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 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 St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  II. Augustine looks back on his early education and is reminded about the power of words and how beautiful words can easily become guides to, and reasons for, bad behavior. III. Augustine is shocked by the moral vacuity of his early education. A. If a student described his lusts in elegant Latin, he received the teacher’s approval. B. If a student described good behavior in less than perfect Latin, he would be subject to embarrassment from the teacher. C. Augustine realized when he wrote the Confessions that he was learning to accept moral conventions, rather than to determine right and wrong. IV. Augustine considers the concept of childhood innocence. A. There are those who take the “boys will be boys” attitude, implying that children grow out of the sorts of behavior Augustine exhibited as a child. B. The author of the Confessions disagrees with this idea. C. He used to lie to his parents and to steal from them so that he could participate in competitions with his “friends.” D. Augustine would cheat in contests with his friends to win prizes from them, yet he resented it when other children cheated him. E. These attitudes suggest, once again, that Augustine was as selfish as the day he was born. 1. He was the center and focus of all things. 2. The purpose of everything and everyone was to make him happy. F. Unless Augustine changed, he would be exactly the same as an adult, except that he would exhibit his selfishness in matters of business and politics rather than in trivial children’s games. V. Augustine realized that what he called his education as a child was not, in fact, education in the Platonic sense at all. VI. Having looked at his early schooling, Augustine is ready to turn to the question of whether his parents provided him with real education. ©2004 The Teaching Company. 19 Suggested Readings: See readings for Lecture Five. O’Connell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul, chapter 3. Questions to Consider: 1. Why are such ideas as “boys will be boys” and “he’ll outgrow it” insufficient for Augustine? 2. Why was the young Augustine so drawn to literature, especially Virgil’s Aeneid, and the writer Augustine somewhat skeptical about the value of such literature? 3. How does the selfishness of Augustine, which was a part of him when he was one day old, manifest itself throughout his childhood? 20 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When I started sixth grade, the other kids made fun of Brian and me because we were so skinny. They called me spider legs, skeleton girl, pipe cleaner, two-by-four, bony butt, stick woman, bean pole, and giraffe, and they said I could stay dry in the rain by standing under a telephone wire. At lunchtime, when other kids unwrapped their sandwiches or bought their hot meals, Brian and I would get out books and read. Brian told everyone he had to keep his weight down because he wanted to join the wrestling team when he got to high school. I told people that I had forgotten to bring my lunch. No one believed me, so I started hiding in the bathroom during lunch hour. I’d stay in one of the stalls with the door locked and my feet propped up so that no one would recognize my shoes. When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the garbage pails, I’d go retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food: apples, hard-boiled eggs, packages of peanut-butter crackers, sliced pickles, half- pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn’t like the pimentos in the cheese. I’d return to the stall and polish off my tasty finds. There was, at times, more food in the wastebasket than I could eat. The first time I found extra food—a bologna-and-cheese sandwich—I stuffed it into my purse to take home for Brian. Back in the classroom, I started worrying about how I’d explain to Brian where it came from. I was pretty sure he was rooting through the trash, too, but we never talked about it. As I sat there trying to come up with ways to justify it to Brian, I began smelling the bologna. It seemed to fill the whole room. I became terrified that the other kids could smell it, too, and that they’d turn and see my overstuffed purse, and since they all knew I never ate lunch, they’d figure out that I had pinched it from the trash. As soon as class was over, I ran to the bathroom and shoved the sandwich back in the garbage can. Maureen always had plenty to eat, since she had made friends throughout the neighborhood and would show up at their houses around dinnertime. I had no idea what Mom and Lori were doing to fend for themselves. Mom, weirdly, was getting heavier. One evening when Dad was away and we had nothing to eat and we were all sitting around the living room trying not to think of food, Mom kept disappearing under the blanket on the sofa bed. At one point Brian looked over. “Are you chewing something?” he asked.

