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 45 of 267 · 20 per page

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “I thought so. Doesn’t matter.” He stretched out his hands and laid them on the table. “She’s tired of our lives now. Certainly by now she’s gone on to . . . well, I’m sure her doings would seem bizarre even to us. Still, I notice she has no compunction about steering you back into the tangles of what she, no doubt, considers a swamp.” He noticed that when he touched the table Peggy-Ann’s fingers retreated into her lap, meshed in a pale knot. “I’m also sure she didn’t misrepresent us. Can you tell me why you thought you would enjoy it here?” She shook her head again. “Oh, I’m so sor . . .” That word failed. She tried three more; could make no sound; could only beg with her eyes. He let the chair legs tap down. “We’ll let it go by saying you just wanted to see for yourself. I dare say you’ve done quite a bit of ‘experimenting’ in your . . . time. You’re very attractive. Are you twenty yet?” She hazarded a nod. “Older?” With a small jerking motion, she shook: no. “I dare say you’re also bright. Catherine never had time for stupid women. Or stupid men either.” “I . . . I didn’t know her well.” “Then your intellect must have impressed her very much, if she recommended us so quickly.” “I feel so . . . silly . . .” in a voice that communicated only terror. “No. Not silly. You have quite a lot of time left to wander this globe. You must find out who you are. So. You’ve discovered, now, you are the sort of person who can enjoy such things as pass in these rooms only in fantasies—eh?” Her eyes jerked back up to his. He laughed. “There, with your pretty green eyes and your red hair all awry—” Her hands started for her hair, stopped when Proctor laughed again.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  forced to have an abortion due to the Rh factor of her blood. I didn’t know what an Rh factor was, but I’d been immediately hooked. Heidi’s plight, also revealed on the first page, involved an older girl’s dubious plan to deposit Heidi, who’d been placed in the girl’s charge, at the top of the mountain with a relative known as the Alm-Uncle. While they walked through the little village of Dorfli, a place that seemed as interesting to me as the inside of a shoebox, various residents inquired as to the girl’s destination, each expressing a sense of concern about the prospect of Heidi being left with the uncle. After twenty minutes I’d read only about three pages and could barely recall any of the story. I tried to speed-read, picking up bits and pieces of pertinent information, but was left with muddled images in no sequential order: wild flowers, a frowning uncle, fresh air, happy child. The hour dripped by, and I jumped at the sound of a timer. “How far have you read?” I looked up at my teacher’s flat face and down at the book in my lap. For the last thirty minutes I had been trying desperately to absorb the words. I had no idea where I was in the story because I’d skipped around in increasing panic. I chose a page at random and watched my teacher’s lips tighten when she held out her hand for the book. “Tell me what’s been happening so far in the story,” she said. I stared at her, trying to think. I didn’t know. I couldn’t talk. I just stood there. She set the book aside. “You have been fooling people into thinking that you’re a reader. You are slow and have zero recall or comprehension of what you read.” She opened a folder and made a note. “You can leave now.” I suppose my love of books began with my earliest memories of my mother reading Goodnight Moon to me. It began, “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of the cow jumping over the moon. And there were three little bears sitting on chairs and two little kittens and a pair of mittens and a little toy house

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  old I reasoned to myself that Ray’s story of Maitreya coming to enlighten humanity was unlikely. “Whatever you are doing, wherever you are, he will appear before you to bring his message,” Ray continued. “If you are watching TV, he will come through the channel to talk to you.” “Isn’t that far out?” Theresa said. I nodded while Melissa smirked at her tea. “They’re crazy,” she said once we were outside their dorm. Because I admired Melissa, her words were cutting, and I felt a flash of shame. Later, she complained to one of the demonstrators about Theresa and Ray, saying that they were trying to push religion on us. Synanon did not tolerate religiosity. The only devotion Synanon members were allowed was devotion to Chuck. Melissa’s complaint prompted another ban on my spending time with Theresa and discussion among the demonstrators about whether she and Ray were mentally fit enough for children to be around. An official complaint was made to management. Ray’s things were confiscated, and he was sent to work camp for a week. During the evening hours when Theresa and Ray were alone in their room, they began to discuss their growing dissatisfaction with Synanon and the possibility of leaving. To leave the community was an undertaking that seemed insurmountable to many of the residents. Living in such an insulated society for so many years and being told regularly that it would be almost impossible to survive outside of Synanon made many people afraid to leave. To leave meant severing ties with close friends and sometimes children if one parent left while the other stayed. There were also restrictions against taking money or items of value. Synanon management purposely made leaving difficult, thereby quashing any incentive to start a new life and inciting fear of the world outside of Synanon . Management wanted community members to see leaving not as a positive beginning, but a punishment. Even with the squeeze, it was still hoped that the Synanite would make the right

