Here she is again: her naturally black hair, thick and coarse as ropes that were usually found in the hands of stevedores, cut off so short that she might be mistaken for a stevedore himself, the color of her hair was the color of new rope in the hands of a stevedore—blonde; her eyebrows removed with a razor and in their place a line drawn in the colors: blue—if she felt like it; green, if she felt like it; gold, if she felt like that then; her lips painted red, a red meant to reflect the color of the fires that burnt in one of the many lower circles of hell; her cheeks daubed with an orange goo that was the same color orange as the daylily, Hemoracallis fulva, a flower native to China but that now grows wild, unencumbered, without inhibition, in the northeastern part of the United States, an area in which the Sweets lived now, though it was unknown to Mrs. Sweet then, and revolting to Mr. Sweet’s consciousness then, and a nightmare for him now! But Then: when Mrs. Sweet was young and so ignorant, she, this lovely person now, then thought that to grow old was a mistake the person who had grown old had made, she thought that all the people who had grown old, had walked through a door, the wrong door, and if only they had chosen the correct door, that thinning and embarrassing folding up of the flesh would not have taken place, they would have continued to be as freshly made as the day they’d turned twenty-one or somewhere around then now, and not be a creaky something, complaining about their failing organs, just the way you do about a car that goes on and on and up and down the roads for a long time and the engine needs a new something, needs many new somethings and the muffler is doomed but can be replaced too and—well, was a person not like that, something useful then, and now not so, but a person was not like a car, a car aged naturally but a person walked through the wrong door: grow old or not! When Mrs. Sweet was young, the not was beyond assuming, like drinking water and not cyanide, and Mrs. Sweet had no true understanding of Now and Now again, and then was in the lower regions of holy grammar. And her youth, before she knew the Tudor-sized prince, Mr. Sweet, was a carnival of sexual activity: all the men on one side, all the women on the other side, dressed in clothes made from the skin of an animal—domesticated or not—or wearing nothing at all, only swirling around to the sound of music coming from a special source or the sound of music which was made up inside their head; and all her youth was a giant atmosphere of sensation, sensation, and sensation again, and her Now (which becomes Then, as is all Now, eventually), she is the mother of the well-hidden Persephone and the young Heracles and even before that, the wife of Mr. Sweet, a master player of the lyre, is not then known to her; her Now is the scrupulous Mr. Sweet, a man (Tudor prince in size) who understood Wittgenstein and Einstein and all such persons. All such persons!
But Then: in those days when Mrs. Sweet was young and beautiful to him, he then wore shirts and trousers and a navy-blue corduroy jacket, and in the pocket of the navy-blue corduroy jacket was the note from his father, the note that told him how to lead his life: two households, two wives, two sofas, two knives; but he had not found it yet. He then played the pianoforte in a room all by himself, and there was a small audience, then Mr. Sweet, in his full Tudor Princely–ness, would sit down and play some music written by Ferdinand Morton and Omer Simeon and Baby Dodds and Wolfgang Mozart, and if compelled to he would play the music written by his overwhelming favorite, Igor Stravinsky. His mother, a Mrs. Sweet in her own right, was as dutiful and misinformed as Mrs. Sweet—the now Mrs. Sweet, mother to the well-hidden from her Persephone and the young Heracles—adored his performance and led the applause of family and assorted friends, and everyone bowed before him, curtsied, and some of them kissed the ground. Mr. Sweet was then ten years old and for the rest of his life he would be so, ten years old, always in that now moment—that room of playing the music of Ferdinand Morton and sometime the much beloved W. A. Mozart, but how was Mrs. Sweet to know that when she fell in love with the young man who bore himself as if he was a young Tudor prince, how was she to know that at thirty years of age, forty years of age, fifty years of age, sixty years of age, seventy years of age, Methuselah’s age now, he lived in the world as it was then, when he was ten?
