Longing

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 137 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Trash (1988)

  I thought she was going to slap me. I wanted her to slap me. If she slapped me, she would be the bad guy. I would be the heroine, the victim. I’d be able to stare her down and hate her forever. But she didn’t touch me. She shook her hands like she was throwing off dust, turned around and walked away. It was a good move. It was the perfect dismissive bar dyke move. I worked in the labs over the holidays, slept on a lab table, and went back to the nearly empty dorm only to shower and change my clothes. I lived on peanut butter sandwiches and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer from the cases the other lab assistants had hidden behind the furnace. The warm beer gave me gas, and I’d sit up on one of the tables and entertain the monkeys with rock and roll punctuated with burps. I sang the love songs the loudest, emphasizing the female pronouns by slapping the table. The monkeys were remarkably quiet, only getting noisy if I beat the table too long. They stared at me out of infinitely wise and patient faces. I poured them all a little beer and smeared peanut butter on their feed trays. They loved the peanut butter and chewed with great wide-smacking sounds. I knew I could trust them. They wouldn’t tell my secrets to anybody. “The problem is . . .” I told them, checking first to be sure the door was locked. “The problem is I don’t love her. I want to love her. I want to love somebody. I want to go crazy with love, eat myself up with love. Starve myself, strangle and die with love, like everybody else. Like the rest of the whole goddamned world. I want to be like the rest of the world.” I went up and put my hands flat against one of the cages. The monkey inside, old and hunched and gray, watched me with eyes that seemed to be all whites. “But I’m not,” I whispered. I was drunk, but I was telling the truth. “I’m not like anyone else in the whole wide world. And all I want of Toni is just a little piece now and then. A little controlled piece that she won’t mind giving me, that she wants to give me. You understand? I don’t want nothing too serious. I don’t want to need her too much. I don’t want to need her at all.”

• From Trash (1988)

  “With what they’ve taken off me, off Granny, and your Aunt Grace—shit, you could almost make another person.” A woman, a garbage creation, an assembly of parts. When I drink I see her rising like bats out of deep caverns, a gossamer woman—all black edges, with a chrome uterus and molded glass fingers, plastic wire rib cage and red unblinking eyes. My mama, my grandmother, my aunts, my sister, and me—every part of us that can be taken has been. “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood,” my mama sang for me once, and laughing added, “But we don’t need as much of it as we used to, huh?” When Mama talked, I listened. I believed it was the truth she was telling me. I watched her face as much as I listened to her words. She had a way of dropping her head and covering her bad teeth with her palm. I’d say, “Don’t do that.” And she’d laugh at how serious I was. When she laughed with me, that shadow, so gray under her eyes, lightened, and I felt for a moment—powerful, important, never so important as when I could make her laugh. I wanted to grow up to do the poor-kid-done-good thing, the Elvis Presley/Ritchie Valens movie, to buy my mama her own house, put a key in her hand and say, “It’s yours—from here to there and everything in between, these walls, that door, that gate, these locks. You don’t ever have to let anyone in that you don’t want. You can lay in the sun if you want to or walk out naked in the moonlight if you take the mood. And if you want to go into town to mess around, we can go do it together.” I did not want to be my mother’s lover; I wanted more than that. I wanted to rescue her the way we had both wanted her to rescue me. Do not want what you cannot have, she told me. But I was not as good as she was. I wanted that dream. I’ve never stopped wanting it.

• From Trash (1988)

