That pale and careless and unjudged power of theirs?
I’m a lot kinder in talking about myself than I am when I talk about Nonie. Sight has shadowy areas where wide and untrained vision spreads out from the narrower, schooled registry of conscious inspection. Coherence is a serious and censorious matter—but it is not part of the ordinary nature of things: Hey, it’s all in your head, buddy-boy. I guess that’s how YOU see things, like a crazy man . . .
We’ll wait and see who’s right; we’ll see how it comes out.
I am a confessed dream self, a translator of night murmurs into public statements—somewhat. I peer out of my dream of knowledge at her—at Nonie; I’m in a burrow of assumed comprehension.
Take me, for example, at age thirteen—the age Nonie was at the time the lightning affected her so much. I was a party to my puberty, quarrelsome, sometimes cruel, un-Edenish expelled—was I so different from her? I was male—and tall—she wasn’t those things—do I mind her aggression? I was known to have a temper, to be grudging—not all the time . . . I’m a lot kinder in talking about myself but I can begin to see her.
I was considered more often than not to be oddly good in spirit . . . rabbinical: philosophic: scientific . . .
Well, put that aside. I had a wish, an ambition to be bad, to be ordinary, to enter the real world— these are not my terms, my words, but those of boys and girls in other scenes, on porches in varying lights, and in living rooms and rumpus rooms and rathskellers, and in the woods and fields: confessions, boasts, seductions . . . The football coach told me, You’re okay in a pinch. You’re rough . . .
But he kicked me off the team for not being serious enough. He gave me a talk, a semi-talking-to; a burly man, with blue eyes and wavy grayish-gold-rust hair: he said, Now don’t talk, don’t talk back, don’t change things around—you’re tricky . . .
The rest of this talking-to was a somewhat defensive, somewhat offensive attack on himself and then on everything that was ordinary or unblessed compared to the purity of sports and of the will then, and then he attacked sports to show he was fair-minded, and then came a paean of praise for competition and victory and single-mindedness, and finally a gently and maybe frighteningly kind-and-rough dismissal of me.
But my mother—Lila—said I was relentless—but she liked getting her own way particularly in relation to me—and she tried to train me to give in to her—she said I was relentless especially in relation to Nonie—and sometimes when I was obstinate toward her, toward Lila, she led me to understand—rightly or wrongly—that I was admirably set in my ways, male, humorless . . . cute . . . and to be outwitted . . .
She felt I was asking for it . . .
Nonie’s slanders were different, perhaps in kind and spirit, from my roughness . . . She said of Lisa, for instance, that she was a bedwetter, which wasn’t true . . . I doubt that I ever lied in order to do harm to someone through lies: but I tell the truth to do harm sometimes . . .
Lila said, It’s terrible when you tell the truth—it makes me sick when you tell Nonie you don’t love her, you can’t stand her . . . I never saw such battles between any two people. I’m a battler myself but the two of you, my God, my God . . . Goodness, it scared me, the two of you going at it, hammer and TONGS, it scared me out of a year’s growth . . . And you, you were always, I don’t know what, but even as a little child, you came out better than I thought you would . . .
Then—in a strange, drugged, sad voice—I preferred you, which was a terrible thing to do to my own daughter . . . isten, Wiley—And a funny look overspread her face: You have funny weapons: you had a very strange mother: LISTEN TO ME: YOU AND NONIE WASN’T SO DIFFERENT: SHE’S NOT SO DIFFERENT FROM ME: I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU SEE [IN THINGS] BUT IF YOU ASK ME A LOT OF WHAT YOU SEE IS CRAZY . . .
Nonie was born in the 1920s and had her adolescence in the 1930s, and to whatever extent she was Momma’s and Daddy’s creation—and of the movies and schools—and of ancient beliefs and whatever—she carried the marks of that period, of events in the world then: she flickers with those moments, those distant men, those famous women, the ones of that time . . .
The opinions of the moment (a phrase of Lila’s) . . .
