(S.L. ought to teach a class in it, Lila said, I know a lot of men who don’t know as much as he does about these things. People don’t like to listen to him any more than they like to listen to a pretty woman but he knows whereof he speaks. He’s done some thinking. )
Out the windows, now, the roofs of the town appear even with us. The tops of trees, like the sky edge of fountains, or eruptions from water mains, are balls of points or of a bubbling and rounded glare. The leaves with their summer skins, that shiny skin on them, glare as much almost as glass does. A minute passes and now the roofs form a broken rug and the silent sky flows into the basins of the windows.
We climb into a more and more simplified air almost as if we are climbing the tightly wound stairs inside a church steeple that is largely open to the light.
“This road tests a driver; I don’t know how your bitch mother manages it; how does she manage to get home, the way she drives?”
By nerve and speeding.
The road heads into the west at an upward slant, into an afternoon’s real sunlight spread at this altitude through larger and clearer and yet clearer volumes of space.
I don’t understand how this road is attached to the town behind (and below) us or how the car fits itself to it, but I already know more about how this moment fits with others than Daddy does although he would deny it—he would stake his life, his sanity, such as it is, his soul, too on his being right about these connections.
But he is mad—foolish—and he finds the best transitions to be mad ones, as if the world, like the moment, was newborn; he closes and slams the books on moments in a kind of applause. Those points of actuality—sex and a kind of wit in some events and kinds of courage and kinds of cowardice and his knowledge of cars and his powers of theory apart from books and set in specialized tones and languages—are points where this flying and hurdling man, a horse-bird-plane-motor-and-lecher of a creature, touches down on sanity and is reorganized: one might say he is held together by the glances he exchanges with someone twice a day—anyone—and by certain things having to do with material objects, cars, asparagus plants and asparagus farms (in sandy river bottom soil). When I am not there, he has no compass reading for goodness. When I am there, I am a compass set up as a knower or indicator of true worth. These are my dad’s secret terms, his private rhetoric that he uses only with men: he says now, “Level and true, lower a plumb line, and you are there.” A measure of the vertical? The perpendicular, like a steeple? An indicator of other meanings? His voice has a certain loud, inflected humming that I, the child, have to translate down into a thin sound, shrinking the symphonic tones to a solo piping, thinly inflected: “Daddy, I like this car.”
I hold his hand.
“Lower a plumb line and you are there—”
He is in motion, Dad and the wheels and gearings of his mental states, as well as the outer revolutions of the wheel of fate, and I am the axis, the still point for him—and this is suffocating: I feel it as a gift I give him, as a duty.
I felt myself being absorbed into his physical existence, creeks and plowed fields and nearby Mississippi (heart and big emotions), and into the lights and flows of force and of electricity of the amusement park, the roller coaster and dodgem and racing cars, gloom and joy, madness and specialness, a park of his mind—his mind thinking, handling things, in and out of the light, taking up and dropping subjects.
He shifts me half onto his lap. “You drive, I may want a chauffeur one of these days.” His hands cover mine. His breath riffles the hair on the top of my head. His large thigh pushes against my buttocks.
The growing extent of daylight moved around us. Dad said, “Well, it’s hot but it’s not such a bad day after all, you got yourself all cheered up, you’re not such a bad driver, here, sit on the seat right here, and practice your smile, I want a new chapter, we soldiers got to stick together, we got to smile, we got to earn our keep, where do you keep your smiles, show me the drawer you keep them in, I’ll show you the one to wear, where is it, where is the smile you owe me, you want me to give you a good tickle, you need that kind of boost to do a decent job in the world.”
He stroked—with his large hand—his giant hand—my side, my ribs; he made me wriggle once or twice, convulse really, that kind of agony, do you know it? The idea, the model of smiling—even of laughing—was invoked: a dark smile flew through my inner dark toward my nose and eyes as much as toward my mouth: I snorted and my eyes watered; then my mouth tasted some of the white water, enamel and warm ice and sky quality of a kind of smile.
