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RATIONALE FOR A WOMAN CENTERED COMPOSITION COURSE

THE MAN WHO MADE TEETH

By

Maria Bruno Holley

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1986

ABSTRACT
RATIONALE FOR A WOMAN CENTERED COMPOSITION COURSE
THE MAN WHO MADE TEETH
By

Maria Bruno Holley

In this study I argue that writing workshops
especially designed for female students can support their
efforts to use language to free themselves from the
restrictions imposed by cultural and educational
traditions. In the proposed course, the woman student
would gain a knowledge of her predecessors — not only a
knowledge of a female literary tradition long denied her,
but also a knowledge of the history of women who have
struggled, worked, and created in private and public life.
The course would provide an atmosphere of mutual
acceptance, based on the commonality of experience of the
women classmembers, where the student's perceptions and
language are not inhibited by the presence of, or reshaped
for, a male audience. Throughout her life the female
student has understood variousintimidating cultural
messages: the only serious writers are male; so too, the
only valid human experience (the stuff that makes "good"
writing) is male. A woman-centered composition course will
encourage her to speak the truth of her own experiences

with confidence and authority and a newly emerged personal

voice.

The second part of the dissertation is a collection of
short stories written during my graduate career. The
stories have been published in various magazines including

ߤ., Midway Review, Women Studies Newsletter, Red Cedar

 

Review and The Burning World. "A Matter of Disguise" won
the Mg. College Fiction Award in 1984 and "Clippings" was
the recipient of the Midway Review Little Sister Award for

fiction in 1985.

DEDICATION

To my daughters, Emily
and Rebecca, and to
all the women I know.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In my six years of graduate study I have been
influenced and encouraged by many people. I am grateful to
each one of them for their support. I especially wish to
thank Linda Wagner whose invaluable advice and
encouragement have gotten me through the most difficult
times; Cathy N. Davidson, an exceptional role model for any
woman graduate student who wishes to write and teach;
Sheila Roberts, whose constructive criticism of my first
short stories enabled me to grow as a writer; Jay Ludwig
who sparked my dormant need to write in his English 840 and
who provided valuable feedback from the start of this
study.

I also want to thank all my women friends.

Finally, I want to thank my typist, Greta McVay, who
has provided her skill, knowledge and friendship

throughout.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER
I. RATIONALE FOR A WOMAN CENTERED
COMPOSITION COURSE .. ..... ....
II. WOMEN'S STORIES .... ..........
III. WOMAN-CENTERED WORKSHOP ......
IV. CONCLUSION ......... ..........

APPENDIX
A. SELECTED READING LIST .. ......

B. ORAL AND WRITTEN HISTORIES ...

C. PERSONAL WRITING .... ...... ...
D. LINGUISTICS ..... ...... .......
WORKS CITED ...... ....................
BIBLIOGRAPHY . ...... ..................

Page

73
78
81

84

95

CHAPTER I

Rationale For A Woman Centered Composition Course

... if they (women) undertake to write,
they feel overwhelmed by the universe of
culture, because it is a universe of
men, and so they can only stammer.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

 

In this study I argue that writing workshops
especially designed for female students can support their
efforts to use language to free themselves from the
restrictions imposed by cultural and educational
traditions. In the proposed course, the woman student
would gain a knowledge of her predecessors — not only a
knowledge of a female literary tradition long denied her,
but also a knowledge of the history of women who have
struggled, worked, and created in private and public life.
The course would provide an atmosphere of mutual
acceptance, based on the commonality of experience of the
women classmembers, where the student's perceptions and
language are not inhibited by the presence of, or reshaped
for, a male audience. Throughout her life the female
student has understood various intimidating cultural
messages: the only serious writers are male; so too, the
only valid human experience (the stuff that makes "good"
writing) is male. A woman-centered composition course will

encourage her to speak the truth of her own experiences

2

with confidence and authority and a newly emerged personal
voice.

This course will help to provide the particular legacy
germane for the female writing student. She has probably
had a lifetime of cultural and educational messageslthat
label her experiences marginal, unheroic, "outside" of what
is considered "real" human experience, because by virtue of
her gender, those experiences are not male. She has,
probably, not traveled the Mississippi River on a raft or
struggled to build a fire in the Alaskan wilderness. She
has suffered from the invisibility of the women writing
before her, believing there are no serious women writers at
all, because she has been denied a knowledge of a female
literary tradition. She probably saw only two or three
works by women in her school texts and anthologies, and
those were most likely poems: one conceit about a spinning
wheel by Anne Bradstreet and two very short poems by Emily
Dickinson. (She may have memorized their first lines like
I did, secretly reciting them for years, at the time not
knowing why. "There is no frigate like a book," I
whispered. "I heard a fly buzz when I died.")

Besides a lack of knowledge, the woman student may
bring to class a culturally imposed timidity based on years
of being rewarded for good behavior (i.e., passivity) in
the classroom. Her timidity is also based on her real fear.
of male antagonism, coupled with the unspoken or

unrecognized need for a female audience to validate her

3

perceptions and experiences. Perhaps the female student
lacks confidence and believes it is improper, even

' to be creative at all. She has seen too few

"unfeminine,'
women painters, sculptors, novelists, poets, and film
directors--to name a few--and believes, as I did long ago,
that there are simply no serious women artists. She has
seen too few female heroes, except perhaps a socially
acceptable smattering: Florence Nightingale (nursing);
Betsy Ross (sewing) and Emily Dickinson, again, Of whom, I
might add, my tenth grade teacher said almost sorrowfully:
"But; she never married."

I was always a creative child in search of heroes. As
long as I can remember, I secretly wanted to be a writer.
Since fourth grade, I wrote quietly in my room every night.
I wrote Westerns, with swarthy bearded male heroes. My
women were practically invisible: 2a Miss Kitty or two
lurking somewhere in the background of the story, beauty
marks and all, speaking in soft, adoring monosyllables to
the "real" heroes who got to ride horses, guzzle hard
whiskey, and say strong things like: "This town isn't big
enough for the two of us (pause), Jesse!" As I got older
and outgrew the only female writers I knew, Beverly Cleary
and Nancy Keene, (who created Ramona Quimby and Nancy
Drew), I shifted my allegiance to the female heroes readily
available to me: Actresses and singers. 380 I found my
female heroes: I won 3 Natalie Wood look-alike contest in

the eleventh grade; practiced saying "What a dump!" in

4
Bette Davis' gritty, cigarette-swinging falsetto; and

lip-synched to The Chiffons, mouthing angry lyrics about
lost boyfriends and territorial rights into a makeshift
microphone-—-a plastic dolphin I won at Marineland. But
all the while, I, the secret writer, was channeling my real
need to write, to find literary predecessors, to find
female heroes in literature-~and in the world, period——into
fantasy, and consequently into a college major.

Even in college, as a lackluster theatre major, I
still took over fifty credits of English courses. I read
only two women writers in over twelve English courses,
however: Flannery O'Connor and, yes, Emily Dickinson ("But
she locked herself in her room," the male professor told
us, as if it were a warning to all aspiring women writers
of what might befall them). In college, I gave up my
dreams completely of being a writer and was effectively
silenced until my late twenties when, during a diaper run
to the local grocery store, I picked up a copy of Alix

Kates Shulman's Diary 2£_A2 Ex—Prom Queen. The next week I

 

went back for Lisa Alther, and the week after that, Marge
Piercy. I was hooked. I had discovered stories written by
women, filled with women characters I actually liked. I
wrote my first short story when I was thirty-one, and I
haven't stopped writing since.

Virginia Woolf and Tillie Olsen have written about the
great silences in women's writing throughout history. In

their treatises, A Room of One's Own and Silences,

 

5

respectively, they both seek to resolve the inherent
contradictions of the silences in women's fiction. Whether
it be the all—consuming question, "Where are all the women
writers?" or the concept of stereotyping of females by
males in society as well as literature or the need for
authentic women's voices in all forms of writing, both
approach the subject-—albeit fifty years apart--with
insight into a pervasive problem.

In 1928, Virginia Woolf published A Room 2; One's Own,

 

 

one of the first writings to deal specifically with what
Woolf called an "unsolved" problem, "Women and Fiction."
Woolf theorized that the woman writer, a product of
historical circumstances, was usually trapped by her lack

of material support: "a woman must have money,"

she wrote,
"and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." (4)
It was, however, virtually impossible to achieve these
simple prerequisites when the average woman of Woolf's era
"in real life...cou1d hardly read, could scarcely spell,
and was the property of her husband." (46) Woolf
suggested that women had been prevented from creating
literature and art because they were denied education,
access to publishing, and most important, the right to make
a living and become economically sovereign:
in the first place to earn money was impossible
for them, and in the second, had it been

possible, the law denied them the right to

possess what money they earned. (43 )

6
The social conditions of any period in history, according

to Woolf, affected the writing of women, causing grand
silences, and psychological trauma.

In Rggm, she tried to answer key questions: "Why was
one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?"; "What effect
has poverty on fiction?"; "What conditions are necessary
for the creation of works of art?"

At one point in the essay, she picks the Elizabethan
period and asks "why no woman wrote a word of that
extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed,
was capable of a song or sonnet?" (43) She concluded that
"...it would have been impossible, completely and entirely,
for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in
the age of Shakespeare." (48) She then poses a
hypothetical situation---that Shakespeare had a sister,
"Judith," who was as gifted in genius and poetry as the
bard. There was, however, a critical difference in their
lives. While Will went off to grammar school to study
Latin, Ovid, Virgil and Horace, little Judith stayed home,
denied access to literacy:

She had no chance of learning grammar and logic,
let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She
picked up a book now and then...but her parents
came in and told her to mend the stockings or
mind the stew and not to moon about books and
papers. (49)

This illustration further fuels Woolf's conviction that

"...any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth

century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or
ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village
half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at." (51)

We find at the end of Woolf's essay that Judith
Shakespeare did indeed die young. She never wrote a word.
We will never know, Woolf suggested, how many Judith
Shakespeares have been lost, or how many are alive, yet
silenced: "She lives in you and me, and many other women
who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the
dishes and putting the children to bed." (117)

In Silences, Tillie Olsen discusses what she calls the
"unnatural thwarting of what comes into being, but cannot."
(6) Like Woolf, she believes that a woman's social
situation determines whether she will find fertile soil for
creativity. She too laments the lost genius, the lost
Judith Shakespeares, whose "mighty hungers" are unfilled,
energies aborted, hopes diminished. She contends that the
assigned roles of womanhood, throughout history, are firmly
fixed in the domestic sphere, where women become Woolf's

"Angel in the House,"

always moving in the rhythms of
others, and never stopping to listen to the rhythms of
their own creative selves:

...women are traditionally trained to place

Others' needs first, to feel those needs as their

own, ('The infinite capacity'): Their sphere,

8

their satisfaction to be, making it possible for
others to use their abilities. (16)

Olsen catalogues many of the overwhelming life
circumstances that too often interfere with a writer's
"sustained creation." She lists—-among others—-poverty,
illiteracy,"the inhibiting standard literary canon, the
cultural denigration of women, and the demands of
motherhood. Silences, which tries to understand the
relationship between life circumstance and creation, shows
"where the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute,
or have never attained full capacity, it is because of
circumstances inner and outer which oppose the needs of
creation." (16) Olsen speaks of the effects of racism and
class on all writers, but she focuses primarily on the
plight of women writers. In the book's second essay, "One
Out Of Twelve: Writers Who Are Women In This Century," she
explores the continuing impediments to women becoming
writers:

Why are so many more women silenced than men?
Why, when women do write (one out of four or five
works published) is so little of their writing
known, taught, accorded recognition? What is the
nature of the critical judgements made throughout
that (along with the factors different in women's
lives) steadily reduces the ratio from one out of
three in anthologies of student work, to one out

of seventeen in course offerings? (24-25)

9
In a later chapter, Olsen provides statistics about the low

ratio of acknowledged women writers to men in literature
courses, critical surveys, reference works, anthologies,
textbooks, literary prizes and awards, published fiction,
etc.

Olsen writes of the long silence in her own life, not
having published a book untilshe was fifty (after writing
one at 19 and then putting it away). She worked inside the
home and outside in a low-prestige job, and became to her
family of spouse and four children "The Angel in the House"
because there was no one else to do her work. She draws
parallels between herself and all the surviving women
writers: if they did write, they did not marry and write;
they did not have children (or they had only on; child);
and if they had many children, they waited late in life to

' One out of

write, suffering a "foreground silence.'
twelve, she keeps reminding us.

Both Woolf and Olsen have chronicled the particular
legacies of women writers which impede sustained creation.
Their relevant theories have a substantial impact on the
teaching of women writers. Breaking culturally imposed
silences becomes paramount to the teaching strategy.
Teachers have to address the special needs of women writers
who have for too long, as Elaine Showalter suggests, "been
denied the full resources of language and have been forced

into silence, euphemism, or circumlocution." ("Feminist

Criticism" 255)

10

According to Showalter, the concept of creativity,
literary history, or literary interpretation is based
entirely on male experience and put forward as universal.
(247) If we make the assumption that writers learn to

write by discovering the validity and variety of their own

 

experience, and, in the instance of women, if the cultural
message is that male experience is the only valid
experience ("A writer must have balls," quips Norman
Mailer)show can women, as writers, take themselves L
seriously? And if the literary role models are male, how
can a woman writer take her predecessors seriously? And if
the cultural messages to women have been that they live
passive and compliant lives, and with female intelligence
devalued, then we find women writers in every century,
including our own, inhibited "both by economic dependence
and by the knowledge that true writer signifies assertation
while true woman signifies submission." (Ostriker 315)
And if the language is patriarchal ("The oppressor's

" Adrienne Rich calls it), how does a woman writer

language,
find the basic linguistic tools to write and validate her
own experience?

In The Madwoman i the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan

 

Gubar describe the ways the woman writer experiences her
own gender as "a painful obstacle or even debilitating
inadequacy." (257) They describe the loneliness of the
female artist, who lives alienated from the standard male

literary canon and yearning for validation from a female

 

11

audience, and her very real anxiety about the impropriety
of female invention. (50) The woman writer, suggests
Gilbert and Gubar, faces greater obstacles than her male
peers:
...all the phenomenon of inferiorization mark the
woman writer's struggle for artistic definition

and differentiate her efforts at self creation

 

from those of her male counterpart. (50)

‘\

It seems clear--judging from these critics and from
the life experiences of most women—-that women experience
definite problems of language and gender and silence. If
all writers need to value and to speak the truth of their
own experience, how can we get women writers to value their
own "selves" and to handle what Joanna Russ calls "the
unlabeled, disallowed, disavowed, not even conciously
perceived experience which cannot be spoken about because
it has no embodiment in existing art"? (Russ 160) Women
writers are the outsiders, the "Other," people living
outside the patriarchy, outside current fictional myths
reinforced in the existing canon of literature; they do not
even own the language. According to Nina Baym, little is
expected of them in their role in the drama of creation
"...either she is to be silent, like nature, or she is the
creator of conventional works, the spokesperson of society,
what she might do as an innovator in her own right is not
perceived." (Baym 77)

In this study I ask how can we devise writing

 

12
rkshops for women which will allow them to break these

lturally imposed silences. Women students need both to
cognize their predecessors and have a writing environment
ich supports their efforts to use language. They need to
ee themselves from damaging societal restrictions and
ssages which denigrate their experiences as women. I
ntend that in all female writing classes, many women find
ey are able for the very first time to take for granted
e acceptability of their experiences and the truths they
sh to explore without the fear of male antagonism. In
is type of supportive atmosphere, the woman student can
et the challenge of what Adrienne Rich calls "a whole new
ychic geography to be explored." (Rich 35) For
nguage can, in fact, be used to change reality; and it
n here enable us to break those imposed silences.
ynocentric writing is risk taking," asserts feminist
ry Daly in Gyn/Ecology, but gynocentric writing is also 3
ans for women, at last, to be liberated through their
nguage:
Breaking our silence means living in existential
courage. It means discovering our deep sources,
our spring. It means finding our native
resiliancy, springing into life, speech, action.

(Daly 21)

I

Any writing workshop ideally is a laboratory of

13

risk-taking and exploration, a place where students can
present their ideas without fear of ridicule or dismissal,
and the overt sexism that too often inhibits women's
writing. A workshop should provide a group of sympathetic
readers and co-writers who are willing to take risks and
who take women's writing seriously. Novelist Diane Johnson
writes: "It is hard for the world to take her (the woman
writer) seriously; it is even harder for her to take

' (Johnson 155) When a woman's

herself seriously.'
experiences are attacked, or not given serious attention,
she feels such recognition or lack of recognition as an
attack on her "self." And what happens when a woman's
experiences are questioned as insignificant, uninteresting,
or even false by fellow students?

Allowing the woman to take herself seriously is one of
the central responsibilities of this proposed course. In
this workshop, with the affirmation and support of a
network of women, the female student can defy the male
definition of women as object, victim, marginal being. She
no longer will have to see only the male stereotypes of
women in a canon of literature which has consistently
excluded her or denigrated her or made her the object of
hostility or sexual violence. She can, at last, gain a
knowledge of her own history, her own biology, her own

foremothers: writers, workers, rebels. In teaching women,

Adrienne Rich suggests we need to begin "Believing in the

14

value and significance of women's experience, traditions,

perceptions. Thinking of ourselves seriously, not as one

of the boys, not as neuters, or androgynes, but as women."
("Taking" 240)

I remember my first graduate-level poetry writing
course.I was lectured by a fellow male student who did not
like my use of the word "cervix" in a poem. "Why did I
have to hear that word anyway?" he demanded, waving his
arms in the air (His poem that week, I remember, was about 1
the industrial military complex and M-16's). I thought,
well, maybe it was offensive to him——the poem was about a
male doctor cauterizing my cervix, and maybe the thought of
the procedure for this student was "unpleasant." I was
sufficiently silenced for the class period, pretending to
take notes in the large margins of the paper. In
actuality, I was doodling the word "ovary" running the
words together like an angry stream: ovaryovaryovar....

The next week he brought in a poem about abortion, in which
he used the word cervix four times, slamming it together
with adjectives like "eroded," "swollen," "cauterized," and
"perforated." I felt as if I had been slapped in the face.
In all fairness, the male instructor made the student
analyze the reasons why he wrote the poem in the first
place; but the student talked around his motivations,
neglecting what I think was the real reason: he wanted to
show me that a man could write about female experience and

female body parts better than any woman could. I also

 

15
believe he dreaded me and my experience. For the rest of

the term, I wrote about birds.

In an environment of mutual respect, women will no
longer have to write for men. They will not have to
sacrifice their own voice to convention; they will be able
to create a language that grows from their own lives. They
will transcend the cultural assumptions of conformity and
passivity and begin to write. The primary goal of this
woman—centered course is connecting the process of learning
to write well with the student's own reality and not, as
Adrienne Rich says in her description of goals for a
minority developmental writing course, "...to simply teach
him/her how to write acceptable lies in standard English."
("Taking" 239)

Another way to increase this supportive atmosphere is
to help students escape the traditional isolation of women
writers by connecting with the local community, and in the
larger sense, the community of women. Drawing on a phrase
James Miller, Jr. and Stephen Judy use in Writing in
Reality, I would call this aspect of the course
"Interweaving the World." Student writers should be aware
that women are writing everywhere. Students would be
introduced to local writers, readings, feminist presses,
academic journals, newspapers, writing workshops,
discussion groups. Students would extend invitations to
the community to come to readings of their own works, panel

discussions, dialogues, video presentations, play

 

l...-

 

l6
productions. Students would publish the best of their

works hiabooklet and distribute it to community
institutions and bookstores. The emphasis, then, is on
having the female student participate directly in an
environment where she can acknowledge and become a part Of

the large body of female energy creating, flourishing.

II

A writing workshop is not intended to be a literature
course, but because women do not know a female literary
tradition, they have suffered a great injury to their
confidence in assessing the value of their own experience.
Most women have not grown up with a knowledge of a
women's literary tradition, so I would encourage, in the
classroom, familiarity with several categories of writings
by women. Student writers need to see how women wrote,
often, to create a world in which they could live. "I had
to create a world of my own," wrote Anais Nin in a diary
entry, "like a climate, 3 country, an atmosphere in which I
could breathe, reign, and create myself when destroyed by
living." (38) The absence of a female literary tradition
produces the suspicion that women's experience, what they
know intimately enough to write about, is not acceptable
material for any type of writing.

I would devise reading lists of essays, books,
stories, and criticism by women for my students, but I

would also explore intensively other modes of discourse

17

that women have chosen to "create a world in which they
could live": oral storytelling, family histories, letters,
diaries, and journals. I would use all of these as
springboards for the student's own personal writings.
Familiarity with several modes of discourse would provide
glimpses into the lives Of their foremothers, not only the
established female writers, but the lives of their aunts,
mothers, grandmothers. When students recognize the value
in the recorded lives of their predecessors, they will

begin to value their own lives, their own voices.

III

A major theme in feminist theory has been the demand
that women writers need to be "thieves of language,"6 the
language Rich calls "the oppressor's language"and linguist
Wendy Martyna calls "He-Man Grammar." Linguist H. Lee
Gershuny describes "the androcentric bias in thinking,
structure, and semantics." (66) The language women speak
and write has seldom been their own; it has rather been an
encoding of male privilege inadequate to describe or
express women's experience. Language is a reflection of
social values, and sexist language, according to Wendy
Martyna, is not only a reflection of society's sexism "but
as a particular form of that sexism: a social behavior
which works to create and maintain an atmosphere of
inequity." (296) Our common language is coded to depict

males as the norm, while defining females in relation to

l8

them, naming females passive or inferior, objects of sex or
violence, and probably the most damaging, invisible.
Conventional language usage imprisons women within a
specific social reality, which becomes "the guardian of the
patriarchy." (Goldstein 181) Language becomes confining
to the powerless in a patriarchal society, for they are
forced to use language that excludes them or depreciates
them. Linguist Andrea Goldstein discusses this in her
essay, "Notes on the Tyranny of Language Usage":
The patriarchal elite defines reality through a
selective language usage so that the present
power structure is maintained, whilst disruptions
to the established order are averted. The
powerful (that is the mainstream men) have no
desire for social change; therefore they do not
need to engage in critical reflection and thus
have little use for a flexible language system.
The society is their construction, and they work
to maintain it so as to preserve their status.
(181)
Our common language is monolithic. It legitimizes the
oppression of women and other minorities. Therefore, when
women turn to conventional language in an effort to
interrupt it, or write it, Goldstein suggests "at best they
confront confusion at worse, they meet their own failure."
(182)

If the goal of a woman-centered writing course is to

r'
I.

 

 

19
validate women's experience, then women need to explore the
ways their experience has been invalidated by the very
language that they use. I do not mean that hours should be
spent in the classroom changing words from mailman to

mailperson to femailman, and history to herstory, for I

 

feel that is a reductive effort, and, as Mary Daly asserts,
becomes "inauthentic, obscuring women's existence, and
masking the conditions of my oppression." (Daly 24) A
few alterations in spelling and the addition of some new
words will not help us to dissipate confusion and failure.
Women students have to look at the existing discourse,
analyze it, and trace its roots to understand its patterns
and its threat.

I would like to define in the classroom how sexist
language limits the rich cultural word to sexist concepts.
As a group we could examine ways the language of textbooks,
religious codes, laws, male fiction, and grammar defines
women as inferior to men. I think it is vital to introduce
the concept of linguistic sexism and for the students to
see how it literally has silenced women through the
centuries. If beginning women writers can recognize that
language usage has reinforced male-dominance, they can look
for the androcentrism inherent in their language and
culture and become aware of non-sexist language usage.

Thirty years after my first all—male mega—Western

written in Ticonderoga #2, Natalie Wood is dead, Bette

 

I,._

 

20

Davis is doing horror flicks, and, except for a few Mo—Town
specials, the Chiffons have retired. But I'm still
lip-synching; this time to Aretha Franklin ("Sisters are

' she sings). My stories' heroes

doing it by themselves,’
are all women now, for I have learned that women can be
heroes of their own lives. My women characters no longer
lurk in the shadows of the story. They can ride horses,
guzzle whiskey, and order one of the James Boys (or James
Girls) out of town. I now know a heritage of other women
writers and I joyfully keep reading them. I am now
committed personally to writing and to women writing. But
it's as if I always knew, even in my silence when I didn't
know. At 21, I named my first child Emily, after that
woman who "never married," who "locked herself in her
room," who wrote those very short poems that I kept with me

for years. The naming, it seems to me now, was a hope, an

affirmation, even a challenge.

 

 

NOTES

1From the 1985 November/December issue of Humanist

magazine,

sociologist, Meg Bowman, lists a few:

"One hundred women are not worth a single
testicle." - Confucius (551-479 B.C.)

"A proper wife should be as obedient as a
slave...The female is a female by virtue of a
certain lack of qualities — a natural
defectiveness." — Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

"Do you know that each of your women is an Eve?
The sentence of God - on this sex of yours -
lives in this age; the guilt must necessarily
live, too. You are the gate of Hell, you are the
temptress of the forbidden tree; you are the
first deserter of the divine law." - Tertullian
(22 A.D.)

"In childhood a woman must be subject to her
father; in youth to her husband; when her husband
is dead, to her sons. A woman must never be free

of subjugation." — The Hindu Code of Manu
(c.100)

"Among all savage beasts, none is found so
harmful as woman." — St. John Chrysostom
(345-407)

"Any woman who acts in such a way that she cannot
give birth to as many children as she is capable
of, makes herself guilty of the many murders..."
- St. Augustine (345-430)

"Are women Human?" (In the year 584, in Lyons,
France, 43 Catholic bishops and twenty men
representing other bishops, after a lengthy
debate, took a vote. The results were: 32, yes:
31, no. Women were declared human by one vote.)
-Council of Macon, France

"Men are superior to women." - The Koran (c.650)
"Women should remain at home, sit still, keep
house, and bear and bring up children...If a

woman grows weary and, at last dies from
childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from

21

22

bearing, she is there to do it." - Martin Luther
(1483-1546)

"Woman in her greatest perfection was made to
serve and obey man, not rule and command him." -
John Knox (1505-1572)

"The souls of women are so small that some

believe they've none at all." -Samuel Butler
(1612-1680)

"What misfortune to be a woman! And yet, the
worst misfortune is not to understand what a
misfortune it is." -Kierkegaard (1813—1855)

"It seems to me that nearly every woman I know
wants a man who knows how to love with authority.
Women are simple souls who like simple things,
and one of the simplest is one of the simplest to
give...0ur family airedale will come clear across
the yard for one pat on the head. The average
wife is like that. She will come across town,
across the house, across the room, across to your
point of view, and across almost anything to give
you her love if you offer her yours with some

honest approval." - Episcopal Bishop James Pike,
1968

"Blessed art thou, Oh our God and King of the
Universe, that thou didst not create me a woman."
- daily prayer of the Orthodox Jewish male

2The only kind of female character I envisioned at the

time.

Linda Nochlin explains in her essay "Why Are There No
Great Women Artists?" the fact that there are many women
stage performers even though there are few great writers,
painters or composers: "Where there is a need there is a
way, institutionally speaking: once the public and the
authors themselves demanded more realism and range than
boys in drag or piping castrati could offer, a way was

found to include women in the institutional structure of

23

the performing arts, even if in some cases they might have
to do a little whoring on the side to keep their careers in

order." (484)

4"Two thirds of the illiterate in the world today are

'

women,' writes Olsen. (183)
5See Cynthia Ozick's discussion of the Testicular
Theory of Literature and the Ovarian Theory of Literature

in "Women and Creativity: The Demise of the Dancing Dog."

6Alicia Suskin Ostriker has coined this phrase. For a

more detailed discussion, see her book Stealing the

 

Language, The Emergence gf Women's Poetry ig America.

 

CHAPTER II

Women's Stories

...all these drives are our strengths,
and among them is the gestation drive -
just like the desire to write: a desire
to live self from within, a desire for
the swollen belly, for language, for
blood.

1'.

Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the
Medusa"

If discovery of the self is one of the primary goals
of a woman-centered composition course, writing, then,
becomes a process of exploration with language clarifying
and validating experience. This introspection of the

students' experiences as women, the writing of their "own

stories,’ will lead to a recognition of their deeper

selves, the true newly emerging voices: "... for when you
are fully and deeply in touch with your real self," write
James Miller and Stephen Judy in Writing i3 Reality, "it
will be reflected in the tone and vigor of your own
writing. When people write from the self, their writing is
better than when they are writing in a false voice from a
false self." (42)

The experiential approach is a critical feature in a
classroom of women students who have previously had

language and literature used against them to keep them

silent and to keep them in their place in all levels of

24

 

25

their education - particularly in higher education where
the "bias is white and male, racist and sexist... expressed
in both subtle and blatant ways." (Rich, "Taking Women
Students Seriously" 241) A female student's experience of
education is characterized by a rewarding of passivity, the
indoctrination of stereotypic sex roles, the perpetuation
of cultural messages that imply that relationships, male
approval, and beauty are more important than selfhood and
accomplishment, and the devaluing of female intelligence
and work. How can college teachers address the particular
needs of the female student whose culture denies the
validity of her own experience and of her predecessors?

How can college teachers rectify a lifetime of education
where the female student has seen literature and other
means of artistic expression, not to mention the very
language that she uses, consistently exclude and demean
female experience? (Rich, "Taking Women Students
Seriously" 239-241)

If we accept Joanna Russ' assumption that "Culture is
male. Our literary myths are for heroes, not heroines,"
(Russ, "What Can a Heroine Do?" 7), then there is a real
problem of finding the existing sources for the female
heroic ideal and existing sources to create true women's
voices. Women, who are traditionally defined and
stereotyped by men in literature, film, and other media,
are hard pressed to find fertile directions for their

heroic journeys. We simply no longer can accept the

 

 

26

myths that all strong women (as portrayed by canonized male
writers such as Hemingway, Mailer, Lawrence, Barth, etc.)
if they are not conquered by the male hero, often become as
Mary Ellmann suggests in Thinking About Women,
traditionally male defined stereotypes: The Bitch, The
Whore, The Balloonhead, The Virgin, The Monster.1 (Ellmann
55) Jane Tompkins describes the existing literary canon as
being codefied by "a cultural elite" which "has the power
to influence the way the country thinks across a broad
range of issues." (Tompkins 201) When feminists turn
their attention toward this elitist canon, filled with male
authors, who, under the guise of aesthetics, create women's
stories and women characters which are inauthentic and
stereotyped, they should assert, as Tillie Olsen suggests,
their "right to say: this is surface, this falsifies
reality, this degrades." (Olsen 45)

The act of writing has always been a masculine domain
which is, according to French feminist, Helene Cixous,
"reserved for the great---that is for 'great men'...."
(280) It constitutes a phallocentric tradition, which,
Cixous believes is a "self-admiring, self-stimulating,
self-congratulatory phallocentrism." (283) In a world
culture that has despised and denigrated women for
everything from their bodies and bodily functions to their
spirit to their intellect, men have had the historical
prerogative for literary creation, or more aptly, for the

"re-creation" of women. They have perpetuated their own

27

narcissistic images of women in culture and hence, in

' they say. 0r "weak."

literature. Women are "sensitive,'
Or "dreamy." We are angels, (preferably dead by the last
chapter) they say. Or monsters. Devouring mothers.
Shrews. Whores. Bitches. We'll swallow them whole if

' I overheard

they let us. ("...suck us back into the womb,'
a man say just the other day.) Or we are shallow,
empty-headed---fluttery ornaments who'd rather shop, fluff,
dazzle with furs and jewelry instead of turning our minds
toward "weightier" male issues that involve rational
thought. (Hence, we have presidential aide Donald Regan's
recent remark that American women wouldn't want severe
economic sanctions against South Africa's apartheid regime
because "they couldn't give up their diamonds.") In the
views of many males, women are one dimensional, cardboard
dolls moved around vertically or horizontally (or, perhaps,
spread-eagled) on an inflexible grid. If writing has
traditionally been reserved for men, then women's image,
women's story, has also been reserved for them. Women's
stories have not been told authentically. Women need to
sing, to paint, to write our own stories. We need to
re-create ourselves for the world and writing is one way of
doing it. Cixous explains:

I mean it when I speak of male writing. I

maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing

as marked writing; that, until now, far more

extensively and repressively than is ever

 

28
suspected or admitted, writing has been run by a

libidinal and cultural---hence political,
typically masculine---economy; that this is a
locus where the repression of women has been
perpetuated, over and over, more or less
consciously, and in a manner that's frightening
since it's often hidden or adorned with the
mystifying charms of fiction; that this locus has
grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual
opposition (and not sexual difference), where
woman has never £2; turn to speak---this being
all the more serious and unpardonable in that
writing is precisely the very possibility gf
change, the space that can serve as a springboard
for subversive thought, the precursory movement
of transformation of social and cultural
structures. (283)

And when, through history, women have chosen to write,
they have been haunted by what Gilbert and Gubar call an
"anxiety of authorship." In order to write at all they had
to defy societal assumptions of what was feminine and
proper, let alone what was a writer (which translates to
writer = male. Women do not write ). A female writer who
was presumptuous enough to defy cultural stereotypes and
write, became an anomaly, a freak, at the least
unfeminine--perhaps a "crazy lady" or a "shut-in."2 And if

she demonstrated the least bit of fervor, political or

 

 

 

 

29

otherwise, she could be labeled "a hyena in petticoats,"
(Mary Wollstonecraft) or "a transcendental heifer"
(Margaret Fuller), or more recently, simply "a dyke."
(Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, or Robin Morgan
interchangeably). So women apologized for their writing,
hid behind male pseudonyms. Or, to survive as writers,
they imitated male texts. Or they behaved, in style and
thematic approach, like modest, quiet ladies. In 1811,
Jane Austen published her first novel as the work of "A
Lady," signaling to the reader, as Rachel Brownstein
suggests in Becoming a Heroine, that here is a "distinctly
feminine and well-bred voice, the voice of a genteel
maiden...." (83) And when women did write, publish, and
sell books, (often more than their male contemporaries),
they were accused of having a distinctly "feminine style"
which, by definition, meant weak, trivial, marginal; where
"good equals male, bad equals female." (Atwood 182)

When women writers chose to write about what they knew
— activities in the private domestic sphere, love/marriage
relationships, or low-prestige jobs outside the home -
they were charged, by male critics, with having a
narrowness of vision. When their writings, by virtue of
topic and theme, exemplified their exclusion from the
military-industrial complex, they were considered again, by
these same critics, as being "minor." If they did not
write about "major" themes (insert: "male"), such as war,

politics, or intrigue in the commercial marketplace, they

30
were vilified by literary critics for perpetuating the
patriarchal assumption that women's experiences are
marginal, outside the realm of "real" human experience.

