Dear Digby

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “What is she like?”

  “She’s … unusual. Like Mary Poppins on the skids. You know, twenty years later with the shakes, no teeth, and a fright wig. Trying to fly up with her umbrella, but ramming into buses, getting caught in power lines. Poking meter maids in the eye with her umbrella. You know the type. Or I do. Spoonful of acetylene.”

  Tracy was laughing softly and sniffling. “This is so weird,” she said. “I work part-time as a manicurist and I thought I’d heard everything there was to hear. I’m amazed you called me—I’m amazed you even read my letter.” I heard her blowing her nose, a discreet little honk.

  “Of course I read your letter. I read every letter personally. SIS stands for nothing if not systematic,” I squawked, shameless. There was another blast of static. “Besides,” I continued when our connection kicked in, “I know how you feel. I …”

  “I believe I’ve heard enough!”

  A male voice, nasal and twangy, very irritated, split our airwaves.

  “Allan!” I heard her gasp. “How long have you been on?”

  “I picked up at the beginning of this … crank call. I heard everything, Tracy. Including the bit about you writing to SIS magazine!”

  She gasped again.

  “Listen, Allan—” I began.

  “No. You listen to me. You think you can call up my wife and tell her she secretly wants to murder her mother and me? Or that she should flaunt her craziness??? Who the hell are you? I’ll sue your ass!”

  “Allan,” I said, “you sound exactly like Jerry Lewis! Has anyone ever told you that? Your voice has certain subtle intonations—like a drive-in speaker! But I’ll try to overcome that impression! Let’s be reasonable—did it ever occur to you that eavesdropping is creepy and wrong? Violates privacy? Or, even more to the point, that Tracy doesn’t need you to make her feel guilty and crazy right now?”

  “Yeah,” said Tracy, “she’s right.”

  “Get off this phone and out of our lives!” he roared. “What about my privacy?”

  “Stop talking to her like that,” said Tracy. “I don’t like it, Allan.”

  “Tracy, hang up.”

  “No. You hang up!”

  “Well,” I said, “that seems to make a majority here for flushing Allan. If you ask me …”

  “No one asked you. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to hang up this phone and come downstairs, Tracy, and hang yours up too. And then we’re going to turn the phones off for tonight—we’re going to forget about hearing from this maniac. Forever. And if she calls back tomorrow, I’m calling the police. Do I make myself understood?”

  He didn’t wait for our answers—I heard a determined click.

  “Miss Digby, I guess we have to say good-bye now. Thank you so much for calling me up tonight. I feel kind of … better. You’re a very … unusual person.”

  “Thanks, Tracy. I’m feeling a bit perkier too. Like I was saying, I know pretty much what you’ve been going …”

  The sound of arguing voices, then: “Allan, don’t do that, don’t hang up—Allan, you jerk!”

  Then just static again, broken connection—and I was left alone again with my strange, familiar interlocutor, the night. And those other voices, the ones I’ve come to welcome and trust, the ones who talk to me, soothe me, cajole me, get me through to dawn.

  “Lily?” I called. “Lily?” And Lily was there. She told me she’d listened to everything and she loved me. Lily would always love me.

  Three days later, Minnie W-W-G hustled over with a registered special-delivery letter for which I had to sign. It was from Iris Moss.

  Well, well, well, Willis.

  So you are a woman! Ha! I say, ha! The reason I say “ha” is because I have come to the conclusion that my hypnotic-rapist may not be of male persuasion at all, but rather a female. These stains (which I found yet again this morning) may not be semen on my panties, but rather gynecological juice from the she-bitch in heat (excuse my profanity) who gets into my undergarments as I sleep and licks me, rolling her tongue over my cringing clitoris in passionate whorls of lust!

  I have decided it is a woman dressed as a man who sneaks into my room. I see the whole sordid picture. I see that it is not semen that has been pumped into my vagina, it is your own female sexual arousal juices, your lubricants that facilitate sexual congress. You seem to me the type of person who would pursue vibrators and dildos, and in public places.

