Sadness

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)

  —BUCK’S PEAK LOOKED THE way it always did at Christmas—a snowy spire, adorned with evergreens—and my eyes, increasingly accustomed to brick and concrete, were nearly blinded by the scale and clarity of it. Richard was in the forklift as I drove up the hill, moving a stack of purlins for the shop Dad was building in Franklin, near town. Richard was twenty-two, and one of the smartest people I knew, but he lacked a high school diploma. As I passed him in the drive, it occurred to me that he’d probably be driving that forklift for the rest of his life. I’d been home for only a few minutes when Tyler called. “I’m just checking in,” he said. “To see if Richard is studying for the ACT.” “He’s gonna take it?” “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “Maybe. Dad and I have been working on him.” “Dad?” Tyler laughed. “Yeah, Dad. He wants Richard to go to college.” I thought Tyler was joking until an hour later when we sat down to dinner. We’d only just started eating when Dad, his mouth full of potatoes, said, “Richard, I’ll give you next week off, paid, if you’ll use it to study them books.” I waited for an explanation. It was not long in coming. “Richard is a genius,” Dad told me a moment later, winking. “He’s five times smarter than that Einstein was. He can disprove all them socialist theories and godless speculations. He’s gonna get down there and blow up the whole damn system.” Dad continued with his raptures, oblivious to the effect he was having on his listeners. Shawn slumped on a bench, his back against the wall, his face tilted toward the floor. To look at him was to imagine a man cut from stone, so heavy did he seem, so void of motion. Richard was the miracle son, the gift from God, the Einstein to disprove Einstein. Richard would move the world. Shawn would not. He’d lost too much of his mind when he’d fallen off that pallet. One of my father’s sons would be driving the forklift for the rest of his life, but it wouldn’t be Richard. Richard looked even more miserable than Shawn. His shoulders hunched and his neck sank into them, as if he were compressing under the weight of Dad’s praise. After Dad went to bed, Richard told me that he’d taken a practice test for the ACT. He’d scored so low, he wouldn’t tell me the number. “Apparently I’m Einstein,” Richard said, his head in his hands. “What do I do? Dad is saying I’m going to blow this thing out of the water, and I’m not even sure I can pass.” Every night was the same. Through dinner, Dad would list all the false theories of science that his genius son would disprove; then after dinner, I would tell Richard about college, about classes, books, professors, things I knew would appeal to his innate need to learn.

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

  I turned once more to Chuck Robinson. He’d served with distinction as lieutenant commander on a battleship in World War II. He’d built Saudi Arabia’s first steel mill. He’d helped negotiate the grain deal with the Soviets. Chuck knew business cold, better than anyone I’d ever met, and I’d been wanting his advice for quite some time. But over the last few years he’d been the number two man under Henry Kissinger at the State Department, and thereby “off-limits” to me, according to Jaqua. Now, with Jimmy Carter newly elected, Chuck was on Wall Street and available once again for consultations. I invited him out to Oregon. I’ll never forget his first day in our office. I caught him up on the developments of the last few years and thanked him for his invaluable counsel about Japanese trading companies. Then I showed him our financial statements. He flipped through them, started to laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing. “Compositionally,” he said, “you are a Japanese trading company—90 percent debt!” “I know.” “You can’t live like this,” he said. “Well… I guess that’s why you’re here.” As the first order of business, I invited him to be on our board of directors. To my surprise, he agreed. Then I asked his opinion about going public. He said going public wasn’t an option. It was mandatory. I needed to solve this cash flow problem, he said, attack it, wrestle it to the ground, or else I could lose the company. Hearing his assessment was frightening, but necessary. For the first time ever I saw going public as inevitable, and I couldn’t help it, the realization made me sad. Of course we stood to make a great deal of money. But getting rich had never factored in my decisions, and it mattered even less to the Buttfaces. So when I brought it up at the next meeting and told them what Chuck had said, I didn’t ask for another debate. I just put it to a vote. Hayes was for. Johnson was against. Strasser, too. “It’ll spoil the culture,” he kept saying, over and over. Woodell was on the fence. If there was one thing we all agreed on, however, it was the lack of barriers. Nothing stood in the way of going public. Sales were extraordinary, word of mouth was positive, legal disputes were behind us. We had debt, but for the moment it was manageable. At the start of the 1977 Christmas season, as the brightly colored lights appeared on the houses in my neighborhood, I recall thinking during one of my nightly runs: Everything is about to change. It’s just a matter of time. And then came the letter. AN UNIMPOSING LITTLE thing. Standard white envelope. Embossed return address. U.S. Customs Service, Washington, DC. I opened it and my hands started to shake. It was a bill. For $25 million.

