Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

grace: Describe him.

wing: He has taken off his clothes, I cannot see him except his face, which has a thin, light-colored beard and he licks his lips when he listens and when he speaks he smiles and listens a lot but the rest of his body does not exist for me. We change contacts now (Senora Wing draws away and extends her index finger to touch Grace under her jaw).

grace: I see a woman named Rima in your cluster somewhere. I have many sisters. You have only one. I don’t know what is going on with you and her and I don’t want to know—

wing: Good! Let’s keep it that way for friendship’s sake.

grace: For the goddess’s sake maybe… but Mr. Turnstein over there looks freaked out; are you armed?

wing: (Raising her palm) Hand to hand now. (Grace meets her, palm to palm.) You do good work, Madam Kimball. You have to understand the limits of your powers.

grace: Listen, dear, my power is from the goddess and takes the form of the responsibility my people learn to take for themselves, their bodies, their trips. My power is unlimited because the future of the people I encourage is unknown and unlimited. You couldn’t really predict how far some woman will go, once she is free of the mother-provider kitchen-trip or helping her invalid husband get his penis into her before it wilts and then taking her own happiness in his coming after three and a half minutes and thanking her; you could not really predict how far a woman will go when she walks out on her family, her furniture, her vanity about her hair, her belief that he has all the things to say; walks out on house arrest that’s lasted twenty years, knowing that the orgasm that puts her in touch with her Body-Self and with the peace that passes understanding might not have to depend on a man, on a man or another woman — she might be able to make a gift of it to herself. There’s no predicting these things, but you take responsibility for the unknown by entering it. It can be more violent staying in it than getting out of it and the tyrant suspects that you’re murdering him, but he’ll survive.

wing: You say things that will get you in trouble. What I tell you about your future I take responsibility for. Remember the man who licks his lips; if you have information about a trip to be taken by the man who is husband to your woman friend from across the water, do not give it to the man who licks his lips and has a small beard, he does not understand how to use it and neither do you.

grace: This is gossip. This is unreal bullshit. This isn’t energy.

wing: If you have such information, you can use it to control your own future by tellin’ it to me and about house arrest and murdering the tyrant.

grace: (Rising, giving her interlocutor a sunny grin) We’re both encouragers; you do your part, I do mine; you could afford to lose some weight around the hips and the triceps, you come to the workshop next week, I’ll give you a good rate.

wing: I give you this for nothing.

grace: What were you giving me for nothing? Maybe I missed it, and what was the nothing?

wing: Advice, baby.

turnstein: (Bursting — slowly, if possible) You know those old folks out there. She said she watched Jimmy’s bike for him. Where’s he go on his bike?

grace: I don’t know them personally. I guess Jimmy runs messages on his bike. (To Senora Wing) Did Rima get more than she gave you? Does she like your politics? Does she know your sister? Are you into gay theater?

wing: (Smiling widely, speaking softly) You think these things are gossip. They are real. Who cares if a woman leaves her husband, who cares what they are doing in bed? That’s their business. Big deal if the woman goes out to work. When the family goes hongry, who the hell cares if the doctor don’t warm up his speculum? I don’t know any Rima. You got nothing to tell me now — maybe later, maybe sooner.

turnstein: (Seeming to be on the verge of stammering) You see Jimmy tell him I can’t cover for him indefinitely.

grace: You should tell him yourself.

turnstein: He says it takes him longer to do a job than it used to, but he’s got a bike now — he says he doesn’t have a bike but we know he does.

grace: "We"?

Senora Wing snaps her fingers at the awakening androgyne twins, who tumble out of their bunk nook and stumble humorously toward the storefront window to clamber onto the stage-like shelf and do their thing.

The old lady seemed to stare at the window but welcomed Grace. "They’re not so funny any more, not so funny at all. They don’t want to be there? I better leave them before they leave me."

"I found out what I went in for."

The old lady took Grace’s hand: "I knew you would. But I don’t have anything to go in for. And I have no money." She nodded at the tough old man. "He has our money. But he works."

"Not recently," the old man said. "I feel like I’ve been unemployed for about a century. But I have my own work that I do — just as well."

"Listen, do those people in there want you two to come here every day? Is that it? Is that why those nitwits put on a show in the window?"

"I wouldn’t know," the old man said. His lean, worn face kept its young strength in the full, firm mouth and the clear, ready forehead. "I worked in New Jersey but they let me go."

"Oh, we were in New Jersey for many a year," the old lady beautifully said.

"I was the one who worked there," the man said. "She wasn’t there recently so far as I know."

"Sad but true," his companion said.

"Forced retirement?" said Grace. The city had retreated from them; the hill of fruit-and-vegetable truck had disappeared and with it the high chair as if it had been sucked back into the window it had been thrown from.

"I felt like a friend of mine out West years ago. One day they came asking questions about him; the next week he went to Uruguay. Broke up his family."

"He did?" asked Grace. "No," said the old man, "it did."

"People came asking questions about you?"

"Oh some free-lance gypsy."

"Political?" "Oh I wouldn’t think so; a matter of convergence — I’m a maverick to begin with."

The old lady spoke up. "We worked there in New Jersey for many a moon." The two of them laughed at that.

The man didn’t want to talk about what had happened. They were moving off down the sidewalk, and the wind picked up, and Grace didn’t feel they had snubbed her by not saying goodbye.

Grace called out to them. "Do you know the fortune teller in there?"

"Yes, yes," said the old lady. "No," said the old man; "she hasn’t been there long."

"She said she took complete responsibility for what she was telling me about things to come."

"Did she describe them?" asked the old man, who was looking at, more than into, Grace’s eyes. "Not in detail, really," said Grace; "I guess I filled in the details, like some guy who licks his lips and has a light-colored beard and I shouldn’t talk to him. I suppose she tells everybody that one."

"Yes," said the old man, and stood there narrowing the distance between them, his companion singing a little song. "Yes; it sounds exactly like the fellow who came asking questions about my past connections as if he had been there."

"If he feels he was, maybe he was," said Grace. "I feel that, too, but then I have Indian blood, or my mother always said I did." She would be back in her own space in a second if she could; the men would be returning to finish the carpet; and that unknown Santee and the others would be displaying a full spectrum of excitement and sheepishness arriving and—"hang up your hat and stay a while," Grace heard her mother say to someone, past becoming future if, now that she’s a widow, she is having some fun with the old electrician who fixed the timer on her furnace.