Don't Cry Stories Part 2

Laura lived in a slow, run-down neighborhood, but today there was heavy traffic. She talked to herself as she negotiated the lanes, speeding and slowing in a lulling rhythm. When she talked to her-self, she often argued with an imaginary person. This time, she argued about the news story concerning the president's supposed affair with a twenty-one-year-old intern. "Personally, I don't care," she said. "If it were rape, or if the girl were twelve, I would want him in jail. But if it's consenting adults..." Stopped at the red light, she glanced at the people waiting for a bus. They looked tenacious and stoic as a band of ragged cats, staring alertly down the street or pulled tidily into themselves, cross-legged and holding their handbags as if they were about to lick their paws. "When things are private like that, it's hard to tell what really went on between the two people anyway," she continued. "Sometimes things that look really ugly on the outside look different when you get up close." Or feel different.

She had gone to see her father in the hospital in Tucson. Of the daughters, she was the last to arrive, and by the time she'd gotten there, her sisters were fighting with the doctors about their father's treatment. He was too weak to eat, so they'd stuffed tubes down his nose to feed him something called Vita Plus. "His body doesn't want it." Her sister Donna was talking to the nurse. "It's making him worse." It was true. As soon as Laura looked at her father, she knew he was going to die. His body was shrunken and dried, already half-abandoned; his spirit stared from his eyes as if stunned, and straining to see more of what had stunned it. "I know" said the nurse. "I agree with you. But we have to give it to him. It's policy." "Hi, Daddy," said Laura.

When he answered her, his voice was like a thin sack holding something live. He was about to lose the live thing, but right now he held it, amazed by it, as if he had never known it before. He said, "Good to see you. Didn't know if you'd come."

His words struck her heart. She knelt by the bed. "Of course I came," she said; "I love you."

She paused at a crosswalk; there was a squirrel crossing the street in short, halting runs. She stopped traffic for a minute, waiting for it. A woman sitting on a public bench smiled at her approvingly. In her pointy shoes, her feet were like little hooves. It made sense she was on the squirrel's side.

They brought their father home to be cared for by hospice workers. By that time, he was emaciated and filled with mucus that he could not discharge through his throat or nose. It ran out of his nostrils sometimes, but mostly they heard it, rattling in his lungs. He couldn't eat anything and he didn't talk much. Because he was too fragile to share a bed with their mother, they put him in the guest bedroom, in a big soft bed with a dust ruffle. The sun shining in the window made his skin so transparent that the veins on his face seemed part of his skin. He blinked at the sun like a turtle. They took turns sitting with him. Laura stroked his arm with her fingertips, barely grazing his fragile skin. When she did that, he said, "Thank you, honey" He had not called her that since she was a little girl.

When the hospice workers had to turn him, he got angry; his skin had become so thin that his bones felt sharp, and it hurt him to be moved. "No, leave me alone. I don't care, I don't care." He would frown and even slap at the workers, and, in the fierce knit of his brow and his blank, furious eyes, Laura remembered him as he had been, twenty-five years ago. He'd been standing in the dining room and she was walking by him and he'd said, "What're you doing walking around showing your a.s.s? People'll think you're selling it." She had been wearing flowered pants that were tight in the seat and crotch.

She arrived at the clinic early and got a good place in the parking garage. On the way up to the seventeenth floor, she shared the elevator with Dr. Edwina Ramirez, whom she liked. They had once had a conversation in the break lounge, during which they both revealed that they didn't want to have children. "People act like there's something wrong with you," said Dr. Ramirez. "Don't they know about overpopulation? I mean yeah, there's biology. But there're other ways to be a loving person" She had quickly bent to take her candy bar out of the machine. "You know what I mean?"

Ever since then, Laura had felt good around Dr. Ramirez. Every time she saw her, she thought "ways to be a loving person." She thought it as they rode up in the elevator together, even though the doctor stood silently frowning and smoothing her skirt. When they got to their floor, Dr. Ramirez said, "See you," and gave Laura a half smile as they strode in opposite directions.

