The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  She was ruthless in her way, but in a new way; and I am older than I was and bigger and almost safe. I am considered to be attractive . . . If I mention it again, it is because it came and went, or seemed to me to do that; and it has a different weight, or weightiness, with different people—this thing here, today, with her, is not as it will be with Abe whom I will meet in three months or Daniel whom I will meet in six months or so or as it is with X or Y at school or with people at any of my jobs, tutoring or working in a shoestore downtown or in the warehouse. A dream come true in real air is wilder than a dream working itself out in your head. It is logical differently in the real sequence of things, in real consequentiality and in coming-and-goingness, if I can say that.

  I am, even though I am standing in real air, dimly aware of being made of pipe and lathes in her eyes—her feelings, that is—and having a head almost like a hat with a stuffed bird on it, wings outspread, but this a real bird, smelly, mostly beardless, its chest heaving, its wingspan large—male, I think in her eyes—an albatross: a young male face, boyish.

  Dad said at this time—from time to time—Water, water everywhere—and not a drop to drink. I don’t know how the real words go in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” He was ill and becalmed; and an albatross haunted the ill-fated ship . . . Youth, unexamined sexuality as yet—one has glanced at only a page or two.

  We are where breath is, where people die—my sister and I are where you are when you are awake; and I think that when you have real space and real time, then perhaps real-world logic is moral no matter how harsh it may seem: to walk across the floor to her or the size and purposes of your voice near actual sunlight-in-a-window, the sunlight shifting on the chains and pulleys of the real world; and the smells there, in Nonie’s bedroom, mine first surrounding me, and then past or through S.L., the smell of her long, now dyed, now reddish-blond hair, the smells of her cardigan—whatever I said of her before, I am afraid of her illogic or her logic differently now: she has begun to smell to me of the question of what-will-become-of-her; I may have to take care of her when I grow up.

  She is partly dressed in that—it is as if her youth has gone into that.

  One is aware of her discipline now and of her interest in me—perhaps mirroringly—that is real along with her differently brassiered breasts: they are very noticeable; they are pure 1943. Nonie’s ‘love’ (or ‘interest’) is realistic; Nonie’s feelings are neatly displayed; her sense of domestic, and proper, theater is much further along than mine; the bits of ‘nifty’ ironic expression on her face and in her lips are truly enviable ribbony highlights of an intelligence-of-the-world that creates a kind of movingly highlit value that her powdered and rouged and light-stained and pretty cheeks have.

  The love—and the no-saying—like the familiarity as knowledge (ho, ho, ho, I know, know, know) and not as encyclopedia entries of varieties of affection—her glance—her glances—are so quick that they define the unease, the suspicions we might have of the other’s intentions. They flick here and there in machine-gun order, in the new dispensation of her training, and are like cupped hands for me to throw a glance to, or an ironic smile back to, or in; or they are like snapped fingers or like a rubber band snapped at my nose, her glances: they can make me wince—that makes her laugh; as time ticks along; the speed of the abortive dialogue is still that of a dialogue, a peculiarly homegrown stichomythia, a thing in Greek plays in olden time, where the exchanges are short and often idiomatic; but it is the short rat-a-tat-ness that defines them; the speeches are bits of a flying moment with all the past contained like bits of ghost-splash of sensations, bits of pictures and of syllables—so that there is no need for a prompter or a book or a continuity expert. Lila often said, I have to laugh, meaning something like now when I have to laugh, in an aggrieved way.

  I am not someone no army would ever want to have in it—Nonie, when wanting something from me, has said that of me.

  The ribbon-bits of twists of expression of her lips, the slaplike, loud-voiced reality of her heartbeat, of her breath, and the feelings in her because of her own business and then those and others that come to exist at-the-sight-of-me—like animals at the doorways of their dens—I guess it is easier for me to feel or suspect or sense (viscerally) that she is cold to me as the predisposing line of the dialogue and not that I am cold toward her first—wary, unloving.

