The Summer Without Men

  * * *

  That night I dreamed I woke up in the bedroom with the Buddha on the dresser where I slept. I climbed out of bed, and although the light was dim, I noticed that the walls were wet and glistening. I reached out, touched the damp surface with my fingers, put them to my mouth, and tasted blood. Then, from the next room, I heard a child screaming. I rushed through the door, saw a bundle of white rags on the floor, and began pulling at them to unravel the cloth and uncover the child, but all I found were more and more wrappings. I woke up, breathing hard. I woke up in the room where the dream had begun, but the story did not stop. I heard screaming. Was I still asleep? No. With a racing heart, I understood that the sound was coming from next door. Good Go whihought, Pete. I threw on a robe and flew across the yard. Without knocking or ringing the bell, I ran into the house.

  There was a wigless Flora, brown curls exposed, prostrate on the living room floor, shrieking. Her small face was purple with rage and her burning cheeks streamed with tears and snot as she kicked a chair with her heels and slammed her fists into the floor. Simon was emitting a series of desperate gasping wails from the bedroom upstairs and before me was Ashley. Standing only a foot or so away from Flora, she looked down at the child with blank, dead eyes, and I saw her mouth twitch once. When she understood someone had come in and, in the same moment, recognized me, I watched her expression change instantly to one of concern and helplessness. I swooped down on Flora, picked her up in my arms, and pressed her close to me. The fit didn’t end, but I started talking. “It’s Mia, sweetheart, Mia. What’s the matter?” That was when I realized she was screaming, “I want my air! Air!”

  “Where’s her wig?”

  Ashley looked at me. “I threw it away. It was gross.”

  “Get it this instant!” I growled at her.

  Flora stopped writhing the minute her “air” was restored, and with the sniffing child in my arms I mounted the steps to the bedroom to rescue Simon. Telling Flora I had to put her down in order to retrieve Simon, I instructed her to hug my leg. The baby’s little body was convulsing with sobs. I picked him up and began rocking him until he grew calmer. The three of us, now one three-headed body, lumbered slowly down the stairs into the living room.

  The person I had first seen when I arrived had vanished. In her place was the Ashley I knew from class, a person who was relieved I had come, a person who had been overwhelmed, a person who hadn’t known what to do when Flora had smeared peanut butter in her wig, a person who had wanted to pick up Simon but was afraid to leave Flora. It all made perfect sense. Weren’t Lola and Pete dunderheads for leaving two children under four with a thirteen-year-old? I did not argue with her. I told her I understood. What was I to say? When I came in, I saw something in you that shocked me? I gleaned it from your eyes, your mouth? These insights do not count in social discourse; they may be true, but articulating them sounds insane. After I had settled the three of us onto the sofa, I asked Ashley to get me a bottle for Simon and sent her home.

  The children were both exhausted. Simon collapsed after his food, his tiny curled hand pressed into my collarbone. Flora found a clinging spot a little lower on my body and rested her head on my abdomen. We slept.

  I woke to Lola’s touch. Her hand was moving over my forehead and into my hair. I heard footsteps in the front hall, the bullying or to-be-pitied Pete (depending on my mood), and felt Lola lift Simon from my arms. She smelled of liquor, and her eyes had a watery, sentimental look. I gave her a brief synopsis. All she did was smile, my Madonna of the Split-Level, in her low-necked sparkly top, her tight jeans, and her own golden earrings—two Eiffel towers swaying slightly as she ld down at me.

  * * *

  Dr. S. and I talked at length about Boris’s housing arrangement, during which I leaked a small bucket of tears, and then I told her about the bloody Kleenex, Alice slipping away, Mrs. Lorquat’s complaint, and Ashley’s face. I used the sentence “I feel something is brewing” and saw witches steaming toads on their Sabbath. Dr. S. agreed that it was entirely possible that the girls were engaged in popularity politics, but the evidence of anything more sinister was, well, nonexistent. My blood dream interested her more. Rags. The Change. No more children. The babes next door. There is a wistful sadness when fertility ends, a longing, not to return to the days of bleeding, but a longing for the repetition itself, for the steady monthly rhythms, for the invisible tug of the Moon herself, to whom you once belonged: Diana, Ishtar, Mardoll, Artemis, Luna, Albion, Galata—waxing and waning—maiden, mother, crone.

