Daddy tried to calm Lisa’s mother: This is a terrible thing to happen. We’re a friendly neighborhood.
I guess the measure that establishes limits is not clear since it has to do with pain in degrees and in nature and is, in a very creepy way, statistically and metaphysically considered even if people aren’t statisticians and philosophers—on the face of it, although, in truth, clumsily or not, they are.
I fainted . . . The thought of pain makes me ill.
A threatened lawsuit—over a tennis game? You-must-be-insane—you’re-talking-like-a-crazy-person. A lunatic.
The sight of Lisa’s pain, the reality, means what? These things happen all the time. Bruises and abrasions and defeat bloom in our garden.
It’s too terrible—I can’t think about it. Let’s keep this in proportion; no one broke any bones. Everything is peaceful . . . We’re all one big happy family . . .
The family is made up of some essential universality of Nonieness having to do with us and them . . . And with blood . . .
I don’t mean the family is this as a gist or essence. I mean the reality, the thing itself, in real moments . . .
Nonie: “I didn’t do . . . anyTHING. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything bad, I didn’t do anything you should think was bad.”
A partial analysis of Nonie’s speech: The first I-didn’t-do-anyTHING is a correction of suspicions that anything meaningful occurred. The second I-didn’t-do-anything means that nothing substantive occurred through the agency of her act. The third denies that her act occurred in any reality in which jealousy, violence, and mental or physical pain exist commonly enough to be used as a measure for every little thing even assuming it can be. Nonie refused that, insisted that it was not so, and that no suspicion should now or ever attach to her at all in regard to pain, ill will, cruel and limitless impulse, calculation, calculations of will—and so on.
Nonie was clearer, in a way, than Momma was. Nonie claimed the right to be seen as someone who lived entirely in sunlight. Her acts were not worth discussing, were not to be discussed. No questions about her ought sensibly to exist. The simplicity of her vocabulary maybe was stupidity, as Lila said, but it was also a style and a tactic, a conscious anesthesia of her mind and soul and everyone else’s, a way of separating her life from any universe of harm and from any real responsibility for the consequences of her will.
When I was young, much of the time the future so prevailed with me that nothing else had that much authority as explanation, as comfort (and unease), as the source of reason, and as a measure of (practical) goodness, the future with me in it and stronger than I was. Nothing mattered as much as the future, a common future, a firm and unarguable continuing, an ongoing persistence of more or less joined destinies . . . A protection of that. So, goodness arose from that, from what lasted in real moments and involved more than one person.
I might have liked the tactics Nonie used but they were hers. I thought she ruined them. I could not see that Nonie was wise but I did think she was clever and shrewd . . . The future is in my bones then and now—it has never stopped being a measure of goodness although, God knows, I am not young anymore.
A falsity is futurity lied about as solved.
I feel it like a doom, my hatred and amusement and pity for Nonie. I pitied Nonie’s way of trying to handle the sneaky—furtive and gorgeous—ghost-dwindle and ascent to futurity. Conventional meanings are comforts. They’re classics—you’re a fool to use them and a fool not to. It’s all okay. Nonie’s nothing much. I cannot ever fully grasp how Nonie, in her pride, was willing to cast off the imperatives of intelligence, an honest view of the past and a real worry about the future, and how she proceeded with such assurance—and such velocity—anyway . . . She needs me . . . The way she did it, she lived in a Now become paramount in pleasure and excruciating pain, those things as they were present, flat-out, up-front, sans perspective. Nonie’s calculations were based on notions of people in a sort of present-tense landscape and on notions of what-works and what-will-work as a sure thing there . . .
Am I so different?
I think the cheated-on past, the lied-about future will harm us more than we have to be hurt, but I think it is hard to measure. I think the degrees of this matter—and motives, and terms, and extents of accomplishment and judgments about lesser and greater and more dangerous crimes. It’s easier just to choose sides and to do everything because you’re on one side but then the world suffers, doesn’t it?
