Dear Digby (3 page)

I could see Iris on the cover of SIS myself, sitting in her lovely room with a pair of underpants over her head, waving the paneled radio on the shelf broadcasting from Pluto, plants percolating in their pots, the president’s goonish photo smirking out from the bulletin board tacked with Snoopy figures, withered balloons, a rain of construction paper exclamation points, yellowing articles clipped from SIS.
Seminal fluid.

Dear Iris,

SIS can’t help you. SIS has the utmost sympathy for most bodily secretions, but alas, little tradition of dealing with seminal fluid. I too know, as an individual, what it’s like to feel happy, fairly content with one’s life, independent, etc.—and still feel like one is getting secretly fucked over. That’s why I can’t really help you but can suggest only vigilance. Smoke a cigar after, smile enigmatically,
stay awake.
You can fight this, Iris.

A large blue-and-green Nike, with a foot in it, appeared on my desk. The shoe and foot belonged to Minnie White-White-Goldfarb.

“Editorial meeting, Willis.”

I looked up at her, hunched worriedly over her raised bent knee, which was dimpled like a backside. She wrapped her arms around the knee, a large anxious Germanic woman with a big long nose and two huge yellow braids like a Wagnerian heroine.

I felt great pity for Minnie White-White-Goldfarb because she had more names than anyone I’d ever known. In her heart, Minnie’d felt obligated to hyphenate herself and her spouse, each surname like a chapter of a mystery novel. She’s married a man named White—her own name had been White too. She could not bear the thought of “disappearing” into her husband’s Whiteness. “It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt,” she was fond of saying. “How did she know
which
Roosevelt she was? When people asked for Eleanor Roosevelt, how could she determine if they wanted the Eleanor Roosevelt she was
before
marrying FDR (and maybe secretly still was!) or the Eleanor Roosevelt she was
after!
How could anyone tell if she really changed her name?” It
was
a hard question to answer. Minnie had finally solved her dilemma by keeping both names, her own and her husband’s. She was Minnie White-White for a long while. Then her first husband was electrocuted in the bathtub when the answering machine fell into the bath water. “He’d put it right on the ledge above the tub,” Minnie recalled sadly. “So he could monitor calls and pick up if he wanted. It was
terrible
—when I came in, the machine was half-floating, half-submerged, and the recorded message kept repeating: “Greetings! This is Minnie White-White” (
“and
her hubby, Endor L. White!”) “Guess what? We’re not available to answer your call right now. …” She said the beep sound, like a drowning dolphin’s shriek, still haunted her dreams. After an appropriate period of mourning, Minnie married Amiri Goldfarb, the Arab-Jewish owner of the electronics parts store where she took the fatal answering machine to be fixed. They divorced a year later, but I’d heard rumors that a new name was about to be attached like an invisible Leggo to the series, the little arms of Goldfarb reached out for closure.

“This is an extremely happy time for me, Willis,” she said. She looked alert but sad, as if a bad boy had put ice down her back. She began to cry.

I handed her a tissue. “Why?” I asked. I put Iris aside.

She cleared her throat. “I’m getting married. I’m marrying a wonderful guy. Salt of the earth. Get this: a Unitarian minister who plays mah-jongg
and
loves salsa!” She fumbled with a wad of Kleenex and blew her nose with a great beep.

She gave me a baleful look. “Gerard Biskell Rutgers-Oblonski.” She waited for a reaction.

“Jesus,” I said.

She cried softly for a while, then added: “Names are so easy for other people. They give up their history so readily, just sign a marriage license and all those years as somebody else are gone. I can’t do that.” She looked at me as if I headed the name-erasing conspiracy. “My fiancé’s mother is English, his father is Polish. They wanted to preserve both strains.”

She put the tissue back in her pocket. The six phone lines at the front desk, where she was supposed to be sitting, were lit up and squawking.

“God, I’m sick of names,” she bellowed suddenly, and pulled her rubber sole, screeching, from my desk top. “I think I’m just going to call myself Number 208 or something.”

“Why don’t you just use your own name?”

“My
own
name? No woman owns her name! Anyway,
my
name was and is White, the same as my first husband. What good does that do me? I don’t want to go back to that name, but I don’t want a three-page driver’s license either.”