Mrs. Sweet took a deep breath, then and now, and plunged ahead in the dark—for to live in any Now and any Then (they are always the same) is to do just that, plunge ahead in the dark, placing one foot in front of the other—and hoped that there would be some solid, not to mention fruitful, ground to meet her feet, really or metaphorically. As a young woman she had been like a flower found in the deep jungles of the new Americas: a black dahlia, a brown marigold, a sea-green zinnia; when she was a young woman, the world was not her oyster, did not harbor her like its oyster, providing a sweet space in which she became a pearl; when she was a young woman, younger than the young Heracles, it was her fear of death that kept her alive.
* * *
Plunge ahead or buck up—so Mrs. Sweet’s mother would say to her when she was a child, a tall thin girl all bones covered with skin, and she was afraid of the larger girls and the larger than anything boys, and would be so afraid of them that just to walk past them on the street was impossible; and earlier than that, when she was afraid of cows, for no reason at all, only that they were cows and had horns, so she was afraid of them and to walk by a pasture where these animals were fenced in and tethered to iron stakes driven into the ground was impossible for her to do: plunge ahead, put one foot in front of the other, straighten your back and your shoulders and everything else that is likely to slump, buck up and go forward, and in this way, every obstacle, be it physical or only imagined, falls face down in obeisance and in absolute defeat, for to plunge ahead and buck up will always conquer adversity, so Mrs. Sweet’s mother had said to her when she was a child, thin in body and soul, and this caused her mother much pain and great shame, for her child—the young Mrs. Sweet—needed to have drummed into her very being the clichéd words of the victorious.
And so: plunge ahead, buck up, aim for a triumphant outcome, death being superior to failure, death is sometimes a triumph, and all this made up the amniotic fluid in which Mrs. Sweet lived when she was a child: in this way Mrs. Sweet learned to drive a car, learned to love the stark realities of her life with Mr. Sweet (he never loved her, not then, not now, she accepted it, now then and now again), took out a loan from the bank to buy the Shirley Jackson house, the house in which they lived, and it was a nice house, with views of mountains and waterfalls and meadows of flowers native to the New England landscape, and farms that cultivated food especially delicious to animals who would then be slaughtered and eaten by someone quite familiar to the slaughtered animals, friends of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their children: the young Heracles and the hidden Persephone; in the far distance, Mrs. Sweet could see the beautiful Mrs. Burley—her long yellow hair in a braid cascading silently down her back and coming to rest just below her shoulder blades—a young cheese-maker milking her cows and her goats, and from this milk she would make some rare cheese and delicious yogurt that Mrs. Sweet would purchase and the rest of her family would hate: Mr. Sweet, because he hated everything about Mrs. Sweet, especially her enthusiasms and these were: growing species of rare flowers from seeds she had gone hunting for in temperate Asia, cooking, and knitting, especially that infernal knitting. Oh Mom! Oh Mom! That would be the sound of young Heracles. And the love and contempt and indifference that came toward Mrs. Sweet from her beloved Heracles seemed at once to be as natural as a sweetly cool breeze that will unexpectedly change the mood of a group of people justifiably angry, or a group of people whose every need and expectation is satisfied and still they search for happiness! By that time (then, now, and then again), Mrs. Sweet had buried her past—in the cement that composes memory, even though she knew quite well that cement deteriorates, falls apart, and reveals eventually whatever it was meant to conceal.
Plunge ahead, buck up, and Mrs. Sweet did just that, as she gathered up Mr. Sweet’s dropped clothes and the soiled bath towels and the sheets and the children’s clothes, blouses from Wet Seal for Pers
ephone and trousers from somewhere else she could not pronounce, T-shirts for young Heracles bought at a store called Manhattan, though it was located in a city far from the actual place known as Manhattan, and all the articles of clothing and dry goods that a seemingly prosperous American family might use. Mrs. Sweet washed all the clothing and other such things in the washing machine (known to her now, but unknown to her then, when she was that easily defeated child) and dried them in a clothes-drying machine and then folded the towels and other such things, and she got out the ironing board and ironed all of Mr. Sweet’s shirts and trousers too, for she loved him so, and wanted him to appear to everyone who glimpsed him for the first time as if he had just stepped out of a display in the window of a store called Love: dignified and worthy of respect. All this made her tired, in body and mind equally—the work of it, the imagining of it: clean clothing for two children and Mr. Sweet, making them look as if they lived in a mansion on a prominent street in Manhattan, or as if he lived in a village in New England with a wife and mother who had no idea of how to be her own true self. But to Mrs. Sweet, to whom he was actually and legally wedded, all this was something else: here she is plunging ahead and bucking up too: and walking on air, on nothing visible to the human eye, and she did not fall into oblivion or whatever substance was made to disguise oblivion, and she went on to the next thing and the next thing and the thing after that, and each thing and each nothing she conquered, and she went on in her ways, looking after her husband, tending her children, looking up at the moon (quarter, half, or full) to see if it was in a shroud of clouds (rain tomorrow, in any case), and feeling happy, whatever that is, Then and Now!
