And when I dropped them, they slowly sank through the class and were … oh … semiruined … intellectually: only intellectually.
I remember one boy: he liked me—he hated me; he waited for me to come see him; he hated me if I escaped from him, if I didn’t love him; he was afraid of me; then at moments he wasn’t—and so on. I couldn’t tell if that was “normal”—I didn’t know anymore.
Nonie wanted me to appear to like her, to adore her if possible. But I disliked her; she bored me; and it showed. “Why can’t we be a normal family?” she would scream, meaning why couldn’t I as a
younger
brother admire her? I think I managed thoroughly to hurt her.
She needed me for the sake of her reputation, perhaps for merely human reasons. Some people did like her because they disliked what I stood for—elitism, intellectual luck: I can’t define
what
they thought.
I tried to care about Nonie, but she was always the same, threatening me with a hot iron, trying to lock me in the closet, so the hell with her. I don’t see how it could have been otherwise.
Sanity is rough, is dirty. At least, as I knew it.
T
HEN REAL
happiness returned—in a special guise.
A boy I had tutored in reading, and who now reveled in being the second-brightest, or even apparently the brightest, kid in the third grade (since I did not compete), became my friend, and a girl who had liked me in kindergarten when I’d been the boy who was so handsome—she’d run in games when I ran, always a half step behind me and solemn—and who’d always been half loyal but a little surprised, a little betrayed when I turned ugly, liked me a lot again; now that I had a good friend (his name was Meynell), she attached herself to me again. Or I accepted her. Again.
Her name was Laura. She had been bored. She was somber, freckled, erect, with a milky look and very heavy purple-red hair and purple, or violet, eyes. Grownups admired her. Meynell was in local suburban terminology “an imp” (a woman would cast about for a word to describe him and then come up with that one and would be very proud). The three of us met every morning before school; we looked at each other every few minutes in school; we were known for our friendship—friendship and happiness are legendary. Laura’s parents thought we were too close (one time, in a garage, she lifted her skirt and showed me herself; I showed her myself; we were very calm, unobscene, except I did kiss her belly, and one of her knees). Also, we played Torture a lot, the three of us, pretending to interrogate each other, pretending to break each other’s spirits. We screamed and writhed—in pretend resistance, in practice for pain.
I was not allowed to have my friends come to the house very often, nor did I want them to. Nonie could not bear it—and my friends found Momma, Daddy, and Nonie odd, perhaps detestable.
I entered the lives of my friends, and to an extent shared their parents. Older children knew about us—we were envied, liked, smiled at, teased. The three of us together could bear most of that easily. There was a kind
of excitement whenever, after a separation—at recess, overnight—we met; we were sharply bitten by pleasure in each other and the intertwined affections; we hopped as if bitten by mosquitoes. Laura did not play many games, but she would talk, and she would climb things—onto garages or up into trees. Also, sometimes she would be allowed to play outside at dusk, on swings, or we would simply run and she would spread her arms and open her mouth and explain—pantingly—later, “I was eating the darkness.” Meynell and I played marbles, mumblety-peg, running games, street hockey, primitive baseball, stoopball, games of imagination: his mother said, “They’re closer than brothers.” The intensity was such that for a while everything gave way before us—family schedules, rules at school. Daddy wanted to make peace now—it was as if he wanted to touch this happiness—he offered peace on his terms: I was to be a very young loving child; he liked baby talk, stuff like that. He did not understand. Nor did Leila, who was forbearing
and
jealous. Sometimes wicked—but we fought her off.
Momma said, “I don’t see how Alan does it—he has a gift for coming up smelling like a rose.”
Momma said to me, “It will never be me who will get the credit for anything you do.”
She said, “Make it easy for the rest of us—be ordinary; it won’t hurt you; don’t try so hard.”
I did not try at all, as far as I knew.
Momma and Daddy were sad but, on the whole, kinder to me. Momma said, “That child is lucky—I don’t know where he gets his luck: he didn’t inherit it from me.”
Momma said to me, “You talk like a book—that wins people over.”
She and Daddy were increasingly unhappy in their lives. Momma said, “Sometimes I think it’s not right for life to be like this.”
