Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

It was later like he’d turned to these facts, all scattered and all the more exact and kind of meaningless, yet horrendous, funny — he’d imagine the entire life of the Stormer woman (going far away from her home and feeling occasionally guilty, and bearing a child and then another child conceived in marriage while perhaps her doctor-husband watched, watched her being a good doctor’s wife or falling out of love with him without knowing if it was him as a man or as a medicine man), the woman who married the hairy, intensely hard-working doctor ("workaholic" we always say now in the mid-eighth decade of a century that threatens to see life itself as a drug), in Chicago they lived, and Leona who on a visit to Windrow parents ran into Sarah and seemed not to be insulted by her one day in the old, still drugstore that was also a soda fountain and afterward Jim asked his mom if he could have a Clark bar and she paid for it with the tears in her eyes and then needed a bite of it, raising her lipsticked lip a shade above the upper teeth looking along her nose at it. Jim aimed the balled wrapper at the trash can and it missed and landed on the white tiles that weren’t as much like bathroom tiles as was the facing in the barbershop from linoleum floor up to the counter.

Yet Flick Mayn, the daughter of Jim, once wrote for herself to give to her dad ridding she hoped some need from not just her system, why was it insulting to say to Leona Stormer, "It isn’t that I feel much for you; you take me back, that’s all you do—" but it’s honest— and your mother cried—

— which she never did, said Mayn, and granted she did say "that’s a hell of a lot to make me do," I think she said that—

— damn right she said that, said the daughter never flinching from (well) someone else’s life, but she meant "taking her back": that was the "hell of a lot" she meant, and I think you knew that, Dad.

No. . no — which was how Mel habitually responded to someone’s opinion, even on special occasions a cluster of facts reported to him, such as that Sarah when she played the piano, which wasn’t her first instrument, was able to see places she had never been to, markets full of red beets in a Polish village, the Chicago wind from the north raking the lake into white flesh, grouped skeletons down a mine, and when Brad looked at Mel saying gently, No… no… his brother Jim fighting mad, said back at Mel, Yes. Yes. Yes, to which Mel answered Jim, What do you mean? How do you know? Whereupon Jim seemed to surprise Mel by saying, I was there when she said it, she said it to me and Brad — upon which Mel was just able to smile, Well if she thought so. .

You can just about take an insult from an adult who will at least not decorroborate what you have testified when he, or his relief, inquired who’s doing the script for the opera-ette we’d cited entitled Hamlet?

But Alexander, whom Flick came to know in his ninety-second and ninety-third years (concluding postscript years, not twilit so much as noisier, que brujo, what din, as he lost his sight and turned the radio up and up and discovered music all over again — Alexander no more meant to insult Brad by removing the Densmore book he had loaned to Sarah a decade before than to dishonor Brad’s Day (quite the reverse) by bearing upon his person a simple smell of peanut butter from his supply downtown, which was neither here nor there:

The Indians of course lacked peanut butter, or the demand for it, to begin with, though the jojoba bean, a very buffalo among vegetables, not in that they used all of it which wasn’t the feat that totaling a buffalo was, but in that the jojoba got them through many a weekly problem, from shampoo to the generally unknown desert fish fry, when these deep-underground travelers found their way or it found them up into the warmed waters of the high cacti, raised the level and brinked the pressure of these standing reserves and ceremonially leapt from cactus "eyes" we name them, openings sometime occupied by owlbirds, one at a time unless we include the biggest-ever elf owl that Mena the itinerant zoologist had seen, plugging that particular hole clearly, yet, in the dusk, darkly when contrasted to the visible but illusory wash of moon-stark dawn-lumen literally coating the cactus trunk as the real light otherwise diminished: for that elf owl would not have budged for a pressure of fish risen inside that cactus except to fly at the eye of some night camper Anglo or Indian glinting in the flash of jojoba oil awaiting that desert fish fry so unknown even Mena had not witnessed it (hence the importance of judging comparative descriptions), and the Hermit-Inventor of the East said he had not witnessed it but Marcus Jones was more to be believed, a plainer, less potent figure so that when little Flick ran off outside to see what her younger brother was doing around or under that house where Alexander still lived though now with supervision, the name of that west-renowned botanist who found, and found names for, even unknown growths of locoweed so that his feats of broken-ground bicycling south of Salt Lake City and, monumentally, still south, are overlooked, brought from old Alexander, who was just turning the radio volume dial up again a generous exclamation, Oh Marcus Jones! (as if to say with distant softness, My old friend!) he was real, you know, that was him, with his field work in Colorado, you only see that book in French, (slowly) last day of April, the air perfumed you know, the sunny white flowers and the silver stems of the poisonous loco, and the Spanish bayonets, reaching an eminence, lights across a mesa—

— he remembered that? the thirty-odd-year-old grandson inquired.

But only that, came the reply, all else is gone, like your daughter just now, and the volume dial turned delicately while the man in carpet slippers who had been bald through four decades "quoted" a mass of dark rocks. . gigantic walls half ruined, some ancient cathedral. . good stuff, lifting sadly in the wind its proud debris notched and made jagged or something by the puissant hand of time — Ute Pass by horse, and so forth, and I have no reason to suppose your grandmother didn’t really know him, he was out there in the late seventies and the eighties and he’s up at the Sperry Glacier in Montana twenty, thirty years later — but in the late seventies he changed to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at Kansas City… is it possible that Colorado is more beautiful than Iowa? he asks, and you don’t have to go there to say with him you bet your life.

Upon the sinking of Sarah’s teeth into the outer-skinned chocolate of the Clark bar on into the honey-colored brown-sugar-crumble inside you would not build a broken marriage, or a self-destroy scenario either. Yet you won’t go so far as to say you’d have ruled out Sarah’s leaving her husband one way or another. Taking the boys with her? Hard to imagine her taking Jim; in the end he would not go. Why is another question. Not loyalty to Mel. Nor to the town, for what is loyalty to a town? get out your hose and have a speed contest outside the fire station once a year against fire companies in English-town, Toms River, Holmdel. Grease a pole and set the duck or flag at the top. Loyalty to a place and time: Jim would have been able amidst the madness to say I’m not goin’. And in his heart would be, Not yet. But then she had gone, she had gone. He couldn’t have foreseen it, could he? Not in the drugstore the Leona Stormer day of the enforced sharing of the Clark bar. He just saw Willy and Wally pass by the bright drugstore doorway in the downtown direction running in step and he knew where they were running and he didn’t recall what it was all about: years later, fallen forth into other lives, he lighted Mayga’s cigarette, an American cigarette for a change, and he said to Mayga that he could see his mother’s mouth, teeth, infinitesimally nose-crossed eyes watery still, but no fingers. Mayga told him he’s so precise on what’s not there, while she waves away her smoke and not into but away from his face. Oh, you see, I was feeding her, that’s how I recall it. Nonsense, said Mayga.