by Nell Zink
“Christ,” he said in exasperation. “Where’d you read that, Ladies’ Home Journal? You think women don’t sleep around, just because they bring a moving van on the second date? Feminism was cooked up to keep the black man and the homosexuals down. ‘Hey, Mr. Charlie, why don’t you hire your wife? That way you can double your money, instead of letting some faggot make enough to feed his kids!’”
The girls gasped.
Lee paused to double back and revise what he had just said, but he saw it was impossible. Returning to poetry, his rock of abstraction in the storm of reality, he proclaimed, “I built up this magazine from scratch, and I’m proud of it. It’s mine, not the college’s. And I can move it to another college, if that’s what I have to do to publish poetry.” He closed his notebook and stood up from the table. “My final offer,” he said. “You publish four issues of a poetry magazine a year, in book form, or you resign.”
“We resign!” the Maoist called out, but she felt a hand on her arm.
“I need this for my résumé,” the girl next to her whispered.
Lee turned around. “That’s exactly it. You need this for your résumé. Guess what? You’re all fired. I don’t need you for my résumé. I don’t need to read unsolicited poems to reject them. I can get the best poets in America by asking if they’ve got anything for me. Suck on that.” He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and flounced out.
“He wouldn’t dare fire us,” a girl said anxiously.
“Maybe he has a point. It was his idea, having a magazine and all. And it’s not his fault he’s a man.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” the poetry editor pointed out. “We can put it on our résumés either way.”
“He needs us to do layout and stuff envelopes,” one girl said hopefully.
There was instantaneous consensus that the last speaker was right. Lee would hardly type up copy, open mail, maintain the mailing list, or do anything else except call the shots.
So there was no point in taking the mass firing seriously. They continued the editorial meeting without him as though nothing had happened, tacitly assuming four printed issues a year, one featuring black writers and one with women, both with interviews to add context.
Out on the placid, viscous lake, heading home, Lee raged bitterly . . . but inwardly, not enough to rock the canoe. To be at once a disinherited black sheep and a straw man liable for the sins of patriarchy! It was too rich. In their stupidity and immaturity, the Stillwater students of recent years increasingly called to mind the fact that he had a daughter. A daughter who would already be too old to start on time at Foxcroft, should he ever find her. A daughter old enough now to come calling. But she didn’t, meaning she didn’t know he existed. The closer she got to the age of his students, the more he hated them. The more options bright women had, the fewer of them turned up in places like Stillwater. He gazed down at the green broth beneath his keel and thought, They ought to change the name to Pillwater. The college’s primitive septic system was letting so much untreated urine into the lake that its hermaphroditic mollusk species had all turned female and died out.
Lee often thought of his children.
That is, he thought of them whenever he was alone and angry, which was often. To feel angrier, he thought of Mireille. When the adrenaline spiked uncomfortably, he would console himself with Byrdie. Of course Byrdie had the potential to become an arrogant ass because everybody worshipped him, but so far he was safe in the secondary phase of education where things still revolve around universal ethical values. No one sat him down to say, “You are the type boys imitate and girls fuck. You are the phallus spoken of by Lacan. You have power. Now abuse it.” Back then they saved that stuff for MBA programs, and something kept Byrdie from picking it up on his own. Perhaps being abandoned by his mother had put a dent in his self-esteem?
Woodberry’s prettiest, richest day student made a desperate play for Byrdie. But he had no interest in long-term alliances forged at teen summit meetings. His Stillwater babysitters had taught him all about being a sexy girl’s favorite spoiled darling, and he wanted more. That naive faith shielded him from false coin.
He recognized her tactics at once, partly because the student body included the heir to a very large ranch and a Bostonian who would be king of France just as soon as France reintroduced the monarchy, and he’d seen girls stalk them. The girls worked slowly, studying every trace and footprint, keeping their quarry moving for months until it lay down exhausted. At which point, in Byrdie’s opinion, a girl in love would have pounced. Her hands would have gone out and encircled the boy she loved, drawing him away from human society and down to a mattress. Whereas an aspiring bride-to-be would establish a public surveillance post at a distance of five feet and never budge.
The pretty day student became known as his girlfriend almost before he’d exchanged a word with her. They ate lunch together every day, or certainly at the same table. And in fact she was charming, pretty, and very smart. They were in AP calculus together. They attended basketball games and formal dances. But she didn’t pounce, and Byrdie knew a woman worth fucking would make the first move in spite of herself. She would know what she wanted and coax it out of him, absolving him of all responsibility and bathing him in a flame of eternal femininity that would make sex so unlike masturbation that nobody in his right mind could ever get them mixed up.
That romantic belief in transcendent submissiveness, borrowed from Hesse’s Steppenwolf, kept him a virgin until college.
