Ice And Fire

by Andrea Dworkin

  your hands behind you and sometimes they would put tape

  over your mouth. The game was to be the witch and have

  them chase you and catch you and put you in a wooden cage

  and tie your hands and hoist you up a telephone pole and tie

  the rope so the cage would stay up high: you weren’t supposed

  to want to be the witch but if you were a girl and running

  there was nothing else to want because the game was for the

  boys to chase you. Everyone else just stood around waiting

  until the boys got bored and tired and let the witch down.

  *

  The horses were running as fast as they could, Roy Rogers

  was sort of standing up on the wagon driving them on,

  shouting go boy go faster faster, and you could see the horses

  streaking by up and down the roughest mountain roads, the

  fringes on his cowboy jacket were all swept back by the wind,

  and he looked back over his shoulder as he sort of stood up and

  shook the reins so the horses would go faster and shouted how

  you doing back there do you like this you uppity little thing or

  something like that with his grin from ear to ear like a smartass,

  and instead of the covered part of a covered wagon there was

  a wooden cage like maybe from a medicine show that had a

  circus and transported animals and it was heaving over the

  rough roads at the full speed of the horses with Roy making

  them go faster and faster and up against the slats Dale Evans

  was holding on, her face all dirty, imprisoned in the wooden

  cage and saying she would never speak to him and he had

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  better let her go. She had been snotty to him and he had gotten

  her in the cage and locked her in and taken off, making the

  horses go faster and faster and she was screaming and

  screaming for him to stop and saying she never would never

  not as long as she lived and he was shouting back over his

  shoulder as the hills flashed by and the horses’ manes stood up

  on end from the wind and the fringe on his cowboy jacket

  went the same direction as the horses’ manes and his gun and

  holster were tied to his leg, had enough yet I’ll tame you you

  little devil. Eventually she was tired and dirty and saw he was

  stronger and she got quiet and loved him and he won. They

  were in love then. Once she quieted down he slowed down the

  horses and took her back to town, leaving her in the cage,

  singing her a song. Back in town, all his friends, the Sons of

  the Pioneers, got to see her come out of the cage, quiet, dirty,

  and she got out of the cage, all the men knowing.

  *

  I had a cowgirl suit, a cowgirl hat, a gun, a holster. There was

  nothing more important than being a cowboy, even though I

  had to be a cowgirl because I had to wear a skirt, with fringes,

  and a blouse, with fringes, and the cowgirl hat and the gun

  and holster didn’t entirely make up for it. It was my favorite

  thing to wear, even though we never did play cowboys and

  Indians. It had more to do with wanting to be a gunslinger and

  learning how to draw fast and shoot straight. I would practice

  my draw for hours at a time but no one would go along with

  me and have a gunfight. I would draw my gun on my father

  and my brother, who would be wrestling and tickling on the

  living room floor. There was vague disapproval of the gun in

  the air and so I would shoot it outside and it would make a

  huge noise and I would gleefully shoot round after round of

  caps, a red paper that sort of exploded and burned. I had a

  rifle too and boots. But it was the gun I loved, and Annie

  Oakley. She wore a skirt and was a crack shot and once we

  went to see her at a live show with Gene Autry. I wanted to be

  her or Roy Rogers or the Lone Ranger, not Dale Evans, not

  ever, not as long as I lived.

  *

  The wooden cage would hang from the telephone pole, hoisted

  by a rope or a piece of clothesline. It would dangle there, the

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  girl inside it not easy to see. They would push her around

  before they put her in the cage. Sometimes they would tie her

  hands. The wooden cage hung over the black asphalt lined by

  garages, some open, some not, and garbage cans, all the fathers

  at work, all the mothers inside the houses or in the front on

  the steps visiting. It would be desolate on the asphalt, boys all

  huddled around the cage with the one caught girl, and slowly

  girls converging back there from all the directions they had

  run in, some coming back from a long way away, having run

  and hidden, run to the very edges of the boundaries of our

  street or having run up and down the back ways and in and

  out of garages, avoiding boys, hiding from them, and then

  enough time would pass, and they would dare to drift back,

  lonely perhaps, thinking enough time had gone by that

  someone else had been caught or the game was over, and there

  would always be the one girl surrounded by boys being pushed

  into the cage and the cage being hoisted off the ground, or the

  cage would already be tied up there. And the boys would stand

  under it, watching it, watching her, and the other girls would

  stay far away, around the edges, each alone, afraid to get too

  close, afraid perhaps that the boys would grab them and do

  something to them, also lonely, also left out. It was our saddest

  game. It never ended right.

