See Now Then (10 page)

Plunge ahead, buck up, and Mrs. Sweet did just that, as she gathered up Mr. Sweet’s dropped clothes and the soiled bath towels and the sheets and the children’s clothes, blouses from Wet Seal for Persephone and trousers from somewhere else she could not pronounce, T-shirts for young Heracles bought at a store called Manhattan, though it was located in a city far from the actual place known as Manhattan, and all the articles of clothing and dry goods that a seemingly prosperous American family might use. Mrs. Sweet washed all the clothing and other such things in the washing machine (known to her now, but unknown to her then, when she was that easily defeated child) and dried them in a clothes-drying machine and then folded the towels and other such things, and she got out the ironing board and ironed all of Mr. Sweet’s shirts and trousers too, for she loved him so, and wanted him to appear to everyone who glimpsed him for the first time as if he had just stepped out of a display in the window of a store called Love: dignified and worthy of respect. All this made her tired, in body and mind equally—the work of it, the imagining of it: clean clothing for two children and Mr. Sweet, making them look as if they lived in a mansion on a prominent street in Manhattan, or as if he lived in a village in New England with a wife and mother who had no idea of how to be her own true self. But to Mrs. Sweet, to whom he was actually and legally wedded, all this was something else: here she is plunging ahead and bucking up too: and walking on air, on nothing visible to the human eye, and she did not fall into oblivion or whatever substance was made to disguise oblivion, and she went on to the next thing and the next thing and the thing after that, and each thing and each nothing she conquered, and she went on in her ways, looking after her husband, tending her children, looking up at the moon (quarter, half, or full) to see if it was in a shroud of clouds (rain tomorrow, in any case), and feeling happy, whatever that is, Then and Now!

5

Mrs. Sweet ended all these thoughts, for the door to the room that was just off the kitchen opened with a mighty force, and Mrs. Sweet knew immediately that it was her son the young Heracles.

The young Heracles would always be so, then, now, and then to come, as would his sister the beautiful Persephone be so, then, now, and then to come. Their mother Mrs. Sweet had deemed it to be that way. But now, just this now, the young Heracles flung open the door to the room just off the kitchen, the room in which Mrs. Sweet kept her true self and had never revealed it to anybody, not Mr. Sweet, not the beautiful Persephone, not the young Heracles, and she had no idea that they knew of her secret communing with her true self and that they viewed this with feelings of various kinds: sympathy from Heracles, simple hatred from Persephone, homicidal rage from Mr. Sweet. But now, just this now, the young Heracles said to his mother, “Mom, Mom, what are you doing? I’ve been looking for you all over the place. You weren’t in the garden, you weren’t in the kitchen, you weren’t in bed reading a book no one but you would care about. Where were you? Can Tad, Ted, Tim, Tom, and Tut come over? We wanna play a game but Dad says I better ask you because we’re gonna make a lot of noise and he’s trying to finish writing his concerto for two pianos for the Troy Orchestra and we’re probably gonna make a lot of noise because we don’t know how to be quiet, I don’t know how to be quiet, I keep telling Dad, I don’t know how to be quiet, I don’t know how to stay still, I don’t know what to do, Mom, Mom are you listening to me, are you listening to me? Help me, Mom, say something, tell me what’s going on.” Oh how his mother loved him and she thought of the time when he was in her stomach and would not stay still, how all night he jumped up and down in her womb and then would stretch himself to his full height, almost twenty-four inches diagonally, and she could see the imprint of his heel and the imprint of his fist through her skin, as if her skin were a piece of old, worn-out fabric, and then she wanted to say something to him that would make him place himself into that posture of the unborn child in the uterus that decorates the walls of obstetricians’ waiting rooms, and that unborn child who fits perfectly in the illustrated pelvic area and develops into a baby without the host knowing of it, and host and child are one but they acknowledge nothing of their unspeakable intimacy, and that intimacy is a lost island that has not yet been found. But so did Heracles enter into Mrs. Sweet’s very being, distorting the skin of her stomach, bouncing up and down on her sciatic nerve, rupturing the lining of her cervix so that she had to go to bed for days and days and she worried that she would never see his face, his broad nose, his eyes that were the color of some mineral to be found in distorted rock, his lips like hers, thick and unparted like night mixed up with day, his large hands and feet, his hair so thick and curled, the weight of his head on his shoulders; and then he was born suffering from jaundice, the blood of his mother and the blood of his father at war inside him, and that battle had not ended before he came into this world; for days he lay in a bassinet under the glare of fluorescent lights and Mrs. Sweet stayed by his side and fed him food from her breasts and on the eighth day he was released and only the blood of his mother remained in his veins. But Mrs. Sweet thought nothing of this in her everyday life, only when she was in the little room just off the kitchen, and the insufferableness of all of them, Mr. Sweet, the beautiful Persephone, the young Heracles, their demands, their needs, their requests and not one among them pitied her; why should they? She seemed to sail along smoothly, magically finding the money to purchase computers powerful enough to employ software that could arrange and copy complicated musical compositions, or building a lovely little cottage in the woods where Mr. Sweet could retreat from the disturbance of those children and the presence of that woman who had absolutely arrived on a banana boat or some vessel like that, for nobody knew exactly how she arrived; she had a story that began with her mother hating her and sending her away to make money to support her family and she had no father, there was no claim made on her, she was just sent away on a vessel that went back and forth, carrying cargo, human sometimes, of a nonhuman but commercial nature sometimes, and there she was, this woman who was the mother of his children, a woman from a place far away, a place Mr. Sweet could never visit, for Mr. Sweet would not cross the street if he knew his shadow would accompany him.

