On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  She smiled, leaning away lightly from the steering-wheel. The air had that first poached clarity before the lion-must of summer coarsened it; the breezes were finicky but no longer serious. And I have my jokes back.

  At the same moment, she’s thrust back into those adolescent days of similar weather when, stalking the parks and museums, lone and exalted, there had beat in her a pulse almost of knighthood—toward the possibilities of life. Under the downy veil of womansweat that is her body now, she still hears it, beating light. Happiness is androgynous then?—what a surprise.

  When she got home, she stared longer than usual at her house. Strictly, it had two towers, one a sort of leftover gambrel somebody gave up on, to the rear of the real one. Any way you look at it, architecturally or not, an ambivalent house. On a narrow road, but the view all river. Small frontally, but with wings added for its second century. The rear kitchen looked directly into the base of the hill, which hid all sunsets; above it, the jutting back-bedrooms attach to the hill itself.

  After supper that night, she walked up the back hill. From the houses here—all facing the east, at the bottom of a ridge which hides the west from them—you could see only dawns, which required either gumption or agony. To see the end-of-day colors, as in the vases of that name, you had to climb up here through what once had been a formal garden, gone now to briar but sparking here and there with old bulbs, iris and daffodil, even whose blooms were stunted antique.

  Tonight there’s a sunset like a centrifuge, sucking the world into a golden pantheon.

  Down in the real garden, Charles, with golddust on his face, is training the wisteria up. In the bedroom that juts north with a small bay, she can see Chess sitting like a figurehead, against a background of the lilac-brown wallpaper, patterned like calico, which Chess herself had spent a month pasting on so accurately into the room’s gabled crannies, all help refused. The same paper to which—the minute she saw their proud admiring faces—she’d taken a marking-pencil to, in gravenings of red scrawled everywhere. Behind which barrier she’d then drawn a rear rank of line-figures, outlandishly tall—as she considers herself to be—with black blotheads.

  It has unsettling power, that frieze, and a certain mad taste. What’ll happen though, when we don’t have a house where Chess can scrawl like that, can sit like that, where we can check on her? When we don’t have a house?

  Maureen’ll be in the kitchen now; there are kitchens everywhere. Royal, still smug after the dentist’s, is out here, watching Charles. With his jaw swollen, how much Royal resembles his Uncle James.

  Who is presently in—Kabul, is it? Or Passawatomie, New Jersey? James enjoys returning from the former as if he’s been no farther or foreigner than to the latter. And he can return from some local township he’s been dissecting as if he’d found it to be the tundra, the veldt, the bush, with habits to suit. “Double-breasted chickens, they eat—” James’s supermarket shopping is done for him “—and pizza-to-go, in which every square inch or so you can find a human hair.” While Kabul will of course have a hospital to make his own medical center blush.

  There’s a well-known freedom in not having one’s males alongside. Does she think differently then? Like eating a meal, absently, which hasn’t been cooked for anyone else. Who’ll set down the housewife’s true anthropology? Human hair by the yard, brother, and all our turds piled high as copra.

  Now why must she think that, when the night air is lensing in like a benediction, and the children’s voices haunt in and out of it, her chorale? They’re calling her. They think she is inside the house. A sense of herself, the dark figure without, terrorizes her. She’s terrified of her power, that’s it. But like any tyrant, uses it. What if all her relationship with the children—has been for herself?

  Later that night before going to bed, she doesn’t stand as usual looking out from her ledge. Never again; all ego is there. Instead, she goes down the hall to a little backporch off an unused bedroom, and stands looking out into the black hill. “What do you think—” she breathes, “—am I talented?”

  No poems come. But she sleeps well.

  All that next week, she roamed her own patterns, mentally marking them for scrutiny in study-reverie where she’s both the anthropologist’s subject, and the anthropologist. Soon finding that all these conscious observations had long since been recorded, in that umber part of herself which had had nothing verbal to serve it.

