The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  People always liked the way I looked, if I do say so myself, but when we moved to St. Louis it wasn’t so easy—as it had been. The bus driver yelled at me. The passengers did, too . . . Horrible noise—it was HORRIBLE. God’s honest truth: I didn’t know what was happening . . . I ruined a good faille suit: I got so wet, dress shields and all . . . I’m being too personal. I was very nervous: the smell of gas scared me. No one was bleeding. I didn’t know if I was coming or going. I have always been nervous. My own mother thought I was too nervous for anyone to stand. People think I have an easy life. They say I’m spoiled. What it is is I’m good-looking. Let them try my life and see if they like it. Let them try and cut the mustard . . . My mother minded it that I was so American, so she said I was too nervous. She said I’d be calmer if I lit the candles on Friday night. I tried it. Don’t ask me if it worked or not—I no longer remember. The bus driver was angry—very angry; did I say it was a county bus? Not one of the big city ones . . . Oh no: I wasn’t that crazy . . . The bus driver thought I was a rich woman . . . I don’t know what he thought. I was getting older. I had on a veil and a nice little hat. If you ask me, he didn’t like the way I looked. He didn’t like my type: I wasn’t his type . . . I drove out of a side street and I sideswiped his bus. I wasn’t looking; I didn’t signal . . . I admit it. I looked; I saw him; I had the right-of-way. I’m pretty and I was in a pretty car and I thought he would give me the right-of-way—men did—if they weren’t stuck-up. But he ran into me instead. And he leaned out his window and he yelled at me . . . God, did you ever hear of such meanness?

  He said I drove the car into the side of his bus but he drove into me, and he called me names, bad names, FILTHY names—he was the worst sort of person, no one should ever say such things to a woman—he was scum . . . I’ll bet a lot of people knew it.

  I suppose he thought he would be blamed and that he was going to be fired. It was an accident—that’s what you say when you’re willing to compromise. I had a big car, a Buick, but it wasn’t as big as the bus. I knew why he yelled those filthy things and didn’t give me the right-of-way: I was too old and he thought I was rich.

  Listen: I’ve spent my life making things easy for people: he could have remembered I was a woman. What was in my mind was to kick him—I have my little ways . . . that would make people laugh at him. I did that once in Alton—kicked a man. He’d yelled at me on the street—I’d bumped into him . . . He’d chased me around a parking lot. I was twenty-two years old. He was big and ugly and everybody laughed at him when I kicked him: everybody. I brushed against him, he dropped a package is all it was. Everyone knew me in Alton, they laughed at him and said he’d been beaten up by a woman, but the people on the bus, all of them, they yelled and screamed, they yelled and screamed at me. No one yelled at the driver. I was in my highest heels, I had on a tight skirt—I was in my best bib and tucker, if you really want to know—and still there was no sympathy. Well, let me tell you, you can say let bygones be bygones but I knew my way around, I know when politics get bad: those people didn’t know me and they didn’t like me, not one bit—they didn’t like what they thought I had; and I hiked up my skirt and I ran for dear life . . .

  I was six or so. We lived on a street called Amherst—all the streets in University City were named after universities. Or colleges. I was playing spaceship with a boy my age and a girl and an older boy—Joey Brooks, Marilyn Berger, Martin McCauley. Joey was facing the street and I was doing something with a ray gun and he said, “Is that YOUR MOTHER?”

  Up the street, westward, in the maw of afternoon light among the leafed-out dappled enormousness of trees that seemed so large to me when I was small was a running figure. The street was dead-end at its other end, chained—the chain ran between stone piers—and at each end of the block in the street was a triangular park where the street widened into two roads, one for leaving, one for coming in. The houses were staid compared to the woodland fairy-tale cottages on Katie Rogers’s block. In my memory I see the bus and car, although it’s odd, I am standing so close to them—I must have dreamed that or imagined it—I was standing a tenth of a mile away on a lawn, and in that setting, in the distance, under the great, leafy, light-and-shadow structures of the trees, was a running figure dressed mostly in black, and veiled, or with a blackened face, and running swingingly . . . In furs and high heels.

  If I reenter the memory, I do, actually, shrink—I mean in my consciousness—and the color of the macadam of the street changes: a lot of orangey pebbles are in it. The light itself has an odd quality—the pollution then was different: St. Louis suffered from fogs, from so many coal fires, in so many houses; and anyway, the light is thickened and a bit oily: a whitish-yellow, buttery, dulled light, but thick, and then the green, and then the reddish-brownish-bluish brick of the houses and the blue-gray slate or shingle roofs. Birdsong and the temperature of the air—my sweaty skin—my neck rising from a childhood shirt—my bare legs.

