Yearning

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 Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Yes, you!” I hissed. “Take it.” For someone who had been so blessed eager to come on the hunt, Marcus Markey seemed downright reluctant to pull the trigger. “Markey, point that fucking rifle and shoot.” I allowed a little exasperation to seep into my voice, knowing that would motivate him. He eased the Remington thirty-aught-six over the edge of the blind and took a bead. I watched as he drew a breath, held it and squeezed. Judging from the stricken look on his face as the report echoed against the far hills, his aim had been good. The second last thing the kid desired was to kill a living animal; the very last thing was to look like a pussy to someone he looked up to…and that would be me. There was a gulp and the strangled words, “Got him.” “Good shot, buddy. Your first kill.” “Yeah…kill,” he responded with another gulp. “Well, let’s go collect him,” I said, leaving the blind and starting down the hill. I had recently returned to my Oklahoma hometown of Victor for the first time in fifteen, tumultuous years. If the navy had tamed my wild side, the SEALS handed it back in spades. You won’t have read or heard news reports about the clandestine missions I’d been on, but I have killed and collected commendations for the killing. Quiet heroes, the SecNav once said of my team. I would likely have finished out my career and retired to a restless pastoral life of secret memories had it not been for Beet. When Beet—Warren Borak—a lithe, dangerous man four years my senior, took a nineteen-year-old tadpole under his wing, neither of us suspected powerful forces had been unleashed. He guided me, counseled me, nurtured me and protected me. And one memorable, moonless night in Lebanon, he fucked me vigorously in the excitement of an especially brutal action while we waited for the team to reassemble. My life was never the same after that. Nor was my future… our future. Ten years into my enlistment, Beet and I got drunk with some buddies in Naples and our physical attraction for one another surfaced. We were kicked out of the navy in record time and with as little fanfare as possible. We became mercenaries, fighting for causes just and not-sojust all over Africa and Southeast Asia. Happy and open about our relationship, we dared the macho world of mercenaries to do something about it, but those intrepid warriors didn’t give a shit. So we hired out for buckets full of money to do what our government had trained us to do for peanuts.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  You?” “Still married,” she tells him. Then adds, “Happily.” “One of the lucky ones.” She nods. “I was at your stepbrother’s funeral. Steve Osner. He was your stepbrother, wasn’t he?” “Yes. The family was devastated.” “A military hero. He was my best friend all through school. The way Corinne threw herself over his coffin…I’ll never forget that moment.” No one had told Miri about this. Rusty had been asked not to attend the funeral. She’d understood. She was pregnant again, anyway, and as sick as the last time. Daisy went with Dr. O to the funeral, as much to look after Dr. O as to mourn Steve. “If only I’d been able to convince him to go to Lehigh with me,” Phil said. “Neither of us could stand the idea of Syracuse after my cousin’s death. You remember Kathy?” “I do, and her green velvet New Year’s Eve dress.” “It was an awful time.” “Yes.” “But Steve went and enlisted the second he graduated.” He shakes his head. “Maybe to prove something to his parents. Who knows? He was enraged by the divorce. Shipped out to Korea after basic training.” “He walked into enemy fire, didn’t he?” They didn’t talk a lot about Steve’s death but Miri knows Dr. O blamed himself. “Tossed a grenade into a bunker on Pork Chop Hill,” Phil said, “blew himself up along with the enemy. And you know, the war was basically over by then. But they kept fighting over that stupid hill, as if it mattered, as if it would make a difference. Such a fucking waste, excuse my language.” “Dr. O’s never gotten over it. I doubt you ever get over a child’s death. He and Rusty named my second brother Stuart. It would have been too hard to have another son named Steven.” It’s bittersweet, chatting with Phil, then Gaby, who takes Miri aside and asks if it’s true about Longy. “Was he really a mobster?” “I’m afraid so,” Miri says. “He sent me a basket of flowers after the crash. He was such a gentleman.” “Yes,” Miri says, then adds, with a straight face, “and he was good to his mother.” She doesn’t mean to be the last to leave. Or does she? Before she reaches the door, Mason says, “Sit awhile, Miri. Talk to me.” He brings her a glass of wine. She sinks into the sofa, tucks her feet under her. She’s more relaxed now. “Hungry?” Mason asks. She shakes her head. Looks right at him for the first time. “Do you ever think about how young we were? My kids are older than we were.” “Miri…” Hearing him say her name like that in a soft, slightly hoarse voice takes her back to the basement in Irene’s house, to the night they played Trust. He rests his hand on her arm, and just that is enough to make her tingle. “I didn’t know how to hear your side of the story,” she says.

