See Now Then

by Jamaica Kincaid

  The young Heracles went through the stages of crawling, though he was very awkward at it, and at trying to pull himself up from a sitting position, and after many tries, he one day could do this; and then not long after, he could walk across the room by himself, though at that time, Then, he did not walk in the way walking is known to be, instead, he projected himself across the room in which he stood, from one side to the other and when successfully reaching the opposite place from where he started out would burst out in laughter and clap his hands in happiness, so proud was he of his own accomplishment. Mrs. Sweet shared his joy, how could she not, she loved him so! When one day Mr. Sweet observed this performance, he later asked Mrs. Sweet if perhaps Heracles should not see a specialist, for the way he hurled himself across the room seemed abnormal. Mrs. Sweet said, hmmmmmh! and then chewed her nails down to the quick, how to pay the enormous heating bill from Greene’s Oil and the electric-light bill from Central Vermont Public Service. For how were they to live? Mrs. Sweet asked herself and then she looked up at the heavens and from time to time a large check would fall out of the clear blue sky and it was addressed to her; and then again, from time to time, the postman would bring lots of sealed envelopes and when the envelopes were addressed to Mrs. Sweet, inevitably they held checks made payable to that Charles Laughton–like entity. Mr. Sweet would look up at the sky too and see out of its true blueness the white envelopes falling down to the earth, and all the envelopes were addressed to Mrs. Sweet; Mr. Sweet would intercept the postman just as he was about to deposit all the Sweets’ mail in their mailbox and all the envelopes were addressed to Mrs. Sweet and some of them held checks made out to Mrs. Sweet. Here, it’s all for you, Mr. Sweet would say, throwing the contents of the mail on the dining table, not caring how it landed, in what order it appeared, and to himself, he would say, “She is such a shit,” but Mrs. Sweet would never hear it, for he said it to himself, he said so many things to himself and only he, only he, heard himself say these things.

  * * *

  Heracles soon could walk in a normal way, one foot, not parallel, in front of the other, each allowing him to balance himself, and he did so with great peals of laughter and other exclamations of joy! And he went from one room to the other without inhibition, and in his joy at this he would shout, “I did it, I did it,” and this declaration of his accomplishment was a source of intrigue to Mrs. Sweet, for what did it mean, “I did it, I did it,” and the triumph of Heracles, for he broke free of the borders between the kitchen and the dining room and the living room and the doors that led to outside, where there would be a road with cars going back and forth to unknown destinations and their drivers heedless of the occasional presence of the young Heracles; this triumph of Heracles was such a mystery to Mrs. Sweet. But Mr. Sweet looked at the damage done when that small child, no more than a year old, went from room to room, in his herolike struggle, his strong body shoving the furniture out the window, tearing down the curtains and shredding them into pieces as if they were tissue paper, throwing up his half-digested vegetables all over the white couch for the fun of it: and he thought, what the hell is this! what is the matter with this kid! where the hell did he come from! For that boy, the young Heracles, could die if he was not contained in the rooms of the Shirley Jackson house, with its yard separating it from the busy street, and Mr. Sweet did not desire this: that the young Heracles be struck dead by a car driven by someone drunk or driven by a teenager as Heracles in exhilaration wandered out into the nice country road, without being noticed by his dear mother, that loving Mrs. Sweet, he had not desired at all. And so Mr. Sweet went to Ames, a department store that then sold many useful things at a price the Sweets could afford, and he bought many sets of safety guards, expandable barriers, which when placed between two doorposts blocked entry from one room to the other, and he also bought locks for the cabinets that held dangerous substances, in the kitchen, bathroom and other appropriate places, and these locks were so complicated that only an adult person could manage to unlock them. But here comes the young Heracles! For his fingers so thick and ungainly-seeming were so intelligent they knew how to unlock the cabinets that held the poisonous liquids that a child might swallow and he was so strong that when he, in a fit of running, threw himself against the child-barrier gates, they gave way, and Mr. Sweet fled from him, his child, he was the father of the young Heracles, in despair. He longed to see them dead, or stilled in a permanent way, not dead exactly just stilled, the young Heracles and his wife Mrs. Sweet; if only a great hand would just appear and arrest them, the mother and her child, for how she loved the way he could destroy the child-barrier gates, and how she marveled at the way his clever fingers could undo the locks that were childproof, which had been placed on the cupboards and doors and everything else that might pose a life-threatening danger to the young Heracles; how unbelievable to him now and then, to see his beloved Mrs. Sweet—formerly so at any rate, for he must have loved her when they lived all alone and together at 284 Hudson Street without Heracles or that daughter, now carefully hidden in his pocket, out of her mother’s sight—Persephone was her name—in the thrall of a child, not even that, a baby who could only stagger across the floors from one room to the other, and dismantle the barriers that kept him out of one room from the other, and unlock cabinets that held in them poisonous housecleaning liquids and such, and if he drank them he would be dead. But the young Heracles never drank the poisonous household liquid cleaners, and he never did run into the busy street just at the moment an unthoughtful teenager in a sports car made of graphite, a graduation gift from his parents, two people who were professionals and made a salary that allowed them to make such a gift to that careless boy, their son, was driving by. And his mother, his beloved Mrs. Sweet, loved him more than can be imagined, then or now.

