The Sweetheart Is In
The yearnings of a little sister, the hazy memories of a concentration camp liberator, and the romantic entanglements of political activists are portrayed in The Sweetheart Is In, S.L. Wisenberg's first collection of short stories. Each of these edgy, lyrical stories creates its own universe in the space of a few pages even while overlapping characters and themes.
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The Sweetheart Is In
The yearnings of a little sister, the hazy memories of a concentration camp liberator, and the romantic entanglements of political activists are portrayed in The Sweetheart Is In, S.L. Wisenberg's first collection of short stories. Each of these edgy, lyrical stories creates its own universe in the space of a few pages even while overlapping characters and themes.
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Overview
The yearnings of a little sister, the hazy memories of a concentration camp liberator, and the romantic entanglements of political activists are portrayed in The Sweetheart Is In, S.L. Wisenberg's first collection of short stories. Each of these edgy, lyrical stories creates its own universe in the space of a few pages even while overlapping characters and themes.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810151086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/06/2001 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 139 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
S.L. Wisenberg is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her award-winning stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the North American Review, Tikkun, and numerous anthologies, including The 1997 Pushcart Prize XXI. She is a freelance writer and leads writing workshops in Chicago.
Read an Excerpt
The Sweetheart is In: Stories
By S.L. Wisenberg
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2001 S.L. WisenbergAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0810151243
Big Ruthie Imagines Sex without Pain
Ruthie imagines sex without pain. She imagines it the way she tries to reconstruct dreams, really reconstruct. Or builds an image while she is praying. She imagines a blue castle somewhere on high, many steps, a private room, fur rug, long mattress, white stucco walls, tiny windows. She imagines leaving her body. It frightens her. If she leaves her body, leaves it cavorting on the bed/fur rug/kitchen table (all is possible when there is sex without pain), she may not get it back. Her body may just get up and walk away, without her, wash itself, apply blusher mascara lipstick, draw up her clothes around it, take her purse and go out to dinner. Big Ruthie herself will be left on the ceiling, staring down at the indentations on the mattress and rug, wishing she could reach down and take a book from a shelf. She does not now nor has she ever owned a fur rug. But when Big Ruthie achieves sex without pain, she will have a fluffy fur rug. Maybe two. White, which she'll send to the cleaners, when needed.
She imagines sex without pain: an end to feeling Ruben tear at her on his way inside, scuffing his feet so harshly at her door, unwitting, can't help himself, poor husband of hers.
She knows there is a name forit. She has looked it up in various books and knows it is her fault. All she must do is relax. It was always this way, since the honeymoon. Of course the first months she told herself it was the newness. She is so big on the outside, so wide of hip, ample of waist, how could this be--a cosmic joke?--this one smallness where large, extra large would have smoothed out the wrinkles in her marriage bed? When all her clothes are size 18 plus elastic, why does this one part of her refuse to grow along with her? At first she thought, The membranes will stretch. Childbirth will widen. Heal and stretch, heal and stretch. But no. She has never healed, never quite healed. From anything. She carries all her scars from two childhood dog bites, from a particularly awful bee sting. I am marked, she thinks.
Ruben is the only lover she has ever had. "OK, God," Big Ruthie says, well into her thirty-fifth year, "I'm not asking for sex without ambivalence or sex without tiny splinters of anger/resentment. I am not even asking, as per usual, for a new body, a trade-in allowance for my ever-larger and -larger layers of light cream mounds. I am not asking you to withdraw my namesake candy bar from the market, to wipe its red-and-white wrapper from the face of the earth. I have grown used to the teasing. It's become second nature, in fact. And I am not asking you to cause my avoirdupois, my spare tire and trunk, to melt in one great heavenly glide from my home to yours. I am only asking for a slight adjustment. One that I cannot change by diet alone. As if I have ever changed any part or shape of my body through diet. For once I am not asking you to give me something that just looks nice. Make me, O Lord, more internally accommodating." Big Ruthie, turning thirty-five, prays. Alone, in bed.
She is afraid.
She is afraid she will lose herself, her body will siphon out into Ruben's, the way the ancient Egyptians removed the brains of their dead through the nose. Ruthie wants to carve out an inner largeness, yet fears she will become ghostlike, as see-through as a negligee, an amoeba, one of those floaters you get in your eye that's the size of an inchworm. A transparent cell. Mitosis, meiosis. She will be divided and conquered. She imagines her skin as nothing more than a bag, a vacuum-cleaner bag, collapsing when you turn off the control. No sound, no motion, no commotion, all the wind sucked out of her. Still. A fat polar bear lying on the rug. Hibernating without end. No one will be able to wake Big Ruthie or move her in order to vacuum. No one.
She mentioned it once, timidly, to the ob/gyn man. He patted her on the knee. Mumbled about lubrication. Maybe the pain didn't really exist, Big Ruthie thought. Maybe it was her imagination and this was the intensity of feeling they talked about. But it is pain. It combines with that other feeling so that she wants it and doesn't want it, can't push this word away from her brain: invaded. My husband is invading me. He makes her feel rough and red down there. As if he's made of sandpaper. Even with the lubricant they bought. It makes her want to cry and sometimes she does, afterward, turning her head away. How could her Ellen and Cecilia fit through there and not her Ruben?
