Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

Simon laughs for the first time. While Lola and Pete lean over the princely crib, their faces contorted with adoration, he looks up at his two devotees, waves all four limbs in a rush of excitement, and chortles.

Abigail works her way through my six slim collections of poems, all faithfully published by the Fever Press in San Francisco, California: Lost Diction, Little Truths, Hyperbole in Heaven, The Obsidian Woman, Dang It, and Winks, Blinks, and Kinks .

Regina forgets. Neither my mother nor Peg nor Abigail can say exactly when they first notice the decline in their friend’s memory. They all forget bits and pieces of recent reality, after all. They, too, occasionally repeat questions or stories, but Regina’s forgetting has a different coloring. The three Swans (four when George was alive) have tolerated Regina’s vanity, self-absorption, and restlessness (she could not eat at a restaurant without changing tables three times) because she knows how to have fun. She has arranged teas for them and called for tickets to this event and that one. She has told charmingly garbled jokes, and rarely appeared at the door of her friends’ apartments without an offering: a flower or decorative box or candleholder picked up somewhere on her life’s journey across continents; but the advent of potential thrombosis—“straight to my lungs and I’m dead”—has given her already flighty character an extra propeller that has started to whirl at high speed. Her growing amnesia for appointments, conversations, the location of her keys and purse, her glasses, and some faces (not Swan faces, but others) quickly turns into panic and tears. The deficits the other three joke about as “senioritis” or “old-lady brain” seem to devastate Regina. She has been rushing to her doctor three or four times a week, has sulkily repeated that she simply can’t believe, can&x2019t believe that she, she, Regina, who was once, by marriage anyway, a crucial player in the world of international diplomacy, has ended up in this place, a home — that’s what it is, isn’t it, a home? It strikes her as an outrage. And so, little by little, without anyone being able to pinpoint the moment of transformation, the old coquette has alienated herself from her far more stoical friends.

Flora becomes psychological: “Mommy, you know what’s funny?”

“No, Flora,” says Lola.

“Sometimes I love you so, so, so much, but other times I really, really hate you!”

Ellen Wright calls the other mothers, calmly recounts Alice’s story, and arranges a meeting of parents and children at her house. She asks me as well, but I beg off due to Bea and say I will reorient my class toward verses that promote the greater good — mutual understanding, warm camaraderie, melting kindness — although I have no clue how I will achieve this. I do know that the colloquy took place the Sunday after the fatal Friday when Alice poured forth the unsavory details of her persecution. The mothers and daughters (Alice’s father is the only male personage in attendance) convene around the time Bea, my mother, and I are having a glass of Sancerre as we prepare our farewell dinner for Bea in my rented kitchen — a succulent roast chicken with garlic, lemon, and olive oil, a new-potato salad, and beans from Lola’s garden. The secondhand reports cannot be reassembled perfectly, but the drama unfolds, if not as follows, then in a way very much like it and, as we all know, even eyewitness accounts are hardly reliable, so you will just have to swallow this report as I have decided to render it.

Six tense mothers straggle into the Wrights’ living room with sullen, irritable daughters in tow. (Whether or not anyone glances at the large poster of Goya’s priest defeating a robber in six frames from the Chicago Art Institute that hangs over the sofa, I cannot say, but it is a great work even in reproduction.) Ellen Wright, who once trained in social work, now employed as an administrator at the Bonden Health Clinic, opens the forum with a short speech, during which she uses the current verb of choice to describe the events in question: bullying. She notes its prevalence, its potential damage to long-term mental health, notes that girls are sneakier and more underhanded than boys (my adjectives) and that these activities do not go away by themselves; it takes a village . I am not responsible for the dead phrases that litter the discourse of pop sociology. Mrs. Wright then articulates a heartfelt desire to listen, to open the floor to all players.

Silence ensues. Several pairs of eyes glare at Alice, who sits between parental buffers.

Mrs.-Lorquat-of-the-frowning-Deity, mother of Jessie, wonders aloud how, when so much of what went on was anonymous, can it be known that her Jessie was even involved.