  *

  lt would begin in a blaze of excitement. Someone would say

  let’s play witch. Everyone’s eyes would look wildly around,

  scanning the street for where the adults were. We were

  accomplices in this game. We all knew not to tell. No one ever

  talked about this game or mentioned it any other time than

  when we were going to play. The boys would get together and

  count to ten fast because it was a ferocious game: the chase

  was fierce and fast and it had to be close and there had to be

  the excitement of being almost caught or having a hard time

  getting away and they had to be able to see you and get you. It

  wasn’t a patient game like hide-and-seek. It was a feverish

  game, and it would begin at a fever pitch of the boys chasing

  and you running as hard and as fast as you could but you

  wanted to keep them after you as much as you didn’t want to

  be caught so you would have to slow down to stay in sight,

  and they would divide up going in twos and threes after one

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  girl or another and they would hunt someone down but if she

  wasn’t the one they wanted they would pretend not to see her

  finally hiding or they would suddenly turn and run after

  someone else or run in another direction pretending to run

  after someone else and in the end they would all have circled

  the same girl, whoever they had decided on, and they would

  herd her from wherever they had caught her, sometimes far

  away from the wooden cage, and push her and shove her until

  they got her to the telephone pole with the wooden cage. Once

  they caught her it was against the rules for her not to go with

/>   them anyway. The game slowed down after the first few

  minutes and each girl was running on her own figuring out,

  independent of what the boys had planned, whether she wanted

  to be caught or not: and what to do to get caught or not to get

  caught: and did the boys want her anyway? It became a game

  of slow loneliness, of staggering solitude: breathless, dizzy, she

  would stop running in a fever and turn to see no one chasing,

  no one following. Had she won, outsmarted them, outrun

  them, or had she lost, they had never really been after her

  anyway. She might hide, or stalk the boys, dazzle them by

  showing herself, and then they would chase her and she would

  lose them again or hadn’t they really tried at all? Or she would

  see one in the distance, maybe half a block away, and he didn’t

  see her, or did he, and she would start running and running

  and congratulate herself on getting away, or had she? Then a

  long time would go by and she would get bored and tired and

  want the game to be over and wonder where everybody was

  and make her way back to the starting point and no one would

  be there so she would make her way to the back alley and the

  telephone pole, but from far away, toward it but not to it, not

  directly walk up to it, always stay far away from it and the

  boys, safe, and see the boys huddling around the cage and try

  to see who was in it and hear the screams and watch the cage

  go up, two or three boys hoisting it while the rest stood under

  it and watched, and you could never see who it was. Later

  when they let her down you could see. They would untie her

  hands and walk away and she would be left there and the

  scattered ring of lonely girls would watch. She was the witch.

  No one talked to her at least the rest of the day.

  ♦

  1 6

  The convent gave us the right atmosphere. We never saw anything except the thick stone walls, and they were thick, not brick or cement, but huge stones like something medieval,

  black and dark gray with moss and other hanging things and

  shadows falling like God over the stones: and above the high

  walls thick leafy green trees all casting shadows and it seemed

  like no sky or light could ever get through them, in or out. It

  was completely silent. We never saw anything or heard anything. No door ever opened or closed. No Latin poured out, no bells chimed, no music pierced the early dawn or night.

  The wooden cage was hoisted in the back alley closest to the

  convent, and you could see it from there, hanging over the

  tops of the houses, a place of gothic mystery, Catholic, eerie.

  From the telephone pole, hoisted up, inside the wooden cage,

  you were raised above the stone walls and the ghastly trees:

  and with your hands tied there you were the witch: and the

  Catholics could see you.

