On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  Sometimes her mother did come after her, sometimes not. Shouting instead “You’re not to start out as a heroine. Not yet.” Her mother read romantic novels, good ones—furred elopers on Russian trains, innocent arrivers in evil English or American cities—and despised herself for it. Later on Lexie herself stretched the distance between them, retreating huffed as far as the apartments or houses they lived in would permit, to an upstairs bedroom, the back one which was usually hers. Finally, as girlhood went on, she parlayed the time too—into hours, half a day, overnight—before she could be persuaded to “come out,” smile sheepishly and resume a relationship with others, as well as with her scorned self. The day of her twelfth birthday—whose anniversary the whole family, not one for calendar specifics, had forgot—she spent outside the house altogether, on the Morton Street dock—a princess towering her neglect, tearlessly in control of unspecified disaster, but meditating too, on the mockeries of life. These sorties fuse into habit. One week after her marriage, and after a first quarrel, Ray, returning from a late call, searches for her and finally finds her, after her five-hour vigil in the night-garden, as she’d hoped to be found—pathetically asleep, in the purple dressing-gown.

  The oddity is that afterward she could never recall the actual slights which had started her off on these sulks, at first so mild in themselves. Later, in her own private language—her great sulks. Saying the private phrase to herself, she sometimes almost initiates one, circling around some hurt that is constant. This too, she’s known for some time. Scorn of self is at the bottom of it. This must be why she is always ashamed—afterward. Once her alternating self-esteem has been a little repaired, or else has risen to the humiliate’s counterpart—arrogance. But there’s more to her story than that. Could it be that the great sulk, surfacing from her own cells like a cloud of black nucleoles—was in answer to some great injury? Done her intangibly, impersonally. Not in itself (she came to conclude) inflicted by any one person. And—one last, last thunderbolt—she herself can be party to it.

  How odd above all, that conclusion should come upon her—in the exact sensation, is offered her—during these same involuted, self-arranged martyrdoms. For these become the times also of her most sustained meditation. Almost as if her sense of injustice, based on the indefinable, bore her up in her right to sustain it. In these publicly stolen moments in chairs, gardens, parks and porches, in beds and on window-ledges, hoarding her offended self, coddling it, she had increasingly forgotten the actual offense after a minute, all the blame siphoning out in a healing flood, in the stately divertimento of her progress to a wider self. So that without professors, short on books, and under only this one peculiar authority, she has been teaching herself to think.

  What have these last months been but the greatest of her sullen times? Prison thoughts—yes, I began with those. Tainted ones. But in the thinking, the prison has disappeared. Glorious thought-careers have surged from behind bars—and oh sages: O Socrates, O Monte Cristo, and who’s that female flamenco-politico—O La Pasionaria—I understand how.

  They sprout from the black, barring stripes, in the bright air-float between. Martyrs at their martyrdom have only being—a noose, a fire, a gallows, a blade. Saints at the height of sainthood have only grace. But prison-thought is mortal—boiling headily with all the bloody flux.

  Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. And all women are mortal too. As syllogisms go. But a woman is not a man. Was that the injury?

  Lexie, take it as offered. Keep your eyes sealed.

  In the baby days of her strange woe, her father would come to her, at first in his own jaunty pose as daddy-of-all-treats, but later appeasingly to her sulkhood, as if he knew the source of it. James followed too, abashed in those days, almost respectful then, of the force behind her veiled, vestal eyes. Did he and his father already think of it as her female principle? Perhaps her father already knew of it from his mother? Smartly soon enough, jealously guarding her close, it was Renata, her mother, who had informed them of it.

  From her own motherhood, she now knew why. For, Socrates—as you know well, a man, however vain or ego-blinded, cannot carry himself about as if he is his own foetus. Or confuse himself with the foetus once carried, now gone. Even the most doting of fathers cannot, does not, do that. But a woman, starkly pitying both parties, easily transliterates from self to child. I see my mother’s face, at these times. I see the process. Call it—womb-punishing.

