Women and Men (39 page)

O.K. what about her? replies the interrogator closing in: it goes like this: Grace Kimball is one-thirty-second Pawnee, you said; and at her big turning point she flew east from Indian country to change her life; the grandmother likewise flew east from Indian country at a big turning point in
her
life and with the beloved Navajo Prince somewhere behind her on her track.

But the interrogator is going haywire perhaps because we have become everything to him—and, ‘ That was the East Far Eastern Princess," we mutely protest, our breath pounding, repelled by our heart—it’s not good—he’s so close now he’s breathing down our neck, what is he about to come up with? we’d like to set eyes on him but we’re riveted and his voice ahead of itself retorts in questions, Who and why was
she?

Likewise somewhere behind the East Far Eastern Princess is that pivotal moment when she disarmed her awesome pursuer from the West, the still not entirely empty-handed Navajo Prince; conceived her vision of history to take back to her interested father the King of Choor; and according to Alexander —who is
Alexander?
—Mayn’s grandfather, but—according to him she acquired for future contingencies that common revolver that in all the hands Indian, Mexican, American that handled it, multiplied into perhaps a small arsenal in fact. While Grace Kimball, to turn to her as you did to avoid our question if Mayn is armed, also flew east having acquired already her vista of history: for it is obvious to anyone who knows women that whatever she felt some years later the dark morning she broke Lou’s egg against the sink and her heart came up—or was it his?—in her mouth—Kimball when she first fled east and well before she met her already imagined husband, already had her vista of history intact if only in essence and by intuition.

That is, without analytic thought, without the study of books which is known in women to bring on Bright’s disease, the interrogator jokes, we think (except to another voice submerged to the point of virtual disappearance in us it’s not a joke, and this voice, a woman, by historical convergence, sighs in recognition of someone whose words she knew so well she was like a friend to her, who died of Bright’s disease far away in another part of the country almost too far to make the trip until one day she elected to think only of herself and like a desperado covering his tracks did take that trip and went away).

So without study or research Kimball came to her vista of history when it came to her, that is to go ahead and be it, make it, because it was in her already in the form of an available space that needed only to be managed. But that doesn’t say how she saw it.

It had its funny side.

Funny? asks an unknown child, looking away from its homework screen but still reading—looking up to and from its home—an unknown child, a multiple child. Funny? it asks.

Well, a side beyond the triangle.

We’re doing rotation in class right now.

Well, there you are, honey, you rotate the triangle, never stop rotating it—that’s the funny side, like you go all around a statue so quietly the statue doesn’t see you move so it’s the statue that seems to be turning before your eyes.

I don’t see what’s funny.

Grace’s brother Saturday in the backyard where his mother in exasperation said he belongs, suddenly has nothing to do. (Except be watched by his sister from an upstairs window.) There’s a line drawn (Grace can just about see it) between his offer to help Dad change the oil and Dad’s gruff "You’re too late, I already started," and, at seven-thirty earlier this morning in the kitchen, Grace’s mother’s empty abstract feeling that she must go on to the end come hell or high water discussing a surprise postcard of a giant gorge—a dark cut in the earth—sent from Medicine Bow, Wyoming, by her brother whom her husband objects to because the man doesn’t drink, is unmarried, doesn’t vote, is a trouble-shooter running errands in the wilderness for the Department of the Interior, and probably (a man like that) doesn’t pay his taxes: the postcard said only,
HERE WE GO AGAIN, LOVE TO ALL,
W
ALTER:
the discussion in Grace’s mother’s kitchen went on beyond breakfast when Grace’s mother interrupted it to say she needed Dad to drive her to do the marketing and he said he would be busy changing the oil and didn’t know how long it would take: that’s one of many, many triangles, some with Grace, some with only one parent, talking about one thing like a postcard maybe meaning something else which like the unused message space around her uncle’s bulletin from Medicine Bow is both something and a nothing, a gap where you fill it in, you dream at night that you have only others to blame, but for what?—you’ll have to go back and dream again to find out for what and Grace is determined enough to and finds in the office in her hometown where she is a draftsman in 1949 that all the love ‘n romance people are getting where she works is in triangles that all depend on her and she wakes up sad, though hungover and rarin’ to go: you say through (by now) your own windshield one Sunday, approaching the municipal lake, that you will have it different and maybe you will send for your brother when you get where you are going, maybe not. But one week Grace sold her little red (for Rarin’) convertible, hugged and kissed everyone So long—

—The triangles you’re talking about were rotating, observes the serious child looking away from its homework; so didn’t they come all the way around?

