That is not all the child saw: he saw the momentary strengthlessness of her throat. I felt no larger than her knee. I could feel my having a face. And that the expression on it turned her mood but could not control it, her mood. It is infinitely sophisticated, childhood, being a child.
She sees ill health and the child being doubting, and she refuses to identify with her pain and reproach—or hatred even. The expressionless, or kneelike, face the child has at the moment is not innocent. It is partly malicious, and comic, if it is seen, if she sees the malice. His will is separate from hers.
The movements of the water in the white tub, the recent suffocation hurts still and induces a particular round-eyed memory of pain. Perhaps it is a form of the presence of pain; it rends the child; perhaps the boy is mad. There is some quality of space about my mother now: she does not want me dead; she does not want me to be company for her; she is ignorant and closed-off; she does not want me to suffer; she wants me to have a good time; she wants me and my life to make xsense—it is odd how much that meant, that wish in this woman, my mother, my mother now.
The moment consists of an un-ideal reality of being loved by someone who cannot love but within limits, in sheer unadulterated moderation, in common sense woundedness. The moment failed to be intense, although it was much too intense; the woman here, combined with my errors and my true perceptions about her, is far odder as substance than water is: my mother is odder than water. An intense, quasi-lyrical laughter fills me. I hadn’t known the water had sections to it such as surface and inside; and that the inside could leak if you licked it; that it could crawl into you in a dully willed way.
She has no idea who I am. But she knows she does not know, and that is hugely different from before, and it is a great relief; this one knows how bad I am; it is soothing not to be claimed and forgiven. I mean the way water enters you is by a law of some kind but not a law having to do with sin and ultimacies of wrath and anathema. And Lila’s love was effective enough, according to laws of a frolicking but dangerous sort, more dangerous in the surfaces and interiors, less stable, more overt, with no grounding in hidden laws—only in difficult, real ones of the actual moment.
The water is toothed and grabby. It slaps your hand and smashes your breath. It is a crushing and uncrushing weight on my legs. I can manage. My emotions are toothed and grabby, too, and shy, very shy. They are frolicsome, too, perhaps obtuse—and devious. The medium of personal attachment slows my heart and seems almost to crush it.
I’m staring, appalled and fascinated at the woman who is odder than water. The woman, in a watery, watchful way, watches me while she moves and leans forward and, with inordinate skill, kisses my head and says again, “You’ll live, pupik, won’t you? It’s true, isn’t it?”
I look at her. I don’t want to hide it that I am awake. Are you sure of what you’re doing, Momma? No. Of course not. She does it anyway. She says, “Do you know the philosophy of anyway? People told me, Don’t do it, but I did it anyway, and that’s my philosophy.” She says with a little snort or whistle (the tiles make the sounds sharper; I’m amazed at the sharpness of the sound in my head and throat at the back of my mouth), “Let’s be friends. Lean forward and I’ll scrub your back.” She says, “I bet you’re the one who kills me.…”
I don’t turn and look at the disarranged and startling woman. She jerkily and energetically rubs my back with a washcloth; her movements with the cloth splash into the water at one end and rise wetly along the bumps of my spine; the pressure of her strokes forces me near the water that choked me so that the water throws splayed paws on my face. The cloth moves down into depths of water, and into the cleft in my buttocks, which suddenly exist in my mind as dulled spaces around a glaring light moving around rubblingly down there.
Momma’s breath is like a cap over my round skull—such purposeful breath—the washcloth moves into the hole and tenderly cleans it; and then, shifting her finger, she touches the tiny beans—the future testicles—then the penis that feels like a fine glinting blanlcness, a hint of how the soul might try to draw its own image in a rowdy future.
No part of me is forbidden this woman. Her breath, my being a test of her merit, the peculiar home feeling of this, fills me—my chest and skull—just as my damp hair and her breath cover my skull rufflingly. Her touch explodes in me as nauseated and then quickly denied pleasure, verging on extreme delight, which induces passivity and yet a violence of feeling and of light in me. I hate the sensation and yet I collect it and ponder it and hold myself in readiness to receive it again. Imbecile child. Sense has departed from the present moment in order to exist in the burning thickets of the touch sensorily.
