What is my life worth?
Nonie turns toward me—she is in motion—her face assumes, like a billboard announcing something or other, an expression of permitted malice.
Nonie says in an ecstasy of something-or-other,
“You’re going to get it now.”
I can’t believe this is happening. My senses start to function erratically. Shadows gather. Lights dim. Or so it seems.
My consciousness is as faceless as a wind—a typhoon: there is an emergency here: Nonie grabs me by the arm to hold me for Momma.… I am kicking her or at her. My legs are stronger than my arms, my shoes harder than my fists.
Nonie lets me go (no subsequent battle or physical adventure has the heroism of these childhood struggles with women: none of the same brilliance of being Captain Marvel).
Momma cries, “Nonie, keep hold of him!”
Momma nagged everyone.
I could dodge pretty well. I run—or scoot, scuttle—toward the dining room sideways along a wall, facing Nonie, who grabs at, swipes at me: I make a noise and draw myself up on tiptoe so that my middle is small and Nonie’s hand hits an end table. I turn and sprint, my back blazing with anxiety and expectation of being grabbed from behind.
I rolled under the couch.
“Come out from under there at once,” Momma said. “That’s cowardly—I don’t like that.”
There is an unspeakable pressure on me, on my ears, mind, and heart, to listen to her, to everything she says.
The child yelled: “
YOU SHOULDN’T BE DOING THIS, MOMMA!
”
My mother replies, “Oh, you like to dish it out—but you can’t take it—”
(She does not think I ought ever to get even with her.)
“I’m ashamed of the way you’re acting,
” Momma said.
We are antagonists.
But she is my mother, and what she says also means that she is considering my welfare and that for me to be enraged … to suffer … as I was doing … was
stupid.
One hates and trembles at the stupidity of the world: but more so at one’s own stupidity—the two things flicker into each other.
Momma kicks idly under the couch. Her foot appears in the shadows where I’m hiding—I pull off her shoe.
“Oh, he’s impossible!” she exclaims.
One senses purposes in people—how can it be otherwise?
When I was handsome, these scenes were very different from those after I became ugly.
When I was ugly, the women quickly grew tired of fighting with me; I could extend the struggle, mulishly, and nearly destroy them that way:
give them headaches. But when I was young and a pretty child, there was something unwearying in them, in these scenes, something flattering and terrible to me.
My mother said, “Come out from under that couch: I’m your mother and I’m telling you to stop this. Do what I say! Give me my shoe!”
I don’t have to do what she says—she is not good. To frustrate her is not to harm Goodness itself.
This mood can change at any minute.
I shout, “
YOU SHOULDN’T TRY TO HURT ME—YOU’RE NOT BEING GOOD TO ME!
”
I was referring to the way I was a child in their care.
What they were doing had an appalling richness of emotional sophistication I did not share. I felt an
aha-aha-aha
—bitter: not ever to be undone: a sense of them-as-women.…
Some people speak of the infant’s love for its mother: how clever they are to name that sleeping-and-waking, the dependencies and dreams, as
love.
I don’t think there is any possible single name for the life-and-death mind-and-language thing of a woman with an infant.
The nature of almost any real moment makes almost all theory a sweet, maybe boyish farce far gone in willfulness.
The comfort and shock of using tremendous abstract terms as truth—when how can they be true? in what way can they be true?—permits us to explain a fleshly event without having to toy with the enormous emotions of actuality.
“
YOU’RE ACTING CRAZY TO ME! YOU’RE BEING TERRIBLE TO ME!
”
When I am older, I will defend myself differently.…
My mother says,
“Stop—stop at once—stop that—I don’t think this is funny!”
Then:
“What’s wrong with you! Where is your sense of humor! Give me my shoe!”
Her remark makes me afraid I am a fool, and that this event is not serious and that I ought to laugh and give in. I give her her shoe because her being
ridiculous
pains me.
But I am too deeply buried in the quarrel. There is something like the whipping of curtains back and forth, against my eyes, my temples—it is confusion. Perhaps this is some kind of domestic festival, one for impatient-but-joking women.
