Seeing then now, that small child that she was, vulnerable like the young bean vines that she should remember to water, for she was starting her own vegetables from seeds this year, and if they were not taken care of, if they were not looked after, they would shrivel and die, as that small child shriveled and died only to become Mrs. Sweet’s Now, and to live on forever inside her. Unreachable, is that child; inconsolable and unreachable, but there she was, Mrs. Sweet, little pleats of fat girdling her not-so-youthful-anymore waist and no amount of running the four miles around the Park McCullough house with Meg could help that; her upper arms were the size of the pig’s tenderloin on sale at the Price Chopper, her legs were still enviable, if only you could see them beneath those dreadful overalls purchased from the Gap and Smith and Hawken, and when Mr. Sweet was saying his eternally last goodbye to her, he looked at her in her overalls and said, I will be interested to see the man or woman who would find you desirable; and at that, Mrs. Sweet wept once more again and again also; and at the knees, the pants permanently blackened from her kneeling on the ground, weeding or planting something with a hard-to-pronounce Latin name. There then was Mr. Sweet intruding into Mrs. Sweet’s line of accounting for her own being, there in her mind’s eye, and she crossed the threshold into the mudroom of the Shirley Jackson house, opening the door to the kitchen, walking across the pinewood floors, standing in front of the stove, washing some dishes at the sink, preparing the ingredients for a crab soufflé, while the voice of the beautiful Persephone was cascading down the stairs, for she was in her own bedroom, and in that very tone that she had sung on the way home she sang: why are we having French food, is this a French restaurant, this is not a French restaurant, I want to go to McDonald’s; and then she sang on: you think you are with us, you think we think that you are with us, but we know that you are really inside your own head and only what’s there is real to you and you live in that little room with the big desk and we mean nothing to you, only your childhood with all its pain, as if no one had ever suffered in childhood, as if only your mother had ever been cruel to her own child before; and then, right then, all her words swelled into the high whine of a powerful body of water falling down through rocks that have been cast asunder by a violent eruption from the earth’s belt itself or somewhere nearby and now were resting precariously with the uninterrupted flow of water passing over and around and below it and all this was situated at an altitude feeble with oxygen, and the girl’s voice was painful to the ears, the pattern of rows and rows of notes, repeated in order and the order repeated again, was so painful to the ears. But Mrs. Sweet proceeded to make a crab soufflé, following the recipe of a woman who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but who was a specialist in French food that no French woman Mrs. Sweet ever met was interested at all in cooking. However, and this was one of the ways Mrs. Sweet had of making See Then Now neutral, robbed of its power to cast powerful feelings and shadows over the people gathered at the dinner table, or the basketball tournament organized for the children who can’t play very well, or the argument that will eventually lead to the divorce courts and the realm of child support, or the injustice of child support for someone who had children but had never given serious consideration of how to buy bread for them, or the ways in which to make a violation mute and dismiss its consequences! However, and even more contemptible: whatever! Mrs. Sweet continued on her way, deliberately ignoring the serpentine contempt in which her very being was wrapped and strangled as she entered that world of Mom and Mommy and Mother and so on; and she made dinner and set the table herself, for the children refused to do it, they were busy with making a replica of Hadrian’s Villa for Latin class, replicating the viaducts that brought water from the Tiber to the Roman home, and household objects, useful or simply decorative, that were to be found in that Then known as Roman civilization: and all this homework was to be presided over by a teacher named Mr. McClellan.
