Guilt

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.

Page 79 of 99 · 20 per page

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was a kind of devil! I have told you — ’‘And yet, you stayed with her, so long...’I felt suffocated, all at once, by my own story, and by the meanings she was teasing from it. ‘I can’t explain,’ I said. ‘She had a power over me. She was rich. She had - things.’‘First you told me it was a gent that threw you out. Then you said it was a lady. I thought, that you had lost some girl... ’‘I had lost a girl; but it was Kitty, and it was years before.’‘And Diana was rich; and blacked your eye and cut you, and you let her. And then she chucked you out because you - kissed her maid.’ Her voice had grown steadily harder. ‘What happened to her?’‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’We lay a while in silence, and the bed seemed suddenly terribly slim. Florence gazed at the lightening square of curtain at the window, and I watched her, miserably. When she put a finger to her mouth to chew at a nail I lifted my hand to stop her; but she pushed my arm away, and made to rise.‘Where are you going?’ I asked.‘Upstairs. I want to sit a little while and think.’‘No!’ I cried; and as I cried it, Cyril, in his crib upstairs, woke up, and began to call out for his mother. I reached for Florence and seized her wrist and, all heedless of the baby’s cries, pulled her back and pressed her to the bed. ‘I know what you mean to do,’ I said. ‘You mean to go and think of Lilian!’‘I cannot help but think of Lilian!’ she answered, stricken. ‘I cannot help it. And you - you’re just the same, only I never knew it. Don’t say - don’t say you weren’t thinking of her, of Kitty, last night, as you kissed me!’I took a breath - but then I hesitated. For it was true, I couldn’t say it. It was Kitty I had kissed first and hardest; and it was as if I had had the shape or the colour or the taste of her kisses upon my lips, ever after. Not the spendings and the tears of all the weeping sods of Soho, nor the wine and the damp caresses of Felicity Place, had quite washed those kisses away.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  He remained about a month, and then intended to leave for Zürich. He asked his host to hire a boat to convey him over the lake some distance eastward. But before his departure he attended church, on Sunday, the 13th of August. He was recognized and arrested by an officer of the police in the name of the Council.1165 Calvin was responsible for this arrest, as he frankly and repeatedly acknowledged.1166 It was a fatal mistake. Servetus was a stranger and had committed no offence in Geneva. Calvin ought to have allowed him quietly to proceed on his intended journey. Why then did he act otherwise? Certainly not from personal malice, nor other selfish reasons; for he only increased the difficulty of his critical situation, and ran the risk of his defeat by the Libertine party then in power. It was an error of judgment. He was under the false impression that Servetus had just come from Venice, the headquarters of Italian humanists and sceptics, to propagate his errors in Geneva, and he considered it his duty to make so dangerous a man harmless, by bringing him either to conviction and recantation, or to deserved punishment. He was determined to stand or fall with the principle of purity of doctrine and discipline. Rilliet justifies the arrest as a necessary measure of self-defence. "Under pain of abdication," he says, "Calvin must do everything rather than suffer by his side in Geneva a man whom he considered the greatest enemy of the Reformation; and the critical position in which he saw it in the bosom of the Republic, was one motive more to remove, if it was possible, the new element of dissolution which the free sojourn of Servetus would have created … . To tolerate Servetus with impunity at Geneva would have been for Calvin to exile himself … He had no alternative. The man whom a Calvinist accusation had caused to be arrested, tried, and condemned to the flames in France, could not find an asylum in the city from which that accusation had issued."1167 § 150. State of Political Parties at Geneva in 1553.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Cecily sat with Fiona at the big wooden table. She wore a beige turtleneck sweater today, one that in its solid plainness made her look protected—from the chaos of the city, the poison darts of family. “It’s like they were trying to be symbolic,” Fiona said. “At least it’s not a GOP headquarters or something. Richard, listen, there’s a Starbucks at Belmont and Clark. It’s—it’s not as sterile as I’m making it sound. But it’s not the same. Every winter they have this soup walk. You go from restaurant to restaurant, and you get soup. Everyone’s out there: gay guys, straight couples, babies in strollers. And soup. It’s beautiful. You wouldn’t want it to be the same. Because the vibe before, it came from an outsider place, and there was—you know, there was desperation all around. Even before AIDS.” “So it’s grown up,” Richard said. “No more Boystown!” Serge laughed. “Man’s town!” No one else appreciated it. Richard said, “Do you ever think it’s just a fleeting moment?” No, she didn’t. Not really. It was hard to imagine going back, losing ground. He said, “Because I do. I’m sure I’d roll my eyes at the gentrification, but listen, honey, I’m old and I’ve seen a lot of shit, and I’m telling you, let’s enjoy it while it lasts. Because this isn’t Mother May I. You’re not always advancing. I know it feels that way right now, but it’s fragile. You might look back in fifty years and say, That was the last good time.” Fiona pulled her sleeves over her hands. It was