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 When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  I had lost over forty pounds since being diagnosed, fifteen in the last week. I weighed as much as I had in eighth grade, though my hair had considerably thinned since those days, mostly in the past month. I was awake again, alert to the world, but withered. I could see my bones against my skin, a living X-ray. At home, simply holding my head up was tiring. Lifting a glass of water required both hands. Reading was out of the question.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  As winter turned to spring, the saucer magnolias in our neighborhood bloomed large and pink, but Paul's health was declining rapidly. By late February, he needed supplemental oxygen to keep his breathing comfortable. I was adding his untouched lunch to the trash can atop his untouched breakfast, and a few hours later I'd add an untouched dinner to the pile. He used to love my breakfast sandwiches—egg, sausage, and cheese on a roll—but with his waning appetite we'd changed to eggs and toast, then just eggs, until even those became intolerable. Even his favorite smoothies, the glasses I filled with a steady stream of calories, were unappetizing.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Dr. Jones greeted me at the door. She was lovely, polite, brown. She appeared to be somewhere in that range between forty and seventy years, when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black person’s precise age. She was well composed, given the subject of our conversation, and for most of the visit I struggled to separate how she actually felt from what I felt she must be feeling. What I felt, right then, was that she was smiling through pained eyes, that the reason for my visit had spread sadness like a dark quilt over the whole house. I seem to recall music—jazz or gospel—playing in the back, but conflicting with that I also remember a deep quiet overcoming everything. I thought that perhaps she had been crying. I could not tell for sure. She led me into her large living room. There was no one else in the house. It was early January. Her Christmas tree was still standing at the end of the room, and there were stockings bearing the name of her daughter and her lost son, and there was a framed picture of him—Prince Jones—on a display table. She brought me water in a heavy glass. She drank tea. She told me that she was born and raised outside of Opelousas, Louisiana, that her ancestors had been enslaved in that same region, and that as a consequence of that enslavement, a fear echoed down through the ages. “It first became clear when I was four,” she told me. My mother and I were going into the city. We got on the Greyhound bus. I was behind my mother. She wasn’t holding my hand at the time and I plopped down in the first seat I found. A few minutes later my mother was looking for me and she took me to the back of the bus and explained why I couldn’t sit there. We were very poor, and most of the black people around us, who I knew were poor also, and the images I had of white America were from going into the city and seeing who was behind the counter in the stores and seeing who my mother worked for. It became clear there was a distance.

• From Little Women (1868)

