Nostalgia

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 Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “To Israel,” she immediately answers. I must look surprised, because she adds, “I know you are originally from there. It’s not because of you that I want to move there. I always wanted to live in Israel, since I was a young girl. I’m not sure why.” Rachel tells me that the homeland I have left behind is the promised land of her fantasy. “If I had a child, I would like to live there. Did you know that every young child in Israel learns about the Holocaust?” she asks. There is a moment of silence. I remember the schoolyard and how we all stood there waiting for the siren. I remember the Holocaust survivor who visited our class when I was in second grade. She told us about her childhood, that when she was our age she walked barefoot in the snow for hours, a story that we referenced every time someone complained that they were cold. “You would never survive the Holocaust,” we would tease one another. I remember that in fifth grade, during recess, the kids made a list of all the places where people hid from the Nazis. We discussed where we could hide, and I thought of the stories of mothers trying to quiet their babies so they wouldn’t expose the hiding places. That night I couldn’t sleep. I imagined my baby brother crying as the Nazis came to our apartment. The next day, I decided to practice hiding with him. I packed his pacifier and some baby toys, and I took him with me into our bedroom’s closet. We stayed there for what seemed like a long time. Every time I heard a noise, I shushed him, making sure he didn’t expose our whereabouts. When I heard my mother coming, we got out and I put him back in his crib. It was a secret that only many years later, when my brother was a grown-up, I shared with him. The Nazis were always in our nightmares, and as children we were afraid that the bad guys would find and kill us. “Yes, every child in Israel knows about the Holocaust,” I say to Rachel. “Do you wish you had known about it when you were a child?” “Yes. I really do. As a child I heard about it but I didn’t learn about people’s lives and their personal survival stories. I didn’t see the photos, like those I saw years later of kids in striped uniforms. I just knew that something bad had happened to my family in Europe.” Rachel’s family tried to protect the children from their own trauma and therefore never talked about it. Rachel was left with the knowledge that something terrible had happened but she didn’t know what exactly. She had a bad feeling that she couldn’t put into words. Rachel wishes there were a family story she could tell, or a concrete picture that would help her know what was real and what was only in her imagination.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I’m more like her, however, than I might be. I’m more like her than some of the ladies you see working for the poor and the homeless and the out-of-work -’ ‘Ladies like Miss Derby,’ I said. She smiled. ‘Yes, ladies like that. Miss Derby, your great friend.’ She gave me a wink and took my arm; and because it was pleasant to see her so light-hearted I began to forget the little shock that I had had in the seamstress’s parlour, and to grow gay again. Arm-in-arm we made our slow way, through the sinking autumn night, to Quilter Street, and Florence yawned. ‘Poor Mrs Fryer,’ she said. ‘She is quite right: the women will never fight for shorter hours and minimum wages, while there are so many girls so poorly off that they’ll take any work, however miserable...’ I was not listening. I was watching the lamplight where, at the edges of her hat, it struck her hair and made it glow; and wondering if a moth might ever come and settle amongst the curls, mistaking them for candle-flames. We reached our home at last, and Florence hung her coat up and began to busy herself, as usual, with her pile of papers and books. I went quietly upstairs, to gaze at Cyril as he slumbered in his crib; then I went and sat with Ralph, while Florence worked on. It grew chilly, and I set a little fire in the grate: ‘The first of autumn,’ as Ralph pointed out; and his words - and the idea that I had been at Quilter Street for the turning of three whole seasons - were strangely moving ones. I lifted my eyes to him, and smiled. His whiskers had grown, and he looked more than ever like the sailor on the Players’ packets. He looked more than ever like his sister, too, and the likeness made me like him all the more, and wonder how I had ever mistaken him for her husband. The fire flamed, then grew hot and ashy, and at half-past ten or so Ralph yawned, and slapped his chair and rose from it and wished us both good-night. It was all just as it had been on my first evening there - except that he had a kiss for me, too, these days, as well as for Florence; and there was my little truckle-bed, propped in the corner, and my shoes beside the fire, and my coat upon the hook behind the door.

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

  We proceed northward to Galilee where Jesus spent the most popular part of his public ministry and spoke so many of his undying words of wisdom and love to the astonished multitudes. That province was once thickly covered with forests, cultivated fields, plants and trees of different climes, prosperous villages and an industrious population.166 The rejection of the Messiah and the Moslem invasion have long since turned that paradise of nature into a desolate wilderness, yet could not efface the holy memories and the illustrations of the gospel history. There is the lake with its clear blue waters, once whitened with ships sailing from shore to shore, and the scene of a naval battle between the Romans and the Jews, now utterly forsaken, but still abounding in fish, and subject to sudden violent storms, such as the one which Jesus commanded to cease; there are the hills from which he proclaimed the Sermon on the Mount, the Magna Charta of his kingdom, and to which he often retired for prayer; there on the western shore is the plain of Gennesaret, which still exhibits its natural fertility by the luxuriant growth of briers and thistles and the bright red magnolias overtopping them; there is the dirty city of Tiberias, built by Herod Antipas, where Jewish rabbis still scrupulously search the letter of the Scriptures without finding Christ in them; a few wretched Moslem huts called Mejdel still indicate the birth-place of Mary Magdalene, whose penitential tears and resurrection joys are a precious legacy of Christendom. And although the cities of Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazim, "where most of his mighty works were done" have utterly disappeared from the face of the earth, and their very sites are disputed among scholars, thus verifying to the letter the fearful prophecy of the Son of Man,167 yet the ruins of Tell Hum and Kerazeh bear their eloquent testimony to the judgment of God for neglected privileges, and the broken columns and friezes with a pot of manna at Tell Hum are probably the remains of the very synagogue which the good Roman centurion built for the people of Capernaum, and in which Christ delivered his wonderful discourse on the bread of life from heaven.168 Caesarea Philippi, formerly and now called Banias (or Paneas, Paneion, from the heathen sanctuary of Pan), at the foot of Hermon, marks the northern termination of the Holy Land and of the travels of the Lord, and the boundary-line between the Jews and the Gentiles; and that Swiss-like, picturesque landscape, the most beautiful in Palestine, in full view of the fresh, gushing source of the Jordan, and at the foot of the snow-crowned monarch of Syrian mountains seated on a throne of rock, seems to give additional force to Peter’s fundamental confession and Christ’s prophecy of his Church universal built upon the immovable rock of his eternal divinity.

