All at once I did imagine myself a girl, a girl my own age; it was a flicker, a very peculiar feat—clearly I was scared to death of doing any of this. But I did it a couple of times without really pausing to experience what it was I was as a girl: I just performed the feat, I flickered into it and out again. Then, carried away by confidence, I did pause and was a girl for a second but it was so obliterating, so shocking that I couldn’t stand it. I was sickened. The feeling of obliteration or castration or whatever it was was unsettling as hell.
I had more than once imagined having breasts. Other boys and I had discussed what it must be like to have breasts: we’d imitated the way girls walked; we’d put books inside our shirts to simulate the weight of breasts. But I had not imagined breasts as part of a whole physical reality. Now suddenly, almost with a kind of excitement—well, with a dry excitement as in writing out an answer to an essay question on a test, working out an outline, a structure, seeing a thing take shape—I suddenly saw how shy I’d been about the physical thing, and with what seemed to me incredible daring (and feeling unclean, coated with un-cleanliness), I imagined my hips as being my shoulders: I hardly used my hips for anything; and my shoulders, which were sort of the weighty center of most of my movements and of my strength, as being my hips. I began to feel very hot; I was flushed—and humiliated. Then after a moment’s thought, going almost blind with embarrassment—and sweat—I put my behind on my chest. Then I whacked my thing off quickly and I moved my hole to my crotch. I felt it would be hard to stand up, to walk, to bestir myself; I felt sheathed in embarrassment, impropriety, in transgressions that did not stay still but floated out like veils; every part of me was sexual and jutted out one way or another. I really was infinitely ashamed—there was no part of me that wasn’t dirty, that wouldn’t interfere with someone else’s thoughts and suggest things. I seemed bound up, packaged, tied in this, and in extra flesh. To live required infinite shamelessness if I was like this. I was suddenly very bad-tempered.… (Possibly I was remembering dreams I’d had, ideas I’d had in dreams.)
I felt terrible. I tried to giggle and make it all a joke, giggle inwardly—or snort with laughter. But I felt a kind of connected hysteria, a long chain of mild hysteria, of feeling myself to be explosive, hugely important, and yet motionless, inclined to be motionless. I suddenly thought that to say no was what my pride rested on; saying yes was sloppy and killing. All this came in a rush. I was filled with impatience and incredible defiance and a kind of self-admiration I couldn’t even begin to grasp.
The life in me, in her, seemed a form of madness (part of me was still masculine, obviously, part of my consciousness) and maddened and mad with pleasure and also unpleasantly ashamed or stubborn. I really did feel beyond the rules, borne over the channels laid down by rules: I floated over everything. And there was a terrible fear-excitement thing; I was afraid-and-not-afraid; vulnerable and yet emboldened by being dirty and not earthbound—it was like a joke, a peculiar kind of exalted joke, a tremendous, breathless joke, one hysterical and sickening but too good for me to let go of.
I began to shake.
I had only the vaguest idea of female physical weakness—women controlled so much of the world I was familiar with, so much of University City; but all at once, almost dizzyingly, almost like a monkey, I saw—I saw connections everywhere, routes, methods (also things to disapprove of, and things to be enthusiastic about): I was filled with a kind of animal politics. But I was afraid of having my arms and legs broken. When I was a man, I saw only a few logical positions and routes and resting places, but as a woman I saw routes everywhere, emotional ways to get things, lies, displays of myself: it was dazzling. I saw a thousand emotional strings attached to a thousand party favors. I felt a dreadful disgust for logic: logic seemed crippling and useless, unreal; and I had the most extraordinary sense of danger: it almost made me laugh; and I had a sort of immodest pride and a kind of anguished ambition and a weird determination not to be put in danger.… I was filled and fascinated by a sense of myself. Physical reality was a sieve which I passed through as I willed, when my luck was good. (I had read a number of books about women: Gone With the Wind, Pride and Prejudice, Madame Bovary.)
