by Roy Blount
I even engaged in a couple of group BB-gun battles. These mostly entailed creeping around in the woods, but it was considered fair, if you were careful, to shoot another participant in the behind. This stung, and seemed wrong as we did it, and worked off forever my desire to shoot somebody like in the movies. My friend Francis Rowe once shot his BB gun at a blue jay and it actually fell from the tree and landed at our feet. We felt abruptly grave, and I think even briefly discussed religion. I had shot at squirrels and blue jays to scare them out of our fig tree, but had never actually hit one. The blue jay wasn’t dead yet. My friend tried to get me to end its misery — it was staring in our direction — but I couldn’t. Finally he did. I haven’t shot at a bird since, except some ducks near Waco, Texas, with a shotgun. To clean the freshly shot ducks, we cut them open from the tail end, gave them a fling while holding on to their necks, and then reached up into the body cavity to pull out the guts. It felt red-hot in there. I haven’t shot at anything living since then. Once I went goose-hunting, and had a good time, and fired when everyone else did, and got a kick out of firing, but I didn’t aim at anything — certainly not geese.
And if I ever saw my kids shooting other kids in the pants I would, of course, be horrified and move to stop them, as my parents would have done if they had seen me. So it is not in the interest of wild gunplay that I decry the International BB Gun Championship. I decry it because it seems like the kind of thing a kid would want to escape from, not into. A great many of the things that seemed tome most worth doing as a child were things of which an adult, had one been watching me do them, would have said, “What do you want to do that for?” and I wouldn’t have answered.
Throwing mud clods is actually more fun, and better exercise, than shooting BBs. Why not an International Mud Clod Throwing Championship? One reason is that nobody sells mud clods, but I don’t begrudge the Daisy people — who made my Red Ryder and whose name is nice — their promotional interest in this event.
I just don’t see what value there is in it for the shooters. I don’t see why a kid would want to go hang around with a bunch of Jaycees under carefully controlled conditions, for the sake of precisely quantified and certified target scores, when he could be out somewhere by himself or with friends shooting at a bird, actually hitting it, looking the bird in the eye with a wild surmise, regretting it all, and learning something. And not knowing what, exactly.
One Man’s Response to a Question Posed by Mademoiselle
“As Men, What Do We Think We Need from Women, How Does What We Say We Need Coincide with or Differ from What We Really Need?”
I HAVE LOOKED DEEPLY into my heart on this one, and then looked quickly away. I hate looking deeply into my heart. It’s like looking deeply into my filing system. Or my garage. There are interesting things in my garage — just for starters, three chickens walking around loose — but you wouldn’t ever want to go in there and try to sort them all out.
But here is what I am inclined to believe. Just speaking for myself. I am inclined to believe that I don’t need the same things from all women. What I need from the woman I hand my dirty shirts to is not what I need from an ideal wife, say. What I need from the woman I hand my dirty shirts to is no starch and on hangers. I hate starch. But employees of laundering concerns tend to say to themselves, “Well, he probably doesn’t mean ‘no starch’ like, you know, no starch. He probably means ‘not a whole lot of starch.’ But I think he’ll look perkier with, oh, about a pound and a half of starch.”
On hangers I can usually get, but no starch is like pulling teeth. Incidentally, I had a woman dentist when I was a boy. How many of your so-called new males can make that claim? I liked the way her fingers tasted.
What I need from an ideal wife — well, I should mention that I have been pretty busy myself lately trying to remember what it was that I was trying to think of a couple of weeks ago, because I have the feeling I am about ready to think of it now if I could only remember what it was. Also, I have been tied up with all the consideration I’ve been devoting to the idea of doing something about my filing system.
What I need from an ideal wife is for her to go into my mind …
No, that is asking too much. Say you are an ideal husband. Can you imagine what it would be like to go into your actual wife’s mind? You’d be saying, “What is this pile of stuff over here?”
And she would be saying, “Oh, well, that’s just — never mind, I’ll go through that later.”
“You say you will, but … Okay, what is this cruddy old dingbat here? Let’s throw it out.”
“Cruddy! No! I want to keep that.”
“Why? What possible use could you have for it?”
“Well, I’m fond of it. It’s … you know.”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“Well, it’s … my idea of you.”
“What!?”
What I need from an ideal wife is for her to go into my filing system … No, that is asking too much.
What I need from an ideal wife is for her to go into the garage (there!) and sort everything out. (She was the one who wanted chickens.) Let me put it this way: I am not holding my breath. Except when I get too close to the garage.
Which brings up something that men may reasonably expect from women: that they smell better than men. By that, I mean that they have a higher sense of smell. In a recent study at the University of Pennsylvania, women on the average outperformed men in odor identification tests at all ages. So why am I always the one who is finally driven to empty the Kitty Litter?