• From Less (2017)

  Of the Russian River School, Arthur Less missed all the fun. Those famous men and women took mallets to the statues of their gods, those bongo-drumming poets and action-painting artists, and scrambled from the sixties onto the mountaintop of the seventies, that era of quick love and quaaludes (is there any more perfect spelling than with that lazy superfluous vowel?), basking in their recognition and arguing in cabins on the Russian River, north of San Francisco, drinking and smoking and fucking into their forties. And becoming, some of them, models for statues themselves. But Less came late to the party; what he met were not young Turks but proud bloated middle-aged artists who rolled in the river like sea lions. They seemed over-the-hill to him; he could not understand they were in the prime of their minds: Leonard Ross, and Otto Handler, even Franklin Woodhouse, who did that nude of Less. Less also owns a framed excision poem, made for his birthday by Stella Barry out of a tattered copy of Alice in Wonderland. He heard bits of Handler’s Patty Hearst on an old piano in a rainstorm. He saw a draft of Ross’s Love’s Labors Won and watched him scratch out an entire scene. And they were always kind to Less, especially considering (or was it because of?) the scandal: Less had stolen Robert Brownburn from his wife. But perhaps it is fitting, at last, for someone to praise them and to bury them, now that almost all of them are dead (Robert is still kicking but is barely breathing, in a facility in Sonoma—all those cigarettes, darling; they chat once a month on a video call). Why not Arthur Less? He smiles in the taxi as he weighs the packet: lapdog yellow, with its leash of red string. Little Arthur Less, sitting in the kitchen with the wives and watering down the gin while the fellows roared beside the fire. And I alone have lived to tell the tale. Tomorrow on the university stage: the famous American writer Arthur Less. It takes an hour and a half in traffic to get to the hotel; the rivers of red taillights conjure lava flows that destroyed ancient villages. Eventually, the smell of greenery bursts into the cab; they have entered Parque México, once so open that Charles Lindbergh supposedly landed his plane here. Now: chic young Mexican couples strolling, and on one lawn, ten dogs of various breeds being trained to lie perfectly still on a long red blanket. Arturo strokes his beard and says, “Yes, the stadium in the middle of the park is named for Lindbergh, who was of course a famous father and a famous fascist. We are here.”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  But after considerable consideration, I reconsidered: becoming a saint would entail even more pain than I could imagine. And what if one suffered all that pain and still didn’t see God, still didn’t have that mystical union? The risk was very high indeed. Besides, I didn’t want to suffer just to suffer. Dancing had taught me about pain for gain, pain for beauty. Pain for pain was self-indulgent, whereas my youthful masochism was both ambitious and realistic. Saint Teresa of Avila would have no competition from me. Instead, I would stick to dancing and continue plunging my toes into the beautiful, tight, shiny sheaths called pointe shoes. And there was the miracle, made manifest daily on my very own feet. Despite blistered and bloody evidence to the contrary, my feet didn’t hurt at all while ensconced in the shoes, while dancing. They only hurt when the shoes came off, when my foot was released from its satin prison. This curious experience, the ironic marriage of physical discomfort and euphoria, taught me the power of transcendence. My pink pointe shoes became my fetishistic ally, my crown of thorns, my bed of nails. I adored my toe shoes. Alongside my saint obsession, I developed a passion for reading. This passion, I came to believe, detracted from my ultimate success as a dancer by luring me from the circumscribed, nonverbal world of movement to the limitless plains of thought. The Book Phase included: Simone Weil (beyond my scope to emulate); Nietzsche (Thus Spake he to me); Henry Miller (the romance of poverty in Paris!); D. H. Lawrence (John Thomas and Lady Jane); Anaïs Nin (sexual liberation between the sheets and on the page—in Paris); Freud (incest is best—or at least inevitable); Thomas Mann (the poetic profundity of X-rays); Henry James (I am Isabel Archer, living in the wrong era, in the wrong wardrobe); Virginia Woolf (diary after diary right into the river); Erich Fromm; Eric Hoffer; Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death, every page underlined in red); and Søren Kierkegaard (seven tomes in a row, with voluminous notes on either legal pads or index cards . . . I loved Kierkegaard). These books and their revelations constituted my secret life until I was nearly twenty. Then I lost my virginity. And although my deepest interests have perhaps never changed, they immediately became irrevocably diverted to deriving answers—dancing had presented all the questions—from experience, not only books. But while all this reading and searching for external connection went on in the early morning and late at night, my deepest allegiance and dependence belonged elsewhere during the day: on the walls of the dance studio, where I could not escape my savage self. MY MIRROR, MY MASTER

