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.

Page 37 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Educated (2018)

  Charles and I spent the next afternoon in the park, rocking lazily in tire swings. I told him about the scholarship. I’d meant it as a brag, but for some reason my fears came out with it. I said I shouldn’t even be in college, that I should be made to finish high school first. Or to at least start it. Charles sat quietly while I talked and didn’t say anything for a long time after. Then he said, “Are you angry your parents didn’t put you in school?” “It was an advantage!” I said, half-shouting. My response was instinctive. It was like hearing a phrase from a catchy song: I couldn’t stop myself from reciting the next line. Charles looked at me skeptically, as if asking me to reconcile that with what I’d said only moments before. “Well, I’m angry,” he said. “Even if you aren’t.” I said nothing. I’d never heard anyone criticize my father except Shawn, and I wasn’t able to respond to it. I wanted to tell Charles about the Illuminati, but the words belonged to my father, and even in my mind they sounded awkward, rehearsed. I was ashamed at my inability to take possession of them. I believed then—and part of me will always believe— that my father’s words ought to be my own. — EVERY NIGHT FOR A MONTH, when I came in from the junkyard, I’d spend an hour scrubbing grime from my fingernails and dirt from my ears. I’d brush the tangles from my hair and clumsily apply makeup. I’d rub handfuls of lotion into the pads of my fingers to soften the calluses, just in case that was the night Charles touched them. When he finally did, it was early evening and we were in his jeep, driving to his house to watch a movie. We were just coming parallel to Fivemile Creek when he reached across the gearshift and rested his hand on mine. His hand was warm and I wanted to take it, but instead I jerked away as if I’d been burned. The response was involuntary, and I wished immediately that I could take it back. It happened again when he tried a second time. My body convulsed, yielding to a strange, potent instinct. The instinct passed through me in the form of a word, a bold lyric, strong, declarative. The word was not new. It had been with me for a

• From Educated (2018)

  That was how Dad and Shawn became comrades, even if they only agreed on one thing: that my brush with education had made me uppity, and that what I needed was to be dragged through time. Fixed, anchored to a former version of myself. Shawn had a gift for language, for using it to define others. He began searching through his repertoire of nicknames. “Wench” was his favorite for a few weeks. “Wench, fetch me a grinding wheel,” he’d shout, or “Raise the boom, Wench!” Then he’d search my face for a reaction. He never found one. Next he tried “Wilbur.” Because I ate so much, he said. “That’s some pig,” he’d shout with a whistle when I bent over to fit a screw or check a measurement. Shawn took to lingering outside after the crew had finished for the day. I suspect he wanted to be near the driveway when Charles drove up it. He seemed to be forever changing the oil in his truck. The first night he was out there, I ran out and jumped into the jeep before he could say a word. The next night he was quicker on the draw. “Isn’t Tara beautiful?” he shouted to Charles. “Eyes like a fish and she’s nearly as smart as one.” It was an old taunt, blunted by overuse. He must have known I wouldn’t react on the site so he’d saved it, hoping that in front of Charles it might still have sting. The next night: “You going to dinner? Don’t get between Wilbur and her food. Won’t be nothin’ left of you but a splat on the pavement.” Charles never responded. We entered into an unspoken agreement to begin our evenings the moment the mountain disappeared in the rearview mirror. In the universe we explored together there were gas stations and movie theaters; there were cars dotting the highway like trinkets, full of people laughing or honking, always waving, because this was a small town and everybody knew Charles; there were dirt roads dusted white with chalk, canals the color of beef stew, and endless wheat fields glowing bronze. But there was no Buck’s Peak. During the day, Buck’s Peak was all there was—that and the site in Blackfoot. Shawn and I spent the better part of a week making purlins to finish the barn roof. We used a machine the size of a mobile home to press them into a Z shape, then we attached wire brushes to grinders and blasted away the rust so they could be painted. When the paint was dry we stacked them next to the shop, but within a day or two the wind from