Pudgy Nonie makes you choose sides just in the obvious way she presents herself—it’s hard to be rude to her but if you’re not, you’re her accomplice. We must go into the future as those who have hurt her or as her friends. She went out every day to play with other children and she forced herself on them. She forced them to accept or deny her. It is a matter of degree . . .
Similarly, she went into people’s houses even when those people were uncomfortable with her.
She was pushy, obtuse, talkative: I didn’t do any . . . THING. She was without moral self-consciousness. She was actual and unselfconscious.
Momma said, What can I do?
Nonie’s fine eyes are ripe and guarded—they are hard-surfaced with denied guilt. Often, they have the bloom of tantrum. She was always pretty in some way or another. She slept long hours. In her dreams, she dealt with the future—and with her past. In wakefulness, she was active, very active . . . often snubbed . . . Then she’d go to bed . . . In the waking hours she was often in bed sleeping. Momma went around using phrases for Nonie like “More-normal-than-normal.” Nonie had clear skin and good sleep habits. Momma kept Nonie’s image obscure. Momma had a funny, cruel, partly sentimental grip on the actuality of pain all-the-time for everyone and on what it cost her to be a mother—she was different from Nonie in other ways as well. It hurt Momma to be a mother at all and especially to be one to Nonie. She wanted Nonie’s too openly cheerful-cheerleader smile and Hollywood-starlet-in-the-sunshine-with-ermine-on-her-bedroom-slippers-while-she-reads-comic-books-like-you-and-me style modified to show that Nonie knew she was expensive for the world, for women, for Momma . . . for everyone. Momma said, People around here are not absolute fools. Momma said, Nonie won’t listen to reason: Nonie doesn’t know what reason is . . . It could hit her over the head, a good reason, and she wouldn’t even feel it . . . Momma said, fairly often, that the presence of pain was too much for sensitive Nonie.
And then, because Nonie and her real-life manner existed, Momma said, Nonie’s a fool, but in some ways she’s a realist. Many people like her. She gets along in the world.
Momma went in and out of any number of opinions about Nonie.
Nonie said to her, You make me laugh. You’re a riot.
And Nonie said to Lila, You make things up. No one likes you.
(Nonie was steadier in her moods and purposes and dislikes than Lila was in hers . . .)
Lila-makes-things-up: that meant Lila no longer had a real life or mind but was abstract, a mother, and dead and ghostly otherwise. Nonie often said she herself had no gift for what-was-made-up. Nonie couldn’t watch the movers from a window, for instance—she’d have to go outside and touch the side of the truck, the metal hot from the sun. Watching children play, she’d twitch, she’d start to play, too, on the sidelines, and not only with truncated and imaginary (or little) gestures of play, either: she’d do what the children she was watching were doing: the whole game, all-out, but alone and strangely—I mean because of its odd reality, its echo-yness as well . . .
I’m a better person than you, she said to Lila often. That meant, in part, that Lila wasn’t cheerful-likable—being likable had to with feeling good in the way Nonie sometimes felt good: a rapid shallows, a brooklike flow of will as a being regarded as innocent by a docile company—as someone good in an unvarying progress of goodness in an unchanging and certain world. Until she was challenged—then the world changed nature and being likable became a claim of righteousness among the issues, the challenges, and the
wars.
Nonie’s sense of the normal, her idyll of the world, was melodramatically single in intent, and unambiguously set on her own projects, her own life—she insisted on this to what was a dangerous, and even imbecile, extent, Lila thought. This insistence lay in Nonie’s face, its expressions, her voice, its shrill, birds-tied-together tone: I am happy, I am justified in being happy, people who disagree with me are really wrong, I am really truly right.
Nonie was really right.
Do what I say or I will hate you . . .
Physically, Nonie seemed terrible to me. Nothing in her posture or style or face showed any sense that life would proceed moment by moment in the future and would have to be lived by us as humanly and as anarchically as the past had been, or that there was just us as bulwarks against despair and against the isolation in our souls. I think Nonie imagined an entirely new, entirely happy future that would be truly as she wanted it, as in an ad.