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Tomo la revista y asiento, sin poder mirarlo a los ojos. Vuelve a su tarea, y me doy la vuelta para alejarme, pero me detengo y lo admiro. —No tienes que hacer eso, ¿sabes? —le digo, refiriéndome a los platos—. Cole dijo que lo haría. Veo temblar su cuerpo con una risa, y luego se inclina para dejar caer algunos cubiertos en el lavaplatos antes de mirarme. —También tuve diecinueve años —responde—. “En un momento” significa con el tiempo, y con el tiempo no significa esta noche. Resoplo, mis hombros se alivian un poco. Cierto. No sé cuántas veces me levanté a la mañana siguiente con un fregadero lleno de platos. Por supuesto, no me haría más feliz con Cole si su padre soportara su peso con las tareas, pero lo ignoro como diciendo “no es mi problema”. Mientras yo no tenga que hacerlo. —Gracias —contesto, rápidamente me lanzo rápidamente al refrigerador y me llevo una botella de agua. Pero luego se me ocurre un pensamiento. —¿Tienes otros hijos? —pregunto. Supongo que necesito saber si habrá otras personas que entren o salgan de la casa. Pero cuando lo miro veo su mandíbula tensa y su ceño fruncido, luciendo un poco demasiado serio. —Creo que Cole te diría si tuviera hermanos, ¿no es así? Contra mi voluntad, mi columna se endereza instantáneamente. Su tono es castigador. Por supuesto, Cole me diría si tuviera hermanos. Lo conozco desde hace tiempo. —Claro —respondo apresuradamente, sacudiendo la cabeza como si estuviera en una niebla y por eso había hecho una pregunta tan tonta. —Además, nunca he estado casado —agrega, su manzana de Adán sube y baja—. Tener varios hijos de varias mujeres no era un error que quisiera seguir cometiendo. Me quedo quieta, mirándolo y sintiéndome un poco mal. Definitivamente Cole no fue planificado e, incluso en un pequeño grado, no deseado por sus padres adolescentes. Parte del misterio de su mala relación comienza a esclarecerse. Pero también aprecio su pragmatismo. No le llevó mucho tiempo a un joven Pike Lawson aprender que, hacer bebés con cualquiera no era lo correcto para él. Esa era una consecuencia que nunca quería experimentar, ni siquiera una vez. Parece darse cuenta de lo que ha dicho y probablemente cómo se escuchó, porque se detiene y me mira, entrecerrando sus ojos en una disculpa. —No quise decirlo… así. Yo… —Sé lo que quisiste decir. Está bien. Muevo mi pulgar detrás de mí y retrocedo. —Voy a estudiar. Voy a tomar un par de crédito este verano, así que… buenas noches. Se da la vuelta, cargando el lavaplatos con jabón y encendiéndolo. —Gracias de nuevo por permitir que nos quedemos aquí —digo. Me mira. —Gracias por la cena. Y antes de irme, camino hacia la mesa donde dejé una vela aromatizada encendida. Debería haberle preguntando al respecto. Puede que no le gusten los aromas tontos en su casa. Inclinándome sobre la mesa, cierro los ojos, inhalo y pido mi deseo de siempre.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Freedman as Herself Deenie Just as Long as We’re Together Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson PICTURE BOOKS The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo The Pain and the Great One Freckle Juice THE “PAIN & THE GREAT ONE ” SERIES Soupy Saturdays with the Pain & the Great One Cool Zone with the Pain & the Great One Going, Going, Gone! with the Pain & the Great One Friend or Fiend? with the Pain & the Great One [image file=Image00007.jpg] JUDY BLUME is one of America’s most beloved authors. She has written books for all ages. Her twenty-nine titles include Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Forever; Wifey; and, most recently, In the Unlikely Event . Her books have sold more than eighty-five million copies in thirty-two languages. She lives in Key West, Florida, with her husband, George Cooper. www.judyblume.com Facebook.com/ItsMeJudyBlume @JudyBlume [image file=Image00008.jpg] Best Friends by Judy BlumeMary . Summer Sisters is dedicated to Mary Weaver. Though we never spent our summers together, she was and still is my “summer sister,” my soul mate. We met in seventh-grade homeroom and connected right from the start—Sullivan and Sussman—like a vaudeville act. And we became a team, best friends through junior high and high school and into college. We pretended to be twins separated at birth—identical in size—one with a beautiful Irish face, the other a Jewish girl with a ponytail. Inseparable. My mother, who wanted me to be perfect, recognized Mary’s beauty and winning personality but didn’t feel threatened, because Mary wasn’t Jewish. Therefore, she and I weren’t competing for the same boys. When I look back now and think of the times I lied to my mother to please her, to assure her that yes, indeed, I was the most popular, the best all-round girl, I cringe. I kept my anxieties to myself. Only my eczema gave me away. Yet my friendship with Mary survived and blossomed. I had what she wanted: A father who thought I was wonderful. A secure home where no one had to worry about paying the rent. Piles of cashmere sweaters (even if they were bought wholesale). An older brother away at college. And her life seemed romantic to me. The struggle. The bond with her mother. The irreverent sense of humor. Beauty, popularity. She didn’t have to worry about being such a good girl, such a perfect girl—or so I thought at the time. She kept her demons to herself. Didn’t we all in the fifties? There was a chemistry between us. Being together was so much fun! We felt so smug with our quick repartee and our private jokes. And the drama! We were both interested in theater, both dreamed of being onstage, like Susan Strasberg in The Diary of Anne Frank —or in movies, like Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause— both of whom were just our age. Loss .

