I couldn’t figure out that one-sidedness: how did she expect not to irritate me, not to bore me? Then suddenly I had an inspiration, which maybe had nothing to do with the truth, but I could imagine she might want to be independent of absolutely everything, even of having to be fair in the most minor way.…
My poor mother’s freedom. She was utterly wretched, and at this point in her life she screamed most of the time rather than spoke. “I have no life.… Why did this happen to me.…” And: “My brothers are filth.…” And so on.
One day she was ranting about one of her brothers, “He used to be in love with me but now he won’t come near me because I’m ugly and sick,” and it occurred to me that she was enraged—and amazed—to discover selfishness in anyone except her. No one had the right to be selfish except Doris.
She remembered everything she had ever done as having been a favor for someone. And this wasn’t just madness, although I thought so at first; it was her cold judgment of how life operated: it was her estimate of what she was worth. Or a bluff. She thought or hoped she was smarter and prettier and more realistic than anyone.
To watch somebody and think about them is in a way to begin to have the possibility of becoming them.
It seemed to me I could see certain ways we were already alike and that I had never noticed before. I had never noticed that I had almost no pity for what men suffered—in a war, say; I didn’t care if men got hurt, or if I hurt boys in a fight, so I was always more comfortable with men than with women. And I caught sight of something in me I hadn’t admitted to consciousness but it was that I judged all the time how well I was being taken care of, even while thinking I did not ask to be taken care of at all. And she was like that. She thought pain belonged to women; she did not like men who suffered; she thought suffering in men was effeminate. She didn’t think men deserved help: she was a woman and too exposed; she had to be taken care of first. I tried to imagine a conscious mind in which all this would seem sensible and obvious.
I heard a woman say, “It’s easy for me to be nice—I have a husband who is good to me.…”
It was terrifying to contemplate the predicament hinted at in such a speech.
I could believe a lot of what my mother was was what had been done to her.
She said to me once, “I would have been happy married to a gangster.” I knew people did not always say what they meant: they uttered words that seemed to make the idea in their heads audible but often the sentence said nothing or said the opposite to anyone outside their heads who did not know all the connections. Partly because the idea was defective, but more often because in simple egoism and folly one could say, especially if one was a woman, “Why don’t you understand me?” and never think about the problem of having to make oneself clear. Men had to make themselves clear in order to run businesses and to act as judges, but in order to be clear they said less and less: they standardized their speeches. Or were tricky or—But anyway, when my mother said something it seemed easiest to take her literally because the literal meaning would cover more of her intention than any interpretive reading would. She often became very angry with me for taking her literally, but since no one else understood her at all, ever, I thought my system was the best possible, and also, by taking her literally I could control her a little.
When she said she would have been happy with a gangster, it was hard to know what she meant: did she need violence, did she want a man who could be violent because of how he would act toward her or because of the way he’d act toward other people? I guessed she wanted someone to be tough toward the world, who would be her fists, who would be no fool, and who, busy with his own life, would give her a certain freedom. My mother did not like needing anyone—“If you don’t need anybody, you don’t get hurt”—but she needed people all the time. She said of my real mother, “She was brave—she went where she wanted to go, she would go alone, she didn’t need anyone, I don’t know where she got the strength, but she could stand alone. I envied her, I wanted to be like her. I wanted to adopt you because I thought you would be like her.”
I thought, without much confidence, that women were held under the constraint of social custom more than men were: almost all of civilization had to do with the protection and restraint of women; but that seemed to be true of men too. My mother lived a half fantasy of being tough, she was verbally tough: a failed adventurer. She wanted to have her own soul and to stand outside the law: she thought she could be independent if only she had a little help. My mother was willing, up to a point, to blaspheme, to try to defraud God.
Then, more and more, it seemed to me my mother hated all connections; even her bones did not seem to be fastened to each other, I noticed; my mother was soft, fluid, sea-y, a sea-y creature. What harrowed her most was the failure of her maneuvers, of her adaptations, her lack of success. It seemed to me that her illness was an experience, an act of destiny outside the whole set of things that made up that part of life where you were a success or a failure. Will and charm and tactics could manage just so much—then you had to believe in God or luck or both, which led you into theological corruption of a very sickening kind (I could not believe God would help you make money). They were two different orders of experience, but my mother thought they were one. She thought your luck as far as having looks was part of the other, even though she said, “Anyone can be good-looking—you have to try, you have to carry yourself right; sometimes ugly people are the best-looking of all.…” She was generous enough to admit of some women, “I was much prettier than her once but she’s outdistanced me: she knows how to dress, she’s taken care of herself.…”
Riding on the bus I tried to imagine myself—briefly—a loose-fleshed, loose-boned soft-looking woman like my mother with her coarse ambitiousness and soulful public manner (when she wasn’t being shrill) and the exigent fear of defeat that went with what she was.… I did it sort of absently, almost half drowsing, I thought it was so, well, dull, or unilluminating. But suddenly I experienced an extraordinary vertigo, and a feeling of nausea, and I stopped quickly.
