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.

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• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Herbert’s care at the veterans hospital in New York City slowly allowed him to recover. He eventually met a nurse there, a woman from Dothan, Alabama, whose compassionate care made him feel comfortable and hopeful for the first time, perhaps, in his entire life. When she was around, he felt alive and believed things would be all right. She had saved his life. When she moved back home to Alabama, Herbert followed. He tried to date her and even told her he wanted to marry her. At first she resisted because she knew that Herbert was still suffering the effects of his time in combat, but ultimately she gave in. They had a brief intimate relationship, and Herbert had never been happier. He became intensely protective of his girlfriend. But she began to see his desperate and relentless focus on her as something closer to obsessive need than love. She tried to end the relationship. After months of unsuccessfully trying to create distance from Herbert, she finally insisted that he stay away. Instead, Herbert moved even closer to her home in Dothan, which elevated her anxieties. It got to the point where she refused to allow him to see her, talk to her, or get anywhere near her. Herbert was convinced that she was just confused and would eventually come back to him. He was deluded by obsession; his logic and reasoning became corrupted, irrational, and increasingly dangerous. Herbert was not unintelligent—in fact, he was quite smart, with a particular aptitude for electronics and mechanics. And he had a big heart. But he was still recovering from the trauma of the war as well as some serious traumas that preceded his military experience. His mother had died when he was just three years old, and he had struggled with drugs and alcohol before he decided to enlist. The horrors of war had added a new level of distress to an already damaged psyche. He came up with an idea to win back his girlfriend. He decided that if she felt threatened, she would come to him for protection. He concocted a tragically misguided plan: He would construct a small bomb and place it on her front porch. He would detonate the bomb and then run to her aid to save her and then they would live happily ever after. It was the kind of reckless use of explosives that wouldn’t have been sensible in a combat zone, much less in a poor black neighborhood in Dothan, Alabama.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  There is a story there, though I’ll likely never hear it. Mamaw dreamed of turning that passion into a career as a children’s attorney —serving as a voice for those who lacked one. She never pursued that dream, possibly because she didn’t know what becoming an attorney took. Mamaw never spent a day in high school. She’d given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car. Even if she’d known what was required, her new lifestyle offered little encouragement or opportunity for an aspiring law student with three children and a husband. Despite the setbacks, both of my grandparents had an almost religious faith in hard work and the American Dream. Neither was under any illusions that wealth or privilege didn’t matter in America. On politics, for example, Mamaw had one opinion—“They’re all a bunch of crooks”—but Papaw became a committed Democrat. He had no problem with Armco, but he and everyone like him hated the coal companies in Kentucky thanks to a long history of labor strife. So, to Papaw and Mamaw, not all rich people were bad, but all bad people were rich. Papaw was a Democrat because that party protected the working people. This attitude carried over to Mamaw: All politicians might be crooks, but if there were any exceptions, they were undoubtedly members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. Still, Mamaw and Papaw believed that hard work mattered more. They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn’t excuse failure. “Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them,” my grandma often told me. “You can do anything you want to.” Their community shared this faith, and in the 1950s that faith appeared well founded. Within two generations, the transplanted hillbillies had largely caught up to the native population in terms of income and poverty level. Yet their financial success masked their cultural unease, and if my grandparents caught up economically, I wonder if they ever truly assimilated. They always had one foot in the new life and one foot in the old one. They slowly acquired a small number of friends but remained strongly rooted in their Kentucky homeland. They hated domesticated animals and had little use for “critters” that weren’t for eating, yet they eventually relented to the children’s demands for dogs and cats. Their children, though, were different. My mom’s generation was the first to grow up in the industrial Midwest, far from the deep twangs and one-room schools of the hills. They attended modern high schools with thousands of other students.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we slowed towards stops I looked around at the other passengers, wary slumpers and strap-hangers who never met each other’s eyes for more than a fraction of a second. Half-heartedly playing the game James and I used to play I tried to select which person in the carriage I would least object to having sex with. Occasionally the choice could be made difficult by the presence of too many scrumptious schoolboys or too many dusty-handed navvies. Normally, as now, the problem was to choose between that businessman, regular and suited but with a moody something about him, and the too-tall youth in the doorway giving off a tinny, high-hat patter from his headphones, and looking flightily around through a haze of Trouble for Men. It was James’s theory that everyone had about them some wrinkle at least of lovability, some peculiar and attractive thing—a theory which gained poignancy from the problems in applying it. Consoling and yet absurd, how the sexual imagination took such easy possession of the ungiving world. I was certainly not alone in this carriage in sliding my