Tenderness

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 115 of 145 · 20 per page

• From Another Country (1962)

  At first she did not answer him, seemed merely to be enduring him, seemed suspended, hanging, waiting. She was trembling and he tried to control her trembling with the force of his arms and hands. Then something seemed to bend in her, to give, and she put her arms around him, clinging to him. Finally, he whispered in her ear, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go.” “Yes,” she said, after a moment, “I guess it’s time to go.” But she did not step out of his arms at once. She looked at him and she said, “I’m sorry I was so silly. I know you didn’t mean it.” “I’m sorry, too. I’m just a jealous, no-good bastard, I can’t help it, I’m crazy about you.” And he kissed her again. “—–leaving so soon!” said Miss Wales. “And we never got a chance to talk!” “Vivaldo,” said Cass, “I’ll call you this week. Ida, I can’t call you, will you call me? Let’s get together.” “I’m waiting for a script from you, you bum,” said Ellis, “just as soon as you climb down out of that makeshift ivory tower. Nice meeting you, Miss Scott.” “He means it,” said Mrs. Ellis. “He really means it.” “I was happy to meet you both,” said Ingram, “very happy. Good luck with your novel.” Richard walked them to the door. “Are we still friends?” “Are you kidding? Of course, we’re still friends.” But he wondered if they were. The door closed behind them and they stood in the corridor, staring at each other. “Shall we go home?” he asked. She watched him, her eyes very large and dark. “You got anything to eat down there?” “No. But the stores are still open. We can get something.” She took his arm and they walked to the elevator. He rang the bell. He stared at her as though he could not believe his eyes. “Good,” she said. “We’ll get something and I’ll cook you a decent supper.” “I’m not very hungry,” he said. They heard the elevator door slam beneath them and the elevator began to rise. The smell of the chicken she had fried the night before still hung in the room, and the dishes were still in the sink. The wishbone lay drying on the table, surrounded by the sticky glasses out of which they had drunk beer, and by their sticky coffee cups. Her clothes were thrown over a chair, his were mainly on the floor. He had awakened, she was asleep. She slept on her side, her dark head turned away from him, making no sound. He leaned up a little and watched her face.

• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  Though the field had begun to open up, the majority of MUDders and Mooers were still men, and many of these men were on their own journey of discovery. Childerhose said, “I swear to God I was probably on for about an hour before someone said something sexy-sexy and I was a bit taken aback by it. I kind of let them—sort of like experimental sex: let them do what they were doing and just kind of observe—which is exactly how it was to come of age, I found, as a teenage girl. Let them do it, observe largely, let them run the show.” Childerhose quickly mastered both the technology and this new form of erotica. She transitioned from ingénue to maven. Soon it was men, skilled with their keyboards, but not exactly masters in the art of love, who were learning from her. “I guess these were all guys in their teens and early twenties,” she recalled, laughing at the kinds of things they used to write. “‘You have the biggest vagina I’ve ever seen,’ or whatever elegant phrasing they had. I was just really fascinated by the communication at all and then I realized that it was really easy to delight them because I had some small mastery over the English language and a dirty mind.” She found herself trading off sexual encounters to get to other kinds of intimacy within the games. She likens the connections she made in MOOs to pillow talk—somehow, this strange, clunky medium took players very quickly to that deep form of intimacy, where they could, ironic as it might seem, really be themselves. It wasn’t just the speed with which the technology made this happen that was remarkable—it was also the way it allowed so many emotionally clumsy people to open up in ways they never had before. This aspect of the relationship between pornography and technology often gets forgotten, lost among tales of the millions of pornographic images that circulate. Yes there is a biological imperative that gives human beings a sex drive, and yes, this has sometimes meant that hard-core pornography has been a powerful force for innovation in how we communicate. But both the terms “technology” and “pornography” connote a lack of warmth and an absence of emotion. The truth is that a powerful part of the technology-driving-erotica continuum involves passion, intimacy and love. It involves weeping, and sharing secrets, comfort and connection, and for some, an escape from isolation. And quite apart from any cash changing hands to download pictures or watch pornos, this more personal form of sexuality was—and is—the impetus for many people to find their way onto the Internet.

