Authors: Hortense Calisher
She sneaked a look at him. Never coarse enough for her? But surely the rape was mutual? Thinking back on how it was with her, she isn’t sure. Youth-sex, hot for immersion, and a young mind already in extremis, in its urge not to be eunuchoid. A matter of the spirit—with the sexual self conniving. Against her abiding fear that all her relationships would be with herself.
But the man beside her is still the mystery she raped. She could slice his throat to raw meat with her armed tongue, before he could tell her what he thinks.
Where’s she walking to? To the high edge of this riverbank, which here falls away in raw fissures and mesas for ants, down to the soggy pebbleline below. No one could build here; what’s he been saving it for?
Her ankles have swollen with the night’s heat; her buttocks are redprinted with weed. The pattern of my wife’s backside changes with the season and the sofa; I must assume a similar swell in her brain. Women and the moon were both oedematous—part of their charm. Stark naked—she’s gone behind a bush to pee.
He recalled how after Charles was born the contour of her back became as he could glimpse it now through the scrawny bush—fatally thickened from the outline of girl. And how this had frightened him, repelled him almost. For as he now knew, this was the most subtle sign of maternity; a woman could become nearly skeletal and still keep that contour. While by the time a faint prolapse in his own belly had occurred, it was age, not fatherhood.
Yet Charles has been accepted at Harvard and Oxford both—and hasn’t yet told her. Instead writing him—in the formal misery which keeps his son untouchable yet keeps them kin—that he can’t decide. “Of course Boston’s conveniently near Chessie’s school.” Then a paragraph down: “Would you mind if I went into medicine too, the mental side of it?” And finally the postscript stopper. “I think I understand what you might be hassling with, Dad. I’m reading William James’
Varieties of Religious Experience.
”
To be understood like that. Lightly, without moral suasion, by one’s own child. He felt the grace of fatherhood. His son’s heart, firmly transplanted on the pocket-ruin of his own.
Tears haggled for his face.
Relieving herself, she said goodbye to this beloved promontory, its nile weeds and crystal sky. A lookout, a lighthouse even, but conservationist to the end. Up here it all went into the chlorophyll, women like her included. Downriver her city tumbles heavenward, a Chartres of waste. But within it are all the trampoline hills, multi-leoparded. A language-thrill went through her—nonsexual. I never wanted to be ideal—only alive. Joy alone was never my thesis. She saw the winter city as she used to, its darkly scarlet innards—of people, sunsets, chickens—scattered on the stonegray streets. In those iceberg evenings which harshened down on many lines of troubled roof, could her life pursue some thesis, unfinished maybe, but always emancipating from the too pure arch of self? There will they let her be that—objective? Not a gender but a human animal rising?
She stared down at the clump of weed she’d wetted. “Called dock in the vernacular” the children’s flower-book said. “Otherwise
snakewort,
or
adder’s root
.” Once it was rumored here that someone had managed to grow a dafora, a plant from a warmer clime and poisonous; when it bloomed was why the woods smelled of shit and sirocco—threatening. Others said it was only a native mulberry dropping its tassels and pulp in some secret acre not yet built upon. There were no real crops here. Yet these mysteries are what she hopes to remember, hopes the children will, when they’re grown. Though from now on with them she must keep to the vernacular. They’ll have enough to bear without her language forcing them to bloom before their time.
She can smell herself steaming up from the shiny leaves. Dogs stunt a path that way. Afterwards turning their backs on their mess, their hindlegs scuffing. Trembling, she tore at a sparrowgrass bush, dropping fronds on the spot where she’d been. She knew the mess her language had made. All she’d meant to do was to carry her family with her, rung by rung, as the pulse of the world flooded her, lifting them along with her, bootstrap insight by insight—but always domestically—as was happening to her. All she’d meant to do was to characterize the world for them. She’d been forging it—her language. But once empowered, there’s no hiding it. At times the woods behind her house must fill with the smell of female dissenter, rank as a new menses. And with the odor of childbloom forced.
Peering through the bushes she saw he wasn’t watching her but the river. How Buddha-quiet he’d grown; that old tee-shirt might already be a monk’s singlet. With one holy darn. Ever-suggestible he is, yet hard. In all their children there’s some of that. Of him.