Then I saw why, maybe, Doris was a terrible person—it was her attempt at freedom. Her willfulness was all toward being free; now she was ill and caught. Briefly, I felt I understood Doris a little, only a little, for the first time. I felt I understood part of the stormy thing in her, and the thing where her pains blocked out the world and her obstinate selfishness and the feeling of having a face. I did not have entire confidence in my penetration, but still I admired my sympathy for her, but dully, almost boredly—with an open mouth, half wondering what to think about next—when suddenly, without warning, I really imagined myself her, Doris, middle-aged, disfigured, with loose skin, my voice different from what it had been: my voice was not that of a young woman. My mouth hurt with the pressure of my bitterness: my mouth was scalded. (In my own life, when I was unhappy, it was my eyes that hurt; my vision would hurt me: people would look like monsters to me and would seem to have evil glances, as if black cats inhabited their eyes.) It was almost as if there was steam somewhere in my throat; really, I burned with the pressure of angry words, with a truth I wasn’t willing to modify, a truth meant to be wholly destructive to the errors and selfishness of others. To their complacency. I imagined all of it—not being liked by my family anymore, my husband hating me, being forsaken by my mother and sister. By my friends. As myself, as someone young, I could bear a good deal; but it takes energy to feel depressed, and when I imagined myself to be Doris, when I was Doris, I hadn’t the energy anymore to die; too many things had gone wrong; I was too angry to die; I felt too much; there was no end to what I felt—I could do nothing but scream.
I DIDN’T know if I was faking all or any of this. What does imagination consist of? I was thirteen and perhaps a superficial person. There was no guarantee I felt deeply or that I possessed any human grace at all. The trees around me, the tiny creek (like an endless parade of silvery snakes of varying thinnesses rustling over pebbles), the solitude suggested to me a gravity, a decency, a balance in life that was perhaps only the reflection of my Middle Western ignorance, or idealism. It is hard to know. But as long as I held on to the power to pity her, even while I imagined myself to be her, I did not, in my deepest self, suffer what I imagined her suffering. With what I would consider the equivalent confidence and folly of a boy playing at chemistry in the basement, I held up a mental snapshot of what I had in the second before half experienced in imagining myself to be Doris: it was a condition of mind, of terror and bitterness and hate, and a trying to win out still, all churning in me, and it was evil in that it was without bounds, without any fixity or finality, and suggested an infinite nausea—I was deeply afraid of nausea. It was a condition of mind, a sickening, lightless turmoil, unbearably foul, staled; and even to imagine it without going crazy myself or bursting into tears or yelling with horror, not to live it but just to conceive of it without going through those things was somehow unclean. But with nearly infinite coldness, a coldness that was a form of love in me, I held the thought. The mind’s power to penetrate these realities is not distinguishable from the mind’s power merely to imagine it is penetrating reality. My father had twice contemptuously called me the Boy Scout. Did Doris live much of the time in that foulness? I thought there was no end to her wretchedness, no end—I was thirteen—to the uselessness of her misery.
The thing about being a bad person, the thing about being free and a little cheap and not letting yourself be owned by other people at all, by their emotions, was that then you had to succeed, at everything you did, all the time: failure became an agony. And there was no alternative to that agony when it began except to become a good person. Not a saint, nothing extreme. It was just that if I imagined myself a middle-aged woman like Doris with both my breasts cut off and my husband dying, hating me while he died, turning his back on me and saying a
ll the years he’d spent with me were foul, and with myself as selfish and hungry for triumph still, I was deprived of all justice, of all success, and my pain and terror were then so great that I would of course be insane.
Which magnified the agony.
Clearly—it seemed obvious to me as I sat there and reasoned about these things—unselfishness lessened such pain if only in the way it moved you outside your own nervous system. Generosity emptied you of any feeling of poverty anyway. I knew that from my own experience. Extended generosity predisposed you to die; death didn’t seem so foul; you were already without a lot of eagerness about yourself; you were quieted.
I BICYCLED home, to bear the news to Momma, to tell her what I’d found out.
I was adolescent: that is, I was half formed, a sketch of a man. I told Doris unselfishness and generosity and concern for others would ease most pain, even her pain; it would make her feel better.