I touched his sleeve so that he turned to look and saw me smiling in that fashion.
While I crawled up and over the back of the seat, my father said, “I knew I could cheer you up like you never been cheered up before.”
He said, “I want you to remember this: it was no ordinary whatsis; this was special, and I did it for you, boogiekins. Now we’re turning over a new leaf—you ain’t never going to be sad again: I hear the wind telling me, I hear the birds saying it, it’s a rule, it’s a rule of nature. The bad stuff’s over—what do you think of that , pisherkins?”
“That’s fine.”
Daddy shifted up, the car noise lessened. Our neighborhood, which began at Cherry’s house, unscrolled out the windows, houses, and park, until we came to the driveway of our house. How complicated our degree of wealth is: see the poorly tended gravel and the row of ratty azaleas—but the driveway is gravel. Daddy was the first unghettoed man in his family and he knew precious little about lawns and flowers. He had taste, though. But he was sloppy and forgetful so the house looks like a slum farmhouse, Momma said, which is to say, a little overgrown and natural, and not citylike. I remember it as strange and lovely—beautiful and big: but that’s probably just me.
The history of the house covers a lot of different matters.
The front porch rides on its trellised substructure—brick columns and a hidden, dirty shade where lozenges of light from the trellis lay on strange, lighter-than-ordinary (almost indoor) dust.
“Honk the horn, let’s get your mother out here to see what we’ve got for her.” He whispered and nuzzled me and said, “You got a great big car for her.”
The horn was a trio of long silvery trumpets on the fender that blasted out Apocalypse—they were so loud and so tuned and toned that I heard the noises shoot off the wooden wall of our house and then off the wall of the clapboard house nearest us and the strange clarion notes were doubled and quadrupled and overlapping: birds flew up, leaves stirred. “That’s enough,” Daddy said.
He opened the door, the car door—the lecher is aware in part of him of my physical restlessness, its range—he lowers me casually by one arm: that is he holds my wrist and I twist and descend. My foot hits the edge of the running board, and I prop it there and lean out as if to be upside down or merely parallel, bandaged head risked like that. I jump and am held midair and am lowered finally to the gravel.
“Enough!” he said. A house window opened, and from behind the screen, Nonie said, “What is it?”
I grew still at once—a pale fox of a child in the shadow of a copper beech.
Daddy moved his big head to a funny angle so that he could look out the car window and up toward the house window. He said, “Come see what we’ve got for you, darling. Nonie, go get your mother and come outside, Wiley has a present for you. And your mother.”
“No,” I said, but to him. “No!” I turned and then I turned back because I heard him getting out the car. I ran to him and he picked me up and I yanked at his shirt—I pulled myself partway up, I pulled two childish handsful of his shirt—he didn’t notice. He said, “We like everybody and everybody likes us. Ah, home sweet home, it’s good up here, this is a good place to live, Wileykins.”
He was putting me in my place, he was using his child-hand, he was getting his money’s worth and his applause, so to speak; and maybe, chiefly, he was getting his sense of a happy home back, the atmosphere of charity and loyalty w
e had had in the house—he had brought it back, bought it; now he was enjoying it—which is to say, he was enforcing it; or rather, that he had made a mad leap, and in no natural way, but only in his way, to the new moment. And tone. I stared into his face with terrible reproach that was hardly final because he would not look at me and much of what was on my face was the request, Look at me. He ducked his head and avoided me and said, to the house, to vanished Nonie, “Hurry up, get your mother and come outside—hurry up—it’s time to be happy.”
“Daddy—”
“Be still, be nice, pussycatkins.”
“It’s not for Nonie—No. No!”
“What’s the matter, you going to be selfish now? Haven’t you had a good time? Didn’t you like the automobile place?”
“I liked it, Daddy. Nonie hurt me.”
“It was an accident.”
“It was not.”