  Editor of Letters, indeed! I spoke to my friend Basil Schrantz (a gentle man who wants nothing more than to be an Oral Surgeon), and he informed me that he is aware how you gain access to my room at night dressed as a man. He insists on remaining in my room, as I sleep, to protect me. So BEWARE! You will have to contend with Basil Schrantz if you plan to continue your frenzied tonguings of my labia major and minor.

  I will write again, with details. Do not forget: I am on to you! I can have photographs taken! DO NOT PRINT THIS LETTER. Do not print my other letter to you either—I do not authorize it. If you do, I will sue you! (Or charge my professional writer’s fee, which is $625.)

  Do not try to contact me by telephone. I know how you are capable of sending germs (or worse) through the wires.

  Utterly Disagreeing,

  Iris L. Moss

  Iris Moss’s first letter had already been sent to the printer, I picked up my pen.

  Dear Iris,

  Basil Schrantz is wrong. I do dress as a man occasionally—but I don’t fancy unconscious sex partners. Have you noticed Basil dressing up in female garb ever? Most specifically as a nurse?

  Listen, Iris, let’s not be enemies. I have this sense of you and me: that we can somehow help each other. I would like to continue to write to you. I like the thought of writing to a woman who’s such a fighter, at least during waking hours.

  I repeat, with regret, I cannot pay you for your thoughts. Your first letter has already gone to press; I promise this most recent one will not be published.

  Sincerely,

  WJD

  The phone on my desk rang.

  “Willis Digby here.”

  “Hey. Are you the crackpot there who sent me this smartass letter?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Dino Pedrelli. I wrote you frustrated old maids a letter about three weeks ago, and here I get this poison pen response that’s tellin’ me I’m impotent.”

  He said im-poh-tent. I remembered the letter suddenly. Dino the Dong.

  “Yeah. So what do you want from me now? A balloon?”

  There was a choking sound on the other end.

  “Jesus. God. A man goes to work, he picks up a magazine to read on the subway, and he sees all this vicious crap”—he choked again—“he takes the time to write in, to write in to you bitches—and this is the thanks he gets? Tellin’ me I’m im-po-tent?”

  I hung up after Dino described in detail a few of his most recent sexual encounters, after he wept badly, after he’d promised me he would “make me pay” for this transgression.

  “Guess what?” I called across to Page when I’d hung up. “Dino Pedrelli is not im-poh-tent.”

  She frowned and went back to her typewriter. “Impotent, Willis, impotent,” she corrected.

  Four

  GET BACK, THE voice was screaming through the bullhorn. Get back, lie down, keep your eyes and mouth covered. Lie flat, cover your eyes!

  The crowd was stumbling and screaming, a single blinded animal. The tear gas hung in sick orange streamers in the 90-degree air. The police, in their riot gear, kept on coming. I felt a leather hand on my neck—it picked me up by my T-shirt the way a kitten is plucked up by the ruff. I wrenched around to get a look at my manipulator—and got a nightstick flat across the face. I saw the cop’s face—big nose, helmet, mail-slot mouth—in a kind of 3-D ripple: green, red, then, mercifully, black.

  When I came to, I heard someone screaming. I sincerely hoped that it would not turn out to be me. Nothing worse than catching yourself
in a cliché. As it turned out, it wasn’t me, but a fat Mamma-Cass-like woman nearby who had just caught a glimpse of my face. “Look at that, I’m going to faint!” she bellowed to someone. “Look at what happened to that poor girl!”

  Someone else began pressing a cold wet cloth against my nose. I brushed the cloth away and stared up into a blond, sympathetic moon-face. “Ah’m jus’ tryin’ to hep,” she said.

  I tried to retort but found that my lips and tongue seemed sealed together by a powerful mortar. I spit some blood on the grass.

  “I think it’s broken,” I said, or thought I said, pointing to my nose.

  The girl looked mystified. “Come ag’in?”

  I wrestled my bruised tongue once more into speaking position.

  “B’oken. My noth. My noth!” I shouted, losing patience, jabbing my finger at my proboscis.