  * * *

  Oh, and oh again, during all that time, Now and Then, Mr. Sweet had been making a symphony, composing a piece of music that brought together many different and even conflicting modes of sound: melodies sung by occupants of a cloister, an abbey, in the middle of the Middle Ages, and in these places sex was forbidden but partaken of nonetheless; remnants of riffs (a word, an idea, riffs that Mrs. Sweet did not quite understand) played on the piano by descendants of slaves who, without meaning to, found themselves in New Orleans or a town in Alabama or a town on the banks of the Mississippi River; repeating a coda from Mozart and Bach and Beethoven (or so Mrs. Sweet understood it, but her understanding is not without its misunderstandings), and then the whole thing ended in a calamity of sounds and melodies and emotions and the audience hearing it would rise up from their seats and clap and cheer, for the audience was made up of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet’s friends, who were also in the same predicament: only they, each of them, cheered each other on and on in their wild undertakings, trying to portray the known world in a new way and hoping to persuade all its inhabitants, or at least just the people who lived next door (in the Sweets’ immediate case, it would be the people who lived in that village in New England), that things—the arts in particular—were in a constant state of flux and this flux was the very essence of living, and living in this way was to be in contact with the ineffable, the divine. And Mr. Sweet had worked away at this symphony, from before the young Heracles was born, during the time Mrs. Sweet carried the young Heracles in her stomach, at great personal cost to her, for she suffered: while in her womb, the young Heracles would often fall asleep contentedly, but in such a way that he pressed against a major nerve ending in her leg, the sciatic nerve; and Mr. Sweet worked away at his symphony of contrasting and contradictory modes of melody and so on, then, now, and also toward the time that then became his now—and it mattered not to him, Mrs. Sweet’s discomfort in carrying the young Heracles, and they then and now did not interest the world, his compositions.

