She will say, “I warn you—don’t be mean to me, be kind, or you’ll get your comeuppance.”
She will explain to me, “Women have hard lives—try to understand what I’m saying—I have a lot to aggravate me, I—” She will go on in a mild, not really direct voice: sometimes she doesn’t look at me but talks to herself; usually, though, she looks at me; and what she is saying is sensible enough, even if I can’t quite make it out; but the real thing is her eyes, her gaze, is her will-you-listen-to-me-or-not. It is immensely personal: the comparative heaviness—of her haunches—her neck, her slightly crumpled skin—her me-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-me-you-there-the-boy-in-this-house.
When I was successful at something in my life as a child, or if I was ill and helpless, Momma would look at me and it was touch and go if she would decide she wanted me to survive.
Sometimes I minded it that she had free choice in such a matter: She’s not a good mother, I would think. I didn’t want her to have free choice in such a matter: we don’t want to hope they will love us—that they will encourage us to live—we want it to be a law, separate from our good and evil and belonging only to their good and evil.
Politeness, with a faint note of fear and respect, was the best thing you could get, I thought when I was a boy. I got it sometimes.
How much pain can you stand, Momma?
Momma could only help proud people—she told me so: she said to me, “I’ll tell you a secret about me: don’t come to me when you’re hurt; learn to take care of yourself; learn to be brave; you have to be brave—and not be hurt—and then I can help, then I want to help—oh, I’m a real woman—or maybe I’m not.”
My life had a vaguely jocular, rough, not too sensible quality to me, but so did hers to her: she said, “I’ll tell you a good one: I used to be Delilah, but when you get older you have to do all the work—that’s what my mother always said, and I thought she was wrong but she was right—so I used to be Delilah and now I’m Samson, now I have to be Samson: don’t you think that’s a good one?”
V
WE ARE not to advance in time but to slide back now.
When I am running in the upstairs hallway and I come to the head of the stairs, to the trickily folded structure of the stairs, the issue arises of bravery.
Going downstairs is not a high point in my repertoire of physical skills. I sighed then, even as I ran, in those days—thin chest, small bones stretched with the sigh—at the approach of confronting the fact of this weakness, of this hole in my world, the I-can’t-do-this-right-yet.
I do it anyway and often fall—occasionally headfirst or sideways. I slide on my heels from stair to stair; fall on my behind and bump from riser to riser: I have rolled down partway, recovered, risen, run again. Momma used to say, “He doesn’t care if he hurts himself—”
But he did.
I learned something of the nature of the world, or mislearned it, when I plunged into the jolt and disorientation of falling on the stairs.
Being brave is an upsurging thing in your chest before you fall: I irresistibly love myself, in silence, sternly and completely, when I am brave.
Being brave gets you started on something, and then you just have to be stubborn and finish what you start.
When I can’t rise as far as bravery, I go as far as stubborn slyness.
If I fall, I grunt, the wind is knocked out of me: I hear it, in an exquisite moral-immoral clutter (I may be making more work for Momma and Daddy, I may be killing their rose, their bouquet, the heart-of-the-house); I get up and run, a maybe dying child, galloping with some dexterity, and some no-dexterity, down these stairs. But if I sit on the stairs and lean against the rungs to wait for my breath to return, it is more loving toward my parents.
I suppose I always thought, with terror, with envy, with delight, that beauty was the knowledge of how not to die—at least, not yet. Beauty lives in some vivid way, corporeally, without stinginess, with death near.… The music of dead composers …
The thumping of a falling child, the single thump of the limited fall of a slightly older child, the silence in the hall, the footsteps of a running child on the stairs.
At the landing, I grab the newel post and run, run in an arc. Then the whole house shudders, rises slightly, wheels, settles again as if a wind struck some huge fin on the roof, blew hard, and then stopped: but it is only me, running. I quickly correct the sensation of the house’s turning—I know that much. I am well past the constant ageometric naivete of the primitive time of no symmetries, of flat, busy surfaces, of knowing almost nothing.
