion color bomb. Paul played music to get away—and when his old man tore up his application for music school, Paul got even further, all the way to the enlistment office, and found himself, at nineteen, in South East Asia.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  With only Novocain injected between your thighs, the nurses went in with a long metal instrument, and just “scraped my baby out of me, like seeds from a papaya.” It was that image, its practical mundanity, the preparation of fruit I have seen you do a thousand times, the spoon gliding along the papaya’s flesh-orange core, a slush of black seeds plopping into the steel sink, that made it unbearable. I pulled the hood of my white sweater over my head. “I saw him, Little Dog. I saw my baby, just a glimpse. A brownish blur on its way to the bin.” I reached across the table and touched the side of your arm. Just then, a Justin Timberlake song came on through the speakers, his frail falsettos woven through coffee orders, used grounds thumped against rubber trash bins. You eyed me, then past me. When your eyes came back you said, “It was in Saigon where I heard Chopin for the first time. Did you know that?” Your Vietnamese abruptly lighter, hovering. “I must’ve been six or seven. The man across the street was a concert pianist trained in Paris. He would set the Steinway in his courtyard and play it in the evenings with his gate open. And his dog, this little black dog, maybe this high, would stand up and start to dance. Its little twig legs padded the dust in circles but the man would never look at the dog, but kept his eyes closed as he played. That was his power. He didn’t care for the miracle he made with his hands. I sat there in the road and watched what I thought was magic: music turning an animal into a person. I looked at that dog, its ribs showing, dancing to French music and thought anything could happen. Anything.” You folded your hands on the table, a mixture of sadness and agitation in the gesture. “Even when the man stopped, walked over to the dog wagging its tail, and placed the treat in the dog’s open mouth, proving again that it was hunger, only hunger, not music that gave the dog its human skill, I still believed it. That anything could happen.” The rain, obedient, picked up again. I leaned back and watched it warp the windows. — Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living thing.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  Then the priest said something I didn’t catch, pointing with his bottle, and N. said Yes! The beach! I take you there, and we followed him across the square. I was eager to be festive with these people, to distract myself from the grief I had felt since receiving R.’s message, my own grief and grief at the thought of him alone in his room in Lisbon—though I didn’t know where he was, of course, he had sent his message hours before and might already have recovered from his spasm of regret, who could know. I hung back a bit, as we reached the other side of the square, to look at the structure we were passing through, something like a covered patio between two buildings, while the others were descending the wooden staircase to the sea. There was a set of wooden counters, what looked like a sizeable bar, but all of it was abandoned now, strewn with trash and empty bottles. It must come alive in the season, I thought, though there was a kind of finality to its disuse, it was difficult to imagine that in a few weeks it would be transformed, packed with young people. I felt uneasy, and suddenly I realized I wasn’t alone; a man, who must have been watching us as we passed, was leaning against the wall. He took a long drag from a cigarette, the tip flaring red in the dark, and met my eyes briefly before lowering his gaze. I almost thought he was there to cruise, that maybe this was a place men used, but he had an air of belonging, leaning against the wall, and I decided he must be something like a guard, keeping an eye on the place until it came to life again for the summer. Maybe he would stand there all night, I thought, but I didn’t see any television or radio to keep him company, anything at all, there was nothing but the sea to mark the time. Or maybe there was an office or booth he would retreat to once we had passed, maybe he had only emerged on hearing our approach. I nodded to him as I moved toward the stairs, murmuring Dobur vecher, but he just raised his eyes again and flicked his spent cigarette to the ground.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  Stage four bone cancer was the official diagnosis. While you waited in the hall with Lan in the wheelchair, the doctor handed me the manila envelope with the X-rays inside, and simply said, avoiding my gaze, to take your grandma home and give her whatever she wanted to eat. She had two weeks, maybe three. We brought her home, laid her back on a mat on the tile floor where it was cool, placed pillows along her length to keep her legs in place. What made it worse, you remember, was that Lan had never once believed, even to the end, that she had a terminal illness. We explained her diagnosis to her, about the tumors, the cells, metastasis, nouns so abstract that we might as well have been describing witchcraft. We told her that she was dying, that it would be two weeks, then one week, any day now. “Be ready. Be ready. What do you want? What do you need? What would you like to say?” we urged. But she wouldn’t have it. She said we were just children, that we didn’t