Perhaps we were competitive and glad to escape from her power and thievish toward the rights she’d once had and that could be ours if we could take and hold them. She handled badly what was happening to her. She rubbed your face in her moods, in part so she could feel the full extent of her problem. By making very clear to herself your impatience with her and exaggerating it, she imprinted the real situation on her nerves and looked at it, and felt it more: this was one way she was alive.
But it made you her enemy, her competitor.… Her moods were sometimes heavy now, like Daddy’s, masculine. Her sense of things wasn’t young; it wasn’t airy—or generous.
You could see how different she was in the way she walked, or just by looking into her face. Her self-consciousness had grown so that if you were me and got her attention you were looked at by a pair of eyes in a face of I-am-this-woman-now.
She came to conclusions every day about I-am-this-woman-now—and then she’d change her mind; and through that variety her attention would be directed at me—at anyone.
Part of what she had been was careless, or at least uncaring much of the time about what people thought about her and about what she did, and now she was enraged at having to worry about who she was.
By the time I started to speak, to enter on the difficulties of ideas uttered and trafficked in, Momma, like everyone else, often mentioned that she was getting older.
I REMEMBER Momma going on diets, changing her hairdos, not desperately but sighingly, using her mind, her wits; she was trying to be what she’d more or less casually planned for herself for when her “bloom” went, which was to be “smart,” angular, knowing, stylish, older (older and striking—strike, smite, deal a blow), to gain a new say-so to match the one she had lost.
She was not at all ill-natured when she worked on herself, but when it turned out her looks didn’t have the possibility of being modish she became moody, even quite wild with moods. Thin, her body was insignificant, not electrically sexual or stylish; and her face, bony, was not distinguished and romantic but was openly full of temperament—an overused face, ambitious, hot, restless: it looked bad-tempered even when she smiled. She said once, “One of the tragedies of my life was that I couldn’t be chic—I didn’t have the bones. I would have known how to use it, too—believe me—if I’d had the chance, but I didn’t have it.” Sigh. “I had to make do with what I had.”
Daddy said she was “a killer,” that she turned “murderous.” She got rid of Anne Marie, my nurse—I was pretty dependent on Anne Marie. Once Anne Marie was gone, Daddy found the house unpleasant and agreed to move to the suburb Momma wanted to live in. No one told me Anne Marie was leaving: one day she was gone. “Act like a man,” Momma said to me.
She told one of her brothers he was “an oily fool” and another that he was “an ignorant fool”—she did it in a polite voice; she didn’t mean “to drive them away—I want them to know I’m someone they have to consider; I protect them from looking like fools.” But she did drive them away: they began to avoid her. Her looks, with care, could have a local haute-bourgeoise, slightly plump prettiness, with a delicate aging romance to them, or a neat, serene, lyrical, and calm middle-aged prettiness, but nothing youthful or electrifying.
I remember periods off and on when she would suddenly adopt a spy lady’s glamour, an old expert’s glamour, slinky and instructed, and she would do it whether she was plump or not: she took to furs, hats that shaded her face. She did it frankly as an aging woman—“I’m at the age for overdressing: I have to strike while the iron is hot,” she’d say with a sarcasm that somehow broke off or shaded into a strangely deep resignation, almost a placidity, a placidity of storminess so you had to blink, confused about how fierce she was being at the moment.
She said she needed money for beauty parlors, for clothes, for entertaining: “It costs a lot more when you get older just to keep up.…” Actually, she was climbing a little higher socially: she was bolder, pushier in a way. She would be furious about my pleasures—sports, for instance—but she wouldn’t raise her voice: she would mock in a resigned voice, and then forbid me wearily, boredly to take sports seriously. I fought her, and she’d back up into shadows and hold off, sort of; but she’d think of errands, household duties for me to do to keep me from my games—she wanted to run everything and everyone: she ran Daddy’s business. But in mood, in tone, in manner, she was always elegiac.
