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 Trash (1988)

  The mystery is how many no one remembers. I show them to Jesse, not saying who they are, and when she laughs at the broken teeth, torn overalls, the dirt, I set my teeth at what I do not want to remember and cannot forget. We were so many we were without number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted? My maternal great-grandmother had eleven daughters, seven sons; my grandmother, six sons, five daughters. Each one made at least six. Some made nine. Six times six, eleven times nine. They went on like multiplication tables. They died and were not missed. I come of an enormous family and I cannot tell half their stories. Somehow it was always made to seem they killed themselves: car wrecks, shotguns, dusty ropes, screaming, falling out of windows, things inside them. I am the point of a pyramid, sliding back under the weight of the ones who came after, and it does not matter that I am the lesbian, the one who will not have children. I tell the stories and it comes out funny. I drink bourbon and make myself drawl, tell all those old funny stories. Someone always seems to ask me, which one was that? I show the pictures and she says, “Wasn’t she the one in the story about the bridge?” I put the pictures away, drink more, and someone always finds them, then says, “Goddamn! How many of you were there, anyway?” I don’t answer. Jesse used to say, “You’ve got such a fascination with violence. You’ve got so many terrible stories.” She said it with her smooth mouth, that chin that nobody ever slapped, and I love that chin, but when Jesse said that, my hands shook and I wanted nothing so much as to tell her terrible stories. So I made a list. I told her: that one went insane—got her little brother with a tire iron; the three of them slit their arms, not the wrists but the bigger veins up near the elbow; she, now she strangled the boy she was sleeping with and got sent away; that one drank lye and died laughing soundlessly. In one year I lost eight cousins. It was the year everybody ran away. Four disappeared and were never found. One fell in the river and was drowned. One was run down hitchhiking north. One was shot running through the woods, while Grace, the last one, tried to walk from Greenville to Greer for some reason nobody knew. She fell off the overpass a mile down from the Sears, Roebuck warehouse and lay there for hunger and heat and dying. Later sleeping, but not sleeping, I found that my hands were up under Jesse’s chin.

• From Trash (1988)

  “Still,” she says, “you’re so good with children, so gentle.” I think of all the times my hands have curled into fists, when I have just barely held on. I open my mouth, close it, can’t speak. What could I say now? All the times I have not spoken before, all the things I just could not tell her, the shame, the self-hatred, the fear; all of that hangs between us now—a wall I cannot tear down. I would like to turn around and talk to her, tell her . . . “I’ve got a dust river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be.” But I don’t say anything, and I know, as surely as I know I will never have a child, that by not speaking I am condemning us, that I cannot go on loving you and hating you for your fairy-tale life, for not asking about what you have no reason to imagine, for that soft-chinned innocence I love. [image file=image_285.jpg] Jesse puts her hands behind my neck, smiles and says, “You tell the funniest stories.” I put my hands behind her back, feeling the ridges of my knuckles pulsing. “Yeah,” I tell her. “But I lie.” Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee My Grandmother Mattie always said my Great-grandmother Shirley lived too long. Shirley Wilmer, of the Knoxville County Wilmers, married Tucker Boatwright when she was past nineteen, and he was just barely sixteen. Her family had a peanut farm off to the north of Knoxville, a piece of property they split between the five sons. Shirley was the only daughter. Her inheritance was a cedar chest full of embroidered linen and baby clothes that she and her mama had gotten together over the years—that and sixty dollars in silver that her daddy gave her, a fortune in those days. Granny Mattie swore that when Grandma Shirley died, those silver coins were still tied in the same cloth in which she had gotten them. Two of Grandma Shirley’s children died of the flu after gathering melons on a frosty fall day. People swore you could cure the flu with a bath of hot oil and comfrey, but Shirley wasn’t the kind to gather herbs and certainly not the kind to spend her silver on someone who would. She’d never wanted children anyway—not really—and hated the way her body continuously swelled and delivered. She called the children devils and worms and trash, and swore that, like worms, their natural substance was dirt and weeds. Shirley Boatwright believed herself to be one of the quality. “The better people,” she told her daughters. “They know their own. You watch how it goes; you watch how people treat me down at the mill. They can see who I am. It’s in the eyes if nothing else.”

