354: In Maryland, ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 14 concludes
IN MARYLAND, she allowed herself to acknowledge her secret talent. At night, when the women who performed the calculations were at their leisure, they entertained themselves with cards and songs and talk. One evening, not long after the group was assembled, one of the women said, “You know what we are, don’t you? Doing what we do? We’re a bunch of calculating women!”
They took the name. The talk in the evenings wandered, as the talk of people who’ve been thrown together and have time on their hands will, but it included lots of the anecdotes that we introduce into a conversation not because they illustrate a point, but because they give us a chance to talk about ourselves. On many evenings the conversation became a string of such anecdotes, and these were the liveliest and most revealing evenings of all. One evening, the topic turned to uncles who had a more than avuncular affection for their nieces. Many of the women had interesting anecdotes to contribute on that topic, but none commanded such rapt attention as Lorna’s, and the attention of her audience, the avidity with which they followed her story, made her extend it. The more she told, the more they wanted to hear. After a while, she found it easy and pleasant to say to these women things she had thought she would never be able to say to anyone at all, and she wasn’t even terribly surprised when she found herself saying, “My uncle also taught me to make jewelry, carved jewelry, very special jewelry — ” As soon as she began, she was so thrilled to be telling someone at last that she told it all, everything.
That very night, she began making soap carvings for the women. She found that soap was a congenial medium, so easy to work that she could turn out a carving in an evening. She had an eager audience from the start, and soon she began taking requests. The earliest requests were the obvious ones: a woman would ask Lorna to make the soap woman resemble her and the soap man resemble her husband or boy friend. Then they began to get more interesting and more complicated. More and more of the women began to ask for men who resembled men they had never made love to, men they’d hardly spoken to, and in several cases, men who had appeared only in their day dreams, the wonderful men of their imagination. Because soap was so much cheaper a commodity than ivory, Lorna found a new freedom and artistic daring in working with it. She let her imagination range a bit more, and she also used the soap carvings to release some of her loneliness, some of her longing for Herb. This had a result that Lorna found oddly titillating: many of the men wound up resembling, in one way or another that none of the other women would have detected, Herb. Whenever a woman couldn’t describe her dream man adequately for Lorna to go on with her work, Lorna would supply the required bit of Herb. Soap was in short supply, and it couldn’t be wasted, so Lorna’s carvings were used for washing, and the expectation that her work, the evidence of her secret occupation, would go down the drain gave Lorna a feeling of security that allowed her to enjoy the work as never before. This was also the first time she had ever come to know her audience, and the first time she had ever counted women among her audience. Under these unusual, irreplicable conditions, she did some of her best work. It lacked animation, however, and Lorna felt the lack, an emptiness in the work, apparent only to her, as if the couples were hollow; it was a feeling that, if she had had a reason to describe it, she would have compared to the hollowness she felt in herself, missing Herb.
[to be continued on Thursday, October 6, 2022]
In Topical Guide 354, Mark Dorset considers Art: Sculpture: Soap Carving from this episode.
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