Words&Dirt

“The story we are told of women is not this one.

The story of women is the story of love, of foundering into another. A slight deviation: longing to founder and being unable to. Being left alone in the foundering, and taking things into one’s own hands: rat poison, the wheels of a Russian train. Even the smoother and gentler story is still just a modified version of the above. In the demotic, in the key of bougie, it’s the promise of love in old age for all the good girls of the world. Hilarious ancient bodies at bath time, husband’s palsied hands soaping wife’s withered dugs, erection popping out of the bubbles like a pink periscope. I see you! There would be long, hobbledy walks under the plane trees, stories told by a single sideways glance, one word sufficing. Anthill, he’d say; Martini! she’d say; and the thick swim of the old joke would return to them. The laughter, the beautiful reverberations. Then the bleary toddling on to an early-bird dinner, snoozing through a movie hand in hand. Their bodies like knobby sticks wrapped in vellum. One laying the other on the deathbed, feeding the overdose, dying the day after, all heart gone out of the world with the beloved breath. Oh, companionship. Oh, romance. Oh, completion. Forgive her if she believed this would be the way it would go. She had been led to this conclusion by forces greater than she.

Conquers all! All you need is! Is a many-splendored thing! Surrender to!

Like corn rammed down goose necks, this shit they’d swallowed since they were barely old enough to dress themselves in tulle.

The way the old story goes, woman needs an other to complete her circuits, to flick her to the fullest blazing.

[The refutation would come. During those dusky years of her eighties, in the far-off beyond-the-horizon, she would sit solitary over tea in her London breakfast room and look up to see her own hand like an ancient map and then out the window where a blue budgerigar peered in, naturalized citizen of this unnatural subtropical world. Suddenly clear, in the small blue shape, she would see her life had not been, at its core, about love. There had been terrific love in it. Heat and magic. Lotto, her husband. Christ, there had been him. Yet––yes!––the sum of her life, she saw, was far greater than its sum of love.]

In the immediacy, though, in stingy moonlight over bruised metal, cow flesh, glass, there was only her bitten tongue and all that blood. The hot rust-tasting flood of it. And the great Now What stretching without end.”

––Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff, pg. 235-6