And at dinner: the soufflé had not enough salt in it, too much salt in it, not enough crab in it, too much crab in it, the crab was stale, that was certain, frozen, for how can there be fresh crab in a village in a state that is landlocked? There are no land-dwelling crabs here. The salad was limp, Mrs. Sweet had poured the vinaigrette over the tender leaves a long time before it was eaten. The beautiful Persephone made an island out of her salad as it sat on her plate, the collapsed portion of soufflé was a beach where a vicious pirate of Elizabethan times ruled or where vicious people who came from Haarlem sunned themselves because winter in Holland can sometimes be vicious. The world is vicious, thought Mrs. Sweet to herself, as she sat with her husband and two children at the dinner table. Mr. Sweet said in a loud voice, as if he were on a stage and addressing an audience: all the tulips your mother planted last autumn were eaten by the deer, a deer with six antlers, a clever old deer with good and malicious taste; the deer came and ate them all, just as they were about to bloom, just as they had reached that point in budding before bursting into bloom, the deer came and ate them, each bud a delicious juicy morsel of something that was perhaps holy, perhaps not, but they ate them, chowed down on them, devoured them, leaving your poor mother nothing but tall stalks of green, where there should have been, glistening with dew, “Queen of the Night,” “Holland Queen,” “Black Parrot,” the little clusiana “Cynthia,” “Lady Jane,” the humilis “Alba Coerulea,” turkestanica, kolpakowskiana, linifolia, Kaufmanniana hybrids and Greigii; where there should have been single, early blooms of “Purple Prince,” “White Marvel,” and “Christmas Orange”; where there should have been double, early blooms of “Mondial,” “Monsella,” and “Monte Carlo”; where there should have been lily-flowering blooms of “Mariette,” “Marilyn,” and “Mona Lisa”; where there should have been Mrs. John T. Scheepers, especially Mrs. John T. Scheepers, for that is your mother’s favorite tulip of all tulips; where there should have been all these treasures that she had looked forward to all winter, sitting in the bathtub and drinking ginger ale and eating oranges way into the middle of the night, dreaming of tulips and dreaming of ways to be alive that only enrage me (Mr. Sweet), and she does it solely to enrage me, for I (Mr. Sweet) want her dead, beautiful Persephone and I want her dead, beautiful Persephone and I would ask young Heracles to kill her but he loves her so much, but now, at this moment, this now, what happiness, for the deer ate her tulips just as they were all about to open in a glorious bloom. And the two children burst into applause and clapped their hands and raised their glasses of milk in the air, even spilling some of the liquid onto their plates, the food now looked like something to be described by people interested in the obscure and unusual, and then they burst into a chorus of: who got her turban, deer got her turban, who got her turban, deer got her turban, who got her turban, deer ate her turban, call and response, response and call, and it all reached a crescendo that broke to the ground, twelve discordant notes, none of them meant to be together. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Mom! Mrs. Sweet’s children sat across from her, their breath was her breath, and it smelled of all the sweet things she had given them, and their names were Persephone and Heracles, not Rover and Lion, and in any case they had never heard of and so could not have eaten the eggs of ducks.
Gathering her children to her bosom, Mrs. Sweet soothed them with kisses, reminding them that they loved her then, not only just then, but that then when they were babies and couldn’t fall asleep without her milk-yielding breasts in their mouths, of that Then when they couldn’t cross the road and she had to show them how, of that Then when young Heracles could only be lulled into a stupor by being taken to a place where men operated huge machinery and the machines made noises that were so loud you could not hear yourself think and the men were in the process of realizing some marvel of engineering; of that Then when she took them to see the Continental Divide and a receding glacier in the state of Montana and unexpectedly found a species of clematis, columbiana, in bloom right outside the kitchen of the motel where they were staying, and inside their breakfast was being cooked and