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  It was subsumed for native women under our tribal struggle, though we certainly had struggles particular to women. I felt the country’s heart breaking. It was all breaking inside me. After one semester as a premed major I immersed myself in art studio classes and dance. I did not have the math and science background to do well in the chemistry and biology classes that were required for premed. I changed my major to studio art. “I’m not interested in marriage or finding yet another man to break my heart,” I remember telling a friend as we stood in the heat in front of the student union. The tech people were making a racket while they set up the microphones and tables for a National Indian Youth Council and Kiva Club press conference. I had just finalized the divorce with my son’s father. A fine-looking contingent from NIYC made its way to the makeshift stage to join our leaders for a press conference. Its members were modern-age warriors in sunglasses and with long black hair. There is my future, I remarked to myself as I watched a Pueblo man whose hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail. I watched his sensitive hands as he balanced his coffee and unclasped his shoulder bag full of papers. He felt familiar, though I didn’t know him. I had heard him holding forth at meetings and had seen him in passing on campus. As we stood in the hot sun listening to the prepared statements, I felt the immense preciousness of each breath. We all mattered — even our small core fighting for justice despite all odds. That day would become one of those memories that surface in my mind at major transitional points in my life. I feel the sun on my shoulders, hear the scratch of the cheap sound system, and become emotional. I recall a Navajo girl in diapers learning to walk, her arms stretched out to her father. I remember picking up my son at the day care across campus, his bright yellow lunchbox shaped like a school bus swinging as he darted along beside me. That night there was an impromptu party after the strategy meeting. I watched from the doorway of the kitchen of the student apartment we gathered in, as the eloquent Pueblo man I’d eyed at the press conference easily rolled a cigarette with his hands, pulling me over to him with his eyes. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke in my direction. The lazy lasso hung in the air between us. I passed him a beer and took one for myself. “Who are you, skinny girl?” he asked. “Come over here.” I pretended to ignore him. He was too sure of himself. “You must be one of those Oklahoma Indians,” he said. I could tell he was used to getting what he wanted when it came to women.

• From Carmina (-50)

  quod tibi si sancti concesserit incola Itoni, quae nostrum genus, has sedes defendere Erechthi annuit, ut tauri respergas sanguine dextram, 230 tum uero facito ut memori tibi condita corde haec uigeant mandata, nec ulla oblitteret aetas; ut simul ac nostros inuisent lumina collis, funestam antennae deponant undique uestem, candidaque intorti sustollant uela rudentes, 235 quam primum cernens ut laeta gaudia mente agnoscam, cum te reducem aetas prospera sistet.' haec mandata prius constanti mente tenentem Thesea ceu pulsae uentorum flamine nubes aereum niuei montis liquere cacumen. 240 at pater, ut summa prospectum ex arce petebat, anxia in assiduos absumens lumina fletus, cum primum inflati conspexit lintea ueli, praecipitem sese scopulorum e uertice iecit, amissum credens immiti Thesea fato. 245 sic funesta domus ingressus tecta paterna morte ferox Theseus, qualem Minoidi luctum obtulerat mente immemori talem ipse recepit. quae tamen aspectans cedentem maesta carinam multiplices animo uoluebat saucia curas. 250 at parte ex alia florens uolitabat Iacchus cum thiaso Satyrorum et Nysigenis Silenis, te quaerens, Ariadna, tuoque incensus amore. qui tum alacres passim lymphata mente furebant euhoe bacchantes, euhoe capita inflectentes. 255 harum pars tecta quatiebant cuspide thyrsos, pars e diuulso iactabant membra iuuenco, pars sese tortis serpentibus incingebant, pars obscura cauis celebrabant orgia cistis, orgia, quae frustra cupiunt audire profani, 260 plangebant aliae proceris tympana palmis, aut tereti tenuis tinnitus aere ciebant, multis raucisonos efflabant cornua bombos barbaraque horribili stridebat tibia cantu. talibus amplifice uestis decorata figuris 265 puluinar complexa suo uelabat amictu. quae postquam cupide spectando Thessala pubes expleta est, sanctis coepit decedere diuis. hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino horrificans Zephyrus procliuas incitat undas, 270 aurora exoriente uagi sub limina Solis: quae tarde primum clementi flamine pulsae procedunt, leni et resonant plangore cachinni, post uento crescente magis magis increbescunt, purpureaque procul nantes ab luce refulgent: 275 sic tum uestibuli linquentis regia tecta ad se quisque uago passim pede discedebant. quorum post abitum princeps e uertice Pelei aduenit Chiron portans siluestria dona: nam quodcumque ferunt campi, quos Thessala magnis 280 montibus ora creat, quos propter fluminis undas aura parit flores tepidi fecunda Fauoni, hos indistinctis plexos tulit ipse corollis, quo permulsa domus iucundo risit odore. confestim Penios adest, uiridantia Tempe, 285 Tempe, quae siluae cingunt super impendentes, [+]Minosim[+] linquens [+]doris[+] celebranda choreis, non uacuos: namque ille tulit radicitus altas fagos ac recto proceras stipite laurus, non sine nutanti platano lentaque sorore 290 flammati Phaethontis et aerea cupressu. haec circum sedes late contexta locauit, uestibulum ut molli uelatum fronde uireret. post hunc consequitur sollerti corde Prometheus, extenuata gerens ueteris uestigia poenae, 295 quam quondam silici restrictus membra catena persoluit pendens e uerticibus praeruptis. inde pater diuum sancta cum coniuge natisque aduenit caelo, te solum, Phoebe, relinquens, unigenamque simul cultricem montibus Iri: 300 Pelea nam tecum pariter soror aspernata est, nec Thetidis taedas uoluit celebrare iugalis. qui postquam niueis flexerunt sedibus artus, large multiplici constructae sunt dape mensae, cum interea infirmo quatientes corpora motu 305 ueridicos Parcae coeperunt edere cantus.