Laura went to the lounge to get a coffee. Some other technicians and a few nurses were sitting at the table eating doughnuts from a box. Newspapers with broad grainy pictures of the White House intern lay spread out on the table. In one of the pictures, the girl posed with members of her high school cla.s.s at the prom. She stood very erect in a low-cut dress, staring with focused dreaminess at a spot just past the camera.

"She's a porker," said a tech named Tara; "Just look at her."

Laura lingered at the little refrigerator, trying to find the carton of whole milk. Everybody else used 2 percent.

"It makes me sympathize with him," said a nurse. "He could have anybody he wanted, and he picks these kinds of girls. Definitely not models or stars."

"That makes you sympathize? I think that makes it more disgusting."

"But it might not be. It might mean he wants somebody to be normal with. Like somebody who's totally on his side who he can, like, talk about baseball with. "

"What? Are you nuts? She was a homely girl sucking his d.i.c.k!" Laura had to settle for edible oil creamers. She took a handful, along with a pocketful of sugars and a striped stir stick. She walked down the empty hall whispering, "Ugly c.u.n.t, ugly c.u.n.t."

The day they brought their father home, the plumbing in the bathroom backed up. Sewage came out of the bathtub drain; water seeped into the chenille tapestry their mother had put up around the window. It was like snot was everywhere.

Laura lay with Anna Lee on the foldout couch in the living room. She and Anna Lee had slept close together in the same bed until Laura was fifteen and Anna Lee thirteen. Even when they got separate beds, they sometimes crept in together and cuddled. Now they lay separate even in grief.

Anna Lee was talking about her six-year-old, Fred, an anxious, overweight child with a genius IQ. The kid couldn't make friends; he fought all the time and usually lost. He'd set his room on fire twice. She was talking about a psychiatrist she had taken him to see. In the light from the window, Laura could see her sister's eyelashes raising and lowering with each hard, busy blink. She could smell the lotion Anna Lee used on her face and neck. The psychiatrist had put Fred on a waiting list to go to a special school in Montana, a farm school with llamas the children could care for and ride on.

"I hope it helps," said Laura.

There was a long silence. Laura could feel Anna Lee's body become fractionally softer and more open, relaxing and concentrating at the same time. Maybe she was thinking of Fred, how he might get better, how he might grow happy and strong. Laura had met the child only once. He'd frowned at her and looked down at the broken toy in his hand, but there was curiosity in his mien, and he was quick to look up again. He was already fat and already bright; he seemed too sorrowful and too angry for such a young child.

"I had a strange thought about Daddy," she said.

Anna Lee didn't answer, but Laura could feel her become alert. Even in the dark, her eyes looked alert. Laura knew she should stop, but she didn't. "It was more a picture in my head," she continued. "It was a picture of a woman's naked body that somebody was slashing with a knife. Daddy wasn't in the picture, but-"

"Oh for crying out loud!" Anna Lee put her hands over her face and turned away. "Just stop. Why don't you just stop."

"But I didn't mean it to be-"

"He's not your enemy now," said Anna Lee. "He's dying."

Her voice was raw and hard; she thrust it at Laura like a stick. Laura pictured her sister at twelve, yelling at some mean boys who'd cornered a cat. She felt loyalty and love. "I'm sorry," she said.

Anna Lee reached back and patted Laura's stomach with her fingers and half her palm. Then she withdrew into her private curl. Laura lay awake through the night. Anna Lee moved and scratched herself and spoke in urgent, slurred monosyllables. Laura thought of their mother, alone upstairs in the heavy sleep brought on by barbiturates. Tomorrow, she would be at the stove, boiling Jell- O in case her husband would eat it. She didn't really believe he was dying. She knew it, but she didn't believe it anyway.

Carefully, Laura got out of bed. She walked through the dark house until she came to her father's room. She heard him breathing before her eyes adjusted to the light. His breath was like a worn-out moth feebly beating against a surface. She sat in the armchair beside his bed. The electric clock said it was 4:30. A pa.s.sing car on the street filled the room with a yawning sweep of light. The wallpaper was covered with yellow flowers. Great-Aunt's old dead clock sat on the dresser. Great-Aunt was her father's aunt, who had raised him with yet another aunt. Two widowed aunts and a little boy with no father. Laura could see the boy standing in the parlor, all his brand-new life coursing through his small, stout legs and trunk. The dutiful aunts, busy with housekeeping and food, didn't notice it. In his head was a new solar system, crackling with light as he created the planets, the novas, the sun and the moon and the stars. "Look!" he cried. "Look!" The aunts didn't see. He was all alone.