“Stop this, Wileykins, as a favor to God and a summer day—” he said that in his role as great poet. Then he said, in his harassed and fleeing self, man attacked by Furies daily, their dark wings and stink covering us, “Let her have a little pleasure, too. Be good. I’m good to you: you be good to me. Have pity on a working man. Be a scholar and a gentleman, like you really are. Are you a son who rises and sets or are you a pain in the neck? Show your good side, Little Sunshine.”
Dad is breasting the moments—his and the world’s that are focused here—and everything is surrounded by terror and light for him. He said almost dreamily, panting a little with pain in abeyance, he spoke without judgment, “I surely do like to live well—This is a nice moment, Wileykins—take my word for it—”
S.L.—Sam Lewis—is panting slightly. He is a study in teeth and fabrics—he has studied in magazines, observed men in restaurants in St. Louis and Chicago. In bad dreams, the schools he went to, and then the army training, appear most often as mixtures of animals and machines—grunting cows and hippos among whirling knives—but sometimes as sharks, huge ones: Everyone takes a bite out of you, everyone cuts his cut.
The enormous car and its fantastically styled sweep of metal is something historically new. The mind boggles at this extent of invention, it mimics no natural thing: it is pure will, pure wish, married by means of history and accident to that sense of time and distance that money is—so many inches, so many minutes at your disposal. Buy it. Buy it. Another kind of bite. S.L. who talked in his sleep had a recurring subject at night: The Indians are coming. He said it now, “Hey, kid-dykins, you think the Indians are coming back to get their land?” The only children’s toys he liked were Indian warbonnets and bows and arrows. I can feel his pulse jump with stage fright and nervousness about the women and with pride and daring and girlish-and-grown-up-male stubbornness about this inventory of success—of pleasures, this lawn even if weedy, this neighborhood, these trees, this safety, this bold and absurd and unimaginable car.
Pulse and eyes, posture, the set of his lips, the glare of his eyes—the happy hunter with his trophy shows his SIMPLE pleasure when the outcry of the slammed screen door makes him say, makes him whisper, “Here they come, won’t they laugh and smile now, to see you bought—what you wrought—”
Lila’s wife-voice from somewhere invisible to me on the porch says sharply, “Nonie! Don’t!” Don’t slam the screen door.
Lila’s voice has that exposed nerve of physical pain and moral hurt that made her such a registrar of things.
A tiny breeze flicks here and there, a brief nervous pulse of wind, warm and steeply scented, as if Dad’s pulse and SIMPLE happiness had turned itself into breeze.
The sounds of rapid footsteps on the unsteady boards of the front porch are a rapid tattoo of drama for me. Swiftly gliding shadows race out from the women and fly over the gravel like the wings of goddesses and join the shadows under the tree. I see the New Car in its splendor of chrome, paint, and wax, radiator ornament and spare tire in its slick bisected case and chrome fastening, and the set of horns as a guarantee of pleasure.
But Momma’s face—the female reality—and Nonie’s shouts, “What is it, what did you buy? Oh not blue, not ugh-ugh blue!” suddenly hurl out lines of order and scale that change everything.
Both women have small, fine skulls; and Lila wore something with a floppy collar: she is hip-shot and glamorous, she has on a sort of turban, she is being both cute and sexual just now because she had intended to reward S.L., to show Sam Lewis she appreciates the car he got her—she’s sorry she racked up the other one, chewed up the engine block and so on.
Of course, this guilt-ridden and obstinate woman, good-looking and sexual, fine-nerved, open-nerved, as exposed as an almost lidless eye, she has the gleam and delicacy of an eyeball become a person—a woman—and in the round hole, the pupil at the center, perches a moody bird-goddess so to speak, patron of rationality, and thoroughly mad.
