Siri Hustvedt - The Summer Without Men

When I looked up, Abigail smiled.

“It’s not what it seems to be at first,” I yelled in her direction. “The girl. The teeth. Where is the quote from?”

“Hollering is not helpful,” she said loudly. “A firm loud voice will do the trick. Job. ‘O remember that my life is wind; mine eye shall no more see good.’”

I said nothing.

“They don’t see it, you know.” Abigail stroked a hearing-aid cord as she tilted her head. “Most of them. They see only what they expect to see, sugar, not spice, if you comprehend my meaning. Even your mother took her time noticing them. Of course, the eyesight around these parts isn’t too hot. I started doing it, oh, it was years ago, at my crafts club, made my own patterns, but it wouldn’t do to come right out with it — up front — you know, so I began what I came to call the private amusements, little scenes within scenes, secret undies, if you understand. Take a gander at the next one. It’s got a door.”

I laid the small blanket on my lap and looked down at needlepoint roses, yellow and pink on a black background, with leaves in various greens. The stitching was flawless. There were also tiny pastel buttons sewn here and there into the floral motif. No door.

“One of the buttons opens, Mia,” she said. Her voice shook as she spoke, and I could sense her excitement.

After fumbling with several buttons, I looked up to see Abigail grab her walker, raise herself twice before she pushed herself up off her seat, and begin to move slowly toward me — walker tap, step, tap, step. Once she had arrived, her lowered head poised just above my own, she gestured toward a yellow button. “That one. Then pull.”

I pushed the button through a hole and pulled. The rose fabric gave way to a different view. The image on my lap was another needlepoint, but this one was dominated by a huge gray-blue vacuum cleaner, complete with an Electrolux label on its flank. The thing was not grounded but airborne, a flying machine guided by a disproportionately small, mostly naked woman — she wore only high heels — who sailed alongside it in the blue sky, commandeering its long hose. The household appliance was engaged in the business of sucking up a miniature town below. I studied the two legs of a tiny man that stuck out from the bottom of the attachment and the hair of another pulled upward by the air, his mouth open in terror. Cows, pigs, and chickens, a church, and a school had all been uprooted and were soon to be digested by the hungry hose. Abigail had worked hard on the suction disaster scene; each figure and building had been rendered in tiny precise stitches. Then I saw the miniature sign that said BONDEN hovering just outside the vacuum’s mouth. I thought of the hours of work and the pleasure that must have pushed her forward, a secret pleasure, one touched by anger or revenge or at the very least a gleeful feeling of vicarious destruction. Many days, perhaps months, had gone into creating this “undie.”

A low sound came from my throat, but I don’t think she heard it. I looked at her, nodded, smiled my appreciation, and said, careful not to yell, “It’s great.”

Abigail slowly returned to the sofa. I waited through the taps and steps, and then through the lowering ritual that began with a double-fisted grip on the walker and concluded with a rocking drop into the seat cushion. “Did it in fifty-seven,” she said. “Too much for me now. My fingers won’t cooperate, the work’s too fine.”

“You had to hide it?”

She nodded, then smiled. “I was spitting mad at the time. Made me feel better.”

Abigail did not elaborate, and I felt too much the outsider to press her. We sat together for a while without speaking. I watched the old Swan munch her cookie very neatly, gingerly wiping away a few crumbs that had settled at the corner of her mouth with an embroidered napkin. After some minutes, I said I had to go, and when she reached for her walker, I told her not to worry about showing me to the door. And then, in a fit of admiration, I leaned over, found her cheek, and kissed it warmly.

What do we know about people really? I thought. What the hell do we know about nyone?

* * *

After only a week of class, my seven girls emerged from behind their adolescent wardrobes and their tics, and I found myself interested in them. Ashley and Alice, the two A girls, were friends. Both were bright, had read books, even some poets, and they vied for my attention in class. Ashley was poised, however, in a way Alice was not. Alice was inward. A couple of times she absentmindedly picked her nose in class while she worked on a poem. She was inclined toward stilted Romantic images — moors, wild tears, and savage breasts — that indicated her immersion in the Brontë sisters but often sounded merely silly when she read her works aloud in emotional tones that made her compatriots writhe with embarrassment. But in spite of her pretensions, she wrote grammatically and with far more sophistication than any of the other girls and came out with a few lines I truly liked: Silence is a good neighbor and I watched my sullen self walk away . Ashley, on the other hand, had a strong sense of what would fly with the others. She liked rhymes, the influence of rap music, and impressed her friends with her agility, matching fret and Internet, for example, and plate with investigate. The girl had perfect pitch for workshop politics and dealt out praise, comfort, and delicate criticism in beneficent doses to her peers. Emma lost some of her shyness, pushed aside her hair, and revealed a sense of humor: “Never put a rainbow in a poem. Never rhyme true with you, but scarf and barf will do.” After a few classes, Peyton had become so relaxed, she set herself up with an extra chair to accommodate her long legs. Like Alice’s, Peyton’s body lagged behind the other girls’. The hormonal onslaught of puberty showed no signs of having visited her person, and though I’m sure it worried her, I couldn’t help but think that backwardness in this area had its advantages. In all events, that is how I read the grass stains on her shorts and the fact that horses, not boys, continually found their way into her poems. Jessie looked the little woman already, but I sensed she was waging an internal battle. The mature body must have come fast. The camp that welcomed it preened and smelled musky, while the other side donned roomy T-shirts to disguise ample breasts that appeared to be growing apace every week. Whatever else took place in Jessie’s inner life remained hidden behind clichés. The grinding stupidity of phrases such as “You just have to believe in yourself” and “Don’t let anything get you down” recurred without cease, and I soon understood that these weren’t just lazy expressions but dictates of dogma, and she would not have them wrested away from her without a fight. After her early efforts, I had gently suggested she reconsider her wording and had watched her face close. “But it’s true, ” she would intone. I gave in. What did it matter? I asked myself. She probably needed these slogans to end her war. Nikki and Joan remained a team, although I came to see that Nikki was the dominant of the two. One day they both arrived with chalky faces, heavy eyeliner, and black lipstick, an experiment I decided not to notice. The Halloween getup had no effect on their personas, however, which remained chirrupy. Their tittering back and forth was equaled only by the expansive delight they took in fart poems, which was mostly contagious, and they responded warmly to my short lecture on the scatological in literature. Rabelais. wift. Beckett.

I was not deluded that I knew what was going on in the lives of these seven. After class, telephones suddenly appeared in their hands, and I watched the girls’ thumbs pick out text messages at high speed, half of them, it seemed, directed at friends on the other side of the room. After a Tuesday class I found an e-mail from Ashley.