The fireman was too abashed to speak.
The fireman never in his life told anyone either the particulars of his masturbatory techniques, and they were manifestly soothing inventions. The fireman knew how to feel as if he was with someone he could love when he was all alone. He should have told at least one other person how.
Spanish
I wish that everything is enough for Mr. Red who is the husband, who has a heavy Spanish accent. He is a scholar. Mrs. Red speaks English with a heavy Spanish accent also, and she is a full-time scholar, too.
Yesterday, I saw the Reds’ bed of scarlet impatiens waving in the wind, which was quite unremarkable. But, that is not all.
Mrs. Red, who is probably responsible for the planting of the flowers, was on her way, carrying her folded-up folding chair and several other things.
She was big enough, even with carrying all of her things, so she could fit comfortably between my thumb and my forefinger from where I sat inside of my house watching her—that was my perspective on my hand.
To me, she is like a cutie-pie! like a little doll!
Society, schools, hospitals, factories, and homes are the other victims of the perpetual movement of philosophical thought, as well as many other organees.
A Field That Can Never
Be Exhausted
I must let you know how urgent I felt racing down the stairs. We did that—the whole group of us girls. Next winter I am going to be in Florida.
I didn’t have any money with me. There was an additional obstacle. Things were probably not that simple. He said, “Follow the good-looking blond!” He was the blond he was referring to, and he was very good-looking, and jaunty, I thought. It was a cute idea to tell us to follow him and to use a line like that. He was having fun I think. Off we trooped. He shouted, “Single file!”
I suppose he had to shout that. I suppose there was no other way to do it.
What do you expect? Don’t you expect him to get a little fun out of his job? When he was telling me to pull my pants down, he said, “Pull them down lower.”
But how should I tell this? I have been waiting for years to tell this anecdote that any civilization would need to illustrate that there are people, you know, who are perfectly capable of being cheerful.
They Were Naked Again
In an instant she may not see it as it happens, how light crowds in and around her red hair, and all around her head, before vanishing into some other light, which is likely having nothing more to do with her hair?—but this is wrong, because there is no inkling of science.
So—I’ll get her into his bed, looking at his carpet, which is on his floor, rolled up. Together, they look at it, not for any reason they guess might augment them.
He is prepared to get rid of the carpet. It has been causing him to feel bereft of something he probably never had—something which I could give him.
I could.
She says, “Please don’t get rid of it. It comforts me.”
I would never say that to him. I would never say that to him in this situation, which is a situation which is a spectacular opportunity for them both, and it is my time they are taking.
You know what happens when they both are thinking so much about the carpet at the same time?
His experience appears to be one of elation, such as finishing. Then she says something obscene, which happens to be clairvoyant. Then I say, “I gave my own carpet away like that, bitch!”
But they cannot hear me.
I’ll threaten suicide!
You—you think about a carpet.
Me.
The Meaning of Life
One point must be made and this concerns what we learn from the history of the world. It must be noted that usually men do not possess valuables or huge sums of money. Their sense of their being sorry about this grows and it grows and it grows. A woman may be their only irreplaceable object. That’s why I think the meaning of life is so wonderful. It has helped millions of men and women to achieve vastly rich and productive lives.
Recently, this woman appeared on TV. She has a small head, a big head of hair, and she sings solo. She’s wonderful, but because of her dread fear of almost all men, she does not want any more than one man at a time in her life, which is reasonable, but she is always at a loss.
The Big Parade
The only beginning to this I can bear is “You weren’t wearing any!” which a woman who would not hush herself in a restaurant declared. I am asserting she wanted to set another woman there straight, who, with some shame, I suppose, did not hesitate to put her hands up over her ears and to ask anyone at all, “Where are they?”
All of the above stirs me.
All of the above stirs me no more than does the most urgent matter in my own life. The damage is done.
With some difficulty, I could tell you more. I could name you, the unnamed you.
Here I am with what has happened. I am not now going to back up and go around to where this is supposed to end by rule, to where I would have to publicly proclaim my loss, as my husband did yesterday, hunched over, carrying my suitcases, headed with his head down—that attitude. I followed him down the big avenue, through the big parade—we cut right through it, and I followed, and there at the big hotel my husband said, “I want to take these inside for you!” and I followed him to where he delivered me personally, so passionately, to my next husband forthcoming.
I had a strangely tender attitude only toward myself then, not toward either one of them, which I have been told is the motive force behind anyone’s pursuit of novelty.
The Hag Was
Transformed by Love
The guys, oh, how you longed for them, round and savory, and just how they get after a few days in their gravy, in the pot, in the refrigerator, and then they are heated up, and then they are eaten up.