5
Mrs. Sweet ended all these thoughts, for the door to the room that was just off the kitchen opened with a mighty force, and Mrs. Sweet knew immediately that it was her son the young Heracles.
The young Heracles would always be so, then, now, and then to come, as would his sister the beautiful Persephone be so, then, now, and then to come. Their mother Mrs. Sweet had deemed it to be that way. But now, just this now, the young Heracles flung open the door to the room just off the kitchen, the room in which Mrs. Sweet kept her true self and had never revealed it to anybody, not Mr. Sweet, not the beautiful Persephone, not the young Heracles, and she had no idea that they knew of her secret communing with her true self and that they viewed this with feelings of various kinds: sympathy from Heracles, simple hatred from Persephone, homicidal rage from Mr. Sweet. But now, just this now, the young Heracles said to his mother, “Mom, Mom, what are you doing? I’ve been looking for you all over the place. You weren’t in the garden, you weren’t in the kitchen, you weren’t in bed reading a book no one but you would care about. Where were you? Can Tad, Ted, Tim, Tom, and Tut come over? We wanna play a game but Dad says I better ask you because we’re gonna make a lot of noise and he’s trying to finish writing his concerto for two pianos for the Troy Orchestra and we’re probably gonna make a lot of noise because we don’t know how to be quiet, I don’t know how to be quiet, I keep telling Dad, I don’t know how to be quiet, I don’t know how to stay still, I don’t know what to do, Mom, Mom are you listening to me, are you listening to me? Help me, Mom, say something, tell me what’s going on.” Oh how his mother loved him and she thought of the time when he was in her stomach and would not stay still, how all night he jumped up and down in her womb and then would stretch himself to his full height, almost twenty-four inches diagonally, and she could see the imprint of his heel and the imprint of his fist through her skin, as if her skin were a piece of old, worn-out fabric, and then she wanted to say something to him that would make him place himself into that posture of the unborn child in the uterus that decorates the walls of obstetricians’ waiting rooms, and that unborn child who fits perfectly in the illustrated pelvic area and develops into a baby without the host knowing of it, and host and child are one but they acknowledge nothing of their unspeakable intimacy, and that intimacy is a lost island that has not yet been found. But so did Heracles enter into Mrs. Sweet’s very being, distorting the skin of her stomach, bouncing up and down on her sciatic nerve, rupturing the lining of her cervix so that she had to go to bed for days and days and she worried that she would never see his face, his broad nose, his eyes that were the color of some mineral to be found in distorted rock, his lips like hers, thick and unparted like night mixed up with day, his large hands and feet, his hair so thick and curled, the weight of his head on his shoulders; and then he was born suffering from jaundice, the blood of his mother and the blood of his father at war inside him, and that battle had not ended before he came into this world; for days he lay in a bassinet under the glare of fluorescent lights and Mrs. Sweet stayed by his side and fed him food from her breasts and on the eighth day he was released and only the blood of his mother remained in his veins. But Mrs. Sweet thought nothing of this in her everyday life, only when she was in the little room just off the kitchen, and the insufferableness of all of them, Mr. Sweet, the beautiful Persephone, the young Heracles, their demands, their needs, their requests and not one among them pitied her; why should they? She seemed to sail along smoothly, magically finding the money to purchase computers powerful enough to employ software that could arrange and copy complicated musical compositions, or building a lovely little cottage in the woods where Mr. Sweet could retreat from the disturbance of those children and the presence of that woman who had absolutely arrived on a banana boat or some vessel like that, for nobody knew exactly how she arrived; she had a story that began with her mother hating her and sending her away to make money to support her family and she had no father, there was no claim made on her, she was just sent away on a vessel that went back and forth, carrying cargo, human sometimes, of a nonhuman but commercial nature sometimes, and there she was, this woman who was the mother of his children, a woman from a place far away, a place Mr. Sweet could never visit, for Mr. Sweet would not cross the street if he knew his shadow would accompany him.