• From Educated (2018)

  We trapped mice to feed it, but sometimes it didn’t eat them, and we couldn’t clear away the carcasses. The smell of death was strong and foul, a punch to the gut. The owl grew restless. When it began to refuse food, we opened the back door and let it escape. It wasn’t fully healed, but Dad said its chances were better with the mountain than with us. It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong. —I WANTED TO TELL SOMEONE I’d failed the exam, but something stopped me from calling Tyler. It might have been shame. Or it might have been that Tyler was preparing to be a father. He’d met his wife, Stefanie, at Purdue, and they’d married quickly. She didn’t know anything about our family. To me, it felt as though he preferred his new life—his new family—to his old one. I called home. Dad answered. Mother was delivering a baby, which she was doing more and more now the migraines had stopped. “When will Mother be home?” I said. “Don’t know,” said Dad. “Might as well ask the Lord as me, as He’s the one deciding.” He chuckled, then asked, “How’s school?” Dad and I hadn’t spoken since he’d screamed at me about the VCR. I could tell he was trying to be supportive, but I didn’t think I could admit to him that I was failing. I wanted to tell him it was going well. So easy, I imagined myself saying. “Not great,” I said instead. “I had no idea it would be this hard.” The line was silent, and I imagined Dad’s stern face hardening. I waited for the jab I imagined he was preparing, but instead a quiet voice said, “It’ll be okay, honey.” “It won’t,” I said. “There will be no scholarship. I’m not even going to pass.” My voice was shaky now. “If there’s no scholarship, there’s no scholarship,” he said. “Maybe I can help with the money. We’ll figure it out. Just be happy, okay?” “Okay,” I said. “Come on home if you need.” I hung up, not sure what I’d just heard. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the next time we spoke everything would be different, the tenderness of this moment forgotten, the endless struggle between us again in the foreground. But tonight he wanted to help. And that was something. —IN MARCH, THERE WAS ANOTHER exam in Western Civ. This time I made flash cards. I spent hours memorizing odd spellings, many of them French (France, I now understood, was a part of Europe). Jacques-Louis David and François Boucher: I couldn’t say them but I could spell them. My lecture notes were nonsensical, so I asked Vanessa if I could look at hers. She looked at me skeptically, and for a moment I wondered if she’d noticed me cheating off her exam. She said she wouldn’t give me her notes but that we could study together, so after class I followed her to her dorm room.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Many were dismayed by Heidegger’s apparent refusal to condemn National Socialism after the war. But his ideas were extremely evocative and influenced a generation of Christian theologians. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) insisted that God must be de-objectified and that the scriptures did not convey factual information but could be understood only if Christians involved themselves existentially with their faith. “To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves … with an objective event,” he explained, “but rather to make the cross our own.”55 Europeans had lost the sense that their doctrines were mere gestures toward transcendence. Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is “not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. … Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but … existentially.”56 Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art. Religion was possible only when people were “stirred by the question of their own existence and can hear the claim that the text makes.”57 A careful examination of the Gospels showed that Jesus did not see God as “an object of thought or speculation” but as an existential demand, a “power that constrains man to decision, who confronts him in the demand for good.”58 Like Heidegger, Bultmann understood that the sense of the divine was not something to be comprehended once and for all; it came to us repetitively, by constant attention to the demands of the moment. He was not speaking of an exotic mystical experience. Having lived through the Nazi years, Bultmann knew how frequently, in such circumstances, men and women are confronted by an internal requirement that seems to come from outside themselves and which they cannot reject without denying what is most authentic to them. God was, therefore, an absolute claim that drew people beyond self-interest and egotism into transcendence. Paul Tillich (1886–1965) was born in Prussia and served as an army chaplain in the trenches during the First World War, after which he suffered two major breakdowns. Later he became a professor of theology at the University of Frankfurt but was expelled by the Nazis in 1933 and emigrated to the United States. He saw the modern God as an idolatry that human beings must leave behind. The concept of a “Personal God,” interfering with natural events, or being “an independent cause of natural events” makes God a natural object beside others, an object among others, a being among beings, maybe the highest, but nevertheless, a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.59

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They darkened further. Driving back to the house one afternoon I passed a huddle of walkers staring at a rabbit crouched in the grassy verge on the other side of the road. They were upset. Their shoulders were hunched in concern. I pulled in a little further up the road and waited. I did not want to talk to them, but their concern pulled at me. They knew the rabbit was sick and wanted to do something, but no one knew what that could be, and no one was brave enough to get near it. For minutes on end they stared at it, unable to intervene, unwilling to leave. Then they walked on. When they were gone I got out of the car and went up to the little lump of fur. It was a small rabbit. Its muscles were wasted, its head covered in tumours, its eyes swollen and blistered. It was matted with mud. It could not see. ‘Oh rabbit,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Leaning down I hardened my heart and put it out of its misery. The rabbit had myxomatosis. It arrived in Britain in 1952 and in two years the virus – originally from South America, but already introduced by humans to Australia and Europe – killed ninety-five per cent of the British rabbit population. Tens of millions of rain-soaked corpses littered the roads and fields, and their disappearance had huge effects on the countryside: rabbit-grazed grasslands grew thick with scrub and predator populations crashed. Rabbits have recovered since, though never to the numbers that we once thought normal. And while the virus is less virulent now, outbreaks still occur.

