“Tell me again how you like vegetables.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I just do.”
He really does. My husband begins to twitch when green things are not included on a plate at a restaurant or in the home of a friend.
“But what part of you loves the kale—the part that knows it’s good for you, or the spot on the tongue where flavor is sensed?”
“Both,” he says, and I look at him sideways. May as well poke yourself in the eye with a stick. To willingly turn from something great tasting for something bitter but good for you demonstrates an uprightness not of my world, so that I begin to wonder if this penchant for pleasure is more my problem than Susan B.’s—who admittedly cares little either way. So why do I? Did she fear pleasure, or do I fear its opposite? The tight bun? Mouthful of greens? All backbone and resolution? What becomes of women without pink skin and soft smiles? What happens when I stop seeking out the sweet in every last thing?
Seriousness was a kind of rudeness where I come from.
Clarity of purpose was odd, follow-through was suspect, and planning was for people in other neighborhoods—those on TV and characters from books. Laughter first and laughter always. Even a face full of tears beat the hell out of tedium. But then, despite the larger culture, we seemed to escape much of the strict Protestant influence. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop: I nearly choked the first time I heard that said. In the flickering lights of liberal Catholicism and the doctrine of poverty, there is no such thing as idle hands, no purpose greater than pleasure. To feel good is divine. Serious words come from others, those who think they know better. May as well go back to school for filmstrips on the metric system and the refrigeration plants of the Yucatán. No thanks and thank you very much. Pleasure first and pleasure last. Taste it now and taste it good, taste it all and taste it often, because life is nothing but one unpredictable surge—so use that mouth of yours to laugh and take wine and receive every last drop of every last thing because no one, and I mean no one, wants to suffer any of your straight talk.
Pleasure. The word itself is a sort of extravagance. The s and u coming together in a full-bodied rolling sound, the x in luxuriate, the oozing z of azure, the soul softening d in adieu. The Russians have a letter for this, the Ж, called zheh, the sound of lazy mornings an expanse of clean sheets, a sound with a certain je ne sais quoi as in the French je, but we of English tongue must make do, so that the sound becomes a combination of s and u and oh, what a word, rhyming with treasure—and if you say it the way the English do—even leisure. Swollen as the lushest sh as in hush and gush but deeper still, more resonant, as in resin, a sap of sorts, thick and viscous. Pleasure.
My feelings began to shift in sixth grade, in 1979, starting with the Susan B. Anthony dollar. They were smaller than the Kennedy coins my gambling grandmother had once won by the hundred and sent one per child back East, so that, to me, the Kennedy dollar was forever imbued with a kind of Vegas glitz. I’m not sure if Susan B. coins were ever placed in Vegas machines or whether such winnings would have been any less welcome by those cozied up to their slots, but even as a child I saw the way people disliked the Susan B. dollars. I’d never heard anyone talk about the faces on their money before and this dollar they spoke of as if someone had removed their wallets and replaced their coins with wafers of sawdust.
Despite the singsong slogan—Carry Three for Susan B.!—the Susan B. Anthony dollar was one of the most wildly unpopular coins in U.S. history.
Some took a rational approach to their dislike of the currency, complaining about its size and feel—too close to that of a quarter. But how much had to do with the face set into the metal? It was the first circulating American coin representing an actual woman and went largely unused. After sitting in treasury vaults by the millions, the Susan B. Anthony dollars finally found use in vending machines and mass transit fare boxes before being replaced by Sacagawea, whose Native face almost didn’t make the cut when a poll indicated that the public preferred the allegorical image of the Statue of Liberty to the actual woman’s face.
Still, I’m not sure that not wanting women on our money was the main problem. Evidence abounds to support the thought, of course, but I suspect that back in 1979, a Farrah Fawcett coin would have been more popular than Susan B.’s. Soft as a fawn, that Farrah, she might have become the most well-liked silver dollar in history. I could be wrong—a Farrah Fawcett dollar might have faltered as well. Money may be too serious for even the most pleasing of feminine forms. Perhaps we simply prefer our currency marked with a man’s face.
Every woman should have a purse of her own.
Fifty years before Virginia Woolf prescribed a room for women, articulating the need for the space and money with which to create, Susan B. prescribed another space, one held close to the body, a container in which to hold private objects, which implied that a woman must first have private objects to hold. In her time, a married woman did not have her own money, her own bank account, or property. The husband owned all, decided all. And so Susan wanted for women a purse and something to put in it. Why do Susan B.’s words, said half a century before Virginia’s, seem more difficult to swallow?
Money is power. Susan B. did not couch her speech behind niceties, and expected that others should do the same: Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place, think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.