• From Trash (1988)

  I put it all away. I began to live my life as if nothing I did would survive the day in which I did it. I used my grief and hatred to wall off my childhood, my history, my sense of being part of anything greater than myself. I used women and liquor, constant righteous political work, and a series of grimly endured ordeals to convince myself that I had nothing to decide, that I needed nothing more than what other people considered important to sustain me. I worked on a feminist journal. I read political theory, history, psychology, and got a degree in anthropology as if that would quiet the roar in my own head. I watched other women love each other, war with each other, and take each other apart while never acknowledging the damage we all did to each other. I went through books and conferences, CR groups and study groups, organizing committees and pragmatic coalition fronts. I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself. That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it. Just as I did not know that what I needed had to come up from inside me, not be laid over the top of my head. The bitterness with which I had been born, that had been nurtured in me, could not be eased with a lover or a fight or any number of late-night meetings and clumsily written manifestos. It may never be eased. The decision to live when everything inside and out shouts death is not a matter of moments but years, and no one has ever told me how you know when it is accomplished.

• From Trash (1988)

  I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping. “You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.” “Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory. And just that easy her face was there, her full swollen mouth mocking me, whispering back, “Like a dyke. You the dyke here, girl. I sure an’t.” So then I’d cried, sobbed and cried, and beaten on that mirror with my fists until the women outside came to try and see what was going on. I’d shut up, washed my face, and told them nothing. What could I tell them, anyway? My ghost lover just came back and made me piss all over my jeans. My ghost lover is haunting me, and the trick is I am glad to see her. Katy hands me the joint again, moving her small hands delicately. She smiles when she sees where my glance is trained. She flexes her fist, opens the fingers, and wags them in front of my nose. I laugh and take the joint again. “I loved that shirt. It was the best present you ever got me.” “You forgetting those black gloves with the rhinestones on the back I got in that shop on Peachtree Street. We always got the best stuff in Atlanta. Didn’t we?” “You just about got us busted in Atlanta.” “Oh hell, you were just a nervous Nellie. Thought you were the only woman capable of sleight of hand. You just never trusted me, girl.” “You were always so stoned. You did stupid things.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Because of the long and unceasing care that was lavished upon it, and also because the soil was enriched by the decomposing head inside the pot, the basil grew very thick and exceedingly fragrant. The young woman constantly followed this same routine, and from time to time she attracted the attention of her neighbours. And as they had heard her brothers expressing their concern at the decline in her good looks and the way in which her eyes appeared to have sunk into their sockets, they told them what they had seen, adding: ‘We have noticed that she follows the same routine every day.’ The brothers discovered for themselves that this was so, and having reproached her once or twice without the slightest effect, they caused the pot to be secretly removed from her room. When she found that it was missing, she kept asking for it over and over again, and because they would not restore it to her she sobbed and cried without a pause until eventually she fell seriously ill. And from her bed of sickness she would call for nothing else except her pot of basil. The young men were astonished by the persistence of her entreaties, and decided to examine its contents. Having shaken out the soil, they saw the cloth and found the decomposing head inside it, still sufficiently intact for them to recognize it as Lorenzo’s from the curls of his hair. This discovery greatly amazed them, and they were afraid lest people should come to know what had happened. So they buried the head, and without breathing a word to anyone, having wound up their affairs in Messina, they left the city and went to live in Naples. The girl went on weeping and demanding her pot of basil, until eventually she cried herself to death, thus bringing her ill-fated love to an end. But after due process of time, many people came to know of the affair, and one of them composed the song which can still be heard to this day: Whoever it was, Whoever the villain That stole my pot of herbs, etc. SIXTH STORYAndreuola loves Gabriotto. She tells him of a dream she has had, and he tells her of another. He dies suddenly in her arms, and whilst she and a maidservant of hers are carrying him back to his own house, they are arrested by the officers of the watch. She explains how matters stand, and the chief magistrate attempts to ravish her, but she wards him off. Her father is informed, her innocence is established, and he secures her release. Being determined not to go on living in the world, she enters a nunnery.