• From Wild (2012)

  He left me at Todd’s Outdoor Supply Store, where Mr. Todd himself dismantled my stove, cleaned it, installed a new filter, sold me the correct gas, and then led me through a stove-lighting trial run just to be sure. I bought more duct tape and 2nd Skin for my wounded flesh and went to a restaurant and ordered a chocolate malt and a cheeseburger with fries, feeling as I had at dinner the evening before: shattered by each delicious bite. Afterwards, I walked through town as cars whizzed by, the faces of the drivers and passengers turning to look at me with cold curiosity. I passed fast-food joints and car dealerships, unsure of whether I should stick out my thumb for a ride or spend a night in Ridgecrest and head back to the PCT the next day. As I stood near an intersection, trying to figure out which direction to go, a scruffy-looking man rode up beside me on a bicycle. He held a wrinkled paper bag. “You heading out of town?” he asked. “Maybe,” I said. His bike was too small for him—made for a boy instead of a man—with garish flames painted along the sides. “Which direction you headed?” he asked. His body odor was so strong I almost coughed, though I guessed I smelled almost as bad as he did. In spite of the bath I’d taken the night before at Frank and Annette’s after dinner, I was still dressed in my dirty clothes. “I might stay in a motel for the night,” I told him. “Don’t do that!” he bellowed. “I did that and they put me in jail.” I nodded, realizing that he thought that I was like him. A drifter. An outlaw. Not a so-called college girl, or even a former one. I didn’t even try to explain about the PCT. “You can have this,” he said, holding the paper bag out to me. “It’s bread and bologna. You can make sandwiches.” “No, thanks,” I said, both repulsed and touched by his offer. “Where you from?” he asked, reluctant to ride away. “Minnesota.” “Hey!” he cried, a smile spreading across his grubby face. “You’re my sister. I’m from Illinois. Illinois and Minnesota are like neighbors.” “Well, almost neighbors—there’s Wisconsin in between,” I said, and instantly regretted it, not wanting to hurt his feelings. “But that’s still neighbors,” he said, and held his open palm down low so I would give him five. I gave him five. “Good luck,” I said to him as he pedaled away. I walked to a grocery store and wandered up and down the aisles before touching anything, dazzled by the mountains of food. I bought a few things to replace the food I’d eaten when I hadn’t been able to make my dehydrated dinners and walked along a busy thruway until I found what looked like the cheapest motel in town.

• From Another Country (1962)

  Sometime in the course of the afternoon, though they had only come down from Paris for the day, they decided to spend the night. It was Yves’ suggestion, made when they returned to the cathedral and stood on the steps, looking at the saints and martyrs trapped in stone. Yves had been unusually silent all day. And Eric knew him well enough by now not to push him, not to prod, even not to worry. He knew that Yves’ silences meant that he was fighting some curious war of his own, was coming to some decision of his own; presently, later today, tomorrow, next week, Yves would abruptly retrace, in speech, the steps he was taking in silence now. And, oddly enough, for it seems not to be the way we live now, for Eric, merely hearing Yves’ footfalls at his side, feeling Yves beside him, and watching that changing face, was joy enough—or almost joy enough. They found a hotel which overlooked a stream and took a double room. Their windows overlooked the water; the towers of the cathedral loomed to the right of them, far away. When they took the room, the sun was setting and great streaks of fire and dull gold were splashed across the still, blue sky. There were trees just outside the window, bending into the water; and there were a few tables and chairs, but they were empty; there did not seem to be many people in the hotel. Yves seated himself in the large window and lit a cigarette, looking down at the tables and chairs. Eric stood next to him, his hand on Yves’ shoulder. “Shall we have a drink down there, old buddy?” “My God, no; we shall be eaten up by bugs. Let’s go and find a bistro.” “Okay.” He moved away. Yves stood up. They stared at each other. “I imagine that we must come back early,” Yves said, “there is surely nothing to do in this town.” Then he grinned, mischievously. “Ça va?” “It was your idea to come here,” Eric said. “Yes.” He turned to the window again. “It is peaceful, yes? And we can be gentle with each other, we can have a moment together.” He threw his cigarette out of the window. When he turned to Eric again, his eyes were clouded, and his mouth was very vulnerable. After a moment he said, softly, “Let us go.” But it was very nearly a question. And, now, both of them were frightened. For some reason, the towers seemed closer than they had been; and, suddenly, the two large beds, placed close together, seemed the only objects in the room. Eric felt his heart shake and his blood begin to race and then to thicken. He felt that Yves was waiting for him to move, that everything was in his hands; and he could do nothing.

• From Another Country (1962)