so tempting to think of the fires of her twenties as being the great historical struggle of her life, all past tense. Even her work at the store, her lobbying and fundraising, always felt like aftermath. People were still dying, just more slowly, with a bit more dignity. Well, in Chicago, at least. She considered it one of her great moral failings that, deep down, she didn’t care on quite the same visceral level about the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa. It didn’t stop her from donating money to those charities, but it bothered her that she didn’t feel it in her core, didn’t cry herself to sleep over it. A million people in the world had died of AIDS in the past year, and she hadn’t cried about it once. A million people! She spent a long time asking herself if she was racist, or if it was about the width of the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe it was because it wasn’t happening primarily to the gay community there, wasn’t only killing beautiful young men who reminded her of Nico and his friends.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother and I kneeled together beside Agong, turning his head to the side and opening his mouth to irrigate his drool, redirecting it into an ashtray. I wanted to say I never meant to hurt him. She cut a hole in his shirt so that it wouldn’t chafe against his burn wound, a steak-raw stripe the length of my hand. Dabbing the wound with spit and mud from the yard, my mother told me not to touch it. It glowed like plum meat, stripped of its skin, pus drying into sap. I wanted to say that my tail had outgrown me, grown crooked like the roots of Duck Uncle’s tree that time our sidewalk split open and scabbed. Its reach was beyond this body, this city. When I tried to speak, my mouth felt full of bees. I didn’t know how to own what I’d done. My mother touched her knuckle to the back of my neck, told me to go away and sleep. She’d stay awake all night to watch him, to pad the sweat off his cheeks with her sleeves, to reel him in from dreams too deep. He reminded me of the neighborhood stray with a spotted face. It was incontinent, dragging a river of piss up the driveway. That night I dreamed of Ama in the yard, feeding chicks out of her left hand. With her right hand, she practiced the width of the hens’ necks. She dug into the soil, tore out white carrots that glowed like rib bones. She sat all night in front of the TV the way my mother did, face scabbed in blue light, watching soap operas about women who married their husbands’ ghosts when they didn’t return from war. In one of the scenes, the wife doesn’t want to sleep with her ghost husband, so she tricks him by dressing a dead goat in her clothes, tucking the goat into her side of the bed. But the ghost husband isn’t tricked. He gets revenge by cleaving the goat open and sewing his wife into its body. When the wife-goat is slaughtered and spit-roasted for a feast, no one ever finds out who they are eating. I woke, wanting to know the ending, but there was no one in the room to tell it. _ The verb cleave has two meanings: to split from and stick to. Another doubling: When my mother says mother she means the body that gave birth to her and the one that tried to kill her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her mother soon followed her to the landing.‘My dear!’ she called, ‘you’re home, and thank goodness! We’ve been wondering ourselves silly - haven’t we, love ? - about where you might’ve got to. Gracie was fretted near half to death, poor soul, but I said to her: “Don’t you worry about Nancy, girl; Nancy will’ve found some friend to take her in, or missed the last bus home, and passed the night in some rooming-house. Nancy will be back all right, tomorrow, you wait and see.”’ As she spoke she came slowly down the stairs, until at last we were quite level. She gazed at me with real affection; but there was a hint of reproach, I thought, in her words. I felt even more guilty about what I must tell her - but also slightly resentful. I was not her daughter, nor was I Gracie’s sweetheart. I owed them nothing - I told myself - but my rent.Now I drew carefully away from Grace, and nodded to her mother. I said, ‘You’re right, I did meet a friend. A very old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. What a surprise it was, to meet her! She has rooms over in Kilburn. It was too far to come back so late.’ The story sounded hollow to me, but Mrs Milne seemed pleased enough with it.‘There now, Gracie,’ she said, ‘what did I tell you? Now, just you run downstairs and put the kettle on. Nancy’ll be wanting a bit of tea, I don’t doubt.’ She smiled at me again, while Gracie dutifully lumbered off; then she headed back up the stairs, and I followed.‘The thing is, Mrs Milne,’ I began, ‘this friend of mine, she’s in a bit of a state. You see her room-mate up and moved out last week’ - Mrs Milne checked slightly, then stepped steadily on - ‘and she can’t replace her; and she can’t afford all the rent herself, she has only a little part-time work in a milliner‘s, poor thing ...’ We had reached the parlour. Mrs Milne turned to face me, and her eyes were troubled.‘That is a shame,’ she said feelingly. ‘A good roomer is hard to find, these days, that I do know. That’s why - and I’ve told you so before, you know I have - that’s why me and Gracie’ve been so glad to have you with us. Why, if you was ever to leave us, Nance -’ This seemed the worst possible way for me to tell her, yet I had to speak.‘Oh, don’t say that, Mrs M!’ I said lightly. ‘For you see, I’m sorry to say I shall be leaving you. This friend of mine has asked me and, well, I said I would take the other girl’s place - just to help her out, you know ...’

