Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So without study or research Kimball came to her vista of history when it came to her, that is to go ahead and be it, make it, because it was in her already in the form of an available space that needed only to be managed. But that doesn’t say how she saw it.

It had its funny side.

Funny? asks an unknown child, looking away from its homework screen but still reading — looking up to and from its home — an unknown child, a multiple child. Funny? it asks.

Well, a side beyond the triangle.

We’re doing rotation in class right now.

Well, there you are, honey, you rotate the triangle, never stop rotating it — that’s the funny side, like you go all around a statue so quietly the statue doesn’t see you move so it’s the statue that seems to be turning before your eyes.

I don’t see what’s funny.

Grace’s brother Saturday in the backyard where his mother in exasperation said he belongs, suddenly has nothing to do. (Except be watched by his sister from an upstairs window.) There’s a line drawn (Grace can just about see it) between his offer to help Dad change the oil and Dad’s gruff "You’re too late, I already started," and, at seven-thirty earlier this morning in the kitchen, Grace’s mother’s empty abstract feeling that she must go on to the end come hell or high water discussing a surprise postcard of a giant gorge — a dark cut in the earth — sent from Medicine Bow, Wyoming, by her brother whom her husband objects to because the man doesn’t drink, is unmarried, doesn’t vote, is a trouble-shooter running errands in the wilderness for the Department of the Interior, and probably (a man like that) doesn’t pay his taxes: the postcard said only, here we go again, love to all, Walter: the discussion in Grace’s mother’s kitchen went on beyond breakfast when Grace’s mother interrupted it to say she needed Dad to drive her to do the marketing and he said he would be busy changing the oil and didn’t know how long it would take: that’s one of many, many triangles, some with Grace, some with only one parent, talking about one thing like a postcard maybe meaning something else which like the unused message space around her uncle’s bulletin from Medicine Bow is both something and a nothing, a gap where you fill it in, you dream at night that you have only others to blame, but for what? — you’ll have to go back and dream again to find out for what and Grace is determined enough to and finds in the office in her hometown where she is a draftsman in 1949 that all the love ‘n romance people are getting where she works is in triangles that all depend on her and she wakes up sad, though hungover and rarin’ to go: you say through (by now) your own windshield one Sunday, approaching the municipal lake, that you will have it different and maybe you will send for your brother when you get where you are going, maybe not. But one week Grace sold her little red (for Rarin’) convertible, hugged and kissed everyone So long—

— The triangles you’re talking about were rotating, observes the serious child looking away from its homework; so didn’t they come all the way around?

But Kimball, like the grandmother, must look ahead, insists the interrogator; she would not look back at the communication gap fusing mother-centered and father-centered forms in one disturbing moment of transition, would not reflect upon the triangles coming full circle—

— because, we add, the family circle, less than fullness, boasted—

— boasted? demands the interrogator, boasted?—

— a circumference, chimes the child.

And inside was all that was inside.

Who spoke up then?

No one really.

Boasted? demands the interrogator; up? his voice above but so close his words sting the scalp.

Nobody ever spoke up and said, I’m angry because after your second drink after dinner you’re half asleep; or said, When you go out to fix the living-room shutter that’s banging in the wind that’s sweeping in from the winter fields outside of town and then come back in like you’re in the reading room of the library and sit slowly so slowly with a sigh down into your straight chair there and right away ask if anyone wants an apple, why don’t you never ask me to go out and fix the shutter? or said, What’s it matter if Uncle Walter just enjoys himself in Wyoming, in Utah, in Colorado, let’s eat breakfast for creep’s sake, or said, When did you two have a good laugh together, no strings attached? or said, Let’s get it out in the open, the power in this family derives from what is not quite said and the power resides primarily—

— in, continues the interrogator, the explosive potential of this confusion of two systems patriarchal and matriarchal, such that (says the interrogator acquiring in our language an uncertain seat he’ll damn well sit no matter what olden cities now rumbling and coming unstuck he’s sitting on top of which is definitely something big) from a matrilocal system appropriate to a women-controlled garden-agriculture where men are secondary and gardens are irrigated by the heavens, the exogamy or marrying out of the tribe was Kimball’s which, as she winged eastward, a true Pawnee in her visions, imitated on the contrary the movement of women to the husband’s home territory in a patrilocal hunting culture where the sons continue to live where they know the habits of the game and every inch of the terrain as the sky rotates over it; whereas, though also likewise, the East Far Eastern Princess renamed Rainbow Cloud at the crisis fled on her bird eastward home to her father’s country having disarmed the Navajo Prince and drawn him against her will away from the lands of his home where he later was abandoned doubly to a matrilocal people as strange to him as their multiple structure of small-scale dwelling units, and to the wilderness of her heart’s one-time errands where he could not help casting his shadow, as he moved on. So you see, recedes the interrogator inside one’s very head totaled hole by hole, the question remains, Is Mayn armed? and is dodged if you turn to Grace Kimball, no more an obstacle to our question than her decision that men (the weak sisters) would certainly dream of failure, can keep the power vac of her privately beaten (now late) Dad from taking us wormhole and all on the public horse we also sit to the power vac externalized and tabled (is it 1974, is it the talks in Vladivostok?) in the form of an accord holding numbers and the paper they’re printed on together in the mind — giving the legs under the table a good deal of latitude: frankly if in the preceding two years three thousand warheads have been added, we have to live after all, so we’ll grant ourselves increases in this area within reason while we still set definite upper bounds, which, early in the eighth decade of the century in question, Jim Mayn, for whom the story itself made an inflationary spiral, recorded as a middling-conscientious newsman who doesn’t go in for predictions while in suspecting that history made little sense even as random intermittence (some overheard economist’s phrase) found more to interest him in the margins, in old and new weather, in it, indeed, those real outer screens, spheres of magnetism, and molecules-turned-ions, and ozone, yes weathers that lid our radiance and in the grandeur of their checks upon us inspire our immortality.

Which prods us to recall what matrilocal-patrilocal adventures the interrogator-persuader, a gross outsider, reported of the grandmother and/or Princess between the two of whom we pivot our eyes back and forth as fast as he interrogation chair our eyes are riveted in lets them, and prods us to retort blindly, Isn’t that putting the horse before the cart? (while we feel him behind us in the ballpoint vibes we’re getting from the ground up writing down enthusiastically as a local idiom new to him). But is it he or really us all now asking, Why did this grandmother-to-be, Margaret, turn out to be such a rather strict Victorian parent? And care less and less for that family paper? The answer is that this did not happen right away, but is that a good answer? And when her own daughter Sarah went to France the summer of 1920, why did she not let her stay the half-year she so longed for?