In order for a woman writer to be good, she has to
"write like a man" which predictably in a style, is
characterized by boldness, clarity, and rationality. The
"feminine style," is, predictably, stereotyped by vagueness
or invisibility. (Fill in the blanks: hysterics,
neurosis, paleness, etc.) In order to be considered good,
she has to acquire literally what Norman Mailer is so
vocally fond of: the blood and guts of all gggd writing,
male genitalia. Margaret Atwood explains:

'she writes like a man' ... is usually used by a
male reviewer who is impressed by a female
writer. It is meant as a compliment. See also,

' which means the author

'She thinks like a man,
thinks, unlike most women, who are held to be
incapable of objective thought (their province is
'feeling'). Adjectives which often have similar
connotations are ones such as 'strong,' 'gutsy,'
'hard,' 'mean,' etc. A hard hitting piece of
writing by a male is liable to be thought of as
merely realistic; an equivalent piece by a woman
is much more likely to be labeled 'cruel' or

'tough.' The assumption is that women are by

nature soft, weak and not very talented, and that

31

if a woman writer happens to be a good writer,
she should be deprived of her identity as a
female and provided with higher (male) status.
(182)

In The Madwoman £3 The Attic, Gilbert and Gubar
discuss how historically women who lack "the pen/penis" in
a patriarchal society (12) cannot refute male fiction's
propensity to reduce women to "mere properties, to
characters and images imprisoned in male texts generated
solely... by male expectations and designs." (12) The
teaching of male fiction with its often slanted
stereotypical portrayals of women in a ratio of twelve
canonized male writers to one canonized female writer
(which translates, according to Tillie Olsen's
calculations, to one female writer in every twelve: and
consequently one woman writer in every eleven represented
in high school and college anthologies; and one woman in
every seventeen represented in college syllabuses...)3gives
this cultural message: "women writers, women's experiences
and literature written by women are by definition minor."
(Olsen 28) This persistent stereotyping becomes,
according to Olsen, a given, and a damaging one at that:

most, not all, of the predominantly male
literature studied, is written by men whose
understandings are not universal but
restrictively male (Mary Ellmann, Kate Millett,

and Delores Schmidt have pointed out); in our

32

time more and more surface, hostile,
one-dimensional in portraying women. (28)

In her essay, "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,"
Alice Walker laments the proliferation of male-defined
literary stereotypes of black women which include the
"Superwomen," the "Mean and Evil Bitches," the

"Castrators,"

and "Saphire's Mama." (237) According to
Walker, these stereotypes only serve to reduce women,
especially in the "folklore that so aptly identifies one's
status in society." Black women become "'the mule of the
world,‘ because we have been handed the burdens that
everyone else - everyone else - refused to carry." (237)
Feminist criticism, has, initially, a revisionary

mode, where feminist critics study carefully "the images
and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and
misconceptions about women in criticism, and women - assign
semiotic systems." (Showalter, "Feminist Criticism" 245)
The feminist critic begins to ask new questions about these
standard texts, questioning these literary myths based
solely on the male experience, and spoon-fed to all readers
as "universal." Feminist criticism can liberate women
imprisoned in these texts, but most importantly, it can
liberate the woman student who has been subject to this
demeaning canon since infancy. Adrienne Rich elaborates:

A radical critique of literature, feminist in its

impulse, would take the work first of all as a

clue to how we live, how we have been living, how

33

we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our
language has trapped as well as liberated us, how
the very act of naming has been till now a male
perogative, and how we can begin to see and name
and therefore live afresh. ("Dead Awaken" 35)
But there is a second mode of feminist criticism which
is of equal importance, especially to women who actively
seek to write. There has to come a time when we must shift
from androcentric criticism to gynocentric criticism,
looking to women authors for answers and validation of our
experiences as women. "There is much more good literature

' writes Joanna

by women in existence than anyone knows,’
Russ in_flgg IQ_Suppress Women's Writing. (122) We have to
learn how to find existing resources, and more importantly,
encourage our women students to create more. Therefore,
women's writing and its biological, linguistic,
psychoanalytic, and cultural differences lead us into a new
understanding about the relation of women to literary
culture, and to the culture of humankind as a whole.

In a woman-centered writing course, the introduction
of women writers as models becomes critical and can spur
the students on to their own creative efforts. We have to
convince them that published writings by women, and their
own writings, are not merely trivial extensions of a
male-defined code. We have to encourage our women students

to look into the literary world of women, and the world of

women in general, to break the culturally—imposed

34

stereotypes that damage confidence and that suggest that
women are enemies, especially enemies of literary creation.
Nina Auerbach feels we must learn to trust our intuitions
of who we really are:
...our intuitions about the way we live have
burgeoned into a sense of the past, a past
inhabited by women who were neither angels nor
whores, shrews nor dolls, but women speaking, if
sometimes haltingly, for themselves with a power
that old, easy stereotypes screened out. (259)
In order to eliminate damaging stereotypes and begin
to relate to the true dimensions of female experience, it
is important, Alice Walker argues, that women write on "the
condition of humankind from the perspective of women."
("From An Interview" 260) She too has a painful awareness
of the consequences of gender-defined roles: the loss of
female creative potential, the loss of genius, the
trivialization of woman's nature, and particularly the
black female experience.
When we have pleaded for understanding, our
character has been distorted; when we have asked
for simple caring, we have been handed empty
inspirational appellations, then stuck in the
farthest corner. When we have asked for love, we
have been given children. ("Search" 237)

Walker cannot conceive of a denial of one's reality,

35

of one's race, or class, or especially gender. It is in
her fiction, especially The Color Purple, that we see the
best examples of this. She has an ongoing commitment to
the recording of all women's voices and the heroic
dimension of the black female experience. Her commitment
to the perservation of black folklore, the oral tradition,
where legacies from one generation of women to another are
passed down, and to the telling of her own stories (Her
essay "One Child of One's Own" is a prime example), all
contribute to her belief in the authenticity of women's
voices.

Carol Christ writes in Diving Deep and Surfacing that
"Women often live out inauthentic stories provided by a
culture they did not create." (1) These inauthentic
stories need to be replaced with stories that articulate
their own experience:

Without stories, she cannot understand herself.
Without stories she is alienated from those
deeper experiences of self that would have been
called spiritual or religious. She is closed in
silence. (I)

With women telling their own stories, they create a
sense of self, a sense of their own experience. And when
women begin to tell their own stories and begin freeing
themselves from traditional stereotypes, we can see what
Elaine Showalter calls "an imaginative continuum, the

recurrence of certain patterns, themes, problems and images

36
from generation to generation." (Showalter, A Literature

 

2; Their Own 11) Showalter goes on to say that women are

usually regarded as "sociological chameleons, taking on
the class, life-style of their male relatives." (11) But
this is a fallacious, typically male assumption. By the
very nature of their shared status as second hand citizens,
women have been unified by values, experiences, and
behaviors. Showalter believes that women become a
subculture within the patriarchy, and create a subversive
sub-text of language, a literature of their own:
Women share a subculture, a world of secret
rituals that characterize our experience --
puberty, menstruation, sexual initiation,
pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, the entire
female life cycle... women write about these
experiences, albeit concealed or veiled, with a
graphic frankness... (11)

The woman-centered composition course, would encourage
students to reevaluate cultural assumptions about women's
experience and women's writing. It would encourage women
students to challenge the patriarchal norms that perpetuate
the myths of women's submissiveness, incompetence,
child-like capabilities and non-creativity. These same
patriarchal assumptions restrict women's freedom of
movement, their personal recognition of the power of

nature, their right to meaningful work with comparable pay,

the use of their intellect and their sexuality, and,

37

ultimately, their right to a creative life that transcends
the socially acceptable tasks of cooking, sewing and
homemaking. We must encourage our students to recognize
that the female literary tradition, a symbol of women's
ability to have a creative life, "comes from the still
evolving relationships between women writers and society."
(Showalter, Literature 12)

A woman centered composition course must ask Gilbert
and Gubar's important question: "What does it mean to be a
woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of
literary authority are, as we have seen, both overtly and
covertly patriarchal?" (Madwoman 45-46)

Most women writers constantly struggle under a sense
of their own femaleness and their second-hand status in the
patriarchy. Mary Ellmann sees writing as being
historically a male domain, another sacred locker room, so
to speak, where women cannot enter:

The capacity to write, even as it is held more
and more precariously is made synonymous with
sexual capacity, whereupon the woman becomes the
enemy of both. (47)
According to Nina Baym, what has happened to the woman
writer is that "She has entered literary history as the
enemy." ("Beset Manhood" 69) The literary myths,
codefied in the standard canon, perpetuate the culturally
predominant theory that "the essence of American culture

means that the matter of American experience is inherently

38

male." (69) When literary critics say that there are
almost no major women writers in America and that all the
country's major novelists have been men, they are
restricting, as Baym suggests, "literary creation to a sort
of therapeutic act that can only be performed by men...
Then every act of writing by a woman is both perverse and
absurd. And of course, it is bound to fail." ("Beset
Manhood" 78)

The woman writer must constantly fight the
complications of all those patriarchal definitions. In
order to define herself as a writer, she must struggle to
analyze, redefine, rename the terms of her socialization.
As Gilbert and Gubar explain:

Unlike her male counterpart, then, the female
artist must struggle against the effects of
socialization which makes conflict with the will
of her (male) precursors seem unexpressibly
absurd, futile, or even... self annihilating.
(Madwoman 49)

Socialization and its effects becomes the real enemy
of beginning women writers. Women come into any writing
course with a lifetime of estrangement from their own
experience, in part because they do not see the value of
that experience confirmed anywhere in their culture. They
are told that the authentic human experience is male, and
whatever they think or feel is rarely validated in

androcentric texts. The primary goal of a woman centered

 

39

writing curriculum is to defy, through language, the
patriarchal assumptions that woman is marginal, is the
Other, or is the silent "castrated, deficient mirror of
man." (Abel and Abel 9) Women students must be able to
transcend the societal assumption that they are
non-writers, by virtue of their gender alone.

Second, this proposed curriculum must encourage a
process of self definition through writing. But
self-definition also defies male definition, and therefore
becomes an arduous psychological process. Gilbert and
Gubar offer a beginning:

...for all literary artists, of course, self
definition precedes self assertation: the
creative 'I am' cannot be uttered if the 'I'
knows not what it is. (17)

The process Of self-discovery, then becomes paramount
to the course. When Esther Greenwood proclaims in Plath's
The Bell Jar: "I am I am I am," it is a proclamation that
emerges unpunctuated, free-flowing, and only after an
archetypal journey into the heroine's psyche, downward into
the dark, closeted resources of the self where she finds
that "I" still alive, pure and unfragmented. I envision,
in part, that the proposed writing curriculum, will aid in
women students' journeys to self-definition through
writing. The "I am I am I am" should emerge gradually in
their writings, despite the many cultural obstacles that

may impede them.

 

NOTES

1Ellmann discusses several catagories of stereotypes
which include: formlessness, passivity, instability,
confinement ("Range is masculine and confinement is
feminine." p. 87) piety, materiality, spirituality,

irrationality, compliancy. (55-145)

2Margaret Atwood adds a few to the list: The woman
writer as Happy Housewife, Ophelia (a crazy, doomed freak),

Miss Martyr, or Miss Message (feminist messiah).

("Paradoxes" 184-185)

Olsen writes: "By the most generous estimate, simply
the percentage of fiction of all manner and kind published,
men are three quarters Of the writing race; in the more

selective and indicative estimates, they are 88% t 98%."

 

(193)

40

CHAPTER III

Woman-Centered Workshop

In a woman—centered composition course, the use of the
first person singular is valued, encouraged, cherished for
what Miller calls its "frankness, candor, and simple
honesty." (Miller, World, Self, Reality 5) The common

n

denominator for women writers, writes Joan Didion, ... is

always transparently, shamelessly, the impeccable 'I'."

(Didion 150) "The women writers I know," novelist Diane
Johnson states in an essay, "What Women Artists Really
Talk About," "... find themselves talking about the uses

of the present tense, say, about the authenticity Of the
first person female narrator. To such subjects, all one's

" (Johnson

experience as a woman is brought to bear....
155) It is the immediacy of that present tense, and the
power inherent in the first person "I" that I would want to
encourage in this woman-centered curriculum.

The course would take seriously the power of the
personal self. The climate of the class would encourage
this. As a student begins to write in the experiential
mode, she will begin to recognize the central
responsibility to herself, and experience a unique quality

of validation reaffirmed in her language.

Donald Murray believes that almost everyone who learns

41

42

to write will learn to do so through of personal writing:
"This means writing which is not concerned with the
objective recording of facts, but with recreating the
varied impressions and perceptions of individual
experience." (Murray 152) According to Murray, it is the
material that comes from the senses, the emotions, the life
experience of the writer that Ken MacCrorie, another
proponent of an experiential approach to writing, says that
first requirement of good writing, is truth: "... not the
truth (whoever knows surely what that is?) but some kind of
truth - a connection between the things written about, the
words used in the writing, and the author's real experience
in the world he knows well - whether in fact or dream or
imagination." (MacCrorie 5) Through the process of
writing, the female individual, free of male-definition and
condescension, discovers her self. She owns up to her
unique life experiences, that are nobody else's and cannot
be claimed, rearranged or rewritten (as was my "cervix"
poem) by anyone, especially males.

Stephen Judy writes that the best student writing is
personal and that writing from experience takes place in
many modes of discourse, including creative forms, but by
no means excluding expository and academic modes. Writing
from experience does not preclude exposition or research
writing, according to Judy, and the development of the
personality infuses all types of writing, energizes it, and

binds language, thinking and experience together. (Judy,

43
"The Experiential Approach" 39-40) Judy also believes

that the one constant that runs through all good writing is
"... the writer's voice, the distinctive accent transferred
from the depths of the self to the blank sheet of paper."
(Miller and Judy 15).

The process of discovering this distinctive voice is
inextricably linked with the process of writing. What the
writer will uncover, discover, cannot be predicted in
advance.1 Writers get insights from writing the paper; they
learn as they write; they discover as they write and they
don't have to know all they are going to say before they
begin - - in fact, they could not know so much in advance.
In an English Journal interview, James Britton discusses
the potentiality for discovery through writing of what you

think and believe and mean: "Discovery,"

Britton says,
"means you've got to look for a form; so you're going to be
informal; you're going to be unformed, loosely structured,
as an approach to finding form." (Rosen 55) Looking for
a form as Britton suggests, instead of letting the form
define you* would become another focus of a woman-centered
course.

The writing process, then, becomes free-flowing, with
pre-writing, writing, and revision overlapping,

intertwining, flowing forward and backward. Language and

experience and thought are linked together in an organic

 

*
Women in general have always been defined by a form

of patriarchal enclosure.

44

process, life giving, focused on the discovery of the deep
self, that unique voice.

Britton asserts that writing itself is a process, an
act of perceiving. He believes that students learn by
writing and that they also learn how to write by writing:

... we are accustomed from early uses of language
to shaping at the point of utterance. To abandon
that process when it comes to writing and to try
to shape the utterance ahead in any sharp way
seems to me to reflect a misunderstanding of the
way language works. (Britton, Explorations, 34)

Peter Elbow, too, believes that writing is a
developmental process where "meaning is not what you start
out with but what you end up with." (Elbow 15) Elbow
suggests a rambling growth process where there's lots of
writing and lots of throwing away and as I have often
described it to my own students, putting their "Muse on

Cruise;' letting things happen, getting in touch with the
creative unconscious, dealing with the element of surprise.
Elbow thinks of writing as an "organic" process in which
you start writing before you know meaning at all and
"encourage your words gradually to change and evolve."
(Elbow 15) His developmental approach suggests that
writing mirrors every life cycle on earth:

Most processes engaged in by live organisms are

cyclic; developmental processes that run through

time and end up different from how they began.

45

The fact is that most people find they improve
their ability to think carefully and
discriminately if they allow themselves to be
sloppy and relinquish control at other times.
(Elbow 33)
Linguist L.S. Vygotsky believes that thought and language
reflect reality in a way different from that of perception
and became keys to unlocking the nature of human
consciousness. "Words play a central part not only in the
development of thought but the development of historical
growth of consciousness as a whole. A word is a microcosm
of human consciousness." (Vygotsky 153)

Many women writers have described experiences which
parallel those of Britton, Elbow, and Vygotsky. For Joan
Didion, writing is a release from the "moving pictures" of
her mind. Images come to her without explanation and
refuse to go away: "I write entirely to find out what I'm
thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it
means. What I want and what I fear." (Didion, "Why I
Write," 20) Gwendolyn Brooks lends almost a magical
interpretation to her own writing process:

So much is involved in the writing of poetry --
and sometimes, although I don't like suggesting
it as a magic process, it seems you really do
have to go into a bit of a trance, a self-cast
trance, because "brainwash" seems unable to do it

all, to do the whole job. The self cast trance

46

is possible when you are importantly excited on
idea, or surmise, or emotion. (72)
Susan Griffin describes the way her shaping at the point of
utterance retains that element of surprise: "I lose
control. I do not know exactly what words appear on the
page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words,
and I am surprised and transformed by what I record."
(Griffin 113) Adrienne Rich believes "... poems are like
dreams; in them you put what you don't know you know."
(Rich, "Dead Awaken" 40) Francoise Sagan begins, perhaps
with one single idea of a character and then watches this
idea grow as she writes: "... but nothing really came of
it until my pen was in hand. I have to start to write to
have ideas..." (Sagan 304) And for Gertrude Stein, who
was often delightfully experimental in the cadence of her
own language, writing comes from the unconscious:
... you will write... if you will write without
thinking of the result in terms of result, but
think of the writing in terms of discovery, which
is to say the creation must take place between
the pen and paper, not before in a thought, or
afterwards in a recasting... it will be a
creation of it come out of the pen and of you and
not out of an architectural drawing of the thing
you are doing. (Stein 159-60)
What Carson McCullers called the "flowering dream,"

Anais Nin called "the first jet of writing." For Amy

47

Lowell it was "a semi—trance," a "sub-conscious factory."
(110) Edith Wharton described her writing process as
taking place "on the sheer edge of consciousness." (95)
Anne Sexton also spoke of this inner region: "The poetry
is often more advanced in terms of my consciousness, than I

am. Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious."

(Plimpton
401)

I'd like to add my own experience as a writer here.
As a child, when I began composing fiction at the
typewriter, I remember waiting for the "click" to happen in
my mind. I would call it the "click" when I was twelve,
and I call it "motion pictures" now. It is the click into
a creative rhythm, a spiralling of thought, a movement -
and I'd type in this cadence, and let things happen. Now
when I'm into it, I'm never curious as to what I'm writing.
I listen to voices, bits of dialogue; watch visual spirals,
pictures in my mind, and I often begin to giggle, because
I'm sure, when I'm finished and I read it over, that I'll
discover I've probably written something wild, and funny.
This click seldom happens when I'm writing long hand
because I can't write quickly enough. It seems I can't
recreate that downward spiral to my unconscious quickly
enough without my typewriter.

As students begin to use language for exploration of
their deeper selves, they will begin to make connections

with others in dialogue and discussion and all those

48

criteria that a writing teacher still must be concerned
about: organization, structure, style, and correctness
will evolve. Language, for all human beings, is the
primary means of classifying experience, and order grows
from the struggle.1 "What language has done for us,"
writes James Britton, "is to reduce confusion in infancy
(and of course, thereafter) continues to serve our higher
thought processes throughout our lives. (Britton,
Explorations 27)

If we shape experience by talking and writing about
it, then it becomes our own "representation of the world."
We establish our own unique selves, our individual ideas,
our humanity through language; we create our own order.
Eudora Welty writes of bringing order from chaos through
her writing:

... it is the business of writing and
responsibility of the writer, to disentangle the
significant - in character, incident, setting,
mood everything - from the random and meaningless
and irrelevant that in real life surround it and
beset it. (Welty, as cited in Murray, Writer,
245)

In the beginning phases of my proposed course,
breaking away from the established order, and having
students create their own order in writing, would be an
underlying premise. Discussions of organization and

correctness would, however, be kept at a minimum}2 Such

49

lack of attention does not mean that ultimately these
criteria are not important, but only that if they are
introduced too early and given too much emphasis, they will
only hinder the student's ability to explore, experience,
and discover through language.

Since this course would be a laboratory workshop,
large and small group sessions would be used to their full
advantage. There will be a great deal of talk going on:
talk about the women's literature we're reading; talk about
the students' life experiences, or the life experiences of
their foremothers, close relatives, friends; and a lot of
reading aloud of student works, whether a free-writing
exercise or a fully evolved essay. The relationship
between talk and writing is paramount to the writing
process. In his School Council Project Study, Britton

states that ... good talk helps to encourage good
writing." (Britton, School Council Project Study, 29)
Talk encourages the free flow of ideas, the expression of
the self, the commonality of the struggle -in this case- of
being women.

Classroom talk becomes a part of the pre-writing
process, and the pre-writing process is critical and cannot
be ignored. It is crucial. Pre-writing not only increases
the student's ability to form new conceptions which give
meaning to her experience, but, when combined with

instruction in arrangement and style, produces more

adequate writing then the conventional approach which

50
offers no instruction on invention. (Burhans 1968) When

Peter Elbow says he has nothing to offer but two metaphors
"growing and cooking," (Elbow 18) he is summing up the
writing process. Cooking, brewing, percolating, and
incubating are all words composition theorists use for the
pre-writing stage. It can involve discovering a topic or
an idea as well as letting it grow in the mind. Students
must be made aware that the pre-writing stage doesn't
suddenly end when writing begins; it overlaps into all the
stages of writing.

A good way to illustrate this process is to talk about
my own writing with students. I often begin telling them
how I get an idea for a story, how it grows in my mind and
takes shape long before I sit down to write. I tell them
how the idea could germinate from a single line of dialogue
I overheard, from seeing a woman in a short-sleeved print
dress searching through the waste container in front of
Jacobson's, or from seeing a tattered glove lost in the
middle of the highway. I'll talk to them about the "moving

pictures,"

and about the character's speaking. I'll then
display several rough drafts of the story on a table in
front of me, showing how the story kept growing, changing.
This underlies my own beliefs, which mirror Donald Murray's
et. al.: a writing teacher can write with the students,
discuss the way she writes, and the problems she has in

writing. I believe this use of my own experience can serve

as an essential part of the pre-writing process as I

51

attempt to get the students "pumped up" about writing in
general and their own writing in particular.

In this workshop atmosphere, women students have to
own up to their words and their writing; they have to
articulate, read aloud, write, break silences. The large
and small groups become places where students can be active
participants in an environment where they experience a
network of support, immediate feedback and constructive
criticism.

In this creative environment, various "Getting
Started" or pre-writing strategies can be used effectively.
I have previously mentioned that novels, essays, and poems
of women writers would be used in this particular format
because women students need to become familiar with a
female literary tradition. In workshop, students can react
verbally to the literature. They can also react in
free-writing exercises or, later in the course, in a fully
realized essay. Through reading, women students can
discover the commonality of experience, archetypes, and
myths, as well as the distinct female literary voice of
women writers. Students can thereby recognize the validity
of the female experience; that alone would inspire their
own personal writings. Free writing and stream of
consciousness writing is also another pre-writing strategy
that works; so does journal writing. And when the class
begins to move out into the community of women, stories

from their grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and friends,

 

52

reproduced in interviews, on tape, or videocassette can
serve to fire up their own writings in the form of oral
histories, transcripts, stage or television plays, short
stories, narrative poems, etc.

Language play can be another pre-writing strategy.
Discovering ways to ferret out sexist language, devise
non-sexist language, and revalue female qualities in
language are possible modes of language play.

If women are "silenced/split by the babble of
grammatical usage," (Daly 18) and sexist grammar "burns
into the brains of little girls and young women a message
that male is the norm, the standard central figure beside
which we are the deviants," (Rich, "Taking Women Students

' 241) then students should be able to examine

Seriously,’
closely the language they have been using since infancy,
and begin to recognize how patriarchal paradigms not only

silence women but sacrifice women. For example, students

could study the origin of the female pronoun she. The male

 

pronoun £2, since the Middle Ages stood for all mankind,
including women, but sh; represented only females. In
essence, hg_becomes a metaphor for all humanity, making
male the universal norm, while Egg remains "the Other" and
cannot be used interchangably. It is as if Egg were a
metaphor for a subspecies. Students can also examine how
feminists have experimented with the patriarchal paradigms:
Mary Daly re-defining culturally pejorative words such as

spinster, hag, crone, lesbian; Marge Piercy using the

53

pronoun pg; to refer to androgynous beings of the future in
Woman 22 Egg Edgg g; limg; Monique Wittig splitting the
pronoun "I" visually on the printed page to show how she is
"broken by the fact that she must enter this language in
order to speak and write." (Wittig 10—11) In the spirit
of language play, students can redefine or invent new
words, new pronouns, even a new language. This is a play
exercise, where the spirit of language comes alive in the
classroom, and where women can begin to notice oppressive
power relationships inherent in our existing discourse.

But it is not a call to devise an alternative discourse,
which many radical feminists might suggest. I think we, as
women, are wasting valuable time trying to invent a new
language - we can work within the existing language if we
persistently challenge the discourses that stand, and
examine closely the words, syntax, genres, and patriarchal
attitudes toward language and representation that have
silenced women through the centuries.

Defining a female consciousness through language
becomes a political act. For women students who have been
silenced in their former education; who have been rewarded
for passivity, conformity and not "misbehaving" in the
classroom; who have been taught that risk taking through
speech and writing might be considered "aggressive,"

"hysterical," or "trivial,' language implies power. For on

a larger scale, female silence is a political and

54
historical as well as psychosocial phenomenon. (Ostriker,

Stealing, 68) For women writers in a gender polarized
culture it results in a divided self - a split self, with a
double-voiced discourse couched in "the oppressor's
language." The task of teachers of women -- however
precarious in male-defined academia -- is to help women
break free from culturally imposed silences. Language
becomes the first action "words are purposes. The words

are maps."

(Rich, "Diving," 163) Adrienne Rich explains

in her essay "Teaching Language in Open Admissions":
I think of myself as a teacher of language: that
is, as someone for whom language has implied
freedom, who is trying to aid others to free
themselves through the written word, and above
all, through learning to write it for themselves.
(63)

If the language of cultural myths, assumptions, and
linguistics has been used against women, then the task of
teachers of women is to turn this around. Language can
become a tool used £3; women; it can become an instrument
of articulation and change. Being released into language,
according to Rich, "is not simply learning the jargon of
the elite, fitting unexceptionally into the status quo but
learning that language can be used as a means of changing

reality.' (Rich, "Open Admissions," 68) For Ntozake
Shange's woman who "doesn't know the sound of her own

voice" language can break that enclosure of silence.

55

For all women - including women of color, working
class women, and lesbian women - writing becomes possible
"to release imprisoned strata of experience onto the
daylight of language." (Ostriker, Stealing, 89) For

Erica Jong, writing leads her away from voices inside her

that say "... turn back, you'll die if you venture too
far." (Jong 174) Anne Tyler says "writing something down
was always the road out." (Tyler xvii) For Margaret
Walker:

Writing has always been a means of expression for
me and other black Americans who are just like
me, who feel, too, the need for freedom in this
"home of the brave, and land of the free."
(Walker 96)
Toni Cade Bambara believes writing should be an instrument
of social change and ought to be used in service of the
community:
Through writing I attempt to celebrate the
tradition of resistance, attempt to tap black
potential, and try to join the chorus of voices
that argues that exploitation and misery are
neither inevitable or necessary. (Bambara 154)
Writing, according to Gloria Steinem can be used as a means
to reshape history so it is not limited to the patriarchal
version or "the documented acts of national leaders, or to
the interpretations of scholars proving a particular

0

theory.' (Steinem 149) We can begin to rewrite to

56

include women: "We can begin to create a women's history
and a peoples' history that is accurate and accessible."
(Steinem 149) Adrienne Rich describes language as "...
such a weapon, and what goes with language: reflection,
criticism, renaming, creation." (Rich, "Open Admissions,"
68)

The naming of ourselves becomes a critical act in the

writing process. We seek, through language, to deal with

that fragmented self and we seek integration by naming that

self. "If we don't name ourselves we are nothing," says
Audre Lorde. "If the world defines you it will define you
to your disadvantage." (Lorde 19)

In a classroom of women writers, women can gain power
in their common struggles with their divided selves; they
can break silences, and do what French feminist, Helen
Cixous implores in "The Laugh of the Medusa":

I shall speak about women's writing: about what
it will do. Woman must write her self: must
write about women and bring women to writing...
(245)

In a writing workshop specifically designed for women
students, the emphasis is on naming, re-creating, writing
their "selves." In this community where we bring, as

" Joan Didion's

Helene Cixous suggests, "women to writing,
"implacable I" becomes the "implacable we" struggling
together for articulation, for voices, for action.

Then, of course, in order to become better writers,

57

students must write and write and write. In this
atmosphere of uncalculated discovery where language leads a
student writer to meaning and self, revision becomes
critical to the process of writing. Donald Murray
reexamined the revision process and defined two principal
and quite separate editorial acts involved in revision.
After the pre-writing stages and an actual rough draft is
written, the writer undergoes "Internal Revision" where the
sole audience is the writer and where she reads to discover
where her content, form, language, and voice have led her.
Step two in the revision process, according to Murray, is

"External Revision,"

where the audience goes beyond the
writer, and where the writer pays attention to conventional
forms of language, mechanics and style. (Murray, "Internal
Revision," 91) Peer editing becmms a critical asset to
the external revision process. Students not only provide a
network of support for each other in small groups; they
also, as women, can recognize that their responses, their
opinions, and their shared experiences, can be as valuable
and helpful to the writer as anything a teacher could
offer. The nation that Eflll the teacher's advice counts (a
patriarchal concept?) should be dispensed with. Each woman
can move outside her own writing to look at it more
critically, and with a degree of detachment, and learn to
help other writers. "Revision, then, is not just a

question of correcting and improving. It is also the final

stage of the process by which a writer presents himself:

58
every piece of writing can be, to some extent, a

declaration, a tacit agreement with the reader that the
writer accepts responsibility for his own creation."
(Britton, School Council Study 47) Most important,

N

Stephen Judy writes ...it helps writers learn to function
independently so that when they write outside the confines
of a composition course, they have the skills and
confidence to serve as their own editors." (Judy, "The
Experiential Approach," 47) This is the type of
confidence that is a focal point of the course, confidence
to stand outside the perimeters of the course and assert
one's personal voice.

If the need to re-name, re-capture, re-imagine all
that has been lost or never known about ourselves as women
is a major emphasis in a woman—centered workshop, then the
process of revision--the re-vising—-becomes a means of
validating women's experience. It becomes a critical step
in the overall search for a voice, a personal truth, an
identity which transcends patriarchal definition. Plunging
into our inner regions, or as Helene Cixous calls it,

"...the other limited country...where the repressed manage

" (284) is only one step in the process. It

to survive...
mirrors what psychotherapist Kim Chernin, author of Th3
Hungry Self, describes as a "process of understanding"
that she feels her women patients need to follow to become

whole:

...the process of understanding is basically the

59

same: a question of correctly naming, stripping
back, finding the roots, moving beyond the skein
of impulse and inhibition, and hidden desire that
ties us to the past.... It is this we must
unravel, patiently, meticulously, strand by
strand, until we know ourselves. (xiv)

Women writers essentially must do the same. They must
emerge from the plunge into the subconscious, the flowering
dream, the first jet of writing, to unravel meticulously
strand by strand what has happened. This is Revision---a
process where confidence, trust, and the emergence of a
strong, coherent voice is the inevitable next step. Irish
novelist, Brigid Brophy, explains:

As a Shavian biologist I know that the impulse to
art is involuntary, like the instinct to live, of
which it's a part. As a Freudian, I know that
the material of art is from the unconscious. All
the same, as a rational aesthete, I hold it the
duty of my conscious mind to pass aesthetic
judgement on the material and impose
aesthetically logical direction on the implulse.
(Shenker 106)

Coming from the inner regions a the clearer vision
becomes a common pattern when women writers discuss their
methods. Edith Wharton explained in "The Secret Garden":

I can only say that the process, though it takes

60

place in some secret region on the sheer edge of
consciousness, is yet always illuminated by the
clear light of my critical attention. (95)
French novelist Nathalie Saurraute concurs:
I write a whole book from beginning to end—-and
then rewrite the text entirely, shaping it like
poetry. This comes more easily, because there's
a basis, while at the beginning, one ventures
into the void. (Shenker 246)

These are the testimonies of skilled writers who have
the instinctive ability and control to revise as much or as
little as the situation requires. But what about beginning
women writers who have, all their lives, been given the
cultural message that they do not have the instinctive
ability to write at all, let alone to make rational,
critical, revisionary decisions concerning their writing?
In an essay entitled "Women and the Literary Curriculum,"
Elaine Showalter discusses the way women who are estranged
from their experience, "unable to perceive its shape and

' often do not have what she calls "the happy

authenticity,'
confidence, the exuberant sense of value of their
individual observations which enables young men to risk
making fools for the sake of an idea." (51 ) Revision
ultimately becomes for women writers in a woman-centered
curriculum a conscious display of confidence in their

ability to articulate, to enter a world of language which

Helene Cixous says "...has been governed b the hallus."
y P

61

(285) In this type of environment women's experiences are
valued, listened to, and given credence, not simply
reshaped for a male audience. The class allows them to
take risks in a climate of mutual acceptance. The class
encourages confidence, authority, voice.

Revision, then, becomes central to the writing
workshop, because that is the place new learning about the
self, and about writing in general, is likely to occur.
Besides giving students varied opportunities to write and a
supportive environment with a responsive teacher and peer
editing groups, the workshops provide time for the students
- in the revision process - to explore ideas in their own
ways. They need thinking time and re-thinking time, seeing
time and re-seeing time. They need time to revise, to push
beyond their initial surface handling of a topic into the
fresh, the surprising, the uncalculated. Women students
need that "happy confidence" to take risks.4

It is the overall atmosphere of this woman—centered
workshop that will allow the woman writer to achieve the
skills and confidence to become her own editor. She will
begin to ask herself questions. They are the questions of
all writers--about form and craft, relationship and

identity, but also about value and meaning..

NOTES

This could be considered at variance with the advice
in some college composition texts which advocate outlines
in the pre-writing stage. In the landmark study,_lhg
Composing Processes of defth Graders, Janet Emig examined
the composing processes of professional writers and senior
student writers; she found it is not necessary to write a

complete outline before beginning a rough draft.

I'm not going to detail all the research that refutes
the false notion that skills must be taught before a larger
coherence can be formulated (grammar, spelling, paragraph
formation, punctuation), but many composition theorists
agree that although surface correctness is ultimately
important, it must be placed in a subsidary position to

writing itself. (Miller and Judy 5) In an essay,

"Writing For The Here and Now,' Judy says ...textbooks and
composition teachers have too long blurred the distinction
between editing (changing content and form) and
proofreading (polishing up matters of spelling, mechanics,
and usage)." (109) Britton feels over attentiveness to
linguistic acceptability might make a young writer
"mistrust his own language, and by trying to be correct,

stifle half of what he wanted to say." (School Council

Research 47)

62

63

3For example, Early American male writers repeatedly

compared the qualities of the new world to those of female
sexuality. Their metaphors express their conflict between
raping and dominating the land and being nourished by her

fertility. See Annette Kolodny's The Lay f the Land for a

 

 

thorough study. (66-89) For a classroom assignment,
students could examine how language defines women in
relationship to men, and most importantly, subordinate to

them.

