Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Well, a little knowledge used to be a dangerous thing which is why we have always been in danger, as Larry’s economic mentor and interrogator said, always never out — but now a lot of knowledge is as much more dangerous as Larry’s twin-twain two-thingama-screen personal system matters more than where in the end this Mayn’s really coming from, or the true whereabouts of Krakatoa to whose foot Lar’ thought he should have come having imagined Hawaii’s leper colonists not wiped out so much as re-pondered by a record tidal wave gushed from the sky directed by Larry himself from a high, pastel sea-view balcon (corbelled out over the beach from an elegant dark hotel room behind him where his parents weren’t quite talking), or the actual position of ten-thousand-to-twenty-five-thousand-year-old Midland Woman lying patiently in Texas waiting to be discovered in 1953 under much younger Folsom Man and the remains of his half-wasted bison all of which Mayn had deleted from some New Mexico copy of his as a subtly irrelevant look southeastward from Ship Rock to that postwar oil-boom town (you guessed it), Midland, Texas, upwards of sixty miles east of the New Mexico border that in ‘53 made it onto the Digger’s Map of Ancient Time though all that Midland Woman gave was her good head, long and delicate, small-toothed so Lar’ imagined beneath the unthinkably deep-set eyes of her precious skull a glistening tongue that could do what his mother Susan could with hers — a big thing with Lar’!—fold it to a long-tubed music-flower yet flute the edges of this scrolled and folded pipe — what no one else in the world would do.

Yet why, then, does the little knowledge he has of Mayn get in the way of all that Lar’s, well, "got" on his mother Susan who has left her normal bigamouse-spous playing with Larry-son and Marv-el-housbond to live in the house on the Island? — so while she’s the one who went, Larry-son feels he is the one who is now successfully out of the way; he’s got no name for this except that in his active sadness that ("If I could be another person, she could be") his mother has split, no kidding his real sorrow, his black-with-brown-letter-and-trim Raleigh ten-speed bike’s sweetest (though deceptive) swiftest uphill gear catches — good, he’d been concerned about it — or the chain catches it, and, even against the wind, frees him of that transitional threatening clank (like some hideous thing wrong with your car) to vector between the united product of gravity raining invisibly down through his shoulders and the steep incline at the point of Tenth Avenue. But he’s not looking for locoweed in Utah, he’s just out on his bike thinking his way between double-parked trucks with potential open doors and sour pedestrians crossing ‘gainst the light until they run out of sotto-voce names for him gearing himself seventy blocks uptown, eighty blocks down like a hired messenger, then forty blocks uptown and several east to wind through the other dimensions of our Central Park with its labeled trees and so on, and nothing will stay still. For although your Mississippi catfish nine foot long with God knows what all in it contains, they say, the word we are waiting for of whether the fault from New York to Tokyo will divide and crack and bring the Earth to its knees and skyscrapers will scrape the ground and fire our well-rehearsed salute to the Sun, the two screens twain can’t bring a future Tokyo earthquake here to New York and Larry knows he’s pretty free and could be relieved if he would let himself be even if things won’t stay still: for he thinks for a moment of the woman his mother is staying with whom he likes and how she rides a bike bent way forward and now his mother Susan does — God, he can’t keep up with them any more; and he might like to think further upon this stumbling block in the way of his life but, on the contrary, here comes the gearless two-wheeler of the botanist Marcus Jones in 1883 bumping, jarring, careering, cutting his way through the living locoweed of all the names he could think of for new varieties, ten years before a Victorian-American girl Margaret of nineteen or twenty (secretly and premaritally at war from herself) exceeded her mandate to cover the 1893 Chicago Fair for her father’s Windrow Democrat, particularly the (as we remember it a century later, "low-key") New Jersey exhibition (plus twenty-seven nations and remcarnation a la Carl Browne the populist spellbinder who could not spell but peddled a breathtaking theory of our — as we might say it a century later — soul "bank" drawn upon by each newborn according to its incoming and ongoing needs), yet Margaret upon completion of her Chicago stint in summer ‘93 kept going as if she could not turn and return home to (her parents, her brothers, her implicitly betrothed) Alexander who, one score and one year later, went with his wife Margaret through the last dull glow of October trees in Englishtown, Red Bank, and Rah way to Carnegie Hall, New York, to hear the Pankhurst woman shock American suffragettes crying that Britain was fighting Germany partly "for you," and Germany "hacking her way through Belgium" was as much in the wrong as "we" were when "you fought us" on what proved to be the good suffragette claim of no taxation without representation, and Alexander carried the report of Christabel Pankhurst’s anti-neutrality speech back to Windrow where his father-in-law was even more reluctant to run it than Alexander to leave Margaret in New York to "cover" Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s pacifist pleas to America at Carnegie Hall five days later splitting the suffragettes and precipitating the Women’s Peace Party of New York and splitting, as Mayn hardly knew and his grandfather Alexander never would accept, a female wing of his own family, though Margaret’s daughter Sarah, Jim’s eventual mother, subtle in her own mild, needling jokes and pleasingly soft ‘n sweet upon the violin at the age of ten(-and-up) must have had deeper reasons for turning pacifist and vegetarian against her mother Margaret, who was a minor New Jersey celebrity-militant. Later, Sarah actually amused Mayn’s father her putative husband (who really and truly dreamed at night of owning a white Hispano-Suiza touring motorcar) by observing that the Vote was the least of the complaints of her sex and while votes for women might matter even to the point of electing women one day, suffrage was suffered to be a substitute for a lot of other things. Witness her own once-militant mother Margaret’s relief at not being returned state senator in one run that she had been coerced by a bunch of men into making in the days of Coolidge. Who’s Coolidge? Larry asked. Mayn said that without knowing the French or the English for the proverb Emmeline Pankhurst quoted in honor of her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in hopes of joining younger women with older, Calvin Coolidge would have approved and would have said, "If youth could know; if age could do." And Larry, feeling he is not alone in this individualized history and doesn’t mind passing it on to other minds if it’s there already because he intends to squeak to a stop at, economically, a Tenth Avenue red light where there’s a transparent phone booth and phone the young woman of his dreams at her office in an area so different from the Tenth Avenue small Spanish shops and garages and a public school and a bar — weaves through a decade of Krakatoa’s debris dodging forward and backward in time to find Mayn’s grandma Margaret in her fifties in Windrow-town, not hitting the ceiling but waxing, if not quite flummoxed at least so fiercely angry at some electrical contractor Bob that Larry couldn’t help recalling that it was this Bob’s view that government without newspapers had much more to be said for it than the other way around because where would newspapers be without gov’ment to go on about, which Larry coupled with a wrong notion voiced by Mayn that if there had been newspapers the news of the 1815 peace would have saved hundreds of British soldiers in New Orleans from becoming mere material to be shaped into a mountainous monument to War as Fun by the sword of the very Jackson, Andrew, whom the Windrow Democrat was later founded to support — where what was lacking warn’t newspapers but rapid communication. Which in modern times we have but always had, as Larry thinks (shifting into a heavy-pedal gear) breasting a hill headed north through real-estate values inhabited by an active if not ever-prosperous Hispanic working class who are getting in his way thinking yes rapid communication we always had in order to take such assembled data as Mayn’s news of Fort Nightmare that you can pass through like a shadow or like a machine-gun spray shot and never feel that fort you’re passing through.