My childhood had a lot of tricky things in it.
What-I-am amazes me: this is when I was a child . . .
Daddy said, “Anne Marie, you think well of yourself, but look at that—look at those two—I ask you seriously; open your eyes and admit you were wrong and I’ll say you were a big person. Here is something worth remembering right in front of your very eyes.”
He is ironic in style, but he’s mostly serious—no, not serious, truly dismissive, truly uninterested, truly confused morally—he doesn’t care at the moment what the truth is—he’s relieved.
Well, why not? Nonie’s his own flesh-and-blood. I’m legally his son nowadays . . . We’re a family, of sorts . . . She’s one of us. We have our styles of morbid aggression, of death-dealing. We all have them. Nonie spits at Anne Marie. “LEAVE ME ALONE.” Anne Marie was trying to lever her off me. But it’s clear Nonie’s not hurting me, and when Daddy says—more sharply—“Leave the kids alone,” Anne Marie releases me to Nonie’s grasp. Daddy says to Nonie, “Be lovable, Honey . . .”
The monstrous girl, Evil or not, problematically Evil or not, is of course, of a certainty, innocent to some extent.
The questions are: What harm will she do? How far will she go? Is her judgment all right? What will happen to me with her today? What will save her today? What is the right thing to do now? These are only some of the questions while the summer rain tumbles weightily outside.
She holds me backwards; my back is to her. She lugs me out of Anne Marie’s reach. I’m a bulky weight for Nonie although she’s strong. My legs are like pillows filled with dirt, I am that heavy for her. My rear end is a sack of weight. My neck, the back of my head bounce and slide against the girl’s pudgy chest, the ribs, the ligaments and little muscles, childy smooth, bulgy with the little pockets and outpushes of the fat of her girlishness. It is almost shapeless what the back of my head bangs against. Her elbows dig into me, into my ribs and waist, my sides, unevenly, joltingly—a by-product of motion and whatever. She has physical acumen and can spare me some of this discomfort if she wants—no: she’s too upset, maybe. I see her in the mirror on the closet door, the distorted and almost terrifying lynx mask of glare formed by the light on the bones of the upper part of her face—in the gray rainlight, in the flickering shadows of raindrops. She shouts, “I’M ALL RIGHT,” and lugs me through the quivering air . . .
She puts me on the carpet—standing. I turn—at once—and reach up, to embrace her. I want her to be okay. I want her to be reliably present. I want her to love me. I want her to be saved. I can smell her damp neck in the rainy air. Her face is near mine but is higher. I see Nonie’s chin, I see Nonie’s terror-wet lips, her eyes, the lopsided lynx mask—I am determined to affect her. I’m not much bruised. The casual standards of harm in early childhood (unless you have some sensitive, thin standard—usually a lie) mean that some stuff about being hurt is up in the air. At the moment, Nonie’s ability to hurt, and her attractions, and her character are an abstract matter of other occasions—of a multitude of occasions—moments of our being in the house with each other again and again over a number of years, over a period of years—an abstract matter of physical change, itself the cause of quarrels, spread over weeks and then years, the various bodies and shapes and sizes and attributes we had, while what is present now is her simple nearness as she becomes less caught in terror. Then the reality of her proximity at the moment is as if a sponge is cleaning away heat and dismay—disorder, too—or as if she is walking toward him even while she is standing still . . .
I am involved in the emotional reality, to me, of her life moment-to-moment during the time that I knew her. Nonie’s being evil is not always important to me—that’s all there is to that—but that some evil exists in everyone, the logic of that is important to me.
Anne Marie, whom I thought well of, thought (or thinks in a present-tense moment) that Nonie is pretty foul. Momma gets depressed at what parts of Nonie’s character are. What things add up to bothers Daddy more than it does me, but he is dead and now it bothers me. Daddy doesn’t face any of it except when he walks out on Momma. Except when he withdraws. He is dead. What people are and do gets on his nerves. She drives him crazy. So have I—.driven him crazy. He avoids thinking about that—He’s a very, very, very affectionate man—in his way . . .