"Writing badly," says Peter Elbow, "then is a crucial
part of learning to write well. Indeed, regressing and
falling apart are a crucial and necessary part of any
complex learning." (136) Women students need to be
supplied with an environment where making a mistake is not

followed by real or supposed male condescension.

CHAPTER IV

Conclusion

When I was very young, I roamed the Detroit streets
singing the TV theme songs (for TV was very new and very
wonderful then) to "Paladin," "Maverick," and "Davy
Crockett." I'd marvel over Eliot Ness' very square jaw,
Sheriff Matt Dillon's main street walk, or I'd jump, like
half the neighborhood, from our high brick porch,
pretending to be Superman. My mother let me stay up the
night I broke my leg after one of my aborted flights,
tucking me in on the couch, elevating my cast with two
chenille pillows. I watched Lucy that night. She was my
real hero, as I see it now, only you couldn't admit that
out loud on the streets where cops and cowboys reigned
supreme. I remember the plot to this day. Ricky didn't
want Lucy to perform at the Club Copa, where he was the

star, and where he got to sing "Ba-Ba-Loo,"

sport ruffled
sleeves, and carry two big Conga drums. But somehow, with
the help of a disguise, and her sidekick Ethel Mertz, Lucy
not only sung at the club, but danced, and wore the most
beautiful, dazzling head dress of them all (which also was
the heaviest, and it lead to her ultimate fall, as she
careened down a flight of marble stairs). Despite the "You

Dare, You Pay' 1950's message, Lucy had sung and she had

64

65
danced and that was all that mattered to me. Out on

Woodward Avenue, where you had to stay tough (or Bobby
Baker would run over your nose with his bicycle*or stick a
nightcrawler down your Spankies**), I sang "Paladin,
Paladin, where do you roam?" out loud so the others,
especially the boys, could hear. But in my head, I was
secretly doing Lucy, each "Dah-Dah-Dah" of the wordless
soundtrack rattling against my closed teeth like miniature
explosives. Because every time Lucy wanted to sing, or
dance, or go to work, or make Vitamin-A-Vegamin
commercials, she did, despite Ricky's relentless efforts.

We all lived as one big extended family back then in a
large brick house in an Italian and Armenian neighborhood.
My grandmother lived in the downstairs flat, returning
nightly from the store she owned and managed, to fill the
house with cooking smells: tomato sauce, fried green
peppers, zucchini sizzling in hot olive oil. There was
always a pot of thick coffee brewing, or loaves of Italian
bread bought at Lombardy's split open on the table ready
for the dipping into a meat sauce or a thick soup. My aunt
lived there too, with her husband and three children. I'd
see her ready for work everyday, dressed for her government
job as a social worker, a stack of books under her arms to
be read on the bus trip to the core of the city (years

later I saw sandwiched between two books on Christian

 

* He did.

**I did (to him).

66

Science, a copy of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

 

I remember the title clearly because I had trouble
pronouncing the M word for months, trying to figure out
what it meant).

And I remember my mom going off to work everyday too,
dressed in a white uniform and white wedged shoes, for her
job at the school cafeteria. I'd watch her as she walked
briskly out the door towards the back alley, her large
canvas purse tapping her hips as she moved.

And I remember the three of them on Saturdays
(Saturday was always laundry day), standing out in the big
back yard, hanging clothes, wooden pins in their mouths,
hoisting wet muslin sheets onto the ropes. We'd play
cowboys at their feet, kicking up dirt. When they
finished, my grandmother, (always in a print dress, knee
high hose, and black leather shoes with holes cut in the
sides to let her corns breathe), would head into her
kitchen to prepare for Sunday's meal. There was always
something cooking. The kitchen was filled with silver
pots, large wooden spoons, giant cans of imported olive oil
with a foreign script I could not decipher, or homemade
noodles drying on spindly racks.

On some Sundays, after we had a grand meal and the men
left to watch the Tigers, smoke cigars, and yell at the TV
screen, the women and the children would sit at a long
mahogany table and talk. We'd still be dipping thick

crusts into the leftover sauce, or snacking on grapes;

67

there was never much room for dessert, as I remember, but
there always was room for talk. After the boys tired, and
had gone off to play Davy Crockett or cowboys, I'd still be
sitting there listening to all the family stories. There
were stories of my grandmother's arranged marriage, her
work in the textile mills, bad men and lost opportunities,
cousins who got rich, married well. There were stories of
my mother and her red hair, how she too fed the ice man's
horse - like I did - with the small leaves from the
shrubbery in the front yard of the house we both grew up
in; how she first saw my father when she was only sixteen.

And then the stories would end; for there were dishes
to be done, or maybe tomatoes to be canned for the winter,
meat to be ground for sausage for the week, clothes to be
ironed and mended. My mother would go upstairs to wash her
cafeteria uniforms. I still remember her freshly polished
shoes sitting like two tired birds on the Sunday paper by
the back door.

I have always remembered the women in my childhood
working, weaving histories, leading active vital lives.
And so it seems to me that Adrienne Rich is correct when
she says "Women's culture is active: women have been truly
active people in all cultures without whom human society
would long ago have perished." (Ligg 13)

In a a culture that has managed to denigrate and
inhibit them, women have still been active and vital and

heroic in ways that remain unacknowledged. Who were these

68

women who left us an oral culture of folk songs, tales,
lullabies, superstitions, legends, and home remedies? Who
were these women, who, when they were not spinning tales on
the front porch of a clapboard house, or at a long mahogany
table after a grand meal, were spinning wool or flax, or
were sewing colorful quilts recording their own family
histories in their choices of patterns and remnants? Who
were these women who stole into their rooms at night,
almost apologetic, and wrote secretly in private journals,
diaries, and letters to their women friends? Who were
these women who worked the spinnies in a Pennsylvania mill,
or sewed hats in a New York factory; or who worked at home
raising generations of children, preserving and preparing
food, sewing and cleaning? There is a legacy in our

culture of lost genius and unrecorded lives. In A Room f

 

One's Own, Virginia Woolf addresses the loss:
For all the dinners are cooked; the plates and
cups washed; the children sent to school and gone
out into the world. Nothing remains of it. All
has vanished. No biography or history has a word
to say about it. And the novels, without meaning
to, inevitably lie. All these infinitely obscure
lives remain to be recorded, I said...feeling in
imagination the pressure of dumbness, the
accumulation of unrecorded life. (93)

In her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens,"

Alice Walker speaks of lost female genius. Where were the

69

black women who wanted to paint, to sing, to write? The
artistic energies, Walker suggests, were dissipated by the
social structure of their lives--energies lost forever
under the conditions of slavery, of not being able to own
one's self, and of being forced to bear many children.
There were simply no outlets for the women's genius:
For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were
not Saints, but Artists, driven to a numb and
bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in
them for which there was no release. They were
creators who lived lives of spiritual waste,
because they were so rich in spirituality which
is the basis of Art--that the strain of enduring
their unused and unwanted talent drove them
insane. (233)

Since, says Walker, most of the years black people
have been in America it was a punishable crime for a black
person to read or write, there had to be other modes of
expression: the potential poets, fiction writers, and
essayists were silenced. Sewing and quiltmaking, suggests
Walker, was one meaningful channel for creative expression.
So too were singing the blues, oral story telling, and an
attachment to the natural world, which included the growing
of vegetables and flowers in her own mother's case,
petunias.

Virginia Woolf spoke, too, of this lost genius in

women:

70

Yet genius of a sort must have existed among
them, as it existed among the working classes,
but certainly it never got itself onto paper.
When, however, one reads of a woman possessed by
the devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or
even a remarkable man who had a remarkable
mother, then I think we are on the track of a
lost novelist, a suppressed poet, or some Emily
Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor,
crazed with the torture her gift had put her to.
(Room 50-51)

Women's writing might well begin to record these lost
lives. In voices previously unheard, women can tell the
unfamiliar heroic stories. Societies' pre—conceived
notions of heroic action (white, male and mobile) has to be
reevaluated to include the heroic ideal in society's
restricted roles, including those imposed upon women. We
must actively seek out female heroism, realizing it can be
found in "the repeated instances of bravery, strength, and
wisdom in their roles as wives and mothers, protectors and
breadwinners." (Pearson and Pope 6)

A woman centered writing course has, as one of its
objectives, bringing the world of women, this record of
heroic action, to the student. In order to develop
confidence and a strong personal voice, a woman student

should know her foremothers. Women have been creative.

71
Women have worked. Women have struggled.

Today's women students need to become aware of the
need for an actual literacy, for ways to share women's
history, and for recognition of "the lies and distortions
of the culture men have devised." (Rich, Algg 12) In the

forward of her book of essays 9A Lies, Secrets and Silence,

 

 

Adrienne Rich prescribes what I believe is the ideal
formula for a woman-centered writing workshop:
Today women are talking to each other, recovering
an oral culture, telling our life stories,
reading aloud to one another the books that have
moved and healed us, analyzing the language that
has lied about us, reading our own words aloud to
each other. (13)
In a woman-centered composition course, language will give
the students a means to interweave the world of women.
Women's culture, women's voices, women's stories, which
have been silenced for generations, can finally emerge.
Women students can spin and weave and create in a circle of

acceptance, energy, and new confidence.

POSTSCRIPT

It's Sunday evening and my daughter Emily stands here
ironing while I write. My youngest daughter lies on the
couch reading a novel called Sisters while Janet Jackson
croons on the radio: "What Has He Done For Me Lately?".
There is no big family dinner today where women sit at my
grandmother's table trading stories. I served up
cheeseburgers and dill slices on Dixieware and I had time
to write some more.

But my mother, widowed now, and recently retired from
cafeteria work, does call on the telephone and we line up,
my daughters and I, one-by-one, and listen to her stories
of her California vacation; of how my 90-year-old
grandmother has finally hired a tutor and learned to read
and has moved through all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books in
a few short months; of how my cousin is selling her
paintings now, no longer miniatures in watercolors, but
broad acrylic strokes on large canvasses.

Somewhere in the conversation, after she asks how my
writing is going, she mentions that once, before she quit
high school and went to work, she was a very good speller
and also wrote stories. It has never occurred to me that
perhaps my love of writing comes from her too, and not only
from my father who told me bedtime stories of Salami Kings
and muskrats down in Wyandotte. It has never occurred to

me until now.

72

APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

SELECTED READING LIST

APPENDIX A

SELECTED READING LIST

FICTION

Olive Schreiner, The Story 2i AA African Farm

 

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (several volumes)
Louisa May Alcott, Work

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives or The Autobiography 2: Alice
B. Toklas

 

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life AA the Iron Mills

 

Mary Wilkins Freeman, The Revolt 2i Mother and Other
Stories

 

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country g£_the Pointed Firs
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper

Willa Cather, Ml Antonia, A Lost Lady

 

Ellen Glasgow, Virginia, Barren Ground, The Sheltered Life

 

Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun

Zelda Fitzgerald, Save M2 the Waltz

 

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
2f

Edith Wharton, The House Mirth or The Age _£ Innocence

 

 

Nella Larsen, Quicksand
Tillie Olsen, Tell !£.A Riddle and Other Stories

Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

 

 

Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers

 

73

74

Jane Austen, Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

 

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Margaret Drabble, The Needle's Eye or Realms A; Gold

George Eliot, Middlemarch Mill RE the Floss

 

 

Radclyffe Hall, The Well 2i Loneliness

 

 

Doris Lessing, Summer Before the Dark or Golden Notebook

 

Iris Murdoch, The Bell

 

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Muriel Spark, The Prime 2i Miss Jean Brodie or The Takeover

 

 

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, :2 the Lighthouse

 

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

Mary Helen Washington, ed. Black-Eyed Susans

 

Alice Walker, Meridian, The Color Purple
Toni Morrison, Song 2i Solomon,Sula, The Bluest Eye

Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

 

Buchi Emecheta, The Bride Prince

 

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
Joyce Carol Oates, Them, A Garden 2i Earthly Delights

Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker

 

Lillian Hellman, Pentimento

 

Carson McCullers, The Heart l§.2 Lonely Hunter or A Member
‘gf the Wedding —

 

 

 

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood or The Violent Bear I Away

Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

 

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

75
Eudora Welty, stories

Ntozake Shange, "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered
Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf"

Judith Rossner, Lookigg For Mr. Goodba;
Erica Jong, Fear 2i Flying

Marge Piercy, Small Changes, WomaA n The Edge of 13mg

 

 

Lois Gould, SAEA Good Friends

Marilyn French, The Women's Room

Lisa Alther, Kinflicks

Alix Kates Shulman, Memoirs 2i AA Ex-Prom Queen
Cynthia Buchanan, Maiden

Diane Johnson, The Shadow Knows

 

Maureen Howard, Before My Time

Nellie Wong, Dreams 33 Harrison Railroad Park

 

Joanna Russ, The Female Man

 

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand 2£ Darkness

 

Rita Mae Brown, Ruby Fruit Jungle

 

POETRY

Poetry by: Ann Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, Emily
Dickinson, H.D., Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, Edith
Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Maxine
Kumin, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille
Clifton, Audre Lorde, Margaret Walker, Diane Wakoski,

Alta, Margaret Atwood, Lyn Lifshin, Marge Piercy,

76

Nikki Giovanni, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, Toi
Derricotte, Cherrie Moraga, Carolyn Forche, Susan

Griffin, Judy Grahn.

POETRY ANTHOLOGIES

Erlene Stetson, ed., Black Sister: Poetry By Black
American Women, 1764-1980

Sara Miles et. al., eds., Ordinary Women, Mujeres Comunes —
AA Anthology gg Poetry Ay New York City Women.

Elly Bulkin and Joan Larkin, Lesbian Poetry: AA Anthology

 

Beverly Dahlen, ed., Poetry From Violence: San Francisco
Conference on Violence Against Women

 

 

 

 

 

WOMEN STUDIES

 

Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication gi the Rights 2i Women

 

Sojourner Truth, "Speech at Akron Women's Rights
Convention"

Margaret Fuller, Memoirs, Woman $2 the Nineteenth Century
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics

Jane Addams, Twenty Years A£_Hull House

 

Emma Goldman, Living My Life

Virginia Woolf, A Room 2i One's Own

 

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: ‘Toward 3 Philosophy gf
Women's Liberation, Gyn/Ecology

 

 

 

Shulameth Firestone, The Dialectic 2i Sex: The Case For
Feminist Revolution

 

 

 

 

77

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics
Karen Horney, Feminine Psychology
Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman

 

Alice Rossi, The Feminist Papers: From Adams £_ A_
Beauvoir

 

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and

 

 

 

Institution, 93 Lies, Secrets and SilEHCe

 

 

 

Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction g£_Mothering:
Psychoanalysis and The Sociology g£_Gender

 

 

Tillie Olsen, Silences

Cathy N. Davidson and E.M. Broner, eds., The Lost
Tradition: Mothers and Daughters 12 Literature

 

 

 

Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class
Nancy Hoffman and Florence Howe, Women Working

Betty Friedan, LE Changed My Life: Writings 22 the Women's

 

Movement

Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Women in Sexist
Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness _—

 

Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her

 

 

 

Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Sexist Language: A Modern
Philosophical Analysis —

 

 

Gloria T. Hull and Patricia Bell Scott, eds., All The Women
are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are
Brave: Black Women's Studies -—'—_

 

 

Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences:
Conflicts 32 Black and White Feminist Perspectives

 

 

 

Alice Walker, AM Search 2i Our Mother's Gardens

Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My
Back: Writings My Radical Women 2f Color

 

 

 

Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of
Women's Literature ‘-

 

APPENDIX B

ORAL AND WRITTEN HISTORIES

APPENDIX B

ORAL AND WRITTEN HISTORIES

One of the first class assignments is the recreation
of an oral and written history with the use of a personal
interview as a strategy for information gathering. In 122
ABC'S 2i Literacy, Stephen Judy discusses the merits of
utilizing interviews in a composition course:

Interviewing develops oral language skills,
'thinking' and synthesizing skills, the ability
to transcribe and write, and, finally, the
editing process. (132)
Interviewing also enables students to become historians;
finding the answers to who women are and where they've been
in the voices of women who are readily accessible to them.
There are tellers of tales everywhere: a grandmother
recreating a childhood scene on Ellis Island; a mother
telling how she had to give up her job on the railroad to a
man after World War II; an elder in the community who
traces the history of her family through the cloth
rectangles on her "Log Cabin" quilt. There are singers,
midwives, teachers, seamstresses, factory workers,
political activists, dairy keepers, and writers--all with
stories to tell. Through interviewing, students would learn

that women have been a part of our cultural history as

78

79
caregivers, workers, and artists-—to name a few--despite

efforts to diminish them.

The implications for language usage are astounding.
Students not only become historians, but they become
listeners, transcribers, speakers, and writers.
Interviewing would naturally lead to various modes of
discourse: written narratives, memories, mixed media

presentations, reports, biographies and autobiographies.

I. Questions for the interviews should include these
areas:

earliest childhood memories

school experiences

experiences where they distinctly knew what it meant to
be female in their society

voyages and journeys

job experiences

home chores: food preparation and preservation,
sewing, tending animals, raising children, cleaning

favorites: songs, family stories, jokes, home health
remedies, recipes, lullabies

clothing, fashions, jewelry

books and magazines they've read

a favorite photograph

family artifacts: afghans, quilts, china, coverlets,
doilies, antique furniture, diary and journal entries

important people that influenced them

dancing, singing

dating customs

marriage customs

religious life

art works of their own creation

their childhood dreams and visions for the future

A. Suggested Writing Assiggments
1. Write an accurate written transcript of the
interview.
2. Videotape the interview.

3. Make a photographic essay to accompany a

11.

12.

8O

written text of the interview.

Write a descriptive essay of one particular
incident in this woman's history.

Write a biographical essay.

Write a first person memoir in which you
recreate this woman's voice for the reader.
Write a fictional narrative about this woman's

life, a specific incident, memory,
transition. (or write a narrative poem,
dramatic scene, radio play...)

Give an oral presentation. Bring in some
stories, artifacts, art work, pictures of
interviewee.

Write a character sketch.

Create an actual physical scene from this
woman's past (her kitchen, her garden, the
sweat shop where she worked, the bedroom
where she gave birth, etc.).

Write a biographical history of the women in
your family. Begin with your grandmother, to
your mother, to yourself.

Write an essay discussing the cultural messages
defining women in the interviewee's past.
Compare them to the cultural messages
operating now. How are they the same?

Different?

APPENDIX C

PERSONAL WRITING

APPENDIX C
PERSONAL WRITING

I. Suggested Writing Assignments:
1. Write your own childhood memory. Then tell it out
loud to the class. Then read it out loud.
2. Willa Cather remarked, "Most of the basic material
a writer worked with is acquired before the age

of fifteen."

Consider the meaning of that
statement in view of your own experience. To
what extent do your childhood and adolescent
experiences establish a pattern of perceiving
(and using language) that becomes fixed. (Miller
and Judy 33)

3. Write an essay about a time when you knew (or
suddenly realized) what it means to be female in
this society.

4. Write a fictional narrative, or a poem, or a
one-act play about a specific event in your life.

5. Record your dreams and fantasies. Write an essay
comparing them to the woman's in your interview.

6. Choose one of the times when you feel you were
discriminated against for being female. Recount

the episode in a personal narrative.

7. Write an imaginary dialogue between yourself and

81

82

your alter-ego.

8. Since women are Often defined by their body image
in this culture (as opposed to their
interiority), write an essay about feeling
unhappy with your body and your body image.

9. Keep a journal.

10. Since women had to choose other forms of discourse
to channel their perceptions and writing,
experimenting with these different modes would
give you a clearer understanding of their lives.
Write a fictional story in the form of a journal,
a diary entry, a letter, or a letter between two
females, creating two distinct female voices
(Some suggestions: between two sisters, two
female friends, a mother and a daughter, etc.).

11. Write an essay paralleling your experience growing
up female with the woman in the interview.

12. Research a woman writer and recreate an oral
history in that writer's voice. Or - write a
biography. Or - write a one-act play using
quotations from the woman writer's work
interwoven with a biographical history.

13. Research a public female hero, such as Mary
Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman,
Bella Abzub, Gloria Steinem, etc. Let your
research naturally lead you into different modes

of discourse: reports, research paper, fictional

83
narratives, memoirs, biographies.

14. Research the depiction of fictional female heroes
in current media (for example: Ripley and
Vasquez in the movie Aliens; Kate and Allie from
the television show of the same name; a character
created by various contemporary novelists.
Discuss what cultural stereotypes are
perpetuated. What stereotypes are shattered?
Gather your findings and write a report or an
analytical paper. Organize group discussions,

panels, and debates.

APPENDIX D

LINGUISTICS

APPENDIX D

LINGUISTICS

By examining any language, students can learn more
about the culture of its people. And by examining English
which is one of the most highly evolved of the world's
hundreds of languages, women students can learn to identify
many vestiges of archaic sexual attitudes inherent within
the discourse. (Strainchamps 348) The following is a
list of writing exercises that can lead students to
recognize and understand the dynamics of linguistic
oppression. All of these exercises can lead to various
modes of discourse: oral and written reports, analytical
papers, panel discussions, debates, etc.

1. Take any text written by our founding fathers.
Examine their use of verbs (i.e. active and
passive voice), nouns, and metaphor. Recount
your findings in an essay.

2. Take one of your science texts (i.e. biology
sociology anthropology, psychology) and expose,
if it exists, the androcentric nature of the
language scientists use. For example: Is the
male experience - even in the animal world -
depicted as the norm, naming females passive and

inferior? Compare the language in a nineteenth

84

85

century text, and early twentieth century text
and a current science text. What are the
similarities in language usage? What are the
differences?

3. Look at an excerpt from a contemporary male author
(i.e. Henry Miller, Normen Mailer, John Updike,
etc.) where a woman character is described.

What types of language (verbs, nouns, slang, use
of metaphor) does the author use to portray
women? What conclusions can you draw from your
reading? Compare two authors. Gather your
findings and devise a report for the class.

4. "For the purpose of this assignment, you are to
take the unusual perspective of an observer from
another galaxy. You are a staff psychologist in
charge of writing a report on Earth inhabitants.
You are aware of the general appearance of the
two sexes and their biological differences
having acquired some Earth biology texts from an
earlier expedition. What you are now interested
in is the psychological characteristics of the
sexes. Unfortunately, all you have to go on is
a dictionary, thesauraus, collection of famous
quotations, and dictionary of American slang
phrases. Choose any or all of these sources and
use the references to the sexes which they

contain as the basis for your brief report on

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

86

'the psychology of human males and females.'
(Note: you may want to check not only

references to 'man, woman' but to such terms as
'manly, womanly, femininity, masculinity,'

etc.)" (Martyna 298)

Examine sexism in Newsweek, Time, Esquire, and

 

 

Playboy advertisements.

Examine sexism in television advertisements.
Examine sexism in song lyrics from the fifties to
now. (For example: what are the linguistic
implications in the Rolling Stones' "Under My
Thumb" (1968) and the more recent "She's the

Boss." (1985))

Examine the language usage in newspaper accounts

of crime, rape, sexual violence. Or compare the

language on the sports page (generally written
for a male audience) and the language on the
"Living" page (directed at a female audience).
Do you notice any difference? (Word choice?
Imagery? Verbs?)

You will be given a copy of either 12239

Seventeen, Ym, or Young Teen magazine. Analyze

the language in reference to beauty, body image,
getting and keeping boyfriends, etc. Do you find

any cultural stereotypes in operation? Is there

an attempt to use non-sexist language?

Examine modern slang in reference to females.

87

Compare it to slang in reference to males. What
are your findings? What assumptions about males
and females are in operation?

11. Examine the graffiti in a women's bathroom on
campus. Copy several examples and study
carefully. What do you notice about topics,
theme, word choice, use of verbs (i.e. active or
passive voice). Have a male friend copy some
examples of male authored graffiti from a
bathroom in the same building. Do a similar
study. Compare your findings.

12. Consider how males talk in the company of other
males and how females talk in the company of
females. Then consider how our language changes
when we're in the company of the opposite sex.
Write dialogue scenes depicting:

a. Three men speaking in a singles bar, or in a
locker room, or at a sports event/then
shift, and write a dialogue using women in
the same situations.

b. Two men discussing the break-up of a
relationship/then, reverse, using two
women.

c. A male salesman talking to a female
customer/a female salesperson talking to a
male customer.

d. A female employee asking for a raise in pay

88

from a male employer/reverse.
e. Devise a situation of your own.

13. Record dialogues you overhear between parents and
children (same sex and opposite sex encounters).
Strive to retain the accuracy in content, word
choice, mode of expression. Analyze your
findings. Do you find any subtle cultural
messages about sex roles being transmitted from
parent to child in the language and the mode of
expression?

14. Examine the language of characters in a soap
opera, movie, television show.

15. Analyze the origins of sexual slang.

16. You are creating a non-sexist utopia inhabited by
androgynous beings. The inhabitants speak a
form of English, but they have rid the language
of any vestiges of sexism. Make a list of
non-sexist pronouns, nouns, verbs, and slang

that would be part of their vocabulary.

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n n
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THE MAN WHO MADE TEETH

By

Maria Bruno Holley

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1986

I

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE MAN WHO MADE TEETH ............................ 1

A MATTER OF DISGUISE .............................. 12

CLIPPINGS ........ ....... .......................... 21
ROSALIE'S CUISINE ........... ....... ............... 32
BAD ENDINGS ... ....... ............................. 42
SICILIAN REVENGE ...................... ...... ...... 53

IN SEARCH OF SAM THE SHAM AND THE PHAROAHS ........ 59

THE FEEDER ... ..... .................. ........... ... 72
FAT ARLENE ...... . ................................. 92
PRIMAL SCREAM ..................................... 113
THE REST OF HER LIFE .............................. 131
A WAY WITH WORDS .... .............................. 146

iv

THE MAN WHO MADE TEETH

It was at a party that I met the man who made teeth.
He was standing in a dark corner, wearing shaded glasses.
I could not see his eyes. But I saw his teeth. White and
clean and perfect--gleaming like diamonds in the darkness.
I stepped closer to him, seeing my reflection in the black
glass that covered his eyes. I smiled. He smiled. I
looked at his teeth. They were like nothing I had ever
seen before. I always remembered teeth. Like Billy
Xavier's in fifth hour high school French. His teeth wore
little yellow cardigans, each and every one. When he
turned around to face me, his pimpled nose scrubbed raw,
his thin, purple lips slanted over his yellow mouth, he'd
say something he thought was particularly pithy like,
"Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?" and I'd frown, and think
how I'd like to get into that mouth with some of those
Playtex rubber gloves, unbutton those sweaters with a stiff
wire brush, and set his teeth free, but of course I didn't,
on account of I was always thinking of something equally
pithy to say back to him in French, like "I'd rather sleep

with cow dung,"

only I never could find the word dung in my
French/English/English/French dictionary fast enough. And
I remember Mindy Marinelli's teeth from my early years

playing on the Detroit streets. The boys would tease her

and call her dog mouth. Her teeth were all jagged and

2

misshapen and hung like mottled stalactites from her
swollen gums. She would never smile, on account of the
boys would bark when she walked by, and she would grip her
teeth together like a workman's vice. And I told her when
she grew up she would have new teeth and no one would laugh
at her, but she would laugh, a rich full laugh, with her
mouth wide open. And then I thought of my lover Richard's
teeth. He was still wearing braces at thirty years of age,
braces he would have tightened every week, braces that
would trap strands of my long hair, that would cut into my
tongue, make me bleed.

"I can't see your eyes,"

I said, staring at his
silver hair instead.

"That's the way I like it," he said and sipped slowly
on his drink.

I really wanted to ask if they were real and all, his
teeth, if he had made them himself to sit so perfectly like
white knights in his mouth, but I didn't. I talked other
teeth instead. I told him how I didn't have a cavity until
I was twenty-seven, how my dentist had told me I had
"masculine bicuspids" and then proceeded to file them away
with his drill, letting the shattered bone jet from my
mouth like demons, until he had whittled them into

' rounder, smoother, the teeth of

"feminine bicuspids,'
complacent Polynesian goddesses. I told him about how I
saw George Washington's teeth, all wooden and disfigured,

sitting in a glass case at Mount Vernon, how I like to

3
watch Richard slip the tiny rubber bands onto the hooks of

his braces, how Billy Xavier's yellow mouth was right out
of Les Miserables, how I hoped Mindy Marinelli's teeth had
turned out all right.

"I could fix her teeth," he said smiling again. "I'm
very good at what I do."

He talked teeth too. He told me he could make
anything for anybody. Porcelain teeth, like your toilet
bowl, he chuckled. Teeth with diamonds, teeth with gold,
teeth the color of eggshells or warm cream or tusks. He
smiled.

I imagined him biting into my neck as if it were a
piece of delicious cake.

He talked about Consuelo from Caracas, the prostitute
he hired when he was in Venezuela making teeth for a
prince. She could do a backbend, he said, while she was
screwing, a regular Nadia Comenici, with a perfect score of
10. She could go on TV, he said, eat Wheaties, smile for
the camera. And when he looked into her mouth, he
whispered, "Gold crowns. A high priced whore." I
envisioned myself doing a coital backbend, my tapioca
thighs locked in some primal battle with gravity and age,
my unexceptional third molars bruxing together like knives.
I thought of how my back might go out, or I'd be screaming
for Jesus, or my boyfriend, who was convinced that the
male-superior position was the only game in town, would

pout, letting his pink swollen lips press into his braces

4

and maybe he'd even flick a few used rubber bands at me,
calling me a whore too.

The man who made teeth told me how he did it with the
Roma triplets, Vene, Vidi, and Vici, all at once. He told
me how they would each take turns doing the tarantella on
his back, sharp toenails etching his skin, and how they
nibbled his smooth buns like little rats with their
ninety-six perfect teeth nurtured all their lives on wine
and pasta. And he told me about the seventy-five women,
(read my lips, seventy-five, he said) he had had in the
last ten years, some withtfluppmi teeth, impinging
overbites, discolored teeth from well water and
antibiotics, women with peridontal disease, retruded
mandibles, pegged laterals.

' said my friend

"David's car is in the fast lane,'
John, sliding into the darkness next to me. I watched the
man who made teeth move through the shadows towards another
woman.

"SO?" I asked.

"Yours is parked on the shoulder waiting for a tow
truck," he said, laughing at the brilliance of his
metaphor. He had long brown hair that fell over his ears,
and his Albanian-wide face wrinkled as he smiled. He was
protecting me, I knew. He looked like 8 Buddha standing
there all plump and swollen with beer.

"Oh, real funny," I said. "I was just talking to

him."

5

"You wear your heart on your sleeve,"

he said, pushing
his wirerims up off his small nose, taking a sip of his
beer. "And men, more often than not, come round and wipe
their noses on it."

"John, it's okay. I'm all grown up. He didn't
misrepresent himself. He's a wild boy, plain and simple."

"It's a defense,’ he said, "like anything else."

"Don't worry about me, Johnny,"

I said, hugging him.
"I'm very good at reading between the lines."

That night Richard slept inside of me. I could feel
his full weight on top of me, like one of those crushers
you see in action movies ready to flatten the hero who
struggles to push free. I could not breathe. I felt like
a beached baby whale suffocating under a human protector
that only wanted to save me. Making love to Richard had no
sound to it. He didn't like to make any noise. He
explained it to me once, how he always thought of a
certain sequence of images to achieve orgasm. I never knew
the precise order, but he somehow always had to think of
the eating scene in the Tom Jones movie, black net lace
against moist skin, the Stones singing "Under My Thumb,"
split figs, kiwis, avocadoes, and Catherine the Great
riding her equine pal, Trigger, and if I even said
something as muted as a "Yes. Yes," or an "I'm coming.

" I'd destroy his concentration and he'd have to

I'm coming,
start all over again envisioning a wine sogged Albert

Finney sucking on a chicken thigh. I felt, for the most

6
part, that I didn't have to be there, like it could be

anyone lying next to him, anyone who silently mirrored his
rhythms.

Listening to Richard's heavy breathing, I thought of
the man who made teeth, and I was suddenly in Venezuela,
the clacking of castanets somewhere in the background; and
I was doing somersaults, double axles, and silky backbends,
as he urged me on, until I became a regular Mary Lou
Retton, going for the Olympic gold, pirouetting in the air
with my lover by my side, urging me to scream, to bite,
with my still pointed bicuspids, into his neck which tasted
rich and moist like a guava or a mango.

"Are you awake?" asked Richard, as he lithely removed
himself.

1

"Hmmm,' I said.

" he whispered, kissing me.

"I love you,

"Me too," I replied. And then I felt the silence, the
inextricable silence before you ask the question, "What's
wrong with this picture?"

A few days later I had lunch with an old high school
friend, LaWanda Peters. LaWanda and I had been lab
partners our senior year in high school and we had worked
diligently dissecting a male cat that we christened Duane,
after her ex-boyfriend. Boys were a mystery to both of us
then—-It seemed like we did everything in our power to win

I c

their approval. I ironed my kinky curls with 3 Steam n

Press to wear my hair in a smooth pageboy, pinking my nose,

scorching my cheeks. I bought those pointy cotton bras at
Kresge's that all the fast girls wore to make my breasts
perkier, like iced cupcakes. I bought Passion Fruit
lipstick, Maybelline everything, and I lisped on every date
to appear more vulnerable. LaWanda learned to blow smoke
rings through her thick lips so the boys who owned
motorcycles would exclaim "Bitchen"; she inhaled and
exhaled allowing her padded chest to expand like chimney
bellows. She said she knew a special way to French kiss
that would make boys think they had died and gone to
heaven, ratted her hair into black flames that spiraled
from her head, and wore those leather mini skirts like
Gracie Slick and Marianne Faithful. Her boyfriend Duane
had gotten a girl at the Catholic school pregnant, and he
had to quit school and work in the Vlasic pickle factory.
LaWanda had wanted to name our cat Duane, because she
wanted the pleasure of dissecting him, piece by piece.

When I looked at Duane's retractable penis, all
flaccid and the color of snot, I was reminded of the sea
lampreys pictured on page 257 of our text, You and the
Universe. I imagined a boy's penis to be like the blind
lamprey, sheathed in a phlegmy skin, groping for some
aquatic cavern of light.

" I remembered LaWanda telling

"I've got news for you,
me. "Someday you'll have to touch one of those."

"We have to touch it?" It really hadn't occurred to

me. I suddenly felt queasy.