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But fortune, jealous of so long and so great a delight, with a woeful chance changed the gladness of the two lovers into mourning and sorrow; and it befell on this wise. Tancred was wont to come bytimes all alone into his daughter's chamber and there abide with her and converse awhile and after go away. Accordingly, one day, after dinner, he came thither, what time the lady (whose name was Ghismonda) was in a garden of hers with all her women, and willing not to take her from her diversion, he entered her chamber, without being seen or heard of any. Finding the windows closed and the curtains let down over the bed, he sat down in a corner on a hassock at the bedfoot and leant his head against the bed; then, drawing the curtain over himself, as if he had studied to hide himself there, he fell asleep. As he slept thus, Ghismonda, who, as ill chance would have it, had appointed her lover to come thither that day, softly entered the chamber, leaving her women in the garden, and having shut herself in, without perceiving that there was some one there, opened the secret door to Guiscardo, who awaited her. They straightway betook themselves to bed, as of their wont, and what while they sported and solaced themselves together, it befell that Tancred awoke and heard and saw that which Guiscardo and his daughter did; whereat beyond measure grieved, at first he would have cried out at them, but after bethought himself to keep silence and abide, an he might, hidden, so with more secrecy and less shame to himself he might avail to do that which had already occurred to his mind. The two lovers abode a great while together, according to their usance, without observing Tancred, and coming down from the bed, whenas it seemed to them time, Guiscardo returned to the grotto and she departed the chamber; whereupon Tancred, for all he was an old man, let himself down into the garden by a window and returned, unseen of any, to his own chamber, sorrowful unto death. That same night, at the time of the first sleep, Guiscardo, by his orders, was seized by two men, as he came forth of the tunnel, and carried secretly, trussed as he was in his suit of leather, to Tancred, who, whenas he saw him, said, well nigh weeping, 'Guiscardo, my kindness to thee merited not the outrage and the shame thou hast done me in mine own flesh and blood, as I have this day seen with my very eyes.' Whereto Guiscardo answered nothing but this, 'Love can far more than either you or I.' Tancred then commanded that he should be kept secretly under guard and in one of the chambers of the palace, and so was it done.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  But, ere I come to make answer to any of them, it pleaseth me, in mine own defence, to relate, not an entire story,--lest it should seem I would fain mingle mine own stories with those of so commendable a company as that which I have presented to you,--but a part of one,--that so its very default [of completeness] may attest that it is none of those,--and accordingly, speaking to my assailants, I say that in our city, a good while agone, there was a townsman, by name Filippo Balducci, a man of mean enough extraction, but rich and well addressed and versed in such matters as his condition comported. He had a wife, whom he loved with an exceeding love, as she him, and they lived a peaceful life together, studying nothing so much as wholly to please one another. In course of time it came to pass, as it cometh to pass of all, that the good lady departed this life and left Filippo nought of herself but one only son, begotten of him and maybe two years old. Filippo for the death of his lady abode as disconsolate as ever man might, having lost a beloved one, and seeing himself left alone and forlorn of that company which most he loved, he resolved to be no more of the world, but to give himself altogether to the service of God and do the like with his little son. Wherefore, bestowing all his good for the love of God,[216] he repaired without delay to the top of Mount Asinajo, where he took up his abode with his son in a little hut and there living with him upon alms, in the practice of fasts and prayers, straitly guarded himself from discoursing whereas the boy was, of any temporal thing, neither suffered him see aught thereof, lest this should divert him from the service aforesaid, but still bespoke him of the glories of life eternal and of God and the saints, teaching him nought but pious orisons; and in this way of life he kept him many years, never suffering him go forth of the hermitage nor showing him aught other than himself. [Footnote 216: _i.e._ in alms.]

