Women and Men (107 page)

Who was it heard her words? They come down to us to lodge in many small-scale filaments and are heard in turn from such fars and forgots, easts and wests, as are not yet vacant enough for the absent mind. So that the many have got too serious for the interrogator and he is going to press (el) button releasing his ‘lectrically- (from concentrate) squeezed juice and give a body a hit of it in self-defense.
(Our body, his self.)

Her words slant down to us along an angle of the desert twilight from her century which soon could turn a century ago. Owl Woman’s words we mean come down to us we already remember from our friend the multiple child who is getting along and was in the next room doing homework when last we looked or better still research—

I
am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling.

Songs sung who by? the correspondent Lincoln, sage in saffron, asks (as we hear the research child call,
Not
your
friend;
your daughter/son he-or-she).

Sung who by? Oh, by grownups—or similar folk left behind to act in place of grownups—who heard the prevailing easterlies and told their kids, "Hear the song in the wind." Grownups to hear themselves sing the praises of these songs of the wind so the children, who heard within the music honest noise, while hearing also the real song between the volts of their resident adults’ deafened lipservice to those songs (if you call that music real noise), privately willed that whereas grownups were to be heard, they might be not seen. Which lipservice, like global debt, turns ever toward big-talk/small-talk, that stuff of history, which got our parents through the long nighty-night of marriage ever after, like the weather that that talk precipitates and reports and clouds with light.

Where? When? (Who? What?)—and why
did
you say things more than once? asked the high-school journalism teacher (No: why did anyone?) she long borne in the future memory of the boy and man Jim Mayn, him whom in 1976-7 our saffron-(dis)robed gal correspondent Lincoln (cross-legged in Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop) daydreams out of thin air though she hasn’t met Jim—daydreams on her back burner while breathing-in an evening of women histories, one by one going round the joyful, awful circle healed with humor of tears of women on Grace’s carpet all bare and unedited: except for the foreign entrant, Clara, Chilean but with quick English accent, less naked than the others, it is her secret along her fine, tender arms and not quite flat stomach, and softly changing breasts, higher, lower, as if sometimes having just breathed along with her and sometimes not, and that like a motion of sway hint inclination faintly outward, flowers of one being—who has such a fund of international lore, and such contained eyes, such remote ordeals in her centered awareness—well, in her manners—that when she tells about life it enriches you in all its variety as the next-to-last word in narrative small talk that describes
her
life, even relations with husband (Men ought
always
use condoms,
always,
she says she sometimes thinks) so you think you know more of her than you know about anyone else on Grace’s carpet, but then you don’t: and yet you haven’t been tricked; for Clara—subtly husbanded, faintly shadowed Clara—makes you feel (Shit, said Grace at least more than once, nobody can
make
you feel unless you
want
to) that she’s here in Grace’s Body-Self Workshop not only for some other reason but, possibly to her surprise, the right ones too. Yet maybe the doubt is due to our gal Lincoln’s bein’ in love with a man she imagines she’s never seen except in a letter he wrote her young acquaintance slender, intense daughter Flick, where his "When’s the funding for your Washington job run out?" and "Where’s your brother Andrew spending the summer because he don’t never write his dad" decay quickly into the landscape water table of the continental Southwest as if it, and not the person himself, were the issue—not what cut to the quick his high-school journalism teacher thirty years ago.

Statuesque Miss Myles—Pearl W. Myles—was angry at his absence, and, though strong, she saw unfriendly hierarchy out-towering her and mysterious upheaval threatening underfoot; and she imagined three camps of students, those who were with her all the way in her historic fight to set up a school newspaper independent of the principal, a columnar young figure named Thompson Fulkerand; those who hardly cared; and those who in the great race took the baton from their parents if it was not the other way around and felt there’s neither a need for such a news organ on administratively so small a scale nor much of an excuse for making so much noise, and said so again and again of the woman who herself preached, "Why
did
you say things more than once? No: why did anyone?"

