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.

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• From Little Women (1868)

  keep the pot boiling. If they haven't, it's a pleasure to comfort the poor souls, and keep them from despair when they find it out." "Yes, indeed, and there's another class who can't ask, and who suffer in silence. I know something of it, for I belonged to it before you made a princess of me, as the king does the beggarmaid in the old story. Ambitious girls have a hard time, Laurie, and often have to see youth, health, and precious opportunities go by, just for want of a little help at the right minute. People have been very kind to me, and whenever I see girls struggling along, as we used to do, I want to put out my hand and help them, as I was helped." "And so you shall, like an angel as you are!" cried Laurie, resolving, with a glow of philanthropic zeal, to found and endow an institution for the express benefit of young women with artistic tendencies. "Rich people have no right to sit down and enjoy themselves, or let their money accumulate for others to waste. It's not half so sensible to leave legacies when one dies as it is to use the money wisely while alive, and enjoy making one's fellow creatures happy with it. We'll have a good time ourselves, and add an extra relish to our own pleasure by giving other people a generous taste. Will you be a little Dorcas, going about emptying a big basket of comforts, and filling it up with good deeds?" "With all my heart, if you will be a brave St. Martin, stopping as you ride gallantly through the world to share your cloak with the beggar." "It's a bargain, and we shall get the best of it!" So the young pair shook hands upon it, and then paced happily on again, feeling that their pleasant home was more homelike because they hoped to brighten other homes, believing that their own feet would walk more uprightly along the flowery path before them, if they smoothed rough ways for other feet, and feeling that their hearts were more closely knit together by a love which could tenderly remember those less blest than they.

• From Wild (2012)

  Moments later, he did, sitting on the bench of Ed’s picnic table, after we arrived at our camp and the men gathered around to introduce themselves. I watched as Tom carefully peeled off his filthy socks, clumps of worn-out moleskin and his own flesh coming off with them. His feet looked like mine: white as fish and pocked with bloody, oozing wounds overlaid with flaps of skin that had been rubbed away and now dangled, still painfully attached to the patches of flesh that had yet to die a slow, PCT-induced death. I took off my pack and unzipped a pocket to remove my first aid kit. “Have you ever tried these?” I asked Tom, holding out a sheet of 2nd Skin—thankfully, I had packed more into my resupply box. “These have saved me,” I explained. “I don’t know if I could go on without them, actually.” Tom only looked up at me in despair and nodded without elaborating. I set a couple of sheets of 2nd Skin beside him on the bench. “You’re welcome to these, if you’d like,” I said. Seeing them in their translucent blue wrappers brought to mind the condom in my back pocket. I wondered if Tom had packed any; if Doug had; if my bringing them had been such a dumb idea after all. Being in Tom and Doug’s presence made it seem slightly less so. “We thought we’d all go up to Grumpie’s at six,” Ed said, looking at his watch. “We’ve got a couple hours. I’ll drive us all up in my truck.” He looked at Tom and Doug. “Meanwhile, I’d be happy to get you boys a snack.” The men sat at the picnic table, eating Ed’s potato chips and cold baked beans, talking about why they chose the pack they chose and the pros and cons of each. Someone brought out a deck of cards, and a game of poker started up. Greg paged through his guidebook at the end of the table near me, where I stood beside my pack, still marveling at its transformation. Pockets that had been bursting full now had tiny cushions of room. “You’re practically a Jardi-Nazi now,” said Albert, in a teasing tone, seeing me gazing at my pack. “Those are the disciples of Ray Jardine, if you don’t know. They take a highly particular view about pack weight.” “It’s the guy I was telling you about,” added Greg.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  A few hours later, a lactation consultant came to visit us. She talked to us for a long time, told us all about her family. She was a member of the Pima tribe from Arizona and had married into an African American family, raised her six kids in Watts. She nursed them all. One of her sons was named Eagle Feather, Eagle for short. Her mother had insisted on a ceremony at which Eagle learned to say his name in his tribal language, as Eagle was the white man’s language. I don’t know why I’m telling you guys so much about my family, she kept saying. You were probably passing, but I like to think she had an intuition that something about identity was loose and hot in our house, as, perhaps, it was in hers. At some point we told her about wanting to name Igasho Igasho. She listened, while giving me tips on how to nurse him. Let your boobs be the guide, not the clock, she said. Whenever they feel full, bam!, you pull that baby onto your chest. On her way out, she turned and said, If anyone ever gives you trouble about your baby’s name, you tell them that a full tribe member, from Tucson and Watts, gave you her blessing. Later I learn that Pima was the name given to the Othama tribe by the Spaniards. It is a corruption, or misunderstanding, of the phrase pi ‘añi mac or pi mac, meaning “I don’t know”—a phrase tribe members supposedly said often in response to the invading Europeans. A few months after your mother died, we got all her papers in the mail. One afternoon I sat on a milk crate outside our storage shed to give them a cursory look, trying to decide where to file them. Amid the mountains of medical bills and threatening collections statements, a certain set of papers stood out—papers with smiley faces and flowery mastheads, exclamation points and carefully handwritten signatures. Your adoption paperwork.

• From The Argonauts (2015)

  Luckily, Iggy couldn’t care less. He is stalwart, has a high tolerance for physical intrusions. Within his first year of life, he withstood a spinal tap, several catheterizations, a contrast enema, electric shocks, nuclear scans, countless IVs, and an infusion of rare antibodies harvested from other people’s bodies (an infusion that, had we not had health insurance, would have cost $47,000 for the vial, an amount that puts the price of frozen sperm to shame). All that said, his native joy and robustness have continued, unabated. Until he grows too heavy, I carry him always and everywhere, even against the rules (making pancakes at the stove, walking down steep trails, etc.). When we go on the road together, I let him drag around my enormous roily-bag at the airport, even though he’s been ambulatory for only a few weeks. He insists. I recognize his insistence. I ignore the books that sternly advise against rocking or nursing your baby to sleep, so that she learns to go to sleep by herself; I am blessed with the time and the desire to hold Iggy until he slips off, and so I do. I wait and wait and wait until I hear a sleep rattle enter his breath, I watch his eyes flutter open and closed, open and closed, a hundred times, until finally they stay shut. I know from raising my stepson that this ritual won’t last forever—Iggy’s babyhood is already speeding away. By the time this book is published, it will be gone. Sturdy pilot, he flips over the coffee table and rides. I adore Winnicott. But the perversity is not lost on me that the most oft-cited, well-respected, best-selling books about the caretaking of babies—Winnicott, Spock, Sears, Weissbluth— have been and are mostly still by men. On the front cover of The Baby Book—arguably one of the more progressive contemporary options (albeit oppressively heteronormative)—the byline reads “by William Sears (MD) and Martha Sears (RN).” This seems promising(ish), but nurse/wife/mother Martha’s voice appears only in anecdotes, italics, and sidebars, never as co-narrator. Was she too busy taking care of their eight children to join in the first-person? I look down at my well-loved copy of Winnicott on the Child and note that it comes laden with not one, not two, but three introductions by male pediatricians (Brazelton, Greenspan, Spock). What kind of bubble would burst if a lady shrink were presumed to add value to his legacy? Why don’t I myself seek out child-care books by women? Am I unconsciously channel-surfing for the male weatherman? How could Gallop, or any mother, however whip-smart, present the rule of negative gynecology and be taken as seriously as Sloterdijk? I’m boring myself with these reversals (feminist hazard).

• 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.