this was just before she learned that the path to a lake named to commemorate a woman who would have been a pain to have as a friend was closed because some German tourist had been knocked down to the ground by a grizzly bear the day before, the bear’s real purpose was to consume a baby elk that had been swimming in the lake with its mother. Herding her children to their rooms upstairs in the Shirley Jackson house, Shirley Jackson being a woman who had been long dead by the time Mrs. Sweet was living in that house and a woman Mrs. Sweet would never know, but her being nevertheless was all too present even as she was unknown to Mrs. Sweet as she went about the everyday: Mrs. Sweet tossed them into their beds without incident, for by that time putting the children to bed was such an ordeal for dear Mrs. Sweet, so full of bargains made around the packed lunch: would Mrs. Sweet put extra Oreos so the beautiful Persephone could share with Joree, whose parents did not allow her to have sugary things; would Mrs. Sweet allow the young Heracles to have a playdate with Gregory, whose parents were devout Christians attached to some branch and sect that Mrs. Sweet could not understand. And after all she allowed the young Heracles to go to Gregory’s house for a visit though at the same time she prayed or wished, prayers and wishes then being interchangeable and indistinguishable, that no harm would come to him, and no harm ever came to him when he visited Gregory’s house. All the same, Mrs. Sweet was so relieved to hear that Gregory was soon moving to Florida. But just before he could let go of her—because he sensed she was longing to go back to that much-hated room, the room just off the kitchen, the room in which she would commune with the vast world that began in 1492, the room in which lay her mother and her dead brother and her other brothers and all the other people whom she sought out even as they had turned their backs on her, that room, that room: burn it down, cried her children, burn it with her in it, cried Mr. Sweet, but Mrs. Sweet knew of no other way to be and in any case did not know that her existence and her way of being caused so much as a stir in others—but just before he could let go of her, just before he drifted off to sleep, a state of being he fought mightily against, for Heracles sought to dominate, not to be dominated, he said to his mother, Mom, Mom, oh Mom! Tell me again of the Dean and Mrs. Hess and he was referring to those tales of two deep-sea-dwelling creatures, a man and a woman who were married to each other and who did this without having gills and without having lungs. The Dean had grown up in a place called Oxnard, California, where for two or three or four generations his family made hats for all kinds of people and the people wore the hats to every kind of event: to church, to work in mines where they extracted from the seams of the earth all sorts of things that are featured prominently in the periodic table, to drink beer in a bar, to marry each other, to attend a funeral, a baptism, a bat mitzvah, a bar mitzvah, to assassinate someone, to pay a visit to someone recovering from a serious illness in the hospital, to go to the bank to repay a loan in installments, to attend ceremonies of customs that originated in not well-understood parts of the known world, Africa just for example; but the hats that were made by the Dean’s family were now integral to these customs and the people who wore the hats had no interest in the people who made them at all. Mrs. Hess had grown up in a place called Massachusetts and for generations her family made furniture from the trunks of maple trees and oak trees and ash trees and butternut trees and pine trees of various species and all kinds of people ate their dinners and had conversations and rendered judgments of a legal kind or of an everyday conversational kind; that was the world of Mrs. Hess. They now congregate within the pages of a book and their ups and downs, all taking place deep in the watery bowels of earth and even deeper than that, in places where the earth’s substance was not water at all but only something like it—liquid; and when Mrs. Sweet read that to the young Heracles, he would say, what does that mean, not water but only something like it, come on Mom, come on Mom, is it water or is it not water and Mrs. Sweet would proceed as if she had not been interrupted and the young Heracles would recede as if he had not interrupted. But in any case, the adventures of the Dean and Mrs. Hess, these two people, who without precedent inhabited and were familiar with the watery depths of the earth as if it were a surface and they knew depths beyond this depth, this so thrilled the young Heracles.