Of course if one’s wife’s olfaction were more ideal, then one’s own effluvium might have to be. I don’t know that any Ivy League school has done a study on this, but I think it is generally accepted that men tend to reek more than women do, on the average. Isn’t that just like nature? Making one sex smell worse and the other more acutely?
What does nature want, anyway?
Mind you, I’m not saying it’s women’s fault. In fact I’m …
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute; wait a minute.
Am I being sandbagged here? I thought it was sexist to suggest that men need anything in particular from women that they don’t need from men. I thought what a liberated woman was supposed to say when a man asked her to go upstairs and come down wearing nothing, but a pair of fluffy pink house shoes was, “Because I’m a woman, right? Get your friend Ed to do it.” I thought a person was a person now.
On second thought, however, I guess things have lately come around to the point where men don’t always have to be skittish about saying something that discriminates. If you ask me, a lot of the credit for that should go to President and Mrs. Reagan. I know I find it very hard to think of either one of them in terms of, you know, a person, as such.
So, what the heck. If I’m out of line here, tell me. (That last sentence is a good example of something men say to women that doesn’t coincide closely with what men think they really need.) But here’s what I think:
What men really need is for women to have more sense than men do.
Let me give you an illustration. A man is sitting home staring off into space, of an evening, and all of a sudden he springs up, slaps his head, and exclaims to his significant other (who is, I don’t know, knitting, whittling, restructuring a holding company):
“Hey! I’ve got it! Wouldn’t it be a neat idea if I invented this magnetic chemical so strong that a tiny drop of it in Cincinnati would attract a freight train all the way from Dayton? And then I could develop a piping system whereby we could pipe this chemical beneath all the streets of Moscow — see, the great thing is, the Russians have all their radar pointing up — so we could sit down at the negotiating table and kind of lean back in our chairs for a minute or two, smiling and listening to all their rantings, and then we could shift forward suddenly, with narrowed eyes, and snap: ‘Can it. Here’s the deal. You come to your senses and drop all this Communist malarkey right now, and give us Cuba back. Or else.�
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“And the Russians sputter for a minute and then they get very still and say, ‘Or else what?’
“And we smile again. And lean back in our chairs again. And say, in this casual tone, ‘Ohhh, or else we will open the little pores in the pipes that at this moment are in place beneath all the streets of your capital city, thereby releasing this magnetic chemical that is so strong it will pull you, by the nails in your shoes, down into the earth up to about mid-calf level the minute you set foot out of the Kremlin. Then try to keep some kind of crazy godless economy afloat.’
“Wouldn’t that be neat?”
Okay.
What this man thinks he needs from this woman is for her to answer, “Yes, dear, I suppose so.”
No, I take that back. What he thinks he needs from her is for her eyes to sparkle as she answers, breathily, “Oooo, yes!”
What he says he needs from her is for her to give him some thoughtful, objective feedback on this thing.
What he really needs is for her to say, “No.”
Why?
Not because a man (or a woman) needs the consolation of saying to himself/herself, “There is no telling how far I could go if it weren’t for Ms. [Mr.] Cold Light of Dawn over here.”
But rather because a man needs for a woman to help him understand the limitations of “Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.”
There may also be something along those lines that a woman needs from a man. But I haven’t sorted it out yet.
New Renaissance Lyrics
I
From Celia
Come, my Arthur, finish up
With that saucer and that cup.
Now that I’m a realtor,
I’m not moody anymore.
Elbow-deep in suds you stand,
Art, my sweet dish-doing man.
Now that we have traded roles,
Let us haste to merge our souls.
You’re in housework, I’m in houses.
Ev’ry move you make arouses
Me to seize the fruits of love.
Come, peel off your rubber glove,
Then — no, no, forget the laundry.
Turn the lights down, play an Andre
Kostelanetz tape, and we’ll
Close our new domestic deal.
II
To Jane’s Mind
When from aerobic exercise you rise,
You are no fairer, Jane, nor am I fonder.
For what I love in you is not your thighs
But how your forehead wrinkles when you ponder.
Other women may have higher pectoral
Development and glutei more taut.
They lack your expertise on the electoral
College and the state of modern thought.
And when you raise a complex current issue,
You’re always penetrating, always apt.
The times I want most eagerly to kiss you
Are when in chess I find you’ve got me trapped.
The books that I can’t fathom, Jane, you memorize.
I never get the jokes you think are cheap.
You scoff at films that dazzle my poor dimmer eyes,
And now you’ve learned Italian in your sleep.
So though I’m glad you limber up your frame, dear,
The thing that makes me hurtle through the ozone
Like Santa Claus behind his merry reindeer
Is just to see your mind without its clothes on.
III
To a Shy Person She Has Had Her Eye On
Bob, if I were twenty-four
Maybe I’d be charmed by your
Tendency to hint around.
