Joy

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 39 of 299 · 20 per page

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

  She was on metal crutches, and she was just plugging along, one tiny step after another, moving one crutch forward two or three inches, then moving a leg, then moving the other crutch two or three inches, then moving the other leg. It was just excruciating. Plus, I was starving to death. Inside I was going, Come on, come on, come on, swabbing at my forehead with anxiety, while she kept taking these two- or three-inch steps forward. What felt like four hours later, she crossed the finish line, and you could see that she was absolutely stoked, in a shy, girlish way. A tall African American man with no front teeth fell into step with me as I left the bleachers to go look for some lunch. He tugged on the sleeve of my sweater, and I looked up at him, and he handed me a Polaroid someone had taken of him and his friends that day. “Look at us,” he said. His speech was difficult to understand, thick and slow as a warped record. His two friends in the picture had Down’s syndrome. All three of them looked extremely pleased with themselves. I admired the picture and then handed it back to him. He stopped, so I stopped, too. He pointed to his own image. “That,” he said, “is one cool man.” And this was the image from which an article began forming, although I could not have told you exactly what the piece would end up being about. I just knew that something had started to emerge. After lunch I wandered over to the auditorium, where it turned out a men’s basketball game was in progress. The African American man with no front teeth was the star of the game. You could tell that he was because even though no one had made a basket yet, his teammates almost always passed him the ball. Even the people on the other team passed him the ball a lot. In lieu of any scoring, the men stampeded in slow motion up and down the court, dribbling the ball thunderously. I had never heard such a loud game. It was all sort of crazily beautiful. I imagined describing the game for my article and then for my students: the loudness, the joy. I kept replaying the scene of the girl on crutches making her way up the track to the finish line—and all of a sudden my article began to appear out of the grayish green murk. And I could see that it was about tragedy transformed over the years into joy. It was about the beauty of sheer effort. I could see it almost as clearly as I could the photograph of that one cool man and his two friends. The auditorium bleachers were packed.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I could feel the cheetah’s hot breath on my face. He looked right at me. His amber eyes were steady but sad, as if he knew he’d never see the plains of Africa again. “May I pet him, please?” I asked Dad. Dad took my hand and slowly guided it to the side of the cheetah’s neck. It was soft but also bristly. The cheetah turned his head and put his moist nose up against my hand. Then his big pink tongue unfolded from his mouth, and he licked my hand. I gasped. Dad opened my hand and held my fingers back. The cheetah licked my palm, his tongue warm and rough, like sandpaper dipped in hot water. I felt all tingly. “I think he likes me,” I said. “He does,” Dad said. “He also likes the popcorn salt and butter on your hand.” There was a small crowd around the cage now, and one particularly frantic woman grabbed my shirt and tried to pull me over the chain. “It’s all right,” I told her. “My dad does stuff like this all the time.” “He should be arrested!” she shouted. “Okay, kids,” Dad said, “the civilians are revolting. We better skedaddle.” We climbed over the chain. When I looked back, the cheetah was following us along the side of the cage. Before we could make our way through the crowd, a heavy man in a navy blue uniform came running toward us. He was holding on to the gun and nightstick on his belt, which made him look like he was running with his hands on his hips. He was shouting about regulations and how idiots had been killed climbing into cages and how we all had to leave immediately. He grabbed Dad by the shoulder, but Dad pushed him off and assumed a fighting stance. Some of the men in the crowd clutched Dad’s arms, and Mom asked Dad to please do what the guard had ordered. Dad nodded and held out his hands in a peace gesture. He led us through the crowd and toward the exit, chuckling and shaking his head to let us kids know that these fools were not worth the time it would take to kick their butts. I could hear people around us whispering about the crazy drunk man and his dirty little urchin children, but who cared what they thought? None of them had ever had their hand licked by a cheetah. IT WAS AROUND this time that Dad lost his job. He said there was nothing to worry about, because Phoenix was so big and growing so fast that he could find another job at a site where they hadn’t spread lies about him. Then he got fired from his second job and from his third, and was kicked out of the electricians’ union and started doing odd jobs and day work. Whatever money Mom had inherited from Grandma Smith had disappeared, and once again we started scraping by.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Y no es tocino de pavo, ¿verdad? —espeta, de repente. ¿Ah? —¿En los rollitos? —aclara, y puedo ver por el rabillo de mis ojos, que me está mirando. Jesús, ¿todavía está pensando en la comida? —Y no le pusiste a hurtadillas nada extraño, como germen de trigo o usaste coliflor en lugar de papas reales en la ensalada de papas como lo hacen algunas de esas malditas dietas bajas en calorías ¿verdad? —continúa. Estallo en carcajadas, dejando caer mi cabeza hacia atrás, mi teléfono cae en mi regazo y cierro mis ojos. Oh, Dios mío. —Jordan, lo digo en serio —me regaña—. He estado esperando esto toda la semana. Mi cuerpo se convulsiona cuando sacudo la cabeza y sonrío. Él es tan raro. Y me divierte que anhele las cosas que hice con tanta vehemencia. Termino riéndome en silencio y entierro mi nariz en mi teléfono otra vez. —Todo es grasoso, salado y delicioso —le digo—. No te preocupes. Te voy