“
WHY DO YOU LIE TO ME! WHY DO YOU LET NONIE LIE
!” I shout at her. I think it is fair to have one’s masculinity on terms—masculinity is not a gift, as femininity is.
When I am young and these scenes occur, Momma says,
“Why are you making this so difficult! Now I’m telling you for the last time: come here, come to me and get what’s coming to you.…”
The hot tears gush. I may scream then—or I am silent, breathing hard, but thinking: Do I have to give in? Have I been defeated? Or I scream, as I said; I am convulsed with screaming—with flailing and kicking. Nonie may run up and grab my shirt and she can go
heb, heb,
like a villain, or Momma can pick me up—if I am quite little—and if I kick and wiggle she may drop me. Nonie may choke me—not seriously at first, but when she means it her fingers tighten like a noose: I start to black out; I say, “Momma!”
Sometimes Momma cannot bear the event, either, and will want to simplify it; and she will say in a tired, patient voice—as if she had never been in a different mood, “Stop kicking—Nonie’s not hurting you.”
Momma cares for the happiness a man feels, as for a man’s pain, only if she has bestowed it on him; and then she regards the happiness very highly and wants to be repaid for it.
She says, “Stop that yelling. Do you want the neighbors to know you’re a mollycoddle? Don’t you know yet how to grin and bear things?”
If I then become silent and grave and resigned, she will say, “Don’t stand there and be so disapproving. It makes me sick. I hate holier-than-thous. You’re only getting what you deserve. Can’t you be big and admit that?”
And: “Don’t you dare judge me. Do you hear me?”
Momma’s breasts smell sweaty. Her shaven armpits have a mechanically sweet odor—of a deodorant or whatever. Her clothes make noises. Her pubic hair rustles against its covering. Her body squeaks, rubs, gives off heat: her shoes have wrinkles in them. I can, as a child, almost absorb the reality of her.
If she cannot punish me, she is indeed a slave.
She can’t just grab me and spank me. Sometimes she spanks me as if to get material for an anecdote: “
I spanked the child the other day.
” (She thinks spankings are elegant—rich—high-class.) I have almost no reaction when she spanks me like that: I have been hired for the occasion: I lie in her lap, limp and sullen and absent: she can’t tell if I am punished or not. She gives up in disgust: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I’m done. Get away from me.” She is disgusted that I don’t know how to be spanked, that I don’t know how to amuse her when I’m spanked by her.
Sometimes I stiffen and resist and make an issue of having been spanked, until Momma shouts, “I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it: he’s a monster!”
Sometimes she spanks me so lightly that Nonie will cry out, “You’re not hurting him, Momma—”
Momma will say, “Then here—you do it—”
But if Nonie tries I will fight “like a madman” or “the madman from Borneo.” Nonie cannot spank me without looking brutal. She knows that.
She shifts from foot to foot: “You let him get away with everything!”
Momma does not want to be browbeaten by Nonie: “Stop it—don’t be any more of a fool than you have to be.”
The two women try and try, but neither can control the other, although they can hurt each other—they are like medieval champions who are evenly matched.
Momma says, “I am sick and tired of scenes! All right, Nonie, you run the house. You deal with your father—and the child. Let’s see how far you get—”
She will say to Nonie, “You think I don’t know what really went on here this afternoon? You think everyone’s a fool but you?”
Momma is a pudgy, somewhat giddy and obscure, obstinate version of a policeman.
She may say to me, “Lie still—you have to learn your lesson.” It is not clear what I am learning—it is never clear what a child is learning.
If I don’t forgive Momma for what she does, the household enters on a period of difficulty—the difficulty is a joke if everyone is getting along with each other, but no one gets along with anyone long in our house, Momma with Daddy, Daddy with Nonie, Anne Marie with any of them, if I am in bad shape.
I am the child.
Momma can persuade Daddy for a while that I’m spoiled; he peers and suspects there is that in me, or worse. But then she is stuck with him, with Daddy: he will remember that he knows her; often he can’t abide her; meanwhile, I am crushed, silent, listless, angry, sinking, half suffocated—ah, but uncomplaining. There is an unmasking: Daddy grows uneasy—where is his home, where are his chances for comfort, has Momma fooled him?
