Ayla understood now that it was unlikely she would ever give birth; her totem was too strong….
Not so fast, Ayla. Unfortunately, babies are not actually made by the battling of random tribe totems, but you’re going to figure that out anyway, because you’re Homo sapiens and your brain is capable of intuitive leaps based on observable data, but anyway. Broud? You were saying?
He looked around, then down at the woman sitting at his feet, waiting with unruffled composure for him to get on with his rebuke and be on his way. She’s worse than ever since she became a Woman, he thought…. What can I make her do?…Wait, she’s a woman now, isn’t she? There’s something I can make her do.
Broud gave her a signal, and Ayla’s eyes flew open. It was unexpected. Iza told her men only wanted that from women they considered attractive; she knew Broud thought she was ugly…. He signaled her again, imperiously, to assume the position so he could relieve his needs, the position for sexual intercourse…
Ayla knew what was expected…Many young girls of the Clan were pierced by pubescent boys who lingered in the limbo of not-yet-men, before their first kill; and occasionally a man, beguiled by a young coquette pleased himself with a not-quite-ripe female…Within a society that indulged in sex as naturally as they breathed, Ayla was still a virgin.
The young woman felt awkward; she knew she must comply, but she was flustered and Broud was enjoying it. He was glad he had thought of it; he had finally broken down her defenses. It excited him to see her so confused and bewildered, and aroused him…
Broud got impatient, pushed her down, and moved aside his wrap exposing his organ, thick and throbbing…She’s so ugly, she should be honored, no other man would have her, he thought angrily, grabbing at his wrap to move it out of the way as his need grew….
But as Broud closed in on her, something snapped. She couldn’t do it! She just couldn’t. Her reason left her. It didn’t matter that she was supposed to obey him. She scrambled to her feet and started to run. Broud was too quick for her. He grabbed her, pushed her down, and punched her in the face, cutting her lip with his hard fist. He was beginning to enjoy this. Too many times had he restrained himself when he wanted to beat her, but there was no one to stop him here. And he had justifiable reason—she was disobeying him, actively disobeying him…
She was nearly unconscious when he threw her over on her face, feverishly ripped her wrap aside, and spread her legs. With one hard thrust, he penetrated deeply. She screamed with pain. It added to his pleasure. He lunged again, drawing forth another painful cry, then again, and again. The intensity of his excitement urged him on, rising quickly to unbearable peaks. With a last hard drive that extracted a final agonized scream, he ejected his built up heat.
Well! Smell you, Nancy Drew! That is where dawn-of-mankind porn slips right into PORN, I guess—which is probably a good 85 percent of why THIS STUFF IS COMPLETELY ADDICTING. (You don’t really get any kinkier than human/Neanderthal sex.) But I do think you can differentiate the books from other fur-wrap rippers by the fact that The Clan of the Cave Bear is not only about some overheated welter where both the earth and the beings upon it rumble with ecstasy and agony and split on a regular basis. On a fundamental level, it’s about sex not for sex’s sake but for how it interacts with our lives—how Ayla suffers to keep the baby that results from Broud’s raping her and her status as hunter and medicine woman, and how, in the next few novels, she strives to find a partner not only of her own kind, but of her own kind—an equal partner that appreciates Ayla the species and Ayla the woman. As the novel ends, Brun berates Broud for having brought chaos and dishonor to the clan by his treatment of Ayla: “She was a woman, and she had more courage than you, Broud, more determination, more self-control. She was more man than you are. Ayla should have been the son of my mate.” Doesn’t quite have the ring of “Like a fish needs a bicycle,” but a good dawn-of-mankind start nonetheless.
BOOK REPORT
Flowers in the Attic
By V. C. Andrews 1979
He Ain’t Sexy, He’s My Brother
Truly, when I was very young, way back in the fifties, I believed all of life would be like one long and perfect summer day. After all, it did start out that way.
