Determined not to let the girl ruin their day, the sisters ignored her sullen silence to chatter and gossip and praise the food, making the meal another orgy of delight. They were so saturated with good feeling that they sent the servants off (heaped with Christmas gifts, cookies, and bottles of wine) as soon as they had served the dessert—a real gift, since much cleaning up remained to be done. But they said they would do it themselves—after a brisk walk through the woods to burn off some calories. Marie-Laure, who had not eaten enough to need to walk it off, stayed behind. She lay on her bed smoking, wearing earphones and listening to rock tapes, staring at the ceiling. Bundling into heavy coats, the sisters did not mention her, but they were relieved at her absence. They walked for a long time in silence. When they began to speak, their voices seemed to reverberate in the evening light. Serenely they returned to clean up the kitchen with music on the tape deck, a little singing, a little dancing, and some hilariously incompetent tap dancing. And the work went fast enough with four of them, so who can say when it was, what it was that turned things, what exploded a perfect day into fragments that had not even seemed to exist within it.
Maybe there can’t be any perfect days, Ronnie thought later.
Maybe it was when they were walking in the woods and Mary began to compare the beauties and pleasures of Islamic art, the Alhambra in particular, with the great Christian cathedrals.
“They were of course brilliant mathematicians, those old Moors, and their craftspeople were superb, but the way they
used
light, drew it in, used shade for coolness, the way they built everything—gardens, fountains, pavilions—to celebrate the sensuous pleasure of the created world, it all seems to me so much more humane and
moral
than the austere straining against created nature that you find in the cathedrals. All those arches struggling to stay erect, straining to hold up a roof that never needed to be so high, that was so high only to daunt, to make people feel insignificant. All that cutting out of light, turning everything into dank dark shadows, into stone, into blue glass. It’s cruel and antihuman and denying of pleasure—and after all those poor people had little enough—in the name of some god, some power. The west is really crazy,” she concluded.
“But it’s precisely that effort,” Elizabeth burst out (could that be anger in her voice?) “that makes them so splendid! The struggle to go beyond the mundane, the struggle not to live like sensuous animals, to give life significance—that’s what makes the cathedrals great!”
“Well,” Mary said easily, “if I had to choose between pleasure and significance in life, I’d take the first any day. Any significance you can come up with you have to invent. At least pleasure is real and it nourishes you. Like us today.”
Ronnie braced herself for a nasty “Well
you
!” but Elizabeth tightened her lips and said nothing, and the moment passed.
Or maybe it was when Alex, staring at a leafless tree, suddenly began to talk about the condition of the dispossessed peasants in a town in Brazil, describing hovels and huts built on a hillside, men who worked cutting sugarcane for fifty cents a day, not enough to feed a family, the women working as domestics or laundresses for even less. The women had to come all the way down the hill every day at dawn for water, which was delivered in limited supply. If they were lucky enough to be in the front of the line they got water, then had to carry it back up the steep hillside on their heads. If they didn’t get water, they had to use river water, deeply polluted by the chemicals used by the cane growers and filled with parasites. In any case, they had to wash clothes in the river. Most of their babies died, Alex said, of starvation and thirst, but whenever they tried to organize themselves to create a crèche or a clinic, the wealthy cane growers and professional men of the city denounced them as communists and thwarted them. They prevented clean water lines from being put through, or electricity, so huts often burned from spilled kerosene. And they denied that the people were starving.
Alex had learned about these people when she attended a talk at the convent by a Dominican nun who had worked with them, but she spoke innocently, without a real sense of the politics of the situation, her sweet light voice rising in outrage at the monsters who exploited these people and kept them in a state of misery so extreme that mothers rarely mourned when a baby died.
“Once upon a time,” she concluded sadly, “these people lived on little plots of land, raised their own food, and lived decently. But they were shoved off the land by the growers, who were greedy for bigger cane plantations, by the rich! It’s so cruel!” she explained.
“Don’t idealize the way they lived. They were probably little better off than animals,” Elizabeth said in a stiff authoritative voice. “Their babies still probably died, they were probably hungry then too.”
“No, they grew beans, things that nourished them!” Alex cried. “Now they have to have money to buy food!”
