Loneliness

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  It was about two-thirty in the morning, and as I stood there the avenue grew quieter after the initial rush of traffic from the bar. The desk lamp inside the motel office made me lonely. I felt far away from everything. I carried an ache under my ribs that was like radar: it told me I was miles away from the world I intended to make for my son and myself. I saw my easel set up in the corner of the living room in our apartment, next to my son’s box of toys. I imagined having the money to walk up to the motel office to rent a room of my own. I knew what I would do: I would sleep until I could sleep no more. I would wake up with my dreams and listen and sketch and paint the visions I had put aside to take care of everyone else. I recalled the dream I’d had of a daughter who wanted to be born. I had been painting all night when she appeared to me. She was a baby with fat cheeks, and then she was a grown woman. She asked me to give birth to her. This isn’t a good time, I told her. I was in the middle of finals and assisting in planning for a protest of the killing of Navajo street drunks for fun by some white high school students. They had just been questioned and set free with no punishment. Why come into this kind of world? I asked her. Her intent made a fine unwavering line that connected my heart to hers. I walked behind the motel to look for him. I found his shoes under a tree. Beyond them were his socks, like two dark salamanders. A little farther beyond his socks was his belt, and then I followed a trail of pants, shirt, and underwear until I was standing in the courtyard of the motel. My stomach turned and twisted as I considered all the scenarios a naked, drunk Indian man might get into in a motel on the main street of the city. I heard a splash in the pool. I remember thinking, He’s a Pueblo Indian; he can’t swim. I considered leaving him there to flounder. It would be his foolish fault, as well as the fault of a society that builds its cities over our holy places. At that moment, his disappearance would be a sudden relief. It was then that I first felt our daughter moving within me. She awakened me with a flutter, a kick. As I walked to the pool, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I never told her father about the night she showed up to announce her intentions, or how I saw her spirit when she was conceived, wavering above us on a fine sheen of light. I never told my daughter how I pulled her father from deep water.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She drove on and left the car at the stables, then walked round to the house, and when she got there she opened the door of the study and went in, feeling terribly lonely without her father. Sitting down in the old arm-chair that had survived him, she let her head rest where his head had rested; and her hands she laid on the arms of the chair where his hands, as she knew, had lain times without number. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize his face, his kind face that had sometimes looked anxious; but the picture came slowly and faded at once, for the dead must often give place to the living. It was Angela Crossby’s face that persisted as Stephen sat in her father’s old chair. 4In the small panelled room that gave on to the herb-garden, Angela yawned as she stared through the window; then she suddenly laughed out loud at her thoughts; then she suddenly frowned and spoke crossly to Tony. She could not get Stephen out of her mind, and this irritated while it amused her. Stephen was so large to be tongue-tied and frightened—a curious creature, not devoid of attraction. In a way—her own way—she was almost handsome; no, quite handsome; she had fine eyes and beautiful hair. And her body was supple like that of an athlete, narrow-hipped and wide shouldered, she should fence very well. Angela was anxious to see her fence; she must certainly try to arrange it somehow. Mrs. Antrim had conveyed a number of things, while actually saying extremely little; but Angela had no need of her hints, not now that she had come to know Stephen Gordon. And because she was idle, discontented and bored, and certainly not over-burdened with virtue, she must let her thoughts dwell unduly on this girl, while her curiosity kept pace with her thoughts. Tony stretched and whimpered, so Angela kissed him, then she sat down and wrote quite a short little letter: ‘Do come over to lunch the day after to-morrow and advise me about the garden,’ ran the letter. And it ended—after one or two casual remarks about gardens—with: ‘Tony says please come, Stephen!’ CHAPTER 181O n a beautiful evening three weeks later, Stephen took Angela over Morton. They had had tea with Anna and Puddle, and Anna had been coldly polite to this friend of her daughter’s, but Puddle’s manner had been rather resentful—she deeply mistrusted Angela Crossby. But now Stephen was free to show Angela Morton, and this she did gravely, as though something sacred were involved in this first introduction to her home, as though Morton itself must feel that the coming of this small, fair-haired woman was in some way momentous. Very gravely, then, they went over the house—even into Sir Philip’s old study.