• From The Girls (2016)

  We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm. It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high schools. Every day after school, we’d click seamlessly into the familiar track of the afternoons. Waste the hours at some industrious task: following Vidal Sassoon’s suggestions for raw egg smoothies to strengthen hair or picking at blackheads with the tip of a sterilized sewing needle. The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions. As an adult, I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted. The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare thirty days in advance for the first day of school. Day 28: Apply a face mask of avocado and honey. Day 14: Test your makeup look in different lights (natural, office, dusk). Back then, I was so attuned to attention. I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anyone happen to glance over.

• From The Girls (2016)

  But some nights, unable to sleep, I peeled an apple slowly at the sink, letting the curl lengthen under the glint of the knife. The house dark around me. Sometimes it didn’t feel like regret. It felt like a missing.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  "Yale realized no one had touched him, not really, since his life had fallen apart. Teresa had hugged him when he came home from Wisconsin that day. Fiona had hugged him at Terrence's funeral. That was it. And being touched was Yale's weakness, always had been. People joked sometimes about not being held enough as a child, but in Yale's case it was so terribly literal, like a vitamin deficiency."

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “I didn’t believe there could be another side to the story.” “My side of the story is easy,” he says. “I was an idiot.” “I didn’t know how to forgive you.” “I never blamed you for not forgiving me. No girl in her right mind would have forgiven me.” “I couldn’t compete with her.” “If it matters, I was never with her again. A few months later she married a guy who owned a bar, had another kid and died at thirty-nine of ovarian cancer.” “That’s sad.” “Yes.” As she sips her wine, she can feel the pull. But she’s not going to do anything stupid. Never mind the devil on her shoulder whispering, Life is short and then you die. He leans in, kisses her gently, waits to see if she responds. She does, then changes her mind. “I can’t do this.” “I know,” he says. “Neither can I.” It’s all about remembering, it’s all about being fifteen and in love for the first time. She can almost smell the winter air outside the Y, feel the oil burner’s warmth in Irene’s basement, see the kaleidoscope, the colors, the patterns—which reminds her—she jumps up, walks across the room and pulls a tissue-paper-wrapped package tied in red and white bakery string from her bag. She hands it to him. “I thought your daughter might like to have this.” He rips off the paper, holds the kaleidoscope up to his eye, then hands it back to her. “Remember what I said when I gave it to you.” She remembers. He pulls her to her feet, hits the switch on his tape player and Nat King Cole sings, “Unforgettable, that’s what you are…” He’s thought of everything. They dance, holding each other, swaying, the way they did at the Y. Is this what she wants? Is this why she came here? She loves the idea of the kids they were, the sweetness between them. She sometimes thinks of Mason when she and Andy are making love. When she’s not sure she can get there—something new, something perimenopausal—as soon as she puts herself back—ohmygod—as soon as she’s there, she calls out, Yes, yes, yes! And Andy is happy he’s satisfied her so well. Does Mason imagine her when he’s with Rebecca? Does he imagine Polina? “Do you ever wonder about what might have been?” Mason asks. “Who doesn’t?” She collects her shawl, her bag, the kaleidoscope. When they say goodnight at the hotel room door he touches her face. She goes back to her room, kicks off her boots, falls back on the bed and calls Andy. She needs to hear his voice. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Yes…but I miss you.” “Miss you, too.” “See you tomorrow,” she tells him. “I’ll meet you at the airport.” “But I left my car there.” “So what?” She tears up. “Ask me about the snow on the mountain,” he says.