About a decade ago, bouncing around a bookstore with my best friend, I ascertained with increasing horror that she had somehow managed to plow through the field of YA literature from the 19th through the 20th centuries without seeding any V. C. Andrews. “You have to read this!” I said, shaking Flowers in the Attic at her frantically, disturbing the other Eileen Fisher-clad patrons. “Uh-huh,” she said, turning over some Alan Shapiro to read the back. “No, really!” I pressed. It is a testament to her forbearance that, after she passed on buying the book and I insisted on buying it FOR her, she suffered me enough to open it and read the first page. At which point she immediately ceased to respond to all communications until she had reached the last one.
What is it that makes V. C. Andrews, and particularly Flowers in the Attic, so compelling? The story of Cathy Dollenganger, nee Foxworth, and her siblings, Chris, Cory, and Carrie, Flowers in the Attic is the compelling story of a family’s betrayal and heartbreak, love and revenge, apparently. (See above.) More precisely, it is the story of a blond, Dresden-doll family torn apart after the death of a father—and a mother who sacrifices her own children to get a massive inheritance she finds she loves more than her own flesh and blood.
WHY do I not have a successful career as a flap-copy writer? Anyway, when we meet the Dollenganger clan, they are in the waning days of their picture-perfect life. Cathy, at 12, is an aspiring ballerina, while Chris, her older brother, is a brainy know-it-all who delights in tormenting her. (More on that later.) The young twins, Carrie and Cory, are not that interesting. (They are twins, etc.) And the parents, Christopher and Corrine, are possessed of a shattering beauty as well as an icky, overarching sensuality:
Our father was perfect. He stood six feet two, weighed 180 pounds, and his hair was thick and flaxen blond, and waved just enough to be perfect; his eyes were cerulean blue and sparkled with laughter….
Yada yada yada, await the yick:
His booming greeting rang out as soon as he put down his suitcase and briefcase. “Come greet me with kisses if you love me!”
Somewhere near the front door, my brother and I would be hiding, and after he’d called out his greeting, we’d dash out from behind a chair or the sofa to crash into his wide open arms, which seized us up at once and held us close, and he warmed our lips with his kisses….
…Love was a word lavished about in our home. “Do you love me?—For I most certainly love you; did you miss me?—Are you glad I’m home?—Did you think about me when I was gone? Every night? Did you toss and turn and wish I were behind you, holding you close? For if you didn’t, Corrine, I might want to die.”
BEST argument for fathers having to work such long hours in a coal mine is that they come home and start drinking in front of the TV immediately, EVER. But Corrine, the mother—Cathy’s model for womanity—is no better. Without any employment other than maintaining her beauty, she shows Cathy precisely how a woman grooms herself to maintain a husband’s interest:
On Fridays, Momma spent half the day in the beauty parlour having her hair shampooed and set and her fingernails polished, and then she’d come home to take a long bath in perfumed-oil water. I’d perch in her dressing-room, and watch her emerge in a filmy negligee. She’d sit at her dressing-table to meticulously apply make-up. And I, so eager to learn, drank in everything she did to turn herself from just a pretty woman into a creature so ravishingly beautiful she didn’t look real. The most amazing part of this was our father thought she DIDN’T wear make-up! He believed she was naturally a striking beauty.
Lying whore betrayer! Seriously, she is. You’ll see. Because, after her husband’s untimely death, she is shortly going to lock her children in the attic of her parents’ estate—“…My parents are rich! Not middle-class rich, or
upper-class rich! but very, very rich! Filthy, unbelievably, sinfully rich!” Wait, what are they?—in order to wile her way back into her father’s good graces, which she fell out of after marrying her half-uncle and presumably bearing their Devil’s Issue. (I hate it when that happens!)
As Corrine brings the children to the enormous, grim estate, her stated plan to her four charges is as follows: They’ll hang out for a few days until she prepares her father to meet them. Then they’ll charm him with their blond perfection, he’ll write them into the will, and everyone will be happy and blond. Or, she’ll just charm him and he’ll die, which is the preferred plan.
What they haven’t banked on is the grandmother who greets them:
Her nose was an eagle’s beak, her shoulders were wide, and her mouth was like a thin, crooked knife slash. Her dress, a grey taffeta, had a diamond brooch at the throat on a high, severe neckline. Nothing about her appeared soft or yielding; even her bosom looked like twin hills of concrete.