  The girl smiled beatifically and nodded, adjusting her white armband with the red cross, preparing to move off through the crowd, or what remained of it.

  “Ah’m up heah from Alabama with a blues group. Ah’m jus’ tryin’ to he’p out.”

  She floated off, and I sat up, looked out over Pennsylvania Avenue. The crowd had been effectively dispersed, except for a few bloody hangers-on, like me, a few last-worders. Twenty minutes or so before, ten thousand people with banners reading: OUT OF VIETNAM NOW, STOP THE BOMBINGS, HO, HO, HO CHI MINH: VIET CONG’S GOING TO WIN, and WITHDRAW DICK had been milling in front of the White House, chanting, snake-dancing, smoking dope, waving their placards.

  We had all come down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to protest a brunch meeting that sat President Nixon down with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and some of the Vietnam Hawk generals, including Westmoreland. They were planning more bombings, as everyone knew; the meeting was obviously not a high-level strategy discussion—those were never witnessed—but their arrogance in coming together in such an upfront manner, with such public disregard of the nation’s mood about recent war developments, had triggered this spontaneous demonstration in front of the White House—and as far as possible, or accessible, the White House lawn.

  I had been in the vanguard of the Lawn Streakers—Rennie Meyer, my boyfriend (long since vanished), and several other friends and I had all joined hands, singing “Give Peace a Chance,” waving Cong flags, and waltzed onto the grounds. All of the friends had disappeared, driven off in the front-line fire.

  Holding a tissue gingerly to my nose, I searched for a familiar face. And suddenly, in the most unlikely of all places, I saw one. I can’t remember the words that began flowing out of my mouth, but I began to cry out—and I began to run faster than I had ever run before in my life, through the impossible heat and the leftover gas, in the direction of the White House gates.

  The generals, having finished their meeting with Nixon, had decided to board their limousines at the east gate, where they would also answer one or two fast questions from the press, then hop into their stretch Caddies. They apparently wanted to appear Calm and Steadfast for the media, in the midst of the morning’s massacre.

  As I ran toward them, they completed their cheery “No Comments” to the TV cameras, shook hands all around, began slithering into their shiny black hearses. I recognized Westmoreland, a couple of Joint Chiefs, but the first face I’d recognized was the one I was headed for.

  No one saw me, no one tried to stop me, which was astounding, considering my physical appearance. The cops were scattered, everyone was intent on the circle of cameras and lights.

  As I got within earshot, I began to shriek over my bloody lisp. “Colonel Digby!” I screamed. “Hey, I should say General Digby—I heard it on the news yesterday, General, General Digby?”

  He whirled around and faced me—I was within three feet of him—and gasped. I must have looked like a ghoul from a basement horror flick: blood had coagulated, crusted on my face, hair, T-shirt, teeth. There was so much dried blood in my throat I was having trouble getting words out.

  “How do you like the way I look, Dad? This is what happens to people who want peace in this country! How do you like it, Dad? How do you like it—take a good look!”

  I pushed in closer. His face was still handsome under his white hair, a shocked handsome face. He put up a hand as if to protect himself.

  “Willis,” he said. “What …”

  Suddenly more leather hands were on my back; this time I could feel they Meant Business. He seemed about to protest, but then I bent, coughed, shook off the hands, stood up, and spit blood in his face.

  “Killer,” I screamed as they dragged me off. “Killer!”

  After his telephone call, which came the next day, I left the doctor’s office and stopped by my apartment to change before going to see him.

  Consequently, I, Willis Jane Digby, am the only United States citizen who has ever walked into the offices of the Pentagon wearing bell-bottom jeans, no bra, a T-shirt reading FUCK THE WAR on both sides, a huge LEGALIZE MARIJUANA button, pink heart-shaped aviator glasses over my taped nose, a Janis Joplin hairdo, a necklace made of roach clips, and a fettuccine of bandages.

  The guard who accompanied me to General D’s office remained poker-faced, but I could feel his sidelong glances every now and again.

  “Care for a cigarette?” I asked him—my jaw ached tremendously but somehow moving it helped.

