Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 (7 page)

I knew there was something to be afraid of

Though I was never sure exactly what it was:

Communism or radiation poisoning

Or the bomb.

Now I'm a grown-up.

My nail clippers are carefully packed in my checked luggage.

I've stopped wearing the hair clip that sets off the metal detector.

They've put heavy-duty trash cans back in the subway station

Though you still have to walk across the street to buy a newspaper.

Several times a day helicopters drone above my house.

Are we on orange alert this week?

Or mauve?

Meanwhile the government of my country has launched another war.

I scream at the radio every morning.

So far, no one has listened.

But I stopped being quite so frightened

When I found out

That blue green algae grows inside the nuclear reactor at San Onofre.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The Story of Little Eight John

What stares back

from inside the cupboard

is the blank this-ness of things

that don't need names

or something living in them

making music.

That boy knew better

than sitting backwards in his chair

and the cornbread burned,

just like his mama said.

You live in flesh and bones

but if you look too hard

at what's outside and what is not

you leach the faith

from all your braids and knots.

She said, Don't step on frogs

it brings bad luck,

The little frogs said nothing, underfoot,

but the chickens would not lay.

Stare at the sun and you'll go blind.

Finally he counted all his teeth,

though his mama told him not to,

and his little brother sickened.

Bits of you fly loose.

Fingernails clitter on the tile

looking for mouseholes.

Just like she feared,

Old Rawhead come one night

and made him be a grease spot on the kitchen table.

Next morning, his mama called and calle

and. while she waited,

she swabbed the boards real good.

Muncaster Mill Road

My heart is in a hovel in a field,

a narrow field knee-deep in sparrowgrass,

cicada click, blue chicory, and ease.

Half-hearted boards allow thin slats

of light to brush the dust with blinding gold,

just here and there. Two dust-colored cats

curl beneath a broken chair. Rolled

in cotton batting inside the sofa springs

are velvet mice. The sofa smells of mold.

Up the broken chimney, an owl clings.

Don't come. The cats will wake and hiss

their broken growl. Nightime brings

us all the wealth we need. We do not miss

your leavings. Do not see us. We are healed,

we sleep. And we will wake without a kiss.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Richard Butner

"I drink so I can talk to assholes. This includes me."—James Douglas Morrison

Drink what you like, so you can talk to assholes including yourself. But. But you might want to have a martini. And here's how to make one.

First off, martinis are made of gin and vermouth. If you make one with vodka, it's not a martini; it's a vodka martini. If you make one without vermouth, it's not a martini, it's cold gin, which is a perfectly fine KISS song but perhaps not a perfectly fine beverage.

The state of being in a martini glass does not instantly confer martini-hood on any given concoction. Some perfectly fine drinks are served in martini glasses (aka cocktail glasses, as opposed to old-fashioned glasses or Collins glasses or cordial glasses). Gimlets, say. Hell, even Lemon Drops. There is no such thing as a Choco-Banana Martini, though.

Get some vermouth that's decent. Universally renowned as decent is Noilly Prat. It deserves its rep. If you have some fancy small batch vermouth, try that—make sure to use dry vermouth, not sweet. If you're stuck with Martini & Rossi or Stock or Cinzano, make do until you've finished that bottle, then pay the extra buck for the Noilly Prat.

Get some gin that's decent. This is actually easier than the vermouth purchase. Gin is a poor person's drink; it's flavored grain alcohol, the simplest booze to manufacture. It is automatically not fancy, no matter what various pop cultural artifacts of the twentieth century say. So, get something that's good but not faux good, like Bombay or Beefeater but not Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray Number Ten, unless you feel like plunking down the cash. In other words, get something in a glass bottle (not a plastic one).

Now, get a garnish. Weird purists (weird purists who are not me) will demand that you eat an olive. You do not need to do this. One thing you definitely do not need to do is to drink a dirty martini, obtained by pouring olive brine in with the other fluids. If you like olive brine, then go have a large salty flagon of olive brine, but don't ruin your martini with it. So decide whether you'd like one olive or two, or instead of olives, a citrus twist. The citrus can be lemon or lime (see Bombay Gin bottle as reference for the lime option). The olives can
only
be manzanilla-sized olives, not jumbo or “queen” olives. You're having a cocktail, you're not eating lunch.

Keep the vermouth in the fridge once you've opened it; it's delicate, like Sandy Denny. Keep the gin either in the freezer, or in the liquor cabinet. If you keep it in the freezer, it's already nice and cold, which is good, but the ice will melt less quickly when you prepare it. You want the ice to melt. You want some dilution. Dilution via melting ice is the key to any good cocktail. If you keep the gin in the freezer, make sure to stir your martini for an extra-long time.

Get a mixing glass. Crack some ice. You don't want just ice cubes; you want actual cracked ice. Buy a bag of it, or make it yourself with a hammer or with a Tap-Icer(R), or build a robot friend that you can program to crack ice for you. Put plenty of the cracked ice in the mixing glass. Then put in the vermouth. If you're completely vermouth-o-phobic, allow it to flavor the ice, then dump it out (this is the “In and Out” martini). If you want a real martini, though, leave it in, and use about one part vermouth to six parts gin. Add the gin. Stir. Continue stirring. Stir some more.

Strain into your frosted martini glasses. You have kept them in the freezer, right? Add the garnish. Drink, and enjoy. If the gin-to-vermouth ratio feels wrong to your taste buds, well then, make another. Cheers, y'all.

