Valerie

by Sara Stridsberg

  NARRATOR: My dream is for another ending to the story.

  VALERIE: You’re not a real storyteller.

  NARRATOR: I know.

  VALERIE: And this is not a real story.

  NARRATOR: I know. And I don’t care. I just want to sit here with you for a little while.

  VALERIE: I don’t have much to add.

  NARRATOR: I don’t want to live in a world where you die. There must be other endings, other stories.

  VALERIE: Death is the end of all stories. There are no happy endings.

  (Silence.)

  NARRATOR: I just want to talk to you, Valerie.

  VALERIE: And I don’t want to die like this.

  VENTOR, JUNE 1946

  STEELWORKERS ARE ON STRIKE, COAL MINERS ARE ON STRIKE, RAILWAY WORKERS ARE ON STRIKE

  You and Dorothy in the kitchen. It is hot and sticky and there are black flies everywhere in this never-ending summer. It is the first summer since Louis left and you have to duck to avoid Dorothy’s jungle of flypapers to reach your place at the table. She has emerged from her bed, emerged from the black river water, and bought a new plastic handbag. The old one has water stains and stands on the kitchen windowsill with a bunch of wild roses stuck in the opening. The flowers in her garden are dead, but she cooks again and laughs again, incandescent with despair.

  DOROTHY: Eat up, my little pony, and you’ll grow.

  VALERIE: Is it flies or people you’re intending to catch with those flypapers?

  DOROTHY: Fellers.

  VALERIE: I thought you’d gone off them.

  DOROTHY: There’s men and there’s men.

  VALERIE: Yeah.

  DOROTHY: You have to beware of certain men.

  VALERIE: Yeah.

  DOROTHY: All men are not pigs.

  VALERIE: Nah.

  DOROTHY: Your father’s a pig.

  VALERIE: Yes.

  DOROTHY: A girl can do anything she wants. And you know I love you.

  VALERIE: Yes.

  DOROTHY: Good. Eat up now. Watch out for that fly.

  Electric light in the desert. Dorothy on the porch with peroxide on her hair, the tinfoil reflecting in the sun, a women’s magazine in her hand, glossy pages, daydreams. You walk under the trees with skyscraper thoughts. Huge American trees, blind, bloodied shadows between the trunks, in your memory Louis’s blond hair covering your hands, the sunlight, gasoline fumes, pins and needles in your arms. You dream of a typewriter, of Dorothy giving you a typewriter at last, you dream about moving away from the desert and your filthy little life in Ventor. Your hands are sparks flying over the black keys taking you onto the highway out of there.

  Dorothy dreams of being a housewife, but has no one left to look after. She plays housewife some days to whoever passes through. Marries on a drinking spree and lands in trouble with the mayor when she has to settle her divorces. The long, long decade of the forties. First the war years with women in the factories, and later plasticky, unreal, with perfect curves and curls, and knee-length baby-doll dresses. Daddy Knows Best will soon be showing on everyone’s new, flickering television sets; postwar plans, postwar prosperity. Dorothy sits and swivels on different barstools and smokes Peace cigarettes, holding forth in her overbearing, insistent way. The atom bomb has fallen on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a hundred thousand burned to ash; the president has spoken to the nation. Dorothy has no television and no self-respect, she loves the president and the White House so much her eyes fill with tears. And in the bars she sounds off about nothing until she is thrown out and zigzags home across the desert, her handbag filled with stolen ashtrays and beer glasses.

  The power lines blow down around the house and Dorothy has neither electricity nor lasting points of reference. As soon as a guy appears in the sunset Dorothy changes all her opinions. Republican, Democrat, prowar, antiwar, Dorothy changes her views like she changes her dresses and underpants. Several times a day and whenever required. Laughing in her mad-dog voice at their bad jokes, all over the house Dorothy’s croaking, ingratiating cackle. The sky descends alarmingly close to the house and you tell Cosmogirl about it later:

  there were plants in her useless garden glowing like flames in the dusk and the white sheet of metal where the light poured out and there would be no vessel stranded in the desert just the huge bell jar over the blackness of her eyes and the blackness of her dresses and everything without memory or fear and a bit like childhood in which the heavens never exploded and there were only the desert trees and the orange tree I pinned pink wish notes to every time one of us had a birthday and all the wishes were still attainable and childlike and we hadn’t yet been turned into silent dark exasperated desert creatures and as long as I was a birthday child as long as children still existed

  Dorothy gazes into the distance when she is not scouring the bedroom for old letters and memories she has lost and some man who has already left her. She is a cloud of doom and the smell of slime and festering water cloaks every piece of furniture and every movement and every room and nothing seems to want to stay with Dorothy except you and the flies. She is no good with anything other than flypapers and gets into fights when she drinks too much sweet wine and rubs people the wrong way. And then she has to write long pink letters and race across the desert asking forgiveness, you and a stolen bunch of dying roses strapped to the bike rack.

  The horizon is still sharp and beautiful, a fence and a boundary at the point where the world begins and ends. And the mountains are high and warm and friendly beasts now that Louis is not here. You will always be fearful of his yellow Ford appearing on the skyline of sand.