A pressure in him grows; it pushes and tugs at his mouth, at his eyes. And at his behind, which squirms. He closes his eyes in fright. The present is warm and immediate, burning and sexual, filled with presentiment, with the possibility that this is humiliation; one breathes suspiciously at the cold edge of the large dark of futurity. An exhilarated terror. One likes it. The jumble of illness and grief, delight and horror, and moderated grief—I am furrowed and implanted—I am a cornfield already partly grown or stubbled, itchy and streaming with light. I am clenched, with light hustling in me without reason or caution—it is not exactly my will. Her face is like an eye opening and closing when I look up at her; it discloses and sharpens itself, fish-faced moon goddess, monumental, absurd. I see her split and faded rose-mouth. Her smart and ignorant meddling touch moves over my rash-bitten, half-starved, meager, frightened body. I put my wet hand up in the air; it is clearly a willed movement. I think I pulled her forward, or I gestured and she came forward; or she didn’t move at all; and it didn’t matter. But with my other hand, with poor sick-child clumsiness, I splash the water; sickness makes the motion thin and shy; still, the water rises; it has the extraordinary broken beauty of glass and whispers and of an outcry; but the child is silent, and it is only the noise and then the echo of water being splashed that one hears.
And irrational tracks and arcs appear on her nightgown—small trails. Some appear on her face. The child stares and stares. The climax is in seeing the defacement, the rain or tears, or spit, the water of the future, the mark of the rock in a tide branding an enormous liner sailing by—no: halted there. The marks look like handprints, or twig prints on snow or sand or mud, or red marks on skin. Her steam-pale face and one breast and its nipple, the latter through wet fabric, peer at me. I gaze at the drying and elemental painting I have made.
She says, “I see that Meanness is going to be your middle name.”
Oh, I hate her. I also loved being named.
My head went so far back in my looking up at her that I fell backward, infantlike, against the curved porcelain of the back of the tub. I did not cry. Lila observed that silence of the child. She says, “Well, gentlemen are quiet about things—it’s a useful trait.” Then, in a peculiarly distant voice: “I can see that Too Much Mischief is going to be your middle name, too.”
Rage and mindliness and interest in each other (at times) and flirtation and seduction—and death, death, of course, numberless deaths—she says, that madwoman to that mad child, “Am I your first love? Or are you just willing to play with me?”
Not very lovingly but with a great amount of complicitous duty or alliance, or teasing amusement, she helps bring the child upright in the water again, to a sitting position, and she says, “Here. I’ll kiss it and make it well.”
I am unfenced. Scramblingly, I faint a little. I misplace my senses. She can feel it and observe it: “You’re quite the Beau Brummell,” she says. “I think I can like you. Maybe you’ll do. We’ll have to wait and see. Here, it’s time to get dry; let me give you a hand; I like someone who knows how to cooperate; here we go,” and, dropping the washcloth in the water, she puts both her arms around my chest and she wetly lifts me. She says, “Hold still! What are you doing? Be careful; don’t be a fool; you always were a fool—I bet.” She hauls and tugs and lifts and succeeds; she i
s in command of epic force; she might as well be a goddess or an angel, as far as I can see.
I drip with water onto her. My wet, meager chest lies against the nightgown over her far from meager chest. “Being affectionate, that’s always a plus in this world,” she said.
I have wild reasons and mystical ones for the ways I’m a fool. Many of hers are planned and have to do with complications springing from her friendliness and from what friendliness was for her. She shudders, but only a little. I like when she blinks inwardly and physically, when the darkness in her is in place, and she and I seem to be dreaming simultaneously, when our dreams seem to grow out of each other and then to be entangled again and then to be halves of the same thought. In certain neural corridors in me, her touch ignites a pink-fiery sense of cleanliness and a sense of secrets as well. I burn in the darkness in me with being cleaned. I am wet between my legs and on my tight scrotum and dick and on my buttocks and spine and between my shoulder blades. This is among the rubbles of fear and the pressure of unease.