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  Stop action film: a white orchid from bud to bloom. Breath regular. Mucus drips his knuckles. Still stiff, the shaft glistens. Pearls on black wire. “Kirsten?” He swung his feet over the edge, his shoulders hunched (dull as cannon shot); his dirty shirt was sleeveless. Buttons: copper. “Kirsten!” His voice: maroons, purples, a nap between velvet and suede. “Come down here!” When the door cracked, he laughed. Her hair was yellow, paler than the light. Her smock, torn at her neck, hung between her breasts. One dull aureole rose on the blue horizon. Her face moved with its laughter before she saw, “Captain, you . . . ?” saw, and smothered it, to have it break again. Blue eyes widened in the half dark. “What do you want?” She stepped on to the rug. A copper anklet sloped beneath the knob of her ankle, crossed low on her calloused heel. (Uneven hem brushes smudged knees.) A print sash bound her belly. “Where is your brother?” “In the wheelhouse, asleep.” “Where were you?” “On deck. I was sitting in the sun.” “With the men on the docks all coming by to stare? How many with their hands in their pockets?” “Oh . . . !” “None of them with what I got.” He leaned back. His fingers tracked his stomach. “Come here. Tell me what’s for supper.” “Your thoughts have gone as high as your gut, now?” “How do you and the boy get chores done if you sleep and sun all the time?” “But what is there to do in port?” She stepped across the rug, laughing. He grabbed her wrist. She stumbled and he caught: “How many times!” She pushed his chest. Her wrist turned under slippery fingers. “Five times? Six? I’ll say seven—” “But see, you’ve already—” “Once already. Six more now.” He kneaded her inner thigh. “Captain . . . !” She tried to pull away. His hand went beneath the hem. She shrieked and bit the sound off. What spilled after was a giggle. “How many years have I had you two, now?” His forearm shifted like bunched blacksnakes. She tried to push his hand from under her skirt. Stopped trying. She opened her lips and caressed his arm. “How many years? Seven. Now, once for each year you’ve worked on my boat.” He looked down at himself. She touched where he looked: she took it, slipping the loose skin from the head. When she fingered beneath the twice full bag, he arched his back. “Pig. Sit on it. Little white pig . . .” Three calloused fingers were knuckle deep in her. She bent; her hair swept his face. He caught it in his yellow teeth, twisted his head. Kirsten grabbed at her hair, and made an ugly sound. His teeth opened on laughter; it and her hair spilled black lips mottled with cerise. Barking. Claws at wood.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  In the mirror, a different little girl stared back at me, a girl whose head was too small for the rest of her body, her dark eyes now seemingly enlarged. I had become an alien like the others. I didn’t want to look at my reflection, but I couldn’t stop staring. The woman bent down to my level. Her eyes glowed with an intensity I would later learn to recognize as fanaticism. “Look how beautiful you are now.” I knew she was lying, trying to make me feel better about what she had done. Why had she done it, I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t seem to talk. I wanted to tell her I needed to go home—that I’d changed my mind; I didn’t want to be at Synanon anymore. Where was my mom? My thoughts clamored like frantic spectators at a show where things had gone drastically wrong. My words were stuck. “Today you are a new person, a Synanon kid. Today is your birthday,” the woman said. It wasn’t my birthday. My birthday was in October. “It’s your Synanon birthday,” she explained, as if she could read my thoughts. “Now what do you say?” I had no idea what she meant or what she wanted me to tell her. I felt numb. “You’re welcome,” she said in the absence of the “thank you” she’d anticipated from me. She smiled and watched for my reaction. I stretched my lips, imitating the woman, and the haunted-eyed alien in the mirror smiled back. I didn’t want to be her, so I looked away. After brushing me off and cleaning up the mess of my shorn hair, she took my hand again and led me back to the other children, who hovered around me. One spoke up, asking, “Who’s going to be her buddy?” “Theresa will decide,” the woman said. My mother returned shortly, much to my relief. In her arms she carried a box that held everything necessary for making popcorn. I immediately ran to her side. She oohed and aahed over my new