by Nell Zink
“Was he French?” She recalled that the French like black people, or might be black themselves—she wasn’t sure.
“They’re all French,” Meg said. “It’s like people used to just get it on, but modern science started sorting us into categories. So you get assigned this identity, like ‘straight woman,’ meaning woman who likes men. Except ninety-nine guys out of a hundred, if they touched you, you’d scream. And the hippies and the male chauvinists say the same thing, that sex is a form of play and you should relax. But what makes sex great is that it’s exciting. Sex isn’t relaxing! Relax and free your mind is what you have to do when somebody’s raping you! But that’s all men ever think about, getting you to relax so they can rape you and go to sleep.”
She surveyed the room to see how her audience was reacting. They were aghast.
Unable to backpedal, she decided to sum up. “So, the theory is basically that they had to define sexuality as a one-way street to orgasm so they could market it as a therapy that’s not predicated on attraction to a certain individual.” She concluded with a “Whew!” to show she was done. There was silence. Meg put her hand on her purse and glanced at the door, thinking it was time to leave.
“I think I know what you mean,” a woman ventured. “You’re in love with the wrong person, so you tell yourself you have needs and your husband can satisfy you.”
“It’s more like what society tells you,” Meg answered her. “It’s a way of labeling you. You fall in love with one man, so they tell you you’re into men, which is a joke. Nobody likes men. I mean, come on. Most of them are disgusting.”
An especially cute woman leaned forward and said quietly, “My husband makes me play that I’m a whore who’d do it with anybody or anything. I think he’s in love with my niece. My marriage is a joke, and his idea of a solution is to role-play that he’s a motorcycle cop. In the garage. He makes me keep my seat belt on. God, I hate that fucker. I fucking hate him.”
“That’s exactly it!” Meg said, inexpressibly delighted, yet worried, because everyone was taking her seriously and she had said way too much. “The idea is that the concept of sexuality was invented to stop us from stepping out of line and wanting people we’re not supposed to want.”
“What’s the guy’s name? Does he have a book out?”
“I don’t remember. Besides, I don’t know that he’s right.” She rose to their disappointment by adding, “I mean, he’s right about women, because women fall in love with individuals. But won’t guys fuck anything that doesn’t fuck them first?”
“My husband says he fell in love with me at first sight,” the cute woman said. “If that’s not proof, I don’t know what is.”
“Same with mine,” Meg agreed. “Love at first sight.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s deceased. He was much older.” Meg shook her head and made a sad face, feeling ecstatic. Her first act on leaving the encounter group would be to find the cute woman’s motorcycle-cop husband and punch him in the nose. “He was an entomologist,” she added, feeling that an intellectual in the family might make her butchering of Foucault seem less out of place. “I’m finishing up his manuscript about the butterflies of southeastern Virginia. That’s why I live down here.”
When the feminist encounter group wound down, Meg rescued Karen from the group of kids out in the yard playing doctor and headed for the car, vaguely worried that she had blown her cover. She went over every moment in her mind. Somebody must have noticed something. Mustn’t they? It was so obvious that she could not possibly be anything she said she was—black, straight, an entomologist’s grieving widow. But no. No one had noticed a thing.
As she was preparing to drive away, a not-very-cute woman appeared at her window, introducing herself as Diane. Her husband was an electrical contractor, but she was nominally the owner of their business and not a housewife at all. There were government contracts for minority-owned businesses, and women were a recognized minority.
That made Meg laugh. “The majority of people are women!” she objected.
Diane replied, “Not in construction. It’s a great line of work. We’re cleaning up. I don’t want to say how good, but we’re doing all right. It’s a shame I never learned a trade.” She looked searchingly at Meg, eyes lingering on her V-neck, and Meg thought, Dyke.
Now, you’d think two dykes might be on the same team. But sexual deviance doesn’t trump anything. It just makes a person more paranoid. The weak are always the first to turn on each other in a clinch, like Peter denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed. If ever two deviants were on the same team, it was Jesus and the rock on which he would build his church.
To Meg, an unattractive lesbian was a clear and present danger: someone whose feelings she might hurt. There weren’t many of those in the county—people vulnerable to her—and maybe just one (Karen). Also, Diane was white, meaning she couldn’t be trusted. There was proof: a roadhouse named Ye Olde Coon Hunting Club with a big sign. Any well-intentioned white person would do something about the Coon Hunting Club before he or she started building schools.
Diane told Meg to stop by for coffee if she was in the neighborhood, and Meg lied that she would.
Two days later, Meg heard the slurping sound of tires in the mud and peered around the window shade to see Diane emerging cautiously from her car. She went out to meet her.
Diane sought a political favor. She wanted Meg’s support at a public hearing. “We want the board of supervisors to apply for a grant to build public housing,” she explained. “Some people in this county live in conditions I just can’t believe. Especially black people, no offense. It’s not sanitary.”
“My people, the black race,” Meg said, offended. “We got one thing in common. And that’s that we’re exactly like the white race. The white people around here don’t live in a housing project. Why should we live in a housing project? We never did before. We have our own driveways now. We just need better houses.”