Her walk changed—it changed a lot; it became fluffy and more elegant; but in a year or two more it became purposeful, frightening, and knowing, a stalking as if she were Fate (she said, “I’m a very conceited woman, I admit it”). When I walked next to her, sometimes it was like being next to granite blocks tumbling slowly in melodramatic little avalanches. It was strange to me as a child when she changed. I used to laugh, inwardly but outwardly too, briefly, shocked or—something: amused, and she would say, “You don’t recognize me? You think I’ve made a mistake? I’m not sure I like the way I look today myself.” When she walked hipshot, it was not like before at all: now it was metronomic, now demanding; the shiftings of her body tended to be comic or comic-lyrical, startling and obvious (elegiac sexuality is comic, I suppose); for daytime functions, she was more and more careful to be girdled and serene.
There was a period of about two years when she would complain—jokingly—about getting older: “I used to be good-looking,” she would say; she would speak to other women of the loosening of the skin of her arms and of her neck; she would say to a man who was complimentary, “Oh, I’m getting past all that, Herb; we all are.” She said to people—she said it to herself, as if to herself; I would be there, sitting on the edge of her bed, swinging my legs, listening—“I want to grow old well; it’s a job like any other—it’s something you figure out.” She was competitive about it; she meant to do it better than anyone else.
People talked to her differently; they talked of their own affairs differently, not as if to a sibyl, not darkly and haltingly and embarrassedly or with a rush; they took their time; they assumed she had to be “charming” (her whole social manner was more fluid, more polite, more outgoing, a serene and happy, resigned, semiretired woman); she listened with what seemed a calm attentiveness. She was supposed to. She was supposed to make up for her age by a seductiveness of attention and of concern for them, for their interests: she said in private, “They’re getting even with me now—I don’t blame them—I took advantage of everyone for years—I like thinking of it now.” (Sometimes she said, “I don’t like thinking of how selfish I was—I thought I owned everything. I was a terrible fool. I laid the wrong foundations.”) She said, “I knew what was coming—I used my time well—I only wish I’d taken more advantage of people.…” She had periods now of what seemed true kindness, of a wish to nurture others, of an interest in other people’s sadness—Daddy’s or Nonie’s or mine; but that was part of wanting to tell us what to do and of punishing us if we didn’t listen to her and do what she told us all the time; I resisted—one did resist her with a kind of guerrilla evasiveness—and she was grand, a full army, soft-bodied, carefully got up, or sometimes, now, messy and at-home, her full age, brown-lipped, hanging skin, masculine and strong-looking but tired and depressed, with sudden spurts of savagery. She rarely bothered with sarcasm; she attacked directly—my father in this fashion: “You’re dumb—you were always dumb—everyone knows you’re dumb—why don’t you grow up and face it, S.L.?” She said it almost wearily, looking up at him, without personal heat, with the heat of a rage too weary to become hysterical.
He said, “You’ve got a terrible mouth on you—you’re a terrible woman.” He said, “We’re getting older—the best is yet to be.”
“God, you’re a fool,” she said.