• From Trash (1988)

  Anna giggled with her, and then there was a wave of laughter. I smiled but didn’t laugh. After a little while Mona started explaining just what she meant at the last consciousness-raising session at the Women’s Center when she told Sharma she was antimonogamous. Someone else began to describe the sit-in at the student council that got us the funds for the rape crisis phone line. Then Mona tried to talk Anna into coming to a poetry reading the next weekend. Judy started going on and on about the article she had just read that explained why a women’s revolution was inevitable at this point in history. I sat quietly, sipping at my beer. I was exhausted from typing up the budget requests for the day care center, and my stomach ached, but I didn’t want to go off to bed yet. If I did, I was pretty sure I would become the next topic of conversation. Worse, I was feeling the same way I did at the concert. Part of me wanted to disappear, to become just another version of Mona or Lenore, just like everyone else. Cass wanted to take me to the stock car races the next night and I still didn’t know if I wanted to go. I used to go to the races with my mama when I was a teenager, rooting for Bobby Allison and Fireball Roberts, eating boiled peanuts and pissing into an open trough behind the bleachers, but I hadn’t done anything like that since I left home—never told anyone about it at all. “You’ll love it,” Cass insisted. “Fast cars and lots of noise, and we can pinch and kiss each other when everybody jumps up to look at the crashes.” I watched Judy’s face, the slim fingers that kept coming up to push her bangs over behind one ear, the white collar of her blouse startling against her tanned skin. Her eyes tracked past me when she turned her head, not stopping to risk catching my glance. I don’t like her, I thought, and it surprised me to realize that. We slept together once, when I had just moved in. It had been an awkward night. She’d made a point of stopping me when I’d slid down her body, telling me she really didn’t like oral sex, and she’d shrieked when I’d pushed one finger between her labia. “Don’t do that,” she whispered, pulling up and planting her pubic mound firmly against my hip. What she wanted to do was climb on top of me and rock against me until she’d made herself come.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  “We almost died.” I loved to hear the story of my warrior fight for my breath. The way my mother told the story, I was given only so much time on the ventilator and I had to decide to live. I had been strong. I had been brave. My parents felt lucky to have insurance, to be able to have their children in the hospital. My father’s mother, Naomi Harjo Foster, was a full-blooded Creek. She gave birth to my father in a private hospital in Oklahoma City. My mother and five of her six brothers were born at home, with no medical assistance. The only time a doctor was called was when someone was dying. When she was born, her mother named her Wynema, a Cherokee name my mother says means “Beautiful Woman.” She was also named Jewell, for a can of shortening stored in the room where she was born and because she was her father’s jewel. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] The morning of my son’s birth, I stirred awake with contractions. I was sticky and hot, tucked in a room the size of a large closet. I woke up the baby’s father. I ironed him a shirt before we walked the four blocks to the old W. W. Hastings Indian Hospital. We had no car and no money for a taxi. My husband’s only job was working part-time with an older Cherokee artist, Cecil Dick, silk-screening signs for specials at the supermarket. When he worked, he made five dollars a day. He dropped me off at the hospital before going to work. We didn’t bother his mother. She would have to get up soon enough to fix breakfast for her daughter and granddaughter before leaving for her job at the nursing home. My life was poised at the edge of great, precarious change. I felt alone. I had no family with me to acknowledge the birth. It was still dark as we walked through the cold morning, under oaks that symbolized the stubbornness and endurance of the Cherokee people. They made Tahlequah their capital in the new lands. I looked for handholds in the misty gray sky. I wanted to change everything. I wanted to go back to a place before childhood, before our tribe’s removal to Oklahoma. As I questioned the kind of life I was bringing this child into, I felt the sharp tug of my own birth cord, still connected to my mother. I believe it never pulls away completely. It symbolizes the important warrior road. Now here I was, becoming a mother, while my mother was a few hours away in Tulsa, cooking breakfast at a factory cafeteria and preparing for the lunch shift as I walked to the hospital to give birth. I wanted her with me; instead, I was far from her house, in the house of a mother-in-law who was using witchcraft to try to get rid of me.

