Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "Girls," her brother said, out of breath putting down a half-drunk quart bottle of milk on the table beside a yellow mixing bowl, "always think you’re looking at them."

  "They want you to look at them," said her father from the living room, huskily, absent-mindedly.

  "Only if they like you," said her mother from the screened back porch where she had been humming—as if of how newbaked bread smelled like sweetened ironing.

  "Maybe they want to be left alone sometimes," Grace said to all of them and wanted to get away at least to her room upstairs, at least to the bathroom to smile in all possible ways in the mirror; she heard the cushions of her father’s leather chair crack and she felt his body rising and unbending out there in the living room in a small city in the middle of the cornfield, to come to her mother’s proud icebox and "steal" a beer—who knew, as Grace’s mother said, where his bread was buttered even if he was apt to knock the toothpaste into the toilet bowl on a bad night and leave it there faraway.

  "He kissed you at the train station a little wetly when you left for New York, and you never looked back," Maureen said: maybe at five P.M. for a quick rap or at eight on the far side of the salad bowl fingering the sprouts and green leaves and flowerets of cauliflower or living bright orange trails peeled lengthwise from the inner carrot—or at midnight or three A.M. when Grace worked. And " Right on," was what Grace said, as if she were Maureen, but had told many listeners many times. Told them that that particular trip of hers signaled by the corsage on the lapel of the suit was almost less toward professional school and career than toward marriage kept quite as secret from herself as from the parties involved in those old Life magazine specials, "Life Goes To An Elopement," although her unavoidable destiny with a smart, reasonably hard-drinking salesman named Lou three or four years later was just as much with others as well—her family and Lou’s so simply and smoothly swinging golfer father; and the public rendezvous, the nuptials, though only two days long back at the bride’s home nineteen hundred miles from New York, was carried off jovially—a little history in bright clothing—and, for a while that then lasted, New York was a break you joined yourself across so oppositely to its noisy ways that it burst into silence like terrific photographs.

  What was she thinking of ? The only real reincarnation? that when it was discovered would be discovered by Grace Kimball? She phoned Maureen to tell her one thing and told her another, the sweep second-hand of her Body-Room’s office-style clock turning all the time. She phoned to share with Maureen why she’d almost been sick in the gutter but instead told her "about" the black dude with the alligator hat that nearly matched her Abundance boots who was "in all probability" in her periodic cluster—come on up later because he absolutely will appear.

  But Maureen ("Far out!") was thinking someplace else, Grace knew her well enough to pick it up threaded down the phone connection, Maureen’s chronic ongoing internalization arguing like an icepick point by point that the body’s a conduit for the inevitable future of vegetables: yet she was saying, Did Grace know Sue and Marv were taking an apartment in this building as a second residence, they were keeping the Long Island place, but Sue was kidding herself, she was having it both ways, you can’t be in two places (—"unless": and Grace heard Maureen suddenly think) and how could Marv with that fixed smile last night, passive-aggressive, compulsive-defensive, not set himself up for feelings of retaliation (Maureen could suddenly take off with words) slaving in that glittering farmhouse of a kitchen all day for the party. Served the food, detested the scene. Wait a second, Grace said, he’s always liked cooking, they’re on a food trip, that’s all they used to really talk about—recipe books, mucus pie, where’s the fucking meat thermometer, fresh fennel; last night I got him upstairs to try the Panasonic: he’s a learner, I’ll have to give him that, but he hated me today, he doesn’t know how much he’s a feminist already, he’s got too much on his plate.

  Well, he was ready to stick a meat thermometer into me, Maureen said.

  They don’t eat meat any more, said Grace.

  Marv waylaid me over by the window, said Maureen, next to that insane gigantic bookcase, so the other forty people slid down to the far side of the room, it was weird, he was sort of hitting on me—he was excited, he asked if the vanilla yogurt was really true because he’d heard me say you’d mainlined it out of my fridge and there you were publicly claiming you’d come off Dairy: I told him to fuck off, he said it was his house, I said tell Sue that and then he said, Sue thinks she’s in love with Grace, did you know that, Maureen? I looked at Marv and said, Love.

  Maybe they’ll leave all the furniture out there, said Grace.

  Furniture is heavy. It can’t move by itself. You have to move it. It’s full of unknown past and future people who are an environment you have no control over. Space is freedom if it is free space. So-called easy chairs are carted into your space to fill a void. I passed this on to Maureen, who I sense understands this better than I. Her antique expertise during her marriage was deeper than anything. The space you put furniture in is yours only if you stand in it. You put a dining table into a space because you can’t move the space while you can move the table. So what, Kimball? What was at stake? Empty your hands of it to see what it was.

  She stacked some Forums to throw out. Give the neighbors a thrill when they visit the trashroom. She paused over one with a photo of a blonde kneeling behind an Italian-looking stud on a carpet somewhere, side-frontal but discreet. She felt hungry and had a handful of nuts and raisins. She would phase out the raisins. To the music she trotted into the sleeping room/office to check the project items on her wall chart, she was sending the Pitney-Bowes mailing machine back to the people in Stamford when she got up courage to tell them she was not satisfied. These are really just vulgar details, Cliff said jokingly, but he meant it.

