See Now Then

by Jamaica Kincaid

  Is Mom an error, and if she is what should I do with her, rub her out like when I’m in school and I make my letters not so good? Is Mom a mistake and can I correct her? Is Mom a disaster, like when the wind blows too hard, or when the rain comes too much, or when the rain doesn’t come at all for years and years? Is Mom a disaster? Jesus Christ, and that was the voice of Mrs. Sweet, shredding the air itself, if such a thing could be done, and she sprinted across the lawn that had just been mowed by Mr. Pembroke or someone who worked for him, and she stretched out her already unusually long arms, as if she were one of the transformers, the toys that were not yet part of the everyday life of young Heracles, and she removed him from the path of the speeding vehicle, a red Nissan sports car being driven by a boy, a junior at the Mount Anthony Union High School, a member of a sports team where speed of foot is highly valued, a boy whose mother worked in a factory not far away in which fabric made from barrels of petroleum was sewed into something that might be worn or sat upon or contain food in such a way that a person on eating it will think of the word fresh, but only the word fresh will actually be fresh, and it was in this moment that young Heracles was removed from death’s door, and his mother, the delightful and much despised Mrs. Sweet, who could from time to time be despicable and just plain awful, hugged him to her close and wished the boy driver a fiery death, and later when he did die and not at all because of anything having to do with that swift red sports car made of fiberglass but because of an unexpected rupture of an artery somewhere in his head, the dear Mrs. Sweet wept for his mother, not for him but for the boy’s own mother.

  And those tears she wept then were so much, so much, so much, and they might be the beginning of a sea that might be ancient eventually, but just then, right now, they were absorbed into the bib of her overalls that had been purchased from the Gap or through the Smith & Hawken catalog, depending, and the tears that began the sea that would eventually become ancient remained just tears, and Mrs. Sweet gathered the young Heracles to her bosom and was so glad that just then she had avoided the face of sorrow and the immediacy of sorrow and also had avoided becoming intimate with that dreadful entity, that world: sorrow; and those tears she wept then and now, Now being constant and unchangeable and liable to make foolish all that insists on being held permanently dear, Then being like the earth’s surface with its crust seemingly fixed and stable to all who need it to be so, those tears were absorbed in her mom garment and also were in the great world of water and all that might be vulnerable to it.

  All the same, there was the young Heracles, saved from being made dead by the boy who did not listen to his mother when she warned him about all the dangers of the world, who would have died at nineteen years of age anyway, even if he had listened to his mother, from some unexpected malfunction in his body; and that mother had loved that boy and would have reached into her son’s body to mend it and make his life a long life, a life that continued after hers ended, for she could see herself absent in his world but couldn’t imagine him absent from hers, now or then. Mrs. Sweet saw all that, standing over a bed of lettuce that would soon bolt and Shep, who sometimes helped her to move full-grown trees from one place to another, was now speaking to her, and as she watched his lips move, she heard herself only: Where are the Oberleys? For Shep has, this year, a spectacular crop of beans that we all must taste; Gordon has made Ann a dry riverbed; Mrs. Sweet’s friends Dan and Robert who live in Heronswood, Washington, has sent her a batch of their white double-flowering hellebores; and then, only then, she heard the words that made Shep’s lips move: By the way, did you mean to park the car in the grove of white pines that has been purposely sited at the entrance of the pond, and just then the threshold of her life disappeared for she saw the middle-aged Kuniklos, a car made in Germany, a country that had transgressed the human bond to such a degree that it could not be discussed in the intimacy of a kitchen or even the indifferent atmosphere of a restaurant, and the car had come to a rest in the grove of white pines, a grove of trees that had not been removed because their presence in the landscape of an expansive field was pleasing to the eye of the owner of the field, and the owners were Gordon and Ann. The young Heracles was all strapped up in his car seat, and the car seat itself firmly fixed to the middle seat in the back of the car, all these precautions recommended by authorities devoted to the prevention of sorrow and despair of a particular kind; but he had removed himself from the car seat and climbed over to the driver’s position, seated himself, and turned the key to the ignition, but he had never seen the maneuvering of the driver’s feet, and so the car jumped forward and jumped forward and jumped forward and came to a halt in the grove of pines, instead of breaking the surface of that beautiful pond and eventually sinking to its stinking bottom, for the bottom always stinks. And when the grower of the beans, Shep, said those words, by the way did you guys mean to park the car down near the pond, Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, the father and mother of the young Heracles, knew everything that had happened, every motion, and thought of him, knew it as it happened, knew it before it happened, but did not know the end, and they leapt out of themselves and ran toward him, not knowing if they would find him dead or alive, but they did find him and he was alive in the car, trying without success to open the doors and get out into other adventures, which might be cleaning the fabled Augean Stables, slaying the Nemean Lion and wearing its skin as a cloak, an encounter with the Erymanthian Boar, though not yet and perhaps never the policeman in the city of Boston, who traces himself through some long-dead people from Ireland, imagines that young Heracles has run through a red light and by that time, then and now, the young Heracles had become a young black man, whatever that might be, and even now, whatever that might be is not certain.

