Earth Works: Selected Essays

Looking at Women

69 n that sizzling July afternoon, the girl who crossed at the stoplight in front of our car looked, as my mother would say, as though she had been poured into her pink shorts. The girl’s matching pink halter bared her stomach and clung to her nubbin breasts, leaving little to the imagination , as my mother would also say. Until that moment, it had never made any difference to me how much or little a girl’s clothing revealed, for my imagination had been entirely devoted to other mysteries. I was eleven. The girl was about fourteen, the age of my buddy Norman who lounged in the back seat with me. Staring after her, Norman elbowed me in the ribs and murmured, “Check out that chassis.” His mother glared around from the driver’s seat. “Hush your mouth.” “I was talking about that sweet Chevy,” said Norman, pointing out a soupedup jalopy at the curb. “I know what you were talking about,” his mother snapped. No doubt she did know, since mothers could read minds, but at first I myself did not have a clue. Chassis? I knew what it meant for a car, an airplane, a radio, or even a cannon to have a chassis. But could a girl have one as well? I glanced after the retreating figure, and suddenly noticed with a sympathetic twitching in my belly the way her long raven ponytail swayed in rhythm to her walk and the way her fanny jostled in those pink shorts. In July’s dazzle of sun, her swinging legs and arms beamed at me a semaphore I could almost read. As the light turned green and our car pulled away, Norman’s mother cast one more scowl at her son in the rearview mirror, saying, “Just think how it makes her feel to have you two boys gawking at her.” Looking at Women 70 Earth works How? I wondered. “Makes her feel like hot stuff,” said Norman, owner of a bold mouth. “If you don’t get your mind out of the gutter, you’re going to wind up in the state reformatory,” said his mother. Norman gave a snort. I sank into the seat, and tried to figure out what power had sprung from that sashaying girl to zap me in the belly. Only after much puzzling did it dawn on me that I must finally have drifted into the force field of sex, as a space traveler who has lived all his years in free fall might rocket for the first time within gravitational reach of a star. Even as a bashful eleven-year-old I knew the word sex, of course, and I could paste that name across my image of the tantalizing girl. But a label for a mystery no more explains a mystery than the word gravity explains gravity. As I grew a beard and my taste shifted from girls to women, I acquired a more cagey language for speaking of desire. I picked up disarming theories. First by hearsay and then by experiment, I learned the delicious details of making babies. I came to appreciate the urgency for propagation that litters the road with maple seeds and drives salmon up waterfalls and yokes the newest crop of boys to the newest crop of girls. Books in their killjoy wisdom taught me that all the valentines and violins, the waltzes and glances, the long fever and ache of romance were merely embellishments on biology’s instructions that we multiply our kind. And yet, the fraction of desire that actually leads to procreation is so vanishingly small as to seem irrelevant. In his lifetime a man sways to a million longings, only a few of which, or perhaps none at all, ever lead to the fathering of children. Now, thirty years away from that July afternoon, firmly married, twice a father, I am still humming from the power unleashed by the girl in pink shorts, still wondering how it made her feel to have two boys gawk at her, still puzzling over how to dwell in the force field of desire. How should a man look at women? It is a peculiarly and perhaps neurotically human question. Billy goats do not fret over how they should look at nanny goats. They look or don’t look, as seasons and hormones dictate, and feel what they feel without benefit of theory. There is more billy goat in most men than we care to admit...