“It’s time Wiley had a little rest. Nonie, will you take him upstairs? S.L., do you want to go chaperon the fearless duo?”
Damp rises from a blue, oval rug.
Some pee trickles down Nonie’s leg.
Our housekeeper, my nurse—Anne Marie—she has been keeping trays of little sandwiches filled—has a dish towel over her arm. She moves toward Nonie. She dabs—she knows what to do. She says, “The Devil’s banging skulls.” She’s partly sorrowful, duplicitous. She has a German accent. She doesn’t like Nonie—she wants to scare her. Maybe not.
A lightning flash moves in tree branches outside the front door—its flare touches us in here. What it is this time is that the light balls up not far from our lawn, a cloud of glare runs toward us, it’s around us: in the glare, walls and windows visibly quiver; and there’s a ringing and hum from the rush and flow in house gutters and on the walls—the sounds of water streaming sharper in the moment of eerie light.
Nonie yells, “IT’S BAD.” Then she’s quiet and she pees some more.
Daddy says, “You’re not a child, you’re not scared.” He says it sweetly—the untruth, the consolation. The hint. “It’s some storm, I’ll tell the world.” Then he says, “Anne Marie, no Devil business: Devil business is monkey business—this neighborhood’s too expensive for Old Nick; we get only nice people and Republicans around here; that’s what we have and that’s enough to keep the Devil away from our door.”
He doesn’t touch Nonie; he smiles (to show that this isn’t an emergency for his emotions yet); complications of voice and intent make rosebushes, thombushes, and paths, a park, a site of something made into a public sweetness. Anne Marie mops Nonie.
Daddy’s a guard, a reinforcement, a plural: he’s reinforcements, he’s so big. He shepherds us—we’re on the stairs. Anne Marie, the towel, me, the pale, reciting girl, saying, “I’m not frightened—sticks and stones can break my bones—” The ammoniac smell, her spraddled legs as she walks.
In an eerie balloon of white light, her face seems to sail outward: bleached pottery with black lips.
The air smells burned.
“The Devil stinks,” Daddy says, partly during, partly after the thunder. Then: “That’s why he can’t live around here.”
He now admits, sort of idly, that the Devil exists—at least, as far as Nonie is concerned.
Outside the white-sashed mid-stairs window are waving branches, swooshing and askew. It’s semi-dark in the deluge out there. The wind dies, the branches droop, are bent in affecting, water-weighted postures, and the rain takes on a hard, harsh, cracking sound. Everything is moist and odorous.
“Don’t let it get you down, honey,” Daddy says.
She stares toward the window, where a nervous river of skinny light runs in the domelike, temporarily lighted sky.
She shouts, “YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.” She has an athlete’s comprehension of danger, of tactics. A series of blurred ripples of weird light are rising and sinking in wet clouds. Something hisses in my ears—it’s abominable: it’s her breath—her fearful breath.
I see Nonie in you, in you, in you.
I see her in me.
Crimes against Nonie exist.
Skating past this, arguing with it, hiding it restlessly, querulously—powerfully—lazily—Daddy says, holding her shoulder, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s a real siege. God, it never rains but it pours.”
In Nonie is an inverted rapture of exploding pulse: giant doors boom and slam in her. It is a godawful filth: she feels it as that: “I HATE THE GODDAMNED LIGHTNING . . . I HATE THE GODDAMNED LIGHTNING . . . MAKE IT STOP . . . DADDY.” Then: “THE LIGHTNING WANT YOU, DADDY . . .GO OUTSIDE AND LET THE LIGHTNING GET YOU . . . DADDY . . . THE LIGHTNING’S MAD AT YOU . . . DADDY.”
He won’t obey her today—with company here: his obeying her never has calmed her for long. He’s not very brave in her cause anymore anyway. But he laughs courageously: he’s brave in another way, denying her and the whole outdoors while knowing her temper, her gift for outrage. And while the rain goes on, while the storm continues outside the house.
A glare, milky, has the effect that we and the stairs are completely without shadow. That flattens the planes and curves of our faces and irons out the folds of wood and of carpet. Nonie shouts, “YOU BASTARD. I KNOW YOU. I KNOW WHAT IT IS. YOU BASTARD.”
“Nonie, sweetie. God. Oh, Nonie—goddamn it—what’s the matter? Sweetie, what’s wrong?”
“IT’S IN THE HOUSE, YOU GO STAND ON THE LAWN, YOU GO LET IT BURN YOU, LET IT BURN YOU UP, DADDY.”