  * * *

  Oh now, oh then, but see him now, that would be the young Heracles, with the chicken pox he caught from his sister the beautiful Persephone and their mother Mrs. Sweet caught it from them both and it made her unable to breathe properly, for her lungs were covered with little blisters even as she appeared without blemish; and see him now with the other children in their striped overalls and white turtleneck, with the words OshKosh embroidered on these garments, so discreetly that it wasn’t discreet at all, swinging a toy hammer, or a toy version of every tool useful to a carpenter or a plumber or a farmer, a toy version of such an individual, for neither did Mr. and Mrs. Sweet nor any of the other parents imagine that these children would become in real life a carpenter, a plumber, a farmer, but what these children would become was not a question that was ever asked then and so cannot be answered now; and the children, that would be the young Heracles and the beautiful Persephone, did really love their mother then and would miss her terribly when she left the house to do something they found incomprehensible, read out loud those words she had committed to paper while dwelling in that awful room off the kitchen, the room to which they had no access, not even if they took a boat or a plane or a car or a hike, not at all could they reach her when she was in that room off the kitchen, and then how they loved her, but she was apart from them and only in the world of those sentences: “I have the most sensible suitcase in New York, I have the most sensible small car in New York” and “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind” and “There is a chamber in the life of the gardener that is not a place in the garden at all.” Oh mom, oh mom, where are you, cried the young Heracles and the beautiful Persephone, not at all in unison, for their mother was lost to them but never at the same time, and the young Heracles in particular missed her, and had always missed her for even when he was a baby and she nursed him she wasn’t with him at all and he would look up into her face and then into her eyes and she looked down on him but it was as if he were a picture of a little baby nursing at his mother’s breast and he would sink his little baby teeth into her breast and then it yielded only her flesh, the milk was diminishing, she wanted it so, and
the flesh of her breast was like the wheel of a tire but he had no idea of a tire then, and when he bit her, her annoyance at his presence grew, at his very appearance in her life, she had forgotten that he was her beloved and only son, for then he was simply an animal biting her in the breast, like a serpent or some other small invertebrate that would be a symbol of the great decline of humankind, and how she wished he wouldn’t hurt her so, and how he wished that his mother would look at him as she nursed him; Oh Mom, oh Mom, where are you? asked the children of the dear Mrs. Sweet and they asked this of her as if she could not ever have been in need of such a thing herself, a mom! A mother!

  But the young Heracles recovered from all the childhood diseases that might have killed his mother when she was a child in that friendly banana-growing entity in which she grew up but which she, without any known explanation, survived, and this fact, her survival, could and was often used as an epithet hurled at her, she survived tropical illness and now lived in a climate in which such vulnerability was known only in proper literature which she would like to write, poor woman, said her husband to himself! And all that should be put aside, for it is then, even as it is now, and the young Heracles was wading through the time when he was prescribed a medicine that made bumps the size of an infant’s fist appear on his body, and the doctor said to Mrs. Sweet that such a thing only occurred in one person out of a million, and Mrs. Sweet was so made speechless by this that she took the young Heracles to Key West, Florida, and there he met a man who wrote five books and in each book one of the vowels was absent.

