See Now Then

by Jamaica Kincaid

  The time passed. But did time pass? Yes, it did and the Dean grew hungry and said to Mrs. Hess, “Dinner?” and she answered, “Not yet!” for it would be many ages before such a thing was possible, dinner: the purchasing of meat and vegetables from the supermarket, cooking them, setting the table, sitting down to eat them while going over the events of a day, the way we live now. The way we live now! Yes, the way we live now: the tawdriness of it, the small-mindedness in it, the importance of the self, the self degraded not properly valued, the self of no use, of no comfort to any individual. The way we live now! The Dean sighed and lay down, and Mrs. Hess, thinking this a secret from him, continued to turn this way, flip that way, in imitation of the earth’s magnetic field, but how could such a thing be unknown to this god of geomancy? Iron-nickel alloy, peridotite, gabbro, granite—all known to him by hand and heart. “Well, all right,” he said to her and the eras and periods and epochs, too, flew by in his mind’s eye: Cambrian, Devonian, Permian, the ’cenes, and there were many of those, the ’cenes. The green plaid of the duvet, under which lay the young Heracles, moved up and down in a constant perfect rhythm, the beat of his heart it was, but then he shifted violently and his hand swung out into the air and came to rest on the top of his covering, there his hand lay isolated like a part of a landmass, submerging or emerging, neither one nor the other. But he was dreaming of flowers, of fields upon fields of wheat in flower, and then flour, and flowering trees that would bear fruit, and then some that would bear nothing edible, and his whole night was like that: dreams of flowers and flours and fruits and flowers that were beautiful for their own sake.

  8

  When I was a child, said Mrs. Sweet to herself, speaking to herself in her mind’s eye, her lips that could be seen not moving at all, her eyes fixed on the stitches that the needles made as they slipped from one to the next under her guidance, for she had taught herself the ways of knitting, slipping the knitted stitch off the needle and then retrieving it by twisting it in the opposite direction, making it raised as if it were a pearl and this stitch was called a “purl,” and even so Mrs. Sweet understood that her method of doing this would meet with the disapproval of any Olympian authority; and Mrs. Sweet was making a baby’s blanket, following the instructions of the authorities that would frown upon her, producing a Vandyke check pattern, a series of stitch-and-purls, and at that time she was not expecting a child but: When I was a child, she said, I thought the world was first still and then all of creation had come into being solely for me and that I was born on the Seventh Day. I did think that, really and truly so, until I was about nine years of age and then something happened and what was that?

  Before I was nine, before that, something happened. I do see now that there was much turbulence and upheaval in my life, but all this had to do with my own creative narration, my own individual creation: I was not allowed to cry when I was being scolded for some transgression or the other, and I had so many, for I was always being scolded, and I was so ashamed of my imperfections, though if I had been left to myself I would have been perfect: there was not a thing about me that I found wanting, not my thoughts, not my physical appearance, not my mother, not anything she did or did not do. All of my sadness and all of my longing and all of myself was accepted by me. But I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me, my own self, though at the time I did not know that myself constituted such a thing as an existence. I couldn’t please the people I knew and so I couldn’t please myself. A whole life is distilled from some event that occurred before you are three years of age or after three years of age but not past your sixth year; a whole life can span six thousand years and each year consists of 365 days excepting for a leap year, and it would remain so: that a whole life is made up of some small event, fleeting, something so small, deeply buried within itself, a catastrophe, not easily detectable to you or to the careful observer, but visible enough to a lover or a roommate or the person living next door who does not wish you well, the event, which in fact becomes your greatest flaw, occurs when you are most powerless to thwart its occurrence, when you are most unable to make its malignancy benign, when you are most unable to shrug it off, as if it were nothing more than a leaf falling off a tree in October, a change of seasons, a phenomenon that is quite apparent in parts of the earth’s atmosphere, yes, yes, that is what makes up a whole life, the small event that cannot be seen by you, but can be seen by random people, and that small event makes you vulnerable to the deep and casual desires of these people, random or select, you can never know, really know. All this said Mrs. Sweet to herself as she resided in her mind’s eye, and she knitted a garment, this time it was a sweater made up in a pattern to be worn by men who lived on an island adrift in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean and this island was formed there in that period of time called the Lower Carboniferous and these men who lived on this island wore this garment to sea. The Aran sweater it was that she knitted, the stitches were knit two purl two and knit one purl two, or purl two knit one drop one, or drop two and then pick up one or pick up nothing at all, and in that way Mrs. Sweet continued: I was not allowed to cry; so many times I wanted to cry, so many times, but when I did, I was scolded so harshly, I was told that my tears were a sign that I was proud like the fallen hero of a paradise that was lost, that I was Lucifer or something like him, and when I was seven years of age my punishment for misbehaving in school was to copy by longhand Books One and Two of Paradise Lost by John Milton; and at that time I lived without artificial light, that would be light provided by electricity, I lived then in a little house with my mother and her husband, a man who was my father by association and that association made him more important to me than my father through biology; and I copied those chapters, Book One and Book Two, and I identified with Lucifer, who did not cry, but it was not something I knew in the way I knew I preferred to be hot than to be cold. But I did cry: I cried when my mother took me with her to the St. John’s Public Library when I could not yet read, and she read many books all to herself while I sat on her lap and looked up at her lips which never moved but her whole being, her body, was transformed, for she did not remain the same.