  It’s true. The diet of poor southerners is among the worst in the world, though it’s tasty, very tasty. There’s pork fat or chicken grease in every dish; white sugar in the cobblers, pralines, and fudge; and flour, fat, and salt in the gravies—lots of salt in everything. The vegetables get cooked to limp strands with no fiber left at all. Mothers give sidemeat to their toddlers as pacifiers and slip them whiskey with honey at the first sign of teething, a cold, or a fever. Most of my cousins lost their teeth in their twenties and took up drinking as easily as they put sugar in their iced tea. I try not to eat so much sugar, try not to drink, try to limit pork and salt and white flour, but the truth is I am always hungry for it—the smell and taste of the food my mama fed me. Poor white trash I am for sure. I eat shit food and am not worthy. My family starts with good teeth but loses them early. Five of my cousins bled to death before thirty-five, their stomachs finally surrendering to sugar and whiskey and fat and salt. I’ve given it up. If I cannot eat what I want, then I’ll eat what I must, but my dreams will always be flooded with salt and grease, crisp fried stuff that sweetens my mouth and feeds my soul. I would rather starve death than myself. In college it was seven cups of coffee a day after a breakfast of dry-roasted nuts and Coca-Cola. Too much gray meat and reheated potatoes led me to develop a taste for peanut butter with honey, coleslaw with raisins, and pale, sad vegetables that never disturbed anything at all. When I started throwing up before classes, my roommate fed me fat pink pills her doctor had given her. My stomach shrank to a stone in my belly. I lived on pink pills, coffee, and Dexedrine until I could go home and use hot biscuits to scoop up cold tomato soup at my mama’s table. The biscuits dripped memories as well as butter: Uncle Lucius rolling in at dawn, eating a big breakfast with us all, and stealing mama’s tools when he left: or Aunt Panama at the door with her six daughters, screaming, That bastard’s made me pregnant again just to get a son, and wanting butter beans with sliced tomatoes before she would calm down. Cold chicken in a towel meant Aunt Alma was staying over, cooking her usual six birds at a time raising eleven kids I never learned how to cook for less than fifteen. Red dye stains on the sink were a sure sign Reese was dating some new boy, baking him a Red Velvet Cake my stepfather would want for himself.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  And so the whole company arose, gentlemen and ladies alike, and some of them began to wade, barefooted, in the limpid waters of the lake, whilst others went roaming off over the greensward to beguile the time amongst the tall, straight trees. Dioneo and Fiammetta sang a long duet about Palamon and Arcite.2 And so, in their several different ways, they whiled away the time to their entire delight and joy until the hour of supper, when they seated themselves at table beside the tiny lake. There they supped in gay and leisurely fashion with never a fly to trouble them, fanned by a gentle breeze that came from the surrounding hills, with the dulcet songs of a thousand birds delighting their ears. No more than half the vesperal hour had elapsed when the tables were cleared away, and at the queen’s behest, they wandered for a while through the delectable valley before slowly retracing their steps towards their lodging. Jesting and laughing not only about the things they had been saying earlier in the day, but many others also, in due course they arrived at the goodly palace a little before dark. There they dispelled the fatigue of their brief journey with the coolest of wines and the daintiest of sweetmeats, and in no time at all they were dancing caroles beside the beautiful fountain, accompanied sometimes by Tindaro on the cornemuse and sometimes by the music of other instruments. Finally, however, the queen ordered Filomena to sing a song, and she began as follows: ‘Alas, my life is desolate! For will I ne’er return Whence I departed all disconsolate? ‘Certain I know not, such is the desire That burns within my breast There to return, alas, where once I was. Oh, my true love, who sets my heart afire, My one, my only rest, Tell me what I should do, my dearest lord; I dare ask none, nor know to whom to go To beg for hope and help except thyself, My soul is wounded so. ‘I cannot well relate how great the pleasure Which so impassioned me That neither day nor night could yield me rest. My hearing, sight and touch, in strongest measure Were so increased in me That each sense lit new fires within my breast Which burn and scorch me to the very core. Save thee alone, no one can comfort me Or my faint heart restore. ‘Alas, come tell me when it is to be, When will that time return When I may come upon thee once again And kiss those eyes which have so murdered me? My love, for whom I yearn, Tell me when thou wilt come, and tell me “soon”, And somewhat ease the pains Love made me bear. Say thou wilt swiftly come, then linger here; How long I do not care. ‘If I perchance should hold thee once again, I may not be the fool That I have been before to let thee go.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Of course there was David, the grateful, the devoted. Mary could always talk to David, but since he could never answer her back the conversation was very one-sided. Then too, he was making it obvious that he, in his turn, was missing Stephen; he would hang around looking discontented when she failed to go out after frequent suggestions. For although his heart was faithful to Mary, the gentle dispenser of all salvation, yet the instinct that has dwelt in the soul of the male, perhaps ever since Adam left the Garden of Eden, the instinct that displays itself in club windows and in other such places of male segregation, would make him long for the companionable walks that had sometimes been taken apart from Mary. Above all would it make him long intensely for Stephen’s strong hands and purposeful ways; for that queer, intangible something about her that appealed to the canine manhood in him. She always allowed him to look after himself, without fussing; in a word, she seemed restful to David. Mary, slipping noiselessly out of the study, might whisper: ‘We’ll go to the Tuileries Gardens.’ But when they arrived there, what was there to do? For of course a dog must not dive after goldfish—David understood this; there were goldfish at home—he must not start splashing about in ponds that had tiresome stone rims and ridiculous fountains. He and Mary would wander along gravel paths, among people who stared at and made fun of David: ‘Quel drôle de chien, mais regardez sa queue!’ They were like that, these French; they had laughed at his mother. She had told him never so much as to say: ‘Wouf!’ For what did they matter? Still, it was disconcerting. And although he had lived in France all his life—having indeed known no other country—as he walked in the stately Tuileries Gardens, the Celt in his blood would conjure up visions: great beetling mountains with winding courses down which the torrents went roaring in winter; the earth smell, the dew smell, the smell of wild things which a dog might hunt and yet remain lawful—for of all this and more had his old mother told him. These visions it was that had led him astray, that had treacherously led him half starving to Paris; and that, sometimes, even in these placid days, would come back as he walked in the Tuileries Gardens. But now his heart must thrust them aside—a captive he was now, through love of Mary. But to Mary there would come one vision alone, that of a garden at Orotava; a garden lighted by luminous darkness, and filled with the restless rhythm of singing.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  Eighteen was the legal age for marriage in the state of Oklahoma. My mother must have known that fact, but she asked me no questions. I recognized that it would be a relief to get me out of the house. I was the cause of the tension. After two weeks, when there was no letter or bus ticket, I asked my brother Allen for the money to get to Tahlequah. Allen always had money. Once I had to break up a sweatshop he had going with our sister, Margaret. He hired her to weave cheap loop potholders for a nickel apiece, then sold them for a dollar each. I told her she should charge more and she quit. He soon found another way to make money. He needed it for all of his bike and race projects. He was brilliant with his ongoing constructions, which included upside-down bikes and fast go-carts hammered together with found items. He and I sold white paper bags of Daylight Doughnuts door-to-door in Skiatook, Oklahoma. The shop’s owner would sip coffee and read his paper in his car as my brother and I sold to women in housecoats, men who were already downing their morning beer, and families watching Saturday-morning cartoons. I spent my money on photography. I bought film and paid for development. I also bought art supplies and fabric to make clothes. Allen and I covered for each other. I never told our mother of the time he hot-wired a huge yellow earthmover parked at the church down the street. He took it on a joyride through the neighborhood while she was at work. He must have been only ten or eleven years old. My brother loaned me the money, and I bought my bus ticket and told my mother that my boyfriend had sent for me. When the bus left from the Tulsa Greyhound station, everything I owned fit in my army-surplus Indian school footlocker. I left with about ten dollars in cash. As Tulsa, the city of my birth, fell behind me, I barely noticed the landscape while the bus navigated the country two-lanes that carried me toward an uncertain future. I imagined what would happen when I arrived at the bus station in Tahlequah. He would be there to greet me. I would go with him. Somewhere. I knew he was living with his mother, and she was taking care of his young sister, who was still in elementary school, and his daughter, Ratonia, a two-year-old. His mother knew nothing of me. I pulled out the photograph he’d given me at Indian school of his daughter, taken the summer before. Squinting her eyes at the sun was a wiry and energetic one-and-a-half-year-old who, with her Cherokee nose and smiling eyes, resembled her father, the man I loved. His daughter’s mother was my age when they got pregnant. They were living in Oregon, where his mother worked in a clinic. He had heard that his baby’s mother was drinking.