Be off then, Ray. Will I be the one to go back to the house?—I always am. Yes, leave me. To the self-pity I can never master.
She stole a look at her house. It’s always our house, whether we choose it or not. There you are, nanny-house. Still guarding those loving banditti, my children. Who’ll suck us dry if they have to, because they have to. Because they too are in thrall. To the flesh we’ve given them.
Stay, nanny. Hang on just a little while yet; I’m coming. One village to pass; then I’ll cross the road to you. And what’ll I do then?
She drew a long breath, lifting her. I’ll organize.
Her body’s wealed, scratched, swollen feverish and ever vulnerable. Its bare soles never harden sufficiently. Abusing it helps.
Let him dare laugh, she thought, emerging. He’s clothed.
She’s grinning down on him, half superior, half abject. But with the quick self-ridicule which always rescued her, she shrugged, sweeping a glance over herself—an actress throwing a line away. “This is the way it is, Ray. Without pearls.”
Without his pearls. Cheap hurts she can always inflict. But she can never steel herself to the big ones. Will that still do her in?
He can see her in that city flat he’ll do his best to pay for—maybe one near Royal’s hospital, and also convenient enough to her brother’s so that she can leave in nightly charge Maureen. Who’s suitable to leave, and in the daytime will sweep. In time will her mother find a job—in one of the talking disciplines? In order to become one of those women at her brother’s parties—those evening Statues of Liberty, with their hair in braids instead of spikes? Who more often than not, he’d observed, had a child at home to sweep.
And a string of pearls from the past, now and then wearable. For a couple of James’s black girls, lazily stretching their zebra necks and flower-toed feet in a party-corner, to laugh at.
“No, never trust your brother,” he said. “But I suppose you’ll go on seeing him.”
“My brother?” She smiled, flopping down beside him. Her hazel smile, big-eyed. She can’t help her innocent coloring. “He and I have a mutual friend. Who’s finally made me see what James is to me. Has always been. James is the way I know my own force.” She snapped her fingers, an odd gesture in a naked woman. But that appeared to be the end of James. It would take some odd gestures, that’s for sure—to be rid of him.
“The city’s deep, Lexie. Deep.” He studied the tangling shoreline of the river; he should have known that sooner or later it would lead her there. The river was her lifeline, while she was here.
“Deep?” She flung her exalted, alto laugh at him. “I’m out of my depth—and I mean to stay there.”
He retreated. He knows her depth.
She sneaked a look at his watch, still there on the ground. Soon men will be standing at every river street-corner, with their watches strapped to their wrists. Not a one of them on this road was born here. Ah how good it was to know an environment—any—but in your very grain, dusting your brain dark forever, searing your heart in tannic light. The city’s not deep, only multiple. It might look like a clutch of verticals aiming at God but its history was always horizontalizing, all connection and disconnection going on at once. There I can travel out from what I am, and no one the wiser—except everyone. Maybe to be what I am, without benefit of where? No—that’s poetry.
She wondered what sex Tom Plaut’s baby had been. And Mrs. Plaut’s. Women don’t live by images alone, Tom; perhaps by now he knows. But Plaut’s language was the public one the minute he was born. In the eyes of the world he and it have a continuity of scrutiny, of an altogether different scale. Painful to him at times maybe, but marvelous—to all those who have only voice.
I know that to some I’m all voice; maybe that’s why.
Here’s Ray, who has almost none. And married her for it. “The coloratura’s husband,” James said scathing behind Ray’s back once. And Charles rushed at him.
Listen, all of you. Even Dad, whom I haven’t much thought of in a long time. All of you with whom I’ve had argument. That was Girlbud. This is Lexie speaking. To herself:
Lexie. If a language is so private it makes people stare—then make it public. Make it a deed.
Could I do that, she thought, awed. In some small station of life—which might get to be an outpost—could I be workhorse to an idea? Not a proclamation. Or even a treatise. A little manual of my own. On how it keeps with us. One person’s manifest—on keeping on.
Awareness—yes, she lives for it. But not like Charlie’s philosophers, under world-mandate. Because she has to. Hers being a special case of it, which the world finds ungraspable. She’d have to define it her self—and still not fall in love with it. Only to end up circling that tunnel-of-self love which the world called “sensibility,” and was particularly happy to attach to the awakenings of her kind.