I hold Nonie’s hands. Her bones are loose in nets of muscle. The noise of tambourining leaves disappears in a bass halloo. A rod of wood is swiftly rolled shakingly along my spine. Nonie’s mouth opens; she’s forced to swallow noise.
When you see someone at an absolute physical limit, it does suggest the passing over a line toward deity.
Or something dirty, in another sort of story entirely; but in real life, happening inside the same moment, so that, as a child, you blink and see and don’t see.
Big-bodied Daddy and Anne Marie—the big-bodied characters here—haul and hustle Nonie along the upstairs hall; she’s howling and growling. Nonie breaks loose, Nonie is leaning at the waist, sideways, a little backward in the half-dark, in the noise. We have company in the house downstairs. Now we push her. Now we have her in the bathroom. Anne Marie has gotten Nonie’s pants half off and in the flexing and wriggling of Nonie’s buttocks, big and pink-gray-brown in the muddy light, is the proof of the abject sincerity of her terror, even though her finely shaped head is stiffly erect—terror is discouraged by assertions of the nothingness of the humiliation.
I see Nonie everywhere I look.
A point of white light across a bedroom at a window speeds and blooms. Faces float. The rending and clatter spread Nonie’s face: it’s painful to see—people sometimes remark, That girl’s painfully pretty.
She says in a really crazed way, “THE LIGHTNING DOESN’T WANT ME—IT WANTS YOU, YOU MEAN PIECE OF CRAP.”
Daddy’s cheeks are scored with effort, with dry tiredness. Daddy says, “Nonie, Nonie, stop it—what is it? Tell me. Listen to me. What are you scared of? It’s only some rain and a little noise and some electricity like a—a flashlight—in the sky.”
She stares at him: the complexities of his logic are walled spirals which she is too canny to admire even in her state of crazed, involuntary terror. “GO AWAY. I DON’T WANT YOU NEXT TO ME. IT WANTS YOU. YOU GO. LEAVE ME ALONE.”
Daddy gets tired of the slyness and temper and selfishness in this sort of woman’s heroism, so to speak. He holds her arm firmly and gives her a very little shake: “You try to get hold of yourself, Nonie. You be a lady, now.”
Nonie doesn’t listen; she almost never listens: she eavesdrops face-to-face. It’s her tactic to believe women are what’s moral: the unreligious part: a measure (they’re soft flesh—solace and amusement; they make up for God’s being what He is). The woman says, I’m more than God—Daddy, go meet your death and Maker and say How-ja-do.
And: Do you love me? Are you my father?
Daddy is tired of both those things. Daddy looks into her eyes; he has a jutting, determined posture of his face, a set of postures that slide finally into an obliquity of address: he often speaks before her and not to her, which seems a witch’s triumph that she has—it’s an odd privilege or rank with him that she has—but now he’s talking to her, except, ultimately, he’s sure of her because she’s a female: “Listen to me. No one’s hurting you.”
“I KNOW WHO I AM.” That is, she knows what’s going on and she would like to call on certain facts of biography and of social reality: I’m Nora Silenowicz, aged thirteen; I live at home with my parents: home is 4 Vista Drive; you leave me alone. Don’t you know who I am? I just told you—are you too dumb to catch on? I’m not exactly a big-brain type of person, I’m not real booky, but I get the point and you don’t seem to. I’m not a c
reep. I love sports, do you? Don’t get too funny. Just maybe my family can handle you. We can get you thrown in prison.
“HELP ME, DADDY, I’M A GOOD GIRL.”
“I know you are, sweetie.”
She yells, “OH, AH, YAH-AH”; that is, she argues for a moment sheerly as a girl yelling—if she was that noisy and that upset, then something was wrong; you were supposed to help her—this was a serious argument, an earnest one.
Her eyes are screwed into being maybe three-quarters shut, and yet they’re peering; she’s not totally defeated; her eyes have nutty angles of vision; they’re also twitching and angry; but they function still; they have a childish obstinacy of function. In her terror, this terror.
“I DON’T HATE MYSELF, DADDY!” she screams.
She’s been in treatment with psychologists—they try to help her be happy.
Her warm thighs, stickily pressed together, tremble syncopatedly.
Daddy says, “Nonie, it’s like a knife in my goddamned heart. My heart is breaking. Oh, Honey, can’t you get hold of yourself?”