  * * *

  In class, I found myself examining Ashley’s face for some sign of the frightening babysitter, but there was no trace of her. The other girls were slightly withheld, I noticed, but cooperative, and I did not have to confiscate any phones. And Alice, Alice looked happy, more than happy. She looked elated. I had never seen her in a radiant state before. Her eyes gleamed, and the poem she wrote had a jazzy tone I would have thought was completely out of character. “I’m banging out my thoughts today / Singing on a comet / Yelling in the clouds / Dancing on the sun.” Something has happened, I said to myself. Alice left last, as was often the case. She stood over the table, carefully depositing her notebook and pens into her bag, and she hummed a few notes from an unrecognizable tune.

  “You’re in a good mood.”

  She looked up at me and smiled; her braces shone silver for an instant in the light from the window.

  “Have you had good news?”

  Alice nodded.

  I looked at her young face encouragingly.

  “You might find it silly,” she said. “But I’ve had a message, a nice message, from a boy I like.”

  “That’s not silly,” I said. “I remember. I remember how nice that was.”

  As we walked to the door, I told her she should keep writing. She laughed. It may have been the first time I had heard her laugh. Outside, she jumped down the steps, turned to wave at me, and started to run. Farther down the block, she slowed her pace, but her joy remained visible in the added bounce she gave to her walk.

  * * *

  It was the title that got me thinking. Persuasion. My mother was reading it for her next book club with the other Swans and they had invited me, Mia, Mistress Degree, to say a few words of introduction. A story of love postponed, of love found, lost, and refound. Austen’s heroine is persuaded to give HIM up. Persuasion: to influence, sway, move, induce, soft-pedal, weigh upon, cajole, convince, the work of words, mostly, words that play on weakness, on a vulnerable spot. Honeyed tongues wag as men sweet-talk women into parting their thighs, the smooth palaver that breaks down feminine resistance. Wily women urge men toward this or that crime; the cool seductress of cinema with a teeny little pearl-handled revolver in her purse. Speed-talking Rosalind Russell snaps lines at Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Love as verbal war. Scheherazade keeps on talking and stays alive one more night. The troubadours moon and croon for a lady’s favor. I will win her with words and music. I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and seas. I will dissect the Beloved’s body in metaphor. I will compliment her. I will lure her with wit. “Had we but world enough, and time…” I will tell stories. I will stay alive one more night. Comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death. Otherwise they aren’t so different. In the end, Scheherazade gets the man who wanted to kill her, but he’s besotted by then. Anne Elliot gets Captain Wentworth. The wrap-up is swift. It is the getting him back that counts and the marrying, but in spirit, Austen knows, they were wed before and suffered the emptiness of separation for six long years. This story of Mia and Boris begins deep in a marriage, after years of sex and talk and fights. If it is to be a comedy, then it must fall into Stanley Cavell’s territory, the comedies of repetition, of the already-married coming together again. The philosopher gives us a trenchant parenthesis: “(Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)”

  The
Eleatics did not believe in change, in motion. When does one thing cease to be itself and become another? Diogenes walks back and forth in silence.

  Can we change and stay the same? I remember. I repeat.

  * * *

  Dear Boris,

  I am thinking of you in the bath, smoking a cigar. I am thinking of that day your zipper broke in Berkeley and it was summer and you had not worn your boxer shorts and you had to give a lecture, so you pulled out your shirttails and hoped that no breeze would blow and reveal Sidney to the audience of three hundred or more, and I am thinking of time and rifts and pauses and that you sometimes called me Red, Curly, and Fire Head, and I called you Ollie after your belly got a bit big and Izcovich Without a Stitch in bed and that’s all except that Bonden isn’t too bad, albeit a bit slow and baked. I am waiting for Bea and then Daisy to visit and Mama is good, and I’ve been thinking of Stefan, too, but about the light days, the laughs, the three Musketeers in the old apartment on Tompkins Place and that really is it. Love, Mia

  * * *

  Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can’t control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic.