  Dandelions in the grass . . . The cracked pavement of the sidewalk . . . My mother, my mother by adoption, Lila; what I remember is the sight, first at a distance; and then came a sense of the motion on the street, nightmarish, the dressed-up thirty-five-year-old woman (really thirty-eight), trimly curvaceous and overly glamourous in her fur neckpiece—foxes, with glass eyes, biting their tails—and a little gravy-boat-shaped hat with a long black-green feather floating behind and a flying veil with darker dots on it than the regular netting, and black gloves, and bracelets . . . She was so truly a pretty woman that children and older children and adolescents gathered, or leaned toward each other, to watch her run past . . . On other occasions, they used to come and sit on our lawn and wait to see her leave the house; she used to say jokingly, I’m the prettiest woman for miles around . . . The orthodontist, the doctor, the insurance agent we used had crushes on her. She could get things—favors—special treatment.

  That woman in perspective, running in a pretty-straightforward-but-sideways-slipping kind of way down the middle of the suburban street under the trees, shifting her fur piece as she ran and not stumbling much in her three-inch heels and panting and with her purse and she had on pearls—it is my mother.

  I dreamed about it for years—the monstrosity of it, the monstrous shock of it. In the language of the age I was, I murmured, “Aw-ow,” a little groaning whistle kind of thing—it meant what “Oh-my-God” would mean twenty years later if a kid said it. Joey had identified her before I did. He’d had to say, That’s your mother, Wiley, isn’t it? before I really saw who it was. I think I thought at first that with Lila’s sense of emergency and of daily horror she was running to tell us that Martians were landing on Delmar Boulevard or that a flood was coming down Midland—or that a monster was loose on the next block of Amherst and was on its way to eat us . . . I assumed she was running in order to save us, the children, some of us, me. I didn’t know what she was saving us from—crooks, fires, hoboes, kids from poor neighborhoods in a raid . . . Revolution . . . Invasion from Europe . . . Something bad. “No,” I said. Then I called out, “Momma!” and I started running toward her.

  I called out, “Momma! Momma!” and Lila was startled and she stumbled: she hadn’t been looking for me. It wasn’t Martians or dinosaurs awakened and coming out of the sewer. I ran to her and then I ran alongside her. We ran another fifty yards mostly in silence—she said, “Don’t ask me questions . . . I . . . can’t . . . talk . . . and . . . run . . .” And: “Go . . . and . . . hide . . .” and perhaps a little more.

  I didn’t leave her, but ran alongside . . . I kept up and even was a little ahead at times. And Momma scrambled up our stone steps—she got through the front door—(in dreams I often can’t get into our house)—I don’t remember her getting out her key—and we were inside, in the shadows, in the darkened hallway . . . The house was kept dark much of the time to preserve the fabrics and the paintings . . .

  And she said, “Oh God . . . my heart is pounding to beat the band . . .”

  Then
we hid, she and I, behind the couch: she was all dressed up still except for her shoes; and as her breath slowed, she got her hat off and then the fur neckpiece which she laid on the floor and she got the jacket of her black faille suit off. She was crouched in white blouse and pearls, one stocking foot forward, one skirted knee up. Men walked heavily up onto our porch talking in loud voices—a detective and the bus driver: perhaps some of the passengers or uniformed policemen: I could not see them. I saw only the black, limp fabric back of the couch tacked to the wooden frame. I heard voices, loud, threatening, and determined.