• From Educated (2018)

  talked about a lot, in which half a dozen people had been martyred by a tyrannical government. To have misunderstood it on this scale—five versus six million—seemed impossible. I found Vanessa before the next lecture and apologized for the joke. I didn’t explain, because I couldn’t explain. I just said I was sorry and that I wouldn’t do it again. To keep that promise, I didn’t raise my hand for the rest of the semester. — THAT SATURDAY, I SAT at my desk with a stack of homework. Everything had to be finished that day because I could not violate the Sabbath. I spent the morning and afternoon trying to decipher the history textbook, without much success. In the evening, I tried to write a personal essay for English, but I’d never written an essay before—except for the ones on sin and repentance, which no one had ever read—and I didn’t know how. I had no idea what the teacher meant by the “essay form.” I scribbled a few sentences, crossed them out, then began again. I repeated this until it was past midnight. I knew I should stop—this was the Lord’s time—but I hadn’t even started the assignment for music theory, which was due at seven A.M. on Monday. The Sabbath begins when I wake up, I reasoned, and kept working. I awoke with my face pressed to the desk. The room was bright. I could hear Shannon and Mary in the kitchen. I put on my Sunday dress and the three of us walked to church. Because it was a congregation of students, everyone was sitting with their roommates, so I settled into a pew with mine. Shannon immediately began chatting with the girl behind us. I looked around the chapel and was again struck by how many women were wearing skirts cut above the knee. The girl talking to Shannon said we should come over that afternoon to see a movie. Mary and Shannon agreed but I shook my head. I didn’t watch movies on Sunday. Shannon rolled her eyes. “She’s very devout,” she whispered. I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as

• From Educated (2018)

  “Doctors can’t cure a migraine before it happens,” Dad chimed in, “but the Lord can!” As we walked to his jeep, Charles said, “Does your house always smell like that?” “Like what?” “Like rotted plants.” I shrugged. “You must have smelled it,” he said. “It was strong. I’ve smelled it before. On you. You always smell of it. Hell, I probably do, too, now.” He sniffed his shirt. I was quiet. I hadn’t smelled anything. — DAD SAID I WAS BECOMING “uppity.” He didn’t like that I rushed home from the junkyard the moment the work was finished, or that I removed every trace of grease before going out with Charles. He knew I’d rather be bagging groceries at Stokes than driving the loader in Blackfoot, the dusty town an hour north where Dad was building a milking barn. It bothered him, knowing I wanted to be in another place, dressed like someone else. On the site in Blackfoot, he dreamed up strange tasks for me to do, as if he thought my doing them would remind me who I was. Once, when we were thirty feet in the air, scrambling on the purlins of the unfinished roof, not wearing harnesses because we never wore them, Dad realized that he’d left his chalk line on the other side of the building. “Fetch me that chalk line, Tara,” he said. I mapped the trip. I’d need to jump from purlin to purlin, about fifteen of them, spaced four feet apart, to get the chalk, then the same number back. It was exactly the sort of order from Dad that was usually met with Shawn saying, “She’s not doing that.” “Shawn, will you run me over in the forklift?” “You can fetch it,” Shawn said. “Unless your fancy school and fancy boyfriend have made you too good for it.” His features hardened in a way that was both new and familiar. I shimmied the length of a purlin, which took me to the framing beam at the barn’s edge. This was more dangerous in one sense—if I fell to the right, there would be no purlins to catch me—but the framing beam was thicker, and I could walk it like a tightrope.

• From Educated (2018)

  I limped through the pasture until Dad was out of sight, then collapsed in the tall wheatgrass. I was shaking, gulping mouthfuls of air that never made it to my lungs. I didn’t understand why I was crying. I was alive. I would be fine. The angels had done their part. So why couldn’t I stop trembling? I was light-headed when I crossed the last field and approached the house, but I burst through the back door, as I’d seen my brothers do, as Robert and Emma had done, shouting for Mother. When she saw the crimson footprints streaked across the linoleum, she fetched the homeopathic she used to treat hemorrhages and shock, called Rescue Remedy, and put twelve drops of the clear, tasteless liquid under my tongue. She rested her left hand lightly on the gash and crossed the fingers of her right. Her eyes closed. Click click click. “There’s no tetanus,” she said. “The wound will close. Eventually. But it’ll leave a nasty scar.” She turned me onto my stomach and examined the bruise—a patch of deep purple the size of a human head—that had formed a few inches above my hip. Again her fingers crossed and her eyes closed. Click click click. “You’ve damaged your kidney,” she said. “We’d better make a fresh batch of juniper and mullein flower.” — THE GASH BELOW MY knee had formed a scab—dark and shiny, a black river flowing through pink flesh—when I came to a decision. I chose a Sunday evening, when Dad was resting on the couch, his Bible propped open in his lap. I stood in front of him for what felt like hours, but he didn’t look up, so I blurted out what I’d come to say: “I want to go to school.” He seemed not to have heard me. “I’ve prayed, and I want to go,” I said. Finally, Dad looked up and straight ahead, his gaze fixed on something behind me. The silence settled, its presence heavy. “In this family,” he said, “we obey the commandments of the Lord.” He picked up his Bible and his eyes twitched as they jumped from line to line. I turned to leave, but before I reached the doorway Dad spoke again. “You remember Jacob and Esau?” “I remember,” I said. He returned to his reading, and I left quietly. I did not need any explanation; I knew what the story meant. It meant that I was not the daughter he had raised, the daughter of faith. I had tried to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