  * * *

  Lola brought me earrings, two miniature Chrysler Buildings. I had told her it was my favorite building in New York City, and she had rendered it twice in delicate gold wire. Holding them up, I couldn’t help thinking of the buildings in the city that had come as a pair, as twins, and a feeling of sorrow silenced me for a moment, but then I thanked her enthusiastically, tried them on, and she smiled. Looking at her smile, I realized how calm she was, how easy, how unflappable, and that these related qualities, which bordered on languor, were what drew me to her. I guessed that inside her head, the discourse that went on was also tranquil. My own head was a storehouse for multiloquy, the flux de mots of myriad contrarians who argued and debated and skewered one another with mordant parley and then started up all over again. Sometimes that internal babble wore me out. Lola wasn’t dull, however. I had met people who bored me stiff because they seemed drained of all internal conference and deliberation (the SMUGLY STUPID) and others who, whatever their inner capacity for complex cogitations, lived in an impenetrable box, immune to dialogue (the INTELLIGENT BUT DEAD). Lola belonged to neither camp, and even though her utterances were neither original nor witty, I felt an acumen in her body that was missing from her speech. Small alterations in her facial expression, a slow movement of her fingers, or a new tension in her shoulders when I spoke to her made me aware of how intently she was listening, and she seemed to be able to listen even while she was adjusting Flora’s shorts or putting a new bib on Simon. I suspect that she knew, without having to tell herself, that I admired her.

  The offering of the Chrysler Buildings happened on a Saturday, if I am not confused, and I often am about days and dates, but as I remember it, Simon was asleep in a stroller, well strapped in, and Flora’s wig was not on her head. She clutched it tightly in her arms at first, sucked on a thick bunch of strands after that, meditating deeply on some subject known only to her, and once abandoned it entirely to run into the bedroom and examine the professors’ Buddha. All three looked exceptionally clean and shiny. They were off to visit Lola’s parents in White Bear Lake. When I admired the children’s outfits, Lola sighed and said, “If it will only last. I can’t tell you how many times we get there and Flora’s spilled grape juice and Simon’s spit up and I’m slimy. I have clean clothes for them in the car.”

  That same day, Flora introduced me to Moki. As she told me about him, she swayed back and forth, pushed out her bottom lip, puckered both lips, rolled her head, and breathed heavily between phrases.

  “He was bad today. Too loud. Too loud. And bouncy.”

  “Bouncy?19;s sp1D;

  Flora grinned at me, her eyes lit with excitement. “He bounced on the house. And then he flied.”

  “Can he fly?”

  She nodded eagerly. “But he can’t go fast. He flied slow like this.” She demonstrated by moving her legs and arms as if she were swimming in the air.

  She came very close to me and said, “He jumped on the ceiling and in the window and on a car!”

  “Wow,” I said.

  She gabbled on about him, her mother smiling. They had to wait for Moki because he dawdled. Moki loved chocolate chip cookies, bananas, and lemonade, and he had beautiful long blond hair. He was strong, too, and could lift heavy objects, “even trucks!”