But Kimball, like the grandmother, must look ahead, insists the interrogator; she would not look back at the communication gap fusing mother-centered and father-centered forms in one disturbing moment of transition, would not reflect upon the triangles coming full circle—

—because, we add, the family circle, less than fullness, boasted—

—boasted? demands the interrogator, boasted?—

—a circumference, chimes the child.

And inside was all that was inside.

Who spoke up then?

No one really.

Boasted?
demands the interrogator;
up?
his voice above but so close his words sting the scalp.

Nobody ever spoke up and said, I’m angry because after your second drink after dinner you’re half asleep; or said, When you go out to fix the living-room shutter that’s banging in the wind that’s sweeping in from the winter fields outside of town and then come back in like you’re in the reading room of the library and sit slowly so slowly with a sigh down into your straight chair there and right away ask if anyone wants an apple, why don’t you never ask
me
to go out and fix the shutter? or said, What’s it matter if Uncle Walter just enjoys himself in Wyoming, in Utah, in Colorado, let’s eat breakfast for creep’s sake, or said, When did you two have a good laugh together, no strings attached? or said, Let’s get it out in the open, the power in this family derives from what is not quite said and the power resides primarily—

—in, continues the interrogator, the explosive potential of this confusion of two systems patriarchal and matriarchal, such that (says the interrogator acquiring in our language an uncertain seat he’ll damn well sit no matter what olden cities now rumbling and coming unstuck he’s sitting on top of which is definitely something big) from a matrilocal system appropriate to a women-controlled garden-agriculture where men are secondary and gardens are irrigated by the heavens, the exogamy or marrying out of the tribe was Kimball’s which, as she winged eastward, a true Pawnee in her visions, imitated on the contrary the movement of women to the husband’s home territory in a patrilocal hunting culture where the sons continue to live where they know the habits of the game and every inch of the terrain as the sky rotates over it; whereas, though also likewise, the East Far Eastern Princess renamed Rainbow Cloud at the crisis fled on her bird eastward home to her father’s country having disarmed the Navajo Prince and drawn him against her will away from the lands of his home where he later was abandoned doubly to a matrilocal people as strange to him as their multiple structure of small-scale dwelling units, and to the wilderness of her heart’s one-time errands where he could not help casting his shadow, as he moved on. So you see, recedes the interrogator inside one’s very head totaled hole by hole, the question remains, Is Mayn armed? and is dodged if you turn to Grace Kimball, no more an obstacle to our question than her decision that men (the weak sisters) would certainly dream of failure, can keep the power vac of her privately beaten (now late) Dad from taking us wormhole and all on the public horse we also sit to the power vac externalized and tabled (is it 1974, is it the talks in Vladivostok?) in the form of an accord holding numbers
and
the
paper
they’re printed on together in the mind—giving the legs under the table a good deal of latitude: frankly if in the preceding two years three thousand warheads have been added, we have to
live
after all, so we’ll grant ourselves increases in this area within reason while we still set definite upper bounds, which, early in the eighth decade of the century in question, Jim Mayn, for whom the story itself made an inflationary spiral, recorded as a middling-conscientious newsman who doesn’t go in for predictions while in suspecting that history made little sense even as random intermittence (some overheard economist’s phrase) found more to interest him in the margins, in old and new weather, in
it,
indeed, those real outer screens, spheres of magnetism, and molecules-turned-ions, and ozone, yes weathers that lid our radiance and in the grandeur of their checks upon us inspire our immortality.

