Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

  not being kicked anymore, it has stopped, and you think, oh,

  I’m not dead, I can breathe, now let’s see if I can move, and

  you try to stand up no matter what it costs because standing is

  the best thing, it gives you something back, and it is in the

  process of trying to get up that you look around and see your

  friends watching, and it is in the process of getting up that you

  see you have to do it alone, and it is in the process of getting

  up that you realize without even thinking that anyone can see

  how much you hurt and your friends are just standing there,

  watching, staying away from you. It is the process of getting

  up that clarifies for you how afraid they were for themselves,

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  not for you, and how chickenshit they are, and even though

  you are tiny and they are tiny you know that even tiny little

  girls aren’t really that tiny, in fact no one on earth is that tiny,

  and then they say sissy and it makes you understand that you

  and your daddy are different from them forever and there is

  something puny at the heart of them that smells up the sky.

  You can be seven or eight and know all that and remember it

  forever.

  *

  Diane was holding her scarf, real pretty with lots of very pretty

  colors: and it was Marcy who said, your daddy is a sissy.

  *

  I got home down long blocks bent over and not crying and

  they walked all around me not touching me, staying far away.

  My stomach was kicked in but my face wasn’t hurt too bad. I

  was bent and there was no way on earth I could straighten out

  my back or straighten out my stomach or take my hands away

  from my stomach but see I kept walking and they kept walking:

  oh, and after that everything was the same, except I never

  really liked Marcy again, as long as I live I never will: and I

  still would have done anything for Diane: and we played

  outside all our games: and I didn’t care whether they lived or

  died.

  *

  Down the far end of our block, not the end going toward

  school but the end going somewhere I never saw, there was a

  real funny girl, H. She lived almost at the very end of our

  block, it was like almost falling off the edge of the world to go

  there and you had to pass by so many people you knew to get

  there and they expected you not to go that far away from

  where you lived, from the center of the block, and they

  wondered where you were going and what you were going to

  do, and I didn’t know too many people up that end, just some,

  not any of my favorites: and also the principal of the Hebrew

  School was up that way, and I didn’t like going by his house at

  all because in heavy European tones he chastised me for being

  alive and skipping about with no apparent purpose. So I

  avoided going there at all, and also I was really scared to be so

  close to the end of the block, but this girl was really funny and

  so sometimes I went there anyway. She had a real nice mother

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  and a sort of bratty younger brother. It was the same basic

  house as ours but with lots more things in it, lots nicer: and

  her mother was always cheerful and upright and never up dying

  in bed, which was as pleasant as anything could be. We

  weren’t real close friends but there was some wild streak that

  matched: she had it by being real funny, crazy funny, and I

  had it some other way, I don’t know how I had it or how she

  knew I had it, but she always liked me so she must have.

  One regular Saturday afternoon H ’s mother went away and

  her father was working and she and her bratty brother were

  being baby-sitted and I went there to visit. The baby-sitter was

  some gray gray teenager with pimples and a ponytail, and we

  just got wilder and wilder until we ended up on top of her

  holding her down and punching her and hitting her and

  taunting her and tormenting her and calling her names and

  telling her how ugly she was: and then the bratty brother came

  down and we got scared for a minute that he was going to tell

  or she was going to get up because we were getting pretty tired

  but he came right over and sat right on top of her and we kept

  hitting her and laughing like mad and having so much fun

  making jokes about hitting her and calling her names and then

  making jokes about that. H was at her head holding her down

  by pulling her hair and sitting on her hair and slapping her in

  the face and hitting her breasts. The bratty brother was sitting

  sort of over her stomach and kept hitting her there and tickling

  her there and grinding his knees into her sides. I was at her

  feet, sitting on top of them and digging my nails into her legs

  and punching her legs and hitting her between her legs. We

  kept her there for hours, at least two, and we never stopped

  laughing at our jokes and at how stupid and pathetic she was:

  and when we let her up she ran out and left us: and when H’s

  mother came home we said the baby-sitter had just left us

  there to go see her boyfriend: and H’s mother was furious with

  the baby-sitter for leaving us alone because we were just

  children and she called to complain and call her down and got

  some hysterical story of how we had tortured her: and we

  said, what does that mean? what is that? what is torture? she

  left to see her boyfriend, that’s what she said to us: and the

  baby-sitter said we beat her up and tortured her and we said

  no no we don’t know what she means: and no one ever believed

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  her. She wasn’t Jewish was the thing. It was incredible fun was

  the thing. She was dumber and weaker than we were was the

  thing. Especially: it was incredible fun was the thing. I never

  laughed so much in my life. She wept but I’m sure she didn’t

  understand. You can’t feel remorse later when you laughed so

  hard then. I have never— to this day and including right now—

  given a damn. Why is it that when you laugh so hard you can’t

  weep or understand? Oh, little girls, weep forever or understand too much but be a little scared to laugh too hard.