“Not if you can’t pay for it,” Diane said. “People living on squatters’ rights have no equity. To fix up a house, you need a loan. We can’t just give you the land. It wouldn’t be fair, when the taxpayer has to pay cash. I think moving to a town is a fair trade for not seeing your kids go barefoot to the outhouse.”
“I don’t think of this as an aesthetic issue,” Meg said.
“I didn’t say it was aesthetic,” Diane said. “It’s pretty swampy there now, but what are we going to do? Put a housing project on good farmland that’s already drained? No offense.”
Just a few months later, Meg’s shack was inspected and condemned as unlivable. Not remotely up to code. A contractor would be paid to tear it down. In its place she was offered AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), food stamps, and cheap rent in the housing project to be known as Centerville.
Meg and Karen moved to Centerville the summer before Karen started eighth grade. Temple Moody now lived right across the courtyard.
It was a one-story complex, built on a slab, with a minimum of nails and wood that hadn’t cured. You could reach up and pull the siding right off. That looseness kept the air circulating between the siding and the tar paper, which was important in such a damp environment. The newly drained soil was still putting out huge cabbage-like foliage that covered the courtyards between the wings of the building in an almost impenetrable thicket, with pigweed six feet tall by April.
For Karen, Centerville held endless pleasant surprises: Neighbors. Playmates. TV. Telephones. Flush toilets. Long, hot showers. The paradise that is modern life.
It even had a little shopping center across the road, with a Greek restaurant (self-service, with gyros on the menu as “Mexican Taco”) and a florist.
At first Meg continued to do business with Lomax at her old place, uneasy about her new lack of privacy. She had graduated over the years from collecting mushrooms to warehousing bales of pot for over a week in exchange for sums in excess of two hundred dollars.
> It was risky—the bales were fair size and fragrant—but at her old house, it had worked fine. There she had no neighbors and a moat. Almost nobody ever stopped over but Lomax, and Flea kept careful watch. But there was no question of continuing in that line. You can’t stash pot in an empty house. Sooner or later it’s going to get ransacked. And you most certainly can’t carry bales of homegrown through a federally subsidized housing project. There was no driveway in Centerville, just a busy parking lot. Who was Flea going to watch out for—everybody? Meg had to move up in the world.
Lomax had already made his career move. A childhood friend had looked him up. This was a man known as “the Seal” because he was AWOL from being a Navy SEAL. For years he took it out on the navy by running his speedboat out to the mothball fleet with a grappling hook and stealing vital parts for scrap. That was more gratifying than it was lucrative. More lucrative was a connection he made in a waterfront bar in Yorktown while eating raw clams in an informal contest that proved to all present that he was made of sterner stuff than most men. One of the losers told him there was major cash to be made by someone with the cojones to transport certain bundles to a certain parking lot in Newport News. These were to be found strapped in inner tubes on the beaches of the barrier islands of the Eastern Shore. They originated in Colombia and had been dropped from airplanes.
The Seal was game to try it, but not naive. He agreed to take the job, but privately he planned to bring the bundles only as far as Poquoson, there entrusting them to Lomax, who would drive them to Newport News.
Once a month thereafter, Lomax accepted a package and payment in advance from his dear old friend. He sat down in Crosby Forrest’s seafood restaurant to wait, and Flea drove the bundle an hour, past stoplight after stoplight, past the MPs manning the gates to the naval shipyard and the air base, and heaved it into the bed of a pickup in a certain parking lot. It was that simple.
Then they got into a discussion about street value, and they got creative.
That was Meg’s career opportunity.
The next shipment was two bundles. One went into the bed of the pickup as usual, and the other, smaller one went to Meg’s apartment in Centerville. She didn’t do much with it. Mostly it just sat there like utilities stocks, paying dividends. All she had to do was measure level tablespoonfuls into Baggies. She worked during the morning, by natural light, so matter-of-factly that passersby would have thought she was bagging sugar cookies for a bake sale. Sooner or later Lomax always dropped by to pick them up.
She was making enough money to think about the rainy day when she would blow out of there. She was of two minds about where she wanted to retire. Something about her current profession made her value the ethos of a hacienda in Mexico. But as a writer, she still aspired to make it in New York. Plus she didn’t feel it would be fair to Karen to move her to Spanish-speaking schools.
She subscribed to Writer’s Market and queried five agents about her play The Wicked Lord. They all said the most interesting character dies too near the start. She reacted by writing a play in two days and a night about a utopian lesbian commune defending itself from real estate interests. The villain saved his appearance for the end. The lesbians became the bacchants of Euripides, killing him in a festive manner.
It was gripping and seemed to write itself. But she knew you can’t publish material like that.
She outlined a romance novel set in colonial Virginia, with a ghost, called Blame It on Beldene. The draft ended on page fifteen.
As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.
The combination of relative prosperity and a mailing address (the shack had not enjoyed rural free delivery) allowed Meg to money-order books from catalogs. Karen routinely appeared with Temple in tow to beg for Newbery Medal winners. Temple would point out that with two children reading each book, it was effectively half price.
