*
Dorothy dreams of being a housewife, but has no-one left to look after. She plays housewife some days to whoever passes through. Marries on a drinking spree and lands in trouble with the mayor when she has to settle her divorces. The long, long decade of the ’40s. First the war years with women in the factories and later plasticky, unreal, with perfect curves and curls, and knee-length baby-doll dresses. “Daddy Knows Best” will soon be showing on everyone’s new, flickering television sets; post-war plans, post-war prosperity. Dorothy sits and swivels on different bar stools and smokes Peace cigarettes, holding forth in her overbearing, insistent way. The atom bomb has fallen on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a hundred thousand burned to ash; the President has spoken to the nation. Dorothy has no television and no self-respect, she loves the President and the White House so much her eyes fill with tears. And in the bars she sounds off about nothing until she is thrown out and zigzags home across the desert, her handbag filled with stolen ashtrays and beer glasses.
*
The power lines blow down around the house and Dorothy has neither electricity nor lasting points of reference. As soon as a guy appears in the sunset Dorothy changes all her opinions. Republican, democrat, pro-war, anti-war, Dorothy changes her views like she changes her dresses and underpants. Several times a day and whenever required. Laughing in her mad-dog voice at their bad jokes, all over the house Dorothy’s croaking, ingratiating cackle. The sky descends alarmingly close to the house and you tell Cosmogirl about it later:
there were plants in her useless garden glowing like flames in the dusk and the white sheet of metal where the light poured out and there would be no lost ships in the desert just the huge bell jar over the blackness of her eyes and the blackness of her dresses and everything without memory or fear and a bit like childhood in which the heavens never exploded and there were only the desert trees and the orange tree I pinned pink wish notes to every time one of us had a birthday and all the wishes were still attainable and childlike and we hadn’t yet been turned into silent dark and wayward desert creatures and as long as I was a birthday child as long as children still existed
Dorothy gazes into the distance when she is not scouring the bedroom for old letters and memories she has lost and some man who has already left her. She is a cloud of doom and the smell of slime and festering water cloaks every piece of furniture and every movement and every room and nothing seems to want to stay with Dorothy except you and the flies. She is no good with anything other than flypaper and gets into fights when she drinks too much sweet wine and rubs people the wrong way. And then she has to write long pink letters and race across the desert asking forgiveness, you and a stolen bunch of dying roses strapped to the bike rack.
The horizon is still sharp and beautiful, a fence and a boundary at the point where the world begins and ends. And the mountains are high and warm and friendly beasts now Louis is not here. You will always be fearful of his yellow Ford appearing on the skyline of sand.
Time passes so slowly in the desert. Childhood an eternity of blazing, glittering dragonflies as they rustle through the trees, trucks passing on the horizon, the howling of desert dogs in the distance. You are at the back of the house with the hoses and gasoline looking for snakes and giant insects. Dorothy fell asleep in the sun for too long, her hair is ruined under the peroxide and the brush pulls out her pride and joy in sorry puke-green clumps when she tries to untangle it, crying in front of the make-up mirror in the bedroom.
DOROTHY (chunks of hair in her hand): My hair, Valerie!
VALERIE: You little calamity.
DOROTHY: I’m nothing without my hair . . .
VALERIE: You look like a little soldier with that hair. Or without it. My brave soldier. I’ll help you get rid of that mess.
DOROTHY (wails): I don’t want to look like a little soldier. Definitively not like a filthy little soldier.
VALERIE: Your eyes make you look like a film star. With the blue on your eyelids.
DOROTHY: Louis is going to turn up at the door.
VALERIE: You’ve got to stop dreaming about Louis.
DOROTHY: It’s called eyeshadow. Your father, Valerie. I’m talking about your father.
VALERIE: I don’t remember him. I just remember he was a small, fat, blond guy with bad breath and ugly teeth.
DOROTHY: He was a very handsome man.
VALERIE: I think he’s dead, Dolly. I think he’s been electrocuted by a power line. It doesn’t matter, Dolly. Only God can love you for yourself alone and not your blond hair. You’ll be glad you didn’t color your bush like you wanted to.
DOROTHY: I’m lucky it’s not my bush.
VALERIE: Dorothy.
DOROTHY: Yes?
VALERIE: I think you’re beautiful.
*
Dorothy’s cool hands on your face and shoulders, her wine-smelling breath warm and moist, a cigarette balanced precariously on the edge of the table, the smell of soot on the sleeves of her dress. For a fraction of a second you can still hold her in your arms, her menthol scent and her smooth freckled skin. Her laugh a broken mirror.
*
Dorothy roams between bars with a scarf over her bleach-damaged hair. Blackened ends of green-blond debris. Scraping along in her high heels, asking for a little help with the essentials. The electricity does not come back on. Dorothy has kept on paying and ringing and complaining and bad-mouthing on the telephone; still the electricity does not come back on. No lover wants to come and climb up to the lines; at the electricity company they tire of her ranting. Dorothy cycles back and forth to the phone booth, imploring everybody in her hot, impassioned voice.
*
And they always come back once or twice before they disappear for good, until the day they leave with a screech of tires and never return. A few rounds of silky contrition, their hands deep in her hair, before they take their warm bellies from Dorothy forever and she starts again, painstakingly burning herself with candles and writing long pink letters and chasing across the desert with you on the rack.
There is no more money in the house, only the sun outside, white and hot and shimmering, and the gasoline drums where Dorothy sets fire to her memories. The radio is permanently on in the kitchen and Dorothy brushes her dishwater-hair over the food and traces her lipstick always slightly outside her lips. Much later in Maryland you and Cosmo decide that wearing lipstick outside your lipline at all times is a political act. Dorothy knows nothing about politics, but she knows all about lipstick and all about the future. She continues to swat at bluebottles, continues to have those depth-plunging eyes. The President is speaking on the radio and Dorothy foretells a brilliant future for you. Valerie Jean Solanas will become president of America and she dreams of being electric with happiness again, and the heady smell of underpants will rule her household as before. She cannot stop thinking about the days at the river when the sun was high and quivering and the water smelled of iron and rotting plankton and no-one knew it was poisoned yet and she and Louis lay on the grass so deep in beery kisses she nearly drowned and she imagined being a woman with her house and her refrigerator full of roses.
VALERIE: This soup just tastes like water.
DOROTHY: Shh! I’m listening.
VALERIE: What are they saying on the radio?
DOROTHY: The President’s dropped another atom bomb. A nuclear bomb on the Bikini islands. In the middle of goddamn nowhere.
VALERIE: Why?