  For how many years has she been alternately amused, depressed, startled?—to find herself between breakfast and lunch moved from attic to basement, from object to intention, from water to fire to food and to washingstarch, on an assemblyline scarcely willed, but moving as gravely as one’s blood-rhythm, beneath all complaint, beneath even a vow. Suspended between past meals, present dirt and the moment’s stop-go, she gathers the leftovers of day and twines them for tomorrow’s stockpot. Greasing the seasons, she’s opening the attic vent to let the wasps blunt their way to spring; she’s down in the laundry gently pairing the mittens for snow. Outside the windows of her small centrist system, the arterial world can only lap; meaning brims here, but must wait. She is in the great architectonic of the task; her movements make a drapery through the house. A fugue invisible. Clotted strong with necessity.

  What is it, though, to move through the lives of children? Under their helplessly imperial gaze setting out her store of trash fact. Whisking the soiled napkin of somebody’s puberty from the bathroom bin, is she redeemed? To drift toward the creation of cake? For suppers which are never the last. At home parties, like all the other daylong preparers, she serves up her own flesh—in the salmon’s skeleton already dissected plain by her own day-dreaming, long before the guests get to it.

  I the anthropologist saw this with my own eyes. When the woman served us broth, it was cups of reverie she was serving. This webby stuff exudes from them day and night, tripping their conversation, wrapping the mind. The headmen are aware of its force but consider it an inert one, best dealt with privately, but not in their own daydreams. Which are all of the public street, the council-hall and the granary. One of the women, shyly letting me examine a bit of her web, told me that some of the more rebellious or daring or “lost ones” made poems of it. ‘But we know these are not the real poems, even for us. The real ones are outside.’ When we asked where was outside, she smiled and indicated the window. It is considered among them that when they themselves cross that barrier, which they do endlessly in their own way, they are however entirely different people compared to the men, who in so doing remain whole. She would not tell us what was meant by ‘lost.’

  And all this I saw myself, in the village of Ys.

  “Ma. The telephone.”

  And how come she’s here, bending over the garbage-pail on the morning backsteps, with Royal, the last to leave because his school is nearer, calling that out to her? When only a moment ago she was standing on the evening hillside?

  Addenda: After the night, the women say—which is spent lying with the mouth shaped for kisses sometimes received, sometimes not—and after the family is packed off in the various chutes which transport them to the outside—the women find it their duty to “weave the village together again” as they say. Which is done by means of holes poked through from housewall to housewall, with wires then inserted. It is an affecting sight, as one wanders from house to house, to see them, each one alone, but joined to another by means of this telephonic thread, and dutifully weaving, each with her mouth still pursed or pouting, the eyes here wistful, here gossip-greedy, but always sororal, the mouth always pressed close to the hole for its obligatory music, thrilling its birdsong. When I asked one of them if they consider this done from duty or from necessity she shrank from me, as some natives do when first they see the photograph. It is possible that just as birds gulp air with song, this matutinal urge is a physical one; perhaps the shape of their mouths, still puckered from the night, requires it.

  And all this I myself saw, in the village of Ys. Where li
ves the lost tribe.

  And all this time she performs her household duties well.

  And the village hadn’t forgotten her. Lexie. Would she like to substitute, a voice asks, for the editor’s assistant on the county newspaper, which since time out of mind has been published in the next town north? “Dorothy Haber, his girl Friday—you’ve seen her around, grizzled blond about sixty—she’s going in for a hysterectomy. Insists she’ll be back at her desk in three weeks. Afraid of her job with old Nutcracker, I guess. But it would help spell you until Ray comes back, wouldn’t it?”

  It would. Should she be surprised that the voice knew this, and all its implications, probably? Not as an anthropologist. As herself, she was out of her mind—the webbed part of it—with excitement over what a newspaper implied. Although she knows the County News’ fussy cubicles and faded staff, from taking an item there now and then—it may be a ship in disguise.