The Dean and Mrs. Hess possessed neither lungs nor gills, for they did not live in water or on dry land, for they were not yet of this earth as we now know it, but they did see the earth grow dense and large and larger still; they did see an inner core become covered with an outer core and then that become covered over by a mantle. “Well, look at that,” said Mrs. Hess to the Dean, just as inner core disappeared beneath mantle. At that, the Dean adjusted his glasses. “This is exhausting,” he said and Mrs. Hess said, “You think so, just wait till we have children.” The Dean wanted to say, “What’s that?” but he knew that Mrs. Hess hated just then any unusual amount of irony and she might interpret his attempt at humor as inappropriate. He said nothing. He looked at his wife, her hair a beautiful rust, her eyes the color of a fire as it is reflected in the glass eyes of the two cats that decorated the andirons in the hearth of a fireplace in New England in mid-November; he looked at his wife as she spun around and around first in one direction, then in another in an effort to make herself at one with the earth’s own turning; she failed and sank to her own center. And the Dean said, “What’s that!” and then for a while, he turned molten and silent. And then he boiled up, not in resentment and anger but in laughter and much clapping with approval at his own happiness. He loved Mrs. Hess. He loved her so much! He bombarded her with kisses which she sensibly ignored but took note of nevertheless. “Is it time for dinner?” asked the Dean and Mrs. Hess replied firmly, “Not yet!” and time moved on in the way it always would, always will, then and now intertwined, losing uniqueness, difference, distinction, subject only to laws of human consciousness. “Mom, Mom, what’s happening? Where’s the time when the Dean eats the plate full of hot horse chestnuts, fresh from being roasted in the immortal fire, you know, the fire that is burning forever at the center of the earth, the one that is waiting to turn us back into the thing from which we came, that thing called the universe? Where is that? Can you get to that chapter, please? I want to hear about the millions of years of rain. Can you skip to that, please Mom, please Mom?” The young Heracles loved the sweet mellifluous tone of Mrs. Sweet’s voice as she read to him the story of creation, the story of how he Now was Then, the very story, the nature of any story, the story being the definition of chaos, of the unstable, of the uncertain, of the pause that holds the possibility of nothingness, empty. And Mrs. Sweet continued in a very steady voice, for the personality of the reassuring mother came readily and easily to her: she said, while speaking for Mrs. Hess, “It rained a kind of water that was so complicated with various elements and each of them separately or combined, it would not matter, would be inhospitable to the life of the mosquito who was a vector of the most virulent form of malaria and it rained for one hundred million years.” The young Heracles, said, “Oh Mom, oh Mom, can we go to Africa?” But Mrs. Sweet, still speaking as Mrs. Hess said, “Not yet is there an Africa, not yet is there an Africa,” saying it twice, for that would make it really so and it was really so then and it is really so now. “Well enough of this, young man,” said Mrs. Sweet, for she could see the to and fro of traveling to Africa undifferentiated from Now and Then, just a landmass emerging from billions of years of the earth’s relentless restlessness, the earth indifferent to a unique individual consciousness as it might manifest itself in Mrs. Sweet, the young Heracles, or anyone else; and she brought the bedsheets and down comforter, mixed up as they were, sheets and comforter, to his chin, and folded them around his body as if he were in a shroud but he was only going to sleep and would wake up the next morning, not going to sleep forever. He lay in the bottom half of his bunk bed that Mrs. Sweet had purchased from Crate & Barrel, and Mr. Sweet had objected to the cost of it; the top half was left for the young Heracles’ friends, Tad and Ted and Tim
and Tom and Tut, and such were their names and they were not afraid to fall out of a bed so high up from the floor, or so they said, and the young Heracles did not believe them. And just before she left him, just before she showed him the moon and said goodnight, Mrs. Sweet said, “Tomorrow is another day and what will you do then?” for she was familiar with seeing now, in any case dreaming. Mrs. Sweet closed tightly the book that contained the adventures of the Dean and Mrs. Hess but the Dean and Mrs. Hess were not concerned at all, they continued as always, as before and after and as they do now: the Dean’s glasses slipped down from the thin banister that was his nose for a moment, a moment of millions of years in the realms of the batholiths and into formations of thickened fluids that solidified into granite, rocks becoming stilled through cooling. “Oh yes, oh yes!” said the Dean and Mrs. Hess to each other, as they traversed the deep realm, before there was any surface which was habitable, and they were creating a surface which could be made habitable, but they were not at all interested in that then.
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