  They overhung the archway, thrust themselves between the bars of the great gate with a sweet welcome to passers-by, and lined the avenue, winding through lemon trees and feathery palms up to the villa on the hill. Every shadowy nook, where seats invited one to stop and rest, was a mass of bloom, every cool grotto had its marble nymph smiling from a veil of flowers and every fountain reflected crimson, white, or pale pink roses, leaning down to smile at their own beauty. Roses covered the walls of the house, draped the cornices, climbed the pillars, and ran riot over the balustrade of the wide terrace, whence one looked down on the sunny Mediterranean, and the white-walled city on its shore. "This is a regular honeymoon paradise, isn't it? Did you ever see such roses?" asked Amy, pausing on the terrace to enjoy the view, and a luxurious whiff of perfume that came wandering by. "No, nor felt such thorns," returned Laurie, with his thumb in his mouth, after a vain attempt to capture a solitary scarlet flower that grew just beyond his reach. "Try lower down, and pick those that have no thorns," said Amy, gathering three of the tiny cream-colored ones that starred the wall behind her. She put them in his buttonhole as a peace offering, and he stood a minute looking down at them with a curious expression, for in the Italian part of his nature there was a touch of superstition, and he was just then in that state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, when imaginative young men find significance in trifles and food for romance everywhere. He had thought of Jo in reaching after the thorny red rose, for vivid flowers became her, and she had often worn ones like that from the greenhouse at home. The pale roses Amy gave him were the sort that the Italians lay in dead hands, never in bridal wreaths, and for a moment he wondered if the omen was for Jo or for himself, but the next instant his American common sense got the better of sentimentality, and he laughed a heartier laugh than Amy had heard since he came. "It's good advice, you'd better take it and save your fingers," she said, thinking her speech amused him. "Thank you, I will," he answered in jest, and a few months later he did it in earnest. "Laurie, when are you going to your grandfather?" she asked presently, as she settled herself on a rustic seat. "Very soon." "You have said that a dozen times within the last three weeks." "I dare say, short answers save trouble." "He expects you, and you really ought to go." "Hospitable creature! I know it." "Then why don't you do it?" "Natural depravity, I suppose." "Natural indolence, you mean. It's really dreadful!" and Amy looked severe.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  Cindy talked some about skiing and her job with an ad agency and about the movies and books she likes. She likes Jesus Christ Superstar , too, but she said she couldn’t understand why I’d seen it eleven times, especially since I’m not even a believer. I told her it was food for my soul. “Your soul?” she said. “It can’t live on the promise of milk and honey alone,” I said and gave her a hungry-cherub grin as my stomach growled mightily, interrupting Miracle on 34th Street , which we’d been half watching. “That’s not your soul,” Cindy said, smiling. The ad agency Cindy works for has done business with Dad for a long time. I remembered that the name on the inside covers of those books on Dad’s nightstand is C. Callus—Cindy. And I wondered how long Dad’d been seeing her. And then as we sat in the soft candlelight with the snow shining in through the window and the Christmas-tree smell fresh in the air and a miracle having only shortly transpired on TV, I got to thinking about Mom and being lonesome for her and wondering what new dishes she got herself for Christmas. But later, just as I was about to call her, she called me. And though she said she missed me, she sounded real happy, too. Her stepkids were yelling and screaming and having a good time in the background. I thanked her for the heavy-duty suspenders and she thanked me for the new tapes for her fat-assed Buick. It continues to amaze me that Carla doesn’t get homesick for her parents. She contends they’re assholes, and they must be if she doesn’t miss them at Christmas. Maybe she’s just made up her mind not to. I let my spirits get a little low on the way up to the park to meet Kuch and run our three. I guess I haven’t really gotten over feeling a little weird about Mom and Dad. Stupid as it is, I kind of wish marriages would last forever. Actually, I sometimes wish everything would last forever. This is a wish I fight hard but am not always able to defeat. Really, I’m proud of Mom and Dad for having the strength to fight for big-time happiness after twenty years of something that must not have been enough. Christ, it must take guts to break up at the age of fifty, then go right out and find somebody new to love better. I get about half choked up just throwing away my sweat clothes at the end of the season. I’ve poured out so much of my life in them. I’d probably save them if they weren’t so smelly and disintegrated. The end of the year is just a bad time for me anyway. I get used to thinking about Time moving and I have to fight hard not to be depressed.