• From Educated (2018)

  All we could do was wait, and soon it felt as though everything we did was just another form of waiting—waiting to feed him, waiting to change his bandages. Waiting to see how much of our father would grow back. It was difficult to imagine a man like Dad—proud, strong, physical—permanently impaired. I wondered how he would adjust if Mother were forever cutting his food for him; if he could live a happy life if he wasn’t able to grasp a hammer. So much had been lost. But mixed in with the sadness, I also felt hope. Dad had always been a hard man—a man who knew the truth on every subject and wasn’t interested in what anybody else had to say. We listened to him, never the other way around: when he was not speaking, he required silence. The explosion transformed him from lecturer to observer. Speaking was difficult for him, because of the constant pain but also because his throat was burned. So he watched, he listened. He lay, hour after hour, day after day, his eyes alert, his mouth shut. Within a few weeks, my father—who years earlier had not been able to guess my age within half a decade—knew about my classes, my boyfriend, my summer job. I hadn’t told him any of it, but he’d listened to the chatter between me and Audrey as we changed his bandages, and he’d remembered. “I’d like to hear more about them classes,” he rasped one morning near the end of the summer. “It sounds real interesting.” It felt like a new beginning. —DAD WAS STILL BEDRIDDEN when Shawn and Emily announced their engagement. It was suppertime, and the family was gathered around the kitchen table, when Shawn said he guessed he’d marry Emily after all. There was silence while forks scraped plates. Mother asked if he was serious. He said he wasn’t, that he figured he’d find somebody better before he actually had to go through with it. Emily sat next to him, wearing a warped smile. I didn’t sleep that night. I kept checking the bolt on the door. The present seemed vulnerable to the past, as if it might be overwhelmed by it, as if I might blink, and when my eyes opened I would be fifteen. The next morning Shawn said he and Emily were planning a twenty-mile horse ride to Bloomington Lake. I surprised both of us by saying I wanted to go. I felt anxious when I imagined all those hours in the wilderness with Shawn, but I pushed the anxiety aside. There was something I had to do. Fifty miles feels like five hundred on a horse, particularly if your body is more accustomed to a chair than a saddle. When we arrived at the lake, Shawn and Emily slipped nimbly off their horses and began to make camp; it was all I could do to unhitch Apollo’s saddle and ease myself onto a fallen tree.

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

  We heard his name coming from every direction, and his spirit seemed to hover like the low clouds roiling above the track. And if you were tempted to forget him, even for a moment, you got another bracing reminder when you looked at the runners’ feet. Many were wearing Pre Montreals. (Many more were wearing Exeter-made products like the Triumph and the Vainqueur. Hayward that day looked like a Nike showroom.) It was well known that these trials would have been the start of Pre’s epic comeback. After being knocked down in Munich, he’d have risen again, no doubt, and the rising would have begun right here, right now. Each race prompted the same thoughts, the same image: Pre bursting ahead of the pack. Pre diving through the tape. We could see it. We could see him flush with victory. If only, we kept saying, our voices choking, if only. At sunset the sky turned red, white, and a deep blackish blue. But it was still bright enough to read by as the runners in the 10,000 meters gathered at the starting line. Penny and I tried to clear our minds as we stood, hands clasped as if in prayer. We were counting on Shorter, of course. He was extremely talented, and he’d been the last person to see Pre alive—it made sense that he’d be the one to carry Pre’s torch. But we also had Nikes on Craig Virgin, a brilliant young runner from the University of Illinois, and on Garry Bjorklund, a lovable veteran from Minnesota, who was trying to come back from surgery to remove a loose bone in his foot. The gun went off, the runners shot forward, all bunched tight, and Penny and I were bunched tight, too, oohing and aahing with every stride. There wasn’t an inch of separation in the pack until the halfway mark, when Shorter and Virgin violently pushed ahead. In the jostling, Virgin accidentally stepped on Bjorklund and sent his Nike flying. Now Bjorklund’s tender, surgically repaired foot was bare, exposed, smacking the hard track with every stride. And yet Bjorklund didn’t stop.

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

  Bowerman had held a twilight meet at Hayward Field to raise money for Woodell’s medical expenses. Now he faced the task of finding something for Woodell to do. At present, he said, the poor guy was sitting around his parents’ house in a wheelchair, staring at the walls. Woodell had made tentative inquiries about being Bowerman’s assistant coach, but Bowerman said to me: “I just don’t think that’s going to work, Buck. Maybe he could do something for Blue Ribbon.” I hung up and dialed Woodell. I nearly said how sorry I was about his accident, but I caught myself. I wasn’t sure that was the right thing to say. In my mind I ran through another half dozen things, each of which seemed wrong. I’d never been so at a loss for words, and I’d spent half my life tongue-tied. What does one say to a track star who suddenly can’t move his legs? I decided to keep it strictly business. I explained that Bowerman had recommended Woodell and said I might have a job for him with my new shoe company. I suggested we get together for lunch. Sure thing, he said. We met the next day at a sandwich shop in downtown Beaverton, a suburb west of Portland. Woodell drove there himself; he’d already mastered a special car, a Mercury Cougar with hand controls. In fact, he was early. I was fifteen minutes late. If not for his wheelchair, I don’t know that I’d have recognized Woodell when I first walked in. I’d seen him once in person, and several times on TV, but after his many ordeals and surgeries he was shockingly thinner. He’d lost sixty pounds, and his naturally sharp features were now drawn with a much finer pencil. His hair, however, was still jet black, and still grew in remarkably tight curls. He looked like a bust or frieze of Hermes I’d seen somewhere in the Greek countryside. His eyes were black, too, and they shone with a steeliness, a shrewdness—maybe a sadness. Not unlike Johnson’s. Whatever it was, it was mesmerizing, and endearing. I regretted being late. Lunch was supposed to be a job interview, but the interview part was a formality, we both knew. Men of Oregon take care of their own. Fortunately, loyalty aside, we hit it off. We made each other laugh, mostly about Bowerman. We reminisced about the many ways he tortured runners, ostensibly to instill toughness, like heating a key on a stove and pressing it against their naked flesh in the sauna. We’d both fallen victim. Before long I felt that I’d have given Woodell a job even if he’d been a stranger. Gladly. He was my kind of people. I wasn’t certain what Blue Ribbon was, or if it would ever become a thing at all, but whatever it was or might become, I hoped it would have something of this man’s spirit.