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Ah, Lisabetta, you do nothing but call to me and bemoan my long absence, and you cruelly reprove me with your tears. Hence I must tell you that I can never return, because on the day that you saw me for the last time, I was murdered by your brothers.’ He then described the place where they had buried him, told her not to call to him or wait for him any longer, and disappeared. Having woken up, believing that what she had seen was true, the young woman wept bitterly. And when she arose next morning, she resolved to go to the place and seek confirmation of what she had seen in her sleep. She dared not mention the apparition to her brothers, but obtained their permission to make a brief trip to the country for pleasure, taking with her a maidservant who had once acted as her go-between and was privy to all her affairs. She immediately set out, and on reaching the spot, swept aside some dead leaves and started to excavate a section of the ground that appeared to have been disturbed. Nor did she have to dig very deep before she uncovered her poor lover’s body, which, showing no sign as yet of decomposition or decay, proved all too clearly that her vision had been true. She was the saddest woman alive, but knowing that this was no time for weeping, and seeing that it was impossible for her to take away his whole body (as she would dearly have wished), she laid it to rest in a more appropriate spot, then severed the head from the shoulders as best she could and enveloped it in a towel. This she handed into her maidservant’s keeping whilst she covered over the remainder of the corpse with soil, and then they returned home, having completed the whole of their task unobserved. Taking the head to her room, she locked herself in and cried bitterly, weeping so profusely that she saturated it with her tears, at the same time implanting a thousand kisses upon it. Then she wrapped the head in a piece of rich cloth, and laid it in a large and elegant pot, of the sort in which basil or marjoram is grown. She next covered it with soil, in which she planted several sprigs of the finest Salemitan basil,3 and never watered them except with essence of roses or orange-blossom, or with her own teardrops. She took to sitting permanently beside this pot and gazing lovingly at it, concentrating the whole of her desire upon it because it was where her beloved Lorenzo lay concealed. And after gazing raptly for a long while upon it, she would bend over it and begin to cry, and her weeping never ceased until the whole of the basil was wet with her tears.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  She never went out except for work or to do errands he had specifically approved. He watched and marked her every step, her every word. In those times there were no domestic abuse shelters. If either my mother or I had been brave enough to report him, the authorities would have accepted his word over ours because he was an employed white man. We would have been forced back with no protection, and he would have been given tacit permission to keep us in line. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] I never heard my mother sing much anymore. Her singing used to fill the house. We would turn up the radio and dance to rock-and-roll together. Our house now was quiet with our labor to keep it in order. My sister and I had the bulk of the duties, because we were female. I was in charge of cleaning, doing laundry, including the ironing for the family, washing dishes, and child care. Our brothers emptied the trash and mowed the lawn. I tried making a case for rotating duties. I didn’t feel it was a fair distribution. There was no negotiating. Our mother worked hard and long hours in restaurants, either cooking or waitressing or both. Our stepfather contributed only his share of the mortgage. Our mother paid for everything else. She bought all groceries, food, and clothes. Our father could not be found for child support. The last and only time I saw my mother sing publicly was shortly after she and my stepfather got together. Leon McAuliffe and His Cimarron Boys were gigging at a huge community picnic near the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, not far from where my mother grew up. McAuliffe was known for his steel guitar solos, especially for playing with Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. That McAuliffe had agreed to let my mother sit in for one of her original songs was a big deal. This had been her life. The bandleader Ernie Fields had even arranged one of her songs for his orchestra. There was tension in the car as my stepfather drove us the two hours to the event. My mother sat up front with him, the four of us children crowded in the back. She was nervous. She hadn’t sung with a band for a few years. She was dressed for her musical coming-out party in satin, frills, and perfume. My stepfather was already jealous and ready to go at someone because his wife, who was younger than he was, looked so pretty. She didn’t look like a jailed, beleaguered mother of four children. I was wary, because I knew our stepfather would make her pay. My grandfather—my mother’s father—met us there. I sat next to him as I balanced my box of greasy fried chicken on my lap. I was nervous for my mother. I embodied her every emotional knot and fear. I wanted this opportunity to be good for her.

• From Trash (1988)

  “A glass of water,” she said. She leaned over the table to line up her closing shots. I brought her a glass of water. “You’re good,” I told her, wanting her to talk to me about how she had learned to play pool, anything but family and all this stuff I so much did not want to think about. “Children.” She stared at me again. “What about children?” There was something in her face then that waited, as if no question were more important, as if she knew the only answer I could give. Enough, I told myself, and got up without a word to get myself that can of Pabst. I did not look in her eyes. I walked into the kitchen on feet that felt suddenly unsteady and tender. Behind me, I heard her slide the cue stick along the rim of the table and then draw it back to set up another shot. Play it out, I cursed to myself, just play it out and leave me alone. Everything is so simple for you, so settled. Make babies. Grow a garden. Handle some man like he’s just another child. Let everything come that comes, die that dies; let everything go where it goes. I drank straight from the can and watched her through the doorway. All my uncles were drunks, and I was more like them than I had ever been like my aunts. Aunt Alma started talking again, walking around the table, measuring shots and not even looking in my direction. “You remember when y’all lived out on Greenlake Road? Out on that dirt road where that man kept that old egg-busting dog? Your mama couldn’t keep a hen to save her life till she emptied a shell and filled it again with chicken shit and baby piss. Took that dog right out of himself when he ate it. Took him right out of the taste for hens and eggs.” She stopped to take a deep breath, sweat glittering on her lip. With one hand she wiped it away, the other going white on the pool cue. “I still had Annie then. Lord, I never think about her anymore.” I remembered then the last child she had borne, a tiny girl with a heart that fluttered with every breath, a baby for whom the doctors said nothing could be done, a baby they swore wouldn’t see six months. Aunt Alma had kept her in an okra basket and carried her everywhere, talking to her one minute like a kitten or a doll and the next minute like a grown woman. Annie had lived to be four, never outgrowing the vegetable basket, never talking back, just lying there and smiling like a wise old woman, dying between a smile and a laugh while Aunt Alma never interrupted the story that had almost made Annie laugh.