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being teased in school and asks her parents, “Are we niggers and what does this mean?” Sometimes it is subtle—the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it’s all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance. Was it Mike Brown? I don’t think I want to know. But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. It is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. Dr. Jones was reserved. She was what people once referred to as “a lady,” and in that sense reminded me of my grandmother, who was a single mother in the projects but always spoke as though she had nice things. And when Dr. Jones described her motive for escaping the dearth that marked the sharecropper life of her father and all the others around her, when she remembered herself saying, “I’m not going to live like this,” I saw the iron in her eyes, and I remembered the iron in my grandmother’s eyes. You must barely remember her by now—you were six when she died. I remember her, of course, but by the time I knew her, her exploits—how, for instance, she scrubbed white people’s floors during the day and went to school at night—were legend. But I still could feel the power and rectitude that propelled her out of the projects and into homeownership.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  I’ve seen the cabin he lived in—the foundation of it, anyway. And I’ve walked most of the two miles he walked to the highway to catch the school bus. Part of that walk is underwater now. I’ve seen pictures of him in his Sunday best—his sweatshirt, his black jeans, and his weird high shoes with the huge round toes. Dad’s hair was jet black and straight then. His complexion is darker than mine and his cheekbones are high. In one of his old basketball pictures he looks like an Indian. His hair is wavy now and gray around the ears. He said he pressed the wave into it when he was fishing in Alaska before he went into the service. In his Alaska pictures he’s got one of those little thin mustaches and looks exactly like the old movie star Clark Gable. I try to get him to grow it again, but he won’t. Every Christmas, Dad always got Mom and me about a dozen presents each. Perfume and scented soap and slippers and robes and tapes for her, always socks and gloves and a flannel shirt and whatever I needed for school or sports. I don’t think he got Mom anything this year, though. But he got Carla and me all kinds of stuff. I think it really hurts him that I’m not able to eat my way through the holidays this year. Otto takes up the slack. This evening he was good for a few chocolate peanuts for his pockets, a couple pieces of fudge, a slice of cold turkey, and a big mouthful of hard candy to keep his energy level high through our three miles. Kuch went for a glass of cider. Dad likes Otto. Otto reminds Dad of himself as a kid. I can see it in his face. Otto doesn’t have much money and neither did Dad. Otto’s parents broke up when he was pretty young and so did Dad’s. Otto’s got it a little tougher than Dad had it, though. At least as far as I know. Otto’s been living with his father in an apartment downtown since his mother was committed to the state hospital for her alcoholism. I used to stop by his place on my way home from work, until one night when just before I knocked on the window of their apartment, I heard Mr. Lafte yelling at Otto that he was just a big fat baby and not as tough as he thought. He was drunk and I could hear him push Otto after each sentence. “Oh, come on, Dad. Jesus Christ, lay off!” was about all Otto said back. I wanted to leave, out of respect for Otto, but my curiosity got the best of me, and I walked quietly up to their half-open door. Mr. Lafte, who is nearly as big as Otto but about half dead from straight whiskey and three packs of Camels a day, kept pushing and pushing.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Her aunt thought that she regretted her answer to Fred, and finding denials useless and explanations impossible, Amy left her to think what she liked, taking care that Laurie should know that Fred had gone to Egypt. That was all, but he understood it, and looked relieved, as he said to himself, with a venerable air... "I was sure she would think better of it. Poor old fellow! I've been through it all, and I can sympathize." With that he heaved a great sigh, and then, as if he had discharged his duty to the past, put his feet up on the sofa and enjoyed Amy's letter luxuriously. While these changes were going on abroad, trouble had come at home. But the letter telling that Beth was failing never reached Amy, and when the next found her at Vevay, for the heat had driven them from Nice in May, and they had travelled slowly to Switzerland, by way of Genoa and the Italian lakes. She bore it very well, and quietly submitted to the family decree that she should not shorten her visit, for since it was too late to say goodbye to Beth, she had better stay, and let absence soften her sorrow. But her heart was very heavy, she longed to be at home, and every day looked wistfully across the lake, waiting for Laurie to come and comfort her. He did come very soon, for the same mail brought letters to them both, but he was in Germany, and it took some days to reach him. The moment he read it, he packed his knapsack, bade adieu to his fellow pedestrians, and was off to keep his promise, with a heart full of joy and sorrow, hope and suspense. He knew Vevay well, and as soon as the boat touched the little quay, he hurried along the shore to La Tour, where the Carrols were living en pension. The garcon was in despair that the whole family had gone to take a promenade on the lake, but no, the blonde mademoiselle might be in the chateau garden. If monsieur would give himself the pain of sitting down, a flash of time should present her. But monsieur could not wait even a 'flash of time', and in the middle of the speech departed to find mademoiselle himself. A pleasant old garden on the borders of the lovely lake, with chestnuts rustling overhead, ivy climbing everywhere, and the black shadow of the tower falling far across the sunny water. At one corner of the wide, low wall was a seat, and here Amy often came to read or work, or console herself with the beauty all about her. She was sitting here that day, leaning her head on her hand, with a homesick heart and heavy eyes, thinking of Beth and wondering why Laurie did not come.