thoughts between the legs of other passengers. Desires, brutal or tender, silent but evolved, were in the shiftless air, and hung about each jaded traveller, whose life was not as good as it might have been. I remembered for some reason a little public lavatory in Winchester, a urinal and a couple of cubicles visited by bandy-legged old men going to the market and at night by ghostly fantasists who left their traces. It was up an alley where the College turned one of its high stone corners against the town—not a place for boys, for scholars, though I went there once or twice with an almost scholarly curiosity. The cistern filled for ever, the floor was slippery, there was no toilet paper, and between the cubicles a number of holes had been diligently bored, large enough only to spy through. Talentless drawings covered the walls, and wishful assignations, and also, misspelt in laborious capitals, long unparagraphed accounts of sexual acts—‘they had her together … 12 inches … at the bus station’. In between these were fantastic rendezvous, often vague to allow for disappointment, but able sometimes to touch you with their suggestion of a shadowy world in which town and gown pried on each other. I had read: ‘College boy, blond, big cock, in here Friday—meet me next Friday, 9 pm.’ Then: ‘Tuesday?’ Then: ‘Next Friday November 10’ … I had thought almost it could have been me, until I just made out, bleared and over-written, the date ‘1964’: a decade of dark November Fridays, generations of College blonds, had already passed since those anonymous words were written.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Children of Divorce Having ChildrenAS I GLANCED out the window, I caught a glimpse of Maya in her bright purple sweater happily playing with another child. Karen followed my glance and smiled. “We decided to have a child right away because I’m not getting any younger. I was thirty-four when we married and happily it only took a year for me to get pregnant. She’s been a delight from the beginning. Gavin’s a wonderful father. He does a lot more than most men I see. He comes home and plays with her several evenings a week. I get a break and he loves it. It’s been very important for me to have a child.” “You mean important in some very special way?” “Yes, I do. It was like having a child gave me another chance—for me and for Maya. I have a lot of expectations for her and you might say they are based on what I didn’t have. I want her very much to have a childhood that was not like mine.” “Like how?” “What I want for her is not to be worried about her mom the way that I worried my whole life about mine. I don’t want her to take care of me. I want to take care of her. I want to give her all the love and security that I never had. I want for her to have everything I never had. I want her to play. I want her to have time to spend with her friends in school without worrying about what’s happening at home. I want her, unlike me, to think of things she enjoys for herself. When she grows up, I want her to think back on her childhood and to know what it was like to be a happy child.” As I listened to Karen, tears welled in my eyes. I looked at this caregiver child as she talked passionately about her own daughter. “You’ve really put your heart into mothering.” “Yes, as a matter of fact, it’s linked to one of the biggest decisions of my life. I decided after she was born to leave my job and to work part-time. I want to take care of her myself. I want to be home with my daughter. I’m not sure for how long, but definitely until she gets into elementary school. My career means a lot to me, but I felt I had to make a choice. The truth is, and I had to face it, that if I wanted to stay and play the game at the top, I would have had only six weeks leave after Maya was born and then I would have had to go back to work full-time. So I bit the bullet and got off the ladder. I’m working half-time.” “Will you be able to get back where you left off? I know how important that program was and how you built it yourself.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  After every piece I scrub, I stretch to relieve the strain in my back that comes from leaning over the tub. I’ll wash everything except the clothes we have on. After wringing them out, I carry the damp bunch and hang them everywhere in the house: on doorknobs, hooks, and the backs of the couches and chairs. Then I open the back door and un-jam all the windows to let the air circulate. EACH DAY FOR the next two weeks, the kids and I walk with a packed lunch to the park or the Middle Country Public Library. The kids moan about the sweltering forty-minute trek and are relieved when we’re finally situated at the library, which mercifully blasts with air-conditioning. They don’t know that I spent the two-mile trek watching for Doug’s brown Chevrolet or any possible hint that Camille’s about to return. At a library table we play Mad Libs and muse through the Highlights magazines together. When the kids are quietly wrapped in their storybooks, I find myself living with my favorite characters in the worlds of Judy Blume novels. I don’t care that I’ve already read Deenie , Forever , and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Camille frowned upon me reading Forever —“It’s not for kids your age,” she said—but then, Camille’s not here . . . and I’m not a kid my age. Anyway, as I’ve told Camille, I’m not concerned with the sex. I love the story because of the romance. I also go through every biography they have on Amelia Earhart, my heroine. Amelia was brave and courageous. She didn’t let others limit her dreams and she never took no for an answer. Amelia Earhart made her own rules. And unlike Cookie, she wasn’t interested in being dependent on a man. In fact, after Amelia broke off her first engagement, she waited until she was thirty-three to marry George Putnam, who actually had to propose to her six times before she finally agreed. Her husband was jokingly referred to as “Mr. Earhart,” and on the morning of their wedding, Amelia had a friend deliver him a note that read: I want you to understand that I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. How thrilling! So fearless! When I’m searching for a solution or scared at night, I’ve begun to ask myself: What would Amelia do? The answer always makes me feel braver. BY THE END of July, we’ve settled into a routine I’m confident with, but my worries about getting food never end. With only me present to search for food, my resolution to eat more isn’t so successful. Since we don’t have enough food to go around, I often skip meals. When I start to feel weak and jittery, I take a swig of vinegar.