know everything yet, and that when we grow up, we’d know how the world really works. And because denial, fabrication—storytelling—was her way of staying one step ahead of her life, how could any of us tell her she was wrong? Pain, however, is no story in itself. And these last few days, while you were out making funeral arrangements, picking out the coffin, Lan would howl and cry out in long, piercing bursts. “What have I done?” she’d say, looking at the ceiling. “God, what have I done to have you step on me like this?” We would give her the synthetic Vicodin and OxyContin prescribed by the doctor, then the morphine, then more morphine. I fanned her with a paper plate as she drifted in and out of consciousness. Mai, who had driven all night from Florida, shuffled through the rooms, cooking food and making tea in a zombie-like daze. Because Lan was too weak to chew, Mai would spoon oatmeal into her barely opened mouth. I kept fanning as Mai fed her, the two women, mother’s and daughter’s black hair fluttering in unison, their foreheads almost touching. A few hours later, you and Mai rolled Lan on her side and, with a rubber-gloved hand, removed the feces from your mother’s body—too wasted to expel its own waste. I kept fanning her face, jeweled with sweat, her eyes shut as you worked. When it was over, she just lay there blinking. I asked her what she was thinking. As if waking from a sleepless dream, she answered in a gutted monotone. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?” “Okay, Grandma, I know—” But she wasn’t listening.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  A VALEDICTIONThere was a moment, as the little beaten cab took another tight turn too quickly, when suddenly to our left we could see all at once the three hills of Veliko Turnovo, the houses of the old town clinging to their terraces, the river Yantra snaking its way beneath. I had seen it in precisely this way when I had visited the city a year before, and now R., sitting in the back seat beside me, took a sharp breath at the wonder of it. His fingers found mine as I reached for him across the seat, and we continued looking with our hands linked low, beneath the driver’s notice, freed from the weight of uncertainty or sorrow we had carried with us on the train from Gorna Oryahovitsa, a pressure that had almost seemed caused by the trees crowding the tracks, their long branches brushing the clouded glass of our wagon. It was mid-August, nearly the end of summer; R. would be leaving soon. He had come back to Sofia in May, just after finishing his degree in Lisbon, and our idea had been that he would stay, though it was a sacrifice for him to exchange his sun-drunk city, with its river and avenues and tiles, for a city that even in high summer held on to its grayness, like an animal somehow suspicious of the season, unwilling to shed its coat. But R. quickly realized how little there was for him in Sofia, where he had no friends or relatives, and where without the language there was almost no prospect of work, and so what we had thought of as the beginning of real life had become instead an extended vacation, culminating in this final trip together before he went back home.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was a place to walk, and to do other things; there were always bottles and cans and cigarettes, people hung out there, I guess, there was nowhere else to go. Guys went there too, R. said; I didn’t know it then, we were only there in the daytime, but at night it was a cruising place, and when I got older it was where I went too, even though I hated it. It was always the same three or four married assholes, but whatever, it was something. We’d go walking there, just talking to each other, and then one day he stopped and pointed at something on the ground. It was a condom somebody had dropped by one of the walls, stretched out and dry, it was disgusting. He pointed at it with his shoe and asked me if I knew what it was for. And that’s how he started it, R. said, he put his arm around me and led me behind one of the walls where no one would see us. I didn’t want it but I let him do it, I guess, I mean I didn’t fight him and I never said anything, I let it happen. R. looked at me then, finally turning away from the glass, he looked at me where I sat immobile as he spoke, my fork still in my hand. I never said anything, he repeated, I’ve never said anything until now. Oh, I said, the single syllable, not a word but a sound, oh, and I set my fork down beside the plate I had hardly touched, that was past touching now. Skupi, I said, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but at this his anger snapped back, a fierce anger as he said See, almost snarling it, you see me differently now, I don’t want you to be sorry for me, I don’t want to be some hurt little boy, I don’t want it. On his face there was an expression I had never seen before, on his face or any other, it was a desperate, frightened face, though frightened of what I wasn’t sure. Okay, I said, leaning back, I was frightened too, okay.