• From Trash (1988)

  Some days I think the way to make a storyteller is to refuse to tell her what happened—as my mama and aunts did with me. I had to make up my great-grandmother, and I did it in a story that was originally to be about her daughter—a story I started when I was still in college, and my mother told me my grandmother had died—but three months after the funeral was past, and long past any hope I might have had of going to Greenville, attending the funeral or learning anything about how she had died. “In a ditch,” my Uncle Jack told me a decade later. “Had a stroke halfway between our house and your Uncle Bo’s. Just lay down and died.” “Oh.” I just stood there. “Oh.” I was living in Tallahassee then, in a feminist collective household, and fiercely determined to learn more about my grandmother, my aunts, even legendary Great-grandma Shirley. But my uncle’s brutal comment was all I gathered in that visit, and almost as soon as I asked about it, one of my aunts denied that was how it happened. “She didn’t die down there. She died in the hospital two whole days later. She just fell in that ditch and lay there awhile before we went out and found her.” Maybe that was the story I should have written, but it was not. By the time I got back to my big complicated household, I was working on the story of what Grandma Mattie Lee might have been like as a girl. What if? And I was in it, watching Shirley beat on the steps with that broom handle. Would I have made Mattie Lee so heroic if my own mother had not hidden her death from me, if my uncle had not spoken so brutally? Maybe. Still, what I wrote felt right on the page, and from this distance that seems the primary fact. I did a lot of things because it felt right on the page, or sounded right when read out loud in an empty room. I did not finish that story in Tallahassee. I did not finish that story till Brooklyn, fully fifteen years after my grandmother’s death. Even then, I think I finished it because I fell in love with that teenage girl, her mouth full of white and her eyes full of fire. It worked well enough that it was another of the stories my mama would never talk to me about. “Now that’s mean,” my mama said about one of the stories I sent her. She smiled and gave a little shudder when she said it. That is what I intended, I told her. I want it mean. I did not say that I also wanted the story to be about love and compassion.

