Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

When Columbus spied the Mount of bliss,

He stopped and asked himself, “What is this?”

A button, a pea?

An anomaly?

No, silly man, it’s a clitoris!

* * *

Alice’s confession was not coherent, but it was possible to piece together a narrative after it was over. She spoke to me and to her mother, Ellen, who was admitted not long after the bean-spilling began. My eyes moved from child to mother as the girl shifted from barely audible whispers to choked admissions to hoarse gasping sobs. I noted that the mother’s face functioned as a vague mirror of her child’s. When Alice spoke softly, Ellen leaned forward, her eyes intent as her lips registered every insult with tiny movements. When Alice cried, Ellen’s eyes grew smaller, a wrinkle appeared between her brows, and her mouth tensed into a thin straight line, but she did not weep. Maternal listening is of a special kind. The mother must listen, and she must empathize, but she cannot identify entirely with the child. This calls for an enforced remove, a distance acquired only by steeling oneself against the story being told. The knowledge they have hurt my child can easily summon a brute response, something on the order of I will tear those little tarts into a thousand pieces and gobble them up for dessert. Watching Ellen, I sensed that she was resisting the desire for grisly vengeance, and I realized that I liked her — both for her rage and for blocking it.

Alice had been receiving ugly messages for quite some time. “Skank” and “Ho” had appeared regularly as text messages, as had the highly original commentaries “You think you’re so smart,” “Go back to Chicago if it’s so great there,” “Ugly slut,” “skinny weird bitch,” and “Fake.” All anonymous. As for my cabal of girl poets, Alice admitted that they had been on again and off again with her, one day confiding, the next, cold. They reeled her in and they cast her out. When, after weeks of misery, she confronted them with the bald statement “What did I do?” they snickered, rolled their eyes, and chanted “What did I do?” over and over again. It pained me especially to think of Peyton among the tormenters. Then photos of a naked Alice standing in front of her own mirror at home had been posted on Facebook — blurry images taken with the spy’s cell phone through a crack the blind. The poor kid snuffled hard when she coughed up this humiliation. She had taken the pictures down, of course, but not before the damage had been done. The memory of my changing body at thirteen and the achingly private, protective feeling I had had for my newly swollen breasts, three pubic hairs, and the mysterious red lines that appeared on my hips (which I discovered only two years later were stretch marks) made me squirm with discomfort. The bloody tissue narrative was garbled, but eventually Ellen and I understood that Alice had gotten her period just before my class and had been unequipped and too shy to ask any of her “friends” for a pad. She had stuffed her underpants with the Kleenex she was carrying in her purse (always on hand for her allergies), but when she walked into the room, one slightly bloody tissue had dislodged itself from her shorts and fallen to the floor, at which moment Ashley had grabbed it and then, pretending to understand all at once what she had touched, had thrown it on the table and begun to squeal the word gross. The most recent ruse, the one that must have induced the stomach pains, involved the message from the desired boy, Zack, who had arranged to meet her at the park near the swings at three. That must have been where Alice was off to when I saw her bouncing down the sidewalk after she left class at two forty-five. Upon her arrival, however, there was no Zack. She waited half an hour and then, realizing that something was wrong, sat down on the grass, put her hands over her face, and cried. When the tears came, so did the jeers and laughter from behind a tall fence that bordered the park. The invisible hooting girls berated Alice for her fantasy that a boy like Zack would even look at her. This was, it seemed, the most recent “joke,” the one Alice hadn’t been able to “take.”

Despite its particulars, Alice’s story is depressingly familiar. Its basic structure is repeated, with multiple variations, everywhere all the time. Although occasionally overt, the cruelties are most often hidden, surreptitious jabs to shame and hurt the victim, a strategy most often adopted by girls, not boys, who go for the direct punch, blow, or kick in the groin. The duel at dawn, with its elaborate legalisms, its seconds and its paces; its mythical reincarnation in the Wild West when black hat and white hat face off with their six-shooters; the plain old let’s-take-it-outside fisticuffs between two male disputants, who are each cheered on by a rooting faction; even the playground brawl (young boy returns home beaten bloody to face Father, who says, “Son, did you win?”) — all are granted a dignity in the culture that no female form of rivalry can match. A physical fight between girls or women is a catfight, one characterized by scratching, biting, slapping, flying skirts, and a scent of the ridiculous or, conversely, of erotic spectacle for male enjoyment, the delectable vision of two women “going at it.” There is nothing noble about emerging victorious from such a squabble. There is no such thing as a good, clean catfight. As I sat there looking at Alice’s sad, red countenance, I imagined her socking Ashley in the jaw and wondered if the masculine solution wasn’t more efficient. If girls banged each other over the head instead of plotting nasty little games of sabotage, would they suffer less? But that, I thought, could only happen in another world. And even in that improbable world where a girl could dust herself off after a wrestling match with her nemesis and declare victory, what good would it do?

By the time I said good-bye to them, Ellen had managed to coax her big girl onto her lap. Mother and daughter were enfolded in the beanbag chair, where Ellen had bitting alone only minutes before, listening to Alice’s saga of intrigue and deception. Alice buried her head in her mother’s neck, and her long bare legs and feet hung over the side of the chair. Ellen’s hand was moving up and down her daughter’s back, slowly and rhythmically. Behind the two, I noticed a row of the child’s dolls on a shelf. The impassive porcelain face of one of them stared at the wall behind me. Another poppet had a faint smile on her pink lips. A woman doll in a kimono stood rigidly at attention. An antique baby lay on her back with her arms in the air. The chorus, I said to myself, and they began to stir and move their lips in unison. I saw their teeth. The old magic trembled inside them all for an instant, animus, élan vital . On the sidewalk as I made my way “home,” I had a wild thought:

But I can no longer stand in awe of this,

Nor, seeing what I see, keep back my tears.

As my feet moved, one in front of the other, my gait jogged loose the source. It had arrived courtesy of the doll chorus. Antigone. I smiled. A tragedy for a travesty, but still, I said to myself, there is grief. And who is to measure suffering? Which one of you will calculate the magnitude of pain to be found inside a human being at any given moment?

* * *

Multiply by words, Alice—

Your airborne army spits spears,

Cracks syllables, breaks glass

Spews fury skyward.

The hundred tricksters

In flight on the page are you,

A swarm of grins penciled in

While oval heads are trampled underfoot,

Or name the Gorgon in the mirror

Alice. The monster twin, the other story,

Whose mouth blasts killing winds,

Forbidden thoughts, brazen phrases