Another car went by. Her father muttered and made noises with his mouth.

No wonder he hated them, thought Laura. No wonder.

Behind the reception desk, there were two radios playing different stations for each secretary. One played frenetic electronic songs, the other formula love songs, and both ran together in a gross hash of sorrow and desire. This happened every day by around 1:00 p.m. Faith, who worked behind the desk, said it was easy to separate them, to just concentrate on the one you wanted. Laura, though, always heard both of them jabbering every time she walked by the desk.

"Alice Dillon?" She spoke the words to the waiting room. A shabby middle-aged man eyed her querulously. A red-haired middle-aged woman put down her magazine and approached Laura with a mild, obedient air. Alice was in for a physical, so Laura had to give her a preliminary before the doctor examined her. First, they stopped at the scale outside the office door; Alice took off her loafers, her socks, and her sweater to shave off some extra ounces. A lot of women did that, and it always seemed stupid to Laura. "Five four, one hundred and twenty-six pounds," she said loudly.

"s.h.i.t," muttered Alice.

"Look at the bright side," said Laura. "You didn't gain since last time."

Alice didn't reply, but Laura sensed an annoyed little buzz from her. She was still buzzing slightly as she sat in the office; even though she was small and placid, it struck Laura that she gave off a little buzz all the time. She was forty-three years old, but her face was unlined and her eyes were wide and receptive, like a much younger person's. Her hair was obviously dyed, like a teenager would do it. You could still tell she was middle-aged, though.

She didn't smoke, she exercised three times a week, and she drank twice weekly, wine with dinner. She was single. Her aunt had diabetes and her mother had ovarian cancer. She had never had an operation, or been hospitalized. Her periods were regular. She had never had any s.e.xual partners. Laura blinked.

"Never?"

"No," said Alice. "Never." She looked at Laura as if she was watching for a reaction, and maybe holding back a smile.

Her blood pressure was excellent. Her pulse rate was average.

Laura handled her wrist and arm with unusual care. A forty-three-year-old virgin. It was like looking at an ancient sacred artifact, a primitive icon with its face rubbed off It had no function or beauty, but it still felt powerful when you touched it. Laura pictured Alice walking around with a tiny red flame in the pit of her body, protecting it with her fat and muscle, carefully dyeing her hair, exercising three times a week, and not smoking.

When the doctor examined Alice, Laura felt tense as she watched, especially when he did the gynecological exam. She noticed that Alice gripped her paper gown in the fingers of one hand when the doctor sat between her legs. He had to tell her to open her legs wider three times. She said, "Wait, I need to breathe," and he waited a second or two. Alice breathed with her head sharply turned, so that she stared at a corner of the ceiling. There Was a light sweat on her forehead.

When she changed back into her clothes, though, she moved like she was in a womens locker room. She got up from the table and took off the paper gown before the doctor was even out of the room.

"She's probably really religious, or maybe she's crazy." That's what Sharon, the secretary, thought. "In this day and age? She was probably molested when she was little."

"I don't know" said Laura. "I respected it."

Sharon shrugged. "It takes all kinds."

She imagined her father looking at the middle-aged virgin and then looking away with an embarra.s.sed smile on his face. He m ight think about protecting her, about waving at her from across the street, saying, "Hi, how are you?" sending protection with his words. He could protect her and still keep walking, smiling to himself with embarra.s.sed tenderness. He would have a feeling of honor and frailty, but there would be something sad in it, too, because she wasn't young. Laura remembered a minor incident in a novel she had read by a French writer, in which a teenage boy knocked an old nun off a bridge. Her habit was heavy and so she drowned, and the writer wondered, with a stupid sort of meanness, Laura thought, if the nun had felt shocked to have her genitals touched by the cold water. She remembered a recent news story about a nut job who had kidnapped a little girl so that he could tie her to a tree and set a fire around the tree. Then he went to his house to watch through binoculars as she burned. Fortunately, a neighbor called the police and they got there in time.