• From Little Women (1868)

  In a postscript she desired him not to tell Amy that Beth was worse, she was coming home in the spring and there was no need of saddening the remainder of her stay. That would be time enough, please God, but Laurie must write to her often, and not let her feel lonely, homesick or anxious. "So I will, at once. Poor little girl, it will be a sad going home for her, I'm afraid," and Laurie opened his desk, as if writing to Amy had been the proper conclusion of the sentence left unfinished some weeks before. But he did not write the letter that day, for as he rummaged out his best paper, he came across something which changed his purpose. Tumbling about in one part of the desk among bills, passports, and business documents of various kinds were several of Jo's letters, and in another compartment were three notes from Amy, carefully tied up with one of her blue ribbons and sweetly suggestive of the little dead roses put away inside. With a half-repentant, half-amused expression, Laurie gathered up all Jo's letters, smoothed, folded, and put them neatly into a small drawer of the desk, stood a minute turning the ring thoughtfully on his finger, then slowly drew it off, laid it with the letters, locked the drawer, and went out to hear High Mass at Saint Stefan's, feeling as if there had been a funeral, and though not overwhelmed with affliction, this seemed a more proper way to spend the rest of the day than in writing letters to charming young ladies. The letter went very soon, however, and was promptly answered, for Amy was homesick, and confessed it in the most delightfully confiding manner. The correspondence flourished famously, and letters flew to and fro with unfailing regularity all through the early spring. Laurie sold his busts, made allumettes of his opera, and went back to Paris, hoping somebody would arrive before long. He wanted desperately to go to Nice, but would not till he was asked, and Amy would not ask him, for just then she was having little experiences of her own, which made her rather wish to avoid the quizzical eyes of 'our boy'. Fred Vaughn had returned, and put the question to which she had once decided to answer, "Yes, thank you," but now she said, "No, thank you," kindly but steadily, for when the time came, her courage failed her, and she found that something more than money and position was needed to satisfy the new longing that filled her heart so full of tender hopes and fears.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I had dinner with a friend. The restaurant was the size of two large living rooms. The tables were jammed together, and to be seated, the waitress employed a kind of magic, pulling one table out and then wedging you in, like a child in a high chair. You had to summon her to use the toilet. When it was time to order, I flailed at her with my catastrophic French. She nodded and did not laugh. She gave no false manners. We had an incredible bottle of wine. I had steak. I had a baguette with bone marrow. I had liver. I had an espresso and a dessert that I can’t even name. Using all the French I could muster, I tried to tell the waitress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off in English, “The best you’ve ever had, right?” I rose to walk, and despite having inhaled half the menu I felt easy as a featherweight. The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musée Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I’d want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly.

• From The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

  If only I could combine the humorous verve of my two recently accepted stories with the serious prose style of the Mintons [story], I should be pleased.… If only I could break through my numb cold glibness that comes when I try to make a declarative sentence. Color it up, thicken it. … Keep a notebook of physical events. My visit to the tattoo shop and my job at the hospital supplied me with two good stories. So should my Boston experience. If only I can go deep enough. A party at Agatha’s, Starbuck’s wife. The gardens. Oh, God, how good to get it all. Slowly, slowly catch the monkey. Small doses of acceptance help. Perhaps telling stories to children will help me do a few books there.… … Last night … the girls: the elder, ageless, with dark, old-maidish bun, skinny, flat chested, short, with flat black shoes and a nondescript beige dress with maroon velvet belt.… Glasses, a bright, luminous face, a speech instructor: “Oh, Mr. Binkerd, the music sets such a mood! ” The other, younger, arty, quite pretty with delicately heeled blue shoes, a loose fashionable hairdo, blue-shadowed eyes, glasses also, a stylish gray-blue sweater and skirt, a silver Mexican necklace, elaborate, in good taste. Sultry manner. Teaches weaving and jewelry making. May [Swenson] in the other room: freckled, in herself, a tough little nut. I imagined the situation of two lesbians: the one winning a woman with child from an apparently happy marriage. Why is it impossible to think of two women of middle-age living together without lesbianism the solution, the motive? November 14, Saturday . A good walk this morning. Got up in time for breakfast at 8 and the mail came early as if to reward us. Warm blowy gray weather. Odd elation. Note this. Whenever we are about to move, this stirring and excitement comes, as if the old environment would keep the sludge and inertia of the self, and the bare new self slip shining into a better life.