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

  We entered General Digby’s temporary office. He would be shipping out in three days, they’d said on the news. I did not know the specifics of his commission.

  We had not spoken in three years. Since I had gotten so involved with antiwar politics on campus, I found it impossible to communicate anything to him other than the shame I felt at his holding a position of such significance in this war. For his part, he remained fairly withdrawn; he offered little in the way of explanations.

  I had come to see him today, when he called me, before he left for Vietnam, because I thought he might try to explain. As passionately as I believed that there was no explanation or forgiveness—a part of me wanted to hear my father (the way he had when I was a little girl) deliver a few choice words that clarified everything. Or maybe I just wanted another chance to say more about my own anger. Or maybe, I thought as I saw him standing up behind his desk—thin, tall, and powerful in his uniform—maybe I just wanted to see him.

  To say good-bye.

  We stood facing each other.

  “That’s an interesting outfit,” he said. “You look like the antiwar celebrity you’ve become. I saw you spitting on me on all three channels on the six o’clock and the eleven o’clock news.”

  “Yeah, I’m a real star. Too bad I had to get my nose broken and my jaw slightly realigned in order to do it.”

  “Sit down, Willis.”

  I noticed a slight unsteadiness. Had he been sipping a bit?

  “Yes, yes, I’ve had a drink,” he answered, as if I’d asked the question out loud. “Would you like something? Scotch? Mixed drink? Wine?”

  “No, thanks. Still hitting the sauce, huh?” I rearranged my button so that a FUCK THE WAR emblem caught a shaft of cool white light from his desk.

  “Willis,” he said, pouring a straight Scotch, “I admire you for putting yourself on the line like this, for getting your head bashed in because you care so much about protesting this war. However, you don’t know shinola about what I’m trying to do—and while I would never expect you to admire me, I would ask that you reserve judgment of me.”

  Much to my horror, I found myself starting to cry, losing a breath as the tears stung the swollen flesh around my nose. “Wait a minute … waaaait a minute … shinola. Is that the stuff you guys use to shine your boots with? Shinola. Is that the stuff that burns the skin off little kids’ faces—or eats up the grass and the trees? Yeah, I know that stuff. This is the Shinola War, isn’t it?”

  He laughed and took a drink and looked away. “You’re proud of that mouth, aren’t you?” he said.

  He turned around sudde
nly and faced me, terrifying and quiet.

  “Contrary to what you believe, there is an organized program of withdrawal. I’m going over there to assist that movement out. However, it’s going to take time; patience—a virtue that you’ve never cultivated—is required.”

  “How can you sit there and lie like that?” I stood up, accidentally nudging my jaw and winced. “You know as well as I do that all we have to do to end this war is to get out.”

  “Willis, wake up. There’s an entire population of Vietnamese who are now dependent on us. What’s going to happen to those people if we turn tail and pull out? Anything good, do you think? Mass executions, petty dictators are just the—”

  “I’m going now. I don’t know what I came here for, but it certainly wasn’t to hear a lecture on the U.S. global conscience. That’s what started this whole thing.”

  “Willis,” he said more insistently, “you do what you believe. I’m doing the same thing. How the hell can I help what you think of me? But I’m doing the only thing we can do over there. I wouldn’t mind if you got that straight.”

  “Good-bye, General.” I started to walk out and then something made me stop and turn around. He had his head bowed, his hand over his eyes.

  I found myself walking toward him. I paused at the edge of his desk.

  “The gun just went off that night,” I said. I started to cry. “We were rolling around on the floor and then the gun went off … and Matthew Kallam was dead.”

  I was crying harder now. “It wasn’t my fault. The gun just went off. Why did you leave me in that tent? Why?”

  He kept looking down. “I raised you to be fearless, Willis—and you are, I think.” He looked up at me. “You are. But being a woman and fearless”—he shook his head, troubled, and took a drink—“men will back away from you for that. I wasn’t wrong to make you strong, was I? I was wrong not to tell you that men fear fearless women. How about a little mercy, Willis, how about a little mercy?”