  Her business trip had left her looking younger after six years. In the Body-Self workshops, her own trip had gathered like the story it was—she wasn’t trying to prove anything—she didn’t have to—all she had to do was tell her trip to the women whose ignorance about themselves and their inner, untouched freedom was no more sad than their insights and sudden group laughter—and new hope through eating live food, speaking out, taking responsibility for their orgasms; instead of hitting on obstacles that made it easy to not get what you need, finding a seed in you that belongs only to you and was always there waiting to be slowly moistened, not pried at dry. Power was where it was at: but power to change to what? She smelled raisins and three sorts of unsalted nuts around the corner in the other room forty feet away like smoke. She dialed the answering service to sample the action. It was the division of labor, these separate tracks. They got back to her, she got back to them. Those other tracks kept going—to get to them she would turn to them. Each phone call a whole thing, an operation, someone’s unparalleled story now including Grace. Dial that number: in came the track. What was this Politics?

  She let the light settle onto the carpet and walls, and lens the window panes until she thought she could see in less light minute careless crumbs, crumblets, like crumblet shadows made of light, not noticed before on the barely shining little piece of mirror lying flat on a low low table across the room. One morning a week she would let herself be two feet taller right after breakfast. One more thing to come off. But boric acid was what she thought ecologically of because it could give poor big-little roaches tiny white grains of gas but she had never heard them pop, they went away like perhaps the city pigeons to vanish in secret. Come off killing, too. And what really was this Politics? Group power, O.K., to be grasped and divvied up. It felt Sex Negative, but it meant women and maybe mind/body attached to earning power. The political woman who had driven Grace and Maureen home— Kate—laughed loud, like how some of the workshop women came. And last night in the dark of the car lighted by a deli open late and a street light and in a silence at a stop light, she said she had never masturbated. No real surprise, yet also here was another kind of appl
ause, coming out of years of silence, eyes straight ahead watching the traffic light. Your need and his need on separate tracks: that’s why you get a hard-on for yourself, honey. Masturbation no obstacle to anything else you want to do. Or want to give up—like killing roaches. Hadn’t there been a twenty-dollar bill rolled tube-tight on the mirror on the table? Abundance present here or present elsewhere was what absence meant. All alone you can invent it. Sue had wanted her son Larry to hear Grace:

  Yes that’s how I see myself at eighty, eighty-five, ninety-five, a hundred in my wheelchair at the home with all the sisters, we’re all in our chairs in front of our TVs, good TV porn funded by a government inspired by the Goddess, a Body-Sex government decentralized all over the land, California, Florida, and here we all are, a bunch of happy old ladies in our wheelchairs, our vibrators plugged in, happily jerking off.

  She had designed sessions with fifteen women and men around the edges of her Body Room: fifteen vibrators at once, with Grace in the middle, that’s sixteen, until the collective energy rose peacefully from the group, and some people made noise, Cliff always, but not Desmond, who was all legs with thighs of a bike racer and later asked Maureen to tell him her trip again and asked Grace if his fruitarian diet might be why he was ejaculating a foot further than before, beyond the small towels Grace had distributed, beyond the small, woolly rug he himself was on, and onto the free spaces of the brown carpet: Grace said she would have licked it up wet if she had known all that protein was going to waste on her rug. Masturbation opens a menu of life-style choices, though the rug fibers might be carcinogenic though with months of charge built up from vacuuming. Her neighbors up in the penthouse felt their floors bowing and their roller skates rolling down to all the corners of their home. All coming together roughly to some point. Each making a contribution. Turning to each other and away, knees up, knees down, breath rising in praise, turning ahead. The unheard-of story that was being told back to her might be her own but it was coming from the future in a changed voice. She was evolving into a new type of person, wasn’t she?—and from outside in as well. The world, it equals Love—but she was being invaded vividly sort of and not by the Goddess just now—by those Grace had given herself to. Or invaded by just these—hmmm, well, angels she had to reckon with because she had heard them talked of lately, she had never feared angels—she thought that’s what these humdingers might be, for they felt like more than one. The puffiness by her nose and around the eyes at Christmastime had been the cleansing juice diet: it was convenient that she and Maureen each had their own Acme Juicer and had done juice alone for two weeks once until a case of free-range pineapples from downtown overloaded Maureen’s machine and burnt it out. What if there was an angel in the pineapples eager to be in her and Maureen, but she had not told Maureen. Coming off pot the first time gave Grace a rheumatism that was the body’s natural cleansing, and congestion in the chest so if she’d saved her snot she could have gone into business. Maureen agreed with Grace that work was an addiction; did Grace now agree?

  She phoned Maureen, who did not pick up—then did, to say she had washed out her roller and her brush and was just about to have her enema, and would it wait. Grace felt grateful, then, and to the Goddess, that the intervention of Maureen’s at times almost invalid-like health-and-cleansing number had kept Grace from speaking of what was, she saw now, better not spoken of. The nausea today, the shorthand models of her talk, her gig, her repeatedly unrehearsed life publicly given from her own self to others, into others, her own distributed (that was it) person, an unlocked pelvis flying above Murray Hill.