  But whether I start it or she does, the issue is that I don’t like her very much. This is so now with almost every woman—they are often a bit angry with me. I can only distantly admit what is going on—sexual reality—or economic-and-sexual reality—and the like. A heat, a radiance of virginity intervenes. I can have no feelings in me at all—except those that come from the fact of my being in the lee of her life, her age: sexual and economic currents break near her figure—or on it—and I stand, nonplussed by reality (and by my reality) in the shallows sheltered by her life, if not by her.

  When I say that to myself, not in words but by permitting a sense of that, a music, a dumb show, a bit of a movie, a child’s sense of it—of her breasts and behind, her lips, her life and prettiness as buffers between sexual urgency and my existence—that shows on my face: that defines me. I have feelings burning away in me, but turned down low; or, maybe, I back away into thought—as if onto a golf course, an area of ritualized concentration on something. I transfer those feelings; I ascribe those feelings to her; I see myself as innocent.

  But not for long. In the space of a heartbeat I am then only as innocent as the reading room of the public library in U. City, as the uninnocent, hardly innocent books there. The things I want from her and for her would destroy her as she is if they were to be imposed, whoops, this very second: remorse, charm, concern for others.

  I hold back, inwardly and outwardly—I am a theater of almost neutral innocence . . . This tempts her: I am almost shrewd enough to see that; Mom has told me stuff about this. I am an empty space—I am carefully lifeless: it is as if I have little choice. Nonie likes to stir still waters, Wiley: she’s human . . .

  I fear her too much to be sensible or entirely sentimental . . . Or straightforward . . . Nonie’s moods—my dumb sister—her fate—in the watery, barely westering Missouri sunlight. But to call it fear is wrong: it is a primal familiarity.

  The shifting light and the notion of unalterable law and the human: I prefer alterable law. Nonie has come home briefly from Carolina, having quarrelled with Casey—before I knew Casey, I could not imagine quarrelling with one’s money, so to speak; the idea of quarrels, quarrels everywhere inside the self and outside it came and went.

  As did the idea of familiarity as being like the physical sense when, in warm weather, at the end of winter, one sits in the sunlight on grass, or on someone’s steps, in front or in back of their house; and the different temperatures and the day are familiarity around the oddity of one’s wintered body, time-charged, time-electrified, time-chemicalled.

  Stirred blood, the heat, and the recognitions, have a sports element and a sexual component: one’s throwing arm becomes limber. The different temperatures of pants and legs inside the pants and feet (sometimes bare) on pavement or on grass and in sunlight.

  Now here at home, she has quarrelled with Momma. The Declaration of Independence in its various forms tends to be a cry of war. People are people, Momma said with a kind of determination to adjust to such a state but with no sign of giving in to it. S.L. said the same words, People are people, completely disowned the whole kit and caboodle, the human thing—I mean I had never seen, in real life, such a human mightiness of disgust, a male majesty of abdication, of refusal; he has checked into the Veterans Hospital blaming Nonie and Momma: he saw Nonie rifling Momma’s bureau, stealing things: “She has no use for them!” Nonie said, flushed but not ashamed. I was standing in my room and saw down the hall and past Dad but I couldn’t see what flashed or flared between the two of them . . . Nonie won’t take a backseat to anyone or to anyone’s ideas . . . Momma, Daddy . . . She lis
tens to Casey—now and then . . . Nonie has been able, really a heroine, in her war work: St. Nonie in the war. She has good suitcases so that when she travels, she will get a certain kind of treatment.

  Nonie is older, more experienced in the world, having lived so far in wartime in this war, Nonie has a theatrical thing, a style of letting her moods buzz and mumble and pop—formidably, her feelings come and go. The fluctuations of her softish lips have pebblelike varieties of hardness behind them—beanbag-and-pistol lips and eyes, and face: she’s a pistol . . . she’s as hot as a pistol . . . At school, some of the softer-fibered girls scare me and seem almost unreal and to be part of a different order of human being; the homosexual boys and girls, however, don’t seem unreal, merely temperamental. Nonie’s breath cackles—it’s a family trait: S.L. had it slightly; and Daniel. I mentioned her dyed reddish-yellow hair: she is a girl of the free world, a democratic windblown girl of the era; and her blouse and her bra and its straps and her slightly pudgy, slightly bulgy hips in her pale blue expensive skirt, her really high heels—platform pumps, slingbacks—the pearls and pale beige cardigan she wears—mark her social class. The peculiarity of her eye-nests—eyebrows, bone sockets, eyelids, eyelashes and her faintly hectic, well-made-up (or fictional) cheeks and the actualities of her breasts are really her—the true heroine, the saint of her own predicaments, of her stories now: the who-she-is—her being as smart and ironic and as tough-and-grown-up as a man her age—well, you have cooler feelings and then time-warmed, hotter, farmyard feelings, blood, bloody, mulelike, maybe stupid . . .