When I am still handsome, and Momma comes home and I am running down the stairs to get to her and she looks up and sees me, she is, even then, more than later, at once suspicious (later, when I am ugly, she is patient, pitying—not generous but kind).
She is in the lower hallway, by the table where she has placed her purse; she is loosening her clothes. Her beauty is still there, somewhat rotted, like a fading painted-wood fish. And she has the added beauty that my regard for her bestows.
I don’t then or ever when I am a child understand how exhaustion shapes her life and Daddy’s life, how exhaustion determines things for them as for armies during a battle, how it is that confusion from tiredness can be so great it is a form of sleep.
I know what shelter is worth.
As I run toward her, I can feel the darkness break from, pour out of, tumble out of her until we are in an excavation as I run, she and I—it is like being in a pit of earth, with the smell of earth, and all things hidden behind walls of earth, so complete it is, this seeing her; and her exasperation—from the day—her tiredness, her way of liking me that year, that month, these things, all of them dismay me and excite me if such words will serve: they stand around us like animals in a pit, a black horse, a wolf, a bear.
When I actually touch her, the pit vanishes: it is suddenly grayey, like a misty light on the ridge, where we are: the air is thickly feathered, puffy, padded, soft; something invisible, unnameable pulls at … my nerves—it is my sense of her, of what is happening; something pummels me—my own heart? Around us spreads the obscure, mist-riddled gray-ness, the obscure aura of our privacy, of the secrecy that is her special quality: we are mother and son: so far as I know.
My arms go partway around her hips. I have her in a net (the net is me). I feel the false layers, the false body, clothy and rubbery—buckles, seams, vast complications: she is a pile of clothes. There is a smell: one half-remembers hair, a nightgown, the burning desert of a bed. One hears—her heartbeat, is it? … One is at the edge of a seashell—is that true?
Momma and I quite often irritate each other. Oh, you, the irritation goes, oh, you are being really treacherous (or careless or tiresome); and then it is: oh-well-so-what-I-don’t-really-mind.
Sometimes one is aware of an apparently meaningless continuing passion—in one’s self toward her powers, toward her; the blood of emotion swiftly flushes through me as if reddening me with the lyric and dramatic and mistaken knowledges she and I have of each other: her protection, my worth, my perpetual changeableness, and hers.
I am her shrunken and diminutive masculinity, on trust for the future: she is partly husband to me: I am, by obvious reasoning, her femininity as well—how the shadows cling.
There is no innocence in mothers—that’s just a game.
My mother tends for many reasons, including the wish to influence judgment and opinion about her stewardship and rule, to say the equivalent over and over of There are no crimes here except against me.
It is much easier that way, more elegant by local standards; and also, it avoids pain. Part of influencing judgment is to call this Clytemnestrine absolution or whatever making peace and making a home.
Holding on to Momma, perhaps pleating her skirt with one hand, looking up into her face, I tell her that Nonie fought with Anne Marie, made a scene, threw a tantrum, made a mess in the kitchen, called Anne Marie “fat and ugly” and “said she was poor, said she
was stupid.…”
I relate this loudly—in a childish manner—and am moral and indignant.
Momma is loosening—her underclothes, I think: anyway, her hands are inserted here and there, her arms hold strange postures, her eyes are distracted, her mouth slightly awry with the pain of feeling now how tired she is after the effort she has been making all afternoon, and with the minor pleasure of this beginning of private egoism, the nearly-absolute-smallness of the relief of this loosening. She is free of a number of pretenses she has to support all day: she is at home.
She answers me in a voice that has more to do with that and with the residue of her power and independence at luncheons and in club politics among inhabitants of the world than with what I’m saying.
She answers me in a voice, an inflection that chilled and prickled my skin (my blood) and darkened my skull.
She said, “Don’t bother me with this—I don’t want to be bothered: I just got home … fight your own battles, don’t be a tattletale … I have enough on my mind.…”
Her lipstick is worn—is partly rubbed away; curved, oily scales, quite large, stick in two places; in another place the coloring is rubbed into the ridges of her lips; shadows make the color heartbreaking (to me).
