Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Well, look who’s here," she said matter-of-factly.

The vehicles parted wildly as they entered the gravel patterns of the cemetery drives. The Mayn Pontiac contained Mel, who embraced the wheel, his head close to the windshield as if to see better, and Brad, who sat back with his tough insect’s elbow out the open passenger window. The noisy-bodied Ford pickup truck had followed until they all got past the stone posts of the gateway, then it veered along another gravel way so Jim, who was at once on the move himself across the grass, could just about hear Bob Yard talking and Pearl Myles laughing and exclaiming, but the two vehicles got to the golf course side of the cemetery almost simultaneously, and Jim, who was walking away toward the caretaker, Eukie Yard, and later remembered a dog barking out on the road, heard Miss Myles, on removing herself from Bob’s truck, tell Mel she was shocked to hear (which Jim knew meant the projected termination of the newspaper but he didn’t hear the end of her suddenly respectful sentence). Eukie stood off against the lintel post of the Vandevere mausoleum wearing one of his — maybe his only — large and voluminous garment like what Churchill always wore. Jim went over there and right up to Eukie with his dirty old crew cut, red cheeks, gray chin, and asked quiet like if Eukie would give him a slug of that applejack (CT never had ‘ny apple, is it strong?").

Eukie bobbed his bald, crusty head in assent or turning his eyes somehow down into the places of his great olive-green garment and the bottle was in Jim’s hand before Jim could ask what Margaret and Eukie had been in conversation about. He could just punch Bob Yard for upsetting Brad, back home, but why did he think this? — for Bob hadn’t upset Brad. In a moment Jim was both more with his "host" and way beyond him, the effect of the fluid was a burn at first, then a worm coiling gently over his bodily structure outlining his skull-mask which there in the cemetery he saw he had looked forward to.

"We’ll piddle along with the job printing, but we’ll get a good price for the Democrat," he heard his father saying far away. So the paper was being sold to someone, Jim thought idly; yet it was not going to come out every week any more. "Your wife," a respectful voice was heard muffled by the length of the day, by the grass, by the cushioned distance of this stinking pleasant place, where an impromptu thing was going on, secret each from each of the persons there "your wife was sick…"

No connection: it’s been in the works for a year and more; her death had nothing to do. .

"Damn," said Bob Yard; "damn it to hell." But Bob himself, he had been affected by Jim’s mother’s death. You might not know it, because he just went on with business, and him and his wife went to the Harness for dinner out on the Matawan road twice a week and drank a snootful and laughed all through the movies, no matter what, or went to sleep in the back row. Margaret didn’t move, as if she’s waiting for a word to set her going, or a funeral that might come from the four persons clustered near the headstone. Jim, off by the Vandevere mausoleum, took another drink. Eukie breathing heavily said nothing, while Brad, whose Day it had turned out to be, stood at the undug grave and his mother’s stone. He said, "What do you mean ‘Damn’?" and Bob, who was not nice but was good company, said threateningly, "Listen, Brad—" who retorted, "Well, my mother was probably right for all you’d know. I bet the wind does curve—"

"Listen, kiddo—"

"Bob" said the unknown foster father.

"Listen, little Brad, you’ve been the center of attention," said Bob, "but you ain’t the only one."

"Bob, you simmer down, the boy’s got a point—"

"How’s it sitting?" came the murmur in Jim’s ear as if nobody was next to him where he stood at a distance from the cluster by his mother’s memorial. "You better step in ‘n defend your dad." It was, of course, Eukie the caretaker speaking, but he didn’t ask for his pint back, and Jim just knew there was another in that giant suit.

"Of course the wind curves," said Pearl Myles like a speech or song, and if the latter then ‘twas no bird ever seen in that landscaped acreage; "you’re all of you right: the wind bends round the curve of the Earth, the Earth’s gravity draws the wind — isn’t that it?"

But who is remembering all this? stabs the interrogator, himself again; or, better said, what use are the family facts to the abiding subject of the grown journalist James Mayn’s activities? both in the seventies and in relation to folk drawn into the interior or the meaningful margins of Grace Kimball’s workshop carried on naked, with visual aids, "glass, rubber, plastic" (a modern variant of an old game played with hands), and in a living unit rented as residential within the articulate structure we have gradually seen built up by partial pictures, accommodating (on faith, perhaps) a multiplicity of small-scale units, when in reality Kimball takes money from her workshoppers and is even now planning not only Eros, a nationwide system of women’s health "houses" which will serve fresh foods subject to selective boycott and which will aim at further rearranging man and woman in terms of checks and balances by supposedly establishing healthier and more permanent separation between the sexes, but Kimball is also contemplating workshops for men —which will require a compulsory minimum nudity about the genitals hopefully spreading to other areas of the body including the feet, which contain wonderful tangled and stalled powers, and the teeth, the cleansing of which she proposes to instruct by means of an imported servo-oscillator, if the assembled members will ever stop betraying themselves with talk called input taped raw into Kimball’s abundance bank where it is always retrievable though you might have to skim off the crust to get to the cream which in turn includes the lengthy conviction lubricated by repetition as by any good commercial shortening (yet far far from her home, her adolescence, some solace she is coming from that no one will find in her famous fuck-your-audience auditorium a purgatory to tell how she saw through guilt, manipulation, universal addiction) that the asshole, sensitive zone that it is, should be upgraded as not only the easy out that it has traditionally been but as a joyful entry as well, which can be neat to a degree that the person is a really neat person without respect to age or shape or size or color (of genitals, that is, at this early stage when they are all that are exposed of the person who is brave enough to commit himself to the achievement of "personoia").

"That wasn’t it," said Jim’s newly discovered half-brother Brad to Miss Myles, whose handsome scale fitted that of the stonework in the Windrow cemetery, though it might have been lost on Brad, who pondered the mere stone marking his mother’s undug grave; "she said—"

"— well I was the one that heard it," said Bob, staring across the gravestones and spruce bushes at Cousin Eukie and at Jim, who could seemingly hear what he could see an actual face and mouth say, no matter how far, maybe, except when a vehicle came along the highway which was about a football field away from where he stood.

"But you didn’t believe her," said little Brad, "and even if I hear what she said from you, I believe her, and—" he raised his finger profoundly and shook it at Pearl Myles, who taught high school—"Mom meant — I know what she meant — the Earth turns and it pulls the wind sideways."

"Well, I don’t see it," said Margaret; "the wind winds up at a different latitude because the Earth turned while the wind was moving; I heard of a person who could actually see latitudes but couldn’t quite see the wind. What happened to Alexander? Did he go back downtown?" (Not that the gathering here was a regular month-and-a-day observance, it had just happened; and she turned to see Jim take some steps toward them. A hand touched him and dropped off; he was drunk.)