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  44 BY TEN THE SUN has burned through and as Vix dozes in the worn wicker rocker on the porch of Lamb’s house she breathes deeply, catching the scent of the stargazer lilies from Abby’s garden. She pictures herself walking down the aisle an hour from now, wearing the straw hat that’s resting on her lap, the gauzy ivory dress skimming her ankles. She’ll be carrying sunflowers. She’s been instructed to smile. After all, she’s Caitlin’s Maid of Honor. Or is it Made of Honor? She winces at her own bad joke. She can’t help wishing the same fairy godmother who let her be Caitlin’s friend in the first place would swoop down and rescue her now, carrying her away from this island, this island of memories—all the best and worst of her life. She hears Caitlin calling to her from far away. “Vix ... get your ass up here! A Maid of Honor’s got responsibilities, you know.” Caitlin laughs and an echo of laughter follows. Phoebe shakes her gently. “Vix ...” When she opens her eyes Phoebe asks, “Hard night?” Vix fans her face with the straw hat. Philippe has probably told Phoebe that he saw her early this morning, that she’d pulled an all- nighter. She prays none of them will ever know the truth. Abby has finally redone Caitlin’s room. The walls have been whitewashed, the old twin beds have been replaced with an antique iron bedstead piled high with lace-trimmed pillows. Books line the shelves where broken toys once sat. Their beach stone collection, sorted by color —lavender, tortoise, gray—is stored in glass canisters. A blowup of a black-and-white photo hangs on the wall, taken that first summer when she and Caitlin were twelve, arms around one another, looking into each other’s eyes, as if they’re sharing a delicious secret.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now, more vividly, I saw my father, in the apron that fell to his boots; I saw my mother, and my brother, and Alice. I saw the sea. My eyes began to smart, as if there was salt in them. ‘You can send me the letters,’ I said thickly: I thought, I’ll write, and tell them of Florence. And if they don’t care for it - well, at least they’ll know that I’m safe, and happy ... Now Kitty came nearer, and lowered her voice still further. ‘There’s the money, too,’ she said. ‘We have kept it all. Nan, there’s almost seven hundred pounds of yours!’ I shook my head: I had forgotten about the money. ‘I have nothing to spend it on,’ I said simply. But even as I said it, I remembered Zena, whom I had robbed; and I thought again of Florence - I imagined her dropping seven hundred pounds into the charity boxes of East London, coin by coin. Would that make her love me, more than Lilian? ‘You can send me the money, too,’ I said to Kitty at last; and I told her my address, and she nodded, and said she’d remember. We gazed at one another then. Her lips were damp and slightly parted; and she had paled, so that her freckles showed. Involuntarily I thought back to that night at the Canterbury Palace, when I had met her first and learned I loved her, and she had kissed my hand, and called me ‘Mermaid’, and thought of me as she should not have. Perhaps the same memory had occurred to her, for now she said, ‘Is this how it’s to end up, then? Won’t you let me see you again; you might come and visit -’ I shook my head. ‘Look at me,’ I said. ‘Look at my hair. What would your neighbours say, if I came visiting you? You’d be too afraid to walk upon the street with me, in case some feller called out!’ She blushed, and her lashes fluttered. ‘You have changed,’ she said again; and I answered, simply: ‘Yes, Kitty, I have.’ She raised her hands to lower her veil. ‘Good-bye,’ she said. I nodded. She turned away; and as I stood and watched her, I found that I was aching slightly, as from a thousand fading bruises ... I cannot let you go, I thought, so easily as that! While she was still quite near I took a step into the sunshine, and looked about me. Upon the grass beside the tent there was a kind of wreath or bower — part of some display that had come loose and been discarded. There were roses on it: I bent and plucked one, and called to a boy who was standing idly by, handed the flower to him and gave him a penny, and told him what I wanted.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But I said: “It’s just the carnival outside; it’s what everyone comes here for.” “Youll see it all,” he assured me, indicating that to him it’s not important. “It doesnt really begin again until after the morning parade. Ive seen it before. There nothing going on now that wasnt going on when you were down there just a while ago—only more of it.” He spoke softly, nevertheless compelling conviction. He was a well-built, masculine man in his early 30s, with uncannily dark eyes, light hair. He is intensely, moodily handsome.... Looking at him, I wonder why such a man would pay another male when he could obviously make it easily and mutually in any of the bars, and I wonder if perhaps there is another reason for his having given unasked-for money. It is a sudden feeling, not substantiated by anything that has actually happened. But it is a strong one. The money rests there, something constantly present, but, still, by the fact of my not having yet taken it, unacknowledged. He was propped against the headrest on the bed, a pillow at his back; covered from his waist down by the sheet. I lie on top of the sheet in order not to feel that Im actually in bed with him. This room, just around the corner from the bar where I met him, is obviously one of those expensive rooms reserved months in advance of the carnival: their prices determined almost exclusively by their location in the French Quarter, the balcony from which the carnival rites can be viewed. The furniture attempts to suggest the Old New Orleans of novels and movies, romance; but there is an air of emulation—of carnival-masquerade, even about this room. “Besides,” he was saying, “if you rest a while longer, you can take full advantage of it all.... Thats what you feel you have to do, isnt it?” he shot at me strangely. Then, quickly, before I could answer his question, as if he had already known the answer: “What is your name?” Following the rules of that nightworld which tacitly admits guilt while seldom openly acknowledging it, I told him my first name. He smiled. “My name is Jeremy—Jeremy Adams,” he said, announcing his last name pointedly. And, curiously, something which is seldom done in those interludes, he held out his hand for me to shake, and I took it.... (I remember Mr King and his resentment of the distrust implicit in merely giving first names. I remember him with a sharp, pungent loneliness, not only for him but for the situation he had resented.... “I’ll give you ten, and I dont give a damn for you,” Mr King had said, and with those words he had verbalized the imposed coldness of the life he lived, of the life I would soon, then, discover.) I told Jeremy Adams my own last name. “It’s your first Mardi Gras, isnt it?” he asked me.