  I was surprised they came after me, I knew they would (often the degree of inconsistency indicated her lack of calculation—or it meant she wanted to seem uncalculated in order to express, somehow, how upset she had been: she is breathing loudly next to me in her fancy clothes, the furs on the floor, behind the couch)—for all I knew, it was the Ku Klux Klan . . . It was the Nazis. I have a good memory usually, I have a good memory, period. I’d put the brakes on, I didn’t run into the bus on purpose: but the brakes on the car were bad: what good did that do me with that mob? It was a lynch mob . . . The terms of her fear—of social unease . . . Why were they blaming me? I was shaken up . . . The police took his side: union people . . . It would have been different if I’d been a nice old lady . . . They came to the house and I told them a piece of my mind . . . No, you’re right: I hid—were you there, too? You know what I’m like: I have no feeling about busses. If I’d been in a housedress and had no makeup on and had a child with me, they wouldn’t have acted like that . . . The way I was dressed laughed at them—well, what can you do? Often people are nice but do me a favor: don’t count on it. Maybe no one is ever nice . . . How should I know? I’m not a liar, I had only one life, I had only my life, I’m not the kind of liar who says I know what everything means and what everyone does . . . I know my limits . . . I never heard of a son listening to his mother before except in a rich family when she has the money. You like my stories? You like how I talk? Well, what I don’t know would fill a book . . . It fills all the books—ha-ha, ha-ha. You like stories? I’ll tell you a story: I’ll tell you this: I did it on purpose: that bus driver was a son of a bitch, that mean-eyed hairy fat man yelling at me, cutting me off: he made me feel old and I didn’t give a goddamn. If it’s the end of the world, I’m sorry. But I’ll tell you this, too: it was an accident that it happened . . . I didn’t know I’d do anything . . . And when it came near, I didn’t make up my mind: my hands slipped . . . You think I know this for a fact? You think I knew what was happening then? Everyone knows by the time they’re five years old not to say they did it on purpose—so you never do anything on purpose . . . You make a little accident: it’s a kind of joke. But it gets to be not a joke . . . It goes too far—the whole thing was a mistake: not the whole thing, but that’s what you say. I’m the executive type: but still . . . But still . . . I’m not sure what I know and what I don’t know: I trust to luck—and I use my head. You don’t trust me, find another nice woman to tell you a long story . . . I may not be whaddyacallit, ideal, but I’m what there is. I’m telling the story. Maybe I’m crazy, after all—the brakes were bad—I’m not playing games; I’m telling you the truth now. Bad brakes are illegal. When people act like they know what they’re doing, it’s very—you know—SMART: it’s a way to get to be the head of things. You get attention—a little attention goes a long way—there is such a thing as enough attention is too much attention, do I make myself clear? I was wrong, I expected sympathy, I was dressed like Kay Francis—Who knows how that is going to work? You can’t keep track of everything. A woman who keeps her nerves is an interesting person . . . People often want to know me better because they want to know who’s better, me or them: button, button, who’s got the nerve . . . Well, try me and see . . . It’s human . . . But that’s not the question. The question is, I wasn’t wrong . . . People made it up that I was worse than I was . . . But what else is new? About the long haul I can’t complain . . . On the whole I got what I deserved—I’m not the religious type. I grieve every day of my life over what I’ve lost, but I’m not going to sigh over the way things are . . . Ask me no questions, tell me no lies . . . I know what’s what, and believe you me, one thing you can count on is I’m not asking for it . . . I was never the type to play dumb-fluttery, fidgety—I had big breasts before my operation and I didn’t like to be touched: even women touch you—what I hate most in the world is being grabbed at. I’ve never been a crawler . . . I’ve never been a hail-fellow-well-met. I always lived the other way: if you’re someone who’s outstanding—I’m not saying I am but a lot of people have been impressed by me one way or the other—you get a lot of attention, people want to see you in jail, they want to see you in the loony bin: it’s only fair. Well, I lived with that all my life: give people what they want and don’t give them what they want. You know why S.L. and I gave parties until we ran out of money? We didn’t want to be hated. People thought we were a cute couple. Well, there are cute couples and there are cute couples . . . Now people think I’m smart because of you, but I was always smart . . . All in all, about those Rogerses, I’m not going to say I’m sorry I stuck up for Nonie. You liked the Rogerses, but they were no great shakes . . . She couldn’t work her way out of a paper bag; and he was a corporation toady. I’m not sorry . . . I’ve forgotten more than they ever knew . . . I didn’t keep on educating myself . . . I stopped short, but I always was a learner . . . But life is fun if you can get away with things . . . That comes to an end . . . I would like to have been right—that’s what makes a woman interesting—to be the one who was right . . . Oh well, with two l’s, I’m the original I-don’t-care-girl . . . No one was ever interested in what Nonie had to say. A woman gets more chances to think than a man does: is that why you like to talk to me? But Nonie never took a chance to think . . . I didn’t want to hurt the people on the bus and I didn’t hurt anyone . . . Maybe they were shaken up . . . They yelled before they were hurt . . . And if they were hurt, what’s so bad about that? I’m a grown-up. I go too far. So what? You want to shoot me for that? You want to hang me? I wanted to be a nurse when I was young but that wasn’t a nice thing to be. I do charity work. I pull my weight in the world. When I was little Momma always knew something about me I didn’t know, that I’d left out, that I should have known—that scared me. I showed her: I became the I-don’t-care girl . . . What are