Mrs. Hartley, mother of Emma, pokes her child to prompt words. Several pokes later, Emma, red-faced, confesses to messages cooked up by an ensemble cast. And she names names: Jessie, Ashley, Joan, Nikki, and herself. But they hadn’t really meant it; it was just stupid stuff kids do.

Nikki and Joan alternately make short exclamatory remarks to the effect that they, too, had not intended to do any real harm. It was just that Alice was always talking about Chicago and she was always reading books and acting better than they were and so they thought she was kinda stuck-up and everything and so …

Mrs. Larsen, mother of Ashley, weary-faced, meek-voiced, inquires innocently of stone-faced daughter: But I thought you and Alice were such good friends.

We are!

Peyton, squirming under an avalanche of guilt, shouts the word liar and unloads revelations that will come as no surprise to either you or me, while Mrs. Berg tries to dampen her daughter’s zeal by saying quietly, Don’t shout, Peyton, but Peyton shouts anyway that Ashley took the photographs and posted them, that she suggested the Zack deception, and that she, Peyton, went along with it and she feels bad, really bad. But Peyton isn’t finished. There is more. Peyton says she was scared to tell, freaked, because she, Ashley, started a club called the Coven. Before joining the group, each girl agreed to cut herself with a knife and bleed enough to sign her name in blood to a document, in which she swore her allegiance to the other members and promised that their dark alliance would remain a secret forever. Peyton produces small scar on thigh of very long left leg as evidence.

This gothic twist on the proceedings, with its air of satanic ritual, creates a stir among the adults. Poor Mr. Wright, a chemistry professor, accustomed to shepherding premed students through the peaks and valleys of predicting formulas with polyatomic ions, is uncomfortable in the extreme and begins an intense examination of his fingernails. Mrs. Lorquat issues a gasp, as bloody documents are even more offensive to God than D. H. Lawrence. The mothers of Nikki and Joan, friends for life, seated side by side, drop their jaws in unison. Aghast questioning of Coven members ensues.

Ashley commences crying.

Alice watches.

Ellen watches Alice.

What Alice thinks at this juncture we do not know, but it is more than likely that she feels some satisfaction that the pubescent witches of Bonden have been exposed. At the same time, Alice isn’t going anywhere. She is staying in town with the little she-devils, her friends.

* * *

Commentary: The instruments of darkness tell us truths. What are they? Boys will be boys: rambunctious, wild, kicking, hanging from the trees. But girls will be girls? Gentle, nurturing, sweet, passive, conniving, stealthy, mean?

We all start out the same in our mothers’ wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn’t swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around. Men are the metaphorical ribs of women, not women of men. Most of the time, it’s XX = ovaries, XY = testes. The renowned Greek physician Galen believed that female genitalia were the inversion of the male’s and vice versa, a view that held for centuries: “Turn outward the woman’s, turn inward, so to speak, and fold double the man’s and you will find the same in both in every respect.” Of course, outward trumped inward every time. Inward was definitely worse. Exactly why, I can’t say. Outward is pretty vulnerable, if you ask me. In fact, castration anxiety makes a lot of sense. If I were carrying my reproductive organs on the outside, I’d be pretty damned nervous about that delicate little package, too. As with the human navel, the ancient sex model had innies and outies, which meant that an innie might just surprise you by becoming an outie, especially if you went around behaving like someone who already had an outie. That hidden, folded-over yard might just make a sudden appearance. Montaigne, great literary peak of the sixteenth century that he was, subscribed to the innie/outie thesis: “Males and females are cast in the same mold, and, education and usage excepted, the difference is not great.” He repeats a well-known story about Marie-Germain, who was just plain Marie until the age of twenty-two in Montaigne’s version (fifteen in other versions), but one day, due to strenuous exercise (jumping over a ditch while chasing pigs), the male rod popped out of her, and Germain was born. Incredible, you say. Impossible, you say. But there is a particular family in Puerto Rico and another in Texas with a genetic condition in which XY looks for all the world exactly like XX. In other words, phenotype disguises genotype, until puberty that is, when late in the game the little girls become little boys and grow up to be men. Carla turns into Carlos! Darling daughter becomes darling son without a surgical instrument in sight. What is certain is that in utero, the sex differentiation story is fragile. Things can and do get all mixed up.