God, how she screamed.
She said that I came from filthy people and what I was was more filth, that I came from the scum of the earth and was more scum. Each thing she said struck her with its aptness and truth and inspired her and goaded her to greater anger. She threw an ashtray at me. She ordered me out of the house: “Sleep in the streets, sleep in the gutter, where you belong!” Her temper astounded me. Where did she get the strength for such temper when she was so ill? I did not fight back. My forbearance or patience or politeness or whatever it was upset her still more. I didn’t catch on to this until in the middle of calling me names (”—you little bastard, you hate everybody, you’re disgusting, I can’t stand you, you little son of a bitch—” “Momma … Come on, now, Momma …”) she screamed, “Why do you do things and make me ashamed?”
It was a revelation. It meant my selfishness would calm her. At first I said, “Do you really want me to go? You’ll be alone here.” I was partly sarcastic, laughing at her in that way, and then I began muttering, or saying with stubborn authority that I would not leave, I wanted my comfort considered, I wanted her to worry about my life. She said, huffing and gasping but less yellow and pinched and extreme, “You’re a spoiled brat.” I mean she was calmed to some extent; she was reduced to being incensed from being insane. But she screamed still. And I kept on too: I did not care what grounds she used—it could be on the grounds of my selfishness—but I was really stubborn: I was determined that she try being a good woman. I remember being so tense at my presumption that I kept thinking something physical in me would fail, would burst through my skin—my nerves, or my blood, my heart, everything was pounding, or my brain, but anyway that particular fight ended sort of in a draw, with Doris insulted and exhausted, appalled at what I’d said. At the stupidity. But with me adamant. I couldn’t have stopped myself, actually.
After that, with my shoulders hunched and my eyes on the ground or occasionally wide open and innocent for inspection and fixed on her, I referred to her always as brave and generous. I dealt with her as if she was the most generous woman imaginable, as if she had been only good to me all my life. I referred to her kindness, her bravery, her selflessness. She said I was crazy. I suppose certain accusations, certain demands, were the natural habitat of her mind. At one point she even telephoned the junior-high-school principal to complain I was crazy. He wouldn’t listen to her. I went right on behaving as if I remembered sacrifice after sacrifice she had made for me. She was enraged, then irritated, then desperate, then bored, then nonplussed, and the nonsense of it depressed her: she felt alone and misunderstood; she did not want me to be idealistic about her; she wanted me to be a companion to her, for her. But she stopped screaming at me.
I don’t know if she saw through me or not. I don’t think I consciously remembered over the weeks that this went on what had started all this or its history; continued acts develop their own atmosphere; that I sincerely wanted a home of a certain kind for us was all that it seemed to be about after a while. That I had to protect myself. When she gave in, it was at first that she indulged the male of the family, the fool, the boy who was less realistic than she was. Then to conceal her defeat, she made it seem she couldn’t bear to disillusion me. Also, while she more or less said that she hadn’t the energy to do what I expected of her, she must have realized it took energy to fight me. She may have said to herself—as I said to myself before I imagined myself to be her—Why not? I think, too, my faith seduced her, my authority: I was so sure of myself. And besides, the other didn’t work anymore.
