On Keeping Women (11 page)

Silence.

“I shouldn’t have said it to him. Or about dirt—why did I say that? I always transliterate.” But at least she hasn’t blamed it on the absence of Ray.

“No, you were wonderful; trans-what?
—
you do, huh?; whatever that means, yes you were Lexie; honey, who knows better about dirt than us; yes, she must be talented; haha, is labor illness yet; is motherhood dirt.”

Brows knitted, mouths with watermelon grins, they rock her on a solidarity that rests her like an old lap. Early approval, feminine penny-candy-approval which smells lineny too—the whole calyx of a household opening to a child at the bottom of it—of mothers, though I had only one, of sisters, though I had none, and from everybody’s gaggle of aunts.

She looks at the class. Singly, I don’t much like any of them, except Jean who is gone. Together, they’ve almost made me cry. And feel basking-strong. Deceptively strong.

Across the ocean Ray floats, a three-letter ripple, or one of the tiny, bobbing buoys we kids used to tie on our fishing-lines when we left them at the pier; taught my river-kids to do the same. When a man like Ray feels male approval, or any of them do, what do they smell nostalgically—a baseball cigar?

He’ll be coming home, a cipher, but the relationship still large. To be dealt with. As we deal.

Staring at her classmates, her treacherous mind moves further. Our days-in-town, yours and mine; oh yes, we transliterate bloody well. From female to personal, what’s the difference? My other day in town, did I assert the personal, or the female? What is the difference? Oh yes, we Glorianas transliterate well. And is this treason: All her relationships with men, with a man—have they been with herself?

Elaine shifts the silence. A generous sigh. “So we can’t huh. Ask for his dismissal. Not with a baby coming on. And no medical plan.”

From the rear, their horsegirl spoke up, eyes narrowed at all of them, or beyond.

“Siccum!” she said.

Driving home, the winding parkway perspectives send Lexie past the college. Though she’ll miss it, she knows she’s not going back. To that class where all the women are trying on life like a new hat. Except for Elaine, who already has one.

I, Lexie, won’t go anywhere cloistered for women only. There must be an even deeper strength than that to strike out for. I don’t need to be a nun to know what the cloister is like. Though cloisters of women are warming and I’ve spent many heartfelt hours there, what is there about such cloisters that sends us back to the niggling detail? Or keeps us circling there. Along with a consciousness—submerged as the kind of background music only musicians can’t tolerate—of gently closed doors.

And I won’t go back to the city as if to a man. Nor even as if I were one. The erogenous zone, and that freedom-valve which opens hungrily in the flesh and closes again—I must disentangle them; they’re not the same.

Since Day, she hasn’t had a man, or a man hasn’t had her. She has resolved not to masturbate—that deadbeat flogging which leaves her doubly alone. Even when the monthly butterfly pulses jump in all her veins, when her dreams are wet with orgasmic pools and her thighs wake, open enough to receive one of the stele from Stonehenge, the resolve has been kept.

She smiled, leaning away lightly from the steering-wheel. The air had that first poached clarity before the lion-must of summer coarsened it; the breezes were finicky but no longer serious. And I have my jokes back.

At the same moment, she’s thrust back into those adolescent days of similar weather when, stalking the parks and museums, lone and exalted, there had beat in her a pulse almost of knighthood—toward the possibilities of life. Under the downy veil of womansweat that is her body now, she still hears it, beating light. Happiness is androgynous then?—what a surprise.

When she got home, she stared longer than usual at her house. Strictly, it had two towers, one a sort of leftover gambrel somebody gave up on, to the rear of the real one. Any way you look at it, architecturally or not, an ambivalent house. On a narrow road, but the view all river. Small frontally, but with wings added for its second century. The rear kitchen looked directly into the base of the hill, which hid all sunsets; above it, the jutting back-bedrooms attach to the hill itself.

After supper that night, she walked up the back hill. From the houses here—all facing the east, at the bottom of a ridge which hides the west from them—you could see only dawns, which required either gumption or agony. To see the end-of-day colors, as in the vases of that name, you had to climb up here through what once had been a formal garden, gone now to briar but sparking here and there with old bulbs, iris and daffodil, even whose blooms were stunted antique.

Tonight there’s a sunset like a centrifuge, sucking the world into a golden pantheon.

