Shame

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

  We were all so thrilled and proud, and this girl seemed to think I had the coolest possible father: a writer. (Her father sold cars.) We went out to dinner, where we all toasted one another. Things in the family just couldn’t have been better, and here was a friend to witness it. Then that night, before we went to sleep, I picked up the new novel and began to read the first page to my friend. We were lying side by side in sleeping bags on my floor. The first page turned out to be about a man and a woman in bed together, having sex. The man was playing with the woman’s nipple. I began to giggle with mounting hysteria. Oh, this is great, I thought, beaming jocularly at my friend. I covered my mouth with one hand, like a blushing Charlie Chaplin, and pantomimed that I was about to toss that silly book over my shoulder. This is wonderful, I thought, throwing back my head to laugh jovially; my father writes pornography. In the dark, I glowed like a light bulb with shame. You could have read by me. I never mentioned the book to my father, although over the next couple of years, I went through it late at night, looking for more sexy parts, of which there were a number. It was very confusing. It made me feel very scared and sad. Then a strange thing happened. My father wrote an article for a magazine, called “A Lousy Place to Raise Kids,” and it was about Marin County and specifically the community where we lived, which is as beautiful a place as one can imagine. Yet the people on our peninsula were second only to the Native Americans in the slums of Oakland in the rate of alcoholism, and the drug abuse among teenagers was, as my father wrote, soul chilling, and there was rampant divorce and mental breakdown and wayward sexual behavior. My father wrote disparagingly about the men in the community, their values and materialistic frenzy, and about their wives, “these estimable women, the wives of doctors, architects, and lawyers, in tennis dresses and cotton frocks, tanned and well preserved, wandering the aisles of our supermarkets with glints of madness in their eyes.” No one in our town came off looking great. “This is the great tragedy of California,” he wrote in the last paragraph, “for a life oriented to leisure is in the end a life oriented to death—the greatest leisure of all.” There was just one problem: I was an avid tennis player. The tennis ladies were my friends. I practiced every afternoon at the same tennis club as they; I sat with them on the weekends and waited for the men (who had priority) to be done so we could get on the courts.

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

  Most of them didn’t even drink, and they certainly did not have colleagues who came over and passed out at the table over the tuna casserole. Reading my father’s article, I could only imagine that the world was breaking down, that the next time I burst into my dad’s study to show him my report card he’d be crouched under the desk, with one of my mother’s nylon stockings knotted around his upper arm, looking up at me like a cornered wolf. I felt that this was going to be a problem; I was sure that we would be ostracized in our community. All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging. In seventh and eighth grades I still weighed about forty pounds. I was twelve years old and had been getting teased about my strange looks for most of my life. This is a difficult country to look too different in—the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it—and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But I was funny. So the popular kids let me hang out with them, go to their parties, and watch them neck with each other. This, as you might imagine, did not help my self-esteem a great deal. I thought I was a total loser. But one day I took a notebook and a pen when I went to Bolinas Beach with my father (who was not, as far as I could tell, shooting drugs yet). With the writer’s equivalent of canvas and brush, I wrote a description of what I saw: “I walked to the lip of the water and let the foamy tongue of the rushing liquid lick my toes. A sand crab burrowed a hole a few inches from my foot and then disappeared into the damp sand.…” I will spare you the rest. It goes on for quite a while. My father convinced me to show it to a teacher, and it ended up being included in a real textbook. This deeply impressed my teachers and parents and a few kids, even some of the popular kids, who invited me to more parties so I could watch them all make out even more frequently. One of the popular girls came home with me after school one day, to spend the night. We found my parents rejoicing over the arrival of my dad’s new novel, the first copy off the press.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  He came home in such a drunken fury that Mom usually hid while we kids tried to calm him down. He broke windows and smashed dishes and furniture until he’d spent all his anger; then he’d look around at the mess and at us kids standing there. When he recognized what he’d done, he hung his head in weariness and shame. Then he’d sink to his knees and pitch forward face-first on the floor. After Dad had collapsed, I would try to pick up the place, but Mom always made me stop. She’d been reading books on how to cope with an alcoholic, and they said that drunks didn’t remember their rampages, so if you cleaned up after them, they’d think nothing had happened. “Your father needs to see the mess he’s making of our lives,” Mom said. But when Dad got up, he’d act as if all the wreckage didn’t exist, and no one discussed it with him. The rest of us had to get used to stepping over broken furniture and shattered glass. Mom had taught us to pick Dad’s pocket when he passed out. We got pretty good at it. Once, after I’d rolled Dad and collected a handful of change, I pried his fingers loose from the bottle in his hand. It was three quarters empty. I stared at the amber liquid. Mom never touched the stuff, and I wondered what Dad found so irresistible. I opened the bottle and sniffed. The awful smell stung my nose, but after working up my courage, I took a swig. It had a hideously thick taste, smoky, and so hot it burned my tongue. I ran to the bathroom, spat it out, and rinsed my mouth. “I just took a swig of booze,” I told Brian. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.” Brian grabbed the bottle out of my hand. He emptied it into the kitchen sink, then led me out to the shed and opened up a wooden trunk in the back marked TOY BOX . It was filled with empty liquor bottles. Whenever Dad passed out, Brian said, he took the bottle Dad had been drinking, emptied it, and hid it in the trunk. He’d wait until he had ten or twelve, then tote them to a garbage can a few blocks away, because if Dad saw the empty bottles, he would get furious. • • • “I have a really good feeling about this Christmas,” Mom announced in early December. Lori pointed out that the last few months hadn’t gone so well. “Exactly,” Mom said. “This is God’s way of telling us to take charge of our own fates. God helps those who help themselves.” She had such a good feeling that she’d decided that this year we were going to celebrate Christmas on Christmas Day, instead of a week later. Mom was an expert thrift-store shopper.