Of course, it was a swindle all the way: she could no longer ask things of me so freely, so without thought of what it would do to me. She became resigned, and then after a while she became less sad—she even showed a wried amusement. She almost became good-tempered. She was generous to some extent with everyone or I was hurt. She reconciled with her mother and her daughter, with her brothers and her sister, with the neighbors sometimes at my insistence—even with my advice—but after a while she did it on her own in her own way. It seemed to me it was obvious that considering all the factors, she was much kinder to us than any of us were, or could be, to her, so that no matter what bargain she thought she was negotiating, she really was unselfish now. The bargain was not in her favor. She practiced a polite death or whatever, a sheltering politeness, which wasn’t always phony, and a forgiveness of circumstances that was partly calculated to win friends: she comforted everyone who came near her, sometimes cornily; but still it was comfort. I was a little awed by her; she was maybe awed and instructed by herself; she took over the—the role, and my opinions were something she asked but she had her own life. Her own predicament. She still denounced people behind their backs but briefly, and she gloated now and then: when her rich brother died suddenly, she said with a gently melancholy satisfaction, “Who would have thought I could outlast J.J.?” She showed a shakily calm and remarkable daily courage; she made herself, although she was a dying woman, into a woman who was good company. She put together a whole new set of friends. Those friends loved her actually, they looked up to her, they admired her. She often boasted, “I have many, many very good friends who have stuck by me.” But they were all new friends—none of her old friends came back. Young people always liked her now and envied me. What was so moving was her dying woman’s gaiety—it was so unexpected and so unforced, a kind of amusement with things. Sometimes when no one was around she would yell at me that she was in pain all the time and that I was a fool to believe the act she put on. But after a certain point, that stopped, too. She said, “I want to be an encouragement—I want you to remember me as someone who was a help to you.” Do you see? After a certain time she was never again hysterical when I was there. Never. She was setting me an example. She was good to me in a way possible to her, the way she thought she, Doris, ought to be to me. But she was always Doris, no matter how kind she was. If at any time restlessness showed in me or if I was unhappy even about something very minor at school she would be upset; I had to have no feelings at all or stay within a narrow range for her comfort; she said often, “I know I’m unfair but wait until I die—can’t you bear with me?” When I stayed out sometimes because I had to, because I was going crazy, when I came home she would say pleadingly, “Don’t ask too much of me, Buddy.” She would sit there, on the couch in the living room, having waited fully dressed for me to come home, and she would say that.
All right, her happiness rested on me. Her sister and one brother and her daughter told me I couldn’t go to college, I couldn’t leave Doris, it would be a crime. Her cancer was in remission; she had never gotten on so well with her own family (she was patient with them now), I owed it to her to stay. I am trying to establish what she gained and what she lost. Her family often said to me bullyingly, without affection or admiration, “Her life is in your hands.” I hadn’t intended this. Doris said they were jealous of me. I wanted to go to college; I wanted to use my mind and all that: I was willing for Doris’s life to be in her mother’s and sister’s hands. I was modest about what I meant to Doris—does th
at mean I didn’t love her?
The high school, when I refused to apply to Harvard, asked me why and then someone went to see Doris, and Doris went into her bedroom and locked the door and refused to eat until I agreed to go away to college. To leave her. And she made her family and her doctor ask me to go (they pounded on her door but she wouldn’t eat until they did what she told them). Doris’s sister Ida came and shouted through the bedroom door at her and then said to me in a cutting, angry voice, blaming me, that Doris was killing herself. This was when I was sixteen.
I said I wasn’t that important. My modesty stymied Ida.
That sacrifice, if it was that, was either the first or second thing Doris had ever done for me. But perhaps she did it for herself, to strengthen her hand for some Last Judgment. Perhaps she was glad to be rid of me. I only lost my nerve once in accepting it from her, this gift. I was lying on my bed—it was evening in early spring and I should have been doing physics—and I was thinking about college, Harvard, about a place, the Yard, that I’d never seen, grass and paths and a wall around it, and buildings and trees, an enclosed park for young people. The thought took me to a pitch of anticipation and longing and readiness unlike anything I’d felt in years; all at once it was unendurable that I had that and Doris had nothing—had what she had. It was terrible to think how Doris was cheated in terms of what she could see ahead of her. I felt I’d tricked her in some way. Not that that was wrong but she was too nice, now that she was cheated, for me to—I don’t know what. I suppose I was out of control. Clumsy, even lumbering, I blundered into her room and without warning or explanation began to say I was sorry and that I’d better back out of going to Harvard. She breathed in the loud, nervous way of a woman concerned about herself, but then she got herself in hand and said in the detached, slightly ironic voice, gentle, convivial, and conspiratorial, that she used at that time, a Middle Western voice, “Sorry for what? What is it? Buddy, you have nothing to be sorry for.”
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 31