Not only does this modern Miss Minchin have a bad attitude, she seems to have a bad view of the children: namely, that they are Devil’s spawn. As she leads them through a long list of do’s and don’ts that includes always brushing one’s teeth, never opening the blinds, and staring at the Bible to try to absorb the “purity of the Lord and his ways,” the children begin to cotton on to the fact that something is amiss: “Eight: if I ever catch boys and girls using the bathroom at the same time, I will quite relentlessly, and without mercy, peel the skin from your backs.”
Okay first, who WANTS to use the bathroom with someone at the same time—to say nothing of using it with a BOY? But the senior Mrs. Foxworth will not be put off:
“They’re only children,” Momma flared back with unusual fire. “Mother, you haven’t changed one bit, have you? You still have a nasty, suspicious mind! Christopher and Cathy are innocent!”
“Innocent?” she snapped back, her mean look so sharp it could cut and draw blood. “That is exactly what your father and I always presumed about you and your half-uncle!”
Finding out you’re your own first cousin…I HATE it when that happens!
And thus begins a long series of days that stretch from two or three into, I don’t know, FOUR YEARS, during which the children subsist on a daily diet of cold bacon, toast, jelly sandwiches, warm milk, and fried chicken; are almost forced to eat mice; make a paper garden in the attic, and slowly grow thin and spindly along with the flowers they have placed in the wan sun. Corrine’s response to this treatment is to continue to buy them more games and expensive clothing, and assure them that the father is about to die, and they are going to lose their investment if they rush things now: “Just have patience. Be understanding! And what fun you lose now, I’ll make up to you later, a thousandfold!”
This is all very well, except for how being locked alone in a room for four years, cast as the de facto parents of the twins, Cathy and Chris begin to have a shaky sense of their own roles as well:
Now the twins ran to me with their small cuts and bruises, and the splinters garnered from the rotten wood in the attic. I carefully plucked them out with tweezers. Chris would apply the antiseptic, and the adhesive plaster they both loved. An injured small finger was enough to demand cuddly-baby thing, and lullabies sung as I tucked them into bed, and kissed their faces, and tickled where laughter had to be freed. Their thin little arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I was loved, very loved, and needed.
I have always wondered if Andrews’s continued use of the passive voice is what creates such an urgent air of mystery around her characters, as if whatever agents of activity afoot, unspecified, might not belong to the agents in question but to the grim finger of fate. And they are completely without any control over their circumstances—not over the grandfather who won’t die, the grandmother who won’t stop beating them, or the mother who is showing up increasingly less often.
Worst of all, however, is the problem arising that no one can control—Chris and Cathy’s burgeoning sexuality:
I was coming alive, feeling things I hadn’t felt before. Strange achings, longings. Wanting something, and not knowing what it was that woke me up at night, pulsating, throbbing, excited, and knowing a man was there with me, doing something I wanted him to complete, and he never did…he never did….
Tell me about it, sister. But Cathy, who is the only child cynical enough to see that her mother has no intention of ever letting them out (“It was my way to turn over all that glittered and look for the tarnish”) is unable to see her brother (sorry) coming:
We were not always modest in the bedroom, nor were we always fully dressed…. None of us cared very much who saw what.
We should have cared.
We should have been careful……. “It would help if you weren’t so near, so unavailable.”
Okay, Cathy. Just, whatever you do, don’t sleep with your brother. Don’t sleep with your bro—
He yelled out something like, “You’re mine, Cathy! Mine! You’ll always be mine! No matter who comes into your future, you’ll always belong to me! I’ll make you mine…tonight…now!
I had the strong dancer’s legs, he had the biceps and greater weight…and he had much more determination than I to use something hot, swollen and demanding, so much that it stole reasoning and sanity from him.
And I loved him. I wanted what he wanted—if he wanted it that much, right or wrong.
Somehow we wound up on that old mattress—that filthy, smelly stained mattress that must have known lovers long before this night. And that is where he took me, and forced in that swollen, rigid male sex part of him that had to be satisfied. It drove into my tight and resisting flesh which tore and bled.
