On Keeping Women

by Hortense Calisher

  “Lexie.” His hand touched hers, pressed on its own privates. “Lexie—there’s still time.” To go back across the road and be normal again. Back into the house, both of us.

  “Oh, there’s time, time—and thank God for it. Thank you for reminding me.” Ray—thank you for many things.” Her face shone. Out that door. He could tell from her voice. “So wait with me, if you want to.” Her eye flicked once-over him. A wife with her spouse, entering some fete of an importance both are unaccustomed to. “Anyway you want to.”

  So they wait, each trailing generosities which fade and return.

  There’s a barge on the river now, traveling as they always did, south.

  “Look at it.” He pointed angrily. “Piled high with slag. What can the city want with it?”

  “They put out to sea.” Her hand clasped her mouth. “All that charnel. That I used to know about. I know none of it anymore. Nothing.”

  “Out to sea. To burn it. Or to dump.”

  She showed her teeth. “I may want to know damnation too. It’s my right.”

  The trilling of the birds began again, that sound which always seemed to her to speak the one road, the true path, when all it meant was that summer—or winter—was done. The house-of-cloud is gone. Gone in like a moon. All the while, it was her house.

  Shuddering, she bowed her head. Whatever she is has come about because she sees herself as the irrationally mute half of things. As they see her. So that when she does speak, she screams.

  And still she waited, for him or one of them or all of them, every cell in her screaming to be found—to be found tragic, equal, necessary. In equal part.

  What’s he whispering?

  “It’s like being in the stocks, out here. Isn’t it. Like being put in the stocks.” With each urging word his hands find a purchase on her, clenching her thigh, buttock, abdomen as if she’s cold putty he’s molding. Her neck—in iron hands she’d never felt before. Her hair. “That why you were lying here?” The whisper tongued her ear. Sank by an undisclosed channel into her breast. “Look up there then, Lex. Look.”

  No. She knew what he wanted her to see. Ancient wooden stocks, once in the village square, were now preserved in the vestry of the Dutch Reformed Church. Where eight-year-old Chess, malingering after Sunday School, once got herself caught in them. After everyone had gone. No, don’t look up there. Bury your head deep.

  Nowhere to put it, except her own fundament. This was why women wore skirts.

  Up there. In the bay-window. The figure that’s always there. The girl who’s always cold, and never feels it. The blot-head. Looking down at them.

  Feel cold, Mother? Stupidly bare? In the world of those who aren’t you and me, who pull the wool over themselves? What you harbor against little Roy, Mother—that cool tinkle of self-confessed guilt—that’s nothing. Against this other monstrous tenderness which dooms me. To be wombed again with you. Your other monster child.

  Dig your fingers into the ground, Lexie. As night beyond night you’ve dug them into pillow, bed, Ray’s breast—against the undertow urge to rush in and put your arms around the girl up there for keeps—to be as murderously sick. To say: Eat me—for putting you into the world with your angry hunger for me. Eat. My nipple is still in your mouth. My brain is your brain. That double counterpart. If we could, we would bed with it. Like sister children, running away. To each other’s wombs.

  The figure was gone.

  Yes, the stocks. Male and female used to be paired there together. As if their sins could ever be the same, or their damnations either.

  His hands worked against themselves, kneading. Water’d done nothing for the slick on them. He held them out to her mutely. Hers were strong with housecraft. Clasping them over his she held their joined hands quiet. “What, what—?” she crooned, absently gentle, as to a child. “Something on them, eh? What, what?”

  He bent over that fourhanded fist. Mutual blame. It must be what we yearn to rest from in the afterlife. Or in foreign wards, or vacantly public tasks.

  “Parental slime.”

  He saw that her body had aged overnight; it had already begun to hoard up their guilt for them. What overpowered a woman in herself, what finally overpowered the men who loved them, was so curiously the same. They interpose their bodies between themselves and all events. He pities her, this lost cohabitant of his planet. With the pity one has for foreigners, in one’s native place. It’s what Hector and Isaac will feel toward him.