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

  I bet he thinks he’s above that. Whenever I’m giving a lecture at a writing conference and happen to mention the benefits of finding someone to read your drafts, at least one older established writer comes up to me and says that he or she would never in a million years show his or her work to another person before it was done. It is not a good idea, and I must stop telling my students that it will help them. I just smile, geishalike, and make little fluttery sounds of understanding. Then I go on telling people to consider finding someone who would not mind reading their drafts and marking them up with useful suggestions. The person may not have an answer to what is missing or annoying about the piece, but writing is so often about making mistakes and feeling lost. There are probably a number of ways to tell your story right, and someone else may be able to tell you whether or not you’ve found one of these ways. I’m not suggesting that you and another writer sit in a cubby somewhere and write together, as though you were doing potato prints side by side at the institution, and that then you beam at each other’s work the way you gape when your kid first writes his name. But I am suggesting that there may be someone out there in the world—maybe a spouse, maybe a close friend—who will read your finished drafts and give you an honest critique, let you know what does and doesn’t work, give you some suggestions on things you might take out or things on which you need to elaborate, ways in which to make your piece stronger. In the first story of Donald Barthelme’s I ever read, twenty years ago, he said that truth is a hard apple to catch and it is a hard apple to throw. I know what a painful feeling it is when you’ve been working on something forever, and it feels done, and you give your story to someone you hope will validate this and that person tells you it still needs more work. You have to, at this point, question your assessment of this person’s character and, if he or she is not a spouse or a lifelong friend, decide whether or not you want them in your life at all.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  Mom thought I should be writing exposés about oppressive landlords, social injustice, and the class struggle on the Lower East Side. But I leaped at the job, because it meant I would become one of those people who knew what was really going on. Also, most people in Welch had a pretty good idea how bad off the Walls family was, but the truth was, they all had their problems, too—they were just better than we were at covering them up. I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets. Dad thought it was great that I was writing a weekly column about, as he put it, the skinny dames and the fat cats. He became one of my most faithful readers, and would go to the library to research the people in the column, then call me with tips. “This Astor broad has one helluva past,” he told me one time. “Maybe we should do a little digging in that direction.” Eventually, even Mom acknowledged that I’d done all right. “No one expected you to amount to much,” she told me. “Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.” I loved my new job even more than I loved my Park Avenue address. I was invited to dozens of parties a week: art-gallery openings, benefit balls, movie premieres, book parties, and private dinners in marble-floored dining rooms. I met real estate developers, agents, heiresses, fund managers, lawyers, clothing designers, professional basketball players, photographers, movie producers, and television correspondents. I met people who owned entire collections of houses and spent more on one restaurant meal than my family had paid for 93 Little Hobart Street. True or not, I was convinced that if all these people found out about Mom and Dad and who I really was, it would be impossible for me to keep my job. So I avoided discussing my parents. When that was impossible, I lied. A year after I started the column, I was in a small, overstuffed restaurant across the table from an aging, elegant woman in a silk turban who oversaw the International Best Dressed List. “So, where are you from, Jeannette?” “West Virginia.” “Where?” “Welch.” “How lovely. What’s the main industry in Welch?” “Coal mining.” As she questioned me, she studied what I wore, assessing the fabric and appraising the cost of each item and making a judgment about my taste in general. “And does your family own coal mines?” “No.” “What do your parents do?” “Mom’s an artist.” “And your father?” “He’s an entrepreneur.” “Doing what?” I took a breath. “He’s developing a technology to burn low-grade bituminous coal more efficiently.” “And they’re still in West Virginia?” she asked. I decided I might as well go all out. “They love it there,” I said.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  If we asked Mom about food—in a casual way, because we didn't want to cause any trouble—she'd simply shrug and say she couldn't make something out of nothing. We kids usually kept our hunger to ourselves, but we were always thinking of food and how to get our hands on it. During recess at school, I'd slip back into the classroom and find something in some other kid's lunch bag that wouldn't be missed—a package of crackers, an apple—and I'd gulp it down so quickly I would barely be able to taste it. If I was playing in a friend's yard, I'd ask if I could use the bathroom, and if no one was in the kitchen, I'd grab something out of the refrigerator or cupboard and take it into the bathroom and eat it there, always making a point of flushing the toilet before leaving.