• From City of Night (1963)

  I stopped before the house where Winnie had died, where I had grown up. The porch no longer slanted. The skeleton vine was gone. The walls had been painted white. A dark shade was pulled over the window where I had looked out at the cactus garden, the street... my dead dog in the wind.... I tried from the sidewalk to look into the backyard.... My mother’s white sheets had hung on a line there, and I had watched her in unfocused fascination. Those remembered clean, clean sheets in the Texas wind.... Now a new fence blocked my view. But without seeing it, I knew the yard had changed too. About that house there remained no trace of those angry years. I listen for the wind. But the air was completely calm. The sun looks down blindly at me. Part Two “They’ve been so long on lonely street They never will go back....” —Heartbreak Hotel CITY OF NIGHT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, WHICH IS SHAPED SOMEWHAT like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way.... This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night—usually starless here—comes down. And although youll soon discover youre still separated from the Sky, trapped down here now by the blanket of smog and haze locking you from Heaven, still theres the sun, even in winter, enough—importantly—to tan you healthy gold... and palmtrees drooping shrugging what-the-hell... green-grass... cool, cool blessed evenings even when the afternoons are fierce. And flowers... Roses, roses! Orange and yellow poppies like just-lit matches sputtering in the breeze. Birds of paradise with long pointed tongues; blue and purple lupines; Joshua trees with incredible bunches of flowers held high like torches—along long, long rows of phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair.... Everywhere! And carpets of flowers even at places bordering the frenetic freeways, where cars race madly in swirling semicircles—the Harbor Freeway crashes into the Santa Ana Freeway, into the Hollywood Freeway, and when the traffic is clear, cars in long rows in opposite lanes, like cold steel armies out for Blood, create a whooooosh! that repeating itself is like the sound of the restless windswept ocean, and the cars wind in and out dashing nowhere, somewhere.... Anywhere! Along the coast, beaches stretch indifferently. You can rot here without feeling it . All that, I would see and realize later. Now it’s the Greyhound station in the midst of the Westcoast Times Square, the area about Los Angeles Street, Main Street, Spring, Broadway, Hill—between about 4th and 7th streets.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Vix decided the Countess’s popularity had to do with the fantastic stories she told—stories about running away to join the circus at sixteen, winding up in Paris at eighteen, finding herself stranded with the Count in a stalled elevator at some hotel called George Sank , marrying him a week later. Even though the marriage didn’t last more than six months she came out with gobs of money, or maybe she had money all the time. Vix, trying to picture the Countess atop an elephant under the big top, once asked her mother if the Countess’s stories were true. “All I know is what I’m told,” Tawny had replied, which was no answer at all. When Vix had balked she’d added, “I don’t ask questions, Victoria. That’s why I’m still employed.” With her pixie haircut, outlandish outfits, and infectious laugh, the Countess was still in center ring. She was never boring. She was definitely not ordinary. On the last full day of her whirlwind visit, the Countess gave Tawny the afternoon off to spend with Vix, who couldn’t remember an hour, let alone an afternoon, she’d been alone with her mother, and the idea frightened her. They drove up island in the red convertible rental car, all the way to the scenic overlook at Gay Head, and when Tawny peered through the telescope—a dime for each minute—and saw the colors in the cliffs below, she said, “But this is just like New Mexico!” “Except there are no crashing waves in New Mexico,” Vix reminded her mother. “There’s hardly any water at all.” “Yes, but we have mountains,” Tawny said. She didn’t sound angry, the way she usually did if Vix disagreed with her. She didn’t call her impossible or irritating or even immature. They ate lunch outside, overlooking the ocean, with the wind blowing their hair and the sun in Vix’s eyes. Tawny ordered fried clams and drank a beer she’d brought with her. “I can see why you like it here, Victoria,” she said. “It has a magic quality … something I haven’t felt since I first got to Santa Fe.” She let out a deep sigh. “But that was so long ago …” Vix could not believe how different Tawny seemed away from home. “Things change … things happen … things you can’t even imagine when you’re young and full of hope.” Tawny gazed out over the ocean. “I always thought I’d travel, see the world, but this …” she said, looking back at Vix and rapping her knuckles on the table, “is as far away as I’ve ever been.” Was this stranger swigging beer out of a bottle, this stranger who suggested they kick off their shoes and walk along at the ocean’s edge so she could say she’d not only seen the Atlantic, she’d dipped her toes in it, really her mother? TawnyALL RIGHT , she admits it, just for a minute this afternoon, she’d envied Victoria her freedom, even her youth.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Se sienta en silencio, aparentando como si estuviera pensando, y la urgencia de tomarla entre mis brazos me recorre. Ahora mismo. —Cuando mi hermana se graduó de la secundaria, la encontramos —explica— , e hicimos un viaje por carretera ese verano para visitarla. —¿Cómo resultó? Se encoge de hombros. —Bien, supongo. Estaba trabajando de camarera, tenía un pequeño apartamento y estaba viviendo su vida. Estaba encantada de vernos. Ahora que habíamos crecido y no necesitábamos muchos cuidados, supongo —añade. Finalmente me mira, portando una sonrisa triste. —¿Le preguntaste por qué se fue? —pregunto. Pero simplemente sacude la cabeza. —No, solía querer saberlo, pero luego cuando la conocí, realmente ya no me importaba. —Se detiene y luego añade—: Ella no me gustó. La observo, permaneciendo en silencio. ¿Cole tiene esos pensamientos sobre mí? —Así que, ¿has estado casado? —Su voz es ligera, y me doy cuenta que está intentando cambiar de tema. Me enderezo, respirando profundamente y poniendo los ojos en blanco para mí mismo. —La madre de Cole y yo no duramos mucho tiempo después que él nació —le digo—, y no lo sé… me quedé atrapado intentando crear un sustento… un futuro. Me acostumbré a estar solo. Deslizo mis dedos por mi cuero