by Naomi Holoch
Indeed it was as well you were only fixing the gutters, because on other days, lovers and mothers aside, when you were making the dinner, or adding a bit to the symphony, saving the whale, or lazy beds dug for potatoes (and no beds have ever been lazier, what with the sun shining that way on the bare skin of her back, and the spade being heavier in your hands than any spade before it, and the wood warm and piercing your hands with little splinters of desire—oh desire among the lazy beds getting lazier) and potatoes you know, contrary to common opinion, being the most fragile of vegetables, easily bruised or spoilt, and she said, yes you’ve told me before, very often before, and you had, of course, because a good potato is hard to find, even in a country where thousands died for the want of them, and you feel for potatoes and cherish their delicacy: flowery and open and butter melting thick and yellow in their whiteness. And you were putting in these potatoes, hanging out the sheets or some such, and she was reading to you passages from a notorious and much slandered feminist philosopher whose words were many and startling and interwoven and made your head spin (spinning being just one of her favorite words and a much sought after trade, had you known it), which was all fine and well, this weaving, except that it did not get the washing done. And then you dropped a sheet in the mud and had to drag it inside and start all over again with the cats climbing in the sink to chase the suds, and the hens flying in the window, and why hadn’t you by this time got a washing machine, other women have, and if you want that kind of life why don’t you go back to the suburbs where you came from, and if only you had held the sheet in the first place, and who is it who always complains about not finding time for feminist philosophers, yes but not when we’re hanging up sheets in a northeast wind. It was beds we were digging, beds you fool, have you forgotten beds for fragile potatoes easily bruised, ah, easily bruised yes, and in the sun too, don’t you remember what you said about sun on the back? Ah yes, beds it was, you’re right, lazy beds and laying out the lazy beds and digging in the spuds, and with that you left the suds overflowing the sink and followed the cat trail of scarlet and mediterranean blue upstairs to the loft that was Cleo’s until she needed more space. Given any excuse, this is what happens, which explains the gutters leaking, the sheets unwashed, the mothers unwritten to, the whales unsaved, the cats running riot, the feminist philosophers unread—and if we don’t support them she said, who will, I mean actually go out and buy the goddamn books, not just get them on loan from friends?
And it was one of those days and it led to one of those nights and more of those mornings.
And that was long before you noticed the noise from the woodshed. A startling and disturbing noise that might have been many things or one. Do you hear that noise, she asked, looking up from the list of power stations for the nuclear family you were compiling at the kitchen table. And you looked up, and you did hear, and you both wondered if it had just begun or if it might have been going on for days, perhaps since you came, being so busy with lists and laundry and things in between, you might well not have noticed anything going on. There had been other noises before, of course, she said, mostly of an animal or vegetable origin: the time she found the bird, for instance, bald and featherless, that might have been a newborn blown from its nest, or an adult struck by disease, and she fed it mashed catfood in case it was a newborn that should have been eating regurgitated worms; then there was the vagrant goose escaped from a poultry farm where it failed to lay its golden egg; and the blue whale, or dogfish, or was it a seal, someone had brought up from the beach for saving; and the fox you caught raiding the garbage you had forgotten to leave out: bags and bags of black plastic refuse, foul rotting rubbish that had been on the way to the dump the morning Cleo decided she had had enough of the loft and took off on her Yamaha for somewhere more spacious. This Cleo, you were tempted to say, sounds a hard act to follow, more literal than metaphoric. Yes, she said, as if you had said it, which after all you very well might have—impossible to follow, even when you knew where she was going, but she had beautiful eyes, an amazing way with whales, and no woman could write a better symphony, another week and we’d have had it finished. In that case, you said, we had better get the rubber gloves, anxious to put the day on a more solid footing, you thought (more metaphoric than literal—your mind growing helplessly lateral, it should have thought boots—and would shortly), in case it’s the garbage again or a goose or a dog or a seal making free with it. But the gloves, when you found them, were punctured—and who was it who was forever borrowing them for the garden so that when you came to do the washing they let in jets of scalding soapy water—and it couldn’t all be blamed on the cats, inquisitive and temperamental as they were (not to mention the dog)—do you hear them on the roof this instant? And you did, and she said, don’t bother with that now, it’s the other noise we have to deal with. Out you went then, armed only with two odd rubber gloves, a sweeping brush, and one pair of wellingtons, and thank goodness once more for the discovery of rubber, for you might soon be up to your knees in decaying refuse, as she had been before, alone, lonely, and lovelorn: knowing where to look but having promised not to; a chase or a search of any kind being the one thing a claustrophobic could not take. As you knew, having known something of claustrophobia yourself. Out you went.