  “Stay away from her,” her own mother said, punishing her early for what she herself had acceded to. Inuring her to it. “Women do this.” So, by the time of that twelfth birthday, her father and James—gliding around her and away from her at these times as if she was already veiled and in howdah, and rocking toward her wedding-hour—were trained to understand her better than she would herself, for years yet. “It’s only the puberty-sulk,” their averted glances said. “This is what women do. Forget it. We have public chores.”

  So that during all the raging marvels of her teens, when she might have been advancing as coolly as any with her bucket of poetry, energy and ambition, an acolyte ready as any to scrub the face of the world, or rub her own, ah, ah, in its musky bottom, meanwhile advancing at her own leisure, in her own spirit, toward tragedy or foolishness—hysteria had instead been granted her at once. Drop by drop, a little salutary water-torture, turning the rage into steam. So that, rocking on her nightly bed instead of on an elephant, at last she was tamed, turned inward. So that she might be housed.

  Where all the localized embroideries were waiting. And this being the modern world—the telephones.

  And I loved it, love it. I love the amah-bliss of holding the child. It’s my office. As with a priest. Snuggling into that cloister, I retreat. Language becomes linenfold. No need to talk. A faith-in-white-curtains is fair exchange at any font. For faith.

  But, God—I’ve been lucky. I’m turning it all, all into meditation. And I shall manage to turn that into something—you’ll see. God of gender, I’m not your simple bifurcate. I’m your globed one. Behold me, your transliterate.

  Now may I wake?

  Not yet. Not until you swear.

  Swear what? Let me wake.

  Swear never to swear by the cross of sexual injury.

  How not? Why not?

  That way you keep to the prison-club of what women do.

  Who are you?

  I am the voice of the true clarity. In saecula, saeculorum. Where you too have a place.

  I won’t swear against only. I want to swear for.

  Then say simply “This is what I did. What I do.”

  But that voice is genderless.

  Human.

  Ah, that old word, Define it.

  To keep holy. But remain in the world.

  But what if I have only my monologue?

  Then mount it on an elephant.

  But will I talk this language when I’m awake?

  You are awake.

  And so she was, almost. Sore, and paisleyed all over with weed-and-grass pattern. Holding onto the melting keys of freedom, which turn into burdock with dew on it. But I remember. I only dreamed at the last. (A likely epitaph, if you’re going in for them.) On the riverbank is where I am. Set to sail. Ninety degrees still, and the sky just whitening—August in the temperate zone.

  It might be that all over the sloping lawns and terraces here now, there were other people, other bodies lying in similar circumstance, pink on green, pink on green, all at the same slant. Like a good fabric design—one just a shade too literal. There had been a man lying nude on their own lawn one morning after a party next door, with his arms and legs spread, his face to the sky. When she and Ray crept out in the ebbing starlight to see if it was alive, it had smiled up at them with calm, castaway eyes. “Beached,” he’d said. Rolling over, a lion couchant, he’d looked at the world. And still smiling, had picked himself up and walked off.

  I’ll roll over onto my hands and knees. A lioness couchant.

  But she can
’t seem to.

  Help, help, she screamed in her nightmare. I can’t open my eyes. I can’t enter the world. And I know I’m not screaming.

  You’re delivering silently. Women do that. When they’ve been carrying themselves.

  Who said that? Cold-soft as gooseflesh. Are you the same voice?

  All of them. I am the record. Sleep now. Cry a bit. I’ll scream hard enough for you. When it comes time.

  On Keeping On

  AS HE RAN TOWARD her she lay in the half-light like a woman with her throat cut—body arched, knees blasted apart, splayed toes digging the ground. The patch between her legs reared at him, black and creased pink, a bearded mouth rolled sideways. When men were hanged they erected. When women were hatcheted, what went on down below? No morgue had ever instructed him.

  Alive. Grossly alive. The neck’s whole. Her smile is what gapes, the way he saw it in labor once, stretched like a smaller vagina, the lips rose-wet and muscular. Her eyes were wide. Their substance seeps from them.