• From City of Night (1963)

  He squashes the cigarette into a butt-crammed ashtray; the butts squirm like gutted white worms. “You still wanna make the ten bucks?” he asked me abruptly. I panic. I think hes lost interest; and I realize uncomfortably how important it is, to me, that he still want me. “Yeah, sure,” I said, trying to sound casual. “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?

• From Educated (2018)

  across from my sister, the reverence and power in his words. Audrey told Dad that she had accepted the power of the Atonement long ago, and had forgiven her brother. She said that I had provoked her, had stirred up anger in her. That I had betrayed her because I’d given myself over to fear, the realm of Satan, rather than walking in faith with God. I was dangerous, she said, because I was controlled by that fear, and by the Father of Fear, Lucifer. That is how my sister ended her letter, by telling me I was not welcome in her home, or even to call her unless someone else was on the line to supervise, to keep her from succumbing to my influence. When I read this, I laughed out loud. The situation was perverse but not without irony: a few months before, Audrey had said that Shawn should be supervised around children. Now, after our efforts, the one who would be supervised was me. — WHEN I LOST MY SISTER, I lost the family. I knew my father would pay my brothers the same visit he’d paid her. Would they believe him? I thought they would. After all, Audrey would confirm it. My denials would be meaningless, the rantings of a stranger. I’d wandered too far, changed too much, bore too little resemblance to the scabby-kneed girl they remembered as their sister. There was little hope of overpowering the history my father and sister were creating for me. Their account would claim my brothers first, then it would spread to my aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole valley. I had lost an entire kinship, and for what? It was in this state of mind that I received another letter: I had won a visiting fellowship to Harvard. I don’t think I have ever received a piece of news with more indifference. I knew I should be drunk with gratitude that I, an ignorant girl who’d crawled out of a scrap heap, should be allowed to study at that grand place, but I couldn’t summon the fervor. I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it. —

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I am the Fool , I think, dully. I used to be a Research Fellow, a proper academic. Now I am in motley. I am not Helen any more. I am the hawk woman . The hawk pulls on the rabbit leg. Wasps circle her like electrons. They land on her feet, on her nose, seeking shreds of rabbit flesh to take back to their paper nest in some nearby Cambridge loft. She flicks them away with her beak and I watch their yellow-and-black striped abdomens spinning through the air before they right themselves and fly back to the hawk. This summer lunch feels deeply unreal . Shadows of damask and silver , a photogravure in an album, something from Agatha Christie, from Evelyn Waugh, from another time. But the wasps are real. They are here, and they are present. So is the hawk, the sun at their centre. And me? I do not know. I feel hollow and unhoused, an airy, empty wasps’ nest, a thing made of chewed paper after the frosts have murdered the life within. Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. In the evenings, by the light of the Aladdin lamp, in the soft white glow of its fluorescing mantle, White is doing his old life to death. He is committing the murder in a novel he’d started writing at Stowe, and now it is nearly finished. The book is called You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down , and it is the story of the decline and fall of a public-school headmaster called Dr Prisonface. Prisonface is terrified of life; he is a chameleon, a mirror, existing only through his reflection in the eyes of others. He loses his job at the school. He woos and is rejected by a boyish dark-haired barmaid, flees in terror from the advances of her mother. He flies with drunken aviators descended from Romantic poets. He tries to teach Hollywood moguls how to be Gentlemen and is humiliated when they mow down grouse with tommy guns. The book is a vicious satire on the educational system and the cult of the English Gentleman, but it is also a psychological exorcism, a caustic narrative written to burn away his former life. White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die. From headmaster to private tutor, from farmworker to beggar, he fails at everything he attempts. Everyone he meets on the way lectures him on why he is useless and unreal, and the book’s narrator , too, puts the boot in at every opportunity . Towards the end of the book, limping and homeless, Prisonface meets a mysterious man on a country road. The man has saturnine, strangely carved features, and walks in darkness, a black dog by his side.