… We walked out on the bland, sandy track. Pale purple and bluish hills melted in the gray distance. The black twiggy thickets of the bare treetops. Leaves rattled in the wind. A black bird flew up to a bow. Burnt corncobs, old corn stalks. A black flapping scarecrow on crossed staves made out of a man’s tattered coat and a pair of faded, whitened dungarees. Waved vacant arms. Saw dogs, two, tongues hanging, exploring a copse of saplings and bracken. The yellow-brown, dessicated color of the land. Found cartridge shells. Fox tracks, deer prints in the soft sand. The green, brilliant underbed of the lakes. Molehills and tunnels webbing the Yaddo lawn. Felt into a hole, both ways, with my finger after breaking into the tunnel. Wrote an exercise on mushrooms yesterday which Ted likes. And I do too. My absolute lack of judgment when I’ve written something: whether it’s trash or genius. Exhausted today after several late nights.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  It occurred to me that I really was in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished. I was the one the police stopped on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I was the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black woman, a freighted symbol of black love. But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor—landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner. I remember, that night, watching the teenagers gathering along the pathway near the Seine to do all their teenage things. And I remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory. But I had you. We came back to Paris that summer, because your mother loved the city and because I loved the language, but above all because of you.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  And when Cookie was around, we’d somehow establish a small space among the chaos for solace, where we could go and be together to talk and snuggle or play games. “By now I know how I want to live my life,” Camille continues, “and it’s not by learning to obey new rules in a strange house. I’ve already raised myself.” She gets a job at Wicks ’n’ Sticks, a candle shop at the Smith Haven Mall. In turn I begin making friends at the bus stop. Sheryl and Tracey make it clear they’re talking to me because they’re really interested in coaxing me out of my shell, and it doesn’t take long before I’m spending all my time outside school at their houses. They both have fathers and mothers who live together, two cars in the driveway, swimming pools in the backyard, closets stuffed with well-fitting clothes and, most important to me, refrigerators and pantries stocked with snacks and soda. I find it’s much more comfortable to play the guest outside my foster family’s home than in it. It’s fascinating to observe how normal families interact. With a mother and father in the house, it’s as though everyone has a distinct role in the family: Dads work full-time at offices, moms work part-time or run the kids around; we kids can just hang out . . . and be kids. It’s a totally new experience for me. We spend weekday afternoons watching MTV and doing homework and weekends at the movies, the bowling alley, and playing Pac-Man and Centipede at the mall arcade. Tracey giggles at my pronunciation. “It’s Centipede, not Centerpede!” I just shrug and smile. These families think they know me well, that I live at my aunt’s house. I never share my story; the details of how I grew up, that I have younger siblings I’m trying to save, or that I have a mentally ill, alcoholic, promiscuous mother who won’t be my mother much longer. Camille and I are allowed a once-a-week phone call with Rosie and Norm, who cry in hushes when they tell us their new foster mom never hugs them and then disciplines them with hits and cursing. Over and over they say they’ve tried to tell their social worker, but instead of the sympathy or solutions they need, she tells them they ought to be better listeners. Camille and I tell our social worker that the kids, especially Rosie, would never lie about being hit. We beg Addie to please allow the kids to come live with us. Each time, however, she sadly tells us that she just cannot take them as well. She says she’s already stretching her energy and resources; and besides, Rosie and Norm’s social worker isn’t convinced they’re not just making up these stories because they’re homesick for us. As Christmas approaches, a social worker named Ms. Harvey is assigned to our case now that the Petermans have invited us to stay permanently.