Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Absence" — what she had gotten wrong recalling Cliffs poem. Same old material but unrehearsed: on a fresh track but you’re the same person: track to one side of where she’d been: or a new person on an old track. As the door buzzed, she thought she was content for Maureen to believe in reincarnation, but maybe the whole thing might be updated. She got up, pressing Play, the old stuff suddenly word for word the same, an external memory; "to share with others the absence" started to follow her to the door: bullshit, she heard herself feel: the voice telling her back her story snuck up behind her, and "absence" was alone there and all the words fell away from it. .

absence you can’t quite put your finger on [a pause, a silence] the fact, the human fact that you can’t quite remember when you had an orgasm and you assume you don’t need to because you can get off on feeling a little guilty you know about not wanting to screw last night, then angry over feeling guilty, then confused, which is a good feminine state to be in when he walks in the door and you sweep everything under the mat [laughter], guilt, did I say? guilt over taking a nap after lunch, and the guilt is your gift to yourself to get over feeling not guilty [laughter, applause], of being, O.K., not quite there when you were in the car with your two kids and your certified husband or of not, you know, doing anything worth spending all day today — Where’d it go? Today is missing. Because you’re busy and your loved ones need you and you’re constipated and have lower back pains to pity yourself for, and if anyone asks you, it’s no bother to carry this guilt, it gets to be like two-piece outfits the stores choose for you, no bother, but I mean really what do you have to give anyone unless it’s your independent self, and that could please even your family—

She had run back to turn off the voice and heard her mother’s vacuum running, her mother who, in incredible shape for her age, had let go of widowhood and came up sex positive, though basically anti-enema-cleansing. Grace was in the carpeted hall, a pair of sweatpants on one of the cunt-hooks; and just as she had known that the word family was the word that went with bike in Cliff’s verses, family bike not absent bike, she had opened the door to a half-smiling woman in a green sweater and a tartan skirt who couldn’t speak when she saw Grace all there in front of her and to whom Grace said, "Is it about the women’s workshops?" So the day’s periodic cluster had sent Grace away a couple of hours early to collect her bike so as to wheel her back on a fresh track as close to where she had already been as the cool, gray-haired, heavy set man was surprised to recognize her (and kept from looking her in the eye).

A track as close to where she had already been as the man with the curved look was surprised to recognize her.

Thinking not hers: then due to the Goddess, who said, Never argue: only assert. Whose voice is not the voice charging a very special cone of her body-mind with the cluster heats of convergence, but it’s the Goddess who gave her knowledge of the two cones making up her Mind-Body, so she can just about identify this voice — she’s already told her story to it in future though there is no future — familiar voice with a difference which is a lot of Space among the words, to breathe, lay back into: so she finds, like waking, a new Her evolved through all this work she has done on herself for so long. So when Sue’s teenage son Larry the expert on poison gas and chess listened with downright affection to her interpret earlier remarks by Maureen on reincarnation groping to tell the new kind that was coming into existence, Larry said he did not think there was a future but asked— asked —if what she would be reincarnated into wasn’t already in her— into her, he added. Girls aren’t used to doing all this kind of work on themselves, she said, feeling she was the same old person she had always been in her eyes and lips and hope.

"Girls," her brother said, out of breath putting down a half-drunk quart bottle of milk on the table beside a yellow mixing bowl, "always think you’re looking at them."

"They want you to look at them," said her father from the living room, huskily, absent-mindedly.

"Only if they like you," said her mother from the screened back porch where she had been humming — as if of how newbaked bread smelled like sweetened ironing.

"Maybe they want to be left alone sometimes," Grace said to all of them and wanted to get away at least to her room upstairs, at least to the bathroom to smile in all possible ways in the mirror; she heard the cushions of her father’s leather chair crack and she felt his body rising and unbending out there in the living room in a small city in the middle of the cornfield, to come to her mother’s proud icebox and "steal" a beer — who knew, as Grace’s mother said, where his bread was buttered even if he was apt to knock the toothpaste into the toilet bowl on a bad night and leave it there faraway.

"He kissed you at the train station a little wetly when you left for New York, and you never looked back," Maureen said: maybe at five p.m. for a quick rap or at eight on the far side of the salad bowl fingering the sprouts and green leaves and flowerets of cauliflower or living bright orange trails peeled lengthwise from the inner carrot — or at midnight or three a.m. when Grace worked. And " Right on," was what Grace said, as if she were Maureen, but had told many listeners many times. Told them that that particular trip of hers signaled by the corsage on the lapel of the suit was almost less toward professional school and career than toward marriage kept quite as secret from herself as from the parties involved in those old Life magazine specials, "Life Goes To An Elopement," although her unavoidable destiny with a smart, reasonably hard-drinking salesman named Lou three or four years later was just as much with others as well — her family and Lou’s so simply and smoothly swinging golfer father; and the public rendezvous, the nuptials, though only two days long back at the bride’s home nineteen hundred miles from New York, was carried off jovially — a little history in bright clothing — and, for a while that then lasted, New York was a break you joined yourself across so oppositely to its noisy ways that it burst into silence like terrific photographs.

What was she thinking of? The only real reincarnation? that when it was discovered would be discovered by Grace Kimball? She phoned Maureen to tell her one thing and told her another, the sweep second-hand of her Body-Room’s office-style clock turning all the time. She phoned to share with Maureen why she’d almost been sick in the gutter but instead told her "about" the black dude with the alligator hat that nearly matched her Abundance boots who was "in all probability" in her periodic cluster — come on up later because he absolutely will appear.

But Maureen ("Far out!") was thinking someplace else, Grace knew her well enough to pick it up threaded down the phone connection, Maureen’s chronic ongoing internalization arguing like an icepick point by point that the body’s a conduit for the inevitable future of vegetables: yet she was saying, Did Grace know Sue and Marv were taking an apartment in this building as a second residence, they were keeping the Long Island place, but Sue was kidding herself, she was having it both ways, you can’t be in two places (—"unless": and Grace heard Maureen suddenly think) and how could Marv with that fixed smile last night, passive-aggressive, compulsive-defensive, not set himself up for feelings of retaliation (Maureen could suddenly take off with words) slaving in that glittering farmhouse of a kitchen all day for the party. Served the food, detested the scene. Wait a second, Grace said, he’s always liked cooking, they’re on a food trip, that’s all they used to really talk about — recipe books, mucus pie, where’s the fucking meat thermometer, fresh fennel; last night I got him upstairs to try the Panasonic: he’s a learner, I’ll have to give him that, but he hated me today, he doesn’t know how much he’s a feminist already, he’s got too much on his plate.