  She’s thinking that their story was deformed from the beginning; there was no way of telling it classically. Or is there. Two people so unaware, yet they have come to the riverbank in the end.

  Or is it the awareness, when it comes—mine—that deforms, since it speaks. The old legends, maybe they were better. Two bowed down and wending their way, as in a paradise lost—but still paradise?

  She sat back on her heels, an open palm attentive on each thigh. It’s her condition. Perhaps their story would be only as deformed as human stories are.

  “It’s the same, isn’t it,” he said suddenly, loudly. “In any walk of life.”

  What can he mean? Is he awarding her one? His face has assembled itself. Where’s the trembler of a minute ago, the father? Sloughed.

  Ah, she’d know him anywhere—this other one. This tribe.

  “The same,” she breathed, softly mocking. And now indeed, they are separate.

  He too sits on his heels, thumbs linked behind him.

  How we’ve traveled.

  Did she say that aloud? Or not?

  Dreaming there, he doesn’t answer. There was something she had to tell the children about him at once. She can’t remember it.

  It seems to him that they have had their heart-to-heart. Life has prepared them. Out of their differences awarding them the silence other people found in love.

  Is it so strange then that he’s reaching for her with the same engrafting movements those other people find?

  As he smoothes that wild hair and scraped breast and mounts what melts toward him, it seems that he and she are rehearsing what would have been their middle age together, even their old age. Who hasn’t seen such couples?—he’s had more scope than most. Two musing at the edge of a bed or across a table, nodding absently at each other’s totems—at the totem the other now is. Each conceding at last the vital process of the other—now that there’s not much of it left.

  It’s not that her zones are up, submerging her; physically she’s long since a professional. Or that she doesn’t know—even on the open ground she once craved—that he can never be her nakedness. It’s that what first raped her in him has grown strong on him again.

  He climbs on her. The foreigner.

  The bus, lumbering out of the cove a mile north to backfire the shot that set off the early-morning race here, hove itself out onto the shore road.

  In the same plunged second that he reminded himself where he was, where they were—and held on as he could anyway, she rolled him off.

  They sat up, slow-motion, in the bruised, unfinished way one did. In the confusion of not being animal enough.

  He picked up his watch, strapping it on, winding it intently. Ashamed—that he can never brutalize.

  “Sorry, Lex.”

  “Don’t be. Nothing would have changed.”

  He saw it square. To him their children have always been the real interruption of the sexual fugue. To her—would it still be the telephone—that unremitting hole which drained his services from her?

  She sat on her haunches, airing the rawness between.

  How maiden he looks—they look—when this happens. When that long muscle of theirs falls short. Once, at one of these times, she’d rushed to a mirror, to catch the moment of coition still on her face, and was shock-pleased to see that white vacuity. To see her rational self—a self which so often pained her because it so often had to go begging—beaten into dazement.

  “Nothing,” he said. “And afterwards anyway—all animals are sad.”<
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  “They are?” How could one know? “Are you?” She waited, for his slow nod. “I’m not. Or not really. It’s not exact enough. For what I feel.”

  “An old saw,” he said. He was still winding his watch. “What do you feel. Afterwards.”

  How ignorant she is. Many must have recorded that non-personal afterglow—has any of her sex ever tried?

  She’ll have to get it right, or else no use to it. Holy ardor toward the act itself—is that what she feels? And toward the natural world that allows it.

  “I feel loyal,” she said. “To the situation.”

  In her language. Exactly.

  But other people stare.

  Let them.

  She’s folded her arms in the cradle position. A palm under each elbow, like a plinth. As if he’s in there. All his shrunken baby-parts exposed.

  “And to the man, if you want the bloody truth.” Her mouth wrinkled, folded into her teeth, opened wide for a taut, oval cry that never came, and fell back smooth as a bud, young. “Loyal to every one of them.”