  Time passes so slowly in the desert. Childhood an eternity of dazzling, blazing dragonflies as they rustle through the trees, trucks moving on the horizon, the howling of desert dogs in the distance. You are at the back of the house with the hoses and gasoline looking for snakes and giant insects. Dorothy fell asleep in the sun for too long, her hair is ruined under the peroxide and the brush pulls out her pride and joy in sorry puke-green clumps when she tries to untangle it, crying in front of the makeup mirror in the bedroom.

  DOROTHY (chunks of hair in her hand): My hair, Valerie!

  VALERIE: You little calamity.

  DOROTHY: I’m nothing without my hair …

  VALERIE: You look like a little soldier with that hair. Or without it. My brave soldier. I’ll help you get rid of that mess.

  DOROTHY: Waaah! I don’t want to look like a little soldier. Definitively not like a filthy little soldier.

  VALERIE: Your eyes make you look like a film star. With the blue on your eyelids.

  DOROTHY: Louis is going to turn up at the door.

  VALERIE: You’ve got to stop hankering after Louis.

  DOROTHY: It’s called eye shadow. Your father, Valerie. I’m talking about your father.

  VALERIE: I don’t remember him. I just remember he was a small, fat, blond guy with bad breath and ugly teeth.

  DOROTHY: He was a very handsome man.

  VALERIE: I think he’s dead, Dolly. I think he’s been electrocuted by a power line. It doesn’t matter, Dolly. Only God can love you for yourself alone and not your blond hair. You’ll be glad you didn’t color your bush like you wanted to.

  DOROTHY: I’m lucky it’s not my bush.

  VALERIE: Dorothy.

  DOROTHY: Yes?

  VALERIE: I think you’re beautiful.

  Dorothy’s cool hands on your face and shoulders, her wine-smelling breath warm and moist, a cigarette balanced precariously on the edge of the table, the smell of soot on the sleeves of her dress. For a fraction of a second you can still hold her in your arms, her menthol scent and her smooth freckled skin. Her laugh a broken mirror.

  Dorothy roams between bars with a scarf over her bleach-damaged hair. Blackened ends of green-blond debris. Scraping along in her high heels, asking for a little help with the essentials. The electricity does not come back on. Dorothy has kept on paying and ringing and complaining and bad-mouthing on the telepho
ne; still the electricity does not come back on. No lover wants to come and climb up to the lines; at the electricity company they tire of her ranting. Dorothy cycles back and forth to the phone booth, imploring everybody in her hot, impassioned voice.

  And they always come back once or twice before they disappear for good, until the day they leave with a screech of tires and never return. A few rounds of silky contrition, their hands deep in her hair, before they take their warm bellies from Dorothy forever and she starts again, painstakingly burning herself with candles and writing long pink letters and chasing across the desert with you on the rack.

  There is no more money in the house, only the sun outside, white and hot and shimmering, and the gasoline drums where Dorothy sets fire to her memories. The radio is permanently on in the kitchen and Dorothy brushes her dishwater-hair over the food and traces her lipstick always slightly outside her lips. Much later in Maryland you and Cosmo decide that wearing lipstick outside your lipline at all times is a political act. Dorothy knows nothing about politics, but she knows all about lipstick and all about the future. She continues to swat at bluebottles, continues to have those depth-plunging eyes. The president is speaking on the radio and Dorothy foretells a brilliant future for you. Valerie Jean Solanas will become president of America and she dreams of being electric with happiness again, and the exhilarating smell of underwear will rule her household as before. She cannot stop thinking about the days at the river when the sun was high and quivering and the water smelled of iron and rotting plankton and no one knew it was poisoned yet and she and Louis lay on the grass so deep in beery kisses she nearly drowned and she imagined being a woman with her house and her refrigerator full of roses.

  VALERIE: This soup just tastes like water.

  DOROTHY: Shh! I’m listening.

  VALERIE: What are they saying on the radio?

  DOROTHY: The president’s dropped another atom bomb. A nuclear bomb on the Bikini islands. In the middle of goddamn nowhere.

  VALERIE: Why?

  DOROTHY: I don’t know. Last year they dropped an atom bomb on the sixth of August. The war was practically over.

  VALERIE: Did the animals die too?

  DOROTHY: Everything died. The trees. All the flowers, all the grass, all the children.

  VALERIE: What’s the president’s name?

  DOROTHY: Harry.

  VALERIE: I can just imagine his fat butt when he sits down for a crap. What does he look like?

  DOROTHY: Beard, glasses, and shit on his ass.

  VALERIE: Right.

  DOROTHY: You’re my little president. My little Miss President.

  VALERIE: I want pie, not water soup.

  DOROTHY: I’ll have some money soon. When Louis comes back.

  VALERIE: Louis isn’t coming back. Is there a war happening now?

  DOROTHY: There’s no war.

  VALERIE: None at all?

