‘Surely you could teach her to believe that a man’s intellect is, and always will be, fundamentally superior to a woman’s?’ I suggested. She brightened at this and began to turn over our old minutes again. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘think of their discoveries, their mathematics, their science, their philosophy, their scholarship—’ and then she began to laugh, ‘I shall never forget old Hobkin and the hairpin,’ she said, and went on reading and laughing and I thought she was quite happy, when suddenly she threw the book from her and burst out, ‘Oh, Cassandra, why do you torment me? Don’t you know that our belief in man’s intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?’ ‘What?’ I exclaimed. ‘Ask any journalist, schoolmaster, politician or public house keeper in the land and they will all tell you that men are much cleverer than women.’ ‘As if I doubted it,’ she said scornfully. ‘How could they help it? Haven’t we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if they’re nothing else? It’s all our doing!’ she cried. ‘We insisted upon having intellect and now we’ve got it. And it’s intellect,’ she continued, ‘that’s at the bottom of it. What could be more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs. Then they teach him to cultivate his intellect. He becomes a barrister, a civil servant, a general, an author, a professor. Every day he goes to an office. Every year he produces a book. He maintains a whole family by the products of his brain – poor devil! Soon he cannot come into a room without making us all feel uncomfortable; he condescends to every woman he meets, and dares not tell the truth even to his own wife; instead of rejoicing our eyes we have to shut them if we are to take him in our arms. True, they console themselves with stars of all shapes, ribbons of all shades, and incomes of all sizes – but what is to console us? That we shall be able in ten years’ time to spend a weekend at Lahore? Or that the least insect in Japan has a name twice the length of its body? Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven’s sake let us devise a method by which men may bear children! It is our only chance. For unless we provide them with some innocent occupation we shall get neither good people nor good books; we shall perish beneath the fruits of their unbridled activity; and not a human being will survive to know that there once was Shakespeare!’
‘It is too late,’ I replied. ‘We cannot provide even for the children that we have.’
‘And then you ask me to believe in intellect,’ she said.
While we spoke, men were crying hoarsely and wearily in the street, and, listening, we heard that the Treaty of Peace had just been signed. The voices died away. The rain was falling and interfered no doubt with the proper explosion of the fireworks.
‘My cook will have bought the Evening News,’ said Castalia, ‘and Ann will be spelling it out over her tea. I must go home.’
‘It’s no good – not a bit of good,’ I said. ‘Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in – and that is herself.’
‘Well, that would be a change,’ said Castalia.
So we swept up the papers of our Society, and though Ann was playing with her doll very happily, we solemnly made her a present of the lot and told her we had chosen her to be President of the Society of the future – upon which she burst into tears, poor little girl.
Generous Pieces
Ellen Gilchrist
Ellen Gilchrist (b. 1935) is an American author and poet who studied creative writing under Eudora Welty. Her 1981 collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, received immense critical acclaim and, in 1984, she won the National Book Award for her collection of stories, Victory Over Japan.
I am poking around the house looking for change to spend at the Sweet Shoppe. It is afternoon, November. The light coming through the windows of my parents’ room is flat and gray and casts thick shadows on the rug my father brought home from China after the war.
I am going through the pockets of his gabardine topcoat. The pockets are deep and cool. The rubbers are in the right-hand pocket. I pull them out, look at them for a moment, then stick my hand back in the pocket and leave it there. I stand like that for a long time, halfway into the closet with my hand deep in the pocket, listening to the blood run through my body, to the sound of my own breathing.
I smell the cold safety of his suits and shirts. I stare down at the comforting order of his shoes and boots. I hold one of the little packets between my fingers, feeling the hard rim, the soft yielding center. It gives way, like the hide of a mouse.
Behind me is the walnut bed in which he was born far away in Georgia. Beside it, the old-fashioned dresser with a silver tray onto which he empties his pockets in the evenings. While he dreams the tray holds his daytime life, his plumb bob, his pocketknife, his pens and pencils, his onyx Kappa Sigma ring, his loose change, his money clip.
How do I know what the rubbers are? How do I know with such absolute certainty that they are connected with Christina Carver’s mother and the pall that has fallen over our house on Calvin Boulevard?
I stand in the closet door for a long time. I want to take out the little package and inspect it more closely, but I cannot bring myself to withdraw it from the pocket, as if to pull it out into the light would make it real. After a while I become afraid my mother will come home and find me in her room so I take my hand from the pocket and leave.
I wander into the kitchen and make a sugar sandwich and talk for a while to the elderly German housekeeper. She is a kindly woman with a thick accent who smiles all the time. She has a small grandson who is deaf, and occasionally she brings him to work and talks with him in the language deaf people make with their hands. I feel sorry for her because of the deaf child and try to remember to pick up my clothes so she won’t have to bend over to reach them. When I am good about this she bakes me gingerbread men with buttons and smiles made out of raisins.