Lee’s sex life was a lot like Byrdie’s, but he knew the reason. Beyond his little AIDS scare, he had gained weight. His back bothered him. Riding English hurt his knees. Riding Western gave him hemorrhoids. He couldn’t have fucked a Maoist to death if he tried. He would drive up to Orange occasionally to take Byrdie out to dinner and sometimes play a few holes of golf, but mostly he was avoiding full-length mirrors. He saw Byrdie coasting through school on gentlemen’s Bs, singing in the chorus, playing piano, painting in the art room, brooding over novels, getting into stylish and inconsequential trouble, sublimating frustrations into golf, being a major cunt tease to his poor innocent girlfriend, and otherwise doing everything a boy should be doing at his age, and he was satisfied in every way. The perfect child, goddamn it.
Heading to a Chrysler Museum board meeting in Norfolk, Lee stopped off at Doumar’s for ice cream. It was an old-fashioned drive-in with teenage waitresses on roller skates. He was trying to cut down on drinking during the day, especially before board meetings, and ice cream made a nice substitute. Doumar’s reminded him of New York. There were signs on the wall to prove the founder had invented the ice-cream cone. Something about claims of inventing the obvious—pizza by the slice, or reading poetry aloud over a recording of yourself reading poetry aloud—always reminded him of New York.
He pulled his new blue Chevette in to the right of another blue Chevette, and thought, Quelle coincidence, a sister ship. As he clambered out to visit the restroom, he had to be careful to avoid colliding with the tray hung on the other Chevette’s passenger-side door. Heaped with heavily salted French fries, it was serving as a feeding trough to a stocky but fine-featured child with blond hair in cornrows. She lowered her mouth to the tip of the topmost French fry, guiding it inside with her tongue and a slurping sound like a robin eating a worm. The driver’s seat was empty.
Husky. Blond. Cornrows. A suspicion burst in on Lee. He stooped down and said, “Karen?”
“Who are you?” the girl asked.
“I might be your daddy,” he said.
“My daddy’s in Leavenworth for fragging his CO,” she replied.
That settled it for Lee. He recognized Peggy’s sense of humor. He jerked the door open, disregarding the greasy fries that tilted onto his clean khakis, and took her by the arm. “Come along,” he said. “We need to clear some things up.”
“Get off of me!” she said. She raised her voice and called out, “Marcella! Marcella!”
A shiny, pyram
idal white woman with fine, limp hair—also in cornrows—came around the corner from the ladies’ room and said, “What are you doing? You get away from my granddaughter right now.”
Lee let go and backed away. He had seized the arm of a repulsive child on gut instinct without the least stirring of sensitivity or rationality—the child looked nothing like anyone he knew—feeling momentarily manly for what? For acting out like a drama queen? He didn’t even look around to check that he knew no one there. He simply closed his eyes, placing his right thumb and index finger on his eyelids, thankful it was Doumar’s.
“And you’d best pay for those fries,” the woman added. To the child she said, “Don’t eat food off the ground.”
“I’ll buy her new fries,” he said. He eased her door shut and reached for his wallet. “Watch your arm there. I’m so sorry. I mistook her for someone. Just sort of a confusing couple of years. Would five dollars be all right?” He extended the money toward the grandmother, inadvertently creating a suggestive still life: gold cuff link, gold watch, eel-skin wallet, five-dollar bill. The woman was nearsighted and lacked glasses. Lee’s face was fuzzy to her, but the still life was not. “I’m really very, very sorry,” he added. “I saw her hair and thought she might be my daughter.”
“Well, she might be,” the woman said. “She might well be.”
“I don’t think so,” Lee said.
“She’s a foster child. I just call her my granddaughter because my kids is growed up. You could be her father. What did you say your name was?”
“I got to go,” he said. “I simply must book. I got a meeting. Excuse me.”
“But you should keep in touch. Let me get you my card. I’m a hairdresser.”
As she went for her purse, he lowered himself into the driver’s seat and lurched into reverse. He stayed in reverse, backing all the way out to the main road, thankful he didn’t have a front license plate.
Six
There were new families in the county where Meg lived, drawn by the cheapness of two-acre lots with fishponds at their lowest points and septic tanks and wells going uphill in that order. Their motive for moving to the county had a name: “white flight.” And the more white people moved beyond the city limits, the more wanted to come. They had a snowball effect. Anybody with a little money to invest could make a good living building houses on spec.
You wouldn’t have noticed the newcomers just driving around, especially in summer when the leaves were on the trees. But behind the bushwhacked shoulders of the roads lay new home developments, sometimes as many as ten or twelve families, screened from view by thick buffers of vines and tree snags.
The new families founded a countywide Parent Teacher Association with a political agenda. They hoped to tear down all the public schools and build new ones. The current schools were in towns, convenient to stores where the kids could dash during breaks to grab such necessities as wax lips and fast-burning ten-cent cigarettes. They were overcrowded, because integration had been achieved by closing two-thirds of them. Most white children still went to private schools (“Christian academies”), although the voucher program that once paid their tuition had been phased out years before.
Thus many a newcomer discovered that his dream home was served by a decrepit public school that was 80 percent black. He was subsidizing it with his tax dollars. Yet he couldn’t get a voucher to pay for private school for his own kids. There was a lot of anger.
But there was also realism. The Supreme Court had invalidated one segregation scheme after another, no matter how well it worked. But that was partly because the movement made strategic errors. It called the voucher system “Massive Resistance to Integration” and school choice “Passive Resistance.” In public relations terms, it was a fiasco. When the Supreme Court went on the warpath, imposing busing that turned white people into refugees, they surrendered. The new way forward was to be subtle enough to fool even themselves.
