A friend and I went to see Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution a couple of months ago, before it closed. I’ve driven her a few places now, and she always screams while I drive. She always thinks I’m going to kill us. In fact, I am, according to my record, a very safe driver. I don’t have accidents. I never hit other cars with mine. Sometimes I think that’s because I’m living in a dream state in which nothing real can happen. I don’t tell my passengers that, though, since that would frighten them.

My parents live on a bumpy road that ends at a highway. Once, when I was a new driver, I drove down to the highway with an apple, and as I waited at the light I started to eat the apple. I had just taken my first bite, and the apple was in my mouth, held to my mouth by my hand, when the light turned green, and, as I made the hard right turn onto the highway, I had to, at the last moment, remove my hand from the apple to use it to turn the wheel enough to clear the center guard rail, and ended up spitting the apple across the car. Then I tried to reach for it on the floor.

Now that I think about it, none of the art at the show was about driving. Yesterday we passed a boarded-up Gaseteria and I felt a wave of real sadness at this image, and the idea that twenty years from now, or at some point relatively soon, all the gas stations will be boarded up, obsolete, and we will drive by them in silent electric cars. All those beautiful old cars, useless, I thought. I hadn’t realized I was so attached to the internal combustion engine. Since then I’ve wavered between the position that everything becomes useless, so I should stop being such a baby about it, and that everything becomes useless, and that this is deeply sad.

I had a lot of criticisms of Wack!. I thought, by and large, that the artists could have done better. I thought I could do better, even, in the alternate world where I was a visual artist and halfway handy with a saw. I felt a little sad about this, a little betrayed. I wanted the women who made revolutionary art to have done their homework, to have better understood the art that brought them to where they were, and to have worked harder to make art. I’m not talking about you, Judy Chicago, or you, Carolee Schneeman. But Kirsten Justesen, the person who pasted a painting of a woman in a box on top of a box? Yes, you.

I had been watching the Whitman program on the American Experience, and thinking about “As I Ponder’d in Silence”:

As I ponder’d in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
Know’st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
The making of perfect soldiers.
Be it so, I answered,
I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I above all promote brave soldiers.

And I suppose I felt that Whitman had been concerned with the things these women were concerned about, but had based his concern on thousands of years of history and writing, and had worked on making poems out of this that took his whole life to make. And I felt disappointed in these women, but, at the same time, in myself. Whatever I am, I am not yet a revolutionary. I want us to continue.

This is a story about a sink that was too small and a car that whined in the cold, the boy who didn’t want to grow and the boy who learned to read. The boy who didn’t want to grow would only wear old clothes, nothing new, and the boy who learned to read loved to read the word drool, and could spell, when it was spelled out loud near him, the words dump and asshole. They had wonderful times in the house with the bats and the mice and the rats and the spiders, killing things and listening to them scratch in the walls at night, except that the boys slept soundly, on their backs, their arms thrown out, and never heard the mice at night. Only their father, the man who could hear the beating of enormous moth wings, heard the mice in the walls at night. Their mother, who did not hear the mice in the walls at night, did hear their father at night. Their father had holes in his shoes and their mother had one silver hair and an unreliable lower back and had somehow lost her serve, and even though she couldn’t hear the mice in the walls at night she could hear the people on the other side of the tennis court telling each other what they should do with her second serve, since there was so little on it.

But this isn’t just her story, this is their story, the story of the sink and the car and the two boys, one who didn’t want to grow old, but needed new shoes, and one who learned to read, the story of the animals outside the house, which collected nuts, and inside the house, which made noises in the walls. It is the story of the train ride home, and orange cones on the road. It is the story of everything, even of the stories we haven't told.