Mothers of my friends, Jewish women—not the Gentile ones—would sometimes say something like “I never did like Leila Cohn.”
Such women often angled to have me as a friend for their children, but I already had Meynell and Laura; and I was
kind
to other children but no more than that. Still, I was part of Momma’s social leverage—I could help her if I chose. She needed me. She knew I knew that. Usually I wouldn’t help her. She accepted her defeat. She said, “I know, you already have your friends—I wouldn’t trust them if I were you.… If I were you, I’d listen to me.…”
She said, “I don’t want you to be smart and despise women—don’t ever look down on women: brains aren’t worth it.”
Of other families and women, Momma would say, “You wouldn’t like them so much if you lived with them—they wouldn’t let you get away with things the way I do; they’d put a stop to your gallivanting around.” That was partly true: my situation with the Cohns forced them to give me, willy-nilly, a great deal of freedom.
Meynell’s mother suggested I live with them a few days a week; at first, Meynell was wildly agreeable, but then he grew jealous—his jealousy grew and grew and grew: how could it fail to grow? He said, “You’re wonderful and I love you a lot, but I’m silly and I get along with people better than you do.” He didn’t, really.
A teacher joined herself to Meynell’s unease with me: she said that I dominated Meynell, that he would not get a chance to develop properly if he was anywhere near me. He began to say he wanted to be “equal friends” with a lot of boys.
With Laura, the issue was my being Jewish—a Jesuit uncle of hers objected to the influence I had with her; her parents had become fond of me, but they, too, felt Laura and I were too close, that she listened to me and not to them.
At first, Laura fought her parents, but then she gave in; and she liked my sadness at losing her. She could not help smiling sometimes.
Meynell said, of himself, he was too “wild” to be a good friend to me. I said, “No, you’re not.” He said, “We shouldn’t be such close friends: we shut everyone out.” I said, “No, we don’t.” He said, “You should have other friends.” I was sorry I loved him.
To some extent, they had to return to the friendship and did, as long as they remained in the suburb—who can surrender happiness easily? But now everyone was troubled.
Momma said, “See: you’re hard for everyone—you’re hard
on
everyone.”
Laura’s family moved from the suburb, as did Meynell’s, the following year—it was a solution of sorts.
There was an atmosphere around my childhood of its being kind of a joke. Perhaps that’s true for most children.
Momma said, “I tell you things, but you don’t listen. Don’t show anyone you’re smart: stop being such a fool; I’ll admit you may be smart, but no one can stand it.”
Sometimes she treats me like a brother or a form of husband, unsatisfactory
but better than Daddy and more available for certain purposes.
She said a hundred times or more, “I don’t want him to be a genius! I have no interest in those things! I want him to be happy! Geniuses die young! They’re not lucky in love! Let him be selfish, let him have a good time. Talk to
me:
I’m the interesting one around here.…”
I was a rigid, muscular, tense-faced boy, with odd, squinting eyes, a perpetual look of a resigned jokester’s agony—with a peculiar power of ingratiation. Ugly and proud and secretive and often ashamed, domineering in a silent, incontrovertible way. If I fight Momma publicly, she—oh, all life drains from her: she says, “Don’t let the neighbors know everything—this isn’t nice—
please stop.”
I am a policeman … a young boy … foul, willful, secular—I can taste it in my mouth, how secular I am. What a joke I am. A
local
child. Nothing else. Leila’s.
If Nonie tries to pick on me, I say, “Leave me alone—or I’ll lie about you.” (A lie is designed to be spoken and so is easier to understand and often to believe than a stumbling attempt to relate something that really happened: what happened is not designed to be spoken of.)
Momma says, “You always have to win.”
I said to Nonie once, “You’re a real mess: when you’re honest and really act the way you are you’re disgusting, and when you lie you’re a jackass.”
Still, she will come to me sometimes for comfort, for help against Momma or Daddy.
I am going to make it through my childhood, it looks like.
There is something about Momma’s life, a dissatisfaction, a distortion—it is partly gender, partly a blackmail she practices, partly a simple truth—so that it is wrong to triumph over her.
She exaggerates and suffers from and is caught in her differences from me, from everyone.… She does not like “chivalry.”