She is like a wooden board that I sat on and that hit me in the head somehow and smashed the soft, fluid textures of the mind and soul and the more heated affections. Nothing between us is complete or settled; but since everything in her is brilliant or is deep and dark, like a pit, the dangerousness and the comfort form a reality of mothering that the child accepts. I grip her weakly, which is to say gently; but in me is a male rage of affixing myself to her. Much of that rage is a melancholy languor—she half-understands this sort of thing.
I say now that she had a sense of infuriated tragedy, and of bitterness and irony; and this was affectionate; and the child knew it. It is not very different from before. Maybe it is Jewish. In her is also a deep infuriated tic of harshness and ridicule toward what-is-not-her-child. That is swathed in flirtation now. And I despise the change in her and her lust for change. But I am not angry and never will be again.
For each of us, the woodenness, the horror of affection—dead mother, dead sons—makes an area where we perch and watch and also perform in this odd way of ours, muscleless and without music but intimately and with fatality.
She and I share a peculiarly full and not very joyous and yet happy enough (or savory) nakedness. The window and the mirror are glazed with steam. Holding me, Momma takes a towel and wipes the window and the mirror and throws that towel on the floor, too. And she takes yet another towel—she is showing off: this is many more towels than the other house had. “Get hold of the mirror, here; hold on to the mirror while I dry you,” she says in a cranky mean voice. She wants me to stand in the sink and hold on to the upper edge of the small mirror, but I can’t stand up very well. She pronounced the word mirror as “meer"—breath—"uh.” It used to be glottal and dark and less airy: “mirrr—errrrr.” Halfway between the sounds is the streaked mirror, is the pupil of a ghost’s eye in front of me.
Momma rubs my wet, shivering shoulders. Momma and her will. Silently, as I hang from the meer-uh, propped by Ma’s hands, the wordless, and illegal, attachment—not a sacrament—proceeds. Nothing in it is a hidden fatality. We always knew we were merely human. Nothing is or was ideal. Nothing. And I don’t care. She holds me with one hand and towels my hair and my rump, my trembling self, the thinness of my skull. She likes power. I am accustomed to death. I can feel it in her—how she likes running things.
She says, “Handsome is as handsome does; I’m telling you, pupik, you’re not fooling anybody. Don’t make me laugh.”
Twice an infant, pale with unvoiced utterance, the child slides back and forth to her movements in a sacrament only of the puzzled and the puzzling.
She says, “I didn’t think you were like this.”
The child does not speak. His mother is cynical, not sentimental and not appalled, and so he is not, either. He and she are nonplussed and knowing: mother and son. He has entered her life, which is populated by people who preceded him. Where am I in that web of jealousy? (What detectives we have to be.)
She is patting me. I leaned finally, heavily against her shoulder. Her shoulder pushed me erect. She says aloud, “Ha, ha.” The distances in her mind and mine are unalike; the differences are amusing to us. We are matter-of-fact, she and I, and we are hysterical and astounded, and we are antagonists, independent of each other and full of mutual mistrust and blame and amusement.
She is a tremendous egoist. “You like me enough, you think I’m so wonderful you’re ready now to meet the world? You look like hell to me, you know that? You’ll depress S.L. I know it. I’m too conceited to do a botched job, I’m the best there is, I’m the Queen of the May, still, I can’t say I’ve done too good a job on you. We’ll have to wait; we’ll give it a day or two; I’ll make a date with you: we’ll try it again to see if you can cheer up and put on a little weight. I want you to be a credit to me. I have a position in the world. The truth is the truth, pupik. I like you too much to lie to you. You’re not ready for anything but a funeral home. Well, time heals all wounds. At least we’ve made a start. Isn’t that a step in the right direction? I think it is, and I’m the boss here, I’m the Queen of the May. Do you mind or do you think you can put up with the way we do things around here?”
