Enthusiastic—mannerly—huge (in proportion to me). It is possible that Momma, angry with Nonie and trying to win an argument with her, said, I’d rather have Katie for a daughter than YOU. But rivalry doesn’t always need an outside trigger to get it going more violently.
Katie’s flapping sundress the day she fell, it flapped like a flag as she fell. Her shoulder blade was thrown out. Fantastickle, grub-grub. If you see someone fall, in those seconds, in some of those seconds, the figure is not that of a person—it is that of someone who is unlucky . . . and you withdraw. I do, I become a bystander figure . . . I try to regulate my sympathies. It is not one of us, it is someone who has lost her safety who is falling.
Lila says, I can’t feel sorry for everyone—I haven’t that kind of time—I’m serious when I feel sorry for someone . . . Now, S.L. feels sorry as a general rule; he does a little here and a little there; and then he thinks he’s Mahatma Gandhi; but it’s a big show with him. He likes to pretend he’s the Biggest Cheese in the World and just like Gandhi.
A pretty girl, a lovely person . . . a child. Those were terms for sympathy. They set, or calibrated, one’s dismay. A fine person, never did any harm to anyone.
(If I asked S.L. or Lila a question about what they were saying, each, either was likely to say, Hush, the grown-ups are talking.)
It is hard to know what to think about someone else’s pain. After she fell, she was there on the concrete of her driveway. She held out her hand—her thumb is askew. Her nose was swollen and torn. Her forearms begin to darken a purple-and-green and shuddery ochre and were beginning to swell. Her shoulder is out of its socket. She is not so deep in shock that she fails to be upset at how she looks.
Don’t let the pain break your spirit . . .
Katie, six months ago, hurt a boy (who was teasing her) by hitting him in the forehead with a roller skate.
It was what Ma would call A seven days’ wonder . . . No one particularly cared about it.
(Lila has said to S.L. about one thing and another: You ought to fight back, S.L. Taking it lying down isn’t going to improve your standing.)
In the first moment of falling, when you’re the faller, you enter a wide and glassy moment—or I did—a moment of the conviction of the oncoming of real pain. It’s a different circumstance of will. You keep yourself from screaming or you don’t—Daddy used to say, Being a coward makes a lot of sense some ways. It’s been my experience that my blood does run cold when the accident starts, maybe in preparation for the chill of shock. I fall into the raw mouth of air and pursue comfort—first in a calculation of the event as This probably won’t kill me . . . Daddy’s near . . . He’ll get me to the hospital . . . There’ll be blood . . .Then the first thud and the conviction of pain around a central wooden mass of shock, your body still conscious in ugly surprise. Then maybe you lose your head for a while in the pain. My head sits above the plunging, roaring body and is silent and inert. Maybe I am crying. I pass out in blinks; the chagrin is raw. I trusted a dead tree branch. In a way, the onset of pain is a little bit like falling asleep: here is the sudden other landscape, or world, or planet, or headscape, here is the ruined other light; now I will never be, oh, a good shortstop, or beautiful . . . I will never be a worthwhile person now. The dread ruinousness of the state . . . the thread snapping and you are in darkness . . . You are in the pain continuum.
A slap, a fall, serious grief, the collapse of love, a bad humiliation, I think: Oh yes, here it is.
I was never of divine substance, never so clever or so privileged as to escape this stuff for very long. The feeling of my face and of my hair in the air at such times—well, once blood fell from a cut on my forehead and clotted on my eyelids, and in my eyelashes. The self-conscious belief, overall, in a suburban neighborhood that the place is idyllic or Elysian, that no one needs to suffer, trembles and collapses.
Momma, Momma, I hurt myself . . .
Be brave. Try to be brave.
Momma, Momma, I look disgusting . . .
One time when I was hurt S.L. looked up at the sky and muttered, What the hell is going on?