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

  Hearing my aunts traffic in such stereotypes, I would try to explain to them the error of their ways. “It’s thinking like that that holds us back,” I would say. “We’re all part of one tribe. The black tribe. The human tribe. Look what tribalism has done to places like Nigeria or Liberia.” And Jane would say, “Ah, those West Africans are all crazy anyway. You know they used to be cannibals, don’t you?” And Zeituni would say, “You sound just like your father, Barry. He also had such ideas about people.” Meaning he, too, was naive; he, too, liked to argue with history. Look what happened to him …. The van suddenly came to a stop, shaking me out of my reverie. We were in front of a small shamba, and our driver, Francis, asked us all to stay put. A few minutes later, he emerged from the house with a young African girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, who was dressed in jeans and a neatly pressed blouse and carried a small duffel bag. Francis helped her into the back and pointed to the seat next to Auma. “Is this your daughter?” Auma asked, scooting over to make room for the girl. “No,” Francis said. “My sister’s. She likes to see the animals and is always nagging me to take her along. Nobody minds, I hope.” Everyone shook their heads and smiled at the girl, who suffered bravely under the attention. “What is your name?” the British woman, Mrs. Wilkerson, asked. “Elizabeth,” the girl whispered. “Well, Elizabeth, you can share my tent if you like,” Auma said. “My brother, I think he snores.” I made a face. “Don’t listen to her,” I said, and held out a package of biscuits. Elizabeth took one and nibbled neatly around its edges. Auma reached for the bag and turned to Mauro. “Want some?” she asked. The Italian smiled and took one, before Auma passed them around to the others. We followed the road into cooler hills, where women walked barefoot carrying firewood and water and small boys switched at donkeys from their rickety carts. Gradually the shambas became less frequent, replaced by tangled bush and forest, until the trees on our left dropped away without warning and all we could see was the wide-open sky. “The Great Rift Valley,” Francis announced. We piled out of the van and stood at the edge of the escarpment looking out toward the western horizon. Hundreds of feet below, stone and savannah grass stretched out in a flat and endless plain, before it met the sky and carried the eye back through a series of high white clouds. To the right, a solitary mountain rose like an island in a silent sea; beyond that, a row of worn and shadowed ridges. Only two signs of man’s presence were visible—a slender road leading west, and a satellite station, its massive white dish cupped upward toward the sky.

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

  But of course I wasn’t either of those things. Even in the States, wealth involved trade-offs for those who weren’t born to it, the same sorts of trade-offs that I could see Auma now making as she tried, in her own way, to fulfill the family’s expectations. She was working two jobs that summer, teaching German classes to Kenyan businessmen along with her job at the university. With the money she saved, she wanted not only to fix up Granny’s house in Alego but also to buy a bit of land around Nairobi, something that would appreciate in value, a base from which to build. She had plans, schedules, budgets, and deadlines—all the things she’d learned were required to negotiate a modern world. The problem was that her schedules also meant begging off from family affairs; her budgets meant saying no to the constant requests for money that came her way. And when this happened—when she insisted on going home before Jane served dinner because things had started two hours late, or when she refused to let eight people pile into her VW because it was designed for four and they would tear up the seats—the looks of unspoken hurt, barely distinguishable from resentment, would flash across the room. Her restlessness, her independence, her constant willingness to project into the future—all of this struck the family as unnatural somehow. Unnatural … and un-African. It was the same dilemma that old Frank had posed to me the year I left Hawaii, the same tensions that certain children in Altgeld might suffer if they took too much pleasure in doing their schoolwork, the same perverse survivor’s guilt that I could expect to experience if I ever did try to make money and had to pass the throngs of young black men on the corner as I made my way to a downtown office. Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; that no one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association. It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along. As if the map that might have once measured the direction and force of our love, the code that would unlock our blessings, had been lost long ago, buried with the ancestors beneath a silent earth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Above me, my brother’s breath was backfiring, unable to leave his lungs. I asked my brother why, looking up at his shadow-battered face. My brother didn’t answer. He just said, Why did he bring that here? I wanted to tell him, Because he missed me and not you. Because he knows that I can fly, too. But instead, I bent and plucked paper from between the floorboards. I didn’t want my father to find the pieces and think it was me. Go back to bed, I said, but my brother just looked at me. The apartment was still black, but the sky outside was beginning to dull into a dime-colored day. Our father now stood in the bedroom doorway. He was relaxed, his hands loose at his sides, and I wanted to tell him we could go to the roof. We could saddle the sky with our kites. His eyes focused on the wall behind us. The bald spot where the kite had been. My father looked at me first, then at my brother. My brother, trembling now, backed into his own shadow. I spoke to wedge my words between them: I broke the kite. It was me. I reached into my pockets and made a fist around the pieces, brought them out into the light. The paper scattered from my hands, snowing between my fingers. I told my father I tore the kite up, that I was still upset that he wasn’t coming home and couldn’t bear to see anything his hands had made. My mother woke, stirring the sheets on the bed. She saw all three of us in the far corner of the room, my father putting his hands on my brother’s shoulders, telling him to kneel. Pick it up, he said, pointing to the pieces. My brother bent his knees halfway but stopped. I could see him straining to be straight. He said no. My mother got up from the bed, palms up as if she were coming to pet us. Her mouth pleated quiet. I kept saying I did it, I did it, it was me, but my father didn’t look at me. My brother dropped his knees to the ground. I heard their bones. My brother’s upper lip was wet; what I thought was his shadow was sweat. My brother bent his head to the floor like in prayer as the room was delivered into daylight. He pressed his tongue to a petal of paper on the ground. I imagined it dissolving like a wafer, but it stayed there, pinned and wet. My brother lifted his head. Stood up and spat. We heard it land: a glob of spit hitting my father’s cheek. My mother reached up to touch her own face. My father fisted my brother’s blue shirt and tried to lift him. But my brother jerked away. He was always bird-boned, so light inside my father’s hands, planning flight.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I get it, I said to my mother. The moral is you can’t really save anything. My mother laughed and said listen, little anus, the story’s still singeing: The neighbor’s tree, the one that had once carried the monkey, burned down in a night. No one had seen anything or smelled any smoke, but one morning the tree had no torso. There wasn’t even a stump, just a socket in the ground that bled for a month. The same woman who did that, my mother said, threw us into the river. I said, Maybe she thought you were a fire. But I thought of what Ama had said: Maybe it was true that a mean thing could not be made good again. Maybe my tail had been corrupted into something that couldn’t be saved. I’d whipped it against Agong. Ama had walked me with it like a leash. I no longer knew how to hold it, and at night when it tried to cuddle against my leg, I swatted it away, orphaning it to the other side of the bed. After grinding the powder, my mother squatted next to the sofa. She propped up Agong’s head with a pillow and tried opening and closing his mouth with her hands. He won’t swallow, she said. She said she’d tried everything: pinching his nose shut, sugaring the spoon, tickling his throat. Agong, I said. If you don’t swallow, your stomach will get so light it’ll float out of your body. You need to anchor it with something solid. He was listening. He swallowed. I remembered the story of gegu: to cure your father by cutting your own flesh and feeding it to him. I glanced at my mother’s thighs, but they were the same size I remembered. That night I stayed awake to the soundtrack of my father’s voice saying thigh, saying knife, saying father. When I was tired of counting the leaks in our ceiling, I slipped off of the mattress and walked to the pantry, where my mother kept her toes in the cookie tin. The lid popped from its socket soundlessly and I looked inside, knowing already what had been taken. The tin was empty, rinsed clean, my mouth mirrored back at me. I thought of my mother in the kitchen, grinding out powder for hours. The pestle multiplying her toe-bones. To give something a new shape, she’d said. You have to break it.