  But life, real life, the way a life unfurls, is never as you have imagined it: so said Mrs. Sweet to herself, as she sat packing up a trunk of clothes for the young Heracles who was then going off to golf camp with his friend, the equally young Will Atlas, and Mrs. Sweet was going over in her mind the scene of Mr. Sweet saying to her, well, I know you are trying very hard but I love someone else and I will not give her up, for she makes me feel like my true self, my real self, who I really am, I am in love with a woman who originates from a far different climate and culture than the one you are from and she is very sweet in nature, quite like me, and she plays all the Brahms everything with four hands even though she only has two just like everybody else, and she is young and beautiful and can bear children who are beautiful and sweet in nature like me and they will never need Adderall; Mrs. Sweet then, that is, while Mr. Sweet was saying all these words that made up sentences and made sense and yet didn’t, for that little man dressed in corduroy trousers and a wool plaid jacket that was in the style of a gentleman hunter in rural England and saying those words that broke her sweet heart, she could not have had anything to do with such a person, but all the same that man in those clothes was her husband, Mr. Sweet, and then, right then, she understood all the little scenes that had come before: that January, when she suffered most from the lack of heat from the weakened sun, Mr. Sweet took ballroom-dancing lessons and she wanted to join him in this exciting activity, and when she suggested it he exploded in a rage that would be worthy of a suggestion that he drop an atomic bomb on an island nation in the Pacific Ocean but then calmed himself and said to her, politely with a smile, well no, you can’t do that because Danny and Susan, and then for Mrs. Sweet all the words that followed in that sentence vanished, for there was the beautiful Persephone and she needed all sorts of things to be sent to her w
hile she was boarding at Eisner Camp or St. Mark’s School or just in summer residence somewhere, and then there were the bills to be paid for the upkeep of the house, which was the Shirley Jackson house, or so it was called by all the people who lived in that village, which lay on both banks of the river called Paran.

  Oh Now, oh Then, said Mrs. Sweet out loud, but it didn’t matter, it was as if she said it to herself, for no one could ever understand her agony, ever, ever understand, her suffering, her pain, no words could express it, nothing in existence could convey or express her existence just then, now or ever, her husband’s voice, her husband had been enfolded in an entity called Mr. Sweet. I am dying, she said to herself but that was silence; I am dying when I am with you, said Mr. Sweet to Mrs. Sweet, I am dying and that is why I hate you, for I am dying and I can’t be myself, my true self, I am dying and you will die when I say this, but I am dying, I am dying, I am dying. Oh I see, said Mrs. Sweet out loud but even she couldn’t hear herself, and all that she saw, then and now, was silent!