Instead of going back to the waiting room, she went to the public bathroom and leaned against the small windowsill with her head in her hands. She was forty, she tried to imagine what it would be like to be a virgin. She imagined walking through the supermarket, encased in an invisible membrane that was fluid but also impenetrable, her eyes wide and staring like a doll's. Then she imagined her virginity like a strong muscle between her legs, making all her other muscles strong, making everything in her extra alive, all the way up through her brain and into her bones.

She lifted her head and looked out the small window. She saw green gra.s.s and the tops of trees, cylindrical apartment buildings and traffic. She had not wanted her virginity. She'd had to lose it with three separate people; her hymen had been stubborn and hard to break.

She brushed the dust and particles from the windowsill off her elbows. "I was a rebellious girl," she said, "and I went in a stupid direction."

She thought of the Narcotics Anonymous meetings she had attended some years ago. People talked about the things that had happened to them, the things they had done on drugs. Nothing was too degrading or too pathetic or too dull. Laura had talked about trying to lose her virginity. Her friend Danielle had told a story about how she'd let a disgusting fat guy whom she hated try to shove a can of root beer up her v.a.g.i.n.a because, he'd suggested, they might be able to fill cans with heroin and smuggle them.

Laura smiled a little. After the meeting, she'd asked Danielle, "Who tried to stick it in, you or him?"

"Oh," said Danielle, "we both tried." They laughed.

Such grotesque humility; such strange comfort. She remembered the paper plates of cookies, the pot of coffee at the low table in the back of the room at NA. She loved standing back there with Danielle, eating windmill cookies and smoking. Laura looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. "A stupid girl," she said to her reflection.

Well, but who could blame her? When she was still a teenager, out of nowhere her mother asked Laura what it had been like to lose her virginity. She wanted to know if the experience had been "special." It was late and the living room was dark. They had been watching TV together. Laura was startled by the question. "Was it someone you loved?" asked her mother.

"Yes," replied Laura, lying. "Yes, it was."

"I'm glad," said her mother. She still looked straight ahead. "I wanted you to have that."

What a revolting conversation, thought Laura. She couldn't quite put her finger on why; her mother had only been expressing concern. But her concern seemed somehow connected with the nun in the water, and the dirtbag trying to set the little girl on fire.

She went back to the waiting room and got the grouchy middle-aged man. He didn't bother to take off his shoes when he weighed himself. He was there, he said, only because his wife had made him come. He had taken off from work and shot the whole day. "My wife loves going to the doctor," he said. "She had all those mammograms and she lost her breast anyway. Most of it."

"Well, but it's good to come in," said Laura. "Even if it doesn't always work. You know that. Your wife's just caring about you."

He gave a conciliatory snort. With his shirt off, he was big and flabby, but he carried it as if he liked it. His blood pressure was much too high. Laura let her touch linger on him as she worked because she wanted to soothe him.

When the man was gone, she asked Dr. Phillips if she could go outside on her break. He usually didn't like her to do that because she was always a little late getting back when she went out, but he was trying to be extra nice since her father died. "Okay," he said, "but watch the time." He turned and strode down the hall, habitually bristling, like a small dog with a dominant nature.

Outside, the heat was horrible. She started sweating right away, probably ruining her uniform for the next day. Still, she was glad to be out of the building. The clinic was located between a busy main street and a run-down little street occupied by an old wig shop, a children's karate gym, and a large ill-kept park where aging homeless men sat around. She decided to walk a few blocks down the park street. She liked the trees and she was friendly with a few of the men, who sometimes wished her good afternoon.

She walked and an old song played in her head. It was the kind of old song that sounded innocent and dirty at the same time. The music was simple and shallow except for one deep spot where it was like somebody's pants were being pulled down. "You got nothin' to hide and everybody knows it's true. Too bad, little girl, it's all over for you." The singer laughed and the music laughed, too, and the laughter was spangled all over with s.e.xiness.