appearance, although I felt embarrassed to my very core. “We are going to have a party to celebrate your coming to stay with us and your new birthday,” she said, seeming not to notice my discomfort. “But first I want to introduce you to a special friend of mine. This is Sophie. She’s going to be your buddy.” I looked at the chubby, potbellied child with the large, round head and round, rosy cheeks. So it’s a girl, I thought. She had been clinging to my mom ever since she’d come back into the room, and watching her, a faint feeling of jealousy tickled at my throat. I wanted to be the one at my mother’s side. I was her daughter, not this boyish-looking girl who possessively held her arm. As Sophie’s round, eager eyes took me in she leaned in closer to my mother, claiming the space.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  I decided it was best to stay quiet. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “All right, I’ll have a turn,” Linda said. She turned to my mother. “Theresa, look at what you’ve done to your daughter. Do you know how much you’ve fucked her up?” My mother flinched as if someone had flicked water in her face. Then she recovered, her mouth quivering back into a smile. I bit my lip, tasting blood. Little girls didn’t say words like that. When I’d heard cuss words in the past, my first reaction had been to throw my hands over my mouth. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know that cuss words were nasty. This woman, Linda, demanded that I say things that back home would have earned me a mouth washing with soap. When I remained silent, one of the other children said, “Last night there wasn’t enough fucking popcorn. I hardly got any.” This remark set off a litany of complaints from the other kids, who then turned on each other, remembering old slights and recalling incidents that brought them to a pitch of boiling fury. “You poop-head!” one of them screamed. “I know you are, but what am I!” “You stole my money!” “I told you, for the last time, I never took your stinking money, you stupid asshole!” The children began to scream, fighting to be heard. A few of them rocked manically in their chairs. One boy balled his hand into a fist and hit it against his palm while he yelled. Another snarled, baring tiny milk teeth. The high-pitched sound of someone yelling “Shit, shit, shit, shit” caught my attention. Across from me, the chanter’s eyes widened, boring into mine, the bald head tilting crazily from side to side. I didn’t know whether it was a boy or girl. “Shit, shit, shit.” I shrank back in my chair.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “Really—you couldn’t expect to keep your pleasure in the fantasies secret, could you? You revealed that simply by coming here. Ah? And because it is a secret no longer, you sit there with your cheeks moving through alternate shades of plum, while I rear back in my chair and laugh.” He leaned his elbows on the scarred table top. “I do laugh.” His voice was very sober and gentle. “Can you laugh with me? Because I’m not laughing at you.” He waited until her eyes could stay with his. “Is it such a terrible thing to content yourself with only visiting places like this in sleazy books or in . . . what do they call them—underground comics? If their reports are uninformed, blurred, or inaccurate, you’re intelligent enough to doctor them back to your individual specifications, edit out those particular bits which to you are personally distasteful, thanks to either your or the author’s prejudices. Don’t you think I have this fantastic preoccupation as well as you? I’m an artist: imagination is a weakness we share. If you could merely arrive, tear off your clothes, throw yourself between the knees of whatever buck hauled out his—” He stopped, because she was looking down at her hands. “You tried. Quite admirably, I might add.” “It was so dark in there, I couldn’t even see who it was who . . .” “But you were afraid they could see you? They could, you know. You were the last one in. There was a light on in the hall. When you stepped through the open door, there was a moment when your eager, expectant face was in full view of all those already—I’m sorry. I’m being cruel. But my simple point is: even so, it doesn’t matter. We, above all people, have learned how to keep secrets. When you leave here, no one outside will know. Your skirt is neat; you’ve sustained no terribly large bruises; your hair? That can be counted to the sea breeze outside—” “Ohhh . . .” on an indrawn breath. “My . . . do you have a . . .” She reached for his arm: stopped before she touched him, stared at her hand, jerked it back. “. . . comb. Oh I can’t . . . anymore, I’m afraid to . . . You must have a—comb? I . . . ” She let her head fall forward. Her shoulders shook twice. The dark red hair, which wasn’t very messy at all, swung forward. When she looked up, bright tracks descending her cheeks, she blinked. “I’m afraid to . . .” (Head shaking.) “. . . touch anybody, now!” Proctor reared his chair back again and locked his hands over his stomach. “Go home, Peggy-Ann. Go home. It will all be over in a sleep and a shower and the nice, smiling man who will come tomorrow—if not tomorrow, next month, next year.”