  He associated the act with the humiliation and the debasement of one male by another, the inferior male of less importance than the crumpled, cast-off handkerchief; but he did not feel this way toward Eric; and therefore he did not know what he felt. This tormented self-consciousness caused Vivaldo to fear that their moment might, after all, come to nothing. He did not want this to happen, he knew his need to be too great, and they had come too far, and Eric had risked too much. He was afraid of what might happen if they failed. Yet, his lust remained, and rose, chafing within and battering against the labyrinth of his bewilderment; his lust was unaccustomedly arrogant and cruel and irresponsible, and yet there was mingled in it a deep and incomprehensible tenderness: he did not want to cause Eric pain. The physical pain he had sometimes brought to vanished, phantom girls had been necessary for them, he had been unlocking, for them, the door to life; but he was now involved in another mystery, at once blacker and more pure. He tried to will himself back into his adolescence, grasping Eric’s strange body and stroking that strange sex. At the same time, he tried to think of a woman. (But he did not want to think of Ida.) And they lay together in this antique attitude, the hand of each on the sex of the other, and with their limbs entangled, and Eric’s breath trembling against Vivaldo’s chest. This childish and trustful tremor returned to Vivaldo a sense of his own power. He held Eric very tightly and covered Eric’s body with his own, as though he were shielding him from the falling heavens. But it was also as though he were, at the same instant, being shielded—by Eric’s love. It was strangely and insistently double-edged, it was like making love in the midst of mirrors, or it was like death by drowning. But it was also like music, the highest, sweetest, loneliest reeds, and it was like the rain. He kissed Eric again and again, wondering how they would finally come together. The male body was not mysterious, he had never thought about it at all, but it was the most impenetrable of mysteries now; and this wonder made him think of his own body, of its possibilities and its imminent and absolute decay, in a way that he had never thought of it before. Eric moved against him and beneath him, as thirsty as the sand. He wondered what moved in Eric’s body which drove him, like a bird or a leaf in a storm, against the wall of Vivaldo’s flesh; and he wondered what moved in his own body: what virtue were they seeking, now, to share? what was he doing here? This was as far removed as anything could be from the necessary war one underwent with women.

• From Another Country (1962)

  It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot’s wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre. Sometime in the course of the afternoon, though they had only come down from Paris for the day, they decided to spend the night. It was Yves’ suggestion, made when they returned to the cathedral and stood on the steps, looking at the saints and martyrs trapped in stone. Yves had been unusually silent all day. And Eric knew him well enough by now not to push him, not to prod, even not to worry. He knew that Yves’ silences meant that he was fighting some curious war of his own, was coming to some decision of his own; presently, later today, tomorrow, next week, Yves would abruptly retrace, in speech, the steps he was taking in silence now. And, oddly enough, for it seems not to be the way we live now, for Eric, merely hearing Yves’ footfalls at his side, feeling Yves beside him, and watching that changing face, was joy enough—or almost joy enough. They found a hotel which overlooked a stream and took a double room. Their windows overlooked the water; the towers of the cathedral loomed to the right of them, far away. When they took the room, the sun was setting and great streaks of fire and dull gold were splashed across the still, blue sky. There were trees just outside the window, bending into the water; and there were a few tables and chairs, but they were empty; there did not seem to be many people in the hotel. Yves seated himself in the large window and lit a cigarette, looking down at the tables and chairs. Eric stood next to him, his hand on Yves’ shoulder. “Shall we have a drink down there, old buddy?” “My God, no; we shall be eaten up by bugs. Let’s go and find a bistro.” “Okay.” He moved away.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Recently my mother visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia. After she returned, she sat in our living room showing me her trip photos while Iggy motored around the shaggy white rug, doing “tummy time.” I barely want to tell you about this, because of the baby, she said, nodding in his direction, but there was a tree there, an oak tree, called the Killing Tree, against which the Khmer Rouge would kill babies by bashing their skulls. Thousands and thousands of babies, their brains smashed out against this tree. I get the point, I say. I’m sorry, she says, I really shouldn’t be telling you this. A few weeks later, talking about her trip again on the phone, she says, Now, there’s something I shouldn’t really mention, because of the baby, but they had this tree there, at the Killing Fields, called the Killing Tree … I know my mother well enough by now to recognize, in her baby-killing-tree Tourette’s, her desire to install in me an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a baby human on this planet. I don’t know why she needs to feel sure I have this parameter in mind, but I have come to accept that she feels it necessary. She needs me to know that she’s stood before the Killing Tree. For the week after the man’s visit to my work, campus security will assign an officer to stand outside the door of my classroom while I teach, in case he returns. On one of these days, I teach Alice Notley’s grouchy epic poem Disobedience. A student complains, Notley says she wants a dailiness that is free and beautiful, but she’s fixated on all the things she hates and fears the most, and then smashes her face and ours in them for four hundred pages. Why bother? Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That’s what you kept telling me when we first met—that in a real, material sense, what is made from where. I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don’t understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip. Notley knows all this; it’s what tears her up. It’s why she’s a mystic, why she locks herself in a dark closet, why she knocks herself out to have visions. Can she help it if the unconscious is a sewer? At least my student had unwittingly backed us into a crucial paradox, which helps to explain the work of any number of artists: it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Thanks, but I can’t. My friends just got here and we’re all camped,” I said, gesturing to the rise beyond the road, behind which my tent and probably by now the tents of the Three Young Bucks were erected. As I did so, I had a precise image of what the Three Young Bucks were likely doing at that very moment, the way they’d be crouched beneath their raincoats in the rain, trying to eat their loathsome dinners, or sitting alone in their tents because there was simply no other place to be, and then I thought of that warm fire and the booze and how if the men went with me to drink with the ranger I could use them to help me dodge whatever else he had in mind. “But maybe,” I wavered, as the ranger drooled and then blotted his mouth. “I mean, as long as it’s okay to bring my friends.” I returned with the cake to our camp. The Three Young Bucks were all zipped into their tents. “I have cake!” I called, and they came and stood around me and ate it with their fingers out of my hands, splitting it among themselves in the easy, unspoken way they’d honed over months of endless deprivation and unity. In the nine days since I’d said goodbye to them, it seemed as if we’d grown closer, more familiar, as if we’d been together in that time instead of apart. They were still the Three Young Bucks to me, but they’d also begun to differentiate in my mind. Richie was hilarious and a little bit strange, with a dark edge of mystery I found compelling. Josh was sweet and smart, more reserved than the others. Rick was funny and incisive, kind and a great conversationalist. As I stood there with the three of them eating cake out of my hands, I realized that though I had a little crush on all of them, I had a bigger crush on Rick. It was an absurd crush, I knew. He was nearly four years younger than me and we were at an age when those nearly four years mattered, when the gap between what he had done and what I had done was large enough that I was more like a big sister than I was someone who should be thinking about being alone with him in his tent—so I didn’t think about it, but I couldn’t deny that to an increasing degree I got a little fluttery feeling inside me every time Rick’s eyes met mine, and I also couldn’t deny that I could see in his eyes that he got a little fluttery feeling too. “I’m sorry about dinner,” I said, after explaining what had happened. “Did you guys eat?” I asked, feeling guilty, and they all nodded, licking the frosting from their fingers. “Was it good?” asked Richie in his New Orleans accent, which only increased his appeal, in spite of my crush on Rick.