I can confirm how impossible it is to attempt to maintain the reader’s interest without lapsing into narrative Red-Bulls-like incest, beatings, poison, and disgusting lies. (My character had to be content with doing a lot of cleaning.) But the stifling scenes depicted in Flowers in the Attic—and all of Andrews—take soap opera to a new level. Cathy tells Chris:
Chris, soap opera people are like us—they seldom go outdoors. And when they do, we only hear about it, never see it. They loll about in living-rooms, bedrooms, sit in the kitchens and sip coffee or stand up and drink Martinis—but never, never go outside before our eyes. And whenever something good happens, whenever they think they’re finally going to be happy, some catastrophe comes along to dash their hopes.
But if a soap opera is opera in drag, V. C. Andrews is a drag queen, holding a scented hanky to her heaving bosom, standing in front of an Elvis preacher at a Las Vegas chapel on New Year’s Eve. No one ever turns—they spin around with their legs flashing through a thin negligee. There’s face cupping and bosom clutching extraordinaire. Fists bleed. Bodies swell. Odors are left, things are returned tenfold! Innocent, Beave-like protestations—“I didn’t mean to rape you, I swear to God!” “I just couldn’t believe this fantastic tale of something he called ‘nocturnal emissions!’—exist alongside cloying, too-close informations, glances at cleavage, sighs like, “Let me have all those swelling curves that men desire.” If there were ever a book meant to be read aloud by Blanche Devereaux, this is it. Andrews writes like a non-native speaker who has done time in a jail where they only show 1960s sitcoms and One Life to Live, and my small heart aches and blood runs from many small paper cuts as I read her, beating my small fists on the pages.
EXTRA CREDIT
Domestic Arrangements
By Norma Klein 1981
Girls on Film
You will forgive me for looking forward, on the day of my 14th birthday, to a battery of mildly unorthodox events. First, there was the old artist who was going to ask me to model nude, compliment me grumpily, then decline to do away with my virginity. There was the awkward boyfriend whom I’d play tennis with who would not. There was the film I might be asked to star in, in which I’d model nude, an act which would be met without comment by my peers, and then there were the parental affairs I�
�d observe without too much comment either, letting my elders work out their sex roles just as I was working out mine. There were the gallery openings and Upper West Side apartments stuffed with books and African masks I’d visit, and there were the bagels and lox and Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee I’d consume while either participating in and/or listening to energetic debates about art, feminism, death, God, sex, the government, and whether or not my boyfriend at the time could sleep over. (He could.) Perhaps when I hit my twenties, I’d even bear the child of one of my two genial lovers, then name him Bruno. Life would be, in short, something like Manhattan—but with Mariel Hemingway in the starring role.
I did, in fact, do one or two of those things that year, mainly because I already had (viz: eat bagels and lox, visit apartments stuffed with books) but my life stubbornly refused to produce the remainder, if it did at all, until I was well of age. By then, of course, some of the offers had lost some of their appeal. (The request to model nude, in particular, proceeds past its sell-by date somewhere around the time you turn 17.) But I was only confused, not bereft. I hadn’t expected all those things because I was a preternatural sophisticate chomping at the bit, being denied my rightful place in the boho parade. I’d just expected them because I’d read too much Norma Klein.
Cultural gatekeepers appalled at the sex-ready, credit-card-armed avatars of youth culture today should simply instruct their DVRs to continue recording episodes of Gossip Girl if they want to keep body and soul together, because opening any Norma Klein novel might actually put them out of commission forever. While it’s easy to scapegoat the over-the-top depictions of youth today for, you know, whatever, Klein’s characters are far harder to pin down as the enemy. Simply put, they’re nice, smart, appealing kids, and they’re interested in the idea of sex not only for its own sake, but also to get a sense of how it should fit into a monogamous, loving relationship. It’s kind of hard to fault them for that. (Though many would try.) There’s only one problem. In the midst of all this philosophical sexual rumination, the darn kids keep having it.
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