Relief

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 Educated (2018)

  She said that when she was young, she’d wanted to tell Mother, to ask for help, but she’d thought Mother wouldn’t believe her. She’d been right. Before her wedding, she’d experienced nightmares and flashbacks, and she’d told Mother about them. Mother had said the memories were false, impossible. I should have helped you, Audrey wrote. But when my own mother didn’t believe me, I stopped believing myself. *1 It was a mistake she was going to correct. I believe God will hold me accountable if I don’t stop Shawn from hurting anyone else, she wrote. She was going to confront him, and our parents, and she was asking me to stand with her. I am doing this with or without you. But without you, I will probably lose . I sat in the dark for a long time. I resented her for writing me. I felt she had torn me from one world, one life, where I was happy, and dragged me back into another. I typed a response. I told her she was right, that of course we should stop Shawn, but I asked her to do nothing until I could return to Idaho. I don’t know why I asked her to wait, what benefit I thought time would yield. I don’t know what I thought would happen when we talked to our parents, but I understood instinctively what was at stake. As long as we had never asked, it was possible to believe that they would help. To tell them was to risk the unthinkable: it was to risk learning that they already knew. Audrey did not wait, not even a day. The next morning she showed my email to Mother. I cannot imagine the details of that conversation, but I know that for Audrey it must have been a tremendous relief, laying my words before our mother, finally able to say, I’m not crazy. It happened to Tara, too. For all of that day, Mother pondered it. Then she decided she had to hear the words from me. It was late afternoon in Idaho, nearly midnight in England, when my mother, unsure how to place an international call, found me online. The words on the screen were small, confined to a tiny text box in the corner of the browser, but somehow they seemed to swallow the room. She told me she had read my letter. I braced myself for her rage. It is painful to face reality, she wrote. To realize there was something ugly, and I refused to see it. *2 I had to read those lines a number of times before I understood them. Before I realized that she was not angry, not blaming me, or trying to convince me I had only imagined. She believed me. Don’t blame yourself, I told her. Your mind was never the same after the accident. Maybe, she said. But sometimes I think we choose our illnesses, because they benefit us in some way .

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  “Yes,” I said, “we’re on the East Coast, the West Coast, and soon we may be in the Midwest. We can handle national distribution, no question.” I looked around the table. The grim faces were becoming less grim. “Well,” Kitami said, “this change things.” He assured me that they would give my proposal careful consideration. So. Hai. Meeting adjourned. I walked back to my hotel and spent a second night pacing. First thing the next morning I received a call summoning me back to Onitsuka, where Kitami awarded me exclusive distribution rights for the United States. He gave me a three-year contract. I tried to be nonchalant as I signed the papers and placed an order for five thousand more shoes, which would cost twenty thousand dollars I didn’t have. Kitami said he’d ship them to my East Coast office, which I also didn’t have. I promised to wire him the exact address. ON THE FLIGHT home I looked out the window at the clouds above the Pacific Ocean and thought back to sitting atop Mount Fuji. I wondered how Sarah would feel about me now, after this coup. I wondered how the Marlboro Man would feel when he got word from Onitsuka that he was toast. I stowed away my copy of How to Do Business with the Japanese. My carry-on was stuffed with souvenirs. Kimonos for my mother and sisters and Mom Hatfield, a tiny samurai sword to hang above my desk. And my crowning glory—a small Japanese TV. Spoils of war, I thought, smiling. But somewhere over the Pacific the full weight of my “victory” came over me. I imagined the look on Wallace’s face when I asked him to cover this gigantic new order. If he said no, when he said no, what then? On the other hand, if he said yes, how was I going to open an office on the East Coast? And how was I going to do it before those shoes arrived? And who was I going to get to run it? I stared at the curved, glowing horizon. There was only one person on the planet rootless enough, energetic enough, gung-ho enough, crazy enough, to pick up and move to the East Coast, on a moment’s notice, and get there before the shoes did. I wondered how Stretch was going to like the Atlantic Ocean. 1967I didn’t handle it well. Not well at all. Knowing what his reaction would be, and dreading it, I put off telling Johnson the whole story. I shot him a quick note, saying the meeting with Onitsuka had gone fine, telling him I’d secured national distribution rights. But I left it at that. I think I must have held out hope, in the back of my mind, that I might be able to hire someone else to go east. Or that Wallace would blow the whole plan up.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  ITO AND SUMERAGI were right on time. Monday morning, 9:00 a.m. sharp, they pulled up to the building, each wearing a dark suit and dark tie, each carrying a black briefcase. I thought of all the samurai movies I’d seen, all the books I’d read about ninjas. This was how it always looked before the ritual killing of the bad shogun. They walked straight through our lobby and into our conference room and sat down. Without a word of small talk we stacked our books in front of them. Sumeragi lit a cigarette, Ito uncapped a fountain pen. They commenced. Pecking at calculators, scratching at legal pads, drinking bottomless cups of coffee and green tea, they slowly peeled back the layers of our operation and peered inside. I walked in and out, every fifteen minutes or so, to ask if they needed anything. They never did. The bank auditor arrived soon after to collect all our cash receipts. A fifty-thousand-dollar check from United Sporting Goods really had been in the mail. We showed him: It was right on Carole Fields’s desk. This was the late check that set all the dominoes in motion. This, plus the normal day’s receipts, covered our shortfall. The bank auditor telephoned United Sporting Goods’ bank in Los Angeles and asked that their account be charged immediately, the funds transferred to our account at Bank of California. The Los Angeles bank said no. There were insufficient funds in the United Sporting Goods account. United Sporting Goods had also been playing the float. Already feeling a splitting headache coming on, I walked back into the conference room. I could smell it in the air. We’d reached that fateful moment. Leaning over the books, Ito realized what he was looking at and did a slow double-take. Exeter. Secret factory. Then I saw the realization dawn that he was the sucker who’d paid for it. He looked up at me and pushed his head forward on his neck, as if to say: Really? I nodded. And then… he smiled. It was only a half smile, a mohair sweater smile, but it meant everything. I gave him a weak half smile in return, and in that brief wordless exchange countless fates and futures were decided. PAST MIDNIGHT, ITO and Sumeragi were still there, still busy with their calculators and legal pads. When they finally left for the day they promised to return early the next morning. I drove home and found Penny waiting up. We sat in the dining room, talking. I gave her an update. We agreed that Nissho was done with their audit; they’d known everything they needed to know before lunch. What followed, and was yet to follow, was simply punishment. “Don’t let them push you around like this!” Penny said. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Right now they can push me around all they want. They’re my only hope.” “At least there are no more surprises,” she said. “Yes,” I said. “No more shoes to drop.”