• From Trash (1988)

  I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what. Lenore cleared her throat and cracked a few sunflower seeds. “I don’t know,” she giggled. “Don’t really feel like playing feminist evangelist to the pool hall set myself.” Anna giggled with her, and then there was a wave of laughter. I smiled but didn’t laugh. After a little while Mona started explaining just what she meant at the last consciousness-raising session at the Women’s Center when she told Sharma she was antimonogamous. Someone else began to describe the sit-in at the student council that got us the funds for the rape crisis phone line. Then Mona tried to talk Anna into coming to a poetry reading the next weekend. Judy started going on and on about the article she had just read that explained why a women’s revolution was inevitable at this point in history. I sat quietly, sipping at my beer. I was exhausted from typing up the budget requests for the day care center, and my stomach ached, but I didn’t want to go off to bed yet. If I did, I was pretty sure I would become the next topic of conversation. Worse, I was feeling the same way I did at the concert. Part of me wanted to disappear, to become just another version of Mona or Lenore, just like everyone else. Cass wanted to take me to the stock car races the next night and I still didn’t know if I wanted to go. I used to go to the races with my mama when I was a teenager, rooting for Bobby Allison and Fireball Roberts, eating boiled peanuts and pissing into an open trough behind the bleachers, but I hadn’t done anything like that since I left home—never told anyone about it at all. “You’ll love it,” Cass insisted. “Fast cars and lots of noise, and we can pinch and kiss each other when everybody jumps up to look at the crashes.” I watched Judy’s face, the slim fingers that kept coming up to push her bangs over behind one ear, the white collar of her blouse startling against her tanned skin. Her eyes tracked past me when she turned her head, not stopping to risk catching my glance. I don’t like her, I thought, and it surprised me to realize that. We slept together once, when I had just moved in. It had been an awkward night.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  It was about two-thirty in the morning, and as I stood there the avenue grew quieter after the initial rush of traffic from the bar. The desk lamp inside the motel office made me lonely. I felt far away from everything. I carried an ache under my ribs that was like radar: it told me I was miles away from the world I intended to make for my son and myself. I saw my easel set up in the corner of the living room in our apartment, next to my son’s box of toys. I imagined having the money to walk up to the motel office to rent a room of my own. I knew what I would do: I would sleep until I could sleep no more. I would wake up with my dreams and listen and sketch and paint the visions I had put aside to take care of everyone else. I recalled the dream I’d had of a daughter who wanted to be born. I had been painting all night when she appeared to me. She was a baby with fat cheeks, and then she was a grown woman. She asked me to give birth to her. This isn’t a good time, I told her. I was in the middle of finals and assisting in planning for a protest of the killing of Navajo street drunks for fun by some white high school students. They had just been questioned and set free with no punishment. Why come into this kind of world? I asked her. Her intent made a fine unwavering line that connected my heart to hers. I walked behind the motel to look for him. I found his shoes under a tree. Beyond them were his socks, like two dark salamanders. A little farther beyond his socks was his belt, and then I followed a trail of pants, shirt, and underwear until I was standing in the courtyard of the motel. My stomach turned and twisted as I considered all the scenarios a naked, drunk Indian man might get into in a motel on the main street of the city. I heard a splash in the pool. I remember thinking, He’s a Pueblo Indian; he can’t swim. I considered leaving him there to flounder. It would be his foolish fault, as well as the fault of a society that builds its cities over our holy places. At that moment, his disappearance would be a sudden relief. It was then that I first felt our daughter moving within me. She awakened me with a flutter, a kick. As I walked to the pool, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I never told her father about the night she showed up to announce her intentions, or how I saw her spirit when she was conceived, wavering above us on a fine sheen of light. I never told my daughter how I pulled her father from deep water.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  With other young girls she had nothing in common, while they, in their turn, found her irritating. She was shy to primness regarding certain subjects, and would actually blush if they happened to be mentioned. This would strike her companions as queer and absurd—after all, between girls—surely every one knew that at times one ought not to get one’s feet wet, that one didn’t play games, not at certain times—there was nothing to make all this fuss about surely! To see Stephen Gordon’s expression of horror if one so much as threw out a hint on the subject, was to feel that the thing must in some way be shameful, a kind of disgrace, a humiliation! And then she was odd about other things too; there were so many things that she didn’t like mentioned. In the end, they completely lost patience with her, and they left her alone with her fads and her fancies, disliking the check that her presence imposed, disliking to feel that they dare not allude to even the necessary functions of nature without being made to feel immodest. But at times Stephen hated her own isolation, and then she would make little awkward advances, while her eyes would grow rather apologetic, like the eyes of a dog who has been out of favour. She would try to appear quite at ease with her companions, as she joined in their light-hearted conversation. Strolling