Dear Digby

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  I whistled a little. It was all coming together. I would try these letters on my readers as an introduction, then I would publish more and more in my column (as the demand rose) of the unusual, or I corrected myself, the usual unusual. Letters from the people who were not on the political barricades but had found other ways to deal with their frustrations. It would be fascinating. I could imagine the Letters column as a kind of human event, the soul of the magazine.

  I proofread quickly, tagged the yellow sheets for publication, then turned my attention to the other correspondence, nearly barking in its impatience to be noticed. Now for the dailiness of my job, the task of teaching the lesson of official indifference—the job of slipping the Xeroxed brush-off in the SIS envelope, the job of typing the cute little letter of discouragement or downright bureaucratic censure, refusing the demands for publication, money, legal assistance, home phone numbers and addresses of staff, jobs at SIS or the White House, requests for photographs of editors, spiritual, physical, or psychic solace. Then the decisions re: bulk mail—what to do about the clods of foil-wrapped cheese from Wisconsin, the frozen merletons from Arcadia, the three and a half pounds of Liberated Chili from El Paso?

  I had my seventh letter from the Pissed-Off Chef. She wanted SIS to help her “break into the TV Cook Show racket”—her signature music was going to be the sound of a frying pan smashing through window glass, a loud scream, then a snatch of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. The P.O.C. felt that there were a lot of women out there who hated to cook—and who had built up a lot of anger about cooking. Why these bon vivant, giggling-gourmet types? she demanded, ladling their strawberry soup and mincing basil, with no screaming kids or gerbils underfoot—and why old Julia with her ninety dirty dishes per recipe? She told me she could drop-kick a twenty-pound turkey about fifty yards—from the trunk of the car through the kitchen window and hit the roaster pan. She would stomp ingredients—as opposed to fileting, pounding, pestling. She could flatten five pounds of brisket into a slim patty with her big Spring-o-lator shoes and butterfly a pork butt wielding a double-bladed ax. She tested her linguine for readiness, not by flinging it lightly against a wall. She preferred lobbing fistfuls at a blown-up portrait of Wolfgang Puck.

  I was sorely tempted to contribute a new recipe, which involved fish quenelles and Velcro snaps, but I restrained myself.

  In fact, I tried heroically to remain neutral all morning, but then, then the old devil came over me—I had to write personal answers to some of the stuff. I took out my pen and added a few lines of suggestions about personal hygiene on the same page as the “official” answer to a particularly venomous male correspondent. I typed some of my own recipe hints for the woman who laced her hubby’s Grape Nuts with Nine Lives. I took the rabbit ears out of my drawer and put them on.

  I wrote to Iris again.

  Dear Iris,

  First, I really must mention to you that I am a woman, not a man. My father gave me a boy’s name because he wanted a boy. I’ve never changed it; I’ve grown used to it—but it is often confusing and I apologize for this confusion.

  Second, I would like to publish part of your recent letter to me in the Letters column. We do not pay for the right to publish letters, but I would personally like to thank you for the opportunity to print your opinions.

  Have you made any progress in determining who your sleep intruder is? Since I’ve been Letters Editor here, I have the same sense (as I mentioned to you in an earlier letter) that alien brains are taking over my own thought processes.

  Keep me posted about your progress in this important matter.

  Yrs,

  WJD

  A paper clip hit me in the neck as I sealed the letter. I looked over at Page.

  “You’ve got the rabbit ears on again, Willis. Take them off, they make me nervous about who’s really across from me!”

  I made a werewolf face at her, shrugged, and pulled out the rest of the mail from the sack. There was a medium-sized envelope with what looked like a bloodstain in the upper left-hand corner, and the initials W.I.T.C.H. handprinted over the red stain. Trouble. I put the envelope down and stared at it. My name, on the face of the envelope, was put together from cutout letters. I flipped it over—there was a red wax seal with the symbol imprint, the bio-sign of the female with an eye inside. I opened the envelope, and a sheet of paper covered with cutout words fell out.

  PRINT THE FOLLOWING.