Laura had loved the song; she had loved the thought of it being all over and everybody knowing. A lot of other people must've loved it, too; it had been a very popular song. She remembered walking down the hall in high school wearing tight clothes; boys laughed and grabbed their crotches. They all said she'd sucked their d.i.c.ks, but really she'd only screwed one of them. It didn't matter. When her father found out, he yelled and hit her.

"Was it someone special?" her mother had asked. "Was it someone you loVed?"

She stopped at a curb for traffic. Her body was alive with feelings that were strong but that seemed broken or incomplete, and she felt too weak to hold them.

A car pulled up beside her, throwing off motor heat. The car was full of loud teenage boys. The driver, a Hispanic boy of about eighteen, wanted to make a right turn, but he was blocked by a stalled car in front of him and cars on his side. He was banging his horn and yelling out the window; his urgency was hot and all over the place. Laura stared at him. His delicate beauty was almost too bright; he had so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark. He yelled and pounded the horn, trying to spew it out, but still it surged through him. It was like he was ready to kill someone, anyone, without any understanding in his mind or heart. That thought folded over unexpectedly; Laura pictured him as a baby with his mouth on his mother's breast. She pictured his fierce nature deep inside him, like dark, beautiful seeds feeding off his mother's milk, off the feel of her hand on his skull. She thought of him as a teenager with a girl; he would kiss her too hard and be rough, wanting her to feel what he had inside him, wanting her to see it. And, in spite of his roughness, she would.

He turned in his seat to shout something to the other boys in the car, then turned forward again to put his head out the window to curse the other cars. He turned again and saw Laura staring at him. Their eyes met. She thought of her father showing his aunts the stars and all the planets. You are good, she thought. What you have is good. The boy dropped his eyes in confusion. There was a yell from the backseat. The stalled car leaped forward. The boy snapped around, hit the gas, and was off.

Laura crossed the street. How to explain that? she thought How to know what it even was? She thought, I told him he was good. I told him with my eyes and he heard me.

Well, tonight she'd call Danielle and tell her about it; Danielle had a lot of strange emotional moments with, say, a lady standing in the prescription line next to her at the drugstore, or a guy in the car behind her who'd yelled at her because she couldn't figure out the parking gate right away. Except it probably wouldn't seem like a story by the time the day was over.

She walked up the block sweating, feeling so replete and grateful that she wondered if she was crazy She pictured the middle-aged virgin, this time at home at night, doing her meticulous toilet, rubbing her feet with softening cream. She pictured herself at home, curled on the couch, watching TV and eating ice cream out of the carton. She pictured the men in her dream, fighting. She pictured herself kneeling to hold the handsome man's cut-open head. She would pa.s.s her hand over his broken skull and make an impenetrable membrane grow over his exposed brain. The membrane would be transparent, and you would be able to see his brain glowing inside it like magic stones. But you could never cut it or harm it.

She pictured her father, young and strong, smiling at her, the planets all around him. She thought, I love you, Daddy.

She saw the homeless men moving about deep in the park, their figures nearly obscured by overgrown gra.s.ses and trees. For a moment, she strained to see them more clearly, then gave up. It was time to go back. She was late, but it would be okay, probably.

The Agonized Face.

A feminist author came to talk at the annual literary festival in Toronto, one of the good-looking types with expensive clothes who look younger than they are (which is irritating, even though it shouldn't be), the kind of person who plays with her hair when she talks, who always seems to be asking you to like her. She was like that, but she had something else, too, and it was that "something else" quality that made what she did so peculiarly aggravating.

