The belief that there is happiness, or tenderness—not the hysterical belief of someone beleaguered or coerced but the conviction of the child-scientist, the child-egotist, that such things are actual—actually hurts, but in a friendly way. It aches as much as the safe return when you thought you would never get down from where you climbed to, and you do get down and stand still and pant, horrified, proud, and relieved. The reality, then, unless you re very simple, is for older kids, and you do feel older; you feel breezes, gooseflesh; the skin of the mind is very sore; the skin of the heart tingles with I-don’t-know-what.
I sat on the car’s new upholstery; I sat with my hands on the seat on either side of my thighs; I looked up at my father: he had his hat on, his head was just slightly cocked; he was driving. He was pleased with himself. I had no sense of there being a road under the car, or of the road ahead of the car being joined to anything such as ground or the town below us: the road was a hanging bridge, a flap placed somehow in volumes of intervening and kind, sunlit, lucky people’s air and space.
It was not my business to know the topography of our ridge; I did not know the ridge was joined to the town: I left all that to my father.
I kneeled on the seat with the sense and swift taste of marvels as we ascended into the flesh of sunlight and churchly silence of the moneyed houses on the ridge. My father, who was often sentimental about divinity, said, “Life is just a bowl of cherries, God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.”
Mutability ought never speak of immutability.
DADDY’S FACE now had a certain weary human pleasure in it, an I-told-you-so look.
The human uproar of that in me, of his caring, and the evidence of Daddy’s force and wallet, the tremendousness of our luck as a family, the size of his legs going from there to down there (the accelerator), his faint sweatiness as the car air vent blew and roared in a minor way, I liked these things a lot.
We drove into the driveway of our house: the gravel scattered.
“Honk the horn for your mother,” Daddy said.
I did.
The sound flew out, at my instigation. I was the-boy-on-my-father’s-big-lap. The buttons of his suit pushed against my behind as I pushed against the horn.
“That’s enough,” he said.
My sister, Nonie, appeared at a window and called out, “What is it? Why are you honking?”
“Get your mother and come outside and see what we have here, see what we have for you,” Daddy said.
I heard the house door open—oh my God, those long-ago domestic sounds! Then the screen door slammed—and Momma said, “Nonie, don’t slam the door.” Then there were FOOTSTEPS. On the front deck.
Shadows appeared, jerkily half racing over steps, over gravel. Those sounds are clear, are not like voices in memory, and the sight, too, is clear of Momma wearing a black outfit with a big, big lacelike collar; and she had a look as if she required immediate shelter, immediate, from the sun, from heat: she was moist and busty and succulent and frail. (Nonie had fat legs and hips and a babyish face; she was rubbery, outdoorsy.)
Momma often had a gentle look of the-pain-has-begun. It was a look of fierce but softened exasperation. Momma was affected by—everything: she was sensitive to—everything: she was endlessly active in being affected; she was melodramatic in appearance: blacks, whites, reds, a lusciousness, a temper, a heated blooming, a heat of expressiveness—how can one convey the out-of-date way, the coquetry, the highly codified and elaborate style of her being out-of-doors (in sight of the neighbors), ready to flirt with S.L.? And then the exasperation taking control of her, a sneering, crazy temper: she didn’t like that car. When she and Nonie reached the second-to-bottom step, from which they could see the car, I saw Momma’s face was made up, and sweet—to welcome Daddy—but it puckered; and she said in a half-and-half angry voice, the exact tone of which is lost but it was full of rebuke, “What have you done now, S.L.?” Perhaps one oughtn’t to ascribe words to her but only an astonished anger. The sunlight made shadows under Momma’s eyebrows and in her mouth and under her chin: the shadows over her eyes were like a mask: she was a masked, soft bandit. She had told S.L. she wanted a small car, easy to handle and park. I remember her anger or perhaps her voice as being like a flock of crows that blackly sail out and attack, peck at, eat everything—even one’s eyes. I blinked. Or she was squeezed—not by tragedy: by minor tragedy: squeezed by aggravation: squeezed so hard that rudeness squirted from her, even outdoors, where the neighbors might hear; she went slightly mad with exasperation. I could not believe at first that after my having been cheered up, anything unpleasant could happen right away like this, and I was seized by that dreadful-to-grownups hilarity which is partly embarrassment or horror—but not serious horror; if one laughs aloud at such times, if there is someone not really angry, just aggravated, as Momma was, they will say, as I think she did, “I suppose it’s nice to be a child after all.”