But now Mrs. Sweet was very much listening to her sweet son, his voice like an instrument only a boy could play or would want to play, a boy who could summon an army of shy Myrmidons, battalions of archers and sword wielders and spear throwers, all of them borne out of the wrapping of a Happy Meal from McDonald’s or Mickey D’s or the Sign of the Golden Arches, as Heracles would say as it pleased him; there were many Happy Meals and so there were many shy Myrmidons. He said, the young Heracles, in that voice that only his mother could hear, a voice that was so pleasing to her ears, well my dad is a complete asshole, he doesn’t know anything, he hates throwing balls and he won’t take me to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and I don’t even know where that is, and he won’t take me to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and I kind of know where that is, and do you know what just happened, he came in and I know he had been with those girls, those really cute student girls who say to him, oh Mr. Sweet, Pierrot Lunaire and Lulu and I don’t know what else but there is something else and he comes in from outside after all this and he says to me: young Heracles, where is my beautiful wife, as if I didn’t have a clue about all the time he has been adjusting his corduroy trousers that Mom had bought for him at the Brooks Brothers outlet in Manchester, really cool pants too, but they were too long for him, and when she had them shortened he looked like a short guy wearing somebody else’s pants, but that was Dad, my dad, he looked like another guy and I just knew that my dad was someone else and I didn’t want him to be anything but someone else, but when he asked me if I had seen his beautiful wife, I said to him, no, but if you are looking for Mom, she is in the garden. And I knew he was going to laugh: Mom wasn’t beautiful because she was my mother; Mom wasn’t beautiful because she was his wife; and I knew he was going to laugh because it was a funny thing to say, I just knew it and I knew when he laughed he wouldn’t notice that I knew he was doing something and I didn’t know then what he was doing, I couldn’t say, hey Dad, this is what you are doing, you hate me, you hat
e your wife, you don’t think she is beautiful, you hate this house we live in, you hate the garden, you hate the way Mom will just do anything: big things like building a huge stonewall around the house with some stones that she paid someone to haul in a truck from a quarry miles away in Goshen, Massachusetts, and then right after that there was a big quarrel over how to pay for it over dinner and Mom said, but the stones are of mica schist formed 400 million years ago in the Lower Devonian Period and this metaphoric rock, now in shades of rust, gold, blue, black, gray, that will surround the house, making it look afloat, is the result of sandy mud sediments that had been resting at the bottom of an ancient sea, and Dad didn’t say anything else, he just continued to eat his food, and Mom had cooked poached veal with tuna fish sauce and Italian rice with shredded basil and mozzarella cheese and a salad, and Dad just hated Mom, she was becoming fat then, she had taught me to make her a martini and she would sit in the garden at the end of the day, in the middle of all those flowers that Wayne and Joe gave her, some flowers that they said looked great in their garden but they looked terrible in Mom’s garden, they grew all over the place like weeds, as if they hadn’t been given instructions in how to grow in another place other than in Readsboro, Vermont, and Dad was happy to see her disappointments and me too, especially me too, for I wanted her to be Mom and didn’t want to have to go to Clearbrook Farm to buy her a six-pack of celosia for Mother’s Day, just after Dad dumped her because he had fallen hopelessly in love with a woman younger than Mom, a woman that he felt made him understand his true, true self.
See Now Then Page 8