She lobbied hard for the vote, pushed for reform that would enable women to keep their own pay, and campaigned for the admittance of women to the local university, but the leaving off of sugar in her words was perhaps Susan’s most radical act. For a woman to talk of power without at least offering up a tray of cinnamon rolls—even now, such a woman might clear a room of all but the most devoted few.
Our job is not to make young women grateful, she said. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody.
We do not take kindly to women who fail to modulate their tones, whose faces become misshapen through the firmness of their mouths, who risk unpleasantness. Which brings me to the Hillary Clinton nutcrackers for sale at Dulles Airport when she ran for president a few years back. How she was taken apart for the flat voice, the fixed mouth, the speaking plainly of her views. How groups fluttered around the nutcracker display, progressive-looking men and women strapped into mile-high heels. How fun it might be to buy a Hillary nutcracker for their friends.
What would she think of the Hillary nutcrackers, Susan B.? Once she got over the shock of air travel and prepackaged peanuts. Perhaps she’d sidle up to the bar, order a pint, and laugh over the Hillary nutcrackers as I could not.
But no. I don’t suppose Susan would make use of the airport bar.
She worked for temperance after all—and while those women with their sashes are often portrayed as a band of harridans, what other power did they have? Wives lacked the ability to leave husbands and had no source of income to feed their children. Such women as Susan were less opposed to alcohol than in support of keeping money in husbands’ pockets and preventing bruises that sometimes accompanied drunkenness as they came stumbling home. Most women of the era had to rely on prayers and hope, but those few who could afford to raised their voices and made themselves into beautiful nags.
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.
—BLACKSTONE’S LAW (1765)
And the way you did it, Susan. Striding into that barbershop and demanding to vote. Blackstone’s Law had come to the colonies from England and a century later, still governed American thought on relations between men and women. The way you made them uncomfortable, standing tall as a man, demanding to be counted—Blackstone himself might have caved. The way you requested cuffs when they came for you on Thanksg
iving Day, not settling for a quiet apology, the polite explanation—not with so much at stake. You put your arms out and insisted on cuffs. And the sham of your trial, the way they tried to squelch your voice. But you spoke. You spoke. When no one wanted to hear, you went against the very grain of what a woman should do; you refused to back down—standing when asked to sit, using your voice, and making the whole of the room uncomfortable.
You knew that women were as intelligent and feeling as men, knew it so keenly it became part of your body, which remained straight as you spent your days traveling hard miles only to be received with foul language and mocked in the papers, even burned in effigy. You shook it off and kept going, standing before a podium saying, There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.
You were at war. The dialogue may have been polite, the prisoners in cages they couldn’t even see, but it was war nonetheless. Yes, I begin to see that such bearing as yours would have been the only possible thing.
“Help Me Make It through the Night”: the song I’d sing with Susan B. if she ever came calling. I’d let her have the first line before chiming in, both of us singing about ribbons and shadows and the letting down of hair. We’d sing the Gladys Knight version because I can’t imagine Susan would be much for the country-and-western original, which is fine because there’s no wrong way to sing that song. We’d sit together, me in my jeans, Susan in her black dress and red shawl (the fourth-grade teacher had it wrong with her pile of gray; Susan’s shawl was scarlet as the tip of a blackbird’s wing!). We’d sit together singing our Gladys Knight song good and slow, taking our time with the words, trading verses and reaching for the high notes, until something inside each of us came loose.
“Mumps!” said the doctor.
“Measles!” said the nurse.
“Vote!!” said the Lady with the Alligator Purse.
Miss LuLu seems to have been most in need of parenting classes. But since she’s a figure trapped in a hand-clapping song, let us sit back and watch as her baby locks onto a bathtub with a new row of nubby teeth. Let us listen as she calls in the medical professionals only to throw them out one at a time. Let us marvel that such a woman—when all is said and done—knew enough to trust you, Miss Susan.
Miss LuLu kicked the doctor;
Miss LuLu punched the nurse;
Miss LuLu paid the Lady with the Alligator Purse!
Gray hair, ashen face, ridiculed, and worse. But you, dear Susan, are the one for whom the song is named, yours is the song still sung by little girls, a playful chant, whose words we remember by heart.
My favorite place to walk is near you.
The Victorian cemetery at Mt. Hope. A pair of hydrangea trees grows nearby, whose flowers will have moved from cream to pink to rust by now. I pass the others too, Frederick Douglass and Adelaide Crapsey and the handful of markers I visit for the pleasure of seeing their names set in stone. There’s the giant basswood whose branches bend to the ground. How fine it feels to stand at the base and look up into the tumble of branches and leaves all light and shadow. But when I can delay no more, I go to you and stand for a minute by your stone, sometimes muttering a few words, leaving a wild violet or adding to the small pile of pebbles left by others who have come.
Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.