I start to—vibrate—more or less (the enormities on Momma’s chest, the big deh-deh-dehs, are being lowered: Momma straightens her back, fiddles with one hand hidden, her elbow bent in front of her; the big forward bulge settles, first one half of it, then the other): I vibrate with internal principle.
The idea I can’t manage—the one that burns me most urgently—is that Nonie’s crime was of no importance now—I hadn’t a clear idea of now, of this-time-before-sleep-intervenes, this clear, yellowish, rocky landscape before the dark sea of sleep closes this era. I can’t see that Nonie’s crime and Momma’s tiredness balance somehow: the idea of I-will-treat-it-as-a-crime-when-I-am-good-and-ready or when-I-have-more-energy—or the implication I-am-home-you-have-a-mother-aren’t-you-grateful-for-that-isn’t-that-enough-for-now—and the command love-me-welcome-me-leave-me-alone make me shake, literally: I sting with the electricity of the moral absolute. With what I have been taught so far and have guessed and seen of how the future depends on setting things right, on adhering to moral absolutes now and all the time.
The importance to me of having Anne Marie protected and happy is so great I cannot believe Momma cannot care about it. Anne Marie’s God is the haze that sunlight makes around her hair, her head. Her piety makes her steady: I see her triumph over headaches, impatience, and the like—she shares her steadiness with me: “Komm her, Liebchen.” I cannot understand Anne Marie, but I can love her and count on her schedule, so to speak. Her kisses almost never change in mood; or rather they change little and have few tones: each kiss is restrained; she holds back; I am not hers: her restraint is a form of art, a magic summoning up of how foolish we could be, of how restless I might get: it makes me laugh; it makes me solemn with dignity; the ungiven kisses fill me with delight—also dignity: I have to be taken care of! I am important!
She loves me, or so I feel. Also, I am her job. I have to supply good manners, courage, a sort of fineness of posture—I do those things for her.
She is the conscience of the house: “Not in front of Anne Marie,” Momma often counsels us, and keeps us thereby from some momentarily attractive but ultimately demeaning sin.
Sometimes Momma says, with a sigh, “I forget it’s my house.”
She also says, “Without Anne Marie, I’d have no life of my own.”
Anne Marie and Momma originally were coconspirators: Anne Marie loved Momma; but now Anne Marie is somewhat impatient, “hoity-toity,” Momma says, or patient in a way that suggests impatience toward Momma.
Anne Marie talks to me, she tells me things about herself, about God. “She’s fascinated by the child,” Momma said. “Well, I can’t blame her—what else does she have in her life?”
And Momma says—cruelly sometimes (she is jealous of Anne Marie’s piety and steadiness and abilities)—“Look, there they go.” She whispers, “It’s another case of Beauty and the Beast.”
She says to me sometimes, “You’re not good for Anne Marie—do you know that? You distract her from what she should be doing—she should be trying to get a husband.”
Nonie cannot bear to see Anne Marie show any affection toward me.
Nonie goes crazy and accuses Anne Marie of slapping her, of stealing money: when Nonie comes into the kitchen and I am there with Anne Marie, Nonie will start to make trouble, she will eat something Anne Marie has made for dinner, she will speak disrespectfully to Anne Marie, and when Anne Marie mutters or remonstrates openly, proudly, Nonie says, “I will tell Momma—I will lie.”
Anne Marie was fat, self-righteous, not interested in much outside herself, and she was cruelly proud. Her pride nagged her: she may have been overweight and an immigrant, somewhat plain and without money, but she had God.
Momma would mutter, “She’s impossible—she’s wonderful, but she’s impossible—she gives me a pain in my you-know-what.”
Momma said publicly, “We owe everything to Anne Marie—we couldn’t get along without her.”
MOMMA IS fascinating to me, a terrifying ally, medievally ferocious, medievally unreliable, as quick to grab your kingdom as not; she is darkened, grace-haunted, crime-absorbed, interesting-to-me.
Momma’s tiredness is anarchic.
I strive with all my strength—as I vibrate—to yank her into the realm of the moral absolute.
“I’M NOT TATTLING! I’M TELLING YOU WHAT REALLY HAPPENED!”