• 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 The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  When I’d pointed out that all the buttons had been torn from mine, she said that minor flaw was more than offset by the fact that the coat was imported from France and made of 100-percent lamb’s wool. As we waited for the opening bell, I stood with Brian at the edge of the playground, my arms crossed to keep my coat closed. The other kids stared at us, whispering among themselves, but they also kept their distance, as if they hadn’t decided whether we were predators or prey. I had thought West Virginia was all white hillbillies, so I was surprised by how many black kids there were. I saw one tall black girl with a strong jaw and almond eyes smiling at me. I nodded and smiled back, then I realized there was something malicious in her smile. I locked my arms tighter across my chest. I was in the fifth grade, so my day was divided into periods, with different teachers and classrooms for each. For the first period, I had West Virginia history. History was one of my favorite subjects. I was coiled and ready to raise my hand as soon as the teacher asked a question I could answer, but he stood at the front of the room next to a map of West Virginia, with all fifty-five counties outlined, and spent the entire class pointing to counties and asking students to identify them. In my second period, we passed the hour watching a film of the football game that Welch High had played several days earlier. Neither of those teachers introduced me to the class; they seemed as uncertain as the kids about how to act around a stranger. My next class was English for students with learning disabilities. Miss Caparossi started out by informing the class that it might surprise them to learn some people in this world thought they were better than other people. “They’re convinced they’re so special that they don’t need to follow the rules other people have to follow,” she said, “like presenting their school records when they enroll in a new school.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows meaningfully. “Who thinks that’s not fair?” she asked the class. All the kids except me raised their hands. “I see our new student doesn’t agree,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to explain yourself?” I was sitting in the second-to-last row. The students in front of me swiveled their heads around to stare. I decided to dazzle them with the answer from the Ergo Game. “Insufficient information to draw a conclusion,” I said. “Oh, really?” Miss Caparossi asked. “Is that what they say in a big city like Phoenix?” She pronounced it “Feeeeenix.” Then she turned to the class and said in a high, mocking voice, “Insufficient information to draw a conclusion.” The class laughed violently. I felt something sharp and painful between my shoulder blades and turned around.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  And damned if she doesn’t feel the same about me.” • • • All of us kids had our own lives by then. I was in college, Lori had become an illustrator at a comic-book company, Maureen lived with Lori and went to high school, and Brian, who had wanted to be a cop ever since he’d had to call a policeman to our house in Phoenix to break up a fight between Mom and Dad, had become a warehouse foreman and was serving on the auxiliary force until he was old enough to take the police department’s entrance exam. Mom suggested we all celebrate Christmas at Lori’s apartment. I bought Mom an antique silver cross, but finding a gift for Dad was harder; he always said he never needed anything. Since it looked like it was going to be another hard winter, and since Dad wore nothing but his bomber jacket in even the coldest weather, I decided to get him some warm clothes. At an army-surplus store, I bought flannel shirts, thermal underwear, thick wool socks, the kind of blue work pants that auto mechanics wear, and a new pair of steel-toed boots. Lori decorated her apartment with colored lights and pine boughs and paper angels; Brian made eggnog; and to demonstrate that he was on his best behavior, Dad went to great lengths to make sure there was no alcohol in it before he accepted a glass. Mom passed around their presents, each wrapped in newspaper and tied with butcher’s twine. Lori got a cracked lamp that might have been a Tiffany; Maureen, an antique porcelain doll that had lost most of her hair; Brian, a nineteenth-century book of poetry, missing the cover and the first few pages. My present was an orange crewneck sweater, slightly stained but made, Mom pointed out, of genuine Shetland wool. When I passed Dad my stack of carefully wrapped boxes, he protested that he needed and wanted nothing. “Go ahead,” I said. “Open them.” I watched as he carefully removed the wrapping. He lifted the lids and stared at the folded clothes. His face took on that wounded expression he got whenever the world called his bluff. “You must be mighty ashamed of your old man,” he said. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You think I’m some sort of goddamn charity case.” Dad stood up and put on his bomber jacket. He was avoiding all our eyes. “Where are you going?” I asked. Dad just turned up his collar and walked out of the apartment. I listened to the sound of his boots going down the stairs. “What did I do?” I asked. “Look at it from his perspective,” Mom said. “You buy him all these nice new things, and all he has for you is junk from the street. He’s the father. He’s the one who’s supposed to be taking care of you.” The room was quiet for a while.