Empathy

by Sarah Schulman

  Then the doorbell rang.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s me.”

  Oh no, Doc thought. It’s Cro-Mag.

  “What do you want?” Doc yelled through the door.

  “Doc?” he said. “I figured it all out. I figured out the answer to my problem. I found a way to understand the world.”

  Despite being covered in blood, Doc could not resist a good solution so he cracked the front door slightly and peeked out from under the chain.

  “Yes?”

  “Well,” Cro-Mag said. “I don’t have to be guilty anymore. That way no one will ever ask me embarrassing questions again.”

  Now what am I going to do? Doc thought.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-five is a lie. At least, the end of it is. That is not what happened. That was just Doc projecting his worst fears onto the page. Actually he and this woman stepped out for a cup of coffee.

  “There’s an Algerian Marxist with a falafel stand on Ninth Street,” Doc said. “There are two Palestinian brothers running a deli on Tenth. Across the street from them is the mosque and around the corner is the Halal butcher. There are worshipers standing around all the time. The Arabs stand together. The Pakistanis stand together. Each speaks and stands a different way. When I step into Di Robertis Italian Coffee Shop for a Sanka and an éclair, there are always a variety of Muslims standing in line with white caps buying coffee.

  “And down here, on the other corner, is Babu who sells New York Posts and People magazines from his newsstand. He has a PhD in political science from the University of Delhi and has a hard time meeting American intellectuals.”

  Doc had so many things he wanted to tell her.

  Doc felt good walking next to this mean woman. There was something great about it.

  “What do you like about me, Anna?” the woman finally asked.

  “I like the way you like flowers,” Doc said. “I like your muscles. I like the way you kiss when you come.” Then Doc added, “I haven’t been myself lately.”

  “Why, because you’ve been alone?”

  “No,” Doc answered, “because I’ve been without you.”

  They never spoke to each other again.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Is it because of windows that I think the day’s square?

  - EILEEN MYLES

  Finally, the inevitable happened. Doc met a woman on the subway. Her name was Dora. She listened quietly while Doc told her everything.

  “You don’t look like a man to me,” Dora said. “You don’t smell like one, you don’t feel like one or act like one.”

  “Okay,” Doc said, trying to relax and trying on the label Anna at the same time. “Okay, but that woman in white really made me feel like one of the guys.”

  “Well,” Dora answered, “obviously you couldn’t give her what she needed.”

  “What was that?”

  “She needed you to prove that she is heterosexual.”

  That resonated so thoroughly with Anna. She felt so suddenly at ease.

  “Where are you from?” Anna asked.

  “Oh, a small town in Pennsylvania,” Dora answered. “And then the Bronx.”

  “Finally,” Anna said, “do you have any idea of how long I have been waiting for you?”

  Anna O. had been out in public and had seen Dora some time before. Later, as they were fucking, Dora made little sounds, said little words here and there that Anna could play back later.

  “How could you possibly think you were a man?” Dora said. “When you have such a big, hungry pussy.”

  Anna was fast while Dora was slow and sharp. It took her forever to get ready. Once in bed, Anna came on strong and was rough. But Dora really knew how to make love. They were gorgeous girls with lips of glass until they kissed. Then their fucking was a carefree heedless motion. It was emotionally connected. It made them want to be friends for a long, long time.

  “I’m good at service but bad at surrender,” Anna confided.

  “Just left your skirt over your head,” Dora said, whispering to her the way shadows fall.

  “I forgot I was a woman,” Anna said, following orders.

  “Don’t do it again,” Dora said. “You don’t have to.”

  “I feel a little crazy,” Anna said. “Look, goose bumps.”

  “You don’t have to compete with men when you’re here with me. I want you, honey.”

  It was different this time. It had gone beyond anything fleshy. It was carnal desire both ways but Dora liked to speak directly of love and Anna only let it spill out.

  It was one of those rare moments where temptation and joy were the same things. They were lucky, these two. Touching each other was right.

  Now Anna had everything. She was a woman again. She did not have to be Doc. She could be loved instead. She learned that what she had been taught about right and wrong was created for a world that no longer existed and actually never did exist. She learned that a person positions herself on quicksand. She learned that every single individual has to rethink morality for themselves and at the same time come to a newly negotiated social agreement. That’s how Anna learned to be many people at once and live in different worlds of perception at the same time each day.

  She lived in the world where she was a man. She lived in the world where she was a woman. She lived in the world with an unresolvable past and a world with a resolvable future. She lived in the world that could be explained and in the one that could not.

  At night one woke to touch the other. She responded by turning. Gray light. Light blue. Her bones turned underneath. Even her shifts were tender. Simple words are the best.