up to a group of young girls at a party, she would grin as though their small jokes amused her, or else listen gravely while they talked about clothes or some popular actor who had visited Malvern. As long as they refrained from too intimate details, she would fondly imagine that her interest passed muster. There she would stand with her strong arms folded, and her face somewhat strained in an effort of attention. While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them—yes, indeed, at such moments she longed to be like them. It would suddenly strike her that they seemed very happy, very sure of themselves as they gossiped together. There was something so secure in their feminine conclaves, a secure sense of oneness, of mutual understanding; each in turn understood the other’s ambitions. They might have their jealousies, their quarrels even, but always she discerned, underneath, that sense of oneness. Poor Stephen! She could never impose upon them; they always saw through her as though she were a window. They knew well enough that she cared not so much as a jot about clothes and popular actors. Conversation would falter, then die down completely, her presence would dry up their springs of inspiration. She spoilt things while trying to make herself agreeable; they really liked her better when she was grumpy.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  forgetting the songs and stories. Yet others hid out and carried the fire of the songs and stories so we could continue the culture. In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone until somebody got out of line. We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind. Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him; he was lonely in this world. So Rabbit thought to make a person. And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see what would happen, the clay man stood up. Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken. The clay man obeyed. Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn. The clay man obeyed. Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife. The clay man obeyed. Rabbit felt important and powerful. The clay man felt important and powerful. And once that clay man started, he could not stop. Once he took that chicken, he wanted all the chickens. And once he took that corn, he wanted all the corn. And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives. He was insatiable. Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold. Then it was land and anything else he saw. His wanting only made him want more. Soon it was countries, and then it was trade. The wanting infected the earth. We lost track of the purpose and reason for life. We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories. We could no longer see or hear our ancestors, or talk with each other across the kitchen table. Now Rabbit couldn’t find a drink of fresh water. The forests were being mowed down all over the world. The earth was being destroyed to make more, and Rabbit had no place to play. Rabbit’s trick had backfired. Rabbit tried to call the clay man back, but when the clay man wouldn’t listen,

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen had been too sore at heart to reply; but throughout the long journey from Morton to Paris, Puddle’s words had kept hammering in her brain: ‘You’re not working, and yet work’s your only weapon.’ So while Mary lay sleeping in Stephen’s arms on that first blessèd night of their reunion, her lover lay wide-eyed with sleeplessness, planning the work she must do on the morrow, cursing her own indolence and folly, her illusion of safety where none existed. 2They soon settled down to their more prosaic days very much as quite ordinary people will do. Each of them now had her separate tasks—Stephen her writing, and Mary the household, the paying of bills, the filing of receipts, the answering of unimportant letters. But for her there were long hours of idleness, since Pauline and Pierre were almost too perfect—they would smile and manage the house their own way, which it must be admitted was better than Mary’s. As for the letters, there were not very many; and as for the bills, there was plenty of money—being spared the struggle to make two ends meet, she was also deprived of the innocent pleasure of scheming to provide little happy surprises, little extra comforts for the person she loved, which in youth can add a real zest to existence. Then Stephen had found her typing too slow, so was sending the work to a woman in Passy; obsessed by a longing to finish her book, she would tolerate neither let nor hindrance. And because of their curious isolation, there were times when Mary would feel very lonely. For whom did she know? She had no friends in Paris except the kind Mademoiselle Duphot and Julie. Once a week, it is true, she could go and see Buisson, for Stephen continued to keep up her fencing; and occasionally Brockett would come strolling in, but his interest was centred entirely in Stephen; if she should be working, as was often the case, he would not waste very much time over Mary. Stephen often called her into the study, comforted by the girl’s loving presence. ‘Come and sit with me, sweetheart, I like you in here.’ But quite soon she would seem to forget all about her. ‘What . . . what?’ she would mutter, frowning a little. ‘Don’t speak to me just for a minute, Mary. Go and have your luncheon, there’s a good child; I’ll come when I’ve finished this bit—you go on!’ But Mary’s meal might be eaten alone; for meals had become an annoyance to Stephen.

• From Trash (1988)