I pointed to the stack of letters on my desk, Iris’s included.

“Here are some people with real problems.”

Minnie shrugged and turned back to her phones.

“Yeah—but they’re all crazy.”

I sighed. The door to the Situation Room was opening and closing, editors wandered in, carrying notepads and flowered plastic coffee cups. I hurried in, late. Holly Partz, our editor in chief, had already begun to talk. I stumbled into a chair; I coughed loudly. Holly looked at me with exaggerated patience. I looked back at her. She was beautiful and brilliant, and she had invented SIS, then shared it with everyone. I hated her.

“Yes, Willis,” she said. “What is it?”

“I think I’m going crazy.”

There were boos and groans. Someone threw a crumpled napkin at me.

“C’mon, Willis, let’s not start
this
again!”

“I’m going out of my mind,” I said. “I cannot go on reading this stuff”—I waved some letters—“every day and stay sane.”

“Willis. Take off your rabbit ears and the tux,” said Marge Taggart. “You’ll stay sane.”

I looked at Marge. She was six feet tall and handsome. She smiled at me and winked.

“Marge, I think this job is for you. You’ve got the temperament.”

“Willis.” It was Holly—she was tapping her ballpoint against her big, square-faced watch. “Every issue your Letters section gets better. The letters you print are perfect, and your responses are funny and informative. What do you—”

“It’s the ones we
don’t
print I’m talking about. There are so many, I think we ought to publish some of them. I have a letter from a woman in Skyhigh, Utah, who thinks she’s a Female Savior of the world. I’d just as soon pray to her as the Pope, wouldn’t you? I’d like to say that in print.”

Holly sighed. “Willis, what is your point? You know we can’t print those letters.”

“Why not?”

“You know why. The people who write those letters aren’t well. Why would we make fun of them, humiliate them in a national magazine?”

“They
wouldn’t be humiliated. We would, right? We can’t really admit that there are this many crazies out there who are responding passionately to our magazine. Isn’t that it? And why can’t our magazine also be for the woman who’s gone a little crackers, alone in the rec room at ten
A.M.
, eating Ding Dongs, getting weird?”

Page Kenney, my best friend, that traitor, gave me a bored look. “Willis, please sit down and shut up. Nobody cares about this but you.”

“I know that, Page, thank you. That’s what concerns me here. Why is it none of you are interested in a woman who is convinced that while she sleeps, strange men enter her and pump her full of
seminal fluid?”

“Seminal fluid,” said Marge Taggart. “Yuck.”

“This woman wrote to SIS in response to
your
article, Marge, ‘Why I Never Married’—she agreed wholeheartedly with you; she feels you think alike.”

“Well, that figures, doesn’t it? The whole
point
of my article was seminal fluid.”

“I think Willis has a point.” Everyone turned and looked over at Lupé Reyes. Lupé kept to herself a lot; there was a story around that she had been a child prostitute pimped by her own father. She came to the editorial meetings and sat silent most of the time. There was another rumor that she belonged to W.I.T.C.H., which stood for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. It was, as far as I knew, a kind of street theater group. I heard they did things like spray-paint
SEXIST PIG
on girlie posters and send dog poop quiches to Bobby Riggs.

“These so-called crazy women have a right to be heard.” She got up and walked over to Marge and leaned against her chair. “A lot of people think Puerto Rican women are crazy—did you know that, Marge?”

“No,” said Marge. “I didn’t know that.” She glared at me.

Lupé turned and looked at me too, a long, dark look.

“We can trust Willis to come up with something we all need to read about—isn’t that right, Willis?”

I looked back at her, suddenly unsure. She smiled at me, very slow, very deliberate.

“I’d like to get back to our agenda here.” Holly was standing on one foot, tapping her watch.

“I’d like to come up with a couple letters for the column,” I said, “nothing shocking, just a glimpse of alternative approaches to reality.”

Holly frowned and shook her head. “You worry me, Willis. But go ahead.”

Then she turned back to her agenda, which included nominations for the next cover: so far we had Margaret Thatcher and Tina Turner. I waved at Page and slipped out for a drink of water.

Betty Berry was sitting at my desk. She was dressed, as usual, more oddly than me, and that was saying something. She looked like a collision in a boutique between Germaine Greer and General Westmoreland—she wore a kind of diaphanous dashiki with hiking boots. I never commented on her dress (since I was in no position to), and I’d always assumed her own style reflected some really satisfying personal fantasy. Like mine.