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  On the contrary, Jerome (Ep. liii ad Paulin.) urges him to acquire learning in the monastic state, saying: “Let us learn on earth those things the knowledge of which will remain in heaven,” and further on: “Whatever you seek to know, I will endeavor to know with you.” I answer that As stated above [3825](A[2]), religion may be ordained to the active and to the contemplative life. Now chief among the works of the active life are those which are directly ordained to the salvation of souls, such as preaching and the like. Accordingly the study of letters is becoming to the religious life in three ways. First, as regards that which is proper to the contemplative life, to which the study of letters helps in a twofold manner. In one way by helping directly to contemplate, namely by enlightening the intellect. For the contemplative life of which we are now speaking is directed chiefly to the consideration of divine things, as stated above (Q[180], A[4]), to which consideration man is directed by study; for which reason it is said in praise of the righteous (Ps. 1:2) that “he shall meditate day and night” on the law of the Lord, and (Ecclus. 39:1): “The wise man will seek out the wisdom of all the ancients, and will be occupied in the prophets.” In another way the study of letters is a help to the contemplative life indirectly, by removing the obstacles to contemplation, namely the errors which in the contemplation of divine things frequently beset those who are ignorant of the scriptures. Thus we read in the Conferences of the Fathers (Coll. x, 3) that the Abbot Serapion through simplicity fell into the error of the Anthropomorphites, who thought that God had a human shape. Hence Gregory says (Moral. vi) that “some through seeking in contemplation more than they are able to grasp, fall away into perverse doctrines, and by failing to be the humble disciples of truth become the masters of error.” Hence it is written (Eccles. 2:3): “I thought in my heart to withdraw my flesh from wine, that I might turn my mind to wisdom and might avoid folly.” Secondly, the study of letters is necessary in those religious orders that are founded for preaching and other like works; wherefore the Apostle (Titus 1:9), speaking of bishops to whose office these acts belong, says: “Embracing that faithful word which is according to doctrine, that he may be able to exhort in sound doctrine and to convince the gainsayers.” Nor does it matter that the apostles were sent to preach without having studied letters, because, as Jerome says (Ep. liii ad Paulin.), “whatever others acquire by exercise and daily meditation in God’s law, was taught them by the Holy Ghost.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  The smallest stimulus—a certain bar, an old gas station—triggers memories of Cookie; her torment, her smell, her constant reminders that nobody wanted me. So many of the towns were locations where I came and went swiftly, pushed into a random family’s house then swept out again before it ever had the chance to feel like mine. My three other siblings have also not returned. Rosie’s been in Utah since she graduated from college and Norman and Cherie live near each other in Pennsylvania. Of all the places I’ve thought of settling, Suffolk County may be the last spot on earth I ever imagined myself calling home. But Camille is persistent. “Maria asked me yesterday: ‘Mom, what’s the longest Aunt Gi has ever lived anywhere?’ ” “But Camille, Long Island is not exactly—” “Long Island is home. I have the same bad memories you do, Gi. But the kids are growing—they want you around at their games, their plays . . . you’re our family. When we didn’t have anything else, we had each other.” Through all the turns and transitions my existence has taken . . . Camille, Frank, and their kids have been the only constant in my life. Even so, constant shifting has remained more comforting to me than consistency . . . which is why, when I run into Todd Ciaravino one afternoon in August 2006, I’m confronted with yet another situation that calls me to stretch out of my comfort zone. I’m between meetings, exiting a shoe store in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. Just then, Todd walks by and meets my eyes. We take each other in for a moment before we break into smiles, both polished in suits. “What are you doing here?” I ask him. “I had a meeting upstairs.” We exchange a few niceties, and then cell phone numbers, and by the following month we’re back together as an item. Embracing what Camille has been encouraging me to do, I agree to look at properties in Suffolk County, taking plenty of time to explore the North Fork of Long Island. It’s much more low-key than the Hamptons, which sits just across the Peconic Bay, but with its rolling farmlands, peach orchards, and picturesque vineyards, I’m increasingly convinced the North Fork is a place I could see myself planting permanent roots. Todd’s with me in the fall of 2006 when I view a small cottage on the North Fork with a backyard view of a creek off the bay. The shoreline and blue sky remind me of the beach landscape in Saint James where my siblings and I frolicked as kids . . . and I know it’s meant to be mine when it dawns on me how aptly its little hamlet is named: New Suffolk.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Will?’ ‘Yes?’ I sensed some more probing question was coming. ‘Does Arthur and Harold still live in England?’ ‘Oh, I think so, yes.’ ‘He didn’t escape then?’ ‘It doesn’t look like it, my old duck.’ I spent a lackadaisical afternoon, sprawling in the window-seat half-reading the paper, then closing my eyes, as the sun came round. I drifted in and out of sleep, took off my shirt, woke to find the coarse stitching of the tapestry bolster had patterned my slightly sweating back. I thought about Arthur, and how minutely brief our affair had been, and difficult to understand. I saw him again licking my balls; or swallowing as he slowly sat down on my cock; or helpless beneath me, locking his dry heels behind my neck. I hated to think it was over—yet dawdled half-awake in a maudlin, jealous reverie. I imagined him servicing the scarred and despotic Tony as they rolled towards the West End in their black-windowed Cortina. So much had ended, so many things gone crooked and bad—and yet the high June afternoon lasted and lasted, grew stiller, more crystalline. There was no friendly darkness in it. I shifted and slept again. At about drinks time I began to want to do something. I wrapped up my trunks in a towel, flung them in my sports bag with my goggles and soap-box and an American ‘gay thriller’ I had been loaned by Nigel the pool attendant, and trotted off out. The pavements and gardens were exuding their summer smells, and as I approached the Tube station I walked against the current of people coming home, youngsters in pinstripes from the City fanning out from the gates, jackets here and there hooked over a shoulder, smart clippety-clop of old-fashioned City shoes. They were quite handsome, some of these boys, public-school types with peachy complexions and contemptuous eyes. Already they commanded substantial salaries, took long, overpriced lunches, worked out perhaps in private City gyms. In many ways they were like me; yet as they ambled home in the benign and ordered vastness of the evening, as I fleetingly caught their eye or felt them for a moment aware of me, they were an alien breed. And then I was a loafer who had hardly ever actively earned money, and they were the eager initiates, the coiners of the power and the compromise in which I had unthinkingly been raised. My disaffected mood persisted in the sweaty train. Goldie was one of the poorer accessions of the swimming-pool library.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As if he knew what I was thinking he said, with a hint of pride, ‘I’m going to die, you know, quite soon.’ This didn’t seem at all unlikely, but when I none the less havered, he insisted that his ‘Egyptian fortune-teller’ had confirmed it. When he next left the country—for France, quite soon, and then to winter in the desert villages around Cairo—he wd never return. It was a childish & theatrical moment, difficult to respond to seriously, & yet, like occasional lines in melodrama, mordantly moving & true. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he added. I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’ Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: These six denote the steps whereby we ascend by means of creatures to the contemplation of God. For the first step consists in the mere consideration of sensible objects; the second step consists in going forward from sensible to intelligible objects; the third step is to judge of sensible objects according to intelligible things; the fourth is the absolute consideration of the intelligible objects to which one has attained by means of sensibles; the fifth is the contemplation of those intelligible objects that are unattainable by means of sensibles, but which the reason is able to grasp; the sixth step is the consideration of such intelligible things as the reason can neither discover nor grasp, which pertain to the sublime contemplation of divine truth, wherein contemplation is ultimately perfected. Reply to Objection 4: The ultimate perfection of the human intellect is the divine truth: and other truths perfect the intellect in relation to the divine truth. Whether in the present state of life the contemplative life can reach to the vision of the Divine essence?Objection 1: It would seem that in the present state of life the contemplative life can reach to the vision of the Divine essence. For, as stated in Gn. 32:30, Jacob said: “I have seen God face to face, and my soul has been saved.” Now the vision of God’s face is the vision of the Divine essence. Therefore it would seem that in the present life one may come, by means of contemplation, to see God in His essence. Objection 2: Further, Gregory says (Moral. vi, 37) that “contemplative men withdraw within themselves in order to explore spiritual things, nor do they ever carry with them the shadows of things corporeal, or if these follow them they prudently drive them away: but being desirous of seeing the incomprehensible light, they suppress all the images of their limited comprehension, and through longing to reach what is above them, they overcome that which they are.” Now man is not hindered from seeing the Divine essence, which is the incomprehensible light, save by the necessity of turning to corporeal phantasms. Therefore it would seem that the contemplation of the present life can extend to the vision of the incomprehensible light in its essence. Objection 3: Further, Gregory says (Dial. ii, 35): “All creatures are small to the soul that sees its Creator: wherefore when the man of God,” the blessed Benedict, to wit, “saw a fiery globe in the tower and angels returning to heaven, without doubt he could only see such things by the light of God.” Now the blessed Benedict was still in this life. Therefore the contemplation of the present life can extend to the vision of the essence of God.