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I hung over him, letting him grow still, then pulled out and fell onto my back beside him. Mnogo hubavo beshe, he said, that was good, speaking Bulgarian for the first time, his face turned away. When I didn’t answer he turned toward me, then lifted himself onto his side. Hey, he said, his voice solicitous, hey. I put my hand over my face, which was wet with tears. I was embarrassed, I didn’t want him to see me, when he asked what was wrong I couldn’t answer. Stop it, he said, pulling my hand away, stop it, which made me cry harder somehow, and he kissed me, my forehead and cheeks, my lips, when I tried to pull away he grabbed my head with both his hands, holding me in place. Sladurche, he said, sweet boy, stop it now, don’t be like that, and then he licked my face, quickly, playfully, like a cat, everywhere he had kissed he licked, catching my hands in his when I tried to shield myself or push him away, until I was laughing and weeping both, I stopped struggling and let him lick my face. He laughed too, rolling on top of me, still licking me, and I realized that I had been wrong before; it did have an end, what I had felt, its end was here, he had brought me here. Finally he laid his head on my chest. Don’t be like that, he said again as I put my arms around him. Do you see? You don’t have to be like that, he said. You can be like this.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I hadn’t always gotten along with my own brother, and we hadn’t even seen each other in four years, but I still missed him and began to imagine how much better he would treat me. I also missed my father. My mother never complained to me about him, but sometimes Dwight would make sarcastic comments about Daddy Warbucks and Lord High-and-Mighty. He meant to impugn my father for being rich and living far away and having nothing to do with me, but all these qualities, even the last, perhaps especially the last, made my father fascinating. He had the advantage always enjoyed by the inconstant parent, of not being there to be found imperfect. I could see him as I wanted to see him. I could give him sterling qualities and imagine good reasons, even romantic reasons, why he had taken no interest, why he had never written to me, why he seemed to have forgotten I existed. I made excuses for him long after I should have known better. Then, when I did know better, I resolved to put the fact of his desertion from my mind. I visited him on my way to Vietnam, and then again when I got back, and we became friends. He was no monster—he’d had troubles of his own. Anyway, only crybabies groused about their parents. This way of thinking worked pretty well until my first child was born. He came three weeks early, when I was away from home. The first time I saw him, in the hospital nursery, a nurse was trying to take a blood sample from him. She couldn’t find a vein. She kept jabbing him, and every time the needle went in I felt it myself. My impatience made her so clumsy that another nurse had to take over. When I finally got my hands on him I felt as if I had snatched him from a pack of wolves, and as I held him something hard broke in me, and I knew that I was more alive than I had been before. But at the same time I felt a shadow, a coldness at the edges. It made me uneasy, so I ignored it. I didn’t understand what it was until it came upon me again that night, so sharply I wanted to cry out. It was about my father, ten years dead by then. It was grief and rage, mostly rage, and for days I shook with it when I wasn’t shaking with joy for my son, and for the new life I had been given. But that was still to come. As a boy, I found no fault in my father. I made him out of dreams and memories. One of these memories was of sitting in the kitchen of my stepmother’s beautiful old house in Connecticut, where I had come for a visit, and watching him unload a box full of fireworks onto the table.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  We had walked a good distance and the going was rough. I could hear Dwight laboring for breath and muttering when he stumbled. I kept waiting for him to bark at me, but he never did. He was that pleased about Norma coming home. After dinner that night Dwight went into the living room with a can of spray paint and began to shake it. He was very thorough when it came to painting, and if he was using spray paint he always followed the directions to the letter and shook the can well. The agitator rattled loudly as he swung the can back and forth. Pearl and I were doing our homework at the dining-room table. We pretended not to watch. My mother was out somewhere or else she would’ve asked him what he thought he was doing, and possibly even stopped him. When he finished shaking the can, Dwight pulled the tree into the middle of the living room and walked around it two or three times. Then, starting at the top and working his way down, he proceeded to spray it with white paint. I thought he meant to put a few splashes here and there to suggest snow, but he sprayed the whole thing—trunk and all. The needles drank up the paint and turned faintly blue again. Dwight put on another coat. It took him three cans before he was done, but the tree stayed white. By the next day, when we decorated the tree, the needles had already begun to drop off. Every time you touched a limb it set off a little cascade of them. No one said anything. My mother hung a few balls, then sat down and stared at the tree. The needles kept falling, pattering softly down on the white crepe paper spread around the trunk. By the time Norma and Skipper arrived the tree was half bare. They had driven up together from Seattle; Kenneth had to work, but he was all set to join us the following day. Norma must have told Bobby Crow she was coming. He showed up just after dinner that night, restless and grim, silent when Skipper tried to banter with him. He took Norma somewhere, then drove her back a couple of hours later. But she didn’t get out of the car. The rest of us sat around in the living room, and watched the lights blink on the tree, and talked about anything but the fact that Norma was still outside with Bobby Crow. The lights didn’t blink at different times like twinkling stars but all at once, flashing on and off like a neon sign outside a roadhouse. I was in bed when Norma finally came inside and ran to her room, giving long ululating cries that appalled me and made me cringe in anticipation.