• From Educated (2018)

  — I STOOD OUTSIDE THE bishop’s office on a cold night in February. I didn’t know what had taken me there. The bishop sat calmly behind his desk. He asked what he could do for me, and I said I didn’t know. No one could give me what I wanted, because what I wanted was to be remade. “I can help,” he said, “but you’ll need to tell me what’s bothering you.” His voice was gentle, and that gentleness was cruel. I wished he would yell. If he yelled, it would make me angry, and when angry I felt powerful. I didn’t know if I could do this without feeling powerful. I cleared my throat, then talked for an hour. The bishop and I met every Sunday until spring. To me he was a patriarch with authority over me, but he seemed to surrender that authority the moment I passed through his door. I talked and he listened, drawing the shame from me like a healer draws infection from a wound. When the semester ended, I told him I was going home for the summer. I was out of money; I couldn’t pay rent. He looked tired when I told him that. He said, “Don’t go home, Tara. The church will pay your rent.” I didn’t want the church’s money. I’d made the decision. The bishop made me promise only one thing: that I wouldn’t work for my father. My first day in Idaho, I got my old job back at Stokes. Dad scoffed, said I’d never earn enough to return to school. He was right, but the bishop had said God would provide a way and I believed it. I spent the summer restocking shelves and walking elderly ladies to their cars. I avoided Shawn. It was easy because he had a new girlfriend, Emily, and there was talk of a wedding. Shawn was twenty-eight; Emily was a senior in high school. Her temperament was compliant. Shawn played the same games with her he’d played with Sadie, testing his control. She never failed to follow his orders, quivering when he raised his voice, apologizing when he screamed at her. That their marriage would be manipulative and violent, I had no doubt—although those words were not mine. They had been given to me by the bishop, and I was still trying to wrest meaning from them. When the summer ended, I returned to BYU with only two thousand

• From Educated (2018)

  theirs. Sometimes, when I glanced at the mirror and saw the tangle of our twirling forms, I couldn’t immediately discern myself in the crowd. It didn’t matter that I was wearing a gray T-shirt—a goose among swans. We moved together, a single flock. We began rehearsals for the Christmas recital, and Caroline called Mother to discuss the costume. “The skirt will be how long?” Mother said. “And sheer? No, that’s not going to work.” I heard Caroline say something about what the other girls in the class would want to wear. “Tara can’t wear that,” Mother said. “If that’s what the other girls are wearing, she will stay home.” On the Wednesday after Caroline called Mother, I arrived at Papa Jay’s a few minutes early. The younger class had just finished, and the store was flooded with six-year-olds, prancing for their mothers in red velvet hats and skirts sparkling with sequins of deep scarlet. I watched them wiggle and leap through the aisles, their thin legs covered only by sheer tights. I thought they looked like tiny harlots. The rest of my class arrived. When they saw the outfits, they rushed into the studio to see what Caroline had for them. Caroline was standing next to a cardboard box full of large gray sweatshirts. She began handing them out. “Here are your costumes!” she said. The girls held up their sweatshirts, eyebrows raised in disbelief. They had expected chiffon or ribbon, not Fruit of the Loom. Caroline had tried to make the sweatshirts more appealing by sewing large Santas, bordered with glitter, on the fronts, but this only made the dingy cotton seem dingier. Mother hadn’t told Dad about the recital, and neither had I. I didn’t ask him to come. There was an instinct at work in me, a learned intuition. The day of the recital, Mother told Dad I had a “thing” that night. Dad asked a lot of questions, which surprised Mother, and after a few minutes she admitted it was a dance recital. Dad grimaced when Mother told him I’d been taking lessons from Caroline Moyle, and I thought he was going to start talking about California socialism again, but he didn’t. Instead he got his coat and the three of us walked to the car. The recital was held at the church. Everyone was there, with flashing cameras and bulky camcorders. I changed into my costume in the same room where I attended Sunday school. The other girls chatted cheerfully; I pulled on my sweatshirt, trying to stretch the material a few more

