Dear Digby

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  Often I’ve regretted this youthful decision, but since Ollie Mutzner went into a coma not long after the last proposal (though I’ve heard he still does his show!), I think our life together might have been too explosive. We’re both Leos, which has to be faced.

  Not long after my brief fling with Ollie Mutzner, I met a lad who laid carpet for Christ—or so he said. His name was Ronnie Larsk and he was Born Again. I was not. I usually find that being born once is entirely sufficient for a person. So we did not get along well from the first, ideologically speaking, yet I was attracted to his evangelical fire (which sometimes I admit was plain indigestion—the man had terrific Gas) and though I’ve always been an agnostic with cosmopolitan tendencies myself, I respected his Fundamentalist chutzpah. He told me, quite movingly, about prayer meetings he attended where people demonstrated their piety by leaping in the air and calling and signaling for Jesus as if he were some divine headwaiter. He also spent time elaborating on the horrible fates of the Non-Saved, who would be crisped in hellfire like Pork Rinds. He also proposed, though in his eyes, I was in the Dark.

  Ronnie and I broke off one day when he was laying Astro Turf at my place of residence and began speaking in tongues. He caused tremendous upset among the other residents (who began answering him in tongues) and caused further dismay by farting a great deal during this episode—since, as I mentioned, he was a victim of Gas and he had just consumed a typical lunch in our cafeteria (Cuchifritos and creamed corn). By the time the staff got the corridors cleared, he had locked himself in my room (with me), still farting and speaking in tongues. I found myself looking at Ron the way one does when the flame has died. It was becoming harder and harder to fit him into my life. So I struck him a few light karate blows* (about the face and chin, avoiding the gaseous abdomen), knocked him out, and opened the windows wide. It took hours to get Ronnie hauled away (in the meantime, I simply stowed him in a Hefty bag), but the staff wanted to resuscitate him first. I won’t go into it, but it took weeks (as you might imagine) to crank open the airlocks and bring my room back to normal.

  Well. Those are my reasons for never marrying before this. Now here we have a dilemma—we’re up to the present. Here I am, a woman of almost uncontainable sex appeal (and am I cognizant of it, you bet!) and a quicksilver mind and manner. I know the guy who got me would leap tall buildings at a single bound in gratitude. My face is haunting, and I have a pantherlike, smoothly coordinated body. I am brilliant and my conversation is original and scintillating. I know what it would mean to some poor Joe to hook me—PARADISIO! Yet I try to remain objective about it.

  But there’s something more to be considered. Let me put it this way. I know what is repugnant to me in another person, and I am committed to never being repugnant to another. Let me correct that: another blameless person. Naturally, if some bozo, out of nowhere, began forcing his penis into my vagina (under some weird trance or hypnosis), I would try very hard to be repugnant to him.

  I would feel completely righteous if I suddenly came to (from the hypnosis) while he was shooting his sperm into my vagina—to eliminate him.

  What right do these types have to go around hypnotizing women and blasting their seminal fluid up them? I’ve had my fill of this sort of thing in my life, and to deliver death to just one of these violators of my precious body would be the apex, the shimmering peak of my life. Think about it, would it not be of yours?

  These attackers come out of the mist—sometimes in satanic garb and sometimes in doctor’s uniforms—the average unsuspecting female has to be eternally vigilant.

  You see, my underwear is my witness. I’ve been taking the time to sniff my panties a lot lately and, lo and behold!, I noticed that they reek of seminal fluid! What does this mean? It means, I suspect, that someone has been coming into my room to hypnotize me and pump huge quantities of sperm into my vagina. Then the perpetrator leaves me, spread-eagled there on the carpet, with seminal fluid pouring out from between my legs.

  I’ve never seen these predator-fiends, but that’s the way they work—you’re hypnotized, conk-ola—then they hook up their pumpers.

  I know what you’re thinking: This woman does not like men. Wrong. I simply do not like the male member in my kit bag if I don’t want it there. Got it? Simple enough to understand. The point is—I just don’t want wet sperm trickling down my thighs every five minutes. I don’t want to walk around all the time with a womb full of seminal fluid—or various strange penises—if I don’t have to. It’s a free country. If the lady is out for the count, don’t stick it up. Simple enough to understand.