• From Action (2014)

  You are entirely within your rights to let anyone trying to pull that know that they are acting execrably and extricate yourself from the scene immediately. In some terrible, wrenching situations, this self-removal is not an option for the person on whom sex is being pushed, as I also know firsthand. (I have no quips about my experience this time. It was just awful and that’s it.) As we know, despite coming up in a social environment that doggedly tries to convince us of the opposite in order to keep traumatic physical harm a normal: Rape and sexual assault are never caused by their victim’s behavior. They are the result of another person’s callousness, and there is nothing you can do in this life to “deserve” or “invite” rape or sexual assault. The people on whom these acts are inflicted are sometimes led to believe that if they had somehow conducted themselves more responsibly and/or advocated for themselves more insistently, everything would have been A-OK. This is the highest caliber of cold bullshit. Even if you were drunk or on drugs. Another forever-true side note: You are entirely within your rights to stop fooling around with somebody if you’re no longer into it, regardless of how considerate the other person is being. You don’t need a reason or an excuse to not want to get with somebody, and you don’t owe anyone a goddamn thing in that respect, ever. No one has a claim on your body but you.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  outhouse. Episode after episode, Granny and her kin were stymied by the science of the doorbell and the unbearable complexity of kitchen appliances, giving viewers the saddest sort of reminder of the culture shock experienced by real sharecroppers in FSA resettlement communities. Buddy Ebsen’s prime-time hillbillies appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, sketched as characters in Grant Wood’s iconic painting of 1930, American Gothic . This was yet another unsubtle allusion to the long-held belief that white trash were an evolutionary throwback. 9 The Beverly Hillbillies recast as Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting, American Gothic. Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 1963 The Beverly Hillbillies had its defenders. To the creator of the show, “our hillbillies” were clean and wholesome, and the network was actually doing a service in uplifting the image of rural Americans. “The word hillbilly,” he insisted, “will ultimately have a new meaning in the United States as a result of our show.” His optimism proved to be misplaced. 10

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Yale’s own mother was a former child actress who’d tried to settle down in small-town Michigan, then ran off when Yale was three to act again. He grew up watching her on the sly, first on The Guiding Light and then on The Young and the Restless , on which she still made rare appearances. Her character, it seemed, was too old for regular storylines now, but her character’s son, who actually looked a bit like Yale, was still central; so she’d come back to weep whenever the son was kidnapped or had cancer. Yale had seen his mother exactly five times after the day she left, always when she swept through town with belated presents for the holidays she’d missed. She was a lot like her soap characters: aloof, mannered. Her last visit was Yale’s fourteenth birthday. She took him out for lunch and insisted he have a milkshake for dessert. Yale was full, but she was so vehement that he gave in and then spent weeks wondering if she thought he was too thin, or if it really meant something to her, giving her son something sweet, something that ought to make him happy. It hadn’t made him happy, and Yale still couldn’t see a milkshake without also seeing his mother’s red fingernails tapping anxiously on the table, the only part of her body that wasn’t completely controlled. “It’s going to be so interesting ,” she’d said to him that day, “to see what you become.” When he turned twenty, she sent him a check for three thousand dollars. Nothing when he turned thirty. Teresa, on the other hand, had flown into town and taken him to Le Francais, which she couldn’t afford. Teresa would send him clippings from magazines, articles about art or swimming or asthma or the Cubs or anything else that made her think of Yale. “Tell me all about it,” Teresa said. “You’re wooing the rich folks, is it?” “Partly. We’re trying to build the collection.” “You know you have a gift for charm. Mind, I’m not calling you slick. You’re charming like a puppy.” “Huh,” he said and laughed. “Oh Yale, learn to take a compliment.” He managed to keep her on the phone for twenty minutes, telling her about the gallery space, the donors, the university. She told him the rabbits were into her lettuce, or someone was eating her lettuce, and didn’t that sound like a thing the rabbits would do? Yale ran the dust cloth along the television, the picture frames, the antique shaving mirror he kept out here on the bookshelf, the wooden box that housed Charlie’s childhood marble collection. She said, “This must be costing a fortune. Is Charlie there?” “He’s out,” Yale said, as cheerfully as he could. “Well.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  I think there's something wrong with me. I'm jaded. Like…super jaded. I kind of wish I could feel again. I wish I could be genuinely happy, like I used to be. I don't feel that anymore. I even wish that I could be depressed, scream-at-the-world-stab-myself-in-the-chest angry, like I used to be. But I can't feel that either. When all of these terrible things keep happening, everything should have fallen apart, but it didn't. It was like I was watching it all through a glass. It was a movie.