  * * *

  How Mrs. Sweet loved her husband’s creations! When he played them for her on his pianoforte, she did not understand them, this is very true, in the way that Mr. Sweet un
derstood them when he wrote these masterpieces of music—indecipherable to the mentally backward (that would be any person who could not understand the theory of relativity, and Mrs. Sweet was among them), but mind-exploding to their friends—a world made up of Mr. Sweet’s friends from even the time before he was born—and Mrs. Sweet so loved Mr. Sweet that she had made herself into an essential part of his Then and wove it into her own: Now. The fugues of boogie-woogie, dans la sueur, becoming to her like a calypso, steel band, iron band, the sound of two women quarreling over a man they loved but who did not love them, in the open street in the capital city of an island, the capital city must have a cathedral. How Mr. Sweet became a part of her! And in the way that all the parts of another person whom you love deeply become intertwined with your own self: their heart with yours, their lips with yours, their fingers and toes with yours, their Now, their then with yours—it is how they and you make children! And then, right then, Mrs. Sweet wept, not from regret but from joy at something she did not understand, and swelled up with feelings of joy and her love for Mr. Sweet, who sat in a little room above a garage all alone, content to make music on the lyre, music that no one wanted to hear, no one in the entire world, not even this wonderful woman, for it was music she could not understand, and had that music been made by her favorite member of the vegetable kingdom she would have considered it a flaw, a flaw being a necessary ingredient in perfection and love too. But she so loved Mr. Sweet, the father of her most beloved young Heracles and her most beloved Persephone too, a great man, carving something out of nothing, making an entity, an empire of sound—a symphony, a fugue, especially a fugue: polyphonic texture shredded, ribbonlike, a conflagration, and then tones harmonic and expanded and then all wrapped up in a neat procedure! BANG!… BANG!… BANG!… and Mrs. Sweet was down with that, which is the way the young Heracles would put it then, when he would be in his fourteenth year, fifteenth year, and into the years before he went off to college: I’m down with that, by which he meant, “yes,” only “yes” and simply “yes!” And that was the word that came into Mrs. Sweet’s mind when she thought of Mr. Sweet’s fugues and his symphonies and choral presentations and music for four hands playing the piano and music that no one cared about, not even Mr. Sweet, who wrote such music; though he was at once so full of himself, so confident to be exact, and doubt itself or room for doubt never entered his mind. And Mrs. Sweet loved to think how as a child, a Tudor-era-sized child, Mr. Sweet would accompany his mother and father to listen to whole orchestras and choirs playing and singing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Amadeus Mozart, César Franck, for she grew up in the time of calypso, with calypsonians who bore names like Lord Executor, Attila the Hun, the Mighty Sparrow, and a steel band with the name Hell’s Gate.

  * * *

  So Mrs. Sweet loved her husband, their two children—Now, Then—the girl, who Mr. Sweet had made his close companion and kept hidden from Mrs. Sweet among his musical notes; the boy, young Heracles who was growing so rapidly, outgrowing the need to wear diapers, first of all, then no longer needing to be soothed by the sight of men operating large, noisy machines, no longer excited by the sight of the snowplow as it makes its way through a blizzard, no longer losing his balance if he walked too fast, no longer mispronouncing words, no longer an infant, just a boy, a little boy growing rapidly, his every Now becoming Then, his every Now a Then to be. And she loved them and loved them and thought of her love for them as a form of oxygen, something without which they would die.

