Ice And Fire
Andrea Dworkin
ICE AND FIRE
By the same author
Nonfiction
W om an H ating
O ur Blood: Prophecies and D iscourses on Sexual Politics
Pornography: M en Possessing W omen
Right-w ing W omen:
T he Politics o f Dom esticated Fem ales
Fiction
the new w om ans broken heart: short stories
ICE AND FIRE
A Novel
by
Andrea Dworkin
Seeker & W arb u rg
L on don
First published in England 1986 by
Martin Seeker & Warburg Limited
54 Poland Street, London WI V 3DF
Copyright ©
by Andrea Dworkin
Reprinted 1986
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Dworkin, Andrea
Ice and fire: a novel.
1. Title
823'. 91 4[F]
PR6054. W/
ISBN 0-436-13960-X
Pages 52-56 first appeared, translated into French, in La Vie
en Rose, No 18, July-August 1984.
Filmset in Great Britain in II on 12 pt Sabon
by Richard Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Billings & Son Ltd,
Hylton Road, Worcester
For Elaine M arkson
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
I have two first memories.
The sofa is green with huge flowers imprinted on it, pink
and beige and streaks of yellow or brown, like they were
painted with a wide brush to highlight the edges and borders
of the flowers. The sofa is deep and not too long, three cushions, the same green. The sofa is against a wall in the living room. It is our living room. Nothing in it is very big but we
are small and so the ceilings are high and the walls tower,
unscalable, and the sofa is immense, enough width and depth
to burrow in, to get lost in. My brother is maybe two. I am
two years older. He is golden, a white boy with yellow hair
and blue eyes: and happy. He has a smile that lights up the
night. He is beautiful and delicate and divine. Nothing has set
in his face yet, not fear, not malice, not anger, not sorrow: he
knows no loss or pain: he is delicate and happy and intensely
beautiful, radiance and delight. We each get a corner of the
sofa. We crouch there until the referee, father always, counts
to three: then we meet in the middle and tickle and tickle until
one gives up or the referee says to go back to our corners
because a round is over. Sometimes we are on the fl oor, all
three of us, tickling and wrestling, and laughing past when I
hurt until dad says stop. I remember the great print flowers, I
remember crouching and waiting to hear three, I remember the
great golden smile of the little boy, his yellow curls cascading
as we roll and roll.
The hospital is all light brown outside, stone, lit up by electric
lights, it is already dark out, and my grandfather and I are
outside, waiting for my dad. He comes running. Inside I am
put in a small room. A cot is set up for him. My tonsils will
come out. Somewhere in the hospital is my mother. I think all
night long that she must be in the next room. I tap on the wall,
sending secret signals. She has been away from home for a
long time. The whole family is in the hospital now, my father
with me: I don’t know where my brother is— is he born yet?
7
He is somewhere for sure, and my mother is somewhere,
probably in the next room. I remember flowered wallpaper.
I haven’t seen my mother for a very long time and now
I am coming to where she is, I expect to see her, I am
close to her now, here, in the same hospital, she is near,
somewhere, here. I never see her but I am sure she is lying
in bed happy to be near me on the other side of the wall
in the very next room. She must be happy to know I am
here. Her hair was long then, black, and she was young.
My father sleeps in the hospital room, in the bed next to
mine.