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

  I have Astroturf and a whole lot of high-quality plastic flowers stuck in the dirt of our front yard. These are quite a lovely sight and bring to mind many e. e. cummings poems. People used to give me potted plants and trees, and what happened to them is really too horrible to go into here. They’d end up looking like I watered them with Agent Orange. I’d tell people that I didn’t do well with potted plants, and they’d decide that I’d just never met the right one and that they were going to be the person to free me and cause God to restore my glorious gift of sight and all that, and they’d bring me some little training plant, and I’d try really hard to water it and keep it in or out of sunlight, whatever its little card of introduction said it preferred, and to take it for little walks around the house, and within about a month you could almost hear chlorophyllous breakdown, a Panic in Needle Park sort of thing. Then you’d see it clutching its little throat, staring at you with its little Keane eyes, gasping and accusing—and I mean, who needs it? Believe me, I have enough problems as it is. I actually kept this one horrible plant alive for months, this huge potted thing. I don’t even know what it was, but it was about three feet tall, before its decline, and green in a sort of fake jolly way. I watered it, I cut off its dead leaves, and how did it repay me? By becoming Howard Hughes in his last days. It lost all this weight, it stopped going out. I came to believe that it would be requesting latex gloves soon, boxes of them, and boxes of Kleenex with which to cover its food between bites. I gave it water, sunlight, expensive plant food—what was I supposed to do, get it a psychiatrist? So I finally came to my senses, took it outside, and put it against the side of the house where I wouldn’t have to look at it. You are probably thinking that it immediately began to flourish, but it didn’t. It died. So, needless to say, when it came time to design a garden for my main character, I wasn’t going to be able to plumb the depths of my own gardening experience. But I just knew somehow, without being able to explain the process to you, that this main character gardened. I love to see people in gardens, I love the meditation of sitting alone in gardens, I love all the metaphors that gardens are. The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Metaphors are a great language tool, because they explain the unknown in terms of the known. But they only work if they resonate in the heart of the writer.

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

  After submitting to the law, Herculine becomes a juridically sanctioned subject as a “man,” and yet the gender category proves less fluid than h/er own references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses suggest. H/er heteroglossic discourse challenges the viability of the notion of a “person” who might be said to preexist gender or exchange one gender for the other. If s/he is not actively condemned by others, s/he condemns h/erself (even calls h/erself a “judge” [106]), revealing that the juridical law in effect is much greater than the empirical law that effects h/er gender conversion. Indeed, Herculine can never embody that law precisely because s/he cannot provide the occasion by which that law naturalizes itself in the symbolic structures of anatomy. In other words, the law is not simply a cultural imposition on an otherwise natural heterogeneity; the law requires conformity to its own notion of “nature” and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign. Herculine’s pleasures and desires are in no way the bucolic innocence that thrives and proliferates prior to the imposition of a juridical law. Neither does s/he fully fall outside the signifying economy of masculinity. S/he is “outside” the law, but the law maintains this “outside” within itself. In effect, s/he embodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted testimony to the law’s uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it can guarantee will—out of fidelity—defeat themselves and those subjects who, utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis. Concluding unscientific postscriptWithin The History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault appears to locate the quest for identity within the context of juridical forms of power that become fully articulate with the advent of the sexual sciences, including psychoanalysis, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Although Foucault revised his historiography of sex at the outset of The Use of Pleasure (L’Usage des plaisirs) and sought to discover the repressive/generative rules of subject-formation in early Greek and Roman texts, his philosophical project to expose the regulatory production of identity-effects remained constant. A contemporary example of this quest for identity can be found in recent developments in cell biology, an example that inadvertently confirms the continuing applicability of a Foucaultian critique.