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  with his fingers interlocked. He had a stomach so big that his thin black belt reminded me of the equator circling the globe. I was afraid that Mr. Becker wouldn’t give me the job if he knew I was only thirteen, so I told him I was seventeen. He hired me on the spot for forty dollars a week, in cash. I was thrilled. It was my first real job. Babysitting and tutoring and doing other kids’ homework and mowing lawns and redeeming bottles and selling scrap metal didn’t count. Forty dollars a week was serious money. • • • I liked the work. People buying jewelry were always happy, and even though Welch was a poor town, Becker’s Jewel Box had plenty of customers: older miners buying their wives a mother’s pin, a brooch with a birthstone for each of her children; teenage couples shopping for engagement rings, the girl giggling with excitement, the boy acting proud and manly. During the slow spells, Mr. Becker and I watched the Watergate hearings on a little black-and-white TV. Mr. Becker was captivated by John Dean’s wife, Maureen, who sat behind her husband when he was testifying and wore elegant clothes and pulled her blond hair back in a tight bun. “Hot damn, that’s one classy broad,” Mr. Becker would say. Sometimes, after watching Maureen Dean, Mr. Becker got so randy that he came behind me while I was cleaning the display case and rubbed up against my backside. I’d pull his hands off and walk away without saying a word, and that horndog would return to the television as if nothing had happened. When Mr. Becker went across the street to the Mountaineer Diner for lunch, he always took the key to the display case that held the diamond rings. If customers came in wanting to look at the rings, I had to run across the street to get him. Once he forgot to take the key, and when he returned, he made a big point of counting the rings in front of me. It was his way of letting me know he didn’t trust me in the slightest. One day after Mr. Becker had come back from lunch and ostentatiously checked the display cases, I was so furious that I looked around to see if there was anything in the entire darn store worth stealing. Necklaces, brooches, banjos—none of them did anything for me. And then the watch display caught my eye. I had always wanted a watch. Unlike diamonds, watches were practical. They were for people on the run, people with appointments to keep and schedules to meet. That was the kind of person I wanted to be. Dozens of watches ticked away in the counter

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I told her everything - about my life as an oyster-girl; about Kitty Butler, whom I had left my family for, and who had left me, in her turn, for Walter Bliss. I told her about my madness; my masquerade; my life with Mrs Milne and Grace, in Green Street, where she had seen me first. And finally I told her about Diana, and Felicity Place, and Zena. When I stopped talking it was almost light; the parlour seemed chillier than ever. Through all my long narrative Florence had been silent; she had begun to frown when I had reached the part about the renting, and after that the frown had deepened. Now it was very deep indeed. ‘You wanted to know,’ I said, ‘what secrets I had...’ She looked away. ‘I didn’t think there would be quite so many.’ ‘You said you wouldn’t hate me, over the renting.’ ‘It’s so hard to think you did those things - for fun. And — oh, Nance, for such a cruel kind of fun!’ ‘It was very long ago.’ ‘To think of all the people you have known - and yet you have no friends.’ ‘I left them all behind me.’ ‘Your family. You said when you came here that your family had thrown you over. But it was you threw them over! How they must wonder over you! Do you never think of them?’ ‘Sometimes, sometimes.’ ‘And the lady who was so fond of you, in Green Street. Do you never think to call on her, and her daughter?’ ‘They have moved away; and I tried to find them. And anyway, I was ashamed, because I had neglected them...’ ‘Neglected them, for that - what was her name?’ ‘Diana.’ ‘Diana. Did you care for her, then, so very much?’ ‘Care for her?’ I propped myself upon my elbow. ‘I hated her! She was a kind of devil! I have told you — ’ ‘And yet, you stayed with her, so long...’ I felt suffocated, all at once, by my own story, and by the meanings she was teasing from it. ‘I can’t explain,’ I said. ‘She had a power over me. She was rich. She had - things.’ ‘First you told me it was a gent that threw you out. Then you said it was a lady. I thought, that you had lost some girl... ’ ‘I had lost a girl; but it was Kitty, and it was years before.’ ‘And Diana was rich; and blacked your eye and cut you, and you let her. And then she chucked you out because you - kissed her maid.’ Her voice had grown steadily harder. ‘What happened to her?’ ‘I don’t know. I don’t know!’ We lay a while in silence, and the bed seemed suddenly terribly slim. Florence gazed at the lightening square of curtain at the window, and I watched her, miserably.