  Nutcracker’s face is an indented old-man-in-the-moon’s, with wens to complete the crescent at forehead and chin. His newspaper, inherited from his father twenty years ago when he was perhaps not yet thirty himself, still services roughly the same half-dozen towns, some in the center-county already gone from farm sprawl to industry during his tenure, others half-obliterated by state roads. One town, on the river below hers, had been a mill-town since the eighteen-twenties, and lustily remains so. To the north, a few hilly parcels bordering the state parkland are still privately owned, and like her own village-strip are suburban in scale but resisting in temperament. The county takes for granted that in its own hilly outland and riverbank, where artists secrete and professionals follow after, is where its true exoticisms lie. Its terrain still makes its visions. And she’ll learn that this man, who pulls his short, bony length up from his desk to greet her with a curious effusion, almost a bow, is as intent on preserving these as if they too are part of his inheritance.

  “Ah yes—” he says, “—Mrs. Doctor.” Giving a courtly sweep to the syllables, and to herself a character. In her brief stay, she’ll learn that he does this for all women. Of him she knows only that he has a wife, a homebody in the old style, who makes rag-dolls, prettily sewn of bright patches, which are sold in the local shops; Maureen and Chessie had them once.

  “So here you are.” He has the sharp, chiding newsroom voice she expected. In the cubicles behind him, whose occupants she can’t see, there’s a sudden, owlish silence. Paperclips stop rattling. The smell of mucilage is rank.

  “Ah yes,” he says. “From Grand River. The village of unnatural acts. On which you and I, Mrs., will be in confidence.”

  He must do this with each newcomer. Rating them as he does her—person, geography and news possibility—in a glance. His regular staff correspondents, she’ll find, bring in items like eggs to market, brown or white, or bloodspotted. He nicknames their territories as if these were landed estates complete with nobles and serfs, instead of towns ten miles from one another, and the farthest of them no more than forty miles from New York. “That’s Orthodoxtown. Dutch, once. Patroons, and ‘mine hosts.’ After that, petty shops. Now it’s those graveyard shopping-malls. Retired police detectives live there now, and city firemen. Still the same politics.” Or—“Torporsville. Inbred from mental retards who were planted in couples and given the ground, in the eighteen-eighties. Still use outhouse manure, win all the flowershows—but don’t eat their cabbages ’less you wash them with permanganate. Nary a murder there, Missus. But sometimes a dear little bébé with one eye.” His language is contrary, mixed—sometimes even with Latin, or with a country accent hanging among other cultivations like a scarecrow in a conservatory.

  Each morning, standing at the door of his own cubicle, or uprooting her from hers, he shames her, with his special knowledge of her small riverstrip, into giving back what she knows of it. She rises for these addresses the way Jean had told her students were said to honor their professors at the Sorbonne. She saw her village, all villages, shrinking calcified in the high wind of a voice which held its decibel while picking its way through the rubbed gore of any human defilement—while the stunned typewriters stopped behind him, the Applecheeks, the current reporter, halted his chewing-gum. Hoppe’s voice is what is nutcracker, at the business of splitting open a life. She learns nothing more of its own, even whether or not it has children—or whether it considers it has a life. Probably—since it so conserves its own facts—no. Or nothing worthy of its own pincer, which goes deeper than gossip, and is more precise than legend. Sex looms no larger in his probings than ritual; he’s as interested in the rich hermit who erodes time in winding car batteries of matchless strength made to give away but not sell, as in the local rapesters—and the latter only if they’re remarkable. What Hoppe broods over is the human fabric, and the monsters to be made of it. Monsters of fidelity even, or virtue—to him it’s all the same.

  While journalism makes what comic connection it can. “Chained his lactating wife in the barn, he did. For general use. When the Well-Baby clinic preaches mother’s milk in Torporsville, what else can you expect?”

  He’s half a foot shorter than she and the wens repel her, as does his chalky, missionary breath. He’s a vegetarian perhaps, or maybe eats only nocturnally. Never is seen to, and his name on the masthead—J. J. Hoppe—is never used, replaced either by “Sir,” or “Him.” Yet if he put a hand on her, she’d let him have her, even as she’s sure it would have to happen for him—in full sight of the cubicles. Which wouldn’t make a sound. In the light of what they’ve learned from him. Nor would she.