[Back to Table of Contents]

Reading Deena Metzger's The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them

L. Timmel Duchamp

Deena Metzger's
The Woman Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them
tells the story of a woman writer trying to bring into plausible existence within the space of her own imagination a story that runs counter to all the stories she knows, a story that stands in defiant opposition to the unreflective, restrictive logic our society characterizes as “common sense.” On the page, the novel looks like a play, but it lacks stage directions and offers no formal divisions into acts or scenes of whatever “action” it might describe. I imagined, as I was reading it, voices speaking almost at will, as though the text presented to us as a finished work of art, originally began life as a transcript of voices speaking to the author that she has merely polished up and passed along to the reader. And yet my awareness of the sophistication of Metzger's narrative technique and the craft and artistry of her prose, even as I persisted in constructing such an image in my imagination, told me, from the beginning, that this aural impression of voices speaking to the author could only be a conceit promoted with calculation aforethought by the author.

The voices that make up the fabric of
The Woman Who . . .
include a “Narrator,” who often describes scenes and settings for the stories told; a “Chorus,” which occasionally offers comments and criticism of the group-generated sort, sometimes speaking as the voice of mainstream conventional wisdom, sometimes from the perspective of one late-1970s feminist faction or another; a “Witness"; “The Woman,” who is the designated writer struggling to produce this new narrative; “The (Woman's) Friend,” who is a constant critic, unable to suspend her disbelief in the very possibility of the story the writer wants to tell; “the Man,” the writer's lover; and an extensive cast of characters, both invented and historical, most prominently Ada and the General, who figure in the stories told. The Woman wants to devise a narrative in which a war widow, Ada, by engaging in unspecified heterosexual relations with the General (whose men killed her husband and most of the people in her village), “takes the war out of” the General, who is neither “the worst of his species” nor the best. The story she wants to tell is not that of a man saved by the love of a Good Woman (a very popular story in the twentieth-century US), for the Woman says, of her own experience, that love itself makes no difference. What Metzger proposes will take the war out of soldiers and generals and similar others will not be love, but something else—something she apparently sees resulting from a certain kind of heterosexual relation.

In late February, 2003, when I had the impulse to take this book down from the shelf and reread it for the first time in twenty years, I went to Deena Metzger's website and found this quote prominently displayed:

To follow story is to understand the path of healing. Each of our stories is a universe. Each one of us is living a story. To discover its shape and essence is essential to soul making.

Metzger's depiction of the Woman's struggle to create a plausible story of women defeating war itself (rather than warriors) without the use of weapons, then, takes the power of story extremely seriously. Story, for Metzger, creates agency and possibility. Or, to use her own words, is necessary for “soul making."

This novel was published in 1981 and written, we can surmise, during the 1970s. Although the woman-and-sex controversy associated with early 1980s feminism in the US centered on feminist positions toward pornography and sadomasochistic sex, many feminists throughout the 1970s struggled with fundamental questions about heterosexual relations. At the time of its publication, the very title of this novel not only implied a defense and acceptance of heterosexuality as compatible with feminist projects, but also challenged those cultural feminists who held that all men were biologically destined to be warlike, destructive, and oppressive. Early in the novel, the Chorus rebukes the Woman for sleeping with her lover:

We think you will betray us. We think when you will have to choose, you will choose him. We think this is not the time for women to be with men. We think it is more than difficult. We think it is dangerous. To you. And also to us. (22)

The Woman's (and Metzger's) attempt to tell this new story, then, not only flies in the face of common sense and an interminable history of women being the booty, the survivors, and the widows of war, but also implicates how Metzger positions herself as a feminist. The Chorus attacks both Ada for presenting herself at the General's house and the Woman—the novel's designated writer—for wishing to suggest that it might be possible to redeem male oppressors through the very heterosexual relations that many feminists viewed as an instrument of their own oppression.

Chorus. Every country is an occupied country. Every woman is an occupied territory. Every woman knows the enemy. Every woman who sleeps with a man sleeps with the general.

The Woman. It's not true.

The Chorus. You know it's true. You've volunteered for the enemy's bed. (18-19)

Shortly after I began rereading this novel, a friend forwarded me an email announcing the Lysistrata Project. On March 10, 2003, actors in hundreds of cities around the world would, according to the email, perform public readings of Aristophanes’
Lysistrata,
after which their audiences would discuss the play's relevance to the (then) threatening war against Iraq. The email openly fantasized the wives of all the leaders in both governments withholding sex in order to promote a diplomatic solution, but the underlying assumption of such a fantasy, viz., that the leaders’ wives, being women, would likely oppose war in the first place, struck me as unwarranted, notwithstanding the thirteen-point gender gap (as reported in early March) in attitudes towards the war. Moreover, the March 10 readings—which took place in more than a thousand locations—constituted yet another moment of determined, global protest against the war that did not claim to be gender-based. Indeed, Katha Pollit quotes Sharron Bower, one of the New York actors who dreamed up the idea in the first place, as saying, “Nobody can resist an ancient Greek dick joke.” As Pollit put it, “What a pleasure it was to have fun, vitality, humor and sex on our side, not to mention the literary canon, the glory that was Greece and the majority of the world's population, and leave the other side stuck with Confederate flags, Bible study and bigoted prom queens like Ann Coulter."

"Fun, vitality, humor and sex” might be a fair representation of the play, but most classical scholars must have been a bit surprised to find it being used to make an anti-war gesture resting on the apparent assumption that women are naturally opposed to war. While scholars note that Aristophanes, a conservative landowner, opposed the Pelopennesian war, they also suggest that he wrote
Lysistrata
to “exorcise” (as Eva Cantarella puts it) the tragedy of the decline of Athens’ polis, and so depicted Athenian men, “reduced to pure animality,” as forgetting fatherland and honor when they give in to the sexual extortion of women (70). The play, that is, shows them ending the war, but for the wrong—or rather, through lack of—reason, as if to say, this is how low we've fallen: that we are so beyond reason, which would require us ending the war, that only an appeal to our base animal instincts can stop the war.