  Moki lived. After they had left, I meditated for a moment on the imaginary and the real, on wish fulfillment, on fantasy, on stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends. We chart delusions through collective agreement. The man who believes he’s emitting toxic rays while nobody around him seems to be the least bit affected can be safely said to be suffering from one pathology or another and put away in a locked ward. But let us say that same man’s fantasy is so vivid, it affects his neighbor, who then begins to suffer from headaches and vomiting spells, and a contagious hysteria ensues, the whole town retching—isn’t there some AMBIGUITY here? The vomit is real. I thought of the crazed women flailing and wounding themselves in the churchyard of St. Medard, their gruesome deliriums and convulsions, their hideous pleasures, their glorious subversion of EVERYTHING. And what did I think in my madness? I thought that Boris, in concert with “them,” stood against me, and this was, in fact, delusion, and yet, wasn’t it also a howl against the way things are for me, a cri de coeur to be truly SEEN, not buried in the clichés and mirages of other people’s desires, buried up to my neck like poor Winnie. Beckett knew. Haven’t they distorted me with my collusion? Ibsen’s Nora dances the tarantella, but it has gotten out of hand. It is too fierce. Abigail hides her vacuum cleaner that sucks up the town. It is too fierce. I can see in my father’s eyebrows that it is not right, in my mother’s mouth that it is inappropriate, in Boris’s frown that I am too loud—too forceful. I am too fierce. I am Moki. I am bouncing on the house, but I cannot fly.

  * * *

  I do believe that on March 23, 1998, the only person who saw Sidney was you.

  Boris

  * * & fi*

  When I read it, I smiled. Of course, he would know the date. His brain is a goddamned calendar. I was glad he remembered that I had pounced on the unzippered door to the little soldier himself, standing at attention the instant I gave the command. Oh Sidney, what have you gone and done now? Why AWOL now, old friend? You were never too bright, of course. Like all your brethren, you’ve served as little more than a moronic tool of your owner’s alligator brain. But still, I cannot help wondering, wherefore now, old pal of mine?

  * * *

  Soon, you are saying, we shall come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, aging penis, more than Mia’s extravagant tangents onto this or that, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends, or dead people or Pauses or men offstage, for heaven’s sake, and one of these old ladies or girl poetesses or the mild young neighbor woman or the teetering-on-the-brink-of-four version of Harpo Marx or even wee Simon will DO something. And I promise you they will. There is a brewing, oh yes, there is some witches’ stew brewing. I know because I lived it. But before I get to that, I want to tell you, Gentle Person out there, that if you are here with me now, on the page, I mean, if you have come to this paragraph, if you have not given up and sent me, Mia, flying across the room or even if you have, but you got to wondering whether something might not happen soon and picked me up again and are reading still, then I want to reach out for you and take your face in both my hands and cover you with kisses, kisses on your cheeks and chin and all over your forehead and one on the bridge of your (variously shaped) nose, because I am yours, all yo
urs.

  I just wanted you to know.

  * * *

  Alice did not come to class. There were only the six, and when I asked if any of them knew whether Alice was ill, Ashley volunteered that it might be allergies; she was quite allergic to any number of substances, and a titter spread among them, a minor contagion of humor, which gave me an opportunity. “Allergies are funny?” I said.

  The girls went mum, and so we leapt into Stevens and Roethke and what it means to really look at something, anything, and how after a while, the thing becomes stranger and stranger, and I turned them all into phenomenologists and had them staring at pencils and erasers and my Kleenex pack and a cell phone and we wrote about looking and things and light.

  After class, Ashley, Emma, Nikki, and Nikki’s second incarnation, Joan, imparted the news that Alice had been a little “weird” lately and had “made a scene just yesterday because she couldn’t take a joke.” When I asked what the joke was, Peyton looked sheepish and moved her eyes away from mine. Jessie said in her high small voice that I should know by now that Alice “is kinda different.”

  I muddled forward, remarking that Alice was Alice, and I hadn’t been ticularly aware of any disturbing differences as such. We all had our idiosyncrasies and I ventured that she had seemed “up” during the last class (without letting on that I knew why), and she had written an amusing poem, so I was surprised that she couldn’t take a joke.

  Ashley was sucking on a mint or hard candy, and I watched her mouth move as she pushed the lozenge around in her mouth, her eyes meditative. “Well, she takes meds for something about her mood, you know, cause she’s a little…” Ashley gestured as if she were throwing balls in the air.