• From Little Women (1868)

  Poor Jo, these were dark days to her, for something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few small pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier. "I can't do it. I wasn't meant for a life like this, and I know I shall break away and do something desperate if somebody doesn't come and help me," she said to herself, when her first efforts failed and she fell into the moody, miserable state of mind which often comes when strong wills have to yield to the inevitable. But someone did come and help her, though Jo did not recognize her good angels at once because they wore familiar shapes and used the simple spells best fitted to poor humanity. Often she started up at night, thinking Beth called her, and when the sight of the little empty bed made her cry with the bitter cry of unsubmissive sorrow, "Oh, Beth, come back! Come back!" she did not stretch out her yearning arms in vain. For, as quick to hear her sobbing as she had been to hear her sister's faintest whisper, her mother came to comfort her, not with words only, but the patient tenderness that soothes by a touch, tears that were mute reminders of a greater grief than Jo's, and broken whispers, more eloquent than prayers, because hopeful resignation went hand-in-hand with natural sorrow. Sacred moments, when heart talked to heart in the silence of the night, turning affliction to a blessing, which chastened grief and strengthened love. Feeling this, Jo's burden seemed easier to bear, duty grew sweeter, and life looked more endurable, seen from the safe shelter of her mother's arms. When aching heart was a little comforted, troubled mind likewise found help, for one day she went to the study, and leaning over the good gray head lifted to welcome her with a tranquil smile, she said very humbly, "Father, talk to me as you did to Beth. I need it more than she did, for I'm all wrong." "My dear, nothing can comfort me like this," he answered, with a falter in his voice, and both arms round her, as if he too, needed help, and did not fear to ask for it. Then, sitting in Beth's little chair close beside him, Jo told her troubles, the resentful sorrow for her loss, the fruitless efforts that discouraged her, the want of faith that made life look so dark, and all the sad bewilderment which we call despair. She gave him entire confidence, he gave her the help she needed, and both found consolation in the act. For the time had come when they could talk together not only as father and daughter, but as man and woman, able and glad to serve each other with mutual sympathy as well as mutual love.

• From Like Family

  As we passed the abandoned airport, its runway cracked like an eggshell, every third window of its blue control tower blown out, I thought about that Easter morning when we learned of Deedee’s death, how only moments before, we had been singing in Granny’s car and Keith the loudest, the best—his voice all angels and atmosphere. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] WHEN TERESA GOT HOME from track practice, Penny and I went into her room together to tell her about Keith. She was still in her running shorts and a gray T-shirt with the neck cut out that said Wild Woman . “What?” she said from the floor where she sat cradling her albums in her lap. She owned only five and was as possessive of them as a dog with half a bone, putting them in order, going through them over and over for signs of our tampering. We told her the part about Granny first, about her lispy voice and how she had said she couldn’t drive anymore, that ladies from the Gospel Lighthouse were doing her grocery shopping and coming to pick her up for meetings. “When did that happen?” “A few months ago,” I said. “July.” In July, Teresa had been up at Gloria’s resort. That was her excuse, but what about Penny and me? We’d been doing our usual summer thing, spending most of our time over at the Swensons’, forgetting the Lindberghs for as long as they would let us. Sometimes Bub would call over there and say, “Come home. Can’t you see you’ve outstayed your welcome?” But that was only once a week or so. In between, we were free, free, free. Although we hadn’t been forgetting Granny for the same reasons, she’d been forgotten nonetheless, pressed into a scrapbook like a newspaper clipping. We didn’t think ill of her; we just didn’t think of her at all. When I put my mind to it, I could easily picture Granny in her kitchen, whistling as she battered chicken for frying, could see her dark shoes and old-lady stockings and smell her White Shoulders. But these memories were as old as I was. I didn’t have any new ones for her, didn’t have a context for her in this life, which was whizzing forward with crushes and pizza parties and long looks in the mirror to see just what could be done about my hair. “That’s sad,” Teresa said, petting the album on top: Rod Stewart in a black leather jumpsuit and boots, his hair looking, well, electrocuted. Penny fidgeted as she described Keith’s accident, unclipping and reclipping her silver barrette. “We should go to see him, don’t you think?” The question was for both of us, but she was looking at Teresa. “Granny said he would like it.” “Absolutely,” I said. Teresa shrugged. “You guys can go if you want. I’m busy.” “You’re busy when?” I asked.

• From Like Family

  Her gray eyes looked past me at Out, at There. She fought like a drowning dog until I gave up and let her go ripping out of the shower-room door and down the hall, buck naked, her soggy deck shoes making frog noises on the linoleum. This was my very first job, as a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital, and it required me to do horrible things for people who were dying too slowly: give enemas and tub baths to sixty-year-old men; rinse bedpans and emesis basins and drain catheter bags full of lemony pee. Within a month, I had my fingers in a patient’s leg, swabbing a bedsore so deep I could see a gleam of bone. Within a year, I was brushing a dead woman’s hair. My friends had clean jobs at water parks and ice cream parlors. They wore red visors and name tags and said, “Would you like some fries with that?” For a time, I wanted to be a nurse, but I had the nursing home job mainly because on the morning of my eighteenth birthday, Bub told me I was an adult and needed to start earning my keep, pulling my own weight. He said this in the Father voice, the This Will Be a Good Lesson voice, and I knew I had the day to prove my industry. One of Teresa’s many jobs was as a caregiver at a nursing home in Ashland making three dollars an hour, which was a lot more than Burger King paid. I could do that, I thought, and I would get to wear those cute white shoes with tights. [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] PULLING MY OWN WEIGHT at the nursing home began with me going in to fill out an application in my seersucker skirt and tan flats with tassels. It wasn’t a hospital at all, which surprised me, but a converted old house with a broad porch and worn shingles. The parking lot was divided from the street by a weight-sensing gate, though the administrator who handed me my paperwork assured me it wasn’t technically a locked facility—they just wanted to make sure no one wandered into traffic. I had only been sitting in the office a few minutes when one of the potential wanderers wandered in, a woman named Virginia who was wearing her Cross Your Heart bra over her clothes. She made a beeline for me in cotton slippers that lisped along the tile, her lavender slacks a deeper shade at her crotch where she’d wet herself. She took the chair next to me and leaned in so close I could smell orange juice on her breath, could see dandruff like flecks of wax matting her hair. The administrator peered at me from over her computer monitor, and I knew this was the real interview, how I responded to Virginia, who kept repeating her name over and over, changing the inflection until it sounded like a complicated sentence containing everything she needed to say.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Having spent the better part of the week bedridden, with the cancer progressing, I had grown noticeably weaker. My body, and the identity tied to it, had radically changed. No longer was getting in and out of bed to go to the bathroom an automated subcortical motor program; it took effort and planning. The physical therapists left a list of items to ease my transition home: a cane, a modified toilet seat, foam blocks for leg support while resting. A bevy of new pain medications was prescribed. As I hobbled out of the hospital, I wondered how, just six days ago, I had spent nearly thirty-six straight hours in the operating room. Had I grown that much sicker in a week? Yes, in part. But I had also used a number of tricks and help from co-surgeons to get through those thirty-six hours—and, even so, I had suffered excruciating pain. Had the confirmation of my fears—in the CT scan, in the lab results, both showing not merely cancer but a body overwhelmed, nearing death—released me from the duty to serve, from my duty to patients, to neurosurgery, to the pursuit of goodness? Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid. Usually when I had a patient with a strange condition, I consulted the relevant specialist and spent time reading about it. This seemed no different, but as I started reading about chemo, which included a whole variety of agents, and a raft of more modern novel treatments that targeted specific mutations, the sheer number of questions I had prevented any useful directed study. (Alexander Pope: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”) Without appropriate medical experience, I couldn’t place myself in this new world of information, couldn’t find my spot on the Kaplan-Meier curve. I waited, expectantly, for my clinic visit. But mostly, I rested. I sat, staring at a photo of Lucy and me from medical school, dancing and laughing; it was so sad, those two, planning a life together, unaware, never suspecting their own fragility. My friend Laurie had had a fiancé when she’d died in a car accident—was this any crueler?

