The Book of the Great, by one of the factions in the education departments of the land that once had an ascendency, was wider in its scope. Its makers had varying ideas of greatness. There were famous physicians, discoverers, artists, scientists, load-bearers, rescuers, self-sacrificers; all the way from Jesus to Leonardo to Einstein.
The actual nuts and bolts of history, what happened when and what else was going on, in streets and homes and villages, I had no great interest in. Just the personages.
It was possible to perform my new trick in bed or in the toilet, but there was something sneaky about those places and for a thorough masturbation I preferred to do it in the back of the car as it stood safely garaged, and I often did.
At school I heard boys declaiming an old rhyme that made me annoyed:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands
Amusing himself and abusing himself
By making a cunt of his hands.
Why didn’t girls have a verse about it too?
Great Men
Around my room I had pictures of great men from history:
Alfred burning the cakes
Caesar crossing the Rubicon
Drake finishing his game of bowls
Stanley meeting Livingstone
Galileo forced to recant
Newton under the apple tree
Watt watching the kettle boil
Hannibal crossing the Alps
Nelson’s death
Christ hanging and Barabbas watching
Diogenes in his barrel
The death of Socrates
Horatio on his bridge
Lars Porsena with his hand in the flames
Divico’s Victory
Washington at the Delaware.
I had copied from paintings, drawing first in pencil, and painting them with poster colors. My Divico’s Victory with the yoked captives stretching their necks forward for the sword won a prize at school, largely, I think, because the teachers had never heard of him. I got him from one of father’s old Latin books: Latin had disappeared from schools like ours.
They hung round my room like trophies, the first thing I saw each morning. They were all males, but I didn’t mind. The lessons they taught were for me, too.
Now that I am a traveler leaving the cold shores of my old self for a shore I do not know, what were those lessons and what have they done for me?
They stand there on my wall as invitations to immortality, the magic, the life still glowing from those names, called to me, saying that somewhere in the world or in my mind there was something I could attempt that might preserve my name from the usual obliteration death meant for the ordinary person.
Mother’s Day
Father got mother up at seven, insisted that she have some breakfast, then after reminding me that my sandwiches were in the fridge, drove off to act all day.
Mother had little to say until I went to school, then was free to do as she liked till the afternoon, when I’d come home after sport or basketball practice or choir or orchestra and help myself to cakes or fruit and have a look inside the stove or behind the door where father kept his list of what he intended having for dinner. He always bought a supply of biscuits and cakes, so if I didn’t gobble the lot in one afternoon I could eke out three or four each day. He delighted in telling me that the biscuits I liked were ones he had liked when he was a boy; that so little had changed.
Of an afternoon mother might be out where the sun came in at the back of the house, with a pile of paper and her large notebooks.
When she used the large notebooks, the size of diaries, she got through perhaps fifteen pages a day. Thinking and writing, head down, eyes far away, hunched, or up getting coffee in her brown mug or getting disgusted with that and having coffee in the white china teacups with the wildflower pattern.
When father came in he always went to where she was and bent over to kiss her. Mostly it was the wrong time for mother to be kissed, but we got used to that, father and I: mother was known to be impatient of interruptions and we accepted her as she was, once we knew she wasn’t going to change.
She would come to the table for dinner, since they had worked it out between them that a combined dinner would be good for me. She contributed little to the talk. Father always had some little story to tell of the day’s performance, and when he obviously had nothing new he continued the saga of his fellow performers and how they got on together. It was like a family serial.
How my parents got on at night I never knew. Since the time I saw them when I was seven I’ve not been curious about that part of their life.
Mother’s face had been fashionable when she was young; a sort of country plainness round the mouth and chin, a forehead that looked noble with the hair drawn tightly back, and quiet eyes that misled. You would not have been surprised if she had come into the house with a pail of milk warm from the cow; your surprise would have come when she failed to give you any.
Mother forgets things.
She rarely forgets her notebooks and papers, but here is one fragment she left around:
Our first kiss is both near and far, my breast
Has lain by the breasts of my beloved in sleep;
So let us both tread softly, for it is
Our dreams that pave the ground beneath our feet.
I wonder if that Alicia in the photo album was the beloved of mother’s verse. After all, you only have to pronounce Alicia the Spanish way and you have Alethea.
Back Seat of the Car
Reading in the car after lunch on Saturday, I dozed off. It wasn’t a day that I’d masturbated—those days became alive with meaning and I was lifted up above people and suburbs.
I dreamed I was a woman, the first woman in recorded history to become stronger than all men. I could run faster, jump farther, throw farther, lift more, fight better, wrestle more powerfully, than any man. I was also smart to look at; not for me the huge hips and pendulous melons of earth mothers: I was incredibly tall and strong, with small athletic breasts that didn’t flop around and get in my way, and hips that allowed my muscles to move freely; I could wear clothes that made me look relaxed and easy: a living statue of speed, strength and intelligence.
