THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
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me crazy morning to night and to morning again? Why
there?
I knew- I knew, well enough, without knowing. My parents
singly and together (with Jason lately wise-guying it behind
the door) had explained to me the whole process of sexual love
(oh, the 'twenties), mating (oh, the 'thirties), and having
babies blah blah blah! I persisted in imagining that babies
emerged from the rectum, though when asked directly (as I
often was by mates-like poor Aggie-with less progressive
parents ) I would reply dutifully that of course they came out
of your you-know-what, whatja think goofy cross-eyes? Huh,
goofy?
Aggie said she didn't think so. Why not? "Our Sister in
Cath'lic school says babies come from He4ven."
Aggie, did they come from Heaven when your man stuck
them in you and they ripped out again, swollen with life-even
that putrid stillborn-leaving placentas and blood and cancer
behind them? In you? In your torn, bleeding, pulpous, lippy
box?
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At night, in foreign quaint-garden Tyrol, I know no better.
( I have such a horror of what can be put in boxes: children and
r
dead people and cancer and garden gates and palpable, breath-
ing,
passionate fantasies.
Joshua was an artist. A story so monotonous as hardly to
bear notation. He was on WPA but he had caught pneumonia
and WPA could not pay his bills. He needed to live free some–
, where for a brief time to save a little money. He lived with us
for four months while my mother built up his health and morale
and my father helped him find a steady job that left him enough
, time and energy to make
his
"objects."
They weren't paintings and they weren't sculptures and at
~
the time and for years afterward (though I never admitted it
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to anyone but myself) they seemed very queer even to me. Now
I know that he was a kind of Surrealist and that he was doing
really very original work, though Giacommetti had made related
objects a few years before- and Cornell was doing so then but