  Those wide blank eyes looked back at me. I could see myself in the black centers, my hair wild and uncombed around my face, my own eyes as wide as the monkey’s, as blank, the pupils as black and empty as night. My mouth worked, and in the blackness I saw my own teeth—clenching, shining, grinding. My teeth scared me right down into my soul. I stole all the dimes from the petty cash drawer and called Toni from the pay phone in the dorm. She listened to me babble and made soft soothing noises into my ears. “It’s all right, baby. I understand. Don’t none of us want to be too alone if we can help it, now and then.” I put the phone tight to my teeth and sobbed until she yelled to make me stop. “If now and then is all you got to offer, then we’ll see about now and then.” The last Sunday before we all went away for the summer, Toni borrowed a few hours’ time from a friend with an apartment in town. I’d quit my job in the lab and taken another in the post office, signed up for computer class, and was trying to stop dreaming about plush-faced monkeys and wild red rats. Toni and I made love until we were too sore to move and then lay naked, sweating into each other’s hips. Toni held my hands, fingering the two scars that remained on my right little finger. After a few minutes she sucked my fingers into her mouth and bit down gently. “Tell me about that fishing camp again.” I could barely understand her, and didn’t want to talk anyway. “No.” “That monkey left her mark on you, didn’t she?” “Only one that ever did.” I looked into her eyes when I said it, knowing what I was saying as much as she did. “Only one, huh? You think that’s just?” I shrugged, my eyes never leaving hers. “There is no justice,” I told her, meaning it, meaning it absolutely. Toni sighed and rolled over. She took a long pull from the half-empty glass of beer she’d left on the floor, and then looked up at me from under her eyebrows. “Tell you what,” she whispered. “I want you to put me in one of your stories sometime.” I took the glass away from her, took a drink myself. “What in the world for?” She took the glass back and turned away from me. “I want to be there,” she said over her shoulder. “I just want to be there, right in there with the monkeys. Me, you understand—raw and drunk and hairy. Me, the way I am. You put me in there, huh? You just put me in there.” Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  “We almost died.” I loved to hear the story of my warrior fight for my breath. The way my mother told the story, I was given only so much time on the ventilator and I had to decide to live. I had been strong. I had been brave. My parents felt lucky to have insurance, to be able to have their children in the hospital. My father’s mother, Naomi Harjo Foster, was a full-blooded Creek. She gave birth to my father in a private hospital in Oklahoma City. My mother and five of her six brothers were born at home, with no medical assistance. The only time a doctor was called was when someone was dying. When she was born, her mother named her Wynema, a Cherokee name my mother says means “Beautiful Woman.” She was also named Jewell, for a can of shortening stored in the room where she was born and because she was her father’s jewel. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] The morning of my son’s birth, I stirred awake with contractions. I was sticky and hot, tucked in a room the size of a large closet. I woke up the baby’s father. I ironed him a shirt before we walked the four blocks to the old W. W. Hastings Indian Hospital. We had no car and no money for a taxi. My husband’s only job was working part-time with an older Cherokee artist, Cecil Dick, silk-screening signs for specials at the supermarket. When he worked, he made five dollars a day. He dropped me off at the hospital before going to work. We didn’t bother his mother. She would have to get up soon enough to fix breakfast for her daughter and granddaughter before leaving for her job at the nursing home. My life was poised at the edge of great, precarious change. I felt alone. I had no family with me to acknowledge the birth. It was still dark as we walked through the cold morning, under oaks that symbolized the stubbornness and endurance of the Cherokee people. They made Tahlequah their capital in the new lands. I looked for handholds in the misty gray sky. I wanted to change everything. I wanted to go back to a place before childhood, before our tribe’s removal to Oklahoma. As I questioned the kind of life I was bringing this child into, I felt the sharp tug of my own birth cord, still connected to my mother. I believe it never pulls away completely. It symbolizes the important warrior road. Now here I was, becoming a mother, while my mother was a few hours away in Tulsa, cooking breakfast at a factory cafeteria and preparing for the lunch shift as I walked to the hospital to give birth. I wanted her with me; instead, I was far from her house, in the house of a mother-in-law who was using witchcraft to try to get rid of me.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  a form giving consent for the doctor to deliver their baby. Others were sterilized without even the formality of signing. My fluent knowledge of English saved me. As a child growing up in Oklahoma, I liked to be told the story of my birth. I begged for it while my mother cleaned and ironed. “You almost killed me,” she would say. “We almost died.” I loved to hear the story of my warrior fight for my breath. The way my mother told the story, I was given only so much time on the ventilator and I had to decide to live. I had been strong. I had been brave. My parents felt lucky to have insurance, to be able to have their children in the hospital. My father’s mother, Naomi Harjo Foster, was a full-blooded Creek. She gave birth to my father in a private hospital in Oklahoma City. My mother and five of her six brothers were born at home, with no medical assistance. The only time a doctor was called was when someone was dying. When she was born, her mother named her Wynema, a Cherokee name my mother says means “Beautiful Woman.” She was also named Jewell, for a can of shortening stored in the room where she was born and because she was her father’s jewel. The morning of my son’s birth, I stirred awake with contractions. I was sticky and hot, tucked in a room the size of a large closet. I woke up the baby’s father. I ironed him a shirt before we walked the four blocks to the old W. W. Hastings Indian Hospital. We had no car and no money for a taxi. My husband’s only job was working part-time with an older Cherokee artist, Cecil Dick, silk-screening signs for specials at the supermarket. When he worked, he made five dollars a day. He dropped me off at the hospital before going to work. We didn’t bother his mother. She would have to get up soon enough to fix breakfast for her daughter and granddaughter before leaving for her job at the nursing home. My life was poised at the edge of great, precarious change. I felt alone. I had no family with me to acknowledge the birth. It was still dark as we walked through the cold morning, under oaks that symbolized the stubbornness and endurance of the Cherokee people. They made Tahlequah their capital in the new lands. I looked for handholds in the misty