• From Trash (1988)

  It’s been three years since she OD’d, and in that time she’s grown more urgent, not less. This strange air of calmness disturbs me. If the dead lose their restlessness, do they finally go away? Something falls in the other room, wood striking wood. It’s probably Molly going to the bathroom a little drunk as usual, knocking things over. Katy slides up on one knee and clutches the edge of the waterbed frame. If she were a cat her hair would be on end. As it is, the hair above her ears seems suddenly fuller. I reach over and take the joint from her hand, moving gently, carefully soothing her with only my unspoken demand to hold her. “You going to wake me up in the night,” I tell her, “you might as well entertain me. Tell me where you got this delicacy. Its mashed pecan, right? Tastes just like that batch we got in Atlanta that time we hitchhiked up from Daytona Beach.” Still in her cat’s aspect, Katy looks back at me, her huge eyes cold and ruthless. Her expression makes me want to push into her breast, put my tongue to her throat, and hear her cruel, lovely laugh again. It would be easy, delicious and easy, and not at all the way it had been when she was alive. Alive, she was never easy. “You an’t got no taste at all. It’s Panama City home-grown.” She comes back down on the bed, not disturbing the mattress. “You always talking ’bout that mashed pecan, but first time I got you really stoned on it, you got sick. Spent the night in the bathroom being the most pitiful child. I swear.” “That was Tampa, and that killer Jamaican.” I draw another deep lungful of the sweet smoke. “In Atlanta, you got sick and threw up on the only clean shirt I had with me.” Katy gives her laugh finally, and predictably, I feel the goose bumps rise on my thighs. She settles herself so that her naked left hip is against my shoulder. Her skin is smooth, cool, and wonderful. I put my hand on her thigh, and she leans forward to sniff my cheek and rub her lips on my eyebrows. I cannot touch Katy without remembering making love to her on Danny’s couch with a dozen drunk and stoned people around the corner in the living room; the tickle of the feathers she wore laced into the small braids over her ears, and the cold chill of the knife she always pulled out of her boot and pushed under the pillows, the sheathed blade that always seemed to migrate down to the small of my back. Most of all I remember the talent with which Katy would bite me just hard enough to make me gasp, her bubbling laughter as she whispered, “Don’t make no noise. They’ll hear.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Then she took him by the hand, and led him up to the main room of her house, from whence, without another word, she passed with him into her bedroom, which was all fragrant with roses, orange-blossom and other pleasant odours. There he saw an exquisite curtained bed, a large number of dresses hanging from pegs, as is the custom in those parts, and other very beautiful, expensive looking objects. He had never seen such finery before, and was firmly convinced that the lady must be nothing less than a genuine aristocrat. Having made him sit by her side on a chest at the foot of the bed, she began to address him as follows: ‘Andreuccio, I am quite sure you must be astonished at me for embracing you like this and bursting into tears, for you do not know me and it may be that you have never even heard of me before. But you are now to hear something that will possibly increase your astonishment, for the fact is that I am your sister. I have always longed to meet all of my brothers, and now that God has been good enough to allow me to see one of them, I shall no longer die disconsolate when the time comes for me to depart this life. But in case you know nothing of this, I will tell you all about it. ‘Pietro, who is my father as well as yours, lived for many years in Palermo, as I suppose you may have heard. Being a good and amiable man, he was greatly loved there, and he is still loved there to this day by those who knew him. But of all his profound admirers, none loved him more than my mother, who was a widowed lady of gentle birth. Indeed, she loved Pietro so deeply, that she abandoned all fear of her father, her brothers and her good name, and their friendship became so intimate that it led to the birth of the person you see here now, sitting beside you. ‘When I was still a little girl, Pietro’s business called him away from Palermo and he returned to Perugia, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves, and as far as I have been able to discover, he never gave either of us another thought. For this reason, but for the fact that he was my father, I would be inclined to reproach him bitterly, considering (to say nothing of the affection he should have had for me, his own daughter, born neither of a serving-wench nor of any low-class woman) the ingratitude he displayed towards my mother. For she, prompted by her unswerving devotion, surrendered herself body and soul to this man, without so much as knowing who he was.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘My lady,’ said Anichino, ‘I am greatly afraid that you might be offended, if I were to tell you; and for all I know you might repeat it to some other person.’ ‘I shall certainly not take it amiss,’ said the lady, ‘and you may rest assured that no matter what you tell me, I shan’t repeat a word of it to anyone without your permission.’ So Anichino said: ‘Since you give me this assurance, I shall tell you all about it.’ And controlling his tears with an effort, he told her who he was, the things he had heard about her, how and where he had fallen in love with her, how he had come to Bologna, and why he had entered her husband’s service. Then he humbly asked her whether she could bring herself to take pity on him, and grant him the secret desire that burned so fiercely in his heart. But if she was unwilling to do this, he begged her to be content that he should love her, and allow him to continue in her service. Ah, how singularly sweet is the blood of Bologna!3 How admirably you rise to the occasion in moments such as these! Sighs and tears were never to your liking: entreaties have always moved you, and you were ever susceptible to a lover’s yearnings. If only I could find words with which to commend you as you deserve, I should never grow tired of singing your praises! Whilst Anichino was speaking, the gentlewoman fixed her gaze upon him, and being fully convinced of his sincerity, she was so overcome by his protestations of love that she, too, began to sigh. And when her sighs had abated, she replied:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Presently, after they had risen from table and had abidden with him awhile in cheerful discourse, the lady, thinking it time to tell that wherefor she was come, turned to Federigo and courteously bespoke him, saying, 'Federigo, I doubt not a jot but that, when thou hearest that which is the especial occasion of my coming hither, thou wilt marvel at my presumption, remembering thee of thy past life and of my virtue, which latter belike thou reputedst cruelty and hardness of heart; but, if thou hadst or hadst had children, by whom thou mightest know how potent is the love one beareth them, meseemeth certain that thou wouldst in part hold me excused. But, although thou hast none, I, who have one child, cannot therefore escape the common laws to which other mothers are subject and whose enforcements it behoveth me ensue, need must I, against my will and contrary to all right and seemliness, ask of thee a boon, which I know is supremely dear to thee (and that with good reason, for that thy sorry fortune hath left thee none other delight, none other diversion, none other solace), to wit, thy falcon, whereof my boy is so sore enamoured that, an I carry it not to him, I fear me his present disorder will be so aggravated that there may presently ensue thereof somewhat whereby I shall lose him. Wherefore I conjure thee,--not by the love thou bearest me and whereto thou art nowise beholden, but by thine own nobility, which in doing courtesy hath approved itself greater than in any other,--that it please thee give it to me, so by the gift I may say I have kept my son alive and thus made him for ever thy debtor.'