• From Another Country (1962)

  His voice fell over Eric like waves of safety. He was full of stories. He told the story of how he had met Grace, and how he had seduced her, and how (as he supposed) he had persuaded her to marry him; told stories of preachers and gamblers in his part of town—they seemed, in his part of town, to have much in common, and, often, to be the same people—how he had outwitted this one and that one, and how, once, he had managed to escape being put on the chain gang. (And he had explained to Eric what a chain gang was.) Once, Eric had walked into the furnace room where Henry sat alone; when he spoke, Henry did not answer; and when he approached him, putting his hand on Henry’s knee, the man’s tears scalded the back of his hand. Eric no longer remembered the cause of Henry’s tears, but he would never forget the wonder with which he then touched Henry’s face, or what the shaking of Henry’s body had caused him to feel. He had thrown himself into Henry’s arms, almost sobbing himself, and yet somehow wise enough to hold his own tears back. He was filled with an unutterably painful rage against whatever it was that had hurt Henry. It was the first time he had felt a man’s arms around him, the first time he had felt the chest and belly of a man; he had been ten or eleven years old. He had been terribly frightened, obscurely and profoundly frightened, but he had not, as the years were to prove, been frightened enough. He knew that what he felt was somehow wrong, and must be kept a secret; but he thought that it was wrong because Henry was a grown man, and colored, and he was a little boy, and white. Henry and Grace were eventually banished, due to some lapse or offense on Henry’s part. Since Eric’s parents had never approved of those sessions in the furnace room, Eric always suspected this as the reason for Henry’s banishment, which made his opposition to his parents more bitter than ever. In any case, he lived his life far from them, at school by day and before his mirror by night, dressed up in his mother’s old clothes or in whatever colorful scraps he had been able to collect, posturing and, in a whisper, declaiming. He knew that this was wrong, too, though he could not have said why. But by this time he knew that everything he did was wrong in the eyes of his parents, and in the eyes of the world, and that, therefore, everything must be lived in secret. The trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Which is why each time I count the four rungs down on the blue ladder tattooed on your lower back, spread out the skin, push in the nearly-two-inch-long needle, and plunge the golden, oily T into deep muscle mass, I feel certain I am delivering a gift.

• From The Fermata (1994)