  The nausea from cleansing. Her shorthand memory. Cliff’s bitchy verses.

  And the two looks of the heavy set, straight-spined man who had peered into the storefront window: the second look from the corner that Grace had turned away from, the first turning look that curved out with that outrageous male commandingness and included her: with nothing in between the looks except their awareness of each other, the glint in his button-hole, a street-singer somewhere thumping out that old Afro-ethnic "Wimoweh" that made her feel old, as old as the folksinging of the late late forties and early fifties, and in a doorway (she now placed her in memory) a young mime in a tight sports jacket with elbow patches Grace had seen working the New York Public Library steps and now she’s down on a sidewalk that the gray-haired, heavy set man’s first curving look had swept through without occupying.

  A passing thought arrested by the sight of her velvet head. But he didn’t seem to pick anything up. How he would enjoy walking around naked!

  The phone rang and Grace took it: it was Cliff complaining that Maureen had given him hell for interrupting her enema to ask her if he should get his head shaved. Grace told him more about last night. The dude in the western shirt and the gambler’s moustache who had talked highfalutin: was the point of sex only pleasure? and wasn’t the old idea of reproduction and evolution evolving itself to where how we grew into sex pleasure was evolution now rather than later? She thought that was fantastic, but she didn’t think of anything to say except this would be an evolution worth passing on to the kids, and Cliff said with slight jealousy did she mean you could inherit acquired pleasure, and chuckled, she thought dirtily. She repeated herself to Cliff, but he told her. It was her own feedback to herself.

  New workshop sessions began next week: in sharing independences, give only what you like. Colonel Gibbon’s cassette fresh from San Francisco lay by the phone still in its package, the groans and guffaws of ecstasy coming through nonetheless: did Cliff want to take it home and play it? he ought to hear one of those northern California orgasms if he wanted a laugh.

  Safely past the threat of earlier-in-the-day suicide, Cliff listened as she told how she had talked to Sue’s about-to-go-to-college son, Larry, who wanted to go in the city though his dad wanted him to go away. Larry had this severe late-teenage kindness which was condescension to his elders in flux plus passive curiosity. Kids shrugged like no one. The old lady on the street had shrugged, but she was crazy, but beautiful. Did Grace—Aunt Grace—want to have her way with Larry, slender, dark, quite pretty, shy, sharp: why not, said Cliff, it’d be good for him.

  Cliff could keep her honest sometimes while he made himself mad, not her: were they two married? yes, to a friendship that was outside of them lest they get so alike they grow to that special homosexuality of marriage (write that down) (not very gay, dear).

  She felt Cliff wanted to hang up. "It’s your body," she had said to Larry when they had heard his mother say across the room that Larry should get laid, it was what she had said. The kid’s brown eyes were troubled, or his molar had hit a pebble from the Port Adams deli: he was in flux. He had Sue’s dark, thick hair. Someday when he was fifty he would have a twenty-year-old girlfriend. Maureen at that moment had gripped Grace’s arm; Maureen’s eyes were (—"Maureen gets epileptic or mystical," said Cliff). Her smile had gotten fixed. Was Maureen crazy? It had been the incoming group at Sue’s front door, women excited at being at home together for something better than a shower or stitching flags.

  Cliff now was calling to say he felt better, and to complain about Maureen, and not to again apologize for not driving Grace out last night but to say he had a buyer for the old white car, the buyer had a daughter in Washington, an impulse purchase. Manuel, the doorman in Grace’s building, knew him, and Cliff was paying Manuel a little commission. "I don’t know why," Cliff said, "but a nice guy you felt was judging you." The buyer—was this the point? "Had an insignia in his button-hole, military maybe; silver, a star, a circle with points coming out of it not all the same length. I asked, and he said, Wind directions."

  "You’ll save money taking cabs," Grace said. She felt sick again and they hung up and something had been engineered around her that she didn’t quite get, though the Goddess does not need to understand. "We are the future," she had said to a couple of excited women, feeling sucked out of some place and toward them but there was nothing to see. She had noticed S
ue’s tape recorder through the living room door and Marv there, fetched up high and dry in the other room staring at her as if she were the only person in the front hall crowded with people leaving, and he put his hand absently on the bookcase shelf where Sue’s tape recorder was, in fact on the black oblong thing with the silver handle sticking out: but Grace, having told Larry to come visit her sometime, they would talk, heard Larry say, "I’m going to college," and Grace said, "Oh, you’re going to college"—she was high but bushed. She was coasting, and he said, "I’ll drop up some night." He was shy—shy people were open—and he was funny and he liked talking to her —didn’t everyone? The Chilean woman Clara had said things that didn’t really tell Grace.

  She registered—that Larry would be living in her building. Well, this was Change. If she was the future, she would come after herself. But, sliding away into Marv’s eyes faraway in the other room where he was apart from the departing crowd of mostly women (all women) in the hallway, and into Maureen’s tense grip on her arm, Grace turned to Maureen who seemed to come to the point: "You know Cliff could have driven you out, the car was ready this morning, he didn’t want to, that was all." And all this cluster of words and touch and sight was why the cassette had gone out of Grace’s mind at the last minute.