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She’d washed her face, but her neck and temples were still dark with grime. She waved enthusiastically when she saw me. “It’s my baby girl!” she called out. I kissed her cheek. Mom had dumped all the plastic packets of soy sauce and duck sauce and hot-and-spicy mustard from the table into her purse. Now she emptied a wooden bowl of dried noodles into it as well. “A little snack for later on,” she explained. We ordered. Mom chose the Seafood Delight. “You know how I love my seafood,” she said. She started talking about Picasso. She’d seen a retrospective of his work and decided he was hugely overrated. All the cubist stuff was gimmicky, as far as she was concerned. He hadn’t really done anything worthwhile after his Rose Period. “I’m worried about you,” I said. “Tell me what I can do to help.” Her smile faded. “What makes you think I need your help?” “I’m not rich,” I said. “But I have some money. Tell me what it is you need.” She thought for a moment. “I could use an electrolysis treatment.” “Be serious.” “I am serious. If a woman looks good, she feels good.” “Come on, Mom.” I felt my shoulders tightening up, the way they invariably did during these conversations. “I’m talking about something that could help you change your life, make it better.” “You want to help me change my life?” Mom asked. “I’m fine. You’re the one who needs help. Your values are all confused.” “Mom, I saw you picking through trash in the East Village a few days ago.” “Well, people in this country are too wasteful. It’s my way of recycling.” She took a bite of her Seafood Delight. “Why didn’t you say hello?” “I was too ashamed, Mom. I hid.” Mom pointed her chopsticks at me. “You see?” she said. “Right there. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You’re way too easily embarrassed. Your father and I are who we are. Accept it.” “And what am I supposed to tell people about my parents?” “Just tell the truth,” Mom said. “That’s simple enough.” II [image "Images" file=Image00012.jpg] THE DESERT I WAS ON FIRE. It’s my earliest memory. I was three years old, and we were living in a trailer park in a southern Arizona town whose name I never knew. I was standing on a chair in front of the stove, wearing a pink dress my grandmother had bought for me. Pink was my favorite color. The dress’s skirt stuck out like a tutu, and I liked to spin around in front of the mirror, thinking I looked like a ballerina. But at that moment, I was wearing the dress to cook hot dogs, watching them swell and bob in the boiling water as the late-morning sunlight filtered in through the trailer’s small kitchenette window. I could hear Mom in the next room singing while she worked on one of her paintings. Juju, our black mutt, was watching me.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “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

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Yes.” I felt amazingly sober after the short intense sleep. All at once, Im not so anxious to be back on those streets. For a moment, the prospect terrifies me. It’s only that Im still tired, I told myself. It has nothing directly to do with this man. He moved his leg slightly under the sheet, closer to mine. I leaned over as if to retrieve something from my clothes on the floor. Actually I merely wanted to move away from something oddly threatening about him—strangely, the very evenness of his voice now, the certainty of his manner—the moody handsomeness—the ease. Even during the sex, although I had detected no inhibition in him, this ease had manifested itself. There had been none of the hurried hungriness of some of the others. And then—as I sat up on the bed again, farther from him now—he said this, completely unexpectedly, without hint of its coming, without preparation; bluntly: “You want, very much, to be loved—but you dont want to love back, even if you have to force yourself not to.” I faced him on the bed. He was looking at me steadily. I grasp defensively for the streetpose that will dismiss his statement. “Oh, man, dig,” I said, “I just want to ball while I can.” “I was standing right near you at the bar when you were talking to the two men you were with,” he said. “I heard you—everything you said—everything about ‘pretending’—about being just as frightened as everyone else.” I felt my face burning with shame. Emotionally, in that bar, for those few moments, I had stripped myself naked; and this man had witnessed it. “Dont be embarrassed,” he said quickly. “I had sensed something like that, even before I heard you in the bar. I’d seen you several times before—the first time was near the French Market. I saw you staring at the cooped-up roosters there, I saw your reaction when they seemed to want to claw their way out of their cage. Do you know that you actually winced? Do you remember?” Yes, I remembered—and I remember the eery feeling that I had been in that cage. “I would have talked to you then,” Jeremy went on, “but you walked away very quickly.... I knew you wouldnt speak to me—it’s difficult for some people, and I was sure it was so for you.... I was right, wasnt I?—about not wanting to love back; not even wanting to feel anything—for one person.” Curtly, squashing out the cigarette to indicate that the direction of the conversation will push me to leave, I said: “I dont even know that I want to be ‘loved.’ I just know that I want to feel Wanted. I dont even want to feel that I need any one person.” “Just many,” he said ineluctably. “Im sorry,” he apologized. “Dont be... ‘bugged’” he laughed. His use of that word, so obviously for my benefit, made me laugh too.