He’s not thinking, he’s being uncalculating, it’s on purpose: he’s being warm; he’s not judging or guessing or seeing through her—it’s an effort. His face gets a little pudgy, cloudlike with warm foolishness—it’s for her sake, for everyone’s. She sees, she partly grasps it—Be-foolish-for-me—his story isn’t congruent with hers, with Nonie’s story. She stares at him. Daddy says, “Here, Honey, want some love out of my pocket? I have a whole lot of love right here. Just put your hand in and dig it out. It’s all just waiting for you.”
Love rests on illusion, they say—that’s one of Lila’s remarks. I can face it, Lila said; can you?
Nonie’s jumping around, wincing, agonized.
“YOU GO TO HELL. YOU HAVE TO GO TO HELL.” It’s not clear what she means, why he has to, for her sake or because of his vices, or his having failed her, or in order to save her, or what. She shouts, “THE DEVIL WANTS YOU RIGHT NOW.”
Anne Marie tells me, “Don’t look, Liebchen.” The sin, the being an animal, a little animal, and ashamed and disliked by everyone—well, don’t look, except medically: to exorcise or to quarantine or to help.
Anne Marie is pious.
Daddy’s sad look of affection says that Nonie is crazy now. Nonie, alert, shouts, “I’M A GOOD GIRL, I’M NICE!” She shouts it accusingly.
Knots of nerves in her skull skitter shrilly: in the prepubescent, pudgy, pink-thighed girl are facts of nightmare trafficked in, compromised—compromised but not a joke. Her intensity is the size of the warning, of the emergency. Such meaning won’t condense, won’t distill. She shouts: the effect she wants is to reproduce in you what’s in her: but in a family what does she mean by that?
“I know it,” he says; “I know it, Honey.” What does he mean?
Her consciousness dives and races along; it’s not big, her consciousness; it’s mostly eyesight and speed—see how she squints and wiggles: ferocity of endeavor is her emblem. She flies along, flat-out and pure—without pain in this sense: pure indomitability—and complaint: that’s a system. She shouts, “I HAVE GOOD INSTINCTS, DADDY.” Is she advertising herself? No; yes. But she also means, Listen to me. And: I will win—or is it: I will win if you help me?
She’s in a rush.
Is it English she speaks, Nonie-dialect? In this tribe, you have to have a split and blobbing tongue. Other people say the same words as Nonie, but they mean something else, so it’s not the same words.
Nonie shouts, “I’M A GOOD GIRL.”
Hugging me, whispering in my ear; we’re on the porch: another time: it is four o’clock, a summer day: perhaps it is another city—“I’m a good girl,” someone pure—a good girl—the meaning-of-this in the sunshine is that something pure doesn’t hurt you; she’s pure, and whatever she does to you, whatever you think about it, you’re not hurt.
The whisper in my ear partly means her feelings weren’t hurt by Katie Rogers or by Ida Nicholson Gray—a grown-up—or by Momma; and that Nonie hates Ida and Momma and Katie because they make the world impure one way or another. She’s not like them: she’s blameless, she’s perfect—if you don’t agree, she has a right to hurt you for hurting her . . . Perhaps she is daydreaming, pretending. She vaguely intends to make you wise in regard to her purity.
“I’m nice.” She’s pure and unhurt and unhurtable, she means. Nonie pinches me—a hieroglyph, an ideogram, an idiocy, a poem on this subject: if I cry out, I’m not pure, I’m hurt; she has hurt me because I distrusted her; and the proof of my treachery is that I am hurt. She will hug and stroke me, and make me pure now. She’s redeeming me. She’s recruiting me. Purity is smoothness, invulnerability (inviolability), and conceit toward others. Also, it is sweetness—in some cases, in me for instance, it is turning the other cheek. In her, purity is satisfaction, is satisfied appetite.
She kisses me, she kisses the kid and holds him at arm’s length and won’t let me move successfully—getting what you want, and no one can get even with you for it, or be jealous, that’s purity, that’s being good—and middle-class. You are a person who’s pure, and, therefore, are unpunished for what you do. If I want something from Nonie, if I wriggle and try to escape, I—I am impure by definition: it’s an appetite in me: see her startled and seeing-through-me eyes as I do this, her fluttering scorn that I expect something of her. We’re on the porch; Anne Marie is at work in the kitchen depending on what city and what year of my childhood this is . . . Nonie looks at me that way (with moral scorn). Being fond of people is a good discipline, Lila’s said more than once. Lila has said, S.L. lies to Nonie, and you know what they say the outcome of lies is. What does he expect to happen? She has to figure out everything for herself. A young girl’s life is terrible one way or the other, but no one pays attention. Well, she won’t listen to me—I’m not to her tastes lately. It’s a phase. NO: it was lifelong. If she wants a stay-at-home, plain-Jane mother—and she won’t settle for what the cat dragged in (which is me)—then I guess she’ll just have to suffer, take it or leave it. I’m the only mother she has.