Is she a symbol? Is she a set of choices that she made and that we made, too, but with differences because we’re separate people with different endowments and different fates—because we live and have lived in moments different from hers? Is she sort of all of us—me too? Is she herself in no language except that of actual seconds in a real day . . . in reality?
You use what you are the way she uses her wits, Wiley . . . What do you expect? You’re the same as she is but you hide it better . . . It makes me sick, the two of you not getting along: why can’t we have peace and common sense—and some family love?
Lila differentiated between me and Nonie this way: You’re the killer; she’s just a troublemaker—she’s only a woman. You make some sacrifices for people; she never does. When you stop and think about things, you’re not so selfish. You mean well sometimes—she doesn’t care—she doesn’t care about anyone . . . Neither one of you is generous. I don’t like her as much as I like you—you’re more likable. She’s not interesting; I think you’re interesting, Wiley . . . (It’s a family secret how it matters which one is interesting and to whom and when . . . ) It’s not livable around her—I like being with you.
Well, then she’s the killer, isn’t she? And I’m the sucker—isn’t that so?
The thing about being interesting to Lila is that then her forbearance and her wish to cheat you and sometimes smash you—those become built-in. In the real world, back then, and still, I often forget who I am, that I have any worldly attributes—I turn pale and transparent in my own mind, changeable. I am a lot of characters in my own mind, maybe unconvincingly. Still, if someone’s watching and listening to you, you get a chance to live through a day with roughly the same baggage of identity as when you started the day, as when you first woke up in the albino air. But, still, there is more to it than this.
When memory tries to draw on this stuff, it tends not to use actual moments because in them the stuff of futurity—which is in every actual moment—makes memory stagger and stammer around as the mind did at the time in the face of, in the light of what you can’t know about what will happen next and in the face of what then happens next.
The abrupt truth of reality remembered is ignorance all over again.
This absence of finality can make me hunger for finality, make me murderous or apocalyptic, crazed, overly rational, religious and set in my ways—suicidal . . . Pointlessness for me then is waiting for the point to be made, the blade to appear, and I’m humiliated or scared or empty or all of those then, or I manage to be gallant on the chopping block, at the sight of the materializing act—enmity, judgment, the point—and my opinion of it then, at the last minute . . .
I think I mean that, symbols aside, Nonie and I are merely two people, not nature and an unnatural will to educated truce, we are not the spirits of good and evil: we are sister and brother—adopted brother. Nonie’s face in my memory never has the sharp and incredible loveliness and ferocity of her presence when the presence of the future was in her—that is, in one of the actual moments of the past with the presence in it of thoughts of the future and of that urgency . . . Do you remember what it was like when no certainty existed about what would happen, and, so, no certainty existed about what her character was—this is so even in an in-between moment, in a lull after and before her acts offer their clouded testimony . . . her blurred and complicated acts. Her face when everything is in play, and we don’t know what will turn out to have been good and bad in the long run, has a vibrating brilliance of reality that it can’t have in memory when the story is over and only inquiry and questions remain. In memory, I get only a general face, a face without the future in it—not the real thing.
But sometimes I get a real moment going with the real blur of her real face in it, and then I’m so flabberga
sted by the shrewd intensity of her reality—and of my own reality, too—dragged along into the continuums of the shared light of those times—when our lives were conjoined—dragged into the reality that she was so good at (as an older child) and because her style said she was good at it—that I lose control; and sequences and good sense disappear in the miracle and blare of such recall.
Then, almost, I see her unedited face at the edge of her unknown future when she was eleven, thirteen, twenty, twenty-nine, thirty-three, and dead—then, in the last case, it is not her real face, it is memory, it is her future as thought, as memory, saying the future is over for her . . . But that mixture of ages, the mixture of faces in one face, and me actually there looking at it, is uncomfortably without meaning, without distance inside my own life and head. The actuality of seeing her face again in one real moment at the edge of the void of real time to come is so hard to bear that it blinds me for hours at a time—it kills me. Daddy used to say, Be a gentleman and a scholar even if it kills you. He wasn’t kidding. He meant it . . . my God. Why should I want to see Nonie, good old Nonie, my prime knowledge of evil, NONIE, at the cost of hours of my life sickened and shocked, astounded by reality?