  But now, regarding Mrs. Sweet and Mr. Sweet then did just that: her voice in particular annoyed him, especially the sound of it, for she liked to sing in the high-pitched way of a boy and she wasn’t a boy, she was a woman, and her voice sounded like a boy; she was not a soprano, she was his wife, as common as fish or beef or vegetables on his plate for dinner, or the postman who brought the bills from the household utility companies. Mrs. Sweet could not sing, no one thought her voice, as it suddenly burst into song, a joy, a pleasure, something to long for again; only Heracles loved it as she read to him in a singsong way from the books Goodnight Moon or Harold and the Purple Crayon or No Jumping on the Bed and then, he—Heracles—would say, “Oh Mom, read that again,” and when she did, by the time she came to the end, he was snoring, so loud and in a way that she had never heard before, she would laugh hysterically to herself, but smile, if you were observing her. But most certainly she could not sing in a way that could have pleased Mr. Sweet, a man, who as a boy had been taken to venues by his own mother and father, and they listened to people trained to sing in different modes: alto, soprano, and all the formal rest of that; Mrs. Sweet sang like a milkmaid, like a girl singing to domesticated animals, trying to distract both the animals and the girl from the reality of the situation—life and living and death and dinner! And for Mr. Sweet, her voice and all that it contained, all that it reminded him of, all the things in the world of music as he was educated to know and understand, this singing of hers was a violation: like, synonymous to, as if it were a crime worth bringing before a court of justice composed of the world of culture and civilization, whatever those might be, thought Mrs. Sweet to herself, always to herself, she had such thoughts. The sound of her voice, as she read to the young Heracles, made him want to kill her, take an ax (as a child, he lived in an apartment, and he had never seen such a thing) and chop off her head and then the rest of her body into little pieces, pieces so small that a crow could devour them in pleasure, never having to worry about the size of the morsels he was devouring. Mrs. Sweet’s voice, her voice! So nauseating … the sound of it often made Mr. Sweet want to empty himself of the contents of his own stomach or remove his stomach altogether but of course he could not live without his stomach; her voice, Mrs. Sweet’s voice, so full of love for everything and everybody that she loved, so repulsive to Mr. Sweet, for he did not love her; the sound of her voice reminded him of the sound of a single nail raked along the side of a pane of glass; of the sound of a steel spatula against the bottom of a frying pan, as a perfectly fried egg was removed to a breakfast plate; and with that voice, she liked to sing “Beauty’s only skin deep, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  * * *

  But now, for Mr. Sweet was still regarding Mrs. Sweet, her voice was like an unwanted alarm clock on a day that fell in the beginning of the week; a red light on the uninterrupted smooth, long, easily manageable curved road through some green mountains—her voice was the red light, irritating and interrupting everything that was pleasant: an example being Mr. Sweet’s well-being. She was so very annoying, that woman who was his wife, just now, that time after the young Heracles had come into the world: her chest was made up of two sacs filled with milk, and its contents were consumed by that new person, the young Heracles; her torso like a very old tree—a silver maple—whose curiously twin trunks were all that remained after a violent storm that cut a broad swathe through a hillside, a dale, a meadow, and such; her broad and fat feet could only fit into her Birkenstock sandals; her head, and that brought to mind her voice, for it resided somewhere inside her head—and at the thought of that, Mr. Sweet carefully combed through the many operas, or plays, he knew by heart or his own personal memory—in any case, he hated the sound of her voice as he heard it, talking to him or reading a goodnight story to the children, and he hated the sound of her voice, because she could not sing on key the songs she liked, “This Old Heart of Mine” in particular, and he hated the sound of her voice for reasons that were not reasonable at all, the sound of delicately cooked tender flesh parts of a cow trapped inside her jaws—she was eating a piece of steak, it was the sound of her chewing. He loved her, oh yes, yes, so he did, and he hated her, especially the way in which she did things, small things, necessary things: like getting out of bed in the middle of the night to pee.

  But he used to enjoy her company so, for he had the stature of a prince from the Tudor era and the ability to regard the rest of world as if it existed to satisfy his interests or to be vulnerable to his interests a
nd all his interests belonged to him; yes, yes, in the life of the mind he used to love her and enjoy her way of wearing fruits and vegetables as if they were actual clothes, the way she walked into oncoming traffic, certain that it would halt before it turned her beautiful human form into something mushy, dead, something quickly forgotten; the way she would find the simplest thing extraordinary: she once caught forty-six mice in traps she had set and then could not believe that so many of something she hated and feared could exist; the way she towered over him, not physically, just her presence, her reality, she came from far away, she loved things with spices, she had never eaten grapes, apples, or nectarines when she was a child, she loved and she loved and she loved and Mr. Sweet fell in love with her because of the passion with which she could love all the many things that truly made up her true self, even though nothing about her would make him weigh his very own solid existence and judge himself wanting and decide that his existence, his life, his anything should be secondary to hers. But Mrs. Sweet did not know that, did not know of the ways in which Mr. Sweet’s imagination, his Now and his Then, his ways of seeing the present, the past and the future, colored the ways in which he saw her.