• From Trash (1988)

  I feel her tongue licking my cheek, wet and almost as rough as a cat’s tongue. My whole body goes stiff, and my hands ball up into fists. “Why do you keep coming back? Why don’t you leave me alone? You weren’t worth the trouble when you were alive and you sure aren’t doing me any good now.” I start to fight her, trying to pull away or push her away. But she is smoke only, a cloud on my skin, and I can’t escape her. “Motherfucker . . .” I give it up to cry and turn my face into the pillow of her hair. It smells so sweet and familiar, marijuana and patchouli. Katy’s shoulders ride up and down. She arches her back and slides her body over so that her belly is on top of mine. I almost scream from the intensity of the sensation. It feels so good. It feels so awful. “You loved me.” She says it right into the hollow of my ear. “You love me still. Even after you left me, you loved me. You couldn’t stand me, and you damn sure couldn’t save me. But you couldn’t stand it without me either. So here I am. Feel me.” She drums her knuckles on my hipbone. Her teeth nip my neck. I gasp and arch up into her. “I’m part of you,” she whispers. “Right down in the core of you.” I pull myself back down and lie still, giving it up. “I know.” I push my face up. My mouth covers her, tastes her. Her tongue is bitter honey, sliding between my lips, filling my mouth, pushing my own tongue up to the roof of my mouth, expanding until I think I will choke. But I do not fight. I take her in. I want to swallow her, all of her. If she is a ghost, then why not? She could melt into my bones. We could be the same creature. My hips begin to rock. My fingers curl up and try to grip her waist. A heated sweat rises all over my body. I want to rise up like steam into her, pull up right off my own bones, and become something in the air, a scent of marijuana and patchouli, something sweet and nasty and impossibly sad. But I cannot get hold of her. My very movements seem to push her up and away, the cloud of her becoming mistlike, gossamer and fading. “No!” Her thumb is in the hollow of my throat. My own pulse roars in my ears. Her laughter is soft, too soft. “Stop,” she says and it comes from very far away. Too far. “You’ll make yourself sick.” “I’ll take a pill.” “Junkie.” She laughs again. Her pleasure in being able to say that to me almost makes me laugh back. “You take too many pills.”

• From Trash (1988)