Katie, as she fell, called out, “Nonie!” I have thought about this, and I can see that it can be argued she called out to Nonie to save her. Maybe Katie stepped backward and fell accidentally . . . Nonie was saying something bad and Katie stepped back . . . MAYBE THE DEVIL WAS RUNNING THINGS AT THAT MOMENT—it was Pure Accident that means. Maybe Nonie forgot the steps were there when she pushed Katie—if she pushed Katie. Maybe Nonie, goaded, did it unconsciously. Maybe Katie felt guilty and was looking to have an accident (a local thing that was said often).. The movement of Nonie’s hands was perhaps a flutter and not a push and Katie misread it, especially if both girls were in an unruly bonfire of temper toward each other—little fishwives (a phrase of Daddy’s). They were shouting at each other. Under some circumstances, THINGS CHANGE. YOU DON’T BLAME PEOPLE THEN . . .
The memory of the ugly phosphorescence of the realization that you have been hurt triggers the sympathy, but if you want to help, you must not let yourself be upset—by the damaged nose, the skewed thumb, the blood in the eye socket. Do you live in a luminously intended universe some of the time?
(Daddy, being unkind, has said of Margy Rogers—as he has of other women—that she sees the Devil in every man’s butt-end.)
When Margy ran out of her house to go to Katie, her face was lit with a kind of narrowness of brilliance of doctrinal resistance . . . An immediate agony—and exaltation—of revision. Daddy often accused women (and children) of being important. For a long time I didn’t know why he thought that was an accusation.
He said, Everyone has to be important: that’s what’s wrong with the world: a little humble cooperation would make the world a better place. But he taught me that holding some doctrine or other unreasonably was a matter of honor.
Nonie hit me with a brick once . . . And she threw a knife with the blade aimed and cut me just over the eye. The motions of her temper are a given language. Not uncommon.
Margy in her shorts, navy-blue. The muscles and visible skin of her throat ticked and flinched. Shock, nausea and chills, then screaming and the bile; and the awful shame at being hurt—in the sunlight, Katie and Margy in shorts holding her daughter. She begins by saying, “How did you let this happen?” but then she mostly shuts up. In a practical sense, this was one of the human limits of kindness. Nonie may have been innocent, but it was Nonie. Nonie, up high on the lawn, said, “I can’t stand the sight of blood—” She was going to faint. She was asking for help. I felt that her making a claim to be the primary survivor here was a form of guilt—the wish to be the one whose survival matters more, or most, suggests what the reality was like before this moment. The Deal with me first: save ME means the other person was never real. I think Margy knew from her past when she had been the guilty one, knew the terms of guilt; that thirst for fame, the attitudinizing thing in self-justification. That asking for one’s own suffering to come first. Innocence takes its turn . . . I think . . . I don’t know. I am alive. I don’t know.
The sly thing that the mind is. The demon-twists of one’s pretensions.
A neighbor—Melissa Van Maytree—was running across her lawn with a white enamelled tin box with a red cross on it in her hand. (The box held gauze bandages, a scissors, an enamelled white tin circular thing around a central hole—adhesive tape—a bottle of iodine with a rubber eyedropper . . . Mercurochrome . . . a mercury thermometer, a dimestore one, with red mercury.) The box was rattling-chittering. Melissa, forty years old, ran, smart-eyed, clumsy-footed, horrified, worried-looking, calm enough; she was accusing-and-important. Margy Rogers is kneeling in the driveway holding Katie. Nonie at the top of the steps is faint. Nonie can’t bear the sight of blood. The time she hit my eye with the thrown knife, she passed out. Margy said to Nonie, “Why are you looking at us like that?” Katie, the bloodied girl, hair disarranged, long legs sprawled and bare, her damaged hand rests against Margy’s blouse. Li
la said later, I stand by Nonie just the way Margy stands by Katie . . . The ways the girls were mothered are part of the story.
Nonie wibble-wobbles on the steep, rounded height of the lawn. She is about to faint.
“GO AWAY!” Margy shouts at her in a kind of dementedly demanding madness of wanting to have the power to comfort her kid. The danger to Nonie and the comfort for Katie are like light and shadow. Does the world have sense and reason? For two opposed people? I cannot imagine an embodiment of mercy in real time that is not a darkly sympathetic thing of immense exclusiveness: Go to hell, all the rest of you: I intend to save my child. Help me to save my child. A universal mercifulness would be a different world from this one, surely.