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

  For instance, a code bologna sandwich meant white bread, one or two slices of bologna, mustard, one wilted piece of iceberg lettuce. (The Catholics were heavily into mayonnaise, which we might get into later.) Fathers, to begin with, always used nonregulation bread and then buttered it, which made the sandwich about as tradable as a plate of haggis. Also, everything was always falling out of the sandwiches fathers made. I’m not sure why. They’d use anything green and frilly for lettuce, when of course only the one piece of wilted iceberg was permissible. Your friends saw a big leaf of romaine falling out along with the slice of bologna, and you might soon find yourself alongside the kid against the fence . There was always that one kid against the fence. How could the rest of us feel Okay if there wasn’t? If it was a guy, there was probably a trumpet case at his feet and he wore strangely scuffed shoes, because he avoided the foot traffic on sidewalks and walked instead through weedy lots with dogs yipping at him. He didn’t end up at that station only because his lunches were nightmarish in their eccentricity, but his lunches didn’t help . He almost certainly ended up being a writer . Now, who knows if any of this is usable material? There’s no way to tell until you’ve got it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write . I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones , speak on writing once. Someone asked her for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away. I think this was some sort of Zen reference—the Buddhist disciple remembering Buddha’s flower sermon, in which all Buddha did was hold up a flower and twirl it, in silence, sitting on the mountain. Me, I’m a nice Christian girl, and while I wish I could quote something kicky and inspirational that Jesus had to say about writing, the truth is that when students ask me for the best practical advice I know, I always pick up a piece of paper and pantomime scribbling away. My students usually think this is a very wise and Zenlike thing for me to convey. Mostly, I forget to give Natalie Goldberg credit. But write about what? they ask next. Write about carrot sticks, I tell them: Code carrots had to look machine extruded, absolutely uniform, none longer than the length of the sandwich. Your parents would sometimes send you to school with waxed-paper packets of uneven cuckoo-bunny carrots, and your carrot esteem would be so low you couldn’t even risk looking at the guy against the fence.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Finally, Caitlin threw herself on her bed. There was nothing Vix could say to comfort her. Instead, she handed Caitlin a box of tissues then sat beside her, rubbing her back. Caitlin blew her nose. “You’re the only one in this house I don’t hate. You’re the only one who cares about me.” Caitlin didn’t even hate her when Vix got her period, though Caitlin wanted desperately to be first. “I guarantee I’ll be first with everything else!” she promised. Maybe ... maybe not, Vix thought. This was the first thing she’d had that Caitlin wanted and she liked the feeling. They hiked the two miles to town without telling anyone, to buy pads for Vix, then Caitlin escorted her to the secret bathroom behind Patisserie Francaise on Main Street and helped her stick the pad inside her pants. Outside, they ran into Trisha, who was delivering muffins to the gourmet food shop. “Lordy ... look who’s here!” Trisha set the tray on the hood of her truck and handed each of them a peach muffin. She was wearing short shorts and an orange T-shirt. Vix thought of those gigantic breasts and warned hers not to grow that big. “So how’s the bride and groom?” Trisha asked. Caitlin made a retching sound. Trisha nodded. “You think you know somebody really well and then they go and do something so outrageous ... so totally off the wall ...” “He should have married you!” Caitlin said. “Oh, honey ... you’re not the only one who’s thinking that.” Only when Caitlin decided to hitch home did Vix balk. “I’m not allowed to hitch.” Though the idea of walking back with the sun beating down on her when she was already feeling queasy, made her wish she could. “This is the Vineyard, Vix. Everybody hitches.” “I can’t. It’s the one thing I’ve promised my parents I’ll never do, along with drugs and sex before marriage.” “That’s three things.” “You know what I mean.” But moments later an old blue Camaro screeched to a halt. There were