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Banks of fluorescent lights hung down eighteen inches above the slanted, glass-topped desks where men wearing green eyeshades conferred over stacks of copy and photographs. I’d take the Wave galleys and sit at one of the desks, my back firm, a pencil behind my ear, studying the pages for typos. The years I’d spent helping Mom check spelling on her students’ homework had given me lots of practice for this line of work. I’d make corrections with a light blue felt marker that couldn’t be picked up by the camera that photographed the pages for printing. The typesetters would retype the lines I’d corrected and print them out. I’d run the corrected lines through the hot-wax machine that made the back side sticky, then cut out the lines with an X-Acto knife and fit them over the original lines. I tried to remain inconspicuous in the newsroom, but one of the typesetters, a crabbed, chain-smoking woman who always wore a hairnet, took a dislike to me. She thought I was dirty. When I walked by, she’d turn to the other typesetters and say loudly, “Y’all smell something funny?” Just like Lucy Jo Rose had done to Mom, she took to spraying disinfectant and air freshener in my general direction. Then she complained to the editor, Mr. Muckenfuss, that I might have head lice and could infect the entire staff. Mr. Muckenfuss conferred with Miss Bivens, and she told me that as long as I kept clean, she’d fight for me. That was when I started going back to Grandpa and Uncle Stanley’s apartment for a weekly bath, though when I was there, I made sure to give Uncle Stanley a wide berth. Whenever I was at the Daily News, I watched the editors and reporters at work in the newsroom. They kept a police scanner on all the time, and when an accident or fire or crime was called in, an editor would send a reporter to find out what had happened. He’d come back a couple of hours later and type up a story, and it would appear in the next day’s paper. This appealed to me mightily. Until then, when I thought of writers, what first came to mind was Mom, hunched over her typewriter, clattering away on her novels and plays and philosophies of life and occasionally receiving a personalized rejection letter. But a newspaper reporter, instead of holing up in isolation, was in touch with the rest of the world. What the reporter wrote influenced what people thought about and talked about the next day; he knew what was really going on. I decided I wanted to be one of the people who knew what was really going on. When my work was done, I read the stories on the wire services.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Why you want to know?” “I want to see her.” “She don’t want to see you,” he said and shut the door. I saw Dinitia around town once or twice after that, and we waved but never spoke again. Later, we all learned she’d been arrested for stabbing her mother’s boyfriend to death. • • • The other girls talked endlessly among themselves about who still had their cherry and how far they would let their boyfriend go. The world seemed divided into girls with boyfriends and girls without them. It was the distinction that mattered the most, practically the only one that did matter. But I knew that boys were dangerous. They’d say they loved you, but they were always after something. Even though I didn’t trust boys, I sure did wish one would show some interest in me. Kenny Hall, the old guy down the street who was still pining away for me, didn’t count. If any boy was interested in me, I wondered if I’d have the wherewithal to tell him, when he tried to go too far, that I was not that kind of girl. But the truth was, I didn’t need to worry much about fending off advances, seeing how—as Ernie Goad told me on every available occasion—I was pork-chop ugly. And by that he meant so ugly that if I wanted a dog to play with me, I’d have to tie a pork chop around my neck. I had what Mom called distinctive looks. That was one way of putting it. I was nearly six feet tall, pale as a frog’s underbelly, and had bright red hair. My elbows were like flying wedges and my knees like tea saucers. But my most prominent feature—my worst—was my teeth. They weren’t rotten or crooked. In fact, they were big, healthy things. But they stuck straight out. The top row thrust forward so enthusiastically that I had trouble closing my mouth completely, and I was always stretching my upper lip to try to cover them. When I laughed, I put my hand over my mouth. Lori told me I had an exaggerated view of how bad my teeth looked. “They’re just a little bucked,” she’d say. “They have a certain Pippi Longstockingish charm.” Mom told me my overbite gave my face character. Brian said they’d come in handy if I ever needed to eat an apple through the knothole in a fence. What I needed, I knew, was braces. Every time I looked in the mirror, I longed for what the other kids called a barbed-wire mouth. Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of course—none of us kids had ever even been to the dentist—but since I’d been babysitting and doing other kids’ homework for cash, I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Mis ojos se abren por completo y lo fulmino con la mirada. —¿Estás intentando bromear conmigo? ¿Qué demonios? —Oh, por favor —replica—. ¿Me estás diciendo que no la viste inquieta y mordiéndose el labio simplemente por verte cuando te trajo tu cerveza favorita? ¿Lo hizo? —Era como un cachorro con la lengua colgando fuera de su boca —agrega. ¿Lo era? Aclaro mi cabeza y miro por la ventana, el desconcierto está grabado en mi rostro. Lo que sea. —No hables así de ella —le digo—. Es la novia de mi hijo, hombre. Vamos. Montando mi... sacudo la cabeza. Increíble. —Entonces, ¿está fuera de los límites para ti? —¡Sí! —Entonces, ¿por qué la miraste como si te encantara lo que llevaba puesto y quisieras verlo en el suelo de tu dormitorio esta noche? —No estaba mirándola así —digo a través de mis dientes apretados Pero solo se ríe entre dientes. Idiota. —Oye, no estoy faltándole al res... —Cállate —digo. Maldición. No está bien. Ya es bastante malo que la mire