On Keeping Women (40 page)

Plus a head. In the bloody trunk of the neck, the arteries, clamped, are now waiting. Surpliced arms reach for the head—his. Sister Isaac, Sister Judas, attaches it.

He’s grinning. Or appears to be. Because she’s on all fours, crawling toward events? Not waiting for them to come upon her?

She stands erect. A dinosaur, in the act of extinction, looking round itself for the last time. The homely lines of river, road and hill are already a landscape printed on the page, untouchable.

So this was Eden. And that is why I am here on the riverbank. I am the rib, leaving it. Be aware—and beware. For a rib may magic itself into anything, to while away the long hours of being a rib.

These are her jokes. Will they wheedle her away from that ultimate seriousness in which she’s the full half of humankind? She’ll have to chance it. What she’ll be up against is the sweet-simple scripture hardening in Everyman’s arteries from the beginning. The exquisite satire embodied in all Edens will always be at her expense.

And here’s the bus, bearing down on them.

Ah Eden, my village. She stretches luxuriously for it, showing the full dimple of herself. Ruined, yes ruined. But only for the suburbs.

He’s not grinning. What he wants to do, he hasn’t been given the face for.

Lexie. Scream for us.

Ah. Ahhhhhhhhh. I give birth to them. The women. Him. All. Awareness—it’s the unnatural, natural act.

And now—I biggen. I recover, from confinement.

But—how to tell the story? Of how people stammer in and out of the dark. In the fiery glades of the families. Into the hairy Everglades of nights that pass into history—knowingly. How to tell the story that’s always about to begin?

In the end, Ray took off his shirt. But left on his shorts. So that those who passed would know this was not Eden.

So we sat. The world was all before us.

Then the green latch opens.

Faces yearn in on us.

Time was. Time is.

And the bus passes.

But what has she baubling her ears, hung twinkling in the septum of her nose, indented gemdeep in the forehead—and rubying the warm navel, and sparkling onyx between the legs, in the cleft blur of hair?

It is her body that shines, an illuminated story—in every pore, hanging in cell-song, that sad jewel, Joy.

Hortense Calisher (1911–2009) was born in New York City. The daughter of a young German-Jewish immigrant mother and a somewhat older Jewish father from Virginia, she graduated from Barnard College in 1932 and worked as a sales clerk before marrying and moving to Nyack, New York, to raise her family. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled
In the Absence of Angels
, appeared in 1951. She went on to publish two dozen more works of fiction and memoir, writing into her nineties. A past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, the worldwide association of writers, she was a National Book Award finalist three times, won an O. Henry Award for “The Night Club in the Woods” and the 1986 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for
The Bobby Soxer
, and was awarded Guggenheim Fellowships in 1952 and 1955.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1977 by Hortense Calisher

Cover design by Kelly Parr

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