Notecard Collection: Five

This is what I was talking about last week, Mimi, when I couldn’t let Professor Harris get away with that dismissive look in Religions of the World when you said that the whole Adam-and-Eve story was a cheap and sexist rip-off of an earlier Sumerian story, replete with all the color of paganism. His look said, “bitch,” before he could hide it behind professorial condescension and then that rhythmless over-sixties bald man’s imitation of you-go-girl. Very hip these days in the Ivies. I know you don’t like that I called him a wonky-eyed Freudian who’ll walk around for hours with his pants at his ankles if there’s no one around to pull them up after he shits, but you didn’t have to kick at me when I brought up that his ex-wife had been reading Cixous, H.D. and May Swenson long before she slipped his ring on and disappeared into that patriarchal heart of darkness. After all, I was right, and I convinced myself of it today at Sparky’s café when some wing-tipped linebacker entered with credit-card confidence and that same breakneck blindness that in twenty years will make him the irreducible asshole of the downtown office. He stormed a neighboring table to ask what the bathroom code from their receipt was, but I wished so much he’d turned to ours, to me, that I turned when he erupted with entitlement and answered in look-this-way Russian, “ч Á‰‡ÒÚ‚ÛÂÚ ‚ÂÎËÍËÈ ëÓ‚ÂÚÒÍËÈ ëÓ˛Á!” When he said, “What?” I could see that same high-speed look that would never have time for things like street signs, stoplights, pedestrians, and women drivers. “I’ve got the code here, and I’ll give it to you,” I said, and slapped him on the butt, “if you buy something from the table. How about a nice quarter of buttered bagel?” His “excuse me?” was getting us closer to the point, Mimi, working backwards along the trajectory the Prof’s face had taken. First, you-go-girl in that shade of “you-like-what-you-see-don’t you?” upon the butt slapping; second, a tight-lipped condescension when he found himself on the customer’s side of an antagonistic pretend retail counter; and third, not only that look but also its verbalization, “Don’t be a bitch,” just after my eye-flutter. I turned to the girls simultaneously, because I knew what was coming from that LOOK, and said, “This, ladies, is what I was just getting at: the definition of ‘bitch’ in a patriarchal construct is none other than an epithet for a woman who won’t comply with a man’s desires, no matter how unjustifiable. This wonky-eyed Freudian (forgive me, it’s a knee-jerk, irresponsible epithet, paired uncontrollably with the one currently in question) thinks I’m being unjustifiably rude--though if I had bigger breasts or if I could hide contempt better he might find it flirtatious--and thereby justifies his own rudeness. But he has no idea that I work here, that I clean the bathrooms after closing, and that my giving him today’s restroom code without demanding he follow the rules and purchase something like everybody else, is equivalent to my agreeing to clean up after his ass pro bono. I submit that anyone who offers such service in ignorance is an angel but, when offered with awareness, is none other than this suit’s bitch.”