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Her lack of cooperation to help us see the kids causes Camille and me to grow even more reclusive and rebellious, staying out of the house until curfew then locking ourselves in our rooms for the night. When Addie gets our monthly welfare check, she gives us each the county designated amount of sixty-two dollars of the two four-hundred-twelve-dollar checks she receives to use as our personal allowance for clothes, toiletries, books, and school field trips. Then in early December the social workers inform us that we’ll get to see the kids for a Christmas visit. Realizing we’ve spent all of our first check on warm coats and snow boots for ourselves, Camille takes a second job selling fragrances in the mall while I begin walking door-to-door to Addie’s neighbors, offering to clean leaves off their lawns before the first snow for ten dollars each. Addie sees how hard we’re working and recommends me to neighbors who need a babysitter who’s willing to clean house . . . and on top of that I make an extra five dollars per week dusting Addie’s furniture. When Camille and I go Christmas shopping for Rosie and Norm, my sister follows my lead around the kids’ clothing stores at the mall. “I’m a pro around these parts,” I tell her. “They’ve got sizes that fit me, less expensive than the juniors section. Where do you think I’ve been doing all my shopping?” “Save money shopping for kids’ clothes while you can,” Camille says, gesturing at my body. “I can already tell, you’re starting to take some shape. The same thing that happened to me is gonna happen to you: You wake up one morning and—va-va-VOOM!—you need a bra. A real bra,” she whispers. “We oughta place a bet on how much longer you’ll fit into kids’ turtlenecks.” “Just help me,” I tell her. She pushes a cart and we load it with gloves, hats, scarves, new underwear, socks, winter boots, some jeans, and a rainbow array of cable-knit sweaters. On Sunday, December 23, at one thirty in the afternoon, Cherie picks us up from the Petermans’ and drives us thirty minutes to the kids’ foster home. “Don’t be surprised if they’re not blown away by the gifts,” Camille says. “Cookie’s visitation was from nine to one today, and if she tried to win them over with anything, I guarantee it was toys.” “At least her car’s not here,” I say when we pull into the driveway of a dump of a house. The social workers were wise to give us an hour gap so we wouldn’t have to cross paths with our mother.

• From Like Family

  As I stood there, a fly landed on one of Hilde’s hands, but she didn’t move. And what, I thought, if I put my hand on hers? Would she wake up then? Would she cringe? Cry? Gather me in her arms? I never touch her, said a fly voice inside. She never touches me . [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] IT WAS AGAINST EVERY rule to read patients’ charts, but we did it anyway, sneaking behind the swinging door of the nurse’s station when the RNs were out on med rounds. I always felt a little sickened by what I read, like how Mary—a woman who dragged one leg behind her like a piece of cordwood, whose larynx was so ratcheted by gravel in a motorcycle accident she could only make deep growls and screeches—gave birth to a little girl while in another institution. The father was some orderly or security guard, no one knew who, maybe not even Mary herself. Eddie V. had undergone a lobotomy. Esther Feinstein had been administered so many rounds of electric shock therapy that she literally foamed at the mouth. I began to understand that everyone had a sad story. There was no end to them. Several months after I started working at the home, one of the veteran girls took a vacation, and I was shifted on the schedule to cover her usual assignment: five huge men, all needing daily tub baths. Most patients got two showers a week, which were easy enough. The shower chairs were toilet seats on metal frames with wheels. We simply transferred the nonambulatory patients to the chair, threw a sheet over them backward and wheeled them down the hall to the shower room. Tubs, on the other hand, required lifting a sometimes two-hundred-pound man—who might as well have been a bag of gravel—into the low-slung bath. Out was infinitely harder, of course, because the gravel bag would be slick with soap. One tub a day was manageable; five seemed impossible, especially since they all had to be finished before the lunch cart arrived. My first day on the new assignment, I worked like a dog and still only got three done on time. The nurse bringing Ned’s lunch found him still in bed, his gown soaked through and cold. I thought she was going to chew me out but instead she sent Berry, one of the more experienced nursing assistants, to help me after the trays had been cleared. Berry weighed maybe a hundred and ten pounds, but she lifted as efficiently as a backhoe. She helped me lower Ned into the tub and left me to the scrubbing, the lifting and lathering of his thick arms and legs. I knew I was supposed to wash Ned’s penis, but was squeamish about it. I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before: it looked like one of those cave fish that live without light or eyes. I swatted at it with my washcloth and called the bath done.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “So this guy,” I said, standing in the doorway of the living room. “François Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.” And that quieted them. I was after a Great Perhaps, and they knew as well as I did that I wasn’t going to find it with the likes of Will and Marie. I sat back down on the couch, between my mom and my dad, and my dad put his arm around me, and we stayed there like that, quiet on the couch together, for a long time, until it seemed okay to turn on the TV, and then we ate artichoke dip for dinner and watched the History Channel, and as going-away parties go, it certainly could have been worse.