Which prods us to recall what matrilocal-patrilocal adventures the interrogator-persuader, a gross outsider, reported of the grandmother and/or Princess between the two of whom we pivot our eyes back and forth as fast as
he interrogation chair our eyes are riveted in lets them, and prods us to retort blindly, Isn’t that putting the horse before the cart? (while we feel him behind us in the ballpoint vibes we’re getting from the ground up writing down enthusiastically as a local idiom new to him). But is it he or really us all now asking, Why did this grandmother-to-be, Margaret, turn out to be such a rather strict Victorian parent? And care less and less for that family paper? The answer is that this did not happen right away, but is that a good answer? And when her own daughter Sarah went to France the summer of 1920, why did she not let her stay the half-year she so longed for?

Yet the interrogator however internalized by us has said next to nothing so far about any Princess (nee born to be Mayn’s grandmother) winging back home East where the Inventor of New York her cranky, ingenious protector (though what was she to him?) turned her into a sun-drenched cloud so that she might escape for a time into the very statue the unassembled pieces of which she had once eight years previous in 1885 at the age of twelve or thirteen viewed with her father and an unknown photographer while behind her this older man she was about to meet who later sent her Longfellow’s Dante inscribed by the poet for her birthday muttered as they stared into the concave insides of the Statue’s face as tragic as it was dumb, "Look her in the eye, you’ll see what she never will," having also given advice which eight years later she took, "Go west, young girl young woman."

So the torturer-interrogator betrayed himself. He forgot we had said nothing of the grandmother’s return adventures with the Hermit-Inventor of New York before she was restored both to her father the editor of a then thriving weekly newspaper in New Jersey and to an old friend and sometime beau Alexander to whom she soon gave her hand in marriage and indeed friendship and with it an authentic Colt revolver she herself by conflicting accounts had taken as a gift or stolen to use as a deterrent possibly with its possible former possessor in mind, the Navajo Prince who was never so much the obstacle she put behind her to coast the future wind’s inevitable road home as he was the love in her she passed on in her self and her stories to the one of her two grandsons who, then as later raised to the power of future, was in two places at once but not
at one.

And one of these twos that he found himself so bound to he found them in himself like obstacles to be sought again and again was on one hand his grandparents’ house and on the other that other home down the street of Windrow, where a mother sent two sons away, at least one to live human and go on being animal, which, since these two were not just two but one, meant you might have it both ways, why Grace Kimball said so somewhere in the ongoing structure of her good works which accommodated a multiplicity of small-scale units, Redesign your life, cleanse that transverse colon you’ll feel like you’re flying on coke, while you’re at it, at it, at it.

But, Pawnee though she was one-thirty-second, other Indians meant something more actual by having it both ways of being human and animal, both your totem, hence you’re an eagle or you’re a coyote, say, and if the both of you are coyotes or you’re both eagles, you two can’t marry.

This the Ojibway medicine man with the diamond squint might still accept in this day and age matriculating thanks to the diva’s doctor with four of the diva’s own natal compatriots in a forward-looking aeronautics college within range of Lake Superior.

Can’t make a living shipping tapeworms to the opera stars even should she be reduced to the great Minnesota tapeworm as her personal totem softly singing in the entrails of a drifting, ever drifting Mille Lacs pike, "Fly me, fly me." But it was no joke to the diva’s doctor; words have weight; the past has weight, and so, as we have seen, have the diva’s multilingual dictates; just so, the doctor straggled for years to transplant his heart from the mother who called his true love Archaeology his "Hiawatha studies"; and he might relieve himself double-checking the god Morning Star though never at first hand confirm the published report that Navajo women think if you depart from the missionary position which gives you at least the vantage to see up through the teepee’s funneled smoke-hole (since they haven’t evolved ceiling mirrors beyond the mere sky in this culture as yet) your baby will come out feet first. Sediment info from a long-gone sea.