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  As soon as he began to count in my life art ceased to be a luxury and became a resource, a form of succor. I have forced this image upon the world: there are today more portraits of that youth than of any illustrious man whatsoever, or of any queen. At first my desire was to have recorded in sculpture the successive beauties of a changing form; but later, art became a kind of magical operation, capable of evoking a countenance lost. Colossal effigies seemed to offer one means of expressing the true proportions which love gives to those we cherish; I wanted those images to be enormous, like a face seen at close range, tall and solemn figures, like visions and apparitions in a terrifying dream, and as overwhelming as the memory itself has remained. I demanded perfect execution, nay, perfection pure; in short, that god who every boy dying at twenty is for those who have loved him; but I sought also an exact resemblance, the familiar presence and each irregularity of a face dearer than beauty itself. How many discussions it cost to keep intact the heavy line of an eyebrow, that slightly swollen curve of the lip. ... I was counting desperately on the eternity of stone and the fidelity of bronze to perpetuate a body which was perishable, or already destroyed, but I also insisted that the marble, rubbed daily with a mixture of acid and oil, should take on the shimmer, and almost the softness, of youthful flesh. The face was unique, still I found it everywhere; I amalgamated divinities, sexes, and eternal attributes, the hardy Diana of the forests with the melancholy Bacchus, the vigorous Hermes of the palaestrae with the twofold god who sleeps, head on arm, like a fallen flower. I remarked how much a thoughtful young man resembles a virile Athena. My sculptors went slightly astray; the less able fell into the error of too soft a line, or too obvious; all, however, were more or less caught up in the dream. There are statues and paintings of the youth alive, reflecting that immense and changing landscape which extends from the fifteenth to the twentieth year: the serious profile of the obedient child; that statue where a sculptor of Corinth has ventured to retain the careless ease of a young boy with lounging posture and sloping shoulders, one hand on his hip, as if he were watching a game of dice at some street corner. There is that marble where Papias of Aphrodisias has outlined a body tenderly nude, with the delicate resilience of narcissus.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  All of you were wrong; Camille’s going to be fine . I block out everyone’s input except my teachers’, knowing my only hopes of ever rescuing Rosie lay in my understanding of how the system works and getting respect from the people who work in it. A thousand times a day I repeat this to myself: College degree. BY THE TIME I turn sixteen during junior year, I’ve gotten a job at Rickel Home Center a few miles away from Addie and Pete’s. Until Sheryl takes a job at the register next to mine, the work is so boring that to make the time pass I talk to the customers in a British accent. Sometimes I walk all the way there, and other times I catch the bus that takes me a third of the way, then I walk the rest. Sometimes when they can, Addie or Pete will drop me off or my friends Erin and Tracey will give me a lift, now that they both have their permits. Of course, friends with cars present the opportunity for more interaction with boys, because now we’re able to go places unsupervised. Addie reminds me to focus on my studies, and I tell her there’s no need to be concerned. I’ve started dating a boy named Eddie . . . but despite the appearances I create for his sake, I have no real interest in bonding with him. First, while he’s worried about soccer practice and trying to get me alone to make a move, I’m more concerned about my studies and plotting out my next conversation with Cookie to see how Rosie’s really doing. Plus, I know what troubles boys can bring—the same troubles Cookie’s always getting herself into. So with Eddie, I let on like I’m invested, while also doing my best to control my tendency to cut and run when he gets too close. There’s a much more important man tugging at my heart: Paul Accerbi, who, as of this autumn, no longer appears in the Suffolk County phone book. For months after I notice his listing missing, I contemplate what to do. Finally, I rip out the page where his name used to be and study it on the annual February Disney World quest. While hidden away in the top bunk of the mobile home, I stare obsessively at the place where his name used to be . . . then something new jumps out at me: There’s an Accerbi in Lindenhurst, whose names sound familiar: Frank and Julia. How is this just now coming to me? I recall Cherie and Camille talking about an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank and the willow tree we would sit under with them. But with no phone on the camper, I can’t call my sisters to verify the memory. Cherie and Camille used to tell me stories about different places we lived when I was little, and the names they’d given them all.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Part One is about Karen, a child who takes on adult responsibilities at the breakup and continues in this caretaker role throughout her growing-up years. This experience shapes all of Karen’s adult relationships and her view of motherhood in unexpected ways. I compare her development to the life story of Gary, a young man who was raised by two parents who resolved to stay married despite their unhappiness with each other. Gary’s story addresses the question of when and whether people who are unhappy can or should stay together for the sake of their children. Part Two is about Larry, a boy who was raised amid scenes of domestic violence. When his mother left the marriage, seven-year-old Larry was enraged and sought to restore the marriage with the collusive help of his father. I compare Larry’s life to the experiences had by Carol, a young woman whose parents engaged in lifelong violence with zero intention of ever separating. Larry and Carol shed light on the perceptions of children and adolescents raised in violent families and how these attitudes affect their adult lives. Part Three is about Paula, a young child who suffered intense loneliness after divorce when her mother had to go to school and work fulltime. In adulthood, Paula is herself a single parent who is starting over after a wild adolescence and an impulsive early marriage. Her story enables me to explore the long-term effect of court-ordered visiting, joint custody, and other court policies that shape children’s lives and attitudes toward their parents. No person in our comparison group suffered an experience equivalent to Paula’s sudden loss of a loving protective environment, and so they are not included in this section. Part Four is about Billy, a child who was born with a congenital heart condition and who had special needs that prevented him from adapting to his parents’ new lives. Divorce is particularly challenging for such vulnerable children who are not able to handle change very well. In this section, I also explore the issue of who pays for college when obligatory child support stops at age eighteen. Part Five is about Lisa, who was raised in a family where every effort was made to keep the peace. She grew up in comfortable surroundings with the support of two loving parents and an affectionate stepmother. Nevertheless, when Lisa entered adulthood she encountered serious problems in trusting men. She struggled with feelings that stemmed from the long ago divorce. Compared to Betty, who was raised in a very happy intact family, Lisa is not sure that she can find a life partner, raise children, and trust in the institution of marriage.