"And if you're real good,' she whispered, "you'll have

to . . ." and she pointed to her mouth with her lacquered
fingernail.

' I exclaimed. "You cut today."

"Gross,'

SO that day at lunch, I told her about Richard and
about how I knew he loved me but how I felt I couldn't
breathe, and then I told her about the man who made teeth,
and about Consuelo and her gold crowns, the Roma
triumvirate, the seventy-five women, and my Mary Lou Retton
Olympic fantasy of flight. I also mentioned I felt the man
who made teeth was imbued with a certain power, a certain
mystery.

"The only thing that boy is imbued with is a dick,

Rosalie,"

she said, still blowing perfect smoke rings into
the air. "He sounds like a 'Fuck and Run' to me."

LaWanda had several categories for men. She placed
them in neat little boxes, like the "Fuck and Runs," the

"Love Me, Love My Dicks,‘ the Vacillators," the

"Ambivalents,' and the "Possible Significant Others." It
was a way to protect herself, I guess, and besides, she
said, men do that to us all the time. "They've got their
basic Bitch, Whore, Virgin, Ball-buster," she told me once.
"And then they say they can turn us all upside down and we
all look alike to them. Hah!"

"What am I?" I asked at the end of our lunch. "What

category do men put me in?"

9

"You're real, Rosalie. You expect too much," she
said. "You cost way too much for most men."

Making love to him, how can I explain it? It's like
being in the jungles of Venezuela with Robert DeNiro.
DeNiro's in a white suit. You're doing the fandango.
There's all this green--large leafed trees, hot crimson
flowers that splay open, tendrils of vines scrape your

neck, DeNiro dips you, you shout "Yes,"

and you roll
together in the lush weeds, dodging snakes and lizards.
There's always a danger, a darkness, and it's never really
over.

"Who are you?" I asked the man who made teeth after
we had made love.

"You'll never meet anyone like me,"

he said, turning
toward me, his dark glasses still placed steadily on his
nose.

"That doesn't answer my question," I said.

"Who are you?" he asked, smiling.

"Valerie. My name is Valerie. I bet you didn't even
know that."

" he said,

"I know everything I need to know about you,
as he pulled me towards him. I could not see his eyes, but
his teeth, I could see them in the darkness, and he bit
into my neck as if it was sweet dough before the hot oil.

"Why don't you take them off?" I asked him after we

made love again. There was a silence. "Why do you wear

them anyway?"

lO

" he said, "like anything else."

"A defense,
"Or something like, if you can't see me, you can't
hurt me? That sort of thing?"

"If you want to think so,"

he said. "But everything
doesn't always fit so neatly into categories."

"DO you take them off for any of the women you're
with?"

"Once. Maybe twice. There have been times."

"What does it take?"

He turned towards me and I removed his glasses to
reveal very ordinary blue eyes. He pulled me on top of him
and wrapped his legs around me as if he wanted to squeeze
the life from me and make it his own. "David," I said. It
was the first time I had ever spoken his name. "I feel you
have given me something."

"I haven't given you anything, Rosalie,"

he said,
stroking my hair. "You've had it all along."

I had this dream. I was in the jungles of Venezuela
again only Robert DeNiro was doing the fandango with
Consuelo who was wearing three Olympic gold medals. Billy
Xavier had grown up, he still had his sweatered teeth and
he still wanted to ". . . couchez avec moi," but I was too
busy standing there braless, wearing Passion Fruit
lipstick, my hair in ringlets, communicating with the
iguanas and the rubber trees. Richard was in the corner of

the dream, braces gleaming in the tropical sun, standing

with a muzzled horse and a black negligeed woman who looked

11

an awful lot like Catherine the Great. Richard was sucking
on a chicken thigh, motioning to the Roma triplets to join
him. David appeared, silver hair springing from his head
like an aura, his glasses were off, his blue eyes shining.
He said he had two porcelain central incisors that would
make me look like Farrah Fawcett or Christie Brinkley or
Jacqueline Bisset. I declined. He understood. And right
when David was telling me to quit making men into such
mysteries, I could hear the sound of castanets, the ticking
of lizards' tongues, wild petals silking against soft bark,
sea lampreys winding through the clear pools of water, and
I could hear, at last, my own rhythms, strong and fluid
like the Amazon River. In the distance LaWanda came
towards me bringing a resurrected Duane as an offering, and
further on I could see Mindy Marinelli, laughing, a rich
full laugh, with her mouth wide open.

"Are you sleeping?" David asked.

I!

"Hmmm, I said.

"Who are you?" he asked, licking my eyelids.
I felt strong, energized. I took a deep breath.

H

"You'll never meet anyone like me, I said, and turned

towards him.

A MATTER OF DISGUISE

Frank was playing "Julio, Boy of the Streets," the
week of our two-hundred-and-forty-seventh dinner together.
It was his official precinct undercover persona, complete
with sleeveless fuschia t-shirt and matching headband, worn
jeans, black pointy shoes he bought at K-Mart, and a
ten-pound Sony ghetto blaster the department lent him for
that week's sting. I was shredding parmesan for the pasta
while he practiced his "Y0" and his "Hey, Man" into the
kitchen window, preening his chest hairs with his dirty
fingernails. I was about to tell him he was becoming a bit
of a cliche, especially when he got down on the floor, spun
on his back, then on his buttocks, and backflipped into the
refrigerator, knocking off one of the little diet magnets
that spelled "Haven't You Had Enough?" in alphabet
macaroni.

"Like that?" he asked, strutting over to the stove in
his slam-bam-thank-you-mam demeanor. He slapped my behind
with his open hand. "Lopez and Jackson taught me that
break down at the precinct."

"Nice, Frank,"

was all I could say. I began to shred
the cheese with an urgency, paring the white ball down to
the tips of my fingers. I was thinking about my mother's

early morning phone call. She said I probably had old

eggs by now and that I would officially be a spinster

12

13

school teacher when I turned thirty-six next week Sunday.
I thought of the word spinster and had a vision of myself
in a darkened room with all the unmarried spinners, who not
having the good fortune to marry, spun their sexual peaks
into memories, all the while talking about the great
battles and the great men who fought in those battles.
Then I had a more contemporary vision of myself as a Miss
DiPrima, in a beige polyester pants suit and my hair
bundled into something severe at the base of the neck, and
maybe tortoise shell glasses with those little pearl
chains, and I thought of twenty-five more years with
students like Freddy La Guardia who just the other day in
fifth hour told me he thought Chaucer sucked and
Shakespeare sucked and Stephen Vincent Benet sucked and he
bet I sucked too. I wanted to tell him, "Get me a
magnifying glass, kid, and I'll see what I can do," but I
didn't, remembering something from Ed Psych about not
humiliating children even if they are six-foot-four and
wear Day-G10 t-shirts that say "Mutant From Hell." I
shredded the cheese until the tips of my fingers looked
pink and swollen. Old eggs, I thought.

"So, Madeline," I heard Frank say, "do you think
Wendy is too young for me, or what?"

Frank was running through his long list of girlfriends
again, trying to sort out his love life, asking my advice.
He mentioned Clarice who "did hair," Linda who douched with

tofu and processed avocado, Alyssa with the Jacuzzi,

14
Juanita who wrapped his penis in a flour tortilla and
called it lovingly her El Taco Grande, and his current

" he said in his best street vernacular, a

"squeeze,
semi-punk aerobics instructor from Queens, who, according
to Frank, dyed a blue streak down the middle of her spiked
hair, had breasts like cupcakes, and in order to keep her
heart properly challenged, never stopped moving in bed. I
thought of me doing aerobics in bed with Frank, my large
breasts beating against my ribs, my thighs slam-dancing
together like adolescent sea mammals vying for territory.
I could almost hear those ancient eggs reverberating
against my uterine wall.

"So, Madeline," he said, closing the kitchen curtains
and then removing a single leather wrist band. "What
should I do?"

"About what?" I asked, reaching for the tin of
homemade noodles. "Is eighteen too young, or what?"

"It depends," I said, pouring only half a tin into the
pot of boiling water.

"Hey, is that all the pasta you're making?" he asked,
as he shook Off his spit polished shoes and tossed them
into the dining room.

"I'm dieting," I explained, knowing full well that
eighteen-year-old aerobic Wendy was probably thinner than
Nancy Reagan before Nancy was forced fed chocolate chip

cookies at the nation's request.

Frank and I missed only two Sunday dinners in the five

15

years we had known each other. Once, two years ago when
Juanita had used too much jalapeno on her El Taco Grande,
rendering Frank immobile and he was up to his scrotum in
zinc oxide for at least six days. The other time I had
volunteered to chaperone the senior trip at Jack 'N Jill's
Junior Dude Ranch in Osceola when it was rumored that one
of my remedials, Reggie DeGroot, had planned to market a
case of unbranded spermicidal jellies behind the Appaloosa
stables. All the other Sundays I had nurtured Frank with
rich meals masked in white sauces and thick sticky cheeses,
pressed duck wrapped in French sour dough, pork roasts
capped in paper crowns, and more often than not, homemade
yellow noodles smothered in sweet basil and pear tomatoes
that satisfied his nostalgic yearning for his Sicilian
roots. After dinner, we always made love when we were full
and warm and silent.

Frank still had a bit of the wild-eyed Julio in his
face as he disrobed. He threw his t—shirt over the bedroom
lamp and the room glowed in a rosy, warm light. I had
neatly arranged myself flat against the bed knowing my
breasts looked firmer and higher in that position and
pinch-flufffed my hair into a Jose Eber creation against
the satin pillowcase. All I needed was for him to destroy
the whole scenario by slipping on an old Santana tape,
breaking into a bun-wheelie on the throw rug, and then
pouncing on me with his pseudo-macho fervor, nibbling at my

breasts as if they were a pair of blue-plate Chimichangas

16

on special at the El Tango Cafe. But all he did was ease
into bed next to me. He took off his headband and made a
necklace, tying it around my neck. He smelled like A-l oil
and garlic and hair cream.

Later, after we had made love, I laid my ear against
his spine and I could hear the deep thrumming of his heart;
it sounded so far away, so deep, an alien drum whose
message I could not decipher. I watched him breathe and
blow little baby snores into the air. I traced a time line
of men over his soft and doughy earlobe with my finger. I
spun a circle of men. My first lover, an English
professor, who dressed me up as a horned Wagnerian soprano,
complete with a thick blond wig and a spear, and who would
whisper a pre—coital "Aria ready?" and a post-coital "Verdi
good, huh?" all the while chuckling at the brilliance of
his puns. I dropped him for Raoul Benevides, who made me
see God, the twelve apostles, and the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir, but who, while on mescaline, ate my autographed
glossy of Eugene McCarthy in my dorm room in 1968 and taped
up a picture of Che Guevara instead. I tried the fraternity
circuit, only to find a long string of dry-humpers in
borrowed Ford Fairlanes who wanted to preserve their
virginity for a presumably Scandinavian "Miss Right" who
was taller, thinner, and blonder than I'd ever be. Then
after college there was a run of men who at one time or
another told me I was too good for them, or that I deserved

better, or that they just wanted to be good friends, or

17

that I was a very nice person, but they were suffering
from a classic American post-Viet Nam ambivalence towards
women.

I had grown tired of dating men by the time I had met
Frank five years ago when he was still young enough to do
undercover work in the high school where I was teaching. I
decided my Sundays with him were quite enough. He was
exciting. He came to me in many disguises. Usually, there
was his basic Al Pacino, slick and brooding; a fierce lover
who chanted "Attica, Attica" into my ear at the onset of
orgasm. Sometimes he wore black nylon briefs with a
caricature of Marlon Brando sucking on orange peels saying,
in glittered script, "I'll make you an offer you can't

refuse."

Or then there was his high-powered white collared
executive I nicknamed J.B. who was on the prowl for
corporate cocaine. He'd smell sweet from designer
aftershave on those Sundays and we'd build a tent of the
New York Times and make jokes about hog futures and E.F.
Hutton and three martini lunches at Le Petite Prince. We'd
make love in a more deliberate, almost mechanical rhythm on
those days, but, still he made me admit, with a
multi-orgasmic preciseness that rivaled closing hour
excitement on the New York Stock Exchange.

We did not make love when he was Edward Trout, gay bar
cruiser. That's when he wore one earring, and tufted his

chest hairs with an Afro comb so they would billow over his

scoop necked Calvin like little black clouds. On those

18

days, he would blow fish kisses to me over Sunday dinner
(the only dinner he insisted on preparing himself) in his
best imitations of Talulah Bankhead. He said he could
never get it up after doing Edward Trout for a week, so
there were times we lay in bed on Sundays and watch old
John Wayne movies like "The High and the Mighty" hoping he
could shake his character before it was time to go home.

I suppose Julio and all his glorious machismo was not
exactly the best candidate for a marriage proposal, but I
knew it had to be that day and I had waited long enough.
And it wasn't just because my mother had commented that my
eggs had qualified for a senior citizens rail pass on the B
& Ovarian Express, or that with Freddie La Guardia and his
primitive psychoanalytic approach to literature I had
finally understood I no longer had to be the Sister Theresa
of the Remedials and devote my life to saving them all.

And it wasn't just that Frank had mentioned Wendy and her
blue spikes and her cupcakes and her perpetual motion for
at least eight weeks running, which means she survived his
Pacino, J.B., Julio, and even his Edward Trout. It wasn't
that. I suddenly knew it was all a matter of disguise.

There was no trace of Julio in his even breathing. He
was Frank again, all flushed and moist from our love
making. I kissed his back. He tasted salty. He turned
towards me in his half dream.

"What's bothering you?" he whispered. He licked my

eyelids.

19

"Just thinking, I guess." I paused. "My mother
called me this morning. She said I had old eggs."

"Huh?" His eyes widened.

"Old eggs. Old ovaries. Stillborn children. You
know. She wants to be a grandmother."

There was a silence.

"You're only thirty-five,' he said softly. "Same as

me.

"Thirty—six next Sunday."

We'll have to do something special,' he sighed.

"Celebrate." He picked the small digital clock off the

table and held it to his face.

' I said

"I thought maybe we could get married,'
matter-of—factly.

He nuzzled his face into the thickness of my hair.
"We're as married as I ever want to be, Maddy. Five years

of Sundays,’ he said, re-emerging to kiss my forehead.

" he said, "you're way too good for me. You know

"Besides,
that."
Before he left, Frank embedded a similated pearl into
his right ear and brushed his black hair into a pompadour
with a few drops of Vitalis. He slid into a clean madras

' he clucked in his Edward

shirt. "My dress is mah-dress,'
Trout falsetto, blowing me a sloppy fish kiss. I threw his
"Julio, Boy of the Streets" clothes into a paper sack and

handed him a Tupperware container with two meat balls and

20

enough sauce for Monday night, but it would probably go
uneaten. Edward Trout was into bran and lecithin tablets.
I toldd Frank to keep an eye out for that "Mutant From
Hell," Freddie La Guardia, because if he so much as made an
oral complaint against something as inconsequential as a
transitive verb, he'd be doing his own bun wheelies down on
7th and 111th after I expelled him from my class. And then
I told Frank I had plans for my birthday that didn't
include him, some gigantic lie about how I had gotten this
deal on some raw sheep shearings from "down under" and I
was going to have the time of my life spinning wool with a
whole generation of women, including my mother, who no
longer spoke of lost men or missed opportunities. He
looked at me more oddly when I said that, even more oddly
than when I walked out of the bedroom five minutes earlier
wearing a natural fabricked caftan, enamel earrings, and my
new suede Pat Benatar boots. I handed him a whisk and the
recipe for Coeur a la Creme, the elaborate dessert I had
planned for my birthday celebration. I told him Wendy
would have to stand still for at least one minute while she
stirred in the cream cheese filling. I gave him his Julio
headband and my video cassette of "The High and the Mighty"
and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Two weeks from

today?" was the last thing I heard him say.

CLIPPINGS

I just noticed my toenails are turning yellow. The
kind of hard and crusty yellow, like my Grandma D'Angelo's,
whose nails, when she was eighty-three, could not be cut
with a conventional pair of scissors. They were so tough
that she had to have someone kneel at her feet, usually one
of us grandchildren, and cut them with a steel
veterinarian's clipper. We had to borrow the clipper from
her next door neighbor, a Dr. Loomis, who used it for his
patients, the Great Danes and the St. Bernards. I gladly
knelt at her feet, this immigrant woman, enthroned in her
kitchen, clad in a white butcher's apron that was always
soiled with tomato sauce or bread flour. When it was my
turn to cut her nails, that was usually at Easter, my
brother Dominic having the Christmas privilege, I always
imagined them as claws, grown hard and strong, almost
predatory with age, and I could barely work the clippers
into them. She would smile, as I maneuvered the clipper,
and feed me some deep fried bread, its dusted sugar melting
on my tongue like a communion wafer.

But now I am an adult banished to my room, as if I
were an errant child, watching my toes metamorphosize, and
I pick at them with my hands, these claws that have had
thirty-five years to grow, hoping to separate a sliver of

nail. Banished. In exile. With my grandmother's toes.

21

22

My current banishment evolves from my criticism concerning
the adult movies my husband, Vincent, shells out an extra
thirteen-dollars—and-ninety-five-cents a month for. He
expects me to sit on the sofa, night after night, and watch
these things. Tonight's offering was the German made "The

' He nuzzled under a blanket across the room

Garden of Eva.'
hoping my libido potential would somehow be increased by
watching Eva, with her unwashed hair and pocked thighs,
clad only in a mini-skirt and anklets, tangle with a
produce farmer, his wife, and their quarter horse, Brownie.
After the scene in the stable, I asked Vincent, "Can't we
at least watch Johnny Carson?" but he refused, for then Eva
had lain down in the farmer's garden and was undulating
with a large, striped zuchinni. The squash disappeared
into her like she was some kind of commercial food
processor and I half expected some perfectly sliced pieces
to exit out her anus. After she added a stalk of celery
and a jalapeno pepper and began fanning her vagina with one
of her anklets, I asked Vincent to turn the set Off, but he
was busy pouting, and moving his hand underneath his
blanket.

"Are you masturbating, Vincent,tmcmmm you need to
express aggression towards a dominant female in your life?"
I asked calmly, quoting verbatim from the article on
self-gratification I had just read in Psychology Today.

"Do you need to punish the bitch-goddess, the tooth mother

you feel controls you?"

23

He did not answer, but inched closer to the set so he
could hear what Eva was whispering to the squash.

"Do you want to punish me for something, Vincent? Are
you trying to show me I can't compete with this human
Cuisinart?"

"Bitch," was all he said, then exaggerated his
movements under the blanket.

But I was on a roll, and I knew it, saying something
about Ronco Vegematics and irritation of the vaginal lining
and how I didn't think I could make a loaf of zuchinni
bread again, and that was when he banished me to my room.

"You're sexually repressed, Rose. Go upstairs."

"I'm repressed?"

"You don't appreciate erotic art. If you can't handle
this as an adult, then go upstairs."

"Erotic art?" I hissed. "Just how erotic can a barn
scene be with a quarter horse being mauled by this Nazi
kitchen witch? Besides, I'm a member of the Fund For
Animals, and I should be calling Cleveland Amory right
now."

He stuck his index finger through the open weave of
the blanket and pointed to the stairs. That is when I
kicked the wall, threw the Oleander plant, and stomped up
the uncarpeted stairs, making each placement of my feet a
blow to his skull.

After the movie finished its final scenes (I can only

guess what they involved, since I had been sent upstairs

24

and all, but I did notice that in the garden there were two
oxen grazing by an unlatched fence) Vincent snorted
upstairs, and thumped into bed with an exaggerated bravura,
making sure to snort again into the pillow to awaken me.
After Vincent threw his covers over his head and rolled

his shoulders a bit, I consiered braying like a horse and
asking in a thick, German accent, "Who made the salad,
dahling?", but he didn't give me a chance, because he was
about to administer one of his arbitrary guilt sessions.
First, he started in with the mouse droppings in the bottom
of the toaster and how he had thought for the longest time
they were raisins that had dropped from the Cinnamon Swirl
bread. I had heard that one before and knew it was aimed
at how I had fallen off from my usual diligent housework.
And that there were blind slugs carousing the bathroom
tiles at night, and of course, the liquefied green mold in
the dairy keeper. And how he had heard, first hand from
Gretchen Van Ark, the woman who had replaced me several
weeks ago as Lacey's third grade room-mother, that my line
was busy at all hours of the day, and that it appeared to
her that I was intentionally keeping my phone off the hook.
She had called several times to find out how many pounds of
Very Berry Punch concenrate would fill thirty-six five
ounce cups, and she had told Vincent, who I'm sure was
completely sympathetic, that I was inexcessible. Finally,
he got to what he was really angry about. He said my

persistant reactions to the erotic film proved once and for

25

all that I was sexully repressed, and that, and that alone
accounted for our dismal sex life. He admitted, after some
prodding on my part, that the sceanrio with the quarter
horse was a bit much, but what was wrong, he asked, with a
woman being stimulated with a variety of different things,
including natural foods from the earthen soil? That's what
he said, as God is my witness, "...natural foods from the
earthen soil." He was right out of a Grape-nuts
commercial. All he needed was a flannel shirt, some Dingo
boots, and some ceramicware filled with bran. "What's
wrong with a little variety to stimulate a dismal sexual
relationship?" he asked, lifting himself up on his elbow.

"Is doing it the national average of 2.5 times a week,
that was your calculation wasn't it, dismal?" I asked, in
my best bitch-goddess voice. "Okay, I admit I might fake
an orgasm once or twice, put myself on cruise control when
I'm tired or angry, but I hardly call our sex life dismal.
I might go as far as a commercial raspberry and vinegar
douche, but I'm not going to insert anything into myself
from the earthen soil that I'll have to explain to my
gynecologist later."

Victor turned abruptly into his pillow and began
riding the Rosy Palm Express one last time before he nodded
off. This of course is the ultimate guilt trip. He is
insinuating that I, the bitch goddess, tooth mother, keeper
of the blind slugs and Mousinettes, am a failure. Failing

to live up to my wifely duties. He often does this lately,

26

and usually, when the blanket starts moving, I hear this
ancient accented voice coming from somewhere over my left
shoulder,an omniscient ghost observer from the old country
saying, "Shame on you. Shame. Does he drink? Does he
beat you? Does he run around? You do your wifely duty by
him or you're gonna lose him." After the ghost voice I
usually nuzzle towards Vincent and finish him off, which
probably accounts for the .5 of our approximation of the
national average. But tonight I didn't. I just got out of
bed, and now I am sitting here watching the aging process
manifest itself in my toes.

I never used to be banished, and never had any extra
time to dwell on my toes. Vincent called me the perfect
wife and mother and loved me for it. He bragged to our
friends how I stayed up till three in the morning cutting
thirty-six Valentine's Day hearts out of strawberry banana
finger jello for Lacey's third grade party, or worked far
into the night making homemade kluski noodles out of yellow
dough to satisfy his nostalgic yearnings for his
grandmother's Old world recipe. He marvelled at my scratch
cakes, decorated with sculptured sugar roses and silver
dragees, or my jams and preserves and bread and butter
pickles I did up every August. He luxuriated in the bed
sheets that I ironed and the way I color-coordinated his
freshly starched and pressed dress shirts in our walk-in
closet. And he knew I could handle the household on the

allowance he parceled out at the beginning of each month,

27

and sometimes he would test me, lessening the amount by
five dollars every so often, to see if I could manage. I
always did.

He had no need for Night Prowl Theatre and its
thirteen-dollars-and-ninety-five-cents additional fee, or
his obsession with self-gratification. One Christmas, he
even bought me a ticket to Marabelle Morgan's, "You Too Can
Be A Total Woman" lecture series at the Civic Center, and
after listening to her first speech entitled, "Ready and
Willing," I came home with a tub of Cool Whip and an
economy sized package of Saran Wrap. I immediately began
spooning the non-dairy topping over my bare breasts and
ribs, just like Marabelle suggested, and I made love to
Vincent on the dining room table, and in the laundry room
on some soilled sheets, and on the cold bathroom tiles
before the slugs took over. Once, when Vincent came home,
he tapped his umbrella on the vestibule floor and we made
love on the cemented stones--he, still in his London Fog,
me, not having the time to find the roll of Saran Wrap or
the aluminum foil.

Things were going along quite nicely, actually.
Vincent was happy, I thought I was happy, having little
time to myself to think of anything else. We were
challenging the national average weekly thanks to Marabelle
Morgan, and her ideal prescription of seven times a week.

Then one day the drywaller came to spackle the ceiling in

28
the den. I watched him from my kitchen the two days he

spent working with his hands, the plaster, and the trowel.
I watched the drops of white mud fall from the ceiling and
stick to the soft brown hairs that curled out of his blue
work shirt. I liked the way he moved, slow and easy, and I
liked the pony tail he fastened behind his head with a
rubber band. He had a red beard and it too became peppered
with the white mud. When I offered him some coffee the
first day, fresh-perked, the only kind Vincent would
tolerate, he said, "Mrs. DeVries, you don't have to wait on
me. The instant's just fine from my thermos."

He walked into the kitchen, reached into the cupboard
over the sink and grabbed a large ceramic brownstone mug.
He proceeded to pour the coffee from the thermos and then
sipped it slowly. He stared at me. I fumbled with my
hands, then my apron, then my hair.

" I said impulsively. I

"You can call me Rosalie,
hadn't used my given name in years, referring to myself as
Rose, the more dignified name Vincent had christened me
with when we first met. It seemed odd to say Rosalie out
loud to this strange man in my kitchen, so I said it again,
"Rosalie."

' he said, lifting his mug into the

"Cheers, Rosalie,'
air and smiling.
The next day, after he had by my estimates, poured

himself seven cups of coffee, and had called me Rosalie at

least that many times, I took the phone off the hook and

29

made love to him in the den on top of a plastic tarp,
underneath the freshly-spackled ceiling. He kept
whispering "Rosalie and it was like a song to me, a melody
long forgotten, and I forgot that in two hours Lacey would
be home, and Vincent in four, and I hadn't taken anything
out of the freezer to thaw for dinner.

Soon after that, I began to be banished on a regular
basis. I joined a consciousness raising group, began
arguing fervently with Vincent over a variety of things,
and began not to be home for meals, leaving hastily written
messages that there was something frozen in the freezer
they could thaw and cook themselves. I resigned my post as
room mother, left my phone off the hook and read Lacey
"Stories for Free Children" from a feminist magazine. For
Lacey's birthday I ordered a cake from Klender's bakery,
and Vincent was furious, spouting, "I always had a home
made cake for my birthday and I expect my daughter to have
the same."

The Marabelle Morgan "Ready and Willing" average of
seven times a week dwindled to a respectable 2.5, not
because I was sharing my life with the drywaller, for I
never saw him again, but because that was all I could
reasonably give.

Two months after my banishments began, I found Vincent
in the bathroom holding my diaphragm in one hand and a
sewing needle in the other. I watched him as he

methodically punctured small needle holes around the rim of

30

the diaphragm, and then placed it under running water of
the bathtub faucet. I watched for several minutes as he
performed the ritual. I suppose, to complete the scenario,
Vincent should have been perversely grinning at his deed,
or at least slicking his mustache into handlebars, but he
wasn't. He had a pained expression on his face and he
looked pathetic. I watched for several more seconds until
he turned, startled.

"I thought you would come to your senses by having

" he said, and threw the needle into the

another baby,
waste-paper basket. "You're not the same."

"Is anyone expected to remain the same, Vincent?"

"I'm losing you. I thought this would help."

"Help? Is that what you want for me?"

"I want you the way you were, Rose. That's all." He
handed me the diaphragm, and I noticed what a good job he
had done concealing the needle holes.

' I said, as I slammed the

"My name is Roaslie,'
diaphragm into the wastepaper basket. He was still
kneeling and I actually felt sorry for him, because I had
set his life up so perfectly for him, and now he looked
like a small child being weaned from the breast, who was
being offered a paper cup to drink from.

I hear Vincent snoring in bed now. He's probably
dreaming of Eva in her garden doing something unspeakable

with a freshly dug kohlrobi. In the dream, Eva has just

finished Spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY BROWNIE in silver

31

dragees on a home made zuchinni cake. I stand in the back
of the dream by the unlatched gate, wearing my Fund For
Animals 1983 Save The Quarter Horses T-shirt, and my porous
diaphragm for a beanie. I cannot move because my plastic
wrapped leggings are fastened too tight, so I stand still,
by the team of oxen, offering Vincent a five ounce cup of
Very Berry Punch. Eva waves her anklet, and Vincent throws
off his blanket, running towards her, arms outstretched.

He does not wave at me but banishes me with his middle
finger to a spackled ceilinged room suspended over the
garden.

I sit here watching Vincent turn with his dream, and I
finger my toenails. I'm thinking of how I don't want to
sit all plump and doughy in my kitchen, a mythical earth
mother, having my toenails cut by my grandchildren, Muffy
and Derrick, while Vincent taps his cane on the vestibule
stone. I'll invent my own type of grandmother, who sends
out for an anchovie deluxe from Senor Pizza, and serves it
up re-warmed on Dixieware. I'll read my grandchildren some
original stories for free children, written by me in my
self-imposed exile, where I had feasted on the solitude,

the secret life, I had never abandoned.

ROSALIE'S CUISINE

I had decided to become celibate quite by accident,
actually. I had been separated six months from my husband,
Neil, who had left me for what he termed a "culinary

' a woman named Diana with a Cuisinart, a Tuscan

genius,'
oven crock, and he said, "a white sauce that was a cream
lover's dream." Besides the white sauce, she served him
pork roasts capped in paper crowns, King Crab Louie, and a
macrobiotic dish with garbanzos and sauteed pea pods that
was fit for the Dalai Lama. He said when it came to
cooking, Diana was a cup of cool vichysoise served with a
chilled Chablis, and I was, at best, a ceramic bowl of
Chili Mac seasoned with Durkees washed down with a Big Gulp
from the 7-11. "She's perfection, Rosalie," he told me his
last day in the house.

But then Diana cut her hair with lasers, waxed her
legs, had breasts like iced cupcakes, and even though she
worked at being as thin as a post-Vic Tanny Victoria
Principal, she had decided to swallow one highly caloric
ejaculation daily (a whopping 130 calories according to
Playgirl magazine) "...while some women," Neil reminded me,
"still spit into the sheet."

I came to my celibacy after a succession of men. Men

like Leon Spivinsky, a laboratory biologist, who performed

two fingered Pap smears on adolescent monkeys for his IUD

32

33
research grant. He joked during the appetizer on our first
and only date that he called his little patients his

"...you know," he said, "like the candy."

"Rhesus Pieces,"
And I tried to laugh. But after that, I just kept staring
at his spatulate fingers wondering how many simian cervixes
he had dilated that day. And I wondered, during the main
course, if he even bothered to wear surgical gloves during
the procedure. By dessert, I could hear my mother's voice
emerging from the back of my mind saying the same thing she
had warned about my eleventh grade boyfriend who often
helped his mortician father on weekends: "God only knows
where those hands have been Rosalie."

Then there was Clinton DeBarge, the psychoanalytic
critic from the English department where I taught who
chased Freud across the pages of Modernist literature. At
lunch, on our first and only date, he said the house

' smothered in sliced

specialty, the "Big Mama Burger,'
zucchini and dill spears, was obviously concocted by a
woman, "A tooth mother" was the precise term he used, who
had a latent desire to castrate all men and claim their
masculine appendages as her own. Keeping this in mind, I
scrutinized the menu, and immediately dismissed the Tuna
Torpedo and the Baby Bratwurst as simply too risky, and
settled finally, on an endive salad with a limon dressing.
Later, he told me the fact that I cut my salad into tiny

bits instead of eating it passionately whole was

symptomatic of an anal retentive personality and before I

34
lifted the rim of my wine goblet to my open lips (Would he

have used the word vulva if I had stayed?), I made a quick
exit to the bathroom, wanting to say something like, "Gee,

I gotta take a dump,‘ but mumbling something about
powdering my nose instead. I did not return.

After Leon Spivinsky and Clinton DeBarge, I wasn't the
least bit surprised at my bad luck when I decided to date a
younger graduate student, hoping this new generation of men
would offer a more optimistic approach to establishing a
relationship. But Hugh McHugh, or "Baby Huey" as I later
referred to him, called me "Mommy" in bed, pummelled my
flesh like a nursing kitten, and swallowed my nipples whole
as if he were slurping a god-inspired nectar.

"Mommy's a yum-yum, he slurped, kitty-fisting my

stomach on our first and only sexual encounter. "It's

twoo. It's twoo,"

he said in his best baby falsetto
mimicing what sounded to me like Elmer Fudd.

"Could I please get up?" I said, wincing at the word
yum—yum, and half-afraid he'd start to groom himself with
his tongue.

"But I'm not done yet!" he Fudded, looking all
doe—eyed under his thick wire-rims.

H

"Yes you are, I said, pushing at his doughy freckled
shoulder. "It's twoo. It's twoo."

So celibacy began to take on a certain appeal. I

remembered reading an article in Cosmopolitan on how

 

celibacy could clean your pores, make you more creative,

35

increase your earning potential. I decided Cosmopolitan

 

couldn't be all wrong. Hadn't they featured those
definnitive articles entitled "Know Your Own Orgasm" and
"Fight For Your Orgasm" which my college floormates and I
read diligently after hours, as if they were some lost,
torn pages from the Bible?

But it had been two years. My celibate pores seemed
less than cleansed. My creativity hadn't extended beyond
two modest academic papers on Sylvia Plath and a firey
letter to my mother explaining the reason Neil left me had
nothing to do with the fact that I couldn't keep house, sew
from a Butterick pattern, or find all his lost socks. And
my earning potential had not increased significantly since
the department was still paying me per course instead of in
a salaried position.

So I invited a man named Theo to my house for dinner,
much to the amusement of Neil who I'm sure, after I made
him promise to pick up our daughter, Casey, that evening,
had thought I had given up on men forever.

"Ma, things don't have to be perfect," Casey said, as
she watched me scurry around the kitchen preparing for

Theo's arrival. "Times have changed,"

she continued,

running her plum lacquered nails through her spiked hair.
That's easy for you to say, I thought. Her idea of

getting ready for a date is tie-dying her bangs fuchsia and

donning a Day-Glo T—shirt that says "Drugs, Sex, and Rock

and Roll."

36

After sixteen years of training in perfection with
Neil and after two Years of not even remotely fighting
for my own orgasm, I did want things to be perfect. And
Theo seemed almost golden to me, tall and blonde and quite
gentle and he laughed out loud, three times--I
counted—-when I read my short story to our creative writing
workshop.

SO for Theo I had decided to make my grandmother's old
world recipe for spaghetti. I hand crushed each clove of
garlic, added freshly minced parsley, sweet basil, and
oregano to my sauce of individually steamed and hand-peeled
plum tomatoes. I rolled the meatballs in my hands,
balancing them on my open palm, spinning them into perfect
spheres, like I remembered my Grandma D'Angelo doing in her
kitchen when I was a child. I sprinkled grated Parmesan
into the steaming sauce, dropped the meatballs in
singularly with a wooden spoon, and like my grandmother,
who would first smell the sauce, then taste it, said: "A
little bit of heaven!"