cabelludo, finalmente apoyando mi cabeza en mi mano y mirándola. Pero parece escéptica, estudiándome con cierta cautela en sus ojos, como si no creyera que esa sea la razón por la que todavía estoy soltero. —Hubo oportunidades de casarme —le aseguro—, pero supongo que incluso en la secundaria nunca quise ser parte de las estadísticas y hacer lo que se supone que debía hacer, ¿sabes? Graduarme, conseguir un trabajo, casarme, tener hijos… morir. Dejo salir una risa, pero sorprendentemente, ahora las palabras salen con facilidad. —Mi abuelo, quien también fumaba cigarros —aclaro—, murió cuando yo tenía nueve años, pero todavía recuerdo esa fiesta en casa que mis padres organizaron cuando mi padre terminó la universidad. Estaba en sus treinta, el primero de la familia en ir a la universidad, así que fue algo importante. Se recuesta, sosteniendo la botella con ambas manos y escuchando. —Creo que tenía unos seis años en aquel entonces —le cuento—. Mis abuelos estaban allí, y todo el mundo estaba hablando y riendo, pero lo que más recuerdo es a mi abuelo, de sesenta años, metro ochenta de altura y ciento quince kilos de peso haciendo temblar los cimientos de la casa porque estaba bailando Jump De Pointer Sisters. Rompe en una sonrisa. Sí, puedes imaginarlo. —Mi abuela observaba desde la mesa, riendo con los demás con esa mirada de felicidad. —Trago saliva, recordando la gran sonrisa en su rostro—. Todo el mundo estaba simplemente tan feliz, incluso a su edad, seguían creciendo, divirtiéndose, siendo tontos… —Me detengo—. No lo sé. Me gustó eso, supongo. — Quieres eso —dice Jordan en voz baja.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I was glad to have a home that was cosy: gay people go down like skittles in January, with fevers and influenza, or worse; Sweet Alice coughed all through that winter - said he was afraid he should do it while he knelt to a gent, a bite his cock off. As spring came again, however, the evenings warmed and my curious gaslit career grew easier; but I, if anything, grew lazier. Now, more often than I ventured out into the streets, I kept at home in my room - not sleeping, only lying, open-eyed, half-clothed; or smoking, while the night grew thicker and still, and a candle burned low, and trembled, and died. I took to throwing wide my windows to let the voices of the city in: the clatter of cabs and vans from the Gray’s Inn Road; the hoots and the rattles and hisses of steam, from King’s Cross; snatches of quarrels and confidences and greetings, from passers-by -‘Well now, Jenny!’; ‘Till Tuesday, till Tuesday ...’ When the stifling heat of June arrived I got into the habit of placing a chair on my little balcony high above Green Street, and sitting there long into the cooling night. I passed about fifty nights like this that summer, and daresay I could not distinguish so many as five of them from all of their fellows. But one of those nights, I remember very well. I had set my chair as usual upon my balcony, but had turned its back to the street and sat lazily straddling it, with my arms across each other and my chin upon my arms. I was wearing, I remember, plain linen trousers and a shirt left open at the neck, and a little straw sailor-hat I had put on against the strong late-afternoon sun, and forgotten to remove. The room behind me I had let darken; I guessed that, apart from the occasional dancing glow of my cigarette tip, I must be quite invisible against its shadows. My eyes were closed, I was thinking of nothing, when all at once I heard music. Someone had begun to strum some kind of sweet, twangy instrument - not a banjo, not a guitar - and a lilting gypsy melody was playing upon the bare evening breezes. Soon a woman’s voice, high and quavering, had risen to accompany it. I opened my eyes to find the source of the sound; it came not, as I had expected, from the street below, but from the building opposite - the old tenement that had used to be so grim and empty, and such a contrast to the pleasant little terrace in which my landlady had her house. Labourers had been at work upon it for a month and more, and I had been dimly aware of them as they hammered and whistled and leaned from ladders; now the building was spruce and mended. In all my time at Green Street the windows opposite mine had been dark.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Fortunately, the Countess kept Tawny busy. Everyone on the island wanted a piece of her. How did all these rich people know one another? Was there some sort of club? Vix decided the Countess’s popularity had to do with the fantastic stories she told—stories about running away to join the circus at sixteen, winding up in Paris at eighteen, finding herself stranded with the Count in a stalled elevator at some hotel called George Sank, marrying him a week later. Even though the marriage didn’t last more than six months she came out with gobs of money, or maybe she had money all the time. Vix, trying to picture the Countess atop an elephant under the big top, once asked her mother if the Countess’s stories were true. “All I know is what I’m told,” Tawny had replied, which was no answer at all. When Vix had balked she’d added, “I don’t ask questions, Victoria. That’s why I’m still employed.” With her pixie haircut, outlandish outfits, and infectious laugh, the Countess was still in center ring. She was never boring. She was definitely not ordinary. On the last full day of her whirlwind visit, the Countess gave Tawny the afternoon off to spend with Vix, who couldn’t remember an hour, let alone an afternoon, she’d been alone with her mother, and the idea frightened her. They drove up island in the red convertible rental car, all the way to the scenic overlook at Gay Head, and when Tawny peered through the telescope—a dime for each minute—and saw the colors in the cliffs below, she said, “But this is just like New Mexico!” “Except there are no crashing waves in New Mexico,” Vix reminded her mother. “There’s hardly any water at all.” “Yes, but we have mountains,” Tawny said. She didn’t sound angry, the way she usually did if Vix disagreed with her. She didn’t call her impossible or irritating or even immature. They ate lunch outside, overlooking the ocean, with the wind blowing their hair and the sun in Vix’s eyes. Tawny ordered fried clams and drank a beer she’d brought with her. “I can see why you like it here, Victoria,” she said. “It has a magic quality ... something I haven’t felt since I first got to Santa Fe.” She let out a deep sigh. “But that was so long ago ...” Vix could not believe how different Tawny seemed away from home. “Things change ... things happen ... things you can’t even imagine

