I can’t imagine life experienced as blamelessness. Yes I can.
Nonie is a distraught child.
Daddy says, “Nonie, you’re breaking my heart.” He wants to save her. He doesn’t want to touch her while she’s sweaty with emergency and craziness and whatever, while she’s undulating and spitting, and is hot and fat and cold with terror and a kind of soul’s starvation and bitterness. Daddy’s gentleness is unreliable. He doesn’t want to learn anything today: he knows enough, he feels . . . He does feel that way. He often says Nonie’s perfect; and he avoids her—he avoids modifying his sweet view that Nonie’s sweet, she’s perfect, she is sinless, she will never die, that with luck she will never suffer: “Nonie honey, my head hurts. Please, Honey. Nonie—that’s enough, that’s enough of this filth . . . You don’t want to do this, you don’t want to do this to me. My heart is breaking, Nonie.”
“DON’T TOUCH ME. YOU LIE. FUCK YOU, DADDY. I WANT TO GET AWAY FROM YOU. I WANT TO KNOW NICE PEOPLE.”
“Nonie, you don’t know what you’re saying. You like your home. The bluebird is right here. You’ll find I’m right. People here care about you, be assured of that, Hon. Be smart, Honey.”
“I READ YOUR LETTERS IN YOUR DESK. I KNOW ABOUT YOU. I KNOW THE THINGS YOU DO WITH ANGELA.” Angela Martin runs his office.
He shouldn’t tell Nonie to be smart in a voice that’s sad and that has longing in it. It scrapes on her nerves and her sensibility, her sense of things.
“Nonie . . .” he says.
“YOU DON’T KNOW ANY-THING,” she says. “YOU NEVER KNOW ANYTHING—EVERYBODY SAYS YOU’RE A FOOL . . .”
She is frantic. It’s clear that she does love him, even if mostly in this way of accusation and request.
I don’t think I understand love as the right to ask too much of someone.
“Nonie, please: forgive and forget. We are who we are; everybody has to learn to put up with what they can get. We can’t keep track of every little thing or we’ll wind up on the rubbish heap.”
Nonie shouts, “GO AWAY!” to him. Then, as if to a ghost (she is addressing a confusion, Lila maybe—maybe me): “HE’S MY FATHER. HE LOVES ME. HE WANTS TO DO THINGS FOR ME. YOU WANT HIM TO DO THINGS ONLY FOR YOU. YOU’RE SELFISH AND I HATE YOU. YOU SHOULD BE DEAD . . .”
“We know it’s a bad time for you, Honey,” Daddy says in a mournful voice. He’s no longer listening to her.
Nonie soldiers away still in a swift and eerie light. The great round noise comes rolling in; it smoothly shrinks away. She cringes and straightens up again: “THAT FUCKING LIGHT IS BAD . . .”
Daddy doesn’t mind what she does as much as I do because he loves and forgives and forgets—he does: he forgets.
Also, he doesn’t care the same way I do. Sometimes he does, but he can take up and drop fatherhood, he can take up and drop his romance with her . . . She’s a child—what does she know? I am more involved with her—more implicated in what she is than he is . . .
Nonie has something tough in her bulging and toughly outward-focussed eyes—even when she is in extreme terror. Even then. Even then you can’t see into her eyes: she doesn’t want you to.
If Nonie were finally to come to harm today, if she were to change now in any way that would be disapproved of widely, or if she were to become miserable for a long time—if she stops fighting and takes a risk of being another sort of person (or child), a sad or hurt child, even if a sweet one, easily defeated, always ashamed and unhappy—S.L. would be as if emasculated . . . He would not be comfortable if she became more sexual—and less mean. He would like her more but he would suffer then, too. Nonie knows that—she will try at times to shame him willfully, in revenge, as his lover tidying up the past and making it fair—I mean just. Honestly sexless in a sense, after the fact. She is maybe angrily defeated—without hope, but she intends to continue . . . Her state is jumbled. For a moment, she is pure, although in a jumbled state . . . But she attaches the change in her not to being threatened by justice but to being unfairly cut off from having-a-good-life, joyous and comfortable—the sort of life Daddy wants for her. I don’t want to sound like a nag but how free of judgment can anyone be—man, woman, or child? At what point does injustice begin? But if you start with a sense of human evil, then justice is what begins, with an effort, and troubledly—isn’t that so? Nonie will be fiercer than she is here—much more fierce—and more desperately unrepentant—more hysterical and mad if she is permanently defeated today but not hurt enough for-once-and-all to move into that other state of gentleness and civilization.
