Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And so a few hours later Grace scuffs, stunned — or rather spunkily trots — into her kitchen’s awareness of her in a mind-burst zone of her that found history past and future in the middle of the night and now finds herself in the kitchen of her present like a home come back to after years of nights gray as her brother’s dreamed face but may lose what she found last night (for someone might say, Now that you’ve found it, it will be taken from you) — to wit, a whole account of what’s happened for two thousand years, that she has for Lou but in a decision too complete for words. For it’s tricky there for the skipper Grace Rhodes, nee Rhodes because born married, there at the controls of a changing kitchen where she’s turned on the burner to float under the pretty orange kettle (hers) without first (this momentous morning) reaching blindly through the invisible white door without opening it of the refrigerator (soon to be widely called, from the English, "fridge") for the two-quart family-size Florida orange juice carton substantial as a Monopoly hotel, and without reaching even now, she’s spooned coffee into the new glass cylinder with the plunger-piston purchased after seeing the Michael Caine thriller, ee-und. .she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and dreaming at a great rate of history being both here and there yet knowing that in between is the act of decision (hold on to it! pin it down! a donkey’s nipping at her hand) that came to her, promised itself to her, alone last night abed beside Lou, who (through secret bond, the bond of a secret!) is such a known body that her act if she goes "thru" with it threatens her with incarnation (forget the re-, which she never believed in even when her grandmother quoting her friend in support of the poor (around the time of a so-called Panic in 1890-something) "time to quit raising corn and start raising hell," went along with that champion of the unemployed who held that at death the soul like the body spilling its organ chemicals back into the earth, returns to the gross stewpot of the soul reservoir from which children drew what they needed at birth, therefore, therefore, therefore, but) — she’s keeping an eye on the kettle and trying to recall all she must say to Lou now, who’s gon’ say, "Oh cool it, honey" and how hard to do it now — that is, to tell him, tell Lou (medium height upright, medium length in bed a widow’s width away, recall the Irish-Italian old pardner to end all pardners) — tell him without a fight, without a pretext in the convenient shadowy kitchen often so morning-comforted where the only light is the fire buoyant beneath the kettle but her body’s helping her out now so potently she doesn’t think to thank her mother’s God, except, evoking her mother’s word "waterworks" as if centuries of feminine crying were a branch of municipal plumbing planned, see, by (well you got your) managers distributing your monopolies where monopolies are due, she finds the miracle fluid of her morning tears breathing for her anew refueling her force with an angry humor for example that that very instant her face and heart and eyes came unsprung and she wept above the stove — did she hear a cough? the dream donkey ‘tween nips? — and of herself she flickered (watch!) some small communicating part back into the bedroom of these furnished aeons (which part?) that was suddenly certain her husband had been not breathing when she had left his side, or was he busy still being the donkey? while here, buoyed as the kettle itself is by inexpensive flames, she on her side is breathing along the small, not unmusical up-beat of the gentle gasps that go with her tears. And this, in union with that experience of her other body inclining in the bedroom to touch her non- or minimally breathing man, puts her in (no, turns her into) her own picture and if she thinks about her being here at the stove (angry or not, weeping or dry) and being back in the bedroom examining a wife-poor husband worth not living with, she won’t say the one pure thing she is to say to him, only one thing no matter how you squeeze it, while the practically instant brewer pistons the hot water (which, she sees for the first time, the landlord pays for in property taxes) through the coffee a hair less easily than the languorous spy did it in the movie last month; while, recalling to one side of her memory’s decision Lou’s heartfelt "Ah" of wonder and thanksgiving finding the Way In, the entry that ducked once, twice (like another head coming the other way), against her bone only to cant its way in, third try, with gimme an Ah which she once would answer by voice contact relieved at his swift pang, she now reaches through the refrigerator resigned like a mistress (but tense) to not knowing how long they’d have together this time (why bother to open it like a slave) for Lou’s egg, and finds it with his other eggs (Ah, she’s just this second given up eggs; we know it’s so the future can get a purchase on her if only to hold her in its hand) and feeling it smooth and cool like a thing that ought to be hard and is to the lightest touch, she lets it fly toward the sink before she squeezes it into her hand and hears in the exhaled, absorbed cack of egg collapsing on steel what she saved by not holding on to it all gooky in the hand and in the coughing voice at her back what she gained by wasting it against cold steel conjuring a point of entry and departure for a sudden talk between the dry-throated transient who’s himself (!) materialized in a short, white terry-cloth bathrobe (a piece of him lowering notch by notch though not into position still sufficiently at the ready to be preceding him and to be called "it" though it’s him) — not destined to drink today’s juice eyeing the headlines of the paper that’s outside the front door we know through him and add (what Lou can’t hear but already about remembers) that it’s black-edged the morning — and, in front of Lou, his first wife Grace, heart breathing by itself for itself scaring not itself, only her, not quite ready to turn but ready to speak beyond the egg to Lou’s "What was that for?"

And while she’s for a second strung between overlapping views not to be confused with a whole history assembled and announced overnight in her heart at the whorled circuits of instinct interrogation, Genesis, Egypt, the brides of Christ whose soul was also in the fundamental American reincarnation reservoir — and she wasn’t sure if she wanted even a jigger of that, the bare mask of eyes in the all but covered face of woman — really beautiful woman — of girl grandmothers like her own who cared deeply for the poverty farmers and out-of-work marchers on Washington in ‘94 who’re men while still the women were equal to anything if not some Wide Load Grace feels in her shifting flesh reputed headed continentally our way, a pair of rooms (this and a next prob’ly not our style), maybe a mountain of stuff doubtless in a fair cubic shape not to wonder at because the girl grandmothers haven’t time though equal to their time itself but with all those kids, the creak of covered wagons instead of bed and prayer, their way west, their way east, into a kitchen that will collapse into history (let alone his-and-her history, indeed leave alone oh "What a view!" he’d often said, with a sky, an earth, a valley, a morning mountain, a car, a held hand what else canst give me: "Incredible," she agreed and wanted a story, then, anything so long as it’s a story) — she’s in a near future which she foresaw ten woman-and-man minutes from the kitchen, the man in the white robe now packing like an assembly line alternately two suitcases laid back neatly paneled on the undone bed, seeing the man put first in one case shirts in their soft-glass bags from the laundry, then in the other case two cashmere sweaters, pair of corduroys, an ex’s dozen sock balls; then seeing the man vomit into the first case, all this all at once for she sees all this from the kitchen stove ten minutes away thinking will he vomit into the second case too (not to be confused with the special hang-up case for suits that she doesn’t see yet) and when, entering the, yes, cluttered bedroom then in the future that she sees while still heart-throbbing, in the kitchen, she sees his white-robed back, bending away from her over the bad cough before again vomiting, she knows anxiously it was nothing he ate this morning or he "got" from her— she’s not the mother of his stomach — because he won’t eat a thing here in the kitchen as the interaction opens with Grace answering Lou before she turns, with words that she doesn’t feel she’s reduced to — and words that this time he won’t say (like, "Oh, skip it"): because although he didn’t know he knew that he too wanted out (and Grace by successfully not saying all that "needed saying" the fateful morning in the kitchen but creating a package statement delivered at once and yet again, their four bare calves insidiously communicating, will sometimes in future days go sit beside the phone because, with a pang as long as the space-time she’s gained from him by not saying all she might have, knows that he knew) — he too wanted out, for (!) she was now at last not all things to him and hey partly because she never was! — he couldn’t this time of all the times till now let near-silence speak as in the sound of the wide steel sink softly receiving the load of one egg; and he had his own hungover spunk to say, "What was that for? Why’d you do that?"