Anne Marie, as part of her politics, her culture, and her church, has a sense of Evil. Daddy denies that Evil exists. Momma says, Yes-and-no, I play it by ear . . . Daddy denies its existence (evil’s) for the sake of women (and children), even while feeling superior because of his superior knowledge and experience of it in wartime and among men—criminal politics, crimes and politics. Lila hates him for this and is as dark as he is when he is dark—and he tries not-to-give-houseroom (his phrase) to his real feelings or thoughts or memories of that stuff when he is near her or us.
He prefers to take shelter in women, in his forbearance, in theirs, in innocence as it exists—in sunsets and by will, by programmatic goodness.
Lila’s sense of evil is really dark, but it is changeable—sometimes amused, relentless, and female: not steady. She’s not serious about fighting it until I’m good and ready, just wait until I get my war paint on, will you—she says she will lie down with it (with whatever evil comes her way) and approve of it if it will be good to her and to her children—does she love us that much?
Much of the time when I was young, a lot of this stuff didn’t matter to me. I lived from day to day and ate my cereal—S.L.’s words. Nonie’s life, her actual life and not my view of it, well, a lot depended on how seductive her life was for me and how interesting she was as a playmate.
She is a serious person in her way—middle-class with brown hair is her as a child: not really a child: but young for her age.
She can be described in all sorts of ways. And like that. If Nonie frightens or saddens me enough, what will become of me? If she feels the possibility of such a victory, of some ease, of the murder of possibility in me, will she back off? Console me? She consoles no one. She’s alone. If she does win out, then no matter how I lie, or what I do, my story will be secondary to hers—to Nonie’s—my life will matter less than her life does—in real time, this is. I would think she would find it hard to choose to be secondary in her life to mine, to my luck, my ill luck or my good luck.
No matter what she might learn or gain, she’d lose a lot of her momentum. But maybe for a while she should have tried to be secondary, anyway. We could have taken turns—is that too Utopian? She chose to compete all out, not for equality—how was that to be measured?—but to be the one who was the most important, whose pain mattered most of anyone’s . . . And whose pleasures were the most important—the most praiseworthy—the most typical—in the world.
Any extreme lawfulness was a defeat for her. Under the actual rule of law, she’d have to share and not punish—and not win. She went not just for victory but for the taking over and absorption of qualities, opportunities, virtues from her opponent. Her fear was that she’d lose out in the end otherwise and prove to have been wrong, all along, in her pride. She comforted herself by being a rival in everything and appropriating everything, such comfort as there was, by inventing absolute terms—one goodness, one mode of justice, which she administered, and so on—and she called that love for a while.
It was love in her sense. But after a while she simply was unrelentingly out to get what she could—I suppose that came from the pain of defeat or was what adulthood was for her: that sour. It seemed to me that after a certain point it never let up: the sour appetite of acquisition—that immense game.
When we were both grown, she was so afraid of me and so bitter that she would not agree with me about anything. She would not remember anything jointly with me—not picnics, not Christmases, not anything. One time she had access to some money and I was ill (I was maybe eight years old) and she said, “Let him die.”
I’d said things like that about her, but not when she was ill.
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br /> I mean, I didn’t take harming her so directly into my own hands: but then I was not a girl. There were intervening powers to filter and censor and limit the stuff I might do in my state, state of emotion or of unreason.
She said it again when I was older and had been in a car crash: “I can’t help him—let him die.”
It wasn’t even interesting that she hated me.
One time, Lila and S.L. were broke; I wanted to go away to prep school and they wanted to borrow some money from Nonie. She screamed and screamed: NOT HIM, HE’S HAD ENOUGH, I’VE HAD NOTHING . . .
Anyway, I stayed home and did not go away to school—her money was hers. I guess I was twelve at that point.
She was never ashamed of what she did when I was there to see her. She “talked about” me—Lila meant Nonie lied about me so that “if the truth comes out she won’t look so bad—no one will believe your half of the story is the whole story.”
I don’t know. S.L. was ill and difficult. After a set-to with Nonie, he had his first stroke, and after another set-to, his second stroke. Those strokes didn’t kill him, though. Nonie said that she loved S.L. but that she didn’t care if he died now and that he would understand that feeling in her. She said it would be good for him to die, that he was tired of living and that he wanted to die. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention, since I was afraid her blood tie to him gave her secret (and reliable) insight, information, knowledge about him. I wasn’t given to indignation at that point. I didn’t want to lose my grip on things. I couldn’t afford to.