If I ask Daddy for something he can’t give me, if I persist until some dream he has of himself is wrecked, he will say bitterly, “Do you want to turn us all into your slaves?”
He was tired of masculinity. His own. Mine. All men’s.
I am not Momma’s child; I will outlive her, I have better luck than she does, but she has to take care of me meanwhile anyway and make me
happy
—such generosity: so unlikely; that is the style for mothers, Jewish mothers, in this suburb; it is a requirement for social acceptance. She and I know that in my surviving in the way I did lay her social
credit.… I am aware that in some complicated, ill-informed way the world operated more sweetly on my senses than it did on hers—not when I was depressed but most times. She was in a rush, she was tense, she was
not entirely well
She will say to me, “Give me a helping hand—do you want the school, do you want your father to be mad at me?”
She will say, “I warn you—don’t be mean to me, be kind, or you’ll get your comeuppance.”
She will explain to me, “Women have hard lives—try to understand what I’m saying—I have a lot to aggravate me, I—” She will go on in a mild, not really direct voice: sometimes she doesn’t look at me but talks to herself; usually, though, she looks at me; and what she is saying is sensible enough, even if I can’t quite make it out; but the real thing is her eyes, her gaze, is her will-you-listen-to-me-or-not. It is immensely personal: the comparative heaviness—of her haunches—her neck, her slightly crumpled skin—her
me-
what-are-you-going-to-do-about-me-you-there-the-boy-in-this-house.
When I was successful at something in my life as a child, or if I was ill and helpless, Momma would look at me and it was touch and go if she would decide she wanted me to survive.
Sometimes I minded it that she had free choice in such a matter:
She’s not a good mother,
I would think. I didn’t want her to have free choice in such a matter: we don’t want to hope they will love us—that they will encourage us to live—we want it to be a law, separate from our good and evil and belonging only to
their
good and evil.
Politeness, with a faint note of fear and respect, was the best thing you could get, I thought when I was a boy. I got it sometimes.
How much pain can you stand, Momma?
Momma could only help proud people—she told me so: she said to me, “I’ll tell you a secret about me: don’t come to me when you’re hurt; learn to take care of yourself; learn to be brave; you have to be brave—and not be hurt—and then I can help, then I
want
to help—oh, I’m a real woman—or maybe I’m not.”
My life had a vaguely jocular, rough, not too sensible quality to me, but so did hers to her: she said, “I’ll tell you a good one: I used to be Delilah, but when you get older you have to do all the work—that’s what
my
mother always said, and I thought she was wrong but she was right—so I used to be Delilah and now I’m Samson, now I have to be Samson: don’t you think that’s a good one?”
W
E ARE
not to advance in time but to slide back now.
When I am running in the upstairs hallway and I come to the head of the stairs, to the trickily
folded
structure of the stairs, the issue arises of bravery.
Going downstairs is not a high point in my repertoire of physical skills. I sighed then, even as I ran, in those days—thin chest, small bones stretched with the sigh—at the approach of confronting the fact of this weakness, of this hole in my world, the I-can’t-do-this-right-yet.
I do it anyway and often fall—occasionally headfirst or sideways. I slide on my heels from stair to stair; fall on my behind and bump from riser to riser: I have rolled down partway, recovered, risen, run again. Momma used to say, “He doesn’t care if he hurts himself—”
But he did.
I learned something of the nature of the world, or mislearned it, when I plunged into the jolt and disorientation of falling on the stairs.
Being brave is an upsurging thing in your chest before you fall: I irresistibly love myself, in silence, sternly and completely, when I am brave.
Being brave gets you started on something, and then you just have to be stubborn and finish what you start.
When I can’t rise as far as bravery, I go as far as stubborn slyness.
If I fall, I grunt, the wind is knocked out of me: I hear it, in an exquisite moral-immoral clutter (I may be making more work for Momma and Daddy, I may be killing their rose, their bouquet, the heart-of-the-house); I get up and run, a maybe dying child, galloping with some dexterity, and some no-dexterity, down these stairs. But if I sit on the stairs and lean against the rungs to wait for my breath to return, it is more loving toward my parents.