Feelings as they occur are experienced as if they were episodes in Kafka, overloaded with hints of meaning that reek of eternity and the inexplicable and that suggest your dying—always your dying—at the hands of a murderousness in events if you are not immediately soothed, if everything is not explained at once. It is your own selfishness or shamefulness, or someone else’s or perhaps something in fate itself, that is the murderer; or what kills is the proof that your pain is minor and is the responsibility of someone who does not care. I didn’t know why I couldn’t shrug off what she did and said; I didn’t blame her; I even admired her when I didn’t have to face her; but I did not see why these things had to happen, why she had to say these things. I think it mattered to her what I felt. That is, if I came in and said, “Hello, Momma,” she would demand, “Is that all you can say? I’m in
pain.
Don’t you care? My God, my God, what kind of selfish person are you? I can’t stand it.”
If I said, “Hello, Momma, how is your pain?” she would shriek, “You fool, I don’t want to think about it! It was all right for a moment! Look what you’ve done—you’ve brought it back.
… I don’t want to be reminded of my pain all the time!”
She would yell, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you know how to talk to me! My God, do you think it’s easy to die? Oh my God, I don’t like this. I don’t like what’s happening to me! My luck can’t be this bad.” And then she would start in on me: “Why do you just stand there? Why do you just listen to me! It doesn’t do me any good to have you there listening! You don’t do anything to help me—what’s wrong with you? You think I’m like an animal? Like a worm? You’re supposed to be smart, but you don’t understand anything, you’re no good to me, you were never any good to me. I’d laugh at you, you’re so useless to me, but it hurts me to laugh: what good are you to me? Do something for me! Put yourself in my place! Help me! Why don’t you help me?”
Sometimes she would say in a horrible voice, “I’ll tell you what you are—I’ll tell you what everyone is! They’re trash! They’re all trash! My God, my God, how can my life be like this? I didn’t know it would be like this.…”
I really did not ever speak to anyone about what went on at home, but one of the teachers at school suggested that I apply for a scholarship to Exeter, so that I could get away from the “tragedy in your home.” And get a good education as well. I was secretly hopeful about going
to boarding school a thousand miles away. I did not at all mind the thought that I would be poorer and less literate than the boys there. I figured I would be able to be rude and rebellious and could be hateful without upsetting my mother and I could try to get away with things.
I remember the two of us, Doris and me, in the shadowy living room: I’m holding some books, some textbooks. She’s wearing a short wraparound housecoat, with a very large print of vile yellow and red flowers with green leaves on a black background. I’ve just told her casually I can go away to school; I put it that I would not be a burden on her anymore or get on her nerves; I told her I did not want to be a burden—I said something like that; that was my attempt at tact. She said, “All right—leave me too—you’re just like all the rest. You don’t love anyone, you never loved anyone. You didn’t even mourn when your real mother died, you don’t ever think about her. I’ll tell you what you are: you’re filth. Go. Get out of here. Move out of here tonight. Pack up and go. I don’t need you. No one will ever need you. You’re a book, a stick, you’re all book learning, you don’t know anything about people—if I didn’t teach you about people, people would laugh at you all the time, do you hear me?”
I went into another room and I think I was sitting there or maybe I was gathering together the ten or fifteen books I owned—having with a kind of boy’s dishonesty, I suppose, taken Doris’s harangue as permission to leave her, as her saying yes in her way to my going away, my saving myself—when she came in. She’d put on lipstick and a hair ribbon; and her face, which had been twisted up, was half all right: the lines were pretty much up and down and not crooked; and my heart began to beat sadly for myself—she was going to try to be nice for a little while; she was going to ask me to stay.
