Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

And Grace imagined him with the empties soaring three steps at a time down the four-step front porch, dashing down the walk, calling to the motionless milkman and so she followed her brother out of the kitchen and through the living room the way he went, to the front door: so that he may have heard her — she never knew afterward to ask — but he turned his head as if to overhear a word of warning never uttered or some news behind him that then came between him and the milkman, whose elbow was on the edge of the delivery truck’s rolled-down window and he’s watching through the windshield what Grace saw from behind — namely, her little brother fall forward like tripping your skate over a rooty hump in the ice so at that instant of soft chipping you are leaving one element for another.

He was stretched out with flakes of one bottle under one outstretched hand unemployed and the other bottle in some form under him. She saw red, but before she saw it and before, with blood facing him, he lifted his backside painfully to get onto his knees, the picture on his little (what’s she saying, "his little"?) his little jacket, the design of the great superchief of the Cherokees on the back that he was proud of, it wrinkled like a slit across his back when the lower half of the jacket rode up skewed, and the legs and leggings of the awesome Indian were for an instant displaced sideward, these crazy legs, so they half came not from the glittering torso with the feathered face glint-boned in her memory but from the blue ground the Cherokee was stitched on.

Clean break, babe, the past is over, it’s history, don’t get drawn back in. Over there is the beaded baby carrier, the Indian papoose purse with the little hood-window blooming dark-pink-lined, standing on Grace’s New York wall one year, gone the next, though into a closet of memories, against the closet wall caged by the collapsible steel shopping cart she still uses even on her new food trip. Expensive, that papoose carrier, that authentic buckskin craftwork: was it women sewed those Kiowa babies up or was it craftsmen? no zippers no buttons no snaps so it must have been loops and pegs, hooks and eyes, but the shape Grace saw from her bed that Sunday morning having thought better of dialing her friend of the night before never revealed itself until she took it off the wall and stuck it in a closet and it had been so long in a closet that it had disappeared even from the closet eventually, the papoose carrier’s little hooded place at the top, the pursed closing down the front — while the evolution of the papoose carrier in her mind wasn’t single many of us could have told her, wasn’t only (since it looked like) the ancestral vagina that yields the future male member, it was the sun shining upon the middle of America where her kid brother and she lay by a public, a man-made lake across which as if on it three horses and riders could be seen passing one by one, and though he loved her he stopped talking and she in her two-piece bathing suit had to roll half-over toward him to look at him and say, listen, bud, demanding he answer her but what was the argument about? she recalls only the scene, their flesh, her orange bra, his bright brown, hairless chest, all told one night in New York like a huge laugh — told to Maureen or Norma, can’t recall, though Norma passes it all on to her husband, and then Grace told Sue perhaps too, whose husband listens and listens while their eighteen-year-old son hears.

"You see," the interrogator adds half-silently behind the potential apparatus, the charged vessel of our riveted chair, "you tried to non-answer our question re: Mayn’s being armed but you betrayed yourself."

Betray? we ask ourselves (betray?) into the area around our chair. Did you mean reveal ourselves or deceive ourselves? we ask, making allowances for his second language, ours, which gratefully lacks those no-no’s his has. And doesn’t the inquisitor who’s behind us pushing know what’s going to happen no matter how we answer?

We ask in the end ourselves, isn’t that our way? and under this type of interrogation, as James Mayn himself said, we’re human, we’re a survivor.

But the interrogator (in uniform? in mufti?) speaks: This putative woman, he replies to our "Betray, reveal, deceive?" — this womanist nicknamed Grace Kimball has a younger brother, so does Mayn; she has or had parents who fought in private, so did Mayn; she’s divorced and so is Mayn; her genital apparatus is alleged to be in terms of evolution male-oriented; both had grandmas who supported Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marching on Washington Easter of 1894— plus (and our breath is taken away by how the interrogator has saved to spring on us however inaccurately now something largely said so very long ago that it’s just about believed) Kimball left her husband Lou yet he was the one who went: is not this like the mother long ago who sent her son away yet left him with the impression that it was she who’d left: plus the grandmother (breathes the voice behind us distinctly, and racing back over what we all have said, we hardly think but to condemn this totalitarian hireling who may have had the diva’s outspoken old father in the next room or in this very interrogation chair as recently for all we know as us but damn we are saddled as well with the suspicion that this after all non-native user of our language has so ignored the words of our query—"Betray, reveal, deceive?" — that he’s had humorous buttons created out of those words one for each day of his week, but we fight back). But that was Mayn’s grandmother what about her? we retort from our chair seeing nothing before us.

O.K. what about her? replies the interrogator closing in: it goes like this: Grace Kimball is one-thirty-second Pawnee, you said; and at her big turning point she flew east from Indian country to change her life; the grandmother likewise flew east from Indian country at a big turning point in her life and with the beloved Navajo Prince somewhere behind her on her track.

But the interrogator is going haywire perhaps because we have become everything to him — and, ‘ That was the East Far Eastern Princess," we mutely protest, our breath pounding, repelled by our heart — it’s not good — he’s so close now he’s breathing down our neck, what is he about to come up with? we’d like to set eyes on him but we’re riveted and his voice ahead of itself retorts in questions, Who and why was she?

Likewise somewhere behind the East Far Eastern Princess is that pivotal moment when she disarmed her awesome pursuer from the West, the still not entirely empty-handed Navajo Prince; conceived her vision of history to take back to her interested father the King of Choor; and according to Alexander — who is Alexander? — Mayn’s grandfather, but — according to him she acquired for future contingencies that common revolver that in all the hands Indian, Mexican, American that handled it, multiplied into perhaps a small arsenal in fact. While Grace Kimball, to turn to her as you did to avoid our question if Mayn is armed, also flew east having acquired already her vista of history: for it is obvious to anyone who knows women that whatever she felt some years later the dark morning she broke Lou’s egg against the sink and her heart came up — or was it his? — in her mouth — Kimball when she first fled east and well before she met her already imagined husband, already had her vista of history intact if only in essence and by intuition.

That is, without analytic thought, without the study of books which is known in women to bring on Bright’s disease, the interrogator jokes, we think (except to another voice submerged to the point of virtual disappearance in us it’s not a joke, and this voice, a woman, by historical convergence, sighs in recognition of someone whose words she knew so well she was like a friend to her, who died of Bright’s disease far away in another part of the country almost too far to make the trip until one day she elected to think only of herself and like a desperado covering his tracks did take that trip and went away).