His heart constricts; he says, “It’s ugly in here.” Why is that child suffering? Why are we leading this life? Sooner or later, Momma has to placate me.
She will begin by offering me a tentative, self-conscious, phony smile of bravery, of oh-let’s-not-be-petty, or some such thing.
I will turn away, my mouth harsh, my eyes showing contempt, pain, and dislike.
She is trying to get me too cheaply. She acts as if I required nothing. When I am upset, I am partly blinded: colors vanish; I fail to hear things. “Is he deaf—is he in a state again?”
She will say, “I don’t know what I did—remember, I make mistakes, too. If you can’t tell me what I’ve done, I don’t think you should blame me, so be a nice boy and forgive me, what do you say?”
She used my comparative inability to describe things to indicate her comparative guiltlessness—and when I can describe what she did, she says, “Oh, I think that’s awfully petty, don’t you, to blame me for
that?”
No.
She says, “I couldn’t have been so bad if that’s all you can think of to say—be reasonable now.…”
She will say, “It’s small of you to hold a grudge … to fight with a woman. You have a terrible temper. You have the temperament of an I don’t know what.”
She will say, “Listen, my fair-haired little friend, I assure you forgiveness is good for what ails you—you’ll ruin your good looks if you go on like this.…”
Or she will scream, when I am older and ugly, “I don’t want you in my house! You have no heart!”
She believed or hoped that any pain she suffered released her from any compulsion to carry out a duty.
When I am young, I keep track that she has not yet apologized to me for anything. She has not yet seen to it that there is any truth for me.
When I refuse to be fooled by her into too easy a reconciliation, she begins grudgingly or with amusement to admire me.
Or if she detects any plotting or firmness in me, dark, ill lit, obscure in expression, she will lighten, and she will make some offer: “Let’s be friends—I’ll stand by you, you’ll see.” And: “Don’t hold out for too much—believe me, I know whereof I speak—being stubborn is a losing proposition. Listen to me and learn: I’m the best friend you have.…”
When I was young, the house was often as much mine as it was my mother’s.
Then and later, I will always let my mother make peace with me. She will say, “Ah, you don’t intend to be a pain in the neck any longer—”
Sometimes I set her free—when I set her free, she usually
puts me on a shelf:
I become one of the things she doesn’t have to worry about at the moment; her attention flies on to other things.
When I don’t set her free … whenever I entered a room where she was, she would jerk with awareness, with memory: she would mention that I was angry; or she would suddenly glance at me with an entire consciousness that I was there: with calculations of how-to-handle-me.
I was cleverer with her than I was with anyone else.
The women uttered a lot of heavings, puffings, moans, exhortations to each other as I fought in various ways. I’d kick and shout,
“You leave me alone!”
“We’re not doing anything to you,” Momma would say—disingenuously.
Sometimes, when I am older, I can drive them off, make them break off the fight by yelling that everyone knows how awful Nonie is or that some boy she liked had laughed at how big her behind was: I can threaten to repeat things outside the house; I can on occasion silence Momma by repeating Daddy’s views about her.
Momma said, “You always have to win.” And: “Why do you always have to win?” She said, “Why do you have to fight like this?”
I hide underneath something or other and confront her from there.… I run across the room and stand behind a chair and confront her from there.
She and I.
What is to become of us if I don’t listen to her?
I don’t know what I expected to gain.
There is always present the crushing idea that we-deserve-each-other—we deserve each other because we know each other, because this has gone on all my life.…
She will say, “Save your breath—I’m not listening to you.”
Or: “I’m not listening to you—I never listen to people who are rude.”
Some people think the amateurishness of family life is the most widely distributed human beauty.
“Are you willing to listen to reason? You have to give up now,” my mother says. Perhaps I know only a small world, a false world. She will say, “Are you ready to show me some respect now?”
She says, “All right, let’s get on with it.” She means: that woman, that woman sitting there—that if I love her I have to help her hurt me now.
But I only have to help her hurt me if I love her. Otherwise, I can laugh and leave her sitting there forever, in memory, alone, ignored, unobeyed.
My mother.
More or less.