  He saw that he’d broken the watch. But it had been accurate. Bus is on time. Old engine still had the same miss in it, projected far ahead by the wet river air. Quiet now and again. Then it grunted on, in a lurch of gas. Hard-breathing at each corner, it’s picking up a life at every stop. Set lives, as his own had been. But I wasn’t a patient yet. I was only practicing.

  The gassy smell was energizing him. What he needs now isn’t blood but the smell of motion. Oh I needed blood though. In sickness we carnify. One haunted message maybe—to a life. To be worn in secret on a sacred thong. All the rest an iridescent fever of the cells—then the dark green mold of the bones going back to the energy scum?

  She’s still squatting there. Hearing what?

  “Bus is on time,” he said.

  “I hear it.” Yammering brassy for each customer. Stuttering on.

  This is the brink moment, Lexie, just before the image you nurture is broached to the world. All private images of any intensity are lunatic, until externalized. After that it’s up to you. And the world. Whichever one you choose. Or are chosen by. When enough people chose a same world, then there might be a religion, or the art of piano-playing—neither of which is her icon. Or the fine art of loitering in the Hotel de Ville and letting music in as many registers as known pass through you—which is.

  Here it comes down the road, all her village. Gossip binding those in the bus mouth-to-mouth with those there was no room for. Will you stand up in salute, Lexie? Or lie down as you began. With your ear to the ground.

  She begins to count off by streetcorners and housenumbers. Every straggle of path and wall is engraved on her, it seems, each house by shape and catalogue—wood of white or brown, or black-shuttered, stucco stained with damp the way old linen does, and the earliest houses here—of clapboard above and undershot jaws of rose-geranium brick. She can stroll the whole prospect, to rearrange a leaf. In allegiance. It’s not leaving her as it should be. This eccentric inlet whose gloss already twangs bittersweet in her ear: Landing Way, Ricer Street, Bitker Terrace, Route Nine—a faraway eddy of a river road I once lived on. What are the streetnames in Tierra del Fuego; what would she find there? Waves of rearing anthracite foaming rabid at all newcomers—but when once lived near, revisiting the beach like native mind?

  And I forgot the Village Hall—were any children still sleeping there? Cottage by cottage, by new-plastered bargain and august house with five porches, all rotten, the parents are returned, fast or loose in their beds. But here and there now, one by one a man pops out a door, not stopping for history; everybody knows what commuters do. Why do they keep following her, the fathers, each on his time-wheel, each in his slot?

  Except at the Kellihys.

  Was that the bus halting; who could it be picking up there? Red spurts of music, white honeysuckle of a breeze in the throat, always the caterers thumping their dogsbody rhythms—when did it stop? Don’t stop the music, Bets. Or the babies either. Take in the paper, Bob. Good neighbors helped pay for it.

  What’s the bus waiting so long for at Kellihys’? A caterer’s boy?

  Yards away, it can’t have seen her yet. In her bower visible only direct in from the crown of the road. Or from her house. Where, rubbing his black furry arch against one of the stone pillars which mark the path to his doorway, is her cat.

  She could go back in there for good. Back alone, to resume her valuable reflections. Or could she persuade him, Ray, that enough has happened in the red-dark of themselves; it need never be externalized? Yes—bright, crude but competently, drawn as a lithograph, she can see the two of them sauntering out of the bushes, hands joined in the approving sight of all. What’s she doing here, except holding herself up to view more literally than most?

  Ah no, an education has begun here; she won’t fault it. She’s one of the lucky ones, who wake in time to see the arrow sticking in the morning cereal: Rehearse for Age. A circumscribed life can be useful. Boiling down the evening alcohols, the herbal rages, until you have enough brown stock for dynamite. Even the landscape here has helped, lifting her high on its silver salver, so that she might see moral hints even in a downpour of rain. And images, in their season.

  It’s not that the force with which she sees herself is fading. Only that her wretched body is thrashing itself into as many angles and simperings as a woman trying on a hat, a bridal gown, and a pair of blood-proof rubber-pants, all in the same mirror. She sees her vision of herself as she ought to be now. Not this trembling body which has lost its confidence. A Niké, a winged victory—modest class. A woman damaged enough to be classical. Would she have arms—or should these be stumps? May she have a head?