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  There was the Bubble House and the Happy House and the Glue Factory and the Brady Bunch House. I learned the Bubble House was our first foster home, where we all slept in the same room and our foster parents and their daughter, Susan, would lull us to sleep by turning on a globelike machine that would spin around and show bubbles on the blue walls of our room. The Glue Factory was where we lived the longest as a family in Saint James. But I couldn’t remember living in the Happy House, a place were Cherie and Camille seem to remember that we three girls were loved, cared for, and fed beyond anything else we’ve ever experienced. As we moved from place to place, they would reminisce about the Happy House and the Bubble House—“At the Happy House, the curtains were always open to let the light in,” Cherie would say, or “When I hear this song on the radio, I always turn it up because it reminds me of the Bubble House.” Since we never could figure out where the Happy House was, we all finally agreed that it must have been born from our own folklore. We settled on the fact that we learned how to keep a home at the Bubble House. But we’d also agreed that, at one point, there’d been an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank in our lives. There was something that made us believe they weren’t our true aunt and uncle, but people we’d met along the way. As soon as Pete pulls the motor home back into our driveway in Centereach, I run out of the camper to the yellow kitchen phone and call Camille. “Julia and Frank Accerbi—could they be the same people we called aunt and uncle?” “Regina, maybe . . . maybe these people are related to Paul. But I don’t know how we would have known them, and I wouldn’t believe whatever crazy story Cookie would come up with if we asked her. It doesn’t quite fit together.” But she didn’t rule it out . . . and I so badly needed to know if Paul had moved away or, God forbid, died, so I convince myself that they would know. For weeks, I rehearse draft after draft of what to write. On Easter, I select a note at random from a stack of the very best I’ve written. I address it to Julia and Frank Accerbi and include only my name and house number on the return address line—not the Petermans’ names, or their phone number. I don’t want any of the Accerbis letting the Petermans know that I’ve reached out to the man I believe is my biological father. April 3, 1983 Dear Mr. & Mrs. Accerbi, My name is Regina Marie Calcaterra. I am 16 years old and believe that Paul Accerbi is my father. I also believe that there is a possibility that you are related to him.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  These triennial festivities will recur this autumn, but I do not hope to last out until this ninth return of the month of Athyr. It is the more important, therefore, that each detail of such solemnities be determined in advance. The oracle of the dead youth functions inside the secret chamber of the ancient Egyptian temple restored by my care; its priests distribute daily some hundreds of responses already prepared for all those questions which human hope or anguish may pose. I have incurred reproach for having composed several of these answers myself. I did not intend, in so doing, to be lacking in respect towards my god, or in compassion for the soldier's wife who asks if her husband will come back alive from a garrison in Palestine, for the invalid hungering for comfort, for some merchant whose ships ride the waves of the Red Sea, for a couple who desire a son; at the most I was continuing in this way the games of logogriphs and versified charades at which we used sometimes to play together. Likewise there was comment because here in the Villa, around that chapel of Canopus where his cult is celebrated in Egyptian fashion, I have encouraged the establishment of various pleasure pavilions like those of the suburb of Alexandria which bears that name, and have offered their facilities and distractions to my guests, sometimes participating in them myself. He had grown used to that kind of thing. And then, one does not enclose oneself for years in a unique thought without reintroducing into it, little by little, all the mere routines of a life. I have done all they say to do. I have waited, and sometimes I have prayed. Audivi voces divinas. . . . The lightheaded Julia Balbilla believed that she heard the mysterious voice of Memnon at dawn; I have listened for the [Hadrian 288a.jpg] Antinous of Antonianos of Aphrodisias Rome, Osio Collection [Hadrian 288bc.jpg] Marlborough Gem, Antinous (cast) Rome, Sangiorgio Collection Marlborough Gem, Antinous (sardonyx) Rome, Sangiorgio Collection [Hadrian 288d.jpg] Coin of Antinous as Bacchus Coin of Tion, Asia Minor night's faintest sounds. I have used the unctions of oil and essence of roses which attract the shades; I have set out the bowl of milk, the handful of salt, the drop of blood, supports of their former existence. I have lain down on the marble pavement of the small sanctuary; the light of the stars made its way through the openings of the wall, producing reflections here and there, strange, pale gleams. I have recalled to myself the orders whispered by the priests in the ear of the dead, and the itinerary written on the tomb: And he will recognize the way. . . . And the guardians of the threshold will let him pass. . . .