I know what Terri Great thought because I remember my thoughts to a tee exactly about my own little new potatoes I just ate, and I am calling myself for the hell of it, Terri!
She was sticking her fork—Mrs. Alexander Great—into the little new potato, thinking, I may be the only one who likes this!
For the hell of it, Mrs. Great, you should have stayed there sticking in your fork, tasting and enjoying, and eating up little new potatoes until you had finished all four of your potatoes, Terri!
Say it, Terri, from the two and a half little guys that you did eat, you got all the stimulation from the spree you thought was wise, because, if she’s going to say, “This is the best it gets from a potato,” then Terri Great has stretched her mind beyond the wisecrack fully—stop!
Terri left the house then, and her husband Alexander never saw her again, nor her little guy Raymond, nor her little guy, Guy.
She spent most of her time in the company of people like herself who said they knew what they were thinking. For instance, she thinks any penis is ugly.
The enormity of what she had done, leaving her family abruptly, suddenly, and with no warning, gave her lots of other thoughts, too.
She did not upon arrival, speak well the language of the country she had fled to. When she asked a man, for example, on the street, her first day in town, “Where is the train station?” the man told her kindly that there had not been a war in his country for forty years. (He wore a brown, ankle-length, belted trench coat, was about sixty years old.) Miraculously, she thought she could comprehend every word that he had said. It was a miracle, too, that when he flashed it at her, she thought his penis was a beauty. Like magic—the colors of it were the colors to her of her own baby’s shirt, face, and hat that she had only just left far behind, and the form of it was like a much much much bigger dewdrop.
At home, this rich man had a thin wife. He supposedly worshipped his old wife until old Terri Great came into the picture. Then just forget it. (
Things keep happening so perversely for zealots.)
For Terri, she got her first six orgasms during penetration with this man during the next fifteen weeks of their intercourses together.
In the weeks that followed these events, she renewed her days, and she became intrigued with finance.
Jewishness
When the bird was upside down, going along by bumbling, a small one, hanging from the underside of a branch, it was during the snowfall in our mid-April season here. Bobbling? Jerking? An insect would—mice and rats. A bumblebee would do it underneath the branch like that, before returning to its golden world.
The bird then flew up off back the other way, showing me something or nothing I did not understand, like a mood swing.
The experience of getting one to die for me hangs on. I literally ran into it on my lawn, the mouse. It was upside down, with an open mouth, I remember—for cuteness, I bet—a pink tongue behind the teeth.
So I saw the conclusion. I was grateful to see it dead.
I don’t have to say how I knew previously about this mouse. I knew where the mouse had been. I had introduced myself into the picture with this mouse. I don’t have to say what I was doing to the mouse. I deeply dread it was something wrong. I’ve told the story other times. Some of my stories get told more often than they’re worth. This one is one. It signifies not much. It signifies a story I remember. I remember how my forebears ran like rats escaping, stubbornly clinging, because they had never gone along with an idea—an investment in the future. It was just a grand idea, such as Hope springs eternal—but they must have got bored.
The Mistake
She is looking at me curiously. The natural thing is to act sympathetic to her, so I go ahead and do that.
Meanwhile, down the hall, a girl is getting angry. I can hear the telltale sounds. This girl comes in to say something.
She is looking at me curiously.
I don’t know which horrible thing happens next in my real bedroom. The new carpeting is familiar. I know the bedspread. I know the room well, but I don’t remember a clock around here that chimes. I remember mystery, suspense, and adventure.
Even as I blot it out, I was dead wrong to summarize.
Clunk
Stephen still has had no contact with Miss Klinka’s hairy pink crack, and we are—even my brother is—spending a lot of time pacifying the aggrieved Mr. Maurer. Meanwhile, Klinka moves ever so slowly, but surely, because I believe in her, toward an evanescent moment that will be worth everything anyone has suffered, in my opinion.
I had the opportunity to feel very sorry that nothing sexual was going on, or would ever go on, between any of these people, because their business happens to be my business, and my business is what I usually think about when I try to summarize my life so far, which has been completely bereft of sex, except for self-abuse.
I self-abuse.
I dropped Klinka off today for her clinic. She needed to bring a sack lunch because the clinic runs from nine to four o’clock. I saw her standing in the doorway of the hut. People were going in and coming out, and a few of her friends smiled at Klinka when she said hello. It’s just as I thought—people of all kinds convening, to be organized by the organizers, by the persons in charge of the clinic. All of their arms and their legs were in motion, often—their heads turn and nod—there is some mobility in their faces, some nobility. I wonder why.
I always wonder why.
Characterize
The hostess created them in their image. The cookies are turkeys inscribed with edible names on the butter plates.
There are two cooked, twelve-pound turkeys, no longer in those images, on platters for the entrée, waiting.