*
The street was home, but, oh, these were kind streets, the
streets of children, real children. The houses were brick row
houses, all the same, two cement flights of stairs outside, the
outside steps, from the sidewalk. The lawns were hills sloping
down the height of one flight of steps, the lower one, to the
sidewalk. There was a landing between flights. Some of us had
patios: the big cement truck came, the huge tumbler turning
round and round, and the cement was poured out and flattened
down, and sticks marked the edges until it dried. Others had
some flowers: next door there were shabby roses, thorns. Each
house was the same, two floors, on the first floor a living
room, dining room, and tiny kitchen; up a tall flight of stairs
three bedrooms, two big, one tiny, a bathroom, a closet. The
stairs were the main thing: up and down on endless piggyback
rides on daddy’s back: up to bed with a piggyback ride, up
and down one more time, the greatest ride had a story to go
with it about riding horses or piggies going to market; up the
stairs on daddy’s back and then into bed for the rest of the
fabulous story; and I would try to get him to do it again and
again, up and down those stairs, and a story. Each house had
one family, all the houses were in a row, but two doors were
right next to each other above the cement steps so those were
the closest neighbors. The adults, mostly the women, would sit
on chairs up by their doors, or sit on the steps up by the doors
talking and visiting and watching the children, and the children
of all the houses would converge in the street to play. If you
looked at it you would see dismal brick row houses all the
same at the top of two flights of cement steps out in the wea
8
ther. But if you were a child, you would see that the adults
were far away, and that the street stretched into a million
secret hidden places. There were parked cars to hide behind
and under and telephone poles, the occasional tree, secret
valleys at the bottoms of lawns, and the mysterious interiors of
other people’s houses across the way. And then the backs of
the houses made the world bigger, more incredible yet. There
were garages back there, a black asphalt back alley and back
doors and places to hang clothes on a line and a million places
to hide, garbage cans, garages half open, telephone poles,
strange dark dirty places, basements. Two blocks behind us in
the back there was a convent, a huge walled-in place all verdant
with great trees that hid everything: and so our neighborhood
turned gothic and spooky and we talked of children captured
and hidden inside: and witches. Outside there were maybe
twenty
of us, all different ages but all children, boys and girls,
and we played day after day and night after night, well past
dark: hide-and-seek, Red Rover Red Rover, statue, jump rope,
hopscotch, giant steps, witch. One summer we took turns
holding our breath to thirty and then someone squeezed in our
stomachs and we passed out or got real dizzy. This was the
thing to do and we did it a million times. There were alleys
near one or two of the houses suddenly breaking into the brick
row and linking the back ways with the front street and we
ran through them: we ran all over, hiding, seeking, making up
new games. We divided into teams. We played giant steps. We
played Simon Says. Then the boys would play sports without
us, and everything would change. We would taunt them into
playing with us again, going back to the idyllic, all together,
running, screaming, laughing. The girls had dolls for when the
boys wouldn’t let us play and we washed their hair and set it
outside together on the steps. We played poker and canasta
and fish and old maid and gin rummy and strip poker. When
babies, we played in a sandbox, until it got too small and we
got too big. When bigger, we roller-skated. One girl got so big
she went out on a date: and we all sat on the steps across the
street and watched her come out in a funny white dress with a
red flower pinned on it and a funny-looking boy was with her.
We were listless that night, not knowing whether to play hide-
and-seek or statue. We told nasty stories about the girl in the
9
white dress with the date and wouldn’t play with her sister
who was like us, not a teenager. Something was wrong. Statue
wasn’t fun and hide-and-seek got boring too. I watched my
house right across the street while the others watched the girl
on the date. Intermittently we played statue, bored. Someone
had to swing someone else around and then suddenly let them
go and however they landed was how they had to stay, like a
statue, and everyone had to guess what they were— like a
ballet dancer or the Statue of Liberty. Whoever guessed what
the statue was got to be turned around and be the new statue.
Sometimes just two people played and everybody else would
sit around and watch for any little movement and heckle and
guess what the person was being a statue of. We were mostly
girls by now, playing statue late at night. I watched my house
across the street because the doctor had come, the man in the
dark suit with the black bag and the dour expression and the
unpleasant voice who never spoke except to say something bad
and I had been sent outside, I had not wanted to leave the
house, I had been ordered to, all the lights were out in the
house, it was so dark, and it was late for them to let me out
but they had ordered me to go out and play, and have a good
time they said, and my mother was in the bedroom with the
door closed, and lying down I was sure, not able to move,
something called heart failure, something like not being able to
breathe, something that bordered on death, it had happened
before, I was a veteran, I sat on the steps watching the house
while the girl in the white dress stood being laughed at with
her date and I had thoughts about death that I already knew I
would remember all my life and someday write down: death is
someone I know, someone who is dressed exactly like the
doctor and carries the same black bag and comes at night and
is coming tonight to get mother, and then I saw him come,
pretending to be the doctor, and I thought well this is it she
will die tonight I know but the others don’t because they go on
dates or play statue and I’m more mature and so they don’t
know these things that I know because I live in a house where
death comes all the time, suddenly in the night, suddenly in the
day, suddenly in the middle of sleeping, suddenly in the middle
of a meal, there is death: mother is sick, we’ve called the doctor,
I know death is on the way.