  I love my room. It’s quite beautiful, on the sunny side of the building with yucca and spider plants in the window. I am happy and peaceful in it. But, after the other night, when I awoke and felt seminal fluid gushing out of me, I put a big sign on my door:

  WARNING LOCAL PENISES: ARMED VAGINA BEYOND THIS POINT

  Hypnotic rape is no fun. I added a p.s. to my sign stating that Basil Schrantz was the only man who would now be allowed to enter my room. I like Basil. I am fairly sure that he has no seminal fluid at all. Naturally, I do not wish to marry him. However, he is a helpful fellow who understands my strong sexual convictions and never asks about them. He comes in to talk and help me redecorate occasionally. I have my bed in different places: sometimes in the middle of the room, sometimes against the wall. The windows let in sun and cooling air, and I have the radio playing my favorites, which include Don Ho and Mabel Mercer. I put up a mirror or two occasionally, but not too many, because my beauty is distracting. I have a bulletin board with Peanuts cartoons and some of my favorite sayings from Socrates to R. D. Laing, and in the corner sits my desk and typewriter, where I write my letters. What else do I need? NOT SEMINAL FLUID!

  I wasn’t born yesterday! (Only the Born Again can say that!) I was born thirty-five years ago, and I know a gnocchi from an orange hat! Wait a minute—God’s talking to me. She says that I would be thumb-sucking, drooling insane to ever want to change my life by matrimony. So now you have it: I enjoy the occasional companionship of Basil Schrantz. Once in a while, I even shake up a mean martini, which I share with God, and most important, I stand up valiantly and alone against the threat of seminal fluid. Got it? That’s me in a nutshell!

  So marry? That would be dumb, wouldn’t it? The day I waltz down the aisle with some sperm-shooting yahoo, they can declare me a loony, put me in a hula skirt, and give me a free ride to the popcorn factory. I’m too far ahead of them all. I think of myself as a SIS cover: standing here in my room in full karate garb, the sun shining behind me, standing next to the warning on my door against the violators of my precious body—my beautiful eyes, hair, teeth, breasts, yes! yes!—IRIS MOSS, primo representative of the primo single state!

  Hoping to hear from you soon,

  Iris Moss

  I could see Iris on the cover of SIS myself, sitting in her lovely room with a pair of underpants over her head, waving the paneled radio on the shelf broadcasting from Pluto, plants percolating in their pots, the president’s goonish photo smirking out from the bulletin board tacked with Snoopy figures, withered balloons, a rain of construction paper exclamation points, yellowing articles clipped from SIS. Seminal fluid.

  Dear Iris,

  SIS can’t help you. SIS has the utmost sympathy for most bodily secretions, but alas, little tradition of dealing with seminal fluid. I too know, as an individual, what it’s like to feel happy, fairly content with one’s life, independent, etc.—and still feel like one is getting secretly fucked over. That’s why I can’t really help you but can suggest only vigilance. Smoke a cigar after, smile enigmatically, stay awake. You can fight this, Iris.

  A large blue-and-green Nike, with a foot in it, appeared on my desk. The shoe and foot belonged to Minnie White-White-Goldfarb.

  “Editorial meeting, Willis.”

  I looked up at her, hunched worriedly over her raised bent knee, which was dimpled like a backside. She wrapped her arms a
round the knee, a large anxious Germanic woman with a big long nose and two huge yellow braids like a Wagnerian heroine.