But I doubt it. I have found,
In fullness of maturity,
That whatsoever’s said to me
Might just as well be said outright,
Right now — a modern woman’s quite
Prepared to hear what modern men
May have in mind. So try me; then
I’ll let you know if I can see
How we can cheat mortality.
I hate mortality, don’t you?
You do? You’ll say you do? You’ll do.
Let Me Count the Ways (39)
HEY, TO ME, ALL women are sexy. Right? All breathing women. If they want to be. As far as I’m concerned.
I mean where do I get off, picking and choosing, setting standards? What gives me the right?
Just because everyone is abuzz about my head-turning cameo in the ground-breaking new movie Plough, with what’s-her-name who looks so much like Jessica Lange? Just because I am built like a damn moose? Just because my wavy pepper-and-salt hair cascades down my back to where, if it went one quarter-inch further, you’d have to say I was a poof (but it doesn’t)? Just because the person whom I retain to keep that cascade precisely au point with tiny tungsten scissors is (her own idea) a lapsed, monokinied Shiite woman who weeps with shame? Just because it has come out recently that I share a small but elegantly appointed motor home with (the Iranian aside) three not only mouth-watering but also constantly (in a sophisticated way) salivating honeybunches (if the term offends, I withdraw it), one of whom has been known to sport pince-nez but no pants and the other two of whom are teenaged Polynesian twins, Awanna and M’tou, who raise and fight bulldogs on the side?
Just for these and many other reasons, you expect me to put myself in the awkward position of sitting down and taking pen in hand and laying my heart bare in order to tell you “What Makes a Woman Sexy”?
Well, all right. But not for those reasons.
I am going to do it — and I am going to do it with candor, and I am going to do it unflinchingly, and I am going to do it feelingly and straight — because I will do anything.
Well, anything I want to. Within reason. You never know these days what people think you mean, when you say “anything.” I don’t mean anything faithless, trashy, or painful.
So okay. Here are the 39 things that make a woman sexy:
If she has barbecue sauce on her mouth.
If she looks like she will do anything. That she wants to. That isn’t faithless, trashy, or painful.
You’d be hard put to say exactly where one part of her body leaves off and the next begins. You can put your hand on her waist and it feels like all of her is going to pass through there eventually.
If her name is Rita. Think about it. Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, Rita Gam, Lovely Rita Meter Maid, Rita in the movie Educating Rita. And, what the heck (say you’re a congressman or something), Rita Jenrette.
I’m going to skip over a few obvious ones here.
If she can make gravy.
If she appears to have a lot of sense. You know what I mean? Maybe what I mean is, if she knows what I mean. But no, it’s more than that. You look at her and before you even get to know her you feel a certain gratitude, a certain peace. You feel that she is not going to spring some kind of unfairly inexplicable notion on you that you will never make any sense out of and that will wind up being your fault. You feel that she knows where the keys are. You feel that the two of you could give each other little looks to the effect that ah, yeah, unh, that’s life.
If she appears not to have a lick of sense.
Some intriguing combination of a lot and not a lick.
If she is securely hooked up with a good friend of yours. With such a woman you can kid around and bump hips and even take a nip at each other’s neck, in plain view or not in plain view, all the while feeling very good about knowing (a) that neither of you is going to do anything disloyal to your friend, and (b) that you will never have to get in an argument with this woman over why neither of you knows where the keys are. Then too, you never know, your friend might die.
By the same token, sort of: If she is a good friend of the woman you are securely hooked up with. Here again you can bump around guiltlessly, and in this case you are favoring the woman you are securely hooked up with by showing her friend that the woman
you are securely hooked up with is not securely hooked up with some schlump.
Lips.
If she is not too thin and not too rich, “You can never be too thin or too rich” is the most self-serving remark of recent times except for “That camera doesn’t lie” (Ronald Reagan). You can be so thin that you haven’t got any sugar on you. (As a southern American white man, I am resigned to accepting blame for just about anything, but not by God anorexia.) And you can be so rich that nobody ever tells you that everybody thinks you are silly.
If her attitude toward her own physical presence is, “Hey, for whatever anybody else may think it’s worth, I got it. And I can shake it. And if you’re not interested who asked you?” Why in the world do women say things like, “Oh, I’m too droopy in the hiney and got hardly any chest and my legs are just sticks”? Unless they manage to say it provocatively. Sparkle goes a long way.
If she looks shapely in shapeless clothes.
If her hair looks like it looks naturally good without thousands of dollars’ worth of treatments.
If she is naked as a jaybird. Okay, call me old-fashioned.
If she is a good sport but doesn’t take any shit. (I realize this is a fine line.)
Fine lines. I mean, fine in simultaneously the sense of “exquisite” and “she’s so fine.” Not brittle lines. Flexible fine lines. (See 3, above.)