When you got to the woodshed you paused, stopped in your tracks, because the noise had stopped and you didn’t know where it had gone. You would have paused anyway, not being sure what you might find and putting off the evil hour of angry geese or dead foxes, And then she opened the door, because you couldn’t go on standing there forever, and it was what you had come for after all, and in the light from the door you saw a big red sleeping bag laid out on the straw, and in the next moment you saw the two heads at the top of it, one dark and one fair, and then the heads came up fully, and you saw the shoulders and one breast of two women, one black, one white though brown skinned, young, of unidentifiable class and culture, these things being impossible to define from bare skin and bone. Oh it’s you, she said, which meant nothing to you. Yes, they said, it’s us—and they said it together, as if they were used to saying things together. We heard the noise, she said. Yes, that was us, they said. We should have known, she said, I mean recognized it, knowing you were coming back. And of course you should have too and now that she said it you did—recognize the sound. It wasn’t, after all, for the want of hearing it. But then other people are different, especially if you haven’t even heard them speaking or weeping or singing, and anyone can make a mistake about these things, and you had. But now you knew. And from their voices talking now you also knew they were from the continent of North America. And she told you she had met them before and invited them to stay anytime. She had seen them in the hardware store or was it the haberdashers? and spotted them. There are always women being spotted this way and other women going around spotting—it is one of the things you have come to expect. How did you know, they had said to her. Oh I don’t know, I just spotted you somehow. After that they had come to stay, Janette and Janelle from the U.S.A., and they wanted to sleep in the open in their big red sleeping bag under the stars, and, well, she said, there’s always the woodshed if it rains. She remembered that now. They were on an asylum visit from the city where they worked in a women’s refuge for battered women and raped women and women who had been molested as children and children who had been molested before they ever got to be women. And they needed a holiday from it—a vacation, as they said, though not speaking together, speaking separately now that they had grown used to the light and your faces. And there were four breasts now above the sleeping bag, full fleshed and dark skinned, and three arms, the last arm belonging to the woman with short red hair under the sleeping bag still. And they had slept out under the sky for three nights, needing the night and the stars and no noise but their own, or a bird’s or an animal’s or a leaf’s or a stone’s, or whatever it is that makes all the racket in the country when everyone says—how quiet it is—how do you stand the silen
ce?
And after three days of this they had gone off or on, the way visitors do, especially women from the United States of America who have come to see Europe, or find their sanity, or escape it, after five years working with molested and battered women to whom they listen and listen and say very little, trying hard not to say all the things they want to, for this is non-directive counseling and it is listening without directing, which is almost impossible with all this pain that is so familiar and known in your bones. And so they listen and learn, learn more than they ever wanted to learn, and keep silent until the time somebody says—listen you need a break—five years is too long for anyone to listen without a break. And so they stop listening for a while, and go off to find Europe, and find the haberdashers, or was it the grocers? which is where she spotted them, and invited them home to sleep in the woodshed, or out under the stars, at least until the rain came, which was five days ago, but she hadn’t noticed, being so caught up with your life since crossing the river. Well, she said, we’re glad it’s you and not a badger or rat or fox, or some other hapless creature, and this is certainly no day for the garbage. Certainly not, they said, it’s a day for the river (for they had crossed it too, the same one, or another, but they certainly had crossed a river). Indeed it is—why don’t you come? Well we’re kind of okay here, they said, speaking together. Okay so, she said, and there’s always the loft if the rain gets cold—it’s not quite finished of course, we were just getting round to the roof the day Cleo left. Fine, they said, we’re real good with roofs and, being women from the North American continent, they probably were, being real good with all making and fixing and getting acts together and quite undiscourageable, which was something to say in this climate of rain and rivers and cats walking through the gutters so that you could not get at the roof to mend it even when you started. And another thing, she said, in that case, no doubt thinking of the windows. And you could see that there was enough to keep them going for weeks, and they had weeks to keep going, they said, and no better place to spend them, and there was always the loft. They said they would remember if the rain got cold and then the three arms joined the other arm under the red sleeping bag, and you closed the door and walked back up the path. And you said, thank the mother it wasn’t the garbage, this is no day for going to the dump. No, she said, it’s a day for going anywhere else, almost anywhere else; shall we go and leave the gutter and the hens and the list of power stations for the nuclear family and the letters to your mother and the feminist philosophers. This is no day for philosophy. But, you said, if we interpret philosophy as meaning love of wisdom, or life, this is just the day it is for, and why not dump it all and go and philosophize by the river? Ah, the river. And, anyhow, you said, now that there were Janelle and Janette from the United States making it in the woodshed, and when they got tired or thirsty or hungry or too hot or cold, they were bound to come out—sometime anyway—more or less, and then they could help with the symphony and the goats—and don’t go through all that again please, she said, and you did not but definitely, when it came to feminist philosophy, it was mostly written by women from the American continent, she had to agree and if they would not read it, who would? and that was bound to be some sort of help. Too many bounds, she said, in this conversation, almost as bad as ifs and buts, but she saw your point and agreed with you. And that was a weight off your mind, which was tired of weights and bounds and wanted to go boundless, the weight off your feet by the river, any river.