a dar un día libre de dieta. Puedes obstruir tus arterias hasta el cansancio. Siento cómo asiente. —Bien. —Hay una breve pausa y luego vuelve a hablar—. Si te sientes incómoda, avísame. Puedo llevarte a casa. —Estaré bien —respondo—. Hablo con gente todo el tiempo en el trabajo. Sé cómo hacer conversación. Dutch y su esposa nos invitaron a Pike, Cole y a mí, pero Cole dijo que tenía que trabajar un turno extra hoy y que no podría venir. Pero cuando estoy revisando la página principal, me encuentro una foto de Patrick’s Last Ditch, la súper tienda de conveniencia a las afueras de la ciudad, y reconozco el automóvil de Cole en la estación de gasolina. Es su publicación. ¡Salimos de la ciudad por el día! ¡Yuhuuuuu! Trabajando, mi trasero. Pero sí parece inusualmente ambicioso por parte de él. Irse de viaje por carretera en su día libre. Sorprendentemente, no examino el lugar para buscar a Elisa o ninguna otra de las chicas que podrían estar con él, pero sí siento una punzada de resentimiento porque simplemente esté siguiendo adelante como si yo nunca hubiera existido. Quiero decir, no es como si le hubiera respondido el teléfono, pero sería lindo saber que ha intentado llamar. Saber que al menos está

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  ‘Dame Pertelote my love, listen to what I have to say. The honourable Macrobius wrote a commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, in which he declared that dreams can foretell the future. Not all of them - I grant you that - but some of them. Then, if you wish, dip into the Old Testament and see what is written in the Book of Daniel about the subject. You can read about Joseph, and about his dreams of the sheaves and of the sun. What about the pharaoh of Egypt? Ask his butler and his cook whether dreams mean anything. They were rightly interpreted by Joseph, for good or ill. Wherever there are true histories of mankind, there are reports of dreams and omens. Remember the king of Lydia, Croesus, who dreamed that he was sitting in a tree. Of course he was soon hanging on a gallows. And there was Andromache, the wife of Hector, who dreamed that on the following day her husband would be slain in battle. She tried to persuade him to avoid the field, but of course the dream came true. Hector was slain by Achilles outside the walls of Troy. It is a long story. It is almost dawn. I will say only this. I know from my dream that I will suffer some kind of misfortune. In any case, I do not need laxatives. I hate them. I distrust them. They are poison. ‘So, my dear, let us speak of merry things. God has given me one great blessing. It is you, my chick. Whenever I see your lovely face, with your beautiful red eyes and your gorgeous beak, I am happy. My fears dissolve. I know it has been written that woman is man’s ruin, but I prefer the other saying. “Woman is man’s delight and bliss.” When I feel your soft feathers at night - I can’t fuck you, of course, because our perch is too narrow - I feel safe and relaxed. I am so full of joy that I defy all the dreams in the world.’ And, with that, he flew down from his perch into the yard. It was dawn. With a crow and a cluck he woke up all of his wives, to feast on the corn scattered on the ground. He was manly. He was king of the yard. He put his wings around Pertelote, and fucked her, at least twenty times before the sun had risen much higher. He looked as strong as a lion. He did not strut in the yard like a common bird. He walked on tiptoe, as if he were about to rise in the air. Whenever he spied some more corn he clucked some more, and all his wives came running over. I will leave you with this picture of Chanticleer, monarch of all he surveys, and carry on with the story.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Lettuce war!” Brian shouted. He tossed a half-eaten head at me like a grenade. We ran along the rows, pulling up heads and throwing them at each other. A crop duster flew overhead. We waved as it made a pass above the field. A cloud sprayed out from behind the plane, and a fine white powder came sprinkling down on our heads. • • • Two months after we moved to Blythe, when Mom said she was twelve months pregnant, she at last gave birth. After she’d been in the hospital for two days, we all drove out to pick her up. Dad left us kids waiting in the car with the engine idling while he went in for Mom. They came running out with Dad’s arm around Mom’s shoulders. Mom was cradling a bundle in her arms and giggling sort of guiltily, like she’d stolen a candy bar from a dime store. I figured they had checked out Rex Walls– style. “What is it?” Lori asked as we sped away. “Girl!” Mom said. Mom handed me the baby. I was going to turn six in a few months, and Mom said I was mature enough to hold her the entire way home. The baby was pink and wrinkly but absolutely beautiful, with big blue eyes, soft wisps of blond hair, and the tiniest fingernails I had ever seen. She moved in confused, jerky motions, as if she couldn’t understand why Mom’s belly wasn’t still around her. I promised her I’d always take care of her. The baby went without a name for weeks. Mom said she wanted to study it first, the way she would the subject of a painting. We had a lot of arguments over what the name should be. I wanted to call her Rosita, after the prettiest girl in my class, but Mom said that name was too Mexican. “I thought we weren’t supposed to be prejudiced,” I said. “It’s not being prejudiced,” Mom said. “It’s a matter of accuracy in labeling.” She told us that both our grandmothers were angry because neither Lori nor I had been named after them, so she decided to call the baby Lilly Ruth Maureen. Lilly was Mom’s mother’s name, and Erma Ruth was Dad’s mother’s name. But we’d call the baby Maureen, a name Mom liked because it was a diminutive of Mary, so she’d also be naming the baby after herself but pretty much no one would know it. That, Dad told us, would make everyone happy except his mom, who hated the name Ruth and wanted the baby called Erma, and Mom’s mom, who would hate sharing her namesake with Dad’s mom.