She looks at me in the mirror—I am a bruised, meager, naked child. She wraps a towel around my weak body. She moves my hand to hold the towel; she folds my hand around the towel. At first, I can’t do it; then I won’t. Then at last I do it. “We’ll try again tomorrow, pupik. I like you. I have faith in you. Is that all right with you?”
When Lila looked at me, a movement of feeling in me was a speech of sorts; she read my face and posture: I gripped, like a small Roman, my towel. A rough translation of that as speech would be a reply to her of I don’t mind.
CAR BUYING
Momma pretty often displayed me naked to visitors. Even when I was four years old, she would still dress me in front of people who were strangers to me or she would let them do it under her supervising eye. I was, the child was—well, the term back then was cupid—I was part cupid, a dohickey meant to excite, sweetly erotic, gently obscene, gently compared to some things: but people breathed hard sometimes, there was a lot of genteel fiddling, a lot of sentiment and affection had a kind of nostalgia that was strictly nerve-caressing to it. Hands were on me all the time. The child was a creature who was useful in giving pleasure in this way; this may be out of style now; but then it was a social use he had.
So, my mother’s daughter, Nonie, eleven years older than the child and a little backward in school, and often upset, often hurt—lonely and embattled on a level of immense suffering and anger in the way some women have who seem gifted early in life with sexual rage—Nonie offers me clothed or naked to girls or boys if they will play with her. Here she is enticing three children, two girls and a boy, with a life-size and reasonably intelligent but mute thing with a human anatomy and “a sweet smile, a million dollar smile"—so Momma used to say. But come to think about it, she got the terms from her husband: he said it first.
The child can be dressed and undressed for use in various games, medical or adventure some, sentimental, impassioned or cooing, intent or giggly. The child would do it. I would do it. I did it. This stuff was not really secret so I guess it was accepted but it was discreet so I guess it wasn’t really shameless. It was only partly shameless. I remember doing it mostly on porches, front and back and side porches—sometimes in garages and even in the cars in the garage—but sometimes behind shrubs and in basements and in girls’ bedrooms on the far side of the bed, unseeable from the doorway.
It was taken as innocent. It was taken as innocent in that stubborn way that means real trouble if any part of the situation is tampered with. The child didn’t speak. He was mute until he was four and a half years old. This stuff was ignored in part or was permitted as a temporary and minor local corruption although I cannot imagine why that was so, why the neighborhood was sophisticated rather than puritan unless it was that it was, for the locality, a rich neighborhood
and not church-ridden.
Anyway, when I began to speak, Nonie, who by then was fifteen, but admitting to people only to being thirteen and a half (this was sometimes even done with family), was confronted by speech in what had been a dumb (mute) child, dumber than she, certainly. She has the loss of her pleasures and of the use of the child’s body with other children and the loss of love, the end of a love affair to contend with. She does not know what to do.
I was no longer a cupid: I had become a ghost. What I know and remember and will do has some of the effect for her of ghostliness, a haunting by someone, by something of insubstantial reality, of unreal body. A child. A boy child.
Until now she has been the chief authority on my wishes: I know what be wants, he wants thus-and-thus. I usually acceded to that—out of curiosity and politics (she knew better what one could get by asking than I did)—but no longer do accede; she is not sure the situation is irreversible—she will imagine until she dies that the child is enclosed in silence and obedience to her hurt, her will.
She is thirteen. She takes me outside on a day when the enormous vanes of our famous wind turn and creak. My nurse watches for a while from the kitchen window. We look at a snail, at a grasshopper. We go around to the far side of the house, and there we make our way through the branches of the yews to the trellis that hides the square brick-and-mortar columns that support the porch on this side of the house, and there, inside the furry and itching wall of those conifers, we come to a place where the trellis is broken, where the broken edges of the diagonally nailed lathes are pale, sharp, silent guardian flames that bite you if you are incautious at the gate to darkness.
She knees me forward, she pushes me with the side of her leg as if in memory of the first time, a long time ago, and I half-understand with her that if she plays with me, I have to be younger than I am, and I don’t protest.
The World Is the Home of Love and Death Page 11