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  1975 There was no victory party. There was no victory dance. There wasn’t even a quick victory jig in the halls. There wasn’t time. We still didn’t have a bank, and every company needs a bank. Hayes made a list of banks with the most deposits in Oregon. They were all much smaller than First National or Bank of California, but oh well. Beggars, choosers, etc. The first six hung up on us. Number seven, First State Bank of Oregon, didn’t. The bank was in Milwaukie, a little town half an hour up the road from Beaverton. “Come on over,” said the bank president when I finally got him on the phone. He promised me one million dollars in credit, which was about his bank’s limit. We moved our account that day. That night, for the first time in about two weeks, I put my head on a pillow and slept. THE NEXT MORNING I lingered with Penny over breakfast and we talked about the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. I told her I didn’t know when I’d craved a holiday so much. I needed rest, and sleep, and good food—and I needed to watch Pre run. She gave me a wry smile. Always mixing business with pleasure. Guilty. Pre was hosting a meet that weekend in Eugene, and he’d invited the top runners in the world, including his Finnish archnemesis, Viren. Though Viren had pulled out at the last minute, there was still a gang of amazing runners competing, including one brash marathoner named Frank Shorter, who’d taken gold at the 1972 Games, in Munich, the city of his birth. Tough, smart, a lawyer now living in Colorado, Shorter was starting to become as well known as Pre, and the two were good friends. Secretly I had designs on signing Shorter to an endorsement deal. Friday night Penny and I drove down to Eugene and took our place with seven thousand screaming, roistering Pre fans. The 5,000-meter race was vicious, furious, and Pre wasn’t at his best, everyone could see that. Shorter led going into the last lap. But at the last possible moment, in the last two hundred yards, Pre did what Pre always did. He dug down deep. With Hayward vibrating and swaying, he pulled away and won in 13:23.8, which was 1.6 seconds off his best time. Pre was most famous for saying, “Somebody may beat me—but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.” Watching him run that final weekend of May 1975, I’d never felt more admiration for him, or identified with him more closely. Somebody may beat me, I told myself, some banker or creditor or competitor may stop me, but by God they’re going to have to bleed to do it. There was a postrace party at Hollister’s house. Penny and I wanted to go, but we had a two-hour drive back to Portland. The kids, the kids, we said as we waved good-bye to Pre and Shorter and Hollister.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  A hand fell on his shoulder, and a voice said, ‘Come with me, laddie.’ They frogmarched him to the guardhouse, pushed him through the door, and there, behind a desk, a sergeant-major type with a moustache and a frown stood up, barked at him, ripped the page out of his notebook, screwed it into a ball and threw it in the bin, shouted some more, took the back off the camera, exposed the roll of film, pulled it out in loops of falling acetate and dumped that in the bin too. I was crying my eyes out, Dad said. They said, ‘Go home. You didn’t see anything. Forget you were here.’ And they dumped me back at the perimeter and I stood there with my notebook and the Brownie, sobbing away. But then I stopped crying, because I’d thought of something. Something out of Dick Barton or the Eagle. Maybe I’d written hard enough. Using his pencil, he shaded the page of his notebook with graphite, and there, white on grey, impressed on the paper from the missing page above, was the registration number of the secret plane. He stopped crying, he said, and cycled home in triumph.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There it was, White’s cottage, Merlyn’s cottage, quiet on the Ridings over the hill. It looked so ordinary; not a magical place at all. Black leaf-shadows moved on its high gables. A grey horse grazed outside. Electric wires chased fenceposts down the grassy slopes. The forest behind the house was still there. But not all of it: the dark wood where the hobbies had been had gone; now it was Silverstone racing circuit, and the chapel where White had walked with Gos was long demolished; as Chapel Corner it is just a curve on the track under which the long-dead sleep. But as I stood there in the hot sunlight there was a buzzing in my ears. It was the strangest sound, as if on that windless day I could hear the marine roar of wind in all the oaks. It was winter history. Time’s receding. Or possibly heatstroke. I wished I had brought some water. I stood for a long while and looked at the house. It was a private place. I did not want to get closer; I didn’t want to intrude on the person who lived there. But I saw that the trees had grown, that the barn was now a garage. The well would still be there. And then I heard a chipping, scraping noise, and froze. Behind a bush in the garden was a flash of white; a shirt. There was a man kneeling in the garden, bowed over the ground. Was he planting something? Weeding? Praying? I was far away. I could see his shoulders, but not his face, nor anything of him but his concentration. I shivered, because for a moment the man had been White, planting out his beloved geraniums. The feeling that White was haunting me had returned. I wondered if I should go and speak to this man. I could. I could talk to him. He wasn’t White, I knew, but there were people here who had known him still, and I could talk to them. The farmhouse was still there, and behind it the ponds where Gos had bathed and White had fished. Perhaps the same carp swam in them. I could find out more about him, make him alive again, chase down the memories here. For a moment that old desire to cross over and bring someone back flared up as bright as flame. But then I put that thought aside. I put it down, and the relief was immense, as if I had dragged a half-tonne weight from myself and cast it by the grassy road. White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be. I saluted the man, though he could not see me. It was a silly, wobbly salute, and even as I did it I felt foolish. And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water. Notes