I inhabited cities, knew and fought with powerful humans, not all of them men; I won power over my contemporaries; my intellect cut through problems, erected new understanding; my eyes directed a beam of mysterious power that illuminated and conquered and charmed; I was older, but not too old. I had a quality that others were tempted to call greatness.
I was awakened by my father hitting the hose against the garage door. Perhaps he suspected the use I made of the back seat. My dreams of greatness vanished in the effort of picking up my book from the floor of the car.
A Precaution
After the birth film at school I invented what I thought was a good exercise for the muscles around delivery time, and did it along with my sport training. I had no yen for babies, and maybe I would never need it, but I considered it was better to be prepared for the rigors of motherhood than adopt a feminist stance from girlhood, only to find I wanted a baby later and was totally unprepared.
This was the exercise: With both feet flat on the floor, let yourself down into a deep squat, and begin to walk across the room, down the steps and all around the lawn.
I did it for two weeks, then somehow forgot all about it.
My Reading
I had read Lorna Doone, Black Beauty, Seven Little Australians, An Old-fashioned Girl, Little Women, In Regions of Perpetual Snow, The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, The Water Babies, The Black Cloud, The Weapon Shops of Isher, David Copperfield and lots of Dickens, The Soten Monoplane, The Magic Pudding, eighteen Charlie Brown books, Conan Doyle, twenty-two How and Why books, my Children’s Encyclopaedia, the Encyclopaedia of Wild Life, Lamb’s Tales, by the time I was ten.
It’s hard to describe the reading of my eleventh and twelfth years, since I read again and a
gain the books I liked, and my new reading was mainly science fiction, together with the novels that my father had in his shelves. And school library books, of course, with lots of writers of my own country, because we had to do a certain number of Australian books for our Library mark.
Also I began to take an interest in father’s newspaper and his regular magazines. From them I learned, little by little, that we in Australia are not as distant as we think from the rage of history.
English Expression: How Women Became Weaker Than the Enemy, by Alethea Hunt
Before the seven sages, some women were weak and some strong, some men were strong and some weak, some women as big as men and some men small as women.
And men said, “These creatures think they’re the bosses and indispensable and they try all the time to tell us we need sex and babies. They grab the lead every time they’re given half a chance. We can’t have proper respect and tradition and precedent while they have a big voice in our affairs. We need a division between us.”
And other men said, “What is the answer to this problem of the equality of women?”
And one of the smaller ones said, “Specialization.”
And the rest said, “What’s that, Shrimp?”
And the smaller man said, “Let us erect a barrier between men and women. Let us go for small women, let us choose hairless women” (for in those days men and women were equally hairy)—“and we will breed specialization, for they will stay here and have babies and we will stand apart and go and hunt, and make weapons, and return with large food, and they will stay and work round the camp in their spare time from feeding the children, and we will praise their differences and their hairlessness. And we will create Beauty.”
“What’s that?” other men said.
“That’s the difference between us. We will breed for it, and the big women that hit me and kick me will be tamed by having no mates, and they will be ashamed, and will no longer be competition for you big ones and we will arrange the daily affairs of the tribe among ourselves, without them, and us smaller men will do as you say and the women will do as we all say.”
The big men saw the advantage of this, and the small men saw that even they would have some people under them, and everyone agreed. And women became smaller and hairless and “beautiful” and rituals started and legend and precedent and laws and religion. And they called it a step on the way to civilization.
The teachers passed this effort round to each other, and praised me. It got into the school magazine.
It’s very pleasant to be praised, and there’s something extra special about feeling that you can do things better than others can.
Males
Their hands are quite different from ours, I’ve noticed. Some I like the look of, being clean and large and powerful in appearance, but the ones that I suspect are really the most powerful, the thick ones with big veins and no grace, I don’t like at all.
Still, I suppose women have always said that they must accept men as they are, and habit is strong. Either accept them or ignore them, I’m not sure which I mean.
And their limbs . . . And the hairiness . . .
I don’t know if ever I’ll be able to accept them.
Sometimes when I’m thinking of these differences and resenting them; and of the incomprehensibility of males as a whole, I think: if only I were a long, fierce snake, living a private life on the edge between bush and desert, and my world plain to me and not puzzling at all.
Palpable Eyes
Today I found what I’ve thought for a long time: I’m a better climber than any of the boys round here. I don’t mean I can climb higher, because some of the small boys can get up on branches much too thin for me. I mean I can climb quicker, and I can climb carrying a weight.
