Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

No, his importance was elsewhere among the timeless isobars of his increasing labyrinth of coasts within coasts within coasts of constant pressure which because they tell us pressure tell us where air will move, thus discovering to us the vertical distribution of air—

No — the Hermit-Inventor got you out of there.

The horse helped.

The Mexican blue mare. No, that’s the Prince’s. Do the Navajos have princes?

It was a horse as far as Zuni, to the south; and then I got a stage, and then I got a horse (that’s what one of those kids yelled at us the other night at the intersection when they nearly hit us: "get a horse").

I didn’t feel I was in their car with them at all.

Why would you, Jimmy?

That was the day grandson and grandmother had things out, almost. Not why was she in the cemetery at that hour when she had just gotten home from New York: but

Why, why had he spoken to her as he did the day Marie’s brother got stuck in the tree?

Stuck! (sticking up for his generation, even though he didn’t like his girl’s brother, against the older generation even its most beloved representative)

— and Sammy came to get him (she went on), and he really was most rude to her (she insisted).

"Well what did I say — cripes sake."

"You know what you said," retorted Margaret, "and in front of Sam."

"What was it?" (though he more or less knew).

" ‘What a great friendship!’ you said" (oh, she was emphasizing that remark), "as if those two surprising men didn’t care about each other."

"But you were the one — you said the Anasazi put up with a hundred years of talk about the weather from that zany Hermit (when the Anasazi was more the hermit) to humor him, that’s what you said" (knowing, as he spoke, that she had in her mind harder blows or queries that had glanced hither and yon).

"Not one hundred, for heaven sake" (she started to — oh God, she’s crying).

"Well, thirty, then!" (knowing that other words of his he didn’t care to recall were in their heads blocking and breathing). "I mean, you don’t have to talk to me about the weather, Gramma—"

"Oh" (she laughed and cried, like laughing tears but instead musical as a feeling may be word-free) "oh you’re the Hermit and I’m the Anasazi six hundred years old!"

"No," he said, thoughtfully, though to himself granting her truth, "you re my mother" — which threw them both down into silence.

"She is neither here nor there," Margaret stupidly quipped, and the boy-man drifted off toward the future where he’d been told he belonged.

"She wasn’t in the cemetery last time I looked," he always remembered saying, badly, while some opposite barred him, with its words, from taking the following step.

"Why would you look?" asked Margaret as clearly as if she forgot his words about his mother from the other day still delayed; he answered himself, not his grandmother: "How could Sarah do a thing like that?" he said his mother’s name.

"We don’t know," said Margaret.

"Holy hell," said the boy-man quietly quoting his father.

"It was in her to do."

"Holy hell what there is in people."

"We’re ordinary people," said his grandmother.

"Well, it isn’t in her now," said Jim and remembered at once, as if the thing he said covered so much it might cover it up if taken seriously.

It was all held somewhere, a load of what we’re capable of, some plural "we we we we" voicing now and then its slide into action. He couldn’t believe this vague thought but it was in him, the sense that somewhere he was in it, a dump, a general dump of what you’re all capable of, a messy cemetery messy because most of the folk weren’t always dead — oh shit.

"You thought I said some terrible thing, didn’t you?" he persisted, and in later years knew only that she had gently backed off.

"She had such life in her but she couldn’t give it up much," said Margaret. "Sometimes I thought it was my doing, but how could it be?"

"What did she say? I can’t remember."

"She said Chopin was great but as for Schumann, his inspiration seems to come between two sobs. I remember her saying that, because I laughed and she said it sounded better in the French where she’d read it."

He didn’t understand couldn’t give it up much and so couldn’t get it out of his head. One thing: he would get away and hear more than these few special emptinesses. His grandmother put her hand on his shoulder. Two facts: his grandmother had a husband; and she had lost a daughter. (If you ever had a person to lose.)

"Your mother had wonderfully bad manners when she chose."

He wanted to say, Stop.

"The day she met your father at his friend’s wedding she told him he came from one of the dull branches of the family remote enough, though, so that she could marry him without producing Mongols, and she told him, ‘If only you could keep up that dashing appearance you had on the running board leaving the church to come to the reception!’ I was standing at the punch table when she said it and he dropped his hat onto the floor, I don’t recall what it was doing in the room."

Wait a sec, there was a connection—

A connection?

— between spiral winds and present and absent weathers.

Oh! — some strained surprise between grandmotherly wonder, laughter, irritation. "Between" what and what? his father Mel in the newspaper office said to someone, anyone, himself, an orderly thinker who was fond (if "fond" could ever state the difficulty with which he paced himself through life) of saying, to someone who had spoken confusingly or with just too many words, "Say that again."

O.K. he answered her: one morning he had come out of the now motherless house and stopped at the end of the walk and found the wind, which he liked, pressing him but on the right side of his back, not his left, aiming right into the wing of his right shoulder yet practically non-existent on his left side; and he turned with the wind, not toward downtown and school beyond downtown, but turned leftward (in the direction of the intersection at the other end of town where the highway ran one way toward Trenton alongside the race track and the other way toward the shore), only suddenly to see Margaret up the street more vivid than distance should have allowed, on her porch just waving to him: the wind had turned him but it wasn’t spiral, you know — it was only strong and a bit curved, the way winds of the Earth will be, but he felt a bit spun, and he believed in mere coincidence so he didn’t think the wind came from his grandmother (anyway it was sort of blowing toward her, "leading" like a forward pass) — but the thing was, you could think what you wanted, and Braddie was known to get so angry when the winter wind was ramming him that he had a fit almost and once went back inside the house and was late for school, instead of running quick downtown like the three hundred jackrabbits Margaret saw all together several jumps ahead of a Kansas dust storm, but the thing was you could think it was hands on your back pushing you, or one hand there and the other not there or not much there— present, absent — but, true or not, you could learn from nature, and so you had to let it do what it did—

(Oh my yes, his grandmother murmured; life is right.)

— and the hands, right hand pushing, left hand not pushing, or for somebody in another town maybe the other way around, could be just your mistake, your imagination, some other hands of yours inside you pushing out: not that you had to believe that, but if you get turned by the wind and the wind doesn’t have real hands so the hands are inside you or something, you can keep on turning ‘cause you’re started and the wind you sort of give in to is inside you maybe as a spiral — even if, outside, it isn’t—