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  He opened the meeting by saying that he intended to renew Blue Ribbon for another three years. I smiled for the first time in weeks. Then I pressed my advantage. I asked for a longer deal. Yes, 1973 seemed light-years away, but it would be here in a blink. I needed more time and security. My bankers needed more. “Five years?” I said. Mr. Onitsuka smiled. “Three.” He then gave a strange speech. Notwithstanding several years of sluggish worldwide sales, he said, plus some strategic missteps, the outlook was rosy for Onitsuka. Through cost-cutting and reorganization his company had regained its edge. Sales for the upcoming fiscal year were expected to top $22 million, a good portion of which would come from the United States. A recent survey showed that 70 percent of all American runners owned a pair of Tigers. I knew that. Maybe I’d had a little something to do with that, I wanted to say. That’s why I wanted a longer contract. But Mr. Onitsuka said that one major reason for Onitsuka’s solid numbers was… Kitami. He looked down the table, bestowed a fatherly smile on Kitami. Therefore, Mr. Onitsuka said, Kitami was being promoted. Henceforth he’d be the company’s operations manager. He’d now be Onitsuka’s Woodell, though I remember thinking that I wouldn’t trade one Woodell for a thousand Kitamis. With a bow of my head I congratulated Mr. Onitsuka on his company’s good fortune. I turned and bowed my head at Kitami, congratulating him on his promotion. But when I raised my head and made eye contact with Kitami I saw in his gaze something cold. Something that stayed with me for days. We drew up the agreement. It was four or five paragraphs, a flimsy thing. The thought crossed my mind that it should be more substantive, and that it would be nice to have a lawyer vet it. But there wasn’t time. We all signed it, then moved on to other topics. I WAS RELIEVED to have a new contract, but I returned to Oregon feeling troubled, anxious, more so than at any time in the last eight years. Sure, my briefcase held a guarantee that Onitsuka would supply me with shoes for the next three years—but why were they refusing to extend beyond three? More to the point, the extension was misleading. Onitsuka was guaranteeing me a supply, but their supply was chronically, dangerously late. About which they still had a maddeningly blasé attitude. Little more days. With Wallace continually acting more like a loan shark than a banker, a little more days could mean disaster.