Meg had mentally adopted Temple the day she caught him outside watching her type. As he entered her bedroom she perceived his spontaneous awe of her Olivetti’s all-powerful machinery, the medium through which Logos becomes the printed word—their shared ideal. He lifted it as gingerly as a rifle and admired its dark curves like a tiny Steinway. She let him type a little. He left clutching an Ezra Pound couplet as though it were a fifty-dollar bill. There was something very inspiring about Temple. He made her think literature mattered.
His parents, now her neighbors, were soon her friends. His mother, Dee, turned out to be an unflappable realist quite to Meg’s taste. She had taught second grade before they closed the black schools. She had lived for thirty years in her husband’s hereditary compound before rural renewal took it away. Yet she despised nostalgia in any form.
Temple’s father, Ike Moody, also looked to the future. He expected a socialist revolution. His leftism was securely closeted. Even Dee didn’t know the extent of it. From attending party meetings and summer camps, he had acquired an excellent grasp of dialectics as a process—enough to get him blackballed from the draft, the lumberyard, the cannery, etc.—but he always had trouble with historical details. He could sort of read. As a speller he was adrift in a no-man’s-land between phonetic and dyslexic. For many years he had held a responsible position in a black-owned junkyard, selling auto parts and secondhand inspection stickers, before it was closed down for being an eyesore and an environmental hazard. Now it lay under a thick blanket of kudzu, and he and his two older sons worked nonunion construction jobs all over the state, often staying in campgrounds.
Temple was their youngest. His sister, Janice, was also still in school and had come along to Centerville. She was regarded as a strong candidate for Fall Festival Queen. She had ways and means, including hot pants that were mink in the front and suede in back. Dee would shake her head, roll her eyes, administer firm warnings, and placidly watch her fifteen-year-old daughter climb into a car with four adult men to attend a go-go concert three hours away in Washington, DC. “I was just exactly like her to a T,” Dee explained. “She’ll put it behind her.” Meg agreed that it was probably a phase.
Dee sometimes drove Temple and Karen all the way across the James to read books in a public library. Her home library was risqué, consisting of pulp pornography for women disguised as self-help books: the horoscope of love, housekeeping with love, etc. Meg hadn’t known there was such a thing. She thought women’s pornography always promoted slatternly behavior, happy hookers and zipless fucks and so on. In love horoscopes, women were the stars, and their key concern in life was finding the ideal partner. The Aries man would be too rushed for the Gemini woman, but the Cancer man would slowly part her etc. and fondle her etc. Janice studied the books closely, and Meg couldn’t fault Dee for letting her.
Dee’s condoning of sexual freedom in children did not extend to her sons. If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key. She was proud to have no grandbabies yet. In her analysis of heterosexuality she resembled Lee.
As Karen’s classmates approached puberty, Meg realized she hadn’t thought things out very far in advance.
She thanked God for Dee and Temple. She could not imagine letting Karen play with any of the other boys, much less date them. They were very clever in their wry self-commentaries, but no good in school. Their curiosity about sex took a hands-on approach. Whereas Temple, disdaining his mother’s collection, informed himself by reading the classics. The poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art” he found especially hot. At thirteen he lay abed with visions of the raging moon. Meg could tell because he refused to recite it no matter how much she teased him.
Janice felt his geekiness might be healed with judicious application of popular culture. By the time he was fifteen, she couldn’t take it anymore. She took him to see Purple Rain. The cinema was in a black part of Suffolk. The dancing started during the opening credits, and you had to get down (that is, stand up) to see much of anything. She w
as pleased to see that after a quart of grape soda he was not short on moves. But she had not reckoned with the artistic and philosophical repercussions. Temple emerged from the theater electrified, ecstatic, abashed, unable to say precisely what had excited him so much. He avoided eye contact. When they got home he headed straight into the courtyard and began improvising rock songs, stomping his foot to keep time. He chanted his lyrics in a monotone falsetto while waiting for the school bus. Janice hung her head.
A council of the elders was called. It was decided that Meg would take Temple to see a showing of My Dinner with Andre in Norfolk. A huge risk, but Meg adored him enough to put on her sunglasses and watch cap and drive him to a city—something she had never done for Karen. Temple floated out of the theater on gossamer wings, silent, thoughtful, and more bookish than ever.
Meg was moved by the movie from beginning to end. Why hadn’t the intellectuals she met ever been that nice? She remembered the role she had played in real-life dinners with real-life Andres: combination cook, waiter, and busboy. The part where Andre describes being buried alive reminded her of her whole life.
She introduced Temple to Samuel Beckett. As he and Karen stood out in the weeds, rehearsing his travesty Waiting for Dogot with Cha Cha, she felt so proud her heart would break. Not of Karen. Her daughter lacked stage presence. Her reedy voice reached the kitchen window without a trace of projection or resonance. To see an actress in Karen, you had to be charitable and use your imagination. It was the larger-than-life presence of Temple that moved Meg as she watched him arrange props on a cable spool, rolled two hundred yards down the shoulder from the Centerville construction site’s impromptu dump, to furnish his set for Crap’s Last Tapeworm.
Dee approved of Meg’s influence. She remarked that her studious son would be the next Thurgood Marshall.