vOYAGE:O'Side

by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 23

  Dalores.

  “Your bath is ready.”

  Said like the spousal vow: “For better or worse …”

  Dalores undresses him. Hand-steadies him into the tub. Bubbled basin. Huge glaciers of lavender masses: floating, bumping against, clinging, soothing, hiding him…under he goes, right up to his nose...she lathers up her palms to wash his hair, tender fingers plying him with the keen care of a crocheter, a dip and dart through the mass of his muddy entanglement, leaning back his head to wash, fingertips whispering echoes of her heart up and down, across and back his forehead…rinsing him: a coiled, hand-crafted pitcher dumping warm water, running new water, removing all dirt, all smells, all scents of moments past…raising and drying him off: thick towels, cold floor...she quickly sat him down on the lidded stool and damped his feet: soft, new, her gift, Christmas gift—fluffy moccasins: deerskin slippers, cut and stitched by a local cobbler’s hand, like he had seen and admired in Dinkytown...she then stands him tall like a candle-just-dipped and draws from him all that her heat can, all that she has purified of him through her heart…Frank is robed: full length of perfumed terry-cloth...her scent: attar of rose wafting lemony alarms of verbena—towel around his neck, a pat against the nape where gravity has tricked her minutes before...together, they are sitting together in his living room...snow-glare lights flaring off of probing Two Moon sun...all that ten below can conjure up for Minnesota’s opening salvo—crisp, crinkly, ice biting clarity of air and a breath which sucks the lungs icy dry…together: Dalores and Frank.

  Within four months, they marry.

  April Fools’ Day.

  Their marriage was mused upon, not so much for its suddenness, for things were only happening suddenly “in these times” as everyone in their circle knew, everyone in the greater society was slowly coming to grasp...sudden change in the racial laws, sudden Drafting of new flesh, sudden “coming out” of closeted sexual identity, sudden advocacy of a range of alternative lifestyle choices—immersion in dope, “Revolutionary Commitment” to take the “Class Option,” radical switch to “Open Marriage,” dropping out to drop in: “Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.” So what was their marriage in this time except an alternative, here, to Christianity, at least to its wedded bondage of the female soul...they did not say, To Honor and Obey...she did not wear Virginal White: shroud...he did not need a Best Man, rather, “Man, we’re all Family.” So everyone was Best, that day—they did not have to pretend that they had never had sex before...it was assumed that “The sex is good, Man. She’s good.”

  So, what was four months?

  Like the sudden oceanic wave flipping you head-over dumping you face down into the scratchy sand of the Atlantic’s bottom, so had Dalores come, if Frank had known, but which the suddenness kept for him as unknown.

  Dalores’ bed was not what Frank would have ever thought marrying would be, not before The Moment.

  “April Fools!” Dalores had consciously chosen the Anniversary Shout. And time did fool them: three years and Frank muses on how much the Fool he’s been: bumbling, stumbling, being blown about like a leaf. “Women!” is a resigned surrender as he reflects upon what a total Fool he is for Dalores.

  “Why do Fools fall in love?” Why. why, oh, why?!

  Her bed was not sex: bar flirt and backseat quickie—a ram and a jam and a spurt...hours titillating the latest from the Playboy Advisor’s G-spot and all that...no, Dalores was home—fucking: more, home-cooking...she was the hearth, with embers always ready for the stir: a full course meal: seven servings around the clock: cuckoo clock.

  For this Bertha had not prepared him.

  Dalores was, had emerged, fully flowered as “Earth Mother.”

  It was a tag she did not mind hearing uttered. An image cast out by some “radical” men—and women!—as if a bug had landed upon their tongues. At once a spitting out. At once repulsing a fear. At once jolted and shaken in the moment.