This cost makes her invisible, unexaminable, immune to judgment—ordinary. Well, why not? Is it such hell to be ordinary? Is it worth it, is she worth an actual and unexpurgated moment of judgment? She had character, she made up for what she actually was . . . See, I am quoting Momma, but even as I write, I see the pinkish skin of Nonie’s lower abdomen and upper thigh, big—so it’s when I was small—and I seem to smell her. I know it’s fragmentary. The height, the air, the dimensionality of continuance hold mysteries, the future, the not-mastered thought . . . Can I approach that flesh knowing I won’t survive, innocently or uninfluenced, this time, either? Pride is never in such abeyance as that, is it?
Did Nonie feel real pain? Of course. Nonie was often miserable psychically. And she had bad monthly cramps and that affected her feelings, too. She was dramatic over scratches, cuts, her periods, and being snubbed. She never got significantly hurt physically that I can recall. She had her appendix out—never mind.
Did she feel pain to match the pain she caused? Or was it that any pain she felt triggered her demand for justice? She burned to death—maybe that hurt. If I think of her as a forty-two-year-old woman burning to death, I’m moved not to tears (except for all of us in one form or another caught in moments in apocalyptic or ordinary incineration) but I am moved to fear and doubt . . .
Mostly, it’s hard for me to care what happened to her—including her death in the flames. Do you love your sister? Do I? Probably. It’s enjoined. And she was there. But I still don’t care much what happened to her. If I love her or forgive her or whatever, it doesn’t mean I want her to come back—I don’t want to be with her. Any forgiveness going, she always used for her purposes. I can’t go through that anymore—you know how it is in real life, don’t you?
To say it, a third way, differently—to define it as (a narrative hypothesis) a relative absolute, powers and illusions and emotions and one’s strength of command are really different when you picture them tinged with the openness and logic of an as yet unknown future. Men and women and children are kind of beautiful naturally but scarily then. And fear . . . I mean the famous fear and trembling—is it toward God? It is more toward life than toward Godlessness . . . Is it a sickness, a weakness, a neurotic thing? Is it just us moving humanly in a real moment at the edge of a human future? Do you have to imagine a Utopianly improved or an apocalyptically ended future to control your fear and trembling?
And up-until-now is not a pure thing. If this moment is after a defeat at her hands, I don’t have honest access to my future except in repentance or unease and caution toward her. And if it is after a victory over her, then it is as a perpetrator that I find my identity in being grown up . . . necessarily oblivious of the harm I do . . . as I proceed into the future with some kind of guilt or other, which is insufferable for others in a lot of ways and for me, too, of course.
The trembling then . . . The taste of life in my mouth . . . The taste of actual seconds as they pass . . . is it an unforgivable, and inescapable, motion?
Momma said, I always stood by her—she’s my daughter—an extension-of-Momma-into-Futurity—it wouldn’t look good if I didn’t . . . And I’ll be honest: I’m glad she’s a fighter; I’m a realist; I was a good mother to her—no one ever advised me honestly about this.
About standing by a real child? In her temper? And abilities? And disabilities? In her flawed reality? About violence and pain and reality? About how to help a real child survive? About forgiveness? In real life? In the rush of things in the real world? About the toughness necessary to get your own way?
You know what it was like when Nonie woke up to what was going on somewhere? Nonie was always someone who had to keep up with you, she always helped herself to whatever was there to be had . . .
Nonie fought with her weapons to have what she wanted, to have a share of the world, to have what she saw others having; and this was a daily thing, merely that; and a truth about everyone . . . Over and over, Momma came back to saying, It is normal, all of this, all that Nonie is . . .