• From Educated (2018)

  The number of my sister wives would depend on my husband’s righteousness: the more nobly he lived, the more wives he would be given. I had never made my peace with it. As a girl I had often imagined myself in heaven, dressed in a white gown, standing in a pearly mist across from my husband. But when the camera zoomed out there were ten women standing behind us, wearing the same white dress. In my fantasy I was the first wife but I knew there was no guarantee of that; I might be hidden anywhere in the long chain of wives. For as long as I could remember, this image had been at the core of my idea of paradise: my husband, and his wives. There was a sting in this arithmetic: in knowing that in the divine calculus of heaven, one man could balance the equation for countless women. I remembered my great-great-grandmother. I had first heard her name when I was twelve, which is the year that, in Mormonism, you cease to be a child and become a woman. Twelve was the age when lessons in Sunday school began to include words like purity and chastity. It was also the age that I was asked, as part of a church assignment, to learn about one of my ancestors. I asked Mother which ancestor I should choose, and without thinking she said, “Anna Mathea.” I said the name aloud. It floated off my tongue like the beginning of a fairy tale. Mother said I should honor Anna Mathea because she had given me a gift: her voice. “It was her voice that brought our family to the church,” Mother said. “She heard Mormon missionaries preaching in the streets of Norway. She prayed, and God blessed her with faith, with the knowledge that Joseph Smith was His prophet. She told her father, but he’d heard stories about the Mormons and wouldn’t allow her to be baptized. So she sang for him. She sang him a Mormon hymn called ‘O My Father.’ When she finished singing, her father had tears in his eyes. He said that any religion with music so beautiful must be the work of God. They were baptized together.” After Anna Mathea converted her parents, the family felt called by God to come to America and meet the prophet Joseph. They saved for the journey, but after two years they could bring only half the family. Anna Mathea was left behind. The journey was long and harsh, and by the time they made it to Idaho, to a Mormon settlement called Worm Creek, Anna’s mother was sick, dying. It was her last wish to see her daughter again, so her father wrote to Anna, begging her to take what money she had and come to America. Anna had fallen in love and was to be married, but she left her fiancé in Norway and crossed the ocean. Her mother died before she reached the American shore.

• From Educated (2018)

  She had even enlisted the help of our cousin Missy, who had come up from Salt Lake City to tutor her. Missy had worked with Audrey for an entire summer, at the end of which she’d declared that Audrey’s education hovered somewhere between the fourth- and fifth-grade levels, and that a GED was out of the question. I chewed my lip and stared at her daughter, who had brought me a drawing, wondering what education she could hope to receive from a mother who had none herself. We made breakfast for the children, then played with them in the snow. We baked, we watched crime dramas and designed beaded bracelets. It was as if I had stepped through a mirror and was living a day in the life I might have had, if I’d stayed on the mountain. But I hadn’t stayed. My life had diverged from my sister’s, and it felt as though there was no common ground between us. The hours passed; it was late afternoon; and still she felt distant from me, still she refused to meet my gaze. I had brought a small porcelain tea set for her children, and when they began to quarrel over the teapot, I gathered up the pieces. The oldest girl reminded me that she was five now, which she said was too old to have a toy taken away. “If you act like a child,” I said, “I’ll treat you like one.” I don’t know why I said it; I suppose Shawn was on my mind. I regretted the words even as they left my lips, hated myself for saying them. I turned to pass the tea set to my sister, so she could administer justice however she saw fit, but when I saw her expression I nearly dropped it. Her mouth hung open in a perfect circle. “Shawn used to say that,” she said, fixing her eyes on mine. That moment would stay with me. I would remember it the next day, when I boarded a plane in Salt Lake City, and it would still be on my mind when I landed in London. It was the shock of it that I couldn’t shake. Somehow, it had never occurred to me that my sister might have lived my life before I did. —THAT TERM, I PRESENTED myself to the university like resin to a sculptor. I believed I could be remade, my mind recast. I forced myself to befriend other students, clumsily introducing myself again and again until I had a small circle of friends. Then I set out to obliterate the barriers that separated me from them. I tasted red wine for the first time, and my new friends laughed at my pinched face. I discarded my high-necked blouses and began to wear more fashionable cuts—fitted, often sleeveless, with less restrictive necklines. In photos from this period I’m struck by the symmetry: I look like everyone else. In April I began to do well.

