Read Online Dry Your Smile by Robin; Morgan - Free Book Online Page A

wisdom weak never aloud coward never saved us dragged himself left foot right foot from the shul to the hardware store and Yetta and Essie and Madam Betrothed Vienna— cleanse me of their filth, take them , they’re Yours. I don’t need any of you . I’m creating my own miracle. Full American he’ll be, peasant strength and aristocrat’s elegance blending in his tiny veins. Someone who belongs to me. My son, to seize the whole world in his little fist! And I’ll love him. Damn you all I want this baby now . Do you hear, Momma? Do you understand, David? Waltzing together through that room washed with light, you’re dead —one of you dead inside and the other dead everywhere. But I’m alive and I’ll live in spite of you! Up and up through the darkness, carrying my own light inside me, my casket of jewels, my little Mayan prince, my tiny Cossack to crush them underfoot and avenge his mother. My son, my life, my voice, my secret shining self, my future, my weapon! Mine . See? Even the Tsar has come to offer his respects to us. See how he beams down at me from under his high pearl-encrusted crown? White, so white! So tall! He wants me to marry him now, my little princeling, see? The Tsar himself has come to ask forgiveness, to pay homage! The Tsar …
    â€œIt’s all over now, Miss Baker. You had a very difficult labor, Nurse says. And I can certainly tell you it wasn’t an easy delivery. High forceps. Frankly, you almost lost the baby and we almost lost you. But you’ll be all right now. And congratulations. You’ve given birth to a fine baby girl.”

PART THREE
    May, 1981
    But how could Julian write about herself? Julian is only a figment of her own imagination—or of mine—she thought, reclining in an armchair forty thousand feet above land. Julian is only a character, an illusion. God knows who Julian really is. Hope was another matter. She knew Hope better than she did herself. Hope was as large as life. Larger. She was in a lifelong obsessive affair with Hope even when, perhaps especially when, she was able to forget her.
    But what could she say about some mythical Julian-self on an evening in May, sitting in a plane after more than a decade of sitting in planes, on the way home from a speech after more than a decade of speeches, marches, demonstrations, meetings, and press interviews, a decade of trying to reach women like the one who sat next to her now? Her sister passenger.
    Peculiar, how often that word “sister” felt contrived, even after years of public usage. Because of residual convent or labor-union-solidarity associations? Or because such a word grazed against internal wounds, provoking an anxiety of recognition which, no matter how proselytized, trivialized, or denied, did vibrate between women? A recognition that could still annunciate itself as shock or terror, anger or humor or even hope—another maddening word for which there was no precise synonym, so Julian could never avoid using it, despite its being her name.
    Nonetheless, she thought with a sidewards glance, a true-to-life sister passenger this seatmate was, a woman she knew as well as herself: a white woman in her mid-fifties, nondescript in careful home-permanent hairdo, brown polyester pantsuit, yellow blouse, a woman immersed in reading the airline copy of Good Housekeeping . Her sister, Polly Esther incarnate, who was happily married and had been for years, a full-time homemaker and mother, the kind of woman who resolutely tried out all the recipes Good Housekeeping fed her, went to church every Sunday, had voted for Ronald Reagan. The kind of woman who deferred to her husband—even if she did sometimes find herself crying into her pillow soundlessly in the middle of the night without knowing why.
    Polly Esther, unscathed by any “women’s revolution,” taking a plane ride as a big occasion, maybe to visit her own mother in some other city, or