• From Educated (2018)

  At church my first week, my new bishop greeted me with a warm handshake, then moved on to the next newcomer. I reveled in his disinterest. If I could just pretend to be normal for a little while, maybe it would feel like the truth. It was at church that I met Nick. Nick had square glasses and dark hair, which he gelled and teased into neat spikes. Dad would have scoffed at a man wearing hair gel, which is perhaps why I loved it. I also loved that Nick wouldn’t have known an alternator from a crankshaft. What he did know were books and video games and clothing brands. And words. He had an astonishing vocabulary. Nick and I were a couple from the beginning. He grabbed my hand the second time we met. When his skin touched mine, I prepared to fight that primal need to push him away, but it never came. It was strange and exciting, and no part of me wanted it to end. I wished I were still in my old congregation, so I could rush to my old bishop and tell him I wasn’t broken anymore. I overestimated my progress. I was so focused on what was working, I didn’t notice what wasn’t. We’d been together a few months, and I’d spent many evenings with his family, before I ever said a word about mine. I did it without thinking, casually mentioned one of Mother’s oils when Nick said he had an ache in his shoulder. He was intrigued—he’d been waiting for me to bring them up—but I was angry at myself for the slip, and didn’t let it happen again. —I BEGAN TO FEEL poorly toward the end of May. A week passed in which I could hardly drag myself to my job, an internship at a law firm. I slept from early evening until late morning, then yawned through the day. My throat began to ache and my voice dropped, roughening into a deep crackle, as if my vocal cords had turned to sandpaper. At first Nick was amused that I wouldn’t see a doctor, but as the illness progressed his amusement turned to worry, then confusion. I blew him off. “It’s not that serious,” I said. “I’d go if it were serious.” Another week passed. I quit my internship and began sleeping through the days as well as the nights. One morning, Nick showed up unexpectedly. “We’re going to the doctor,” he said. I started to say I wouldn’t go, but then I saw his face. He looked as though he had a question but knew there was no point in asking it. The tense line of his mouth, the narrowing of his eyes. This is what distrust looks like, I thought. Given the choice between seeing an evil socialist doctor, and admitting to my boyfriend that I believed doctors were evil socialists, I chose to see the doctor. “I’ll go today,” I said. “I promise.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  All at once his manner changed. We were standing in the middle of his store, his sneaker sanctuary, and in a barely audible mumble he acknowledged that this was a make-or-break moment for Blue Ribbon, in which he was heavily invested, financially, emotionally, spiritually. He acknowledged that there was no one else who could set up an East Coast office. He delivered himself of a long, rambling, semi-internal monologue, saying that the Santa Monica store practically ran itself, so he could train his replacement in one day, and he’d already set up a store in a remote location once, so he could do it again, fast, and we needed it done fast, with the shoes on the water and back-to-school orders about to roll in, and then he looked off and asked the walls or the shoes or the Great Spirit why he shouldn’t just shut up and do it, do whatever I asked, and be down-on-his-knees grateful for the damn opportunity, when anyone could see that he was—he searched for the exact words—“a talentless fuck.” I might have said something like, “Oh no you’re not. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” I might have. But I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and waited. And waited. “Okay,” he said, at last, “I’ll go.” “Great. That’s great. Terrific. Thank you.” “But where?” “Where what?” “Do you want me to go?” “Ah. Yes. Well. Anywhere on the East Coast with a port. Just don’t go to Portland, Maine.” “Why?” “A company based in two different Portlands? That’ll confuse the heck out of the Japanese.” We hashed it out some more and finally decided New York and Boston were the most logical places. Especially Boston. “It’s where most of our orders are coming from,” one of us said. “Okay,” he said. “Boston, here I come.” Then I handed him a bunch of travel brochures for Boston, playing up the fall foliage angle. A little heavy-handed, but I was desperate. He asked how I happened to have these brochures on me, and I told him I knew he’d make the right decision. He laughed. The forgiveness Johnson showed me, the overall good nature he demonstrated, filled me with gratitude, and a new fondness for the man. And perhaps a deeper loyalty. I regretted my treatment of him. All those unanswered letters. There are team players, I thought, and then there are team players, and then there’s Johnson. AND THEN HE threatened to quit. Via letter, of course. “I think I have been responsible for what success we have had so far,” he wrote. “And any success that will be coming in for the next two years at least.” Therefore, he gave me a two-part ultimatum. Make him a full partner in Blue Ribbon. Raise his salary to six hundred dollars a month, plus a third of all profits beyond the first six thousand pairs of shoes sold. Or else, he said, good-bye.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Get over yourself, Helen, I hiss inwardly. ‘It’s yours?’ he says. ‘Wow.’ I tell him about the goshawk. He listens. Then his face turns serious and sad. ‘You are so lucky,’ he says. ‘I’ve always wanted to do falconry. All my life. I’ve got books and everything. But I’ve never had the time.’ There’s a pause. ‘Maybe one day.’ He hugs Tom a little closer. ‘Come on then, you,’ he says, and they walk away to the ice-cream van. White air and aching bones. Another migraine. I swallow a dose of codeine and paracetamol. My head still hurts. There’s a brumous, pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass. I go back to bed. Must fly goshawk, I think when I wake. Must fly goshawk. But I’m finding it so hard to move that secretly I’m hoping the hawk’s weight is wrong, or the weather is. I have no excuse to stay in bed this time: both hawk and weather are fine. We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke. I am inexpressibly tired. I park the car on the grassy verge near the field, change Mabel’s jesses, unhood her, and she snaps into yarak in an instant. She knows where she is. And here we are. And there are the rabbits. She leaves the fist. As soon as she does the pain in my head recedes and my exhaustion fades. Her flight is getting much more stylish. I am still astonished by how fast she is. When I watch her scaly, foreshortened, hunched flight away from me towards a distant target, I swear that the world around her slows. She seems to be moving at precisely the right speed, and everything around her – rabbits running, leaves falling, a pigeon flying overhead, all these things slow down as if they’re moving through liquid.