Sometimes when I laughed, Momma would stare at me. “He thinks we’re entertainment,” she would say.
Daddy said something like “Leila, it’s a good car, it’s a Buick, it’s the best—”
She protested that he never listened to her. When Daddy told her she was hurting my feelings, that I had selected the car, she said she didn’t want to have her car selected by a child. She said she and Daddy weren’t children anymore. She said Daddy made a joke of everything and that life wasn’t a joke.
I turned from one grownup to the other. My bandages made a sound as I moved my head.
Momma said, “I told you I’m not good at parking. All that machine is good for is carting old women to Jewish funerals—” She said, “I’m not that kind of woman, S.L.” I remember those words: she was trying to soften the occasion and her rage and to get everything back to coquetry.
Daddy said, “Can’t you ever be grateful? What’s wrong with you—do you have to make everyone unhappy? Don’t you love anyone?”
Nonie said, “I don’t like it, either, Daddy—I don’t like the color.”
I rushed forward to kick her. She dodged. Momma said, putting her hand on my shoulder, “Leave her alone, Alan; if I had light eyes like you, I’d like a blue car, too—you look good in that color.”
Nonie, meanwhile, was opening the car door, the rear door; but the hinges had never been fastened, and the door continued to open, it wavered, began to separate from the car; while Nonie stared, screamed—screamed again—the whole door teetered into the air, turned horizontal, seemed to both float and fall—heavily—to the ground, to the gravel, where it crunched and slid and tore its paint with a grating and continuing sound.…
When the silence returned, I felt a grimace on my face. I was staring at the door on the ground. Momma said, “My God! Will they take the car back now? Why did the door do that, S.L.? What do you call it when a door does a thing like that?”
Daddy, thinking it was someone’s fault—it had to be someone’s fault—shouted blindly to Nonie, “WHAT DID YOU DO TO THAT DOOR?”
Nonie shouted back, “I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO IT!”
Poor Daddy. He came over and grabbed my shoulder and pulled me away from Momma. He had a look of great sternness and don’t-lie-to-me-ishness on his face. He shouted at me, “WHAT DID you DO TO THAT DOOR?”
He was trying to get to the truth of the matter.
Daddy used often to say, “We’re all fools and clowns—we have to make the best of a bad business.”
III
MY MOTHER thought real citizenship in a real country—as opposed to ghetto awfulness and claustrophobia and helplessness—real middle-classness in America and getting-away-from-the-rabbis, meant being modern, hypocritical, sort of criminal according to Old Testament notions, criminal-in-a-way, with style, in deep respectability, while keeping-your-nerve, showing you knew how-the-game-went, and living with consequent ironic near-a-nervous-breakdown high amusement and speed and astuteness and duplicity.
She was willing. She was a semipro. She adm
ired people who were better at being American than she was: “Frankly, I’m a social climber—I’m learning.” Her sincerest and most earnest regard was for people who were overtly and gaudily successful in the way she admired: “No flies grow on her—she knows what’s what.”
We lived in a small town—a Midwestern small town but not a constricted, airless one: a semi-wide-open river port with a noticeable upper class who took their pleasures mostly in near or distant cities, with a sense of freedom and of sophistication.
Momma changed the way she looked according to the season and time of day, to whether we had company or not, to her mood, to the social standing of who was coming to the house: of course, something is the same, or many things are, in the woman no matter how she is dressed, but the things that are the same are inexpressible, are The Unexpressed where Momma is concerned so far as I know. When I was little, while she was precisely visible at any one time, over a period of hours she was blurry in a rain of transformations: she dressed differently and wore no makeup or different makeup and her hair was different at breakfast, in the afternoon, at dinner, in the evening, at bedtime. There wasn’t anyone else who changed so noticeably, so richly. She said, “I don’t know, it’s all a lot of work—I think I have to work harder than S.L. does—no one gives me credit for the work it is.” Her physical expressiveness was one of caroming inside various fashions and off mirrors and in self-preparation on the way to getting things done—that was her phrase.