como si fuera una mujer real y no la chica de mi hijo, pero estaría condenado si alguien se entera de ello. —Todo lo que digo es que es exactamente tu tipo —me dice, regulando su voz—. ¿Lo notaste? Siempre fuiste por chicas como ella en la escuela secundaria. Antes de Lindsay, el Desastre, de todos modos. —Solo cállate. Pero no lo hace. —No digo que debas hacer algo. Y es por eso que intervine y no dejé que la trajeras a casa. Su tono se vuelve serio. —Bromas aparte, Pike —continúa—, es exactamente tu tipo. No deberías estar a solas con ella. Sí. Lo sé. Solo espero que sea la única persona que lo haya notado. —Gracias por la intervención —le digo—, pero incluso si me sintiera atraído por ella, soy capaz de controlarme. —No te estás viendo desde mi perspectiva. —Mira por el parabrisas delantero, con seriedad—. Se miran el uno al otro como... —¿Cómo? Traga saliva, un ceño inusualmente fruncido en su frente. —Como si tuvieran su propio idioma.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Why would you want to work there?” “It’s … personal.” “I see.” She paused and Vix imagined her chewing on her pencil, the way she did when she was talking to a dissatisfied client. “Well, if you change your mind give me a call. I’ll always have a job for you.” “Thanks.” Vix dragged her duffel halfway out the long dock, to Trisha’s boat, and caught her just before she left for work. When she explained that she’d left Lamb’s, that she had a job waiting tables at the Homeport and needed a cheap place to stay, Trisha said, “You’re looking at it, honey.” Trisha tossed her a key to the hatch lock, told her to take either of the berths in the main cabin, then left for Vineyard Haven. “I should be back around seven, unless I meet Arthur, my new squeeze, for dinner.” The second Vix was alone, she crumpled. She wept, she wailed, she soaked her T-shirt with her tears, sob bing until she gagged. She was not an emotional iceberg! Then she lay down in the tiny berth and fell into a deep sleep. She’d have slept all day if she hadn’t heard banging on the hatch and voices calling her name. She jumped up, disoriented, needing a minute to figure out where she was and why. When she finally opened the hatch and squinted in the bright sunlight, she saw Lamb and Abby. “Vix,” Abby began, “we were so worried!” “Didn’t you get my note?” “Yes … but you didn’t say where you were going, or why.” “I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure where I was going when I wrote it.” How had they found her? Had Trisha called them already? “Look …” Lamb said, “whatever happened between you and Caitlin I know she regrets it.” “All friends have disagreements from time to time …” Abby added. “It’s only natural … it’s like a marriage …” She looked at Lamb, then back at Vix. “Oh, Vix … no boy is worth this kind of grief.” How did she know there was a boy involved? How much exactly had Caitlin told them? Abby came toward her, steadying herself as the boat rocked in the breeze. “Come home,” she said, hugging Vix. “We’re family. You belong with us.” “I can’t … please …” There was no way for Vix to explain. Finally Lamb said, more to Abby than to her, “If Vix needs some time and space … I trust her judgment.” “How much time?” Abby asked. “A day … two days? We’re responsible for you, Vix. We can’t just let you live on your own. Your parents assume …” Her parents! “ Please don’t tell my parents I’ve left. Not yet …” Then she added, “I’ll understand if you want to give the scholarship to someone else, someone more … worthy.” Her voice broke on that. They wouldn’t be as lenient this time as when they’d found out she and Caitlin had been hitching.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  On the way home—with Dad still singing away in the back, extending the word “low” so long he sounded like a mooing cow—the man asked me about school. I told him I was studying hard because I wanted to become either a veterinarian or a geologist specializing in the Miocene period, when the mountains out west were formed. I was telling him how geodes were created from bubbles in lava when he interrupted me. “For the daughter of the town drunk, you sure got big plans,” he said. “Stop the truck,” I said. “We can make it on our own from here.” “Aw, now, I didn’t mean nothing by that,” he said. “And you know you ain’t getting him home on your own.” Still, he stopped. I opened the pickup’s tailgate and tried to drag Dad out, but the man was right. I couldn’t do it. So I climbed back in next to the driver, folded my arms across my chest, and stared straight ahead. When we reached 93 Little Hobart Street, he helped me pull Dad out. “I know you took offense at what I said,” the man told me. “Thing is, I meant it as a compliment.” Maybe I should have thanked him, but I just waited until he drove off, and then I called Brian to help me get Dad up the hill and into the house. • • • A couple of months after Erma died, Uncle Stanley fell asleep in the basement while reading comic books and smoking a cigarette. The big clapboard house burned to the ground, but Grandpa and Stanley got out alive, and they moved into a windowless two-room apartment in the basement of an old house around the hill. The drug dealers who’d lived there before had spray-painted curse words and psychedelic patterns on the walls and the ceiling pipes. The landlord didn’t paint over them, and neither did Grandpa and Stanley. Grandpa and Uncle Stanley did have a working bathroom, so every weekend some of us went over to take a bath. One time I was sitting next to Uncle Stanley on the couch in his room, watching Hee Haw and waiting for my turn in the tub. Grandpa was off at the Moose Lodge, where he spent the better part of every day; Lori was taking her bath; and Mom was at the table in Grandpa’s room working on a crossword puzzle. I felt Stanley’s hand creeping onto my thigh. I looked at him, but he was staring at the Hee Haw Honeys so intently that I couldn’t be sure he was doing it on purpose, so I knocked his hand away without saying anything. A few minutes later, the hand came creeping back. I looked down and saw that Uncle Stanley’s pants were unzipped and he was playing with himself. I felt like hitting him, but I was afraid I’d get in trouble the way Lori had after punching Erma, so I hurried out to Mom.