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Then she said, “Why don’t you come swimming with us in the morning?” By “us” I knew she meant the other black people. The pool was not segregated, anyone could swim at any time—technically, at least—but the fact was that all the black people swam in the morning, when the pool was free, and all the white people swam in the afternoon, when admission was fifty cents. No one had planned this arrangement, and no rules enforced it. That was just the way it was. I surely wanted to get back in that water, but I couldn’t help but feel that if I took Dinitia up on her offer, I’d be violating some sort of taboo. “Wouldn’t anybody get mad?” I asked. “’Cause you’re white?” she asked. “Your own kind might, but we won’t. And your own kind won’t be there.” • • • The next morning I met Dinitia in front of the pool entrance, my thrift-shop one-piece rolled inside my frayed gray towel. The white girl clerking the entrance booth gave me a surprised look when we passed through the gate, but she said nothing. The women’s locker room was dark and smelled of Pine-Sol, with cinder-block walls and a wet cement floor. A soul tune was blasting out of an eight-track tape player, and all the black women packed between the peeling wooden benches were singing and dancing to the music. In the locker rooms I’d been in, the white women always seemed embarrassed by their nakedness and wrapped towels around their waists before slipping off their underpants, but here most of the women were buck-naked. Some of them were skinny, with angular hips and jutting collarbones. Others had big pillowy behinds and huge swinging breasts, and they were bumping their butts together and pushing their breasts up against each other as they danced. As soon as the women saw me, they stopped dancing. One of the naked ones came over and stood in front of me, her hands on her hips, her breasts so close I was terrified her nipples were going to touch me. Dinitia explained that I was with her and that I was good people. The women looked at one another and shrugged. I was going on thirteen and self-conscious, so I planned to slip my bathing suit on underneath my dress, but I worried this would only make me more conspicuous, so I took a deep breath and stepped out of my clothes. The scar on my ribs was about the size of my outstretched hand, and Dinitia noticed it immediately. I explained that I had gotten it when I was three, and that I’d been in the hospital for six weeks getting skin grafts, and that was why I never wore a bikini. Dinitia ran her fingers lightly over the scar tissue. “It ain’t so bad,” she said. “Hey, ’Nitia!” one of the women shouted. “Your white friend’s got a red bush coming in!” “What did you expect?” Dinitia asked.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The house with the green shutters was more valuable, but Mom had chosen the adobe house. It was near Phoenix’s business district, which made it a perfect place for Mom to start an art studio. She’d also inherited some money, so she could give up teaching and buy all the art supplies she wanted. She’d been thinking we should move to Phoenix ever since Grandma died a few months back, but Dad had refused to leave Battle Mountain because he was so close to a breakthrough in his cyanide-leaching process. “And I was,” Dad said. Mom gave a snort of a laugh. “So the trouble you kids got into with Billy Deel was actually a blessing in disguise,” she said. “My art career is going to flourish in Phoenix. I can just feel it.” She turned around to look at me. “We’re off on another adventure, Jeannettie-kins. Isn’t this wonderful?” Mom’s eyes were bright. “I’m such an excitement addict!” WHEN WE PULLED UP in front of the house on North Third Street, I could not believe we were actually going to live there. It was a mansion, practically, so big that Grandma Smith had had two families living in it, both paying her rent. We had the entire place to ourselves. Mom said that it had been built almost a hundred years ago as a fort. The outside walls, covered with white stucco, were three feet thick. “These sure would stop any Indians’ arrows,” I said to Brian. We kids ran through the house and counted fourteen rooms, including the kitchens and bathrooms. They were filled with the things Mom had inherited from Grandma Smith: a dark Spanish dining table with eight matching chairs, a hand-carved upright piano, sideboards with antique silver serving sets, and glass-fronted cabinets filled with Grandma’s bone china, which Mom demonstrated was the finest quality by holding a plate up to the light and showing us the clear silhouette of her hand through it. The front yard had a palm tree, and the backyard had orange trees that grew real oranges. We’d never lived in a house with trees. I particularly loved the palm tree, which made me think I had arrived at some kind of oasis. There were also hollyhocks and oleander bushes with pink and white flowers. Behind the yard was a shed as big as some of the houses we had lived in, and next to the shed was a parking space big enough for two cars. We were definitely moving up in the world. • • • The people living on North Third Street were mostly Mexicans and Indians who had moved into the neighborhood after the whites left for the suburbs and subdivided the big old houses into apartments. There seemed to be a couple of dozen people in each house, men drinking beers from paper bags, young mothers nursing babies, old ladies sunning themselves on the sagging, weathered porches, and hordes of kids.