Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  I start to swallow the stringy homemade applesauce, it has cinnamon on it; my eyes bug out and it seems to me likely that I’m going to die. She averts her gaze strenuously—vibratingly—she does it pointedly, for the sake of my dignity; she doesn’t like to be looked at ever, even when she’s not throwing up. If I look at her hard when I’m not sick I get drunk on the sight. She might be sitting on my bed and I will wriggle and twist if I look; and later, when I was stronger, I did jump up and down and grab at and muss her hair and throw myself on her, her neck, or her shoulder, or even her lap, where I wriggled and burrowed and made faces as if I were blind-eyed and digging. I could be noisy—I could be “wild,” “vuhhh hi eldd(t) Vuh iii leee” I often suffered just because the sight of her inflamed me, set fire to vats of feelings in me and then spilled them in patterns of fire, in molten tides in me, and I made her suffer then too; I made her join me—she and I had dozens of ways of more than banishing loneliness, of transforming it into some papery thing of time and laziness and distance; and then we jumped through, we tore it up, we burst through the hoop, we butted and stared and meddled and served each other until we were together in a paper chamber of silly childishness and nursing, companionship and collaboration. She seemed to believe in all my outcries, some of which were so tiny that some people never noticed them. She believed the ill child was not a liar, was not so ill, would not always be ill, was worth the time and labor and pain to her nerves (Lila said this: where I just would blow up, you drove me mad, I thought you wanted to be sick, as far as I could see, you just wanted attention and you didn’t care what happened to whoever took care of you, well, I’m not that sort of sucker, believe me). She was rarely mournful in front of me; she was cheerful and unyielding and strong; and since a child’s trust is slavish, she had more power over me than an empress would have: S.L. said that; and it was the power of life and death.

  Forbearance on both sides was really pretty vast between me and Ann Marie—often: not always—sometimes she was too passionate, and sometimes she was too cold, but she never winced or flinched as Lila did—or as S.L. did. Lila flinched at the smells and at the pain, and S.L. could set himself to bear the smells but never the pain. He was no good near anybody or anything that suffered; if you hadn’t cheered up, we couldn’t have kept you in the house.

  The spasm of illness, of nausea and retching, well, I throw myself on it, as onto the sand in a sandbox or pit or at the shore, and I hug it to make it be still, I do this out of love, the spasms become a determined spasm of love seesawing around a spasm of illness—it’s very like ejaculation later (when I am older), awake or in dreams, and it is how I will experience pain from now on.

  We are like teammates, or fellow congregants, or communicants—and yet we are not: we are like lovers or brother and sister—we have a community of feeling here, a literally warm thing.

  She knows a lot; she can see—even with her eyes averted—how a spasm of love rides on top of the nausea in me; she sees me wrestling with the bull stench of nausea—and then, uh, ah, er, all hell broke loose because I lost; nausea won; it erupted; it asserted itself and entered the world—and I am racked, twisted. But except on the first days, the first weeks, not freely so: I fight, and I fight it some more; I fight and fight—in her name, of course—and then it didn’t go so far, the nausea; I managed to swallow a lot of it back, to keep some food down—I can wear out the sickness or nervousness in my own body in her name; using her will, sometimes, sometimes her will to fight; I did it. I sat there, shaking and pale, feeling more ill now than during the worst part of the spasm since I felt more conscious than at the worst of the spasm. I want to die, except I want to please Ann Marie, too.

  I was sure of her love after a while, and of mine. Look at me smiling from my furor of near illness, sweatily and sweetly at her, in the furious fevers of heroism and the wish to please her. The child sits there and looks at her like that.

  Now I start to tease her, which is unwise; I turn my face away, and hide my head under my arm, my hand: I don’t want another bite, please don’t feed me; let me starve, oh, oh, oh.

  This is real.

  By that, I mean it isn’t a game—a game means I won’t lose to a really disastrous point—but then it does become a game—that is to say, I don’t believe in defeat as serious at the moment: I have lived all morning in the wilderness and I am still alive—and I glance at her, not wildly but with a wild intonation of the eyes: I know what love is.