  Dalores: “I love being an Earth Mother.” Stated to herself. Long mirror. Breasts which took two of Frank’s hands to cup...she smiles with the delight in his eyes, with the failure of his mouth to totally suck-in her breasts. He rolls his head across her chest, sliding down with tongue, gasping for breath as he struggles to climb out of their deeply cleaved valley. She feels the eager hands on her thighs, the rush to her fulsome butt, not stopping to wag negatively about any extra pound or blemish or shortcoming of Beauty, for his incessant tracking of her: a tracking trail she has scented—coupling atop the kitchen table, spread-eagle on the living room rug, humped from behind as she hangs onto whatever stout furniture she can grasp, exhausted and dead man: cockless and cockeyed on top of her, under her, around her…yeah, home-cooking is also how Dalores looks at Frank: boil him, bake him, stew him—she will not let a day go by where she doesn’t have some recipe—where Bertha stopped, taking her “woman’s days” to herself, shooing him off, not deigning to recognize his wailing maleness on these days: no hand job, no relief, no cock-a-doodle-do!—there, Dalores was: non-and-unstoppable!

  Bloody Moon—finding a way not to lose him, spicing him with some zippy and zesty ingredient...most notably offering him her ass—not like when he humps her from behind, but as an offering of the Dark Moon—snapping at him, “Are you man enough?!” Wagging as she slithers before him, glides, pulls aside her robe: exposes herself—taunts, “C’mon Big Boy show me what you got!”

  She liked it... the totality of it—the uninhibitedness of it...taking him in at every portal as well as him entering, knowing that he was butt-nuts and would do anything for her, to have her, to be within her—Dalores took his everything as she gave her everything. The cook’s in the cooking!

  Her man finds her a Garden of Earthly Delights, this she loves.

  So, she happily stands there, stroking her yet unplanted garden...not womb, but garden.

  She waits for Frank’s warm spring rain.

  Dalores planted Frank. Not just his seed but his mind and soul. As to his mind it was with her that he tramped around to meetings and potlucks and in and out of communes and rallies and all the other footnoted events of “the times they are a changin’.” Back during the first year, Frank was her Red Flyer wagon. As if her scent had hooked him by the nose:...just trailed her. He simply loved to smell her.

  May Day, 1970, 7:37 p.m.—Frank’s mind, itself, erupted: “Blew my mind, Man!” It was a talk at the Newman Center by a famed psychiatrist whom Frank had never heard of. That in itself intrigued him since he had graduated from the U with a 3.93 in psychology: Magna cum laude—yet only having psychometrically probed rats and fucked with flies and statistically computed all types of behavioral variants...now he getting to know all that his empiricist professors had not taught him—maybe not knew, but surely must have heard...now, the words and images sat upon him, heavily pressed, squeezed themselves into his ears as Dalores sits right by, listening, quickly and deftly knitting—having taken to knitting segments for a giant “Sisterhood!” shawl with her Women’s Group these last several months.

  Floating on the air, written on the walls, interring themselves into his gut: “Anima. Animus.” “Archetypes. Shadow. The Collective Unconscious.” Zonked! Frank was totally stoned...mind racing through imaginative landscapes he had no words for, had no measures for, had only Dalores for. “Man, wasn’t that, that, that just staggering!?”

  Lecture Tonight—7 p.m. Professor James Hillman, “Archetypes—An Introduction to Jung’s Man and His Symbols” Newman Center, Father Bury Memorial Room.

  “Trippy,” she said as she bundles up her things and presses them hard to fit into her large cotton satchel—Leather is murder!