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I threw a couple of rocks back and told him to leave me alone. “Make me,” Ernie said. “I don’t make garbage,” I shouted. “I burn it.” This was usually a foolproof comeback, making up in scorn what it lacked in originality, but on this occasion it backfired. “Y’all Wallses don’t burn garbage!” Ernie yelled back. “Y’all throw it in a hole next to your house! You live in it!” I tried to think of a comeback to his comeback, but my mind seized up because what Ernie had said was true: We did live in garbage. Ernie stuck his face in mine. “Garbage! You live in garbage ’cause you are garbage!” I shoved him good and hard, then turned to the other kids, hoping for backup, but they were easing away and looking down, as if they were ashamed to have been caught playing with a girl who had a garbage pit next to her house. • • • That Saturday, Brian and I were reading on the sofa bed when one of the windowpanes shattered and a rock landed on the floor. We ran to the door. Ernie and three of his friends were pedaling their bikes up and down Little Hobart Street, whooping madly. “Garbage! Garbage! Y’all are a bunch of garbage!” Brian went out on the porch. One of the kids hurled another rock that hit Brian in the head. He staggered back, then ran down the steps, but Ernie and his friends pedaled away, shrieking. Brian came back up the stairs, blood trickling down his cheek and onto his T-shirt and a pump knot already swelling up above his eyebrow. Ernie’s gang returned a few minutes later, throwing stones and shouting that they had actually seen the pigsty where the Walls kids lived and that they were going to tell the whole school it was even worse than everyone said. This time both Brian and I chased after them. Even though they outnumbered us, they were enjoying the game of taunting us too much to make a stand. They rode down to the first switchback and got away. “They’ll be back,” Brian said. “What are we going to do?” I asked. Brian sat thinking, then told me he had a plan. He found some rope under the house and led me up to a clearing in the hillside above Little Hobart Street. A few weeks earlier, Brian and I had dragged an old mattress up there because we were thinking of camping out. Brian explained how we could make a catapult, like the medieval ones we’d read about, by piling rocks on the mattress and rigging it with ropes looped over tree branches. We quickly assembled the contraption and tested it once, jerking back on the ropes at the count of three. It worked—a minor avalanche of rocks rained onto the street below.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I had no idea how much they cost, so I approached the only girl in my class who wore braces and, after complimenting her orthodontia, casually asked how much it had set her folks back. When she said twelve hundred dollars, I almost fell over. I was getting a dollar an hour to babysit. I usually worked five or six hours a week, which meant that if I saved every penny I earned, it would take about four years to raise the money. I decided to make my own braces. • • • I went to the library and asked for a book on orthodontia. The librarian looked at me kind of funny and said she didn’t have one, so I realized I’d have to figure things out as I went along. The process involved some experimentation and several false starts. At first I simply used a rubber band. Before going to bed, I would stretch it all the way around the entire set of my upper teeth. The rubber band was small but thick and had a good, tight fit. But it pressed down uncomfortably on my tongue, and sometimes it would pop off during the night and I’d wake up choking on it. Usually, however, it stayed on all night, and in the morning my gums would be sore from the pressure on my teeth. That seemed like a promising sign, but I began to worry that instead of pushing my front teeth in, the rubber band might be pulling my back teeth forward. So I got some larger rubber bands and wore them around my whole head, pressing against my front teeth. The problem with this technique was that the rubber bands were tight—they had to be, to work—so I’d wake up with headaches and deep red marks where the rubber bands had dug into the sides of my face. I needed more advanced technology. I bent a metal coat hanger into a horseshoe shape to fit the back of my head. Then I curled the two ends outward, so when the coat hanger was around my head, the ends angled away from my face and formed hooks to hold the rubber band in place. When I tried it on, the coat hanger dug into the back of my skull, so I used a Kotex sanitary napkin for padding. The contraption worked perfectly, except that I had to sleep flat on my back, which I always had trouble doing, especially when it was cold: I liked to snuggle down into the blankets. Also, the rubber bands still popped off in the middle of the night. Another drawback was that the device took a lot of time to put on properly. I’d wait until it was dark so no one else would see it. One night I was lying in my bunk wearing my elaborate coat-hanger braces when the bedroom door opened. I could make out a dim figure in the darkness.