• From Educated (2018)

  He begged me not to go, saying a hundred things I already knew and didn’t care about, and when that didn’t work, he said: You told me your story so I could stop you if you ever did something crazy. Well, Tara, this is it. This is crazy. I can still fix this, I chanted as the plane lifted off the tarmac. —IT WAS A BRIGHT WINTER morning when I arrived on Buck’s Peak. I remember the crisp smell of frozen earth as I approached the house and the feel of ice and gravel crunching beneath my boots. The sky was a shocking blue. I breathed in the welcome scent of pine. My gaze dropped below the mountain and my breath caught. When Grandma had been alive, she had, by nagging, shouting and threats, kept my father’s junkyard contained. Now refuse covered the farm and was creeping toward the mountain base. The rolling hills, once perfect lakes of snow, were dotted with mangled trucks and rusted septic tanks. Mother was ecstatic when I stepped through the door. I hadn’t told her I was coming, hoping that, if no one knew, I might avoid Shawn. She talked rapidly, nervously. “I’m going to make you biscuits and gravy!” she said, then flew to the kitchen. “I’ll help in a minute,” I said. “I just need to send an email.” The family computer was in the old part of the house, what had been the front room before the renovation. I sat down to write Drew, because I’d promised, as a kind of compromise between us, that while on the mountain I would write to him every two hours. I nudged the mouse and the screen flickered on. The browser was already open; someone had forgotten to sign out. I moved to open a different browser but stopped when I saw my name. It was in the message that was open on the screen, which Mother had sent only moments before. To Shawn’s ex-girlfriend Erin. The premise of the message was that Shawn had been reborn, spiritually cleansed. That the Atonement had healed our family, and that all had been restored. All except me. The spirit has whispered to me the truth about my daughter, Mother wrote. My poor child has given herself over to fear, and that fear has made her desperate to validate her misperceptions. I do not know if she is a danger to our family, but I have reasons to think she might be. * I had known, even before reading the message, that my mother shared my father’s dark vision, that she believed the devil had a hold of me, that I was dangerous. But there was something in seeing the words on the page, in reading them and hearing her voice in them, the voice of my mother, that turned my body cold. There was more to the email.

• From Educated (2018)

  I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me. Shawn always said you picked the fights, and I guess I wanted to believe that, because it was easier. Because you were strong and rational, and anyone could see that Shawn was not. That didn’t make sense. If I had seemed rational, why had Mother believed Shawn when he’d told her I was picking fights? That I needed to be subdued, disciplined. I’m a mother, she said. Mothers protect. And Shawn was so damaged. I wanted to say that she was also my mother but I didn’t. I don’t think Dad will believe any of this, I typed. He will, she wrote. But it’s hard for him. It reminds him of the damage his bipolar has caused to our family. I had never heard Mother admit that Dad might be mentally ill. Years before, I had told her what I’d learned in my psychology class about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she had shrugged it off. Hearing her say it now felt liberating. The illness gave me something to attack besides my father, so when Mother asked why I hadn’t come to her sooner, why I hadn’t asked for help, I answered honestly. Because you were so bullied by Dad, I said. You were not powerful in the house. Dad ran things, and he was not going to help us. I am stronger now, she said. I no longer run scared . When I read this, I imagined my mother as a young woman, brilliant and energetic, but also anxious and complying. Then the image changed, her body thinning, elongating, her hair flowing, long and silver. Emily is being bullied, I wrote. She is, Mother said. Like I was. She is you, I said. She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story. I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.” I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn? Yes, I remember that . There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you . I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood.