  But the young Heracles grew and grew in strength, wisdom not immediately because sometimes he was said to be suffering from a deficit in his ability to concentrate and sometimes he was said to be unable to comprehend the variety of ways the known world was presented to him and sometimes he was said to be suffering from a variety of rapidly changing bad moods, but he only caused suffering to the shy Myrmidons, who were lined up and poised to join him in battle against the Ninja Turtles, and Heracles took turns leading these hordes of warriors against each other and which was the winning side always depended on the side he favored then, right then, right now. And his arms and feet became retractable then but his dear mother only discovered this when one day, while she was sowing a field with Asclepias with seed purchased from a mysterious seed-man named Hudson whose address was somewhere in Los Angeles, and she wondered how to heal her sweet son, she saw his arms stretch out from his body, up, up into the clear air, below the blue sky and through some white clouds and his fingers came to rest on the bare spot, a smooth cliff, that was a feature of the mountain called Bald, and he would remove small parts of the cliff and place them at his feet and then hit them across the lawn, as if they were golf balls bought in bulk from the store nearby. That bare spot on the mountain was miles and miles away, and as he extended his arm he made a sweet low whistling sound and different species of sparrows settled on it, Mrs. Sweet heard him call out softly: Spizella pusilla, Pooecetes gramineus, Passerculus sandwichensis, Ammodramus savannarum, Melospiza lincolnii and then he sang a series of tunes that were exactly like the birds’ tunes themselves, and Mrs. Sweet marveled at this, for it is well known that her poor little boy could not carry a tune and had been asked by his piano teacher not to attend class anymore, for along with being a disruptive presence, he had no ear at all, that is no ability to imitate and reproduce B flat; and his mother, that would be the dear Mrs. Sweet, said to him, how can you do that, how do you know their songs? and her son said, I know it because I taught it to them, they only know how to do that because I showed them Mom, I showed them. And what else can you do, she said, not asked, what else can you do, she said, and young Heracles said, I can kill a lion and make a coat to wear when I go skiing out of his skin, and I can kill the Lernaean many-headed monster that could kill you if you saw it in a dream, and I can kill a wild boar, and I can kill the Stymphalian Birds, all of them, because I am not afraid of them, and I can clean the Augean Stables, and I can capture the Cretan Bull, I can’t stop Dad from wanting to kill me, that’s just the way he is. I can’t stop myself from killing him, I’m going to kill him and he will never know because I can’t let him know, he would be so disappointed, he is already so disappointed, his disappointment would be complete and I really love him so I don’t want him to see that, but I am going to kill him, he has to die, we all have to die, right Mom, right, Mom? Oh Mom, oh Mom, said the young Heracles, are you going to cry and remind me of how Dad stayed up with me and watched Michael Jordan play in the championships when Jordan had the flu, and when he made a basket he would fall down but Scottie Pippen would run up and rescue him from falling to the ground, are you going to do that, Mom, are you going to say, oh, it was so Homeric, the way Scottie and Dennis played, and Malone was such a Hector and Stockton was so Paris: oh the whole thing was so Homeric, and you would say this over and over until I wanted to throw you overboard but we were not in a sea or anything, we were just in the house in which Shirley Jackson used to live.

  Oh Mom, oh Mom, so said the young Heracles, he spoke to her in that way, calling her name twice, for to him Mrs. Sweet’s name was Mom: oh Mom, oh Mom: and Mrs. Sweet shrank into a ball, the size of a ball of some kind or another that is to be met on the side of the road by accident, and she shrank into the size of a ball that is seen in a basket, one of many, in a store that is filled with things that are not related to balls at all: oh Mom, oh Mom, tell me all the things that happened before you were even born, and he laughed, his laugh was golden, as if it defined that man-made value itself, as if the value of gold had been determined by the laugh of the young Heracles, and Mrs. Sweet sat down, or did something like that, came to a complete halt that was apart from standing, and she looked at her son and adored him, he was so precious and wise, for by then he had absolutely refused to swallow the small white tablets of Adderall; oh Mom, oh Mom, tell me the marriage story tonight when I go to sleep in the bed that Cadmus and Harmony gave you, the bed that was from the time before Cadmus changed his name and that was so cool when we used to go trick-or-treating and Cadmus was all disguised as a woman but now, right now, he really is a woman but then he was just Cadmus and that was so cool and he would come by the Shirley Jackson house and drink rum with you; oh Mom, oh Mom, tell me the marriage story.