• From Educated (2018)

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

• From Educated (2018)

  Dad’s face was haggard, his eyes bloodshot. He’d had a spectacularly bad winter. In the fall, he’d invested a large sum of money in new construction equipment—an excavator, a man lift and a welding trailer. Now it was spring and all of it was gone. Luke had accidentally lit the welding trailer on fire, burning it to the ground; the man lift had come off a trailer because someone—I never asked who—hadn’t secured it properly; and the excavator had joined the scrap heap when Shawn, pulling it on an enormous trailer, had taken a corner too fast and rolled truck and trailer both. With the luck of the damned, Shawn had crawled from the wreckage, although he’d hit his head and couldn’t remember the days before the accident. Truck, trailer and excavator were totaled. Dad’s determination was etched into his face. It was in his voice, in the harshness of it. He had to win this standoff. He’d convinced himself that if I was on the crew, there’d be fewer accidents, fewer setbacks. “You’re slower than tar running uphill,” he’d told me a dozen times. “But you get the job done without smashing anything.” But I couldn’t do the job, because to do it would be to slide backward. I had moved home, to my old room, to my old life. If I went back to working for Dad, to waking up every morning and pulling on steel-toed boots and trudging out to the junkyard, it would be as if the last four months had never happened, as if I had never left. I pushed past Dad and shut myself in my room. Mother knocked a moment later. She stepped into the room quietly and sat so lightly on the bed, I barely felt her weight next to me. I thought she would say what she’d said last time. Then I’d remind her I was only seventeen, and she’d tell me I could stay. “You have an opportunity to help your father,” she said. “He needs you. He’ll never say it but he does. It’s your choice what to do.” There was silence, then she added, “But if you don’t help, you can’t stay here. You’ll have to live somewhere else.” The next morning, at four A.M., I drove to Stokes and worked a ten-hour shift. It was early afternoon, and raining heavily, when I came home and found my clothes on the front lawn. I carried them into the house. Mother was mixing oils in the kitchen, and she said nothing as I passed by with my dripping shirts and jeans. I sat on my bed while the water from my clothes soaked into the carpet.

• From Educated (2018)

  that followed, and the more I considered them, the more I worried that I might be growing into the wrong sort of woman. Sometimes I could scarcely move through a room, I was so preoccupied with not walking or bending or crouching like them. But no one had ever taught me the modest way to bend over, so I knew I was probably doing it the bad way. — SHAWN AND I AUDITIONED for a melodrama at Worm Creek. I saw Charles at the first rehearsal and spent half the evening working up the courage to talk to him. When I did, finally, he confided in me that he was in love with Sadie. This wasn’t ideal, but it did give us something to talk about. Shawn and I drove home together. He sat behind the wheel, glaring at the road as if it had wronged him. “I saw you talking to Charles,” he said. “You don’t want people thinking you’re that kind of girl.” “The kind that talks?” “You know what I mean,” he said. The next night, Shawn came into my room unexpectedly and found me smudging my eyelashes with Audrey’s old mascara. “You wear makeup now?” he said. “I guess.” He spun around to leave but paused in the doorframe. “I thought you were better,” he said. “But you’re just like the rest.” He stopped calling me Siddle Lister. “Let’s go, Fish Eyes!” he shouted from across the theater one night. Charles looked around curiously. Shawn began to explain the name, so I started laughing—loud enough, I hoped, to drown him out. I laughed as if I loved the name. The first time I wore lip gloss, Shawn said I was a whore. I was in my bedroom, standing in front of my mirror, trying it out, when Shawn appeared in the doorway. He said it like a joke but I wiped the color from my lips anyway. Later that night, at the theater, when I noticed Charles staring at Sadie, I reapplied it and saw Shawn’s expression twist. The drive home that night was tense. The temperature outside had fallen well below zero. I said I was cold and Shawn moved to turn up the heat. Then

• From Educated (2018)