• From Educated (2018)

  I carried them to the car and put them in the backseat. “I’m going for a drive,” I told Mother. I tried to keep my voice smooth. I hugged her, then took a long look at Buck’s Peak, memorizing every line and shadow. Mother had seen me take my journals to the car. She must have known what that meant, must have sensed the farewell in it, because she fetched my father. He gave me a stiff hug and said, “I love you, you know that?” “I do,” I said. “That has never been the issue.” Those words are the last I said to my father. —I DROVE SOUTH; I didn’t know where I was going. It was nearly Christmas. I had decided to go to the airport and board the next flight to Boston when Tyler called. I hadn’t spoken to my brother in months—after what happened with Audrey, it had seemed pointless to confide in my siblings. I was sure Mother would have told every brother, cousin, aunt and uncle the story she had told Erin: that I was possessed, dangerous, taken by the devil. I wasn’t wrong: Mother had warned them. But then she made a mistake. After I left Buck’s Peak, she panicked. She was afraid I might contact Tyler, and that if I did, he might sympathize with me. She decided to get to Tyler first, to deny anything I might tell him, but she miscalculated. She didn’t stop to think how the denials would sound, coming from nowhere like that. “Of course Shawn didn’t stab Diego and threaten Tara with the knife,” Mother reassured Tyler, but to Tyler, who had never heard any part of this story, not from me or anyone else, this was somewhat less than reassuring. A moment after he said goodbye to Mother, Tyler called me, demanding to know what had happened and why I hadn’t come to him. I thought he’d say I was lying but he didn’t. He accepted almost immediately the reality I’d spent a year denying. I didn’t understand why he was trusting me, but then he told me his own stories and I remembered: Shawn had been his older brother, too. In the weeks that followed, Tyler began to test my parents in the subtle, nonconfrontational way that was uniquely his. He suggested that perhaps the situation had been mishandled, that perhaps I was not possessed. Perhaps I was not evil at all. I might have taken comfort in Tyler’s trying to help me, but the memory of my sister was too raw, and I didn’t trust him. I knew that if Tyler confronted my parents—really confronted them—they would force him to choose between me and them, between me and the rest of the family. And from Audrey I had learned: he would not choose me. —MY FELLOWSHIP AT HARVARD finished in the spring. I flew to the Middle East, where Drew was completing a Fulbright.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Jocko looked at him ambiguously. “You want to kiss her?” he asked the man, and Kathy smiled. “Could I?” the man said enthusiastically. Kathy turned her smiling face to the man, her parted lips inviting him. “Yes!” Jocko said, pushing the man savagely toward Kathy. The man kissed Kathy, very long. And then, suddenly, ferociously, Kathy reaches for his hand, pulling it from where it wound about her back. Leaning slightly back, she plants the man’s hand firmly between her thighs. The man’s hand explores eagerly. Kathy smiles fiercely. The man pulled his hand away violently, stumbling back in astonishment. Kathy follows him with the fading eyes. Now Jocko smiles too. I turn away quickly from the sight. I feel gigantically sad for Kathy, for the dropped mask—sad for Jocko—for myself—sad for the man who kissed Kathy and discovered he was kissing a man. Sad for the whole rotten spectacle of the world wearing cold, cold masks. And I remember someone’s words—from some darkcity: “The ice age of the heart” Minutes later, my own mask began to crumble. I was standing drinking at Les Deux Freres with two scores who wanted to make it with me—“before the parade,” one said, “weve still got time”—and I had agreed. And as they gulped their drinks hurriedly to leave the bar with me, suddenly something uncontrollable seized me. Incongruously, like this: out of nowhere, surprising myself by the sounds of my words, I blurted to those two: “I want to tell you something before we leave. Im not at all the way you think I am. Im not like you want me to be, the way I tried to look and act for you: not unconcerned, nor easygoing—not tough: no, not at all.” And having said that, as if those words had come from someone else—someone else imprisoned inside me, protesting now—I felt as if something had exploded inside me—and exploding at last, I went on, challenging their astonished look: “No, Im not the way I pretended to be for you—and for others. Like you, like everyone else, Im Scared, cold, cold terrified.” Predictably, I became a stranger to them. They had sought something else in me—the opposite from them; and I had acted out a role for them—as I had acted it out for how many, many others?

• From Educated (2018)

  Mother was marketing her products as a spiritual alternative to Obamacare, and she was selling product as fast as she could make it, even with dozens of employees. God had to be behind such a wondrous success, Grandpa said. My parents must have been called by the Lord to do what they have done, to be great healers, to bring souls to God. I smiled and stood to go. He was the same gentle old man I remembered, but I was overwhelmed by the distance between us. I hugged him at the door, and gave him a long look. He was eighty-seven. I doubted whether, in the years he had left, I would be able to prove to him that I was not what my father said I was, that I was not a wicked thing. —TYLER AND STEFANIE LIVED a hundred miles north of Buck’s Peak, in Idaho Falls. It was there I planned to go next, but before leaving the valley, I wrote my mother. It was a short message. I said I was nearby and wanted her to meet me in town. I wasn’t ready to see Dad, I said, but it had been years since I’d seen her face. Would she come? I waited for her reply in the parking lot at Stokes. I didn’t wait long. It pains me that you think it is acceptable to ask this. A wife does not go where her husband is not welcome. I will not be party to such blatant disrespect. * The message was long and reading it made me tired, as if I’d run a great distance. The bulk of it was a lecture on loyalty: that families forgive, and that if I could not forgive mine, I would regret it for the rest of my life. The past, she wrote, whatever it was, ought to be shoveled fifty feet under and left to rot in the earth . Mother said I was welcome to come to the house, that she prayed for the day when I would run through the back door, shouting, “I’m home!” I wanted to answer her prayer—I was barely more than ten miles from the mountain—but I knew what unspoken pact I would be making as I walked through that door. I could have my mother’s love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth. Mother’s message amounted to an ultimatum: I could see her and my father, or I would never see her again. She has never recanted. —THE PARKING LOT HAD filled while I was reading. I let her words settle, then started the engine and pulled onto Main Street. At the intersection I turned west, toward the mountain. Before I left the valley, I would set eyes on my home.