Her charities increased in number: she paid for them out of money meant for other things; she liked it that the household was in financial disarray. Nonie, cheated of clothes and allowances, screamed and threw tantrums; Momma tried to buy her off with other things: Momma thou
ght “making sacrifices for a daughter is cheap—it’s what women do who have no lives of their own.” But sometimes she would make a big to-do of making sacrifices for Nonie, a sort of I-am-being-a-mother-wow-and-I-want-credit-for-it. Really, her temper grew worse and worse, more impatient and intractable. She ascribed everything she did to self-sacrifice—as in her charities, in keeping up appearances, in running the family: it was for our sakes—“certainly not for my sake: I don’t get anything out of it, let me assure you.” She seemed to imply that only running away from home could have saved her life and could have been amusing. That or suicide or lunacy—any of the three would have been amusing. In her attacks on people, she said things that had been said before in jest and she said them again in a grating, direct, naked voice, or politely, with her face dragged down by gravity, or softly, flirtatiously, sort of idly threatening; and Daddy would twitch and say to her that she was “an awful woman—you come straight from hell—you’re a curse.…” When she attacked me, I laughed as I did when she changed her appearance: look-at-what-Momma-is-doing-now. Her ferocity was like the current superabundance of her underwear (she’d always worn, oh, less before) or her new smells (she smelled more grainy—granular, I should say). The laugh bordered on horror and on delight—the horror of seeing a dead bird, of seeing Momma-get-into-trouble (it didn’t take much vision to realize there’d be trouble for her soon when she acted like this), of having things go really rotten, and of being freed from loving her, of being turned loose as for a recess; the delight came from the same things and was ambiguous and despairing as well. I still loved her a lot but chiefly when I didn’t see her, when I was out of the house, or when she was talking to someone else; when she talked to me, I resisted, I became a knot and twist of resistance, an outward expression of an inner judgment of her as she-is-impossible.
Her sense of self-sacrifice was so great that she felt it right to do anything at all with unparalleled emotional extravagance in the way of making demands, of temper, of pull-the-temple-down-to-hell-with-you-my-rage-is-my-beauty-now. She had puffs of swiftness and remorselessness—as a pretty woman—mothy, puffish, yet fatal. And when people were angry or put off and retreated from her, they also laughed at her in a funny way: in a sense, all traffic between her and everyone had been rerouted.
Daddy was gently, obdurately triumphant—even when she managed to depress him and scare him and make him helpless; he had only two moods at home, really-on-top-of-the-world and then nervous-breakdown, in which he’d lurk in his bedroom or dressing room and then he’d hsst at me to call me in to give him a hug to keep him company just as in comic movies about harridans, or in comic novels. What was odd was that Nonie would take his side in words—“You’re terrible to Daddy,” she would say to Momma—but she would ignore him or pick at him when he was defeated: she would ask him for money, which depressed him.
He was often lost and he would hum disconsolately to himself; he took to rebuilding clocks and model cars—in the bedroom.
But even then he smiled a lot to himself—as if he had won out. His looks had changed, too, but he was still physically glamorous; he was, by and large, indulgent toward Momma. She hated that, I think.
She said, “I have to hold my head and my shoulders right or I get terrible lines.” You could see how tired she was after a few hours of “being presentable to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who comes down the pike.” If she relaxes, she looks—ill-natured, remote, partly erased. When she pulls herself together, she is a vaguely stunning cripple, a matron.
Going out in the evening, after giving Daddy some sort of tongue-lashing or gibing at him while they dressed, she would adopt an I-have-lived-I’m-happy-to-be-the-age-I-am-all-storms-are-over-I-am-Aging-Loveliness-Itself-Sweet-Experience-turned-into-a-sheer-perfume-of-knowledge-all-for-you glamour. To her sweetly serene public matronliness she would add this aura of romance: there-is-still-time-for-one-last-tragically-passionate-and-important-communication-to-pass-between-us.
I’m not sure she meant it—it was just a bargaining do-jigger. And the quality of it was sometimes that of a joke, a joke she played purposefully and satirically on you and on herself but in a way that said you’re-a-fool-and-I’m-not-and-your-being-a-fool-while-I-am-not-is-one-of-the-great-pleasures-of-my-aging-womanhood.
Sometimes it had a vaguely churchly, sermonish quality of it’s-over-for-us-now-don’t-you-realize-that. And: let-us-repent-in-this-twilight-you-go-first-you-need-repentance-more-than-I-do.
For daytime things, for women, she used a friendlier form of that—more conspiratorial, more obviously lonely, a daytime version.