  Bending, he saw his self-portrait in them.

  She’s awake. Leaning over her is the forgotten face. But her feet aren’t in the birth-stirrups anymore. She moved them experimentally. Grass. A good place. Her legs slide down. Arms fanning winglike, she caressed the ground, head lolling. He had nothing to do with it. Not this time.

  She sat up, feeling her mouth. Her jaws ached with health. “Did I scream?”

  What a look on him.

  “No. You didn’t.”

  What a look on her. She’s measuring him.

  The way he’s holding himself down there. Crotch-sprung. Like a man who’s—been to more than Monte Carlo. Her lip twitched. “Somebody kick you?”

  His hands left off their nursing; his head hung. Not too soon for her to note that its features had always been too neat for her.

  “Excuse me.” He turned and ran down the river-bank.

  She could hear him down there, hawking. She tore off grass and wiped her mouth with it. He’s still sick, then. Maybe that’s for the best. Allowing the two of us to just slouch off from each other, in grunt and slur. Like trained apes out to spoil the documentary set up for them. Too smart to talk.

  Down on the beach he was coughing it all up. So it was her up there in the hall, behind him and Chess. When he’d caved in, the air knocked out of him. Out of the corner of his eye, a white figure, merging at once back into a doorway. Whom he took to be Charles, in his old white ducks. Always falling asleep in them. Roused him a hundred times.

  But could it have been her? Sleeping raw the way she did, even into November. In the hot nights stealing out of bed, down the hall onto the upstairs porch, and onto the black hill. Coming back in to tell him “It’s like swimming in the dark.” Or to butt her head against him, a bitch with her pup, nosing him. Whispering into his chest “Her light’s still on.”

  Down the backstairs and out again that way, she could have gone. If she saw them. Out one of the doors of that ever-accommodating house—always so proud she is, that we’ve never kept them locked. Out to show the world her nakedness.

  He moved downstream, as if the river might pool his vomit, and slapped water on his face. The Hudson flowed upstream here and was salt. What’s that on the mudscarp? A shoe, a woman’s. A pair of them draining with tide, filling with it. Twitting their pointy toes at him: All that goes on here silts away—no other answer, dearie. Maybe it was her; maybe it wasn’t. It’s all of them you’re mourning, isn’t it—even Maureen. All of them standing blindly aware, one to a doorway. In the silting house.

  He went up the bankside almost lightly. So much has been lost.

  She sat up at once. To show him how it was with her. This is the way it is, Ray—without pearls. But it sticks in her throat. “So you’re back.”

  She stared up at him as of old, from under eyelids sulked to the purple of her old dressing-gown. The exact division of her body always amazes him. As if some polymath, richer in anatomical lore than he could ever be, had scored her in three parts and each time deeper—once at the girdle-of-Venus line at the neck, twice at the underarc of the breasts, and last at the pale, visibly powerful slope of the stomachline. What is there about her nudity that’s almost painful to him? That he must protect her from? “Do stand away from that window,” he’d snapped on their honeymoon—and knows she’s never forgiven him. Despising him forever, as a puller-down of shades.

  My sister equates nudity with honesty—James once said. It isn’t her self-display. It wasn’t our mother’s either.

  Agreed—Lexie replied to the air. But what really bugged you, James, and Daddy too—what bugs all of you—is when we reject our nudity as household art.

  “Yes, I’m back,” he said. “But not for long.”

  His eyes are sunken, but in a younger face. It’s now plainly a face which always hurt somewhere, but could never say. She can see more clearly now that those cells which speak must have been left out of it, or have been crushed. How she used to plead with it, quite pitifully. How it used to anger her, always to have to be the one to break down their life-tensions into speech.

  Now she’s grateful. For whatever will make him unlovable. The way a Sabine woman might feel, when rescued. Looking back at the abductor she’d lived with for years, not unhappily enough.

  “Pair of women’s shoes down there.”

