Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Oh Daddy! Snow! Thank you, Daddy!" — they were in a restaurant, she was seventeen, there were a moment’s tears in her eyes quickly ironed out— "Snow, Daddy," so he had to laugh but didn’t know all she meant butloved her almost for her confused desires to (what?) make fun of him? to make him more political? but not to get him back with her mother—

— Right! (his shoulders felt stiff and good) so they figure a pellet of dry ice the size of a pea can make a hundred thousand tons of snow—

Who figures? came a voice back (a voice of a daughter) (multiplied by us) — yeah, so who’s this "they" that "figures"? — a multinational oil-insurance corp.? — but it isn’t coming to anything, admit it — they don’t control the weather except in their Men’s Dreams of zooming into a zero-visibility cloud and blowing everything out of there!

Well the Russians have shot rockets into thunderclouds their radar said were packed with hailstones, said Jim.

She would eat her dinner and suddenly ask why the winds came from west to east. This led her father into air masses, their personalities and so forth. He drew one for her, on a paper tablecloth in a little dump in Boston where they had crayons in old jelly jars, drew a picture (with commentary) of the prow-shaped slope of the cold front, its hundreds-of-miles-wide keel bottom frictioning slowly across the land, a very wide load.

She’d drive toward some point, maybe of truth — across land that was water, do you understand? — Yes, Jim, we understand though you didn’t say it aloud to yourself — then shift into another type of love, because it was (we’re sure) always that — love and the incestuous anger-humor/humor-anger all mingled of wanting to send up a parent or two who a bit too easily granted their failings especially her father, though when he was tempted by affection, drink, and food to tell her where he was literally coming from he couldn’t because she would be puzzled as if she believed him (that is, that he was in the future) and in the current present only by leaning like a long-necked proto-pelvic closet-biped ankylo-soaratops into its brained past.

I know what you mean, she said to her father, but he didn’t mean the acceleration of time’s hardware that she meant, tossing her long straight light-brown hair back (and what would she know about how dreadful the future was?) — that is, that you might go and teach Peace Corps in middle Africa (there’ll always be an Africa), but listen Dad the overall grid was haywire, she felt, and run not by Decent Thought or even a collaboration of crooks but — she didn’t know — it had run away with itself — the answer was, she said, socialism maybe, but not the kind we had, with the corporations half-owned by the government that they more than half-owned in turn, and the only point in going to college — she had been accepted by a formerly men’s college that had just gone "public" (joke) and offered excellent skiing close by — Was to study and know your enemies: not men, no, not men, but — she would quit after a year mebbe and go to work for Nader, do obsoletely anythong he needed, but she ought to be a lawyer, but it took too much time, and did she want kids young? but that wasn’t what she thought, it was her father.

The future her father had sloped out onto was like us the slope, static but for the shadow it threw, which was him, back upon Now, the Present, which was really the past from the vantage of that future he had gone into like a shock of memory which gave off a desire to return to what was a void and had to be reinvented, namely this present: God! he thought, it wasn’t him, this future position, it felt causeless, caused by an absence of cause, it came at him a sure home, not someone else’s.

Like when he woke up one night, and it was the night he walked out on the landing to find Sarah his mother wending her way upstairs with a book — and come to think of it her grandmother’s large comb — in her hand, reading. And a flashlight made like a candle.

But when he woke at first he had heard certainly his mother, her neutral though now unusually explaining voice, upon the ground of Brad’s crying coupled with his sort of whining word-sound, and she was telling him it wasn’t a bad dream, it was a good dream; his "terrible" dream (certainly) of the whole town going back in reverse into a volcano it had come out of, but— for reasons that were people in the dream that Jim missed out on because he couldn’t really hear — a "very moving" dream, a good dream, Braddie — she wouldn’t have minded having it herself — which made Braddie laugh and sob-snuffle at once, and something else that caught Jim but he didn’t catch, for what was it? he only got out of bed. He could have run off the roof into space the way he felt but he had heard the train leaving Windrow getting up some speed headed for Little Silver or the Shore or Trenton; but he opened his door to the removed but spread light from the bathroom down the hall, which his instinct told him was empty. Turning to look down the stairs, he saw his mother on the way up with book and comb, reading — the big brown-and-black-and-golden-orange comb. But later on he thought it might have been her ghost, and he could allow the possibility of ghosts because he had ruled out dreams (though not for others).

All this more or less O.K. until — wait a minute — the next afternoon he heard the very same conversation through the slightly ajar music-room door, and Brad was even doing a bit of crying, same whimper-type really and the little shit couldn’t have just had the dream because he had been at school all day: Jim could guess it was lava boiling down out of the volcano in the movie the previous Saturday, even standing the other side of the music-room door, that gave his kid brother that dream of the town reversing itself to flow back into the volcano with everyone boiling back with it like stuck in the tongue of a titanic snake (sheep and people and even a farmer hoeing unconcernedly, etcetera), then his mother saying a "terrible" dream but a "good dream, Braddie," and Jim knew what came next before he heard it, which was, "It was a good dream Braddie because it was your soul rooting for you, telling you what’s inside you." Jim hadn’t ever heard his mother say "soul." But how had he known she was about to say, "It’s your soul rooting for you," except for her having said it last night when Braddie must have woken up out of a bad dream and she went in to him?

But she had been downstairs!

So was it that Jim could see the future? Or hear it! And so right then, surprised at himself outside this door, he thought that his mother coming up the stairs at two or three in the morning — with the book and the great comb he recalled combined so the comb was extending out of the book she was reading as she slowly came up the stairs — had been a ghost.

Though they had exchanged words.

And she had not really said to get back to bed, it was like they were meeting like friendly acquaintances downtown. Oh, hello, Jim — what a nice pair of pyjama bottoms you’ve got on today.

So later, after she had gone down the drain of the sea you might say cruelly, he looked forward to seeing her ghost again, because this other night when she was alive and Jim could have sworn had been just heard outside in the hall or in Braddie’s room sort of comforting Braddie out of his dream, she had evidently been a ghost out of the future. Of course as well as what she was. Which was reading late, while Jim on the landing had been hearing his father’s snoring and so you could feel that the breathing of one parent passed through you and met the nightwalking or breathing of the other parent. Were there thoughts there, too, along the breath-junction you made? He didn’t know. All he knew was that she said at least a couple of times that he only didn’t remember his dreams; it wasn’t that he didn’t have them. Until he once got mad and, yes, chilly at the same time, so didn’t say what he hoped to but did say she didn’t know what she was talking about, and some people definitely did not have dreams, like some did not see ghosts.