Alright, she said, but first, she said, we should go into town and buy some stuff to finish the loft: some wood and nails and hammers and saws and, anyway, you never knew who you might meet in the hardware store, it being some time since she had been in being so preoccupied with your life outside it. Alright, you said, but remember, no spotting, whoever you spot, the loft and the woodshed being temporarily spoken for.
And on the way you collected a bottle of wine and your flute and she took her knapsack and fiddle. It was a day for the old tunes, walking arm in arm down the road till you came to a stream, sitting down together, love, and who knows, you might even hear the nightingale sing. Or at least a blackcap, its melodious song commonly mistaken, or a whitethroat or stonechat. And into the car you got, putting out the hens and some hydrangea plants waiting to be planted, or they might have been rhododendron, or even azalea, that should have been waiting in the woodshed but could not be now. And as the morning was hot, the sun hot on the windscreen, on your cheek, on your neck, on your arms, as you drove, and dazzling her eyes so that she put on her shades, as she called them, that made her sultry and unknown and glamorous, which she was anyway, and the only woman you knew with such an extraordinary collection of household trappings, not to mention garden and farmhouse. And you said, I think this turn on the left is the fastest road to the river, and it might have been, and it was not only the heat of the sun on your neck that was making you sweat: a lovely light sweet earthy sweat unlike horses or ladies, the latter who only glow. And you were glowing too, though no lady. And she knew the way to the river even better than you, and no wonder, having carried how many others across it, you did not ask, though of course you had asked before, and even considered counting, but now the number escaped you, if you had ever established it, and in no time at all you saw the water winding dark and wide and orange, frothing creamy white at its edges and around the snarl of black polished wood hazel, or yew or sycamore, which had fallen across it, forming a dam so that it was deeper and darker on the other side, deep enough for swimming or bathing as ladies would say. And will we, she said, and took off her clothes (being no lady) which were not many; fewer than the first day when the weather was cooler. And you said, this is where it all began, or some of it, the best part of it, do you remember? There’s no hurry, she said, no hurry at all, we have all we need: the wood and the hammer and food enough for four, and we can start on the loft tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever the rain gets cold. And you lay down on the bank, the grass tickling your face, and she said, do you remember, and how could you not, with so little to distract you, and so much the same, only better now that there had been talk and quarrels and reconciliation and forgetting and fixing things that should have been fixed long ago, now that she knew you looked just like your mother and not at all like your father, and now that she knew you had your sister’s voice, and you knew the names of the ones before and had read old letters and had looked at the photographs, and now that the symphony was almost finished, and a start made on the book, and the Nubian goats milked. It was better, substance and texture, shading and tone being added to what had seemed beyond improvement but was not because now it was better even than before. Do you remember, she said, the first day and you did, you loved remembering the feel of her flanks as she carried you over, her strong back under your thighs and you urging her on, smelling the jasmine smell of her hair and promising yourself to get serious—oh so serious. And have you talked yet about women getting serious and all that it leads to?—looking into each other’s eyes and taking one another seriously, seeing one another whole and entire not as stopgaps, mediators, sympathizers, that long lasting, tasting, touching look that is one of the best things going, and if it happens to be at the side of a river when birds are starting up in the fields surprised by you—larks, you think they are, who spin in the sky with such glorious larkful spinning, up in the air like that and a cuckoo—yes a cuckoo calls that cuckoo way from across the heather, a place so distant you can hardly imagine and yet so clear—so heartstillingly, sound breakingly clear, it comes that call, and who will not answer? Falling into the grass then, the wild red poppies, the cowslips, the speedwell speeding blue all around, waiting all around, the long supple green tassled grass: falling into it two women tired from the business of making a living, a loving, making each day a new living, tired from the business of standing up to be counted—and oh they are counting—never stop—and who started all that business anyway?—tired of counting, two women fall into the cowslips and the l
ark rises and the gutters wait for another day and philosophy waits and the potatoes lie lazy for another day.