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Do you think I am talking about my master? Not at all. I am talking about another canon, a hundred times more skilful than the man I serve. He has betrayed more people than you can imagine. It is impossible to describe all of his falsehoods. Whenever I talk about him, my cheeks grow red with shame. Well, they would grow red if they could. I know well enough that I have no colour left in my face. The glow left my cheeks when I first began working among the stinks and fumes. Anyway, listen to the false canon. ‘Sir,’ he said to the priest, ‘get your servant to buy some quicksilver. Tell him to hurry. Two or three ounces of the stuff will suffice. When he comes back with it, I will show you a miracle. Something you have never seen before.’ ‘Of course,’ replied the priest. ‘Right away.’ So he ordered his servant to go to the apothecary, and purchase three ounces of quicksilver. The boy rushed off, and returned very quickly with the material. He gave it to the canon, who laid it down carefully. The canon then asked the servant to bring some coals, and to start a fire. This was promptly done. Once the coals had started burning the canon took a crucible from the folds of his cloak. He showed it to the priest. ‘Take hold of it,’ he said. ‘I want you to do this for yourself. Pour into this crucible an ounce of the quicksilver. In the name of Christ, we will make an alchemist of you yet. There are very few people to whom I would confide my secrets. I will show you how to harden this quicksilver. In front of your eyes I will make it as fine and as durable as the silver in your purse. You can test it with your teeth, if you like. If you prove me wrong, then you can reveal me as a liar and a fraud to the whole world. I have a powder here, in my pocket, that will do all. It cost me a lot of money, but it is worth it. It is the agent of all my work, as you shall soon see. Tell your boy to leave the room, by the way, and shut the door behind him. No one else must learn our secrets.’

• From City of Night (1963)

  But before I can begin to dress, the man in bed says: “Dont go yet. Have a cigarette.” He holds out the cigarette as if, I think, it were an indication of truce after the sex act which has suddenly, for me—now remembered vividly after the brief, blacked-out period of sleep—made us Strangers. I take the cigarette from him. He reached for his pants on a chair next to him and retrieved from a pocket several bills which he places for me on the table beside the bed. He did this as if, for him, this is the most insignificant aspect of the scene we have played out. Coming here with him—I remember distinctly—I hadnt mentioned money. There had been nothing about him to suggest he was a score. In the state of pilled and liquored panic which I had felt threatening to bludgeon my senses at that bar, the evenness of his voice, the calmness, had acted immediately to sap my nerves in that advancing tide of forcedly laughing faces determined above all else to enter an engulfing tide of madness.... And so I had merely been grateful to him for the offer of momentary respite from the crowds. Now, aware acutely of the thriving street, as if its sounds were connected electrically to my senses, and remembering the previous sex scene, during which I had played the unreciprocal role more obsessively than ever before (as if the dropping of the streetpose, in the bar previously with those two scores, had made it necessary for me to prove with greater urgency that I could still wear that mask), I thought of one thing: Escape from this room! Escape from the bedcover thrown in a heap on the floor—escape, especially and mysteriously disturbingly, from the rumpled sheets.... But I lay back in bed. I would stay only a few more minutes, I told myself, trying momentarily to shut out the hypnotizing, seductively beckoning sounds of the frenzy roaring Outside: beckoning like a ritual prepared especially for me. “Why is it,” this man was saying slowly, almost as if he were seeking an excuse, by talking, in order not to join the streetcrowds—or to keep me from it, “that the moment the orgasm is over—or the moment it’s remembered, after sleep,” he added, as if understanding very clearly my anxiety to leave—as if, too, he is speaking about me personally, “why is it that people want to leave, as if to forget—with someone else—whats just happened between them—which will happen again and again—and again have to be forgotten?” The inappropriateness of his searching remarks, while the carnival fury which we have all come to seek—that very cramming of experiences with many, many people—roars outside—the vast inappropriateness of it strikes me immediately. Of course, what he had said was largely true: Afterwards, in those hurried contacts, you want to leave instantly, as if in some kind of shame, or guilt, for something not exchanged.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Yeah!—say yes sir, punk!—aint you got Respect for your elders?—hell, Im twice as old as you are, dont forget that... Greedy bastards—allasame.... Well, then, for chrissake, I aint even got a quarter’s worth from you,” he says, coming back to the bed. “Now stop squirming and dont hold it—relax, if youre gonna go along with it—at least pretend you enjoy it—what the hell, I should pay and you act like you dont give a damn?