  Old Fatty there, she knows a lot herself. “Liebchen—essen—mein guter Ritter—” Ritter—knight—cavalier—Galahad—Don Quixote—Don Juan—to the quest (a joke). The crooning woman, the siren, this good woman leads me now, she wants courage and she wants me to be quiet both, my heroism is a settled matter: it is a ruse on her part—a bluff—a trick—in part.…

  In a state of love and respect I allow myself to be fooled and guided, I trust her to direct my destiny, my wishes; it was love, it was faith, I will escape later—and besides, what she’s asking me to do, to calm down and take another swallow, is too soon after the first swallow; she hasn’t yet learned to allow me several minutes between swallows. Lila said, “It took a year out of my life to feed you once. Ann Marie was a saint, a saint, she was smart as a whip and she had the mind of a snake with you and the patience of a saint—” She must learn to sing and tell stories while time applies a sort of anesthesia of calming seconds to my aroused and unhappy system. I gag and twist half off my chair just looking at the spoon of food she waves—and tears spurt from my eyes and my hand waves idly in the air as I throw up now—but not surrenderingly, not weakly—I am fighting it, as she wants; she says, “Nein, non, stoihhppp itt—Kleine—No, no.…”

  I am wrestling, I am straining, in my throat—with my lips—with my eyelids and my hands—oh, horrible suffocation—oh, blackness and blankness—and the rest of it.

  “I vili moppp opppp—now youuu, Ihh vunttt youuu—to eeeeet—essen—Ritter, Liebchen—I vuhunntttt yuhuuu beckkk in dee pihnnkkk—” (in the pink: S.L.’s phraseology).

  She leans over and she strokes my hair and my ears, while, thin legged, I bustle and wrestle in my struggle. Her touch distresses me, excites me. She sees it, she is very shrewd. She stops, she goes into watchful stasis—like a statue of a goddess or of the Virgin waiting in its cloud of implied mercy, so to speak. She sits, she settles back and doesn’t look at me—she makes an atmosphere of stillness, of calm—love and mercy: not a joke.

  Her arms are like cushions covered in light, heat, pallid sunflowers of glary highlights—my eyes buzz at her, her arms, her face, her face is a giant and fat pallid sunflower. Ann Marie’s attachment-to-me makes Ann Marie flourish and smile, maybe sadly (especially if my mother or father are there taking precedence as the ones who supply the money, taking precedence over her mind and her will and her rule and her knowledge of things). She is often melancholy and intent—she is often indirect—this indirection takes the place of being gentle in her soul, which she is not; she is fierce.

  Love is hard on fat people. Momma has said; she won’t leave that child alone, she won’t let up; I’ll have to find her some friends or Wiley will end up more dead than alive, more choirboy than Huckleberry Finn and more Lutheran than the Pope, ha-ha, well take the spirit for the deed, do you take my meaning? Momma goes soaring into her local, hooty, small-town, Midwestern Englishness. Well, it’s just a figure of speech; I know how to talk. Momma competes with everyone. So did Ann Marie.

  It was never clear to me that it was not serious; they each had to come first in the whole world, or they would avoid me. Ann Marie’s holding out another spoonful of poisonous applesauce. She has brought out some processed cheese and a dry cracker that she crumbled on a plate with a little honey on it, and she’s brought out some cottage cheese, but my reactions were all violent, and I did—nobly, nobly, nobly—struggle to control them. The applesauce, that poisonous stuff, is the most possible nourishment. Ann Marie has to make notes of how much I eat, and if I don�
��t eat enough, I am taken to the hospital in St. Louis for sedation and feeding.

  She is muttering in a certain kind of woman-salesman way about how right she is as an oracle and a nurse, about how right she is about how I am to be tended; I’m a gutes Kind—she is right, I am to trust her, she is like God giving evidence about Himself in the Bible—the hero-Ritter must be hungry, I should eat. She ascribes to me and my voyage a high character: its character was” —uhnt he—didtt notTT wuhhhetttte him—sellllfuHf—” Toilet disciplines mark the hero.

  I believe her, on the whole. Sometimes with an entirety that is both an ecstasy and a source of nervous panic. I am racked by a spasm of nausea and a spasm of love willfully applied, lured out of me, really, and by a spasm of knowledge of the world—i.e., taking care of me and how that will benefit her. I move and raise my hands to her hand and move the spoon slowly toward myself. I eye her. Her eyes get very large. I have never instructed her before, except with weak or vague cries or wriggles of unclear significance; but this is conscious and controlled; it is like talking to her.