Momma said once, I think ads destroyed her mind.
As part of this insane newness for us that Nonie kept insisting had come into existence along about the same time as her life—well, Nonie felt it put her teeth on edge to call Lila Mother. She said you and she said she. Or she used a sentimental but commanding tone when she said MOTHER—it stuck out a mile.
She’s only guessing, like the rest of us, Momma said, referring to Nonie’s certainties and tactics and renamings and sporty—and cultist—taciturnities. It was clear day-by-day that Nonie made mistakes and was limited in her systems even when she was having successes. But it sometimes seemed she was right. It was hard to keep track of in moment-to-moment stuff concerning her. It was easier to think her judgment was better—was saner or “more normal” than it was, than our less cheerful and more wobbly judgments were. As Lila said, A lot of the time it takes too much energy to hate her or anyone (to keep in mind that someone is foul and a blot on the world and is wrong but insistent in judgment). So you can get away with a lot—having a lot of gall is a good tactic.
Nonie was the quickest of anyone to pick up traces of other people’s abysmal cruelties, those in-the-cause-of-good, too. Nonie caught what seemed to me to be every over-the-line murderousness or cold-bloodedness that came along in her presence; and she did it faster than anyone—or so it seemed to me. It occurred to me that she was sensitive to it, attuned to it—valuable in that way and dangerous that way, too . . .
So you can see how, in the light of this, and considering her disdain for futurity and the past, she would understand her being pretty—when she became pretty—better in a lot of ways than other pretty women (or men do) their being pretty. And you can guess at some of the mistakes she made. I never knew anyone who lived so consciously, so thoroughly, what it was to be pretty. Nonie was startlingly complete within her own system. She became pretty when she was sixteen. Breathtaking for a while, Momma said, but it won’t last; she’s got nothing to back it up. She’s not serious about it—treating it as grounds for charity toward others, for instance, or as something that involved her in the negotiable opinions of others in a more earnest way than in childhood. Nonie said Momma was jealous of her, and hateful and mean, as Momma had always been to her (Nonie said). Thin and fine-mouthed and erect and quick to smile, Nonie, pretty in the way she was, in an open, friendly style, took credit for her looks and began to sound both naïve and shrewd: I don’t have any flaws. I’m perfect—this year.” Nonie’s joke. About irony: an idea is not, in actuality, an ideal thing even if it is treated as if it were just that. ‘Realism,’ which, since it doesn’t predicate romance or anything subtle, is a form of modesty: I’m sweet sixteen and I’m very stuck-up. That was modest in a way. Whenever she said she was ‘stuck-up,’ she meant she wanted to have her own way, all the way, because she was pretty and young, and such things were temporary—although not for her: she turned it into an always in her usual reasoning. But you were supposed to see her wanting her own way as a modest (and sometimes tragic) request—as in a queen in a history book or in an ancient play. Her legs and voice and eyes weren’t good, but her overall appearance was, and not too many people notice flaws for a while, Lila said.
She likes to hear herself talk, Nonie said of Lila. It doesn’t mean anything, what she says; it’s all made-up stuff; it’s beside the point.
Nonie said to me, “If I had good legs and a better nose—and a better hairline—I’d go to Hollywood . . .”
And, still, her eyes gave off intermittent signals of her incredible obduracy, signals of darkness, not such bad darkness when she was a sixteen-year-old. It’s been a long wait: women need to get their own way, Lila said; Nonie is at the crossroads, she has a chance—so we’ll see. Maybe she’ll turn out to be a nice person if she gets what she wants—she’s a fighter.
Nonie said, I like having really nice skin—I’m like a rose—and I have very pretty eyes.
She knew what was happening to her—even if she didn’t understand, she knew. But when she claimed credit for her looks it was a trick on you—a demand not to be a victim and a request for intellectual credit for her prettiness: as if she had thought it up and worked it out and gotten it down on paper, on flesh, and on actual moments as they tooted along.
You could see it in her face—slightly concussed but a little fibrous and calculating, hard-minded, a resistance to everything outside herself.
