Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Grace Kimball came east out of the West, hung high above the clouds, and for many moments pursuing the night with all of America around her, she wanted her brother, who wasn’t delivering milk any more, and had a job and was just married, so instead of him it was all of America she let herself desire to be in like a restless, pivoting (not yet unfaithful) spouse — from the wind-filled gorges of Wyoming where a hermit uncle lived, from the gusty Great Lake near overflowing into Minnesota where her brother had served on a cutter; from the herds and vast hot green of the Flint Hills near Wichita; from the school grandstands that she had once seen from a distance approaching an Oklahoma wheatfield as if the miles of pale brown grasses drew spectators with no football field in between, from town to town throw in the extreme southern Rockies of nearby New Mexico of all this sentimental continent, she loved it. She wanted anything but New York, anything flying in the opposite direction, anything but the New York she flew toward when she also felt but didn’t know she felt (right?) that New York was where everyone and no one would know her — didn’t know this any more than (she knew that) she might like to lie down with her brother beside the man-made lake they grew up swimming in, lie down with her brother another year, nor could have known then (could she?) that she would (in private with her intimates, at least, if not to her loosely structured Body-Self Workshop) preach incest if you feel like it for our post-marital era with its changed alliance systems: Came out of the West, she did, like—

Who now? butts in the interrogator with apparently food in his mouth, torturing our words, and wondering with a blink of his eye, a flick of his tail, what it might mean that the American President was learning to embrace other men in public—

For "Who now?" hears in itself sometimes "What now? what next?" (that is, will the god or once and future goddess think of): but if the Who is Grace, where did our knowledge of her come from, for we are but relations: the answer is, "From her, from her," knowledge given up from her to us though power given’s pow’r received we learn she came one day to say because she knew it all her life and if, once in a Thorsday-afternoon kitchen (though not in that event legally penetrated, for history’s precision yields humor ‘bout it if no one else), or once by a Sunday-evening lake, she got enterred so against her will that for actual decades she ran her own industry of disseminating happy powers of herself among women like offspring of a brief but seminal fuck (you) times an organic friendly uncle (who styled himself itinerant, staked Yellowstone-ward either by National Parks Department or the Secretary of the Interior) who got inflamed by how a teenage girl alloyed a well-equipped (one-thirty-second) Pawnee-American kitchen, but soon after by a friend-of-the-family man in uniform lakeside to whom she did not have the heart, once locked onto, to holler the information that from a point of "no return" as was said of an innocent wartime bottle with the neck broken off, the power she was being given was a certificate certifying that she had been raped long before she saw a work of art that proved all that carrying-on called (scream it jokewise in the shower) rape didn’t have to be entry for whether there’s a difference between up-against-the-kitchen-sink Uncle Walter’s hand coming down behind to clamp around in front thanks to his extensible wrist-watched wrist and (hard by the shore of a manmade lake) that other man that soldier’s gentleness that just got going going and hurt only in (a) one lower vertebra where the experience was ever after permanently housed and (b) her heart that got scared into a death she years later knew had been given her by the goddess to come back from like end we know by seeing it from the far side in each event she got raped without the word "rape" luckily so she could only use it as a growing/learning experience (words, words, words, you can stuff ‘em) until one year she found herself a center of once many distances, now all one by fiat (hers), here in a defurnished apartment breathing tragedy out of the trapped women who came to her and life in —into such formal closets of unused amazement (nee resentment, nee goodness, nee unpaid labor divided by that unwritten chronicle of come-come — or cum-cum) that one day when the children are grown we could just as well come out of the closet and check it out if when we do we leave our gowns lay where Jesus hung them or was hung whether or not Grace could prove not just to the satisfaction of those lives she helped but to her own mysteriously distant satisfaction that Jesus could have enriched the incarnation by getting into being woman too— a thought she had on the plane east — an original thought till years later she recalled her grandmother (somehow, she was sure, not non-orgasmic) who heard a dime-museum orator in the nineties preach about money and economics and claim we were all compound reincarnations from the caldron of former souls — it stayed with Grace:

— came out of the West, never imagining that beyond the general shape of her future husband quickly filled by one Lou (his index finger in 1950 held down upon the tilted shaker’s silver cup) was a "starreen" role in the very history she sprung out of her own refrigerator one wonderful, scary morning some years later aforementioned, yes New York cliff dweller that she stayed (leaving Lou by kicking him out) but restructured, now noisily now quietly and gently, into what her idea of history told her had always been — before Mesopotamia (wherever in the brain’s zodiac that was) and the flattening of the goddess by all her consorts who rolled and positioned themselves into one economy-size husband — oh before all these and more, before American Indian Pakulpota, herself the nurturing world of her own sacred stories, got bloody fucked by the gore-horned Greek goat of Grace’s birthday sign — before all these flowed into the pregnant forms that, suddenly that breakthrough morning in the kitchen like her heart in her mouth, bulged into being — which was the matriarchal force that can bring together and bind and renew you (hear also, in song, "Shampoo you") come again upon the Earth to supplant Dad’s power vac (read P-V sex) through whose nervy dispersals and non-orgasmic romps the balling patriarchy (if we may speak for Grace) disarms all risks abutting Dad’s Pad.

Receptive mixed bloods, we nonetheless find not the siwash cheese smoked roe man-hour (-like) truth-surplus we’re logging every damn bastard day, drinking Kickapoo Juice to change toward human, something more doing our potatoes in Seneca Oil, chewing our peanut-spiked Chiclets, gargling with whole pineapples, barking our noses on Ponderosas to try their chocolate scent in the midnight divorce and marriage ceremony of the late century in question, and (far) above rich deposits of coal, steaming our peppers, our squash, our grasshoppers, our tobacco, and our beans upon a bed of long-fiber cotton, while to really understand this Indian meal, we bounce a rubber ball fifty times without thinking succotash, and watch our joint muscles relax with a curare aperiplus trying in the midst of our silence at day’s end to recall through saying the full name of a sacred laxative we meant to pry away from the Indians before they upped their prices (though we will break it down in the lab, name or no name). But think only of corn — if potatoes are your nemesis — think but of corn to remember what we didn’t know we knew, that half our world crops were tamed first by proven red-blooded American Indians. Think but of the vast reserves of reservation taming all but, say, barbed bulbs of cactus whose babies, it stands to reason, are baby cactus (if the Indians, who like the technologists and the economists feeling technological/economical problems require technological economical solutions, feel Indian problems require Indian solutions, would only export these baby cactuses to the diva’s favorite Mexican restaurant in New York, pricklies depilitated! There it is possible for a small, once-dusty, highly metabolized correspondent-woman to sit at a nearby table thinking she actually hears all that half-conscious Navajo landscape dreaming of great planted fields out of the letter Flick read her — and she has shared a veritable granary of information at Grace Kimball’s loosely structured Body-Self Workshop (where she’s found that all the women who stayed at home while she was in South Vietnam bear with her nonetheless strange kinships) and while she doesn’t know that James Mayn (personally unknown to her) in the line of work Stateside took a story off her flown-in tape of a self-incinerating Buddhist monk with commentary (hers), she does know this very newsman’s daughter Flick, and hears his voice in Flick’s quiet, ironic, loving one reading Dad’s letter, and. . women, she is starting to think, have seemed in ordinary social contacts lately more substantial than men by and large.