I didn’t know if I’d felt sick because I was doing something I shouldn’t do—I mean I started with that notion, and it was only a day or so later I thought maybe the nausea had gone with imagining defeat. So far as I knew, I did not mind defeat—defeat hurt but it offered an excuse for being indulgent and sexual and so on.
I didn’t even conceive of total defeat. Being a hobo would be a fate, getting meningitis and dying, being a homosexual, a drunk, a lifelong shoe salesman would be a fate, maybe even amusing. None of that really frightened me. I wondered if it was the war that had done this to me or if I’d been cheated out of a certain middle-classness. Maybe it was that in never having been given much by Doris I’d come not to expect much in general, or maybe I just didn’t fear failure properly, or it had to do with being masculine.
So I had to imagine what it would be like to really hate failure. I worked out a stupid idea that Doris needed family, social position, charm, looks, clothes, or she couldn’t begin to have adventures; something that didn’t require those things was not a real adventure. She maybe needed those things as someone might need a hearing aid or glasses or a tractor or a car: a woman deprived of them was deaf, blind, reduced to trudging hopelessly along.
I was not obsessed with understanding my mother; I worked on this when I had the time.
I sometimes imagined myself in combat conditions, I tried to imagine myself undergoing humiliations, deprivations. It was a matter of pride not to run away from painful thoughts.
I knew my mother had never made an imaginative leap into my life or into any man’s life; she’d said so: “I know nothing about being a Boy.…” She’d said to my father, “I know nothing about being a man.…” She did not like movies that were about men. She never asked me to tell her about myself. Perhaps she was defiant because Jewish women were supposed to be respectful toward men—I couldn’t handle that thought—but it seemed to me very clear she was inter
ested only in her own fate as a woman. She thought everyone dealt in ruses, in subterfuge, but that she did it best. Her world bewildered me. I assumed she did not love me. I did not know to what extent I loved her. I saw that my insensitivity to her, as long as she behaved the way she did, was the only thing that made it possible for me to be halfway decent to her. If I reacted to her directly, I would become a major figure in the drama, and it would become clear she was a terrible pain in the neck, a child, and a fool. She thought if I became sensitive to her I would be struck with admiration for her in what she was going through, as once men had fallen in love with her at first sight. But I knew that would not happen. The depth of pain she suffered did not make her beautiful, could not make her beautiful: what she did, how she acted, was the only thing that could make her beautiful. Maybe once sheer physical glory had made her redoubtable but I figured she’d had to work on her looks. There was nothing you could be without effort except catatonic. If I became sensitive to her and she was careless of me, I would not care if she died.
Obviously, between her and me there were two different minds and sensibilities and kinds of judgment operating: she wanted to control my mind—but without taking responsibility for it. She wanted to ascribe not a general value but a specifically masculine value to my being sympathetic toward her pain. It seemed to me she did not have that right because she had not carried out any specifically feminine side to our relationship, to any bargain. I mean she was working a swindle. She was also trying to help me. She wanted her condition considered a heroic, serious event, but I had nearly died twice in my childhood, and both times she had said, “Be brave.” She had experienced no discomfort, only “aggravation” when I’d been ill—“I’m not good at illness,” she’d said. You couldn’t hold the past against people, but on the other hand, what other contract did you have with anyone except that past?
My mother did not expect gentleness from people, on the whole, but when she was desperate she wept because there was no gentleness in anyone near her. She preferred to go to Catholic hospitals when she was ill, because of the nuns: they forgave her over and over. She lied to them and told them she would convert, and then she took it back and said God would punish her if she stopped being Jewish. She screamed and railed at people but the nuns always forgave her. “They’re good—they understand women,” she said. She whispered, “I’m a terrible person but they don’t mind.”
She said she could not bear it when people came near her and thought of themselves.
I did not do anything merely in order to be good to her. I decided to fiddle around with being—with being a little taken advantage of. I did it as a profanation, as a gesture of contempt for the suburb and toward people who pitied Doris; I did it as an exercise in doing something illicit and foul, as an exercise in risk-taking and general perversity. I figured, well, what the hell, why not do it, what did I have to lose?
I was probably already wrecked and I’d probably be killed in the war besides.
I trained myself to listen to her talk about how she felt; I didn’t wince or lose my appetite when she went on and on about what she was going through. Actually I was losing weight and having nightmares, but I’d get up in the middle of the night and do push-ups so I’d sleep and look healthy the next day. I wanted her to know I accepted what she went through as “normal.”
She could of course describe only with limited skill, thank God, her pain.
“I have a burning—it begins here”—her eyes would fill with tears—“and then it goes to here!” And she would start to tremble. “I want to kill everybody,” she would whisper, “I’ve become a terrible person—” (She’d been terrible before, though.) “I don’t know what to do. Why is this happening to me?”
She said, “If I believed in Heaven, if I thought I could go there and see my father and my sister Sarah—they were always good to me—I wouldn’t be so afraid.” She said, “It always seemed to me the good died young but I wasn’t good and I’m dying young.”
