Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Where? when? who? Turn it one iota, that small talk of passing amity or enmity that Jim’s future colleague-friend said history turned on — turn it one iota, said Ted, hunched at the bar centered above where his drink had been last week before he temporarily gave it up, and you’re looking head-on over someone’s shoulder at some further sight. The grandmother Margaret with her narrow, strong, squared shoulders, tartly directed her fifteen-year-old Jimmy to get out of his True Comics and stir his stumps and wash the mixing bowl (the pale-brown mixing bowl), and while you’re at it the pan and the lunch plates, and anything else he might find in the deep white sink. Small talk less narrative than her stories secretly meant years before to make up for his mother’s not telling him any and even not being there in spirit— when now she is evidently gone for good (read suicide; read, if you can find any, poetry, as Margaret told Jim his mother read as a girl — it’s better than reading nothing, we already remember hoping and half recall books that showed us something we’d been unconscious of); and Margaret’s tales could make him feel that while she might have foreknown mystery afflictions of her daughter, Jim’s mom, who definitely never had had the big hole in her head (like the Navajo Prince’s mother) but had been married as distantly as that demon-infected matron of Margaret’s stories and who Jim realized years later he’d felt must have married his father for some pretty good reason even if not out of deep wish or realistic considerations but — but if, later, other matter in his grandma’s stories seemed fact, some parallels with his own mother might make the Navajo Prince’s mother worth reflecting on — yet the tales existed in this kitchen in New Jersey. Into which now came grandfather Alexander —"Not going to rain after all" — bald as a tall old Danish farmer in a Life magazine, and ever arriving from a distance always, such as the next room, which came a little with him no matter how near he approached (that is, the doughnuts— and crullers in this instance — and his wife), and friendly upon the new soles and heels of his cordovans reflecting fine messages of dust, of history itself precipitated between himself and his shop downtown of shelves and tables (that seldom caught anyone in the act of purchase, yet was a business, year upon year), shoes buffed every day, polished every week, nicked and scraped and rained on, so as then to be rubbed to the patina repeated through these periods of time as the single kiss he now gave Margaret was then given on the far cheek she with brief absent-mindedness turned to him. So that — as Alexander added, "We might get an earthquake instead" (a joke, it seemed) — Margaret turned her gray-blue eyes on Jim while hearing his less-loved, though little, brother Brad call from the front porch and shove open the front door that stuck in the upper corner, for she wondered (though wouldn’t say so to Jim, though did before her death, in a letter) if he guessed Brad’s half-brotherhood as little as Brad did, the love-child of Jim’s mother Sarah and sort of fatally the wall-eyed electrician Bob Yard, who had two good cars but went around in a rusted-out pickup truck with one claw missing on the tailgate, who for once in his rampant, epically give-and-take, and childless married life, wept before Margaret’s very eyes, tears all down his five-hour stubble, and told her that just between the two of them he could after all believe in Sarah’s drowning, but God was this because he had loved her too much to run off with her? (through wind and rain, ‘cross land and sea)— poppycock, said Margaret, a word Jim used years later once so his children laughed and laughed. Poppycock, though, in Margaret’s mind, that her own retiring, original daughter Sarah could ever have run away with Bob, who loved his wife over a much longer haul; but then less nice than poppycock that Bob stood there and told Margaret like a gentleman friend that her eyes got bluer, did she know that?

But she retorted, The eyes went bluer, the hair whiter, Bob — as if to dismiss him when she knew that he really had loved that Sarah of hers (who had never been hers though she had known that Sarah would have to do some original thing), absent now invisibly absent now under the wedge of (when you stared at it) sparkling gray granite in the graveyard where Margaret would stand with Jim and recall that Sarah had asked if Owl Woman had been married and came to Margaret once (a unique meeting as far as intimacy went) with Owl Woman’s words from a book Margaret had never heard of (just as Sarah had never, as a girl, been told most of the tales of Margaret’s West — though told something in return for something she one day told Margaret):

In the dark I enter.

I cannot make out what I say —

Not the most trenchant verse Sarah would quote, Margaret told Jim— Jimmy — too smart a boy to let catastrophe show, though who could say what daydreams washed his mother inshore until, when he was all set to see her, the coast was of a different place or held an unmapped gap, unmanned so any foreign matter at all might drift in, and he turned to check where he was and never did see the body: "let catastrophe show"? for what was catastrophe, after all, but (let alone catastrophe theory that journeyman journalist Mayn heard tell of from those who cared more than he to know the going theories and so forth) a dramatic chance to be elsewhere, launched into that supposedly strong detour by the awful pain one nonetheless got credit for bearing the weight of, when maybe one just was somewhere else instead and not in two places at once?

Catastrophe here so unnatural and remote you almost didn’t have to run away from it, whether you can measure a mother, and her grandson’s run was an absorbed sprint down the sidewalk of upper West Main Street from her house to his and further, sometimes clear to the Fire House by the railroad tracks with a football pumping in his arm zig-zagging away across the grass-lawn of the private home of the owner of the American Hotel downtown, zigzagging right behind the gardener-mower one-hundred-year-old Mr. Lester Brown, who ate one bomb of a Bermuda onion and that was his lunch under a tree, and who knew that this dangerous athlete in a time when the Olympics had been suspended was detouring to criss-cross behind him and his hand mower and grass bag — then to zig-zag off the sidewalk into the street between the cars, so that once Mr. Brown saw him do it and feared that if hit he wouldn’t (momentarily) skid and roll like Lilac the pale hairless bull bitch that when the car braked to a stop (partly because of dog) ambled away, first up the street’s very white line (like she was a conquistador in shock), then off onto the sidewalk, and never looked back until she began to run; but Jim never got hit though he caused more than one car to brake, and gave his grandmother pause and gave her inspiration to tell her stories right down to the truth though never at the cemetery, where he and she would go, and she would guess that Jim was too willful to let the catastrophe of his mother’s death draw him into a center where, like little Brad, he would fall apart with a passion that Brad at nine or ten never had betrayed before (had he?) and never would again, in her opinion.

Meanwhile our Wide Load bore eastward — a home, or house on a trailer, winding through the Colorado night, bending the Kansas dawn to make telegraph wires yowl and every seven or eight miles make the monumental grain elevator from its oasis of trees, brief white-frame dwellings ("homes," as is said in America but literally true here), church, and mega-barn complex flow upward the Chilean economist assured his waking but still dreaming wife Clara as if its gusher-shaft guiding the feed of electrons from the unseen sphere of Earth toward the positive ionosphere a short forty miles away were the gusher itself, silent as space-minus-solar sirocco, while our Wide Load (a transport tradition with us here on this map-worn continent) sweeps on toward its various coast. The Wide Load with us stretched on top of it passes through several weathers, a muffled catalyst to be unchanged by them (oh the weather of the heart! exclaims one adult to another ‘gainst a tree, unaware of today’s kid upstairs in the same tree destined soon to feature an open-plan house who closing a good book contemplates loosing a compact goober Bombs ahoy! or stares up through live branches at the actual air of the sky).