you going to blame me for? For what I thought? For what I didn’t think? That I was helpless? That I was too calculating? Oh please, spare me . . . I’m a sick woman. How much bullshit am I supposed to take? What’s the point of confessing when you don’t know what you did? I’m too old to be clever. I’m tired of being clever. I didn’t want to slow down: I hit a bus: the brakes were bad—I don’t know what-all—who does? And who cares? I came in last in the horse race, but I came in first for a long time. My mother said I lost two infants because I was a bad person, a bad Jew. I forgive her—but I never will, never forgive her. You don’t get over things, but you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and you go on again. I sit here some days and I think—when I feel good enough to think—some days I feel like thinking—don’t laugh—what God wanted, what it would have been like to have a better time. I don’t blame Momma—she went through hell in her life—I’m not a blamer: I’m not like you: I make do. In the end all you know is you know what you know—and what can you do? One minute it hasn’t happened, then it has, and who are you then? You tell me how you’re supposed to deal with that . . . Listen, you think I didn’t talk to scholars? I was pretty and I had my share of those men, and I met smart women, too. You think I don’t know what the problem is? God is this, God is that, but then nothing else counts, nothing else matters. So you have things God isn’t—can you follow me? Tell me what you think. Wait: I’ll lose my thread—you talk too much as it is . . . What I think is, God doesn’t know what is coming next—God is here, not there. We have minds so we can help. Is it like a tidal wave, Momma? The onrush of time an
d of consciousness? I feel it like burning water although I don’t like to say so—I’m not that type of woman . . . That bus driver was some kind of religious fanatic and he called me a dirty whore. I was pretty and I had good clothes on—he didn’t think women should drive cars—everyone has a voice whether you allow it or not . . . And then it was all happening: and it just went on happening—tell me who to blame for that? Nonie wasn’t Hitler—ydu think it’s all one thing? I never thought like that. Tell me what to blame her for and I will judge her. I’m not a woman who gives up but on some issues I have to say I pass. Try to love her, Wiley . . . She’s a fool . . . I blame her for being a fool. What happened happened . . . An accident is an accident—once it becomes an accident, no matter what you do first or second . . . That girl, what’s-her-name, was calling Nonie names, she called her a dirty Jew, and Nonie told her to go fly a kite, and the girl took a step backward. She wasn’t a nice girl no matter what you thought . . . You liked her is all—and Nonie liked her for a while—but I’m not going to be stupid about it just because the two of you were. Nonie didn’t touch that girl in harsh feelings: and if she did, who gives a damn? I’ll go to hell, she’ll go to hell, we’ll all go to hell—will you be satisfied then? I’m not like you, Wiley, I stand by my own. Going, going, gone . . . That’s not me. You want another mother: go ahead: I’ll be dead in a little while . . . Two days . . . I know a dozen women who will take you in. You want a mother this minute: I’m the one you have. You know what I like about me: I’m on my deathbed and I haven’t lost my nerve, Wiley. You know what’s wrong with me? I’m all used up—I can’t handle things anymore . . . I’m not going to sit in judgment until I know the true story, and even then who knows what I’ll think. I never expected to get to heaven in a Chevrolet. I know who I am, I was just what the doctor ordered for a while. I’m still a regular devil, you want to smile at me now and hold my hand? You got a soft spot for me now that you’re bigger and I’m at my wit’s end? Are you thinking of something else? In the rebelliousness of attention . . . You want to go love someone else, go ahead . . . I’ve had enough . . . I’m tired of my own head. I am someone who requires mercy and I go where I can get it . . . I don’t know if I’m coming or going—if you ask me, enough is enough.IS THAT OKAY WITH YOU, POOPERKINS, THEN IT’S OKAY WITH ME. I’ll tell you about dying, I go a little crazy from time to time. I know my way around: I can’t say I ever wanted to hurt anyone but sooner or later although it hurts me to say it, I can’t say I was an angel and didn’t want not to hurt someone . . . I do what I have to do . . . I like to sink my teeth into a good fight now and then . . . I don’t mind showing what I’m made of. S.L. says I take on all comers. Well, I believe women get the raw end—frankly, I tried to change the world—and I don’t care who knows it. I’m ready . . . Put up your dukes . . . hahaha. I never wanted to be one of those women who was too sensitive to live: take my advice and stay away from that type. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t trust myself: I think I have the killer instinct—I don’t always trust myself . . . I could kill somebody, I play for keeps, you know . . . Just don’t get in my way . . . S.L. used to say to me, You have no conscience: you’re the Queen of Hell . . . And I’ll tell you the truth, I was flattered. I don’t know about me . . . All I ask of you, S.L. honey, sweetheart—Wiley—is pay attention when I talk . . . I’m something of a bluffer. I like seeing what I can get away with. A lot of things I wanted to do, I wanted to do just for the hell of it. What I regret is that I played for small-town stakes. When he got mad, S.L. was worse than I can ever be: he wants you dead then and there . . . He wasn’t like that all the time: if you picked the right time and a good place, he’d cave in like an angel, he’d give in like an angel—he could be soft as a little bunny rabbit. When you look at me like that, Wiley, you think you’re being polite but it’s like you’re putting me in my grave. Momma thought we shoulda stayed religious Jews and prayed all the time and never known one little thing about how we thought and lived, just been dizzy and conceited, but that was never me . . . I am what I am, said Popeye the Sailorman. Go away now and let me sleep . . . I like to talk but enough’s enough, it’s as good as a feast . . . I’m all out of breath. Hold my hand; I want to take a nap . . .