Women and Men (27 page)

Father, bother,

Mother, brother,

Tune up the absent bike.

In sharing inde-

Pendences give

Only what you like.

That neatly folded piece of paper was beside the tall white book down at the end of the diet shelf next to a speaker. She had inspired a poem. She had written off to California to a place where, with life credits alone in this year of 1976 in these United States, you could get a Ph.D. for fifteen hundred dollars. Cliff asked, In what? mucus research?

The phone rang in two places and the service picked up. Vibrators lay like mikes or hair-dryers at two far strategic corners of her Body Room plugged in beside softly overflowing clusters of brown, orange, purple, and gold cushions and ceramic trays she had made—in another kind of workshop once, and painted rainbow vaginas on—which held carved pipes of wax or wood, double-ended for mutual toking, a cock’s peeled bulb, a cunt’s deepish flower, the chimney-bowl midway between.

Henceforth, she would have one day a week without talking, and this might be more helpful and cleansing than being off the weed. Push Rewind, let ‘er rip, push Stop, push Play, push Stop, push Rewind: she had found her place, remembering the day Cliff drove her to the college in New Jersey at noon and had reduced her spiel to his verses at suppertime—he said her body was what had put over her speech, pelvis power, those little abrupt struts and shuffles of the alligator boots—she had never had an audience of fifteen hundred! It was a university and they had laughed, they had loved her. And in this carpeted room where she now got a very odd division of temperature between outside and inside like swallowing ice cream and throw in a ‘frigerated thermometer up behind, steely speculum up her front, she had said to Cliff and Maureen that talking to that audience was fucking them, ‘cause that was what you did to an audience.

And it came back to her, as the curious passage from last night began to replay, and she thought she needed an enema or a joint, she had a little hash in the fridge—a break-through hash-enema she realized she had already discussed with Maureen—it came back to her that Cliff had answered, "You can say that again, Grace," while Maureen Baby’s Breath, thinking of God knows what—maybe what she called the "proof of reincarnation" in her own Grace Kimball—maybe currents of carrot juice freed of pulp, messengering with overwhelming news a city of mucus hawked up from the collective throat brain, for Maureen was a scientist, a new
woman-kind
of scientist sweetly smiling—
and
now to her leader saying, "Right on," though she had not attended the audience fuck at the New Jersey college.

So Grace with all this on her mind surrounded by
TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER,
didn’t think until quite a while after the foreign woman Clara had come and gone, that Clara had not been announced by the doorman Manuel on the intercom.

Father, bother,

Mother, brother,

Tune up the absent bike.

In sharing inde-

Pendences give

Only what you like.

TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER. It wound on . . .