I don’t want the world to be essentially different—I think that is a stupid thing to wish for: who would ever be smart enough to know what a world should be, let alone this world—but I want her to be different.
Daddy has to dodge Nonie and the nature of her disasters—or this one disaster, here—or he can’t live. He’s running away even as he sort of tends to her and is present.
Maybe he thinks Momma will see to it that this isn’t a disaster; Momma is gambling at this moment that Nonie won’t throw herself out the window, that Nonie won’t have serious hysterics or a breakdown, upstairs, today, et cetera. Momma is keeping her nerve, downstairs with the company . . . Momma and Nonie each blame the other’s character and the other’s being nerve-racking for S.L.’s erraticisms of attachment to them.
Daddy is holding me; I start to wriggle and he bends to put me down rather than risk squeezing or juggling me. I want to give Nonie my hope and my contentment with things—such as it is, that contentment. I want her penitent—and saved . . . No one will do this, only me.
Momma said once, I want to go for six months without telling a single lie. You know, it takes real nerve to lie in front of the whole world and then wait and see what happens to you.
In Daddy’s grip—held by his hands at the end of his outstretched arms—I press one foot down on the carpet. In Nonie’s room. In this house. I want to go to Nonie—my other self . . .
“Go to Anne Marie,” Daddy says to the stretched-out, spinally contorted kid.
My heartbeat is a mass of knocking pulsations in me. The rainlight in the room is darkish-brown and gray-blue. And a lot of wet is in the air. Nonie’s hands are the same color as a puddle.
The grown-ups’ speeches are the differently weighted branches of a tree. I am a child; I am intent on Nonie, one child to another—I join myself to her now in the separate sect.
When I start toward Nonie, Anne Marie shouts, “NEIN!” and Daddy drags me back.
See, here is Nonie as a marvel—her reality is part of the lied-about, filthy sweetness of childhood. I remember Nonie—this-girl-here, the one in pain, the one I want to help—not Nonie-of-other-times much. I’m about to do something; I’m about to go and hug mad, ammoniacal Nonie. Daddy and Anne Marie think Nonie is very bad or they would not try to prevent me. But in my mind they are quiet. I have a steamy chaos in me. All order is concentrated in my will—my concentration. They don’t matter—Nonie’s in pain. I tear, I pierce the badness in the room. I move toward her legs, the reachable legs below the terrified and stony face of the shouting girl. In her anger and piteous prettiness and ferocity and blindness, Nonie is here. I hug her smelly leg. I preferred having her be calm to having her sacrificed in order to have a world with less evil in it. Nonie raises her hand. Her hand is moving—swattingly. Pay no attention. Blink. Squint. See the pewter-and-peony-skinned child’s face pucker. If you ask me, it’s a shame.
“HE’S BOTHERING ME.”
The slap rocked me. I can’t find the nerve connections to my eyes.
She damaged my eyes.
Maybe I exaggerate.
This isn’t EVIL—this is just something that happened. This is just something that happens.
The child’s cry—that upward fluster, that ascent of a noise of pain, and then the sound of the slap—change the face of the girl. The girl is wild-eyed but shrewd. She looks like Lila for a moment. She gazes around measuringly; then she glares mad
ly again . . .
The child’s outcry in the rain-dark, in the wet air, and the smell on Nonie, and Nonie’s face, its multiple expressions, are gruesome, crawly—also sympathetically childhoodlike . . .
“I DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. I DON’T HATE MYSELF, DADDY.”
Anne Marie and Daddy said things and tried to pull me away from Nonie, but I clung to her, to Nonie.
You’ll survive.
She feels the stupidity of having shown such a quick automatism of temper in front of DADDY. She feels her terror still—the storm is weighty outside—and now she is anguished and chagrined: is that guilt? For a few seconds, Nonie blacks out. She hopes to return from her terror to some more central space. She says, “HE WAS BOTHERING ME, DADDY.” She squints as if she were being beaten on—in what is, she feels, her own vast innocence. With one hand, in a gesture of pudgy unanger, while she stares at Daddy, she clubs the kid with blows of erratic trajectory, some quite brief, a cover-up, a risk to make her accusation look true—her nerves are strung tight—she’s embarrassed now . . .