  “Not mine.”

  “I know.” In spite of himself—as she could well see—he took his jacket off and held it down to her. “Here.”

  “No thanks.”

  It was still very hot of course.

  In spite of herself, she reached out to touch one of his new yellow shoes. “Spanish?”

  “A gift.”

  The jacket dropped to the ground in front of her. He gripped his shirtcollar, easing it. Is he too going to divest himself, at last? To stand here naked also, in silent explanation?

  There flashes over her what she always wanted of him. To understand her nakedness—beyond the sexual. To say to her, by those silent means which are allpowerful: I am thy nakedness, too. To have him capable of lying here, her replica. And not for love.

  “How long have you been down here like that?” It burst from him.

  She shivered. Ah—in that case. An idyll—she mourns it. “Since you left.”

  The truth. She wanted to tell him the whole truth. She stared at it.

  He’s covered that face of his.

  “Ray—.” No, she won’t have this. Old feelers, old mutuals pushing up.

  He kneels beside her.

  She kneels beside him.

  “Look at you.”

  “Look at you.”

  They rise on knee, hands upraised and spread before each other’s faces. A prison couple, pawing glass. Which one of us is the visitor?

  How she’d blossomed. And yet fallen away. He doesn’t dare touch her.

  How he’d fallen away. And yet—bloomed. She drew a finger down his gaunt cheek.

  “It’s from the disease,” he says. Proudly.

  When they cling, the rucked-up jacket slides between them.

  I am thy nakedness, she whispers in his arms. But not to him.

  “Don’t—.”

  “—explain.”

  Both have said it. The nearest they’ve ever come, to equal speech.

  “Not—anything?” she said.

  “Anything.”

  “You mean that?”

  “You do?” he said.

  “I do.”

  He nodded. “I mean that.”

  They’re in a rhythm. Call it the dawn-rhythm. When two people begin to know they are two.

  “Only what we’ll—have to say.” She glanced behind them, in the direction of the house. “Like what we’ll do now. And how.”

  “And—where.”

  They were quiet for the same minute.

  “But no whys and wherefores.” She hesitated. “Unless we—want to.”

  He considered. Nodded.

  “And no excuses.”r />
  He hesitated. “None.”

  They were silent. Would it be the triumph of their life together, if they could hold to that?

  “Agreed—” he said. “Then—I’ve just this minute gotten off the bus.”

  “Agreed. And I’ve been—lying here. Waiting for it.”

  His eyes widen, but hold. This man, long ago rejected in the flesh, is by circumstance her one sharer. From long association able to stalk the underbrush of her mind in all its yallery-greenery of serio-comic reference. Where, as they both know, one minute she’s in vestal command of all the mysteries, but the next is wandering uncommissioned in the semigloom of her kind—as a family professional whose personality, by reason of a work-history only loosely corroborated by others, has to operate at some loss.

  His glance slid down her, reinforcing her nudity. In the warm, viscid air, she’d forgotten about it, as real nudists must.

  “I see,” he said. “Of course.”

  He must think she’s waiting for someone. Stripped, to him she’s erotic only. Fair enough. When that’s how she came to be here. “No,” she should say, “there was someone. But he’s gone.” I heard the car go by.

  She resists. In their minds, did all naked women wait merely for them? Not for—other connection.

  What did a naked man wait for in the eyes of women? Not for them alone, that’s certain.

  She’d equip him. That’s it; she herself always equipped them. Lying in bed beneath or above anyone of them, with his throat and sex bare to her hand, she herself complicitly armed them, even before they did it themselves. Respectfully she hung the powerbag between their legs like a codpiece, and cocked on her pillow their judge’s-hat.

  For in her mind they already lie twice as open as she to life’s accounts. Lying in her bed, they waited to rejoin the world. Or in the piercing contemplation of arrows already received. They wait in such busy dignity. In her own mind.

  It’s why she can never wholly love or murder them.

  “I didn’t mean to ask,” he’s saying.