  One time, twice, once in a while again, I get it right. Once in a while, I can make the world I know real on the page. I can make the women and men I love breathe out loud in an empty room, the dreams I dare not speak shape up in the smoky darkness of other people’s imaginations. Writing these stories is the only way I know to make sure of my ongoing decision to live, to set moment to moment a small piece of stubbornness against an ocean of ignorance and obliteration. I write stories. I write fiction. I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life—the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed, working- class lesbian, addicted to violence, language, and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine. River of Names A t a picnic at my aunt’s farm, the only time the whole family ever gathered, my sister Billie and I chased chickens into the barn. Billie ran right through the open doors and out again, but I stopped, caught by a shadow moving over me. My Cousin Tommy, eight years old as I was, swung in the sunlight with his face as black as his shoes—the rope around his neck pulled up into the sunlit heights of the barn, fascinating, horrible. Wasn’t he running ahead of us? Someone came up behind me. Someone began to scream. My mama took my head in her hands and turned my eyes away. Jesse and I have been lovers for a year now. She tells me stories about her childhood, about her father going off each day to the university, her mother who made all her dresses, her grandmother who always smelled of dill bread and vanilla. I listen with my mouth open, not believing but wanting, aching for the fairy tale she thinks is everyone’s life. “What did your grandmother smell like?” I lie to her the way I always do, a lie stolen from a book. “Like lavender,” stomach churning over the memory of sour sweat and snuff. I realize I do not really know what lavender smells like, and I am for a moment afraid she will ask something else, some question that will betray me. But Jesse slides over to hug me, to press her face against my ear, to whisper, “How wonderful to be part of such a large family.” I hug her back and close my eyes. I cannot say a word. I was born between the older cousins and the younger, born in a pause of babies and therefore outside, always watching. Once, way before Tommy died, I was pushed out on the steps while everyone stood listening to my Cousin Barbara.

• From Trash (1988)

  Imagine what kind of a woman sits still, safe in her own mind, slow as myrtle leaves turning. Sugar thickening the blood in her veins, pressure pinking her skin. Wanting nothing more than new plumbing and her daughters’ slow movement forward, alive. Some man to come along now and then, never quite as real as the man who lives behind her eyes. Temple writes me once a year, a letter that lists who’s died, who’s been born, a letter that ends with a reminder of who she is. She is my favorite cousin, after me the most remarkable, the one who lived with us the year I was seven, the year Mama almost died, the year she first had cancer and I fell in love with the very idea of redheaded women. “Do you hear from Temple?” Mama always asks me. “She say anything about the girls? Heard from Dot that Maryat was planning on getting married and Claire wasn’t doing very well at all.” Every year I do not go home, it hurts me. I think of Temple, the year I was seven and she was eighteen; the year I was eleven and she lost her lover; the year she lost her teeth and her baby girl; the years I realized she would never be mine. “Do you hear from Temple?” my mama, my cousins, my aunts always ask. I am the one she writes to, and if I have not heard from her then no one has. Sometimes I do not answer, I fall into Temple’s white-eyed memories, the silence of her flushed cheeks, her thin face and hot eyes. The wolf in my neck bares his teeth, stretches, lays one paw on the other, dreaming of fire and sparks raining down, myrtle leaves blackening in the heat. I fight the wolf, fight him with my love for Temple. I hug to myself the warmth and stillness of her porch, the certainty that she does not fear the wolf as I do, the wolf in her, the wolf who hides his teeth but watches, watches out of her eyes. Notes: Lupus: Any of various skin diseases; especially a chronic tuberculosis disease of the skin or mucous membranes; a particularly dangerous disease of metabolic origin—incurable but sometimes controlled by steroid drugs—which exhausts the energies of its victims and necessitates an extremely careful restricted life. Lupus: A wolf, from “eating into the substance of”; cancer. Compassion I n the last days Mama’s mouth cracked and bled. Pearly blisters spread down her chin to her throat. The nurses moved her to a room with a sink by the bed and a stern command to wash up every time you touched her. “Herpes,” Mavis, the floor nurse, told me. “Contagious at this stage.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  SEVENTH STORYLodovico discloses to Madonna Beatrice how deeply he loves her, whereupon she persuades her husband, Egano, to impersonate her in a garden, and goes to bed with Lodovico, who in due course gets up, goes into the garden, and gives Egano a hiding. The stratagem adopted by Madonna Isabella, as recounted by Pampinea, drew gasps of astonishment from every member of the company. But the king now called upon Filomena to follow, and she said: Lovesome ladies, unless I am much mistaken I think I can offer you no less splendid a story, which will not take long to relate. You are to know, then, that in Paris there was once a Florentine nobleman, who on account of his straitened circumstances decided to become a merchant, in which capacity he was so successful that he made a huge fortune. His wife had borne him no more than a single child, to whom he had given the name of Lodovico, and because this child was more of a patrician’s son than the son of a merchant, instead of launching him on a career in business the father had secured him a place in the French royal household, where he was brought up with other young nobles and acquired the manners and attributes of a gentleman. One day, whilst Lodovico happened to be discussing with several other young men the rival merits of various beautiful ladies from France, England, and other parts of the world, they were joined by a number of knights who had recently returned from the Holy Sepulchre. And one of these latter began to maintain that of all the women he had ever seen in the numerous places he had visited, he had never encountered anyone so beautiful as Madonna Beatrice, the wife of Egano de’ Galluzzi,1 who lived in Bologna. Moreover, he claimed that those of his companions who, like himself, had seen the lady in Bologna, were entirely of the same opinion. Having listened to this gentleman’s words, Lodovico, who had never yet fallen in love, was inflamed with such a longing to see her that he could think of nothing else. And having firmly made up his mind to go to Bologna and see this lady, and to stay there for a while if she lived up to his expectations, he gave his father to understand that he wished to go to the Holy Sepulchre, and with the greatest of difficulty obtained his permission.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Thus, dear my lord, thy vassal am I grown And of thy might obediently await Grace for my lowliness; Yet wot I not if wholly there be known The high desire that in my breast thou'st set And my sheer faith, no less, Of her who doth possess My heart so that from none beneath the skies, Save her alone, peace would I take or prize. Wherefore I pray thee, sweet my lord and sire, Discover it to her and cause her taste Some scantling of thy heat To-me-ward,--for thou seest that in the fire, Loving, I languish and for torment waste By inches at her feet,-- And eke in season meet Commend me to her favour on such wise As I would plead for thee, should need arise.[293] [Footnote 293: This singularly naïve give-and-take fashion of asking a favour of a God recalls the old Scotch epitaph cited by Mr. George Macdonald: Here lie I Martin Elginbrodde: Hae mercy o' my soul, Lord God; As I wad do, were I Lord God And ye were Martin Elginbrodde.] Dioneo, by his silence, showing that his song was ended, the queen let sing many others, having natheless much commended his. Then, somedele of the night being spent and the queen feeling the heat of the day to be now overcome of the coolness of the night, she bade each at his pleasure betake himself to rest against the ensuing day. HERE ENDETH THE FIFTH DAY OF THE DECAMERON _Day the Sixth_ HERE BEGINNETH THE SIXTH DAY OF THE DECAMERON WHEREIN UNDER THE GOVERNANCE OF ELISA IS DISCOURSED OF WHOSO BEING ASSAILED WITH SOME JIBING SPEECH HATH VINDICATED HIMSELF OR HATH WITH SOME READY REPLY OR ADVISEMENT ESCAPED LOSS, PERIL OR SHAME