My mother. Right? O.K. My mother. She was always there, you know? she was always getting
ready
to sit down [laughter], getting heavier and heavier but, in my insane memory of it you know, always not quite making it down into that chair, that straight chair that made her look as if she was taking a two-minute breather on
our
time not hers but it was
hers
[laughter] a two-minute breather from dusting the other chairs she didn’t sit in, if she ever got her behind down onto it, no arms—because y’know,
as
she’s sitting down she’s asking can she get someone something to eat. [laughter] Well, not if it’s any bother, Mother (I think that’s my Dad speaking); not if it’s any bother, Mother. Oh
it’s
no bother, [laughter] Sure? Sure. Have you been there, have you been there? [applause drowns out
Yes yes yes yes]
Where
was
I? [an enthusiastic wisecrack from audience not quite audible] Where was I? Jerking off under the covers? Don’t kid yourself, I didn’t know where it was [laughter] and anyway I’m saving
that
secret, guilty pleasure for the middle of the marriage-night ten or fifteen years after this little family scene [laughter] that I’m giving you which you recognize even though the North Shore of Long Island is a long way from a little American city in the middle of a cornfield, [laughter] Where
was
I? Talking pedal pushers—remember those below-the-knee pants that exposed the calves, the shins, a supposedly feminine neither here-nor-there? [laughter] And I’m talking about my mother, thinking about my father [hush], thinking at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that this is the way people live, right?, this is right and normal, O.K.?, this is my working model, the four of us, mother, father, brother, myself junked out on Habit Patterns, staying on instead of getting off, and
that’s
staying power for you. Like after five beers my father saying I think I’ll have a drink now. Or like Dad going up to bed an hour before Mama because Mama wants a chance to read the paper: wait! question! How many people admire their mothers? [silence, applause, drifting into some kind of laughter] How many I ask you? and why is that? Is it that she was the one who said, . . .
No
bother. Whatever happened to Mama? and is she still on your back because guilt perpetuates itself? overweight, non-orgasmic, creaking with varicose pains from the new linoleum in the kitchen clear up to her locked pelvis. Well, I got a knapsack to keep my hands free, and I got a bike so I can skip cabs that the man can’t fix if he knew what was under the hood, which he doesn’t, he doesn’t dare think what Henry Ford and Co. put under there, and that’s why he gets uptight when he loves his car, you live with him and you know, right? [applause, "Right!"] But he hates it and he pours your money into it that you never saw for your housekeeping except as an allowance you get from his real paycheck no matter if it’s out of a nice unspoken balanced joint account or like Dad doling it out on Fridays. [Pause, in which nothing is heard] But you never know what those men are doing under your hood [a loud lone laugh cuts short followed by a burst of brief laughter] until you get the bill and
then
you know [titters], so when a friend tells me he’s getting his car a tune-up and then they find problems they’ve got to work on I am glad to know every part of my bike because this way I can put it out of my mind like when I hit the street keeping my hands free by carrying a knapsack, you know?, full of sex-positive thoughts [laughter, applause], knowing every part of your body whatever your male gynecologist tries to lay on you in a little bottle that’s half full of cotton or a cold-handed metal speculum that feels like a computerized abortion when you could do it yourself with good old American plastic [applause, cheering, interrupted by someone calling something], the smallest example of sharing information, like that your doctor doesn’t know any more than you and can’t begin to know your body like you do even if you let him try. Flee, my dears, you don’t have to explain to him, just get your ass out of his office, it’s your ass and it will fly if you let it. Yes, dear sisters and brothers of the Goddess [laughter, cheering] the smallest example of sharing information in order to belong to yourself. To learn how to love your body. Friend left her husband, went to a room she rented and took a nap, woke up suicidal—we could have told her, Recharge with meditation or yoga, sleep is too much like sleeping it
off’.
Know what goes on in you. Have you ever gotten off on an enema? Sometimes the sharing is a simple comparing of notes to find out that you aren’t alone [applause, prolonged], you’re not the only woman in your apartment building in 1976 who doesn’t know quite how to share with others the absence—

"Absence"—what she had gotten wrong recalling Cliffs poem. Same old material but unrehearsed: on a fresh track but you’re the same person: track to one side of where she’d been: or a new person on an old track. As the door buzzed, she thought she was content for Maureen to believe in reincarnation, but maybe the whole thing might be updated. She got up, pressing Play, the old stuff suddenly word for word the same, an external memory; "to share with others the absence" started to follow her to the door:
bullshit,
she heard herself feel: the voice telling her back her story snuck up behind her, and "absence" was alone there and all the words fell away from it . . .

absence you can’t quite put your finger on [a pause, a silence] the fact, the human fact that you can’t quite remember when you had an orgasm and you assume you don’t need to because you can get off on feeling a little guilty you know about not wanting to screw last night, then angry over feeling guilty, then confused, which is a good feminine state to be in when he walks in the door and you sweep everything under the mat [laughter], guilt, did I say? guilt over taking a nap after lunch, and the guilt is your gift to yourself to get over feeling not guilty [laughter, applause], of being, O.K., not quite there when you were in the car with your two kids and your certified husband or of not, you know, doing anything worth spending all day today—Where’d it go? Today is missing. Because you’re busy and your loved ones need you and you’re constipated and have lower back pains to pity yourself for, and if anyone asks you, it’s no bother to carry this guilt, it gets to be like two-piece outfits the stores choose for you, no bother, but I mean really what do you have to give anyone unless it’s your independent self, and that could please even your family—

