Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

Held back in the years of silent ainthood.

Good behavior. Conduct E for excellent.

Weep, Alice, if you want to, howl!

Make it rain, a deluge

Of N’s for needles from your eyes.

Your many I’s. Your multitudes.

Be foment, Alice, ruckus, tirade, trouble,

And if you wish, wish three times.

Wish them out. Write them null.

Blacken their bodies with ink.

Gorge them on sublimated sweets

Until they reel and fall

Beneath your dancing feet.

I wasn’t at all sure I liked the poem, but it felt awfully good to write it. “Why are they so mean to me?” Alice had uttered this several times in a soft, bewildered voice. Wasn’t this the puzzled refrain of the “kinda different?” Jessie had said that by now I ought to know that Alice was “kinda different.” How different? Perception is laden with visible differences, with light and shadow and object masses and moving bodies, but also always there are invisible differences and similarities, ideas that draw the lines, separate, isolate, identify. I was, am kinda different. Not one of the gang. Outside, always outside. I feel the cold winds blow over me. I would have to decide what to do about them: the clique, the girls. I couldn’t let the business go. But I would have to resist hating them, my six still unformed little broads with their sadistic pleasures, the envy they sweated from their pores, and their shocking lack of empathy. Ashley, the princess of punishment. Hadn’t I seen it when she looked at Flora? Ashley, my devoted student. The girl wanted power. No doubt she had too little at home, a middle child in that large family who had probably fought for recognition from Ma and Da. Look at me! Surely, she deserved sympathy, too. I thought of her mother; it is worse to be the mother of a bully than a victim, worse to have a cruel child than one whose vulnerability allows attack. I would have to devise a strategy, if not to save the situation, at least to bring it into the open air. I like that expression, the open air. Before me I see the wide fields outside Bonden, flat and broad, with the immense sky over them.

* * *

I cried on Bea the first night after she arrived. You’d think that all the bawling and blubbering I had done over the course of about six months would have drained my ducts and left my eyeballs permanently damaged from flooding, but it seems that there is an endless supply of the salty secretion, and it can pour forth at regular, bounteous intervals without any lasting effects. The old fleshy temple truly is a marvel. It felt so good to have Bea patting my back and shushing me and rocking me a little in her arms. Mia and Be-a. Once we had dispensed with my keening lachrymosity, we settled into the Burdas’ bed, and she filled me in on the doings of Jack and the boys. (Jack, the same old, same old, driving her crazy with his weekend sculpting, the results of which she referred to as erections because they were, each and every one, towering protrusions inspired by the Gaudí phalluses on top of the Padrera, but she did not want them all over the lawn. She did not want a skyline of yards in the yard, for Christ’s sake. Jonah thriving in college, Ben a little lost in class but soaring in musical theater and no girlfriend ever, and maybe he’s gay, which was fine by Bea, she just knew she couldn’t say it first, what kind of mother would do that, if he was or wasn’t, and then he had never been obviously fey, or anything like that, so they’d just have to let him figure it out, and her lawyering, which she loved the way Harold had, Our Father before her, the subtleties and loopholes and the precedents and even the grind.)

And then with our two heads, one brown, one red, propped on pillows, we lay beside each other and gazed upward at the white ceiling and remembered playing Baby Huey. I was usually Huey, the enormous baby duck in diapers who drooled and puked and pooped and issued guttural gagas to Bea’s howling joy. We remembered Mrs. Klinchklonch, the witch woman we invented, who hated children, and how we delighted in describing her monstrous doings. She threw children out the window, dunked them in wells, peppered them vigorously, and drenched them in chocolate sauce. We remembered becoming the Mellolards, a vocal team that appeared when we sat at our little red table in our little red chairs and sang commercials, not real commercials, but made-up ones about toothpaste that spurted from the tube and laundry detergent that turned the clothes green and candy that melted in your hand, not in your mouth. We remembered our blue dresses with pinafores and our patent leather shoes that shone with Vaseline and that we held our knees together and folded our hands in our laps and were very, very good. We remembered Mama’s embroidered calendar and the tiny wrapped presents that appeared on it every day of December and that our anticipation for Christmas gave us stomachaches, and we remembered baths. We held a washcloth over our eyes so we wouldn’t get soap in them and leaned backward, and Mama poured the warm water over our heads with a pitcher, and she heated towels in the dryer and wrapped us in the warm terry cloth, and then Father would lift us, one at a time, high up into his arms and gently lower us into chairs in front of the fire to keep us warm. Baths were paradise, said Bea. They were, said I, and then she told me she used to pretend to be asleep in the car when we returned late from our grandparents’ so that Father would carry her inside, and I told her I knew she was faking and that I had been jealous because I was too big, and I had sometimes worried that he loved her more. I was a crybaby and she wasn’t. You’re still a crybaby, she said. So true, I said. Maybe, my sister said, I should hried more. I always had to be so tough. We were quiet then.

I’m sorry I was such a wimp, Bea .

Let’s go to sleep, she said, and I said, Yes, and we did, and I didn’t take a pill, and I slept very well.

* * *

How to tell it? asks your sad, crack-brained, crybaby narrator. How to tell it? It gets a bit crowded from here on in — there’s simultaneity, one thing happening at Rolling Meadows, another at the Arts Guild, another at the neighboring house, not to speak of my Boris wandering the streets of NYC with my concerned Daisy on his heels; all of this will have to be dealt with. And we all know that simultaneity is a BIG problem for words. They come in sequence, always, only in sequence, so while I sort it out, I will refer to Dr. Johnson. Referring to Dr. Johnson in a pinch is a good bet, our own man of the English language, our wise, fat, gouty, scrofulous, kindhearted, witty glutton, a being of authority, to whom we can all turn in moments of trouble, a cultural pater familias who was so important he had his own man document him while he was still ALIVE. And that was the eighteenth century, well before every Tom, Dick, Harry, Lila, and Jane recorded each tawdry, moronic detail of his or her lamentable life on the Internet. (Please note the addition of Lila and Jane; there is no female equivalent of “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” which connotes Everyman; Everywoman, alas, is something entirely different.) Grub Street, however, to the great dismay of Dr. Johnson, was churning out countless confessions or faux confessions, just as lurid and hair-raising as today’s misery memoirs. But enough. We cite Rasselas, a section on marriage, in which our hero offers his appraisal of the sacrament:

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and a maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.