When I got closer, I saw that she was drinking Stolichnaya right out of the bottle and placed it, chilled and dribbling, right on Iris Moss.

She lifted the bottle as I approached, and I pulled Iris away—there were wet half-moons all over the page.

“I’m sorry, Willis,” she croaked. “I’m sorry for taking over your desk and spilling on your papers. I’ll get out of here.”

She made no move, however, and I was forced to sit down in the chair across from my desk. I sponged Iris lightly with an envelope. Betty took another drink.

“Willis, remember when I called myself Betty Myrtlechild?”

Not
names
again,
I thought. I couldn’t take any more discussion of names.

“I just went through this with Minnie. …”

Betty made a face. “Minnie? Minnie’s trying to annex a personal history; I was trying to escape my history. And give myself another identity.”

“Your mom’s name is Myrtle, right?”

“Right.”

“Betty, don’t get me wrong. But I know everything you’re going to say here. You took your mother’s name because you wanted to be free of the male patronymic and added ‘child’ to designate yourself, then I assume that you went back to your original name because you found Myrtlechild kind of a dumb name.”

“You’re partly right. The first part. I went back to Betty Berry because my children were embarrassed by the other name.”

I looked at her. Children? I’d never known about any children—Betty was a lesbian. She looked like Gertrude Stein’s sex therapist. Children?? I saw now how stupid I’d been, looking at a cliché, not Betty.

“It’s great—the way you’re looking at me. Yes, I have kids. Two little girls. My husband kept them when I fell in love with a woman and had to leave.”

She was going to start confessing something. Why did this happen to me? Why did I attract the lonely, the miserable, the desperate—and why did they feel such a need to confide in me? I looked down at my letter to Iris.

Let’s wake up here, Iris. Let’s face the fact that
this is not
happening to you—at least not under hypnosis, kiddo. Who is it that you’re inviting into your room at night?

Betty took another swig. “My husband won custody of the children when I left. He won’t let me see them. He’s convinced the court I’m a bad influence. He told me on the phone that the oldest thinks I’m dead.”

She sat up and banged the vodka bottle on the desk. It splashed over the top and spritzed a few more letters.

“I’m not alive? Do I look dead to you? Don’t I look like I’m still the mother of Jenna and Louise? It’s Lou-Lou’s birthday today; she’s nine and I sent her a gift. I had a SIS messenger take it over to their apartment—my ex-husband told her to wait a minute, went out of the room, then came back with the gift and told the messenger to return it to me.”

She flipped something across the desk. It was a package wrapped in red-and-blue paper with a bright red bow, a tiny plastic clown dancing from the bow. A piece of ruled writing paper had been taped to the package. On it was painstakingly printed:

LEAVE ME ALONE MOMMY. YOUR DEAD. FOREVER.

I handed the package back.

We sat in silence for a while, then Betty Berry stood up. “Jesus, Willis,” she said. “When are you going to take those fucking rabbit ears off? You look like a goddamn idiot.”

She picked up her bottle and her terrible package and shoved off, teetering a little. I stood up and walked, glancing at my reflection across the room in the opaque windows of late afternoon. An elongated, square-cornered figure in an antennalike headpiece slowed down, stopped to stare. I did look like a goddamn idiot.

I sat down, pulled off the rabbit ears, and tore up the soggy letter to Iris Moss. And began to type another.

Dear Iris,

I just destroyed a very smart-aleck letter to you written by me in a state of mind that had nothing to do with your communication to SIS. First of all, SIS can’t pay you for your thoughts; we don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. We
do
publish letters to the editor occasionally, but I think your remarks might be misunderstood by our general reading public. I’m presumptuous enough to think I understand what you’re talking about in your letter. I am touched by your straightforward presentation of the facts of your life, including the hypnosis-rapes you endure. There is a part of everyone’s mind that’s hypnotized, that cannot look at itself. I have so much in me that’s in a trance, a state of suggestion. Iris, I would like to stay in touch with you. I would like to know if you ever discover the identity of this intruder-in-sleep. I would like very much to know what is going to happen to us.

Write soon,

WJD