• From Trash (1988)

  Even now, after all this time, I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then, with drunk and dangerous strangers around the corner and Katy playing at trying to get me to make a sound they might hear. It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that—as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much, or made me love them so much. And no one else has ever died on me the way she did, with everything between us unsettled and aching. I slap her thigh brusquely, pushing her back. “You should have had the consideration to puke into a pot. Ruining that shirt that way. You were always careless of me and my stuff.” Katy nods. “A little. Yeah, I was.” She settles back on the mattress, cross-legged and still just touching my shoulder. “But I always made it up to you. Remember, I stole you another shirt in Atlanta.” Her hand trading the joint is transparent. I can see right through to her smoky breasts, the nipples dark and stiff. “That cotton cowboy shirt with the yellow yoke and the green embroidery. Made you look like a toked-up Loretta Lynn.” She gives her short, barking laugh. “You still got that one? ” “No, I lost it somewhere.” I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping. “You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.” “Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Moreover, since you felt bound to bring so much dishonour upon yourself, in God’s name you might at least have chosen someone whose rank was suited to your own. But of all the people who frequent my court, you have to choose Guiscardo, a youth of exceedingly base condition, whom we took into our court and raised from early childhood mainly out of charity. Your conduct has faced me with an appalling dilemma, inasmuch as I have no idea how I am to deal with you. I have already come to a decision about Guiscardo, who is under lock and key, having been arrested last night on my orders as he was emerging from the cavern; but God knows what I am to do with you. I am drawn in one direction by the love I have always borne you, deeper by far than that of any other father for a daughter; but on the other hand I seethe with all the indignation that the folly of your actions demands. My love prompts me to forgive you; my indignation demands that I should punish you without mercy, though it would be against my nature to do so. But before I reach any decision, I should like to hear what you have to say for yourself on the subject.’ And so saying, he lowered his gaze and began to wail as though he were a child who had been soundly beaten. Realizing, from what her father had said, that not only had her secret been discovered but Guiscardo was captured, Ghismonda was utterly overcome with sorrow, and needed all the self-control she possessed to prevent herself from screaming and sobbing as most other women would have done. But her proudness of heart more than made up for her shattered spirits, and by a miraculous effort of will, she remained impassive, and rather than make excuses for herself, she resolved to live no longer, being convinced that her Guiscardo was already dead. She therefore allowed no trace of contrition or womanly distress to cloud her features, but addressed her father in a firm, unworried voice, staring him straight in the face without a single tear in her eyes.

• From Trash (1988)

  She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early. Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull. “You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.” When Temple laughs, her head goes back. Her long red hair shakes out, and all the gray she has so skillfully tried to hide flakes loose and flashes at me silver and white. “Temple,” I tell her, “you’re finally getting old.” “Bullshit,” she flares. “And apple butter. I’m just more woman than the men in this town can handle. And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.” Then she smiles, oh she smiles! The skin around her mouth that’s aged so dry and tight flushes and fills like the grin on a mewling baby. But her teeth slip loose, and her hand flies up to hide the wolf grin. “Goddamn,” she sighs. Her daughter doesn’t look up. Temple’s hand caresses her porch, strokes the soft, worn wood like the lover she barely remembers. “It an’t Robert, you know, but it is, I’d swear. All I have of him anyway. Nights, I seem to hear him breathing, but it’s the walls. They sweat so, they smell just the way he did. And I got to where I don’t care if I’m crazy. I talk to this house like it was him.” Somehow it is. There was an army insurance policy, a thousand-dollar burial, and a four-thousand-dollar mortgage, plus two more for the plumbing which never worked anyway. In the North, it would have bought nothing: in Asheville only a little more: but out here off Old Henderson Road in 1959 it was an estate for three orphans and a redheaded woman suddenly going gray. “Lupus,” she says. “It was lupus.” An old story I have heard many times these twenty-five years.

• From Trash (1988)