“It’s true,” Elizabeth conceded in that same authoritative voice, “some people are being destroyed by the shift in the world economic order. That’s sad, but it can’t be helped. These currents are larger than people, they create the changes we call civilization.”
“I’d hardly call what they’re doing civilized, Lizzie,” Alex objected mildly.
“Alex, you’re a political naïf, I can’t have this discussion with you. But things aren’t as black-and-white as you imagine.”
Which silenced Alex, and that ended.
But the real trigger was Ronnie herself, when they were back at the house and had finished cleaning the kitchen, and were relaxing in the playroom with drinks. The tape, a Gregorian chant, had run out, but everyone was feeling too lazy to get up and put another one on, and feeling utterly benevolent, Ronnie said, “This was one of the best days of my life.”
“Ummm,” Mary mumbled. “Me too.”
“Oh, me too,” Alex said fervently.
“It’s so great when women do things together,” Ronnie went on. Then she told them about the dinner her friend Linda had had for her. “You know, it was the opposite of this, but it was great too. She’s a graduate student, she hasn’t got two cents, she lives in a dingy apartment, well, all my friends are poor, they all live like that, but they wanted to celebrate, it’s something they do a lot, me too when I lived there. And everybody brings something, you know, pasta or bean soup or rice and beans or a stew, bread, salad, wine, fruit, and we talk and laugh and eat and we all help clean up, and there are no zinging egos flying across the room, no pretenses about manliness to bolster, no lies to defend. We just have a great time.”
Elizabeth’s chin changed. Was it jealousy at the fact of all those friends? An implicit challenge in Ronnie’s saying that dinner had been as fine as this one? The mention of defended lies? The accumulated pleasures of the day lying thick and lardy on an austere heart? Or was it a recognition of some essential difference in her from all the rest of them? Whatever hit her, she was palpably hit. She glared at Ronnie, included the others in the glare, burst into speech.
“You all make me sick with your idealization of femaleness, as if women were morally better than men, as if they had a different nature! What sentimental slop! What a stupid ideal to entertain, some sweet little domestic world, everyone sharing, loving, cooperative, no egos, what a laugh! Who’s more competitive than women, I ask you! Weight, shape, clothes, hair, nails, cooking, they work like dogs to vie for men men men! And women have such nasty little ways of getting at each other, all the while smiling, such hypocrites, at least men pull out weapons and kill each other directly!
“Do you really think if there were only women, if we could reproduce ourselves alone, we’d all be living in some communal paradise? We’d all be living in grass huts, that’s what!”
When she paused to take a long drag on her cigarette, Ronnie said calmly, “Actually, if you look at the remains of matricentric societies, they lived in considerable luxury and well-being. Without war. And even if we did live in grass huts, if we got along and had enough to eat—and the evidence shows we did when we controlled our own lives and crops, most of the time at least—it might not be so bad. Compare a grass hut to some of the cribs in Roxbury and the South Bronx, and it doesn’t look half bad,” she laughed lightly.
“Oh, what nonsense!” Elizabeth interrupted. “War broke out eventually, didn’t it? When there were enough people, when there was crowding. It was inevitable. It’s part of the beast we are! All this feminist nonsense, it’s as bad as Marxism, it asserts, simply asserts, that we are kind loving cooperative creatures when every line in every book of history testifies to something else! The commies insisted we were something else, they tried to remake human nature by fiat, look where it’s gotten them, they’ve created the most oppressive society that ever existed—worse than any oriental tyrant, dictator, emperor. The only way you can build a halfway civilized society is by taking into consideration the fact that we are savage, cruel, competitive, aggressive, predatory animals. We’re killers, like other large mammals! Haven’t you ever heard of survival of the fittest? Well, who do you imagine are the fittest? The most savage, the most efficient killers—and here I’ll grant you, men take the prize. And the best you can do is protect yourself against them. But it’s inevitable that the weak will be destroyed, they will be exterminated. It’s happening clear across the globe right now. Every primitive society, every simple society is being wiped out, there’s nothing you can do about that, it’s nature, human nature, it’s inevitable because it’s necessary! And it has a function: it keeps the human race strong!”
