Andrea Dworkin: Ice And Fire

had to be a cowgirl because I had to wear a skirt, with fringes,

and a blouse, with fringes, and the cowgirl hat and the gun

and holster didn’t entirely make up for it. It was my favorite

thing to wear, even though we never did play cowboys and

Indians. It had more to do with wanting to be a gunslinger and

learning how to draw fast and shoot straight. I would practice

my draw for hours at a time but no one would go along with

me and have a gunfight. I would draw my gun on my father

and my brother, who would be wrestling and tickling on the

living room floor. There was vague disapproval of the gun in

the air and so I would shoot it outside and it would make a

huge noise and I would gleefully shoot round after round of

caps, a red paper that sort of exploded and burned. I had a

rifle too and boots. But it was the gun I loved, and Annie

Oakley. She wore a skirt and was a crack shot and once we

went to see her at a live show with Gene Autry. I wanted to be

her or Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, not Dale Evans, not

ever, not as long as I lived.

*

The wooden cage would hang from the telephone pole, hoisted

by a rope or a piece of clothesline. It would dangle there, the

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girl inside it not easy to see. They would push her around

before they put her in the cage. Sometimes they would tie her

hands. The wooden cage hung over the black asphalt lined by

garages, some open, some not, and garbage cans, all the fathers

at work, all the mothers inside the houses or in the front on

the steps visiting. It would be desolate on the asphalt, boys all

huddled around the cage with the one caught girl, and slowly

girls converging back there from all the directions they had

run in, some coming back from a long way away, having run

and hidden, run to the very edges of the boundaries of our

street or having run up and down the back ways and in and

out of garages, avoiding boys, hiding from them, and then

enough time would pass, and they would dare to drift back,

lonely perhaps, thinking enough time had gone by that

someone else had been caught or the game was over, and there

would always be the one girl surrounded by boys being pushed

into the cage and the cage being hoisted off the ground, or the

cage would already be tied up there. And the boys would stand

under it, watching it, watching her, and the other girls would

stay far away, around the edges, each alone, afraid to get too

close, afraid perhaps that the boys would grab them and do

something to them, also lonely, also left out. It was our saddest

game. It never ended right.

*

lt would begin in a blaze of excitement. Someone would say

let’s play witch. Everyone’s eyes would look wildly around,

scanning the street for where the adults were. We were

accomplices in this game. We all knew not to tell. No one ever

talked about this game or mentioned it any other time than

when we were going to play. The boys would get together and

count to ten fast because it was a ferocious game: the chase

was fierce and fast and it had to be close and there had to be

the excitement of being almost caught or having a hard time

getting away and they had to be able to see you and get you. It

wasn’t a patient game like hide-and-seek. It was a feverish

game, and it would begin at a fever pitch of the boys chasing

and you running as hard and as fast as you could but you

wanted to keep them after you as much as you didn’t want to

be caught so you would have to slow down to stay in sight,

and they would divide up going in twos and threes after one

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girl or another and they would hunt someone down but if she

wasn’t the one they wanted they would pretend not to see her

finally hiding or they would suddenly turn and run after

someone else or run in another direction pretending to run

after someone else and in the end they would all have circled

the same girl, whoever they had decided on, and they would

herd her from wherever they had caught her, sometimes far

away from the wooden cage, and push her and shove her until

they got her to the telephone pole with the wooden cage. Once

they caught her it was against the rules for her not to go with

them anyway. The game slowed down after the first few

minutes and each girl was running on her own figuring out,

independent of what the boys had planned, whether she wanted

to be caught or not: and what to do to get caught or not to get

caught: and did the boys want her anyway? It became a game

of slow loneliness, of staggering solitude: breathless, dizzy, she

would stop running in a fever and turn to see no one chasing,

no one following. Had she won, outsmarted them, outrun

them, or had she lost, they had never really been after her

anyway. She might hide, or stalk the boys, dazzle them by

showing herself, and then they would chase her and she would

lose them again or hadn’t they really tried at all? Or she would

see one in the distance, maybe half a block away, and he didn’t

see her, or did he, and she would start running and running

and congratulate herself on getting away, or had she? Then a

long time would go by and she would get bored and tired and

want the game to be over and wonder where everybody was

and make her way back to the starting point and no one would

be there so she would make her way to the back alley and the

telephone pole, but from far away, toward it but not to it, not

directly walk up to it, always stay far away from it and the

boys, safe, and see the boys huddling around the cage and try

to see who was in it and hear the screams and watch the cage

go up, two or three boys hoisting it while the rest stood under

it and watched, and you could never see who it was. Later

when they let her down you could see. They would untie her

hands and walk away and she would be left there and the

scattered ring of lonely girls would watch. She was the witch.

No one talked to her at least the rest of the day.

♦

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The convent gave us the right atmosphere. We never saw anything except the thick stone walls, and they were thick, not brick or cement, but huge stones like something medieval,

black and dark gray with moss and other hanging things and

shadows falling like God over the stones: and above the high

walls thick leafy green trees all casting shadows and it seemed

like no sky or light could ever get through them, in or out. It