• From The Art of Memoir

  clear ones that matter most anyway, because they’re the ones you’ve nursed and worried over and talked through and wondered about your whole life. And you’re seeking the truth of memory—your memory and character—not of unbiased history. Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty. Yes, you can misinterpret—happens all the time. “The truth ambushes you,” Geoffrey Wolff once said. (More on those hair-raising reversals in a later chapter.) But unless you’re looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You’ll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He’s missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life. Liberation how? you might say. Why isn’t it just as good to make up a version of events you can live with and stick to that? If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you. But whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but the most hardened sociopath—carve a lonely gap between your disguise and who you really are. The practiced liar also projects her own manipulative, double-dealing facade onto everyone she meets, which makes moving through the world a wary, anxious enterprise. It’s hard enough to see what’s going on without forcing yourself to look through the wool you’ve pulled over your own eyes. To watch someone scrutinize a painful history in depth—which I’ve done as teacher and editor and while working with former drunks trying to clear up ancient crimes—is to witness not inconsiderable pain. You have to lance a boil and suffer its stench as infection drains off. Yet all the scrupulous self-examinations over time I’ve been witness to—whether on the page or off—always

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Our father now stood in the bedroom doorway. He was relaxed, his hands loose at his sides, and I wanted to tell him we could go to the roof. We could saddle the sky with our kites. His eyes focused on the wall behind us. The bald spot where the kite had been. My father looked at me first, then at my brother. My brother, trembling now, backed into his own shadow. I spoke to wedge my words between them: I broke the kite. It was me. I reached into my pockets and made a fist around the pieces, brought them out into the light. The paper scattered from my hands, snowing between my fingers. I told my father I tore the kite up, that I was still upset that he wasn’t coming home and couldn’t bear to see anything his hands had made. My mother woke, stirring the sheets on the bed. She saw all three of us in the far corner of the room, my father putting his hands on my brother’s shoulders, telling him to kneel. Pick it up, he said, pointing to the pieces. My brother bent his knees halfway but stopped. I could see him straining to be straight. He said no. My mother got up from the bed, palms up as if she were coming to pet us. Her mouth pleated quiet. I kept saying I did it, I did it, it was me, but my father didn’t look at me. My brother dropped his knees to the ground. I heard their bones. My brother’s upper lip was wet; what I thought was his shadow was sweat. My brother bent his head to the floor like in prayer as the room was delivered into daylight. He pressed his tongue to a petal of paper on the ground. I imagined it dissolving like a wafer, but it stayed there, pinned and wet. My brother lifted his head. Stood up and spat. We heard it land: a glob of spit hitting my father’s cheek. My mother reached up to touch her own face. My father fisted my brother’s blue shirt and tried to lift him. But my brother jerked away. He was always bird-boned, so light inside my father’s hands, planning flight. He ran for the door, through the hallway, then up the stairs to the roof. I’d later ask why he ran up instead of down, but he told me nothing.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Snakes arriving to scalp you I watch you open your mouth in the water brief flower the snakes answering from inside you Years ago a storm chaperoned your birth the soil gave up its trees for adoption the snakes singing now rhyming that year & this morning my babies buoying river lifting like a tongue to lick my back turn me around I do I needle my body through the water stitch you this new ending I fish you out one by one last of all you my eldest I went in belting the river around my waist on land I lay you safe water flocking from your mouth the river revised you a new body ribs ridging into scales your skull a snakehead legs arrowed into a tail hands honed into fins Snakehead fish can limp on land their gills sewing shut I carried my daughterfish *1 home in my skirt released you all into a rainbarrel from the river I take frogs turtles fish I scoop the turtles from their shells debone the frogs with my fingertips feed you minnows whole feed the barrel like my own belly in the water you slough your scales your fin fleshes into a foot you outgrow your barrel in a week girl again I ask you not to blame the river you did anyway you wanted the river dammed some part of you misses that water umbilical cord of salt silt admit it return to it your name the river loving your wrists like rope you my redgirl my shithole my first to follow little missionary boys around hunting sparrows frying them on fencewire candying the bones I didn’t want you around those boys I knit you a leash from reeds tied you to my calf you dreamed of slaughtering both my calves vealing me running from me. If every mother in the world threw her children *2 in the sea how high would the water rise to hood me how much of this coast do I lose to you daily When you died I asked the crematorium to wash your body clean as when it was born bright as an onion don’t believe any doctor what whipped your blood to cream wasn’t sodium sofas food coloring it was the river roosting in you eroding your bones into rooms I’ve lit. I admit to putting it there: I pulled the river through you like string through a bead into the mouth-hole out the asshole my life threaded through yours *1 YOU LUCKED OUT. A TIGER TAIL IS SO MUCH COOLER THAN BEING A FISH.

