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By Root 328 0

to the water to help cleanse the wound, just as her mother had taught her. The water bloomed pink. She looked down at the color and cried. The salt was causing her wound to sting. "Obey," like "worship," is a strong word. Her mother and father had told her so, and she believed them. They gave her life, they told her, so that she could give them grandsons. She had been prepared to perform that task from the very beginning. When her body took the first step, her mother found for her a husband. A scholar-prince, the girl had imagined. In the days that followed her mother's announcement, the girl was reminded again and again that she must obey this man. He must be wise, the girl thought. She must not displease him. He must be sensitive, the girl thought. She must not leave him. He must be kind, the girl thought. From the soft mouth of the woman who gave her life, my mother received the words that would keep her, still and unmoving, underneath the Old Man. The words swam with her in the dark and kept her from reaching up with a knife and cutting his neck like that of a chicken. Her mother told her to swallow her anger, and she gulped it down until her belly became distended with it. Worse, her mother knew that it would.

19

"I HAD A BROTHER, once..."

GertrudeStein is fond of throwing this non sequitur before the baffled faces of her newly formed acquaintances. It is a test for alertness, skill, and agility. Think of a martial arts master who suddenly, violently, turns on her disciple. If the disciple passes the test, he proceeds to the next level of instruction. If the disciple fails, he is left to die of his injuries. Whether the wound is fatal or merely an abrasion is left to the hapless youth to decide by his response. For GertrudeStein, if the young man switches the topic of conversation to the whereabouts or wherewithal of her brother, then it is a fatality. Too easily distracted, therefore not worth knowing, she thinks. A brother is not interesting, not interesting enough to displace her from the center of her own conversation. But if the young man does not venture down that shadowy lane, if he is able to resist the tantalizing reference to the brother Stein, then Miss Toklas and I are certain to see his face again at 27 rue de Fleurus.

"Actually, she has three and a sister," Miss Toklas can often be heard amending from her corner of the studio.

"But, Pussy, for me there was only one," my Madame would then insist.

How true, I think. We all have only one, no matter the size of our family. The one for whom we would dive into an algae pond, drink in its muck, and sink into its silt to save. The one for whom we would claim, "It was all my fault," no matter the infraction or the crime. The one whom we worship and envy in tandem, until envy grows stronger and takes the lead.

GertrudeStein had a brother, once. She crossed the Atlantic Ocean for him. She had reached the age of twenty-nine in the land of her birth to find there nothing but a sharp, sloping hill. She could take graceful, mincing steps down it, or she could ask, "Can women have wishes?" and run down that same hill flinging her arms in the air in a series of "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Paris had two things to recommend it, her brother Leo and the new century. Already three years into the twentieth, and she still had the distinct impression that she was living inside a museum, under glass, properly shielded from the white glare of the sun. Oakland, Allegheny, Cambridge, Baltimore, all the cities that she had slept in, but never quite awoken in, had the nineteenth century written all over them, she thought. No greater insult could she ever imagine for a city or for herself. Certainly, life for her had been eventful. She had studied and she had loved. She preferred the former because there her talents for thinking and talking allowed her to excel. Thinking and talking, though, were never helpful to her when it came to loving. She, like many of her fellow medical school students, tended to suffer the symptoms of whatever illnesses they happened to be studying. The topic