My spaghetti sauce was the only thing that Neil didn't

complain about. "It's near perfection, Rosalie,"

he always
told me. Every other meal was his idea. He left me a
mini-menu every day magneted to the regrigerator. He would
suggest meals that would take me hours to prepare; meals
that would send me to the store searching for shallots or

coconut milk or baby goose livers and I'd spend my late

afternoons in my kitchen nurturing pans of spicy beef or

37

stews or pots of fish soup or lentils. And he would tell
me, after taking a calculated sip from a wooden spoon that
something wasn't right; it was a little off, too much salt,
too little salt, too much sherry, too little sherry--then
he'd proceed to fix it, make it over, make it his.

So it was my sauce for Theo.

And I was determined everything would be perfect. I
had folded the linen napkins in three different shapes
before deciding on what resembled an Origami bird, place
tapered candles in the ceramic centerpiece, and fussed
relentlessly with the woven placemats, picking at some
scattered cat hairs with my new acrylic nails I purchased
at Lucinda's Beauty Boutique.

I bought a new musk cologne made out of crushed pig
scrotum that was guaranteed to provide an attraction,
according to the shop clerk at Griswald's, that would have
me dusting off those cobwebs on my copper IUD. I hung for
an hour in my inversion boots to bring a subtle flush to my
skin, checked my teeth for plaque, spreading my lips as if
I were a prized race horse. Then I moussed, dried, then
pinch-fluffed my hair like I saw Jose Eber do it on Phil
Donahue. Then there was the silkdress, the cinch belt,
the textured panty hose, and some four inch strapless black
heels.

And while I was thinking about what women go through
for men, I began to wonder if Neil made Diana view his

bowel movements like he made me. Neil always made me look,

38

then do an impromptu tarantella on the bathroom tiles, to
recreate the childhood toilet training scene where his
mother, suitably impressed with the contents of the
miniature bowl, would feed him an M&M, squeal with delight,
then do a barefoot jig. I can picture Diana in her basic
black and pearls, her waxed legs cold against the toilet
bowl, 3 lacquered nail brushing the strands of East Hampton
Blonde away from her forehead. She glances down at Neil's
bizarre flotilla, perhaps for a brief moment wondering how
she ever got herself into this, and perfunctorily smiles.
Of course, Diana cannot do the tarantella in her four inch
Bandolinos, so she does something classier, like maybe one
of those carefully placed Juliet Prowse kicks to the
ceiling to show her approval.

Casey entered the room wearing an off the shoulder
sweatshirt, a mini-skirt, and little suede boots that
wrinkled at the ankles.

Her father's going to hate that, I thought, as I knelt
and looked at my reflection in the black glass of the oven
door. My fluffed hair spread across the glass like a swirl
of cotton candy. I pouted at my shadowed reflection.

Casey hunched beside me, her bare knees knocking flat
against the linoleum.

"Mom," she said, hugging me, "You've got to relax.
Theo isn't Dad. You'll see. You'll be perfectly fine."

"Will I?" I asked, still looking at our dual

39

reflections. Casey's straight sproggets of hair porcupined
out and blocked the reflection of the table's candlelight.

" I said.

"You're cute, ya know,

But then it happened. Something simple, really.
Casey and I both looked up at the same moment. A mouse,
all saw toothed and pink eared, did a platform dive off the
refrigerator ("Pike position, 8.1 degree of difficulty,"
Casey later said.) into my plum tomatoes, and hung for a
brief moment on one of my meatballs, shredding flecks of
hot beef into the waiting sauce before it steamed to its
untimely death.

I saw three little hair bubbles pop open and then
there was nothing but a rise of heat that pinked my nose.
I looked at Casey who stood with her hand over her mouth.
I looked at my Origami birds, my tapered candles, the woven
placemats imported from Ecuador, and my Lucinda's Beauty
Boutique acrylic nails. I bit into one and spat it on the
floor. My mind was a jumble of images: hog scrotum, a
rhesus monkey in gynecological stirrups, Johnny Petapinto
in the ninth grade who told me my home ec project tasted
like marinated elk pies. I thought of what I had in the
freezer to serve Theo: some Koegel Viennas, an open bag of
shoestring potatoes, two Scooter Pies. I smelled my sauce
and it filled the room. It smelled so good.

Casey giggled, then tears fell down her freckled
cheeks.

"Are you serving Theo mousetaciolli?" she asked,

4O

wiping the tears away from her face. "How about
vermincelli? Better yet, ratatouille?" She was on a roll
and she knew it when she howled, "Are you serving the
noodles al dente or ro dente?"

'"

"Out Casey. Just out I snapped, still mooning over
my spoiled cuisine.

But all I could think of was how you'd never find a
disabled swimmer in Diana's Tuscan oven crock, and how Neil
would snicker and offer to cater the event with some of
Diana's Tibetan garbanzos and sauteed peas.

"Anything wrong?" It was Neil. He had walked in on
his own. He still felt that somehow this was his house.

' I said.

"Nothing,'
"Ahhh....spaghetti...," he sniffed. "That's about the

only thing that Diana doesn't do better than you."
"Really?" I asked, pretending to be pleased. I was

thinking about Diana's Betty Crocker breasts, and how I was

going to have to buy the newest copy of Cosmopolitan with

 

its CLIP-OUT-AND-SAVE "Guide to Self-Orgasm," and how Leon
Spivinsky flashes the "Victory" sign to his Rhesus Pieces.
And then I thought of what Clinton DeBarge would say if he
found out I was serving Theo Koegel Viennas for supper.
Somewhere in the back of my mind Hugh McHugh was Fudding an

' when I considered that I would

"It's twoo. It's twoo,’
still, in the final analysis, spit into the sheet.
I stirred the thick sauce deep, feeling the balls of

meat thud against the wooden spoon. I lifted a spoonful of

41

sauce to his waiting lips. He smiled.

"Perfect," was all he said.

Bad Endings

Dorie sat at the kitchen table with her usual
breakfast of two Excedrin and a mug of thick, black coffee.
She scissored an article from the morning Herald, snipping
meticulously at the large block letters of the headline:
"EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIRS MAY CAUSE CERVICAL CANCER IN
UNSUSPECTING WIVES." She rose from the chair and tacked
the headline and accompanying article on the refrigerator
with a piggy dough magnet that spelled out a diet message
in Mueller's alphabet macaroni: "HAVEN'T YOU HAD ENOUGH?"
She centered the article between her mother's recipe for
Tofu Almondine and Jack's crayola school drawing of an
intergalactic battle, then returned to her chair,
concentrating this time on a yellowed bit of paper she
clipped from the Sunday supplement years ago: PAUL NEWMAN
ASKS: WHY SVHOULD I GO OUT AND EAT PORK & BEANS WHEN I
HAVE STEAK AT HOME?" Dorie rather liked that one and
chuckled. She took a big sip of coffee, winced, then taped
the Newman epithet inside the cupboard door where Warren
kept his blood pressure pills. She could hear Travis and
Jack, the twins, already playing Cosmic Cruncher on their
video computer. That ought to keep them busy for a while,
she thought, seating herself again, popping the two large
white tablets into her mouth, remembering how her friend

Clare had warned her that she had an addictive personality,

42

43
that swallowing eight to ten pain relievers a day was only
a way to sidestep pain, to exist somewhere in the lull
before it occurred, and not confronting it head-on. She
frowned, then rummaged through the remaining newsprint for
the article on infidelity by the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

It was then that she noticed the smell. It came from
somewhere in the cupboards. Another mouse had overdosed on
Silent But Deadly, and had maneuvered itself into a corner
crevice or a wall space and had died. She had looked the
past three days for this one, a victim of the poisoned meal
she had placed out weeks ago, but couldn't find it,
smelling its dark, fetid odor, reminding herself she had
found several others from the bottoms of different
cupboards in the kitchen, pulling them with their grey wire
tails from their death nests made of bits from the
household, tattered cloth, newspaper, and foil. She would
often grow used to the odor, then it would become
increasingly noticeable, and then she would begin her
search once again.

"What's that smell?" Warren asked, entering the room,
buttoning his Christian Dior shirt.

' she answered. "I can't seem to

"Another dead mouse,'
find it."

"Well, see that you do." He glanced into the living
room at the twins. "DO they have to start those games so

early?" he asked, knotting his monogrammed tie. "Can't

they read a book or something?"

44

"You bought them the games, Warren."
"It was a mistake. All they want to do is blow up
spaceships by remote control."

' she said,

"I think it gives them a sense of power,'
and found the Falwell article and began applying glue to
its underside.

"Isn't this coffee a bit thick, Dorie? You know how I
hate strong coffee. Into your sabotage again?" He scowled
and wandered over to the refrigerator. "Oh funny, real
funny. Are you trying to tell me you have cervical
cancer?"

She did not answer, but began gluing the article into
a small, clothbound scrapbook. She wished he would leave.

'1

"I've got to go, he said, walking to the cupboard for
the pills, "Another Saturday meeting." He saw the picture
of Paul Newman on the weathered newsprint and traced his
manicured finger over the words PORK & BEANS. He bent his
head toward the sink's water faucet, and turned on the
water. She could swish the water in his mouth, then
swallow the pills. "You know, Dorie," he said,
straightening himself, "you really ought to pull yourself
together."

She watched him leave. He looked nice in his long
wool overcoat, she thought, as he appeared for a brief
moment outside the kitchen window. And the beige scarf

that he tucks around his neck, ruffling the wisps of his

greying black hair. But she didn't want to think of him

45

that way now. The way, she thought, he felt when he got
out of the shower, so real and warm and smelling like early
trees in April, and how she could blow the wet droplets off
his skin with her breath, and trace a line of body steam on
his spine with her finger. She Spent most of her time
categorizing her feelings now, now that she has found out
again. It was safe to think in terms of columns and sums,
bank balances and debits, so crisp and clear, etched on
white paper with a sharpened pencil. She thought how she
couldn't possibly manage on her small salary from the
junior college. That Warren paid the heat bill, the
mortgage payment, the charge accounts. There was the
orthodontist to pay, the guaranteed student loans, the
installment payments on the three piece velour sectional

She had found the woman's brassierre mixed into his
laundry from an out—of-town meeting. It was two sizes
smaller than her own size, had no underwires, and snapped
provocatively in the front with a lace butterfly. She
washed it along with his underwear and soiled shirts in
Clorox and ammonia, then placed it, folded neatly, in his
top drawer. He never mentioned it, but said a week later,
"You know, Dorie, I can't be expected to be monogamous."

"Sounds like a personal problem to me," she whispered,
as she brought her attention back to the newspaper
clippings.

"Ma, Travis won't give me the stick! It's my turn!"

Jack wailed.

46

"I'm on a roll, Mom, and I'm not gonna give it to
him!"

"Travis! Get in here!" she shouted. "Now!"

He was a small boy with thick black hair like his
father's and black eyes.

"Boy it stinks in here,"

he said, sniffing his nose
like a rabbit. "Another rat bite the weenie?"
"Yes. A mouse. And I haven't found it yet. But

'

that's not why I called you in here.' She tried to find
his eyes, but he would not look at her, he was mugging
faces into the kitchen window, sniffing, gagging, then
heaving his small chest. "Travis?"

"Too bad the Cruncher couldn't wipe them out," he
said, still mugging his mirror image. "No stink, No mess."
He grabbed his throat, pantomimed a death knell, then sank
to the floor. He rolled out of the room, his chest
slapping the linoleum, then the carpeting of the living
room.

Dorie knelt at the cupboard underneath the sink
searching for the mouse. She knew it was near for she
could feel the corpse aching in the wood. Bits of floor
crumbs cut into her knee as she rummaged through the
bottles of polish, detergents, floor waxes. She picked up
the box of poison meal and shook it, hoping the small mouse
had lodged itself into the cardboard corner, but the box
was empty, except for a few pieces of meal and dung. "No

Stink. No Mess, my ass,' she grumbled and read the box

47
outloud, "Rats and Mice Just Eat Themselves to Death, Then

'9'

Go Away and Die Oh sure, she thought as she began taking
the blue soap pads out of their carton one by one. The
blue steel wool embedded itself underneath her fingernails
and she winced. "Nothing is ever that uncomplicated."

Travis entered the kitchen again. "You wanna round of
the Cruncher, Mom?"

"I'm not sure I know how, Travis."

She gathered him
into her arms. "Do you want to teach me?"

"Oh, it's simple. You just hang on to the joystick
and destroy everything in sight. No stink. No mess."

A few minutes later, Dorie felt the power of the
joystick in her hand. When she moved it forward, the
Cruncher, her space heroine, would open and devour the
small white pulsars in its path. Each pulsar, she
imagined, was Warren "1 can't be expected to be monogamous"
Nicholson, his latest lover in her butterfly Vassarette,
his other anonymous lovers that Dorie had not met via the
undergarment railroad, her mother and the diet tofu recipes
she sends weekly, the mother that tells her all men have
affairs and women are dutybound to keep their mouths shut,
and even, surprisingly, Rickie Goodsen, the guy who stood
her up for the eleventh grade Sadie Hawkins. She hadn't
thought of him in years, but there he was, pimply with his
swimmer's crewcut and his madras shirt, 3 shimmering

pulsar. The next to last dot on the grid was the No Stink,

No Mess mouse, wiped clean by the Cosmic Hunger as each

48

was, voraciously consumed, swallowed whole by the blue
cosmic meteor. But Dorie had to hurry, she had to consume
the larger energy capsules, each shaped oddly enough like
futuristic hearts, before they became brightly colored and
turned on her, and blew her into a million particles of
space dust.

She gripped the stick tighter, lifting herself up from
a sitting position on the shag carpet onto her knees.
"Maooooooom! You're gonna break it," Jack cried. "Ease
up, will you?" His interjection diverted her attention for
a second, and in that time, the space satellites, now green
and yellow and a brilliant pink were upon her, and she
heard the sound of an explosion. "YOU'RE DEAD" flashed
onto the screen, then it too exploded into threads of
crimson and gold fireworks, and she knew her space heroine
had dissolved into infinity on the brightly lit screen.

!" she

"Damn it, Jack, you spoiled my concentration
exclaimed, feeling at once the sweet surge of power and the
sudden loss of it, "I almost cleared the board."

Clare Ashton arrived three hours later for lunch,
nodded to the twins who had started to program software for
a multi-galaxy nuclear missle, and surprised Dorie in the
kitchen, who had finished pasting the last of a set of
glossy black and white photographs from People magazine

into her scrapbook. The pictures were all of international

celebrity couples, locked in a loving embrace, who had

49
divorced within the last year.

Clare was a long beautiful woman with a dancer's body,
her lean legs wrapped in handwoven warmers, a tassled
cashmere shawl swirled over one shoulder and overlapped her
men's khaki knickers. Dorie often thought she'd like to
climb inside of Clare's body to feel the energy and power
of those long limbs, to point the long slender toes and
give a slap-kick to the ceiling.

"Why don't you leave him?" she asked, fingering the
gray tendrils of hair that escaped from her French braid.
"How many has it been? Three women in two years? And you
have to do their fine washables too?"

"Ssssshhh...the boys," whispered Dorie, as she poured
the coffee.

"The man is a gland, Dorie,"

she continued, letting
her fork mash into the soft tofu. "He'll always be this
way. It's a given, like death and taxes... And the fact
that if you stop at a red light anywhere in this country,
you can look on either side of you and someone will be
picking their nose."

Oh, Clare," Dorie giggled, heaping a spoonful of
Cremora into her steaming cup.

"Well, are you going to leave him?"

Dorie paused. "I guess I can't see myself living at
the Havana Trailer Park with two kids and one-and-a-half

pieces of a velour sectional."

"So you're going to joke about this?"

50

H H

...serving Tater Tots as an entree...

"SO, it's the money?"

H H

...and wearing generic panty hose...

"Is it?" Clare stretched her long legs forward and
plucked at the bright yarn of her warmers, then at the dry
winter skin on her bare knee. "Is it?"

' Dorie

"I guess it would be silly to talk about love,’
said, scooping two more heapfuls of creamer into the bitter
coffee, stabbing at the floating clumps with the spoon,
watching them slowly disintegrate into the liquid.

It was three weeks until the death smell went away,
Dorie never having found the mouse, and three weeks until
she got around to reading her creative writing students'
stories, with their contrived, abysmal endings. Endings
where the main deciding characters were either butchered,
maimed, or forever lost in catastrophic accidents, victims
of pathological killers, demons, blackguards from another
dimension, or mountainbound airplanes. She had read them
all, semester after semester...the persistent stream of bad
endings, where the characters never have to work for
anything, or connect in any way. "When in doubt, use a

chainsaw,"

she quipped as she placed the last grade on the
final story in the stack, and it was then that she decided
it was time to give her lecture, simply entitled: "Bad
Endings."

"I want your characters to make decisions, solve their

'

problems, connect in some meaningful way,' she began the

51
next day at the at the beginning of class. "Don't kill

them off." The sci-fi fantasy kid in the front row
scowled, as if to tell her he'd never give up his
dragonslayers and disembowelments.

"Not one woman in bikini underwear skewered at a

' she continued with her standard

shis-kebob picnic,'
semester joke, noting the quiet student in the back row who
penned "Mutants From Hell" did not laugh.

"No chainsaw massacres, electric drills...", she
paused, and it was then that she noticed Warren, sitting in
the third row, sandwiched between Raoul Benevides who
authored the grizzly story on human taxidermy, and Brenda

"...and no

Petracelli who was into killer centipedes.
self-immolations," she fumbled, "...a...just real people
hashing it out honestly." He was wearing his long overcoat
and scarf, and the sight of him looking so boyish, and
grinning, made her almost forget that he had not come home
for the last two nights. "Any questions?" She was afraid
he would raise his hand and she would have to answer.

After the lecture ended, the last of the disgruntled
authors exited, some pausing first to discuss what they
considered to be unfair appraisals of their work, others
pausing to tear the last two or three pages from their
manuscripts, then tossing them wrinkled in the wastepaper
basket by the door. Warren came to the front of the room.

I

"I didn't know you had a lecture on endings,' he said,

standing very close to her while she fumbled with some

52

papers, stuffing them finally into her valise.

' she whispered. "What are you

"I give it every term,'
doing here anyway?"

"Watching you teach. You're pretty sexy when you get
angry."

"Apparently you've also missed my lecture on clichés."

"Let's go home." He was so close now she could smell
what she thought was his aftershave, but then again it could
have easily been a trace of someone's perfume.

"I have another class."

"Cancel it,"

he whispered, letting his fingernail
ripple over her hand.

"I can't."

He was so close now that she could feel his heat, and
she thought of him in bed after he had just had his shower,
the warm droplets of water steaming the crevice at the base
of his spine, and the way he smelled, like early trees in
April, an almost addictive fragrance, like magnolia or
dogwood, just a hint, a possibility that somehow the earth
would be renewed.

"I've broken off with her," he said, and in that moment

when she was still smelling April, she let him kiss her

neck.

SICILIAN REVENGE

This is just to thank you for the present you gave me
ten weeks ago yesterday. I think you should know what I'm
talking about. I should have known when you lay back in
bed after removing your underwear, the ones with "Home of
the Whopper" emblazoned on the front flap with Day-Glo
paint. I should have known when I saw that solitary red
blotch on your thigh, you know, the one you called prickly
heat; the one you said you always got when you wore your
size 34 underwear instead of your size 36; the one you said
could be easily treated with a tube of zinc oxide and some
cornstarch. A veritable case of diaper rash, you said, and
readmm for my breasts. I should have known the doctor's
excuse from Fuentes, M.D., Fuentes M.D., and Fuentes, M.D.
of Mojave Junction, New Mexico was a phoney. I thought I
was being modern, demanding a clean bill of health, a
herpes—free testament. I read in Cosmopolitan that I
should demand some documentation with any new relationship
and you produced it: a yellowed bit of paper, weathered on
the edges, creased from the compression of your slimline
wallet with the Fuentes Brothers' logo at the top in crisp,
slanted, black italics.

Your so called prickly heat is growing out of my

thigh. The "fever blisters,‘ that's what the clinic's

nurse called them, are multiplying, moving like a regiment

53

54
of aliens up my leg, around my vagina. The nurse at the

free clinic turned on the elevated wall television and
there was the Reverend Billy Graham on a Phil Donahue

special, "Let's Dialogue About Herpes,"

gesticulating, as
he usually does, and railing, "I want to thank you, Jesus.
I want to thank you, Jesus, every day that I do not have
herpes!" And there was Phyllis Shafley, seated next to
him, in her conservative white wool suit telling Phil's
suburban Chicago audience that anyone who gets a genital
lesion deserves Divine Retribution.

All I remember of the evening is the long strand of
your black hair threaded between the bristles of your
toothbrush that lay next to the night lamp, the stains on
your muslin sheets, your bizarre sense of humor. I mean,
if you're going to give me an incurable life-long disease,
you could have managed to do something besides pinch the
tips of my nipples and then say, in a thick Slavic accent:
"I am the Russian Torturist, Puller Tittizoff." I didn't
like the mirrors on the ceiling, the poster of Adrienne
Barbeau in a leather camisole tacked on the wall, or the
fact that you kept gouging me with your erectile tissue
searching in vain for my G spot. I know you said you said
you read a book about the G spot, which is supposed to be
the most sensual part of the female anatomy, guaranteed to
produce at least five succesive orgasms, if found. But the
G spot is a myth, and even if it isn't, that's probably

where my first lesion formed. Just think of it. You

55

destroyed my G spot. A spot you never found. A spot
Phyllis SHafley calls unChristian. A spot that Billy
Graham thanks Jesus every day that he doesn't have, that
his wife doesn't have.

For awhile I experimented with recipes for any salve
or potion to ease the pain. Pureed vegetables, tofu,
chamomile tea, Fels Naptha, and Murphy's Oil Soap. I spent
my time designing toilet seat liners after I read in a
national magazine that the herpes virus lives up to four
hours on a non-organic surface. I've got a calico one to
match my brown velour J.C. Penney towel ensemble, one
hand-stitched in clear vinyl, and an expandable one for my
purse fashioned out of combed cotton. I even joined a
Herpes Consciousness Group where we spent most of our time
discussing the latest statistics for finding a cure.
There's supposed to be an octagenarian with bottled spring
water from Beaver Creek, Tennessee. And then there's DMSO,
a new wonder salve, that has the numbing effect of Ben Gay
but the power to erode your labial lips; and of course,
there's a cotton seed derivative being researched in Sweden
by some guy named Lars that's guaranteed to win the Nobel
Prize.

I even tried dating a herpes sufferer, but there's a
hierarchy even among the consciousness group. You're a
much more attractive possibility if you break out only once
or twice a year, as opposed to someone who breaks out once

or twice a month, like I do. And just how romantic can

56

anyone get when they're counting open sores?

But now I'm into revenge. I've thought of some real
basics, like having some pit gravel dumped on your
driveway, or taking out four hundred magazine subscriptions
in your name, or hiring a costumed midget to pie you at La
Petite Oiseau during a three martini luncheon with your
business associates. I wanted to leave some used kitty
litter on the driver's side of your Trans Am. I've studied
the practiced art of genital dismemberment. I've had vivid
dreams of photographing in detail, with my 35mm camera, the
various stages of my disease, having it blown up into a
24x24 inch color poster. I'd slip into your office one
night (after having befriended the cleaning lady) and super
glue it to the wall above your desk. I'd like you to look
at it every day, try to scrape it from the wall with a
letter opener, only to find the scraps of paper remain in
shreds glued to the vinyl paneling. You'll have to have
the wall recovered or replaced, because the stain will be
persistent, lingering, pink now with the constant workings
of your hands with water, vinegar, turpentine, anything to
remove it. I saw the whole plot for this on "Twilight
Zone" when I was a kid. This guy and his lover kill his
wife, then bury her beneath the floorboards of their
chalet, only to find the next day there was a stain on the
wall, and the more they tried to rub it with chemicals and
solvents, the more the stain got to looking like the face

of the dead wife, and at the end of the story, they're

57

still rubbing and the skeletal visage is trapped in a
silent scream. Of course, they both off themselves and Rod
Serling interjects in his marvelous baritone that they've
just bought a one way ticket to another dimension.

I'm thinking of my Grandma DiPrima cutting thin
triangles of yellow dough in her windowed kitchen. I can
hear the white ball of cheese rasping against the grater,
her floured hands mixing in the rich ingredients of the
ceramic bowl. She's talking Sicilian Revenge. Calm,
deliberate, long-term retribution. She's talking Palermo,
the Padrones: no waiting for a divine apparition to appear
on the wall, or for you to battle prostate cancer when
you're ninety and in a nursing home. Grandma DiPrima is
sipping Lambrusco from the thumb-printed glass, then wipes
her hands on the white butcher's apron. She tells how she
scouted Grandpa's lover in 1918, tackled her on Second
Avenue, pulling the long pins from her Gibson Girl hairdo.
But, she explains, that is not the Sicilian way. It's too
overt. Too open. And besides, the girl pressed charges
and Grandma DiPrima went to jail for two days. Sicilian
Revenge is when she sent an ailing messenger to the girl's
house, and in turn, the girl contracted the flu so severely
that the carts used to carry the dead stopped at her door
every day. My grandfather vowed never again to mix with
Anglo-Saxons because they were a weaker stock, had bad
teeth, and contracted the flu so easily. It had only cost

Grandma DiPrima $2.00 for the messenger and fifty cents

58

extra for the sneeze.

I haven't decided what I'm going to do to you. I
haven't discarded the idea of the midget and I have a
theory concerning genital dismemberment that has something
to do with a towel and some Teflon hedge shears. But
again, that is not the Sicilian way. But I just want you
to know, that I'm not going to become a recluse. I have a
date tonight. One of several dates I have made this week.
It's not with anyone from the consciousness raising group
either, but with men I've mostly met in bars, men that come
on to me, brush up against me. Men who tell me they shoot
blanks, so I don't have to worry about getting pregnant.
Men who run their fingertips up the slit in my skirt and
inside my thighs. Men who Billy Graham thanks Jesus every
day that his daughter isn't dating. Men with Day—Glo
underwear, with mirrors on their walls so they can observe
their sexual prowess, men who search in vain for the G
spot. Men very much like you. And I'm going to lay back
on their stained sheets and open my legs wide, and mumble
something about prickly heat. I just might sleep with all

of them. Each and every one.

IN SEARCH OF SAM THE SHAM AND THE PHAROAHS

The day the visiting professor from Oxford arrived,
Janine Zonndeveldt was certain she had found the perfect
genetic specimen to father her future progeny. She told me
one night when we had overdosed on amaretto at Pony's
Tavern, that she had, at thirty-seven years of age, given
up on all men ("They're all hosebags, Dorie. Each and
every one."). She was also forced to give up on her Nobel
Prize winning sperm donor, Rupert McPherson, 89, a corn
geneticist from Stanford ("A good school, Dorie, but not a

great school,"

said Janine.), who died suddenly of a
myocardial infarction after giving his fifty-seventh and
final donation earmarked for a childless hogs commodities
broker from Scranton, New Jersey. Anyway, she said licking
the rim of her third glass, she preferred someone a tad
classier than a California vegetable geneticist. She
wanted someone more cosmopolitan, like a Shakespearean
scholar, or a nuclear physicist, or a conservative
economist, from, let's say, Oxford University. And
besides, there were only local boys on this Nobel prize
winner's list. This, she said, slurring her words, had
something to do with the short shelf life of fresh
spermatazoa on transatlantic flights.

The idea of being artificially inseminated in her

doctor's office went sour when she found out the doctor

59

60

used donations from struggling medical students who had an
unlimited opportunity to donate at sixty bucks a whack, and
she didn't want her one and only future child to be related
to half the population of Michigan and the regional
midwest, even if they did freeze the sperm for up to ten
years in an airtight container ("There's fifty million of
those little buggers in a shot, ya know," Janine said.).
So all her present hopes lay in her Mason canning jar
and a plastic turkey baster she kept handily in her office
drawer. And in, of course, her symbol of the perfect
"genetic pool," Dr. Bertram Willoughby-Young, Oxford
scholar and visiting professor to our college's English
department; tall, blond, and boyish in his good looks,
innocent in his lanky demeanor. I'd call him your basic
Anglo-Saxon god. He certainly was a far cry from what my
mother had told me about the English-—weak-lunged with bad
teeth and a tendency to boil all essential vitamins out of
their food. He was hardly the type you'd walk up to and
ask to whack off into a canning jar. I mean, what would
you give this man to whack off to anyway? Certainly not
the copy of Playboy Janine kept in her office drawer, or
Penthouse, or Larry Flynt's special Nazi and leather issue
of Hustler. Where would the pages fall open and wet for
this man? Proust? Kant? St. Thomas Aquinas? I felt
Janine had lost her mind. It was all too impossible. And
where did she get off thinking that Oxford sperm were

infinitely more preferable than the home-grown Stanford

61

ones? I could just see the way Janine's mind worked.
She'd envision the Oxfordian spermatazoa, fast and noble
swimmers, decked out in white prep sweaters, tweed
knickers, and a knitted striped scarf in maroon and
baby-blue; and then the Harvard contingent (her second
choice) all Irish and toothy like the Kennedy brothers,
clutching their stock portfolios as they bounced a Harvard
cheer off her uterine wall, and bringing up the rear, the
Obviously inferior Stanford flotilla, blond and tanned with
that California sense of the fast lane, body surfing
through her cervix in their Hang-Ten T-shirts.

I wish she had taken Wowo Bielieki up on his offer.
He had offered to donate his proud Slavic sperm, no strings
attached, but she had declined. She had insisted she truly
admired the integrity of the Polish people and their
struggles against tyranny, she was very careful about
making that perfectly clear, but Wowo, educated at the
University of Poland, eminent scholar in comparative
literature, and an ardent admirer of the most recent pope,
was a far cry from Janine's Waspish ambitions. And
besides, she said, he had a velvet painting Of a
bullfighter in his living room that he bought at a corner
gas station, and Janine absolutely hated velvet paintings,
and she couldn't possibly sleep with, or accept a sperm
donation from a man who owned one, let alone hung it over
his davenport.

We had heard through the grapevine that Dr.

62

Willoughby-Young had done his doctoral thesis on Sir
Rudyard Kipling. Being the resident non-scholar, and
cynical graduate assistant, I felt obliged to make my usual
irreverent No-Doze jokes, and a few pointed barbs directed
at the traditional classics which were all dominated by
male writers. But then I managed to get a glimpse of the
visiting professor one day in the darkened hallway,
clutching a campus newspaper in one hand, a cup of the
department's coffee in the other, and I watched intently
the way he moved, so fluid in the darkness. Suddenly
Rudyard Kipling gained a new respectability.

"Janine, it'll never work. He's out of your league,"
I said, still watching him move through the hallway.

"I'll just ask him," Janine said, rearranging her
instant insemination kit in her office drawer. She pulled
out the brand new September copy of Playboy. "He's
perfect. He's brilliant. He's tall. He wears natural
fabrics.

"Well, maybe you'd better wait until he's been in
America at least a week," I shrugged. "You figure enough
of the crazies around here are going to come out of the
woodwork after him."

And I wasn't far from wrong. That Friday, at the
first faculty outdoor party of the fall term, our resident
crazy, a Dr. Richard Pick (our office called him "The
Dickpick"), made a play for the visiting professor. Dr.

Pick had a disconcerting reputation for propositioning just

63

about anything that moved, which included all the permanent
male staff, the faculty husbands, his young male students,
a repairman named Julio from the Board of Water and Light,
and Wowo Bielieki's Doberman Pinscher.

We never knew if Dr. Pick scored as often as he tried,
but we did know that he made the rounds of the faculty
parties. And it seemed, at that first outdoor party of the
year, Professor Pick, clad in a thick cable knit sweater
and his Levi Bendover slacks, with his flaccid body
retreating to some uncertain center of his being,
apparently pressed his everpresent erection on the inseam
of Dr: Bertram Willoughby-Young's natural fabricked thigh.
Dr. Willoughby-Young, with the utmost of British decorum,
had managed to extricate himself from the clutches of Dr.
Pick, mumbling something about needing a refill of wine.

"The most offensive thing has just happened to me,"
said Dr. Bertram Willoughby-Young, as he clutched my elbow
and ushered me away from Dr. Pick's entreating glances.
"I've been approached." He pointed at Pick.

I looked over at Professor Pick, who was now standing
directly behind Wowo Bielieki's Doberman Pinscher which was
tied to an elm at the edge of the property. "Oh. That's
Dr. Pick," I said. "He's harmless. Just let him know
you're not interested."

"I'm not gay," he said, looking at me intently. I

whispered a silent, "Thank you, Jesus."

"Listen, he won't bother you again," I lied. "Maybe

64

you could join another group. They're doing structuralism
over there, phenomenology by the keg, the psychoanalytics
are at the fencepost, and that young group of professors
over there is discussing how meaningful the sixties were.
You know, street concerts. Timothy Leary. The Pill. Viet
Nam. Wedgies. Joan Baez singing Kumbaya."

"Sorry?" he asked.

"Derrida to the left, late Sixties to the right, penis
envy directly ahead."

"And where do you stand?" he asked, brushing his
blond hair away from his face.

"I'm starting my Jane Fonda Workout any moment. Wanna
join?"

He grinned. Maybe Janine was right. Maybe he was the
perfect genetic specimen. I decided right then and there I
would have his baby too. I wasn't serious, of course. It
was just a momentary lapse from my usual feminist stance.
The kind of thing that always amazes me. Just a flash
across the brain that usually erases years of feminist
training. It's like a confirmed anti-capitalist who drives
a klunker that's at least ten years old to protest
America's love affair with the car, who sees a forty
thousand dollar Porsche and suddenly hungers for a drive, a
little spin, just to burn some rubber down on Woodward
avenue. One look, one grin from this Anglo-Saxon god and
I'm ready to ovulate. This is the kind of thing women

often get themselves into when tall men in leather jackets

65

who smell like springwater look at them. I suppose he's
incredibly healthy, I thought, remembering how I heard he
ate Branbuds every morning and ran three miles a day down
by the river in his Frank Shorter silk jogging shorts. I
had a dangerous vision of me serving him Branbuds in a
ceramic bowl, while our son, named Clive or Colin, tall and
blond and dressed in a striped soccer shirt, grappled at my
knees. Bertram, or better yet, Bert, and I had spent the
night making love in forty-seven different athletic
positions, all the while he was whispering lines from
Kipling's Jungle Book. Suddenly I forgot about Frank and
the hurt and Frank's girlfriend calling me up from Detroit
telling me he's into Vaseline and batteries and the Kama
Sutra.

"A penny for them," he asked.