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  MOM NEVER TOLD Dad that I’d urged her to leave him. That summer he still thought of me as his biggest supporter, and given that there was so little competition for the job, I probably was. One afternoon in June, Dad and I were sitting out on the porch, our legs dangling over the side, looking down at the houses below. That summer, it was so hot I could barely breathe. It seemed hotter than Phoenix or Battle Mountain, where it regularly climbed above a hundred degrees, so when Dad told me it was only ninety degrees, I said the thermometer must be broken. But he said no, we were used to dry desert heat, and this was humid heat. It was a lot hotter, Dad pointed out, down in the valley along Stewart Street, which was lined with those cute brick houses that had their neat, square lawns and corrugated aluminum breezeways. The valleys trapped the heat. Our house was the highest on the mountainside, which made it, ergo, the coolest spot in Welch. In case of flooding—as we had seen—it was also the safest. “You didn’t know I put a lot of thought into where we should live, did you?” he asked me. “Real estate’s about three things, Mountain Goat. Location. Location. Location.” Dad started laughing. It was a silent laugh that made his shoulders shake, and the more he laughed, the funnier it seemed to him, which made him laugh even harder. I had to start laughing, too, and soon we were both hysterical, lying on our backs, tears running down our cheeks, slapping our feet on the porch floor. We’d get too winded to laugh any further, our sides cramping with stitches, and we’d think our fit was over, but then one of us would start chuckling, and that would get the other going, and again we’d both end up shrieking like hyenas. • • • The main source of relief from the heat for the kids in Welch was the public swimming pool, down by the railroad tracks near the Esso station. Brian and I had gone swimming once, but Ernie Goad and his friends were there, and they started telling everybody that we Wallses lived in garbage and would stink up the pool water something awful. This was Ernie Goad’s opportunity to take revenge for the Battle of

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  He used the word “textured.” He said “smooth” was boring but “textured” was interesting, and the scar meant that I was stronger than whatever it was that had tried to hurt me. • • • We pulled into the drive. Jessica, John’s fifteen-year-old daughter from his first marriage, came out of the house, along with Brian and his eight-year-old daughter, Veronica, and their bull mastiff, Charlie. Brian hadn’t seen much of Mom since Dad’s funeral, either. He hugged her and immediately started ribbing her about the plucked-from-the-Dumpster presents she’d brought for everyone in the shopping bags: rusting silverware, old books and magazines, a few pieces of fine bone china from the twenties with only minor chips. Brian had become a decorated sergeant detective, supervising a special unit that investigated organized crime. He and his wife had split up around the time Eric and I did, but he had consoled himself by buying and renovating a wreck of a town house in Brooklyn. He put in new wiring and plumbing, a new firebox, reinforced floor joists, and a new porch all on his own. It was the second time he’d taken on a true dump and restored it to perfection. Also, at least two women were after him to marry them. He was doing pretty darn well. We showed Mom and Lori the gardens, which were ready for winter. John and I had done all the work ourselves: raked the leaves and shredded them in the chipper, cut back the dead perennials and mulched the beds, shoveled compost onto the vegetable garden and tilled it, and dug up the dahlia bulbs and stored them in a bucket of sand in the basement. John had also split and stacked the wood from a dead maple we’d cut down, and climbed up on the roof to replace some rotted cedar shingles. Mom nodded at all our preparations; she’d always appreciated self-sufficiency. She admired the wisteria that wrapped around the potting shed, the trumpet vine on the arbor, and the big grove of bamboo in the back. When she saw the pool, an impulse seized her, and she ran out onto the green elastic cover to test its strength, Charlie the dog loping after her. The cover sagged beneath them, and she fell down, shrieking with laughter. John and Brian had to help pull her off as Brian’s daughter, Veronica—who hadn’t seen Mom since she was a toddler—stared wide-eyed. “Grandma Walls is different from your other grandma,” I told her. “Way different,” Veronica said. John’s daughter, Jessica, turned to me and said, “But she laughs just like you do.” • • • I showed Mom and Lori the house. I still went into the office in the city once a week, but this was where John and I lived and worked, our home—the first house I’d ever owned.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I wondered if the welfare agency had found some millionaires to be our foster parents and they had arrived to take us away, but Dad was inside the house, twirling a set of keys on his finger. He explained that the Cadillac was the new official Walls family vehicle. Mom was carrying on about how it was one thing to live in a three-room shack with no electricity, since there was a certain dignity in poverty, but to live in a three-room shack and own a gold Cadillac meant you were bona fide poor white trash. “How’d you get it?” I asked Dad. “One helluva good poker hand,” he said, “and an even better bluff.” We’d owned a couple of cars since we’d been in Welch, but they were true buckets of bolts, with shuddering engines and cracked windshields, and as we drove along, we could see the blur of the asphalt through the rusted-out floor panels. Those cars never lasted more than a couple of months, and like the Oldsmobile we’d driven from Phoenix, we never named them, much less got them registered and inspected. The Coupe DeVille actually had an unexpired inspection sticker. It was such a beauty that Dad declared the time had come to revive the tradition of naming our cars. “That there Caddy,” he said, “strikes me as Elvis.” It crossed my mind that Dad ought to sell Elvis and use the money to install an indoor toilet and buy us all new clothes. The black leather shoes I had bought for fifty cents at the Dollar General Store were held together with safety pins, which I’d tried to blacken with a Magic Marker so you wouldn’t notice them. I’d also used Magic Markers to make colored blotches on my legs that I hoped would camouflage the holes in my pants. I figured that was less noticeable than if I sewed on patches. I had one blue pair and one green pair, so my legs, when I took my pants off, were covered with blue and green spots. But Dad loved Elvis too dearly to consider selling it. And the truth was, I loved Elvis almost as much. Elvis was as long and sleek as a racing yacht. It had air-conditioning, gold shag upholstery, windows that went up and down with the push of a button, and a working turn signal, so Dad didn’t have to stick his arm out. Every time we drove through town in Elvis, I’d nod graciously and smile at the people on the sidewalk, feeling like an heiress. “You’ve got true noblesse oblige, Mountain Goat,” Dad would say. Mom grew to love Elvis, too. She hadn’t gone back to teaching and instead spent her time painting, and on the weekends we began to drive to craft fairs all throughout West Virginia: shows where bearded men in overalls played dulcimers and women in granny dresses sold corncob back scratchers and coal sculptures of black bears and miners.