The child, in a way, expected this. He has an odd childhood sense of futurity—and of the rightness of his life—he clings to her on and on . . . He feels very little pain . . . He is intent on erasing her wildness . . .
Because he doesn’t cry out, Anne Marie stops pulling at him, she stops trying to rescue him.
The child’s choked, hurried breath, near his sister, is as if around a hollowing and echoing pit in him of devastations, from long before now, from before Nonie, an old grief, the dead matter of a literal silence in him, the once almost dead child. I have some knowledge of what pain is. Nothing has granted Nonie such a silence; she never goes inward; she has no silence in her; everything in her is a living voice, a chorus of live voices: the child hugging her leg and squinting and making no noise except for his breath is inexpressibly foreign to her, his mind—his presence. She did not expect to have such a presence in her life. His silence is unreal, the silence of that male child—but he is physically real to her even if only as an emotional pressure bound up in certain gestures—perhaps as a ghost—another ghost evoked by the rain . . .
Demons take her and hide her, and I want her here. Presence is an absolute in real life for many of us.
If you are here, you matter to me.
Daddy moves forward, takes Nonie’s hair, and pulls and jerks her head so that she stops hitting the kid. She glares at him . . . Then merely stares . . . He is embarrassed and backs away while she stares at him . . . His silence mixes sexual and paternal shock and a sense of justice and a surging but suffocated relief—all of us now are tangled in will and shame . . .
Nonie, testing him, returns to wildness—she persists—she grabs my arm and yanks it, as she did her doll’s. (She has the devil in her.)
I doubted the pain I felt then . . .
The pain fluttered and slid—slid away for a while, to some extent: do you remember the anesthesia childhood could summon up, the thick blanketing, the psychic musculature? I moved into inward angled places and into sturdy postures in them over an emptiness, postures of the mind meant for accepting hurtful blows while at the same time bouncing (in slow ways) away from such blows without affect—this was in a childhood reality of hurt, forgiveness, folly, and lunatic willfulness, at that age when one is important as a child for whose sake grown-ups indulge in restraint and calm and in special faces and even redemption . . .
It’s easy enough to think the kid deserves to be hit—he’s so odd, so stupid, so alert.
He is so much in another place in the story.
Daddy has released her. I haven’t—I mean my presence and my purposes haven’t released her.
“THERE’S TOO MUCH LIGHTNING. DADDY, I HATE THE LIGHTNING!” She is explaining things to S.L. Nonie shouts, “IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!” She is trying to push me away from her legs—what use does she have for penitence?
Daddy says, “She’s so upset she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Nonie—oh, Nonie, look how he likes you.”
His eyes aren’t focussed—if S.L. doesn’t look at her, he’s not concerned about what she might do, although it seems that her mind, her soul weren’t geared to abhor accidents.
Also, Wiley is a small creature, an accusing ghost perhaps sent by caterpillars and other small creatures that she’s put or beaten to death, for instance. His circumstances undermine her position as a wronged and pure child. She is exasperated, as if to say that everyone has the right to some jealousy, some violence—the right, the habit of those things, the right, the habit of normality: these habits . . .
It is harder for me to believe in Nonie’s mind as worth respect, it is harder for me to believe in her right to live, in this fashion, in her fashion than it is for me to accept the fact of my own future death. I have tested myself to see.
I was given this girl to love, I was given this girl as a companion in my childhood—our childhood, I guess.
Nonie’s eyes aren’t blind; she’s a little crazy. I see her eyes; they’re wretched. I forget my own feelings at the sight of so much drama and expressiveness as I awedly see in her eyes . . .
“He wants to help her—look, he took his punishment, he’s standing his ground—he’s a real ace, he’s a trouper.”
Anne Marie says strangely, in her deeply accented English, “He does not melt . . .”