• From Trash (1988)

  “Sit up,” she says. “I won’t bite you.” But her teeth are sharp in the pale light, and I sit up warily. The only predictable thing about Katy was her stubborn perversity; she would mostly do whatever she swore solemnly she would not. “Shit,” I whisper, and roll over. She laughs and passes me a joint. The smoke wreathes her like a cloak, heavy and sweet around us. I inhale deeply, grin up at her and say, “My hallucinations get me stoned.” “Lucky you. It costs everyone else money.” She blows smoke out her nose. Katy has a matter-of-fact manner about her tonight, very unlike herself. It’s been three years since she OD’d, and in that time she’s grown more urgent, not less. This strange air of calmness disturbs me. If the dead lose their restlessness, do they finally go away? Something falls in the other room, wood striking wood. It’s probably Molly going to the bathroom a little drunk as usual, knocking things over. Katy slides up on one knee and clutches the edge of the waterbed frame. If she were a cat her hair would be on end. As it is, the hair above her ears seems suddenly fuller. I reach over and take the joint from her hand, moving gently, carefully soothing her with only my unspoken demand to hold her. “You going to wake me up in the night,” I tell her, “you might as well entertain me. Tell me where you got this delicacy. Its mashed pecan, right? Tastes just like that batch we got in Atlanta that time we hitchhiked up from Daytona Beach.” Still in her cat’s aspect, Katy looks back at me, her huge eyes cold and ruthless. Her expression makes me want to push into her breast, put my tongue to her throat, and hear her cruel, lovely laugh again. It would be easy, delicious and easy, and not at all the way it had been when she was alive. Alive, she was never easy. “You an’t got no taste at all. It’s Panama City home-grown.” She comes back down on the bed, not disturbing the mattress. “You always talking ’bout that mashed pecan, but first time I got you really stoned on it, you got sick. Spent the night in the bathroom being the most pitiful child. I swear.” “That was Tampa, and that killer Jamaican.” I draw another deep lungful of the sweet smoke. “In Atlanta, you got sick and threw up on the only clean shirt I had with me.”

• From Trash (1988)