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

  Still, I’d felt bad after that particular episode; it was the one trick my mother always had up her sleeve, that way she had of making me feel guilty. She made no bones about it, either. “You can’t help it,” she told me once. “Slipped it into your baby food. Don’t worry, though,” she added, smiling like the Cheshire cat. “A healthy, dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It’s what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.” We could joke about it by then, for her worst fears hadn’t come to pass. I had graduated without mishap, was accepted into several respectable schools, and settled on Occidental College in Los Angeles mainly because I’d met a girl from Brentwood while she was vacationing in Hawaii with her family. But I was still just going through the motions, as indifferent toward college as toward most everything else. Even Frank thought I had a bad attitude, although he was less than clear about how I should change it. What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise. I thought back to the last time I had seen the old poet, a few days before I left Hawaii. We had made small talk for a while; he complained about his feet, the corns and bone spurs that he insisted were a direct result of trying to force African feet into European shoes. Finally he had asked me what it was that I expected to get out of college. I told him I didn’t know. He shook his big, hoary head. “Well,” he said, “that’s the problem, isn’t it? You don’t know. You’re just like the rest of these young cats out here. All you know is that college is the next thing you’re supposed to do. And the people who are old enough to know better, who fought all those years for your right to go to college—they’re just so happy to see you in there that they won’t tell you the truth. The real price of admission.” “And what’s that?” “Leaving your race at the door,” he said. “Leaving your people behind.” He studied me over the top of his reading glasses. “Understand something, boy. You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained. They’ll train you to want what you don’t need. They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore. They’ll train you to forget what it is that you already know. They’ll train you so good, you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit. They’ll give you a corner office and invite you to fancy dinners, and tell you you’re a credit to your race. Until you want to actually start running things, and then they’ll yank on your chain and let you know that you may be a well-trained, well-paid nigger, but you’re a nigger just the same.”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The window was barricaded with a dresser, and a chair in the corner kept only three of its limbs. There were no mirrors—fengshuibuhao—but something had shattered, and there were crumbs of glass in the carpet, burrowing into our feet as we neared the bed. What I thought was slicked-back hair was a bruise spanning his scalp. The liverspots on his hands were the size of quarters and I wanted to pluck them off one by one, spend them on new skin for him. Agong’s mouth was all movement. His tongue worming through the skin of his cheek. My mother got on her knees beside the bed, pressing her forehead to the mattress, and when she lifted her forehead it was bright with blood. The mattress was ripe with it. I squinted at his chest to see if something still lived in it. My brother’s hand was damp inside mine, though I couldn’t remember when I’d reached out for it. Hold your breath, my brother said. He once told me it was important to hold your breath around dying people. That way, the sick person had more air for themselves. But I didn’t think Agong had lungs anymore: His chest was bowled, carrying a soup of sweat. My tail clenched around my thigh when I saw his neck, mottled with moles, so thin I wanted to pluck it with my fingers, make music of this silence. When my mother stood up, her eyes arrowed through everything again: the dresser in front of the window, Ama in the doorway with her hands sprouting a knife, the chair’s bruised knees, my brother and I holding hands. She lifted Agong off the bed, bridal-style, his bones propped in her arms. The skin below his chin was so loose it flapped when he swallowed, and I wanted to iron it down, pleat him smooth. Ama said, Don’t touch him. My mother cradled Agong closer. In a dialect I’d never heard before, Ama spat a word at the walls, making the paint shine the same as her teeth. I stepped forward between my mother and Ama, palm pressed to my sheathed tail, legs apart. Ama didn’t look at me, but I knew how to hinge her, how to latch my tail around her leg and bring her to her knees. Kneeling with Agong in her arms, my mother arranged his limbs on the carpet beside the bed. Careful, there’s glass, I said, though no one was listening. Ama said, I had to do it, flitting her hand through the air, touching the curlers at her forehead. There is something inside of him, eating him.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie suggests we hang Ba by his feet, upside down, so that all his memories flee upstream and pool in his skull. We’d have to unscrew his head somehow. I tell her it doesn’t work that way, but Jie’s been taking anatomy lessons at the high school ten miles away, meaning she knows how to diagram a body, meaning she’s drawn me a penis with veins and everything, shown me a hole or two it could go in. She pulls down her pants so I can see. I ask her to show me where all my holes lead to, and she says if I dig into the dark between my legs, I’ll find a baby waiting to be plucked like a turnip. (Don’t worry, I didn’t scavenge for you. You were conceived the carnivore way.) Ma shaves soft wood from our birch tree and skunk-sprays the strips with perfume to make incense, burning it in bunches. The smoke keeps mosquitos from marrying all our blood. We pray to god and Guanyin, in that order. Pray for Ba’s gold to