• From Like Family

  I wanted to put down my clipboard and walk out, but that would mean I couldn’t report back to Bub and Hilde that I had gotten a job, couldn’t go to the dinner table that night pulling my own weight. So I looked right into Virginia’s wacky gray eyes, smiled and said, “Hello,” the way I imagined a cheerleader/candy striper would. “Virginia,” she said. “Liver, liver, liver.” “That’s right,” I said, nodding, and she settled back into her chair, beaming like it was Christmas and she was getting liver. My first shift started at seven the next morning. I wore a white zip-up-the-front nurse’s dress and stockings and squeaky white shoes that would never be clean again. At my ten-thirty break, I met Teresa in the nurses’ lounge, and she toasted me with a paper cup of coffee. “Do you hate it yet?” she said, offering half of a stale donut. When I shrugged, she said, “I’ll ask you again at two.” [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] MOST DAYS I TOOK care of the eight ladies in rooms 215 and 217. Eleanor was hell on shower days, but otherwise wasn’t a problem. She spun her circuit just outside the perimeter of my attention. Five of my eight weren’t even ambulatory. Vertie, for instance, just got shifted from her bed to the diaper-lined vinyl chair right next to it. I wrapped a restraint around her waist, then through slats on the back of the chair, double-tying it like I would a big gym shoe. If she weren’t restrained, she’d have keeled right over onto her forehead. Her body had become its own knot—her legs crossed so tightly and completely that it was a struggle to even get slacks on her. Vertie’s husband came to visit on Saturdays and stayed through dinner, pulling up a chair to spoon-feed her pureed squash. He’d read to her from Good Housekeeping and rub her papery hand. Vertie was the only one of my ladies who was obviously married. The rest didn’t seem to have families at all, or none I’d seen. We never knew, though; someone might show up, so on weekends we were supposed to dress every patient in their best whatever, give their dentures a good soak and scrub and put makeup on the ladies. We all carried lipstick for this purpose—along with thermometers, plastic gloves and blood-pressure cuffs—thumb-size lipsticks from Avon in the tackiest pinks and corals. Thin skin tears if you press too firmly, so we just dashed a little lipstick in the general area of their cheekbones. Most of them looked like transvestites in the makeup, but we talked it up, shouting: “You look so pretty today, Mrs. Escobedo! You’re a vision! A dream!” Across from Vertie in 217 was Beatrice, who was mean enough to have been lonely her whole life. She dressed and fed herself and wouldn’t have been any work at all if she had ever shut up.

• From Like Family

  [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] ONE OF MY TUB-MEN was Sam Barnum, a collapsed house of a man. He was huge, maybe six foot three or more, and his long legs jutted wildly from even the largest wheelchair. When I first saw Sam, I couldn’t stop staring at his forehead, which featured a dent the size of a Rubik’s Cube and impossibly deep. Where is the brain matter that used to be there? I wanted to ask, but it was just me and Sam in the room, and he was drooling juice from breakfast. Sam didn’t scare me so much as make me sad. I learned from his chart that he tried to blow his head off with a shotgun some ten years before. Because his forehead was sweaty, the muzzle slipped as the gun discharged. A large portion of his frontal lobe was dislodged, but he lived. The left side of his body, including his face, was heavy and slack, unreachable by motor impulse. His speech slurred like a lifelong alcoholic’s. When his wife and teenage son came to visit once a month, he said to them what he said to us all, “Kill me. Please, kill me.” There were too many sad stories at the home; they were starting to wash over me. As I got better at my shit job, I was also growing numb—a blessing, I suppose. Without it, I’d probably have snapped and ended up wearing a gazillion shirts or washing my hands until they came off in the sink. A lot of girls there couldn’t turn the mess off in their heads and had to do it in their bodies. Lyla and Bernadette, two sisters from Micronesia, chewed coca leaves like gum; some smoked reefer out behind the laundry room on breaks; some poured sour mash into their thermoses. Then there was the other kind, those who had been there so long that nothing fazed them, not emesis like potting soil urping out of a patient’s mouth, not Roland banging the emergency door like a drum with the arm that wasn’t blown to smithereens in some war, not the noises that escaped the dead when we prepared them for their families or the coroner. Lupe was one of the oldest of the veteran girls and must have been pushing fifty. I was impressed, thinking she must be strong to still do the lifting and bathing. But she didn’t do any of her work, I soon learned—not the baths, the denture-brushing, nothing. She ran a wet comb over her patients’ heads, sprayed a little air freshener in the rooms and took a two-hour lunch break. Even before I knew Lupe ignored her patients and let them fester in their own smells, I hated her guts.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Fiona handed her own drink to Yale—half full, an arc of pink on the rim. She touched a finger to the cleft of his upper lip. “I still can’t believe you shaved it off. I mean, it looks good. You look sort of—” “Straighter.” She laughed, and then she said, “Oh. Oh! They’re not making you, are they? At Northwestern?” Fiona had one of the best faces for concern Yale had ever seen—her eyebrows hurried together, her lips vanished straight into her mouth—but he wondered how she had any emotion left to spare. He said, “No. It’s—I mean, I’m the development guy. I’m talking to a lot of older alumni.” “To get money?” “Money and art. It’s a strange dance.” Yale had taken the job at Northwestern’s new Brigg Gallery in August, the same week Nico got sick, and he still wasn’t sure where his responsibilities started and ended. “I mean, they know about Charlie. My colleagues do. It’s fine. It’s a gallery, not a bank.” He tasted the Cuba libre. Inappropriate for the third of November, but then the afternoon was unseasonably warm, and this was exactly what he needed. The soda might even wake him up. “You had a real Tom Selleck thing going. I hate when blond men grow a mustache; it’s peach fuzz. Dark-haired guys, though, that’s my favorite. You should’ve kept it! But it’s okay, because now you look like Luke Duke. In a good way. No, like Patrick Duffy!” Yale couldn’t laugh, and Fiona tilted her head to look at him seriously. He felt like sobbing into her hair, but he didn’t. He’d been cultivating numbness all day, hanging onto it like a rope. If this were three weeks ago, they could have simply cried together. But everything had scabbed over, and now there was this idea of party on top of everything else, this imperative to be, somehow, okay. Merry. And what had Nico been to Yale? Just a good friend. Not family, not a lover. Nico was, in fact, the first real friend Yale had made when he moved here, the first he’d sat down with just to talk , and not at a bar, not shouting over music. Yale had adored Nico’s drawings, would take him out for pancakes and help him study for his GED and tell him he was talented. Charlie wasn’t interested in art and neither was Nico’s lover, Terrence, and so Yale would take Nico to gallery shows and art talks, introduce him to artists. Still: If Nico’s little sister was holding it together this well, wasn’t Yale obliged to be in better shape? Fiona said, “It’s hard for everyone .” Their parents had cut Nico off at fifteen, but Fiona would sneak food and money and allergy medicine to the place he shared with four other guys on Broadway, taking the Metra and then the El there by herself from Highland Park. At the age of eleven.