I figured Nonie hated Lila—and S.L.—it’s a silly thing to try to measure: someone’s emotions.
She used to tell people she was helping in my education when she wasn’t helping: she was actively hindering it, or, often, trying to prevent it. In my adolescence, when I was at my meanest, I was sort of sympathetic—understanding-of-her—even in this. She was such a murderous and competitive clunker. A loser. A real competitor . . . I didn’t think time would be good to her. I hoped time would be kind to her. I didn’t always care. Or care much.
On occasion, after I was grown up, to preserve some outward fiction or other (such as that she wasn’t a disaster, as far as I was concerned), I’d arrange to see her when she came to the town where I was living. I have this sloppy habit of trying to make talk to conceal the realities of a situation and not blaming or loathing something or someone I really do loathe or am revolted by and think is foul—her, in this case, Nonie. I go leaning into the situation to conceal what would be shown if I stayed stiff and antagonistic—or merely distant or bored. I don’t say I’m right in this. I do it, that’s all. I hope to stop being like this someday but I am getting old and I am still like that.
The last time I saw her, it bothered me that it was just as on the day of the rainstorm, that I became, in some perverse and perverted and twistedly ill-advised way, concerned with her mood. Why the hell should I care what her mood is? That’s fine in stories but that’s stupid in real life. You know who the hell cares what her mood is? Anyone who’s scared of her. The thing to care about is fending her off. Concern for Nonie is a trait for someone not at all disciplined by sadness, someone spoiled—someone stupid, in a way. A clown . . .
Daddy called me that when I worried about Nonie. My being like that makes Nonie crazed—in the present tense, but in the past. Coldly, hotly. But she’s addicted to it: this is long, long ago. She died nearly twenty years ago, burned to death—burned to death. My God, imagine that . . . My Nonie—dead. Dead in that way . . . Hush, be silent . . . Be silent . . . You’re not a child anymore.
She has asked to see me. She has come to see me. The one-time colossally pretty girl, the one-time older child, now fat, hard-eyed, obese actually, she sits in a chair and is nervous and far-off in a grimacing way, disapproving, menacing as a general tactic—like an angry business-woman. She never referred to me in my hearing as her brother on any grown-up occasion that I know of . . .
She wants favors. She means, hopes, aims to elicit favors from me—a dozen of them: she wants money, information, to meet some people I know. She wants to stay with some people I know and whom she has never met but who she has heard about, including that they are friends of mine. She asks of me that I arrange this and she makes faces as if I were mad and a beggar and not someone who can say no to her if I change the subject or try to weasel out of it.
Or if I simply, flatly, say no.
It doesn’t much matter to her who I am or what I am—she hates it all—I mean as a natural thing. It is her right. And my physical quality is more foreign, more monstrous to her than when we were young. It is worse for her that I exist than it is for anyone else.
Lila said I destroyed Nonie—I won out—but it was Lila who told me the story of the infant sons.
Nonie says, “Well, you are conceited as ever . . .”
I say, “Yes? You think so? Well, but I try not to be a hero . . . I think it is important nowadays not to be a hero . . . even in your own mind.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about I never know what you’re talking about . . .”
I start to feel around me the closet smells, the pressure of hot flesh that earlier day.
I say, “Well, here we are again; we’re an odd pair. Just like old times.”
She says, “I don’t like to talk about the past, I don’t like that sort of talk, I don’t have to talk about water under the bridge. I have no interest in it. I don’t like those things. I don’t know about you but I had a happy childhood—a very happy childhood—and that’s all I know. That’s all anyone needs to know if you ask me, if I know anything about it. I loved everybody and everybody loved me—that’s enough for anyone—that’s what I think. That’s all I want to know. I don’t know about you. You had problems.”
She burned to death when she was forty-two years old.
“Nonie, the bedroom, your bedroom on Vista Drive—that color was nice: a watery-pale-green. Really.”
She said, “That’s really boring—that’s too boring for me to talk about.”
But I think she remembers.
If I don’t dislike her, I can’t have characters in what I write—I can’t attempt to make them come alive if they don’t have a shadow of her in them.
“Well, what do you suggest we talk about?”
