Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

What does your husband do? I asked Clara, and then knew I had felt I was flattering her in advance. She started to say, "He is." And "an economist" came to me — her talk-converter isn’t like mine. "An economist," the words she would have said (and if I am supposed to be so prophetic maybe that is what he will be). But she said, "He is a consultant." "Is your life his?" I asked. "He would never take advantage of that." I wanted her to come to the real point. "You have to learn to live," I said. "Maybe that is a way of putting it," she said, as if she knew literally a world I did not, and again I thought, Danger: but could it be something other than the real danger of losing your self? "Putting what?" I said. Then like a man, almost like Cliff, Clara got her words out too fast—

The words came back to Grace, I mean I want to (her accent thickened for the next word) survive — to leave.

I reached for her arm and she let me touch her. I thought she would cry but she’s tough: but then I got it: leave was what came out, our American word that rhymes with give was what she thought she meant, and she wanted to leave. Not go public. But if she is brought along gently. Nurtured, for how she needs women now. To share with the goddess in her. To share information and break the old self-esteem barrier. But she is no breadbaker.

And there was something funny about her respect for that distinguished husband: so he was not interested in being tracked down by journalists, Grace was happy to give interviews, her life was to be shared, just let them quote you accurately.

But look at me going back later to the Messenger Service/Psychic storefront when I told myself I needed to get my bike now that they’d tuned it up and added a link to the chain due to worn-out derailleur (male-designed).

Grace had by then (but it was way past noon, why had she not sooner) played last night’s tape all by herself, Maureen was busy, played it denying herself nothing; taking it as she had given it — National Orgasm for Women, but not her N.O.W. quoted as a joke by Cliff when not on his monthly suicide alert: seriously a national orgasm: but so was the past crossing a street toward Martha and the lone guy taking care of her, only to be just missed by the whir of a red bike as oblivious of her as the jock in the saddle, but inside that wheeling whir was a clink and, though of chain, bolt, kickstand, or fender, it was a milk bottle delivered out of the past on that route a single milk bottle can clink all by itself as easily as be spilt: she felt the neck and the stripe of cold pale-yellow cream below her thumb and forefinger nineteen hundred and more miles away and the cool base of the bottle’s heavy glass in the palm of her right hand for a while: while, as she looked hard for the boy she loved who was her brother who had come and gone who got up before dawn dutifully and with an underlying mischievousness, too, that only she knew in him, left and along his route came back with the family’s milk and left again — she smelt behind her the breath breathing right through her as if to find something better beyond, when it knew too well: the hoarse breath of her unwashed father who was the living and half-blotted-out memory of last night’s moderate controlled drinking when you did not know where you were with him, for he could get courtly/serious, which might be worst, or most near to threatening, swinging his head and eyes slowly around so his perspective felt curved to her while he, up early, at the top and bottom of the midnight barrel appeared to know that there was nothing out there across the clear porch of morning beyond his daughter and the white misted bottle in her hands, upon which, she would turn, turn, turn (through his — she knew without looking — averted eyes) and step away holding the milk to her, leaving her father to bend just over the threshold for the other quart likewise delivered an hour or so ago by his son, who drank a quart first thing in the morning on the job and another at home during the day, good for missy’s milk-white skin, it was said — always the wrong information authoritatively shared, wrong if she had had pimples which she had not, but the wrong scoop period, but she made up for it now in her forties telling an echoing cassette-ful of mainly women (in a hospital-auditorium in Connecticut, in New Jersey a redone horse-barn, a north-shore Long Island home) how to survive. A good bunch! Did she make them good? And in the midst of this replayed spiel, eyeing the four shelves of art books, sex books, food books, and self books, and, feeling in one shin — why? that she ought to throw some of the books out, she had had the urge to be on her bike; more, have it. The tape ended with the warm, dry crash of clapping which got abruptly breathed back into the waiting silence of the small machine. Her mother phoned across the country. The abundantly dark-haired super stood at Grace’s door talking too long; well, she would talk to anyone who wanted to, but he talked too long as if even if it got abstract about obscure storage space being created in the basement out of nothing by this super, and about Respect — a commodity, he heard himself saying, hard to come by when you had to deal with some of the older tenants — still he figured she might like him well enough to, at the ultimate moment, flash: wasn’t this what all his talk meant? he imagined that Grace possibly flashed for Manuel (now the doorman, once the handyman, who raced cars somewhere out of earshot in New Jersey) and for Spike the spick-and-span porter whom she liked to bullshit with and would never cover up for necessarily if he rang her bell alone. These blue-collar types shouldn’t have known how to take her but they did, and didn’t even sense they got an education, she was in a separate class. (By the time she was a hundred and twenty would New Jersey mean anything to anyone?)

And then came the voices of the T-shirt operation’s representative and the woman with bad posture (political woman, Grace recalled, heav ee , with a touch so serious and urgent she would be serious and urgent making love yet hopeless and noisy) — who wanted to be Grace’s secretary but was into relationships not pleasure, and then a number of other Items as if the day existed in advance.

In the form of a list.

Whereupon some overheard words drew her in reverse to hike downtown, she needed that bike.

So it was that she again passed the storefront she had put out of her mind with the black dude in the alligator who had more important things to further than see signs in storefronts.

Messenger Service/Psychic Consultations, Readings, it said. Another New York operation, yet a play front for what male-female mystery?

She had come back downtown because she’d been driven from her apartment. Maybe by what the tape told her? Maureen would have known but Maureen was painting her kitchen today, controlling her environment, planning to leave it for an apartment in this building, caching yogurt behind an overwhelming sack of stubby carrots in the bottom of her fridge: so much tougher than before she had met Grace coming off marriage in danger of being restored to her now retired nuclear parents where the sun always shines, before she had gone on her power trip which was really turning her toward science, toward cleansing, toward a balance of nature where everything was related to everything else, sprouts on the sill to high colonic enema therapy with the bull Mama in the white coat who turned the dials on the machine and filled your belly to orgasmaximum — to science, yes, to juice cleansing, carrots, celery, oranges, to changing American fields from grazing to grains, from animal to vegetable; and Grace had got her started, just as, coming from someplace else, Sue was getting started now; the workshops and talks were always new starts, this was the timeless factor, she would write that down, she liked being heard, which was why at the end of last evening at Sue and Marv’s Grace had, at the door, responded to more compliments by recalling Cliff and saying suddenly to Maureen, who was at her side of course, "Cliff should have come tonight, you know that?" and Maureen had looked her quite lovingly in the eye and said, ‘That woman who’s driving us home is a creep," and it might have been then that Grace had wanted to be alone and had forgotten to rescue the evening’s tape from Sue’s machine.