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  I let go of R.’s arm as we reached the bottom of the hill, where lights met us again along the stone road, from which it was a five- or ten-minute walk to the observatory point where we would watch the show. Not many of the other operagoers joined us there, they scattered to their cars or set off on foot for home. The benches at the little plaza were full anyway, packed with children and what I took for their grandparents, the very old and the very young, as though everyone of vital age had been called away. R. and I stood behind the benches, watching the last well-dressed couples bend into their cars and slide off, until the speakers behind us popped awake and the lights in the square went out. R. made a humming noise of anticipation, and all of the bodies on the benches stiffened with attention. But as the music started, a kitsch fusion of folk instruments and Slavic chorus and dated synthesizer, as different quadrants of the hill and its ancient walls were illuminated, now in red, now blue and green, I felt myself receding from the square, from the light and sound. For hours I had managed not to think about R. leaving, about the uncertainty of our future, the guilt I felt no matter how I tried to dismiss it. I had never wanted permanence before, not really, or I had wanted my freedom more; I had accepted that passionate feeling faded, all my earlier experience had confirmed it, when love that seemed certain simply dissolved, on one side or both, for no particular reason, leaving little trace. But what I felt for R. was different, it didn’t dissolve, and I wanted to believe in our language of boundlessness and the impossibility of change; to let it go would mean there had been bad faith, on one or both of our parts, maybe it isn’t fair to think that but I thought it.

• From Cleanness (2020)

  As we climbed the hill to the fortress after our meal I could almost feel the centuries peeling back, exposing a world whose brutality was clear in the walls raised up to resist it. The way things are now, it’s hard to imagine the country that could make this, R. said as we bought our tickets and began walking the long strip of stone leading to the fortress, pausing to stare at the huge square frame for gates that once would have barred our way. We weren’t alone on the path up the hill; there were others too, couples mostly, some of them in clothes that made me feel underdressed, the women picking their way gingerly over the stony ground in heels. Apart from the occasional sign and a few wooden staircases granting access to the ruins, there was little to distract us as we walked the uneven ground, making our way around boulders and the ruins of walls. As we turned past one of these walls we surprised three men chatting, dressed in medieval costumes, two half-naked and muscular in leather tunics and a third in a kind of peasant cloth. They snatched the cigarettes from their mouths and stood up, one of the larger men unfurling his whip; and then, seeing our lack of interest, they leaned back against the stone, entirely contemporary in their strange clothes. At first I thought they might be from the opera, members of the chorus waiting for their call, but their costumes weren’t right, and I realized they must have been performing in some tourist reenactment, Ottoman soldiers and a Bulgarian peasant. They resembled anyway the images in the books that had given me what idea I had of the history of the place, a set of slim illustrated volumes, comic books almost, a children’s history of Bulgaria filled with barbaric invaders and mothers in tears, villains and victims stark in their frames. There were multiple versions of the story, I knew; in some the Bulgarians were valiant, in some savage and cruel, holding out for months against overwhelming forces, ceding an inch of ground at a time. There’s no getting to the truth of such things, they’re so far in the past, though nearly everyone I had met talked about the fall of Tsarevets in 1393 as if it were a personal grief. I hate the Turks, the woman who cuts my hair finds an occasion to say every time I sit in her chair; I’m sorry, but I can never forgive them, they are a terrible people.