Before I go any further, it must be said that I arrived at the festival tense and already p.r.o.ne to aggravation. I have been divorced for five years. I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl. My ex-husband is stalwart in his child-support payments, but he is a housepainter who is trying to be an artist, and out of respect for his dreams, his payments are not large. We met in graduate school, where I was studying creative writing, a dream-c.u.m-memory rolling monotonously near the bottom of the subthought ocean. After years of writing in-brief book reviews, plus fact-checking and proofreading for an online magazine, I have recently begun writing full-length reviews (which means a little more money and a lot less time for playing "The Mighty Mich.e.l.le" with Kira); for the first time, I have been a.s.signed to do something light and funny on the social scene at the literary festival. The idea of proximity to so many actual authors may ve caused some more intense than usual subthought rolling, which is perhaps why a fight with my daughter got nastier than it had to this morning. It did not help that it was a fight about whether or not she can, at ten, bleach her hair "like Gwen Stefani," and that the fight then had to turn into a discussion with Tom about how he had to be sure that while staying with him this afternoon, she did not somehow get hold of boxed bleach and take charge of the bathroom. Or, furthermore, that she not be allowed to persuade him that red might be okay if blond was not.

Still, for the most part, I was able to clear my mind of all this once I arrived at the festival. Writers from all over the world were there, people from Somalia, Greece, Israel, the United States, Italy, and Britain. There were writers who'd been forced to flee their countries, writers from police states, writers from places where everybody was starving; writers who wrote about the daily prob' lems of ordinary people, the obscenity of politics and the pain of the lower cla.s.ses, glamorous writers who wrote about the exciting torment of the fashionable cla.s.ses. Writers with airs of gravity or triviality, well-heeled or wearing suits they had probably rented for this event, standing at the bar with an air of hard-won triumph, or simply looking with childish delight at all the glowing bottles of delicious drinks and trays of foodstuffs. I glimpsed a smart blond woman on the arm of a popular author and fleetingly thought of my daughter: If she could see me here, she would feel curiosity and admiration.

But getting back to the "feminist author"; it is not really right to call her that, as she was not the only feminist there, as, in fact, her presence may have annoyed other, more serious feminists. She was a feminist who had apparently been a prost.i.tute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prost.i.tutes as fighters against the patriarchy. She would say stupid things like that, but then she would write some good sentences that would make people say, "Wow, she's kind of intelligent!" Some people may've said she should not have been at the festival at all, but why not? An event such as this is dazzling partly in its variety; it is a social blaze of litde heads rolling by in a ball of light, and all the heads have something to say: "No one should ever write about the Holocaust again!" "Irony is ruining our culture!" Or in the case of the feminist ex-prost.i.tute, "Women can enjoy s.e.xual violence, too!" Well. I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and her arms flexed combatively, head c.o.c.ked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount. An image you could look at and go, Okay, now for the author who says, "We live in an entertainment society and it's terrible!"

She was reading with two other people, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who wrote about rapes and ma.s.sacres, and a middle-aged Canadian who wrote touching stories about his daughters. First the Vietnamese girl read about a ma.s.sacre, then came the feminist writer She immediately began complaining, but she did it in a way that made her complaint sound like a special treat we might like to have. Her voice was sweet, with a sparkling rhythm that made you imagine some shy and secret thing was being gradually revealed. I felt caught off guard; she wore a full-length skirt and litde gla.s.ses and round-toed clog-style boots.

She wasn't going to read, she said; instead, she was going to give a talk about the way she had been treated by the local media, as well-as by the festival organizers, who had described her in an insulting, unfair way in their brochure. I had not even read the brochure-I perhaps should've read it, but the information in such pamphlets is usually worthless-and from the look on other people's faces, they hadn't read it, either. The author, however, didn't seem to realize this. The brochure was not only insulting to her, she continued; it was an insult to all women, to everyone, really. They had ignored the content of her work completely, focusing instead on the most sensational aspects of her life-the prost.i.tution, the drug use, the stay in a mental hospital, the attempt on her father's life-in a way that was both salacious and puritanical. "It isn't that these things aren't true," she said in her lilting voice. "They are. I was a prost.i.tute for six months when I was sixteen and I spent two months in a mental hospital when I was eighteen. But I have also done a lot of other things. I have been a waitress, a factory worker, a proofreader, a journalist, a street vendor! I am forty-five years old and now I teach at Impala University West!"

There were cheers, applause; a woman in the back fiercely hollered, "You go, girl!" The author blinked rapidly and adjusted her gla.s.ses. "I can even understand it," she continued. "It's exciting to imagine such a kooky person off somewhere doing unimaginable stuff! I like the idea myself! But I am not that person!" It seemed to me that she kind of was that person, but right then it didn't matter. "And when we do that," she continued, "when we isolate qualities that seem exciting, but maybe a little scary, and we project them onto another person in an exaggerated form, we not only deny that person her humanity but we impoverish and cheat ourselves of life's complexity and tenderness!"

