Now—go back to Schubert. Because when I see him sitting there like that, that’s what starts going through my head like a freight car. Idgety idgety. And right behind it, on and off like a three-way flash bulb, the Frick. Plus a rhyme for that.
Schubert’s not doing anything though; he’s not really a pervert. I can’t even tell whether he’s looking at me. Those eyeballs are no cinch to pinpoint. What they’re saying to me doesn’t need it. “Baby,” I’m saying to myself, “will this be your trauma from now on!”
Well, it will in a way. Only, on comes another complication.
I hear birds. And that’s the eeriest. Because they seem to be behind me—you know that little shuffling sound they make? Yet I can see quite well, they’re all out front. Twenty or so birdcages, and not a tweet out of them. Then I freeze rigid, all right. Because that bird shuffle is strictly to my rear. Maybe like Saint Joan I’m hearing voices, and who could blame her in my case? Or maybe it’s me kicking myself. But then, standing very still, in a pause Schu maybe takes for pose, it gets to me.
These birds wear perfume.
Bye-bye nothing! Behind me, I’ve got my whole background.
I even fancy I can hear Gran. “Dark as the inside of a cow here,” she’d say, “Queenie, watch that lollytrap between your legs; this time o’ night the mice come in.”
I can’t hear Oscar. He’s only a father-image. And he’s said enough.
Even my own little music man has quit. Mum’s the word, he says. Or Mom.
Because—by the twenty-dollar-per-ounce smell behind me I’ve got four live ones standing ready to do right by me: a muguet ingenu, a southern gardenia, a triple essence of tuberoses from the pharmacia attached to the sacristy of Santa Maria Novella in Firenze—and a Joy.
When I get to this part of my life is when Father and I disband for the moment, on a technological argument. Over whether the girls should have gone on standing there.
He says, “For every poor soul who shows himself, there’s ten women willing to watch.”
I say, “That’s unfair, Father, there’s that many more of us. And we only want to compare.”
He says the pure in heart will take what comes to them.
I say, what would I be doing in his study if I was pure in heart? I only came to tell him why there’s no envy in it.
“If you were to show me yourself, Father, and I looked—who would be wrong?”
It’s then he stands up quick from his chair and gives me a blessing for free, saying he’ll take the penances. Saying the Dominicans have done all they can for me. It’s time for the Jesuits.
So I think, maybe just as well. Father is very pure in heart.
…And I don’t mind moving up. Though I see even a monsignor doesn’t shut the study door. The view from up here is very impressive though. All those clouds…
So is Schubert impressive by then. He doesn’t seem to see or hear or smell. He’s in the highest state of self-preservation I guess a man can be in, except one. Which he’s clearly counting on me to join in on. And I’m giving it the more serious thought.
Not with the girls there, of course. But one waggle of my hand behind me, signaling, “Bug off!” and they would’ve, I know them. They’re only waiting for me to make my value judgment. And I’m thinking, at last Queenie, going on seventeen you poor doubtful titivated creature—you’ve got it made.
I’m even moving toward him now, breathing hard, like what you do for breastplates, but this is natural. And Schubert is closing those eyes. What tact!
And me, I’m exalted. Monsignor, a man without envy of himself is a wonderful thing! But with a light on it, it’s a sight almost out of imagining. In such a holy moment, what can a girl do but kneel?
Monsignor! I’m only admiring. And I am a little nearsighted….And you’re not nearly so pure-hearted as Father Detwiler….
So, well, the rest of it is all theology.
Really? I thought maybe the hierarchy mightn’t have the time.
So, well…we both know the text for the situation, don’t we.
Sure you do. Pride goeth before. It was Gran’s favorite.
If she’d been there—Gran had a heavy foot and a low boiling point—would even that have headed him off? I wonder. Because by then, I think that boy knows he has a larger audience.
Maybe he even figures scoring with all of us instead of one will bring the end of the world that much nearer.
Oh men in that state are so naked to the blast, my heart still goes out to him wherever he is—as long as he’s not with me.