The way she was dressed and the social thing she was embodying at a given moment affected the way she kissed me: it was obviously a different kiss you got from the sore-footed peasant girl-woman relaxing at home than you got from the dressed-up-and-with-diamonds-lady-on-her-way-to-a-dinner-party, and it amused her that you preferred the kiss of one to that of the other—of the less sincere and more abstracted one to the more serious one, for instance. She was openly businesslike about having to have so many styles; she had or professed or displayed an overtly self-conscious, heated, ironic glamour in the years when I first knew her: I get things done; I’m someone people jail in love with; and then a glance asked, Are you hooked?
Her features were good—regular and unstylized. The quality of her particular looks was discreet but sultry, hot and soft, midnight-pallor-and-darkness. Suggestive, I’m not sure of what. Romance. Passion. Knowing-how-to-have-a-good-time. Watch-out-I’m-temperamental-and-a-power. This was all set off socially, when she was dressed up, by a self-conscious sense of humor that she adopted and by a Middle Western, taut, contingent politeness that changed like her humor according to the circumstances of the moment and the rank of whomever she was with and how much she wanted to impress them.
When I first knew her, she was thirty-three years old: she told everyone she was thirty-one. And then thirty-four years old was what she was. And thirty-five. The years she had “under her belt” (she said that) kept getting added on to.
I knew her differently from any way that she spoke of herself—I knew of her in a dreamlike or isolated or inward way: or from outside, as just a person but one who acted out being the-friendliest-woman-imaginable-although-I-am-pretty, and who acted out being tormented and unhappy, and with a defiant, parochial status of being a local woman of undeniable romance and glamour. She was someone I saw every day, a mother, a person, who went out visiting.
She had been a girl, of course. A very young girl soon learns she is innocent-and-helpless, vulnerable—as does a boy—but no one thinks the girl is a failure that way, whereas a little boy is given a sense of being girlish. Nothing is expected of girls except things they can do almost right away (except for childbirth), so that nearly everything a girl does is greeted as well done, as precocity; there is hardly a woman who does not have, by male standards, an undeserved and crippling sense of her own precocity. Momma had that—maybe more than most women have.
Momma sometimes claimed she’d invented her good looks and it was hard work and required “nerve”: sometimes she said she just happened to be good-looking. She couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be thought of as lucky or clever. The way she stood, dressed, smiled served to remind people of her good looks: Why is that woman holding her head to one side? Oh, she’s very pretty, isn’t she?
“I get away with it—I know how to get away with it,” she said.
She had a temperamentally grandiose, genuinely grand, if local, set of moods that had to do with her “getting the most out of” (her phrase) her looks “while they last” (also her phrase), and she had a sly, obstinate, sort of crazy set of moods, inside a thing of I-am-a-prophetess: I-am-crazy-but-I-know-things-and-I-ought-to-be-listened-to.
Momma was honest, but in different ways every few minutes, depending on circumstances and who she was with and her mood. She also lied, but rarely with absolute guile—when she lied, it was more a thing of take it or leave it.
She always said, “Women have terrible lives,” but her tone was different depending on her age. There was a harem smell about her always—she’d never stepped outside the protection of her family and then of her husband—and the harem smell had a tinge of connivance, shadows, and often complaint: it was in her tones of voice, in the varying degrees of defiance or of boastfulness or of seduction in her speaking voice. The complaint went from mild, almost languorous, to maenad-savage, to I-would-kill-you-if-I-could-get-away-with-it. She would say, “No one can force me to do anything.” She would give warning that she was not a mere toy by remarking with quaint good humor or with wild-eyed, lunatic temper, “I have a lot of say-so in this town.”
She never claimed logical rigor, only intelligence. She said, “No one taught me how to think—I had to teach myself,” and besides, her sense of life was made up of illogicalities and inconsistencies: she would say, “Everything’s a big joke, if you ask me,” and “The joke is nothing’s a joke—you can’t let anything pass.”
