“So it’s not a meaningful classification for you?” she says.
“I like it that women like my work. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Do men like your work?” she asks slyly. She’s been going through the back files, she’s seen some of those witch-and-succubus pieces.
“Which men?” I say. “Not everyone likes my work. It’s not because I’m a woman. If they don’t like a man’s work it’s not because he’s a man. They just don’t like it.” I am on dubious ground, and this enrages me. My voice is calm; the coffee seethes within me.
She frowns, diddles with the tape recorder. “Why do you paint all those women then?”
“What should I paint, men?” I say. “I’m a painter. Painters paint women. Rubens painted women, Renoir painted women, Picasso painted women. Everyone paints women. Is there something wrong with painting women?”
“But not like that,” she says.
“Like what?” I say. “Anyway, why should my women be the same as everyone else’s women?” I catch myself picking at my fingers, and stop. In a minute my teeth will be chattering like those of cornered mice. Her voice is getting farther and farther away, I can hardly hear her. But I see her, very clearly: the ribbing on the neck of her sweater, the fine hairs of her cheek, the shine of a button. What I hear is what she isn’t saying. Your clothes are stupid. Your art is crap. Sit up straight and don’t answer back.
“Why do you paint?” she says, and I can hear her again as clear as anything. I hear her exasperation, with me and my refusals.
“Why does anyone do anything?” I say.
Chapter 17
The light fades earlier; on the way home from school we walk through the smoke from burning leaves. It rains, and we have to play inside. We sit on the floor of Grace’s room, being quiet because of Mrs. Smeath’s bad heart, and cut out rolling pins and frying pans and paste them around our paper ladies. But Cordelia makes short work of this game. She knows, instantly it seems, why Grace’s house has so many Eaton’s Catalogues in it. It’s because the Smeaths get their clothes that way, the whole family—order them out of the Eaton’s Catalogue. There in the Girls’ Clothing section are the plaid dresses, the skirts with straps, the winter coats worn by Grace and her sisters, three colors of them, in lumpy, serviceable wool, with hoods: Kelly Green, Royal Blue, Maroon. Cordelia manages to convey that she herself would never wear a coat ordered from the Eaton’s Catalogue. She doesn’t say this out loud though. Like the rest of us, she wants to stay on the good side of Grace. She bypasses the cookware, flips through the pages. She turns to the brassieres, to the elaborately laced and gusseted corsets—foundation garments, they’re called—and draws mustaches on the models, whose flesh looks as if it’s been painted over with a thin coat of beige plaster. She pencils hair in, under their arms, and on their chests between the breasts. She reads out the descriptions, snorting with stifled laughter: “”Delightfully trimmed in dainty lace, with extra support for the mature figure.“ That means big bazooms. Look at this— cup sizes! Like teacups!”
Breasts fascinate Cordelia, and fill her with scorn. Both of her older sisters have them by now. Perdie and Mirrie sit in their room with its twin beds and sprigged-muslin flounces, filing their nails, laughing softly; or they heat brown wax in little pots in the kitchen and take it upstairs to spread on their legs. They look into their mirrors, making sad faces—“I look like Haggis McBaggis! It’s the curse!” Their wastebaskets smell of decaying flowers.
They tell Cordelia there are some things she’s too young to understand, and then they tell these things to her anyway. Cordelia, her voice lowered, her eyes big, passes on the truth: the curse is when blood comes out between your legs. We don’t believe her. She produces evidence: a sanitary pad, filched from Perdie’s wastebasket. On it is a brown crust, like dried gravy. “That’s not blood,” Grace says with disgust, and she’s right, it’s nothing like when you cut your finger. Cordelia is indignant. But she can prove nothing.
I haven’t thought much about grown-up women’s bodies before. But now these bodies are revealed in their true, upsetting light: alien and bizarre, hairy, squashy, monstrous. We hang around outside the room where Perdie and Mirrie are peeling the wax off their legs while they utter yelps of pain, trying to see through the keyhole, giggling: they embarrass us, although we don’t know why. They know they’re being laughed at and come to the door to shoo us away. “Cordelia, why don’t you and your little friends bug off!” They smile a little ominously, as if they know already what is in store for us. “Just wait and see,” they say.
This frightens us. Whatever has happened to them, bulging them, softening them, causing them to walk rather than run, as if there’s some invisible leash around their necks, holding them in check—whatever it is, it may happen to us too. We look surreptitiously at the breasts of women on the street, of our teachers; though not of our mothers, that would be too close for comfort. We examine our legs and underarms for sprouting hairs, our chests for swellings. But nothing is happening: so far we are safe. Cordelia turns to the back pages of the catalogue, where the pictures are in gray and black and there are crutches and trusses and prosthetic devices. “Breast pumps,” she says. “See this? It’s for pumping your titties up bigger, like a bicycle pump.” And we don’t know what to believe. We can’t ask our mothers. It’s hard to imagine them without clothes, to think of them as having bodies at all, under their dresses. There’s a great deal they don’t say. Between us and them is a gulf, an abyss, that goes down and down. It’s filled with wordlessness. They wrap up the garbage in several layers of newspaper and tie it with string, and even so it drips onto the freshly waxed floor. Their clotheslines are strung with underpants, nighties, socks, a display of soiled intimacy, which they have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the gray curdled water. They know about toilet brushes, about toilet seats, about germs. The world is dirty, no matter how much they clean, and we know they will not welcome our grubby little questions. So instead a long whisper runs among us, from child to child, gathering horror. Cordelia says that men have carrots, between their legs. They aren’t really carrots but something worse. They’re covered with hair. Seeds come out the end and get into women’s stomachs and grow into babies, whether you want it or not. Some men have their carrots pierced and rings set into them as if they are ears.
Cordelia’s unclear about how the seeds get out or what they’re like. She says they’re invisible, but I think this can’t be so. If there are seeds at all they must be more like bird seeds, or carrot seeds, long and fine. Also she can’t say how the carrot gets in, to plant the seeds. Belly buttons are the obvious choice, but there would have to be a cut, a tear. The whole story is questionable, and the idea that we ourselves could have been produced by such an act is an outrage. I think of beds, where all of this is supposed to take place: the twin beds at Carol’s house, always so tidy, the elegant canopy bed at Cordelia’s, the dark mahogany-colored bed in Grace’s house, heavily respectable with its crocheted spread and layers of woolen blankets. Such beds are a denial in themselves, a repudiation. I think of Carol’s wry-mouthed mother, of Mrs. Smeath with her hairpinned crown of graying braids. They would purse their lips, draw themselves up in a dignified manner. They would not permit it.