Nonie is no longer really a child; still, she is a child of sunlight. How pretty she is. It was an accident. No one is to blame. I have no filmed record of Nonie’s face that day—her eyes, her lips, the flesh around her lips . . . the muscles of her neck. A confession of malice is often a boast—so in what ways, to what degree is it true if it is meant to hurt and scare you? The hysteria, the politics of a real thing, the dirtied unsacredness of being merely a human observer, the thing of just-because-something-is-there-for-one-moment-doesn’t-mean-it’s-always-there . . . And: Just-because-someone-does-something-once-doesn’t-mean-they’re-guilty-of-everything . . . make judgment very difficult.
You don’t have to go on tiptoe.
Do you want to be friends?
Not if you’re going to hurt me.
Boys are rougher than girls. Being a boy makes it that a wound is almost a cousin to me. One carries guilt with some difficulty. One stumbles. Were the games we played very bad? The mind hardens and is trained against memory and openness; a stupid but shy mindlessness rules you. A potently forceful mindlessness means you’re dirty-souled and awful and ashamed and watchful; guilty often means that soon you will be more guilty. When I was guilty, I laughed a lot and was wild and behaved crazily in various risky ways and thought erratically if I thought at all. Otherwise, guilt isn’t a transparency. But to imagine events as having no traces is wrong. Take having a bath. People after they bathe, after something as minor and common as that, are different, aren’t they? For a while? This is just common sense, isn’t it? Say that Jimbo and I horse around and my back gets broken because of him . . . Or say that Ora Perkins and I destroy each other . . .
The intensity of self-forgiveness in some people defines them for me. Like Momma’s sophisticated and angry degrees of being uncontrite. She goes mad a lot, though. Momma used to say to me, I believe Safe-and-Sound has the last laugh.
Nonie in the sun is about to faint. She tries to escape. She walks blinkingly across the lawn toward the sidewalk. Shadows are on the grass cast by the trees around us. She is a tomboy. Heaven, luck, Katie, Nonie, Nonie’s nerve; her beliefs; the crude scattershot art of screaming—of Margy Rogers—her lack of skill in the science of democratic accusation . . . Nonie did faint . . . on the grass; she fell and then sat up—it wasn’t a full faint: her eyes remained open. She was dead-white. She breathed funny: she was elsewhere.
Margy Rogers on the concrete driveway shouts up at the stricken Nonie: “YOU MURDEROUS LITTLE WHORE, GET OUT OF HERE!” Margy yelled to Melissa: “GET THAT STUPID BITCH OUT OF HERE BEFORE I KILL HER—”
Nonie said, “I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!”
My sister did not seem truly overwhelmed by the unfairness in reality toward her. She reached toward me—for me to go to her and be at her side. I didn’t go to Nonie and stand by her . . . or in front of her . . . I have a stake in this event.
Nonie shouts at Margy, “YOU SAID A BAD THING TO ME!”
Melissa Van Maytree then made a pushing motion in the air and said, “Go HOME—get to yourHOUSE—Go—”
Nonie ran then.
She ran unsteadily. She ran in a partly draggy way—not in a fifteen-year-old fleet-of-foot way. Nonie ran home. The door opened and Momma was there. She didn’t hold out her arms . . . Nonie didn’t fall into her arms . . . Nonie didn’t touch her and she didn’t touch Nonie. Nonie said, “I feel terrible . . . I’m going to faint.” Momma said, “What is it? Come in . . . Lie on the couch.” Then Momma closed the door.
I stayed outside. I’d followed Nonie home, sort of to make sure she got there, but I stayed outside.
Later Melissa Van Maytree’s oldest son hosed the driveway off.
Momma said later, I apologized until I was blue in the face, but that wasn’t enough for Margy . . . She wanted me to have Nonie’s head examined.
Margy said to Momma, “Your stupid animal of a daughter should go rot in A PENITENTIARY.”
Momma said, “Don’t talk like that about my daughter.” She told me later, “What’s the point of examining who did what? I’ll tell you a secret about when you look into things, Wiley. When the chips are down, no one is innocent enough. It will be Margy Rogers’s standing against mine . . . That’s what will decide . . . that’s what things get down to, in the end. My daughter can’t have done such a thing . . . How do people live, Wiley? Tell me, I’d like to know. There’s no sense in it. Do you know that it’s my reputation that keeps the two of you out of reform school when you get into trouble?”