  Her expression stunned me. Her mouth was drawn up in a big painful smile, not at all sincere. “Did you want to kill him?” I turned away from the black window, expecting Jo. But it was Arlene, her eyes huge with smeared mascara. “Sure,” I told her. “Still do.” She nodded and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “But you won’t.” “Probably not.” We stood still. I waited. “I didn’t think like that.” She spoke slowly. “Like you and Jo. You two were always fighting. I felt like I had to be the peace-maker. And I . . .” She paused, bringing her hands up in the air as if she were lifting something. “I just didn’t want to be a hateful person. I wanted it to be all right. I wanted us all to love each other.” She dropped her hands. “Now you just hate me. You and Jo, you hate me worse than him.” “No.” I spoke in a whisper. “Never. It’s hard sometimes to believe, I know. But I love you. Always have. Even when you made me so mad.” She looked at me. When she spoke, her voice was tiny. “I used to dream about it,” she whispered. “Not killing him, but him dying. Him being dead.” I smiled at her. “Easier that way,” I said. Arlene nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.” That evening Mavis stopped me in the hall. She had a stack of papers in one hand and an expression that bordered on outrage. “This an’t been signed,” she said. Her hand shook the papers. I looked at them as she stepped in close to me. She pulled one off the bottom. “This is from Mrs. Crawford, that woman was in the room next to your mama. Look at this. Look at it close.” The printing was dark and bold. “Do not resuscitate.” “No extraordinary measures to be taken.” I looked up at Mavis, and she shook her head at me. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. You been on this road a long time. You know what’s coming, and your mother needs you to take care of it.” She pressed a sheaf of forms into my hand. “You go in there and take another good long look at your mother, and then you get these papers done right.” Later that evening I was holding a damp washrag to my eyes over the little sink in the entry to Mama’s room. I could hear Mama whispering to Jo on the other side of the curtain around the bed. “What do you think happens after death?” Mama asked. Her voice was hoarse. I brought the rag down to cover my mouth. “Oh hell, Mama,” Jo said. “I don’t know.” “No, tell me.”

• From Trash (1988)

  I remember going home for the service one of the local drug counselors organized. People were standing around talking about the shame and the waste, and Katy’s mama slapped my hand when I touched her accidentally. “It should have been you,” she’d hissed. “Any one of you, it should have been. Not Katy.” Her eyes had been flat and dry. She hadn’t cried at all, and neither had I. I spent that night in my mama’s kitchen, talking long-distance to my lover up North about how everybody had looked, and the way Katy’s last boyfriend had glared at me from beside his parole officer. I’d hugged the phone to my ear, that yellow cowboy shirt between my fists, wringing it until I was shredding the yoke, pulling the snaps off, ripping the seams. I’d torn that shirt apart, talked for hours, but never gotten around to crying. I didn’t cry until months later in the Women’s Center bathroom. I’d been stone sober, but I was standing up to piss, my knees slightly bent, my jeans down around my ankles, my head turned to the side so I could see myself in the mirror. It was the way Katy had insisted we piss when we went road-tripping. “You’re the dyke,” she’d always said. “Keep your health. Learn to piss like a boy and keep your butt dry.” “Piss like a boy,” I’d whispered into the mirror, into Katy’s painful memory. And just that easy her face was there, her full swollen mouth mocking me, whispering back, “Like a dyke. You the dyke here, girl. I sure an’t.” So then I’d cried, sobbed and cried, and beaten on that mirror with my fists until the women outside came to try and see what was going on. I’d shut up, washed my face, and told them nothing. What could I tell them, anyway? My ghost lover just came back and made me piss all over my jeans. My ghost lover is haunting me, and the trick is I am glad to see her. Katy hands me the joint again, moving her small hands delicately. She smiles when she sees where my glance is trained. She flexes her fist, opens the fingers, and wags them in front of my nose. I laugh and take the joint again. “I loved that shirt. It was the best present you ever got me.” “You forgetting those black gloves with the rhinestones on the back I got in that shop on Peachtree Street. We always got the best stuff in Atlanta. Didn’t we?” “You just about got us busted in Atlanta.” “Oh hell, you were just a nervous Nellie. Thought you were the only woman capable of sleight of hand. You just never trusted me, girl.” “You were always so stoned. You did stupid things.”

• From Trash (1988)

  At thirty, Arlene had a little girl’s shadowed frightened face and the omnipresent stink of whiskey on her skin. I had been eight when Mama married Jack, Jo five, but Arlene had been still a baby, less than a year old and fragile as a sparrow in the air. “What is it you want to do? Talk? Huh?” Jo rolled her shoulders back and rubbed her upper arms. “Want to talk about what a tower of strength Mama was? Or why she had to be?” My shrug was automatic, inconsequential. A flush spread up from Jo’s cleavage. It made the skin of her neck look rough and pebbly. Deep lines scored the corners of her eyes and curved back from her mouth. In the last few years, Jo had become scary thin. The skin that always pulled tight on her bones seemed to have grown loose. Now it wrinkled and hung. I looked away, surprised and angry. Neither of us had expected to live long enough to get old. For all that we fight, Jo is the one I get along with, and I always try to stay with her when I visit. Arlene and I barely speak, though we talk to each other more easily than she and Jo. There have been years I don’t think the two of them have spoken half a dozen words. In the ten weeks since Mama’s collapse, their conversations have been hurt-filled bursts of whispered recrimination. At first, I stayed with Arlene and that seemed to help, but when Jo and I insisted that Mama had to check in to MacArthur, Arlene blew up and told me to go ahead and move over to Jo’s place. “You and Jo—you think you know it all,” Arlene said when she was dropping me off at Jo’s. “But she’s my mama too, and I know something. I know she’s not ready to give up and die.” “We’re not giving up. We’re putting Mama where she can get the best care.” “Two miles from Jo’s place and forty from mine.” Arlene had shaken her head. “All the way across town from Jack and her stuff. I know what you are doing.” “Arlene . . .” “Don’t. Just don’t.” She popped the clutch on her VW bug and backed up before I could get the door closed. “Someday you’re gonna be sorry. That’s the one thing I am sure of, you’re gonna be sorry for all you’ve done.” She swung the car sharply to the side, making the door swing shut.