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Brian’s feet were in my face, so I grabbed him by the ankles and started chewing on his toes. He laughed and kicked and started chewing on my toes in retaliation, and that made me laugh. We heard a loud thunk thunk thunk from above. “What’s that?” Lori asked. “Maybe the roaches here are bigger than in Phoenix,” Brian said. We all laughed and heard the thunk thunk thunk again. Mom went upstairs to investigate, then came down and explained that Erma was hitting the floor with a broom handle to signal that we were making too much noise. “She asked that you kids don’t laugh while you’re in her house,” Mom said. “It gets on her nerves.” “I don’t think Erma likes us very much,” I said. “She’s just an old woman who’s had a tough life,” Mom said. “They’re all sort of weird,” Lori said. “We’ll adapt,” Mom said. Or move on, I thought. THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. When we got up, Uncle Stanley was leaning against the refrigerator and staring intently at the radio. It made strange noises, not static but a combination of shrieking and wailing. “That there’s tongues,” he said. “Only the Lord can understand it.” The preacher started talking in actual English, more or less. He spoke with a hillbilly accent so thick it was almost as hard to understand as the tongues. He asked all them good folk out there who’d been helped by this here channeling of the Lord’s spirit to send contributions. Dad came into the kitchen and listened. “It’s the sort of soul-curdling voodoo,” he said, “that turned me into an atheist.” Later that day, we got into the Oldsmobile, and Mom and Dad took us for a tour of the town. Welch was surrounded on all sides by such steep mountains that you felt like you were looking up from the bottom of a bowl. Dad said the hills around Welch were too steep for cultivating much of anything. Couldn’t raise a decent herd of sheep or cattle, couldn’t even till crops except maybe to feed your family. So this part of the world was left pretty much alone until around the turn of the century, when robber barons from the North laid a track into the area and brought in cheap labor to dig out the huge fields of coal. We stopped under a railroad bridge and got out of the car to admire the river that ran through the town. It moved sluggishly, with barely a ripple. The river’s name, Dad said, was the Tug. “Maybe in the summer we can go fishing and swimming,” I said. Dad shook his head. The county had no sewer system, he explained, so when people flushed their johns, the discharge went straight into the Tug. Sometimes the river flooded and the water rose as high as the treetops. Dad pointed to the toilet paper up in the branches along the river’s banks.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  All we knew was that every couple of months, this check would show up and we’d have plenty of food for days at a time. When the electricity was on, we ate a lot of beans. A big bag of pinto beans cost under a dollar and would feed us for days. They tasted especially good if you added a spoonful of mayonnaise. We also ate a lot of rice mixed with jack mackerel, which Mom said was excellent brain food. Jack mackerel was not as good as tuna but was better than cat food, which we ate from time to time when things got really tight. Sometimes Mom popped up a big batch of popcorn for dinner. It had lots of fiber, she pointed out, and she had us salt it heavily because the iodine would keep us from getting goiters. “I don’t want my kids looking like pelicans,” she said. Once, when an extra-big royalty check came in, Mom bought us a whole canned ham. We ate off it for days, cutting thick slices for sandwiches. Since we had no refrigerator, we left the ham on a kitchen shelf. After it had been there for about a week, I went to saw myself a slab at dinnertime and found it crawling with little white worms. Mom was sitting on the sofa bed, eating the piece she’d cut. “Mom, that ham’s full of maggots,” I said. “Don’t be so picky,” she told me. “Just slice off the maggoty parts. The inside’s fine.” • • • Brian and I became expert foragers. We picked crab apples and wild blackberries and pawpaws during the summer and fall, and we swiped ears of corn from Old Man Wilson’s farm. The corn was tough—Old Man Wilson grew it as feed for his cattle—but if you chewed it enough, you could get it down. Once we caught a wounded blackbird by throwing a blanket over it and figured we could make a blackbird pie, like in the nursery rhyme. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to kill the bird, and anyway, it looked too scrawny to eat. We’d heard of a dish called poke salad, and since a big patch of pokeweed grew behind our house, Brian and I thought we’d give it a try. If it was any good, we’d have a whole new supply of food. We first tried eating the pokeweed raw, but it was awfully bitter, so we boiled it—singing “Poke Salad Annie” in anticipation—but it still tasted sour and stringy, and our tongues itched for days afterward. One day, hunting for food, we climbed through the window of an abandoned house. The rooms were tiny, and it had dirt floors, but in the kitchen we found shelves lined with rows of canned food. “Bo-nanza!” Brian cried out. “Feast time!” I said. The cans were coated with dust and starting to rust, but we figured the food was still safe to eat, since the whole point of canning was to preserve.