She built a great deal of her public and private politics on having her unhappiness matter: she would be happy as a social gesture, as a form of flattery to you. Sometimes she would refuse to be unhappy in order to claim that defeat was impossible for her. Sometimes defeat was the only idea she wanted people to have of her—that she failed and failed and failed and had to be given help at once—help or forgiveness.
“I’m queen of this little town,” she’d say musingly, or threateningly, or as a joke, or as a cruel joke on herself: I couldn’t tell when I was a child; and in memory she seems always to be feeling at least two emotions when she says it—maybe three, counting boredom. (She also expressed disappointment in herself for not “trying my luck in a big city.”)
She had a hipshot stance and walk, very daring. She was quick—quick and ruthless in style of movement and of mind—but sometimes memory reduces her walk to a wind-pressed slow motion, with her movements bunching her body in soft self-clappings and then wicked, partly inhibited openings out, or archings, to the public view.… People stared at her: children. Dogs barked at her—at the dramatic disturbance she threw out into the air. She said, “All my life, people kowtowed to me because of my looks—and, if you’ll pardon me for boasting, my brains—it was all a lot of foolishness, if you ask me—it was all—what’s the word—superficial.”
She told me, “I was always the beauty of the household.… One thing I’ll say for my mother: she let me be my father’s favorite—she never fought me for him.”
Of her own daughter she said, “I was lucky—it means a lot to a girl: let Nonie have her turn.” That is, she let Nonie, my sister, be close to Daddy. Daddy couldn’t always get along with Nonie, and Momma often was bored with Daddy, so it was funny to try to figure out the generosity involved. Nonie was eleven years older than I was.
Momma gave me the impression that in her there were certain serious purposes, earnest errands, life-and-death projects, charities that concerned whole lives, serious plots, finaglings about money that occupied her mind. Also, there were certain serious gloomy honesties in her, a pessimism, and dark i
nsights into people that served as a form of somewhat lazy omniscience (“No one’s really nice,” she would say), and a dark forgiveness and wonder that a child oughtn’t to know about, so she would say to me at times, “Don’t pay attention to me. Go away now—live your own life.” (Sometimes I would obey that injunction.)
She was said to have helped cause my real mother’s death—by breaking her spirit when she was ill, by enticing my affections from my real mother: “You were your mother’s only reason to live.” (Leila said to me once, “The one thing I’m afraid about is what I did to your mother.”) And then she had her public prettiness—sort of interrupting and dominating everything with All right, now all hands waver toward me—all eyes light on me—now stop—don’t touch me—oh all right, touch me a little—now go back—I don’t know—I have to laugh—my God, what a mess.…
Her particular style of moral defiance was that of a Jewess, I think, but she overlaid that, for the sake of appearances, with an imitation of certain small-town Protestant women who arrogated social power and guiltlessness to themselves and the right to ascribe guilt. Momma never managed the latter; the closest she could come to it was the exposé: “The truth is—if you ask—me—”
I would guess her defiance began with her snubbing the Jewish principle that a woman ought not be the occasion of anyone else’s sinning. She said, “I’m no goody-goody; I don’t like goody-goodies; no goody-goody can get along with me.… I don’t put myself in a special category—I’m not a saint—that’s why I’ve always been popular—that’s why men come to me for advice.”
(Sometimes she said, “They come to me for advice because I have nice eyes.”)
She had many modes of cliché; one of the most common patterns of her speech was a spiel—she liked to make new friends, to seduce and re-seduce and re-re-seduce someone (often she seemed to alienate people in order to have the game, the hunt of re-seducing them—or of seeing what she could get away with: another big interest of hers that blotted out and got mixed up with other things in her); the spiel implied I know the sort of person you are, I don’t mind, you can’t fool me much and there’s no reason you should, I’m not a big blamer, you don’t have to lie to me, so why don’t you tell me the truth, I’m not a child, tell me the truth and then we’ll know where we stand, come on, trust me, include me in—look, you don’t have to respect me, I’m just like you, I’m on your side, you can count on me to understand what it takes to get along in life— it was this that was the center of her being seductive.…
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 40