• From Educated (2018)

  I tried to avoid fights with Richard, especially the kind that ended with the two of us rolling on the floor, him pulling my hair, me dragging my fingernails through the softness of his face. I should have known that one day Tyler would leave. Tony and Shawn had gone, and they’d belonged on the mountain in a way that Tyler never did. Tyler had always loved what Dad called “book learning,” which was something the rest of us, with the exception of Richard, were perfectly indifferent to. There had been a time, when Tyler was a boy, when Mother had been idealistic about education. She used to say that we were kept at home so we could get a better education than other kids. But it was only Mother who said that, as Dad thought we should learn more practical skills. When I was very young, that was the battle between them: Mother trying to hold school every morning, and Dad herding the boys into the junkyard the moment her back was turned. But Mother would lose that battle, eventually. It began with Luke, the fourth of her five sons. Luke was smart when it came to the mountain—he worked with animals in a way that made it seem like he was talking to them—but he had a severe learning disability and struggled to learn to read. Mother spent five years sitting with him at the kitchen table every morning, explaining the same sounds again and again, but by the time he was twelve, it was all Luke could do to cough out a sentence from the Bible during family scripture study. Mother couldn’t understand it. She’d had no trouble teaching Tony and Shawn to read, and everyone else had just sort of picked it up. Tony had taught me to read when I was four, to win a bet with Shawn, I think. Once Luke could scratch out his name and read short, simple phrases, Mother turned to math. What math I was ever taught I learned doing the breakfast dishes and listening to Mother explain, over and over, what a fraction is or how to use negative numbers. Luke never made any progress, and after a year Mother gave up. She stopped talking about us getting a better education than other kids. She began to echo Dad. “All that really matters,” she said to me one morning, “is that you kids learn to read. That other twaddle is just brainwashing.” Dad started coming in earlier and earlier to round up the boys until, by the time I was eight, and Tyler sixteen, we’d settled into a routine that omitted school altogether. Mother’s conversion to Dad’s philosophy was not total, however, and occasionally she was possessed of her old enthusiasm. On those days, when the family was gathered around the table, eating breakfast, Mother would announce that today we were doing school .

• From Educated (2018)

  [image "Chapter 5 Honest Dirt" file=Image00007.jpg] The mountain thawed and the Princess appeared on its face, her head brushing the sky. It was Sunday, a month after the accident, and everyone had gathered in the living room. Dad had begun to expound a scripture when Tyler cleared his throat and said he was leaving. “I’m g-g-going to c-college,” he said, his face rigid. A vein in his neck bulged as he forced the words out, appearing and disappearing every few seconds, a great, struggling snake. Everyone looked at Dad. His expression was folded, impassive. The silence was worse than shouting. Tyler would be the third of my brothers to leave home. My oldest brother, Tony, drove rigs, hauling gravel or scrap, trying to scrape together enough money to marry the girl down the road. Shawn, the next oldest, had quarreled with Dad a few months before and taken off. I hadn’t seen him since, though Mother got a hurried call every few weeks telling her he was fine, that he was welding or driving rigs. If Tyler left too, Dad wouldn’t have a crew, and without a crew he couldn’t build barns or hay sheds. He would have to fall back on scrapping. “What’s college?” I said. “College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the first time around,” Dad said. Tyler stared at the floor, his face tense. Then his shoulders dropped, his face relaxed and he looked up; it seemed to me that he’d stepped out of himself. His eyes were soft, pleasant. I couldn’t see him in there at all. He listened to Dad, who settled into a lecture. “There’s two kinds of them college professors,” Dad said. “Those who know they’re lying, and those who think they’re telling the truth.” Dad grinned. “Don’t know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fide agent of the Illuminati, who at least knows he’s on the devil’s payroll, or a high-minded professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God’s.” He was still grinning. The situation wasn’t serious; he just needed to talk some sense into his son. Mother said Dad was wasting his time, that nobody could talk Tyler out of anything once his mind was made up. “You may as well take a broom and start sweeping dirt off the mountain,” she said. Then she stood, took a few moments to steady herself, and trudged downstairs. She had a migraine. She nearly always had a migraine. She was still spending her days in the basement, coming upstairs only after the sun had gone down, and even then she rarely stayed more than an hour before the combination of noise and exertion made her head throb. I watched her slow, careful progress down the steps, her back bent, both hands gripping the rail, as if she were blind and had to feel her way. She waited for both feet to plant solidly on one step before reaching for the next.

