Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Where was the black dude from her periodic cluster? She now thought she wanted to follow through—or, bike or no bike, have him trotting along beside her. But he had vanished round the corner and she saw around that corner for a second but it faded: she faded, leaving her sight somewhere round that corner—but she did not think like this (coerced, nauseous).

  And the curb right across from the point where the black dude had been was occupied by this heavyset prematurely gray-haired gentleman who had turned for a look back: and she had a spinning sense that he had known she would be there, near the storefront—a tough, square man, businessman but what business trip was he on? without a hat—a restaurant-owner, whose place was near here, or a lawyer with the habits of a senior jock, how he walked, but his mind she could blow if he gave her the chance, she a lady headed for the bike shop in running shoes, velvet head, O.K. said Larry, when asked to run his hand over it. But nothing might be the response of this cool, worn, heavyset, gray-haired guy, calm at the corner, a private eye maybe. While she looked at the storefront without really looking at it or its two signs, until she thought if he was so curious why hadn’t he gone in to that Messenger Service/Psychic Consultation storefront? He had instead thrown first that curved look out of some part of his eye (not sizing her up though at all, no visiting fireman with a flag in his button-hole drifting toward an afternoon bar): then at the corner he looked again, this time straight at her so she felt she was waiting for the afternoon show in the storefront window, and in the corner of her eye she saw him light a cigarette, which was extremely important information to have. She was on her way to the bike shop, the past was past, and there is no future.

  But this time a motorcycle buzz-sawed into the block across her vision. So the spell was broken. She was game. The heavyset guy was one of your nice middle-distance Position-A humpers with a metal taste of meat oxide in his cum and a kinda nice, brawny-sad politeness and the booze lightly airing like aftershave toothpaste from the broad bones of his lean face and from the hard, secretly ruined stomach, though she was game. But as she went on toward the bike shop, the two pieces of spell hung near, and one was his turning, his strange curved look that continued to turn, she found herself too angry to explain the curved, nauseating look except it was his awareness of her like a mental turning that had this slow, sweeping, not-stopping quality, when really all she wanted to see was that he turned away from the storefront finally and caught her in the mere corner of (or cornered twinkle of) his eye; and the other piece of the broken spell was words she had known forced her to leave her apartment again, she need not repeat her gig word for word, words were strictly in your head unless coming way up from stomach like throat was a brain, to be spoken to a turned-on audience when the time came. But it was all there in a very few separated words that could call forth the whole thing between the heavyset man’s first, curved, turning look across the street including her, and then a minute later his second long, straight look at her diagonally from the far corner he had reached and occupied as the black dude reached the corner on Grace s side of the street but then slipped around the corner: words like all words shit substitute for action, for Body-Self, but breath comes through even so, when it is pure breath: TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER.

  She had bent her bike into the elevator before the door slid shut and before she remembered that she hadn’t returned her mother’s call this morning that the service had taken. She had locked her bike in the stairwell hall next to the elevator entrance on her floor which was the top floor of the building with only the penthouses above it.

  She took her clothes off; the white sweetheart rose she put in a vase on a window sill. Her clock which she read by letting it be a shadowy design in motion somewhere in this room, said 3:20. She rolled her stomach and abdomen muscles back and forth in front of a mirror, like self-kneading, no hands. She stopped and turned on the radio; rolled and shrugged to the music, a moment later turned it to the falling, waiting silence of Phono and put on a stack of records.

  Now why (she struggled) was she coerced into going downtown to get the bike then and there and on the way coerced into almost but not quite throwing up in the gutter like a bum? It was the cleansing process, she’d given up cigarettes, the cleansing gripped your joints, or fattened you, or, obviously, could make you feel ill.

  Be all by yourself. In your own head. She liked the words, they gave her back herself. If she’d be lost without people, what was she doing all alone on a rug like a cat? Did anyone know where she was? All the people who had incarnated and incorporated Grace K. into their systems. But was she sure?

  That curved look from the man: she directed her thought to the tape, the part she’d been hearing when suddenly she had felt she had to go downtown to collect her bike, but didn’t phone the bike shop. Her tape was not her child: but instead of the tape with all the clapping, cheering, the wings of laughter, Grace felt in her Cliff apologizing: because he had had to renege on his offer to drive Grace to Long Island last night because his car probably wasn’t going to be ready: but this morning he was on the phone telling her it looked like he had a buyer. She tired of thought: why had she made her second trip downtown to pick up her bike and without phoning! that she had already called for unsuccessfully? But she encountered in her thought Cliff’s rhyme written after an appearance she had made at a college and he had come:

  Father, bother,

  Mother, brother,

  Tune up the absent bike.

  In sharing inde-

  Pendences give

  Only what you like.

