Last week, my daughter Faith destroyed my lexicon of ancient Greek. Playing quietly half-hidden behind an armchair, she succeeded in tearing out a surprising number of pages before I caught her, and what she didn’t tear she managed to fold, spindle, and mutilate. And it’s while I was prying from her fist a pulpy fragment — reading “‘epsilon tau omicron iota mu omicron zeta” at hand, ready, prepared, of food” — that I at long last grasped the fact that women are born, not made. Thirteen months old, and she already knows that one of her jobs in life is to expose the pretensions of men.
There was a time when I imagined that women were ethereal things, fed on honeydew and dwelling in a world of high romance and symbol. But wives and daughters quickly teach one the truth: It’s men who live on a diet of airy, insubstantial food. Women bite to the bone.
My father used to tell of the time he was paid, in lieu of a legal fee, with an old single-engine Piper Cub standing on the tarmac of the “International Airport” of Pierre, South Dakota. And while he was telling her how wonderful it was that now the whole family would learn to fly and our vacations were going to be so much cheaper and we could go visit the grandparents in Rapid City any time we wanted, my mother carefully put on her glasses, looked up from the kitchen table, and explained, “We can’t eat an airplane.”
No woman I’ve told that story to has ever thought it funny. There’s some failure in their makeup, some flaw in their gender, that seems to prevent them from helping build dream castles or joining in the construction of those extended chains of fantasy that all men love. In their hard practicality, they have trouble grasping the symbolic value of things. I would be hard pressed to justify the $ 17 I recently spent on a tattered copy of The Mad Scientists’ Club, a paperback that cost 45 cents back when it was my favorite book in the third grade. In my excitement about finding the book, I showed it to one of my fellow editors, and he thought the price perfectly reasonable. But how does one convey — to those who do not already know — why the book, once seen, had to be purchased?
Fortunately my wife is a woman of some wisdom and experience, and she knows that men must occasionally be indulged in their love of the symbolic if they are to be at all sufferable. What she can’t tolerate is large indulgences in symbol and myth. She never much appreciated the car I owned when we married, an MG in British racing-green that ran perhaps two weeks each month. And she’s never seen what the fact that Alger Hiss once lived there adds to the over-expensive and too-small house we rented when we first moved to Washington. As I caught her explaining one day over the phone to my mother, “We can’t eat Alger Hiss.”
The huge, unwieldy Greek-English dictionary that Faith destroyed was another of those things more valuable as symbol than reality, easily worth the trouble of packing it up each time we moved. Part of its value was pure swank. My ancient Greek was always bad, and now — unused since graduate school — is non-existent. But as long as a copy of H. G. Liddell and Robert Scott’s Oxford Greek Lexicon sat on the shelf, I could still pretend. (And for the occasional guest who noticed the book, the true statement, “No, I don’t really know any Greek,” could be made to sound more like modesty than honesty. After all, what kind of man would haul around a copy of Liddell & Scott if he didn’t need it?)
In part, too, the dictionary was a symbol of times now gone, of graduate school and haunting book stores and stopping at yard sales to search through the stacks of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for an overlooked gem. I bought the Liddell & Scott while my wife was working at a foreign-language bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. — a job she quit, in her practical, hard-headed way, when she noticed that we were using her employee discount to spend more than she made.
Mostly, though, the book symbolized the future — or, more accurately, a pretense about the future: the pretense that one day I would brush up on my Greek. One day, I would settle down and actually become an educated man. One day, given time and some elbow room, I would become a genuine intellectual rather than an ink-stained wretch — learning new things not because I had to write about them but merely for their instruction and delight.
Compared with some pretensions I have had, it wasn’t a difficult one to maintain. Smaller than an airplane, less expensive than Alger Hiss. But the books we don’t use much are the ones on the lowest shelf, where Faith can reach them. With the instinct of a born woman, she chose a book whose value was only symbolic. And afterwards, her mother made me gather up the shredded pages to make sure she hadn’t eaten any.
J. BOTTUM