• From City of Night (1963)

  But I noticed immediately the telltale brand about his eyes: the eyes of someone who has seen much too much. Suddenly this youngman with the massive arms no longer looked so young. And I remembered Skipper.... He placed his hands quickly on Sylvia’s shoulders. “Jocko!” she greeted him warmly. “Back as usual,” he said. “This is one of the ones I was telling you about—who come back every year,” Sylvia told me. “Youre later than usual,” she said to him. “How was Miami?” “I didnt stay there long. I had to split,” he said. “I been in St Louis.” Sylvia frowned. Again I get the impression that she doesnt want to know too much. “Well, welcome back—again,” she said, looking at him tenderly, almost sadly. “Always back,” he said, moving away. Staring after Jocko, Sylvia said: “That guy’s made it on his muscles long after most of them would be through. He was an acrobat—once. Like everything else, the circus folded. Now he comes here each year to join another kind of circus.... He was the best hustler in New Orleans,” she said, almost proudly, “and he had iron rules he stuck by—thats why everyone liked him: never clipped anyone, treated everyone straight.... Now—well—maybe it’s changed.” Abruptly, as if to stop the wondering about why Jocko had to leave Miami, she said: “After Mardi Gras, this city clamps up. It dies, as if it’s seen too much during the Carnival, and then you can almost feel Lent in the air. You breathe it. It takes over the city. New Orleans goes into mourning. Thats when the plainclothesmen haunt the bars again for vagrants,” she warned. “And thats when Jocko leaves—at midnight. The next Mardi Gras, hes back.... And yet, each year since Ive been here, I wonder if that will be the last one—if he’ll never show up again....” As if now on an invisible trapeze, I thought suddenly. “In a few years he’ll be old,” Sylvia said, “and hes the kind that should stay Young. No brains. Just goodlooks—and an instinctive understanding of so many things. I guess no one can blame him for anything,” she said, as if to herself. “Something—something tossed him out!” she said fiercely. An intense silence. Then: “Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d fallen off the damn trapeze,” she said brutally. I looked at her, at the harsh, saddened face, and I realized how violently, at that moment, she hated the world of this bar she owned.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  By the end of August, when the oyster season had started again and we were back in the shop full-time, they began to press me to bring Kitty home with me, that they might meet her for themselves.‘You are always saying as how she is your pal,’ said Father one morning at breakfast. ‘And besides - what a crime it would be for her to come so near to Whitstable, and never taste a proper oyster-tea. You bring her over here, before she goes.’ The idea of asking Kitty to sup with my family seemed a horrible one; and because my father spoke so carelessly about the fact that she would soon have left for a new hall, I made him a stinging reply. A little later Mother took me aside. Was my father’s house not good enough for Miss Butler, she said, that I couldn’t invite her here? Was I ashamed of my parents, and my parents’ trade? Her words made me gloomy; I was quiet and sad with Kitty that night, and when after the show she asked me why, I bit my lip.‘My parents want me to ask you over,’ I said, ‘for tea tomorrow. You don’t have to come, and I can say you’re busy or sick. But I promised them I’d ask you; and now,’ I finished miserably, ‘I have.’She took my hand. ‘But Nan,’ she said in wonder, ‘I should love to come! You know how dull it is for me in Canterbury, with no one but Mrs Pugh, and Sandy, to talk to!’ Mrs Pugh was the landlady of Kitty’s rooming-house; Sandy was the boy who shared her landing: he played in the band at the Palace, but drank, she said, and was sometimes silly and a bore. ‘Oh, how nice it would be,’ she continued, ‘to sit in a proper parlour again, with a proper family - not just a room with a bed in it, and a dirty rug, and a bit of newspaper on the table for a cloth! And how nice to see where you live and work; and to catch your train; and to meet the people that love you, and have you with them all day ...’It made me fidget and swallow to hear her talk like this, all unself-consciously, of how she liked me; tonight, however, I had no time even to blush: for as she spoke there came a knock at her door - a sharp, cheerful, authoritative knock that made her blink and stiffen, and look up in surprise.I, too, gave a start.

• From City of Night (1963)