  But the maybe stupid shrewdness and the quality of both our faces—lovely faces—one male, and briefly, in early adolescence, fragile or ghostly, and the other less amateurishly, less surprised, less helplessly what it is—our moods, almost a mutual flirtatiousness, a distaste—the absurdly straight-postured, rather ugly boy child who is briefly pretty, and the young woman, half passing as a girl (democratic windblown girl of the free world), her eyes crowded with Nonie-esque stuff, an unveiledness here is a kind of wit of maybe false or artificial good-fellowship: I had no words back then for real things. One lives through one’s moments without workable captions. Or maps. What I say now, forty-five years later (four and a half decades further on), is that the best map I had came from her at those times when she put on a show for Casey or some boy she was seeing, a show of family feeling, you know what that is, Pisher—it is a form of perfume or of flowering in order to entice certain feelings.

  But I was saying that when she put on a show of that sort, when that theater place was in play, the theatricality would dissolve, perhaps, in her giving me a tennis racquet, a wartime ID bracelet, or the like, things that reminded me of what I almost was or could be, a role in a middle-class drawing-room comedy or the like, a momentary costume for the soul.

  My parents taught me different things—things from further back and which they thought had lasted or would last, theatrical and domestic elements of traits, attributes, habits, attitudes one ought to manifest and which were part of personal virtue.

  Back then I guessed and felt my way along—a halfway transformed animal or a blind beggar-boy in not quite entirely sentimentalized moments.

  Vaguely smelly, openmouthed intimacy—for-no-reason . . . Momma’s nestlings, between them is a sense of her eyes like pieces of deluding, maybe poisoned candy in close-pored milky-and-pink skin . . . ha-ha . . . a fortunate and shocking, and enviable prettiness-as-ordinariness; Momma says: It is lucky to have that English coloring in wartime, I’ll tell the world. Nonie has the luck of THE DEVIL.

  I cannot see my eyes. I do not know, really, how I strike people. This phenomenological ignorance is what gives form to the episodes of my dreams and to most of my thoughts: I am the blank spot, the determining erasure who dreams you: give me a face and a life, a character and a human quality, and perhaps I will not wake but will stay here with you.

  She is, of course, enticing but she comes equipped with a face and a life, a character and a human quality as if people have dreamed her quite enough or as if she has turned the dream world of her centrality inside out like a pocket, and she can suffer untold hurt and survive it; she can be a third-person self; she can know who she is—and if that is not true—she can hide the selfsame blankness that is so important a part of me, she can hide her real face: that quality of her is hidden, made-up, dressed, reduced-in-immediacy: she doesn’t seem to await definition as I do; she seems to be defining—she seems to be a force of definition. I look into a mirror or a camera—or into her eyes—and I see mostly only how I look when I try to see myself—when I try to wake from that sense of myself-as-blankness. The eyes: I have never seen my eyes except with a foolishly searching or self-defending expression in them: asleep with posing or with peering.

  Momma has yelled at her not to smoke in the apartment: WE’RE SICK HERE . . . Nonie smokes anyway.

  “Hey, Nohns, don’t, hey?”

  “Ohuhah Christ, I hate you . . . You’re a fool . . . It’s too late to make a difference to them . . . Show some common sense; show some backbone; don’t always do what you’re told . . .”

  Mutual semi-murder, the real, or factual, common sense of it, of rivalry—her tone of cutting through the shit and being really reasonable (really at home) in the real world: “She’s going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter if I smoke around here or not . . .” As she’d said it to Daddy.

  I never quite got it through my head how fixed certain things in the world were for Nonie—facts and tact, untact, love for her, no love toward her—whatever.