  Dear Letters Editor,

  W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) has a test for every SIS reader. It will allow you to rate your husband, boyfriend, lover, from 1 to 10. It will tell you if he is secretly sexist. Ask him the following questions.

  On the flip side there were some typed questions under the heading SEXISM QUIZ.

  1. You’re on vacation; who would you rather have as a scuba-diving partner?

  A. Dolly Parton

  B. Sandra Day O’Connor

  2. Let’s say God is a woman. How would the world be different?

  A. Churches would have no steeples.

  B. The Pope would have PMS.

  C. Orthodox Jews would thank God every morning they were not born God.

  3. Let’s say your boss is a woman; would you prefer her to have:

  A. Big breasts

  B. Small breasts

  C. Trick buttocks

  D. Joan Crawford shoulders

  4. Let’s say you have prostate trouble. Would you prefer to visit a woman surgeon who looked like:

  A. Madame Chiang Kai-shek

  B. Pat Nixon

  C. Tina Turner

  D. Sylvester Stallone

  At the end of the list of questions, W.I.T.C.H had this comment. “If your husband, lover, boyfriend has seriously tried to answer any of these questions, he is sexist to the bone. How could anyone with sensitivity to women even listen to these questions, ask yourself that!”

  I stopped reading. Print this? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lupé Reyes glide by the drinking fountain. She gave me a high sign; her hand flashed in the sun and I saw the ring with its big inset stone: bio-sign, eye inside.

  Lupé sidled over. She had on overalls, a bandana blouse, and a Walkman.

  “Pretty funny, huh? You wanted to print some extreme stuff. We’ve got more tests for your public to take, after this one.”

  I must have looked horrified, because she chucked me under the chin, then winked. “It’s all in fun, Willis,” she said.

  I smiled wanly at her. “It strikes me as a little hostile, you know?”

  “You don’t want to be hostile, do you, Willis?” She smiled back, her slow-developing smile, dug her finger into her temple and began to rapidly twist a long strand of dark curly hair. It looked like she was making the loco gesture at her own head.

  We stared at each other for a while. The hair, revolving, set up an orbit of tension that multiplied outside the sliding partitions: Someone sharpened a pencil, someone wrapped a package, winding the twine around and around; a tangled phone cord, dangling, unwound faster and faster.

  The hair stopped. “I don’t know,” Lupé said. “I don’t know about you, Digby. I mean, your sense of humor, I thought you were hip.”

  I narrowed my eyes and slouched a little in my chair: a honky editor trying to be hip. No luck. For years I’d applied an exotic rule of thumb that never failed me in determining instantly (in the right situation) if the woman I’d just met was destined to be a Real Friend. Could she sing “A Boy Like That” from West Side Story? I mean, really sing it, the way Rita Moreno did and whoever was the dubbed-in voice for Natalie Wood—with accusing postures, gestures, a heavy Puerto Rican accent—the whole bit?

  A boy like that … will kill your brother.

  Forget that boy and find another!

  One of your own kind, stick to your own kind!

  A boy who kills cannot love.

  A boy who kills has no heart!

  And he’s the boy who gets
your love,

  And gets your heart … very smart, Maria, very smart!

  Everybody knows “When You’re a Jet” and “Dear Officer Krupke”—only a real purist, a certain kind of obsessive spirit, will have the duet by heart, the crackpot intertwining arias of Anita and Maria. Try it, it never fails. Still, though I felt a terrible urge to do so, I found that I could not launch into Anita’s part, I mean really do the Spanish accent, with Lupé staring at me. Somehow, though I knew we liked each other, I doubted she would go with the flow here.

  Lupé drew me back. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you? You’re afraid that I’m going to tell you some really horrible stories about myself, right?” She leaned closer. “Haven’t you heard the one about my father pimping me?”

  “I have.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Now what am I supposed to say?”

  “Hmmmmmm … what should you say? Do you think I oughta write a letter to you, give you a little more time to think up a response?” She threw back her head and laughed, then put her hand to her right cheek, let it slide slowly down, pulling the lower eyelid away from the eye.