10
The streetlights lit up the street. The brick was red, even- at
night. The girl on the date had a white dress with a red corsage.
We sat across the street, near our favorite telephone pole for
hide-and-seek, and played statue on and off. I always had a
home out there, on the steps, behind the cars, near the telephone pole.
*
Inside the woman was dying. Outside we played witch.
The boys chased the girls over the whole block from front
to back. They tried to catch a girl. When they caught her they
put her in a wooden cage they had built or found and they
raised the cage up high on a telephone pole, miles and miles
above the ground, with rope, and they left her hanging there.
She was the witch. Then they let her down when they wanted
to. After she begged and screamed enough and they wanted to
play again or do something else.
You were supposed to want them to want to catch you.
They would all run after one girl and catch her and put her in
the cage and raise it up with the rope high, high on the telephone pole out in the back where the adults didn’t see. Then they would hold the cage in place, the girl inside it screaming,
four or five of them holding her weight up there in the wooden
cage, or they would tie the rope to something and stand and
watch.
When they picked you it meant you were popular and fast
and hard to catch.
*
When we played witch all the girls screamed and ran as fast as
they could. They ran from all the boys and ran so fast and so
far that eventually you would run into some boy somewhere
but all the boys had decided who they were going to catch so
the boy you would run into accidentally would just pass you
by and not try to catch you and capture you and put you in
the cage.
*
Everyone wanted to be caught and was terrified to be caught.
The cage was wooden and had pieces missing and broken. The
rope was just a piece of heavy rope one of the boys found
somewhere or sometimes even just a piece of clothesline stolen
from a backyard. You could hang there for as long as an hour
and the boys would threaten to leave you there and all the
girls would come and watch. And you would feel ashamed. To
be caught or not to be caught. *
When we played witch it was always the boys against the girls
and the boys always chased the girls and it was a hard chase
and we ran places we had never seen before and hid in places
we were afraid of. There was the street with the row houses
facing into it and then there were the back ways behind the
houses, and the distance between the back ways and the front
street connected by an occasional alley between the row houses
was enormous to a girl running. But we never went out of
these bounds, even when we reached the end of the boundaries
and a boy was right behind us. The street was long and at
each end it was bounded by another street an
d we never crossed
those streets. We never went past the two back ways on to
streets parallel to our own and we never went into foreign
back ways not behind our own houses. In this neighborhood
everyone had their block and you didn’t leave your block. Our
block was white and Jewish. The block across the street on
one end of our street was Polish Catholic. The block across
the street at the other end of our street was black. Even when
we played witch, no matter how hard you wanted to run and
get away, you never left the block.
*
I would play witch, racing heart.
*
I would play witch, wanting to be chased and caught, terrified
to be chased and caught, terrified not to be chased: racing
heart.
*
I would play witch, running, racing heart: running very fast,
running away, someone chasing: realizing: you have to slow
down to get caught: wanting to be caught: not slowing down.
*
I would play witch, already slow, barely chased, out of breath,
hiding, then wander back to where we had started, then wander
back to where the wooden cage was and see the girl hoisted in
the wooden cage, see the clothesline or rope tied to something
and the boys standing there looking up, hear the shrieking.
12
Downhearted, I would wait until they let her down. All the
girls would stand around, looking up, looking down, waiting,
trying to see who it was, trying to figure out who was missing,
who got caught, who was pretty, who slowed down.
*
Inside mother was dying and outside, oh, it was incredible to
run, to run, racing heart, around the houses and between the
cars and through the alleys and into the half-open garages and
just up to the boundaries of the block, farther, farther than
you had ever been before, right up to the edge: to run with a
boy chasing you and then to saunter on alone, out of breath,
having run and run and run. If only that had been the game.
But the game was to get caught and put in the cage and hoisted
up the telephone pole, tied by rope. Sometimes they would tie
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