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  “Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger.” “Fear of Flying was a very, very important book to me,” Blume told Bust magazine in 1997. “I was becoming aware. My husband blamed it for my unhappiness—which is simplistic, to say the least.” Over the course of Jong’s novel, Wing comes to understand that her quest for passion—and the infamous “zipless fuck”—is part of a larger identity crisis about being an artist, a wife, and potentially a mother (she’s grappling with the decision of whether or not to have kids). “Was I going to be just a housewife who wrote in her spare time?” Wing asks herself at a crossroads between her husband and another man. “Was I going to keep passing up the adventures that were offered to me? Or was I going to make my fantasies and my life merge if only for once?” Wing chooses the latter, running off with Adrian Goodlove, another analyst who is the crude and domineering funhouse image of her rigid and respectful husband. The book’s title refers to Wing’s very real phobia—she’s terrified of air travel—but also the nagging suspicion that she’s always holding herself back. When she leaves with Adrian for a road trip across Europe, she feels, at least at first, like she’s finally taken flight. But as time wears on, Adrian’s shortcomings start to surface. He’s mostly impotent, for one thing. He’s also full of crap. When he leaves her without warning to go back to his wife and children, Wing finds herself alone in a hotel room in Paris, wide awake through a bout of insomnia and raking herself over the coals. What had she done to her life? “Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action,” she resolves as the night wears on. It was the first thing she’d ever done that directly defied her parental and cultural programming. By morning she understands that she’s always been afraid of growing up. “I was afraid of being a woman,” she says. “Afraid of all of the nonsense that went with it. Like being told that if I had babies, I’d never be an artist, like my mother’s bitterness, like my grandmother’s boring concentration on eating and excreting, like being asked by some dough-faced boy if I planned to be a secretary. A secretary!” In the end, she goes back to Bennett. After all, he’s kind, smart, and good in bed, and it isn’t his fault that the world makes it nearly impossible for women to be on their own. Isadora can only hope that he’ll live up to his surname and help her soar. Fear of Flying spoke to Judy, as did another feminist novel published in 1967, called Diary of a Mad Housewife .

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  For a few long moments more, you actually sail through the sky. All your childhood dreams come true, as for second after glorious second you are—before the chute opens and yanks you back to reality—almost convinced you can fly. When you feel something touch your outstretched fingers, you almost believe that one of the spangled, ducktailed figures on either side of you, connected in formation as you fall through space, could actually be Elvis. Maybe that's what it's all about. What Vegas has come to mean for chefs, for cooks, for gamblers, diners, for all of us who go there: While we may be rushing inexorably toward the hard realities of the ground, surely and inevitably arriving in the same place (unless our chute fails to deploy or we crap out, in which case we end up there sooner rather than later), for a few moments, or hours, or even days, Vegas convinces us we can stay aloft—forever. ARE YOU A CRIP OR A BLOOD? I just finished reading Canadian author Timothy Taylor's Stanley Park, a brilliant, if irritating, novel with a chef as hero. Taylor's protagonist breaks down the world of chefs into two camps: the Crips—transnationalists, for whom ingredients from faraway lands are an asset, people who cook without borders or limitations, constantly seeking innovative ways to combine the old with the new—and the Bloods, for whom terroir and a solid, rigorous connection to the immediate region and its seasons are an overriding concern. "Crips" would describe chefs like Norman Van Aken, Nobu Matsuhisa, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, guys who want the ingredient, at its best, wherever it might come from and however long it might have traveled, practitioners of "fusion." The Crip relies on his own talent, vision, and ability to wrestle ingredients into cooperation, hopefully breaking ground, revealing something new about ingredients that we may take for granted by pairing them with the exotic and unfamiliar. We have seen what the Crips are capable of at their best, and also what they can do at their worst, the terrible sameness of some of-the-moment Pacific Rim, Pan-Asian, and Nuevo Latino menus, in which chefs misuse Asian or South American ingredients with the single-minded enthusiasm of golden retrievers in heat, humping blindly and unproductively at your leg.