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  off—the refusal would’ve scorched me like a nuclear blast. I lean tentatively on the door jamb. Don’t you think I need to go out? You believe so, he says. Some rage burbles up, and from nowhere, I say—calmly but with force—That’s a shit thing to say. He shakes his head and says, You’ve had your night. Why jump on me now? Excuse me for having a life, I say. That’s the most fun I’ve had in months. It’s not all about fun, Mare. Just fuck you, I say, and bolt up the stairs. Storming into my study, I flip the side switch on the massive IBM computer, which starts to growl and grind. The monitor begins to blink awake. Inching through Warren’s edits on the book review I owe his journal, I seize up like the screen’s stalled cursor. I sit there ping-ponging back and forth between righteous fury and guilty shame. There had been a time when the wide world was sunlit, every grass blade shining, but the sun’s spotlight has shrunk smaller and smaller. Now Warren is squeezed out. He’s a shade, an outline. I can’t see him anymore. (You could say I needed God then, which notion would’ve gagged me like a maggot. But if you’re a nonbeliever, replace the word God with truth or mercy. To kill truth to defend my fear was—in one way—to kill God. Oedipus wound up murdering his father because he ignored the divine warning that he would. When he learned the truth, his guilt so ruined him, he stabbed out his own eyes. Without truth, I was blind, worshipping my own fear-driven thoughts, and the ground beneath me never stopped heaving.) The next morning I find myself riding in circles around my dining room astride a truck, wanting to shriek with boredom, for that’s what I think mothering is—doing whatever my son does, himself not yet literate. That afternoon I bring Dev in solo to the warm-eyed psychologist, who tells me I don’t have to play with him nonstop. She has on a bulky green sweater and heavy boots that ground her to the floorboards as she points to him happily moving cars around on the rug. In tribal cultures, she says, mothers work in the fields, and kids—once they’ve learned not to fall in the cooking fires—run around in a gaggle like geese. Only in the 1950s did the bloated economy permit women to stay home concocting the current parenting fantasy. Till then, I’d believed my job was to impersonate a preschooler every second I was with Dev. In some ill-considered way, I hadn’t wanted him to feel so bad about being so short, so ill spoken and incontinent. Dr. G. looks at me, her forehead bending into a little tilde of concern as she says, You can cook or fold clothes or relax. But if I fold clothes, I say, he starts throwing them over his head. Tell him to stop, she says.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  She dug into her overalls pocket, pulled out a pocketknife and opened the small blade. We all watched as she made a thin slice across the pad of her index finger and a drop of blood welled up to the surface. Carla held out her finger. Charlie cut each of us, then we meshed our bloody fingers against one another’s to seal the deal. “Okay,” I said. “Give me the markers.” “You’ve got to do it first, then we’ll give them to you,” Charlie said. Daniel unbuckled his pants and pushed them off his hips. I unbuttoned my jeans. Our pants sagged around our hips while the girls watched, eyes wide. Daniel stepped up to me and pushed his pale hips in my direction, his tiny, limp penis nudging against my vagina. I looked at the girls. Charlie held her hand over mouth, then removed it to shriek, “Oh my God, that is so disgusting!” A wave of shame washed over me. I grabbed my pants, yanking them up as the girls started to run away. “Hey!” I screamed, trying to button and move at the same time. Their laughter echoed at me. I grabbed a stone and threw it in their direction, but it fell to the ground a few feet away. They were gone. “Shit!” I said. “I’m sorry,” Daniel said. He shoved his shirt into his pants, his light brown eyes soft with an affection that I couldn’t understand. My chest was tight with anger that threatened to turn to tears. “Stay away from me,” I hissed. In that instant I could see that he knew that we were not friends and never would be. He ducked his head and walked away while I remained rooted, hyperventilating. Over the course of just one year in Synanon, between the ages of six and seven, it seemed I had lived a lifetime. The little girl who wore pigtails and short skirts and attended etiquette school and learned to say, “If you please, ma’am,” followed with a gracious curtsy, was no more. In her place was someone I doubted that any of my family would recognize. I strutted about in my blue jeans, white t-shirt and cowboy boots, my speech quick and peppered with the f-word. Anyone in Synanon who didn’t learn to talk fast and take up space was verbally run over by others. In the game there was usually a point when everyone turned on one person. You had to know how to take it and not crumble when ten, fifteen or twenty people all screamed at you, telling you what a fucker you were, a complete shithead, not worth two cents. The gamers would lean forward in their chairs, eyes wide, neck veins popping, fingers pointing as if invisible leashes held them from springing forward to devour the person in the hot seat. The rule was that you must stay in your chair. “I’m going to tear you apart! You’re gonna wish you were dead!” they’d yell.