On Keeping Women Read Free

the list of world capitals dizzies me if I think too much on it—to me a city itself is an erogenous zone.
    One of mine in fact. Father’d done his work too blindly. My body, sleepily arising to whatever objects presented it in the new dark of sensation, had engorged too well. And could Father now tell me what to do with that condition. I found I didn’t want him to. Let me hoard it, and hide.
    “Why honey,” he said. “You’ll be like your mother. I hope.”
    And I saw he really did.
    James and I sideglanced each other. James often gave me those brotherly comforts. Without further advice. He was embarrassed just then to be a brother, I think. Being further on with women than we knew. And with women who were further on.
    “Like Mother?” I said. “Why’s she’s a—a parasite.”
    “A—a what?” Father said. But I could see the idea intrigued. Mother—with her forty-five-hour-week bunions, and those meals—made out of thousands of boxes maybe, but by her. Mother—with her pulled-crepe-paper hair, which went to the tongs for help only if a caseworker’s convention needed her, along with her gray, socially justified sweaters and skirts.
    “Yes, a parasite. Who happens to work.”
    On the way home, we three were silent. With my usual talent for missing the true target, I was angry at James. For encouraging me to go too far, and leaving me to cope with the results.
    Father shared that talent, also. “I don’t know—” he sighed. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with your mind.”
    Late that night, when the others were bedded down, I get up again, and take the body that inhabits my mind back to the Morton Street pier. By then it’s late for cruisers, but beginning for lovers, mostly gay. Drizzling a little. And no sign of the whores I’m looking for. I know a few by sight but have never spoken to one. For a while, I can’t think of anything except the family anyway. James, on the daybed in the dining room, rolling to a city noise now and then, sometimes onto the floor. Father, dead to the world in his twinbed, wearing the singlet that is cool to his psoriasis. Mother in her twinbed, sleeping the sleep of the just, in pajamas with feet. Because of being a girl, I had a room alone, and the old double-bed they’d been married in. That ought to tell me something.
    Until our policeman on the beat comes by—he knows us, but he’ll surely chase me—I have so little time. He himself must have the very information I want—not that he’ll give it. And I need the female view of it.
    Shortly—it’s raining by now—Mother comes down the block to give me hers. She slips her arm in mine confidingly, the same as she sometimes does when she sneaks into my bed, a refugee from Father’s snore. I turn my back on her, the way I always do. And then turn round again, as usual.
    “Anything I can do to help?” she says.
    That’s kind of her. But I wonder why she thinks any woman with pajamas stuffed in galoshes, and a man’s lumberjack covering her dropseat, has advice I can use.
    “The city disturbs me.” I know that in the end I’ll tell her how. But nothing ever got past her language—certainly not her emotions. And that would be that, I thought.
    I was wrong.
    “Dad told me what you said.” She sighs. “He’s so vulnerable.”
    “He is.” I flip back my hair. “Huh.”
    That interested her. She studied gesture. “You mean you are? And you’re denying that quality in him?”
    I flip my hair forward, wetting my nose. “Maybe. I meant—you’re the masochist.”
    “Those puddings!” she says at once. “You’re right. Nobody needs dessert.”
    I put my arms up, and shriek a little.
    The cop on the beat passes, eyeing us. Yeah, he knows us; he’s the one referred James to the morgue. “Now, girls—” he says, shaking his head. “Now girls.” He didn’t like fights.
    “See—you stopped the rain,” Mother says to me, soothing. And giving him the high sign to leave us be. “But