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  One experience involved a caring person I met by chance. During my first year as a cult member, I was fundraising on a steamy summer day in Manhattan. I approached a man who must have been in his sixties, and asked if he wanted to buy some flowers. “What are you selling flowers for, young man?” he asked with a warm smile. “For Christian youth programs,” I answered, hoping I could sell him a dozen carnations. “My, my, you look very hot,” he said. “Yes, sir. But this cause is very important, so I don’t mind.” “How would you feel if I took you inside this coffee shop and bought you something cold to drink?” he asked. I thought, This guy is nice, but he has to buy some flowers; otherwise he won’t have a connection to Father. Then I remembered Jesus saying that anyone who gives water to a thirsty person is doing the will of God. “Just for five minutes,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “It will refresh you, so you’ll be able to sell even more flowers.” “Okay. Thank you very much.” We walked into the air-conditioned shop. It felt so good to be out of the sun. When we sat down at a table, he said, “So, tell me a little about yourself.” “Well, I grew up in a Jewish family in Queens.” “Oh, so you’re Jewish,” he said with a warm smile. “Me, too,” I thought that perhaps God had sent this person for me to “witness to” (a term we used for recruit). We had been instructed that while fundraising, we should never spend more than a couple of minutes with any one person. But since my main job was recruiting, and I had been sent out on Saturday to fundraise, maybe it was okay to spend a few extra minutes with him. In the end, I must have spent at least half an hour with him. He got me to do most of the talking. During that time I became incredibly homesick—not only for my family and friends, but for playing basketball, writing poetry and reading books. Before I left, he insisted that I call home and walked me to the phone. He put in the dime himself. I remember feeling that this man reminded me of my grandfather, someone I loved dearly. I didn’t have the willpower to refuse. Besides, it would look bad for the group if I refused to talk to my parents. I spoke with my mom for a few minutes. After that, I felt that I had to pry myself away from this man. My cult identity was strongly exerting itself. I started to feel guilty that I hadn’t been out raising money and allowing people to “pay indemnity” and connect themselves to the Messiah. But I was “spaced out” and couldn’t sell for the rest of the day.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  To own a piece of the city, to have something that was theirs, that no one could kick them out of on any pretext—that would be something. It might start a trend! If Charlie did it, other guys who could afford to would follow. He looked back up the block. No Charlie, no crowd of drunken revelers. This was as good a place as any to wait. Better than the empty apartment. He stepped closer to the sign, so he wouldn’t look like a creep. They could have parties where people gathered on the porch to smoke and talk, where they’d grab more beer from the kitchen and bring it out and sit right there on a big wooden swing. He wanted, suddenly, to scream for Charlie, to call into the city so loudly they’d all hear. He pushed his foot hard against the sidewalk and breathed through his nose. He looked at the beautiful house. Yale could memorize the real estate agent’s number—the last three digits were all twos—and call this week. And then this wouldn’t just be the night they didn’t go to Nico’s funeral, the night Yale felt so horrifically alone; it would be the night he found their house. He was getting cold. He walked back up Briar and up to the apartment. Everything was dark and still, but he checked the bed. Empty, the blue comforter still bunched on Charlie’s side. He wrote down the agent’s number before it fled his mind. It was seven o’clock, which explained his growling stomach. He should have filled up on abandoned hors d’oeuvres before he left. And suddenly he had a new theory: food poisoning. He’d been a little sick, hadn’t he? It could have hit everyone else harder, sent them carpooling to the hospital. It was the first reasonable story he’d come up with. He congratulated himself for not taking a deviled egg when they came by. He made a double cheese sandwich—three slices of provolone and three of cheddar, brown mustard, lettuce, onion, tomato, rye bread—and sat on the couch and bit in. This was a better version of what he’d lived on at Michigan, at the campus snack bar where burger toppings—including cheese—had been free. He’d stick two slices of bread in his backpack in the morning, then load them up at noon. He dialed Charlie’s mother. Teresa was from London—Charlie’s slightly faded accent magnified, in her, into something glorious—but she lived in San Diego now, drinking chardonnay and dating aging surfers. She said, “How are you!” And he knew from her lightness, her surprise, that Charlie hadn’t called her from a hospital or prison cell tonight. “Good, good. The new job is perfect.” It wasn’t unusual for Yale to call Teresa independent of Charlie. She was, as she knew, his only mother in any real sense of the word.