  Release me, body. Not from life. Just enough—to slump easy. To be able to just—lurch on through. Release me—body which acts like mind.

  She rose on hands and knees, to any eye a whole woman, looking back at her house. Never to be turned to stone by the sight—though she might pray to be. The house recedes, a gothic moth only hovering. Ready still, at a word from her, to hold them all on its wings yet awhile? No, it knew her better than herself, had always known. That she was the face in the pool, terrified but rising steadily. To set fire to her own house.

  A yearning pang struck her, straight from the birth-couch. Then it was gone. Prepare to be ashamed now—of being ashamed.

  Poor old bus, he thought, getting to his feet, craning to see. On the blink again? In front of Kellihys’. Where Horrie must be having to climb over half of tonight’s story before they’ll let him phone the garage.

  Poor Lexie here, behind him. What frail hopes she always floats her images on. On a bus. On me.

  There comes Horrie. Bouncing out of Kellihys’ and into the bus again, for one more try. Or to consult. Good old Horrie, the bus’ll be saying; he stays the route. Meaning that we all do.

  For, poor Lexie, how we switch bargains on you. How we use you, to fox yourself in, the end. That bus, your village—you’re not merely waiting for it. It’s following you, always following you. To watch how the nude bargain comes out.

  What’s that other familiar revving, up the hillside? Between them and Kellihys’.

  In Spain, at eleven A.M. every day except Sunday, in the public square under his balcony the same little hunched bug of a car starting up the time-wheel in his head.

  Breakfast-time in Grand River, and his son the all-night reader going out for it. Or some of that legion he lends his car to.

  No wonder it won’t move, the way they load it.

  Smiling to himself though he’ll have to find other transport, he urges on the old rattletrap. Get going, youngsters. Up this early, to wherever you’re off to. There—they’ve got it running. Smooth. There it goes.

  Fading. Gone.

  “Somebody’s taken out the Volks.”

  Did a spasm of maternity plump her cheeks? “Charlie. Going for buns.”

  Holy are the meals prepared by children’s hands.

&nb
sp; In one of those purses which were her attaché-cases—tucked well down in a bunch of those hieroglyphs of her life which when dumped on a table could be ridiculed both for their insignificance and their inclusiveness—was the flyer the troupe of Chasids once thrust at her on that last solitary city outing; she’d never been able to throw it away. It contained instructions on the mission of women, and girls. Which was—to light the dark world, from the family distance. All its admonitions, crowding Chasidic, were those same ones more commonly directed, without regard for race or religion toward all her kind. But the flyer was more practical. It gave the candle-lighting times for all major American cities. And the procedure by which, in whichever one she found herself, she might cast her holy light to illumine the world—without entering it:

  First light the candles…

  I do it. A candle as high as a house.

  … then cover your eyes with your hands to hide the flame.

  I do. Look here.

  At this point you may recite the blessing.

  I do. I do. I do. In the double language under language, which they never hear:

  Airt. Moil. Bast. And Belding’s Corticelli—which is not Betelgeuse. To be a compass, a guide. To toil, to drudge. To be flexible, as bark. And to hang like a star—by a thread.

  I recite the blessing, for all my tribe. Which until yours hears it, will infiltrate the children, and hallucinate the world.

  But how to say it in a language they understand? The common one.

  She lays her ear to the ground, where she can hear the voice of the Thruway, a religion of onward swaying her dais and passing through her, the voice of the many calling to the single without sex or need of translation. We are not alone. We are never alone. Here is the apparatus. This is the contract.

  Hurry. Answer. Recite the blessing. The bus must be moving again. Ray had his back to her, and was craning up the road.

  It’s what a blessing might be when it’s half banner, half prayer. So that any invoker might stand in a kitchen, or thousands might converge on the Stock Exchange or run to the Champs de Mar to sew it on the air: