Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  They can dress and undress me. The other girl may become sentimental, impassioned and busy, speechless. I may touch her hair, rub my cheek against hers, kiss her, even on the mouth.

  It is maddening to be liked, to feel things—a thick, suffocating blanket that teases me and makes me fall on it, and roll, flattening it—a comforter—and seeing it rise, seeing it fluff up again.

  I might strut, my belly out: I like to have my belly kissed—patted; I might throw myself onto the girl’s lap, or into her arms, wriggle, then jump away, run off, hide; I may lurk in a hiding place: I will jump out, having become what the grownups call “wild.”

  Nonie and I go out into the wind. Giant paddle wheels of wind, atop the ridge, huge, skeletal vanes, turn; and as they do, lift and flutter everything.

  I am coated and trousered, suspendered, snapped and zipped, buttoned up, hatted, mittened, choked in thick, warm, puffy masses of insulation.

  I am artificially pudgy—imprisoned.

  I manage to get my hat off: my scalp crinkles: my whitish hair whips and snaps: my nose stings in the icily gliding and flapping air.

  While I do this—remove my hat with my mittened hands—I drag my feet: Nonie says, “You walk just like a baby—oh, you don’t know how to walk right—you’re so dumb.…”

  My big wind-invaded-now jacket. Sun and wind tease my eyes. I squint. I turn my head this way and that—see things—jerkily—disconnectedly—passages, corridors of the day.

  Our side porch is built on brick piers hidden by evergreens. Nonie has to pull and hold back branches of the yews for me: she knees me forward, pushes me with the side of her lower leg, toward a break in a trellis made of green laths (nailed on the diagonal). The laths that are broken end in naked wood, unpainted, splintery, shrill like the flames of kitchen matches. Most pains are at least in part like being burned by fire. I am into the windlessness of here-under-the-house.

  The house stretches above me wood-walled, monstrous, apparently tilted, echoing.

  It is almost hot under here (for me in my heavy clothes, bareheaded, squatting: very little heat comes from the house: it must be the airless-ness, the motionlessness of the air here).

  Nonie, partially visible through the lopsided graph of the trellis, is huge: her head is invisible. The light is horizontal, weak where I am—is stronger on her. She stoops. The watery inner light laps at her knees, her hand that reaches inside to hold on to a pier: bent over, she enters.

  On the ground is an inordinately fine blowy dust—blowy if you breathe on it; a dustlike dirt it is, undisturbed by wind: it is frailer and dryer and nastier than any other dust I’ve ever seen. It covers yellow-brown ugly dirt, nasty under-the-house dirt.

  A plaid automobile rug, old and smelly, is under here with us; and a dented kettle lies tilted in a small hollow. There is a spoon, a mop handle, a dirtied doll, a hole: around its neck, in fissures, dust drooped, occasionally whispered, slid, and fell.

  The comparative lightlessness, silence, secrecy, and morguishness suggest very loudly IT’S-TIME-TO-PLAY-NOW.

  When we played in her room, she would end the game by announcing, “You’ve been bad—I have to spank you.”

  She would turn me over.

  My bared bottom would seem to develop vision, to look up in a way at the air and at Nonie’s uplifted hand with the doll in it that she intended to hit me with. It seemed her hand, in turn, was an eye looking at me.

  If the blow was soft, then all right: Nonie would fasten me up again: time would continue. She might try to do schoolwork and she’d fall asleep—let me say it this way: one day she climbed up on her bed, sat on it cross-legged, opened her schoolbooks, and fell asleep, sitting up: she snored very faintly, a young girl’s snore: I tiptoed back to my own room.

  But if when the doll hit me, it was as if I had a covering of dust, smartly disordered and scattered—but each particle glowed and had in it a bit of feeling which I felt; or if it was as if I was like a piano, strummed, jangled, chopped at—unsuspected elements in me would race and twang, I would be filled with sounds—and all this then resolved itself into an ache, a stone or a wall, with no face drawn on it, a sheer obduracy, then I was caught up in an unendurable storm of nonsense: much of the world was unreadable, was nonsense, newsprint, foliage, an adult running in a hallway—I heard noises, saw blurs: I did not know it was an adult, I did not realize anyone, or anything, was running. The linear, the comprehensible, was tender—was meant for a child. One was very shy about nonsense—at least, I was. Nonsense was another world. Small, stinging pain was beyond sense: Nonie hurt me: incomprehension, adrenaline, and pain flowed together, side by side; or rather formed, materialized at once, in the vial, the singular unity of a child’s body. There were not too many substantial choices, automatic or conscious ones, but the repertoire grew as I did, as days passed, leaving a residue of captions, guesses, that the nights, and night dreams, played with—the nights were full of study. On one occasion, in Nonie’s room, the child’s face twists, he prepares to howl—“Don’t be silly: we were only playing,” she said, and she hugged me.

  On another, the child rolls away, gets under the bed. It is another afternoon: the child knocks over a night table. And here, in a different light, he kicks his seated sister, holding his pants, while his eyed and warmed ass, outraged and awake, refused to be silent but silently howled behind him.

  She will not let life be other than this.

  If I refuse to be consoled, she buttons my clothes by force. If I get away, she says she was getting me ready to go to the bathroom and I try to make a mess—pee—in her room. A lie is designed for utterance: it is meant to be comprehended—it is not like the truth, which is an utterance full of failure, of references, of an otherness to itself. A lie consoles and flatters with obvious and acceptable meanings: one’s com fort, one’s anger are shown respect by some lies that other people tell us.

  She says to me, in the afternoon light, “You’re just a baby—you have to do what I say—I can get you into trouble.”

  She can: she can make Momma and Daddy sigh and be tired of me for a while.

  If Daddy and Momma start to talk to each other about Nonie, they soon attack each other: “You babied her.”

  “You’re a heartless mother.”

  “You don’t care what happens to people—you’re the irresponsible one in this house.” “You’re selfish.”

  “You treat her like a doll.”

  “You don’t know how to treat her.”

  “You admit it, you’re accused out of your own mouth; oh, Charley, you don’t even know how to argue.”

  It is better for them to approve of Nonie; and anyway, we’re not sure that in this world, as things go, Nonie is really awful.

  One thing, though, is clear: Daddy will not correct her: and he is foot-stampingly not at fault: he is I-am-innocent. He will sometimes cry, he becomes helpless and grief-stricken if Nonie gets scurrilous enough in her tantrums. (Thunderstorms make her hysterical, and she accuses him and Momma of things she has overheard, she has learned about: she wets herself and screams and writhes and says, “God will kill you—He won’t hurt me.” She yells at him, “Go outside—let the lightning get you—make it leave me alone.”) Daddy has no middle ground: he can care about his home only if it has no evil in it: he can care only about people he believes to be innocent. If it seems there is something malevolent in this house, something unpleasant, he gets very upset. “I don’t understand,” he says despairingly, “I don’t understand.”

  SOMETIMES HE will throw a tantrum then: he will stamp his foot, and shout—so that the furniture slides a little bit—that it is the school’s fault or Momma’s, “NONIE IS A GOOD GIRL!” He will shout: “SOMEONE IS RUINING HER.” Then he subsides: he says, “There’s a pain in my chest—I can’t breathe.”

  He holds a hand to his chest: his eyes are stricken: it is frightening how sick of everything he is, then, for a while.

  “He is more afraid of Nonie than of anyone,”
Momma said.

  Nonie trafficked in innocence.

  And in the opposite of it: in accusation, in cruelty.

  Daddy used to say, “It’s better to leave well enough alone.” And: “Nonie’s a fine girl—and that’s the end of the subject.” That was love and not-love. He didn’t want to think about her.

  If Nonie is playing with other children, the nurse takes me outside in the afternoons. If I see Nonie, I will run to her, and she will turn red and yell, “Get away, get him away, I’m busy—”

  If I didn’t go away but stood and stared at her—without comprehension—and if the nurse, who was fat, delayed, Nonie would come over and push me so that I would fall on my rump (she almost never hit me in front of witnesses: she’d learned that was not wise). Sometimes what she did made the people she was with uneasy—or they’d point-blank dislike her: she would blame me: I ruined everything for her always.

  On the whole, it was better for me when she was pretty solidly defeated.