  These words echoed in my head. I’d heard other students talk about their grants, and I’d recoiled from them. I would leave school before I would allow myself to be purchased. “I don’t believe in Government grants,” I said. “Why not?” I told him what my father said. He sighed and looked heavenward. “How much will it cost to fix the tooth?” “Fourteen hundred,” I said. “I’ll find the money.” “The church will pay,” he said quietly. “I have a discretionary fund.” “That money is sacred.” The bishop threw his hands in the air. We sat in silence, then he opened his desk drawer and withdrew a checkbook. I looked at the heading. It was for his personal account. He filled out a check, to me, for fifteen hundred dollars. “I will not allow you to leave school over this,” he said. The check was in my hand. I was so tempted, the pain in my jaw so savage, that I must have held it for ten seconds before passing it back. — I HAD A JOB at the campus creamery, flipping burgers and scooping ice cream. I got by between paydays by neglecting overdue bills and borrowing money from Robin, so twice a month, when a few hundred dollars went into my account, it was gone within hours. I was broke when I turned nineteen at the end of September. I had given up on fixing the tooth; I knew I would never have fourteen hundred dollars. Besides, the pain had lessened: either the nerve had died or my brain had adjusted to its shocks. Still, I had other bills, so I decided to sell the only thing I had of any value—my horse, Bud. I called Shawn and asked how much I could get. Shawn said a mixed breed wasn’t worth much, but that I could send him to auction like Grandpa’s dog-food horses. I imagined Bud in a meat grinder, then said, “Try to find a buyer first.” A few weeks later Shawn sent me a check for a few hundred dollars. When I called Shawn and asked who he’d sold Bud to, he mumbled something vague about a guy

• From Educated (2018)

  while now, hushed, motionless, as if asleep, in some remote corner of memory. By touching me Charles had awakened it, and it throbbed with life. I shoved my hands under my knees and leaned into the window. I couldn’t let him near me—not that night, and not any night for months— without shuddering as that word, my word, ripped its way into remembrance. Whore. We arrived at his house. Charles turned on the TV and settled onto the sofa; I perched lightly on one side. The lights dimmed, the opening credits rolled. Charles inched toward me, slowly at first, then more confidently, until his leg brushed mine. In my mind I bolted, I ran a thousand miles in a single heartbeat. In reality I merely flinched. Charles flinched, too—I’d startled him. I repositioned myself, driving my body into the sofa arm, gathering my limbs and pressing them away from him. I held that unnatural pose for perhaps twenty seconds, until he understood, hearing the words I couldn’t say, and moved to the floor. Charles was my first friend from that other world, the one my father had tried to protect me from. He was conventional in all the ways and for all the reasons my father despised conventionality: he talked about football and popular bands more than the End of Days; he loved everything about high school; he went to church, but like most Mormons, if he was ill, he was as likely to call a doctor as a Mormon priest. I couldn’t reconcile his world with mine so I separated them. Every evening I watched for his red jeep from my window, and when it appeared on the highway I ran for the door. By the time he’d bumped up the hill I’d be waiting on the lawn, and before he could get out I’d be in the jeep, arguing with him about my seatbelt. (He refused to drive unless I wore one.) Once, he arrived early and made it to the front door. I stammered nervously as I introduced him to Mother, who was blending bergamot and ylang-ylang, clicking her fingers to test the proportions. She said hello but her fingers kept pulsing. When Charles looked at me as if to ask why, Mother explained that God was speaking through her fingers. “Yesterday I tested that I’d get a migraine today if I didn’t have a bath in lavender,” she said. “I took the bath and guess what? No headache!”

• From Educated (2018)