I see uncertain malice in Nonie’s eyes—a shapeless rage of childhood, its helplessness half-and-half mixed with I-won’t-be-helpless-anymore. Her malice is not actually focussed on me but on my not being as upset by the lightning as she was. I saw it. She hated my (temporary) guiltlessness. I saw it. I’m sure that she excepted me from her really serious rage that day—not later. Things changed later. But she only hated me a little that day. It was a momentary exemption. But still, my innocent kindness, selfish and childish as it was, sickened her.
The partly privileged child embraced Nonie’s smelly legs.
Her angled body, her face are—a fist. Her face is a fist. Her whole body is a fist. Sweat ripples the already uncertain planes of her clayey cheeks—above me, at that not grown-up height. The sweat further dissolves the already uncertain-outlines of her anger, her malice, her capacity for doing harm, for harming me . . . I remember her face from other moments. I piece her together inside myself, where I am oppressed by the reality of the presence of her grief and terror, and mine on occasion as a measure and a consequence or parallel or half-twin of hers. I see her as a malicious child—she maybe will be less rambunctious when she is prettier, or maybe not. I see her in small, ejaculatory spurts of surprise. I see a bad face on a pretty girl. Then I see a wolf, a solitary cat the size of a girl, a creature from down the street, not from here. That is, I see the animal meanness of her eyes, my sister’s eyes . . . Look, my sister is a secret thing from a dream, not otherwise admitted to, save as marriageable flesh, breeding fodder for nephews. Otherwise, she is completely hidden from me, she is only her name plus an epithet, Nonie, my sister . . . Even to myself, she is as secret as that. How much is she going to hurt me today? How much will she insist on seeing to it that my suffering is the same as (equal to) hers?
It takes nerve to live—Momma says so. She has said, The thing is to be quick on your feet and not a coward. S.L. says to Anne Marie, “Stop it—let him be nice to her: what do you think? That she’s a mad person? She won’t hurt him—she wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
Is that true? Or will she hurt me so badly today I will live with it for the rest of my life, suffer one way and another in who I am and in what I do, because of her—is that what is going to happen?
Nonie is looking at Daddy. She is staring at him. She is trembling. She moved her hand—Nonie struck me on the forehead without looking.
“It’s only her hand!” Daddy shouted at Anne Marie.
Her hand, then her elbow, as a matter of fact.
“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. HE BUMPED INTO ME.”
That was partly true.
“Ach,
Gott,” fat Anne Marie said in her accent. Her facial posture said we all knew, everyone knew, Nonie always lied.
Anne Marie reached for me with a fat, indignant snort of dislike for Nonie . . .
“YOU HATE ME, YOU SHOULD BE KILLED,” Nonie said to her. Nonie swung at her.
Daddy, partly at an averted angle—as if shyly—pushed Nonie back from me and away from Anne Marie; Nonie stumbled—but I went on clinging to her.
“We all feel bad. Don’t say that, Sweetie,” Daddy said while he reached, almost idly, almost effectually for me.
My forehead hurts. So what?
The immediacy of Nonie’s pain, her loneliness goad me—I’m in the shadow of her emotions—the emotions of a child in this family—in this house, this air, this rain, among these people . . . I am an often bored child; when she’s in trouble, she often plays with me—it’s like that now; we’re in limbo. She and I.
I tug at her arm—silently. Nonie’s pain, mine—in the moment—burn me. My pain is from loneliness in my sympathy, as if I’d embarked on something that held contractually a kind of paralyzed or stilled or dead sense of myself—my inner deadness and old grief are stirring in me, monsters beneath their wrappings of my conceit in the supposed goodness of my life and in my supposed powers of consolation and rescue as a (male and monied) child . . . I am a someone-not-me at the moment; I have to be hugged by a special Nonie who hugs The Sympathizer—then, the child expects, we will be freed from this moment, she and I, and we will play then—and history will be different then.
Nonie emits a funny cry when I press my head against her belly—she’s partly bent over, because of a bolt of lightning outside. Nonie’s noise draws from S.L. a gasp of intractable emptiness, his form of being gentlemanly, a purposeless will—no self, no selfish will, that emptiness, a formal thing.
DADDY. Daddy.
DO YOU SEE NONIE’S EYES?
Nonie presses her hands over my eyes, over my mouth, those of the child, to be honest—not me but just a child who was there.
The Runaway Soul Page 105