Momma has no interest in what I say. There is a thicket in this hall: branches and shadows of her being home, of her mood, ramify, tangle, fill the air: I am a child in this thicket; she is—a sorceress taking pins out of her hair: she is gazing in the mirror at her sagged face, at her hair, disheveled now: at what she sees.
“Don’t pester me,” she says.
I stare: it is inexpressibly foreign, what she is doing. I speak in the void of my staring at something I don’t understand; I vibrate and speak of what Nonie did—but Momma is not listening; and unless I throw a tantrum and grab at or even hit her, unless I kick at the furniture, my speech is wasted, so wasted that it is as if speech is nonsense unless it is hooked at the other end to someone comprehending what you say. What I have just said is wrong because Momma didn’t listen. I can speak louder and louder, but it is only like a dog’s howling (unless she listens).
She said, “I told you I didn’t want to hear any of that—I don’t want to hear any more about it. Why don’t you pay attention to what I say?”
It is inconceivable, it is like being wreathed in cobwebs; how she does it I don’t know: she turns me into a trespasser. But I am a knight.
I shout at her, “MOMMA! NONIE SAID TERRIBLE THINGS TO ANNE MARIE!”
Momma sighs. “And I told you to be quiet about it.” She has turned away from the mirror; she picks up things from the hall table. “Don’t you know there’s a time to keep your mouth shut?” Then she says in an absently sugary voice, well mixed with boredom, “Your sister’s turning into a teenager.”
There is pity in her voice—for someone, for all of us, for herself. (I think Nonie was menstruating.) And in her voice is contempt for me—friendly contempt, strident, fearless. She says, “Did you eat your lunch today? Did Anne Marie take you outside this afternoon?”
Our conversations as a family, when we’re all together, tend to be very limited: Nonie talks only about herself and her concerns; Daddy has his baby talk; Momma tends to be bored and restless.
But one of the things we do at the dinner table or in the car is feel sorry for people.
There were whole wonderful litanies: “I went shopping today—the saleswoman said I had a remarkable figure—I must say I felt sorry for her: she was so plain, and she …” Almost anyone or anything we discussed ended in our feeling sorry for them: our poor relatives, our rich ones, gangsters, gangs
ters’ victims, famous people—they were heartless and on a merry-go-round and suffered because their children ran wild or went crazy or fell apart.
Nonie was particularly good at interpolating: “I feel sorry for the girls in my class—they don’t know how to dress: they don’t know any better.” Or she said that of the poor: “They don’t know any better.”
Daddy would excoriate manufacturers for adulterating their products, but then he ended feeling sorry for them—and for all ruthless businessmen—because of “the terrible lives they lead—those rednecks, crooks on the make.… They’re all fools.…” Momma would interject that she felt sorry for the President’s wife: “What kind of life is that for a woman: she’s scared to death to open her mouth.” We pitied Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Jews who were “religious and throw their lives away for nothing” we pitied people who lived in cities and those who lived in very small towns—and it was sincere, that pity: the ground we occupied was the only ground that didn’t require pity.
“I feel sorry for Nonie, Momma,” I said.
Momma said, “Your sister’s not having an easy time of it: why do you have to be such a smart aleck? You don’t run this family—” Or: “I want you to shut up—do you hear me?”
At times, Momma turned her attention to Nonie and “liked” her no matter what. What she expected, then, was for Nonie to be enchanted with Momma for being a mother, infatuated with her almost (Momma used Nonie at times as a subsidiary husband); but Nonie was no longer “anyone’s fool” (another phrase of Momma’s) and she would resist Momma’s blandishments—she would demand things from Momma instead.
Momma had what she called her sense of humor, but it was actually a form of rasping at you and making you do what she wanted without her having to give an acceptable moral reason for your being what she hoped you’d be. She would say to me, “I don’t know how anyone stands you—Anne Marie is a sucker, if you ask me. What a pest you are. Don’t you know you should take your sister’s side no matter what? Everyone spoils you rotten. I think you have a mean disposition when you don’t get your own way—you get your own way too much, if you ask me; you’re Mr. Too-Big-for-His-Britches.”
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 47