  They kissed. It appeared that their mouths were a good match. Marian, who normally felt squirmy and put off when she was a witness to heavy public pair-bonding, watched this particular kiss with nothing but good feeling. She was the public, after all. There was some tongue-action, but it had the license of youth and looked like it felt better than it looked. They hugged each other hard; Sylvie’s heel went behind Kevin’s and she used the leverage to press her blue-jeaned mound into him. When they stopped, Marian said, “What a great kiss! You two are obviously great kissers. You must be beautiful when you … make love. Your bodies fit together so well. I wish I could—” She shook her head ruefully, her hand on her heart, and let them laugh at the impossibility of what she was thinking, so that they could start to get used to the idea. Then she slapped her hands on her legs and said, “I tell you what. If you would like to borrow any of these toys, feel free. Really. I don’t make any great claims for them—I’m sure you can do without them, but who knows, just for fun …” They looked indecisive. Marian exerted the slightest additional pressure. “Pick one—or a few, even.” She felt a trickle of sweat on her back. “What do you think, Kevin?” said Sylvie. Kevin shrugged. “Sure, I guess, yeah.” Sylvie and Kevin knelt, not minding apparently that their knees got instantly soaked in the wet grass. Sylvie’s face, though averted, was very close to Marian’s. “Which one would you recommend?” the girl finally asked, having touched them all lightly. “Mmm, well—” This was just too much for Marian. She felt her resistance give way completely. “My current favorite is one I just got,” she said. “It’s called the Armande Klockhammer. As you may know, Armande Klockhammer, Jr., is, or was, a male stripper at the Golden Banana. It’s kind of big, actually. Almost too big, depending on where you need it to go.” “Which one is it?” Sylvie asked. Marian cleared her throat. “I’m afraid I can’t show it to you right now.” “Why not?” Sylvie looked at her with innocent curiosity. “I just can’t.” “But why?” Sylvie insisted. “Where is it?” “It’s in use,” said Marian. She looked at her two young friends and then down at her wet dress. Kevin looked surprised. He had finally pieced it together. “You mean that all the time we’ve been here it’s been …” Marian took a deep breath. “Up my ass, yes.” “Up your … It’s not in your … it’s in your …?” Sylvie, pointing to parts of herself to clarify her exclamation, looked genuinely surprised.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. In the face of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.” By ordinary devotion, Winnicott means ordinary devotion. “It is a trite remark when I say that by devoted I simply mean devoted.” Winnicott is a writer for whom ordinary words are good enough. As soon as we moved in together, we were faced with the urgent task of setting up a home for your son that would feel abundant and containing—good enough—rather than broken or falling. (These poeticisms come from that classic of genderqueer kinship, Mom’s House, Dad’s House) But that’s not quite right—we knew about this task beforehand; it was, in fact, one of the reasons we moved so quickly. What became apparent was the urgent task specifically before me: that of learning how to be a stepparent. Talk about a potentially fraught identity! My stepfather had his faults, but every word I have ever uttered against him has come back to haunt me, now that I understand what it is to hold the position, to be held by it. When you are a stepparent, no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or smart or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it, save endure, and commit to planting seeds of sanity and good spirit in the face of whatever shitstorms may come your way. And don’t expect to get any kudos from the culture, either: parents are Hallmark-sacrosanct, but stepparents are interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters. Every time I see the word stepchild in an obituary, as in “X is survived by three children and two stepchildren,” or whenever an adult acquaintance says something like, “Oh, sorry, I can’t make it—I’m visiting my stepdad this weekend,” or when, during the Olympics, the camera pans the audience and the voiceover says, “there’s X’s stepmother, cheering him on,” my heart skips a beat, just to hear the sound of the bond made public, made positive.

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  Forgiveness has a claim to be the most powerful thing in the world. It transforms like nothing else. It ranges from the top of the scale, “forgiveness” of massive financial debt, all the way down deep to release from the quiet, secret horror of personal guilt and shame, which can, quite literally, paralyze you. That was the case in one of the first and best-known stories (Mark 2:1–12). “Child,” says Jesus to a man lying prone on a stretcher, unable to move, “your sins are forgiven.” All very well to say that, you might think. A bit like walking into town and declaring that we have a new emperor. “What d’you mean? How will this work? And isn’t that pushing your luck? Isn’t ‘forgiveness’ what you normally get in the Temple, under the authority of the chief priests?” Yes, that’s exactly how it normally works. But something else is going on here. A new dimension of the God-in-charge proclamation is being unveiled. “You want to know,” Jesus declares to the assembled company, “that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins?” He turns to the paralyzed man: “I tell you,” he says, “Get up, take your stretcher, and go home.” The man obeys. And the crowd in the house, which wouldn’t part to let the sick man in, now parts, like the Red Sea, to let the healed man out. Forgiveness and healing! The two go so closely together, personally and socially. Whole societies can be crippled by ancient grudges that turn into feuds and then into forms of civil war. Families can be torn apart by a single incident or one person’s behavior that is never faced and so never forgiven. Equally, societies and families as well as individuals can be reconciled, can find new hope and new love, through forgiveness. Jesus was tapping into something extremely deep in human life. But, like the physical healings, forgiveness didn’t stop with this kind of reconciliation. To understand this we must come forward from the Exodus to the other great defining moment in Israel’s history: the exile. We’ve already mentioned the time when the people were taken away to Babylon. Well, the prophets of the time were quite clear why this had happened: it was because of the people’s wickedness. Like their distant ancestors dancing around a golden calf in the desert, they had forgotten their true God. They had worshipped idols. So, instead of being a light to the nations, Israel had become a byword for a godforsaken nation. People looked at the Israelites and sneered at them and their God, the God who had apparently left them defenseless. Exile was seen, throughout the ancient scriptures, as the punishment for Israel’s sin. In a culture where honor and shame were everything, the exile brought deep, deadly shame upon Israel. And, in the eyes of the watching world, on Israel’s God.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “That’s not the usual pattern, is it?” Then she wished that she had held her tongue, or could call the words back. But it was too late, really, to do more than blandly compound her error: “I mean, from what we’re told, most men with a sexual bias toward men love their mothers and hate their fathers.” “We haven’t been told much,” he observed, mildly sardonic. “I used to know street boys in Paris who hadn’t had any opportunity to hate their mother or their fathers. Of course, they hated les flics—the cops—and I suppose some safe slug of an American would work it out that they hated the cops because they were father-figures—we know a hell of a lot about father-figures here because we don’t know anything about fathers, we’ve made them obsolete—but it seems just as likely to me that they hated the cops because the cops liked to beat the shit out of them.” It was strange how she now felt herself holding back—not from him, but from such a vision of the world. She did not want him to see the world this way because such a vision could not make him happy, and whatever made him unhappy menaced her. She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman—for she had never thought of them as being very bright—seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless. She stroked Eric’s hair, remembering how she and Richard, when they had first met, had argued over this very question: for he had been very conscious, in those days, of his poverty and her privilege. He had called her the icebound heiress of all the ages, and she had worked very hard to prove him wrong and to dissociate herself, in his mind, from those who wielded the knout of power. Eric put his head in her lap. He said, “Well, anyway, that’s the story, or all the story I know how to tell you now. I just thought you ought to know.” He hesitated; she watched his Adam’s apple move as he swallowed; and he said, “I can’t promise you anything, Cass.” “I haven’t asked you to promise me anything.” She bent down and kissed him on the mouth. “You’re very beautiful,” she said, “and very strong. I’m not afraid.”