So that the faults she saw in others were her own faults, the secrets hers . . . She had no time for your real faults, usually . . . She was alert, and anxious not to lose out, and curiously wrong, insanely wrong, sometimes, about things: “Looks are the only thing that matter in THIS world . . .”
Still, she was sad. I see things in perspective, she said. That is, she preferred her sense of consequences to that of anyone else. I didn’t know her well anymore. Her life was such a hash of flirtation and anger and clothes and parties and distaste and appetite for sex in her version and on her terms that I couldn’t disentangle the individual words she had for things, one from another, or recognize the intention of the paragraphs, the soliloquies of her utterance as a very pretty girl. I think that women, and competing with them (and hurting them), all that was more important to her than stuff about boys and men or than anything boys or men did. Men pleased her mostly by being real gentlemen. She was secretive about her violences and her crushes on women and her real moodiness, a stringent moodiness now. People know me. I have an even temper, Nonie said. People know I’m likable. To Momma’s dismay, Nonie drank a lot—she passed out in public a few times. She was self-willed but she was secretive about being like that. She tried to make it a matter of rules, of respectability and breeding, being self-willed: I know how to respect myself . . .
Nonie held her head in such a way when she was dressed up that it looked as if she were in sunlight and wind. And it worked: a lot of people who didn’t like her thought she was likable, somewhere, to others. I never saw Nonie lose her nerve. Not once. I was interested enough in her at this time to watch her off and on.
Lila feels that hate is to be expected as a general rule and that Nonie lays down her fortifications and tactics steadily and from early on in any given circumstance.
Nonie says, I like everyone. I think well of everyone.
She didn’t expect a future in which anyone would keep track of her statements and her acts and, except with her sons later, she had no such future.
Lila: “Sympathy’s not so wonderful. It’s what you get when you’re down and out and no one’s scared of you anymore. I’d rather be hated.” Like Nonie—nervy, brave, hated? “I have to hand it to her: in many ways, she is a freer person than I am . . .”
Nonie: I’m not good around sickness and sick people—they only care about themselves. If you can’t love somebody, just keep your mouth shut—that’s what I always say . . .
Nonie could not genuinely give sympathy. She wanted it but she was too angry to give it; Momma had foxed her in this area—Nonie’s asking for it seriously meant Nonie was really defeated; and Nonie
couldn’t do that, at least not too often. She couldn’t ask for real sympathy. And she was too jealous of it and too embattled and too enamored of what other people might have in the way of it for her ever to relax about it—or give it; it was an incredible issue with her. It made her raw and sore and gave her little rest.
With sympathy ruled out, when someone was weakened you couldn’t love them. Nonie thought she was like everyone: she had evidence that some people were like her, so everyone—everyone nice—was. (If you weren’t like her, you weren’t nice.) She firmly, crazedly believed love-among-the-healthy didn’t involve sympathy at all but only envy and acquisition—of each other, of each other’s rank, of each other’s belongings. The sick can’t have or get first-rate love—real love—so you should shut up about your flaws and admire the leading woman. And since you don’t love someone sick, you should shut up about sympathy except as a matter of lying socially.
Nonie: I like love but I’m not sloppy.
In a world of original sin, Lila felt that love, romantic love or family love or both, was a lot of madness since lovers attack you. She felt she had the right to be disgusted when loved, to feel grabbed at—she used cruelty to breathe, to live. But she felt love, she felt suffocated, she felt cruelty—she was a feeling-riddled narcissist, hugely proud and clearly strange. But Nonie would have nothing to do with any of that; everything was spoken of as if sunlit (as I said); all endings were happy endings (unless she was saddened); real love was a sort of splendor of games, a local equality-of-scrapping—with Nonie on top. Hearty, athletic sentiment: straightforward secrecy; propaganda; festivities in the present moment of being the center-of-a-story: Nonie in love, this was Nonie in love: I’m in love with love, [but] I’m hard to please when it comes to men.
The Runaway Soul Page 17