The Summer Without Men

me sneeze twice. Jessica, Ashley, Nikki, and Joan were dressed for something other than a poetry workshop. Adorned with trailing earrings, lip gloss, eye shadow, T-shirts with messages that exposed their bare bellies of various sizes and shapes, they had strutted rather than walked into the room. The Gang of Four, I thought. The comfort, the safety, the group.
    I gave my speech then. “There are no rules,” I told them. “For six weeks, three days a week, we’re going to dance, dance with words. Nothing is prohibited—no thought or subject. Nonsense, stupidity, silliness of all kinds are allowed. Grammar, spelling, none of it matters, at least at first. We’ll read poems, but your poems don’t have to be like the ones we read.”
    The seven were silent.
    “You mean we can write about anything, ” Nikki blurted out. “Even nasty stuff.”
    “If that’s what you want,” I said. “In fact, let’s try nasty as a trigger word.”
    After a short explanation about automatic writing, I had them write a response to nasty, whatever came into their mindin a ten-minute stretch. Poop, pee, snot, and vomit appeared under several pencils in short order. Joan included “Period mess,” which prompted giggles and gasps and made me wonder how many of them had crossed that threshold. Peyton discoursed on cow pies. Emma, incapable, it seemed, of letting herself go, stuck to moldy oranges and lemons, and Alice, who obviously inhabited the realm of the incurably bookish, wrote, “sharp, cruel, pointed, like piercing knives in my soft flesh,” a line that caused Nikki to roll her eyes and glance at Joan for confirmation, which quickly arrived in the form of a smirk.
    That shared look of disparagement registered itself in my chest, like the briefest stab of a needle, and I noted aloud that nasty was a word that included more than objects of disgust, that there were nasty remarks, nasty thoughts, and nasty people. This went over without objection, and after more talk, embarrassed giggling, questions, my directive to keep their work in a single notebook, and an assignment to do more fast writing at home to the word cold, I dismissed them.
    The Gang of Four led the way out with Peyton and Emma fast on their heels. Alice lingered at the table as she carefully, self-consciously inserted her book into a large canvas bag. Then I heard Ashley call to Alice in a bright, brittle voice, “Alice, aren’t you coming with?” ( With is a preposition allowed to hang unaccompanied by a noun or pronoun in Minnesotan.) Looking toward Alice, I saw her face change. She smiled for an instant and, gathering up her notebook from the table, ran eagerly toward the others. Alice’s undisguised happiness combined with Ashley’s tone had for the second time in a single hour touched a raw spot in me, more bodily than cerebral. I had been called back to a young and hopelessly serious self, a girl without the distance of irony or a gift for covering up her emotions. You ARE overly sensitive. The two tiny exchanges between girls lingered into the evening like an old and annoying melody in my mind, one I understood I had never wanted to hear again.
    The girls and their blooming bodies may have been an indirect catalyst for the project I launched that same evening. It served as a methodical way to ward off the demons that arrived every night, all of them named Boris, and all of them wielding knives of various lengths. The fact that I had spent over half my life with that man did not mean that there hadn’t been a period Before Boris (from now on to be designated B.B.) There had been sex, too, in that long-lost era, voluptuous, dirty, sweet, and sad. I decided to catalog my carnal adventures and misadventures in a pristine notebook, to defile the pages with my own pornographic history and to do my best to leave it husband-free. The Others, I hoped, would take my mind off the One.
     
Entry #1. Was I six or seven? I would say six, but it isn’t certain. My aunt and uncle’s house in Tidyville. My older cousin Rufus lounging on the sofa. If I was six, he was twelve. Other family members were around, I recall, moving in and out of the room. It was summer. Sunlight shone through the window, specks of dust visible, a fan blowing from the corner. As I passed the sofa, Rufus pulled me onto his lap, nothing unusual. We were cousins . He began to rub me or, rather, knead me between my legs as if I were dough, and a strange warm feeling arrived, a combination