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  Consent is imperative, but it is a baseline. As health educator Shafia Zaloom says, consent is what makes sex legal, but it doesn’t make sex ethical, and it doesn’t make sex good. Let’s say a teenager consensually hooks up with his girlfriend’s best friend. Criminal? No. Principled? Likely not. Zaloom, a high school teacher whose own book contains multiple real-life scenarios that adults can work through with teens, tells her students that ethical sex means taking into account the well-being of not only the participants, but others who might be affected by their actions. “Good” sex is not only legal and ethical, but pleasurable and mutually satisfying. For that to be the case, boys must have an accurate conception of female bodies and sexual response. If you can say the word “clitoris” out loud to your son, by all means go for it. If you’d rather poke yourself in the eye with a fork—and many of us would—make sure to provide ample, accurate educational resources (books, websites) on informed, progressive sexuality (for ideas, check out my website: https://www.peggyorenstein.com/positive-sexuality). Along with sexual information, young people (of all genders) say they want more insight from their parents about emotional intimacy: how to begin a relationship, establish mature love, how to avoid being hurt (or perhaps how to accept the potential for growth in pain), how to manage conflict, and how to deal with breakups. You needn’t have had unmitigated success in your own romantic life to drop some wisdom on all of that. “We fuss a lot about ‘the sex talk,’” says Richard Weissbourd, the director of Making Caring Common. “We do not fuss about a far more important talk, which is: How do we talk to our children about the courage and subtlety and discipline and tenderness and tough-mindedness that it really takes to love someone else?” In reality, according to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist specializing in adolescent male behavior, most guys prefer physical intimacy with someone they know, trust, and with whom they feel comfortable. In contrast to the “always down for it” image, Smiler found in his surveys of heterosexual high school students that boys’ greatest motivator for pursuing sex was not physical, but emotional: expressing love or a desire to form a closer relationship with a girl. “Guys say they appreciate having a dating partner,” he told me. “That special person who they know will have their backs no matter what, someone they can talk to about anything, especially the things they feel are off-limits with their male friends. They don’t get that with a one-night stand or random hookups. “As adults—whether parents or teachers or professionals—we might ask boys what kind of sexual experience they want,” he continued. “Not just whether they are looking to have an orgasm, but about the context and quality of that orgasm. If we’re willing to be more vulgar and pointed, we might even ask, Do you want a partner who’s more than just someone to masturbate into?”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Pumping milk is, for many women, a sharply private activity. It can also be physically and emotionally challenging, as it reminds the nursing mother of her animal status: just another mammal, milk being siphoned from its glands. Beyond photographs in breast pump manuals (and lactation porn), however, images of milk expression are really nowhere to be found. Phrases such as colostrum, letdown, and hindmilk arrive in one’s life like hieroglyphs from the land of the lost. So the presence of Steiner’s camera here—and the steadfast stare of her subject—feels jarring and exciting. This is especially so when you consider how photographers such as Goldin (or Ryan McGinley, or Richard Billingham, or Larry Clark, or Peter Hujar, or Zoe Strauss) often make us feel as though we have glimpsed something radically intimate by evoking danger, suffering, illness, nihilism, or abjection. In Steiner’s intimate portrait of Childs, the proposed transmission of fluids is about nourishment. I almost can’t imagine. And yet—while pumping milk may be about nourishment, it isn’t really about communion. A human mother expresses milk because sometimes she can’t be there to nurse her baby, either by choice or by necessity. Pumping is thus an admission of distance, of maternal finitude. But it is a separation, a finitude, suffused with best intentions. Milk or no milk, this is often the best we’ve got to give. Once I suggested that I had written half a book drunk, the other half sober. Here I estimate that about nine-tenths of the words in this book were written “free,” the other one-tenth, hooked up to a hospital-grade breast pump: words piled into one machine, milk siphoned out by another. The phrase “toxic maternal” refers to a mother whose milk delivers poison along with nourishment. If you turn away from the poison, you also turn away from the nourishment. Given that human breast milk now contains literal poisons, from paint thinners to dry-cleaning fluid to toilet deodorizers to rocket fuel to DDT to flame retardants, there is literally no escape. Toxicity is now a question of degree, of acceptable parts per unit. Infants don’t get to choose—they take what they can get, in their scramble to stay alive.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was no one near us save our driver - and he had the collar of his cape about his ears, and was busy with his pipe and his tobacco-pouch. I looked at the river again - at that extraordinary, ordinary transformation, that easy submission to the urgings of a natural law, that was yet so rare and so unsettling.It seemed a little miracle, done just for Kitty and me.‘How cold it must be!’ I said softly. ‘Imagine if the whole river froze over, if it was frozen right down from here to Richmond. Would you walk across it?’Kitty shivered, and shook her head. ‘The ice would break,’ she said. ‘We would sink and drown; or else be stranded and die of the cold!’I had expected her to smile, not make me a serious answer. I saw us floating down the Thames, out to sea - past Whitstable, perhaps - on a piece of ice no bigger than a pancake.The horse took a step, and its bridle jangled; the driver gave a cough. Still we gazed at the river, silent and unmoving - and both of us, finally, rather grave.At last Kitty gave a whisper. ‘Ain’t it queer,’ she said.I made no answer, only stared at where the curdled water swirled, thick and unwilling, about the columns of the bridge beneath our feet. But when she shivered again I moved a step closer to her, and felt her lean against me in response. It was icy cold upon the bridge; we should have moved back from the parapet into the shelter of the carriage. But we were loath to leave the sight of the frozen river - loath too, perhaps, to leave the warmth of one another’s bodies, now that we had found it.I took her hand. Her fingers, I could feel, were stiff and cold inside her glove. I placed the hand against my cheek; it did not warm it. With my eyes all the time on the water below I pulled at the button at her wrist, then drew the mitten from her, and held her fingers against my lips to warm them with my breath.I sighed, gently, against her knuckles; then turned the hand, and breathed upon her palm. There was no sound at all save the unfamiliar lapping and creaking of the frozen river. Then, ‘Nan,’ she said, very low.I looked at her, her hand still held to my mouth and my breath still damp upon her fingers. Her face was raised to mine, and her gaze was dark and strange and thick, like the water below.I let my hand drop; she kept her fingers upon my lips, then moved them, very slowly, to my cheek, my ear, my throat, my neck. Then her features gave a shiver and she said in a whisper : ‘You won’t tell a soul, Nan - will you?’I think I sighed then: sighed to know - to know for sure, at last! - that there was something to be told.