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  The woman jumped back just in time and the distraction was sufficient to allow someone else to grab Donna and secure her with a silky cloth rope that was wrapped around her upper body, pinning her arms at her sides. “Look at Celena and how quietly she sits,” one of the demonstrators said. “Fuck her! Fuck you!” Donna yelled. Her face filled with blood, seeming as if it might burst as a demonstrator held her head still against her will. Carlene had given up, breaking into sobs. Watery mucus dripped from her nose. The buzz of the clippers rang, and I felt the comb vibrate over my scalp as chunks of hair fell onto our shoulders and laps. It took only a few minutes to have our hair shaved to a quarter of an inch. The demonstrators passed around oval hand mirrors, seemingly oblivious to our distress. This was “act as if” at its finest. “Take a look at how beautiful you are now,” a demonstrator said to me. I couldn’t stomach looking in the mirror. I avoided mirrors whenever I could. I already knew how I looked: a narrow skinny head with big, dark, haunted eyes. In my dresser drawer was a knitted hat I’d tucked away for these occasions. Every moment that I was allowed I would wear that hat until my hair grew back to some semblance of normalcy. For days we girls skulked around, startlingly odd-looking with our newly shaven appearances until time wore away our timidity and awkwardness and we were once again ourselves. A few days after the mandatory haircuts, a group of us girls were rounded up again. “Come, come!” two of the demonstrators beckoned. The summons was for a special tea party at the Big House. A large, white, plantation-style home on the property where Chuck and Betty had once lived was now a museum of sorts. I was given a shiny, poufy dress the color of pale pink frosting, which clashed with my dark skin and reddish undertones. The fabric, stiff and unyielding, caged my boyish muscular body and long neck. I was freakishly eye-catching wearing this princess attire while sporting my newly shaven look. I joined my peers on the dirt road, each bedecked in her own spectacular atrocity. We followed the demonstrators, who were also queerly dressed, with their cheeks carefully rouged and eyes enveloped in giant, spidery, fake eyelashes. We walked up a hill to the plantation home, climbed up to the wide porch and went into the main parlor, where we were led to small round tables dressed in gossamer white tablecloths and set with fine china. We sat, stuffed into our chairs, sipping tea from delicate, rosebud-decorated cups while we listened in resignation to talk about our status as the daughters of Synanon: beautiful girls with lovely bald heads and healthy bodies. After tea we were made to walk back and forth across the room with our heads held high.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  All of us kids had received paddlings at one time or another. Once, I, along with a group of other children, had been required to witness Gloria’s spanking. The demonstrator had stripped her of her pants and underwear, forced her to bend to the point where we could plainly see her vagina and beat her until she spurted pee.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  On the way out, I pass bandana’ed David talking with great speed and animation to the musician. David’s actually holding up his finger in some Confucian posture, saying, It’s a logical fallacy that they’re telling me I have a disease whose defining symptom is believing you don’t have a disease, since this a priori implies that any citizen who denies they have this ailment is no doubt infected… Like me, he’s obviously here to educate them to their cult’s fallacious thinking. On the sidewalk, the night is cool and wet, and a few passing women hand me their phone numbers, saying call anytime, even to say hello, which feels slightly pitiful on their parts. What do they want? One says, For me, a car wreck was a yet. I mean, it just hadn’t gotten around to happening. Another says she’d wondered just like I had whether she really needed to quit drinking, but that underperforming or having a bleak inner life is a severe consequence of drinking even without an external loss like job or child. The comment stuns me in a way. Inside I say to myself, How dare you suppose I have a bleak inner life! Driving home, I check my puffy eyes in the rearview and tell myself that I look as cheerful as the next lady…don’t I? I know that I don’t, and while I sit in the driveway smoking, I can catch—almost feel zip through me—a streak of the kindness I’d witnessed at the coffee urn. Just to be on the receiving end of a warm baked item while living so fenced off from husband and community brings me up short. Maybe, I think, I do belong among that peculiar company…. Well, maybe not those sad ladies who give their phone numbers out to strangers. What losers. I stuff the slips of paper in the car ashtray. Inside, with my small family abed, I pour my tumbler of whiskey and drink it on the back porch. Before staggering upstairs to pass out, I fix a second, since I’ll invariably wake around two or three, unable to cork off again without a few swallows. The next morning I take the half-empty tumbler of whiskey before grabbing Dev to piggyback downstairs. There, standing over the sink, I look at the watery drink and say to myself—as I do every morning—Seems wrong to pour it out. So I swill down those dregs. Only this time I hear my own voice from the night before, righteously claiming I never took a morning drink. It’s the first lie I caught myself in. In fact, I never poured the drink. Just drank it.