They wouldn’t have let me play with them, but since they were building a tree house and they had to get up some rolls of old carpet to put on the floor and I volunteered to do it, they let me. When I had taken up all the things, I went on up to the top of the tree, taking with me a piece of colored cloth. I tied the cloth to the last branch that went straight up, as a flag for them. They didn’t say much when I got down, and I could feel the antagonism on the back of my neck and down my spine.
Incidentally, why do they take such an interest in looking up my legs? I could understand a glance as natural curiosity, but they dropped everything to look, all the time I was up the tree. I had pants on. There was nothing to see. Are they simply of low intelligence, that their attention can be fixed on something they can neither see nor do anything about even if they could?
Shortly after, a short active boy climbed carefully up and moved the flag a meter higher. They watched me when I left; I could feel their eyes.
There Was an Old Bayard Taylor Translation
There was an old Bayard Taylor translation of Faust Part I at one end of father’s bookshelves, wedged between Good Housekeeping and The Idiot. From its small pages and tiny printing I learned a lesson Goethe didn’t intend.
Faust was given supernatural powers, with one condition attached to the bargain. What did he do with the gift of supernatural powers? He gave some accidental acquaintances free wine, conjured music from nothing, had a barrel fly through the air, made flames appear: party tricks.
Even Frankenstein used the dead to raise the dead and bring them to life; to construct new life, instead of trying to discover the secret of invisibility. Dracula wanted long life with no dying and used the powers of darkness to enslave the living, but at least he was desperate and trying to survive.
To Alethea Hunt, Faust was a fraud. Tricks, bargains, supernatural help don’t add up to human greatness. I wanted to read of greatness. In that moment I felt greatness meant that life is not enough.
I put the book down.
I was standing, I think, in my usual spellbound fashion, eyes wide open, mouth slightly open, looking out of our large front window, and mother said, as she unfailingly did when she saw me like this, “Dreamer. Always dreaming. What are you dreaming about now? Stop dreaming. Get and do something useful.” And she went back to her writing, with complete absorption.
She didn’t know that when I was like that the world stopped. She didn’t know that my eyes were wide open and motionless because the narrow cone of the world that was in my field of vision was melting and evaporating; the evaporating parts rising as a sort of gas labeled with the names of the things they had been, and wafting toward me and entering me; and the melting objects came as fluid and entered directly into some part of me that conducted them right to my innermost parts. Where I would never lose them, always remember their taste. (But what would happen to my memories when I died?)
As for the people I happened to be looking at when such spells came over me, I am convinced that the “them” I received in those moments was the essence of the persons, an essence perhaps unknown to any other persons, and not well known to themselves.
Father walked in the back door. I picked up Faust again. I couldn’t shake off my trance-like state and didn’t feel like explanations. It was an effort to hold the book, but I held it before me, not seeing it.
“That’s a book, darling,” he said.
I must have looked stupid, to him. I hadn’t opened it. He looked at the spine.
“Ah, Faust,” he said approvingly. And launched into a speech. Just what I needed.
“Immortality, or life after the ending of the world, began in man’s mind as an ambition, a greed, a craving for more, after man invented weapons and gradually realized the difference between him and animals in general, and after he spoke a language that he found was growing, and could say much more than animals could say to one another.”
He always forgot birds. “And birds,” he added. Fish never got a mention.
“And feeling so superior. So superior.” And he stopped, thinking. It was one of father’s beliefs that humans weren’t so superior.
I still couldn’t move. I clutched Faust out before me, my eyes locked open
. How could he? He thought Faust was about immortality: I thought it was about power. If only he’d stayed outside. I wanted to experience to the full my apprehension of the twin trees in our front yard near the letterbox; their soft bark, small leaves, what it must be like to stand there day and night, in all weathers, helpless to avoid insects, birds, humans; to be there, there, until death.
Yes, I was right: just to live is not enough.
Mister Small
The man who delivered milk in our street was known for his cannon. Every week he filed it down where it emerged from his lower chest, so he wouldn’t have so much weight to carry. Plenty of people encouraged him to let it grow, but he steadfastly refused, he cared nothing for the foundry date of the cannon or its history. Historians were always trying to arrange for his expenses and wages to be paid while the cannon grew out of him; they hated the idea that they would never see the inscription on its manufacturing plate. But he didn’t like the idea that a ton of cannon might one day be protruding from him, or that he might be stuck on the end of it. He thought of the cannon as his, not as belonging to history.
The Smalls owned dairies once in eight suburbs, and since the value of land increased, they had released five of them to development; our milkman saw himself as a milkman for the rest of his life, and didn’t want to retire. He took to bringing sons and nephews along with him, riding shotgun to guard against academic kidnap, but the historians made no illegal attempts on his freedom.
Often I was tempted to get up early and wait for him one rainy, stormy day and call out, “What about the lightning?” and really scare him. But when it came to the point I didn’t, I practically always had to be woken up by father (still warm from their bed).
A Woman of the Future Page 20