Because five little prideful words come out of his mouth—and he’s ruined. Let that be a lesson to me. Ruined by talk.
You won’t have more obscenity here? Monsignor, you’re not getting it. Not from him. You have to remember what Schubert has behind him. His whole background.
So listen now. Just listen to the envy of that boy.
“And it’s not circumcised either!” says Schubert Fish.
Well, I told you. Four girls suddenly giving out a terrible cackle, in perfect attack like they’ve been trained for it, it’s a cultural shock. Followed by two dozen canaries, miscued by the noise, who are off on what sounds like a mixed chorus of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” and “I Love You Truly.”
Ah, a man in the pure state of pride is so vulnerable. You can see it by only one votive light.
The girls stop laughing on the double of course. The birds trill on with a second round of “Sunrise,” that’s what canaries are for. But one round was enough.
Pride goeth, before a fall. And what’s worse than the kind of fall you have to stand up and button your fly over?
So now Schubert and I are seeing each other straight. Looking, looking, like we’re at the end of a year-long affair. Or over the summer, when you get back to school. He knows I’m no Hapsburg. I know he’s no trauma a girl can’t get over. We stand there, background to background. As I say to Oscar later, gender’s just a ditch with two sides….As I say to Oscar!
As I say to myself, still stuck there; Queenie, you can go to college just as you are. Virginity’s just a matter of taste.
Then I look behind me.
There they are, the pretty beasties who reared me, their teeth still gleaming with a fearful glee. Four hearts without envy. And times four—a heart.
Alba’s face is all smeared with contralto feeling.
And Nila? What’s that other stupidity, oozing over her like honey?
Martyne’s the mean one, but you can see, even she’s got a secret she’ll guiltily keep.
Aurine’s the one always conquers her laughter first. Leaving her up on her haunches, with that lion face both genders love. Because wherever she is, is the kingdom, the evening’s eye. And the aunt with whom you can communicate.
She sees I know it now. The secret that keeps women silly. Suppressed laughter. There has to be a real detour around laughter, in any loving woman’s life.
So, when I motion them “Bug off!” they go. It’s not for nothing I was brought up by daughters of joy.
I guess that, by nature, I come of the same self-confident school: open-face disorder about my civic rights, and a ragbag confidence in the gentlemen. In what they can’t do as well as what they can. After all, we’re there, so to speak—in readiness. The gentlemen have to show themselves.
So there I am, Monsignor, left with the answer to a simple question I never had the wit to ask. The one you men try to keep us from asking.
What have we women got between the legs, that you haven’t?
What have you men got, that we haven’t?
I can tell you, Monsignor, because you can’t use it. And you needn’t look so worried at the door.
You’re temporary. We’re permanent.
And that’s where the ditch comes in.
O Monsignor.
You have the envy.
We have the heart.
And I still have Schubert. Who I see I’ll have to help do what he does best. T
o pass on.
“Oh, Schubert,” I say, “is there anything I can do? What can I?” I mean it. And I don’t laugh, until later.
He draws himself up. I see what those eyes are looking at. Sin, Father.
“I’ll have a cup of coffee,” he says.
I hear later he has three. After which he spends the night there. But not with me.
All the way home, which I sneak back to alone, me, I’m hearing a tinny little tune from my music man, like in three-quarter folk. I lost my cher-reee, a-what, a-was, a-it?
So I go home to my deck chair, and spend the next few nights on my rooftop, more or less in the company of a very important personage. Who has looked after me better than I think.
Sure close the door, there’s a draft. But I love your view.
Wha-at? Why Oscar’s my father-image! Why that would be incest—what a drag. It would be like doing it with you.
Monsignor. Some cherries are in the mind.
Oh, it’s okay. I guess after those parties of mine, I do feel rather intimate with Him. Father Detwiler thought I meant Freud…
I suppose I kind of rushed, Father, when I went back. ‘I’ve got a secret; it’s only the world’s—but who can I tell it to?’ That’s the feeling. Everybody else I know is so weighed down with gender…Isn’t that why they keep you celibate?…And after three days and three nights wrestling with it almost like whoozit in the desert—although this is overlooking Central Park—I wanna tell somebody. That I understand why God keeps on hanging around.