  It seemed the windstorm lasted for days, weeks. But it must have been over, as usual, the next day, when Im standing next to my mother in the kitchen. (Strangely, I loved to sit and look at her as she fixed the food—or did the laundry: She washed our clothes outside in an aluminum tub, and I would watch her hanging up the clean sheets flapping in the wind. Later I would empty the water for her, and I stared intrigued as it made unpredictable patterns on the dirt....) I said: “If Winnie dies—” (She had of course already died, but I didnt want to say it; her body was still outside, and I kept going to see if miraculously she is breathing again.) “—if she dies, I wont be sad because shell go to Heaven and I’ll see her there.” My mother said: “Dogs dont go to Heaven, they havent got souls.” She didnt say that brutally. There is nothing brutal about my mother: only a crushing tenderness, as powerful as the hatred I would discover later in my father. “What will happen to Winnie, then?” I asked. “Shes dead, thats all,” my mother answers, “the body just disappears, becomes dirt” I stand by the window, thinking: It isn’t fair.... Then my brother, the younger of the two—I am the youngest in the family—had to bury Winnie. I was very religious then. I went to Mass regularly, to Confession. I prayed nightly. And I prayed now for my dead dog: God would make an exception. He would let her into Heaven. I stand watching my brother dig that hole in the backyard. He put the dead dog in and covered it I made a cross and brought flowers. Knelt. Made the sign of the cross: “Let her into Heaven....” In the days that followed—I dont know exactly how much later—we could smell the body rotting.... The day was a ferocious Texas summerday with the threat of rain: thunder—but no rain. The sky lit up through the cracked clouds, and lightning snapped at the world like a whip. My older brother said we hadnt buried Winnie deep enough. So he dug up the body, and I stand by him as he shovels the dirt in our backyard (littered with papers and bottles covering the weeds which occasionally we pulled, trying several times to grow grass—but it never grew). Finally the body appeared. I turned away quickly. I had seen the decaying face of death. My mother was right. Soon Winnie will blend into the dirt. There was no soul, the body would rot, and there would be Nothing left of Winnie. That is the incident of my early childhood that I remember most often. And that is why I say it begins in the wind. Because somewhere in that plain of childhood time must have been planted the seeds of the restlessness.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was six in the morning and he’d been driving in silence for most of the night, piloting our station wagon through Arizona, Nevada and Utah. We were in Cornish, a farming town twenty miles south of Buck’s Peak, when the station wagon drifted over the center line into the other lane, then left the highway. The car jumped a ditch, smashed through two utility poles of thick cedar, and was finally brought to a stop only when it collided with a row-crop tractor. —THE TRIP HAD BEEN Mother’s idea. A few months earlier, when crisp leaves had begun slipping to the ground, signaling the end of summer, Dad had been in high spirits. His feet tapped show tunes at breakfast, and during dinner he often pointed at the mountain, his eyes shining, and described where he would lay the pipes to bring water down to the house. Dad promised that when the first snow fell, he’d build the biggest snowball in the state of Idaho. What he’d do, he said, was hike to the mountain base and gather a small, insignificant ball of snow, then roll it down the hillside, watching it triple in size each time it raced over a hillock or down a ravine. By the time it reached the house, which was atop the last hill before the valley, it’d be big as Grandpa’s barn and people on the highway would stare up at it, amazed. We just needed the right snow. Thick, sticky flakes. After every snowfall, we brought handfuls to him and watched him rub the flakes between his fingers. That snow was too fine. This, too wet. After Christmas, he said. That’s when you get the real snow. But after Christmas Dad seemed to deflate, to collapse in on himself. He stopped talking about the snowball, then he stopped talking altogether. A darkness gathered in his eyes until it filled them. He walked with his arms limp, shoulders slumping, as if something had hold of him and was dragging him to the earth. By January Dad couldn’t get out of bed. He lay flat on his back, staring blankly at the stucco ceiling with its intricate pattern of ridges and veins. He didn’t blink when I brought his dinner plate each night. I’m not sure he knew I was there. That’s when Mother announced we were going to Arizona. She said Dad was like a sunflower—he’d die in the snow—and that come February he needed to be taken away and planted in the sun. So we piled into the station wagon and drove for twelve hours, winding through canyons and speeding over dark freeways, until we arrived at the mobile home in the parched Arizona desert where my grandparents were waiting out the winter. We arrived a few hours after sunrise. Dad made it as far as Grandma’s porch, where he stayed for the rest of the day, a knitted pillow under his head, a callused hand on his stomach.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Or was it a swift glimpse, by that man now cringing stonecold-afraid beside his wife, of himself in Chi-Chi, not of the woman in himself, but of the hopelessness of his own sad fate, mirrored in his wife’s tired face, the frigid body—whatever shape that fate may have assumed for him, whatever destiny hovering over him—over us—like a dreadful cloud? What is it that makes that man, his face imprinted with the terrible impact of Chi-Chi’s giant fist, what is it that makes him turn to his wife and to the others with him, away from this menacing-eyed Cassandra whose message of doom, through violence, has finally flashed out—and, after looking at Chi-Chi in amazement and, now, with only the barest, flimsiest imitation of derision—that derision so carefully taught and practiced, seeded, cultivated, nurtured—what is it that makes that man, rising from the ground, retreat and say to his wife, as he covers his face where the blood is now coming—what is it—really—that makes him say—almost sadly: “Lets get away from here and leave them alone.” Oh, soon.... Very soon now it will be just another of many incidents quickly to be forgotten by those who have witnessed it ( but remembered, perhaps—perhaps remembered, unmentioned, unacknowledged but festering in the cobweb-infested shadows of their minds—by that fleeting man, that woman). Already the cleared space about Chi-Chi is being filled. Already the crowds are milling, the horns are blaring again, the streamers floating, the confetti falling, the couples making love.... Already the queens are squealing.... And already, Whorina, fluttering a huge ostrich fan, is saying in a husky siren voice: “Never, never, never try to dish a queen, babies—thats the moral of this story!” And now! Now—that mere interlude of his life over—Chi-Chi again leaned languidly, calmly, demurely against the wall, adjusting her dress with auspicious care, arranging the false breasts. Missing her cigarette holder, she spotted it on the ground; and in a composed queenvoice, softly, she says to a man standing next to her: “Baby—sweetheart—would you mind retrieving her fairy-wand... please... for a Lady?” But despite the composure, there is a note of frightened, melancholy pleading in her voice. A noble cavalier, the man bends, picks up the cigarette holder, and presents it to Chi-Chi with a deep, deep acknowledging bow.... Smiling gratefully at him, Chi-Chi clenched the retrieved cigarette holder between those second and fourth fingers. She puffs a long billowing stream of smoke into the air. Then gazing savage-eyed at the hectic crowds, she defied the world in a loud, clear voice: “Hey, world!” she shouted.