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

  But if the imaginary “before” is inevitably figured within the terms of a prehistorical narrative that serves to legitimate the present state of the law or, alternatively, the imaginary future beyond the law, then this “before” is always already imbued with the self-justificatory fabrications of present and future interests, whether feminist or antifeminist. The postulation of the “before” within feminist theory becomes politically problematic when it constrains the future to materialize an idealized notion of the past or when it supports, even inadvertently, the reification of a precultural sphere of the authentic feminine. This recourse to an original or genuine femininity is a nostalgic and parochial ideal that refuses the contemporary demand to formulate an account of gender as a complex cultural construction. This ideal tends not only to serve culturally conservative aims, but to constitute an exclusionary practice within feminism, precipitating precisely the kind of fragmentation that the ideal purports to overcome. Throughout the speculation of Engels, socialist feminism, those feminist positions rooted in structuralist anthropology, there emerge various efforts to locate moments or structures within history or culture that establish gender hierarchy. The isolation of such structures or key periods is pursued in order to repudiate those reactionary theories which would naturalize or universalize the subordination of women. As significant efforts to provide a critical displacement of the universalizing gestures of oppression, these theories constitute part of the contemporary theoretical field in which a further contestation of oppression is taking place. The question needs to be pursued, however, whether these powerful critiques of gender hierarchy make use of presuppositional fictions that entail problematic normative ideals. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, including the problematic nature/culture distinction, has been appropriated by some feminist theorists to support and elucidate the sex/gender distinction: the position that there is a natural or biological female who is subsequently transformed into a socially subordinate “woman,” with the consequence that “sex” is to nature or “the raw” as gender is to culture or “the cooked.” If Lévi-Strauss’s framework were true, it would be possible to trace the transformation of sex into gender by locating that stable mechanism of cultures, the exchange rules of kinship, which effect that transformation in fairly regular ways. Within such a view, “sex” is before the law in the sense that it is culturally and political undetermined, providing the “raw material” of culture, as it were, that begins to signify only through and after its subjection to the rules of kinship. This very concept of sex-as-matter, sex-as-instrument-of-cultural-signification, however, is a discursive formation that acts as a naturalized foundation for the nature/culture distinction and the strategies of domination that that distinction supports. The binary relation between culture and nature promotes a relationship of hierarchy in which culture freely “imposes” meaning on nature, and, hence, renders it into an “Other” to be appropriated to its own limitless uses, safeguarding the ideality of the signifier and the structure of signification on the model of domination.

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

  The letter’s informality just might free you from the tyranny of perfectionism. You might address the letter to your children, if you have a few lying around, or to a niece or nephew, or to a friend. Write that person’s name at the top of the page, and then in your first line, explain that you are going to tell them part of your story, entrust it to them, because this part of your life meant so much to you. Some of the best pieces to come out of my classes have been written by people who wanted to tell their children about their own childhoods, or about their children’s childhoods, what the years were like just before these children were born and then after, in that first house the family lived in, down the hill from the little white church, or about those years in the Peace Corps, in that tiny wild brilliant African village, or what it was like to work on a whaling ship in the forties. A man in one of my classes, who was raised in a family of foot-washing Baptists, wrote a two-hundred-page letter to his children about his childhood in the South, how he escaped, and his years on an Alaskan whaler, where he found God and later, in port, their mother. A woman in a class many years ago wrote a novella-length letter to her daughter about life as a Chinese American nurse living in São Paulo; it included everything she could remember having seen and felt and thought. She read part of it to our class. It was just beautiful, intimate, funny in places, and sad. People cried. Then she used it as a plot treatment for a novel. A magazine editor recently asked me to write an essay about being a lifelong Giants fan, which I have been, but the anxiety about publication made my mind go suddenly blank. All I could remember at first was coming into the kitchen of the little coffee-colored house where I grew up to find my mother and older brother hunched over the radio listening to a Giants game with such concentration that it might have been the first news reports from Pearl Harbor.

