Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Thanks for the drink," said Gordon.

Who was it heard her words? They come down to us to lodge in many small-scale filaments and are heard in turn from such fars and forgots, easts and wests, as are not yet vacant enough for the absent mind. So that the many have got too serious for the interrogator and he is going to press (el) button releasing his ‘lectrically- (from concentrate) squeezed juice and give a body a hit of it in self-defense. (Our body, his self.)

Her words slant down to us along an angle of the desert twilight from her century which soon could turn a century ago. Owl Woman’s words we mean come down to us we already remember from our friend the multiple child who is getting along and was in the next room doing homework when last we looked or better still research—

I am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling.

Songs sung who by? the correspondent Lincoln, sage in saffron, asks (as we hear the research child call, Not your friend; your daughter/son he-or-she).

Sung who by? Oh, by grownups — or similar folk left behind to act in place of grownups — who heard the prevailing easterlies and told their kids, "Hear the song in the wind." Grownups to hear themselves sing the praises of these songs of the wind so the children, who heard within the music honest noise, while hearing also the real song between the volts of their resident adults’ deafened lipservice to those songs (if you call that music real noise), privately willed that whereas grownups were to be heard, they might be not seen. Which lipservice, like global debt, turns ever toward big-talk/small-talk, that stuff of history, which got our parents through the long nighty-night of marriage ever after, like the weather that that talk precipitates and reports and clouds with light.

Where? When? (Who? What?) — and why did you say things more than once? asked the high-school journalism teacher (No: why did anyone?) she long borne in the future memory of the boy and man Jim Mayn, him whom in 1976-7 our saffron-(dis)robed gal correspondent Lincoln (cross-legged in Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop) daydreams out of thin air though she hasn’t met Jim — daydreams on her back burner while breathing-in an evening of women histories, one by one going round the joyful, awful circle healed with humor of tears of women on Grace’s carpet all bare and unedited: except for the foreign entrant, Clara, Chilean but with quick English accent, less naked than the others, it is her secret along her fine, tender arms and not quite flat stomach, and softly changing breasts, higher, lower, as if sometimes having just breathed along with her and sometimes not, and that like a motion of sway hint inclination faintly outward, flowers of one being — who has such a fund of international lore, and such contained eyes, such remote ordeals in her centered awareness — well, in her manners — that when she tells about life it enriches you in all its variety as the next-to-last word in narrative small talk that describes her life, even relations with husband (Men ought always use condoms, always, she says she sometimes thinks) so you think you know more of her than you know about anyone else on Grace’s carpet, but then you don’t: and yet you haven’t been tricked; for Clara — subtly husbanded, faintly shadowed Clara — makes you feel (Shit, said Grace at least more than once, nobody can make you feel unless you want to) that she’s here in Grace’s Body-Self Workshop not only for some other reason but, possibly to her surprise, the right ones too. Yet maybe the doubt is due to our gal Lincoln’s bein’ in love with a man she imagines she’s never seen except in a letter he wrote her young acquaintance slender, intense daughter Flick, where his "When’s the funding for your Washington job run out?" and "Where’s your brother Andrew spending the summer because he don’t never write his dad" decay quickly into the landscape water table of the continental Southwest as if it, and not the person himself, were the issue — not what cut to the quick his high-school journalism teacher thirty years ago.

Statuesque Miss Myles — Pearl W. Myles — was angry at his absence, and, though strong, she saw unfriendly hierarchy out-towering her and mysterious upheaval threatening underfoot; and she imagined three camps of students, those who were with her all the way in her historic fight to set up a school newspaper independent of the principal, a columnar young figure named Thompson Fulkerand; those who hardly cared; and those who in the great race took the baton from their parents if it was not the other way around and felt there’s neither a need for such a news organ on administratively so small a scale nor much of an excuse for making so much noise, and said so again and again of the woman who herself preached, "Why did you say things more than once? No: why did anyone?"

But if Miss Myles grant he had had a tragedy — Jim — she noticed he had expressed enthusiastic interest in the atom bomb, unique explosives leading up to V-J Day, and seemed unaffected by his mother’s mysterious drowning (read one-way swim, one fellow student called it); more interest in the Indian Ira Lee’s practically white sister (as Miss Myles had gathered from her prospective news editor of the putative school paper), who came around when Ira with the utmost slowness genuflecting, rising, gardened for Jim’s grandmother, than Jim showed in the midst of the rotten, blankly bright, future-catapulting thing his mother had done to as if not even really herself (and yet — and yet) and to him and little Brad his brother and to that poor man his father whose acquaintance Pearl had somehow not made and who could be seen walking home late at night, yet did she not detect — for she was Jim’s teacher, who encouraged what she termed "debate and discussion" but did not appreciate differences if they were petty as when she informed the class that you never underlined for emphasis except when in quoting a source to catch a voice emphasis, whereupon Jim put up his horny young hand to report that his great-grandfather — whom he did not need to identify for Miss Myles as once upon a time editor of the family paper — had issued instructions to his staff of three never under any circumstances to emphasize by underlining— so that Miss Myles sensed in Jim a truculence, maybe just sad tension, and in Jimmy’s unusual cool brown eyes a space falling — falling forward, she felt, but not halfway to meet her his teacher, damn it, and so, on the aforementioned unfateful day when the assigned imaginary news story came due and the tall stone of an unprecedentedly young principal had undercut her again, Miss Myles took it that Jim Mayn was bending his power as fifteen-or-going-on-fifteen-year young scion of the once only newspaper in town for a hundred years (narrow-column weekly) until another had commenced printing at the outset of FDR’s third ("There is no indispensable man") term to undercut her— her, Pearl W. Myles — when in reality Jim’s been glad to hear the answer to those ancient lead questions of the journalist’s song Where and When: but on one of those days, however beautiful and still more beautiful a woman of thirty she was, he had been detained (as we later learned to say at the prompting of our multiple state) by the Indian halfback Ira Lee, who was telling some of the guys about this map that was like the back of some strange thing under glass, this green relief of South America donated to the high school for future study immemorial, a reptile map crawling under one’s eyes as under glass, museum glass. But ignorant of this, she guessed when she stood up and felt across her broad brow and along the backs of her untired thighs that on a day when an imaginary news story following her models was due and that six-foot-six-inch principal Fulkerand, at twenty-nine the youngest male ever to have an eye in the back of his head and hold such a post in New Jersey who happened by a miracle to be exactly half bald from mid-head forward to the brink and down his high if narrow brow, had announced semi-privately that Miss Myles’s initiative was more nourishing than its fulfillment — on this sensitive day of all days, Jim Mayn had chosen to miss class.