Down in the real garden, Charles, with golddust on his face, is training the wisteria up. In the bedroom that juts north with a small bay, she can see Chess sitting like a figurehead, against a background of the lilac-brown wallpaper, patterned like calico, which Chess herself had spent a month pasting on so accurately into the room’s gabled crannies, all help refused. The same paper to which—the minute she saw their proud admiring faces—she’d taken a marking-pencil to, in gravenings of red scrawled everywhere. Behind which barrier she’d then drawn a rear rank of line-figures, outlandishly tall—as she considers herself to be—with black blotheads.

It has unsettling power, that frieze, and a certain mad taste. What’ll happen though, when we don’t have a house where Chess can scrawl like that, can sit like that, where we can check on her? When we don’t have a house?

Maureen’ll be in the kitchen now; there are kitchens everywhere. Royal, still smug after the dentist’s, is out here, watching Charles. With his jaw swollen, how much Royal resembles his Uncle James.

Who is presently in—Kabul, is it? Or Passawatomie, New Jersey? James enjoys returning from the former as if he’s been no farther or foreigner than to the latter. And he can return from some local township he’s been dissecting as if he’d found it to be the tundra, the veldt, the bush, with habits to suit. “Double-breasted chickens, they eat—” James’s supermarket shopping is done for him “—and pizza-to-go, in which every square inch or so you can find a human hair.” While Kabul will of course have a hospital to make his own medical center blush.

There’s a well-known freedom in not having one’s males alongside. Does she think differently then? Like eating a meal, absently, which hasn’t been cooked for anyone else. Who’ll set down the housewife’s true anthropology? Human hair by the yard, brother, and all our turds piled high as copra.

Now why must she think that, when the night air is lensing in like a benediction, and the children’s voices haunt in and out of it, her chorale? They’re calling her. They think she is inside the house. A sense of herself, the dark figure without, terrorizes her. She’s terrified of her power, that’s it. But like any tyrant, uses it. What if all her relationship with the children—has been for herself?

Later that night before going to bed, she doesn’t stand as usual looking out from her ledge. Never again; all ego is there. Instead, she goes down the hall to a little backporch off an unused bedroom, and stands looking out into the black hill. “What do you think—” she breathes, “—am I talented?”

No poems come. But she sleeps well.

All that next week, she roamed her own patterns, mentally marking them for scrutiny in study-reverie where she’s both the anthropologist’s subject, and the anthropologist. Soon finding that all these conscious observations had long since been recorded, in that umber part of herself which had had nothing verbal to serve it.

For how many years has she been alternately amused, depressed, startled?—to find herself between breakfast and lunch moved from attic to basement, from object to intention, from water to fire to food and to washingstarch, on an assemblyline scarcely willed, but moving as gravely as one’s blood-rhythm, beneath all complaint, beneath even a vow. Suspended between past meals, present dirt and the moment’s stop-go, she gathers the leftovers of day and twines them for tomorrow’s stockpot. Greasing the seasons, she’s opening the attic vent to let the wasps blunt their way to spring; she’s down in the laundry gently pairing the mittens for snow. Outside the windows of her small centrist system, the arterial world can only lap; meaning brims here, but must wait. She is in the great architectonic of the task; her movements make a drapery through the house. A fugue invisible. Clotted strong with necessity.

What is it, though, to move through the lives of children? Under their helplessly imperial gaze setting out her store of trash fact. Whisking the soiled napkin of somebody’s puberty from the bathroom bin, is she redeemed? To drift toward the creation of cake? For suppers which are never the last. At home parties, like all the other daylong preparers, she serves up her own flesh—in the salmon’s skeleton already dissected plain by her own day-dreaming, long before the guests get to it.

I the anthropologist saw this with my own eyes. When the woman served us broth, it was cups of reverie she was serving. This webby stuff exudes from them day and night, tripping their conversation, wrapping the mind. The headmen are aware of its force but consider it an inert one, best dealt with privately, but not in their own daydreams. Which are all of the public street, the council-hall and the granary. One of the women, shyly letting me examine a bit of her web, told me that some of the more rebellious or daring or “lost ones” made poems of it. ‘But we know these are not the real poems, even for us. The real ones are outside.’ When we asked where was outside, she smiled and indicated the window. It is considered among them that when they themselves cross that barrier, which they do endlessly in their own way, they are however entirely different people compared to the men, who in so doing remain whole. She would not tell us what was meant by ‘lost.’

And all this I saw myself, in the village of Ys.

“Ma. The telephone.”