Still Big Ruthie imagines sex without pain, imagines freedom: f----ing out of doors. In picnic groves. She imagines longing for it during the day, as she vacuums, sweeps, wipes dishes, changes diapers, slices cheese for sandwiches, bathes her daughters, reads them stories. She imagines it like a tune from the radio trapped in her mind. It will overtake her, this sex without pain, this wanting, this sweet insistence. A rope will pull her to bed. Beds. Fur rugs. Rooftops. Forests, tree houses. She imagines doing it without thinking. Her family does nothing without thinking, worrying, wringing, twisting hands, with a spit and glance over the shoulder at the evil eye. At Lilith, strangler of children, Adam's first wife, who wanted to be on top. Who wanted sex without pain. Whenever she wanted.
Sometimes Ruthie begins. She might tickle Ruben. She might hope: This time, this time, because I started it, we will share one pure, smooth sweep, one glide, a note a tune a long song, as sweet as pleasant as a kiss. She thinks, if she can conquer this, get over this obstacle, she of two children, a house, and a husband--if she, Big Ruthie, can find her way to this sex without pain--then Ruben would be able to rope her, he would be able to lasso her from the next room, from across the house. She would begin to rely on him, and on sex, on sex without pain. Then any man would be able, with a nod of his head, a wink of his eye, to pull her to him. Ruthie and Anyman with a fur rug, without a fur rug. Big Ruthie will advertise herself: a woman who has sex without pain. She will become a woman in a doorway, a large woman blocking a large doorway, foot behind her, against the door, a thrust to her head, a toss, a wafting of her cigarette. Big Ruthie will start to smoke, before, after, and during.
Nothing will stop her. She will be expert. Till she can do it in her sleep. With her capable hands, with her ever-so-flexible back, front, sides, mouth. With the mailman, roofer, plumber; she could become the plumber's assistant, he, hers. She will go at it. She will not be ladylike. She will be a bad girl. She will swing on a swing in a goodtime bar. She will become a goodtime girl, wearing garters that show, no girdle at all, black lace stockings rounded by her thighs and calves, brassy perfume that trails her down the street. People will know: That is Big Ruthie's scent. She will have a trademark, a signature.
Big Ruthie, the goodtime girl.
Fleshy Ruthie, the goodtime girl.
Bigtime Ruthie. Twobit Ruthie.
Ruthie knows that other people have sex without pain. Men, for instance. Ruben. She has watched his eyes squint in concentrated delight. She herself sometimes cries out, the way he does, but she knows his is a pure kind of white kind of pleasure, while hers is dark, gray, troubled. It hurts on the outside just as he begins and moments later when he moves inside her. This was Eve's curse--not bleeding or cramps, not childbirth, but this--hurts as much as what? As the times Ruben doesn't shave and he kisses her and leaves her cheeks and chin pink and rough for days. But this is worse.
If she could have sex without pain, she would have sex without fear, and without fear of sex without pain.
Then the thought of no sex at all would make her afraid, more than she is now of sex with pain, more than she is afraid of losing her body, more than she is afraid of never losing it, never being light.
Ruben said once she was insatiable. This is because she squirmed and writhed, wanting to savor everything, all the moments that led to the act; she wanted to forestall the act of sex with pain. When she has sex without pain, she will go on forever, single-minded of purpose. One-track mind. She is afraid she will forget everything--will forget the multiplication table, the rule for i before e, to take her vitamins, when to add bleach, how to can fruit, drive, run a Hadassah meeting using Robert's Rules of Order, bind newspapers for the Scouts' paper drives, change diapers, speak Yiddish, follow along in the Hebrew, sing the Adon Olam, make round ground balls of things: gefilte fish, matzah balls. Ruthie will become a performer, a one-note gal, one-trick pony, performing this sex without pain, her back arcing like a circus artist on a trapeze, a girl in a bar in the French Quarter. "You cannot contain yourself," Ruben will say, turning aside. She will feel as if she is overflowing the cups of her bra. Her body will fill the streets. People will say, "That Ruthie sure wants it."
She tries to avoid it. So does Ruben. They are sleepy. Or the children keep them awake, worrying. There is less and less time for it. When they travel and stay in hotels, the girls stay in the room with them, to save money for sightseeing. Ruben still kisses her, in the morning and when he comes home from work, after he removes his hat.
But if she and Ruben could have sex without pain, there would be no dinner for him waiting hot and ready at the table. Big Ruthie would ignore all her duties. She would become captive to it. Body twitching. Wet. Rivulets. She would no longer be in control. No longer in the driver's seat, but in back, necking, petting, dress up, flounces up, panties down or on the dash, devilmaycare, a hand on her ------. "Sorry, officer, we had just stopped to look for--." "We were on our way home, must have fallen asleep--."
Sex would become like chocolate fudge. Like lemon-meringue pie. Like pearls shimmering under a chandelier. Or van Gogh close enough to see the paint lines. Blue-gray clouds after a rainstorm. Loveliness. Would Big Ruthie ever sleep?
Big Ruthie's life will become a dream, a dream of those blue castles with long mattresses she will lie across, will f----k in, far away, will never ever come back from, the place high on the improbable hill of sex without pain, the impossible land of sex without pain.
There in the castle she will find the Messiah himself. He too is insatiable. She will welcome him inside her. She will long for him, miss his rhythms, when he departs her body. Up there in his castle, she will keep him from descending to do his duty for at least another forty years. In his land of sex without pain, she and he will tarry.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Sweetheart is In: Stories by S.L. Wisenberg Copyright © 2001 by S.L. Wisenberg. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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