This wasn't funny. This was something wholly unexpected. We were all feeling stirred, like we were really dealing with something here, something that had just been ill.u.s.trated for us by a magical, elfish hand. We felt like we were being touched in a personal place, a little like our mothers would touch us-a touch that was emotionally erotic. Like a mother, she seemed potent, yet there was something of the daughter there, too, the innocent girl who has been badly teased by an importune boy, and who comes to you, her upturned face looking at you with puzzlement. Yes, she seemed innocent, even with her sullied, catastrophic life placed before us for the purpose of selling her.

She must've sensed our feelings, because she cut short her speech. We had been so kind, she said, that she wanted to give us something. She was going to read to us after all-in fact, she had her book right there with her, and she even had a story picked out. It was a story about a middle-aged woman dressing in s.e.xy clothes to attend a party for a woman who writes p.o.r.nography, which is held in a bar decorated with various s.e.x toys. A good-looking boy flirts with the middle-aged woman, who allows that she is "flattered."

What had happened to the mother? Where was the injured girl? The voice of the author was still lilting and girlish, but her words were hard and sharp, the kind of words that think everything is funny. The middle-aged woman invites the young man to her home, gives him a drink, and then pulls his pants off while he lies there gaping.-For the next several pages, she alternates between fellating him and chattering cleverly while he tries to leave.

This was the feminist author we had heard about, all right. Her readers smiled knowingly, while the readers of the Canadian and Vietnamese authors looked baffled-baffled, then angry. And I was feeling angry, too.

I am not really a feminist, probably because, at forty, I am too young to have fully experienced the kinetic surge of feminism that occurred in the seventies, that half-synthetic, half-organic creature with its smart, dry little mouth issuing books, speeches, TV shows, and pop songs. None of it is stylish anymore, and, in fact, feminists have come in for a lot of criticism from female pundits. Some of these pundits say that feminists have made girls think they have to have s.e.x all the time, which, by going against their girlish nature, has destroyed their self-esteem, and made them anorexic and depressed. Feminists have made girls into s.l.u.ts! Others, equally angry, say that feminists have imposed restrictive rules on nubile teens, making them into morbid neurasthenics who think they're being raped, when they're actually just having s.e.x. Feminists have neutered girls by overprotecting them! I don't know what I think of any of it; it's mostly something I hear coming out of my radio on my way to work. But I do know this: When I hear that feminism is overprotecting girls, I am very sympathetic to it. When I see my fashion-conscious ten-year-old in her nylon nightie, peering spellbound before the beguiling screen at the fleeting queendom of some twelve-year-old manufactured pop star with the wardrobe of a hooker, a jerry-rigged personality, and bulimia, it seems to me that she has a protection deficit that I may not be able to compensate for. When she comes home wild with tears because she lost the spelling contest, or her ex-best friend called her fat, or a boy said she's not the prettiest girl in cla.s.s, and I press her to me, comforting her, even as that day's AMBER Alert flashes in my brain, it is hard for me to imagine this girl as "overprotected."

Which is, in some indirect way, why the feminist author was so affecting and so disappointing. She was a girl who needed to be protected, and a woman standing to protect the girl. But then she became the other thing-the feminist who made girls into s.l.u.ts. She sprouted three heads and asked that we accept them all! She said she had been a prost.i.tute, a mental patient, that she had tried to stab her father. She said it in a soft, reasonable voice-but these are not soft or reasonable things. These are terrible things. Anyone who has seen a street prost.i.tute and looked into her face knows that. For her to admit these things, without describing the pain she had suffered, gave her dignity-because really, she didn't have to talk about it. We could imagine it. But the story she read made what had seemed like dignity look silly and obscene. Because the voice of the story was not soft. It was dry and smart as a dance step-but what it told of was neither dry nor smart. While the voice danced, making scenes that described the woman and the youth, an image slowly formed, taking subtle shape under the picture created by the scenes. It was like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for cigarettes where beautiful people are smoking in lounge chairs, and suddenly you see in the cobalt blue backdrop the subliminal image of a skull. Except the image behind the feminist author's words was stranger than the image of a skull, and less clear. It made you strain to see what it was, and in the straining you found yourself picturing! things you did not want to picture. Of course, it can be fun to picture things you don't want to picture-but somehow the feminist author had ruined the fun.