  But she then could see the young Heracles sitting on a couch in the children’s room, watching Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman defeat Karl Malone and John Stockton, and Michael Jordan, who then had a very bad cold and each time he made a score he almost fell down but his fellow teammate Scottie Pippen was always there to hold him up, and the young Heracles, who worshipped Michael Jordan, held his opponents in high disregard and said they were lame, and Mrs. Sweet knitted and purled all the while, listening to her son whoop and shout and moan and cry out in agony at the very idea that his beloved Michael Jordan’s team would lose, but then they won and the young Heracles said to his mother, hey Mom, I know you are going to say this is just like Homer, this is just like the Iliad, and there is Agamemnon and there is Achilles coming up to save everything, admit it Mom, you’re gonna say it’s just like in Homer in that funny little voice of yours as if you’re on the radio, ’cause you talk like someone on the radio, your voice is official but you’re just my mom and you’re so ridiculous I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, you are so embarrassing; and Mrs. Sweet knitted away, for she was right then making the entire orchestra that would perform Mr. Sweet’s suite of nocturnes, but much to her surprise, when this chore was completed the performers were all missing one of the arms they needed to play their instruments. So inevitable are the series of events seen over your shoulder as you glance back from the series of events that stand before you, and in your own mind you can see the series of events that are to come, that are arrayed before you, and they appear as if they are in the rearview mirror but only in reverse, only as if the rearview mirror could make visible the thing that has not happened yet, for perhaps Time, said Mrs. Sweet to herself as she knitted away those garments with one sleeve missing, was a father, not a mother, and Mrs. Sweet had no father, that is, she had not been authored, she had been created by a very malicious woman. Oh Mom, oh Mom, can’t you see, said the young boy to his mother, and he was jumping up and down, running this way and that through the assembled crowds of shy Myrmidons, Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Super Mario, Batman, various figurines from Star Wars, various stuffed animals, some resembling the domesticated, some resembling wild ones who were now extinct; and they all lay before him and also they all lay before him in his memory so fresh, so fresh and so clean, Mrs. Jackson, that they still inhabited his Now; and the boy, young Heracles, was now involved in the sadness of worrying about Ken Griffey, whose father had been a legend of baseball lore, or so the young Heracles told his mother, and the young Heracles loved the young Griffey and so was involved in his fate, which might not be so full of glory as was his Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman; but just then, as he was sitting in his chair in the children’s room, his father Mr. Sweet said to him, I must tell you something and Mr. Sweet said, I don’t love your mother anymore, I love another woman who comes from somewhere else, another woman with whom I have been taking ballroom-dancing lessons and we talk about Mozart, for she plays the pianoforte excellently and she could be the next extraordinary piano genius of the century, the century is long because centuries are long, though in your life you might, ha ha ha, find them not as long as I have found them, but I love her and nothing can change that and I don’t love your mother, you know, we were always so incompatible, for she did emerge from a boat whose main cargo was bananas, and she is strange and should live in the attic of a house that burns down, though I don’t want her to be in it when that happens, but if she was in it when the house burned down, I wouldn’t be surprised, she is that kind of person. And on hearing all this, oh nooooo, was a long howl of pain that came up and out of the bowels, through the darkness of the mouth of the young Heracles, and he furled and unfurled again and again like the petals of a flower as it comes into bloom and then fades rapidly so did the young Heracles, who had only been sitting in his chair in the children’s room, watching on television the young ballplayer Ken Griffey in the process of being or never being the great baseball player all the baseball world thought he would be.

  And Mrs. Sweet now broke in two as if she were made of something to be found in the Pennsylvania formation but she was not made from that, she only knew of that; and she wept and wept over the broken body of her son, who now lay on the couch, the television was on but Ken Griffey was not on Mrs. Sweet’s mind, Mr. Sweet never cared for baseball except he liked Willie Mays and could say things about Willie Mays and that was all so great, seeing greatness in a child’s book; and Mrs. Sweet broke in two continuously, kept breaking over and over again, never into many pieces, just the same two, her heart, her head, and especially her heart, and shortly afterward the wiring in her heart became erratic and had to be ablated. But then, right then, Mr. Sweet elaborated to the young Heracles on all his disenchantment with the young boy’s mother: she snores horribly; she smells of the past, for she is growing old and so am I, said Mr. Sweet, but young women like me and I do not like old women, said Mr. Sweet, your mother is old; she has come to like Wittgenstein but she does not understand him; she likes Erwartung but she does not understand what she reads, she is very naïve, she is very primitive, she is very amusing, she is wonderful when you are trying to be brave, but when you are with her and you face your limitations, she’s a joke, she’s an embarrassment, she’s not my type, we are incompatible. But Dad, but Dad, said the young Heracles, what am I gonna do? and now he crumpled into the shape of a piece of paper on which the wrong thing had been written and it had been thrown into the waste receptacle never to be thought of again, and Mrs. Sweet gathered up her sweet son and wrapped him in a blanket she had made and in that one garment there was no error and she wrapped him up in it and put him in the bottom part of his bunk bed, a bed made of ash and purchased from Crate & Barrel.