• From Another Country (1962)

  “I don’t think it’s just a murder story,” he said, gesturing with the pipe. “I mean, I don’t see why you can’t do something fairly serious within the limits of the form. I’ve always been fascinated by it, really.” “You didn’t think much of them when you were teaching me English in high school,” said Vivaldo, with a smile. “Well, I was younger then than you are now. We change, boy, we grow——!” The waiter entered the room, looking as though he wondered where on earth he could be, and Richard called him. “Hey! We’re dying of thirst over here!” He turned to Cass. “You want another drink?” “Oh, yes,” she said, “now that our friends are here. I might as well make the most of my night out. Except I’m a kind of dreamy drunk. Do you mind my head on your shoulder?” “Mind?” He laughed. He looked at Vivaldo. “Mind! Why do you think I’ve been knocking myself out, trying to be a success?” He bent down and kissed her and something appeared in his boyish face, a single-mindedness of tenderness and passion, which made him very gallant. “You can put your head on my shoulder anytime. Anytime, baby. That’s what my shoulders are for.” And he stroked her hair again, proudly, as the waiter vanished with the empty glasses. Vivaldo turned to Richard. “When can I read your book? I’m jealous. I want to find out if I should be.” “Well, if you take that tone, you bastard, you can buy it at the bookstore when it comes out.” “Or borrow it from the library,” Cass suggested. “No, really, when can I read it? Tonight? Tomorrow? How long is it?” “It’s over three hundred pages,” Richard said. “Come by tomorrow, you can look at it then.” He said to Cass, “It’s one way of getting him to the house.” Then: “You really don’t come to see us like you used to—is anything the matter? Because we still love you.” “No, nothing’s the matter,” Vivaldo said. He hesitated. “I had this thing with Jane and then we broke up—and—oh, I don’t know. Work wasn’t going well, and”—he looked at Rufus—“all kinds of things. I was drinking too much and running around whoring when I should have been—being serious, like you, and getting my novel finished.” “How’s it coming—your novel?” “Oh”—he looked down and sipped his drink—“slow. I’m really not a very good writer.” “Bullshit,” said Richard, cheerfully. He almost looked again like the English instructor Vivaldo had idolized, who had been the first person to tell him things he needed to hear, the first person to take Vivaldo seriously. “I’m very glad,” Vivaldo said, “seriously, very glad that you got the damn thing done and that it worked so well. And I hope you make a fortune.”