She wonders humbly whether she will have to be an intellectual.
He’s been watching her. Hunched there—the way rebels are? No—though she may think so. In the way of those patients who, after long cures, are signed out. He’s seen it often in those discharged by rule in wheelchairs even if they can walk—this sudden adoration at the door. There’s one scratch on her breast should be seen to.
“Lexie.” His hand touched hers, pressed on its own privates. “Lexie—there’s still time.” To go back across the road and be normal again. Back into the house, both of us.
“Oh, there’s time,
time
—and thank God for it. Thank you for reminding me.” Ray—thank you for many things.” Her face shone. Out that door. He could tell from her voice. “So wait with me, if you want to.” Her eye flicked once-over him. A wife with her spouse, entering some fete of an importance both are unaccustomed to. “Anyway you want to.”
So they wait, each trailing generosities which fade and return.
There’s a barge on the river now, traveling as they always did, south.
“Look at it.” He pointed angrily. “Piled high with slag. What can the city want with it?”
“They put out to sea.” Her hand clasped her mouth. “All that charnel. That I used to know about. I know none of it anymore. Nothing.”
“Out to sea. To burn it. Or to dump.”
She showed her teeth. “I may want to know damnation too. It’s my right.”
The trilling of the birds began again, that sound which always seemed to her to speak the one road, the true path, when all it meant was that summer—or winter—was done. The house-of-cloud is gone. Gone in like a moon. All the while, it was her house.
Shuddering, she bowed her head. Whatever she is has come about because she sees herself as the irrationally mute half of things. As they see her. So that when she does speak, she screams.
And still she waited, for him or one of them or all of them, every cell in her screaming to be found—to be found tragic, equal, necessary. In equal part.
What’s he whispering?
“It’s like being in the stocks, out here. Isn’t it. Like being put in the stocks.” With each urging word his hands find a purchase on her, clenching her thigh, buttock, abdomen as if she’s cold putty he’s molding. Her neck—in iron hands she’d never felt before. Her hair. “That why you were lying here?” The whisper tongued her ear. Sank by an undisclosed channel into her breast. “Look up there then, Lex. Look.”
No. She knew what he wanted her to see. Ancient wooden stocks, once in the village square, were now preserved in the vestry of the Dutch Reformed Church. Where eight-year-old Chess, malingering after Sunday School, once got herself caught in them. After everyone had gone. No, don’t look up there. Bury your head deep.
Nowhere to put it, except her own fundament. This was why women wore skirts.
Up there. In the bay-window. The figure that’s always there. The girl who’s always cold, and never feels it. The blot-head. Looking down at them.
Feel cold, Mother? Stupidly bare? In the world of those who aren’t you and me, who pull the wool over themselves? What you harbor against little Roy, Mother—that cool tinkle of self-confessed guilt—that’s nothing. Against this other monstrous tenderness which dooms me. To be wombed again with you. Your other monster child.
Dig your fingers into the ground, Lexie. As night beyond night you’ve dug them into pillow, bed, Ray’s breast—against the undertow urge to rush in and put your arms around the girl up there for keeps—to be as murderously sick. To say: Eat me—for putting you into the world with your angry hunger for me. Eat. My nipple is still in your mouth. My brain is your brain. That double counterpart. If we could, we would bed with it. Like sister children, running away. To each other’s wombs.
The figure was gone.
Yes, the stocks. Male and female used to be paired there together. As if their sins could ever be the same, or their damnations either.
His hands worked against themselves, kneading. Water’d done nothing for the slick on them. He held them out to her mutely. Hers were strong with housecraft. Clasping them over his she held their joined hands quiet. “What, what—?” she crooned, absently gentle, as to a child. “Something on them, eh? What, what?”
He bent over that fourhanded fist. Mutual blame. It must be what we yearn to rest from in the afterlife. Or in foreign wards, or vacantly public tasks.
“Parental slime.”
He saw that her body had aged overnight; it had already begun to hoard up their guilt for them. What overpowered a woman in herself, what finally overpowered the men who loved them, was so curiously the same. They interpose their bodies between themselves and all events. He pities her, this lost cohabitant of his planet. With the pity one has for foreigners, in one’s native place. It’s what Hector and Isaac will feel toward him.