  Anna looked at herself in the mirror. She was attentive and flirtatious; the room smelled of whiskey, blood, and sex.

  “Dora, tell me a story while I admire you. Tell me about the first time you fell in love.”

  Dora was lying back, neatly, on the pillow. Her lips were relaxed so she looked like herself as a young girl.

  “The first time? It’s been a while since someone has asked me that. Let’s see, it was back in Lancaster, PA, when I was seventeen. My first real girlfriend was named Pauline Greene. I was working on Broad Street before the mall - selling, like what I do now. And she used to come by on her motorbike claiming to be shopping for nylons. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I just didn’t want that. And she kept hanging around pretending she was looking at the hosiery but she was really looking at me. Finally she asked me out on a formal date. I remember I was so nervous. I was wearing a white blouse and no bra. We drove around and listened to the radio and talked until she parked the car so we could make out. It was so exciting. I had my arms around this strong woman who wanted me and it was so exciting. We stayed together in that house for five years. Everybody knew about it but I didn’t say anything so they didn’t say anything either. Then she left me.”

  “Were you surprised?”

  “One day I was all curled up next to her and then she wasn’t in my life anymore. But all around were these … remnants. I would find strands of her hair on the sheets. Her fingerprints were on the glasses. I couldn’t do anything but wait until it all disappeared. And it did. The day I realized that everything was gone I cried so hard I couldn’t believe I was actually alive. But you have to work. I was alone for a long time after that. Then I moved to New York.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I changed completely,” Dora said. “I look back on my own life story now and I see the history of the distortion of our imagery. I’m talking about something that has nothing to do with nostalgia. Within that story there is the total history of my oppression and my refusal to be oppressed.”

  “I think I may be like you,” Anna said. “I too have undergone a radical reorientation toward existence.”

  Then Anna thought of a short poem about being like Dora.

  Modesty itself is a temptation

  like dry earth, rough tongue

  you, lik
e me.

  Honeysuckle. Steam

  A blue-gray scalding hiss.

  All night they talked about what living is like.

  Later, Anna got out that old book Romantic Sentences that Mrs. Noren had given her. There she wrote:- Fingering your sticky little ears.

  - Under her skin there are capillaries. The blood moseys along.

  - There is milk in there somewhere. Maybe her throat.

  - Orange peel.

  “I want to write on your face with Magic Marker,” Anna said. “It is so in front of me.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  One morning Anna woke up to Dora kissing her on the cheek.

  “Do you know why you’ve been so confused?” Dora asked.

  “Do you know why you’ve lived with such dread and undefined anticipation? Why the world changed so fast every day that you didn’t know how to help it? Why you had no explanation?”

  “Why?” Anna asked.

  “Because, darling,” she said, “we’ve been living in a country on the brink of war.”

  It was January 16, 1991, the day after Martin Luther King’s birthday. Never before had Anna experienced the beginning of a war. As far as Vietnam goes, she had been born into it. Never before had a president announced exactly what day the war would begin and then the people waited for that day to come. Anna and Dora woke up that day and turned on the radio waiting for the war to start. Anna regretted, for once, not having a TV, but there was something comforting about huddling around the radio just like her parents did in 1942.

  It was a little after six and Anna was boiling water. The radio mentioned a flash over Baghdad and that it had begun. Then, at nine o’clock, the president came on and declared his contempt for his own people. At ten-thirty Anna and Dora went out in the slight drizzle, the kind that was much too warm for January. They walked up First Avenue to the United Nations for the first demonstration on the first night of the war.

  There were so many fears in Anna’s heart. She feared for her own life. She feared for the lives of others. She feared her own complicity and the complicity of others. She feared all their lives changing faster without the knowledge of how they would change. She feared there would be no change.

  “I thought I was going to die of AIDS,” said the man protesting next to her. “But now it seems I might die more communally.”

  This is what it was like, that night, to be an American.

  Wherever people are at the moment of war, that is where they have placed themselves. It is a big spotlight.

  People sat on buses and in audiences with earphones listening to the news, then focused only on the tiniest details. Little forget-menots, forget-mes. Some warm water. A nap. A sweet tooth. A little scratch. A moon for a minute. A soup.

  “I would give anything to fuck her,” is an apocalyptic thought.

  Anna and Dora stood together in the light of the United Nations facing two hundred policemen in riot gear, listening to boring speeches and feeling panic. They could not know that the fear and anticipation they felt would be quickly surrounded by an institutionalized narcoleptic nationalism and widespread boredom. They could not know that all Americans would spend the next few weeks glued to twenty-four-hour news reports that told them absolutely nothing. They could not know that within three days the entire nation would be wearing little yellow ribbons on their lapels as though their children were playing football instead of imposing mass death.