  We play under the porch, and then Nonie has me lie down on the automobile blanket; and we go through the complexities of her undressing me: she pulls down my snowsuit pants, lifts my shirt and snowsuit jacket. I am nearly naked.

  She wants to enjoy me as Momma does. But also she is curious why I am loved the way I am.

  Nonie poked my belly with a stick: “You have appendicitis: I’m operating on you.” She said of my prick, “It’s silly.” She poked it with her stick. I wriggled. I pushed at her hand. She stuck the twig in my ear. I struggled; then she stopped, and we played—I think she was an airline pilot doing an appendectomy in a thunderstorm. Then she tried to stick the twig into my mouth: I turned my head: she grabbed my nose, held it, pressed the nostrils together: for air, I opened my mouth: the twig, its bark, its smell of dust—it had lain in the dust—entered my mouth, touched my palate: I gagged.

  Nonie slapped down my struggling arms and legs. “Do what I tell you! You have to do what I tell you! We’re playing a game!”

  She held my nose and put dirt in my mouth: “This is food—eat it—you have to eat it.”

  I would think the thing of being suited to give birth would go along with an innate patience with, oh, physical explorations, curiosity about pain, about courage and submission. And nothing middle-class approves of that; being middle-class consists of privileges, of being spared pain. Maybe middle-class women become angry, impatient, secretive, somewhat crazed because they are separated from pain and effort, and women must not be separated from pain and effort. Nothing in middle-class men shows they have equally bloody dichotomies and difficult fates and transformations in store for them (lower-class men are the soldiers: but perhaps there will be no more war). Maybe Nonie’s mouth tasted of death, stank of dirt unaccountably: and so she hungered to force dirt between my lips to see if I would choke on the taste of burial, until I shared her fate with her and was a true brother—or maybe she simply hated things or she wanted to see acted out what filled her often, as in thunderstorms, that horror.

  She always headed toward this in our games; sooner or later, she always said to me, “Be brave—why aren’t you brave?”

  She thought of herself as a hero.

  The grownups keep her occupied with shopping and horseback and tennis and music lessons and carefully arranged afternoons with Jewish girls from other suburbs in order to prevent Nonie’s expressing herself in boredom, prevent her from becoming a duchess in an old, bloody play.

  She dug, with the twig, a fake stethoscope, into the soft flesh between my legs, behind my balls.

  I suddenly remember—I enter a continuum—of knowledge, urgent but without expression—sort of Nonie-sometimes-does-bad-things-and-this-is-a-time-when-she … is not to be accepted, perhaps.

  I have a limited repertoire of warlike things: I struggle to my feet, in my wrappings, with my bared belly—or no: I rolled over, onto her leg, or rather right next to it, partly on it, and pushed at her with my mittened hands; she pushed my head back—my neck was bent; it hurt—not a lot, but it drew nets, sieves of being maddened: I was strained through a sieve and became a buzz, a hive of animus: I peed on her leg.

  She didn’t know—she didn’t notice; and then she merely stirred because she didn’t know; and then she suspected—and pushed me away from her so sharply I lost consciousness briefly—and she yelled, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

  And: “DID YOU DARE DO THAT?”

  “I’LL TEACH YOU A LESSON!”

  She starts to slap me but stops and begins to wipe her leg with the blanket.

  I get to my feet, clumsily, hurriedly, holding my snowsuit pants. When I am on my feet, I think, Run—run—and then all at once, but slowly all at once, drowning out every other sensation, is the sensation that I am undressed and I am here—under-the-porch, in this silence, this dust, with her.

  There is a vast and unexpected subtraction suddenly—where there ought to be people nearby, there are none: a shout will not frighten Nonie because here there are no linkages to inhabitants of the world and to the future. It is not the same here. This is a cave of games. It is unsafe and odd here.

  I took a quick, childish inventory of skills, strengths, resources I might have, my allies, my ability to arouse love—in someone.

  What is this girl going to teach me? What can she make me believe now? What can she turn the world into at this moment?

  This is not a good moment.