fall as rain or grow a hundred limbs and shudder out of the soil like metallic shrubbery. We consider other strategies: If we borrow a bulldozer, we can flip the whole yard like a penny. But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body. _ By the creek, Jie teaches me to read out of the Bible. We sit under a grove of trees belled with apples. The branches applaud in the wind and drop what they hold, concussing us with fist-hard fruit. Last week, rain rutted a hole in our roof and everything flooded, so we’re drying the Bible on a tree branch, its pages flapping like moths. I can pronounce only easy words, no proper names, no verbs. Jie says fluency is forgetting. Says I’ve got to un-name my mouth and crack my tongue like a whip. When I pronounce the word tongue with two syllables, Jie pushes me facedown into the mud. When I get up from the riverbank, I swallow the mud of my tongue. Jie says she once saw two girl ghosts kissing in the creek. I mishear her and think she means they were cleaning the creek. Why? I say. Jie says, Because a god made them want but didn’t give them a word for it. I think Ma is made that way too, unable to name her need.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie traces the shape of the crab with permanent marker and I fill it in. Orange first, then black for the shadowing. For practice, Jie and I spray-paint orange crabs all over the street, some of them lopsided or missing legs, some of them looking like stains. Sometime in the afternoon, while the sun is pearling the sweat on our skin, the spray-painted crabs stand up. They walk up and down the street on their half-assed legs, limping in circles and mincing the gravel. Jie and I run after them, flip them onto their backs so they’re clawing at air, cutting the clouds. There are two dozen in total, two dozen crabs we’ve drawn on the street and traced into meat. I say we should sell the crabs, but they’re too strange-limbed to be eaten, too botched to breed. Jie decides they’d make good pets, so we fill a garbage bag with hose-water and toss each of the crabs inside, knotting it at the neck. When the van’s painted, she drives away inside it, leaves me with the cans and brushes and stencils. The crabs awake in her passenger seat, pincers snipping holes in the plastic bag. When we boil them that night, their meat dissolves into salt-foam, and inside their bellies are baby teeth, all the teeth we lost and swallowed in the dark, afraid that Ma would see our parts coming loose and send us back to the factory. _ At home, Ma is asleep on a stool in the kitchen, her hands in the sink, her palms a litany of calluses. Alone on my mattress for the first time, I told the ceiling I’d leave Ma soon, find a man I can steer out of this city, a man who can snuff the sun out with his thumb. In the kitchen, I can hear Ma struggling to tug the thread of her breath up her throat. After breathing all the cleaning chemicals and the factory air, Ma’s lungs cringed to fists and beat at her ribs. When she needs someone to unsnag her breath, I fill a bowl with hot water and push her head an inch from the surface. The steam speaks for us. Her head bucks against my palm, but I press harder. Sometimes I want to sink her head into the water, remind her of the river, but I’m too afraid she’ll become a fish and wriggle out of my fingers. It’s more a punishment to keep her in this body, ache-lunged and coughing, skin worn thin as a lampshade.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  But everyone’s fine. We’re all doing okay. Hey, what happened to your hand?” “Are they here in Paris?” “I can tell you everyone’s safe and healthy. But beyond that—it’s not my place to tell you stuff. I’m lucky to be back in their lives. I’m lucky Claire allows that.” It was all Fiona hoped for, herself—to be allowed back in. She hadn’t messed up as badly as Kurt—she hadn’t been arrested, at least—but maybe she’d messed up for longer. And maybe it was harder to forgive your mother than a man. She’d always figured that her own failings would make more and more sense to Claire as she grew up—that an adult would understand an affair (such a garden-variety mistake!) in a way a child couldn’t have. Shouldn’t Claire know the messiness of the human heart by now? She had too many questions for Kurt, and no good starting point. And she couldn’t give away that she’d spied on him, been in this apartment yesterday. She said, “I understand you’re married.” He looked back and forth between Fiona and Jake, and then he said, “Yeah, she’s a good match. It’s healthy.” “Well, I’m happy for you. I’ve always wanted the best for you, and I just wish—” She wouldn’t be able to express how much fondness she’d always felt for him, or at least for his memory, at the same time that she loathed him with all her being for taking her daughter away. She said, “You’re clear of the, the group, right? The Hosanna people?” Kurt laughed. “You can call them a cult. That’s what they are. Yeah, I was happy to put an ocean between us.” “So you soured on them.” “Hey, can I get you a beer?” Fiona shook her head. “Can I get you a beer?” he said to Jake, and thank God Jake said no. He wouldn’t have looked nearly as effective with a bottle in his hand. Kurt got up and fetched himself one, sat back down. “She soured. I was never that big on them, but I was in love.” “How does being in love mean you have to join a cult?” “It was what she wanted! She—at the beginning, she cared more about them than about me, that was obvious. If I made her choose, I knew who she’d choose, and it wasn’t me.” Fiona glanced at Jake, but he was still just standing there. This made no sense. “You were the one who lived in Boulder,” Fiona said. “You were the one who—you found the cult.” “Nope. Nope, nope, nope. She met this guy in the kitchen of the restaurant where she was working, and at least I knew it wasn’t romantic, because he had this terrible skin and he was sort of emaciated, but he invited her out to a party at the compound, and she brought me along.