I leave the house and begin walking aimlessly across the small Indiana town. Usually I go by Christina’s after school. We are best friends. We spend the night together on weekends. We stand by each other in lines. I work hard to make Christina my friend. I need her for an ally as we have only lived in this town six months and she is the most popular girl in the class.
We have lived in five towns in three years. Every time we move my father makes more money. Every place we live we have a nicer house. This time we are not going to move anymore he promises. This time we are going to stay put.
I want to stay put. When the junior-high cheerleader elections are held in the spring the girls will try out in pairs. If I try out with Christina I know I will win.
My mother was a cheerleader at the University of Georgia. Her senior year in college she was voted Most Popular Girl. There is a full-page photograph of her in the 1929 University of Georgia yearbook. She is wearing a handmade lace dress the color of snow, the color of marble. Her face is small and sweet and full of sadness. Underneath her feet in black letters it says, Most Popular Girl.
I will never be popular. But at least I can get elected cheerleader. I do Christina’s homework. I write her book reports. I carry messages to her secret boyfriend. He is a college boy named Dawson who plays the saxophone and is dying of cancer in an apartment behind his Jewish grandmothers mansion. I carry their messages. I stand guard when she goes to visit him. I listen to her love stories. They lie down together on a bed with their clothes on and strange things happen. One thing they do is called dryfucking. I don’t really understand what it is but I feel funny and excited when she talks about it.
Once I went with her to Dawson’s apartment, some rooms above a brick garage of the only mansion in Seymour, Indiana. There were phonograph albums and cartoons nailed to the walls. Dawson was very nice to me. He kept making me listen to something called Jazz at the Philharmonic. I pretended to like it. I pretended to like the worst part of all when someon
e named Jojo plays the drums for about fifteen minutes.
I pass the grade school and turn onto Duncan Street where Christina has lived every day of her life. Next door to her house is a vacant lot. A bicycle I used to own is rusting in a corner of the lot. It has a flat tire but I have never bothered walking it to the service station to get it fixed. I have a new bicycle with shiny fenders. Christina’s mother always teases me about the old bike. “It must be nice to be rich,” she says, laughing.
She thinks it is funny that no one makes me do anything about it. Christina has to do all kinds of things my mother would never dream of making me do. She has to help with the dishes and iron her own clothes and practice the piano for an hour every day and go horseback riding on Saturday.
When I get to Christina’s house she is in the dining room with her mother looking at the fabrics they have spread out all over the dining room table. They have been to a sale and the dining room table is covered with bright plaid wools and gold and blue corduroy and a heavy quilted cotton with little flowers on a green background.
“Here’s Margaret now,” her mother says, smiling at me, moving closer, her small, brisk body making me feel heavy and awkward and surprised. “Margaret, look at these bargains we got at Hazard’s. We’re going to make skirts and weskits. Look, we bought something for you. So you and Christina can have twin outfits.” She holds up the quilted fabric. “Isn’t it darling? Isn’t it the darlingest thing you’ve ever seen?”
She is always so gay, so full of plans. I think of her getting into the Packard with my father the night they went off to Benton to the ballgame, the night my mother wouldn’t go. Christina’s father was out of town and I stood on the porch watching my father put her into his big car. My mother stood in the dark doorway not saving a word and later she went into the bedroom and locked the door. My mother has not been well lately. She is worn out. She has hot flashes. She takes hormones and writes long letters to Mississippi and is always mad at me.
“Do you like it?” Christina’s mother says, holding the fabric against her body as if she were a model.
“Oh, my,” I say, taking the material. “I love it. It’s darling. Is it really for me?”
“Look,” Christina says, “the one with the green background is for you, to go with your red hair. We got the same print with a blue background for me. Won’t we look great together? You aren’t supposed to mix blue and green together but who cares. We can wear them to the Christmas Follies if we get them made in time.”
“You’re going to make it tor me?” I say.
“Of course we are,” her mother says. “I’ll get started on it tomorrow morning. I can’t wait to see how cute you’ll look together. Besides I need to do something to pay your father back for all the help he’s been to us with our taxes. I’ll have to measure you first, though. Can I do it now?”
“I can’t stay that long today,” I say quickly, not wanting her to know how big my waist is. It is twenty-six. I will never be a belle. “I’ll come back tomorrow and let you do it, if that’s O.K.”
“Whenever you have time,” she says. “I can go on and start on Christina’s.”
Christina walks me out into the yard. “She’s going to a horse show on Saturday,” she says. “Do you want to go with me to see Dawson?”
“Sure,” I say.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Christina says. “I don’t know what I did before you moved here. Dawson says you’re darling. He thinks you’re smart as a whip. He wants you to come back over. He wants you to meet a friend of his from college.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” I say. “I’ll come by in the morning. And thanks a lot about the skirt. That’s really nice of your mother.”