  They had things called nuns, women dressed all in black, all

  covered up, and we thought they walked around in twos and

  never said a word and had their heads bowed and shaved and

  their hands together in prayer. But we didn’t know. We weren’t

  supposed to go too near it, the convent, and we were afraid of

  disappearing in there for life, because once you went in you

  could never come out. There were ghosts there too. We didn’t

  know if anyone in there was really alive. When you saw the

  top of the convent and the menacing trees above the backs of

  the row houses and the wooden cage with a slight figure inside

  it hoisted high on the telephone pole and tied there with a rope

  and the afternoon began to fade and it got dusky or cloudy

  and there were just the silhouettes of things, the starkness of

  the cage and the figure in it, the tautness of the rope, the city

  ugliness, barren, of the telephone pole, all against a sky that

  had begun to lose light, reigned over by old European stones

  and impenetrable trees, you knew you were near something

  old, chill, something you knew but didn’t know: something

  God was supposed to protect you from: something on the edge

  of your memory, but not your memory. When it got late in the

  day or the sky darkened with clouds or oncoming rain, the

  silhouettes were awful drawings of something you had seen

  before: maybe in a book: somewhere: and you stood completely

  17

  still and watched and prayed for the wooden cage to come

  down, for the figure in it to disappear, not be there, that slight

  figure, for the convent to go away, to be somewhere else: and

  especially for the dread boys, the crowd, to notice the coming

  dark and be afraid of what they had done. We were overcome

  watching: the great shadow of the convent and its thick trees,

  its cold walls of stone, and the great imposition of the wooden

  cage and the caged figure on the darkening sky. It was eerie

  and unhappy: and one was drawn and repelled: drawn to the

  convent and the cage, wanting to run inside the house.

  We were all supposed to stay away from Catholics. The

  convent represented their strangeness and malice: the threat of

  their ghostly superstitions. A holy ghost lived there and they

  drank blood and ate cookies and kneeled down. They wanted

  all the children: and at night you could disappear into those

  walls and no one would ever see you again. Standing outside

  the great stone thing, even in broad daylight, even with traffic

  all around, because one side of the convent was right on a very

  big street at a very big intersection, a child was frightened of

  the unscalable cold stone and the height of it. We could never

  find a way in or out and the walls were too high to climb. I

  wanted to see it and go into it but I was afraid even to stand

  near it. Once another girl and I stood on that street corner for

  hours collecting money for a charity and if you got enough

  money you got to go to a special dinner in a restaurant and I

  just thought about the traffic, how regular it was, and the sun,

  how bright it was, the people walking on the street, how they

  looked and dressed, because behind me was the penetrating

  silence of those stone walls and I was cold and afraid. I could

  feel it behind my back and I could feel the cold stones there

  and I could feel the giant height of the wall and I could feel the

  reaching coolness of the shadows from the great trees. Then a

  car stopped to give us money after we had been there for hours

  and this girl I was with went up to the car and then she got

  real frightened and wouldn’t say what the man said to her and

  said we had to go home right away and was really scared and

  since it was right next to the convent I knew it was something

  really bad so we went right home and she talked to her mother

  who talked to my mother and I kept asking what had happened

  and what the man had done to her. Finally my mother said he

  18

  asked her to get in the car with him. It was very terrible and

  ominous to get into the car. The air was heavy with warning

  and fear and my own inestimable incomprehension. There was

  this edging of my fear away from the convent t
o the man in

  the car and to getting into a car. I thought he must be Catholic.

  The girl would never speak of it or answer anything I asked.

  My mother said never to say anything about it. I asked if he

  had hurt her. My mother said: he didn’t get the chance.

  *

  There were Jewish blocks and Catholic blocks and black

  blocks. We were supposed to stay off the black blocks, though

  it was never put that way. We were always just showed how

  to walk, down which streets, and told where not to go, which

  streets. The streets we weren’t supposed to go on just had that

  in common: black faces, black children. The Catholic streets

  and the Jewish streets were all inside the same area, alternating,

  no mixing. But I liked to go where I wasn’t supposed to, and I

  often walked home alone down the Catholic streets, because

  no one could tell by just looking at me exactly. I would make

  new routes for myself down streets my friends didn’t go on.

  Sometimes I went down black streets, because I wanted to.

  Then, getting closer to the one central elementary school,

  where all kinds of children converged from every direction,

  there were blocks that we all had to walk down because we

  were all going to the same place and it was just a fact that no

  matter who lived there we all had to walk by or through,

  however timidly.

  Our street was bounded on one end, the one going to school,

  by a busy street with lots of cars and across that street was a

  Catholic block, Polish. We were supposed to walk up half a

  block before crossing that busy street and continue going

  toward school on a Jewish block, and usually I did. But coming

  home I would want to walk down the Catholic block because

  it was different and it seemed more direct. I knew I shouldn’t

  but I didn’t exactly know why I shouldn’t except that it did

  seep in that they were different from us and we weren’t

  supposed to marry them. I wasn’t even ten yet because I was

  ten when we moved away.

  I had a friend on that block, Joe, and we would say hello

  and talk and say shy things to each other. Their houses were

  19

  different, all brick row houses, but right on the sidewalks, no