A Wild Surmise

To Peter in Germany

111 To Peter in Germany 1 Dear Peter, I met three women this summer at Mono Lake. I knew they were foreigners because of their haircuts. I thought two of them might be dykes, and sure enough, they were East German lesbians . They had left their lovers at home while they were here doing research at the University of Oklahoma. I commented on what an out-of-the-way place they’d been sent to—like Oklahoma isn’t exactly AMERICA—power center and all, but they thought they had seen the heartland. They were returning home to an uncertain future. What they said was their jobs weren’t safe when men needed to be employed—that’s what they believed. I could only sympathize and pet their dog. In Berlin the wall may have fallen, but it fell on the women. No female faces rose in the wave of grey suits on the tide of democratic revolution. 2 Homegrown atrocities surround me when I look at the women who come to sign up for classes— the tight smile of one whose body is a coin rubbed between her boss’ fingers, the unlined, unlearned face of a local beauty, spent by 23. 112 Deferential, they sit in front of my desk, apologetic as a season out of season, to say, “it’s just a feeling, I’ve never read anything.” 3 The dangers to my gender are catalogued in the names of foundations and social service agencies: Haven House Shelter for Battered Women, Alcoholism Center for Women, House of Ruth, Sojourner, Lesbian Rights Advocates, Beyond Survival. The list goes on. 4 Dear Peter, The effects you’ve seen of the Final Solution, built there in a landscape and historical moment, I give you. I honor the truth of the historical moment. When you come home to this city, when you come back to your friends and your place in our history , I can only say I won’t know who I am to you or to any man anymore. I speak out of the dead mouths now, I speak out of my 113 terror for the history of women as it comes before us in living color and not as the dumb-show lie factory production which our common culture drags out in moth-eaten costumes; and while the tap dancing goes on, backstage is clitoridectomy, infibulation , genocidal rape. The meter is running, Peter—more women than Jews. Believe me, the sorry truth is more women than Jews. More women than Jews, even. Hatred unto hatred. More. More. More than we can count. 5 Dirty fingers. It begins and ends with dirty fingers. The priests can burn all the incense in the world, cut up all the sacrificial chickens and throw blood on the walls, chant the laws of eternity and not one thin red running down white trickle of it matters to me. In my lifetime, even with forty years of feminism, cutting the sexual parts out of girls can still be practiced in the name of religion and culture. Want to answer the question of what ‘eye for an eye’ I’m talking about here? Want to know why the revolution is still an itch in my palm, why I lose whatever civilizing effects culture used to have on me? 114 All the non-violence in the world has not saved female bodies from men and their lies: theology-lie, philosophy-lie, regulation-lie, history-lie, lie lie lie lie lie. I grant no one the benefit of the doubt. I speak their language now, an eye for an eye, a part for a part. I commit myself to kill the pain and what causes pain. I commit myself to the end of their world. 6 Dear Peter, If a jawbone is found in the desert separated from the body, what’s your guess, my friend? Is it a woman? Is it a habit? Is it the natural law? ...