  Soon, one hundred and seventy-five thousand Iraqi people would be massacred in a computerized war that would be presented to the American people like a video game. The numbers of Iraqi dead would never be mentioned. Their destruction would never be acknowledged. More Americans would be killed by guns in New York City during the war than would be killed in the Gulf. But afterward, soldiers who had used tanks to plow desert sands into trenches where Iraqis were buried alive, these same soldiers, would be hailed on those New York City streets as heroes. All over America, these soldiers would be paraded and rewarded and then forgotten to the unemployment lines, with no health insurance and no future. In fact, the entire war would be forgotten. It would inspire no books, no songs, no metaphors for right and wrong. A year later a famous fashion photographer would do a fabulous spread on the generals for an exclusive glamour magazine. Anyone remembering to ask what the war was like would probably hear a drunken regurgitated slogan like: “If you want freedom, you gotta fight for it, man.”

  The entire shape of the world’s geography would change. The meaning would not be clear and its beneficiaries would remain obscured. Huge numbers of people would lose the rights they had only recently won on paper, and which had never had time to actually be enforced. There would be a shift in the way people lived.

  But Dora and Anna could not know this on the night of January 16, 1991. They were living in a prewar period that could not be identified until the war itself was acknowledged. But the real war was ongoing. The real war was at home. The real war had not been televised. All Anna and Dora knew was that this was a moment in history whose outcome could not be imagined. And so they looked through the drizzle into the lights with very simple and simplistic understanding.

  “I just figured out the reason for the Cold War,” Anna said.

  “What?”

  “The reason for the Cold War was not to keep the Soviets in check. The reason was to keep us in check.”

  “I was just thinking something like that myself,” Dora said.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  FADE IN

  INT. RUTH AND IRV’S APARTMENT. LATE EVENING. PASSOVER.

  The family is sitting around a seder table set up in the living room. It is obvious from the clutter on the table that they have just finished the meal and are preparing to resume the seder.

  RUTH

  (Getting up to clear the table.)

  Anybody want more coffee? I’ll make another pot.

  ANNA

  Ma, let Stevie clear the table. Steve, clear the table.

  STEVE

  Don’t tell me what to do.

  ANNA

  (Getting up to clear the table.)

  I just don’t see why, in this family in 1991, men still don’t clear the table.

  BARB

  I’ll clear the table.

  ANNA

  What’s the matter, Barbara? You don’t like conflict?

  RUTH

  You, you shouldn’t lift a single plate. You didn’t eat a thing. You didn’t even eat the parsley. What’s wrong with you?

  ANNA

  Obviously she’s anorexic.

  SYLVIA

  Remember the way my Zeyde used to dovan all night?

  IRV

  Yeah. Those were the good old days.

  SYLVIA

  You and me and Morris would fall asleep under the table.

  STEVE

  Let’s start on the second part of the seder. I have an hour on the subway after all of this.

  SYLVIA

  Okay, you gotta find the afikomon. Find the matzah and Daddy will give you a big reward.

  IRV

  Yeah, you can have anything you want under a dollar.

  (Laughs.)

  RUTH

  There’s no more children in this family. Where are the grandchildren?

  SYLVIA

  Ruthie, it’s a new age.

  RUTH

  No grandchildren is a new age?

  SYLVIA

  What do you want? That’s progress.

  STEVE

  I’m gonna be thirty in two weeks. I’m a full professor in Cinema Studies and I have a book on Paul DeMan coming out in the fall. I’m too old to look for the matzah.

  ANNA

  But you’re not too old to clear the table.

  IRV

  We can’t start the seder without the matzah.

  SYLVIA

  You’re all a bunch of stinkers. I’ll find it.

  SYLVIA starts looking for the matzah.

  IRV

  I rem
ember when my Zeyde used to hide it in his butter churn. A butter churn! Steve, I bet you don’t even know what that is.

  STEVE

  I know more than you think.

  BARB

  What’s a butter churn?

  SYLVIA

  I got it! Irv, that was too simple. You put it in the most obvious place.

  IRV

  Where? I forgot where I put it.

  BARB

  What’s a butter churn?

  SYLVIA

  I forgot too.

  RUTH

  Okay, Sylvia, what do you want?

  BARB

  Yeah, Sylvia, come up with something good.

  SYLVIA

  I want everyone around the table to say their seder wish. I’ll start. I wish my daughter will be safe and happy in the Peace Corps.

  IRV

  Where is she again?

  SYLVIA

  Gabon.

  IRV

  Gabon.

  SYLVIA

  And I hope she comes home soon and that next year she’ll be here with us at seder. Now, Barbara, what is your wish?

  BARB

  I wish for all wars to end. I wish for peace on earth for everyone.