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

  The notion of gender parody defended here does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original; just as the psychoanalytic notion of gender identification is constituted by a fantasy of a fantasy, the transfiguration of an Other who is always already a “figure” in that double sense, so gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin. To be more precise, it is a production which, in effect—that is, in its effect—postures as an imitation. This perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities. Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization. As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original, they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that construction. According to Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” the imitation that mocks the notion of an original is characteristic of pastiche rather than parody: Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost it humor.70 The loss of the sense of “the normal,” however, can be its own occasion for laughter, especially when “the normal,” “the original” is revealed to be a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody. In this sense, laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Mom wanted to turn around and drag it back into the house from the other direction, but Dad said that was impossible because the railroad tracks were too close to the front door to get the pickup in position. So the piano stayed where it was. On the days Mom felt inspired, she took her sheet music and one of our spool chairs outside and pounded away at her music back there. “Most pianists never get the chance to play in the great out-of-doors,” she said. “And now the whole neighborhood can enjoy the music, too.” DAD GOT A JOB AS an electrician in a barite mine. He left early and came home early, and in the afternoons we all played games. Dad taught us cards. He tried to show us how to be steely-eyed poker players, but I wasn’t very good. Dad said you could read my face like a traffic light. Even though I wasn’t much of a bluffer, I’d sometimes win a hand because I was always getting excited by even mediocre cards, like a pair of fives, which made Brian and Lori think I’d been dealt aces. Dad also invented games for us to play, like the Ergo Game, in which he’d make two statements of fact and we had to answer a question based on those statements, or else say “Insufficient information to draw a conclusion” and explain why. When Dad wasn’t there, we invented our own games. We didn’t have many toys, but you didn’t need toys in a place like Battle Mountain. We’d get a piece of cardboard and go tobogganing down the depot’s narrow staircase. We’d jump off the roof of the depot, using an army-surplus blanket as our parachute and letting our legs buckle under us when we hit the ground, like Dad had taught us real parachutists do. We’d put a piece of scrap metal—or a penny, if we were feeling extravagant—on the railroad tracks right before the train came. After the train had roared by, the massive wheels churning, we’d run to get our newly flattened, hot and shiny piece of metal. The thing we liked to do most was go exploring in the desert. We’d get up at dawn, my favorite time, when the shadows were long and purple and you still had the whole day ahead of you. Sometimes Dad went with us, and we’d march through the sagebrush military-style, with Dad calling out orders in a singsong chant—hup, two, three, four —and then we’d stop and do push-ups or Dad would hold out his arm so we could do pull-ups on it. Mostly, Brian and I went exploring by ourselves. That desert was filled with all sorts of amazing treasures. We had moved to Battle Mountain because of the gold in the area, but the desert also had tons of other mineral deposits. There was silver and copper and uranium and barite, which Dad said oil-drilling rigs used.

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

  I read the book over and over, read it out loud to my brothers over the phone, then went to the library and said, “Do you have any other really funny books about cancer?” And they looked at me like, Yeah, they’re right over there by the comedies about spina bifida. There didn’t seem to be any. A book about our experience, showing one family’s attempt to stay buoyant in the face of such a potentially flattening process, seemed like it might be a welcome present to other people with sick relatives. This is all I tried to do, to tell our family’s story, because with an enormous amount of support from friends, there were laughter and joy folded into all that fear and loss. It helped my father have the best possible months before his death and the best possible death. I can actually say that it was great. Hard, and fucked six ways from Sunday, but great. Of course, not everyone loved my book. There were some terrible reviews. My personal favorite was from a newspaper in Santa Barbara, which said that our black sense of humor made us look like a New Age Addams family. “Here’s your review from Santa Barbara,” my editor wrote on a note enclosed with it, “where people never die.” Fifteen years later my friend Pammy was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had been keeping a journal about my new son, whom she was helping me raise, so most of the journal entries already included her. And now all of a sudden it turned out that she was not going to be around for much longer. So I started typing up the journal entries and sending them off to my agent. Sam was getting bigger and Pammy was getting sicker, and I was writing as fast as I could, trying to get it done in time for her to read it. And I did. I gave her a finished copy four months before she died. It was another love letter, mostly to her and Sam, and for her daughter, Rebecca. Pammy knew there was something that was going to exist on paper after she was gone, something that was going to be, in a certain way, part of her immortality. Again, there was a part of me that believed that my journal could be a gift for others, for single mothers. I couldn’t find any books about single parenting when Sam was first born that were funny and sick and therefore true. There were some great books on child rearing, but none that made me laugh, and none that went into the dark side, the Seventh-Seal-with- milky-bras part. They were all so nicey-nice and rational and suggested that surely if you did this or that, the colicky little darling would come around, pull himself or herself together, get a grip.