She had run back to turn off the voice and heard her mother’s vacuum running, her mother who, in incredible shape for her age, had let go of widowhood and came up sex positive, though basically anti-enema-cleansing. Grace was in the carpeted hall, a pair of sweatpants on one of the cunt-hooks; and just as she had known that the word
family
was the word that went with
bike
in Cliff’s verses, family bike not absent bike, she had opened the door to a half-smiling woman in a green sweater and a tartan skirt who couldn’t speak when she saw Grace all there in front of her and to whom Grace said, "Is it about the women’s workshops?" So the day’s periodic cluster had sent Grace away a couple of hours early to collect her bike so as to wheel her back on a fresh track as close to where she had already been as the cool, gray-haired, heavy set man was surprised to recognize her (and kept from looking her in the eye).

A track as close to where she had already been as the man with the curved look was surprised to recognize her.

Thinking not hers: then due to the Goddess, who said,
Never argue: only assert.
Whose voice is not the voice charging a very special cone of her body-mind with the cluster heats of convergence, but it’s the Goddess who gave her knowledge of the two cones making up her Mind-Body, so she can just about identify this voice—she’s already told her story to it in future though there
is
no future—familiar voice with a difference which is a lot of Space among the words, to breathe, lay back into: so she finds, like waking, a new Her evolved through all this work she has done on herself for so long. So when Sue’s teenage son Larry the expert on poison gas and chess listened with downright affection to her interpret earlier remarks by Maureen on reincarnation groping to tell the new kind that was coming into existence, Larry said he did not think there
was
a future but asked—
asked
—if what she would be reincarnated into wasn’t already
in
her—
into
her, he added. Girls aren’t used to doing all
this
kind of work on themselves, she said, feeling she was the same old person she had always been in her eyes and lips and hope.

"Girls," her brother said, out of breath putting down a half-drunk quart bottle of milk on the table beside a yellow mixing bowl, "always think you’re looking at them."

"They want you to look at them," said her father from the living room, huskily, absent-mindedly.

"Only if they like you," said her mother from the screened back porch where she had been humming—as if of how newbaked bread smelled like sweetened ironing.

"Maybe they want to be left alone sometimes," Grace said to all of them and wanted to get away at least to her room upstairs, at least to the bathroom to smile in all possible ways in the mirror; she heard the cushions of her father’s leather chair crack and she felt his body rising and unbending out there in the living room in a small city in the middle of the cornfield, to come to her mother’s proud icebox and "steal" a beer—who knew, as Grace’s mother said, where his bread was buttered even if he was apt to knock the toothpaste into the toilet bowl on a bad night and leave it there faraway.

"He kissed you at the train station a little wetly when you left for New York, and you never looked back," Maureen said: maybe at five
P.M.
for a quick rap or at eight on the far side of the salad bowl fingering the sprouts and green leaves and flowerets of cauliflower or living bright orange trails peeled lengthwise from the inner carrot—or at midnight or three
A.M.
when Grace worked. And " Right on," was what Grace said, as if she were Maureen, but had told many listeners many times. Told them that that particular trip of hers signaled by the corsage on the lapel of the suit was almost less toward professional school and career than toward marriage kept quite as secret from herself as from the parties involved in those old
Life
magazine specials,
"Life
Goes To An Elopement," although her unavoidable destiny with a smart, reasonably hard-drinking salesman named Lou three or four years later was just as much with
others
as well—her
family
and Lou’s so simply and smoothly swinging golfer
father;
and the public rendezvous, the nuptials, though only two days long back at the bride’s home nineteen hundred miles from New York, was carried off jovially—a little history in bright clothing—and, for a while that then lasted, New York was a break you joined yourself across so oppositely to its noisy ways that it burst into silence like terrific photographs.