  For she’s recognized him. Moving behind his day, which goes from telephone to print and back again, he walks to some other referential tune. He has meditation, which moves him. He too must believe there is a shape to what is lived. A shape to be made. Or sought.

  Oh yes, she knows him. He’s like one of those faceless narrators she’s met in print only. A figure maybe standing in a ditch in Byelorussia and recording for no reason except that such things must be—whose pangs one afterward remembers as one’s own. Or standing in the orange boudoir-garden in Algiers, or in the clerk’s office in antique Palermo. Wherever suffering that alien life which we know to be ours. Hoppe’s what she is. He’s the other anthropologist.

  When he called Grand River “the village of unnatural acts” she’d known he meant all villages really.

  “Natural and unnatural,” she’d answered him that first time. “And hysterical.”

  For three weeks, they have an affair of the mind.

  In field-knowledge, of course, they’re in no way equilateral. He unlocks her village for her, in all its underground moaning. What can she give such an authority in return?

  The Kellihys.

  “Two days after the fire,” she tells him, “Betsy comes doodling down the martini-path. Politely deploring its lack of use. She means—by Ray.” Yes, she’s told Hoppe that. Or half of it, and he can guess the rest.

  “She’s wearing black satin, at ten in the morning, and carrying a beer. She waves the can at me, very excited. ‘Lexie, how do you get the best swimming pool foundation ever?—When the garage apartment burns down on you! Best he ever saw, the architect says. And Mummy is giving us the ten thousand to pay for it.’”

  Hoppe never laughs at anything. His mind is searching its middens, ever analogizing. “‘Lamb’s Essay on Roast Pig.’”

  She doesn’t know it.

  “Haven’t read it myself in years. A hut burns down, as I recall, with a pig inside. Poking the ruins and charred bones, the savages burn their fingers, put them in their mouths—and taste chitlings. Next time they want a taste of the same—natch, burn down the hut again. And that’s how you get a swimming pool.”

  She does the laughing. Though it stops short. “‘Mummy’ is Bob’s you know. The Kellihys have the money. Betsy only has the pretensions. Longings, really. They do doodle, you know. All they know how to. Bob looks older, but they’re the same. At twenty-eight, the two of them. Two poor crocks.”


  “What did you answer,” Hoppe asks, “—about the path?”

  How did he know? That she’d have said something? “I said ‘Betsy. Didn’t you think I’d give you a beer?’ … Stinking of me, wasn’t it. Because you know, I really envied her. Dragging her silk, drinking from a can. The style of it. Maybe I want to be a crock.”

  “Watch that pity. People like you and me.”

  She doesn’t dare ask—where’s that pity rooted? In tears for myself—is that it, Hoppe?

  He doesn’t answer what she doesn’t ask. Their communion is not that sort. But one evening, they’re sitting late at the office, doing the Saturday ads. Everything on that paper is still unmechanized, including the view. Below them, the whole dusky valley of the county is spreading its footlights. Downstairs and off the front steps prance the two gay men who run the bookshop, who have just left their ad. Their cotton teeshirts bob on the provincial dusk like striped flares from Paris. They always enter on a fast joke and leave on a slow—both belied by too vivid and double a gesture, their anxiously formalized chat lingering on the air like the frou-frou of soubrettes. Everyone in town knows their house—fluffy as a bride’s, when there are two of them. Has Hoppe seen it?

  “Mmm.” Into that face-curve of his, so pulled at both ends, a pipe fits well. The leaf he smokes spreads an odor palatable. Behind that rough tan shirt he hasn’t much chest. But the arm extended her is good; the brown marrowbone knuckles holding the pipe have a polish like ivory. Why is she scrutinizing what has no physical charge for her? Because he’s doing the same to her. What charges him is not merely her body. This makes her bridle with pride.

  “Homos, they’re like women in more ways than one. Both sexes of them.” He always made his points in an extra-heavy voice. “People might laugh at them. So they have to live with more style.”