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I also liked it that I had my own room, since in the trailer I shared one with my brother and my sister. My hospital room even had its very own television set up on the wall. We didn’t have a TV at home, so I watched it a lot. Red Buttons and Lucille Ball were my favorites. The nurses and doctors always asked how I was feeling and if I was hungry or needed anything. The nurses brought me delicious meals three times a day, with fruit cocktail or Jell-O for dessert, and changed the sheets even if they still looked clean. Sometimes I read to them, and they told me I was very smart and could read as well as a six-year-old. One day a nurse with wavy yellow hair and blue eye makeup was chewing on something. I asked her what it was, and she told me it was chewing gum. I had never heard of chewing gum, so she went out and got me a whole pack. I pulled out a stick, took off the white paper and the shiny silver foil under it, and studied the powdery, putty-colored gum. I put it in my mouth and was stunned by the sharp sweetness. “It’s really good!” I said. “Chew on it, but don’t swallow it,” the nurse said with a laugh. She smiled real big and brought in other nurses so they could watch me chew my first-ever piece of gum. When she brought me lunch, she told me I had to take out my chewing gum, but she said not to worry because I could have a new stick after eating. If I finished the pack, she would buy me another. That was the thing about the hospital. You never had to worry about running out of stuff like food or ice or even chewing gum. I would have been happy staying in that hospital forever. • • • When my family came to visit, their arguing and laughing and singing and shouting echoed through the quiet halls. The nurses made shushing noises, and Mom and Dad and Lori and Brian lowered their voices for a few minutes, then they slowly grew loud again. Everyone always turned and stared at Dad. I couldn’t figure out whether it was because he was so handsome or because he called people “pardner” and “goomba” and threw his head back when he laughed. One day Dad leaned over my bed and asked if the nurses and doctors were treating me okay. If they were not, he said, he would kick some asses. I told Dad how nice and friendly everyone was. “Well, of course they are,” he said. “They know you’re Rex Walls’s daughter.” When Mom wanted to know what it was the doctors and nurses were doing that was so nice, I told her about the chewing gum. “Ugh,” she said. She disapproved of chewing gum, she went on.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  The first time Caitlin led Vix through the woods with Sweetie following, along the secret pine needle path that led to the north beach and Vineyard Sound, they clasped hands, closed their eyes, and vowed they would never be ordinary. Phoebe had told Caitlin that to be ordinary was a fate worse than death. Caitlin called this the NBO pact. “NBO or die!” she sang into the wind. “Agreed?” “Agreed.” At that moment Vix felt like the luckiest person on earth. She was the chosen one, chosen for reasons beyond her comprehension to be Caitlin’s friend, so if Caitlin wanted her to swear she would never be ordinary, fine, she’d do it. She made her mark in the sand, a heart with a V inside, while Caitlin drew an elaborate lightning bolt around her initials. Caitlin was impressed by how dark Vix’s skin turned in just a few weeks. “It’s my Native American gene,” Vix explained. “I’m one- sixteenth Cherokee on my mother’s side.” She wasn’t sure of the exact fraction. She just knew it was something to be proud of. “God, that is so interesting! I wish I had unusual genes.” “I’m sure you do,” Vix said, thinking of Phoebe and Lamb. When Caitlin swam Vix watched over her until she was just a dot, bobbing in the sea like a lobsterman’s buoy. “I can’t swim,” Vix confessed to Sweetie. “So you’ll have to save her if she needs saving. Okay?” Sweetie didn’t seem concerned. She cocked her head as if listening carefully, then ran off to find something to roll in, something dead or decaying. Whatever it was, it would leave her fur smelling like old fish. Caitlin shook herself off like a dog when she came out of the water, then wrapped a beach towel around her waist so it dragged in the sand like a long skirt. “Did I ever tell you that in my former life I was a mermaid?” “But in this life you’re a human,” Vix reminded her, just in case she forgot. “And I wish you wouldn’t go out so far.” She drizzled turrets of wet sand onto their elaborate castle. “I like the way you worry about me,” Caitlin said. “Somebody has to.” In their room at night they played Mermaids, using the makeup Caitlin bought on Lamb’s charge at Leslie’s Pharmacy to paint their lips dark red and outline their eyes in coal black. The mirror on the wall above the

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  For chairs, we used some smaller spools and a few crates. Instead of beds, we kids each slept in a big cardboard box, like the ones refrigerators get delivered in. A little while after we’d moved into the depot, we heard Mom and Dad talking about buying us kids real beds, and we said they shouldn’t do it. We liked our boxes. They made going to bed seem like an adventure. • • • Shortly after we moved into the depot, Mom decided that what we really needed was a piano. Dad found a cheap upright when a saloon in the next town over went out of business, and he borrowed a neighbor’s pickup to bring it home. We slid it off the pickup down a ramp, but it was too heavy to carry. To get it into the depot, Dad devised a system of ropes and pulleys that he attached to the piano in the front yard and ran through the house and out the back door, where they were tied to the pickup. The plan was for Mom to ease the truck forward, pulling the piano into the house while Dad and we kids guided it up a ramp of planks and through the front door. “Ready!” Dad hollered when we were all in our positions. “Okeydoke!” Mom shouted. But instead of easing forward, Mom, who had never quite gotten the hang of driving, hit the gas pedal hard, and the truck shot ahead. The piano jerked out of our hands, sending us lurching forward, and bounced into the house, splintering the door frame. Dad screamed at Mom to slow down, but she kept going and dragged the screeching, chord-banging piano across the depot floor and right through the rear door, splintering its frame, too, then out into the backyard, where it came to rest next to a thorny bush. Dad came running through the house. “What the Sam Hill were you doing?” he yelled at Mom. “I told you to go slow!” “I was only doing twenty-five!” Mom said. “You get mad at me when I go that slow on the highway.” She looked behind her and saw the piano sitting in the backyard. “Oopsie-daisy,” she said. Mom wanted to turn around and drag it back into the house from the other direction, but Dad said that was impossible because the railroad tracks were too close to the front door to get the pickup in position. So the piano stayed where it was. On the days Mom felt inspired, she took her sheet music and one of our spool chairs outside and pounded away at her music back there. “Most pianists never get the chance to play in the great out-of-doors,” she said. “And now the whole neighborhood can enjoy the music, too.”

