An Emergence of Green by Katherine V Forrest Page A

image of her son wading into Paul Blake with his small fists flying. “Do you even know what that word means?”
    “Ma, for crying out loud.” He gazed at her in disgust. “Don’t you remember Mr. Steinberg?”
    She remembered when Neal had come home from school to talk only of the English teacher who had asked his students every hate reference they knew to groups of people, writing each word on the blackboard as it was volunteered. “I bet we came up with fifty,” Neal had declared, obsessed with his effort to convey the awesomeness of that list, the ugliness of those words, row upon row of them, beginning with kike, hymie, hebe , and jewboy , which Mr. Steinberg himself had written.
    “Listen pal,” she said to Neal, “it’s the Fourth of July, remember? Why don’t we go watch some fireworks? Let’s drive out to Devonshire.”
    She felt infected by her hatred of Paul Blake. She needed to get out of the house, as if open space and fresh air could relieve the festering. She would not dwell on the events of this night.
    “You wearing that?” He was looking at her dress in disapproval.
    “Is the pope Baptist? Last one to change clothes is a Winged Monkey.”
    “Surrender, Dorothy!” Neal raced for his room.
    Later, on the Ventura Freeway, with fiery flowers bursting and fading in the night sky, and Boy George singing softly on the radio, Neal said soberly, “Carolyn’s a good lady, Ma. I really like her. Why’d she marry such a creep?”
    She returned to her analogy. “Some colors might not mix, sweetie, but others do just fine together.”
    He shrugged and turned up the radio.
    But it was incomprehensible to her as well. She called up the image of Paul Blake, and in the choking fullness of hatred that rose with the image, tried to analyze her emotion. She thought of her trip into the Mojave with Neal, and the solitary diamondback they had watched patrol its harsh terrain with easy, confident menace. While Paul Blake might not be as soulless as a reptile, he was the clear embodiment of the many men she had known whose arrogant superiority mocked her and the value of anything she said, thought, felt, created, accomplished. Men who expected to dominate and control, who viewed independence or rebellion with an amused tolerance, others might give to a child, or an idiot, and viewed more serious threats to their dominance with wary condescension, as if dealing with mental aberration.
    Why had Carolyn subjected herself to such a man as Paul Blake? Val conceded with a moue of distaste that Paul Blake did have an aura of sexual confidence; he had conveyed that when their eyes had first met—not as invitation or comment on her as a desirable woman, far from it—simply as a statement. Many men were hopeless sexual performers, a condition even more likely when they were young. To Carolyn at the age of nineteen perhaps a mature Paul Blake had seemed the ultimate sexual sophisticate. God knows, Val reflected, it had taken an older man to give her the only sexual reassurance she had ever known.
    Perhaps it was Henry Ingall’s stature—five feet seven (why, why did she always attract short men?)—and his age—fifty-five to her twenty-four—which had given her a feeling of confidence instead of the usual tension and apprehension. She had relaxed with him, and climaxed three times, all of them after intercourse, reaching orgasm easily each time from manual, then oral stimulation. “This is what you like,” he told her back in those days when women were trapped in the theories of Freud and Kinsey. “You’re remarkably responsive and that’s all that matters. Don’t feel guilty about what you like; there’s nothing wrong with it and don’t let anyone ever tell you differently.” That assurance had been gratifying but useless in the sexual battles of her two marriages and subsequent affairs. If she confessed her needs, men perceived her—or themselves—as inadequate. After she made the same dismal discovery