Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
25.1
J. Allyn Rosser
The Need for FlowersIt is empty because of the deer. I would have placed flowers in the vase but the deer devoured them last night, because I do not have a penis. If I had a penis a casual stroll around the outside of the house in the cool darkness could have produced the only foolproof deer repellent, with a quick, dignified unzipping of creamy khaki trousers, shpshpsh, then rezip. If I had a penis I would also have the kind of khaki I desire, but they don’t squander the suppler varieties of khaki on women’s clothing.
It is because of this summer that I felt the need for flowers in the first place. I never needed flowers before, though I always liked them. Now they have become in my mind compensation for some new lapse, some deficiency or surfeit, having to do with this summer.
Of course I can always pee in a jar and carry it outside to sprinkle around the flowerbeds with neighborly impunity; I in fact did accomplish this for twelve nights in a row, but last night I was tired and it was too much trouble: fill the bladder, remember to bring the jar, position it under me inside the bowl, not misaim, then decide where to set the jar while tidying myself (having a penis would obviate the phrase “tidying myself”) and pulling up my pants, then handwashing and the embarrassing trip past him, carrying the obviously amber liquid in the clear glass jar for the comparatively trivial purpose of preserving flowers that would droop anyway within days. I say comparatively trivial but I don’t mean it. It is what he might say, his language has gotten inside me.
The deer were waiting for their moment and they got it. They were thorough, leaving behind only a few dried-out cosmos and several crisp, dainty hoofprints. At least now I won’t have to fool with the jar, now that they’ve ravaged the canna lilies, the gladiolas, the peonies. They got the rosebuds, too.
I’ve never had penis envy before. Now at last I feel legitimized as a woman.
Not once before, not in its strict sense, even though my brother used to fix me with that withering look whenever I said anything he didn’t understand, and say, “Oh go get yourself a dick.” This was during high school, when there was a lot he didn’t understand.
In hindsight, I think he must have meant I should secure a boyfriend, get out of his hair, but I took it more literally back then. To mean that a penis could function as a valve to block all foolishly opaque utterance. In his case it worked; at least I never did not understand what he was trying to convey when he addressed me, which circumstance was also unmistakable, as these remarks were usually prefaced with Idiot or Assface, depending on who else was in attendance. We get along much better of course, now that we can escape each other, but every so often I can still hear those epithets in his tone, even over the telephone. But mostly in person.
The deer have become so bold that they stay out in the backyard long after dawn, not bothering to retreat to the woods until as late as 8:30, when he leaves for work. Maybe the door slam startles them. Until then they chew on whatever is not crabgrass, as far as the sprinkler reaches. It has been a dry summer. They look up now and then to regard us through the sliding glass doors, first one then another, another, maybe six or seven, a family, chewing intently, white tails twitching but not raised all the way. The nasturtiums have been nibbled to the ground, though they are planted right next to the house. I alternately watch the deer and him. I can watch him during breakfast, when I still feel comfortable in the same room with him. He does love a good cup of coffee, and I know how to make one. However, his pleasure in the coffee is not what comforts me. Mostly I’m relaxed in the morning because the newspaper he is holding shields me without my agency. The local edition invariably posts obituaries on the back of the living section, so often I am looking in his direction but seeing a dead man gazing back at me, usually not smiling. They don’t often use smiling photographs for obituaries, as if we might then suspect that the dead took their deaths too lightly. Not many photos of women there. Maybe they aren’t dying this year. Maybe dry summers are good for old women, or maybe the dead women haven’t been important enough. It is after all a small town with a substantial stay-at-home contingent. I glance over at the deer, then back at the dead man, then check my hands for incipient hangnails or signs of aging.
If we had a child the deer would not linger, they would hear more noise, cheerful but alarming sounds the child would utter or create by banging things, pots or wooden spoons or doll heads. We had planned to have a child by now but it hasn’t happened. Maybe we did wait too long. Maybe I don’t want one enough.
I could not possibly have had penis envy because I’ve never liked the idea of anything hanging off me. If a thread from my skirt snaked below the hem, I would go to any lengths to remove it. I did not intend to make a pun just now. That was actually not quite a pun but close enough, too close. Puns if you ask me are like bits of language hanging off language, they give me the creeps. Like paradoxes, with their extra flaps of fact. I just cannot stand things hanging from other things, even figuratively. Probably related to this abhorrence is my preference for quick decisions, even if they are the wrong ones. Just to keep an edge on everything, to separate events neatly, get them over with.
On the physical plane, breasts are a different matter, though I’m not thrilled with having them either. At least they are more decidedly a part of the body proper, attached to more surface area than a penis or testicles. In my rational moments, I don’t mind breasts at all. However, an early boyfriend once said, chancing to remark on the size of my breasts, “By the time you’re thirty they’ll be hanging down to your knees.”
Whether he thought this amusing or just something I ought to know, this was even objectively speaking a cruel thing to say. In all fairness he could hardly have known how that would affect me, with my advanced pendulaphobia. I don’t talk about this condition, or I didn’t at the time. I was just eighteen then, yet the dread took hold, and has been a dominant irritant of my emotional-psychological makeup for seventeen years. I am now thirty-five, and although my breasts don’t hang measurably lower than they did then, still I am rueful about all that wasted dread energy, when there were so many worthier and more practically evitable objects to fret about.
Maybe this doesn’t qualify as envy. It’s not that I want to have a penis, more that I want to use one in a way I haven’t already. He is too to pee outside under almost any circumstances. That’s my word for it, not his, since he is too genteel ever to say the word genteel. That is irony, not quite a paradox. Irony is all right, it simply throws a shadow.
At times I believe the physical misery might have been worth it. After all, I could have worn very tight briefs, or doubled up on jock straps. Well worth it, when I consider for example the humiliation I experienced urinating into the sink of my eighth-floor walkup during my twenty-second year. I shared that floor with seven other penurious foreigners, all seven male, and all in the habit of cracking their doors at night when I began my journey to one of the two bathrooms located at opposite ends of the unlit hallway on which my room was centrally positioned. Snow White and the Seven Dorfs, a sympathetic friend used to say. Not many friends would make the trip up all those stairs. The men would crack their doors and eye me, whispering things in their language, which was not native to any country anyone I knew had visited. I finally quit making those trips, and stacked up two milk crates (owning at the time no chair) so as to pee with precision into the sink. It was humiliating because they knew I had to be doing just that. By then they had learned some English words to say, so I knew that my anxiety was not unfounded. If I’d had a penis, I could have peed into the sink without a second thought, unless for hygiene. But of course then I wouldn’t have had to. They would not have cracked their doors or asked to borrow sugar, ha ha ha. Choogarr.
If I had a penis he probably wouldn’t look at me like that over the rim of the empty vase. I don’t know, truthfully, why he is looking at me that way, without speaking. At least my brother would have said, What’s your problem, or, What are you doing here? And even if I couldn’t answer, as I cannot now do, I would be told promptly what deficiency I am supposed to be compensating for with the missing flowers. Assface. Idiot.