There were times when it was so noticeable that she’d lost a lot that I would avert my gaze as if from nudity. She often ruined conversations now by taking chances that no one forgave her for anymore—and then, too, her charm, when she was charming, was so practiced it was like a deformity of spirit; and her alertness was awful, since it was incomplete and was like that of a bird which did not speak a human language: I mean she was so fascinated by her situation, she so extended it as being the chief ground of existence, that she didn’t see your mood, really, or your youth, if you were a child, as I was. She made sweeping entrances into a room still and reproached salespeople or offered sudden friendship to them, but it was wrong now, the way she did it. She would then become sour, poised over resignation about this but anxious to be smart or to get even for it—to be smart about it. Some days, she looks young, and then she dresses up to it, laughs brilliantly: she seems oddly at home and yet uneasy on that ground which will, after all, cave in under her as soon as her tiredness grows, like a fungus, on her face.
She says with finality that it is humiliating to pass as young anymore.
She romanticizes or exaggerates or sees in an odd perspective the strength and resilience and happiness of being young.
She talked about refusing sex with Daddy. She talked about it in front of company, in front of Nonie and me: “We’re past all that, S.L.—our skin hangs.…”
Supposing that he’d used to come at her like some animal occupied by a god momentarily, and there she was, more or less gleaming in the dark, with the residual, supine, slyly and softly complete good looks that had drawn him to her in the first place: supposing she, lazily, from inside her beauty, embarrassed at first, and then with experience, a limited experience, setting herself to enclose and elaborately swallow his excitement and then snuff it out into the darkness of comfort, of oblivion: perhaps she had always buried his passion within the ground of her pride, in a great mausoleum of pride.
Perhaps she had no interest in tenderness, in the clever knowingness of an embrace set in the different key of being older: she only liked the earlier glory and savagery of attraction. She may have wanted to punish him. She may have wanted to break off before she was led into servicing him, into wanting him more than he wanted her.
I had entry to her mind, to the outside porches and some of the inner rooms of her mind—but only at moments. Often, she hid herself from me: “There are some things that aren’t fit for a child.”
She didn’t count on my liking her.
Often, I can see the nerve gathering in her—the sense of umbrage at her luck, a gathering of willful unholiness, or of righteousness mixed with the criminal thing: she gathers herself together and then flares out into a heavy middle-aged leap of being outrageous, impossible, flabbergasting, psychologically or ideologically, as. once she’d been physically flabbergasting, overwhelming everyone.…
I think people had expected her to be a better loser.
They were titillated—amused—horrified—severely displeased—saddened that she was middle-aged in that style. Partly her middle-aged replacing of one power by another seemed like a horror because the later power seemed even more unearned than the earlier one—or was earned only by the earlier one’s having been a self-sacrifice or a right due her; I mean none of it was earned in a job or by an accomplishment or in motherhood. She knew this and half thought it was fair, and in
a mental way she became intensely motherly; she tried to “achieve” something in her charities: she spoke of needing a job.
Meanwhile, the power was simply seized, wielded well or ill, femininely.
She based her righteousness on the issue of the wide-ranging general applicability of her life—as The Life—or as What Life Is.… Her mind, outlook, judgments, experiences, and techniques were the issues she cared about. Well, why not? In a way, everything was being withdrawn retroactively because she was losing physical authority—she grew frantic. Why shouldn’t she grow frantic? She wanted to be general and to be a leader, her life corroborated, like Caesar’s when he seized the government.
People did the equivalent of making the evil eye at her; of course, often that was at moments when she was behaving and being really nice, soft-voiced, mannerly, and concerned; then she’d be enraged because she was given so little credit (people were afraid to trust her because of the way she blew up from time to time, so they didn’t want to be lured when she was nice), and she ascribed a malevolence to life by which you were given credit only when you were young and good-looking. Some people pitied her—she often tried to use that pity ruthlessly and maliciously in order to despoil and cheat the one who pitied her. Momma said of people who avoided her that they were poor sports.
Or that they weren’t “real men” or “real women.” She added a new aspect to her public characterization of herself: she was a woman of gentle but hard-minded regret, primarily sexless, erect, who’d never liked sex or sexual power but who’d been a good sport about it for years—but now she’d been set free.
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 42