  I felt great pity for Minnie White-White-Goldfarb because she had more names than anyone I’d ever known. In her heart, Minnie’d felt obligated to hyphenate herself and her spouse, each surname like a chapter of a mystery novel. She’s married a man named White—her own name had been White too. She could not bear the thought of “disappearing” into her husband’s Whiteness. “It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt,” she was fond of saying. “How did she know which Roosevelt she was? When people asked for Eleanor Roosevelt, how could she determine if they wanted the Eleanor Roosevelt she was before marrying FDR (and maybe secretly still was!) or the Eleanor Roosevelt she was after! How could anyone tell if she really changed her name?” It was a hard question to answer. Minnie had finally solved her dilemma by keeping both names, her own and her husband’s. She was Minnie White-White for a long while. Then her first husband was electrocuted in the bathtub when the answering machine fell into the bath water. “He’d put it right on the ledge above the tub,” Minnie recalled sadly. “So he could monitor calls and pick up if he wanted. It was terrible—when I came in, the machine was half-floating, half-submerged, and the recorded message kept repeating: “Greetings! This is Minnie White-White” (“and her hubby, Endor L. White!”) “Guess what? We’re not available to answer your call right now. …” She said the beep sound, like a drowning dolphin’s shriek, still haunted her dreams. After an appropriate period of mourning, Minnie married Amiri Goldfarb, the Arab-Jewish owner of the electronics parts store where she took the fatal answering machine to be fixed. They divorced a year later, but I’d heard rumors that a new name was about to be attached like an invisible Leggo to the series, the little arms of Goldfarb reached out for closure.

  “This is an extremely happy time for me, Willis,” she said. She looked alert but sad, as if a bad boy had put ice down her back. She began to cry.

  I handed her a tissue. “Why?” I asked. I put Iris aside.

  She cleared her throat. “I’m getting married. I’m marrying a wonderful guy. Salt of the earth. Get this: a Unitarian minister who plays mah-jongg and loves salsa!” She fumbled with a wad of Kleenex and blew her nose with a great beep.

  She gave me a baleful look. “Gerard Biskell Rutgers-Oblonski.” She waited for a reaction.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  She cried softly for a while, then added: “Names are so easy for other people. They give up their history so readily, just sign a marriage license and all those years as somebody else are gone. I can’t do that.” She looked at me as if I headed the name-erasing conspiracy. “My fiancé’s mother is English, his father is Polish. They wanted to preserve both strains.”

  She put the tissue back in her pocket. The six phone lines at the front desk, where she was supposed to be sitting, were lit up and squawking.

  “God, I’m sick of names,” she bellowed suddenly, and pulled her rubber sole, screeching, from my desk top. “I think I’m just going to call myself Number 208 or something.”

  “Why don’t you just use your own name?”

  “My own name? No woman owns her name! Anyway, my name was and is White, the same as my first husband. What good does that do me? I don’t want to go back to that name, but I don’t want a three-page driver’s license either.”

  I pointed to the stack of letters on my desk, Iris’s included.

  “Here are some people with real problems.”

  Minnie shrugged and turned back to her phones.

  “Yeah—but they’re all crazy.”

  I sighed. The door to the Situation Room was opening and closing, editors wandered in, carrying notepads and flowered plastic coffee cups. I hurried in, late. Holly Partz, our editor in chief, had already begun to talk. I stumbled into a chair; I coughed loudly. Holly looked at me with exaggerated patience. I looked back at her. She was beautiful and brilliant, and she had invented SIS, then shared it with everyone. I hated her.

  “Yes, Willis,” she said. “What is it?”

  “I think I’m going crazy.”

  There were boos and groans. Someone threw a crumpled napkin at me.

  “C’mon, Willis, let’s not start this again!”

  “I’m going out of my mind,” I said. “I cannot go on reading this stuff”—I waved some letters—“every day and stay sane.”

  “Willis. Take off your rabbit ears and the tux,” said Marge Taggart. “You’ll stay sane.”

  I looked at Marge. She was six feet tall and handsome. She smiled at me and winked.

  “Marge, I think this job is for you. You’ve got the temperament.”

  “Willis.” It was Holly—she was tapping her ballpoint against her big, square-faced watch. “Every issue your Letters section gets better. The letters you print are perfect, and your responses are funny and informative. What do you—”

  “It’s the ones we don’t print I’m talking about. There are so many, I think we ought to publish some of them. I have a letter from a woman in Skyhigh, Utah, who thinks she’s a Female Savior of the world. I’d just as soon pray to her as the Pope, wouldn’t you? I’d like to say that in print.”