  And Mrs. Sweet said to him, no, no, and she was horrified and had never told him the story of Mr. Sweet and how they met on the seventeenth floor of an apartment building when she was twenty-seven years old on the week before Christmas, and she had always hated Christmas when she was a child, because she grew up in a place not too far from the equator and Christmas is a holiday that is best understood and appreciated if you live much farther north of the equator, and how surprised she was that this idea, Christmas, so special in her imagination when she was a child, was then and now so full of anxiety: partings and closings and partings again, and gifts of things and kisses and then silences, great silences, and food eaten but no loudness, nothing, as if Christmas were a death, a mourning, a funeral, and then they all went to bed. And then thirty days after that we met again and we didn’t even remember that, for we slept in the same bed and we went to see Twyla Tharp and we went to a rehearsal of an orchestra that was perfecting the Goldberg Variations and would later that evening perform in front of an audience; it was then I understood the Long Rain, a period of my life when I was a child and all events seemed to have no end and no beginning at all but certainly no end, for they were only now, and it is only just right now in speaking of them that they become Then, as if the past only becomes past when you render it Now; and the rush on my part to belong to someone who knew the world in ways that were unknown to me, being and not being, was how I came to marry your father. Oh sweet darling, dearest young Heracles, but I couldn’t call out to you then and I can only call out to you now because I needed you then but not so now, never now, always only then, said the dear Mrs. Sweet, reading to the young Heracles a chapter from a book called See Then Now, against he
r better judgment, that is, without her really meaning to do so. And she went on, for she was unable to stop, the pages of that book compelled her to continue, her eyes were glued to them, her tongue was an ingredient of the pages, her own mind made the physical presence of the book possible even as she held it in her own hands: in those days your father, Mr. Sweet, was a very good person, not this grizzled, graying, impotent man you see now who stalks the woods afraid of everything, liking only the trees that have been made dead in a storm; in those days, he was only afraid of the streets of lower Manhattan early in the morning or late at night, for in those days those streets were without people, all the people lived somewhere else, they only worked in those streets and then they went home; but we lived in the places where people only worked and your father hated me for making him live in these places but he didn’t know he hated me yet, he didn’t know that his feelings for me were not feelings of love, they were feelings of hatred; and I loved him, for he was so full of knowledge of Beethoven and Bach and Shostakovich and Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Alban Berg … but we were not married yet, we were not Mr. and Mrs. Sweet then, we would only become that when you, young Heracles, and beautiful Persephone were born, before that we were not anything, we were only possibilities of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, without the birth of young Heracles and the birth of the beautiful Persephone we would not be and so become: Mr. and Mrs. Sweet. Oh Now, oh Then, but even before then, we had become Mr. and Mrs. Sweet because I was living in the United States of America without proper papers and could have been sent back to that small island from which I came, an island that is so small, history now only records it as a footnote to larger events and the larger events are even now footnotes, and before your father married me and I was vulnerable to deportation, George said to Sandy, you know one of us will have to marry Jamaica, and all went on in that way until your father married me and Veronica did not attend the ceremony and Sheila threw rice at us, which she had bought at a market on upper Broadway, and your aunt forgot to turn off the stove with the coffee on the burner and she had to go back home from the ceremony and turn the stove off because the place in which they lived could have caught fire and your grandfather couldn’t go in an elevator and the judge was so kind and he came down from his chamber and officiated at the marriage and your father and mother were then married and your mother didn’t have to be forcibly repatriated to the backwater banana entity from which she came, so Mr. Sweet was thinking but kept to himself, and your father and mother, to whom you, young Heracles and beautiful Persephone, were unknown as if you were nothing and nothing again, not even worthy of a capital letter, nothing, take a breath, a pause here, said Mrs. Sweet, and she held the book in her hand and wanted to rest it on her knees, but did not.