A
FTER THAT
she seemed to feel I’d proved that I belonged to her; or it had been proved I was a man she could hold near her still. Every day, I came home from school, and Doris fluttered down from her filthy aerie of monstrous solitude and pain: in a flurry of dust and to the beating of leathery wings, she asked me a riddle. Sometimes she threatened me: she’d say, “You’ll die in misery, too—help me now and maybe God will be good to you.” Or she’d say, “You’ll end like me if you don’t help me!” She’d say it with her face screwed up in fury. She’d say, “Why don’t you put yourself in my place and understand what I’m
going through.” It occurred to me that she really didn’t know what she was saying—she was uttering words that sounded to her close to something she really wanted to say; but what she said wasn’t what she meant. Maybe what she meant couldn’t be said. Or she was being sly because she was greedy and using bluff or a shortcut and partly it was her own mental limitation and ineptness: that is, she couldn’t say what she hadn’t thought out.
It wasn’t enough that I stayed with her and did not go to Exeter. She railed at me, “You’re not doing me any good—why don’t you go live in the Orphans’ Home: that’s where heartless people who don’t deserve to have a family belong.” We both knew that I didn’t have to go to the Orphans’ Home, but maybe neither of us knew what she meant when she demanded I help her. It was queer, the daily confrontations, Doris and me not knowing what she wanted from me or even what the riddle really was that she was asking. She crouched there or seemed to at those moments, in the narrow neck of time between afternoon and evening, between the metaphorical afternoon of her being consigned to death and the evening of her actual dying, and she asked me some Theban riddle while she was blurred with drugs, with rage, and I looked at her and did not know what to do.
But after a while I knew sort of what she was asking: I knew sort of what the riddle was; but I couldn’t be sure. I knew it was partly she wanted me to show I loved her in some way that mattered to her, that would be useful; and it was wrong of her to ask, I knew because she was ashamed or afraid when she spoke to me and she averted her eyes, or they would be sightless, unfocused from the morphine. In a way, pity could not make me do anything, or love. The final reasons are always dry ones, or rational and petty: I wanted to do something absolutely straightforward and finally loyal to her, something that would define my life with her in such a way that it would calm her and enable me to be confident and less ashamed in the future and more like other people. And also if I was going to live with her for a while, things had to change; I wanted to know that life for me did not have to be like
this.
Things had to be made bearable for both of us.
It doesn’t sound sensible—to make her dying and my being with her bearable. But it is language and habit that make the sense odd. It was clear to me that after a process of fantastic subtraction I was all that was left to her. And for me, what with one odd subtraction and another, she was the only parent I had left to me; she was my mother.
* * *
I
COULD
half see, in the chuffing, truncated kind of thought available to my thirteen-year-old intelligence, that the only firm ground for starting was to be literal: she had asked me to put myself in her place. O.K. But what did that mean? How could I be a dying, middle-aged woman walking around in a housedress?
I knew I didn’t know how to think; I guessed that I had the capacity—just the
capacity
—to think: that capacity was an enormous mystery to me, perhaps as a womb is to a woman. When I tried to think, I wandered in my head but not just in my head; I couldn’t sit down physically and be still and think: I had to be in movement and doing something else; and my attention flittered, lit, veered, returned. Almost everyone I knew could
think
better than I could. Whenever I thought anything through, I always became a little angry because I felt I’d had to think it out to reach a point that someone better parented would have known to start with. That is, whenever I thought hard, I felt stupid and underprivileged. I greatly preferred to feel. Thinking for me was always accompanied by resentment, and was in part a defensive, a rude and challenged staring at whatever I was trying to think about; and it was done obstinately and blunderingly—and it humiliated me.
Death, death,
I said to myself. I remembered Doris saying, “I don’t want to be shut up in a coffin.” That was fear and drama: it didn’t explain anything. But it did if she wasn’t dead yet: I mean I thought that maybe the question was
dying. Dying.
Going toward a coffin. Once when I was little I’d found a horizontal door in the grass next to a house; I had been so small the door had been very hard to lift and to lay down again because my arms were so short; when the door was open, you saw stairs, unexpected in the grass, and there was a smell of damp and it was dark below, and you went down into an orderly place, things on shelves, and the light, the noises, the day itself, the heat of the sun were far away; you were coolly melted; your skin, your name dissolved; you were turned into an openness, into being a mere listening and feeling; the stillness, the damp, the aloneness, the walls of earth, of moist, whitewashed plaster, soaked you up, blurred you; you did not have to answer when anyone called you.