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  Lupita humored her, but I could see that she was no fool. The music teacher wasn’t just teaching her to sing. She laughed as she told us about his wandering hands when he put his arms around her to demonstrate abdominal breathing. “So where is your mother from?” I figured I might as well find out the answer directly. Lupita’s stories about being from Venus, her outrageous flirting, and her sudden appearance in the middle of the semester made her a target for rumors. Not only had I heard that this school was her last chance, but there was speculation on her mother’s absence. “Venus,” she said. She was serious. Her claim was not just a flirting device to attract boys. She had to believe this so she wouldn’t fall apart. It was then I remembered the old man and how I used to fly to the moon. I remembered the stone quarry and my mother holding the baby. I remembered my father. I felt lonesome, my stomach scraped by the edge of sorrow. Lupita opened up and we talked about everything—about our fathers, about the ability to fly in dreams. Georgette listened quietly as she polished Lupita’s nails. I told Lupita I wanted to paint, to be an artist. She told me that what she wanted was someone to love her. And then she said to me nonchalantly, as she looked sideways at Georgette, “What do you know about that Navajo boy, the cowboy with the eyelashes—Clarence?” She had perfect timing, the mark of a good hunter or singer. Then she said directly to Georgette, “He’s a good kisser.” I hated confrontation and kept quiet. “He’s spoken for,” spit Georgette, who stood up quickly to face Lupita, spilling acetone all over her and my prized suede pants. The whole room stank of rotten apples. Lupita knew exactly what Georgette had been up to all along when she invited her to our room. I wondered if she knew anything about Clarence’s bet and whether I should tell her, and if so, when. Lupita picked up Georgette’s sharp nail file and began to file her nails. Georgette wasn’t through, though. “You Mexican bitch!” she snapped. “Get out of here.” “This is my room too,” I said. “She can stay. And by the way, please take

• From Trash (1988)

  Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on. I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes. “How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?” I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days. The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage. “How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?” “What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway. “Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.” Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts. “You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  They discussed many things quite simply together, for be- tween these two was no vestige of shyness. His youth met hers and walked hand in hand with it, so that she knew how utterly lonely her own youth had been before the coming of Martin. She said: ‘ You’re the only real friend I’ve ever had, except Father — our friendship’s so wonderful, somehow — we’re like brothers, we enjoy all the same sort of things.’ He nodded: ‘I know, a wonderful friendship.’ The hills must let Stephen tell him their secrets, the secrets of bypaths most cunningly hidden; the secrets of small, unsuspected green hollows; the secrets of ferns that live only by hiding. She might even reveal the secrets of birds, and show him the play- ground of shy, spring cuckoos. “They fly quite low up here, one can see them; last year a couple flew right past me, calling. If you were not going away so soon, Martin, we'd come later on —I’d love you to see them.’ ‘ And I'd love you to see my huge forests,’ he told her, ‘ why can’t you come back to Canada with me? What rot it is, all this damned convention; we’re such pals you and I, I’ll be desperately lonely — Lord, what a fool of a world we live in!’ And she said quite simply: ‘ I’d love to come with you.’ Then he started to tell her about his huge forests, so vast that their greenness seemed almost eternal. Great trees he told of, erect, towering firs, many centuries old and their girth that of giants. And then there were all the humbler tree-folk whom he spoke of as friends that were dear and familiar; the hemlocks that grow by the courses of rivers, in love with adventure and clear running water; the slender white spruces that border the lakes; THE WELL OF LONELINESS I05 the red pines, that glow like copper in the sunset. Unfortunate trees these beautiful red pines, for their tough, manly wood is coveted by builders. ‘ But I won’t have my roof-tree hacked from their sides,’ declared Martin, ‘I’d feel like a positive assassin! ’ Happy days spent between the hills and the stables, happy days for these two who had always been lonely until now, and now this wonderful friendship — there had never been anything like it for Stephen. Oh, but it was good to have him beside her, so young, so strong and so understanding. She liked his quiet voice with its careful accent, and his thoughtful blue eyes that moved rather slowly, so that his glance when it came, came slowly — sometimes she would meet his glance half-way, smiling. She who had longed for the companionship of men, for their friendship, their good-will, their toleration, she had it all now and much more in Martin, because of his great understanding.