  She is checking through her strangely large wartime plastic purse with its immense plastic floral clasp. Her skirt has a long fringe on the hem that Mom has advised her not to wear. She is successfully pretty in a somehow ill-judged way: small bones, restlessness, her character: a coed, unconvincingly fluffy, with an unusually piercing manner—and an unusually piercing, very pretty face, disciplined.

  The bra is padded; I know from long familiarity with her outlines in various clothes. I am self-conscious when she smokes since I have been wrestling with and spanking her and removing the cigarettes by force. She is testing me, checking to see if I will tear the cigarette from her lips at the last minute before she leaves. She tests everything everywhere she goes—she gets on people’s nerves; she’s no fool but she is a fool.

  In the mirror of her actions, I am now a force of law at my own say-so. This echoes what she did in Momma’s room, smoking and rifling Mom’s bureau.

  Is it sexy to be challenged? Nonie’s lipsticked, lady-commanding-officer’s grinless thing of the shrewd, mad soldier—you know—lets her speak.

  “Nayow you a’n’t so bay-id looking—yuhoor eeeevin uh lit-tell c-you-uuuute . . . so you may as well learn to be ni-eeeeece . . . now when you have a lit-tul time . . . before you’re drafted . . .” Spoken like a Southern belle in a popular novel, Southern flattery—a kind of mockery.

  She is politicking inside a blood relationship. I practice a moral relationship. I slouch in the poisoned honey of self-display, squinting out of uncertainly blond, very youthful features, out of a history of bemused and hallucinatory self-expenditure, sexually and morally. I am inside what I do, which is to say I am largely unknown to myself; and what I do know is of someone crashing and large, thoughtless and assertive. In that persona, willy-nilly, I say, “Put out the goddamn cigarette, Sis, or go on the goddamn back porch and smoke it.”

  She laughs—shrilly, a little. It is odd how, at that age, the semi-constant, ill-explained humiliation of everyone reviewing what you do makes each thing a public gamble, more or less, depending on how thick-skinned and past learning-all-the-time you and your character have become. It is not certain that I will survive my youth. Or this moment. My voice breaks a little. She judges my face.

  That year my crotch misbehaved all the time—every goddamned day—practically EVERY OTHER MINUTE—praise of a rapable world (that could defend itself against me).

  Nonie is not ki
nd. My prick really goes at it in my pants when I give orders, when I assert myself, when I get tough. I am so constructed that if I have a real hard-on, it is visible, embarrassing.

  Nonie respects this inside a frame of realpolitik. She gives credence to the embarrassed but boyishly capable and clumsy and well-lit (not yet tricky) mood of willfulness. After all, I spanked her for what she did to Dad and Mom.

  She and I both know she will never forgive me. And that she will lie about the story. People who take my side when she complains about me do it because they like the idea of my future or tend to distrust women. I have lived slandered by her ever since I was four years old.

  “Don’t be a smart aleck—no one likes a smart aleck.” She says this and puts one of the bedposts between her and me. She is not actually being comic or like a comedienne. But I am smiling—fixedly, with a rictus; I am forcing the smile to be grim—Frankenstein-monsterish. She says, “Try to be nice if you want people to like you or you’ll wind up in left field—like a lot of others.” That’s a threat. I may have set my shoulders to get ready to lunge at her. She says, “You know where you’ll wind up? In the hoosegow.” She backs around the next corner of her bed, puffing away. “You’re the type winds up in the penitentiary . . . So do yourself a real big favor . . . Be smart: keep a sharp lookout on your p’s and q’s . . . and learn RESTRAINT: WILEY: DON’T! Be nice . . . Be practical . . .”

  She screams a little. One of the pads in her bra gets knocked to one side. She calls me a son of a bitch. I throw the cigarette out the window. Lila’s daughter says then, dryly, not extending the scene, “You goddamn smart-aleck little son of a bitch; well, no point throwing good money after bad. You’re not worth fighting with, Brother Mine. Is my skirt straight on my heinie? My hind end? Is my tushie straight? Are we all set, Lieutenant? Shall we go downstairs and wait for the cab?”