Story: She Must Be Killed

Published in Houston Literary Review, 2008. HLR's archives are currently incomplete so I add this here. Oh, how I wish I could detail the exact emotions and persons behind this story. -- Sarah Sarai, May 2010


No getting round it. It’s the hair clips, shiny metal girl-clips, springy, worn by a woman my age. She must be killed.

How to do it. Here, at the bowling alley?

Am hauling kid around this day and have dragged him to the Up The Alley, his request. Okay so you don’t really haul someone in a wheelchair, which kid is, which was why he’s in town, to see doctor who studies particular type of disease so much, the doc’s a regular Lourdes for the stricken. I don’t imply the doc does the trick, but exerts a real pull on certain kinds of persons, persons with certain types of diseases, i.e. kid I am hauling.

Soon I’ll fill you in on Miss Thing with girl-clips in her hair, the one I long to mutilate maim and be prime mover of her last breath, but let me say this: I draw so-thin line dimly visible, at pushing kids around. This one is the son of a person-I-know who transports to kid Mytown USA once a year to get knees tapped, chest inspected, platelets withdrawn by aforementioned Our Highly Paid Medical Professional of Lourdes. Then person-I-know turns kid over to me to bond while person-blah-blah does Our Highly Paid Medical Professional of Lourdes knows what.



Clip-woman. Still thin as a plastic shopping bag blown across half-empty street by gust, is she. Been a couple a years since I’ve seen her. Clips are new; she is pretending she is winsome, 24/7. That birth-to-death, girlhood is a universal, inalienable and perennial privilege of us, the sweetly hormoned gender.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emmeline Pankhurst, Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan. You’ve seen their likenesses. Notice any sprightly placed metal clips? Not even Gloria, who wore bunny ears.

Hey, Lady (thinks I). What’re we trying to prove here?

Kid and I have managed to show right after youth league has up and gone. Bumpers are still on either side of the lanes, to keep a ball rolling on its rightful spread of awesomely laminated bowling alley alley-wood so a player won’t attract humiliation like certain men of medicine attract a particular kind of patient, that being the type that’s sick.

I muse, Can I force the gal with the jaunty clips, Christ Almighty, she has five of those things in her lank brown tresses which would be sad enough dangling unaccompanied, to do herself in and save me the effort? A girl-girl would stop at two metals then build on look with shaped barrettes in pastel plastics of animals.

I feel hot as dog in a street stand steam bin and red with shame. I mean kid in wheelchair will live or the will die. No one can put that on me. Fate’s fingered Dr. Might As Well Be Sacred Spa in France for that. But the planet, for its spiritual survival, needs metal clips on chicks of a certain age like I need a Saturday-night special, with the numbers filed off. Illogical, I think. Because the answer sheet to the above reads: No (Full sentence version reading: Our legendarily doomed Earth has no need for women past prime’s rusted hair clips.)

And: Yes. (I could use a lethal weapon, right about now.)

Girly-girl-no-more’s already noticed me (who doesn’t spot kid in a wheelchair at a bowling alley). I guarantee she believes herself to be original Miss Nurture, just like she believes herself to be timeless. Diane Keaton wouldn’t wear lil’ clips in her hair, and she’s been given a whatever-you-want pass through old age.

At our former workplace, being a university, Miss Miss (the broad I really dislike) stuck her nose at me when word went round I talked back to boss, being a department chair who staged a coup after her predecessor dropped dead walking up a hill. You put it together. I’m no longer teaching.

Department Chair was guttural rambling on and over smutty mouth tongue/teeth about benefits for university if there was a salary roll back for part-timers. What’re ya gonna do? philosophized Sheena of the Hair Clips, thereby answering musical question, Do sheep study ethics? Nope. But sheep glare at speaker-uppers like me. Shut up, they glare. Who asked you, they glare.

You shut up, I thought back. Baa baa, I thought over airwaves static as her skanky do. How do you live with yourself, I thought querulously as if word querulously were arrow headed for numskull her.

So now:

“You gotta die.” My tone, fisting the portal of her ear, is sinister-to-freaky and provides me genuine opportunity to utilize ‘blanches’ which is what she does. I point five times, springy silver clip, silver clip, silver clip, silver clip, silver clip. No guesswork needed. I’m good at what I do.

Her eyes fill and she runs out of the bowling alley, which she’d only visited to emphasize her I’m up for anything attitude, plus, it turns out, buy balls for the Department Chair. The little, little downturned lips. Tweet.

People catch on when ready. I dry-wash hands, one against other, it’s quite the Biblical reference not to mention Lady Macbeth’s storied lack of adequate cleansing in her mans’ castle qua home.

Kid hauls bowling ball on little wheelchair lap, oh joy; x and my pulse has slowed although I feel off. Hell.

Woman qua I-Wanna-Be-Part-Of-The-18-to-25-Market is scrambling in purse for mace or car keys. I pursue. Truck lumbers by.

I push. Screech and bye bye. Dash back to kid. You can’t leave a kid in a wheelchair alone in a bowling alley.