And how come she’s here, bending over the garbage-pail on the morning backsteps, with Royal, the last to leave because his school is nearer, calling that out to her? When only a moment ago she was standing on the evening hillside?

Addenda: After the night, the women say—which is spent lying with the mouth shaped for kisses sometimes received, sometimes not—and after the family is packed off in the various chutes which transport them to the outside—the women find it their duty to “weave the village together again” as they say. Which is done by means of holes poked through from housewall to housewall, with wires then inserted. It is an affecting sight, as one wanders from house to house, to see them, each one alone, but joined to another by means of this telephonic thread, and dutifully weaving, each with her mouth still pursed or pouting, the eyes here wistful, here gossip-greedy, but always sororal, the mouth always pressed close to the hole for its obligatory music, thrilling its birdsong. When I asked one of them if they consider this done from duty or from necessity she shrank from me, as some natives do when first they see the photograph. It is possible that just as birds gulp air with song, this matutinal urge is a physical one; perhaps the shape of their mouths, still puckered from the night, requires it.

And all this I myself saw, in the village of Ys. Where lives the lost tribe.

And all this time she performs her household duties well.

And the village hadn’t forgotten her. Lexie. Would she like to substitute, a voice asks, for the editor’s assistant on the county newspaper, which since time out of mind has been published in the next town north? “Dorothy Haber, his girl Friday—you’ve seen her around, grizzled blond about sixty—she’s going in for a hysterectomy. Insists she’ll be back at her desk in three weeks. Afraid of her job with old Nutcracker, I guess. But it would help spell you until Ray comes back, wouldn’t it?”

It would. Should she be surprised that the voice knew this, and all its implications, probably? Not as an anthropologist. As herself, she was out of her mind—the webbed part of it—with excitement over what a newspaper implied. Although she knows the County News’ fussy cubicles and faded staff, from taking an item there now and then—it may be a ship in disguise.

Nutcracker’s face is an indented old-man-in-the-moon’s, with wens to complete the crescent at forehead and chin. His newspaper, inherited from his father twenty years ago when he was perhaps not yet thirty himself, still services roughly the same half-dozen towns, some in the center-county already gone from farm sprawl to industry during his tenure, others half-obliterated by state roads. One town, on the river below hers, had been a mill-town since the eighteen-twenties, and lustily remains so. To the north, a few hilly parcels bordering the state parkland are still privately owned, and like her own village-strip are suburban in scale but resisting in temperament. The county takes for granted that in its own hilly outland and riverbank, where artists secrete and professionals follow after, is where its true exoticisms lie. Its terrain still makes its visions. And she’ll learn that this man, who pulls his short, bony length up from his desk to greet her with a curious effusion, almost a bow, is as intent on preserving these as if they too are part of his inheritance.

“Ah yes—” he says, “—Mrs. Doctor.” Giving a courtly sweep to the syllables, and to herself a character. In her brief stay, she’ll learn that he does this for all women. Of him she knows only that he has a wife, a homebody in the old style, who makes rag-dolls, prettily sewn of bright patches, which are sold in the local shops; Maureen and Chessie had them once.

“So here you are.” He has the sharp, chiding newsroom voice she expected. In the cubicles behind him, whose occupants she can’t see, there’s a sudden, owlish silence. Paperclips stop rattling. The smell of mucilage is rank.

“Ah yes,” he says. “From Grand River. The village of
un
natural acts. On which you and I, Mrs., will be in confidence.”

He must do this with each newcomer. Rating them as he does her—person, geography and news possibility—in a glance. His regular staff correspondents, she’ll find, bring in items like eggs to market, brown or white, or bloodspotted. He nicknames their territories as if these were landed estates complete with nobles and serfs, instead of towns ten miles from one another, and the farthest of them no more than forty miles from New York. “That’s
Orthodoxtown.
Dutch, once. Patroons, and ‘mine hosts.’ After that, petty shops. Now it’s those graveyard shopping-malls. Retired police detectives live there now, and city firemen. Still the same politics.” Or—“Torporsville. Inbred from mental retards who were planted in couples and given the ground, in the eighteen-eighties. Still use outhouse manure, win all the flowershows—but don’t eat their cabbages ’less you wash them with permanganate. Nary a murder there, Missus. But sometimes a dear little
bébé
with one eye.” His language is contrary, mixed—sometimes even with Latin, or with a country accent hanging among other cultivations like a scarecrow in a conservatory.