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But unless a book publisher stitches them into a volume, I’ll never land the teaching job that’ll let me shed snakeskinlike the business suit I wear like an unwilling drag queen. It’s an old dream. Age about seven, I started posing for the jacket photo in the bathroom shaving mirror. When my sister caught me wearing the baleful, heavy-lidded pout I figured would look snappy, she’d cackle like a magpie, then holler to Mother I’d stolen her beret again. My response? I’d pinch my index finger and thumb together over and over and go psss psss psss like a puff adder. Somehow I’d figured out that this gesture drove her batshit. By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious before Warren carefully pens pretentious on page bottom. The bathtub I’m lying in feels like a stone island I’ve shipwrecked myself on. My pantyhose have twisted around, and the black unwashed soles gross me out. I’m a hack, a hired ghostwriter who gins out reports on Swedish telecommunications companies, or phone technology, or packet switching and deregulation. Oh, and reviews of assholes who’ve actually published poetry collections, in a magazine my husband edits. Which, if he didn’t revise my prose with a hacksaw, I probably wouldn’t get in to. Bam bam bam . The door rattles. I holler out, You grisly fuckers! If I had a firearm, I’d hunt each of you down like the dogs you are. Now I’ve taken up a weensy bottle of Scotch, J&B in the green bottle. What moron designed these bottles so small? And why a minibar when a maxibar is clearly what’s called for? Today on the phone, the big-deal consultant who got me into this business said, Your having to give this presentation in my stead is a little like going to work in the hospital as a janitor and winding up performing brain surgery. Don’t remind me, I said. Think about it, he mused. Your whole business career has derived from a series of flukes…. While he talked, I stretched the phone cord and dexterously slipped the small fridge key into its slot. I said, Aren’t you supposed to be finding flights? My travel agent’s going to ring the other line, he said. He was a captain of industry, this guy. Once the thirtysomething president of my old company’s e-mail subsidiary, he’d left to consult for big bucks, promising me enough subcontracting work in ghostwriting and market research to hang out my own consulting shingle. I could double my salary while freeing up intervals for poetry. On the phone to me, he said, You can write the next great business best seller.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Which prompts the first of many silences I’ll sit through at that table. Silence rolls across us like a gray sea fog. Ice crystals form around our faces. Forks freeze in place. The salad plates are cleared. Warren sits straight enough to be lashed to a stake. Kelley comes in hauling a massive tray where two capons lie prissily on curlicues of kale. Mr. Whitbread rises to carve. I study the stiff painting over the massive sideboard—Mr. Whitbread in full riding gear atop a horse. I feel a stab of tribal pride that in the cracker-box house I grew up in, Mother’s blazing nudes assembled with swashbuckling brushstrokes show way more sensibility. So, Warren, his father finally says, will you row this year? Warren says, I’m not in college anymore. I shoot my eyes to him, but he fails to meet my gaze. How, I wonder, if you pay tuition, is it possible not to know whether the kid’s still in school? Mr. Whitbread forks poultry slices onto a plate, and no one says anything till after Kelley settles it before me. He says, That’s right. Nancy’s at Harvard. Nancy’s getting ready for law school, Mrs. Whitbread says. I’m working in the library, Warren says. Right, his father says. The Harvard library, his mother adds, wreathed in a smile I can’t decipher. That stamp on Warren’s job invokes the family’s appetite for excellence, how expected it is, demanded, devoured. It strikes me then how a house so large might feel like cramped quarters. To their credit, they all read so much they seem to accept Warren’s poem-making—he’s just starting to publish in journals—as a worthy enterprise despite its fiscal impracticality. Still, they say little about it (and it’s the not saying, I later learn, that matters). Widener Library? his father asks. Lamont, Warren says. There’s a recorded poetry archive there. He’s remastering these great lost recordings, I say. He found one of Tennyson. And these amazing Nabokov lectures. The arctic wind blows over us again, for my bragging has breached some protocol too delicate for me to understand yet. One does not brag; one does not need to. Mr. Whitbread pours me more wine, a sympathetic gesture that feels—no doubt unintentionally—like a pat on a dog’s head. Kelley comes in with a vat of asparagus she goes around dishing out. Mr. Whitbread keeps looking for one of the standard social connection points—to explain who the hell I am, I guess—till Mrs. Whitbread mentions that I’m friends with the writer Geoffrey Wolff, whose memoir of his con-man father had made a splash the year before. One of the few writers of any stature I know, Geoffrey happens to be married to Warren’s first cousin. It’s a frail link, and Geoffrey’s being Jewish maybe undoes most of its value, but I try to capitalize on it, saying that he and his brother, Toby, taught at my grad school. Mrs. Whitbread perks up. You went to Princeton? Our son-in-law went there.