Sarah Sarai, reprinted from The Houston Literary Review, February 2008

Delirious Feminism: question #2 of 3

Here's my response to poet Jennifer Bartlett's second question on the Delirious Hem blogspot. See my previous post regarding question #1.

2. If you do believe disability has been glossed over in feminist culture? If so, why do you thing this has happened?

This begs generalization, and so I'll generalize. Yes, disability has been ignored or glossed over and for the same reasons as in culture at large. Differentness scares people, unless the differentness is framed. Also I'm not sure how much differently abled poets have chosen to go public. Writing and publication are somewhat incorporeal pursuits until there's a reading, so I don't necessarily know who has what.

Of course women are continually encouraged to tend to our looks in a no-win situation. If we're beautiful as Helen we can cause ten years of slaughter and warring (or, perhaps more true to our lives, expected to stay beautiful, or not threaten). If we're not beautiful we can be dismissed as horrors--a lesbian. God bless dykes, I say. We all need to access our inner big-breasted, no bra, T-shirt wearing mamas.

IN NO WAY am I saying that dykedom is a disability. But it is a "different" way of being. And look at public intellectual Susan Sontag, a lesbian who stayed in the closet. I'm using it as an analogy. Here's another analogy.

I, Sarah Sarai, bi-sexual, have a belly. Thus I'm "different."

Once I took a "craft" class, ho hum. Grad. school, ho hum. At one point the female poet professor mentioned dried apricots as a sense memory, then recoiled when she remembered how fattening they were, then quickly gave me a guilty look. Hello? This poet trades on a perception of good looks, when her already good poetry would be stronger if she would let herself be who she is.

Mine is a quick response not an essay so I'm going to jump, now, with dispatch, to Helen Keller. What she did to HELP the disabled was astonishing and I don't see her being celebrated. Similar to what happened with Emily Dickinson via The Belle of Amherst, where a dated and too precious play served to define Emily in everyone's imagination for generations, Helen Keller become the miracle of the Miracle Worker, rather than a woman, blind, who set up institutions and lobbied and did more to demystify disability than anyone I can think of.

This is one perspective and I'm grateful if you point out my own generalizations.

Delirious Feminism: question #1 of 3

The blog Delirious Hem is pushing for a Feminist poetics by posting essays by poets, followed by questions. The latest is from Jennifer Bartlett. Scroll down for the link.

I'm responding to her three questions in three blog postings. My response may not be as direct as she would want, but I'm musing. I'm a muser. (Always a muser, never a muse?)

1. Where have you seen mainstream Feminism and disability intersect in positive ways?

Okay, First the definition: I see mainstream Feminism is an impulse similar to that impulse which voted in our first black president, a desire to make amends and a hope the amends (such as Obama) is intelligent and capable. (He is.) In other words, men and women sense equality of male/female capability, each according to their light, which can cause confusion, hurt or ridicule: We are all well armed with expectations and mindsets.

Disability? Since women have been objects of a "gaze" for several millennia, our level of self-consciousness about our appearance is near electric and at odds with disability's perceived threat to our poise and ability to navigate male (and female) expectations. As more women are more conventionally successful, the culture has expanded its zone of the amount of "differentness" it will tolerate. This extends to disability, but only some. Only if it's not threatening. People are really easily threatened and difference is scary, I guess.

I have to laugh at the word "differentness" and the underlying presumption that there's a fine woman who is slim and straight-haired, fair, and is what the Creator intended. That the rest of us are "different." What a crock, but how we all buy into it.

I hope that women become more willing to be at least a bit different, to access our inner-Annie Oakley. Alas I see evidence to the contrary. I'm old school, 70s Feminist and also pulled between urges to be femme and urges to be tough. I'm all over the spectrum of sexuality, and was was astounded when I reached that certain age and began to realize the new breed of young women poets always wear skirts and make-up and are a bit restrained. They're smart and talented, but, as I see them, many aren't women to object too loudly. I could simply be describing the shock between the culture of 70s Feminism and contemporary Feminism.

Old-style Feminism was not all about being feminine. Not at all.

I present differently, at times, than what these new Feminists are comfortable with. One young woman who has a good teaching job, and more opportunities offered to her than I'll ever have, made a snarky remark to be about how angry old time Feminists were. I replied that it did seem to parallel the anger of African Americans of a certain age who, like the Feminists, were subjected to old school prejudice. She is black and didn't respond. I found her comment, the one mentioned and others, hurtful. Her only experience of me at that point was of my poetry and humor, and I didn't take it personally, but hey, I'm a Feminist and I'm angry. Sorry, honey.

We love Nature's diversity. Wow, man, there's eels and tulips and lichen. But when it comes to people, women being people and people being people, we have a long way to go.

Finally, I wrote several poems about my mother's painful (for the daughers and for her) self-inflicted twenty-year bout with cancer and the ravage on her face. This is not a disability. My mom's true disability was a slight limp ("First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn") from the polio epidemic of 1919. But her disfiguration is really hard for people to handle. Just throwing that in.

Jennifer Bartlett's essay at:

http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/%20(January 16, 2010)