  Collective Unconscious—if it ever was or is or shall be, Whatever, it opened up and gobbled Frank: a mind which had sought to broaden itself—his dad an insomniac who read and read and read: flustering the house—his mom with earmarked books, a hundred monthly journals stapled and clipped with notes; scotch-tap
ed: in the bathroom, the garage, living-family-dining-kitchen, any and all—rooms: ideas on index cards, “Nutty, I’m embarrassed to have visitors, they’ll think we’re nutty,” not including herself in that “we”…so Frank had ground himself in the “sweep of ideas” and wrestled with his father’s favorite masochism: Toynbee’s twelve volume, “Rise and Fall of Civilizations”…but he had avoided as much as he had immersed himself in...likewise, in an unusual parallel, there was something, possibly only one thing ever, that his father had avoided: so it seems that it was possibly too much of a challenge to a devout “practicing” Catholic—too much in this era of reform...Vatican II...John the XXIII’s “opening of Vatican windows”…more than a window, now, a gape, a maw, a...Frank is hearing Munch’s “Scream”…his mind flits to the incomprehensibility of all those Medieval visions snared in Bruegel, Bosch and Durer—even Dali’s squishes and the slithering geometry, trigonometry of the Cubists… feels: it is reading which makes him feel, unnerves him—everything he believes Jung has ever written he inhales, bolts down, chokes on like the first whiskey of youth: Isaiah’s burning coal on his lips...then consuming Freud, Adler, Maslow… more, more into the “Death of God” theologians…into and across and around every used book store: Jewish for Kabbalah and mysticism, into Masonry and Alchemy...ferreting out what he could from lectures on Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky…every “underground newspaper” every countercultural flyer every unverifiable unmmeasurable undocumented under and over flying object of knowledge...Frank pushes himself to read tolerable Latin, mumbling Greek, key words in Hebrew…Unconscious: Frank is Unconscious.

  Dalores’ plan was unfolding. Not calculating, not scheming, but following the stars, her astrologer’s wisdom and, of course, the casting of the Tarot cards.

  Cups, and The Female Pope. That was all that needed to be said.

  “Honey, do you love me?” Lofted in that “do you really love me” love of “do you really really love me” spiked with the throat choking slyness which calls attention to her, conveying, “Pay attention to me!”

  So Frank is off to graduate school, this time to sit at the feet of those ignored and maligned during his undergraduate years, those professors—just two—stuck onto the Psychology Department’s roster because of certification needs: a need for comprehensiveness, although any student who studied “seriously” with either of these: Professor Noble and Professor Carroll (she)—well, it would be hard to graduate...definitely not with Honors.

  Now, it was all Noble and Carroll for Frank.

  Doctoral studies and work at the “Institute for Archetypal Analysis,” compromising with “analysis” to cross lines with the Behaviorists who ruled the department and the campus and the cultural mindset...now Frank knowing why their “mind set” for the Behaviorist had no truck with what was unmeasurable since, for them, the Values as well as the Virtues being challenged by the times were equally unmeasurable: “War—what is it Good for—absolutely nothing”…what was an “alternative” or a “counterculture” if in the normative culture there was no need for...indeed, there was only the impossibility of measuring Values and Virtues?

  Because of Dalores, so could he venture forth. At certain moments he clearly knew this, and clearly knew that he didn’t have to say it to her...she did’nt need to hear, rather she just wanted him to be. “Be Here Now!” was hip phrase, but it summed it up. Dalores simply wanted him to be here with her, no matter where Now was.

  Frank draws a deep, consciously sucked by his nuts toke. “Now!”—the call to his troops: to those faithful millions, trillions that in his stoned mind he is rallying, agitating, “Spermies of the World!”...chuckles: sloppy doped splattering of laughing mirth, deeply self-indulgent…“Spermies!” Boot Camp is over! ...he is off: three years readying himself, plotting, planning, Now! Frank is off on his Quest. Riding through fields of flesh. Flowers with the eyes of all the women he has ever loved, ever fucked, ever desired, ever roused the Spermies to “Attack!”—but bumblingly attacking, as he mindlessly slips out of his clothes: Naked Knight...and not so silently—not as he thinks himself so silent—knees the bed and slides over towards his wife, pulling the Her Majesty towards him, lifting up her blanket of flowers, rises upon her rosy fragrance and a sting of tart stimulating verbena...casts himself upon her...wanting to block out the Sun, wanting to block out the Moon, wanting to be her only Sky and her only Star and her Only…“Spermies!”

  Dalores: Virgin Mother.