  I start to waddle away: she looks up, drops the blanket, scoots along her ass—she does not know this is a mimicry of an epic, a capture by a giant or by a siren, or that this is a cave; she thrusts her leg in front of me: gruntingly, she forces me backward, she pushes, corrals, knocks me down so that I sit on the wadded-up blanket—she does this with her fleshy, roundy leg.

  Curiosity tempers fear. There is a strangely biological feel to ignorance: to what now. Also, to anger, to confronting her. I scowl at her: I look directly into her face and scowl. This excites me—and increases my anger: perhaps this time I will master the danger of her having her way with me.

  I get up again and see a long mop handle in the dust, and I grab it.

  The air is cold, or tingly—I mean, on my belly. One-handed, I raise the mop handle—and hit the porch roof with it. The vibrations that zoom along its length—something forces the stick from my hand. “Ha-ha: look at you—you’re so stupid.”

  This pleases her.

  If one is helpless—or the underdog—one can rage as much as one likes—and one is still innocent.

  The actual inability to hurt someone strikes people who observe it in you as comic—you are comic.

  It flashes through one, a heat, a blank fog, of surrender and of not-surrender to being comic, to being (angrily) the one who can be hurt.

  I pick up the mop handle again and use it to poke and swing at the blowy dust, to fan dust toward her: I want to dirty her.

  She takes hold of the mop handle with both her hands: she pulls—and it is gone; the mop handle is gone from me.

  Her back is straight: her posture holds the lines of force of her kidnapping the stick.

  I stoop and scrabble at the loose blowy dust. It has rough-edged flakes in it, bits of old house paint (those flakes), hard bits of foil. Caterpillary scrambling fingers gather it up, throw it. It hovers as if with great moral delicacy between Nonie and me. She waves it off: blows at it. It is terrible to attempt a maneuver that doesn’t work at all. I stoop and dig with finger ends at the puke-colored under-the-house dirt.

  The small clod I throw comes apart in the air: hypnotic flotillas float: the air is full of slowed dirt. She bats some of the pieces aside—ducks—but one lands on her cheek.

  The moment becomes greatly vivid and enlarged. She leans back on her arms (the mop handle is held in her hand: she does nothing with it) and kicks at me: she reaches out her plump, roundy leg and her foot and kicks me in the chest (which is not very high for her).

  Something like a knot of wood forms where she kicked me, a dulled, less sentie
nt thing in me, it seems at first, rough-edged, discolored. It lodges in me, in what had the orderly-silky-toylike-rapid-thing-or-whatever-which-is-me-behind-and-below-my-throat. I am, or rather my chest and nearby parts of me are, cast into a furnace of an unfamiliar throbbing: the wood feeds it: it is unpleasantly gooshy, knotty, grabby, twisty in me: the pain is heaviest at its center but most unsettling at its edges, where it seems to push at me and crowd me.

  What is unhurt in me seems to scream or half scream with disowning what-is-hurt as well as with sympathy and surprise.

  The hurt part of me is tragic and dishonored.

  Inside the moment, Nonie is completely, unutterably mysterious to me. There is no worded or envisioned explanation: it is simply clear—but surprising—that she is this person.

  The various doublenesses of experiencing this, of being hurt—and knowing it—make my heart beat in earnest.

  Nonie kicked me again—in the stomach. I sat down in a bubble of asphyxiation.

  Momma will say, “I’m not going to take sides! I can’t defend him—I have other things to do—he’s the boy—he’s got to learn to live with her—let him learn to take life as it comes.”

  She will, however, blackmail Nonie and regard her coldly, even with disgust.

  Nonie decides to laugh—you can see her face meeting in committee and coming to a decision—at my airlessness. When she laughs, although I have partly blacked out and can’t breathe, I throw myself at her. Suddenly the mop handle—she holds it in one hand—is against my chest: then she uses two hands on the mop handle and thrusts me back. When she then thrusts the mop handle and hits me in the chest, it is almost in curiosity, or emphasis, an experiment, a particular kind of joke: he’s-a-baby; it’s a form of tidiness, of cleaning up—intellectually, perhaps—as of making things coincide geometrically.

  Her tidiness and joking give me a sense of rage and dismissal, her dismissal from my childish consciousness: she is no longer real: she is an enemy.

  The acceptable justification, acceptable to her, is he’s spoiled and he was bothering me.