Alice addresses me in her little notes and cards as “Aunt” Fraidy, and in that aunt-ish salutation I read proprietorial claims.
Also benevolent respect. Also love. The last time I saw her was at little Judy’s christening in Ottawa — that’s one more odd bump on Alice’s psyche: she’s an agnostic who nevertheless christens her children; she actually brings them across the Atlantic Ocean to be anointed by pure and holy Canadian water in the presence of pure and impure family and friends. Ceremony, she says, is society’s cement; ceremony paints large our sketchiest impulses; ceremony forms the seal between the cerebrum and cerebellum. Alice has a theory about every bush and button and human gesture, sometimes several theories.
After Judy’s ecclesiastical sprinkling in that wonderful Ottawa garden, Alice and I stood with our glasses of bubbly and had a good jabber about The Feminine Mystique. I could tell she was surprised I’d read it. Like many young people she believes we elderly types have long since shut down our valves and given way to flat acquiescence about the future. Her eyes widened when I began taking issue with Betty Friedan’s exaltation of work as salvation. “We are our work!” Alice cried. “Work and self cannot be separated.”
Oh, dear. I opened my mouth to protest.
“Look at my mother,” Alice interrupted, lowering her voice, but not quite low enough, and gesturing toward the blooming lilac where Daze was standing in a circle of friends, her body widened out now to a powerful size eighteen, little Judy nestled in the crook of her arm. “Before my mother became a newspaper columnist she had no sense of self-worth whatsoever. Whatsoever! Really, when you think about it, she functioned like a kind of slave in our society. She was unpaid. Undervalued. She was nobody. Now look at her. She’s become”—here Alice groped for words, waving her hand toward the nodding lilacs—”she’s become, you know, like a real person.”
Work is work, I wanted to tell Alice, and don’t I know it. Work’s not just sitting in the corners of shadowy libraries and producing beautiful little monographs every couple of years. It’s the alarm clock going off on winter mornings when it’s dark and cold and you’ve forgotten to iron the green blouse that goes with the gray suit and the car’s not working right and you can’t afford to get it fixed this month because it’s been four years since the Official Board of the Monroe County Art Gallery thought of increasing your salary or even dropping you a word of praise, and on top of that there are whole mornings when no one comes into the gallery at all or if they do they stand around griping about the exhibitions and giggle and smirk at the abstracts, letting you know their kindergarten darlings could do just as well with a pot of fingerpaint, and furthermore (hem, hem) it’s taxpayers who support this kind of thing when what people really like, only they’re too damned intimidated to say so, is a nice landscape, fields and sky and a horizon line that looks like a horizon line for God’s sake. And what else?
Well, there are meetings with the board and the books to balance and the publicity that somehow always misfires and the fund drives that peter out and the misplaced grant applications and the catalogues coming back late from the printers, and the crazies who phone at all hours and beg you to take just one little peek at their portfolio, you owe it, you owe them, who the hell are you anyway but a glorified clerk.
And then — lately anyway, since Mel left — it’s home to a glass of bourbon and a scrambled egg, or maybe stopping by at the library to see what new they’ve got in, and going to bed early because you’ve got a splitting headache and sometimes just before closing your eyes you think about your old pal Daze up there in Canada with her kids and her days to herself, how she bustles along at her own speed, spreading the gospel of Good Housekeeping far and wide and getting her rewards through the accomplishments of others who will certainly crown her with laurels and tell her how grateful they are, in retrospect, that she was a real mother, that she wasn’t out working her tail off for the holy dollar like her old pal, Fraidy Hoyt of Bloomington, Indiana.
Well, once in a while a family has to surrender itself to an outsider’s account. A family can get buried in its own fairy dust, and this leads straight, in my opinion, to the unpacking of lies and fictions from its piddly shared scraps of inbred history. With the Fletts, for instance, the work ethic has always been writ large.
Barker and his hybrid grains. Alice and her Russians. Warren and his music. Joanie and her — whatever the hell it is she does down there in New Mexico — and so it’s only natural that they should attribute Daze’s breakdown to the loss of her newspaper column. I thought as much myself for the first month or so, but gradually I’ve come to believe that the forfeiting of her “job” was only a trigger that released a terrible yearning she’s been suppressing all her life.
Sex is what I’m referring to, what else?
Not that Daze and I ever discuss sex. Well, not for a long time anyway, not since we were young girls trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the copulative act: how long did it last? How much did it hurt? Were you supposed to talk at the same time you were doing it, whisper little endearments and so on? What did a “climax” feel like and how could you be sure you had it or not, and why did it matter anyway, and was it cheating to pretend you did even if you didn’t? That kind of thing.
Then suddenly it became lèse-majesté to discuss our sexual lives.
I think we both wanted to; each of us, when we got together, made a few clumsy gestures in that direction, but we never managed to find any common footing. There’s too much space between us, too much disproportion, you might say. Our awful imbalance.
Daze with her plodding Barker, that epicene presence — and perhaps, or perhaps not, a brief flutter with an editor at her paper, Jay Dudley his name was, who ended up a regular shit, handing her job over to someone else like a king anointing a new lord — well, that sums up Daze’s erotic experience, about one and a half bean sprouts by my count. And on the other side of the fence, here I sit with my fifty-three lovers, possibly fifty-four. I’ve been on the side of noise, nerve, movement, and thanking my lucky stars too, and raising a toast to my army of fifty-four — that’s how I see them, a small, smartly marching army with the sun shining on their beautiful heads and shoulders.
I’ve kept track. This is possibly a perverse admission, that I possess a little pocket diary in which I’ve made note of dates, initials, geographical reference points and coded particulars, going back to 1927, such as duration, position, repetition, degree of response, and the like.
My “phantom” fifty-fourth lover was encountered just weeks ago on a train to Ottawa, no names exchanged, only a pair of ragged weepy histories. We had both drunk too much bourbon in the club car, the hour was late, and we may or may not have made love before we passed out, the two of us drearily naked on the coarse blanket of my lower berth. I have an impression of a rosy, pleated male belly pushing against me. I have a recollection, like a black-and-white movie, that we were noisy, that we made a spectacle of ourselves. He was gone — thank God — when I opened my eyes in the morning. And my body, my sixty-year-old body (Christ!), was unwilling to report what had happened, other than a soreness “down there” that could have been anything, a dryness that puzzled. A question mark went into the diary instead of the usual data. In that question mark I read the possible end of my erotic life. Something to do with shame, though I won’t yet admit it.
What do women want, Freud asked. The old fool, the charlatan.