But if, then, Nonie, abstractly, was normal or typical or okay—she needed no defense—she didn’t need Momma . . . She could find a home anywhere in the world, Nonie could, then . . . And, so, Momma couldn’t manage, usually, to stick to any consistent degree of abstraction about Nonie then unless she sort of gave Nonie up to wickedness or to being really successful or to being another self of Momma’s . . . Is that what being successful means? That you become an image of that sort, purely, but in an unclean way, for everyone? For a lot of people? I mean, is abstraction about one’s self possible only if someone is really successful and is invisible in that? Is that what being successful means? If you become a celebrated writer who represents The Normal?
I mean, Momma and all of us had to be illogical and dumb if we wanted to protect Nonie and not be liars and accomplices, if we wanted to be unlike her. And Nonie had to sail along without an honestly known or honestly felt past and with only an idealized—or typical—future, one with the usual meanings, if she didn’t want to know or think about this.
So it was as if her life was at the center of abstract meaning; and her language and errors and stupidities were clever after all. She was freed from moral common sense so completely I thought it was moral bliss to be ordinary . . . I wanted to live in that moral anarchy, too. The recipe for this citizenship, Nonie’s system, was that in it you never have more than one moment—or than one type of moment—and it is rigorously typical, no matter what. And it fills one sentence, maybe two, but they’re the same old sentences—it all is typical—it is always a now, always an always, always a game in progress; and always in it she is innocent enough and she knows the game and the most real moral truth . . .
The greater the degree of abstraction, then, if you go along this way, the more moments are subsumed in it without your noticing that the real moments have disappeared: that it is costing you your life that you are doing this, that this is being done. The more any one actual moment is excluded, the more anyone’s life loses its features, its particularity . . . perhaps its truth. But the easier it is for you to come to convenient judgments about yourself.
Momma stayed in individual moments without Nonie’s history and with only Nonie’s general future in them: The way I talk is warning enough to the wise. A friend would understand me.
A friend would know what category of uselessness to put Nonie in just from the tones, the obliquities, the ways Momma talked about her, she meant.
It was as if the truth was hidden at a slant among falling beams of revolving light among the leaves and bugs—beams and rays and ovals of glare—in a truly old, full-grown woods . . .
But then what did it mean when Momma seemed to speak with directness: You have a future—no wonder Nonie hates you . . . unless she marries a ric
h man . . . unless she gets what she wants . . . Was that about a Jewish girl’s fear-and-trembling that she wasn’t in the male line? Was there a simple meaning there after all, unhidden, and as obvious as a ravine into which an entirely new army of everyone—nearly everyone—would fall? Or when Momma said, S.L. likes to think everyone’s an angel, so he gets lied to, he gets hurt a lot, but I like people just as they are: I can take it. Is that explanation enough?
S.L. said Momma didn’t know anything; she invented the nastiest ideas possible in order to scare people and get her own way and to drive everybody mad. But sometimes he listened to her. Sometimes I did, too.
Momma would say to me, Why do you hate her so? She’s not a criminal.
I said, She’s no good at all—that’s what I said. I thought she was, in the end, of a criminal order of being, among the genera of worthlessness. Further degrees of Evil had to do with psychotic boldness. But I wasn’t sure of this; I wasn’t sure I wasn’t being petty and selfish. I mostly refused to let myself think about it. When I didn’t think, I carried feeling, or mood, a mooded conclusion about her: I felt that Nonie was as “ruthless” (domestically) as her standing at a given time permitted, that she was a point at which Evil bubbled into the world as a kind of truth of an individual soul and particular will and as part of the overall concatenation of events . . . In some ways I thought her An Ordinary Nazi but well this side of Nazism morally because of where we lived, but I thought her to be worse than most murderers in books. I didn’t always mind that, though. I just behaved in certain limited ways because of feeling like that. Sometimes I minded it. I did and I didn’t want her punished—I mostly wanted to have the world near me, around me, to be different. Sometimes Momma and Daddy both said, You’re some kind of terrible snob who’s bad for people . . . Sometimes they said, You’re the nicest person of all, you’re too sweet for your own good. Often I minded it that they were real.
The Runaway Soul Page 16