"I hear you run down by the river,"

I answered, jerked
out Of my reverie. But before he could answer, Dr.
Puckett, our department chairman whisked him away.
"Tonight's the night," Janine said, as she skirted by
me. She was clutching a bulging shoulderbag to her side
and I prayed she wasn't going to reveal her Mason jar and
turkey baster right then and there. I mean, she could have
lost that fellowship she was up for if she did. "I took my

temperature this morning,"

she said, smoothing down the
white frizz of her bangs with the palm of her large hand.

"I'm ovulating at this very minute."

66

"I'm afraid your biological time clock is going to
have to tick off another twenty-eight days, Janine," I
said. "I don't think Dr. Willoughby-Young is in the mood
for any unusual requests. Dr. Pick just got to him."

"The Press, The Dry Hump, or The Bend Over and See
Cleveland?" she asked, unconcerned.

"The Inseam Press. Our visiting prof didn't have a

' I answered.

prayer.'

"But it has to be tonight. I've been counting on it,
she whispered. "Then I could have the baby in May and
finish my dissertation by September."

"Hasn't it occurred to you, Janine, just what you
would be asking of this man?" I said, protectively.

"He produces fifty million of those little buggers in

' she said scowling. "He'll never miss them.

a shot, Dorie,'
And besides, they're all jerks, didn't you learn that
already with Frank?" she asked, toying with the zipper of
her purse. "This man has exactly what I need.
Intelligence. Good looks. Breeding. High SAT scores."

"They don't take the SAT in Britain, Janine."

"Well, he must have taken something to get into
Oxford. And besides, he has a hyphenated name. That tells
me a lot. I want only the best strains for my once and
future child."

"You would have been a big hit at Dachau, Janine," I

hissed, but she couldn't hear me, for she had gone off to

join the structuralists and had brushed softly against the

67
leather of Dr. Willoughby-Young's arm.

He turned and looked at me. Okay, Dorie, I thought.
He's no god. Just a man that shines, that's all. I tried
to pull something out of my subconscious, a salient bit of
advice from one of Gloria Steinam's editorials in Mp.
Magazine, something about not setting up men as gods
because they'll only disappoint you. I wanted to demystify
him. I had a sudden vision of Lady Diana, latched into a
bathroom stall at a London restaurant, in a tailored suit
and a feathered Edwardian hat tilted to one side of her
head. She was carving with a nail file into the enamel in
a precise, deliberate script: "Even Princes fart in bed."
Aha, I thought, coming to. They all do. Dr.
Willoughby-Young was still looking at me. I pantomimed
some aerobic exercises, letting my arms flail awkwardly in
the air. He grinned.

"What are you doing?" asked Madeline, our other
officemate. She had been drinking.

"Making a fool of myself. Tell me how rotten all men
are, Madeline. Give me a pep talk. I'm slipping."

"Take your husband, Frank," she began. She was really
good at doing Frank. She cupped her thick black hair into
a pony tail at the base of her neck and wound it with a
rubber band. "Just how many women did he have in two
years? Seven? And he told you about each and every one?
Gave names? Gave positions?" Her black eyes were large

and moist and they seemed to devour me.

68
"Okay enough," I moaned. I was suddenly feeling sick.

"Then he told you he wasn't going to be monogamous.
But you had to be. "Isn't that rich?"

"Thanks, Madeline, it's working."

"Anytime," she said, sipping her wine. "Is Janine
going on a trip?" she asked. "Her purse looks packed."

"Have turkey baster, will travel,"

I said, watching
Janine circulate among the structuralists. I pointed at
Dr. Willoughby-Young.

"Him?" she said, startled. "She'll have better luck
with that Doberman than she will with him. I don't think
he can get it up. Too refined."

"Do we have to talk about this man this way?"

"What way?" she asked.

"As if he isn't real. As if he doesn't have a past.
As if he exists just for us?"

"Why not?" she said, finishing her glass. "Men have
been doing that to us for centuries."

I saw Janine looking up into the visiting professor's
eyes and talking intently. She was whirring the zipper on
her purse, and thrumming her index finger on the elbow of
his leather jacket. He glanced over at me exasperated,
then grabbed Janine and maneuvered her over by the elm.
The sleek black dog began to sniff at their ankles. I felt
suddenly ill and sat down in a wicker chair.

'

"Looks like she's got him,' said Madeline, sitting

next to me on the soft grass. Too bad he's only doing it

69
in a jar. I'd sure like to jump his bones."

"Can we not talk about this?" I said, taking a large
gulp of my drink. "Can we talk about something else?"

"Dr. Badgely asked me to spend the night with him,"
said Madeline, crossing her legs in a lotus position and
straightening her back. "He said he'll make me see God."

"I thought he only made women see Samuel Taylor
Coleridge."

"He's improved his technique," Madeline said, dipping
her fingertips into the wine then rouging her cheeks with
the red liquid.

"Listen, Madeline," I whispered. "Haven't you already
seen God with some guy named Nicky La Peda?"

"Nineteen seventy-eight,"

she said, smiling. A Ford
Fairlane. The Dipsy Doodle Drive-In. Royal Oak."

"And haven't you heard from a reliable source who
shall remain nameless that Dr. Badgely recites stanzas from
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" at the onset of orgasm?"

"Yeah," she giggled, opening her eyes and looking at
me. "Judy Pomeranz, right?"

"So why don't you forget Dr. Badgely, go over and get
Janine, and we can have a slumber party at my house
tonight. You know, bon—bons, the Stones. We could read
excerpts from Fear of Flying out loud."

"Mmmmm..."

she said, now rouging her bottom lip with
the wine. Maybe I could find my old Sam the Sham and the

Pharoahs record."

70

"So how about it?"

I watched Janine and Professor Willoughby-Young leave
the party through the front gate. My heart sank. So gods
to have clay feet. I started humming the theme song from
"Chariots of Fire," and envisioned a parade of Oxfordian
spermatazoa oozing down the rim of the blue Mason canning
jar that was once used for sweet and sour dills. "We are
not amused," I said in my precise Queen Victoria persona.

I began to drink heavily.

Thirty minutes later, Janine Zonndeveldt emerged from
the back door of the house, her face flushed, her purse
noticeably absent from her shoulder. For another momentary
lapse, I thought of how lucky she must be carrying this
man's child. But like I said, that was momentary, for the
visiting professor reemerged soon after Janine, cool and
composed as ever. He waved. I frowned.

"Hello," Janine whispered as she sauntered over to me.
She had her hand resting on her stomach, as if, I thought
to myself, feeling drunk and bitchy, she could already feel

the flutters of the Oxford coxswain navigating North. She

just smiled. "It's going to be a boy, I just know it," she
said, not moving her hand. "And he's going to be
perfect."

I wanted to tell her that maybe that was an
impossibility; that maybe that was too much of a burden to
place on anyone; that maybe even he could never fulfill his

role as the only perfect male relationship in her life.

71
But I didn't say anything. Because she looked so happy, so

rich with possibilities. I just grabbed her hand and led
her to my car. Madeline was waiting for us. She had
decided not to see God with Dr. Badgely because she had
already read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in the ninth
grade and considered it a gigantic snore, even then. And
besides, while she was commiserating with the
psychoanalytics by the fencepost, she had learned Dr.
Badgely had sported an albatross tattooed in black on his
right buttock.

"It was all getting a bit tOO metaphysical for me,"
she said, leaning against my car, sipping straight from a
carafe.

I looked at Janine. She was still smiling. I decided
I would tell her later, after the bon-bons, and Fear of

Flying, and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs.

THE FEEDER

That summer day Alma Winters came to lunch, I noticed
she had lost weight. She had lost the fullness of her
breasts, the pinkish flesh of her cheeks, and could have
been a small boy sitting there, instead of a grown woman
playing with the food on her plate. Her once fiercely
platinum hair was a faded brown, cropped close to her head
with rigid sprouts standing upright at her crown and
temples. Her grey eyes seemed much larger than I ever
remembered, glass marbles fixed in a dull yellowed skin.
Alma did not look at me as she arranged the meal into
forced geometric designs on her plate. There was a sense
of primordial ritual as she played with the food,
separating it into squares and triangles with the tongs of
her fork, then pushing the food together into a larger
rectangle. It was only after several minutes of this
ceremonial rite that she took a bite. She showed no
measure of enjoyment of her food, which could have been
tasteless stones, the way she labored to swallow.
Periodically she would lay down her fork, reach for her
water goblet, and take measured mechanical sips, her lips
never leaving the rim of the glass.

I felt like a cow next to her. My breasts were round
and full from nursing my daughter Jenny, and David had

joked just that morning that my arms and legs were getting

72

73
to look like baby sea whales. I felt misshapen, a flesh

balloon, sweat trickling down my inner thighs making my
print shift stick to my skin. I smelled of cooking grease
and soured milk. I was uncomfortable in the late summer
heat. Alma was cool and composed.

Jenny, who was seated in her highchair, squirmed
momentarily and threw a large pasty noodle on the floor.
She whined and I knew she wanted my breast. I lifted her
out of the highchair, wiped the tomato sauce away from her
face with a napkin, and opened the top button of my dress.
Jenny maneuvered herself into a comfortable position,
letting her smooth cheek disappear into the soft white
breast, her lips blowing little fish kisses until she
reached the nipple. Alma did not look up. She rearranged
the food on her plate.

"It's too bad David can't be home for lunch," I said,
shifting Jenny deeper into my arm for more leverage. "He
would have loved to have seen you."

"Oh really?", she asked, taking a small even bite of
the noodle.

"But then, I'm kind of glad we had this time to talk
alone."

Alma neatly wiped her mouth with the cloth napkin,
appearing to be finished, even though a great deal of food
was left on her plate. I noticed fine strands of brown
hair growing above her lip, alien shadows to this formerly

very feminine creature.

74
"SO," I paused, "When did you begin losing all this

weight?"

' she answered.

"Oh, it's all come about gradually,’

The breast milk from my untended breast seeped through
the fabric of my dress, I was embarrassed, and shifted
Jenny, who at nine months seemed too big and cumbersome to
nurse. She eagerly reached for the swollen nipple of my
other breast, while I wiped myself with a cloth diaper that
I carried on my shoulder.

"I've been losing weight for awhile, now," Alma
continued, placing her silverware on her plate and pushing
the plate forward. "Everytime I look in the mirror, I see
fat. It seems my stomach is an enevitable fate." She
pinched a thin line of skin where her stomach should have
been through the fabric of her tailored blouse. "You know,
I don't even have my periods any more. I love it."

"Alma, I'm worried about you."

"Don't be."

"How does Cal feel about this?"

"Oh Calvin. He's been a bit of a brute. But let's
not talk about me, please."

And so I launched into a self-conscious monologue
about my life, my life with baby, my life with David. The
night feedings, the diapers, the baby edging herself around
the coffee table like a plump duck, giggling and cooing one
moment, engaged in a tirade the next. I talked at

considerable length about my body, all round and sagging,

75

laced with white ribbons of stretch marks, and how the heat
made me feel like a swollen pear, all thick and ripe and
miserable. I talked about David and the business, how he
liked his shirts ironed, that he likes his phone messages
written neatly in ink, and how he wrote me a little note
every morning before he left for work, "Sylvia, stick to
your diet." And then I talked of the baby again, the
Laleche League, the parenting group meetings, how zinc
oxide is better for diaper rash than anything commercial on
the market, how I intended to nurse Jenny until she was two
years old even though my mother—in-law thought the whole
idea disgusting. And it struck me as I spoke that I had no
idea what language I spoke before this Baby Talk. What
could I have possibly thought or said before there was a
David or a Jenny? My head was filled with every moment
that Jenny made, every mono-syllable that she uttered,
every new and startling skill she mastered. And when I did
not speak of Jenny, it was David and his business, David
and his needs, his desires for the family. I vaguely
remember a young woman, with long black hair and black
eyes, a literature major at a small university, who romped
in a woolen turtleneck and faded blue jeans, carried a
Greek woven bag she had bought in Europe, laced leather
sandals up her calves, who met friends in dark campus
taverns, political rallies, and in the dormitory rooms late
at night. I vaguely remember her speaking, but the

language and tools of speech are alien to me now, and the

76

faces and names of her cohorts are impossible to remember.
And this woman adopted a new language, and spoke to a woman
who politely listened, but who did not share the language
either.

Alma once had told me she had graduated from Stephens
College in Missouri, when Stephens was a finishing school,
devoted solely to preparing each young woman for a life
with a successful man. Alma had jokingly mentioned once
there was a mini-course in "the art of pouring tea" and she
laughed, "the art of wearing gloves". She had been waiting
for Calvin when he came along, she said. She was attracted
to his angular frame and Nordic coloring, and she was bored
with Stephens, and her courses, and she fell for him so
passionately, that she forgot who she was and why she had
ever gone to college in the first place. She quit Stephens
her junior year and married Cal in a large ceremony
somewhere out East.

I managed to finish college, but I fell hard for
David, much like Alma did for Cal. David told me he didn't
usually like literature majors because he found them
flighty and unpredictable, but he thought he could handle
me and mold me into the perfect wife. I remember tossing
back my black hair and laughing at that remark, telling
him, this abrasive young man, I had only known for two
weeks, that you can only mold gelatin and cheese, neither
of which I remotely resembled. He roared at that one, and

later he told me he had decided that night he wanted to

77

marry me. Something about the anger in my eyes intrigued
him.

As I rambled on, Alma sat composed, smooth like carved
marble, smiling a thin line of a smile, her hands, a small
child's hands, folded neatly in her lap. Jenny was asleep
at my breast.

After Alma had left, and I had put Jenny in her crib,
I remembered back to the time when I had first met Alma.

It was the night she and her husband Cal had thrown a
celebration party honoring his new partnership with my
husband, David. She was much rounder then, her face a soft
pink, her blonde hair like a child's doll, and she was
open, receptive, not the frigid mannequin that measured
every move, every bite of food. She laughed appreciatively
at everything her husband said that night, as if his words
were golden, or god-inspired, and she sat with her tea, her
lacquered nails tapping delicately on the porcelain cup,
smiling, giggling, winking at the other guests. I
remembered the earrings and the fine golden chains that
dangled from her neck and fell into the crevice of her then
fuller breasts. She dressed flamboyantly, in odd-glittered
colors, and men crowded around her. These same men often
congratulated Cal on how lucky he was to find such a fine
hostess and a good wife, and the other wives in the room
envied her, myself included, because she was many things we
were not. I hadn't had Jenny yet, and I sat at the dinner

table, my pregnant belly resting in folds, straining in a

78

slanted position, my puffed legs sprawled beneath me.

David kept laying his hand on my stomach saying such things
like, "That better be my cake baking in this oven", and he
patted my stretched flesh, as if I wasn't even there,
merely a receptacle for some precious cargo. Alma laughed
heartily at David's humor, along with the other men at the
table who spat and choked and roared, and I sat back,
grinning, pretending I enjoyed all this attention. I
remembered at one point the baby gave a strong kick and
David raised his hand with an almost religious
gesticulation and shouted, "Goddamn, it's going to be a
first string linebacker, sure as hell." I remember sipping
my mineral water, amidst the laughing, and wondered what
exactly a first string linebacker did.

Alma sought me out later in the evening, "I'm so glad
our husbands are going to be partners. We're going to be
fast friends, I can tell. I want to hear all about your
baby." And before I had a chance to respond, she had
flittered away, off to Cal's side, crawling into the folds
of his arms, and he steadied her, positioned her, and her
form became fluid as she melted into a cool liquid in his
grasp.

Several months had passed after that summer lunch with
Alma, and I did not think much about her. I was engrossed
with Jenny and the house, and my diet which was David's pet

obsession as well as mine. David had devised a curious

79
regimen he had found in an old Air Force manual. He had

written down my instructions neatly on a legal pad,
detailing the precise amount of sit-ups, leg lifts, arm
twirls, that I was to do each day. By each category, there
was a box to be checked each time the prescribed exercises
were completed. Every morning, next to his "Daily Notes
for Sylvia", ("Don't touch that Jamoica Almond Fudge ice
cream, Syl, I'll check the level when I get home"), he left
the annoying Air Force regimen, with a newly sharpened
pencil laid next to it. I often greeted the note with a
half eaten banana or toasted bagel hanging from my mouth,
and in an act of silent defiance, I checked the little
squares perfunctorily as I dipped my finger into the
Jamoica Almond Fudge.

I decided to have Alma over for lunch again in
November. She arrived promptly, dressed in a roomy t-shirt
that swallowed her boyish frame. Her hair was shorter,
swept back above her ears, and she had lost more weight.
She seemed to be in even more control, her posture rigid,
almost military, her hands tight and folded in her lap, the
purplish veins transparent, like frozen rivers in her
flesh. I stared at her face, the skin still yellowed, but
now deep grey circles swelled around the eyes, and her
smile, much tighter, stretched like a violet string across
her face. I had fixed something rich and pasty, I wanted
to fatten her up, but she no longer bothered to lift the

food to her mouth. She neatly separated it and let it

80

converge again with each mechanical movement of her fork.

"Alma," I began, "Is it possible that you could have
lost more weight? You really didn't need to." I saw in
her form the frozen pictures of war and famine that lay
like a sheet of cellophane over my consciousness.

"When I look into the mirror all I see is fat. It's
funny, but I find I can live quite nicely on some meat
broth and a sliver of fruit."

"But that's not enough, Alma. You need more."

' she shook her head. "I need

"No, you're wrong,'
nothing. I'm in complete control now."

"What do you mean you're in control?"

"My body is my own."

"Has Cal said anything about this to you?"

She laughed, and said nothing for a moment, then
straightened herself in the chair. "Oh he forces me to
eat. He pinches the food between his fingers and forces it
into my mouth. I swallow it alright, but I throw it up

later."

She laughed again. "You think I'm crazy, don't
you?"

"No, I don't think that," I answered. "But you and
Cal were always so close."

"Oh really? Is that what you thought?" I heard the
faint stirrings of Jenny in the upstairs bedroom. She's
probably hungry, I thought, and my breasts ached. "I think

that's the baby, Sylvia," Alma said, and stood to leave.

"Alma, please stay. You just got here. Have dessert.

81

I made it special."

"Sylvia, please don't worry about me."

"How can I help you?"

"You can't."

I noticed the bruise as she was putting on her
overcoat. It lay under her arm, large, circular, the deep
purple of a summer plum.

"Alma!" She jerked, I must have startled her. "What
happened to you?" I heard Jenny wailing in the upstairs
bedroom. My attention shifted in the direction of the
bedroom door, then back to Alma, who was quickly buttoning
up her overcoat.

"Oh, that. A gift from Calvin. He had a bad day at
work."

She lifted the woolen hood over her head, opened the
door, and walked rigidly into the brutal wind I felt a
chill as the wind crept into the open weave of my sweater.
I folded my arms across my chest and hid my hands under
each arm. I closed the door behind her and stood for a
moment ignoring the persistant cries of my child.

"She's the joke of the office," David said that night
at dinner. Mort Kreiners calls her 'Alma from Aushwitz'."

"That's so sick." I said. "I can't believe you can
even repeat that."

' he continued, "Cal was

"Alma used to be some broad,'
considered lucky going home to that every night. Mort says

you couldn't pay him to lay her now."

82
"Mort Kreiners is an asshole."

"Mort Kreiners sold three houses last week."

"How can you defend him?"

"Like I said, he sold three houses last week."

"Anyway, I tried to get her to eat. I made Lasagne.
She just played with it. Wouldn't take a bite."

"I figure if you can't get her to eat, no one can," he
smirked, patting the meat of my thighs. "You're always
feeding everyone, including yourself." He reached for his
coffee, and swirled the black brew with his spoon. He
smiled. "Did you do your leg lifts today?"

"I didn't have time." He let that one slip in, I
thought, he's a real professional, him and his little
calculated doses of disapproval. I had covered my
advancing weight that winter with oversized sweaters and
pants, and had been careful to keep my arms covered and my
legs hidden under large towels after a shower, and then
safely lost under a lounging gown. Even though Jenny had
several teeth and was increasingly mobile, I was still
nursing her and my breasts were still huge and swollen and
laced with purple veins. That's it I thought. No more
nursing, Jenny, you're going cold turkey tomorrow. No more
feeding off of Momma.

"I think Cal has been hitting Alma and I'm worried," I
said, looking for some type of reaction in David's face. I
folded my hands across my breasts hoping to minimize my

misshapen body.

83

"He says he has to get tough with her to make her eat.
It's none of your business, Syl. Now drop it." He got up
from the table and turned, "Cal is my friend, my partner,
and we get along fine. Just drop all of this."

I took David's advice, letting it go, hoping Alma
could resolve what was troubling her on her own, after all,
she herself said I couldn't help her. Months later in the
spring, when I had all but forgotten about Alma, and David
ceased to even mention her in conversation, I became
absorbed with Jenny and her expanding vocabulary. I wrote
down every new word she acquired and the day she uttered it
into a little journal I had been keeping since her birth.
Her newest phrase was "I want, I want", and she followed me
around the house playfully reiterating her new sentence.
David had left a note for me one morning in the spring,
and instead of his usual "Stick to your diet, Syl!", there
was a set of terse instructions: "Get ahold of Alma
Winters. Invite her and Cal to dinner tonight. I'll
explain later."

Alma was distant on the phone, and responded in short,
brittle sentences: "Yes. That will be fine. We can make
it. Thank you. Goodbye." Her voice was a bizarre parody
of one of those computer toys that respond verbally to a
child's persistant finger punches. I heard a grey
undercurrent of pain, not the whinings of a hungry child
that I was so used to responding to, but the low, hollow

moans of the wounded. Her voice made me think of that

84

morning when I lay in bed, startled by the imperiled
quakings of a small bird trapped in our roof that the
workman had finished repairing the day before. It was a
sparrow or a Brewers Blackbird that often nested in the
soffets and gutters of the neighborhood homes. I stared at
the sloped ceiling, directing my attention to where the
bird had been entombed between the rafters. The
scratchings became more frantic as I envisioned the bird
flapping its fragile wings in the darkness, in blind panic,
buffeted only by the freshly laid insulation. I threw off
my covers and stood on the mattress.

"What are you doing Sylvia?" David had asked, turning
in a half sleep. I lifted my fingertips and grazed the
ceiling.

"There's a bird trapped in the ceiling. Can't you
hear him?"

"He'll die soon. Let it go."

"Can't we get it out?"

"Now, how are we going to get it out,Syl? We just
paid eight hundred dollars to have the roof fixed, and you
want to save some damn bird?"

"I can't stand listening to it die."

"Then go downstairs and fix me some coffee."

"How can you stand it, David?"

H

"It's easy, he had answered, sitting up in bed. He

turned on the radio.

85

The dinner party was Cal's idea. He had hoped that
if Alma was around familiar faces, she might eat. He
admitted to David she was losing more weight, that he had
found her vomiting several more times in the bathroom, and
that he had to get physical with her. He had to watch her
constantly now, following her to the bathroom, and having
to force feed her in the mornings before he went to work
and at night when he got home. He thought it was time to
involve a doctor, but Alma had refused.

The dinner surprisingly went well. Alma made a
visible effort to eat, not toying with the food, but
actually scooping large amounts of food onto her fork and
shoving them into her mouth. David and Cal made a
deliberate attempt to not watch Alma, and were engaged in a
raucus retelling of some more office antics of Mort
Keieners. He had, so they said, deliberately spilled
coffee on Miss Kendall's bosom, in hopes of getting to wipe
it away with his pocket handkerchief. Miss Kendall, the
secretary, was noticeably upset when old Mort dropped his
handkerchief down her cleavage, and proceeded to retrieve
it. David recounted that "Her jugs were just a jiggling"
at the sight of Krieners' hand, and she poured another cup
of coffee on his three piece pin-stripe. I often wondered
how a man I could be married to could defend a man who had
such an open contempt for women. It seemed to me that

David and Cal, and all men for that matter, had a fierce

86
comaraderie, impenetrable, a shared, personal knowledge,

fraternity, partnership, that excluded women. It is a
code, an unspoken devotion. I felt jealous of Cal and
David and Mort, much like I felt in high school when I saw
the male athletes on a football or basketball squad hug
each other after a win, or pat each other on the rump, or
fiercely defend each other on the field, while I enviously
sat in the stands, surrounded by the other girls, yearning
for that type of comaraderie. The girls would cheer and
wave at the men hoping for some form of recognition or male
attention. But we were all separate entities, failing to—
acknowledge each other, only interested in extrapolating a
small fragment of this male fraternity.

Alma asked for seconds of the dessert after finishing
two helpings of the main course, and Cal smiled
appreciatively at me. David nodded. She smiled and took
large chunks of the cheesecake onto her fork and dropped
them into her mouth. I reached for a piece of the
cheesecake for myself, hoping that David was so lost in his
reverie with Cal that he would not notice, but, as if on
cue, he tapped my elbow with the prongs of his fork and
whispered so Cal and Alma could most certainly hear, "Not
tonight, Darling, you've had enough as it is." So I
continued to minister the meal, monitoring everyone's
plate, standing, then sitting, treating each portion of
food as a personal gift to the taker.

After coffee, Alma excused herself and left the table.

87

Calvin gave me a sour, pleading look, so I offered to walk
her up to the bathroom using the excuse that I wanted to
check on Jenny. David winked at me, letting me know I had
done the right thing.

I stood by the closed bathrooom door. I heard the low
gutteral sounds, the heavings, the moans, and then the
sudden flush of the toilet. I wondered if I should knock,
and then the door opened. Alma stood in the doorway, not
surprised to see me at all, her dull hair matted and wet,
fresh yellow balls of sweat beading her forehead and the
pronounced hair above her lip. "Please don't tell Cal,
Sylvia." I felt as if we shred a small closet, suffocating
in the dark, acrid smell of vomit, and I felt the sad, sick
walls of enclosure. She lifted her sweater and showed me
several side strips of surgical tape wrapped around her
emaciated body. "He did this," she announced, and headed
down the stairs, her form distinctly masculine in nature.
Her body was propelled by some ethereal energy, giving her
strength, and as she disappeared down the stairway, I knew
I would say nothing.

Alma called three weeks later, her voice was
different, not the clipped military sentences, but a series
of unpunctuated fragments. She asked to see me. It was
urgent. I remembered a doctor's appointment I had made
that day for Jenny's innoculations, and the promise to pick
up David's pin-stripe at the cleaners, and my luncheon

meeting with David's mother. "Yes, Alma. Please come.

88

I'll be waiting here for you."

I suddenly felt the same fear I did the night I stood
in the imaginary closet, the stale air that hung low around
me, the feeling of hopeless enclosure. Jenny had tripped
over a line of toys in front of her and held out her arms
for solace, a green plastic frog lodged in one hand, the
other tugging at the fabric of my shirt, pleading to nurse.
I walked into the kitchen and poured her a cup of juice,
she tagging behind me, at first resisting the cup, still
tugging at the cloth Of my shirt. "No, Jen, you use a cup
now. Momma has no more milk."

Ten minutes later Alma stood in the doorway in a pair
of denims and a bloodied white shirt. There was a large
untended bruise, split and bleeding on her forehead. I
ushered her in, her frail body quaking, her hands, like
strings of bones, convulsing. She bit into her shaking
hand, making small indentations in the skin, trying by the
self—induced pain, to steady herself. She composed
herself, transfixed by the tiny dots that filled with blood
and steamed the hollows of her skin. "Let me take care of
that cut, Alma. Please." I sat her in the living room and
then ran for some disinfectant and some bandages. When I
returned, Jenny was yelling, "Hurt, momma, hurt!" Shaking,
I spilled the bright orange merchurochrome over the wound.
Jenny pummeled my legs, disturbed at my behavior, tugged
demandingly at my slacks, and then sat curiously to watch

the bright spectacle, the merchurochrome spreading like ink

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on white paper, creating a Rorshack abstract on Alma's
face. I took some tissue out of my pocket and gently wiped
away the excess, placed some soft gauze over the wound,
finishing with two strips of adhesive tape.

"I thought I was strong enough to kill him," she
began. "I worked at being strong...in control...I thought
I could do it this time, this time...I waited so long for
just the right time...I thought I had the power...I had the
power..."

"Alma, what are you saying?" I grabbed her fists that
were wound tight like hoarded string.

"I thought he couldn't touch me anymore...I thought my
body was my own...I felt strong...did everything,
everything right..."

"Alma......"

"But oh oh that bastard that bastard he walks in on me
in the bathroom I had to had to vomit that toast he made me
eat that morning and he walked in that bastard and he
grabbed me and he still can beat me he still can hurt me
and it still hurts still hurts and I thought I had the
power to make it stop. I yelled I was going to leave him
and he said 'You skinny bitch, I'll kill you yet.'"

"Alma, please, calm down, slow down."

Her trembling ceased and I wrapped my arms around her.
Jenny, surprised by the sudden silence, edged into our

circle, and with a surge of compassion that young children

often intuitively display, reached for both of us. We sat

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there a very long time, arms entwined, heads together, eyes
closed, listening to the ancient rhythm of our blood. And
in this human huddle, we shared a secret knowledge, a
silent, undying bond, a communion that only females can
share.

Later in the day, David walked into the kitchen and
found Alma, quiet and contemplative, sitting at the kitchen
table warming her hands around a cup of tea. Jenny was in
her highchair fingerpainting with a jello salad, tossing
bits of strawberry gelatin onto the linoleum floor. David
grabbed me by the arm and led to outside to the living
room.

"Get her out of here, Sylvia", he said.

"She's hurt, David. She needs help."

"Cal said she got hysterical this morning, trying to
puke her breakfast into the toilet. He says he's having
her committed."

"He's the one that should be committed. He's an
animal."

"Can't you see she's fucking nuts?, he yelled, and
then more quietly: "Listen honey. She's his wife. This
is his business. You're my wife, and I want you to get her
out of here."

"I can't."

"He's my friend, Sylvia. He's my partner. This is
his mess. I'm calling him." He picked up the phone and

began to dial.

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"David, please, don't."

"Do what I say Sylvia. Get your daughter, clean up
that fucking mess she's made in there, and then start
dinner. I'm not coming home to this kind of thing. I mean
it!"

I walked into the kitchen, went over to Jenny, and
lifted her from the highchair and wiped her face and hands
with a dishrag. I looked at the bowl of jello on the floor
and the little strawberry hills that peppered the tiles. I
looked up at Alma, whose flushed and bruised face
registered nothing. She sipped her tea. "Come on, Alma.
We're going." She looked up. "Come on, I'm getting you
out of here. David is calling Cal. He'll be here soon."
She didn't move. I felt as if my chest was exploding. My
anger was so rich, so deep, surging like volcanic lava, a
grit that burned my throat, enflamed my voice. God, I
thought. It's not only Alma that had to get out of there.

As we drove off, all three of us in the front seat,
huddled together again, as soldiers do in combat trenches,
I looked through the rear view mirror to see David in the
driveway, yelling, I suppose, my name. As we pulled
further and further away, I saw our roof, still neatly
repaired, and I thought of that lost sparrow, entombed in

the darkness, shrouded with its broken wings.

FAT ARLENE

I don't go out anymore. Ever since that thing with
the babushka lady, and that kid Teddy Armbruster, and of
course, my meeting with Alonzo DePalma. Mama brings me my
food, and Mrs. Alexander from down the street still visits
often enough, and there's my stories of TV and my True
Confessions that come in the mail. I'm not going to take
any more risks, that's for sure. Mrs. Palmatier, that's
the lady with the babushka, comes by my front window twice
a day, so I know I'd run into her. And that Teddy and his
friends, well, they've taken to wheeling their dirt bikes,
with those long banana seats, and the colored streamers
right up here on my porch and racing down my steps. You
think it would ruin their tires the way they carry on, as
if I wasn't even alive inside this house, hooting and
hollering things like "Hey, Fat Arlene, why don't choo come
out?" or "Mama says you're real certified crazy, Arlene!"

I'm Arlene Obispo, I am thirty-one years old, and I
weigh three hundred and ninety pounds without my clothes or
my shoes, at least that's what the doctor figures, on
account of his scale only goes up to three hundred and
fifty pounds. He offered to take me down to the grain
elevator to weigh me, or the hospital loading dock, but I
decided to just stop going to him instead. I just hate the

humiliation of getting on any scale. The nurse is always

92

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making these small clucking noises, and writing something
secret on her clipboard, and shaking her head the way all
nurses do.

I don't go anywhere anymore since the babushka lady
started poking me with her umbrella one day while I was on
the sidewalk headed for the market. She's the certified
crazy, not me. Mrs. Palmatier always wears a black wool
dress even in the summer, and has a black knit babushka
tied around her small head, with a big black knot at the
base of her neck. She carries this black umbrella, and a
large shopping bag from Mittler's Emporium. She's a skinny
one, that's for sure, and folks around here say she only
buys one can of tuna and a pound of Jujy Fruits a week at
the market. One day she just took that ugly black umbrella
and started poking at me while I was walking. I admit, I'm
not one to get around easily, having sugar and varicose
veins, and being just plain slow, but here she was poking
at my rear end and giggling. I just stopped in my tracks.
I just froze right there, and the point of the umbrella
slid into my butt, and traveled around my side and traced
little spirals over my body. She faced me head on, this
pile of old bones, with that stick, taking small slices
from my flesh and never once looking into my eyes. She
just wanted to poke at the folds in my flesh like I was
some heifer or feeder calf ready for a livestock auction.

I felt at any minute she was going to bid seventy-nine

cents a pound off the hoof. I guess it wouldn't have been

94

too bad, seeings how she's touched and all; I figured the
Jujy Fruits had done something to her brain. But then this
Teddy Armbruster, he's what you'd call a regular shit-assed
kid, and his buddies, Roger and Bobby, became a crowd, and
gave the babushka lady a few rounds of applause and cheers.
They were chewing on these Slo-Poke suckers, the long thick
kind that last all day, and when they'd smile, brown
stalactites of caramel dripped a thick stream of goo onto
their shirts. Teddy smiled that brown smile and yelled:
"Hey Fat Arlene, you want some of this candy?"

Listen, you shit-assed kid, I thought, I'd like to
shove that stick right up your nose. But I couldn't say
anything, I never do. With all that poking at me and the
laughing, I became disembodied, as if my flesh belonged to
someone else. It was like my mind, by some mistake, was
only temporarily inhabiting this thick, motionless frame.

I closed my eyes and felt the small pricks to my skin
disintegrate, and the static of the boys' laughter melt
into a vacuum inside my head. I thought of the thick
caramel sucker, moist and sweet, like sugar meat laying on
my tongue, and I chewed it whole, and the nectar spewed
forth into a brown sugar stream.

I could feel the circular wind of the dirt bikes as
they taunted me, and when I opened my eyes, Mrs. Palmatier
was gone, headed toward the market, her black receding
frame a stick in the wind. Teddy Armbruster skidded to a

stop in front of my stomach, the rubber front wheel grazing

95
the fabric of my dress. I suddenly felt full and heavy,

the sun began to make me sweat, and my legs ached from my
stationary position. "Hey Arlene, you think if I ram my
bike into your stomach I could bounce home without having
to do any peddling?"