  * * *

  In the corner of that room in which the young Heracles heard the indictment against his sacred mother, he loved her so, he thought her ridiculous, her obsession with plants and the flowers and fruits that they bear; her wanting to wear jodhpurs made of denim, the uniform of workmen in some faraway country, to parents’ night at his school so all the other parents could see that she wasn’t at all like them; her love of cooking food that took a long time to prepare: duck with plum sauce, that took days before it was ready to be eaten; the other mothers didn’t know that she could sing all the words to “Stan” and that she loved Dr. Dre; she once went off to China and spent weeks there collecting the seeds of plants she could grow in her garden; that time she told a man who was taking his family on a shopping outing to Manchester and he took her parking spot before she had a chance to position her car properly, maybe your dick will fall off, and the man, who had never been spoken to like that before in front of his treasured family, became enraged, so much so that it filled him with shame and he almost collapsed from it but he soon recovered and did not yield the parking spot and he proceeded to the Ralph Lauren outlet and was never seen again by the young Heracles; and Mom is so ridiculous and she is so
ridiculous and Mom is so ridiculous, and he thought of the time when she had taught him to make her a martini so he could bring it to her at half past five in the afternoon while she was in the garden doing something that nobody in the rest of the family cared about, and there was this day when Mr. Sweet came into the house and said to the young Heracles, have you seen my beautiful wife? and Heracles answered, no but if you’re looking for Mom, she is in the garden, and Mom, who loved the garden as if it were a person or something like that, so thought the young Heracles, and none of the other mothers were like that, none of them thought the garden was like a person and had an individual need and that it called for attention and care and could enrich your inner life, so thought the young Heracles, none of my friends’ mothers were like Mom and it is so embarrassing, Mom is so embarrassing, if she wasn’t my own mom I would have gone out and found a mom who wasn’t like her at all, a mom who was just like the other moms, for Mom is so embarrassing. And just outside the room in which corner lay the shy Myrmidons and the Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers and Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, though never at all Princess Leia, and Batman though never at all Robin, just outside that room was the tree house that Rob had built with the wood Mr. Sweet had ordered to measure from Greenberg’s lumber store, and Rob had nailed the wood into the evergreens that had been planted in the yard just outside the Shirley Jackson house, and beneath the tree house was the sandbox: the tree house was only a platform with the overgrown branches of the evergreens casting a veil of green tears around it and it harbored insects that fed on its secretions, and the children, that would be the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles, hated it, and so they stayed beneath it, where it formed a canopy for the sandbox; in the sandbox was a bench and table all in one, like the ones provided at a public beach or a state park for the random passerby, for sometimes the children would pretend they were such people, the random passerby at a beach or a state park, for they lived in the mountains, for Mr. and Mrs. Sweet had never in their married life, never in their life as the parents of two healthy children, participated in that family tradition, that transforming and celebrated event called the family vacation, for Mr. Sweet was afraid of spaces of every kind, be they open or enclosed. And in that sandbox was a miniature John Deere tractor that was of no real use, only it made the young Heracles, while sitting in its seat, believe that he was a farmer reaping an imaginary crop of no particular kind in an imaginary field, or preparing the imaginary field for the imaginary planting season to come and just generally being an imaginary man in command of a powerful piece of machinery and just generally imagining himself as a person who would be strange to his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, for they had purchased the toy farm machinery and they had also purchased the toy backhoe made of strong plastic and the miniature buckets and the miniature spades and forks and wheelbarrows, all toy-sized, all useless, all having nothing to do with the real and true people they wanted the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles to become.