—SUSAN B. ANTHONY
No matter what use we make of our days, they end. That is the sad fact of life. Despite your determination, your forward thrust and ramrod back, not even you, Susan, could live another hundred years. You lived to be eighty-six—long enough to plant seeds in the hardest of soils, but not long enough to taste the fruit. Not long enough to enjoy the streamers and the marching bands, not long enough to cast a vote without arrest.
It has been one hundred years, and what would you think of this world? What would you make of Kardashians and sexting and the soft scatter of our lives?
And what a silly woman you might find me, all this time spent imagining the spitting up of perfectly good spinach, picturing you as Aphrodite and Marilyn, singing about ribbons falling from our hair. You’d be right about how foolish I am in some ways, except that I am capable of reform. At least that’s what I’d say once I talked you into my company, because I’d say anything to keep you near.
Come and settle into the seat at my side as we drive to Madison Street and your old house, then on to Mt. Hope to visit your people—your sisters and brothers and parents—and this is where, I’m sorry, Susan, but I’ll have to drive north and ask if maybe we could to go up to the lake for a frozen custard, though I somehow know a furrowed brow would be your only reply, no matter how I go on about the custard, the sweet chocolate, and salted almonds, the way the two are so perfect together. Until finally, I’d drive north, allowing you to point out where all the orchards used to grow and all that has changed until we’d park at Charlotte and I’d stop asking questions and we’d sit together without speaking, the skies clearing over the pier, the lake looking a new shade of blue in the light.
A moment of silence, a Quaker moment, in which we listen to the sound of gulls while considering the carousel horses locked in place for the season. A fortifying thing, such silence, so that I might work up the nerve to grab your hand and squeeze it before pointing the car back toward the city and the polling place, where we’d park and enter the booth together, Susan—you who understand better than anyone else how much all of this means.
Come now, and I’ll show you the wonder of the machines and the list with all our names. Though I’m greedy when it comes to such pleasures, I am a woman in progress—so come now, sweet Susan, and just this once, I’ll let you pull the lever and close the curtain around us.
World without End
THEY CAME TO US from over the lake. Voices transmitted through the buzz of radio, carried through stations that were never quite clear—except during storms or certain times of night, the ionosphere thinning, allowing sound to sweep down from Ontario. Even then, the repetition caused the words to meld into a hum so that the women saying the Rosary sounded like nothing so much as a rush of insects.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
The persistent press of prayer was like a spell, like something out of Rosemary’s Baby. I imagined the Rosary reciters in hooded robes like Mia Farrow’s neighbors, crosses gripped to their chests as they kneeled on uncarpeted floor, a circle of grackles forming a sort of rosary of their bent bodies, black beads of supplication.
Sometimes the voices came in French—Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce—and not understanding the words and the sound of them, lusher and looser in the mouth, granted the French Rosaries an even greater sense of mystery.
They were with us always, the Rosary ladies.
We might not hear them for a year, but then there they’d be again—in our car as we traveled along the New York State Thruway, inside the broken plaster walls of the house in Albion, following us as we moved onto the reservation near Batavia and into the motel room and apartments that followed, eventually landing with us on the tiny dead-end street in a crowded Rochester neighborhood.
My sisters and brothers might listen a bit before turning the dial in search of music and I must have sneered at the sound, never revealing how drawn I was to the swoop of prayer coming from Erie or Buffalo—even Cleveland, I suppose. For what is the Rust Belt but a bastion of Catholics?
No one I knew ever said them together, the Rosary prayers, excepting mothers, of course, who met in groups in churches or living rooms, carrying strands of beads, some wooden, others crystal or seed pearl. My mother’s fervor ebbed and flowed, but when it flowed, it came in scapular-filled waves as she delved into stories of visitations and miracles. The Rosary was pure delight, joint meditation fused onto delicate strands, more rousing than the latest television miniseries or ripest nugget of gossip.
The best rosaries ca
me from cathedrals far away, Paris or Rome. These were practically impossible in my neighborhood but one or two women had them, and how proud they were of their foreign crucifixes and filigreed strings. Others came from the dead, handed down from mothers and great-aunts, the sheen of history absolving the dullness of the beads. Most though were fashioned of glass and came from the shrine near Niagara Falls with an oversized Virgin reigning from atop a giant Plexiglas globe.
But no matter where from or from what material, the women took them up and prayed for relief from bad knees and lost husbands, for better pay, for help with difficult bosses, for the bishop, the pope, and all the saints in heaven. They prayed for upcoming surgeries, full recoveries, for the end of trouble in Northern Ireland, the fall of communism, and thought nothing of following up such lofty intentions with requests for cures for chronic eczema or infected mosquito bites. They prayed for good weather, for weight loss, for help with the electric bill. For difficult children, the resurrection of the dead, for life everlasting and the world without end. Amen.
Queen of the Fall Page 3