But now Mrs. Sweet was very much listening to her sweet son, his voice like an instrument only a boy could play or would want to play, a boy who could summon an army of shy Myrmidons, battalions of archers and sword wielders and spear throwers, all of them borne out of the wrapping of a Happy Meal from McDonald’s or Mickey D’s or the Sign of the Golden Arches, as Heracles would say as it pleased him; there were many Happy Meals and so there were many shy Myrmidons. He said, the young Heracles, in that voice that only his mother could hear, a voice that was so pleasing to her ears, well my dad is a complete asshole, he doesn’t know anything, he hates throwing balls and he won’t take me to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and I don’t even know where that is, and he won’t take me to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and I kind of know where that is, and do you know what just happened, he came in and I know he had been with those girls, those really cute student girls who say to him, oh Mr. Sweet,
Pierrot Lunaire
and
Lulu
and I don’t know what else but there is something else and he comes in from outside after all this and he says to me: young Heracles, where is my beautiful wife, as if I didn’t have a clue about all the time he has been adjusting his corduroy trousers that Mom had bought for him at the Brooks Brothers outlet in Manchester, really cool pants too, but they were too long for him, and when she had them shortened he looked like a short guy wearing somebody else’s pants, but that was Dad, my dad, he looked like another guy and I just knew that my dad was someone else and I didn’t want him to be anything but someone else, but when he asked me if I had seen his beautiful wife, I said to him, no, but if you are looking for Mom, she is in the garden. And I knew he was going to laugh: Mom wasn’t beautiful because she was my mother; Mom wasn’t beautiful because she was his wife; and I knew he was going to laugh because it was a funny thing to say, I just knew it and I knew when he laughed he wouldn’t notice that I knew he was doing something and I didn’t know then what he was doing, I couldn’t say, hey Dad, this is what you are doing, you hate me, you hate your wife, you don’t think she is beautiful, you hate this house we live in, you hate the garden, you hate the way Mom will just do anything: big things like building a huge stonewall around the house with some stones that she paid someone to haul in a truck from a quarry miles away in Goshen, Massachusetts, and then right after that there was a big quarrel over how to pay for it over dinner and Mom said, but the stones are of mica schist formed 400 million years ago in the Lower Devonian Period and this metaphoric rock, now in shades of rust, gold, blue, black, gray, that will surround the house, making it look afloat, is the result of sandy mud sediments that had been resting at the bottom of an ancient sea, and Dad didn’t say anything else, he just continued to eat his food, and Mom had cooked poached veal with tuna fish sauce and Italian rice with shredded basil and mozzarella cheese and a salad, and Dad just hated Mom, she was becoming fat then, she had taught me to make her a martini and she would sit in the garden at the end of the day, in the middle of all those flowers that Wayne and Joe gave her, some flowers that they said looked great in their garden but they looked terrible in Mom’s garden, they grew all over the place like weeds, as if they hadn’t been given instructions in how to grow in another place other than in Readsboro, Vermont, and Dad was happy to see her disappointments and me too, especially me too, for I wanted her to be Mom and didn’t want to have to go to Clearbrook Farm to buy her a six-pack of celosia for Mother’s Day, just after Dad dumped her because he had fallen hopelessly in love with a woman younger than Mom, a woman that he felt made him understand his true, true self.