  could trust myself: that there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable. But now, as I gazed at the shadow Shawn cast on my wall, aware of my maturing body, of its evils and of my desire to do evil with it, the meaning of that memory shifted. Suddenly that worth felt conditional, like it could be taken or squandered. It was not inherent; it was bestowed. What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me. I looked at my brother. He seemed old in that moment, wise. He knew about the world. He knew about worldly women, so I asked him to keep me from becoming one. “Okay, Fish Eyes,” he said. “I will.” — WHEN I AWOKE THE next morning, my neck was bruised and my wrist swollen. I had a headache—not an ache in my brain but an actual aching of my brain, as if the organ itself was tender. I went to work but came home early and lay in a dark corner of the basement, waiting it out. I was lying on the carpet, feeling the pounding in my brain, when Tyler found me and folded himself onto the sofa near my head. I was not pleased to see him. The only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler’s having seen it. Given the choice between letting it play out, and having Tyler there to stop it, I’d have chosen to let it play out. Obviously I would have chosen that. I’d been close to passing out anyway, and then I could have forgotten about it. In a day or two it wouldn’t even have been real. It would become a bad dream, and in a month, a mere echo of a bad dream. But Tyler had seen it, had made it real. “Have you thought about leaving?” Tyler asked. “And go where?” “School,” he said. I brightened. “I’m going to enroll in high school in September,” I said. “Dad won’t like it, but I’m gonna go.” I thought Tyler would be pleased; instead, he grimaced.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  11 years his junior, Alexander put her aside and saw that she was married successively to three husbands, himself arranging for the first relationship and making provision for the second and the third.793 In her later correspondence with Lucretia she signed herself, thy happy and unhappy mother—la felice ed infelice matre. These were not the only children Alexander acknowledged. His daughters Girolama and Isabella were married 1482 and 1483.794 Another daughter, Laura, by Julia Farnese, born in 1492, he acknowledged as his own child, and in 1501 the pope formally legitimated, as his own son, Juan, by a Roman woman. In a first bull he called the boy Caesar’s, but in a second he recognized him as his own offspring.795 Among Alexander’s mistresses, after he became pope, the most famous was cardinal Farnese’s sister, Julia Farnese, called for her beauty, La Bella. Infessura repeatedly refers to her as Alexander’s concubine. Her legal husband was appeased by the gift of castles. The gayeties, escapades, marriages, worldly distinctions and crimes of these children would have furnished daily material for paragraphs of a nature to satisfy the most sensational modern taste. Don Pedro Luis, Alexander’s eldest son, and his three older brothers began their public careers in the service of the Spanish king, Ferdinand, who admitted them to the ranks of the higher nobility and sold Gandia, with the title of duke, to Don Pedro. This gallant young Borgia died in 1491 at the age of 30, on the eve of his journey from Rome to Spain to marry Ferdinand’s cousin. His brother, Don Juan, fell heir to the estate and title of Gandia and was married with princely splendor in Barcelona to the princess to whom Don Pedro had been betrothed. Alexander’s son, Caesar Borgia was as bad as his ambition was insolent. The annals of Rome and of the Vatican for more than a decade are filled with his impiety, his intrigues and his crimes. At the age of six, he was declared eligible for ordination. He was made protonotary and bishop of Pampeluna by Innocent VIII. At his father’s election he hurried from Pisa, where he was studying, and on the day of his father’s coronation was appointed archbishop of Valencia. He was then sixteen. Don Joffré was married, at 13, to a daughter of Alfonso of Naples and was made prince of Squillace. The personal fortunes of Alexander’s daughter, Lucretia, constitute one of the notorious and tragic episodes of the 15th century. The most serious foreign issue in Alexander’s reign was the invasion of Charles VIII., king of France. The introductory act in what seemed likely to be the complete transformation of Italy was the sale of Cervetri and Anguillara to Virginius Orsini for 40,000 ducats by Franceschetto, the son of Innocent VIII. This papal scion was contented with a life of ease and retired to Florence.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Everyone thinks I’m showing off when I talk, ridicu lous when I’m silent, insolent when I answer, cunning when I have a good idea, lazy when I’m tired, selfish when I eat one bite more than I should, stupid, cowardly, calculating, etc., etc. All day long I hear nothing but what an exasperating child I am, and although I laugh it off and pretend not to mind, I do mind. I wish I could ask God to give me another personality, one that doesn’t antagonize everyone. But that’s impossible. I’m stuck with the character I was born with, and yet I’m sure I’m not a bad person. I do my best to please everyone, more than they’d ever suspect in a million years. When I’m upstairs, I try to laugh it off because I don’t want them to see my troubles. More than once, after a series of absurd reproaches, I’ve snapped at Mother: “I don’t care what you say. Why don’t you just wash your hands of me -- I’m a hopeless case.” Of course, she’d tell me not to talk back and virtually ignore me for two days. Then suddenly all would be forgotten and she’d treat me like everyone else. It’s impossible for me to be all smiles one day and venomous the next. I’d rather choose the golden mean, which isn’t so golden, and keep my thoughts to myself. Perhaps sometime I’ll treat the others with the same contempt as they treat me. Oh, if only I could. Yours, Anne FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1943 Dearest Kitty, Though it’s been ages since I’ve written to you about the squabbles, there’s still no change. In the begin ning Mr. Dussel took our soon-forgotten clashes very seriously, but now he’s grown used to them and no longer tries to mediate. Margot and Peter aren’t exactly what you’d call “young”; they’re both so quiet and boring. Next to them, I stick out like a sore thumb, and I’m always being told, “Margot and Peter don’t act that way. Why don’t you follow your sister’s example!” I hate that.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. In the evenings, by the light of the Aladdin lamp, in the soft white glow of its fluorescing mantle, White is doing his old life to death. He is committing the murder in a novel he’d started writing at Stowe, and now it is nearly finished. The book is called You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down, and it is the story of the decline and fall of a public-school headmaster called Dr Prisonface. Prisonface is terrified of life; he is a chameleon, a mirror, existing only through his reflection in the eyes of others. He loses his job at the school. He woos and is rejected by a boyish dark-haired barmaid, flees in terror from the advances of her mother. He flies with drunken aviators descended from Romantic poets. He tries to teach Hollywood moguls how to be Gentlemen and is humiliated when they mow down grouse with tommy guns. The book is a vicious satire on the educational system and the cult of the English Gentleman, but it is also a psychological exorcism, a caustic narrative written to burn away his former life. White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die. From headmaster to private tutor, from farmworker to beggar, he fails at everything he attempts. Everyone he meets on the way lectures him on why he is useless and unreal, and the book’s narrator, too, puts the boot in at every opportunity. Towards the end of the book, limping and homeless, Prisonface meets a mysterious man on a country road. The man has saturnine, strangely carved features, and walks in darkness, a black dog by his side. He is a supernaturally suave figure: Prisonface is drawn to him, drawn to his power, recognising in it ‘the wisdom of certainty, the happiness of reality, the mastership of right’. The stranger had once been a schoolmaster too, at a place called Golden Gates, but left because he could not bear the people teaching there. Now he is married, lives in a cottage in the woods and is content. The man is White’s vision of his future self: a White freed, a White triumphant, a man who lectures Prisonface, over several pages, on the failings of the school system: ‘To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,’ the man says, ‘it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.’ Sitting by the lamp, White finishes writing the speech that is perhaps the least cruel, the most humane in the whole book. He is speaking to his past self with pity and compassion.