I walk off down Duncan Street for a few blocks, then change my mind about going home. I decide to walk out toward the railroad tracks and get some exercise to make myself smaller before I get measured.
It will be light for another hour. I think about going by Janet Ingram’s house to see what she is doing. Janet lives on the edge of town in a house that is very different from the ones Christina and I live in. There are stained red carpets on the floors and over the mantel is a collection of china bulls her father wins at carnivals. I know I am not supposed to go there although my mother has never actually told me so.
Janet’s father sleeps in the daytime and works at night in a factory. Once I was there in the afternoon and he was just getting up, walking around the house in a sleeveless T-shirt. I walk along, thinking about the way Janet’s house smells, warm and close and foreign, as though the air were full of germs.
I try not to think about Christina’s mother. If I think of her I remember how she leans over my father’s chair handing him things when they have dinner at our house. I think of him putting her into his car. Then I think of the beautiful quilted material. I think of Christina and me walking into the junior high together, wearing our matching outfits.
I am walking along a new street where houses are under construction. Two men are still hammering on the high beams of one. They are standing on the slanting half-finished roof. I am afraid they will fall while I am watching them and I turn my face away. It is terrible for people to have dangerous jobs like that. I’m glad my father doesn’t have a dangerous job. People who are poor have to have jobs like that. Perhaps it doesn’t matter as much what happens to them.
Janet comes to the door. Her father is in the living room putting on his shoes. “I can’t ask you to stay,” she says. “My dad’s getting ready to leave for work and I have to help with dinner.”
“That’s all right,” I say. “I was just walking around. I just came by to see what you were doing.”
I am staring at Janet’s breasts, which are even larger than mine. I wonder if it is true that Janet lets boys touch her breasts.
I begin walking home. Dark is falling faster than I expected. The days grow shorter. It is almost Thanksgiving.
A group of children playing in a yard begins following me. One of them recognizes me from school. He picks up a dirt clod and throws it at me. It hits my coat. I don’t know what to do. No one has ever thrown anything at me before. I look up. Another dirt clod hits me on the shoulder. I begin to run, trying to figure out what is going on. I run through the darkening streets as fast as I can. Streetlights flicker and come on. Here and there a yellow porch light shines brightly. I run and run, afraid of falling down, afraid of every shadow, afraid to look up, afraid of the trees, afraid of the moon.
Now it is full dark. How did it get dark so quickly? I fear the dark. I never sleep without a light in my room. If I wake in the night in the dark I am terrified and jump out of bed and run down to my parents’ room and tremble between them until morning.
The night is so still I can hear the branches of the trees reaching out their arms for me. A huge moon has appeared in the eastern sky. I run past the construction site. The exposed beams stand out against the dark blue sky. I think if I looked inside I would find the bodies of the carpenters broken and bleeding on the floor.
I run past an alley where I found an automatic card shuffler in a trashcan once when my grandmother was visiting us. When I brought it home she flew into hysterics and bathed me with lye soap, lecturing me about diseases I could catch from strangers.
Now I am on my own street. I run past the Dustins’ house. I run into my house and down the hall and turn around and around and run into the kitchen and find my father sitting at the table with my brother. They are laughing and cutting fat green olives into generous pieces.
I throw myself upon him screaming, “Look what they did to me! Look what they did to me! Look what they did!”
He takes me into the bedroom and sits on the bed with me. He holds me in his arms. My face is against his shirt. I burrow into the strength of his body. Once I look up and there are tears running down his cheeks.
My mother is touching my hair. “It’s from living like this,” she says. “This insane life in this hick Ya
nkee town. I don’t know who she’s with half the time. God knows who she plays with. God knows what she’s doing.”
“What do you want me to do?” he says. “Go home and starve in Waycross? Run a hardware store the rest of my life?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I want you to do.”
After a while my mother undresses me and puts me in bed in her soft flowered nightgown. She brings me a hot toddy and feeds it to me with a spoon. The hot liquor runs down my throat and soothes me. My mother promises to stay with me till I sleep. She turns off the lamp. She sits touching my arm with her soft hands. And the terror draws in its white arms and is still, watching me with cold eyes from the mirror on my father’s dresser.
The Waltz
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) was an American critic, satirical poet, and short story writer. Best known for her wit and eye for 20th-century foibles, Parker wrote book reviews, poetry and short fiction for the fledgling magazine The New Yorker. She wrote the screenplay for the Hitchcock film Saboteur, but her involvement with Communism led to her being blacklisted in Hollywood. Parker’s most famous story, ‘Big Blonde’, was published in 1933 in the collection entitled After Such Pleasures.
Why, thank you so much. I’d adore to.
I don’t want to dance with him. I don’t want to dance with anybody. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be him. He’d be well down among the last ten. I’ve seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night. Just think, not a quarter of an hour ago, here I was sitting, feeling so sorry for the poor girl he was dancing with. And now I’m going to be the poor girl. Well, well. Isn’t it a small world?
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 89