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  You, reader, are alive today, reading this, because someone once adequately policed your mouth exploring. In the face of this fact, Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.” By ordinary devotion, Winnicott means ordinary devotion. “It is a trite remark when I say that by devoted I simply mean devoted.” Winnicott is a writer for whom ordinary words are good enough. As soon as we moved in together, we were faced with the urgent task of setting up a home for your son that would feel abundant and containing—good enough—rather than broken or falling. (These poeticisms come from that classic of genderqueer kinship, Mom’s House, Dad’s House) But that’s not quite right—we knew about this task beforehand; it was, in fact, one of the reasons we moved so quickly. What became apparent was the urgent task specifically before me: that of learning how to be a stepparent. Talk about a potentially fraught identity! My stepfather had his faults, but every word I have ever uttered against him has come back to haunt me, now that I understand what it is to hold the position, to be held by it. When you are a stepparent, no matter how wonderful you are, no matter how much love you have to give, no matter how mature or wise or successful or smart or responsible you are, you are structurally vulnerable to being hated or resented, and there is precious little you can do about it, save endure, and commit to planting seeds of sanity and good spirit in the face of whatever shitstorms may come your way. And don’t expect to get any kudos from the culture, either: parents are Hallmark-sacrosanct, but stepparents are interlopers, self-servers, poachers, pollutants, and child molesters. Every time I see the word stepchild in an obituary, as in “X is survived by three children and two stepchildren,” or whenever an adult acquaintance says something like, “Oh, sorry, I can’t make it—I’m visiting my stepdad this weekend,” or when, during the Olympics, the camera pans the audience and the voiceover says, “there’s X’s stepmother, cheering him on,” my heart skips a beat, just to hear the sound of the bond made public, made positive.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But there was a warmth in the room that was moving and intriguing: the men embraced one another and came over specially to talk to us women, admiring the baby and congratulating Susan’s and Barrie’s parents with tears in their eyes. I did not think about it much at the time, but that service planted a seed: there were other ways of being religious than I had been accustomed to. Not everybody felt that it was unworthy to feel emotional and to show your feelings. Yet again, in the spirit of Ash-Wednesday, I found that relinquishing hope had released something within me. My love for reading came back in full. Even though I had started to respond to literature again, there had still been something rather dutiful and anxious in my approach. I would read a new novel desperately casting around for a clever thing to say about it that would impress my colleagues. But now that I had been ejected from academia so publicly, I no longer needed to impress anybody. It didn’t matter whether I came up with any brilliant insights or not. When I read a novel or a poem now, I no longer had an ulterior motive; I was no longer trying to use literature to promote myself, but was simply immersing myself in the text for its own sake—as, of course, I should have been doing all along. As a result, I found myself inundated with ideas and with the words to express them. The mind that I had bludgeoned into stupor had been given back to me. Again, I did not reflect upon this much at the time. I simply noted it as an irony. And yet my renewed delight in the written word was a gift and a grace. This too planted a seed of perception. Insight does not always come to order, and there will certainly be no renaissance if you are merely trying to “get” something for yourself. As soon as I stopped trying to exploit my literary skills to advance my career or enhance my reputation, I found that I was opening myself to the text, could lose myself in the beauty of the words and in the wisdom of the writer. It was a kind of ekstasis, an ecstasy that was not an exotic, tranced state of consciousness but, in the literal sense of the word, a going beyond the self. Then, in February 1976, just over a year since the viva that, I thought, had wrecked my life, I received the greatest gift of all, though at first it seemed like another setback. It had been a perfectly ordinary day in college. Richard was producing some short plays by W. B. Yeats and I was his assistant, dogsbody, and stage manager.