After the reading, we all went for refreshments in the hospitality lounge. The Vietnamese girl and the Canadian father, as well as the feminist author, were there, signing books and talking with their readers. There were other authors present, too, including an especially celebrated Somali author known for an award-winning novel of war and social disintegration, and an American womaii who had written a witty, elegant, clearly autobiographical novella about a mother whose child is. .h.i.t by a drunk driver and nearly killed. The feminist author appeared more relaxed in this setting than she had been onstage; she smiled easily and chatted with the mostly young women who approached her. And yet again I sensed a disturbing subliminal message bleeding through the presenta-tion: a face of s.e.x and woman's pain. The face had to do with dis-grace and violence, dark o.r.g.a.s.m, rape, with feeling so strong that it obviates the one who feels it. You could call it an exalted face, or an agonized face; in the context of the feminist author, I think I'm going to call it "the agonized face." Although I don't know why- she doesn't look like she's ever made such a face in her life.

There was only one more person waiting to talk to her, an animated girl with ardently sprouting red hair. I got in line behind her. When I got up close, I saw that the author's eyes were not sweet, innocent, or sparkling. They were wary and a little hard. As she signed the animate red girl's book, I heard her say, "s.e.x has been let out of the box, like everything is okay, but no one knows what 'everything' is."

"Exactly!" sprouted the ardent girl.

Exactly. "I liked the talk you gave," I said, "before the reading." "Thank you," she said, coldly answering my italics.

"But I'm wondering why you chose to read what you read afterward. If you didn't like what they said about you in that brochure you mentioned. I didn't read it, but-"

"What I read didn't have anything to do with what they said." No? "I'd love to talk more with you about that. I'm here as a journalist for Quick! Would you be able to talk about it for our readers?"

"No," she said. "I'm not doing interviews." And she turned her back on me to sign another book.

I stood for a moment looking at her back, vaguely aware of the Somali author talking into someone's tape recorder. With a vertiginous feeling, I remembered the days right after graduation, when Tom was an artist and I was a freelance journalist hustling work at various small magazines. We slept on a Salvation Army mattress; we ate and wrote on a coffee table. "The grotesque has a history, a social parameter," said the Somali author. "Indeed, one might say that the grotesque is a social parameter."

Indeed. I took a gla.s.s of wine from a traveling tray of gla.s.ses and drank it in a gulp. On one of those long-ago a.s.signments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise-l.u.s.terless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money. In the middle of this power talk, she told me a story about a customer who had said he would give her fifty dollars if she would get on her hands and knees with her b.u.t.t facing him, pull down her G-string, and then turn around and smile at him. They had negotiated at length: "I made him promise that he wouldn't stick his finger in," she said. "We went over it and over it and he promised me, like, three times. So I pulled down my G-string, and as soon as I turned around, his finger went right in. I was so mad!" Then bang, she was right back at the Hegel and Nietzsche. The combination was pathetic, and yet it had the dignity of awful truth. Not only because it was t.i.tillating- though, yes, it was-but because in the telling of it, a certain foundation of humanity was revealed; the crude cinder blocks of male and female down in the bas.e.m.e.nt, holding up the house. Those of us who have spouses and/or children forget about this part-not because we have an aversion to those cinder blocks necessarily, but because we are busy on the upper levels, building a home with furniture, decorations, and personalities in it. We are glad to have the topless dancer to remind us of that dark area in the bas.e.m.e.nt where personality is irrelevant and crude truth prevails. Her philosophical patter even added to the power of her story because it created a stark polarity: intelligent words on one side, and mute genitals on the other. Between the poles, there was darkness and mystery, and the dancer respected the mystery with her ignorant and touching pretense.