Is Mom an error, and if she is what should I do with her, rub her out like when I’m in school and I make my letters not so good? Is Mom a mistake and can I correct her? Is Mom a disaster, like when the wind blows too hard, or when the rain comes too much, or when the rain doesn’t come at all for years and years? Is Mom a disaster? Jesus Christ, and that was the voice of Mrs. Sweet, shredding the air itself, if such a thing could be done, and she sprinted across the lawn that had just been mowed by Mr. Pembroke or someone who worked for him, and she stretched out her already unusually long arms, as if she were one of the transformers, the toys that were not yet part of the everyday life of young Heracles, and she removed him from the path of the speeding vehicle, a red Nissan sports car being driven by a boy, a junior at the Mount Anthony Union High School, a member of a sports team where speed of foot is highly valued, a boy whose mother worked in a factory not far away in which fabric made from barrels of petroleum was sewed into something that might be worn or sat upon or contain food in such a way that a person on eating it will think of the word fresh, but only the word fresh will actually be fresh, and it was in this moment that young Heracles was removed from death’s door, and his mother, the delightful and much despised Mrs. Sweet, who could from time to time be despicable and just plain awful, hugged him to her close and wished the boy driver a fiery death, and later when he did die and not at all because of anything having to do with that swift red sports car made of fiberglass but because of an unexpected rupture of an artery somewhere in his head, the dear Mrs. Sweet wept for his mother, not for him but for the boy’s own mother.

And those tears she wept then were so much, so much, so much, and they might be the beginning of a sea that might be ancient eventually, but just then, right now, they were absorbed into the bib of her overalls that had been purchased from the Gap or through the Smith & Hawken catalog, depending, and the tears that began the sea that would eventually become ancient remained just tears, and Mrs. Sweet gathered the young Heracles to her bosom and was so glad that just then she had avoided the face of sorrow and the immediacy of sorrow and also had avoided becoming intimate with that dreadful entity, that world: sorrow; and those tears she wept then and now, Now being constant and unchangeable and liable to make foolish all that insists on being held permanently dear, Then being like the earth’s surface with its crust seemingly fixed and stable to all who need it to be so, those tears were absorbed in her mom garment and also were in the great world of water and all that might be vulnerable to it.

All the same, there was the young Heracles, saved from being made dead by the boy who did not listen to his mother when she warned him about all the dangers of the world, who would have died at nineteen years of age anyway, even if he had listened to his mother, from some unexpected malfunction in his body; and that mother had loved that boy and would have reached into her son’s body to mend it and make his life a long life, a life that continued after hers ended, for she could see herself absent in his world but couldn’t imagine him absent from hers, now or then. Mrs. Sweet saw all that, standing over a bed of lettuce that would soon bolt and Shep, who sometimes helped her to move full-grown trees from one place to another, was now speaking to her, and as she watched his lips move, she heard herself only: Where are the Oberleys? For Shep has, this year, a spectacular crop of beans that we all must taste; Gordon has made Ann a dry riverbed; Mrs. Sweet’s friends Dan and Robert who live in Heronswood, Washington, has sent her a batch of their white double-flowering hellebores; and then, only then, she heard the words that made Shep’s lips move: By the way, did you mean to park the car in the grove of white pines that has been purposely sited at the entrance of the pond, and just then the threshold of her life disappeared for she saw the middle-aged Kuniklos, a car made in Germany, a country that had transgressed the human bond to such a degree that it could not be discussed in the intimacy of a kitchen or even the indifferent atmosphere of a restaurant, and the car had come to a rest in the grove of white pines, a grove of trees that had not been removed because their presence in the landscape of an expansive field was pleasing to the eye of the owner of the field, and the owners were Gordon and Ann. The young Heracles was all strapped up in his car seat, and the car seat itself firmly fixed to the middle seat in the back of the car, all these precautions recommended by authorities devoted to the prevention of sorrow and despair of a particular kind; but he had removed himself from the car seat and climbed over to the driver’s position, seated himself, and turned the key to the ignition, but he had never seen the maneuvering of the driver’s feet, and so the car jumped forward and jumped forward and jumped forward and came to a halt in the grove of pines, instead of breaking the surface of that beautiful pond and eventually sinking to its stinking bottom, for the bottom always stinks. And when the grower of the beans, Shep, said those words, by the way did you guys mean to park the car down near the pond, Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, the father and mother of the young Heracles, knew everything that had happened, every motion, and thought of him, knew it as it happened, knew it before it happened, but did not know the end, and they leapt out of themselves and ran toward him, not knowing if they would find him dead or alive, but they did find him and he was alive in the car, trying without success to open the doors and get out into other adventures, which might be cleaning the fabled Augean Stables, slaying the Nemean Lion and wearing its skin as a cloak, an encounter with the Erymanthian Boar, though not yet and perhaps never the policeman in the city of Boston, who traces himself through some long-dead people from Ireland, imagines that young Heracles has run through a red light and by that time, then and now, the young Heracles had become a young black man, whatever that might be, and even now, whatever that might be is not certain.