But if Miss Myles grant he had had a tragedy—Jim—she noticed he had expressed enthusiastic interest in the atom bomb, unique explosives leading up to V-J Day, and seemed unaffected by his mother’s mysterious drowning (read
one-way swim,
one fellow student called it); more interest in the Indian Ira Lee’s practically white sister (as Miss Myles had gathered from her prospective news editor of the putative school paper), who came around when Ira with the utmost slowness genuflecting, rising, gardened for Jim’s grandmother, than Jim showed in the midst of the rotten, blankly bright, future-catapulting thing his mother had done to as if not even really herself (and yet—and yet) and to him and little Brad his brother and to that poor man his father whose acquaintance Pearl had somehow not made and who could be seen walking home late at night, yet did she not detect —for she was Jim’s teacher, who encouraged what she termed "debate and discussion" but did not appreciate differences if they were petty as when she informed the class that you never underlined for emphasis except when in quoting a source to catch a voice emphasis, whereupon Jim put up his horny young hand to report that his great-grandfather—whom he did not need to identify for Miss Myles as once upon a time editor of the family paper—had issued instructions to his staff of three never under any circumstances to emphasize by underlining— so that Miss Myles sensed in Jim a truculence, maybe just sad tension, and in Jimmy’s unusual cool brown eyes a space falling—falling forward, she felt, but not halfway to meet her his teacher, damn it, and so, on the aforementioned unfateful day when the assigned imaginary news story came due and the tall stone of an unprecedentedly young principal had undercut her again, Miss Myles took it that Jim Mayn was bending his power as fifteen-or-going-on-fifteen-year young scion of the once only newspaper in town for a hundred years (narrow-column weekly) until another had commenced printing at the outset of FDR’s third ("There is no indispensable man") term to undercut her—
her,
Pearl W. Myles—when in reality Jim’s been glad to hear the answer to those ancient lead questions of the journalist’s song
Where
and
When:
but on one of those days, however beautiful and still more beautiful a woman of thirty she was, he had been detained (as we later learned to say at the prompting of our multiple state) by the Indian halfback Ira Lee, who was telling some of the guys about this map that was like the back of some strange thing under glass, this green relief of South America donated to the high school for future study immemorial, a reptile map crawling under one’s eyes as under glass, museum glass. But ignorant of this, she guessed when she stood up and felt across her broad brow and along the backs of her untired thighs that on a day when an imaginary news story following her models was due and that six-foot-six-inch principal Fulkerand, at twenty-nine the youngest male ever to have an eye in the back of his head
and
hold such a post in New Jersey who happened by a miracle to be exactly half bald from mid-head forward to the brink and down his high if narrow brow, had announced semi-privately that Miss Myles’s initiative was more nourishing than its fulfillment—on this sensitive day of all days, Jim Mayn had chosen to miss class.

Where? when? who? Turn it one iota, that small talk of passing amity or enmity that Jim’s future colleague-friend said history turned on—turn it one iota, said Ted, hunched at the bar centered above where his drink had been last week before he temporarily gave it up, and you’re looking head-on over someone’s shoulder at some further sight. The grandmother Margaret with her narrow, strong, squared shoulders, tartly directed her fifteen-year-old Jimmy to get out of his True Comics and stir his stumps and wash the mixing bowl (the pale-brown mixing bowl), and while you’re at it the pan and the lunch plates, and anything else he might find in the deep white sink. Small talk less narrative than her stories secretly meant years before to make up for his mother’s not telling him any and even not being there in spirit— when now she is evidently gone for good (read
suicide;
read, if you can find any, poetry, as Margaret told Jim his mother read as a girl—it’s better than reading nothing, we already remember hoping and half recall books that showed us something we’d been unconscious of); and Margaret’s tales could make him feel that while she might have foreknown mystery afflictions of her daughter, Jim’s mom, who definitely never had had the big hole in her head (like the Navajo Prince’s mother) but had been married as distantly as that demon-infected matron of Margaret’s stories and who Jim realized years later he’d felt must have married his father for some pretty good reason even if not out of deep wish or realistic considerations but—but if, later, other matter in his grandma’s stories seemed fact, some parallels with his own mother might make the Navajo Prince’s mother worth reflecting on—yet the tales existed in this kitchen in New Jersey. Into which now came grandfather Alexander —"Not going to rain after all"—bald as a tall old Danish farmer in a
Life
magazine, and ever arriving from a distance always, such as the next room, which came a little with him no matter how near he approached (that is, the doughnuts—
and
crullers in this instance—and his wife), and friendly upon the new soles and heels of his cordovans reflecting fine messages of dust, of history itself precipitated between himself and his shop downtown of shelves and tables (that seldom caught anyone in the act of purchase, yet was a business, year upon year), shoes buffed every day, polished every week, nicked and scraped and rained on, so as then to be rubbed to the patina repeated through these periods of time as the single kiss he now gave Margaret was then given on the far cheek she with brief absent-mindedness turned to him. So that—as Alexander added, "We might get an earthquake instead" (a joke, it seemed)—Margaret turned her gray-blue eyes on Jim while hearing his less-loved, though little, brother Brad call from the front porch and shove open the front door that stuck in the upper corner, for she wondered (though wouldn’t say so to Jim, though did before her death, in a letter) if he guessed Brad’s half-brotherhood as little as Brad did, the love-child of Jim’s mother Sarah and sort of fatally the wall-eyed electrician Bob Yard, who had two good cars but went around in a rusted-out pickup truck with one claw missing on the tailgate, who for once in his rampant, epically give-and-take,
and
childless married life, wept before Margaret’s very eyes, tears all down his five-hour stubble, and told her that just between the two of them he
could
after all believe in Sarah’s drowning, but God was this because he had loved her too much to run off with her? (through wind and rain, ‘cross land and sea)— poppycock, said Margaret, a word Jim used years later once so his children laughed and laughed. Poppycock, though, in Margaret’s mind, that her own retiring, original daughter Sarah could ever have run away with Bob, who loved his wife over a much longer haul; but then less nice than poppycock that Bob stood there and told Margaret like a gentleman friend that her eyes got bluer, did she know that?