  Red beans and rice, chicken necks and dumplings, pot roast with vinegar and cloves stuck in the onions, salmon patties with white sauce, refried beans on warm tortillas, sweet duck with scallions and pancakes, lamb cooked with olive oil and lemon slices, pan-fried pork chops and red-eye gravy, potato pancakes with applesauce, polenta with spaghetti sauce floating on top—food is more than sustenance: it is history. I remember women by what we ate together, what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I’ve only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long. The sex was good, but I couldn’t think what to do with her when the sex was finished. We drank spring water together and fought a lot. I grew an ulcer in my belly once I was out in the world on my own. I think of it as an always-angry place inside me, a tyranny that takes good food and turns it like a blade scraping at the hard place where I try to hide my temper. Some days I think it is the rightful reward for my childhood. If I had eaten right, Lee used to tell me, there would never have been any trouble. “Rickets, poor eyesight, appendicitis, warts, and bad skin,” she insisted, “they’re all caused by bad eating habits, poor diet.” It’s true. The diet of poor southerners is among the worst in the world, though it’s tasty, very tasty. There’s pork fat or chicken grease in every dish; white sugar in the cobblers, pralines, and fudge; and flour, fat, and salt in the gravies—lots of salt in everything. The vegetables get cooked to limp strands with no fiber left at all. Mothers give sidemeat to their toddlers as pacifiers and slip them whiskey with honey at the first sign of teething, a cold, or a fever. Most of my cousins lost their teeth in their twenties and took up drinking as easily as they put sugar in their iced tea. I try not to eat so much sugar, try not to drink, try to limit pork and salt and white flour, but the truth is I am always hungry for it—the smell and taste of the food my mama fed me. Poor white trash I am for sure. I eat shit food and am not worthy. My family starts with good teeth but loses them early. Five of my cousins bled to death before thirty-five, their stomachs finally surrendering to sugar and whiskey and fat and salt. I’ve given it up. If I cannot eat what I want, then I’ll eat what I must, but my dreams will always be flooded with salt and grease, crisp fried stuff that sweetens my mouth and feeds my soul. I would rather starve death than myself.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Other common features of amour courtois are the lover’s sighs and the lover’s tears, both of which Boccaccio exploits to good effect in many of the tales. The account of Lodovico’s amor de lonh for Madonna Beatrice (VII, 7) includes an episode where Lodovico, having allowed Beatrice to defeat him in a game of chess, heaves an enormous sigh as a prelude to revealing his love for her, after which she too begins to sigh. In the story of Zima’s adulterous love for the wife of Francesco Vergellesi (III, 5), the lady’s ‘barely perceptible sighs’ are the only means she has of responding to the amorous outpourings of her admirer, for she has been forbidden by her husband to utter a word during the meeting he has arranged between them for purposes of his own.46 Although the tale is set in fourteenth-century Pistoia, its connection with the literature of Provence is observable in a seemingly anachronistic reference to Zima’s tilting at the jousts and his troubadour-like skills in the composition of aubades. But even more indicative of its amour courtois antecedents is the lengthy monologue addressed by Zima to the lady, so fulsome in its protestations of love as to leave the impression that Boccaccio is engaged, as in the story of Titus and Gisippus (X, 8), in a deliberate parody of his literary models.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then from out of that still and unearthly night, there crept upon Stephen an unearthly longing. A longing that was not any more of the body but rather of the weary and homesick spirit that endured the chains of that body. And when she must drive past the gates of Morton, the longing within her seemed beyond all bearing, for she wanted to lift the sleeping woman in her arms and carry her in through those gates; and carry her in through the heavy white door; and carry her up the wide, shallow staircase, and lay her down on her own bed, still sleeping, but safe in the good care of Morton. Angela suddenly opened her eyes: ‘ Where am I?” she mut- tered, stupid with sleep. Then after a moment her eyes filled with tears, and there she sat all huddled up, crying. Stephen said gently: ‘ It’s all right, don’t cry.’ But Angela went on crying. CHAPTER 26 I ‘fees a river that has gradually risen to flood, until it sweeps everything before it, so now events rose and gathered in strength towards their inevitable conclusion. At the end of May Ralph must go to his mother, who was said to be dying at her house in Brighton. With all his faults he had been a good son, and the redness of his eyes was indeed from real tears as he kissed his wife good-bye at the station, on his way to his dying mother. The next morning he wired that his mother was dead, but that he could not get home for a couple of weeks. As it happened, he gave the actual day and hour of his return, so that Angela knew it. The relief of his unexpectedly long absence went to Stephen’s head; she grew much more exacting, suggesting all sorts of in- timate plans. Supposing they went for a few days to London? Supposing they motored to Symond’s Yat and stayed at the little hotel by the river? They might even push on to Abergavenny and from there motor up and explore the Black Mountains — why not? It was glorious weather. ‘ Angela, please come away with me, darling — just for a few days — we’ve never done it, and I’ve longed to so often. You can’t refuse, there’s nothing on earth to prevent your coming.’ But Angela would not make up her mind, she seemed sud- denly anxious about her husband: ‘ Poor devil, he was awfully fond of his mother. I oughtn’t to go, it would look so heartless with the old woman dead and Ralph so unhappy —’ Stephen said bitterly; ‘ What about me? Do you think I’m never unhappy?’ So the time slipped by in heartaches and quarrels, for Ste- phen’s taut nerves were like spurs to her temper, and she stormed or reproached in her dire disappointment: ‘ You pretend that you love me and yet you won’t come — and 218 THE WELL OF LONELINESS