“That’s terrible!” Alex gasped. “You can’t be serious, Lizzie.”
“I’m dead serious. You all are a bunch of sentimentalists! You don’t know what you’re talking about most of the time. Jesus Christ, what kind of world do you think you live in? You think our little idyll in Lincoln is anything but a dream made possible—bought and paid for—by the savagery of our forefathers, who robbed and seized and cheated and bribed and killed sufficiently to realize a little island in the middle of hell?
“What do you think is going on out there! Constantly! The prime minister of India is assassinated, hijackers killed passengers in the airport in Teheran, a chemical factory explodes in Bhopal, hundreds of thousands of people are starving to death in Burkina Faso, and that’s just in the last few weeks! And that doesn’t count civil wars in hundreds of places across the globe—El Salvador that Alex is so passionate about is hardly the only place, look at what’s going on in Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Chile, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Jesus, even that only skims the surface. And beyond that, look at what people do to each other on the streets of so-called civilized countries, murder and mayhem, even people who love each other or say they do, how many men murder their wives or girlfriends every day, you can’t count them, how many if you added them up, beatings, rapes, torture, murders, in all the cities, in the towns, in villages, in the countryside across the world?
“You don’t even need to be invaded by hooligans, your own father will do the job right inside that idyllic home! Just like our father! And if he doesn’t, your mother may hit you or worse.
“There is no safe place, that’s an illusion, there is no security even though people struggle for it their whole lives long as if it existed, as if enough money or power or prestige can insulate you. But we know better, don’t we? We are constantly besieged, threatened, life is constant struggle, the best you can do is claw your way to some temporary security, some island like this house or my job or some academic post”—she glanced at Ronnie—“and try for dear life to hold on.
“And beyond that, out there, it’s the same: empty space with exploding stars, black holes, planets of methane ice, comets, and now there’s a hole in the ozone layer, and acid rain, and god knows what else threatening us.
“It’s a struggle to find enough food, to find drinkable water in most parts of the world, and then you have to avoid provoking your fellow man, who may just pull out an Uzi or an AK-47 or whatever the current designer weapon may be. You have to be armed, armed with something, a weapon or money, position, some kind of power, because the name of the game is war, constant war, that’s what it is to be alive!”
She fell back, exhausted, her eyes wild, her hands pulling at her hair, her cigarette out. She stared dully at the wall. The others gazed at her, aghast, and remained silent for a long time.
“Oh, poor Lizzie,” Alex whispered, finally.
“That’s quite a vision, Elizabeth,” Ronnie said quietly.
“It’s not a vision!” she cried, “it’s reality!” She sat up and lighted a fresh cigarette. “Don’t you see? Don’t you realize?”
“But it’s not the only reality,” Alex said softly. “It’s not all of reality.”
“No,” Mary murmured. “What about all the beauty, the beauty of days, of light, of nature, of cities, of people? What about all the lovely things we gave each other today, all the wonderful things we ate, the fun we had?”
“And it’s not the only truth about us, either, about human beings,” Ronnie said stubbornly. “We’re not all at war with each other, we help each other. Where I come from, it’s a world you don’t know, no one would survive if the women didn’t watch each other’s kids, take each other’s kids, sometimes for months, for god’s sake. They share food, there’s always room for one more at the table even if things are rough, and they lend each other stuff—a blanket, a heavy coat, whatever.
“Listen, I work with nature at the lowest level. Mosses and lichen are called lower plants, they don’t have the complexity of larger ones—although some mosses are unisexual and some bisexual,” she grinned. “But our entire ecology depends on them, among other such species. And lichen, which is probably one of the first forms of life to appear on earth, which is thus fundamental to other life, is symbiotic, it’s made up of two different species that need each other to exist. It survives by cooperating, not conflict. It can live where nothing else can live—in the highest mountains where nothing else grows, at the edges of the oceans, at the very top of the highest tropical trees where the sun blazes too strongly for any other plant. It even lives at the bottom of those trees, where the climate is too dark or wet for other plants. And it’s a frontier plant, it makes soil, one of a few species that do. It
creates
.