• From Trash (1988)

  Shannon Pearl spent a good five minutes cleaning her glasses and then sat silent for the rest of the ride to school. I understood intuitively that she would not say anything, would in fact generously pretend to have fallen into our seat. I sat there beside her watching the pinched faces of my classmates as they kept looking back toward us. Just the way they stared made me want to start a conversation with Shannon. I imagined us discussing all the enemies we had in common while half the bus craned their necks to try to hear. But I couldn’t bring myself to actually do that, couldn’t even imagine what to say to her. Not till the bus crossed the railroad tracks at the south corner of Greenville Elementary did I manage to force my mouth open enough to say my name and then Reese’s. She nodded impartially and whispered “Shannon Pearl” before taking off her glasses to begin cleaning them all over again. With her glasses off she half shut her eyes and hunched her shoulders. Much later, I would realize that she cleaned her glasses whenever she needed a quiet moment to regain her composure, or more often, just to put everything around her at a distance. Without glasses, the world became a soft blur, but she also behaved as if the glasses were all that made it possible for her to hear. Commotion or insults made while she was cleaning her glasses never seemed to register at all. It was a valuable trick when you were the object of as much ridicule as Shannon Pearl. Christian charity, I knew, would have had me smile at Shannon but avoid her like everyone else. It wasn’t Christian charity that made me give her my seat on the bus, trade my third-grade picture for hers, sit at her kitchen table while her mama tried another trick on her wispy hair—“Egg and cornmeal, that’ll do the trick. We gonna put curls in this hair, darling, or my name an’t Roseanne Pearl”—or follow her to the Bushy Creek Highway Store and share the blue Popsicle she bought us. Not Christian charity, my fascination with her felt more like the restlessness that made me worry the scabs on my ankles. As disgusting as it all seemed, I couldn’t put away the need to scratch my ankles, or hang around what Granny called “that strange and ugly child.” Other people had no such problem. Other than her mother and I, no one could stand Shannon. No amount of Jesus’s grace would make her even marginally acceptable, and people had been known to suddenly lose their lunch from the sight of the clammy sheen of her skin, her skull showing blue-white through the thin, colorless hair and those watery pink eyes flicking back and forth, drifting in and out of focus. “Lord! But that child is ugly.” “It’s a trial, Jesus knows, a trial for her poor parents.” “They should keep her home.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But Barbara would not so much as turn round; she would calmly and earnestly go on with her praying. Her neck would look thin against the thick plait which hung neatly down between her bent shoulders; and the hands that covered her face would THE WELL OF LONELINESS 415 look thin — thin and transparent like the hands of a consumptive. Fuming inwardly, Jamie would stump off to bed in the tiny room with its eye-shaped window, and there she herself must mutter a prayer, especially if she heard Barbara coughing. At times Jamie gave way to deep depression, hating the beau- tiful city of her exile. Homesick unto death she would suddenly feel for the dour little Highland village of Beedles. More even than for its dull bricks and mortar would she long for its dull and respectable spirit, for the sense of security common to Sab- baths, for the kirk with its dull and respectable people. She would think with a tenderness bred by forced absence of the green- grocer’s shop that stood on the corner, where they sold, side by side with the cabbages and onions, little neatly tied bunches of Scottish heather, little earthenware jars of opaque heather honey. She would think of the vast, stretching, windy moorlands; of the smell of the soil after rain in summer; of the piper with his weather-stained, agile fingers. of the wail of his sorrowful, out- landish music; of Barbara as she had been in the days when they strolled side by side down the narrow high street. And then she would sit with her head in her hands, hating the sound and the smell of Paris, hating the sceptical eyes of the concierge, hating the bare and unhomely studio. Tears would well up from heaven alone knew what abyss of half-understood desolation, and would go splashing down upon her tweed skirt, or trickling back along her red wrists until they had wetted her frayed flannel wristbands. Coming home with their evening meal in a bag, this was how Barbara must sometimes find her. 2 Jamie was not always so full of desolation; there were days when she seemed to be in excellent spirits, and on one such occasion she rang Stephen up, asking her to bring Mary round after dinner. Every one was coming, Wanda and Pat, Brockett, and even Valérie Seymour; for she, Jamie, had persuaded a couple of negroes who were studying at the Conservatoire to come in and 416 THE WELL OF LONELINESS sing for them that evening — they had promised to sing Negro Spirituals, old slavery songs of the Southern plantations. They were very nice negroes, their name was Jones — Lincoln and Henry Jones, they were brothers. Lincoln and Jamie had become great friends; he was very interested in her opera. And Wanda would bring her mandolin — but the evening would be spoilt without Mary and Stephen.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  With other young girls she had nothing in common, while they, in their turn, found her irritating. She was shy to primness regarding certain subjects, and would actually blush if they happened to be mentioned. This would strike her companions as queer and absurd—after all, between girls—surely every one knew that at times one ought not to get one’s feet wet, that one didn’t play games, not at certain times—there was nothing to make all this fuss about surely! To see Stephen Gordon’s expression of horror if one so much as threw out a hint on the subject, was to feel that the thing must in some way be shameful, a kind of disgrace, a humiliation! And then she was odd about other things too; there were so many things that she didn’t like mentioned. In the end, they completely lost patience with her, and they left her alone with her fads and her fancies, disliking the check that her presence imposed, disliking to feel that they dare not allude to even the necessary functions of nature without being made to feel immodest. But at times Stephen hated her own isolation, and then she would make little awkward advances, while her eyes would grow rather apologetic, like the