• From Trash (1988)

  The woman turned to her, a momentary look of confusion on her face. “You do?” “Oh yes, there is no fighting what is meant. When God puts his hand on you, well . . .” Mama shrugged as if there were no need to say more. The woman hesitated, and then nodded, “Yes. God has a plan for us all.” “Yes.” Mama nodded. “Yes.” She reached over and put both hands on the woman’s clasped palms. “Bless you.” Mama beamed. This time the woman did frown. She didn’t know whether Mama was making fun of her, but she knew something was wrong. Her friend looked nervous. “Just let me ask you something.” Mama pulled the woman’s hands toward her own midriff, drawing the woman slightly off balance and making her reach across the pile of underpants. “Have you had cancer yet?” The words were spoken in the softest matron’s drawl but they cut the air like a razor. “Oh!” the woman said. Mama smiled. Her smile relaxed, full of enjoyment. “It an’t good news. But it is definite. You know something after, how everything can change in an instant. ” The woman’s eyes were fixed and dilated. “Oh! God is a rock,” she whispered. “Yes.” Mama’s smile was too wide. “And Demerol.” She paused while the woman’s mouth worked as if she were going to protest, but could not. “And sleep,” Mama added that as it had just occurred to her. She nodded again. “Yes. God is Demerol and sleep and not vomiting when that’s all you’ve done for days. Oh, yes. God is more than I think you have yet imagined. It’s not like we get to choose what comes, after all.” “Mama,” I said. “Please, Mama.” Mama leaned over so that her face was close to the woman’s chin and spoke in a tightly parsed whisper. “God is your daughter holding your hand when you can’t stand the smell of your own body. God is your husband not yelling, your insurance check coming when they said it would.” She leaned so close to the woman’s face, it looked as if she were about to kiss her, still holding on to both the woman’s hands. “God is any minute pain is not eating you up alive, any breath that doesn’t come out in a wheeze.” The woman’s eyes were wide, still unblinking; the determined mouth clamped shut. “I know God.” Mama assumed her old soft drawl. “I know God and the devil and everything in between. Oh yes. Yes.” The last word was fierce, not angry but final. When she let go, I watched the woman fall back against her friend. The two of them turned to walk fast and straight away from us, leaving their selections on the table. I felt almost sorry for them.

• From Trash (1988)

  “You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.” She sighs, rolls the ragged ends of her hair between fingers suddenly flushed pink. “You know what I did?” She looks away, away from me, away from her daughter, away from the dogs who paw restlessly at the bare patches near the trees. “I let them take his body. Told them to go ahead, do anything they had to. When it came down to it, I said, just tell me what it was. The girls, of course, I was thinking of the girls. And they took him, did their stuff to him, things I can’t even imagine. I don’t think, in the end, we buried more than the frame of him.” Temple’s hands shake, her tea spills over the splintered boards of the porch. Leaning forward makes her face go a deeper red. “Doctors, like lawyers you know, they don’t hurry. “I thought it would be a while, weeks maybe, even months. But Lord, years! I never thought they’d take years, and then tell me nothing. Just the lupus, ’cause of the spots and the strangling. Lupus like with Claire or that cousin I don’t know that I really believe ever existed. But hell, they didn’t really know what killed him. Lupus kills slow, and Robert died fast. “Sometimes, sometimes, I dream sometimes, oh God!” Temple rocks her head back and forth, casts a glance at her daughters and looks quickly away, speaking in a whisper that does not carry to where they sit. “I dream sometimes I lead the children out in front of a big old semi, a row of hearses following easy as you please, all their daddies nodding at me as they’re mowed down!” She shakes her head, shakes her shoulders, her whole torso following, the pink in her cheeks going brighter than sunburn. “But, sometimes, too, I dream I am alone, walking through Greenville as it burns, the sparks coming down on my neck but nothing burning me. No one sees me. They come out and throw water and yell. I just walk through and grin. Imagine the kind of woman I am to take pleasure in that kind of thing!” Imagine the kind of woman she is, Temple on her porch with the paint flaking down. Temple with her hands still on her knees, ridged and knobby, the veins blue-purple and high. Her face a permanent red-tan flush. Her daughters going in and out, slowly, carefully, the deadly warts on the pale skin of their necks and calves burning her eyes.