Notable American Women Read Free Page B

interesting to dress him in a costume to entertain the members of a picnic, to inflate balloons and dazzle the children, perhaps, or to pretend he was a horse or some other simpler creature of this world.
    I love what keeps me alive, and my son is an extension of my body, a prosthesis, you understand, that I can dispatch on my behalf to prowl my former house, to collect objects, or witness conditions that might prove to be a revelation upon examination. A father must continually be in a state of study, should he not? I care for this fellow because he is an apparatus that can investigate areas my own local body can no longer achieve. In that sense, my son is the part of myself that still operates
at
large.
And although physical harm to his body does not technically hurt me, if his body were prevented from its task in the greater world, if he were finally captured by the authorities (that is, if personal failure and disappointment were policed and punished by law), my own body would eventually suffer because its special flesh satellite had been severed. There is also a small chance that I might starve without him.
    You might think that ditto is true for your son, that all of the above applies in spades to whatever awful creature you fucked for and birthed into the Ohio pasture to grow into some kind of person who would only live to fail repeatedly before your eyes, to wither, no matter how you watered him. Nothing could be worse than to watch one’s own bodily product fail to learn to swim, I’m sure, or smash his teeth on the rung of a ladder and be forever a kind but ugly man.
    But you cannot share my grief unless your son is also a shandy, but not the kind of shandy who crouches over men’s hips to host the probing of their genitals, but rather one who is supplicated to the dog of the house—you heard me—the quietly elegant creature on all fours who seeks and finds dominion over your son with hygienic regularity, who tracks him down outside in the yard or inside in the den to play horsey, a dog and a man playing horse, giddyap and let’s go at it, this creature all over your son, who is too scared, or too secretly pleased, to assert his evolutionary supremacy and beat back the amorous advance, until his shoulders are calloused from the paws of a dog and he practically wears an apron for the animal, so total is his submission.
    There is then a point when a father says so long, farewell, good-bye to a boy who has traversed so far from actions that might be considered human that he is only the bitch of a beast who eats out of a bowl, a kind of whore to a four-legged “man” that has him in every room of the house and in the field or at the pond and even on the flannel pillow in the kennel. The father becomes deprived of the child; he enters a state of child minus and is in need of a new brood.
    It is therefore asked that those examining this written artifact, or listening to its delivery, defer to the voice of
this
father, the overfather, the father of fathers. If confusion results in such a pursuit—if too many fathers present themselves as figures of authority seeking to exercise power upon your person, to caress or handle you, to dictate the dangers of the day, or to weep just when you doubted their humanity—let it be remembered that the father who commands your attention
at this very
moment
should be given dominion over whatever local father happens to obtain in your vicinity, even if that local father appears familiar and kind, the lover of your mother, warm, a dispenser of money, and fatherlike in other comforting ways. Even if he is the man who appears to be posing in those old photographs, holding an early version of you in his arms and possibly kissing your head. If a picture of him now makes your chest come aglow, if speculation or remembrance of his death causes empty black alarm—he is at all costs to be refused, please, dismissed and forgotten. You are to consider him a