“Tell me, do you have any money now or not?”
“At times, I do. Right now, no.” For you, always no.
It’s the truth in my voice, in my manner that upsets her. In the truth is the offer of a truce if she will allow me to live.
I mean, I will have money then.
She suddenly said, tauntingly, “Hank and I are very happy. I have five wonderful sons and everything I want.” She went on for a while in that fashion; and then she said, “I have no interest in people I don’t know. I don’t know how people stand it who have to read a lot of books and take themselves seriously and just talk, talk, talk all the time.” She began to discuss some of her friends—how rich they were, how much they liked her, how awful they were. “She has just awful brighty-bright eyes—” Then she said, “You think you’re smart, but we’re pretty smart out West now, you know.” It was in California that she died. Then she asked me to set it up for her and her family to visit people I knew and whom she had never met.
That was the last time I saw her. Other people disliked me then and still others do so now. I am not an angel. Lila used to say that. One grows from having merely human curators in childhood to having outright enemies in one’s adult life, and they prevent certain actions; they propose limits to one’s will—one’s rewards—they want a cut of whatever you have—and so on.
That last meeting, her rage—she’s not smart enough to hide it. And she’s afraid of me. She has energy. She does her part forcefully, with a will. She denies us a past, and she pursues me anyway with her malice and her uneasiness and her anxiety about the past, an anxiety to make use of me, to keep the past going, to have it be continuous with now and
herself and her life being not so foul—perhaps they aren’t so foul: I am a snob and I have old scores, I suppose—not conscious ones, not mostly. She wants to have this meaning, too, in her life, of my attachment to her, but one-sidedly. I am reasonably certain I would do it if it was to be two-sided. She allows me little or no reality—which is what kills me, of course. She’s human; SHE’S ONE OF US; I remember one time when I was six or seven and she was seventeen or eighteen, and she was being amiable, even flirtatious—on a porch. She taught me some tricks on a yo-yo. She hated me the worst at that time and, contrarily, had periods of being nicer than ever. She laughed at me and was sweet, but she became angry—even murderous—when I proved dextrous. She said, “You have a filthy mean streak.” She threw hot coffee at me—in my eyes, naturally. “Don’t make a big fuss over him!” she yelled when the grown-ups showed up. She complained to the grown-ups stubbornly on that occasion that they babied me. She did it as a pretty girl who would not speak reasonably or allow herself to be dealt with unless it was admitted to as an assumption around our house that I had a mean streak in me that made me show off and made people want to kill me and no one could be blamed for wanting to hurt me—and for doing it. No one could help hurting me or could be considered guilty for doing it.
That was a clearer occasion than some—I mean people saw it the way I saw it—but just the year before then, something like that happened and Momma had been sympathetic to her, to Nonie.
In those days, and perhaps still, if she’s “normal,” if she’s what people are, then who—and what—am I?
Her bedroom. She is still being a soldier. But nothing and no one instructs Nonie or instructed her ever in the victories she hungers for—I mean, she has mostly the wrong victories, ones she doesn’t want, that Momma and Daddy, one way and another, taught her about. But she wants them anyway, to soothe herself because she feels others’ victories as pain for her . . . My real mother is not present to vote for me here in Nonie’s bedroom. It’s grim that a lot of people won’t grant you the moral authority to defend yourself—you’re defending too much and calling it yourself—and we want you limited now. You have to be cold and obstinate and tricky—I mean, so many people want you undone; and some people who are on your side are really worthless. The flux of Nonie’s temper gives houseroom to her sorts of emotion; I mean, toward actualities of the monstrous; life includes special areas of the monstrous aimed at her: life happens to her in her style—not entirely, but a lot. She perceives it that way; she sets it up, too, sometimes as a perversion of judgment and of mood that just barely fails to be comic—this shapeless-souled girl, perhaps misunderstood, perhaps destroyed, who has me in her keeping . . . I have embraced her and now she kisses me, sobs faintly. Lightning glows distantly a good ten miles to the east. In that glow, enormous reaches of hollow, gray-blue, rainy sky are visible. Then the brownish, darker areas of rain reemerge from the glow, return, the vista is removed, and we are inside the repetitive and mufflingly domestic, somehow amorous noise of the rain.
The Runaway Soul Page 107