  She began to murmur statements about my nature. I am a flower, a soldier, a good soldier, a brave Kind, das bes(te) chee-ild in der Veit; and once again, to make sure I understand, she says I am dry, your pants are clean like soap. But she doesn’t say this excitedly or all at once; she is a master-mistress of tact such that it touches my soul—she speaks slowly as if she were as chary of words as I am of food. Now she is spooning applesauce into my mouth with daring skill and astounding grace—it’s not perfect, but it will do. For the moment.

  For the moment, she understands my condition—the newness of the world for me, for someone unrooted in any familiarity at all. She is like a mother to me; she is my mother now, at this instant. She sees, she knows—for a while—“Yuhuu isst like(uh) dee hard(t)-Herz cut frumm-(ien), fromm, fuhrommm dee brusttt—dee breast—Vuhhhiiillllleeee—”

  I have no real name, I am the best child in the world—the worst eater, heyeh, heyeh (she has an odd laugh)—she never saw such a terrible eater, such a good eater, such an Engel- angel.

  Ann Marie often said I was the most normal person in the house; she says it now, gently, as she holds the spoon, as she averts her glance, as she tests my love and faith in her and in what she says and wants. I blink at her and push her hand away, and then I swallow what is in my mouth. This time it is easier to instruct her; will and affection have to have a velocity, have to be rehearsed, and then they go speeding along.

  It works, I eat.

  In her throat-clearing way (she’d been alone for two hours) she as if sobbed in her throat: this means she’s going to sing.

  Ann Marie’s only usual daily surrender to large-scale feeling is vocal; she’s A Good Singer, truly accomplished. Part of what this means is that one has to watch one’s voice around her, because she shrivels and flinches at ill-pitched sounds as she does at non-Christian sentiment. She is forced to fight with others over this. And over other matters of aesthetic honor—she’s a prima donna if ever I saw one, S.L. says—and so does Lila.

  She gets up and she walks to the sink. Sort of humming to herself—it sounds like growling in a way. She walks with various rhythmic intonations of the hips and rump and of her back, elevatedly, sadly, happily, sort of, like a little girl. Now she skulks at the sink; now she has a swagger to her arms—she’s singing a song to herself, in her head, while she is rinsing the spoon to get rid of my, ah, bad stuff on it from a little spitting up I did just now, bits of half-vomit.

  She returns, she is smiling to herself, she purses her lips, she does not look at me. She fills the spoon with applesauce and dips her head and angles it to one side—she is still singing in her head, and she is sad like a singer who’s out of practice, a ruined singer. This is nerves and self-pity, it is artistic of her.

  She starts to sing out loud, looking at me over her cheeks as she tilts her head, she starts out superpianissimo and her eyes go out of focus. She is very self-pitying, but self-approval is quite near the surface; I like her self-approval a lot; it makes me laugh out loud with pleasure sometimes, her being conceited pleases me as water does when I’m thirsty.

  She tests her might-and-power and her sense of key with a couple of louder notes after a little of the pianissimo, then sort of proceeds to do some notes mezza voce, while I let her maneuver the spoon of applesauce into my mouth. I am thrown partway into the air by a muscle spasm and she sharps an upward scooting note and sort of pushes it out. Twitch and agony.

  She catches my arm, she presses me sturdily down into my chair and partly against her small but pillowy tit—she leans to one side to do this, she rarely is physical except in a very tender, slow, fingertip way, I think chaste but powerfully potent—we touch each other gingerly, usually. Racked with the aftereffect of spasm, I am suffocated in her flesh. Her tit. She is kind, firm, undramatic, and self-involved: she’s getting onto the outer rush of the slowly rushing melody, as into a kind of saddle. Melody encourages her to push suddenly into being expressive; but it’s too soon, her voice isn’t set.

  I have tears running down my face from the vomiting spasms, and I have the taste of bile in my mouth, and the spoon with applesauce in it is wavering near. I feel sickness in me, but shallowly, like a silted pond with a queasy bottom and a lot of gripping weeds. I tremble in the noise. I am touched by the sounds and by the other circumstances of the moment, but the sounds lure me, not into, but away from, maelstroms—“they should call them femalestroms,” S.L. used to say whenever he could, whenever the word came up—usually on radio, maybe only there. Listening is good for me. Our privacy, her intentness, these stir my lower body. When Momma hums to me off key, a melody with mistakes in it, Blow blow western wind with “Greensleeves” mixed in, she says, Don’t tell anyone I sing, don’t tell anyone I sing to you; they’ll all laugh at us and you. People know I can’t sing, so just watch out going around telling everyone that what you appreciate about me is that I sing pretty songs in a sweet voice to you. She minds not being expert. Ann Marie makes a shrill crescendo. A crescendo is a silence stood on end. A yell but much, much, much more willful.

