Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

I had heard words of censure about this little place, and at last we were told that it was just ahead of us. To be sure it is just a handsome old Colonial residence and not prepossessing in comparison with the others. And it may be my entire loyalty, but I thought it was just too nice for anything. There is a drawback in that no one is around who appears to have to do with affairs except the colored servants. But we met Mr. Walter Lennox, the Secretary of the New Jersey Commission, who made us feel very much at home and showed us the rooms — banquet room and sleeping apartments — which are not open to all visitors. Of course the first thing we Jersey girls did was to devour the register.

("Crystal rocks?" — "I think that was over in the Horticultural Building. She described it for the Democrat: a pyramid of tropical vegetation in the center towering up to the glass dome, and grassy knolls with fountains and pools; and avenues; and orchids from Short Hills; and under the pyramid a pint-sized model of the Crystal Cave in South Dakota — that’s the labyrinth in the headline.")

It sounded proper, like her report of the light show one night over the Lagoon with one building after another illuminated with hundreds of electric lights, and the searchlight making the water throw gold sparks, and something called "The White City" there in the dispatch but she never talked about it or much about the Fair, Susan B. was there to visit the Women’s Building displaying handicrafts and Mary Cassatt’s mural of modern woman "plucking the fruits of knowledge and science," Margaret declined an invitation to attend the opera in Milwaukee because she had only just met the people who asked her, who were from Madison, Wisconsin and had an Irish name: a vivid correspondent but then in the next weeks an errant daughter. But the white city under the lights fulfilled "the most alluring dreams anyone ever had, with John Philip Sousa’s band playing dreamy Spanish airs, and, later, car after car passing with people hanging on like swarms of bees." ("I can see them." "Bless you, baby, so can I — one foot on, one foot off. T hear Mark Twain is here, but no one has seen him, which is hard to imagine,’ she wrote, I remember. Do you know, she gave a full account of Coxey’s friend’s reincarnation theory: chemistry came into it, and Christ, and Congress too. Newspapers aren’t what they were, thank God, but Easter 1894 the New York Herald gave a thousand dollars worth of clothing to the Coxey marchers though I happen to know one of the California hoboes named Jack London did not wish to change his clothes.") But she really went West, you know, and Florence got sick after they spent a day at the Cudahy Packing Company in Omaha, visiting one thousand hanging carcasses, and the man who gets five dollars a day for sticking ten hogs a minute (a job which in some states disqualified a man from serving on a murder jury), and the children packing smoked meats, and the process of making butterine mostly out of tallow to which is added some small amount of real butter and the small amount of white waxy waste left after the golden mass got pressed from it was used in chewing-gum factories and Margaret reported (!) the only thing not utilized in the whole plant was the squeal of the hog — and what happened then isn’t clear except two other New Jersey people persuaded Florence to go home with them and Margaret remained with a family in Omaha for two or three days more. And then, incredibly, she kept on west. ("She must have had something amazing in her to go away across the country like that — Victorian girl correspondent." "Or she was homing on something amazing she wanted to get. Long skirts, hat — you ought to see the photograph of her on a bicycle I have — she might have bicycled the Colorado trails!" "No.")

Oh she came back; but she went to Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, well I told you we don’t know where all she went. It’s in the dispatches. ("You mean you haven’t read them all? I guess I can understand that, Jim— Jim, dear.")

Margaret had her own stories when Jim was eight, ten, eleven, twelve. ("You don’t pretend to know much, do you? with your Taney decision of ‘37 and your Amboy Railroad" — "and the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago Fair if we can come back to it, where according to her report she saw the Cairo Street with donkeys being ridden by Americans, and a Dahomey Village with fifty mud huts and grinning natives with next to nothing on and a witch doctor who cured rheumatism by cutting a slit down your back and rubbing powder in it—" " — in her long skirt and her hat. .")

Stories she told were something else, and this girl Barbara-Jean hardly interrupted except in some mental way during two sudden fragments offered during dinner before the movie, before the night, before this morning shower of love geysering down from pipes that otherwise rose up from far below, except to say she was disturbed by a feeling of. . traces, the word just came out— traces —traces in him like a grain giving off vibes (sorry), some Thing that’s, some Power that — I sound like Total Woman — you’re not aware of it — it’s—

Was it animal, vegetable, or mineral?

Well, since he asked, it was more mineral, but speaking; and it was acting at long range.

A few voices ask inside Mayn, So what’s to be gotten out of this? — all this matter of Chicago tipping westward and the rest?

Answer: The reason why two places there in the shower (New York shower; New Mexico plateau) laid upon each other a congruence that wasn’t bad at all, unlike the reason behind that merely mental union — a late-model shower head that has taken James Mayn, and others in his recollection, from the future (whoever happens to be with him in the cube of the future) and has done what is done to the two of them by what the shower head at once reminds him of and foreshadows, both; and as the void fades, a porch-rooted father, his own, is saying, ‘77/ tell the world" and that nowadays you get one for the price of two. The son’s earth-odored flame of anger sprouts only in the rest of the body, not in mouth or eyes, and later he remembers this — this ore.

But they fade apart, the girl breathing, Mayn breathing, the girl asking, "Do you ever get high?" — he answering, "I get drunk sometimes, but intentionally." "Do you feel there are things you remember only when you’re. .?" "I do." "Because when I was drowsy this morning before we got in the shower, I started remembering the time I was half asleep, really a long time ago, Cape Kennedy." "Too long…" "Yes, but I didn’t mean that; I meant that you were talking in the dark and I saw your face; why was that?" "Guess it happens." "Very funny. I think it was about Chile, I know it was, but I think it was someone from Chile; and you talked on and on, and I saw you being tossed over your own shoulder: why was that?"

You talk back to her at the risk of an equal falling backward through the foreign arms of that Navajo windbag and that Albuquerque environmentalist woman into the cracked Earth whose storms tossed up Ship Rock into time, a wreck sailing its gray-blown iceberg through a landfall.

"I’ve got some jewelry from out there," she says naked and thoughtful in her bedroom; "the men make it mostly, the women are starting to do some, the poverty gets to look like landscape if your car is running smoothly; it was spring and I saw some dry-painting, the real stuff you’re not supposed to be able to see (perhaps that’s sad), and I wanted to pay the people and one man surprised me and took my money. You know how they mix charcoal and vegetable pigments, I mean isn’t that right? on a background of buckskin or sand, so it’s sometimes called sand painting. It’s ritual, it’s a cure for sickness; when were you there?"