Okay, I know I'm not pleasant to look at. My arms and
legs are like rippled potatoes all bunched together in a
sack, and my stomach sticks out so far I can't see my feet,
and I've got to wear those orthopedic shoes with tiny holes
in the sides to let my corns breathe. I'm uncomfortable
most of the time. My breasts are supported by this white
cotton bra that cuts into my skin and makes red moist
creases that burn when I walk or move in any way. I've
taken to sitting in my naugahyed chair by the front window
and just watching out. I haven't really the clothes to go
out anyway. I wear two muslin sheets sewn together into a
loose shift. Mama rigs them up for me on her machine. She
buys the sheets cheap at J.C. Penney and sews the tops and
sides and makes the armholes, finishing them off by hand.
They don't have my size anymore in the catalogues, and
since I refuse to go outside and down to the Miss Chubbe
Specialty Shop in Marpole City, Mama said we could order
the pretty flowered sheets that go on special after the
first of the year and she could fashion me a dress or two.

I really took to my dresses, and felt real pretty, the
way she had taken them by hand to sew the finishings. But

Teddy and his gang wouldn't let me alone. It was a hot

96

day, and the air came up between my legs and seemed to cool
me off. I had my hair set and aprayed just right, and my
lipstick bright on my lips. Mama says I have beautiful
hair, just like the models on TV, and she and Mrs.
Alexander both say I have such a pretty face. The sun was
freckling my nose and the slow wind was ruffling the hem on
my dress and like I said, I was feeling real pretty. "Hey
Arlene, Omar the Tent Maker back in town?"

I had almost forgotten the tent jokes, the Omar jokes,
the jokes about my clothes in elementary school. I had
almost forgotten sitting in the back row in school. The fat
kid in the back row dressed in womens' sizes because she
had outgrown the children's department. The kid in the
last row with the too long dress and the sleeves rolled up
to her elbows. I preferred the back row in school. It
allowed me to become anonymous. The kids would always
complain they couldn't see around me or over me, so I'd
sheepishly take a seat in the back, where kids would have
to make a great physical effort to turn around and taunt
me. Sometimes they would even forget all about me. I
remember it was in the fifth grade that Geoffery Webb,
another ass-hole kid, created the name Fat Arlene, and it

' he'd snort, "And

stuck. "Hey just walk around Fat Arlene,'
you're walking around the equator." Or he'd make some
gutteral imitation of a sow, and fall to the ground, his

face shielded by an upraised arm and wail, "Help!! Fat

Arlene's gonna sit on me!"

97
And I'd just stand there, much like I stood there when

the babushka lady was poking at me, and stare at my shoes.
I always had the prettiest shoes. They were red with shiny
gold buckles or a black patent leather. Even though I was
in womens' clothes sizes by the time I was in the fourth
grade, my shoes were a normal size. I found myself staring
at those shoes, especially when kids like Geoffery went at
it, or when the girls refused to pick me for their kickball
team until Miss Prentice, the teacher, made them. I'd just
stare at those pretty shoes and not say a thing, just
thinking how they might need a shine when they got home.
It's not like nobody has ever liked the way I looked.
There once was a man named Marshall who loved me. I met
him while I was visiting my Aunt Lula's down in Marpole
city. He had been visiting his sister in the house behind
my Aunt Lula's and he had seen me working out in the
garden. He had come up to me while I was kneeling on the
ground, the fresh dirt making black patterns on my knees,
and I was wearing one of those shifts Mama had rigged up,
and my hair was fresh washed, and I guess I looked all
right considering I had been clawing in the dirt most of
the morning. He was ordinary looking, with some strands of
thin greased hair combed over a balding spot, and he wore a
pair of glasses that was taped together over his nose. I
sensed right off this wasn't some joke being played at my
expense. He was a small man, with a child-like frame, and

his shoulders curved into his body. He told me how he was

98

one of those official Fat Admirers. They have a group and
everything localized out East somewhere. I thought for a
minute maybe it was one of those cults you read about, but
he assured me they were all very respectable people, mostly
men, who really admired women with a little girth, and a
little meat on those bones. They were not embarrassed to
be seen with women like me, and their official
organization motto was "The Fatter The Better".

At every visit he brought candy, a pie, or a sweet
roll, or maybe some take-out food from Delvechio's. The
only places he would take me was to restaurants, and he
would fuss over the menu, suggesting several desserts,
asking for a double order of whipped topping or chocolate,
and he would even grab a large handful of those pastel
mints that are free by the cash register, and stuff them
into my hands or feed them into my mouth one by one. "Had
enough Arlene?" he often breathed into my ear and then
suggested going home to ride the ponies. And then I would
think of what my mother had said to me: "Arlene, Marshall
may be the only chance at life you'll get."

Well, riding the ponies wasn't exactly what it was
cracked up to be, and Marshall wasn't exactly what you'd
call an active equestrian. He'd often just lie there, his
balding head resting under the flap of my full breast, his
little pink fingers kneading my poundage like a small

kitten pummeling the underside of its mother. Sometimes I

99

was afraid I just plain somthered him and he had died, the
way I never heard anything from him, just an occasional
snort that rippled my skin. He would disappear into my
folds, burrowing away like a fetus in a womb, lying
immobile, offering nothing in the way of what I anticipated
was to be the pony ride of my life. He couldn't understand
it the one day I told him to leave my house, and that I
didn't want to see him anymore. I remember him saying,
"Arlene, baby, sex doesn't have to be wild and frienzied.
Sex can be comfortable, secure, protective." I wanted to
tell him I got more exercise on the toilet, but all I said
was "Marshall, you made love to my body and not to me."

When Mama heard about Marshall, she said she knew all
along he would hurt me, that he couldn't have possibly
loved me, and that perhaps he had found someone skinny to
take my place. I tried to explain to her it was all my
decision, but she seemed not to listen. Now when Mama
thinks I'm feeling bad, she brings over a lot of food and
we cook all afternoon. Her specialty is stuffed cabbage
with rice and a honey bread filled with whole nuts and
candied fruits. She makes a rich pudding from scratch that
needs to be stirred at least a thousand times and tops it
with real shavings from a Hershey Bar. Sometimes she just
bakes donuts all day and lets me dust the twisted rolls
with a fine sugar, and I get to eat them ready hot. Mama

was not always like this. She used to bring over magazine

100

articles about stapling my stomach, wiring my jaw shut, and
rearranging twenty-five feet of my intestines. She would
come with stories about someone who had heard from a friend
of a friend that a miraculous weight loss had occurred
after an injection of lamb urine or the cells of a cow
pancreas. She read out loud newspaper articles about women
who had lived for two years on packets of liquid protein
and shots of Vitamin B .

Even when I was a kid, from the time I was in the
first grade, I had been on the beef-patty tomato-wedge
diet, the "Six Hard Boiled Eggs A Day Diet", and the banana
diet. She pinned pictures of cute little girls, cut from
glossy magazines and catalogs, on the refrigerator with
little piggy magnets. The little girls were usually
involved in some physical activity like jump-roping
(something I was afraid to do) or acrobatics (something I
refused to do). As I grew older, the childrens' pictures
were replaced with teenage models right out of Seventeen
Magazine, modeling junior petites or string bikinis, and
surrounded by muscular boys in tennis sweaters and football
uniforms.

I really did try for Mama and Papa. I was the only
kid in the second grade with carrot curls and melba toast
for lunch, I ate six unsalted hard boiled eggs a day until
I thought I would puke, snacked on Rye Krisp, did
twenty-five prescribed Jack Lalanne daily leg lifts. As I

got older, the picture changed again, to pencil-thin

1" '

 

 

 

101

professional models from Cosmopolitan. I counted my
calories verbally for Mama and Papa before every meal, kept
a written record of my exercises, measured my saturated
fats by the teaspoonful, and tried desperately to change.
I always knew there was something horrible about my body,
and I cursed it as I stood naked in front of a mirror, and
I pinched it and squeezed it until my fingers burned. And
sometimes I would noticeably lose weight, and Mama would
flutter around the house, and call her friends, and say I
had only twenty more pounds to lose. I would wait for my
life to be as suddenly perfect as those photographs. I'd
return to my bedroom and shut the door, and I would unwrap
the Hostess Cupcakes or the Hershey Bar secretly purchased
at the store and hidden in my stamp collection under the
bed.

But that was before Papa died. Now Mama seems to
enjoy all the cooking and she doesn't pay much attention to
what I eat. She warns me that the people on the outside
will hurt me, that they don't understand me, and she'll
protect me.

SO Mama comes to visit regularly three times a week,
and as soon as she steps in the door something is crackling
in the hot oil on the stove, ready to be laid on wax paper
or a paper towel, all smooth and warm and ready hot. Then
she does my dusting and all my heavy work on account of I'm
on "restriction", and pours a gallon of that Sno-Bowl stuff

in my stool, mops my floors, and picks the lint from the

102

carpet with her fingers, just as if she was picking at
little bugs. Then she starts cursing out loud about how I
should have never left her and Papa and how the whole world
out there is going to hurt me.

And I tell her no one can hurt me when I'm in here and
they're out there. Besides they're lovely people, mostly
students, colorful in their fall sweaters and knapsacks,
trekking by my window at all hours of the day. They are a
stream of activity, each one eager and alive, all hurrying
by, never glancing in to see me seated in my chair. I
attach fictional names to their young faces, with fictional
families and homestead. I imagine the dishes they eat
from, the sheets they sleep on, the sounds they make when
they awaken in the morning, even what they can see outside
their kitchen window, and the smell of the strong coffee
percolating in their pots. I give them all strange names
like Alvina, Bird Lady, Wheelman, and Handsome Backpack
Man.

They mix so fluidly with the neighborhood regulars.
They weave around the babushka lady, and that awful
Armbruster boy and his mother, who I hear is carrying on
with the hydraulic lift man at New Tread Tire. They race
by Mrs. Alexander, a little tipsy from her drinking, and
one pretty near knocked Mama over just last Wednesday. On
certain days, the people change, and sometimes there is
someone I see once and never see again. I was hoping

Backpack Man would not be one of these. He would pass my

103

house every day at precisely 10 a.m., always hurrying, his
backpack jammed full, and slung over his shoulder. He wore
a thin T-shirt most days with some white running shorts,
his wild black hair often wet from what I supposed was a
shower. I had been watching him for months, but was
careful not to fall in love right away. I wanted to be
sure.

I started to get up very early for my shower, taking
care to get my hair and make-up just right. I spent a long
time flipping my hair into little ringlets that fell to my
shoulders. I applied my make-up carefully, a bit too
heavily I think, but I wanted him to notice me through the
window. Mama and Mrs. Alexander both say I have such a
pretty face.

Every morning at ten o'clock, I would position myself
in the chair, laying a robe over my lap so he couldn't see
my legs as they flattened and bulged against the base of
the chair. I would repeat my vigil in the afternoon as he
returned at three o'clock, turning off my stories, making
sure once again my hair was sprayed and properly in place,
hoping that in the less hurried stride of his return trip,
he would glance into my window.

It was during one of Mrs. Alexander's weekly visits
that I learned Backpack Man was Mrs. Alexander's new
boarder, Alonzo De Palma. She lives in a two-story white
clapboard down the street next to the Armbrusters. Alonzo,

one of the college's students, had just rented the flat

104

above hers.

She sat in my kitchen, cradling a glass of wine, her
wooly grey hair jutting out at odd angles from her small
head. She always brings her own wine to our visits, the
kind she can pick up cheap at the A&P, seeings how she does
the majority of the drinking. She looks a lot older than
her true age, which I estimate to be about sixty or so, the
drinking causing dark creases in her face and letting the
skin yellow and swell around her eyes. Cigarettes have
soured her breath and stained her teeth, but she does dress
up for our talks. She wears a print polyester dress to
each visit with some costume jewelry and simulated pearl
earrings that hang from her ears like misshapen sea shells.
Mama says Mrs. Alexander is a sad case and I shouldn't let
her in. But Mrs. Alexander is so pleasant to me and tells
me of all the things happening in the Old neighborhood that
I can't see through my window.

She talks about the hummingbird family that feeds off
the trumpeter vine down at Glencairne Park; the way the
poplar leaves look like hoards of quivering silver dollars
when the wind hits them just right; and of the barn
swallows that have chosen her garage to raise a brood.
Years ago, I often visited her house, peeking through the
loose boards of the garage wall, watching the parent
swallows bringing small bits of broken insects to the eager
yellow mouths that gaped in the darkness, hungry, wanting

some acknowledgement that their existence mattered. I

105

would check on them daily until their growth period had
expired, and their yellow beaks that turned to a pale grey
and their wings fluttered and strained against the mud
nest. But now that Teddy Armbruster has grown into the
regular shit-assed kid that he is, I won't be squatting to
see between any wooden boards.

"You shouldn't let any twelve-year-old kid keep you

from doing anything, Arlene honey,"

she said, warm and
flushed from the wine. "Just the other day, he called me
an old broken down drunk, and I told him I'd like to see
his brother Leroy become an only child, real fast. That
shut him up."

And then she would talk about her boarder, Alonzo De
Palma. She was all the time calling him a real nice boy
that didn't play the FM Station too loud, and you never
heard a peep out of him. And there was certainly no
carryings on with any lady friends the way her other
boarders had.

The weather grew colder as I continued to watch Alonzo
from my window. Thick sweaters and angora hats replaced
the thin T-shirts and running shorts of late summer. The
babushka lady had covered her black dress with a black wool
coat; Teddy Armbruster wore a lined silk baseball jacket as
he still flipped his bike onto my porch; Alvina, the lady
with the muscular legs and the wedgies, switched into some

sensible brown shoes; Mr. Wheelman donned a pea coat and

106
still dangled his bike wheel from his forearm. Alonzo

DePalma covered his long legs with blue jeans and took to
wearing a maroon sweater; his face all ruddy from the
autumn wind, his backpack still lazily slung over a wide
shoulder. I was more in love than ever.

I hate winter. I have no winter coat. Mama says she
hasn't figured out how to fashion me one out of wool, there
being no patterns large enough at the store, and besides,
being on Social Security for my sugar and disabilities, I
can't afford it. I have boots, but no balance. The
slickness of the pavement sends me reeling, my uneasy,
thick legs flipping out from under me. I fell once a
couple of years ago on a walk with Mrs. Alexander, and she
just couldn't much as she tried, lift me up. She had to go
call on a policeman that was directing traffic at the
corner. I lay on the sidewalk; I had a coat that could fit
me then, my legs exposed, a raw pink in the brittle cold.
My bare hands scraped the ice from the sidewalk, my eyes
were closed, warm tears freezing in the corners. I was
hoping that no one would notice, me like a giant sea mammal
beached on the ice. I hated myself. I hated winter. I
hated that dark empty cloud that welled inside my stomach.
The meat on my thighs burned, and I hated the wind. I
hated that policeman that finally lifted me up with the
help of two passersby. "Listen Tess," he chuckled, giving
sideway glances to the two men, "Maybe you should stay in

on days like this."

107

Alonzo DePalma grew much more handsome as the winter
wore on. He grew larger in a sheepskin jacket, his black
curls capped in a blue sailor's hat, his cheeks chapped and
red from the wind. One day, after having performed my
daily ritual, showering, setting my hair, preening in front
of the bathroom mirror, and after seating myself in the
large naugahyde chair, wrapped this time in a colorful
afghan, Alonzo seemed to wave at me. His wave was brief,
but I am sure it was for me, and he smiled, not a full
teeth smile, but a smile just the same. He paused
momentarily in front of my house, leaning on one leg,
letting his backpack slide down his arm. And then he
smiled again and walked on. I'm sure he was admiring the
way I had brought my hair away from my face and put it into
a hill of ringlets on the top of my head, and my cheeks
were rouged high on my cheekbones the way the professional
models do, and of course he noticed the new orange lipstick
Mama had picked out for me at Rexall's.

I began to laugh, and lifted myself slowly from the
chair, so moist with the sweat of my own excitement, I had
to peel myself away from it in sections, getting small
plastic burns all over my legs and my back. I hurried to
the front room closet, finding my winter boots under two
years of True Confessions magazines. I grabbed a grey,
rough army blanket from the top closet shelf.

I must have been a sight heading out my front door,

with my sheet dress on, the army blanket not quite fitting

108
around my large breasts, and my black boots. It seemed
strange walking down the steps, letting the snow climb over
my boots. The cold, brutal wind slapped my face, made my
nose run, sent me spinning. It was only a block from Mrs.
Alexander's house, and the sidewalk seemed clear enough,
and my boots packed the snow under my feet. I thought I
could make it, no babushka lady or the Armbruster kid in
sight. But the Armbruster kid was diddling in his
driveway, I could see that from where I was standing, and I
knew I would have to pass him to get to Mrs. Alexander's
and to get to Alonzo DePalma.

I wished I had had a coat. My arms and legs peeked
out from beneath the wool like large pink sausages. "Hey
Fat Arlene," Teddy bellowed, "Ringling Brothers designing
clothes now?" He was stockpiling a reserve of iceballs in
his driveway. God, I wish Ihad a coat. Just a few more
steps. "Hey, Arlene, what's gonna happen if you fall
today? Gonna need a construction crane to lift you up,
that's for sure." How would you like to wear those
iceballs kid? Just a few more steps. Damn, it's cold.
God. "Hey, Fat Arlene? Think this iceball would bounce
offa you?" I've got hemmoroids bigger than you kid and I
set on them all day. You could be next. Shit, what's he
going to do with that iceball? "Hey Obispo, this one's for
you."

The pain was quick, cold, blasting my arm for a

second. I turned to Teddy. He was gliding another iceball

109

from one hand to the other. I thought of Mrs. Alexander's,
then of Alonzo, turned from his slick grin and marched
forward.

Mrs. Alexander answered the door in her bathrobe and
two mismatched slippers. She had a glass of red wine in
one hand, and a short cigarette smoking in another.

"Why Arlene, honey. For heaven's sakes. What have
you got there?"

"I was just out for a walk. Thought I'd stop in."

"Arlene, honey, that's your father's old Army blanket.
I remember the day he brought it home."

"My winter coat is in the cleaners."

"0h,I see. Well, just set yourself down right here.

I

You must be freezing,' she said, directing me toward the

sofa. "How about a glass of wine?"

"No,thank you,"

I said, letting the blanket fall from
my shoulders onto the sofa. Mrs. Alexander brought a clear
bottle to the sofa table.

"I don't like to mix my drinks, but this weather calls

for a real snort,"

she announced, pouring herself a tall
glass of vodka. "I like it straight up. Warms the
innards. Sure you don't want some, Arlene?"

"No,thank you."

"I've got some streudel in the cupboard."

"Maybe later." I heard footsteps overhead.

"Honey,' she began, between sips of her drink, "What

possessed you to leave your home on a day like this? And

110

look at you, bare sleeved and all."

"I thought I'd like to visit. I haven't been here in
a while."

"You haven't been here in six months."

"Has it been that long?" I heard a drawer close and
more footsteps.

Mrs. Alexander lowered herself into the only armchair
in the dark livingroom, taking a long, vocal sip of her
drink, and laid her head back against the worn fabric of
the chair. She dozed a minute, then awoke, and then dozed
again, the glass of vodka dangling precariously from her
hand. Little balls of air erupted from her mouth, making
soft baby snores. "Honey, you'll have to forgive me, you

caught me at a bad......"

And then she was asleep, full
and strong, bits of spittel foaming in the crevices of her
mouth. The glass fell.

I heard his footsteps on the stairs, then a quick,
short slam of a door. I saw Alonzo briefly through the
front window, standing on Mrs. Alexander's stoop, buttoning
his sheepskin jacket and straightening the knit cap on his
head. Mrs. Alexander snored peacefuly in her chair. I
left the living room and climbed the stairs to Alonzo's
apartment.

The second story apartment was long, narrow, and
paneled in a dark wood. Alonzo had tacked up posters and

unframed artists' prints on all four walls. There was a

stereo in one corner, a twin bed and dreser in the other,

111
and to my right was a small kitchenette with a gas stove, a

small sink, and a portable refrigerator. A wooden table
with two chairs was placed in the center of the room.

I walked over to the dresser, dodging between the
table and the wall, and opened the top drawer. I ran my
hands over the folded shirts and the underwear, feeling all
the time a watery sensation in my mouth, feeling my mouth
heat up, almost on fire, then a surge of moisture rolled
over my tongue. I opened the second drawer and rustled the
thick knitted sweaters with my hands, lifting one to my
chest and holding it against the exposed skin of my neck, I
let my hand run over the top of the dresser then onto the
walls, over the posters and prints. Again, the pleasant
fire in my mouth, then the cool liquid laying on my tongue,
I Opened the cupboard, and brought down two plastic dishes
and cups, not very elegant for a first time, I thought. I
found some dirty silverware in the sink and washed them off
with a cool stream of water. I was hungry, empty. I
brought from the refrigerator a pack of bologna, some
cheese, two oranges, and a half a loaf of rye bread. I
began to eat, but did not taste the food. I consumed it
all, but could not tell you exactly what I ate. I closed
my eyes. Alonzo was all naked and smooth, and I was
tree-limb thin, loose and natural like a willow branch,
swaying under his brown body. He wrapped his long legs
around me and rode me like a sleek horse, and he called me

honey and sugar, and I would take small bites of his skin

112

into my mouth and hold them on my tongue and suck the salty
juices from his flesh, leaving his neck all swollen and red
like a summer plum. And when we had finished, I was round
and full, and complete, and knocked a single cup onto the

floor.

PRIMAL SCREAM

September 27, 1980
Dear Claudia Michelle,

We can safely entitle this letter "SLEAZEBALL WHO'S
NEVER BEEN KISSED". That's me all right, Miss Hot Stuff of
Whitman High, the victim of a bum rap. Remember that kid I
wrote you about before, Larry Pinnazo, the guy that picks
his pimples and smears the excess on the lab slides in
Biology 1? He cornered me the other day by the gym
entrance and pushed me into a dark corner, all the time
rubbing his chest against mine. He said he wanted to feel
my "Chicamungas". That's what he calls them, can you
imagine? He put his stubby fingers into the opening of my
blouse and started pressing me with his whole body. I was
completely grossed out. I mean, the kid has these acne
pits, and this real yellow breath, and a nose the size of
an enemy torpedo. And when I could feel the fingers creep
into my underwire supports, I bit his nose and held firmly
like an attack dog that isn't content with a quick nibble,
but likes to hold on and tear a little flesh. Anyway,
Larry yelped, all the time holding on to his big Italian
nose. He screamed that I couldn't fool him. He knew what
I let the other boys do. They had told him. I let them
all unsnap my big white bra and let them feel my big pink

breasts, and if I really liked the guy, I'd let them go

113

114

"down there". I should have gone for his nose again after
that remark, but he was drawing a rather sizeable crowd.

He announced, like a stage actor to an audience, that I
shouldn't have lured him to the corner if I hadn't meant
business. I wanted to clean his clock for the "down there"
remark, and I would have too, I mean, I would have leveled
him, if Jeffrey Van Wagner hadn't been in the crowd,
looking at me with those big puppy eyes. Well, he's never
going to give me a second look now. He heard it all
himself. Larry Pinnazo might as well have taken out an ad
in the school paper: MISS CHICAMUNGA PUNCTURES PROBOSCIS
IN LURID SEXUAL ENCOUNTER. What I want to know is, where
does he get his information? I have been chased, poked,
teased, grappled with, since the fourth grade when I got my
first brassiere, but I have never been kissed. I have
never been on a car date or slow danced. In gym class my
partner is always Juanita Alvarez for square dancing
because the boys never ask either of us. God, I hate these
breasts! I hate them! I want to wear a Grow-bra like
everyone else, not this big cotton thing with wires and
elastic and 3 spandex fastener with extra hooks and eyes.

I call it my steel belted radial special and it digs into
my skin and makes me sweat red rivers. I hate walking low,
always appearing shorter than I am, just so I can slouch
over and cover my chest with my books. I hate the boys
yelling "Hey, Jugs", "Hey, Jungle Tits", and Larry's

dreadful "Hey Chicamungas." NO boy will ask me out because

 

 

ns

115

they think I am too fast, too dangerous, yet in the shadows
of the school, they reach for me, they brush up against me,
and whisper dark things into my ear. I want to take a
knife, Claudia, one of those big butcher ones that Mama
uses in the kitchen. I want to take it and cut a pound or
two from each breast, and somehow, miraculously healed, I
will be sweet, and demure, and will be able to wear
stretchable knits or mohair sweaters or T-shirts that are
702 combed cotton. I don't want to hide behind books or my
folded arms or a blouse with vertical stripes that only an
old lady would wear. I want to, as God is my witness, go
out on a car date with Jeffrey Van Wagner without his
wondering if I was a possible carrier of Herpes Simplex II.
I have had these THINGS since the fourth grade and I am

Singing the D-Cup Blues,

Your forever friend,

Franchesca DiGregorio

October 2, 1980
Dear Frankie Di,

Before you decide what to do with your surgically
removed poundage, you've got a live market right here in
Des Moines. Just send it to me, Claudia Michelle Weber,
who will be forever grateful for the Care Package. I have
my own nemesis, right here in Des Moines, a regular twit
named Dickie Butts (I know what I'd like to do with that

name). Dickie sits behind me in French II, and although he

116

doesn't pick his pimples and send his fellow students to
Cringe City, he has this annoying habit of zipping and
unzipping his fly, so you can hear the faint whirrings
while you're conjugating verbs. Anyway, Dickie calls me
"Nubs", right out loud, and for the French translation:
"Nubbette" (He thinks he's being cute). He says he wants to
get the number of the steam shovel that ran over my chest
and he tells everyone he's finally found a place to stuff
his dirty gym socks. He says a bread board with two
stationary peas on it has more curvature than I do.
Frankie, I'd like to sympathize with your problem, but I
would kill for a Grow-bra. My Ma says I don't even need
one. She says if I don't want my nipples to show, I could
wear an undershirt (Oh, sure, Ma, Maybe I could buy some
Superwoman Underoos!), or I could tape them with small
pieces of masking tape. She said she read that bit of
advice in Heloise's Helpful Hints. Great. That's the same
newspaper column where she finds out how to remove grape
juice stains from carpet fibers or bubble gum from Shinyl
Vinyl. She thinks she can solve my emerging womanhood with
two strips of tape. Arghh!! I did finally talk her into
getting me a bra, after all, I am in the tenth grade. But
I have an even bigger problem. You know how I once told
you how the boys lurk outside the school swimming pool,
waiting to see which girls are sitting out that day on the
bleachers, so they can figure out who has their period? I

think I mentioned it in the same letter that they pelt

117

girls with sanitary pads (God only knows where they get
them), when these particular girls walk down the halls.
The boys act so smug. You'd think they had discovered the
secret for the atomic bomb, the way they strut down the
hall, making Midol jokes, doing some exaggerated pelvic
flinches, and aiming the unwrapped pad with menacing
precision. Well, I've never ever sat out of swimming,
except for an occasional cold or the time I had an abcess
on my finger. I am fifteen years old and I haven't even
gotten my period yet. I hate to admit this, but I'd give
anything for one of those Kotex missiles to graze my body.
I am so worried I may have freeze dried ovaries or worse
yet, that my insides have rotted and turned a dusty grey,
and that I will never be able to have babies when I grow
up. My Ma says she may have to take me to one of those
doctors with stirrups and rubber gloves and long, cold,
metallic instruments. I am really scared, Frankie. Do you
have any suggestions? Would my jogging help, maybe shake
up a few clogged tubes? How about warm showers? My older
sister Samantha says I should put a tampon under my pillow
and pray to the "God of Missed Periods". I tried it,
but... nothing. Heloise's Helpful Hints hasn't addressed
this problem yet. She did a piece this week on saving tin
foil. I'd appreciate any suggestions because I'm

Freeze Dried in Des Moines

Claudia Michelle Weber

118

October 8, 1980
Dear Claudia Michelle,

I asked my mother about your problem and she said to
book a vacation trip to Aruba, buy a white Jantzen bathing
suit, and sure enough! you'll get your period. She says it
works for her every time. I think she was joking. My
mother says to wait, that things will happen naturally, and
that you're what they call a late bloomer. But I have done
some concentrated research. It said in the Sunday
supplement that jogging in any form can cause jogger's
kidney, jogger's heel, and penile frostbite. (I looked
that one up, and we don't have to worry about it). The
article also said that with serious female joggers, the
menstrual period will "cease to flow". It's a proven fact
with statistics and everything. 80 you ought to think
about quitting track before your whole future as a woman is
endangered! To further my research, I asked my friend
Louisa Afficionado all about it. She's the girl that holds
court every morning in the smoker's bathroom before first
hour. I think I wrote you about her before. She knows a
lot about life. She car dates with college boys. She
smokes long cigarettes and gives French Kiss lessons to the
girls in the bathroom mirror. She even wears tampons.
Anyway, I mentioned your problem, and she said cranberry
juice. Definitely cranberry juice. You've got to start
drinking it. She says it cleans out your system. Pretty

soon, she says, you will be sitting out of swimming for

119

something besides an abcess. You will be bombarded with
sanitary pads.

As for my problem, I don't think there is any research
that can help. I told Louisa Afficionado about my problem
one morning and she stood quiet for a moment, letting her
thick lips blow perfect smoke rings from her Virginia
Slims. She talks with a great deal of authority, after
all, she's one year older, and has just been held back.
She told me to stand up straight, stick out my chest and
enjoy all the male attention. And when the boys snap my
bra straps or grab for my breasts or knead them like they
were mounds of yeast dough, I should smile and act
mysterious, let my eyes widen, and act like I'm enjoying
it. She said it was a proven fact that boys like breasts,
and that biting Larry Pinnazo's nose was a mistake. That
was not being mysterious at all. She asked me how was I
ever going to get a date if I got the reputation as a
ball-buster? (I'll have to look that one up).

The new tall and mysterious,

Franchesca Angelica DiGregorio

November 30, 1980
Dear Tall and Mysterious,
Tear up all my previous letters because I am in love.
L-O-V-E Luvvvvvvvvvv!!!!!!!!!! And it is not with an

immature tenth grade boy who lurks outside of swimming

120
pools, or who tells me I need a melon transplant, or who
spends half his time adjusting the traction on his
skateboard. I am in love with a real man. His name is
Rodney Allan Forbes III and he is my language skills
teacher. He wears herringbone tweed jackets, and wide
maroon ties with grey flecks, and he reads us Robert
Browning, and he has the most perfect teeth in all of Des
Moines. And I know I'm in love, really truly in love,
because when he smiles, or reads this Browning guy, my
underpants get wet, well, moist, really. The first time it
happened, I thought I might have peed my pants, but you
kind of know when you're actually doing that. Then I
thought, just looking at him made me get my very own
period, but I checked after class, and that wasn't it
either. But I guess, on account of me sitting in the front
row, and picking up all of his psychic vibrations, and
looking at those white, glossy teeth, I just became a woman
and fell into true love. Anyway, I have volunteered to do
all sorts of work for him, and I'm going down to
Cunningham's to get some of that coral lipstick they have
on special, and I'm going to buy a padded bra with
fiberfill. (I'll have to hide it from my Ma. She says
good Christian girls don't wear padded bras. But, I'm
desperate, and when one is in love, one will do anything).
And, I'm going to get some textured pantyhose! Maybe he'll
notice me.

Just signing,

121
Miss Claudia Michelle Weber

Mrs. Claudia Michelle Weber Forbes III
Mrs. Claudia Forbes III

Mrs. Rodney Forbes III

December 15, 1980
Dear Mrs. Forbes,

What you are experiencing is what Louisa Afficionado
calls "creaming your jeans". She says it happens on car
dates, in roller rinks, and at rock concerts. She says its
natural and it means you are a real woman, well,
practically, but if it bothers you, you can invest in some
of those everyday mini-pads. My mother says big business
would invent a pad for every natural function if they
could, and she said don't waste your money. Rodney Allan
Forbes sounds divine and a lot better than my language
skills teacher, Ms. Haskell. She buns up her hair, wears
grey wool suits, and looks like she's been sucking on
citrus for at least a decade. She doesn't read Robert
Browning. She likes to diagram sentences and pontificate
about the generic YOU. She gave me detention for coming to
class with just one shoe. I tried to explain to her what
had happened, but she told me to take my seat and see her
after school. The reason I lost my shoe had to do with
Teddy Klender, who is a lot cuter than Larry Pinnazo and is
on the swim team, and on first impressions seems

trustworthy. One day, a few weeks ago, he asked me to go

122

sit in his car. I thought maybe Louisa Afficionado's
advice was finally paying off, so I followed him out to the
school parking lot and got into his car, thinking, hoping,
he was going to ask me out for my first real date. Well,
you can call my first male-female car encounter: PROWLING
FOR THE WILD CHICAMUNGAS. Teddy Klender didn't waste any
time. He unsnapped my bra like he had taken official
lessons, and in a matter of seconds my breasts were
straining against the fabric of my blouse, and he pounced
me, and my head hit the dashboard, and his hot, sticky
breath coated my ear, and he kept whispering "Let me lick
them, please, let me lick them". He said he had been
dreaming about them for months, and I tried, I really
tried, like Louisa told me to, to look doe-eyed and
mysterious, and to look like I was enjoying it. But when
he whispered he wanted to lick them, my stomach did a
violent turn, my lips shriveled and contorted, and I began
to think very fast. I kicked off my shoe, lifted my leg,
even though he had me pinned to the seat, and began honking
the car horn with my big toe. Teddy's head just about hit
the ceiling. He sat up quickly, straightened his
shoulders, and peered through the car window to see if
anyone was looking. I opened the door, ran from the car
with only one shoe, my arms folded over my chest, and I
bent real low, like I was walking against one of those
tropical winds, and I ran, limping back to the school. I

never got my shoe back and Ms. Haskell gave me detention

123

for violating the dress code. Is there no justice? I told
my mother about it, and she threatened to call up the
Klenders and tell the whole pack of them to "F_____ off and
and die." I've never heard her speak that way before. My
father made her apologize for her language and sent her to
her room. He told me she just hasn't been the same since
she started going to these assertiveness training groups.
He told me boys would be boys, and he had found himself in
a pickle in the backseat of a Studebaker once. Sometimes,
though, I wonder if my mother is all right. She doesn't
make pasta on Thursdays anymore, just Sundays, she loses
Dad's socks (he says deliberately), and my father's latest
kick is that he says he knew he should have married a woman
from the old country. She gets sent to her room a lot
lately. Oh, she puts up a fight, knocks over a few plants,
kicks the heat register, but still she goes on up, probably
just to avoid a fight with my father. Sometimes, when she
doesn't know I'm looking, I find her in the laundry room
screaming into the washing machine. It's empty, the
agitator isn't moving, and she's screaming her primal
scream, that's what she calls it. After daddy had sent her
to her room for this Teddy thing, I went up to see her.