• From The Ultimate Guide to Orgasm for Women: How to Become Orgasmic for a Lifetime (2011)

  This section does not pretend to be a complete guide to anal sex. I recommend Tristan Taormino’s book, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women.5 This is an excellent book for men too. Men are perfectly capable of enjoying anal stimulation and penetration, although many of them are also afraid of it, often more so than women are. There are two likely reasons for this: firstly, they are afraid it might mean they are gay. I really cannot go into how ridiculous this is, so I hope it will be enough for me to point out that the presence of a penis is not required for anal penetration. Secondly, I think men are afraid of how vulnerable it will make them if they admit they want anal penetration. And it will make them vulnerable, there is no doubt about that; you cannot bend over and allow someone to penetrate you and still feel that you are in control. How sad that so many men will never experience the glory of fully surrendering in total trust to another person, and so many women will never be the recipient of that trust. Notes 1 Alice Khan Ladas, Beverly Whipple, and John D. Perry, The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality (Holt, 2005). Originally published in 1982.2 Ladas, Whipple, and Perry, The G-Spot.3 DVD: How to Female Ejaculate: Find Your G-Spot, Deborah Sundahl, Fatale Media, 60 minutes. Original video was released in 1992.4 Deborah Addington, A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting (Greenery Press, 1997).5 Tristan Taormino, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women, 2nd Edition (Cleis Press, 2006).CHAPTER 11 THE PURPOSE OF ORGASM Orgasms are a great key to health and happiness. They help us to remember who we are, beyond our everyday reality. Orgasms are a path to truth and the meaning of life. —DR. ANNIE SPRINKLE Many people have proposed numerous theories with regard to the social, anthropological, and biological purposes of female orgasm. These range from the obvious (that female orgasm tones the muscles that we use in childbirth) to the ridiculous. However, the unique combination of orgasm with virtually unrestricted sexual availability (we are not limited to a cycle of estrus or “heat” in order to experience sexual desire) has had, and continues to have, an overwhelming impact on our species.