I was much too shy to imagine myself a woman physically, in exact detail, cleft and breasted.
My mother’s room had a wallpaper of roses, large roses, six or seven inches across, set quite close together. One day, sitting with her in a chair by her bed, it occurred to me that she could not bear any situation in which she could not cheat. What she said was, “I don’t know what good morphine is! It doesn’t help enough—I can’t get away with anything.” She may have meant from anything but I took her meaning as the other thing. She also said, “If I pray it doesn’t help, the pain doesn’t stop.”
“Do you believe in God, Momma?”
“I don’t know—why doesn’t He help me?”
“You’re supposed to praise Him whether you’re in pain or not.”
“That’s unfair.”
“Well, we’re not supposed to judge Him.”
“I don’t want a God like that,” she said.
“If you believed what the Catholics believed, you could pray to the Virgin Mary.”
“No woman made this world. I couldn’t pray to a woman.”
Much of her restlessness and agony came from comparing what the movies said life was and death was and what pain was for women with what she actually had to confront in her life. She didn’t think movies lied—like many liars, she saw truth everywhere.
One day I was listening to her and I grew sad. She said angrily, “Why are you looking sad?”
I said, “Out of sympathy.”
She said, “I don’t want that kind of sympathy—I want to be cheered up.” It was much worse, much more hysterical and shrill, than I’m showing.
“How do you want to be cheered up?”
“I don’t know—you’re so smart: you figure it out.” But if I tried to cheer her up she’d say, “You’re talking like a fool.”
The Golden Rule seemed to me inadequate; she wanted something given to her that had nothing to do with what I wished for myself.
I finally caught on; she yearned for a certain kind of high-flown, movie dialogue: “Mother, is the pain any better today?” “No.… No! I can’t bear it.” “Didn’t the nurse come today and give you the morphine shots?” I would say, sounding like a doctor, calm, fatherly. “Don’t mention the morphine! I don’t want to think about the morphine!” she would say like a rebellious girl or flirtatious woman.
She liked it if I pretended to be floored by her bravery whether she was being brave or not. Often she made herself up for these scenes. Doris could not bear to be just another patient for her doctors and nurses and could not bear her relative unimportance to them. My father had minded that too. But Doris plotted; she kept my report card face up on her bed when the doctor came; one day she told me to stay home from school and to cry when I let the doctor in. I said I couldn’t cry. She became enraged.
It was her notion that people were good for their own pleasure or out of stupidity and were then used by people who were capable of extorting love: love was based on physical beauty, accident, and hardness of soul: that is to say, hardness of soul aroused love in other people.
It was a perfectly good set of notions, I suppose, but I have never noticed that women thought more clearly than men.
One day I decided just to do it, finally, to sit down and actually imagine myself being her, middle-aged, disfigured, and so on.
I bicycled to some woods at the edge of town—a woods cut down since—walked and carried my bicycle through the trees, until I came to a glade I knew about where there was a tiny stream between mud banks that were in spots mossy. Enough kids used the glade that the undergrowth had been worn away in the center and the ground was mud, moist, smooth, quivering, lightly streaked with colors. As woods went, that one was threadbare, but I thought it very fine.
I’d cut my classes.
I leaned my bicycle against a tree and I sat on the moss. I’d asked Doris’s sister things about what Doris was going through, and the nearly senseless answers I’d gotten had unnerved me; the casual way peop
le expressed things so that they did not tell you anything or care or ever in words admit to what they knew really bothered me. Perhaps they didn’t admit it to themselves. Doris had a niece who was very intelligent and talkative but she didn’t like me: it wasn’t anything personal, but in the family there were assignments, and she’d been assigned to my sister; and my sister hated me, and out of politeness to my sister this cousin did not show any liking for me. She was rigorous in this (until one day she had a quarrel with my sister, and after that she was medium friendly to me). This particular cousin was outspoken and talked about things like menstruation and desiring boys, but she would not talk to me, although she was polite about not talking to me. So I didn’t know if Doris was going through menopause while she was dying of cancer or not. I didn’t know if one canceled the other out or not.
I don’t think I made it clear to myself what I was doing. I did and I didn’t know, I was definite and yet I crept up on it. Sitting in the glade, I thought it was all right and not upsetting to imagine oneself a young pretty girl especially if you didn’t do it in detail but it seemed really foul to imagine oneself a middle-aged woman. It would be easiest to imagine being a very old woman, a witch, or a rude dowager—that was even sort of funny. But to think of myself as a middle-aged woman seemed to me filthy.
I wondered if I thought middle-aged women sacrosanct, or monstrous, or disgusting, or too pathetic or what. It seemed a great transgression, a trespass to think so ill of them, although a lot of boys that I knew laughed at and scorned middle-aged women, married women and teachers both. Simply contemplating the fact, the phenomenon of middle-aged women, I seemed to myself to have entered on obscenity.
Well, then, I ought just to take them for granted and avert my eyes. But then I could not imagine what it was to be Doris or what she was going through.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 30