Lila said, Nonie’s no angel but she’s no devil either. S.L. says Nonie couldn’t live with herself if she did the things I say she does. And I say she didn’t do this on purpose . . . She said, listening to herself, thinking, Let’s be nice people for a while—do you mind? Is that okay with you? Let’s shame the naysayers. Don’t be a fool and shame us—don’t you go shooting off your mouth . . . you don’t know how dangerous people can be. I’m tired of trouble. I’d like a little peace and quiet—and common sense, do you mind?
Lila said, I have never heard a story told with any justice—to both sides.
Momma and Daddy, Momma more, used to go to the cemetery once a month to visit the dead babies. But at other times Momma put the thought of them aside—she said so: I have to live. Sometimes, after going to the cemetery, Daddy wouldn’t come home for a day or so—he would blame us, Momma mostly, but all of us, and God and accident. When he came home (this was especially when I was mute and small and somewhat helpless), he would ask ME to hug him.
Daddy said, Be a Valentine . . . and don’t fight with me. Be a good boy—be like a sweet sister—show me your lovely eyes. Tell me, pretty maiden, are there any more at home like you . . .
Nonie said to me, You don’t know anything . . . You’re a baby; you shut your trap . . .
Momma said to me, You stay out of it. Shut your trap, do you hear me? Take Nonie’s side, no questions asked. Accidents happen. Nonie’s not the one who’s going to get blamed for this if I have any say in the matter. You want to live in the same house with her you’d better take her side loyally. Don’t be stupid . . . A word to the wise.
When Momma called someone stupid, it was that person’s future doom she had in mind.
(Momma used to say to me, “You have too many preconceptions . . .”)
Nonie had “loved” Katie. What girls do with each other is complicated. When they suffered over each other, did they wish for each other’s death? Blasphemously-daringly? The little kids in our neighborhood often played mean games . . .
Katie’s blood hopped like worms or greenish-bluish-reddish half-grasshoppers—pulsingly . . . The day after her fall her bandages were stained with dried blood and smelled of it as well.
(The mean games the kids played included Cops and Robbers—killing others righteously and imaginary beatings and imaginary handcuffings—and imaginary or real Torture—and Cowboys and Indians—really a variant of Torture—and Galley Slaves Being Whipped to Go Faster—really a third and more culturally profound variant—and various dirty games using knives ((secretly, since knives were forbidden us)) or bricks or stones to deal blows with.)
Both my mother and my father said to me, Do me a favor—learn to have a little sense . . .
Be middle-class, fearful, and instructed . . .
/> Everyone should have ideals, but listen to me, learn what’s what. Learn how to take care of yourself and learn how to get along in the world—no one is fair who doesn’t have to be . . .
Lila: Ask me the truth about anything, I’ll tell you it’s a matter of opinion . . . Some people’s opinions are better than other people’s. Well, what can you do . . . A person can say what she likes, you can talk until you’re blue in the face but a lot of time what’s true is what works . . . Well, there’s no rest for the wicked. You think you remember everything but you don’t. Some people remember nothing—then it’s just a lot of talk. They just like hearing themselves talk. A lot of people do more than talk. I’m the one who sees things through. I’m Mrs. Stick-to-it-iveness. Sometimes I think my middle name is Madame Galley Slave. It’s a burden, you take my word for that . . . I used to be the Queen of the May but I’m getting old. I have a brain and I use it. You want the real story? Well, the real story is it doesn’t matter in the long run . . . The Rogerses moved to California and they probably had a wonderful time out there. And Nonie didn’t like it in this neighborhood once she and Katie were on the outs. You think anyone knows what’s what? I’m a learner—you can’t say that about everyone. I fly by the seat of my pants but I get to Capistrano a lot sooner than a lot of people do. So I say judge me not. To tell you the truth about me, I can be hell on wheels. Well, what can you do—that’s not an empty boast—I’m useful in the world. I know I drive myself too hard. Well, so be it. I’ll start taking things lying down when I’m in my grave . . .
A sequel: Momma had a run-in with a bus. She said to me about it, I can’t tell you exactly what was on my mind but something was on my mind . . . The important thing you have to take into consideration is that I’m a nice woman. That’s the sort of person I am. I was driving along, and with no warning, it was all boom-barn: you have no idea . . . I hit a bus. And when the smoke cleared, we were all catty-cornered in the middle of the street. Midland. The bus and my mother’s Buick . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 28