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  Neither weep nor laugh but understand.

  Spinoza

  *

  There was a stone fence, only about two feet high, uneven,

  rough, broken, and behind it the mountains: a hill declining,

  rolling down, and beyond the valley where it met the road the

  mountains rose up, not hills but high mountain peaks, in winter

  covered in snow from top to bottom, in fall and spring the

  peaks white and blindingly bright and the rest underneath the

  pearly caps browns and greens and sometimes dark, fervent

  purples where the soil mixed with varying shades of light

  coming down from the sky. The building near the stone wall,

  facing out in back over the descending hill to the road and

  then the grandeur of the mountains, was white and wood, old,

  fragile against this bold scenery, slight against it. When it

  snowed the frail building could have been part of a drawing, a

  mediocre
, sentimental New England house in a New England

  snow, a white on white cliche, except exquisite: delicate, exquisite, so finely drawn under its appearance of being a cheap scene of the already observed, the cliched, the worn-down-into-the-ground snow scene. In the fall, the trees were lush with

  yellow and crimson and purple saturated the distant soil. Green

  got duller, then turned a burnt brown. The sky was huge, not

  sheltering, but right down on the ground with you so that you

  walked in it: your feet had to reach down to touch earth. Wind

  married the sky and tormented it: but the earth stayed below

  solid and never swirled around in the fight. There was no dust.

  The earth was solid down in the ground, always. There was

  no hint of impermanence, sand. This was New England, where

  the ground did not bend or break or compromise: it rested

  there, solid and placid and insensitive to the forms its own

  magnificence took as it rose up in mountains of ominous

  heights. These were not mountains that crumbled or fell down

  in manic disorder. These were not mountains that slid or split

  apart or foamed over. These were mountains where the sky

  reached down to touch them in their solid splendor with their

  great trees and broken branches and dwarfed stones, and they

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  stayed put because the earth was solid, just purely itself, not

  mixed with sky or air or water, not harboring fire or ash: no

  ice sliding down to kill anything in its path: no snow tumbling

  to destroy: just dirt, solid ground, made so that humans could

  comprehend it, not die in awe of it, while snow packed itself

  down on top or rain pelted or punched or sun burnt itself out

  or wind flashed through the sky, torturing it. These were

  mountains meant to last forever in a community of human

  sight and sound: not mountains meant to swallow cities and

  towns forever: and so one was surrounded by a beauty not

  suffused with fear, splendid but not inducing awe of the divine

  or terror of the wild, intemperate menace of weather and wind

  gone amuck. These were mountains that made humans part of

  their beauty: solid, like earth, like soil. One felt immeasurably

  human, solid, safe: part of the ground, not some shade on it

  through which the wind passes. The mountains could be one’s

  personal legacy, what the earth itself gave one to be part of:

  one simply had to love them: nothing had to be done to deserve

  them or survive them: one could be innocent of nature and not

  offend them.

  The wooden house, so white and old, underlined the

  tameness of these mountains, the incongruity fitting right in, a

  harmony, a simple delight. The mountains and the house went

  hand in hand: what would the mountain be without the simple

  old house? The cold came from the sky and rested on the

  ground: touched the edges of the mountains high up and

  reached down into the valley and edged along the road and

  paced restlessly on the earnest ground. The cold could

  overwhelm a human with its intensity, its bitterness, like some

  awful taste rubbing on the skin. But in the fragile wooden

  house it was warm: so the cold was not the terrifying cold that

  could penetrate even stone or brick: this must be a gentle cold,

  killed by small fires in charming fireplaces and rattling

  radiators in tiny rooms.