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  Don't get me wrong. I like free-range; it's almost always better tasting. Wild salmon is better than farmed salmon, and yes, the farmed stuff is a threat to overall quality. Free-range chickens taste better, and are less likely to contain E. coli bacteria. Free-range is no doubt nicer as well; whenever possible we should, by all means, let Bambi run free (before slitting his throat and yanking out his entrails). Since I serve mostly neurotic rich people in my restaurant, I can often afford to buy free-range and organic. I can respond to the seasons to a great extent. But at the end of the day, if I can find a genetically manipulated, irradiated tomato from the other side of the country that tastes better than an Italian vine-ripened one from Granny's backyard (not likely, but just suppose), even if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats, I'll probably serve it. It's how it tastes that counts. For instance: I like grain-fed beef. When talking about beef, I don't want some muscular, over-exercised animal with delusions of liberty providing the steaks. I want a docile, corn- and grain-fed jailhouse fatboy who has spent the latter part of his life standing in a lot doing nothing but eating, all that nice fat marbling rippling through the lean. If, as in the case of Kobe beef, some nice cattleman wants to give my steer regular rubdowns with sake (and the occasional hand job), all the better. The grass-fed Argentine stuff, shipped in a cryovac bag full of water and blood, tastes like monkey meat by comparison. "Does the product taste good?" should probably be the chef's primary concern. To insist, to demand, that all food be regional, seasonal, directly connected to time and place can—in the case of some of the more fervent advocates—invite the kind of return-to-the-soil thinking evocative of the Khmer Rouge. Not long ago, watching perhaps the greatest of the Blood chefs (a man with only the faintest and best-intentioned Crip tendencies), Thomas Keller, yanking fresh garlic and baby leeks out of the ground at a nearby farm in the Napa Valley, I felt a powerful, bittersweet frisson, a yearning for how things might, in the best of all possible worlds, be. On the other hand, standing in Tokyo's Tsukiji market, gaping at the daily spoils of Japan's relentless rape of the world's oceans, I thought: "Jesus! Look at all this incredible fish! Damn, that toro looks good! That monkfish liver is amazing! I want some." Fully conscious of the evil that men do in the name of food, I have a very hard time caring when confronted with an impeccably fresh piece of codfish.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  All of you were wrong; Camille’s going to be fine . I block out everyone’s input except my teachers’, knowing my only hopes of ever rescuing Rosie lay in my understanding of how the system works and getting respect from the people who work in it. A thousand times a day I repeat this to myself: College degree. BY THE TIME I turn sixteen during junior year, I’ve gotten a job at Rickel Home Center a few miles away from Addie and Pete’s. Until Sheryl takes a job at the register next to mine, the work is so boring that to make the time pass I talk to the customers in a British accent. Sometimes I walk all the way there, and other times I catch the bus that takes me a third of the way, then I walk the rest. Sometimes when they can, Addie or Pete will drop me off or my friends Erin and Tracey will give me a lift, now that they both have their permits. Of course, friends with cars present the opportunity for more interaction with boys, because now we’re able to go places unsupervised. Addie reminds me to focus on my studies, and I tell her there’s no need to be concerned. I’ve started dating a boy named Eddie . . . but despite the appearances I create for his sake, I have no real interest in bonding with him. First, while he’s worried about soccer practice and trying to get me alone to make a move, I’m more concerned about my studies and plotting out my next conversation with Cookie to see how Rosie’s really doing. Plus, I know what troubles boys can bring—the same troubles Cookie’s always getting herself into. So with Eddie, I let on like I’m invested, while also doing my best to control my tendency to cut and run when he gets too close. There’s a much more important man tugging at my heart: Paul Accerbi, who, as of this autumn, no longer appears in the Suffolk County phone book. For months after I notice his listing missing, I contemplate what to do. Finally, I rip out the page where his name used to be and study it on the annual February Disney World quest. While hidden away in the top bunk of the mobile home, I stare obsessively at the place where his name used to be . . . then something new jumps out at me: There’s an Accerbi in Lindenhurst, whose names sound familiar: Frank and Julia. How is this just now coming to me? I recall Cherie and Camille talking about an aunt Julie and an uncle Frank and the willow tree we would sit under with them. But with no phone on the camper, I can’t call my sisters to verify the memory. Cherie and Camille used to tell me stories about different places we lived when I was little, and the names they’d given them all.