eyes of a dog who has been out of favour. She would try to appear quite at ease with her companions, as she joined in their light-hearted conversation. Strolling up to a group of young girls at a party, she would grin as though their small jokes amused her, or else listen gravely while they talked about clothes or some popular actor who had visited Malvern. As long as they refrained from too intimate details, she would fondly imagine that her interest passed muster. There she would stand with her strong arms folded, and her face somewhat strained in an effort of attention. While despising these girls, she yet longed to be like them—yes, indeed, at such moments she longed to be like them. It would suddenly strike her that they seemed very happy, very sure of themselves as they gossiped together. There was something so secure in their feminine conclaves, a secure sense of oneness, of mutual understanding; each in turn understood the other’s ambitions. They might have their jealousies, their quarrels even, but always she discerned, underneath, that sense of oneness. Poor Stephen! She could never impose upon them; they always saw through her as though she were a window. They knew well enough that she cared not so much as a jot about clothes and popular actors. Conversation would falter, then die down completely, her presence would dry up their springs of inspiration. She spoilt things while trying to make herself agreeable; they really liked her better when she was grumpy.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  But instead she would blink hard and shut her lips tightly, unhappy yet happy. It was a queer feeling; it was too big for Stephen, who was still rather little when it came to affairs of the spirit. For the spirit of Morton would be part of her then, and would always remain somewhere deep down within her, aloof and untouched by the years that must follow, by the stress and the ugliness of life. In those after- years certain scents would evoke it—the scent of damp rushes growing by water; the kind, slightly milky odour of cattle; the smell of dried roseleaves and orris-root and violets, that together with a vague suggestion of beeswax always hung about Anna’s rooms. Then that part of Stephen that she still shared with Morton would know what it was to feel terribly lonely, like a soul that wakes up to find itself wandering, unwanted, between the spheres. 4 Anna and Stephen would take off their coats, and go to the study in search of Sir Philip who would usually be there waiting. ‘Hallo, Stephen!’ he would say in his pleasant, deep voice, but his eyes would be resting on Anna. Stephen’s eyes invariably followed her father’s, so that she too would stand looking at Anna, and sometimes she must catch her breath in surprise at the fullness of that calm beauty. She never got used to her mother’s beauty, it always surprised her each time she saw it; it was one of those queerly unbearable things, like the fragrance of meadowsweet under the hedges. Anna might say: ‘What’s the matter, Stephen? For goodness’ sake darling, do stop staring!’ And Stephen would feel hot with shame and confusion because Anna had caught her staring. Sir Philip usually came to her rescue: ‘Stephen, here’s that new picture-book about hunting’; or, ‘I know of a really nice print of young Nelson; if you’re good I’ll order it for you to-morrow.’ But after a little he and Anna must get talking, amusing themselves irrespective of Stephen, inventing absurd little games, like two children, which games did not always include the real child. Stephen would sit there silently watching, but her heart would be a prey to the strangest emotions—emotions that seven-years-old could not cope with, and for which it could find no adequate names. All she would know was that seeing her parents together in this mood, would fill her with longings for something that she wanted yet could not define—a something that would make her as happy as they were. And this something would always be mixed up with Morton, with grave, stately rooms like her father’s study, with wide views from windows that let in much sunshine, and the scents of a spacious garden.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ir Philip and his daughter had a new common interest; they could now discuss books and the making of books and the feel and the smell and the essence of books—a mighty bond this, and one full of enchantment. They could talk of these things with mutual understanding; they did so for hours in the father’s study, and Sir Philip discovered a secret ambition that had lain in the girl like a seed in deep soil; and he, the good gardener of her body and spirit, hoed the soil and watered this seed of ambition. Stephen would show him her queer compositions, and would wait very breathless and still while he read them; then one evening he looked up and saw her expression, and he smiled: ‘So that’s it, you want to be a writer. Well, why not? You’ve got plenty of talent, Stephen; I should be a proud man if you were a writer.’ After which their discussions on the making of books held an even more vital enchantment. But Anna came less and less often to the study, and she would be sitting alone and idle. Puddle, upstairs at work in the schoolroom, might be swatting at her Greek to keep pace with Stephen, but Anna would be sitting with her hands in her lap in the vast drawing-room so beautifully proportioned, so restfully furnished in old polished walnut, so redolent of beeswax and orris root and violets—all alone in its vastness would Anna be sitting, with her white hands folded and idle. A lovely and most comfortable woman she had been, and still was, in spite of her gentle ageing, but not learned, oh, no, very far from learned—that, indeed, was why Sir Philip had loved her, that was why he had found her so infinitely restful, that was why he still loved her after very many years; her simplicity was stronger to hold him than learning. But now Anna went less and less often to the study. It was not that they failed to make her feel welcome, but rather that they could not conceal their deep interest in subjects of which she knew little or nothing. What did she know of or care for the Classics? What interest had she in the works of Erasmus? Her theology needed no erudite discussion, her philosophy consisted of a home swept and garnished, and as for the poets, she liked simple verses; for the rest her poetry lay in her husband. All this she well knew and had no wish to alter, yet lately there had come upon Anna an aching, a tormenting aching that she dared give no name to. It nagged at her heart when she went to that study and saw Sir Philip together with their daughter, and knew that her presence contributed nothing to his happiness when he sat reading to Stephen.