I mean, for me and Dad, sometimes, she is our talker, our dictionary—who else can we trust as much? But hers is a mad voice, she wants freedom, too; this jealous and willful eye can transmute itself into the cow-goddess Juno, with her great flanks and ill-temper, but the eyes still dominate that creation. She is less mad indoors—she seems unsuitable and frail out of doors on this unwalled lawn. She often says, I know nothing about men—except a little bit about how to be romantic now and then. But she’s bold and doesn’t hide because of her ladyish helplessness, although she is quick often to sadness because it’s useful to her to be pitied—she’s beside herself with amazement: with a kind of dangerous madness.
“That’s not the kind of car I wanted, S.L.”
Daddy knows her, knows her power over him: he breathes asthmatically with shock and then so quickly with a kind of hatred that you wonder about him and her: they are madnesses in a whirl, each startled by the other’s reality of madness: it is the most acute pain imaginable.
Nonie was supposed to be suffering over my anger with her and my being in bandages and she did look out of sorts, temperamental: but remorse didn’t show. The naked way she held her face into the air was pretty. She was bold, and she was playing dumb, and she looked rubbery and outdoorsy, practical, not a luxury like Momma. Her childlike prettiness had the effect of promising she would be pleasant. She was domestically available, not partyish like Momma but isolated.
An orbit of a third madness—leashed and bounded somewhat.
Sunlight lies in bands among the stripes of shadow on the steps to the porch where Momma and Nonie stand en tableau, with Momma’s fine, exposed face (under her turban) showing a faint softening of age compared to Nonie, to Nonie’s startling freshness. Nonie is a step or two lower. Momma’s face rides in the air above the shifty masses of her breasts. Her face seems to rise propelled by spirit and meaning into a higher reach of air above her contrary and downward body in the style for women’s flesh that she affected that month—small-town, her version, this small town, and the local availability of stuff, or in St. Louis, and so on, and influenced by the movies, the downward-flowing weight of breasts and thighs and then the fineness of ankle and wrist, the languorous whatever, the moody reality of primarily sexual flesh.
Lila’s face was made up to represent sweet, naked, fragile welcome—for Daddy who was bringing her her new car. Now her face was puckered and marred. She was very pretty but she was grotesque and absurd, overcostumed and witchlike, thoroughly crazy about what was going on, about what words could do, and will, and what men felt.
Between her body and Daddy’s ran innumerable strings—or even chains—of attachment, and awareness of each other’s character.
She said in a half-and-half voice (half pleading, half exasperated and threatening) and with a smile that jaggedly frowned instead of being a smile: “What kind of car is that, S.L.?”
He, his good humor already marred, even half-collapsed, but struggling on—like a chicken with its head cut off—said like a salesman and not exactly addressing Momma, or her tone (they never could talk to each other in public), he said pompously but without con
viction and almost as if begging for corroboration: “That’s the Buick eight cylinder deluxe sport sedan.”
“S.L., that’s not the kind of car I asked for.” Of course, she wasn’t sure of that but she wasn’t “reasonable"—I mean she wasn’t prepared to listen to him—she had her hurt, her disappointment to deal with here. In a very mysterious and quite mad way, she demanded, “S.L., what is that?”
Still smiling, still salesmanlike but off at an angle, so to speak, into a now Christian and humiliated, thoroughly humiliated purity of offering himself and the car to her, he said: “That’s for you.”
“I want a small car.” Momma closed her mouth and twitched and twittered a little, moving toward being jocular, witty, a fascinating Jewess—some such role, I think—but it came out very young and vulnerable: “I told you I wanted a small car—” Then suddenly she manages to be charming: “I’m deluxe but I’m not up to a sedan, I’m not a playboy, S.L.” She paused, ran her hands over her hips to permit laughter, to encourage it—she was hardly a boy. Then seductively, mildly, she said, “Why did you get that one? It’s so big, it’s too big.” Then in a woman’s tone, flattering him but with a lot of creeping, flowing anger underneath, “It’s much too big for me.”
The World Is the Home of Love and Death Page 16