And when you fell from your bike, while you were falling, the way everything stopped except the knowledge that pain was coming. The blotting out of voices, the sudden distance of everything, the hope, the
conviction almost that this was a dream, the way time drew out, was airy, and nothing was going to happen, and then everything turned to stone again; it was going to happen; the clatter of your bike crashing, your own fall; and then finally you sat up with disbelief and yet with knowledge: you saw your torn pants; you poked at the bleeding abrasions on your elbow that you had to twist your arm to see. You felt terrible but you didn’t know yet, you couldn’t know everything that had happened to you.
I remembered in pictures, some quite still, some full of motion, none of them rectangular; and what I meant, while it was clear enough to me at first, became liquid and foggy when I tried to establish in words what it was I meant, what it was I now knew; it slid away into a feeling of childishness, of being wrong, of knowing nothing after all.
Doris wouldn’t have those feelings about dying. And my feelings were beside the point and probably wrong even for me. Then my head was blank and I was angry and despairing; but all at once my scalp and neck wrinkled with gooseflesh. I had my first thought about Doris. She wouldn’t think in those pictures, and they didn’t apply to her because she wouldn’t ever think in pictures that way, especially about dying: dying was a fact. She was factual and pictureless.
Then after that I made what I called an equation: Doris-was-Doris. I meant that Doris was not me and she was really alive.
That made me feel sad and tired and cheated—I resented it that she was real and not me or part of me, that her death wasn’t sort of a version of mine. It was going to be too much goddamned work this way.
I went off into “thinking,” into an untrained exercise of intellect. I started with
x’s
and
y’s
and Latin phrases. I asked myself what was a person, and after a while, I came up with: A person is a mind, a body, and an
I
. The
I
was not in the brain, at least not in the way the mind was. The
I
is what in you most hurts other people—it makes them lonely. But the mind and body make it up to people for your
I
. The
I
was the part that was equal in all men are created equal and have the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The emotions of the
I
were very different from the emotions of the body and the mind. When all three parts of you overlapped, it was what people meant by “the heart.”
Doris’s heart. Doris’s mind, Doris’s body, Doris’s
I
.
Inside a family, people have mythologically simple characters—there’s the angry one, the bookish one, and so on, as if everyone was
getting ready to be elevated and turned into a constellation at any moment. Notions of character were much less mythical once you got outside a family, usually. Doris in her family was famous for her anger, but she had also said of herself a number of times that she had more life in her than her husband or her mother and sister and brothers and daughter. It had always made me curious. What did it mean to have more life in you? She’d never said I had much life in me, or a little. It seemed to me on reflection that Doris had meant her temper. A lot of her temper came from restlessness and from seeing people and things the way she did. She’d meant she couldn’t sit quietly at home or believe in things that weren’t real. Or be a hypocrite. She’d meant she was a fighter; active—but she never played any sport, not any; she was the most unexercised woman I knew of: she never did housework, never went dancing anymore (I meant before she’d been sick), never swam or played tennis, never gardened or walked, never carried groceries—if she shopped she paid a delivery boy to bring the groceries home for her. She never failed to sleep at night although she complained of sleeping badly—she didn’t have so much life she couldn’t sleep. She dreamed a lot; she liked to have things happen, a lot every day. She liked to go places, to get dressed up, to get undressed and be slatternly: she was always acting, always busy being someone, performing in a way. Was that the life in her? She insisted on people controlling their minds and not thinking too much and she didn’t approve of bodies being too active—she really was mostly interested in the
I: I like to live, I want a good life, you don’t know bow to live, I know what life is, I know how to live, there s a lot of life in me, I have a lot of life in me.