  That neatly folded piece of paper was beside the tall white book down at the end of the diet shelf next to a speaker. She had inspired a poem. She had written off to California to a place where, with life credits alone in this year of 1976 in these United States, you could get a Ph.D. for fifteen hundred dollars. Cliff asked, In what? mucus research?

  The phone rang in two places and the service picked up. Vibrators lay like mikes or hair-dryers at two far strategic corners of her Body Room plugged in beside softly overflowing clusters of brown, orange, purple, and gold cushions and ceramic trays she had made—in another kind of workshop once, and painted rainbow vaginas on—which held carved pipes of wax or wood, double-ended for mutual toking, a cock’s peeled bulb, a cunt’s deepish flower, the chimney-bowl midway between.

  Henceforth, she would have one day a week without talking, and this might be more helpful and cleansing than being off the weed. Push Rewind, let ‘er rip, push Stop, push Play, push Stop, push Rewind: she had found her place, remembering the day Cliff drove her to the college in New Jersey at noon and had reduced her spiel to his verses at suppertime—he said her body was what had put over her speech, pelvis power, those little abrupt struts and shuffles of the alligator boots—she had never had an audience of fifteen hundred! It was a university and they had laughed, they had loved her. And in this carpeted room where she now got a very odd division of temperature between outside and inside like swallowing ice cream and throw in a ‘frigerated thermometer up behind, steely speculum up her front, she had said to Cliff and Maureen that talking to that audience was fucking them, ‘cause that was what you did to an audience.

  And it came back to her, as the curious passage from last night began to replay, and she thought she needed an enema or a joint, she had a little hash in the fridge—a break-through hash-enema she realized she had already discussed with Maureen—it came back to her that Cliff had answered, "You can say that again, Grace," while Maureen Baby’s Breath, thinking of God knows what—maybe what she called the "proof of reincarnation" in her own Grace Kimball—maybe currents of carrot juice freed of pulp, messengering with overwhelming news a city of mucus hawked up from the collective throat brain, for Maureen was a scientist, a new woman-kind of scientist sweetly smiling—and now to her leader saying, "Right on," though she had not attended the audience fuck at the New Jersey college.

  So Grace with all this on h
er mind surrounded by TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER, didn’t think until quite a while after the foreign woman Clara had come and gone, that Clara had not been announced by the doorman Manuel on the intercom.

  Father, bother,

  Mother, brother,

  Tune up the absent bike.

  In sharing inde-

  Pendences give

  Only what you like.

  TRUE LOVE JUNK TUNES UP DAIRY PLASTIC, MOTHERS GUILT, BROTHERS SISTER. It wound on . . .

  My mother. Right? O.K. My mother. She was always there, you know? she was always getting ready to sit down [laughter], getting heavier and heavier but, in my insane memory of it you know, always not quite making it down into that chair, that straight chair that made her look as if she was taking a two-minute breather on our time not hers but it was hers [laughter] a two-minute breather from dusting the other chairs she didn’t sit in, if she ever got her behind down onto it, no arms—because y’know, as she’s sitting down she’s asking can she get someone something to eat. [laughter] Well, not if it’s any bother, Mother (I think that’s my Dad speaking); not if it’s any bother, Mother. Oh it’s no bother, [laughter] Sure? Sure. Have you been there, have you been there? [applause drowns out Yes yes yes yes] Where was I? [an enthusiastic wisecrack from audience not quite audible] Where was I? Jerking off under the covers? Don’t kid yourself, I didn’t know where it was [laughter] and anyway I’m saving that secret, guilty pleasure for the middle of the marriage-night ten or fifteen years after this little family scene [laughter] that I’m giving you which you recognize even though the North Shore of Long Island is a long way from a little American city in the middle of a cornfield, [laughter] Where was I? Talking pedal pushers—remember those below-the-knee pants that exposed the calves, the shins, a supposedly feminine neither here-nor-there? [laughter] And I’m talking about my mother, thinking about my father [hush], thinking at the age of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, that this is the way people live, right?, this is right and normal, O.K.?, this is my working model, the four of us, mother, father, brother, myself junked out on Habit Patterns, staying on instead of getting off, and that’s staying power for you. Like after five beers my father saying I think I’ll have a drink now. Or like Dad going up to bed an hour before Mama because Mama wants a chance to read the paper: wait! question! How many people admire their mothers? [silence, applause, drifting into some kind of laughter] How many I ask you? and why is that? Is it that she was the one who said, . . . No bother. Whatever happened to Mama? and is she still on your back because guilt perpetuates itself? overweight, non-orgasmic, creaking with varicose pains from the new linoleum in the kitchen clear up to her locked pelvis. Well, I got a knapsack to keep my hands free, and I got a bike so I can skip cabs that the man can’t fix if he knew what was under the hood, which he doesn’t, he doesn’t dare think what Henry Ford and Co. put under there, and that’s why he gets uptight when he loves his car, you live with him and you know, right? [applause, "Right!"] But he hates it and he pours your money into it that you never saw for your housekeeping except as an allowance you get from his real paycheck no matter if it’s out of a nice unspoken balanced joint account or like Dad doling it out on Fridays. [Pause, in which nothing is heard] But you never know what those men are doing under your hood [a loud lone laugh cuts short followed by a burst of brief laughter] until you get the bill and then you know [titters], so when a friend tells me he’s getting his car a tune-up and then they find problems they’ve got to work on I am glad to know every part of my bike because this way I can put it out of my mind like when I hit the street keeping my hands free by carrying a knapsack, you know?, full of sex-positive thoughts [laughter, applause], knowing every part of your body whatever your male gynecologist tries to lay on you in a little bottle that’s half full of cotton or a cold-handed metal speculum that feels like a computerized abortion when you could do it yourself with good old American plastic [applause, cheering, interrupted by someone calling something], the smallest example of sharing information, like that your doctor doesn’t know any more than you and can’t begin to know your body like you do even if you let him try. Flee, my dears, you don’t have to explain to him, just get your ass out of his office, it’s your ass and it will fly if you let it. Yes, dear sisters and brothers of the Goddess [laughter, cheering] the smallest example of sharing information in order to belong to yourself. To learn how to love your body. Friend left her husband, went to a room she rented and took a nap, woke up suicidal—we could have told her, Recharge with meditation or yoga, sleep is too much like sleeping it off’. Know what goes on in you. Have you ever gotten off on an enema? Sometimes the sharing is a simple comparing of notes to find out that you aren’t alone [applause, prolonged], you’re not the only woman in your apartment building in 1976 who doesn’t know quite how to share with others the absence—

