Andrea Dworkin: The New Womans Broken Heart

gave quarters to the beggars, she drank tequila and four by four they

were her lovers again,

she was a famous writer by now.

in the winter many people wanted to talk to her. in the winter

many people took her to dinner, and touched her knee, and wanted

her to know them.

in the winter she was more and more on the streets, in the winter

she fled from the people who wanted to take her to dinner, and touch

her knee, and have her know them.

in the spring she left the city, she went to the ocean, she walked on

the sand, she walked up and down the oceans edge, over and over

again, she did not remember what it felt like to be sad. she remembered very little,

in the summer she wrote down everything she remembered,

in the summer people crowded onto the sand and at the oceans

edge so she went to the mountains,

in the fall a famous actor made love to her.

in the winter she forced him to leave, in the winter she called him

terrible names and felt great rage and forced him to leave,

then spring came and she went to the city.

in the summer she was tired, in the summer she became weary into

the marrow of her bones, in the summer she became so tired that her

physical vision diminished and a darkness began to close in on her.

in the summer she was so tired that the streets were blurred and she

could not see well enough to read.

in the fall she tried to remember her husband, and her first love,

and the first 4, and the four by fours and the three by threes, in the

fall she tried with all her might to remember.

in the winter the snows came, in the winter she stayed in the city

and she couldnt remember, in the winter she died, she was 29.

some awful facts, recounted by bertha schneider

(for J. S. )

bertha schneider, nearly 31, was too disturbed to have any friends,

she was like all the other schlubs running around out there, loss was

driving her crazy, loss was eating up her heart, loss was defeating her

cell by cell, corpuscle by corpuscle, loss was the desert in which she

was lost, life had finally forced her to shake hands with the great

democratizer—loss, bertha schneider, lost, was at last just like

everyone else—lost.

her cycles of loss traditionally divided into 3 year periods, a double

cycle was 6 years, there were no half cycles, she had had several double cycles sequentially, these she had put behind her. who could remember so much loss, even her loss was lost, except when she slept

and spectres of loss, all flaming and brazen, assailed her. but most

often even sleep was lost, beyond her immediate grasp, remembered

dimly, imagined badly.

it was this current cycle, only in its 2nd year, that had made her old

all over again, too soon, before her time, at 18 she had been 84.

Schneiders Cocktail—drugs, sex, radical politics mixed with a lot of

banana cream pie—had done that, at 25 she had been 100. m arriage, the good old fashioned kind—beatings and cleaning interspersed with the 3Vi minute fuck—had done that. 27, 28, and 29

were the golden years, she was just a normal age, regular, the past

sometimes welling up and breaking like blisters, one wipes up the

ooze and goes on, reading books, watching television, taking walks,

called cunt and pussy, followed home nights, but not once raped or

beaten, she had known she would have to pay for those golden years.

God exacted interest like a loanshark, you paid and kept paying and

still He broke all yr bones, one Yom Kippur, at the beginning of her

30th year, God had written her name once again in the book of loss,

bertha schneider, let her lose everything, God had written in that

pedestrian prose of His. rub it in, pile it on, and let her eat cake, the

kind wrapped in plastic, God had scratched in the margin.

so in her 30th year bertha had found herself bereft of milk, fish,

and eggs, and all she could afford was cake wrapped in plastic, her

teeth began to go. her friends had already left, all secularists, when it

was writ they obeyed.

bertha had never had any money to speak of but her friends had

been pure gold, the best of every generation, the ones who stopped

wars, the ones who wrote the poems of their time, the ones who held

hands and treasured single daffodils while decadence raged all

around, the ones who were not waxen and false, the ones all those

others could not destroy, the ones police could not police, corruption

could not corrupt, bitterness could not embitter, the ones on whose

hands dirt was clay, not mud. but in her 30th year, God had struck

again, and she had fallen from grace, which is something like doing

a somersault and missing the floor, she kept falling and falling and

falling until she lost even the memory of solid ground.

bertha had learned a few things in life, exactly 3. 1—every Up is

followed by a Down. 2—every Down is followed by an Up, but you

have to live long enough which, depending on how down the Down

is, can be tough and is not a foregone conclusion. 3—Disembodied

Wisdom is the only lover who doesnt get seasick on the curves and

take the easy way out.

bertha had courted Disembodied Wisdom assiduously. Disembodied Wisdom, not nearly as formidable as it is cracked up to be, had given in, lured perhaps by the rhythmic certainty of berthas

tragic sense of life, bertha had had, to be frank, carnal knowledge,

like light through a window pane, bertha, pregnant from the union,

had given birth in a profane world where dog shit and the urine of

drunks and junkies were the only available sacraments, now,

bloodied from delivering the divine fruits of her unique fuck to a

fairly indifferent world, bertha looked around for that one lover detached enough not to run. gone. Disembodied Wisdom had fled, just as Warren Beatty might have. lost, like light through a window pane.

lovers, friends, dust unto dust, dust clings, bertha sneezes, dust

doesnt take kindly to sneeze, dust scatters, bertha calls after it. dust,

what can it answer?

the others are dust and what is bertha? more dust, but bertha

doesnt trust dust, she knows herself, she knows the others, chaos,

craving, dust has its own laws, dust is inconstant, dust hurts the eyes,

dust can sweep up in huge gusts, suffocate, inside the nostrils, blinding the eyes, choking the throat, dust pretends it will cling forever, but bertha knows, it does or it doesnt. either way, once dust touches

dust, the spot is marked, loving, needing, or wanting dust is a waste

of time, especially for dust, even a legal purist like bertha resents it.