Free The Magician's Girl by Doris Grumbach

looking into the windows of shops that sold peasant blouses and skirts, stretched canvases and tubes of paint surrounding wood-block heads and jointed arms and hands for use as painters’ models, and prints by Village artists with scenes of dark-faced longshoremen unloading immense Cunard liners, and black sharecroppers picking cotton under burning suns. At home Liz and her mother listened to records. Liz’s childhood rang with workers’ songs played on their wind-up Victrola. She knew who Joe Hill was before she heard about Thomas Jefferson, the Southern national hero who was never given high marks by her parents, because he was known to have owned slaves. She loved the sonorous bass of Paul Robeson, the harmonies and elevated sentiments of the Weavers, Leadbelly’s gruff prison chants. To her, music was the Movement and the Party, the brave, optimistic words and pounding rhythms to which the Beckers marched on May Day. By the time she was twelve she knew all the verses of the Internationale (‘Arise, you prisoners of starvation/Arise, you wretched of the earth’) and most of Woody Guthrie’s lyrics.
    When she was very young, Liz admired her zealous parents because she thought there was no one they were afraid of. The police, pushing them away from the doors of buildings they were picketing, held no official terrors for them. They clasped arms confidently with locked-out workers and stood their ground against scabs and institutional guards. Both were often arrested. Once, when they were taken out of Washington Square Park for helping to raise a banner on the pole for the American flag saying ARMS FOR DEMOCRATIC SPAIN , a comrade (that was how he introduced himself to her and she understood at once: ‘I am Marcus’s friend, Comrade Earl’) came to her and took her to his apartment, where, with his family, she was fed stew and milk and home-baked bread.
    As she grew older, Liz discovered to her surprise that her parents’ fearlessness did not extend to their own bodies. Small flaws appeared in the brave tapestry of their mutual valor. Their fears were fixed on Muriel’s childbirth and Marcus’s teeth. ‘I will never go through it again,’ Liz grew up hearing. ‘They were the worst hours you could ever imagine. A breech birth, feet first. Terrible tearing. Pain, volcanic eruptions, it seemed like, for thirty-seven hours. Blood. Never again. Not for anything.’ Each time Liz heard the story, a new butchery was added: ‘Holes in my palms from my nails,’ until Liz came to look upon giving birth as a kind of extinction, a catastrophic, long drawn out murder of the mother by the bombarding passage of the baby out of a place that ripped and bled mightily and could, with bad luck, lead to maternal death.
    As for Marcus, he lived in mortal fear of the dentist. He was a private man, whose façade was brazenly, openly public. He showed his face willingly to the owners, the police, the fascist National Guard, the Klan, the Legion. But his true self was hidden. He hated to be touched by anyone he did not know and could not bear the idea of anyone examining his teeth. To him, his mouth, like other secret places in his body, was intimate and forbidden to scrutiny. ‘I cannot bear to have him look into my mouth,’ he told Liz. From that holy place should emerge only the sacred vocabulary of political truth, the maxims of Marx and Lenin, the saintly sayings of Stalin, and a vague, unpleasant odor of tobacco, vodka and unclean teeth. Into it went all the godly choices of his sustenance: the bread of life, and ‘the wine of astonishment,’ as the Psalms say. ‘The soup du jour,’ he would joke to his wife, ‘and nothing else. No probes, no picks and axes and drills, no brushes. They all disturb the balance of nature.’ Marcus never went to the dentist. His teeth turned yellow and then brown from tobacco and accumulated tartar and plaque.