  Holly sighed. “Willis, what is your point? You know we can’t print those letters.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why. The people who write those letters aren’t well. Why would we make fun of them, humiliate them in a national magazine?”

  “They wouldn’t be humiliated. We would, right? We can’t really admit that there are this many crazies out there who are responding passionately to our magazine. Isn’t that it? And why can’t our magazine also be for the woman who’s gone a little crackers, alone in the rec room at ten A.M., eating Ding Dongs, getting weird?”

  Page Kenney, my best friend, that traitor, gave me a bored look. “Willis, please sit down and shut up. Nobody cares about this but you.”

  “I know that, Page, thank you. That’s what concerns me here. Why is it none of you are interested in a woman who is convinced that while she sleeps, strange men enter her and pump her full of seminal fluid?”

  “Seminal fluid,” said Marge Taggart. “Yuck.”

  “This woman wrote to SIS in response to your article, Marge, ‘Why I Never Married’—she agreed wholeheartedly with you; she feels you think alike.”

  “Well, that figures, doesn’t it? The whole point of my article was seminal fluid.”

  “I think Willis has a point.” Everyone turned and looked over at Lupé Reyes. Lupé kept to herself a lot; there was a story around that she had been a child prostitute pimped by her own father. She came to the editorial meetings and sat silent most of the time. There was another rumor that she belonged to W.I.T.C.H., which stood for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. It was, as far as I knew, a kind of street theater group. I heard they did things like spray-paint SEXIST PIG on girlie posters and send dog poop quiches to Bobby Riggs.

  “These so-called crazy women have a right to be heard.” She got up and walked over to Marge and leaned against her chair. “A lot of people think Puerto Rican women are crazy—did you know that, Marge?”

  “No,” said Marge. “I didn’t know that.” She glared at me.

  Lupé turned and looked at me too, a long, dark look.

  “We can trust Willis to come up with something we all need to read about—isn’t that right, Willis?”

  I looked back at her, suddenly unsure. She smiled at me, very slow, very deliberate.

  “I’d like to get back to our agenda here.” Holly was standing on one foot, tapping her watch.

  “I’d like to come up with a couple letters for the column,” I said, “nothing shocking, just a glimpse of alternative approaches to reality.”

  Holly frowned and shook her head. “You worry me, Willis. But go ahead.”

  Then she turned back to her agenda, which included nominations for the next cover: so far we had Margaret Thatcher and Tina Turner. I waved at P
age and slipped out for a drink of water.

  Betty Berry was sitting at my desk. She was dressed, as usual, more oddly than me, and that was saying something. She looked like a collision in a boutique between Germaine Greer and General Westmoreland—she wore a kind of diaphanous dashiki with hiking boots. I never commented on her dress (since I was in no position to), and I’d always assumed her own style reflected some really satisfying personal fantasy. Like mine.

  When I got closer, I saw that she was drinking Stolichnaya right out of the bottle and placed it, chilled and dribbling, right on Iris Moss.

  She lifted the bottle as I approached, and I pulled Iris away—there were wet half-moons all over the page.

  “I’m sorry, Willis,” she croaked. “I’m sorry for taking over your desk and spilling on your papers. I’ll get out of here.”

  She made no move, however, and I was forced to sit down in the chair across from my desk. I sponged Iris lightly with an envelope. Betty took another drink.

  “Willis, remember when I called myself Betty Myrtlechild?”

  Not names again, I thought. I couldn’t take any more discussion of names.

  “I just went through this with Minnie. …”

  Betty made a face. “Minnie? Minnie’s trying to annex a personal history; I was trying to escape my history. And give myself another identity.”

  “Your mom’s name is Myrtle, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Betty, don’t get me wrong. But I know everything you’re going to say here. You took your mother’s name because you wanted to be free of the male patronymic and added ‘child’ to designate yourself, then I assume that you went back to your original name because you found Myrtlechild kind of a dumb name.”