She had piled some pillows against the wall, and had laid
her head back, closing her eyes. I sat next to her and she
ruffled my hair, the way she always does, and said the next
time a boy did that to me to forget the horn, and aim for

his family jewels. She bent her knee and thrust it into

124

the air like a karate champion, and pointed to her body and
showed me where to aim, and then pointed lower to show me
where to go for the second jab. I asked her if that was
being a ball buster (Remember? I tried to look it up, but
it wasn't in the Random House Edition), and she chuckled
and said, "Yes." Then she got to looking kind of sad, and
turned her head to the wall, pulling the covers up to her
neck like a sick child and spoke in a soft, low voice:
"Promise me Francesca promise me, you won't make the same
mistakes that I did." I wanted to ask her what she meant,
but she closed her eyes and turned her body to the wall. I
thought after this Teddy thing, I might want to come and
live with you, but now I see my mother needs me.

Merry Christmas,

Frankie Di

February 3, 1981
Dear Frankie Di,

I've been doing a lot of extra work for Mr. Forbes now
in his office, and I can even go into his top drawer for
paper clips. He has books all over his office, beautiful
hard-bound books lined in neat rows in wooden bookcases.
The room smells of pipe smoke, a cherry blend, I think, and
he hangs his herringbone jacket with the suede patches on
the sleeves on the coat rack by the door. Did I tell you

he wasn't married? Ever since I found that out I have been

125

in heaven. And I have more good news. I can sit out of
swimming now for something more than post nasal drip!! And
as if the two hpd something miraculously to do with the
other, I can now completely fill an A cup, Teen Queen, sans
fiberfill. I cut down on my jogging, drank cranberry
juice, buried a tampon in my father's vegetable garden
under two feet of snow (that was my Aunt Idah's idea, she's
Polish and they do those kind of things), and I did
isometrics for my breasts and VOILA! Dickie Butts is even
laying off in French now. He's quit the steam roller
routine and modified his peas on a breadboard (he's upped
it to two prunes), and best of all, Rodney Allan Forbes let
me read some of his original love sonnets. I think the
tenth grade is turning out to be the best year of my life!

A-Cupped and thrilled,

The Future Mrs. Forbes III

May 18, 1981
Dear Claudia Michelle,

We gave Louisa Afficionado a baby shower in the
bathroom before first hour yesterday. She got four teddy
bears and a box of Huggies Disposables. She's moving with
her about to be future husband, Nickie Rocco, a serviceman,
to Antler, Oklahoma. She's going to live in a trailer with
3 Hoover portable washer and cable TV. Louisa said she

could have stopped herself from getting pregnant, on

126

account of she knows all about those things, but she was
bored with school and wanted a baby to love and to love her
back. She said Nickie Rocco is okay, even if he does slick
his ducktail with Vitalis and carry a pearl handled knife
when he's out of uniform. Of course, I'm in shock, and
gave up my French Kiss lessons on the spot, and I'm going
to take my time to consider all of Louisa's previous
advice. I don't want to end up in Antler, Oklahoma in a
mobile home, and I don't want all the boys whispering that
I squish when I walk, like they do about Louisa, and I
don't want to car date with older boys with slick hair and
slick grins who treat my body like a slab of stewing beef.
And I want to listen to my mother who says my body will
catch up with my breasts, like hers did for her, and I
don't want to go to bed at night dreaming of pounding and
binding and slicing my breasts in my twilight sleep.

Of course, I think your Rodney Allan Forbes III sounds
wonderful, but he ip an older man, and I'd hate to see you
in Antler, Oklahoma talking babies and trading venison
recipes with Louisa Afficionado.

Yours forever,

Frankie Di

June 8, 1981
Dear Franchesca,
I was never going to write another letter again. I

just want to hide myself in my room and never see or hear

127

from anyone, but I figured I owed you an explanation. I am
mortified. Crushed. Grossed out. I want to die, or at
least be a nun. Everything around me looks grey and dirty,
and it shouldn't; school is almost over, and it is warm and
bright outside. My Rodney Allan Forbes, my Mr. Tweed, my
Robert Browning is like all the rest. He's like that Larry
Pinnazzo, or worse yet, Dickie Butts, but I would say in
the final analysis, he's much like that Teddy Klender
fellow that made you lose your shoe. And you know, if you
get up real close and get a good look into his mouth, his
teeth aren't so white. They're wearing little yellow
cardigan sweaters, each and every one of them, and his
breath is horrible, at first smelling like a strong flower,
but underneath, there's a current of ugliness, a smell as
yellow as his sweatered teeth. I bet you're wondering how
I got an A-number—l close-up view of Mr. Wonderful's mouth.
First of all, if I tell you, you've got to promise not to
breathe a word of this to a living soul, because if my
mother finds out, she'll ship me Off to a Bible camp in
Plainfield. Well, last week, I was in his office after
school, stapling and paper clipping and straightening the
papers on his desk, just like I usually do. Mr. Forbes
walked in and stood in the corner, leaning against a
bookcase, staring at me. I noticed he had closed the door,
something he had never done before. The stapler jammed.

He grinned at me, and at that point his teeth still looked

quite lovely and white. "Did I tell you what a wonderful

128
job you've done all year, Claudia?" he asked, then he moved
towards me and stood behind my chair. "I really appreciate

" he continued. The coarse fabric of his tweed jacket

it,
grazed the back of my neck and it started to itch, I wanted
to scratch it, but I was afraid to move, so I kept fumbling
with the jammed stapler. He pulled me up from my seat with
his big hands and turned me around and that was when I got
a good look at those teeth, and smelled the stale, ugly
breath. And then he was pressing himself against me, and I
could feel it, I mean ii, and it was like he was carrying a
rock in his pants, and all I could think of was it must
have been long and a purplish pink, like in those lab
transparencies we have in Biology I. I could have used
some of your mother's karate instructions at that point,
but I couldn't think. And then he kissed me, a wet, tongue
kiss that made me want to vomit right there. I just
ducked, and crawled out from his grasp and ran like hell to
the bathroom where I wiped the wet kiss from my lips with
some brown paper towels, and washed out my mouth with the
warm faucet water, and I locked myself in a stall, and just
cried. I waited till everyone had left the school, and
went home, hoping my mother wouldn't guess what had
happened, hoping there wasn't a rash on my neck from the
tweed, or some telltale sign on my lips. I didn't eat
dinner, just went to my room, and I haven't felt like doing
much since. I sit in the back row of his class now, and I

rarely look at him, I just sit, barely listening, looking

129
out the window at the gray and dirty parking lot, praying

that the term will be over. Did I say the tenth grade was
the best year of my life? Just sign me
Disillusioned in Des Moines,

Claudia Michelle

June 12, 1981
Dear Claudia Michelle,

Well, you can entitle this letter: YOUR GOD HAD CLAY
FEET. Ms. Haskell, my English teacher, explained that to
mean, we shouldn't set anyone up as a god, because they'll
only disappoint you. I personally don't think Rodney Allan
Forbes III should get away with this, on account of
according to some extensive research on my part, he is
guilty of fourth degree sexual misconduct to a female
minor. I personally think he should be lined up and shot
right there in his office. If I could tell my mother,
she'd probably call your school board and tell them to all
go F____ off and die! for hiring him in the first place.
But in order to protect his job, he'd do what Larry Pinnazo
did, he'll say you "lured" him into the office, you shut
the door, and that you've been bothering him all term. In
court, he'll bring up the Jungle Coral lipstick, the
textured pantyhose, maybe even the fiberfill, and when he
got on the stand, under oath, he'll say you, yourself,
pressed against him, and grabbed the rock in his pants.

I've seen all of this before on made-for-TV movies. By the

130

time the hearing was over, the boys would be
squish when you walk and Rodney Allan Forbes
promoted to Vice-principal (I accentuate the

have to move away, or your mother would have

saying you
III would be
VICE). You'd

to send you to

Bible Camp for deprogramming. My advice is to go into your

mother's laundry room when no one is home, lock the door,

open the washing machine and make sure it's empty so you

have a real good echo, then SCREAM! SCREAM that primal

scream my mother says is so therapeutic, and

let that echo

fill your head. Perhaps it can wipe out the memory of Mr.

Forbes and the yellow, wet kiss. I tried it

last week

after Larry Pinnazo called me FranCHESTA, and it worked!

Here's to the eleventh grade,

Franchesca DiGregorio

THE REST OF HER LIFE

Dear Valerie,

I turned thirty today. I stripped myself naked in
front of the bedroom mirror and stared at my body. DO you
remember those upright breasts tests we used back at the
dorm, the ones I always used to fail? You know the one
from Seventeen Magazine, where you had these two pencils
and if you could secure them underneath your bosom you were
destined to a life of saggy breasts and underwire bras?
You and Margaret put the pencils underneath your perky
chests and they dropped to the floor. I remember both of
you breathing a sigh of relief. Of course, when it came my
turn, I not only held up the two pencils, but your snack
banana, and Margaret's copy of Portrait of An Artist As A
Young Man. You both laughed, in fact, you became
hysterical. I knew I was doomed. A vision of my
grandmother flashed before me, standing next to her white
enamel stove in one of those Molly Goldberg housedresses,
sipping from a wooden spoon, with her supple bosom hanging
firmly at her waist. Well, that vision came true today,
and now at thirty years old I've graduated from pencils,
bananas, and slim novels. I think I could take on Websters
Complete Unabridged Dictionary without blinking an eye! To
make matters worse, I edged closer to the mirror and saw

several off-white stretch marks etched on my middrift along

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with that deep pink Caesarian incision that threaded a
highway across my abdomen. The stretchmarks and scars were
like ancient battle wounds embedded in the very fabric of
my being. I just stood there turning from side to side
analyzing my misshapen profile. I also noticed these
spongey fat globules which had invaded my arms and upper
thighs. I pivoted, they jiggled and sent silent waves over
my skin. I don't know how they got there. Were they
secret night invaders that took up residence while I was
sleeping unaware, only to emerge triumphantly on my
thirtieth birthday, trembling sadistically at every one of
my appraised movements? Val, do you have grey hair yet?

My doctor says it's stress. Stress will give you grey hair
and those deep blue halfmoons that settle below your eyes.
We never thought of having grey hair when we were

young, did we? Weren't we both fifteen when we met? You
were with that guy Ricky, whose face was all smile and
freckles, and he had his arms folded around you. I can
remember you sitting under that blue pine in the arbor,
your hair hanging loose to your waist, your slender fingers
polishing your guitar with rose oil. You sang those
mournful Welsh ballads about long lost loves, rakes and
ramblers, fair maidens. Your voice was so clear, so sweet,
so full of purpose. I had to sit down and listen. I loved
"The Wagoner's Lad", you know the one by Joan Baez used to
sing acapela:

Hard is the fortune of all womankind,
She's always controlled,

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She's always confined,

Controlled by her parents,

Until she's a wife

A slave to her husband,

The rest of her life....

We became fast friends after that, sharing in those
big dreams that fifteen year olds are prone to, you the
dynamic folk singer turned lawyer, I the serious novelist

who on her first try writes the Great American Novel and

ends up on the cover to Time Magazine. We did have high

 

standards, though. You would only sing Welsh and Celtic
ballads and I would refuse to sell the movie rights to my
novel because they would probably give the male lead to
Troy Donahue.

We did digress from the totally serious, didn't we?
Remember you decided to do my nails for the prom. You
didn't care that they were ravaged and bitten and my
hangnails were red and swollen. You decided every inch of
me was going to be perfect. We went to Cunningham's and
spent a good hour selecting a respectable pink lacquer and
you earnestly set about to do my nails in the most careful
manner. I remember we were in your mother's bedroom,
filled with lace and the scent of violet, and we kept
laughing and laughing and you kept smearing the thick goo
all over your mother's vanity. You kept missing my nails.
Suddenly you stared me right in the eye and said to me in
your perfect rich bitch falsetto: "My deah, are you
familiar with the celebrated list "HOW TO GET A BOY AND

KEEP HIM"? "At the top of the list," you began, "is the

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most important rule known to any modern woman:"

1. BE MYSTERIOUS—-Keep him guessing, never let him
know what you're thinking, don't lay all your cards out on
the table, be aloof yet alluring.

(I personally thought that was a little like being
constipated all the time).

2. DON'T MAKE WAVES--Keep everything on an even keel.
I loved that one, and it was the hardest for me to control,
I suppose. I was always mouthing Off and getting into some
kind of trouble at school. Remember when I yelled at old
man Weber in 108 English for teaching out of the Cliff
Notes for Moby Dick? He hadn't even read the fucking book,
and he'd say things like "Let's see, on page four of the
helping guide it says Moby Dick chronicles the classic

struggle between good and evil,’ and then he'd look up and
blow his nose. After a few days of this, I snarled at

him, "You're really insulting our intelligence by trying to
teach a book you've never read." And that old fart kicked
me out for three days. My mom was mortified. She told me,
"Don't rock the boat, don't make waves, keep your mouth
shut." Applying the "Don't Make Waves" principle had much
greater implications when it came to male-female
relationships. If he wants to see a Charleton Heston
movie, and you're tired of religious epics, you say
nothing. Even if you'd rather see "Splendor in the Grass"

and watch Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty heat up the

screen, you've got to settle for "Ben Hur", even though

135
you've seen it three times and you know all about the

leper colony and the chariot race.

All right, can you remember what number three was? We
were laughing so hard by this time you had nail polish all
over your upper lip and you tried to wipe it off with your
sleeve.

3. BE FEMININE--Drag out that old mystique, dust it
off, be gracious, ever so alluring, talk in a soft sultry
voice and by all means...OOZE.........

Ooze. I love it. Val, do you know I even practiced a
lisp at home to use on my dates to appear more helpless,
sweet? God, when I think back, I get embarrassed just
thinking of myself lisping all over that guy at the dance.
He was taller, I recall, and I looked at him and lisped
that I wanted some punch, then lisped that I wanted to
dance, and then lisped that I had to go to the bathroom.
It was disgusting. But you know, I can't for the life of
me remember number four? I've tried to remember, but I
can't. I really can't.

Did I ever tell you you did a shit job on my nails?
Ah, the truth comes out. But you were superb at the prom.
I mean, your hair wasn't ratted in that obligatory "flip"
and you wore that black silk gown with the spaghetti
straps. Lillian Van Dusen, you know, the one we called
"Miss Wasp", said she had never heard of any color other
than pink and aquamarine ever being worn at the prom. You

were dazzling though, even if nobody would speak to you at

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the punchbowl. It was those high top basketball sneakers

you were wearing, God, what a scream when you lifted your
dress, of course by that time, your date Chuck had done a
wheelie on his skateboard into the Doctor Zhivago Ice
Palace.

There I was in my pale pink organza with my pale pink
Capezio pumps, and a contrasting pink satin evening bag,
hiding my nails and smiling. God, I might have even been
into my lisp at that point, I don't remember, and I hated
the boy I was out with. His name was David and he kissed
wet and had a brown smile, and was two inches shorter than
me before I ratted my hair. And that little shit had the
nerve to stick his disgusting raw hand down the front of my
dress and gave me what he termed a "love tweek". I think
he expected me to cream my pale pink one hundred percent
nylon panties that I had bought expecially for the
occasion. I just stared at his brown smile and grinned.
Where were you when I needed you? You were probably
helping Chuck disentangle himself from the styrofoam
icicles, I guess. I know what you would have said to the
"phantom tweeker": "Touch me there again, and you're dead
man."

I don't remember how I got through that evening or why
I even went. My mother told me every girl should have a
prom memory, and so when David asked me, I guess I was
doing it out of respect for some future prom memory or

something. So I went with David with the scrubbed pimples

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and Vitalis residue, and let his greasy hand slide under my
dress during the ride home. My mother writes me now and
says this David guy, David Holmes, owns two furniture
stores and a car wash and has a big home in Grosse Pointe
and still isn't married. She's implying, "See, see what
you could have had!" Of course, I never told her he made
me vomit when I got home. I entered the safety of the
bathroom, sank to the porcelain bowl, letting my pink
organza smudge against the cold bathroom tiles. I pulled
the seat, hung my head, and vomited a deep dark bile.

My mother was visiting last weekend. She hardly ever
comes up. She claims she can't stand the way I keep house,
and it makes her nervous to come. I had to go out on an
errand Saturday (I didn't want to be caught without food in
my refrigerator before she came. She always claims I don't
feed Gretchen or Timmy right.) When I arrived home, laden
with groceries and a bouquet of Chrysanthemums, I entered
my kitchen which had been properly scrubbed with a
disinfectant the night before. There, out from beneath the
refrigerator door peeked two tiny slippered feet which
could have only been my mother's, because she's the only
person I know whose pastel slippers look just like
hamsters. I heard a curious scraping sound and asked my
mother what she was doing, and she announced she had seen
something moving in my refrigerator. She was convinced
there was something alive and mobile in my meat keeper. I

assured her there was nothing remotely alive in the meat

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keeper, and the only thing left in there of a suspicious
nature was a small bowl of prune yogurt with a scrummy film
over the top. Then she started in on me on how was I ever
going to keep my husband with my place being a mess all the
time. You've got to remember I had spent most of the night
cleaning. I had dusted everything, washed the kid's hair,
cleaned the junk drawer and arranged my bath towels in nice
little rows, and this woman finds a stray piece of
pepperoni, long forgotten, shriveled into a ragged stringy
mass that was hidden between the bologna and the breakfast
sausage. I wanted to show her the rejuvenated junk drawer,
or the neat rows of color coordinated towels, or the dusted
tops of my tiffany lamps, but I just put away the groceries
and arranged the chrysanthemums and smiled and listened to
her stories about her migraines and her water retention.
She even had the nerve to feed my dog. She said he looked
underfed and malnourished, even ravenous. Val, have you
ever known a cocker spaniel to look ravenous?

She bought Gretchen a pair of those Gloria Vanderbilt
designer jeans and gave Timmy a Tonka steam shovel, and got
Roger a large can of unbroken cashews, and she gave me a
stack of new washcloths and a quart of Murphy's Oil Soap,
no shit. Of course Roger and her get along so
delightfully, it's as if I'm not around. He's always
mentioning my failings, like his socks are never properly

matched, there are mouse droppings on top of the

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refrigerator, and I let my plants die. She sits there and
sucks it all in, and makes these pathetic clucking noises,
and oozes sympathy and laughs heartily at his stale joke on
how there should be a housekeeping school for women with
masters degrees.

I get very nervous when my mother comes here. Things
become out of focus, I get tense, I can't explain it
really. I feel a panic, my head reels, I become
compulsive. Gretchen had told my mother I made her buy
J.C. Penney jeans and wouldn't let her have any jeans with
a name engraved in leather on the rear pocket. My mother
glared at me and then pulled out these Vanderbilt jeans
with the embroidered swan and I swear Gretchen swooned.
She glanced at me with a triumphant smirk and ran quickly
to her room to try them on. Timmy, as if on cue, marched
up to his grandmother and gratefully accepted his Tonka
steam shovel and wandered off into a corner somewhere
muttering that mommy had also refused to purchase this
particular toy because it was too expensive. Roger, of
course, had to get a gibe in that he never buys expensive
cashews because I'd probably eat them all or let the kids
eat them, and my mother told him to hide the can.

That night when the house was quiet, and Roger had
gone to a meeting, and mother was sleeping soundly in the
guest bedroom, I sat alone in the living room sucking in
the stale, grey air. I could feel my mother's presence and

her sense of disapproval. Her lack of faith filled my

140
nostrils like a thick, dense fog, and all I could feel was
a small deep spot at the center of my soul. I grew sick and
queasy. I traveled up to Roger's and my bedroom and found
the can of cashews, unhidden, on top of the bureau. I
swallowed each one whole, like a bitter pill.

Roger left me once for a slim blonde in his office
named Bambi. Bambi, do you believe that name? I swear she
made it up. Anyway, she was a size three, now nobody is a
size three, but she was, and before she ran off with Roger,
she told me she had to buy all her clothes at a pre-teen
shop. She was a friend of mine, or at least she weasled
her way into my confidence. Once I had her and her
husband, Walt, over for lasagne, and Roger told me after
the whole affair was over that she had her foot on his
zipper all during dinner. My God, a guest in my house was
giving my husband a foot job while I was serving up baked
lasagne. First of all, I don't see how she could have
managed it. I tried it the other night and knocked over
the table. Anyway, he lived with her for awhile, and all
she liked to do was go shopping and watch television. She
hated to cook and had four different brands of mascara.
Roger found out she dyed her hair and didn't throw away her
dental floss.

I was at home with Gretchen and Timmy then, they were
so little then and really didn't know what was going on.

It was a difficult time for me. I spent a lot of time

huddled in a corner, almost catatonic, waiting for Roger to

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return. I would beg him and make a fool of myself
everytime he came over to see the children. Sometimes I
would deliberately look destitute, or suicidal, or
schizophrenic, whatever I thought would work to win him
back. He often would find me in that corner,
uncommunicative, forgetting to feed the children, and
unable to eat or urinate. Other times I would throw
tantrums and rage and demand that he give her up, not
knowing he had done just that, months before. Finally, I
said nothing when he came, preferring to stay in my bedroom
until he left. I must have pushed all this inside of me
once again, because I began to feel nothing or want
nothing.

Roger came home about six months after he left. He
just walked into the house, brought his suitcase upstairs
and went to bed. He got up the next morning and ambled
down for his usual breakfast of sausage and eggs and never
said a word about it. We have never spoken about it since.
All I know is that I never want to feel that bad and that
numb again.

Margaret, dear Maggie, left her husband. You know,
the guy who drank a lot and always turned off the Joni
Mitchell records. You predicted she would leave him.
Well, one night he got to drinking, and becoming vulgar,
and he nailed her in the bathroom. She just stayed that
way for seventy-two hours. The fucker got up the next

morning, got dressed, and went to work, and he just left

142

her there. She, of course, became violent and pounded the
door, and shredded the toilet paper, and screamed for two
solid days and then he remembered to let her out. Margaret
has a lot of class, she just walked calmly out of the
bathroom, picked up her cat Felicity, and walked away from
the house. She ended up here after driving all night
without a litter box. We had a long talk. She didn't stay
long because Roger can't stand her. He says she makes him
nervous. He says she always has an opinion about
everything. Remember the time in college he actually
forbade me to see her? He said she was a bad influence on
me. I guess I had more guts back then because I told him
to kiss off, which infuriated him. I didn't see him for
two weeks. I think he took me more seriously back then,
because he relented and never spoke of it again. I'm so
glad she's finished with Clayton. She got the cat and the
orange Corvette and the English clock. He got the house,
the stereo and the good stainless. All these years and she
never said a word. Do you know he dumped pancake batter on
her head and sent her to the hospital with four broken
ribs? All this was going on for years and she never said a
word. She said she was carrying it around with her like a
corpse chained to her heart.

Valerie, the doctor says I am under a lot of stress,
and I've really got to relax. I can't sleep at night.
Roger says I need a job, to keep me busy, you know, but I

can't seem to summon the energy to get dressed and leave

143

the house. I'm not sure I'd find anything I really like,
I've been out of it for so long. So I hang around the
house and stand naked in front of mirrors staring at my
misspent body, and lament over silver hairs and my ethnic
breasts. I can't seem to close my eyes at night. The
pills don't seem to work. I lay awake at night staring at
the darkness, letting it surround me, letting it fill me.
I can't seem to get things moving or together. Last
night Roger came home and the dinner wasn't even on, and
the table not set, and he came up to ask me why the chops
weren't frying in the pan. I cracked what I thought was a
clever bit of repartee and said: "I don't know. Why don't
you ask them?" That pudgy round face of his exploded into
several shades of red, and I could see that line of
perspiration bead above his upper lip. He looked just like
Richard Nixon when he gave his "I am not a crook" speech.
Anyway, he announced quite loudly: "I'm not going to eat
any of this shit!!" And that is when he flung the chop.
He picked it up deliberately with his hand and aimed the
pinkish meat at my sternum. The porkchop smashed against
my white Quiana blouse and bled into what resembled a map
of equatorial Africa. The blood of the meat trickled into
my bra, staining my hidden flesh. From that dark lost
place within me I felt stirrings, and as these feelings
rose, my abdomen and my chest began to quiver. The hidden
energy reached my throat and I howled. I surprised even

myself. I felt woozy and out of control. I reached for

144

this open jar of olives sitting next to the stove, and
poured them all over his three piece suit. I can remember
Gretchen and Timmy giggling somewhere out of my vision and
I can remember the look of supreme horror on Roger's face.
He yelled that I was sick and crazy and fled the room. He
threw the damn porkchop first, for God's sake. Well, he
hasn't spoken to me at all today. I got up this morning
and put on his coffee and his usual sausage and eggs and he
walked right by me and out the door. He left his favorite
suit crumpled in a pitiful mass next to our bed. It
smelled of Olive juice and pimentoes. I went to the window
and opened it wide letting the cool October wind enter.
Since he has left, I have been cleaning like crazy and
getting everything in order. I planned a perfect dinner.

I don't want anything to set him off tonight. So,I've
cautioned the kids to be quiet when their dad gets home,
and they've got to pick up their messes and not fight with
each other.

My head really aches now, and Roger still hasn't come
home yet. The pot roast is overcooked and stringy by now,
and the potatoes have crumbled into a pasty mush. The kids
were hungry, so I gave them some sugared cereal and put
them to bed. I don't have the energy to check the pot
roast any more. I'm still here in my bathrobe and my hair
needs washing. Where is Roger anyway? I'm all out of my

prescription, and I need it, but I'm afraid if I leave the

145

house, and Roger comes home and finds me not here, he'll be
upset with me. He's punishing me, I know he is, because of
the olives, because I got mad and directed my anger at him.
I wasn't thinking straight, I'll expalin that to him. He's
got to come home, it's my birthday today. I should be
happy on my birthday.

Valerie, this is the fifth letter I've written you and
you never write me back. Why don't you ever respond to my
letters anymore? I know you're a big lawyer now, and
you're probably busy, but it's my birthday today and I
deserve a letter. Don't 1?

Your friend,

Lorrie

A WAY WITH WORDS

We did not know it then but it was the year our
president would die; it was the year an undeclared war was
being fought somewhere in Southeast Asia; and it was the
year a young American poet living in England gassed
herself; but it seemed all Vivi Zapata and I could think
about was our fetal pig in fifth hour biology. We had

christened him Harvey. He was all pink and doughy and

silent and he smelled ...like a little sea pickle,‘ Vivi
said. The first week we were assigned his reproductive
organs, and we placed his scrotum underneath our
microscope, picking at it gently with a pair of tweezers,
looking for what Mrs. Cooch would call the "vas deferens"
or the "vast difference" as Vivi would say. She was always
so smart, had a way with words. We had to dissect it
slowly, pick it apart, smooth it on a clean lab slide,
diagram it with a No#2 Ticonderoga, all the while looking
in earnest for the tiny sac that was supposed to be some
kind of aphrodisiac. And when we thought we had found it,
I squeezed it, crushed it, and dabbed it behind my ears
away from Cooch's disagreeable gaze; and I prayed that
somehow it would work, that Billy Clyssdale or Richard
Kirby would suddenly notice me, that my pug nose would

elongate, my tight ethnic curls would relax into a smooth

pageboy, and that my large breasts, stuffed into a pointy

146

147
bra I bought at Kresge's, would suddenly become smaller,
rounder, like iced cupcakes.

Vivi was the one who knew things, like about
aphrodisiacs and stuff. She talked in legendary terms
about the ambergris of sperm whales that washed up in
Molucca with the high tides; about the perfectly nice high
school student who did "IT" with the gear shift of her

' into her

parents' car after some guy had put "Spanish Fly'
Nehi Grape; about, of course, the scrotum of young pigs,
how it could drive boys wild, how it could someday be
marketed in musky bottles named Toujours Amour.

She had no use for aphrodisiacs herself. Boys just
flocked to her. She had that sleek blond pageboy which she
didn't have to iron like I did with a Steam 'n' Press,
small blue eyes, skin like warm cream, and breasts that
didn't announce her arrival like the heavy, flopping wings
of an ancient bird. She dated the handsome boys in their
madras shirts and white chinos, the boys that were all
teeth and grins named Kirk and Derrick. I had occasional
dates, with boys I felt I had to say yes to, tough boys,
like Dominic Casella or Frankie Benevento whose reputations
included lighting tostada farts underneath the 15 Mile
viaduct with their fathers' butane torches. Or with guys
like Chester Nordmann, who would pick his scalp at the
movies and let the sloughings fall like nuclear winter into

the buttered popcorn.

But Vivi Zapata never had to worry about finding

148

something unspeakable in her popcorn. People just seemed
to behave around her. I felt she was imbued with a power,
a knowledge, a light that could make everything right,
everything golden, everything in the tenth grade bearable.
Her name wasn't Vivi Zapata at all, actually. It was
really Vivian Zonderpaat, and I never for the life of me
could get it right. I remembered going to the drive-in on
my second date with "Pick It and Flick It" Nordmann, and
seeing this movie where Marlon Brando is some kind of hero
and he gets shot, and he's crawling on the ground with one
arm outstretched towards the sun, and the people in
sombreros are yelling "Viva Zapata!" and I liked that, so
it stuck.

We were in our second week with Harvey when we
dissected his medulla oblongata. I was cutting, Vivi was
drawing. That was her job. She was always much neater
than me.

"What do you want to be, Vivian?" I asked, accidently
severing some uncharted vessel that would cost us five
points.

"What do you mean?" she asked. She was far away,
printing in perfect script between two fixed lines the word
"MEDULLA".

"When you grow up. When you're out of here." I
glanced sideways at her, looking carefully at her slender
fingers silking across the page.

"A poet,‘ she said, quietly. I could barely hear her.

149

"Of course, my Mom thinks that's a bad idea. She says
there aren't any real female poets."

"There is no frigate like a book," I said out loud,
not knowing why I said it. I could just have easily said,
"I heard a fly buzz when I died." Those were the only two
lines I knew by a female poet.

"And you know what happened to her,‘ said Vivi, not
missing a cue. "She locked herself in a room, wore white,
and never got married." She was printing "OBLONGATA" now,
pressing the slivered tip of the pencil onto the white

paper. "So maybe I'll be a stewardeSS,n

she said,
finishing.

We were into the aortic valve on the third day of the
third week when Vivi brought me a few of her poems. They
were written in tiny script at if a little animal with
delicate claws had etched them into paper. Vivi had
decorated the ivory paper with hand painted violets, which
bloomed purple on the edges, full and rich like regal
trumpets.

She had several poems about the crabapple tree in her
backyard that flowered hot and pink, and a poem about a
purple finch with a broken wing, and a poem about Harvey
and how she thought it was unfair that he had to die before
he was born. She said he was like one of those dead babies
in the jars that Mrs. Cooch kept in her antique cabinet.

She and I would often go up and look at the jars of

fetuses, all different sizes, some with thumbs in their

150

mouths, others with arms outstretched like robbers'
victims, all the color of phlegm. We would whisper to them
and say hello and give them all names like Susie and Mary
and Esther.

"They're good poems, Vivian,"

I said, "only they
should be written bigger. They seem to want to shout right
off the page."

"You like them?" she asked.

"I do. You really ought to show them to someone."

"You're someone, Cassie."

There was a silence. I guess I had to take that in.

"Oh, I mean a 'someone', like a teacher, or somebody
like that," I said.

"Oh," she paused. "Do you really think so?"

So we both decided she should show them to her English
teacher, a Mr. Theodore Croydon, or "Ted", as we referred
to him because we were all in love with him at the time.

He was just one of those men who would just have to smile
or lean or tilt his head and we'd be having hernias or
creaming our jeans or something. He wore suede patches on
his tweeds, held a sculpted pipe between his perfectly
white teeth, and smoothed his blonde hair back with his
open palm the way James Dean did in "Giant." He had some
poems published himself and he was always talking about the
power of imagery in contemporary poetry and the "truth of
the human heart."

Vivi made me promise to walk her to his classroom

151
after school. I loved walking down the hall with her.

Everyone would say "Hi" and the boys would beam at her, and
say things like "Any time, Vivian, day or night," and she'd
smile and roll her eyes and say "Why do they bother?" I
said goodbye to Vivi at Croydon's door. She had her poems
stacked in her hands and she was smiling.

Vivi didn't come to biology the next day. In fact,
she didn't come back the rest of the term. I had to finish
all the work on Harvey myself, only it wasn't as much fun.
It seems that Mr. Croydon had liked Vivi's poems. So much
in fact that he shut the door, grabbed her, and kissed his
tongue into her mouth. He told her to keep it "just our
little secret" and she tried to only she got sick, took to
her bed, and finally told her mother. Croydon denied the
whole thing of course, saying she was just another silly
girl with a silly crush. I kept what was left of Harvey
for her, bringing him home, wrapping him in foil, sticking
him in the back of the refrigerator with the pitted olives,
till my mom found him and made me throw him out. I wanted
to send Vivi a bouquet of violets, or call her, but she was
going to the Catholic school by then and she probably
already made new friends. I wanted to tell her about the
secret name I had for her, how she was my heroine, how we
both got an A on Harvey, and how I finally turned down
Chester Nordmann for a date, on account of I decided I'd
rather be alone on a Saturday night than risk finding

another Crackerjack surprise in the Jujubes.

152

It was right after Kennedy died that I saw Vivi again.
She was walking on Adams Street carrying her school books,
her head swung low against the November wind. I was in the
eleventh grade by then, and I was in Mrs. Cooch's advanced
biology looking for the vas deferens in my laboratory cat I
christened Teddy. Teddy came packed in what smelled like
acid from the Humane Society and had retractable claws and
a retractable penis the color of snot. I didn't have a lab
partner again because Zefferelli was the odd number at the
end of the alphabet, so I took great care in doing
everything myself, slicing fine lines in his unyielding
flesh, penciling the meticulous lab drawings on white
paper. I wanted to tell Vivi about how I named the cat
after Croyden, how I wanted to work for weeks on it taking
my time, trying to find the "vast difference." I wanted to
tell her too about what Miss Prentiss, my English teacher,
had told us about Sylvia Plath, who wanted to be a poet
too, who stuck her head in an oven while her children slept
nearby. But the sun wasn't shining that day, and Vivi was
looking down at her black shoes the Catholic school made
her wear, and I knew she was feeling bad, on account of
Kennedy was our hero and all. I wondered then if she
carried her poems with her anymore, or if they lay silent
somewhere in some desk drawer, the ovals folded into
half-moons, the purple violets faded. I wondered that all
the way home. It was that night I feel I became a writer

for the very first time. I took one of my lab pencils and

153
began to write. I wrote poems at first to Vivi, then to

President Kennedy, then to Sylvia Plath, then to myself.
On the poems to myself, I drew huge gardenias, their

crimson petals splayed open, inviting light to enter. I
felt strangely energized, powerful, as if I could say or
feel or be anything. And it was then I knew I had a way

with words.

C I ‘

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