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  It was by faith that he carried out the Passover and the sprinkling of blood, so that the destroying angel might not touch the children of his people. It was by faith that they crossed the Red Sea as if they were going through dry land and that the Egyptians, when they ventured to try to do so, were engulfed. T O the Jews, Moses was the supreme figure in their history. He was the leader who had rescued them from slavery and who had received the law of their lives from God. To the writer of the letter to the Hebrews, Moses was pre-eminently the man of faith. In this story, as James Moffatt points out, there are five different acts of faith. As with the other great characters whose names are included in this roll of honour of God’s faithful ones, many legends and elaborations had gathered round the name of Moses, and doubtless the writer of this letter had them also in mind. (1) There was the faith of Moses’ parents. The story of their action is told in Exodus 2:1–10. Exodus 1:15–22 tells how the king of Egypt, in his hatred, tried to wipe out the male children of the Israelites by having them killed at birth. Legend tells how Amram and Jochebed, the parents of Moses (Exodus 6:20), were worried by the decree of Pharaoh. As a result, Amram had no contact with his wife, not because he did not love her, but because he wanted to spare her the sorrow of seeing her children killed. For three years they were apart, and then Miriam prophesied: ‘My parents shall have another son, who shall deliver Israel out of the hands of the Egyptians.’ She said to her father: ‘What have you done? You have sent your wife away out of your house, because you could not trust the Lord God that he would protect the child that might be born to you.’ So Amram, shamed into trusting God, took back his wife; and in due course Moses was born. He was so lovely a child that his parents determined to hide him in their house. This they did for three months. Then, according to the legend, the Egyptians struck upon a cruel scheme. The king was determined that hidden children should be sought out and killed. Now, when a child hears another child cry, the first child will cry too. So, Egyptian mothers were sent into the homes of the Israelites with their babies; there they pricked their babies until they cried. This made the hidden children of the Israelites cry, too, and so they were discovered and killed. In view of this, Amram and Jochebed decided to make a little ark and to entrust their child to it on the waters of the Nile.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (a) They may not go to church because of fear. They may be ashamed to be seen going to church. They may live or work among people who laugh at churchgoers. They may have friends who have no time for that kind of thing and may fear their criticism and contempt. They may, therefore, try to be secret disciples; but it has been well said that this is impossible because either ‘the discipleship kills the secrecy or the secrecy kills the discipleship’. It would be a good thing if we remembered that, apart from anything else, to go to church is to demonstrate where our loyalty lies. Even if the sermon is poor and the worship uninspiring, the church service still gives us the chance to show to others what side we are on. (b) They may not go because they are over-particular. They may shrink from contact with people who are ‘not like them’. There are congregations which are as much clubs as they are churches. There may be congregations where a form of social snobbery is practised. We must never forget that there is no such thing as a ‘common’ person in the sight of God. It was for all, not only for the ‘respectable’ classes, that Christ died. (c) They may not go because of conceit. They may believe that they do not need the Church or that they are intellectually beyond the standard of preaching there. Social snobbery is bad, but spiritual and intellectual snobbery is worse. The wisest person is a fool in the sight of God; and the strongest person is weak in the moment of temptation. There is no one who can live the Christian life and neglect the fellowship of the Church. If people feel that they can do so, let them remember that they come to church not only to get but also to give. If they think that the Church has faults, it is their duty to come in and help to correct them. (3) We must encourage one another. One of the highest of human duties is that of encouragement. There is a regulation in the Royal Navy which says: ‘No officer shall speak discouragingly to another officer in the discharge of duties.’ Eliphaz unwillingly paid Job a great tribute. As Moffatt translates it: ‘Your words have kept men on their feet’ (Job 4:4). The writer J. M. Barrie somewhere wrote to Cynthia Asquith, the wife of the Liberal statesman: ‘Your first instinct is always to telegraph to Jones the nice thing Brown said about him to Robinson. You have sown a lot of happiness that way.’ It is easy to laugh at people’s ideals, to pour cold water on their enthusiasm, to discourage them. The world is full of discouragers; we have a Christian duty to encourage one another. So many times, words of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer have kept people on their feet. Blessed are those who speak such words.