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  C for cunt, I thought, for that’s what I am, a worthless cunt of a mother who can’t take care of her own kid without ingesting enough alcohol to stun an ox. To my left, the light shifted, and there was the red-cheeked Dev in his Superman costume, half the cape listing in back. To his blue shoulder, he’d attached one side with Velcro and kept reaching behind himself and twisting in a valiant attempt to find the other piece of Velcro on the opposite shoulder so he could fly right. I captured one arm and dragged him to me. I sank my face into the doughy flesh of his neck. His shoulder rose to squeeze my face out. For a few minutes, he airplaned around the small office. He stopped abruptly to lay a pudgy arm along the chair rest. He picked up the photo of Mother sketching when she was about my age. Is this you drawing? he wanted to know. It’s Grandma Charlie, I said. Dev fingered his grandmother’s profile with curiosity. She has your face, he said. Now she was alive and newly sober, and her demon had entered me, her face submerged my own. He’d inherited her artist’s eye and the keen intelligence that found subtle likeness. As a room parent at his daycare, I’d recently planned an activity that involved making faces to show different feelings. But I’d discovered that most three-year-olds have only sad and mad and glad. Dev had surprised—eyes wide, mouth a perfect O, eyebrows lifted. He had hungry—a leering look at imagined cookies. He had worried—a subtle look in which the twin trajectories of his royal-blue eyes dragged themselves inward. He had guilty, which was sad with the inwardness of worried. I have a monkey face, I said, adding, Your nose honks when I pinch it. I pinched his nose and made the squeaky clown-nose noise—ee-oo, ee-oo. The note I would leave for Warren told him how, within weeks of scattering my ashes, he’d find some cheerful, barrette-wearing Elizabeth of a girl, a blonde from Smith or Barnard or Wellesley. Her Fair Isle sweater would fit better into her in-laws’ Christmas photo than my black schmattas. She would give Dev blond siblings. I’d get scissored from his memory like some grubby nanny from a distant past. He needed to be rid of me if he was to thrive. Looking into Dev’s face, I could almost feel the darkness leave me, but something in me held on to it. (Where is God in this scene? my current spiritual advisor would ask. Now I’d say, He’s right there. In full power in the body of the boy, whose light I had to defend my misery from.) Dev said, No more work. I said, No more work, just play.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  πρόσειμι, inf. --εἶναι, cf. πρόσειμι (εἶμι, bo) τ. 2 : (εἰμί, sum). To be added to, τινι Hat. 2. 99., 7. 173, and Att.: to be attached to, belong to, ἀνδρὶ μνήμη mp. Soph. Aj. 521; δέος, αἰσχύνη, δύσνοια, λύπη Tp. τινι Ib. 1079, ΕἸ. 654; οὐχ ἅπαντα τῷ γήρᾳ κακὰ πρ. Eur. Phoen. 520, cf. Isocr. 256 Ὁ; δυσβουλία τῇ πόλει mp. Ar. Nub. 588; τῇ Bia mp. ἔχθραι καὶ κίνδυνοι Xen. Mem. 3. 10, 12; ἐὰν .. θερμότης τῷ δίψει προσῇ Plat. Rep. 437 D:—c. inf., πρόσεστι γυναιξὶ .. τίκτειν Plat. Theaet. 150 A. 2. absol. to be there, be at hand, προσῆν πλέον στύγος Aesch. Ag.558; ws ἂν ἀγνοία προσῇ Soph. Ph. 129; γνώμη γὰρ εἴ τις κἀπ᾽ ἐμοῦ .. mp. Id. Ant. 720; τοῦ λόγου δ᾽ οὐ χρὴ φθόνον mp. Id. Tr. 251; τύχη μόνον προσείη Ar. Av. 1315; mp. ἡ ὕβρις καὶ ἔτι ἡ .. αἰσχύνη Dem. 17. 5; οὐδὲν ἄλλο προσῆν there was nothing else in the world, Id. 571. 25; Ta προσόνθ᾽ ἑαυτῷ one’s own properties, Dem. 318. 3, cf. 1453. 25; ταῦτα πρόσεσται this too will be ours, Xen. Hell. 3. 1, 28; τὰς τρισχιλίας Kal TO προσόν and the surplus, Dem. 949. 8.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ὑπαΐσσω, Att. -doow, to dart beneath, c. acc., μέλαιναν pi’ ὑπαΐξει (where ἅ, but with v. 1. ὑπαλύξει) Il. 21. 126; so, ὑπὸ φρικὸς ἀναπάλ- λεται 23. 692. ΤΙ, to dart from under, c. gen., βωμοῦ tra- fas. 2. 310. TII. absol., ὑπῴξας διὰ θυρῶν Soph. Aj. 301. ὑπαισχύνομαι, Pass. to be somewhat ashamed, τινά τι of ἃ thing before a person, Plat. Lach. 179 C. ὑπαίτιος, ov, under accusation, called to account, responsible, Tivos or ὑπέρ τινος for a thing, Antipho 117. 8., 125. 343 ὑπ. τινι responsible to one, liable to be called to account by him, Xen. Mem, 2. 8, 5; ὑπαίτιόν ἐστί τινί τι πρός τινος a charge is made against one by another, Id. An. 3. I, 5:—Adv. -τίως, Philo ap. Eus. P. E. 387 A, Poll. 3. 139. ὑπαιφοινίσσω, Ep. for ὑποφοινίσσω, Nic. ὑπᾶκοη, ἡ. (ὑπακούω) obedience, Ep. Rom. 5. 19, Eccl. ὑπακολουθέω, to follow closely, τινι Philo 1. 224; v. 1. for émaxz— in Xen. Hell. 5.1, 21, Arist. H. A. 2.1, 15. ὑπᾶκουός, 6, obedient to, τινος Ap. Rh. 4. 1381. ὑπακουστέον, verb. Adj. one must obey, Ep. Plat. 328 B. II. one must understand, τι περί τινος Plat.Soph.261D; ὅτι .. Plut. 2.34 B. 2. in Gramm. one must understand something left out, Lat. subaudiendum.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  My first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears. Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems. Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time. Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims. Your complicated mother. Your absent father. We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still. Tell it again. In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife. Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her. Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding… You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings. Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy. Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night? We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble. For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves. I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray. Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about? Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  He stretched out his hands and laid them on the table. “She’s tired of our lives now. Certainly by now she’s gone on to . . . well, I’m sure her doings would seem bizarre even to us. Still, I notice she has no compunction about steering you back into the tangles of what she, no doubt, considers a swamp.” He noticed that when he touched the table Peggy-Ann’s fingers retreated into her lap, meshed in a pale knot. “I’m also sure she didn’t misrepresent us. Can you tell me why you thought you would enjoy it here?” She shook her head again. “Oh, I’m so sor . . .” That word failed. She tried three more; could make no sound; could only beg with her eyes. He let the chair legs tap down. “We’ll let it go by saying you just wanted to see for yourself. I dare say you’ve done quite a bit of ‘experimenting’ in your . . . time. You’re very attractive. Are you twenty yet?” She hazarded a nod. “Older?” With a small jerking motion, she shook: no. “I dare say you’re also bright. Catherine never had time for stupid women. Or stupid men either.” “I . . . I didn’t know her well.” “Then your intellect must have impressed her very much, if she recommended us so quickly.” “I feel so . . . silly . . .” in a voice that communicated only terror. “No. Not silly. You have quite a lot of time left to wander this globe. You must find out who you are. So. You’ve discovered, now, you are the sort of person who can enjoy such things as pass in these rooms only in fantasies—eh?” Her eyes jerked back up to his. He laughed. “There, with your pretty green eyes and your red hair all awry—” Her hands started for her hair, stopped when Proctor laughed again. “Really—you couldn’t expect to keep your pleasure in the fantasies secret, could you? You revealed that simply by coming here. Ah? And because it is a secret no longer, you sit there with your cheeks moving through alternate shades of plum, while I rear back in my chair and laugh.” He leaned his elbows on the scarred table top. “I do laugh.” His voice was very sober and gentle. “Can you laugh with me? Because I’m not laughing at you.” He waited until her eyes could stay with his. “Is it such a terrible thing to content yourself with only visiting places like this in sleazy books or in . . . what do they call them—underground comics? If their reports are uninformed, blurred, or inaccurate, you’re intelligent enough to doctor them back to your individual specifications, edit out those particular bits which to you are personally distasteful, thanks to either your or the author’s prejudices.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  A copper anklet sloped beneath the knob of her ankle, crossed low on her calloused heel. (Uneven hem brushes smudged knees.) A print sash bound her belly. “Where is your brother?” “In the wheelhouse, asleep.” “Where were you?” “On deck. I was sitting in the sun.” “With the men on the docks all coming by to stare? How many with their hands in their pockets?” “Oh . . . !” “None of them with what I got.” He leaned back. His fingers tracked his stomach. “Come here. Tell me what’s for supper.” “Your thoughts have gone as high as your gut, now?” “How do you and the boy get chores done if you sleep and sun all the time?” “But what is there to do in port?” She stepped across the rug, laughing. He grabbed her wrist. She stumbled and he caught: “How many times!” She pushed his chest. Her wrist turned under slippery fingers. “Five times? Six? I’ll say seven—” “But see, you’ve already—” “Once already. Six more now.” He kneaded her inner thigh. “ Cap tain . . . !” She tried to pull away. His hand went beneath the hem. She shrieked and bit the sound off. What spilled after was a giggle. “How many years have I had you two, now?” His forearm shifted like bunched blacksnakes. She tried to push his hand from under her skirt. Stopped trying. She opened her lips and caressed his arm. “How many years? Seven. Now, once for each year you’ve worked on my boat.” He looked down at himself. She touched where he looked: she took it, slipping the loose skin from the head. When she fingered beneath the twice full bag, he arched his back. “Pig. Sit on it. Little white pig . . .” Three calloused fingers were knuckle deep in her. She bent; her hair swept his face. He caught it in his yellow teeth, twisted his head. Kirsten grabbed at her hair, and made an ugly sound. His teeth opened on laughter; it and her hair spilled black lips mottled with cerise. Barking. Claws at wood. Black paws and long muzzle lapped the bunk. The captain kicked the dog with his bare foot (the big chain around his ankle jangles). “Down, Niger! Down, you stupid dog!” Down; then back, nuzzling between them: dog’s tongue. One color: Kirsten’s nipple, the dog’s tongue, the captain’s palm. Niger lapped her crotch for salt. “Down, Niger!” The dog barked. Then the captain looked up: frowned. One shutter had swung open. A woman’s face pressed the glass (dock-side of the boat), tongue caught at the corner of her mouth. Her fingers tipped the sill. Sunlight behind her exploded in loose hair, dimmed her features. Niger barked at her once more. Her eyes shifted; she saw the captain.