The guests are waiting for the entrée, discussing the weather, because winter has not arrived, and one month previous to this time, it should have. (This time, in this place, the winter never does arrive.)
The comments of a husband and a wife about how they feel about the weather prove dramatically to any omniscient thinker that they are dramatically unsuitable, maritally, for one another.
Their infant, who can understand their language better than his own, is listening.
A catastrophic earthquake occurs on another continent in a geographical zone that has never harbored a vicious winter. This is in the country Turkey. There they have certainly had a number of earthquakes in the regions where the winter is mild and only rainy and in those other regions as well.
That’s how the cookie crumbles.
No, seriously, my darling, “thou art my bone and my flesh.”
Icky
Her curtains actually do stiffen and then billow into a deformity because of the warm gusts of wind which are periodic. The carnations in her vase tremble when it’s their turn, which is poetic. In her beautiful room she is a bit ghoulish even when she is still.
She is also youngish and balding.
She is so lucky because a picture painted by her son in her beautiful room is revolutionary in its scope, scale, and ambition. All of the knowledge her son will ever need to know about ghoulishness is in it.
The son is correct if he chooses to believe that his mother is a ghoul.
He thinks her armchair is as comforting as nobody he has ever known. There are flowers he cannot identify, printed on the upholstery, but their type, he is well aware, is icky. In her beautiful room where he has gotten her riding crop wet, among other things, his mother has stuck his tiny last lost tooth, with glue, onto the frame of her mirror.
A sensational evening is ahead for the boy, even though he is not allowed to bring food or drink into any room outside of the kitchen.
His mother has just asked him to do a couple of odd jobs for money.
Ore
A generally reliable woman was pestering the seed—or is it called a pit?—that she had noticed was blotchy. The reliable woman at work in her kitchen observed privately to herself, for no reason she knew of, that the pit had been discolored by avocado-colored markings. The woman was using her fingers to wrench the pit out from the center of the ripe fruit. The pit was not coming along willingly.
No, this is not about childbirth.
The surprise is that anyone as reliable as she is had not had plenty of experience wrenching pits.
The pear’s pit—this is an avocado pear pit—was not of a like mind to hers—like, What is the matter with you, pit?
What is the matter with her very reliable husband, who could not extract this woman, his wife, from their home?
The wife had been making her husband miserable for years, being the unbudgeable type.
I’d say time for a change.
In their secret life, the husband and the wife then sought the usual marital excavations—their aim being to meet their troubles with equanimity.
For starters, they agreed. They agreed how excellent their sexual satisfactions together were, how much more reliably attainable these satisfactions were, more now than had ever been the case before, now that every other aspect of their life together, they admitted, was so unsatisfactory in such extreme.
No, no, no, no, no!
This discussion never occurred. The husband and the wife no longer had the means to conduct such a high-level discussion.
These people are annoying. You know how annoying? To me, as annoying as it was to see for myself last night at twilight one bright sparkling spot in the sky that did not move. It did not get bigger, or brighter, or smaller, or dimmer, and for all intents and purposes, it is stuck there.
As I am.
The Care of Myself
So why can’t everything be perfect? God love him, he appealed to me. He had startled me into feeling an incredible amount of affection for a stranger—him—this inspector who rang my doorbell, who had dressed himself as a fireman.
“Do you have
a wound? Is that a bandage on your head?” I asked him.
He tugged on the stretchy cloth which was not supposed to be hidden under his helmet. He said, “We all wear that.”
The days and the years pass so swiftly.
Now, what I am doing for my wound is this: I stick any old rag or balled-up old sock I can find as close to it as I can get. Belly-down on the floor, with my reading glasses on, I’ve also got some filler sticking almost into my asshole. With my bawdy book here to comfort me right in front of my nose—we are both, the book and I, products of a great civilization—I take the plunge. I am thrusting mightily, and sometimes I manage to get hurt again.
Crush
There was no Weinberg. The server barging into all that with his tray of only a few nuggets on a doily was peevish with his back arched, with his chin up. A deadly serious woman was introducing Mrs. Williams and a Darnell Hyde. The woman showed me where her waist was and her curved legs were visible to me when she marched over to a dressed-up man to say his name.
The rest of this story is about my family’s poignant meal in the elegant hotel dining room. Within striking distance, there is a celebrity who thinks she should be eating here. She is exquisite and brainy and delicately made, it appears—or she is fashioned to appear to be delicate. Her lacy necklace sparkles around her neck. Her lacy bracelet on her wrist sparkles. At her throat her skin is deadish white and, elsewhere, her hair is white. The rest of this story is about my wish to be her. Her escort should be ashamed of himself. His back was turned to me the whole time.
The Collected Stories of Diane Williams Page 8