• From The Songs of Bilitis (1894)

  “Shadow of the woods, whence she should come, tell me, where has my mistress gone?--She has descended upon the plain.--Plain, where has my mistress gone?--She has followed the banks of the river.” “Fair river who hast seen her pass, tell me, is she near this place?--She has left me for the path.--Path, dost thou see her still?--She has left me for the road.” “O white road, road of the city, tell me, where hast thou led her?--To the street of gold which enters into Sardis.--O street of light, touchest thou her naked feet?--She has entered the palace of the king.” “O palace, splendor of the earth, return her to me.--See! She has collars on her breasts and circlets in her hair, an hundred pearls along her legs, two arms around her waist.” XXIII LYKAS Come, we will go into the fields, under the thickets of juniper; we will eat honey from the hives, we will make snares for grasshoppers with the twigs of asphodels. Come, we will go to see Lykas who tends his father’s flocks upon the slopes of shadowy Tauros. Surely he will give us milk. Already I hear the sound of his flute. He plays most skilfully. Here are the dogs and the sheep and he himself standing against a tree. Is he not fair as Adonis! O Lykas! give us milk. Here are figs from our fig trees. We would rest with thee. Bearded goats, do not leap, for fear of exciting the restless bucks. XXIV THE OFFERING TO THE GODDESS It is not for Artemis whom they adore at Perga, this garland woven with my hands, although Artemis may be a good goddess who would guard my couches of pain. It is not for Athena whom they adore at Sidon although she may be of ivory and of gold and carry in her hand a pomegranate which tempts the birds. No, it is for Aphrodite whom I adore in my heart, for she only can give what my lips most need, if I hang on her sacred tree my garland of tender roses. But I will not ask aloud that which I beg of her. I will raise myself upon my toes and confide my secret to a cleft in the bark. XXV THE COMPLAISANT FRIEND The storm continued all the night. Selenis of the beautiful hair had come to spin with me. She remained for fear of the mud, and, pressed one against the other, we filled my little bed. When girls lie together, sleep remains at the door. “Bilitis, tell me, tell me, whom lovest thou?” She slipped her leg over mine to caress me softly. And she said, against my mouth: “I know, Bilitis, whom thou lovest. Close thine eyes, I am Lykas.” I replied, touching her: “Do I not know thou art a girl? Thy jest fits badly.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  And when Cookie was around, we’d somehow establish a small space among the chaos for solace, where we could go and be together to talk and snuggle or play games. “By now I know how I want to live my life,” Camille continues, “and it’s not by learning to obey new rules in a strange house. I’ve already raised myself.” She gets a job at Wicks ’n’ Sticks, a candle shop at the Smith Haven Mall. In turn I begin making friends at the bus stop. Sheryl and Tracey make it clear they’re talking to me because they’re really interested in coaxing me out of my shell, and it doesn’t take long before I’m spending all my time outside school at their houses. They both have fathers and mothers who live together, two cars in the driveway, swimming pools in the backyard, closets stuffed with well-fitting clothes and, most important to me, refrigerators and pantries stocked with snacks and soda. I find it’s much more comfortable to play the guest outside my foster family’s home than in it. It’s fascinating to observe how normal families interact. With a mother and father in the house, it’s as though everyone has a distinct role in the family: Dads work full-time at offices, moms work part-time or run the kids around; we kids can just hang out . . . and be kids. It’s a totally new experience for me. We spend weekday afternoons watching MTV and doing homework and weekends at the movies, the bowling alley, and playing Pac-Man and Centipede at the mall arcade. Tracey giggles at my pronunciation. “It’s Centipede, not Centerpede!” I just shrug and smile. These families think they know me well, that I live at my aunt’s house. I never share my story; the details of how I grew up, that I have younger siblings I’m trying to save, or that I have a mentally ill, alcoholic, promiscuous mother who won’t be my mother much longer. Camille and I are allowed a once-a-week phone call with Rosie and Norm, who cry in hushes when they tell us their new foster mom never hugs them and then disciplines them with hits and cursing. Over and over they say they’ve tried to tell their social worker, but instead of the sympathy or solutions they need, she tells them they ought to be better listeners. Camille and I tell our social worker that the kids, especially Rosie, would never lie about being hit. We beg Addie to please allow the kids to come live with us. Each time, however, she sadly tells us that she just cannot take them as well. She says she’s already stretching her energy and resources; and besides, Rosie and Norm’s social worker isn’t convinced they’re not just making up these stories because they’re homesick for us. As Christmas approaches, a social worker named Ms. Harvey is assigned to our case now that the Petermans have invited us to stay permanently.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Sometimes she went to school, but if she felt like it, she stayed home. Her mother and father drank as much as before and each had a series of lovers. Brenda never knew where she’d sleep at night because she wasn’t sure which house would have more strangers in it. Both of Brenda’s parents had multiple sexual relationships that they did not hide from the child. Brenda’s father was a famous television executive who married five times and hit each of his wives. Brenda’s mother owned a travel agency so she could take off on trips whenever she liked. Money was not a concern in this family, but no household help was arranged to provide for the little girl’s care when her parents were otherwise occupied. After the divorce Brenda saw her mother maybe twice a week. Her father came to visit her sporadically, depending on who he was with at the time. Money for food was left on the kitchen table at both houses so Brenda could buy her own food and clothes and other things she wanted. She was never hit. She was ignored. It was as if she had disappeared along with the terminated marriage. Because neither parent took responsibility for the child after the breakup, divorce put Brenda at more risk. Living in a highly charged sexual environment with no help in growing up, she became a call girl at an early age and commanded several hundred dollars a night. She snorted cocaine. When I saw her at age thirty-one, she had just moved into a small apartment in Oakland, by herself. For our visit, we both sat on boxes. And then I noticed that she had unpacked only one item—a framed photograph of herself as a little girl, standing with her mother and father, all smiling and happy. This is all that remained of the intact family, with Brenda struggling in her mind to hold on to some unity, some sense of affection, some hope. Even though her parents had in effect abandoned her, she, like Carol, talked about them with a longing that was utterly heartbreaking. Thus we are left with a troubling but very important finding that highlights what divorce can and cannot accomplish. Children who grow up in chaotic families—divorce or no divorce—have similar lives. The divorce by itself provides no rescue unless at least one parent changes and shows real concern for the child by establishing a stable household and responsible parenting.

