Veronica Tries to be Good, Again. Michael K Freundt
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eyes wandered slowly to meet hers. “Handy, I want you to put your face in my crotch.”
Veronica tried to hold her gaze. “And?”
“… and I want you to lick me. Lick me.” And she put her hand over her mouth as if to stop more naughty words escaping. She blushed deeply. ”Oh Susan.” And she laughed like a pale pink schoolgirl.
Veronica laughed with her. “Do you like saying that?”
“Oh yes.” She said through her fingers, and then,” Put your face in my crotch.” And she took her hand away. “That's what I want to say. Put your face in my crotch. Lick me, Handy.”
“Say it again”.
“Put your face in my crotch. Lick me, Handy.”
“Ok. I want you to…”
“Put your face in my vagina. Lick me Handy.”
“And again.”
“Why?”
“You need these words to be familiar, easy. Again.”
“Put your face in my vagina. Lick me Handy.”
“Again.”
“Put your face in my vagina. Lick me Handy.”
“Again.”
Suddenly Valda’s expression changed. She gasped and looked away as if seeing something for the first time: something she didn’t expect. She looked back at Veronica and said, “Susan, what if he wants me to, to, return the favour?”
Later she smiled to herself at the linguistic challenges of Valda Mirabella and wondered, had she, herself, changed over these five years? Yes, of course, her work and her clientele over the last five years had also changed; they were still human beings whose parental mismanagement and/or inadequate social learning had caused personal problems with relationships, of problem-solving, and sex; but now her clients were predominately female. This had a lot to do with her decision to abandon her professional website - that lawyer of her ex-husband; what was her name? Dunbar, Dunstun, something, anyway had hacked her website, how else did she get information that worked against her in the custody hearing over Jack? So, now, a new site and a new clientele.
Veronica had a curious attitude to her own sex; not curious to her, of course. She thought her attitude was completely rational, sensible, and enlightened. However she also understood that she needed to keep these views to herself: they were politically incorrect in the current social rulebook of the society in which she lived. They were however fundamental to the way she treated her clients.
She saw human beings as the dominant animal species on the planet and their dominance was solely due to their level of brain function; and in particular, their ability to imagine. This ability is the basis of, not only all problem solving, invention, and what is right and good about the human race, but also all misunderstanding, manipulation, and what is wrong and bad about the human race.
Many animal species, especially birds, give the task of attracting a mate to the male: the peacock effect. Humans, not Mother Nature, have given that task to the female. So deep is this task entrenched into the behaviour of humans, in both sexual and social, that it is fundamental to the way females behave and how males, and perplexingly, other females, expect them to behave. Female attractiveness and its attainment permeate all aspects of human existence. This law of attractiveness is mainly obeyed by what the female of the species puts on her body, and this arrangement and adornment, with shape-changing clothes; colours, unguents, baubles and paint, now define her. Mothers forbid their daughters to leave the house unless all of these accoutrements are to the mother’s liking. Well, they try; and some daughters disobey their mothers by being too liberal with their self-adornment. It’s all about what women put, or don’t put, on their bodies. The social laws that govern this adornment have changed over time and it is a continuing source of personal and private amusement, and often annoyance, for Veronica to witness females judging other females based on their choice of adornment when their own choice of adornment is judged and criticised in return. Uniform adornment - uniforms, although never acknowledged - is common in all walks of life and in both sexes. You can tell someone’s occupation and sometimes how they vote, and what they think, by the cloth and decorations they wear; but, ironically, the female’s biggest challenge is to please other females. This seems futile since isn’t the peacock effect meant to affect the opposite sex?
Feminism has complicated everything, like Green politics has complicated the meaning of the political Left and Right. It’s failed and succeeded in equal measure: succeeded inwardly in the way women think of themselves, and the way men think of them, for that matter; but failed outwardly in the way most men, and some women, believe females should be rewarded.
Veronica is a feminist. She not only thinks women are equal to men, she knows that some women are better than some men. Men know this too but would never admit it in a simple sentence. She also knows that some men are better than some women.
For the purposes of her work Veronica understands that it is not the differences between men and women that are the problem - men and women are basically the same - it’s the way men and woman are taught, are socially confirmed, how their imaginations are manipulated that cause social and personal dysfunction; in the same way that the administration - the church, the temple, the mosque - of a belief system is what distorts and perverts that belief system, not the belief system itself.
The way humans deal with each other, or not deal with each other, depends on language. Her gardener, Neville, - well not really a gardener, more of a person who comes around once a fortnight and cuts all the plants in the garden - would be a much more normal human being if his parents had had the words, the language, to talk about what they thought was wrong with him when he began to show signs that something was amiss. The words they did know, “he’s just a bit slow”, “well, that’s Neville, for ya”, “No, Neville can’t do that”, “In his own good time”, were all his parents used and all they thought to use: they didn’t know any others. Even in the private darkness of their own bed they talked about the noisy neighbours and the failing tomatoes, rather than Neville’s intellectual handicap; his cognitive learning difficulties and his very poor school grades. Neville got no special treatment; “Why should he have special treatment, he’s a normal little boy, just a bit slow, that’s all.” His parents belief that his teachers were interfering, and ignorant of their situation - Think of the cost! - left those at his school, who thought they had a responsibility to say something, nowhere to go. Neville will probably always live with his parents and pass his time obsessively occupied with anything and everything to do with Lego and the movie Grease. That is, when he wasn’t butchering Veronica’s front garden in Newtown where she lived again with her mother Sally - in the back shed (she tried calling it a granny flat but it had entered the lexicon of the household as the back shed because that’s, well, what it was), keeping Jack’s room free for his increasingly infrequent weekend visits.
3
As Veronica drove back to Newtown again her phone buzzed and at a set of traffic lights she surreptitiously checked her screen: it was Diane. Her best friend since University days was becoming a bit of a chore. Diane was the mistress of a man called Max Swan, who everyone, except Diane, knew was a widower. Diane still believed that Max’s wife was alive and giving him hell which was why he needed Diane. Max encouraged this; it was an arrangement of his own making. Diane liked being needed, but being needed, being a mistress also meant being kept in the dark, out of sight, as most mistresses are. This had always been the situation with Max and Diane; it’s what Max said he wanted, and it was therefore what Diane wanted. She liked being the antidote to a distant, hard, and uncaring wife, which was how Max had painted his wife and continued to paint her even though she had been dead for over six years; but to Veronica Diane was becoming rather too needy. Veronica had kept up her friendship with Diane while at the same time keeping her distance from Max, who for years now had been trying to get closer to Veronica. She had to admit, but only to herself, that she liked Max, but she wasn’t prepared to think anymore about it. She was well aware of the human capacity for self-delusion, which