  “C’mon, Dear Abby, what advice do you have for me? My poppa dressed me up in a little see-through sundress with teddy bear pins holding up the straps, and he took me into the bars in East Harlem with his other girls. Nueva carne, they called me. Oh, look, do you think that’s awful?”

  She took my face in both hands and turned it around to look directly into her own.

  “Does that make you feel bad? What if I wrote to you, Letters Editor, about my awful, awful father, huh? Or what if I wrote you about my sister, the one he liked to rape—she began to hear voices, but no, it was funny, the voices told her to shit in his shoes and sew his pants shut—you like that kind of thing, don’t you?” She dropped her hands.

  “She sewed his pants shut?”

  “Yeah. Then he came raging after her and stepped into his shoes, which were full of shit.”

  I laughed.

  “You see? It is funny—you’re right! Think about this, everybody at the Women’s House was a laugh riot. You know, either in for boosting Kotex or blowing their old man’s head off—nothing in between! No armed robbery, no break-ins. And everybody inside signed up for Serena de Villaneuve Charm School. I did too—we all wanted the free Ice Blue Secret. Some wanted to smell better and some smashed the little rolling glass balls and made slicers to protect their jailhouse lovers. Corrections freaked out, they hadn’t thought ahead. They never found all those little bits of glass—those with B.O. fought harder to hide the stuff than the weapon makers. They once called a hunger strike protesting the fact that they were not allowed to see an Avon Lady. I swear to you. Women try to be happy at any cost. They have their own justice. They’re crazy, women, that’s why W.I.T.C.H. can save the fuckin’ world, Digby.”

  “I don’t even know what W.I.T.C.H. is.”

  “Your loss. For me, it was W.I.T.C.H. or Felony One. It’s something between jostling and blowing Daddy’s brains out.” She touched the W.I.T.C.H. ring on her finger. “I gotta tell you, if ever anybody in my experience needed W.I.T.C.H., my friend, I’d say you do. Something’s after you.”

  I did listen to what she said; I thought about it. I could feel the dark around her, not a threatening dark, but a night-town badger-black inventiveness. Tricks that keep you sane.

  That night after work I saw the shopping bag lady again, the same sunburned crone I always saw at the corner. I tried to avoid her, but she followed me, singling me out. She puffed and shuffled right in front of me, poking her wizened tortoise face into mine. Her eyebrows bristled like a scholar’s.

  “Ed Koch was down here again, sniffing bicycle seats. I got proof!”

  “Listen, I don’t feel too well,” I said. I gave her a dollar.

  “You’re so cheap you squeak. You know what I mean, dipshit?” She hawked and spit sideways at a passerby. He scowled at both of us and brushed at his overcoat.

  I gave her a five. She checked to see if it was a counterfeit, licked it, then stuffed it in her sock.

  “Hey—don’t walk so fast—there’s somethin’ wrong with you! A bad disease, girlie. I call it Psycho Blood.”

  I gave her another five. I had no more cash. She licked and stashed it, then rattled after me, yelling, “You look like a ghost. Getta tranfusion, dipshit!”

  I turned in at the subway entrance and ran down the steps.

  “GETTA TRANSFUSION IN YOUR HEAD!” she yelled after me. I could hear her repeating it, screeching into the subway well. “A TRANSFUSION, DIPSHIT!”

  I got on the local and felt another darkness seep into me. Like a transfusion: wrong blood type.

  When I got home, I stretched out in the tub with my clothes on (a technique that never fails to relax me) and puffed on a joint.

  Lupé and the shopping bag lady had been bad enough, but the worst part of my day, the real bottom-out, was a letter, one among hundreds in the morning mail. I pulled it out of my pocket.