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

  Their self-esteem would flourish; all self-doubt would be erased like a typo. Entire paragraphs and manuscripts of disappointment and rejection and lack of faith would be wiped out by one push of a psychic delete button and replaced by a quiet, tender sense of worth and belonging. Then they could wrap the world in flame. But this is not exactly what happens. Or at any rate, this is not what it has been like for me. For me, it has been more like a cross between the last few weeks of pregnancy, when you look and feel like Orson Welles and you are hormonally challenged up the yang, your ankles are swollen and you feel revulsion at the smell of vegetables cooking; and the first day of seventh-grade PE class, when they make you line up by size before they hand out your gym uniform. And you’re either four feet tall, like E.T., or made to feel like Diane Arbus’s Jewish giant. Oh, the process starts off well enough. One day several months before your pub date, you get a set of bound galleys, which is to say, a paperbound book with your manuscript set in type. I always feel a desperate sense of relief at this point, because it seems like the publisher is too far in now to cancel publication. These bound galleys have also gone out to hundreds of papers and reviewers, and this makes you believe that the publisher has already shelled out so much money in production and postage costs that they will have to go ahead and actually publish the damn thing. The first time you read through your galleys is heaven. The second time through, all you see are the typos no one caught. It looks like the typesetter typed it with frostbitten feet, drunk. And the typos are important ones. They make you look ignorant; they make you look like an ignorant racist. By the third or fourth time through, you can see that there is not one fresh or insightful or even salvageable line in the whole thing. By the fifth reading, you are no longer sure that publishing this would be in your best interests. Not long after, you get your early reviews, in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews , and sometimes they sound like your mother wrote them. Other times they suggest that you are a show-offy vacuous loser, and they hope you die so that they won’t have to read your work anymore. I have gotten prepub reviews that said I was a treadmark on the underpants of life. Perhaps this is not exactly what they said, but by reading between the lines, I could see that this is what they were implying. You survive that. Possibly you’re still drinking, so you have a pitcher of martinis just to take the edge off, or you’ve quit drinking, so you eat your body weight in pastries and Mexican food.

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

  Most of them didn’t even drink, and they certainly did not have colleagues who came over and passed out at the table over the tuna casserole. Reading my father’s article, I could only imagine that the world was breaking down, that the next time I burst into my dad’s study to show him my report card he’d be crouched under the desk, with one of my mother’s nylon stockings knotted around his upper arm, looking up at me like a cornered wolf. I felt that this was going to be a problem; I was sure that we would be ostracized in our community. All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging. In seventh and eighth grades I still weighed about forty pounds. I was twelve years old and had been getting teased about my strange looks for most of my life. This is a difficult country to look too different in—the United States of Advertising, as Paul Krassner puts it—and if you are too skinny or too tall or dark or weird or short or frizzy or homely or poor or nearsighted, you get crucified. I did. But I was funny. So the popular kids let me hang out with them, go to their parties, and watch them neck with each other. This, as you might imagine, did not help my self-esteem a great deal. I thought I was a total loser. But one day I took a notebook and a pen when I went to Bolinas Beach with my father (who was not, as far as I could tell, shooting drugs yet). With the writer’s equivalent of canvas and brush, I wrote a description of what I saw: “I walked to the lip of the water and let the foamy tongue of the rushing liquid lick my toes. A sand crab burrowed a hole a few inches from my foot and then disappeared into the damp sand.…” I will spare you the rest. It goes on for quite a while. My father convinced me to show it to a teacher, and it ended up being included in a real textbook. This deeply impressed my teachers and parents and a few kids, even some of the popular kids, who invited me to more parties so I could watch them all make out even more frequently. One of the popular girls came home with me after school one day, to spend the night. We found my parents rejoicing over the arrival of my dad’s new novel, the first copy off the press.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  The tall girl, whose name was Dinitia Hewitt, watched me with her smile while we all waited on the asphalt playground for classes to start. At lunch, I ate my lard sandwiches with paralytic slowness, but sooner or later, the janitor started putting the chairs up on the tables. I walked outside trying to hold my head high, and Dinitia and her gang surrounded me and it began. As we fought, they called me poor and ugly and dirty, and it was hard to argue the point. I had three dresses to my name, all hand-me-downs or from a thrift store, which meant each week I had to wear two of them twice. They were so worn from countless washings that the threads were beginning to separate. We were also always dirty. Not dry-dirty like we’d been in the desert, but grimy-dirty and smudged with oily dust from the coal-burning stove. Erma allowed us only one bath a week in four inches of water that had been heated on the kitchen stove and that all of us kids had to share. I thought of discussing the fighting with Dad, but I didn’t want to sound like a whiner. Also, he’d rarely been sober since we had arrived in Welch, and I was afraid that if I told him, he’d show up at school snockered and make things even worse. I did try to talk to Mom. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her about the beatings, fearing that if I did, she’d try to butt in and she’d also only make things worse. I did say that these three black girls were giving me a hard time because we were so poor. Mom told me I should tell them there was nothing wrong with being poor, that Abraham Lincoln, the greatest president this country had ever seen, came from a dirt-poor family. She also said I should tell them Martin Luther King, Jr., would be ashamed of their behavior. Even though I knew these high-minded arguments would get me nowhere, I tried them anyway—Martin Luther King would be ashamed! —and they made the three girls shriek with laughter as they pushed me to the ground. Lying in Stanley’s bed at night with Lori, Brian, and Maureen, I concocted revenge scenarios. I imagined myself like Dad in his air force days, whupping the entire lot of them. After school, I’d go out to the woodpile next to the basement and practice karate chops and dropkicks on the kindling while laying down some pretty wicked curse words. But I also kept thinking about Dinitia, trying to make sense of her. I hoped for a while to befriend her. I’d seen Dinitia smile a few times with genuine warmth, and it transformed her face. With a smile like that, she had to have some good in her, but I couldn’t figure out how to get her to shine it my way.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  A naked lightbulb hung from the ceiling, right next to three or four dangling spiral strips of flypaper so thick with flies that you couldn’t see the sticky yellow surface underneath. Empty beer cans and whiskey bottles and a few half-eaten tins of Vienna sausages littered the floor. On one of the mattresses, Billy’s father was snoring unevenly. His mouth hung open, and flies were gathered in the stubble of his beard. A wet stain had darkened his pants nearly to his knees. His zipper was undone, and his gross penis dangled to one side. I stared quietly, then asked, “What’s the funny thing?” “Don’t you see?” said Billy, pointing at his dad. “He pissed himself!” Billy started laughing. I felt my face turning hot. “You’re not supposed to laugh at your own father,” I said to him. “Ever.” “Aw, now, don’t go get all high-and-mighty on me,” Billy said. “Don’t go and try and pretend you’re better than me. ’Cause I know your daddy ain’t nothing but a drunk like mine.” I hated Billy at that moment, I really did. I thought of telling him about binary numbers and the Glass Castle and Venus and all the things that made my dad special and completely different from his dad, but I knew Billy wouldn’t understand. I started to run out of the house, but then I stopped and turned around. “My daddy is nothing like your daddy!” I shouted. “When my daddy passes out, he never pisses himself!” • • • At dinner that night, I started telling everyone about Billy Deel’s disgusting dad and the ugly dump they lived in. Mom put down her fork. “Jeannette, I’m disappointed in you,” she said. “You should show more compassion.” “Why?” I said. “He’s bad. He’s a JD.” “No child is born a delinquent,” Mom said. They only became that way, she went on, if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to become serial murderers or alcoholics. Mom looked pointedly at Dad and then back at me. She told me I should try to be nicer to Billy. “He doesn’t have all the advantages you kids do,” she said. • • • The next time I saw Billy, I told him I’d be his friend—but not his girlfriend—if he promised not to make fun of anyone’s dad. Billy promised. But he kept trying to be my boyfriend. He told me that if I’d be his girlfriend, he would always protect me and make sure nothing bad ever happened to me and buy me expensive presents. If I wouldn’t be his girlfriend, he said, I’d be sorry. I told him if he didn’t want to be just friends, fine with me, I wasn’t scared of him. After about a week, I was hanging out with some other kids from the Tracks, watching garbage burn in a big rusty trash can.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  I was going on thirteen and self-conscious, so I planned to slip my bathing suit on underneath my dress, but I worried this would only make me more conspicuous, so I took a deep breath and stepped out of my clothes. The scar on my ribs was about the size of my outstretched hand, and Dinitia noticed it immediately. I explained that I had gotten it when I was three, and that I'd been in the hospital for six weeks getting skin grafts, and that was why I never wore a bikini. Dinitia ran her fingers lightly over the scar tissue. "It ain't so bad," she said.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Although we have sworn the contrary to our customers - our patrons, I should say - we never get it quite right. I would not be at all surprised if we became beggars.’ While this young Yeoman was talking, his master came close and listened carefully to everything he said. This Canon, dressed in black, was wary and distrustful of others. Cato has taught us that the guilty man always believes that he is the object of suspicion. That is why the master drew so close to the servant. He wanted to hear everything. Then he interrupted the boy. ‘Shut your mouth,’ he said. ‘Don’t say another word. Otherwise, you will regret it. How dare you slander me in the company of these strangers, and blab all my secrets?’ ‘Carry on, young man,’ Harry Bailey said. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him or his threats.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ the boy replied, ‘I don’t intend to.’ When the Canon realized that all his threats were useless, he fled in sorrow and in shame. ‘Ah,’ his Yeoman said, ‘now we can have some fun. I will tell you everything I know. He has run away, has he? I hope he goes to the devil. I don’t want to have anything else to do with him, I can promise you that. Not for all the money in the world. He was the one who led me into the false game. Yet I never thought of it as a game. I was deadly serious, believe me, in its pursuit. I laboured. I sweated. I worried. I cried. Yet, for all that, I could never leave it alone. I wish to God that I had the brains to tell you everything there is to know about alchemy. I can only explain a small part of the art. Now that my master has gone, I will do my best. So . . .’ Heere endeth the Prologe of the Chanounes Yemannes Tale