  DOROTHY: Far away, there might be. A minor war. But not here. Not in America. Last year there was a war. Do you remember we were sitting in the bar all night and I was wearing my white dress? Louis was there. The war was over. That night … We found out in the afternoon. No one wanted to stay at home that night. Louis bought me roses. He kissed me where everyone could see. He kissed us all.

  VALERIE: Why are we eating war soup if there isn’t a war? I have got to be president of America.

  DOROTHY: I think you will be. A nasty little president. Don’t forget you’re going to be a writer as well.

  VALERIE: I already am a writer.

  BRISTOL HOTEL, APRIL 10, 1988

  Cosmogirl dances by amid small mushrooming clouds of forgotten places and words, the hotel bed a blazing desert of everything you left undone and everything done wrong, an ocean ten thousand fathoms deep with everything you forgot and all the times you failed to say goodbye. You have forgotten her breath was luminous blue, forgotten the way she kissed your back in her sleep before she woke, the way she dreamily mumbled your favorite sentence. The nicest women in our society are raving sex maniacs.

  And you sleep and dream of Maryland and are woken again by the dark and the presence of death, a swirling, blistering abyss of black trees and black snow falling. There is no organization called SCUM, there never has been. All that is left is the Society for Cutting Up Myself, a global organization with countless members. An organization that will never cease or disappear.

  You look in your little pocket mirror (Cosmo kissed your mirrors and your lips, she pressed lipstick kisses on all the pages of your books, wrote your name in blood beside her own on the bathroom mirror that last time in Maryland) and in the mirror is a foul-smelling stranger. Remember to write, Valerie. Don’t forget to write. It is so long since you gave up writing, slaying promises and utopian visions, decades since the turquoise portable typewriter accompanied you everywhere, since your promise to yourself never to sell the typewriter.

         If you have forgiven Valerie …

                … how come you have not been to see her?

  When you cough, you get blood on your hand. Beneath the silver coat is a screaming deep-sea creature wanting out, a birdlike monster with no feathers or skin, champing and chawing and flailing about. Your abdomen aches and weeps and the silver coat is wet and cold with urine, but you love it, and if you are going to die now anyway, you want to die in silver with silver buttons. If you are going to die anyway, you want to die with Cosmo’s hand in yours. The last thing she said to you was “Don’t leave me here,” and the sky was heavy and oppressive and your leopard-skin fur coat was wet with fear when you took the train back to Maryland that last time.

  Robert Brush called and wept on the telephone and you ran through the laboratory, setting all the animals free. You know they will not survive for long out there; the albino rabbits are going to die right away, they will hide in the trees and under the snow and form strange shapes in the park outside the lab. Someone calls your name, someone touches your arm, in slow motion you walk across University Park, the wind gusting slightly, the smell of flowers and newly fallen snow, the sky made of dead faces, and all you want is a hole to open up in the snow and swallow you. What is the point of forgiveness, if death treads on its heels?

                                      Cosmo?

                                             Cosmogirl?

  Feathery veils of light trail across the room; April is the maddest month of all with its sleet and lifeless fields. And when you open your eyes again, a lustrous bouquet of white lilies is over by the window and you cannot understand who has brought you such expensive flowers. It is a long time since anyone knocked at your door and there is no longer anyone who knows you love lilies. I do not want to die and if I have to die now I do not want any man to touch my dead body.

  The ceiling is a swimming canvas of eyes and hands wanting to devour you, and as you stretch out your hands to the flowers in the window, you remember the scent of lilies and happiness, the faint smell of burning and lilies on her coats and dresses. The bed is a whirling chasm of unfamiliar voices and places and you long so much to hear her voice again, Cosmogirl, the most brilliant whore in the whole world, ruler of the universe, beloved. You long for snow and the sound of a typewriter, and when you open your eyes, she is sitting over by the window with a book in her hand and the sun on her hair. A cloud of smoke around her face as she smokes her strong cigarillos again, always with something to celebrate.

  COSMO: What did you say?

  VALERIE: Are the flowers from you? Are they for me?

  COSMO: There aren’t any flowers. It’s your old sheets you can see. I helped you change them. There was blood and piss all over them.

  VALERIE: Oh well. Have you read any of the manifesto?

  COSMO (stubs out her cigarillo on the windowsill): I love it.

  VA
LERIE: Do you?

  COSMO: You know I do.

  VALERIE: It doesn’t matter if it’s only the sheets, you smell like flowers. Did you know Olympia Press published the manifesto after the shooting without asking?

  COSMO: I thought you wanted them to publish it.

  VALERIE: Maurice and Paul made big money from the manifesto. Everybody wanted to read it because I was in the asylum over that business with Andy. Ten years later I published it myself but no one was interested then.

  COSMO: Do you want me to read some of it to you?

  VALERIE: Read to me while I fade away.

  COSMO (opens the manifesto): Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

  VALERIE: And destroy the male sex.

  COSMO: It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.

  VALERIE: We must begin immediately to do so.

  COSMO: Immediately. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y gene is an incomplete X gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.

  VALERIE: Further on. Read from further on. The end. The waves.

  COSMO: Men who are rational, however, won’t kick or struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but will just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their demise.