“You,” she says, “you always want someone to do your dirty work for you—well, I’m the only mother you have, too . . .”
We have a local form of childhood, Nonie and I.
A dog scampers sidelong, crazy-jawed, across the lawn. “Look at that crazy dog,” Nonie says. Nonie likes praise that is extreme, that is enthusiasm plus a loud silence in regard to any qualifications of the praise: It was great, it was really great, it was perfect, you’re perfect, you know that, you’re just absolutely perfect.
“You’re perfectly lovely,” she says to the child, and regards him. “Want a glass of milk? I think that dog belongs to poor people.”
Poor people are cowards and bullies toward people like us—everyone knows that.
Ipso dipso facto ficto.
Daddy wants Nonie to be happy: Stay away from grown-ups, Darling; you can’t tell about them; sometimes they like to make you feel bad.
Nonie says, Momma’s like that.
Nonie is well-bred, high-strung (Momma says). She doesn’t get along with popular children; she can’t hold her own with them; no one likes being overshadowed. Wiley, listen to me; I give good advice: no one likes to be outshone—they’ll kill you if it bothers them enough.
Nonie likes nervous, soft-mannered kids with some social glamour: she’ll pick a girl or a boy with a noticeably behindhand, peripheral social beauty. Doesn’t she know any better? Nonie only likes people who can’t possibly like her once they get to know her. Once their luck changes, they turn on her, and she deserves it, she asks for it, and the fat is in the fire and I have to pay the piper. Momma often sighs; she has a repertoire of good sighs—very different kinds. This one is pigeony, cooish. Doesn’t Nonie know who she is?
Nonie learns little from the passive kids she likes; she imitates them badly. Momma says, We have an ordinary middle-class household. A portrait. Nonie doesn’t like to listen to what
anyone says—she evades the intentions of speech; she eavesdrops face-to-face as a general rule. She’s maybe ordinary morally—Momma has said that’s the best possible claim for Nonie: She’s ordinary and like everyone else, so good-and-normal it hurts.
(I’m shouting in a vacuum; no one listens to me, Momma said. Only Wiley—sometimes.)
Nonie’s happiness is universally desired by theoreticians, by decent people. Universally.
When she’s crushed, if she’s shattered—Momma’s words and Nonie’s—Nonie says, in an agonized and angry tone, “I’M ALL RIGHT.” That may mean she’s given up or is about to. When she is defeated, she says, if asked, “I’m fine, thank you,” and blinks and turns away if she doesn’t want you to notice—she makes you be quiet, though. You notice, but you have to be quiet.
If she’s hurt badly enough, honesty sets in.
Then something in her widens—her consciousness maybe—and she’s private and soft, even if a little shrill in pitch but sometimes not even that: she’s vulnerable, out of control: not evil: defeated—gentle: not lyingly—maybe as an emblem or result of Evil, but she seems to be good then . . .
When I’m drawn to Nonie when she’s in that state, in some version of it, she sometimes turns on me to show I’m a sucker and she’s stronger, she’s getting strong again.
When she’s defeated or hurt, half-nice or the whole thing, she is sexual, private, human, not shrewd—knowing about it in her, feeling it in her, the sound of it while it’s happening near me, the feeling in my head of being near a secret part of Nonie, her weird self in this moment, I like her a lot. She knows it. She holds my hand moistly. Her hurt causes a ripe propriety of soul and demeanor in her. This is one reason she’s so interested in hurt, because of what happens to her then—the sort of grace that comes to her. Similarly, she wants to see the finest part of someone. A theory. Her physical sense of the world, of herself, is stronger than her mental sense of herself and of things, despite the way her hands don’t know the feel of the world as well as her wits do. She lives between the round folds of her thighs; she is physically aware, she is caught in the fleshy constrictions and awarenesses of the inside of her mouth and throat—she drinks water with elaborate and, to me, ornamental gluttony. Flesh overlaps flesh and forms pockets, companionable, not clanking but noisy in a way for her. And then there’s the reality of her toes down there. The physical is familiar to her, a place of automatic diversion. Hurt is always partly physical; it infiltrates her flesh, the pockets—places of registry of herself—in real life, waking life. The insidethe-oyster pearl and pink hind end, in your clothes or naked, is the exposed heart of flesh—the key to attentiveness: to confession; one is driven to touch the finest part: a thrill.
The Runaway Soul Page 13