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There is no point in recalling every detail of his despair. After two years of sorrow, while he lived and suffered in Thebes, as he lay sleeping one night, he had a vision or dream of Mercury. The winged god stood by his bedside, holding his wand of sleep, and bid him to be of good cheer. Now this great god wore a silver helmet, ornamented with wings, upon his golden hair. In just such a guise he had lulled Argos of the hundred eyes, when he came to steal Io. He spoke, or seemed to speak, to Arcite. ‘You must journey now to Athens,’ he said. ‘In that city there will be an end of all your woe.’ At that, Arcite woke up with a start. ‘Whatever the consequences,’ he said, ‘even on pain of death itself, I will follow my dream and travel to Athens. Right away. I will not be deterred by anything or anyone. I will see my lady again. I will be with her, even if I have to die in her sight. Death then will be delightful.’ Then he took up a great mirror, and saw the reflection of his altered looks. He was so wan and ravaged that he was scarcely recognizable even to himself. And then inspiration came to him. Whether he was inspired by Mercury, I cannot say. He realized that he was so disfigured, by suffering and sickness, that he could remain quite unknown in Athens. If he was cautious and prudent he could live there for the rest of his life without being discovered by the authorities. And then he could see Emily every day. What a wonderful prospect! So he threw himself into joyful activity. He changed his clothes, and dressed himself in the garb of a poor labouring man. His only companion was his squire. This young man knew everything, from first to last. But he was happy to follow Arcite. He, too, dressed in the garb of a poor man. On the following day the two of them set off for Athens. As soon as Arcite arrived he went to the court of Theseus, and at the great gate there he offered his services to those who passed him. He offered to drudge, to draw water, to carry goods - anything that might help him to get closer to Emily. Eventually, and by great good fortune, he was offered a job in the household of the chamberlain who looked after the fair lady. He watched and waited, taking advantage of any opening to gain access to her. He was expert at cutting wood, and tireless at carrying barrels of water. He was strong, with fine sinews and big bones. He did any kind of work that was required. He was zealous and indefatigable. So by degrees he became a personal servant to fair Emily herself. What name did he give himself? He was known to everyone as Philostratus. There never was a more well-respected man.

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

  All the index card says is “The lemonade-making thing.” But it’s like a snippet from a movie, a vignette of a family in pain, managing to survive, one of those rare moments when people’s hearts are opened by disappointment and love, and for just a few minutes, against all odds, everything is more or less Okay. Sometimes I’ll be driving along, and all of a sudden words form in my mind that solve some technical problem for me. I may have been trying all morning long to show that time has been passing for my characters, without resorting to old-movie techniques where leaves of a calendar blow out the window or the hands of a clock spin. These techniques do not translate well to the written word. It’s a wonderful feeling when you’re reading something by someone else, and the writer has aged exactly the right detail so that you know the story is picking up again sometime later. Sometimes the seasons change, or children start school, or beards grow long, or pets go gray. But sometimes in your own writing you can’t find the way to make time pass invisibly, and you will not be aided in this by sitting at your desk staring bitterly at your words, trying to will it to happen. Instead, all of a sudden when you’re wrestling with the dog or paying the electric bill, you might look up and know that something is coming to you that might really matter, only you can’t quite reel it in. It’s like watching someone on a ventilator rise again and again to the surface, like a trapped fish, and you stay with the person, and sometimes he or she blinks awake. And so, if you hold some space open, an image may come to you. Then, for goodness sakes, jot it down. I have an index card here on which is written, “Six years later, the memory of the raw fish cubes continued to haunt her,” which I thought might make a great transitional line. But I have so far not found a place for it. You are welcome to use it if you can. I eventually throw away a lot of my index cards, either because I use what’s on them in a paragraph somewhere or because it turns out that the thought wasn’t all that interesting. Many index cards on which I write in the middle of the night tend to be incoherent, like some incredibly bright math major thinking about oranges or truth while on LSD. Some contain great quotes that I share with my students, although I unfortunately often forget to write down whose quote it is. Like this one, for instance: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.” Now, I’m almost positive Ralph Waldo Emerson said this, but with my luck some critic will point out that it was really Georgette Mosbacher.