• From Educated (2018)

  I wanted her to say, “They think he’ll be fine” or even “They expect we’ll lose him.” Anything but what she was saying, which was, “They don’t know.” Mother said I should come to the hospital. I imagined Shawn on a white gurney, the life leaking out of him. I felt such a wave of loss that my knees nearly buckled, but in the next moment I felt something else. Relief. There was a storm coming, set to lay three feet of snow over Sardine Canyon, which guarded the entrance to our valley. Mother’s car, which I had driven to Debbie’s, had bald tires. I told Mother I couldn’t get through. —THE STORY OF HOW Shawn fell would come to me in bits and pieces, thin lines of narrative from Luke and Benjamin, who were there. It was a frigid afternoon and the wind was fierce, whipping the fine dust up in soft clouds. Shawn was standing on a wooden pallet, twenty feet in the air. Twelve feet below him was a half-finished concrete wall, with rebar jutting outward like blunt skewers. I don’t know what Shawn was doing on the pallet, but he was probably fitting posts or welding, because that was the kind of work he did. Dad was driving the forklift. I’ve heard conflicting accounts of why Shawn fell.* Someone said Dad moved the boom unexpectedly and Shawn pitched over the edge. But the general consensus is that Shawn was standing near the brink, and for no reason at all stepped backward and lost his footing. He plunged twelve feet, his body revolving slowly in the air, so that when he struck the concrete wall with its outcropping of rebar, he hit headfirst, then tumbled the last eight feet to the dirt. This is how the fall was described to me, but my mind sketches it differently—on a white page with evenly spaced lines. He ascends, falls at a slope, strikes the rebar and returns to the ground. I perceive a triangle. The event makes sense when I think of it in these terms. Then the logic of the page yields to my father. Dad looked Shawn over. Shawn was disoriented. One of his pupils was dilated and the other wasn’t, but no one knew what that meant. No one knew it meant there was a bleed inside his brain. Dad told Shawn to take a break. Luke and Benjamin helped him prop himself against the pickup, then went back to work. The facts after this point are even more hazy. The story I heard was that fifteen minutes later Shawn wandered onto the site. Dad thought he was ready to work and told him to climb onto the pallet, and Shawn, who never liked being told what to do, started screaming at Dad about everything—the equipment, the granary designs, his pay.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He was offering to help, and I was unprepared for how this made me feel. I’d flown scores of hawks. I’d taught falconry to beginners. I’d written papers on it, had lectured on its venerable history. But now I bowed my head before Stuart. He knew what to do. He knew about goshawks and I did not. I felt weak with relief at not having to be an expert any more. There he was, rolling a cigarette, reassuringly calm and kind, a proper, generous friend; and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life. ‘Need to excel in order to be loved,’ White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved? White was triumphant: Gos had come a whole hundred yards on the creance, was ready to fly free: he could say truthfully now that he had trained a hawk. But something terrible was caught up in his triumph. For the first time since the hawk arrived White felt exposed. Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement. In his hawking day-book White began writing about critics and how he might ‘avoid the kicks which frighten me’. He felt it necessary to explain that his self-satisfaction was not egotism, but ‘actually a horrible surprise at being good at anything after having been so bad at living for 30 years’. And all the authoritarian figures in his life under whom he had lived in fear coalesced in his imagination into an elderly falconer with a waxed moustache who would read his book and consider him a fool. He knew he must explain to that man that what he had written was only the book of a learner. The words in his day-book read very like a prayer. May I hope that this book will receive the oblivion of those austringers on the one hand, and of those critics on the other, who realise that indifference and a supposition of non-existence sometimes are the most killing weapons. May I hope that some will realise that I am only a man. He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

• From Educated (2018)

  I eased the car door open noiselessly, then padded across the grass and slipped through the back door, moving silently through the house, reaching my hand out to feel my way to the filing cabinet. I had only made it a few steps when I heard a familiar clink . “Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “It’s me!” “Who?” I flipped the light switch and saw Shawn sitting across the room, pointing a pistol at me. He lowered it. “I thought you were…someone else.” “Obviously,” I said. We stood awkwardly for a moment, then I went to bed. The next morning, after Dad left for the junkyard, I told Mother one of my fake stories about BYU needing her tax returns. She knew I was lying—I could tell because when Dad came in unexpectedly and asked why she was copying the returns, she said the duplicates were for her records. I took the copies and returned to BYU. Shawn and I exchanged no words before I left. He never asked why I’d been sneaking into my own house at three in the morning, and I never asked who he’d been waiting for, sitting up in the middle of the night, with a loaded pistol. —THE FORMS SAT ON my desk for a week before Robin walked with me to the post office and watched me hand them to the postal worker. It didn’t take long, a week, maybe two. I was cleaning houses in Draper when the mail came, so Robin left the letter on my bed with a note that I was a Commie now. I tore open the envelope and a check fell onto my bed. For four thousand dollars. I felt greedy, then afraid of my greed. There was a contact number. I dialed it. “There’s a problem,” I told the woman who answered. “The check is for four thousand dollars, but I only need fourteen hundred.” The line was silent. “Hello? Hello?” “Let me get this straight,” the woman said. “You’re saying the check is for too much money? What do you want me to do?” “If I send it back, could you send me another one? I only need fourteen hundred. For a root canal.” “Look, honey,” she said. “You get that much because that’s how much you get. Cash it or don’t, it’s up to you.” I had the root canal. I bought my textbooks, paid rent, and had money left over. The bishop said I should treat myself to something, but I said I couldn’t, I had to save the money. He told me I could afford to spend some. “Remember,” he said, “you can apply for the same amount next year.” I bought a new Sunday dress. I had believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would never again work for my father, I believed it.