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

  But if the person could narrow it down to, say, Indian, I might remember one lavish Indian palace, where my date had asked the waiter for the Rudyard Kipling sampler and later for the holy-cow tartare. Then a number of memories would come to mind, of other dates and other Indian restaurants. So you might start by writing down every single thing you can remember from your first few years in school. Start with kindergarten. Try to get the words and memories down as they occur to you. Don’t worry if what you write is no good, because no one is going to see it. Move on to first grade, to second, to third. Who were your teachers, your classmates? What did you wear? Who and what were you jealous of? Now branch out a little. Did your family take vacations during those years? Get these down on paper. Do you remember how much more presentable everybody else’s family looked? Do you remember how when you’d be floating around in an inner tube on a river, your own family would have lost the little cap that screws over the airflow valve, so every time you got in and out of the inner tube, you’d scratch new welts in your thighs? And how other families never lost the caps? If this doesn’t pan out, or if it does but you finish mining this particular vein, see if focusing on holidays and big events helps you recollect your life as it was. Write down everything you can remember about every birthday or Christmas or Seder or Easter or whatever, every relative who was there. Write down all the stuff you swore you’d never tell another soul. What can you recall about your birthday parties—the disasters, the days of grace, your relatives’ faces lit up by birthday candles? Scratch around for details: what people ate, listened to, wore—those terrible petaled swim caps, the men’s awful trunks, the cocktail dress your voluptuous aunt wore that was so slinky she practically needed the Jaws of Life to get out of it. Write about the women’s curlers with the bristles inside, the garters your father and uncles used to hold up their dress socks, your grandfathers’ hats, your cousins’ perfect Brownie uniforms, and how your own looked like it had just been hatched. Describe the trench coats and stoles and car coats, what they revealed and what they covered up. See if you can remember what you were given that Christmas when you were ten, and how it made you feel inside.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Dos —le digo a Dutch y le lanzo las cartas que no quiero. Apartando sus ojos de sus cartas, me tira dos más, las coloco en mi palma y las examino. Es una mierda, pero tengo dos sietes, así que no es una pérdida total. No es que me importe. No soy un hombre competitivo —al menos no en lo que respecta al póker— pero organizar estas reuniones una vez al mes en mi casa nos da algo que hacer mientras hablamos. Dirijo mi mirada hacia Dutch y luego deslizo mis ojos alrededor de la mesa, viendo a Todd, uno de mis supervisores, así como a Eddie, John y Schuster intercambiando y reorganizando las cartas. Todos ponen unos cuantos dólares en el medio, y Todd sube la apuesta por tres más. Todos aceptan... esperando que sea un engaño. —No me entusiasma que mis hijas crezcan, te diré —dice Dutch, mostrándome una mirada divertida. —¿Por qué? Solo niega, suspirando. —Ese ruido me volvería loco. Por ahora, todo lo que tengo que soportar es una pijamada ocasional con un montón de niñas de ocho años que se ríen tontamente. Me río suavemente, los golpes en el piso de arriba comienzan a parecer muros derrumbándose. Me estremezco. Son solo alrededor de las nueve y media. Si continúa así de ruidoso en una hora, le diré a Cole que baje la música o el vecindario estará sobre mí. No se suponía que fuera una fiesta, pero los alenté a él y a Jordan para que invitaran a sus amigos, así que es mi culpa, supongo. —No hace mucho tiempo nos gustaba también el ruido —menciono, lanzándole una sonrisa. Los muchachos se ríen y murmuran concordando. Todos nos graduamos juntos, y fue un feliz acontecimiento que algunos trabajáramos juntos ahora, aunque John y Schuster no lo hacen, siendo un policía y un techador, respectivamente. No hacía mucho tiempo que nos parecíamos mucho a Cole, haciendo desastres y divirtiéndonos demasiado con nuestros errores. Fui el primero en ser empujado a la adultez, pero aun así nos mantuvimos cerca con los años. Matrimonios, niños, un divorcio, todos habíamos pasado por algo, y fue una llamada de alerta un día,

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —¿Le preguntaste por qué se fue? —pregunto. Pero simplemente sacude la cabeza. —No, solía querer saberlo, pero luego cuando la conocí, realmente ya no me importaba. —Se detiene y luego añade—: Ella no me gustó. La observo, permaneciendo en silencio. ¿Cole tiene esos pensamientos sobre mí? —Así que, ¿has estado casado? —Su voz es ligera, y me doy cuenta que está intentando cambiar de tema. Me enderezo, respirando profundamente y poniendo los ojos en blanco para mí mismo. —La madre de Cole y yo no duramos mucho tiempo después que él nació —le digo—, y no lo sé... me quedé atrapado intentando crear un sustento... un futuro. Me acostumbré a estar solo. Deslizo mis dedos por mi cuero cabelludo, finalmente apoyando mi cabeza en mi mano y mirándola. Pero parece escéptica, estudiándome con cierta cautela en sus ojos, como si no creyera que esa sea la razón por la que todavía estoy soltero. —Hubo oportunidades de casarme —le aseguro—, pero supongo que incluso en la secundaria nunca quise ser parte de las estadísticas y hacer lo que se supone que debía hacer, ¿sabes? Graduarme, conseguir un trabajo, casarme, tener hijos... morir. Dejo salir una risa, pero sorprendentemente, ahora las palabras salen con facilidad. —Mi abuelo, quien también fumaba cigarros —aclaro—, murió cuando yo tenía nueve años, pero todavía recuerdo esa fiesta en casa que mis padres organizaron cuando mi padre terminó la universidad. Estaba en sus treinta, el primero de la familia en ir a la universidad, así que fue algo importante. Se recuesta, sosteniendo la botella con ambas manos y escuchando. —Creo que tenía unos seis años en aquel entonces —le cuento—. Mis abuelos estaban allí, y todo el mundo estaba hablando y riendo, pero lo que más recuerdo es a mi abuelo, de sesenta años, metro ochenta de altura y ciento quince kilos de peso haciendo temblar los cimientos de la casa porque estaba bailando Jump De Pointer Sisters. Rompe en una sonrisa. Sí, puedes imaginarlo. —Mi abuela observaba desde la mesa, riendo con los demás con esa mirada de felicidad. —Trago saliva, recordando la gran sonrisa en su rostro—. Todo el mundo