  "Absence"—what she had gotten wrong recalling Cliffs poem. Same old material but unrehearsed: on a fresh track but you’re the same person: track to one side of where she’d been: or a new person on an old track. As the door buzzed, she thought she was content for Maureen to believe in reincarnation, but maybe the whole thing might be updated. She got up, pressing Play, the old stuff suddenly word for word the same, an external memory; "to share with others the absence" started to follow her to the door: bullshit, she heard herself feel: the voice telling her back her story snuck up behind her, and "absence" was alone there and all the words fell away from it . . .

  absence you can’t quite put your finger on [a pause, a silence] the fact, the human fact that you can’t quite remember when you had an orgasm and you assume you don’t need to because you can get off on feeling a little guilty you know about not wanting to screw last night, then angry over feeling guilty, then confused, which is a good feminine state to be in when he walks in the door and you sweep everything under the mat [laughter], guilt, did I say? guilt over taking a nap after lunch, and the guilt is your gift to yourself to get over feeling not guilty [laughter, applause], of being, O.K., not quite there when you were in the car with your two kids and your certified husband or of not, you know, doing anything worth spending all day today—Where’d it go? Today is missing. Because you’re busy and your loved ones need you and you’re constipated and have lower back pains to pity yourself for, and if anyone asks you, it’s no bother to carry this guilt, it gets to be like two-piece outfits the stores choose for you, no bother, but I mean really what do you have to give anyone unless it’s your independent self, and that could please even your family—

  She had run back to turn off the voice and heard her mother’s vacuum running, her mother who, in incredible shape for her age, had let go of widowhood and came up sex positive, though basically anti-enema-cleansing. Grace was in the carpeted hall, a pair of sweatpants on one of the cunt-hooks; and just as she had known that the word family was the word that went with bike in Cliff’s verses, family bike not absent bike, she had opened the door to a half-smiling woman in a green sweater and a tartan skirt who couldn’t speak when she saw Grace all there in front of her and to whom Grace said, "Is it about the women’s workshops?" So the day’s periodic cluster had sent Grace away a couple of hours early to collect her bike so as to wheel her back on a fresh track as close to where she had already been as the cool, gray-haired, heavy set man was surprised to recognize her (and kept from looking her in the eye).

  A track as close to where she had already been as the man with the curved look was surprised to recognize her.

  Thinking not hers: then due to the Goddess, who said, Never argue: only assert. Whose voice is not the voice charging a very special cone of her body-mind with the cluster heats of convergence, but it’s the Goddess who gave her knowledge of the two cones making up her Mind-Body, so she can just about identify this voice—she’s already told her story to it in future though there is no future—familiar voice with a difference which is a lot of Space among the words, to breathe, lay back into: so she
finds, like waking, a new Her evolved through all this work she has done on herself for so long. So when Sue’s teenage son Larry the expert on poison gas and chess listened with downright affection to her interpret earlier remarks by Maureen on reincarnation groping to tell the new kind that was coming into existence, Larry said he did not think there was a future but asked—asked—if what she would be reincarnated into wasn’t already in her—into her, he added. Girls aren’t used to doing all this kind of work on themselves, she said, feeling she was the same old person she had always been in her eyes and lips and hope.