• From Educated (2018)

  The meaning has been preserved. [image "Chapter 40 Educated" file=Image00042.jpg] When I was a child, I waited for my mind to grow, for my experiences to accumulate and my choices to solidify, taking shape into the likeness of a person. That person, or that likeness of one, had belonged. I was of that mountain, the mountain that had made me. It was only as I grew older that I wondered if how I had started is how I would end—if the first shape a person takes is their only true shape. As I write the final words of this story, I’ve not seen my parents in years, since my grandmother’s funeral. I’m close to Tyler, Richard and Tony, and from them, as well as from other family, I hear of the ongoing drama on the mountain—the injuries, violence and shifting loyalties. But it comes to me now as distant hearsay, which is a gift. I don’t know if the separation is permanent, if one day I will find a way back, but it has brought me peace. That peace did not come easily. I spent years enumerating my father’s flaws, constantly updating the tally, as if reciting every resentment, every real and imagined act of cruelty, of neglect, would justify my decision to cut him from my life. Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them . Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. The relief came when I turned inward. When I discovered, finally, that the decision could be upheld for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him. When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me, towering, indignant, I could not remember how, when I was young, his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence, I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us. But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance.

• From Educated (2018)

  He grabbed my wrist and my body slipped into the familiar posture, head thrust forward, arm coiled around my lower back, wrist folded absurdly onto itself. Like a dance step, my muscles remembered and raced to get ahead of the music. The air poured from my lungs as I tried to bend deeper, to give my wristbone every possible inch of relief. “Say it,” he said. But I was somewhere else. I was in the future. In a few hours, Shawn would be kneeling by my bed, and he’d be so very sorry. I knew it even as I hunched there. “What’s going on?” A man’s voice floated up from the stairwell in the hall. I turned my head and saw a face hovering between two wooden railings. It was Tyler. I was hallucinating. Tyler never came home. As I thought that, I laughed out loud, a high-pitched cackle. What kind of lunatic would come back here once he’d escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. That was good. It meant I was close to passing out. I was looking forward to it. Shawn dropped my wrist and again I fell. I looked up and saw that his gaze was fixed on the stairwell. Only then did it occur to me that Tyler was real. Shawn took a step back. He had waited until Dad and Luke were out of the house, away on a job, so his physicality could go unchallenged. Confronting his younger brother—less vicious but powerful in his own way—was more than he’d bargained for. “What’s going on?” Tyler repeated. He eyed Shawn, inching forward. Mother stopped crying. She was embarrassed. Tyler was an outsider now. He’d been gone for so long, he’d been shifted to that category of people who we kept secrets from. Who we kept this from. Tyler moved up the stairs, advancing on his brother. His face was taut, his breath shallow, but his expression held no hint of surprise. It seemed to me that Tyler knew exactly what he was doing, that he had done this before, when they were younger and less evenly matched. Tyler halted his forward march but he didn’t blink. He glared at Shawn as if to say, Whatever is happening here, it’s done. Shawn began to murmur about my clothes and what I did in town. Tyler cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want to know,” he said. Then, turning to me: “Go, get out of here.” “She’s not going anywhere,” Shawn repeated, flashing the key ring. Tyler tossed me his own keys. “Just go,” he said. I ran to Tyler’s car, which was wedged between Shawn’s truck and the chicken coop. I tried to back out, but I stomped too hard on the gas and the tires spun out, sending gravel flying. On my second attempt I succeeded. The car shot backward and circled around.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Mary, however, gazed at me with a kind of admiration in her eyes, as if awed and impressed that I had proved myself so normal - so spectacularly normal - at the last. I gave her a shilling, and patted her hand. Then I took a final turn around Smithfield Market. It was a warm morning, and the reek of the carcases was terrible, the hum of flies about them as deep and steady as the buzz of a motor; but for all that, I felt a kind of bleak fondness for the place, which I had gazed at, so often, in my weeks of madness. I moved on at last, and left the flies to their breakfast. I had only the vaguest ideas about where I should make for, but I had heard that the streets around King’s Cross were full of rooming-houses, and thought perhaps that I might try my luck up there. In the end, however, I did not get even so far as that. In the window of a shop on the Gray’s Inn Road I saw a little card: Respectible Lady Seeks Fe-Male Lodger, and an address. I gazed at it for a minute or so. The Respectible was off-putting: I couldn’t face another Mrs Best. But there was something very appealing about that Fe-Male. I saw myself in it - in the hyphen. I memorised the address. It was for a road named Green Street, which turned out to be wonderfully near - a narrow little street off the Gray’s Inn Road itself, with a well-kept terrace on one side, and a rather grim-looking tenement on the other. The number I sought was one of the houses, and looked very pleasant, with a pot of geraniums upon the step and, beside that, a three-legged cat, washing its face. The cat gave a hop as I approached, and lifted its head for me to tickle. I pulled on the bell, and was greeted by a kind-faced, white-haired lady in an apron and slippers; she let me in at once when I explained my visit, introduced herself as ‘Mrs Milne’, then spent a moment fussing over the cat. While she did so I looked about me, and blinked. The hallway was as crowded with pictures, almost, as Mrs Dendy’s old front parlour. These pictures were not, however, theatrical in theme; indeed, so far as I could make out, they had nothing in common at all save the fact that each of them was very brightly-hued.