• From Untrue (2018)

  But there were wonderful things about church as well, namely the women she saw there, models of what she calls “attainable black womanhood.” Some were well-dressed, proper ladies in proper hats. They were married and matronly. Then there were the unmarried women of her church, carefully turned out, at once authentically and performatively devout. Philyaw fondly likened them to “peacocks preening and displaying, waiting for the Lord to send them a man in a place where women outnumbered men four to one.” These women, she realized, “wanted to be wifed up and chose, validated by the institution of marriage.” All these women—the peacocks and the matrons, the church ladies who were stern and the ones who wiggled their hips—set Philyaw’s imagination on fire. They were different from the women she knew who “danced and wore tight jeans and cussed and played spades and slept with men they weren’t married to.” But how different, after all? And how similar, in the end? “I wanted to know if the proper ladies in my church—the peacocks and the matrons—were like the rest of us. Did they have urges? Did they masturbate? Were they lonely? Did they secretly invite men and women to their beds?” Years later, when she heard through the grapevine about two women in another town—upstanding members of a church who met yearly for sex in a hotel—Philyaw was riveted by the idea, and the seeds of “Eula” were planted. Meanwhile, her novel Good Girl Anonymous centers on Rebecca, a vividly intelligent woman in a monogamous marriage who is, in Philyaw’s phrase, “living bored.” With her husband’s prominence in their church a force that at once lifts her up and keeps her down, Rebecca fulfills all her longings by writing a secret, sexually explicit blog. One day she is outed, all her most private fantasies about the UPS guy revealed for the world to see, and there’s a big blowup with her righteous spouse. “The question is, will she stay in this marriage that doesn’t serve her but lends that respectability, or will she walk? Will she [obey], make repairs, walk a fine line with her husband forever after, or will she change and realize this isn’t what she really wants, and decide that she can leave?” Philyaw, who has been close to several women who were involved with married men, knows how to mine a rich vein. “From the age of five on, I saw women living two lives,” she explains with a laugh when I ask her where the finely wrought characters and dilemmas come from.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was getting a taste for black names, West Indian names; they were a kind of time-travel, the words people whispered to their pillows, doodled on their copy-book margins, cried out in passion when my grandfather was young. I used to think these Edwardian names were the denial of romance: Archibald, Ernest, Lionel, Hubert were laughably stolid; they bespoke personalities unflecked by sex or malice. Yet only this year I had been with boys called just those staid things; and they were not staid boys. Nor was Arthur. His name was perhaps the least likely ever to have been young: it evoked for me the sunless complexion, unaired suiting, steel-rimmed glasses of a ledger clerk in a vanished age. Or had done so, before I found my beautiful, cocky, sluttish Arthur—an Arthur it was impossible to imagine old. His smooth face, with its huge black eyes and sexily weak chin, was always crossed by the light and shade of uncertainty, and met your gaze with the rootless self-confidence of youth. Arthur was seventeen, and came from Stratford East. I had been out all that day, and when I was having dinner with my oldest friend James I nearly told him that I had this boy back home, but swallowed my words and glowed boozily with secret pleasure. James, besides, was a doctor, full of caution and common sense, and would have thought I was crazy to leave a virtual stranger in my home. In my stuffy, opinionated family, though, there was a stubborn tradition of trust, and I had perhaps absorbed from my mother the habit of testing servants and window-cleaners by exposing them to temptation. I took a slightly creepy pleasure in imagining Arthur in the flat alone, absorbing its alien richness, looking at the pictures, concentrating of course on Whitehaven’s photograph of me in my little swimming-trunks, the shadow across my eyes … I was unable to feel anxiety about those electrical goods which are the general currency of burglaries—and I doubted if the valuable discs (the Rattle Tristan among them) would be to Arthur’s taste. He liked dance-music that was hot and cool—the kind that whipped and crooned across the dance-floor of the Shaft, where I had met him the night before.