• From The Art of Memoir

  in the old days long after their former companions have sallied forth into tidy forgetfulness or private versions of personal history in which they star as heroes. Kathryn Harrison was inwardly scalded into writing one of the bravest memoirs in recent memory, only to be blistered by the press for it. (No man I can think of ever took such a public butt- whipping.*) What sin did she commit? In The Kiss, she breaks a universal cultural taboo—at age twenty, she’s seduced by her long- lost preacher father, entering into what she calls an affair with him. In choosing to digest fully her fractured past, Harrison was possessed of a gnawing hunger for clarity. Because she paid such a high price for exposing said past—the ad hominem attacks on her remain the nastiest I’ve ever seen—her complex motivations warrant a look. I posit that her reasons are identical to those of long-venerated memoir masters like Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov—to get the story right. Like some of us, Harrison at first set out to tell her story in fiction, books she’d later rue as untrue and feel honor-bound to correct. Before The Kiss, the subject of incest insinuated itself—“it kept intruding”— into her first three novels. But she particularly hated how, in her first, she located the daughter squarely among the innocent. I wrote The Kiss in many ways as a response to my own first novel, Thicker Than Water, which was held to be autobiographical. The woman in the story, Isabel, has an affair with her father, but Isabel was younger than I was at the time. She was more passive, sweeter, more of a victim. When I finished that book I wanted to disown it. I felt I had betrayed my own history. I was dishonest in a way that has been inordinately painful to me over the years. Fiction, rather than bringing events into sharper focus for Harrison, had blurred them further. She was driven to make it right— not squinting-through-your-eyes-looking-through-your-fingers right, but right as only ruthless scrutiny can make it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  * THIS IS HARDCORE. IS IT CANNIBALISM IF YOU EAT YOUR SISTER WHO’S ANOTHER SPECIES? CAN HUNGER BE INHERITED? I HOPE YOU’RE NOT PLANNING ON EATING ANYONE SOMEDAY. THOUGH IS THERE A CHOICE IN WHAT YOU HUNT—WHAT HUNTS YOU? —BENDAUGHTERParable of the Pirate [image file=image_rsrc1SC.jpg] On our last week of school before summer, Ben and I fed her birdcage to the holes. She said the last letter felt incomplete, and we needed to metabolize metal this time. Metal, she told me, could be melted down into water, and the holes were always thirsting. We believed there were three letters, one for each daughter my Ama had left behind. All losses come in threes, Ben said, and I thought of my mother’s three toes in the cookie tin. When we lowered the cage into the 口, it took an hour for the hole to heal around it. Beneath the dirt, we heard the high whine of bars being wrenched, teethed apart, scoured of rust. I was worried about the shadow-bird suffocating while it was buried so far beneath the sky, but Ben said it was worth killing what was inside. We’d already sacrificed an entire goose. I told her not to remind me: These letters had too many casualties already. The 口 didn’t open for four days, and I told Ben to be patient: Metal was metabolized more slowly than meat. Ben said I should tell the holes a story: They’d open their ears to listen, and then we could reach into them and search. But I said I didn’t have any stories, especially if they were about Ama. She was the voice and I was the ear. Then tell one of your ama’s stories, Ben said. Every other night, my mother used the new landline to call Agong, but Ama was the one who picked up. Agong’s mind had unmarried all its memories, and sometimes he called to tell us the Japanese were invading and we should all find a well to hide in. The nights Ama made him sleep on the sidewalk, he’d duck under a chili bush and slug into the soil, awaiting whatever army was morning.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother was always covering up our crimes: Once, when a candied shrimp slipped out of my mouth and stained the carpet, she threw a napkin on it so my father wouldn’t see. When I was asleep, she bleached the sauce out of the carpet, though the bleach sucked it out too well and left the spot brighter, too white, a spotlight where my stain had been. _ While she cooked, my mother told stories she claimed were from the Bible, though I could never find them later in any translation. When my father told my mother to teach us a mainlander story, the one she told was Meng Jiang Nu, the girl born from a gourd. The story begins with two families on neighboring estates, one known for its fruit and the other for its flowers. Between their yards was a gourd tree, its trunk so wide even the wind could not wrap around it. The tree’s roots lived on the Meng family’s land, but most of its branches—including the branch with the largest gourd, so gold it blinded birds that flew past—crossed over into the Jiang family’s yard. While the Meng and Jiang families argued every day over the ownership of that gold gourd, it grew to the size of an infant, juice-bloated and so tender it bled in the breeze. When it fell at last, the rind split open to reveal a child, a daughter. They wept at the miracle. The Meng family insisted on naming her Meng Nu, while the Jiang family wanted to name her Jiang Nu. The girl starved for two days as the families argued, before someone said that the girl would die before they ever decided. So they named her Meng Jiang Nu, daughter of both families, daughter of two bloods. This story is wrong, I told my mother. If she was really a daughter, neither family would want her. She couldn’t be milked until she was a mother, couldn’t be bartered until she was a bride. My mother never finished the story. I never asked if she had wanted me, if I was the kind of daughter who doubled as a battleground, who was fought over. Later, my mother would say, Remember, it wasn’t the girl they were fighting over. It was the gourd. Maybe, when the gourd split open, they wept not to celebrate her birth but to grieve their lost gold. They cursed gravity as thievery. I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay. _