• From Educated (2018)

  I looked at Kami and felt a tightening in my chest. I resented her for witnessing this. I imagined myself in Emily’s place, which was easy to do —I couldn’t stop myself from doing it—and in a moment I was in a parking lot, laughing my high-pitched cackle, trying to convince the world that my wrist wasn’t breaking. Before I knew what I was doing I had crossed the room. I grasped my brother’s arm and pulled him with me to the piano. Emily was still sobbing, and I used her sobs to muffle my whispers. I told Kami that what we were witnessing was private, and that Emily would be embarrassed by it tomorrow. For Emily’s sake, I said, we should all go to our rooms and leave it in Dad’s hands. Kami stood. She had decided to trust me. Richard hesitated, giving Dad a long look, then he followed her from the room. I walked with them down the hallway then I doubled back. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the clock. Five minutes passed, then ten. Come on, Shawn, I chanted under my breath. Come now. I’d convinced myself that if Shawn appeared in the next few minutes, it would be to make sure Emily had made it to the house—that she hadn’t slipped on the ice and broken a leg, wasn’t freezing to death in a field. But he didn’t come. Twenty minutes later, when Emily finally stopped shaking, Dad picked up the phone. “Come get your wife!” he shouted into it. Mother was cradling Emily’s head against her shoulder. Dad returned to the sofa and patted Emily’s arm. As I stared at the three of them huddling together, I had the impression that all of this had happened before, and that everyone’s part was well rehearsed. Even mine. It would be many years before I would understand what had happened that night, and what my role in it had been. How I had opened my mouth when I should have stayed silent, and shut it when I should have spoken out. What was needed was a revolution, a reversal of the ancient, brittle roles we’d been playing out since my childhood. What was needed—what Emily needed—was a woman emancipated from pretense, a woman who could show herself to be a man. Voice an opinion. Take action in scorn of deference. A father. The French doors my father had installed squawked as they opened. Shawn shuffled in wearing heavy boots and a thick winter coat. Peter emerged from the folds of thick wool, where Shawn had been shielding