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  W Lessons from Forced õuitting hen Maya Shankar was six years old, her mother brought a small violin down from the attic of the family’s Connecticut home. Maya’s mother had taken the instrument, which belonged to her mother, with her from India when she emigrated to the United States. Maya’s three older siblings had already deemed the instrument too uncool. But Maya was instantly taken with it. She quickly demonstrated prodigious talent. At the age of nine, she auditioned and was accepted into the precollege program at the Juilliard School, the legendary performing arts conservatory in New York. Every Saturday, her mother drove her to and from Juilliard for an intense, ten-hour boot camp. Maya excelled, so much so that at thirteen she scored a coveted audition with Itzhak Perlman, who is widely considered one of the greatest violinists of all time, having earned sixteen Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Emmys. Perlman accepted her as a private student. Maya Shankar, having achieved so much so soon, was on a path to a stellar career at the highest levels of professional music. All that was taken away when, one day during the summer before her senior year in high school, she tore a tendon in her finger while playing a difficult section of Paganini’s Caprice no. 13. She underwent surgery to repair the tendon, but the pain persisted. Over the next year, she tried performing through the discomfort by taking anti- inflammatories. She was eventually diagnosed, in addition to the torn tendon, with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. That diagnosis meant that not only did she have to give up playing the violin, but also she was facing a future where she would experience pain every day and eventually perhaps be unable to walk. It was a sudden end to a promising career. The question is, what does someone do when they’re forced to quit the goal they’ve been working toward their entire life? The answer is, of course, that they have to start looking for a new goal to aspire to.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  I sit there as you and Mai, without hesitation, move about, your arms hovering over your mother’s stiff frame. I do the only thing I know. My knees to my chest, I start to count her purple toes. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5. I rock to the numbers as your hands float over the body, methodic as nurses doing rounds. Despite my vocabulary, my books, knowledge, I find myself folded against the far wall, bereft. I watch two daughters care for their own with an inertia equal to gravity. I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead. After Lan is cleaned and changed, after the sheets removed, the bodily fluids scrubbed from the floor and the corpse—because that’s what language dictates now: corpse instead of her—we gather again around Lan. With all your fingers, you pry open her stuck jaw, while on the other side, Mai slips Lan’s dentures inside. But because rigor mortis has already set in, the jaws clamp down before the set of incisors can be secured and the dentures pop out, fall onto the floor with a hard clack. You let out a scream, which you quickly silence with a hand over your mouth. “Fuck,” you say in rare English, “fuck fuck fuck.” With the second attempt, the teeth click into place, and you fall back against the wall beside your gone mother. Outside, a dump truck clanks and beeps its way down the block. A few pigeons gargle among the scattered trees. At the bottom of it all, you sit, Mai’s head rested on your shoulders, your mother’s body cooling a few feet away. Then, your chin turning into a peach pit, you lower your face into your hands. — Lan has been dead five months now, and for five months has sat in an urn on your bedside table. But today we’re in Vietnam. Tien Giang Province, home of Go Cong District. It is summer. The rice paddies sweep out around us, endless and green as the sea itself. After the funeral, after the monks in saffron robes chant and sing around her polished granite gravestone, the neighbors from the village with trays of food lifted over their heads, the ones with white hair who recall Lan’s life here nearly thirty years ago, offer their anecdotes and condolences. After the sun dips under the rice fields and all that’s left is the grave site, its dirt still fresh and damp at its edges, strewn with white chrysanthemums, I call Paul in Virginia. He makes a request I don’t expect, and asks to see her. I take my laptop and carry it the few yards toward the graves, close enough to the house to obtain three bars of Wi-Fi.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  The cigarette smolders between my fingers. Mist rises from the warm soil as I step through the crop. The sky widens, the tobacco drops off, revealing a circle no larger than god’s thumbprint. But nothing’s here. No cow, no sound, only the last crickets, far off now, the tobacco still in the morning air. I stand, waiting for the sound to make me true. Nothing. The heifer, the farm, the boy, the wreck, the war—had I made it all up, in a dream, only to wake up with it fused to my skin? Ma, I don’t know if you’ve made it this far in this letter—or if you’ve made it here at all. You always tell me it’s too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you’ve been through, you’d just like to rest now. That reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost. I know you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know if I do but I hope it’s real. Because then maybe you’ll come back here next time around. Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. Maybe then, in that life and in this future, you’ll find this book and you’ll know what happened to us. And you’ll remember me. Maybe. For no reason, I start to run, past the clearing, back into the tobacco’s stiff shade. My feet blurring into a small wind beneath me, I run. Even if no one I know is dead yet, not Trevor, not Lan, not my friends with the speed and heroin nowhere near their scarless veins. Even if the farm is not yet sold to make room for luxury condos, the barn not yet dismantled, its wood repurposed into craft furniture or to line the walls of trendy cafés in Brooklyn, I run.