What I want to do is dedicate a word of thanks to Him. In somebody’s hearing. I see by now why all my sessions on cloud-deck, from way back when and no matter to who, are really prayers to Him. But this one is like from the whole female world…
So I run over there, bang on the door and slide on my knees before Father can say Succubus!, which he is clearly geared to, or is it Incubus!, and bawl, “BlessmeFatherforIhavesinned”—because that’s the formula. And I must’ve, somewhere.
But right off, Detwiler and I are off to a misunderstanding. Not every girl’s confession is about getting laid.
So there it is again. Envy. Right in the church.
I say, “That’s my trouble, Father. When I sin it’s never what people hope. I’ll come to you the minute it is, though. I’ll even get in the box.”
But he’s a good man, he hears me out just as I am, only near the end he gets nervous. He says maybe I should go higher than him.
I say, why—when it appears like women are already in conference with the top?
He says certain special sins are reserved for bishops to hear or even the pope; maybe meanwhile I could confess over again some old mortal sin from which I have previously been absolved, he’s not too sure yet what my present one is; do I aim to confess or to brag?
I say why not both? And whatever I could’ve been absolved from way back then in my childhood, at my age now it might be ridiculous.
Finally he says to come to you and tell you exactly my theology, you deserve as much news and cheer as anybody, and are like the half-head of the diocese. And might even want to take notes on it.
Which is all right with me. When women really level—it’s not bullshit.
Okay, I’ll watch the clouds. You watch the door.
“Father,” I say. “Penis theology is a leaning tower. The education of virgins ought to be left to God.”
“…Whatever else are women thinking of, Monsignor, with all that clutter we have, sends up a flag once a month to remind us as far as coils and wires and power supplies go, we’re built like a Con Ed substation inside?”
“Screw those analogies about the bees and flowers,” I say, “that’s what’s almost done for us. Ditto the Amazons, with their bows and arrows, when all their ordnance is already built in. What’s a bomber pilot say when he lets go? With a heart full of envy, no doubt: ‘I dropped an egg.’”
…So I say, “Father, I go to college with some conviction. I mayn’t know what my own expression inside is yet, I say. “But whatever I am personally, the universe has sure declared confidence in me. Why, Father, what can even a radical feminist do for the rights of females that Our Lord hasn’t already done for her, even before she opens her legs?”
And when she does, Monsignor!
“Now, Father,” I say, “I want you to visualize them out there, four hundred million or whatever it is. The female population of the world. The entire roll call, all present and answering. All of them lying in front of you with their legs open. But you’re a man of God, you can see straight up to their hearts. And what do you see if you are as objective as Him? Not sainthood; He’s made that unnecessary. Hearts, when you get right down to them, without carnal covet of any kind. People who have the power plant don’t need to have power complexes. Hearts full of laughter, aren’t they, Father? Okay girls—snap shut. Stand h-up! And Thank the Lord.”
Oh Monsignor, we’re helpless creatures, we can’t help ourselves really. Why do we have hearts without envy? Because God is for cunt.
THANKS!
TWO
Queenie:
POLITICAL FUCK
NINE WEEKS HERE AT the Hencoop, over fifteen hundred girls—what a life-force!—and like eggs in an incubator, every one of us has grown up.
Chicked!
In fifteen hundred ways, though Oomph says trends are boringly discernible.
Our hair is standing straight up with the electric shock of the new world.
Or the outside one. Or the inside one. Whatever we didn’t have before.
Got no time for cloud-confession now, or any of the old kinds; everybody’s talking.
Which Sherry says is great for sanity. Nine times out of ten, if you overhear yourself say something freaky it isn’t even yourself.
Any private thoughts you have here have to be strong enough to be written in prison on toilet paper and sent to the President. And no thoughts are any good here unless you lay your bod on the line with them.