  I’m writing to you because I’m depressed, and I keep thinking that if I write down how I feel, it will help. I lost my baby a year ago today. I miscarried at six months—he just came too early. His name was Patrick. The doctors don’t want me to get pregnant again—there were some complications. I don’t want to get pregnant again, either. You see, I want Patrick. Can you believe that I’m sitting in the room that was supposed to be his nursery? It’s 3 A.M., I’m all alone in here—they’ve taken out the bassinet and toys—but it’s still white and empty and expectant, it’s still a nursery waiting for a child. The thing I wanted to tell you was that I talk to Patrick when I’m alone like this, in the house, or when I’m driving in the car. I sing him songs, nursery rhymes. I tell him how I feel, I tell him what kind of day it’s been. This is the only comfort I have in the world right now—all the rest of it, my home and my husband, mean so little. You see, I saw him through glass. I got out of bed against orders and got down to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. I saw him mothered by a robot, all the tubes running in and out of him and the respirator pumping his lungs. I screamed and fought, but they would not let me hold him. They wouldn’t even let him die in my arms when that time came. I hit a nurse so hard they had to resuscitate her. My husband told me later he thought I’d lost my mind, he told me he was mortified by the way I acted. I tell you I could have smashed through that glass wall with my bare fists, and I should have, I should have smashed them all out of the way, and held him in my arms—but they got me, they stuck a needle in me and sedated me. Now my husband and my mother have decided I need therapy—because they found out I talk to Patrick. Will I go? Yes, because they’ll make me. Will I give up Patrick? No, never. I will kill myself first. I have a gun. I have pills. Please understand—I’m sorry about this letter. I don’t know you, but I just had to write this down, write it to someone. If they take Patrick from me now, it will be the end.

  Tracy St. Martin

  Erie, Pennsylvania

  I slid down in the tub and inhaled, staring up at the ceiling, up at the ersatz Tiffany lamp casting its stained-glass shadows on the Sistine-ceiling cracks.

  Then I polished off the roach fast and pulled myself out of the tub. I hurried (before I could change my mind) across the living room to the telephone, found the area code for Erie, Pennsylvania, and got long-distance information and a number for an Allan St. Martin on Tamarack Street in Erie. I dialed the number.

  A young woman’s voice, very tentative, answered on the third ring.

  “Hello,” I said quickly. “This is Willis Digby from SIS magazine.”

  “What?” she said. “SIS?” Then there was such a long silence, torn by quick, vicious rips of static, that I thought she’d hung up.

  “Hello?” I called into the night.

  “Yes?”

  “Is this Tracy St. Martin—the one who wrote me the letter?”

  Another long silence.

  “Yes. This is Tracy.”

 
“Tracy …” I glanced at the mirror on the wall, then away, fast, shocked at my wild, semistoned face.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Tracy, I’m calling because I got your letter. … I just wanted to tell you that I’m so sorry about … Patrick.”

  “Oh, God,” she said. The anguish in her voice cut through me. “Patrick.” Then: “Is this a joke? You think this whole thing is a joke, don’t you?”

  “No,” I said, “no. I do not. That’s why I’m calling you up like this. I just wanted to let you know that even if you go to therapy, I think you can hang on to Patrick, you don’t have to let him go. Don’t let him go, fuck ’em all! Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t mean that last comment.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. It sounded like she’d begun crying very softly.

  “Just don’t kill yourself. You see, that would be a bad joke. That wouldn’t make sense here.”

  “Why?” She began sobbing outright. “Why is that?”

  “Because …” I was sweating. God, give me a reason fast, I prayed—I looked at the mirror again, then away. “Because, granted, though it’s a terrible life, one of its few bittersweet rewards is foiling people. I’m not going to give you any of that ‘gaze at a grain of sand’ shit. On the other hand, think of the personal satisfaction you might derive from not letting certain jerks you know stand around at your wake sipping sherry and saying, ‘I told you so.’ I mean, stuff like ‘She was a lovely girl, but she just couldn’t take it; after the baby’s … tragedy, she just went downhill, she folded up like—a little toy fan.’”

  More silence. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I mean, listen, Tracy. I know this comes across odd now, but it sounds to me like you’d rather bump off your husband and your mother than yourself.”

  Amazing. I heard laughter. Another sob. Then more laughter, higher pitched.

  “If I were you, I’d flaunt my grief for a while. I’d talk to Patrick wherever and whenever I wanted to—let them back off for a while. Try to love your craziness while it lasts, you know? Personally, I think we should all have a Holy Crazy Lady we pray to. To save us. I even have one in mind.”