The PTA wanted the school board to solicit money from the federal government to open new, centrally located, fully integrated public schools and bus all the kids to them. Out in the country busing was more a convenience than a burden. It even provided employment for drivers. The new schools would have air-conditioning and no asbestos. They would be large enough to allow children to be taught in separate classes according to their abilities.
No one had thought to criticize the school facilities before. When it came to quality of education, people always talked about class size and teaching. But to the newcomers, property developers, building contractors, and subcontractors of various trades, it was plain that quality education requires modern buildings. There was a good deal of overlap among the four groups, and Meg did not find their self-interested motives entirely sympathetic. But they made their opponents sound like unregenerate Klansmen.
At the first meeting she attended, all it took was for a speaker to favor modern athletic facilities, and the Pop Warner coach countered that a varsity football program, chronically swamped with aspiring players, would foster un-Christian rivalry for starting positions. A member of the school board opined that children should play sports in familiar surroundings where they speak a common language and learn at their own pace. A third speaker explained that some people’s natural talent would be complemented by other people’s ability to read playbooks, so that the all-county varsity with the deep bench would be victorious in the region and possibly even the state.
Eye contact and whispers raced around the room, and Meg got the feeling she was expected to say something. She was at once a newcomer and black. It was longer than anyone could remember since a black person had voluntarily moved into the county. Quite possibly it had never happened ever before. There were no other black people at the meeting.
She raised her hand and was called on. She said, “I look forward very much to seeing my daughter in a modern middle school with an adequately staffed and funded library, the sooner the better. You know that Andrew Carnegie founded the public libraries so that working people would have the opportunity to better themselves.”
It was a brilliant speech, simultaneously demanding a modern school, praising a robber baron, and exhorting her Negro brothers and sisters to self-reliance and work. After the meeting, the PTA founder made a point of embracing Meg. “An Oreo,” she told her friends later. She remarked that Mrs. Brown was as well-spoken as if she had grown up watching PBS. Her collar was clean (polo shirts and hair relaxers led a difficult coexistence in those days). She was divorced or a widow, but no one saw her turning tricks or even smiling much. No one had met her boyfriend, but it was always the same van. One saw her buying not steaks with food stamps, but canned goods with cash. And her daughter (Karen spent the meeting reading the book of Bible stories that was chained to the chaise longue in the ladies’ room) was, if not the most popular child among children, the idol of the suburban émigrés. The ghostlike, flaxen-haired black child was almost a matter of civic pride. They hoped she would stay in the county and marry a light-skinned, blue-eyed man to found one of those conversation-piece dynasties.
At subsequent meetings, Meg went on to sing the praises of functional plumbing, heat in the winter, and modern electrical systems that don’t shock the kids every time they touch the filmstrip projector. There wasn’t a trace of separatism about her. She was so delightful and approachable! A natural ambassador of the newly ascendant educated black middle class. The newcomer mothers just loved her.
Two of them had founded a feminist encounter group. They discussed for months whether they might not invite a black woman one time, meaning Meg. Then their curiosity got the better of them, and they invited her.
The group’s founders had never been to any other feminist encounter group, but somewhat belatedly got the idea out of Ms. magazine. In between calls to action on the ERA and arousing tales of men who gave head, there appeared mentions of meetings at which women learned to speak openly about their concerns, their wishes and desires, and their bodies.
O
nce you go black, you’ll never go back, men were wont to say, but why is that? They all knew the joke about their flat noses (that’s where God braced his foot when he was stretching the first black man’s penis) and had heard inexact rumors of the Hottentot Venus. Such thoughts of racial “difference,” insinuated shyly at several encounter group meetings in a row, troubled the white liberal moms of the PTA but excited them as well. They planned to get answers from Meg if they could.
However, when Meg was ushered in, they happened to be talking about a course in sex magic you could take in Virginia Beach. “I wouldn’t take that course for a million dollars,” a woman said. “When they say life force, they mean sperm. You have to swallow, like he’s doing you this huge favor.”
Meg sat down in a big armchair and said, “I think the fluids might be a yoga thing. Like you’re handmaiden to the Dalai Lama, and you massage his root chakra, and he uses his penis to drink your menstrual blood like coming in reverse? Some guy told me about this one time.”
The women stared at her, captivated. Their knowledge of obscure sexual practices came almost exclusively from magazines (books such as The Joy of Sex were short on specifics, enjoining readers to follow their hearts), on very rare occasions from women whose husbands had returned from prison demanding things that demanded explanation, and 0 percent of the time from men. “What else did he say?” her hostess asked, her tone as encouraging as she could make it.
“I’m not sure. We were pretty buzzed. He was one of those people into Wilhelm Reich and Total Orgasm. What was it now? I know! I asked him about tantra, and he said the post-structuralist emphasis on jouissance is an artifact of a modern construct, sexuality. Or maybe it was the other way around. Jouissance means ‘orgasm’ in French.”