Not in the college, not in the country. One hundred million people in the U.S.A. alone are watching us, even when we’re not watching ourselves, and everything a college girl does is a significant act. Our indignation is endless, righteous and scrumptious—and nobody said that; I overhear that line all by myself.
Our difference from other good people is that we stand ready to authenticate ourselves in action at any time.
Where our brain goes, our bod goes. Or ought to. To Cuba or to bed.
We come to college to educate.
And the faculty is learning a lot.
And all of it is only fifty blocks from home.
And this is my term paper on myself; the bod comes later. According to who this document gets submitted to.
“Oh, it’ll go to a who——” Oomph says, “don’t you think we all will?” Both of them are reading it. Sherry says, “Who else? A whom is a Jerk.”
Our charm for each other is that we could say “Just like me!” to each other fifty times a day, and yet we are totally different. Like Sherry will say, “Connecticut is the most American part of America.” By which she means the worst of course; she comes from there. And Oomph, who’s from L.A. via Phoenix, will say, “Another goddamn Eastern snob.” I’ll say, “Girls, whatever, just don’t let’s be doctrinaire.”
Unless we find a doctrine we like of course, which each of us apart from the others is secretly pursuing.
Secret here means something we all know.
Meanwhile they’re trying to cure me of saying “Girls.” And it’s for sure we’re all being cured of something. “Join up,” Oomph says. “Smart as we are, they’re not telling us yet of what.”
Oomph already has a reputation. With the faculty because she is fourth-generation Hencoop, and all of them hellers who have subsided proudly into private life; she says her mother is a little overdue at it but her grandmother was a grande dame before forty.
With us, she’s the author of a four-line poem called “Intro” which one underground cri
tic called the best word on coitus since “Post coitum omne animal tristum est”—and which appeared on the masthead of her school paper all last year.
“My maiden effort,” she says. “After that, what that oink calls ‘coitus’ took over.”
Sherry says moodily, “We three all have the fault of language.” Having the fault of something is a Christian Science phrase; her great-grandmam helped found the Monitor. And she and Oomph have heard a few co-authored limericks from me.
“The real truth about college,” I say, “is that everybody has a background.”
Oomph’s problem is that with every school she’s kicked out of she gets brighter and brighter; she says maybe at Hencoop at least the second part of the process will stop.
She says she’s the type even if she ends up on a death wish, something practical will come of it, she can’t help it; she will probably survive as the head of a large department store which she will totally transform, maybe with the primitive clothing and animal furniture that modern depressives love.
She can certainly regularize any plan of ours by merely listening—and a couple of practical suggestions. At present she is writing one term paper on “Brute Parallelisms in Modern Thought” and another on “The Turn of the Screw,” using the modern meaning for Screw all the way. We are helping her with them because she can’t spell. But boy-oh-boy, can she analogize. She says so herself.
Oomph’s poem is:
I (eye) am an auk
Who fucks
An I (eye)
Who auks.
So you see she is probably right about “whom.”
So here I am, happy as a lamb for the slaughter, a member of the most influential set in the school even though it’s the largest—not the ones who are in but the ones who are out. Oomph’s mother, who we call Mrs. O. because she hates it but would like to be den mother to us, says in her day the majority didn’t give itself the airs of a minority, but we seem to want everything. “Anyway, you’re all pretty enough to go around as grubby as you please.” Which she really means; Oomph says she’s quite far forward. Meaning for a mother, too much.
On dirt—as Mrs. O. bitchily points out, there are still divisions among us. Between the ones who wash under the armpits and in all the private places presumably, no matter how fiercely street-stained their feet are—“and the ones who stink all through for the sake of whatever revolution is for today.” Like any stool pigeon, she’s half right. Among the first kind, the really classy dilettantes and usually the rich ones, I myself know one who can’t go in youth camps or pads—she has to have a bidet. The second class, they have to have everything dirty; even the men they sleep with mustn’t ever shave.
Queenie Page 11