• From Educated (2018)

  I asked Mother why she’d never stopped Shawn from hurting me. Shawn always said you picked the fights, and I guess I wanted to believe that, because it was easier. Because you were strong and rational, and anyone could see that Shawn was not. That didn’t make sense. If I had seemed rational, why had Mother believed Shawn when he’d told her I was picking fights? That I needed to be subdued, disciplined. I’m a mother, she said. Mothers protect. And Shawn was so damaged. I wanted to say that she was also my mother but I didn’t. I don’t think Dad will believe any of this, I typed. He will, she wrote. But it’s hard for him. It reminds him of the damage his bipolar has caused to our family. I had never heard Mother admit that Dad might be mentally ill. Years before, I had told her what I’d learned in my psychology class about bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but she had shrugged it off. Hearing her say it now felt liberating. The illness gave me something to attack besides my father, so when Mother asked why I hadn’t come to her sooner, why I hadn’t asked for help, I answered honestly. Because you were so bullied by Dad, I said. You were not powerful in the house. Dad ran things, and he was not going to help us. I am stronger now, she said. I no longer run scared . When I read this, I imagined my mother as a young woman, brilliant and energetic, but also anxious and complying. Then the image changed, her body thinning, elongating, her hair flowing, long and silver. Emily is being bullied, I wrote. She is, Mother said. Like I was. She is you, I said. She is me. But we know better now. We can rewrite the story. I asked about a memory. It was from the weeks before I’d left for BYU, after Shawn had had a particularly bad night. He’d brought Mother to tears, then plopped onto the sofa and turned on the TV. I’d found her sobbing at the kitchen table, and she’d asked me not to go to BYU. “You’re the only one strong enough to handle him,” she’d said. “I can’t, and your father can’t. It has to be you.” I typed slowly, reluctantly: Do you remember telling me not to go to school, that I was the only one who could handle Shawn? Yes, I remember that . There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you . I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  She must be terrified. I race downstairs, three steps at a time, burst through the door and turn on the light in her room. She is asleep. She wakes, pulls her head from her mantle-feathers and looks at me with clear eyes. She’s surprised to see me. She yawns, showing her pink mouth like a cat’s and its arrowhead tongue with its black tip. Her creamy underparts are draped right down over her feet, so only one lemony toe and one carbon-black talon are exposed. Her other foot is drawn high up at her chest. She felt the tremors. And then she went back to sleep, entirely unmoved by the moving earth. The quake brought no panic, no fear, no sense of wrongness to her at all. She’s at home in the world. She’s here. She ducks her head upside down, pleased to see me, shakes her feathers into a fluffy mop of contentment, and then, as I sit with her, she slowly closes her eyes, tucks her head back into her feathers, and sleeps. She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them. I had thought the world was ending, but my hawk had saved me again, and all the terror was gone. She sleeps all the way to Suffolk in my car. Tony’s house is tucked behind trees on a road between two fields and lines of hedgerow elms. I pull into the drive, take Mabel onto my glove and walk across the lawn. He comes out to greet me. We walk together to the high, white-walled aviary behind his mews. He unlocks the door and I step through. Her new home is huge. There are bark-covered branches, and perches upholstered in astroturf to massage her feet. There is a bath, a chute through which Tony will drop her food; weedy undergrowth, gravel, a nest-ledge to lie on, a patch of warming sun. Above the wire- mesh roof the Suffolk sky. ‘Well, Mabes,’ I say, unhooding her, ‘This is your home for the next few months.’ She looks down at my hand as it pulls each jess free from her anklets: now she stands on my fist wearing none at all. She cocks an eye up to the moving clouds, then examines her surroundings. She follows the line of the roof to the corners, peers at the cinderblock foundation walls. For a moment we are back in the darkened room on that first day of our meeting. I remember that moment when the hawk first forgot me and flinch inwardly at the knowledge that now she will forget me again. ‘I’ll see you after the summer’s over,’ I say. Forgetting.