  Emmy and I never touched, outsiders at this rich girls’

  school, on this campus nestled in these welcoming mountains:

  she from Kenya, me from Camden; her an orphan separated

  from her family to be sent to a girls’ school in New England as

  a little girl; me with the woman upstairs dying and the father

  gone to work and the brother farmed out and me farmed out,

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  poor little poor girl; her angry and wild, dark black, separated

  from everyone she loved and everyone she knew and arriving

  here at this college after three or four finishing schools, unfinished, to be educated; me having gotten here so I could read and write; her wanting to go home; me never having a home

  anymore again; her not a rich white girl here at this right

  school; me poor; her upper-class where she comes from; me

  low down; both smart, too smart, for our own good. Also: in

  the world of the rich the poor are outcasts. Being black made

  her poor, money aside. The others were like some distant

  figures who spoke with cotton stuffed in their mouths: nothing

  ever came out clean and clear; they had anguish but it was

  fogged, having nothing to do with what she or I understood as

  real: not that any of the premises were discussed, because the

  rich make their own rules, democracy being one of them, the

  democracy being in the pretense that no rules have been made:

  they suspend them at will: they don’t know: it’s not their fault.

  She had a country to think about and plan for: the freedom of

  its people and her place there, now that she had been

  “ educated, ” westernized, Europeanized: she knew it but not

  what to do about it, and however happy we were, in her head

  she was always on her way home, to a place where she would

  still be an outsider, in exile from a youth that had been stolen

  from her. I loved her. I never touched her.

  *

  The color that comes to New England in the fall does not

  leave it when the trees die. Winter is not barren or monotone.

  The great evergreens go on in muted light. The bare branches

  themselves are tinted with purples and yellows and tawny

  shades like deer flashing by at incredible speeds. The ground is

  every color of brown and blue and black with yellow and red

  running through it like great streaks, and the purple lies in the

  ground like some spectral presence waiting to rise up. The air

  is silver and blue as it edges toward black. It has the purest

  white and the grim gray of a sober storm and in the center of

  it will hang the most orange sun, flaming like dreaded fire. In

  the fall there are only dizzying spreads of scarlet and yellow or

  crimson and ochre: but in the winter, the colors are endlessly

  subtle and complex: so many shades of brown that they cannot

  be counted or named, so much purple in the air between the

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  trees and under the earth shining through and sliding down

  the mountainsides that when the yellow seeps in or crowds in

  next to the purple the mind renounces what it sees, saying:

  impossible, winter is something brown and dead. The branches

  of the trees are elegant, so strong and graceful, even under the

  weight of icy snows: the ice rides them like the best lover, an

  unsentimental kindness of enveloping, hugging, holding on, no

  matter what the pressure is to shake loose. The white branches

  stand in solemn quietude, witnesses without speech to the death

  called winter, reproaches to the effrontery of other seasons

  with their vulgar displays. The white on the mountains reaches

  out to the human eye, persuading it that winter is entirely

  sublime and will stay forever, also persuading the human heart

  that nothing is beyond it— no cold too cold, no snow too big,r />
  no winter too long, no death entirely bereft of some too simple

  beauty, no tree too bare, no color too insignificant or too

  subtle, no silence too still, no gesture too eloquent, no human

  act merely human. In these winter mountains, the human heart

  learns to want peace.

  The trees near the fragile white house are endlessly high.

  They disappear into some low-hanging cloud, all white and

  puffy, wispy, watery, dripping ice that melts and burns in the

  bright sun before it gets down to the ground. They are great

  carcasses rooted in the solid ground, great thick things all

  knotted and gnarled, or smooth and silver-streaked. They never

  were just leaves: the bright colors deceived the stupid mind.

  They were always their trunks, with great canals going through

  them and animals living inside. They have other things growing

  on them, even in the dead of winter, even partly buried under

  the snow or whiplashed by it as the snow swipes on by carried

  by the wind in a storm. The great trunks deceive us into seeing

  them all white in a snowstorm: but they always stay themselves, the misery-racked survivors of every assault and intrusion, every wind and falling thing, every particle blown by or falling down, every stone or rock hurled against them or

  brushing by: the trunk is immoveable while everything else,

  except the ground underneath, moves or dies. This is a permanence beyond our own, redeemed by having no memory and no human speech.

  Emmy had come from a place entirely unlike this and so

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  had I. She said almost nothing about hers, except that there

  was a huge city, cosmopolitan, exciting, and a university, big,

  important, and all around the lush, infested green of hot jungle

  thick with insects and heat. It had many languages, tribal and

  colonial. It was troubling somehow: because there might not

  be room for her there. Mine was simpler, city, a suburb later

  on briefly: telephone poles, asphalt, seasons, the ubiquitous

  cement, the endless chatter of automobiles and human talk:

  not the grandeur of mountains. She hadn’t seen snow, except

  maybe once before she came here. For me snow had been:

  trying to get back and forth from school with the boys surrounding the girls, chasing us, heading us off, pelting us with snowballs, and the snow melting under the dirty car smoke