  Focused. She straightens out the sound until it is more music than hysteria. Ann Marie is a high alto. I can smell the cinnamon on the applesauce, I can smell it through the rain of sounds. She is at the point of singing more seriously, of attempting to. This music is in celebration of me and my heroisms today. It is for me but it’s for God, too, and the world, which is God’s in her view; and of course a lot of it, really a lot of it, is for herself.

  She is singing. I scrunch down and squint. I have a headache, and my backside and chest and arms and legs are bruised; and my mouth and throat and stomach are sore and fouled somewhat. But Ann Marie’s music is concerned with having been sad and then having had a triumph, a triumph in the world of fact, I think; I think the song refers back to that. It’s not happening now in the song. I don’t like the sad parts; I like only the soft, happy parts; the triumph parts are too high and loud; and then I want to scream and howl like her. If I did, I would be an accompanying and enragingly inept echo.…

  She eyes me at the edges of her vision: she is never unaware of me; she is indirect or somewhat distant but she never goes entirely away as Momma does. She knows I prefer lullabies to arias and hymns, but she often ignores that because it makes her sad—maybe it bores her. Anyway, in states of the profoundest nervousness, sometimes even when deep in panic, in justified panic, I can become dignified when I hear in music the evidence that it is kindly meant.

  It’s like that now. It’s as if Ann M.’s fat arms are now partly a habitation of sounds while her warm-up music—the first hymn—clatters around in forecourts of anticipated dreaminess or nervousness in me. A push of tense energy in her voice makes me jump sideways in my chair, but she pushes me down, she holds me in the chair while she brings the spoonful of applesauce near me; and she considers pausing to say something but she shakes her head; her eyes are uplifted oddly; she only gla
nces at me from up there; and she sings, she sort of sings, she sings on; and I take a tiny, really tiny, bit of the applesauce; and I shudder and get nauseated only to a little extent.

  I am in her protection and I hear about the God who protects her; I am a hero, not a bad child; at any rate, I am not a stubborn one—she means something like that in the way she looks at me. I am vomit-stained and teary-eyed, and salt tears—some of it is from the sweats of nausea—sting my eyes and bring rainbows to my lashes.

  I remember how her arms felt, the fat messages of being in them. I am instructed by this woman at this moment in the somewhat tough tenderness available in sounds, in what is, after all, excited and exalted speech, somewhat grotesque, and perhaps unnecessary; but necessary for me. Her nearness, the pressures of the smells and perspectiveless reality of her fuzzed, ample self near my eyes blur out the pretty much sotto-voce singing for a minute. She is feeding me the applesauce again; laboringly, cautiously, I take a truly small bit—but she smiles as if it were a good helping. I remain immobile for a moment, merely holding the food, testing the ground—I have been told Ann Marie is not pretty, but, of course, she is amazingly beautiful—like her voice. I pass through various planes of attention as she sings louder now—I do it to cover whatever spasms ensue when I swallow. She is urging me on to drama: go ahead, pisher—that’s not her vocabulary, that’s her mood, she got it from Lila. Her voice, her soul, are cresting and are in motion, a different species of chamois among screech peaks and chest notes. And she has backed away from me on her chair and she gestures in the air with the spoon—fat woman on a green kitchen chair by electric light at noon.

  Little bits of applesauce fly off the spoon. Her hymn, its intervals, its darkness, flies off her mouth—the singing deforms her throat, her lips. Here’s her tongue being odd and sickening in her open mouth in sickening, fast tremors—she is seen from the accidental angle of me sitting here while she musically dings and buh-dums along. The soft fuzzed movement of her cheek is insanely actual and persistent in its trembling, in what are actual, resonant patterns of the noise. She sings carefully—she would never shout in my ear; she’s steady in a lot of ways. She’s steady out there in the uncertain world and its erratic veerings. It’s real.