But she retorted, The eyes went bluer, the hair whiter, Bob—as if to dismiss him when she knew that he really had loved that Sarah of hers (who had never been hers though she had known that Sarah would have to do some original thing), absent now invisibly absent now under the wedge of (when you stared at it) sparkling gray granite in the graveyard where Margaret would stand with Jim and recall that Sarah had asked if Owl Woman had been married and came to Margaret once (a unique meeting as far as intimacy went) with Owl Woman’s words from a book Margaret had never heard of (just as Sarah had never, as a girl, been told most of the tales of Margaret’s West—though told something in
return
for something she one day told Margaret):

In the dark I enter.

I cannot make out what I say
—

Not the most trenchant verse Sarah would quote, Margaret told Jim— Jimmy—too smart a boy to let catastrophe show, though who could say what daydreams washed his mother inshore until, when he was all set to see her, the coast was of a different place or held an unmapped gap, unmanned so any foreign matter at all might drift in, and he turned to check where he was and never did see the body: "let catastrophe show"? for what was catastrophe, after all, but (let alone catastrophe theory that journeyman journalist Mayn heard tell of from those who cared more than he to know the going theories and so forth) a dramatic chance to be elsewhere, launched into that supposedly strong detour by the awful pain one nonetheless got credit for bearing the weight of, when maybe one just was somewhere else instead and not in two places at once?

Catastrophe here so unnatural and remote you almost didn’t have to run away from it, whether you can measure a mother, and her grandson’s run was an absorbed sprint down the sidewalk of upper West Main Street from her house to his and further, sometimes clear to the Fire House by the railroad tracks with a football pumping in his arm zig-zagging away across the grass-lawn of the private home of the owner of the American Hotel downtown, zigzagging right behind the gardener-mower one-hundred-year-old Mr. Lester Brown, who ate one bomb of a Bermuda onion and that was his lunch under a tree, and who knew that this dangerous athlete in a time when the Olympics had been suspended was detouring to criss-cross behind him and his hand mower and grass bag—then to zig-zag off the sidewalk into the street between the cars, so that once Mr. Brown saw him do it and feared that if hit he wouldn’t (momentarily) skid and roll like Lilac the pale hairless bull bitch that when the car braked to a stop (partly
because
of dog) ambled away, first up the street’s very white line (like she was a conquistador in shock), then off onto the sidewalk, and never looked back until she began to run; but Jim never got hit though he caused more than one car to brake, and gave his grandmother pause and gave her inspiration to tell her stories right down to the truth though never at the cemetery, where he and she would go, and she would guess that Jim was too willful to let the catastrophe of his mother’s death draw him into a center where, like little Brad, he would fall apart with a passion that Brad at nine or ten never had betrayed before (had he?) and never would again, in her opinion.