—punks, allasame. I was like you once—you believe it?” he says, “and now look at me, playing the other side of this goddam game. What the hell, pal, people change, remember that, dont forget it for a moment, remember that and dont be so fuckin cocky. Now lay back, close your goddam eyes and stop staring at me like Im a goddam creep—hell, I aint ashamed of nothing. Pretend Im some milkfed chick back in—wherever the hell youre from.... Thats it, thats better.... Relax.... Thats it....” Later, he adjusted his robe modestly again, reached for his pants, handed me a $10.00 bill. “Thats what you came for, aint it?—so take it,” he said looking at me very long. I take the bill, crush it quickly into my pocket. Suddenly the room is explodingly hot. I want to leave quickly. “And say thankyou, cantcha?” he adds, looking away now. The roles we have just played for each other seem to materialize harshly now that it’s over. “And heres three more bucks for cabfare,” he said. “It’s always goodluck to give cabfare,” he added. “You-wanna-come-back-sometime?... Hell, I dont care. I can pick up a different punk any night, see—and no skinny wiseass punk pulls any shit on me, pal, I know judo like the best of em.... But youre kinda new, I like that. Available, but kinda new.... Take my advice, I know what Im tellinya, go Home and get Married,” he says guiltily, “that streetll swallow you so deep you wont know where you got sucked in, and it wont even throw you up like bad beer, itll digestya—” He gnashed his teeth harshly. “Hell, youll become a part of the 42nd Street army of punks—sleeping in movies, cant make it; everybodys had you: the dayll come nobody wants you—then what?... Bad scene, bad scene.... So you wanna see me again or not? Tellyawot, we’ll have dinner again, wanna have dinner?—how about Friday?” “All right—Friday,” I say quickly, I want to get out. Im sure I wont be there.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Suddenly Im frighteningly moved by this youngman beside me. I feel that impotent helplessness that comes when, through some perhaps casual remark, I see a person nakedly, sadly, pitifully revealed—as I see Dave now. We were both silent as we drove to his apartment. Along the hall of that building, a door is open. Two youngmen had moved in—and the mother of one, Dave had told me earlier, had come to visit them, staying there with them, aware that her son and the other youngman were lovers. Through the open door as we passed it, I heard the voice of one, whining peevishly: “Mommee! listen to what Duane is saying to me!”... I cringed visibly. Dave noticed this. “They fight all the time,” he told me. “Duane thinks Rick is making it with other guys—and Rick’s mother always takes Rick’s side.” Inside the apartment, Dave said unexpectedly: “It sure is great to be with you!” He put his hand fondly on my shoulder, letting it rest there—the first time he had touched me even this intimately since that first night For a long moment, I didnt move, feeling his hand increasingly heavier.... I ierked away from him. The words erupted out of me: “Maybe so—but it’s all stopping!” Even when I saw the look of amazement on his face, even when I wanted to stop, even when I felt that compassion, tenderness, closeness to this youngman—even then, I knew, as much for me as for him, that I had to go on; that although, inside, I was cringing at my own words, in hammerblows I have to destroy this friendship. “I mean—well—Ive spent too much time with you—thats all.” And crazily through it all, I keep thinking about the pink elephant at the park — the ridiculous flowered hat! — the sad eyes!... And the echoing, petulant, girlish “Mommee!” that had emerged from the half-open door along the hallway.... “Im sorry, Dave,” I said at the door, which I was opening now, to clinch the Escape, to get myself away from him. “Im sorry,” I repeated, “but this scene is nowhere!” Outside in the hall, I close the door behind me. I pause for a moment, not knowing why. Then I walked out of the building quickly. Im back in Santa Monica, alone, facing the wind-tossed ocean. SOMEONE: People Dont Have Wings I HAD SEEN HIM ON THE BEACH several times before. He never wore trunks. He was always dressed neatly in summer sportclothes. After I began to notice him—and even on the crowded beach he stood out—I realized that during the last week he had been here daily. He would stand on the sidewalk before the beach, looking, it seemed to me, not at anyone in particular but at the whole beach and everyone on it. After a few minutes, he would drive away—alone, without having spoken to anyone. Occasionally, that same afternoon, he would return. Soon, I began to watch for him to appear.