Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Flick works in Washington, boards her absent boyfriend’s motorcycle, but drives reluctantly (and parks) a great old white sedan given her by her father. She read to the correspondent-woman a letter her father wrote her from The Future (as he headed it) postmarked Farmington, New Mexico, claiming for that landscape this very dream of great planted fields, as if — as if — and our small but growing woman ignoring the well-known mezzo at a nearby table talking Spanish with a broad-faced, dark-mustached, elegant-lapeled male who listens to the diva beyond her words and into her following silence, lovers without question — the correspondent-woman chews a moist, slick baby cactus, moving it around with her tongue, and suddenly she has it! The way Flick’s father talks about that western landscape it’s as if he were — but she has lost it… he were what? She can’t think? is this being a woman? can only recall his written words in their imagined sounds read by his daughter Flick who found "kind of irrelevant" his response to what she had written him (God they had a good relationship, didn’t they?) about that strangely sophisticated South American country most distinct for us for being almost not there—2,500 miles long from Peru to the Pole and a quarter of an inch wide, though a thousand feet deep and now most "tragic," the daughter had written — what "we" did to Chile (cut off spare parts for trucks, paid the truck owners’ confederation per diem to strike, and then reported it as a workers’ strike): to which her father rather rambled on (yet not long-windedly — how was that?) about ‘69 and asking a well-heeled German-Chilean beekeeper in Temuco what was going to happen. Answer: if Nixon could be elected last year, Allende the good medical doctor can be elected next year. (You mean. .?) That both have been working toward their presidencies for years. (But what will happen if Allende squeaks in?) Listen, the only way for Washington to win this one is for Chile as a whole to win. The beekeeper whose parents came from Germany in ‘45 asked if Mayn was CIA but figured the CIA had other interests than a beekeeper’s father years ago. The beekeeper, whose money came from lumber and brewing, now has just the bees down here in the South, two houses, two hundred acres, two cows, a huge, exact, and green vegetable garden. (What will Dr. Allende do if he gets in, and are you for him?) The only Alliance for Progress will be Chileans with Chileans. (And will he stand his enemies up against a wall?) Is that what doctors do in the United States? (But he is an economist as well.) Allende has said what he will do.

O.K., we know how vulnerable we are to the interrogator and his or her questions; but now, in whatever garb, reverse-collar clerical asking us to confess, or mufti, or period, or (ostensibly to infiltrate certain groups in the big cities) nude, he now does not after all ask if by "kinships" the correspondent-woman means that the other workshop women have bodies like hers or in the local or non-statutory sense are governed at some distance by their mothers’ own trapped dominance and will be until they become their mothers; but instead, the interrogator asks verbatim: "The so-called newsman Mayn coded an eastbound message to his daughter ‘The Future’; she works in an agency in Washington; he has been observed watching the Manhattan apartment house if not the very windows of a former national in whom we too are interested, while Mayn’s people in New Jersey we know accumulated if not proliferated a standard military sidearm at least from the early 1890s on, but possibly since the Mexican War a decade after the founding of the family’s weekly newspaper now defunct — so, is Mayn armed?"

We found we counted on our bodies to tell us even what words we were to know. Until we learned too late (which is our life’s apparent time), that the bodies had not been ours and that we some of us were mainly metabolism mapping live the processing of foods and their absorption into time in persons who now had gone! Leaving us a metabolism working away with violent good cheer but with no body to prove it was our thing — our thing to change. For which — O.K. — Let’s change our things (we suddenly recall our mother said as we all came in in the days when metabolism was relatively unknown and we called our bodies our own and they came running until now).

But now, with no breath because no breather since the breather had gone away, we went on metabolizing; yet found limbs for our curves, fresh eyes for our would-be heads to gather round. Yet this had always gone on and was life’s answer to growth and we would hang in there separately or together, a thrust without an Eiffel to throw it, sometimes a will to stow book and torch in a backpack to keep our hands free for the road — yet with only great, locked-pelvis Lady Liberty available to us for body at the time.

From behind us, the question earmarked for us resonates and— whung — bends, so that, as sound, it acquires a shadow, a sound shadow resembling to angels a very ear, though an ear lighted by such inward sources the unknown brain deep buried there weighs its own visiting angels right as they shed from it yet to busy people imperceptibly imprinted; so comes that old lack or gap between what we’re experiencing and us it’s sad to say now that we have said it.

So that if the question with its overstress on Mayn as a belligerent warrior finds a way around us, the very way so hugs our shape that it threatens to describe us. But abstraction already introduced through the new painlessness of torture into us by the undivided labor of our questioner doubling as persuader opens up in us more than we knew existed yet no more than what we didn’t know we had in us. But comes a new problem: the torture of dividing right down to the bone our collective member (with its memberhood): a torture aimed at making unforgettable the information that comes with the torture, as when the slitting and splitting from root to bulb, vein to internally (urethrally) splinted stalk, of the youthful Indian penis (or peenis) followed by enforced blood-squatting above a fire was meant to make the male never ever forget whatever the point of it all was — his puberty, his father’s rivalry, his own unguessed vagina-envy — whereas our torture in the painlessness of its abstraction receives the interrogator’s question about Mayn only to drop the words through us first in the form of a question about a man or Man’s proliferated arms then into a dozen other questions negotiating the passage of what we might have known we had in us. Passage? (read wormhole, read wind-tunnel, read zero gravity chamber, read time baffle, so long as you kids read ).

Questions we mean such as Why does anyone, woman or man, wish to go armed? or take the question of suicide in general, for instance sending or leaving an irate message in the form of suicide to the effect that for years, damn you, messages have not gotten through. Yet whadda you know, the abstracting of our collective member falling pain-proof through the shadow of the sound we would have made if we would suffer conventionally finds in its very thought a breakthrough as real as "the future we already remember we’re in, babe," said Grace Kimball some years beyond her divorced marriage in the month of a thousand reasons and one unrehearsed rhyme given the women who came to know her why first and foremost they had themselves, and not to blame.

Yet thus our demon interrogator has given his torture that old mnemonic twist after all, so we, wishing to be free of the new torture of painlessness, find we absolutely cannot forget Grace’s lanternslides (as they would have been called in her parents’ day) projected now in the eighth decade of the century in question up onto a screen for five hundred women to believe. The message of these slides paired side by side so it looks like two screens, is that — in this hotbed of biology and cure (the auditorium of a hospital) — see for yourself, sisters, the hard-on you’re getting right now proves it, look at the penis then look at the clit, trace your vagina and that scrotum is it, these are the same organs, ladies, which is why you knew you had balls and why men in business and men in bed forget they evolved from Our life.