See Now Then (15 page)

Gathering her children to her bosom, Mrs. Sweet soothed them with kisses, reminding them that they loved her then, not only just then, but that then when they were babies and couldn’t fall asleep without her milk-yielding breasts in their mouths, of that Then when they couldn’t cross the road and she had to show them how, of that Then when young Heracles could only be lulled into a stupor by being taken to a place where men operated huge machinery and the machines made noises that were so loud you could not hear yourself think and the men were in the process of realizing some marvel of engineering; of that Then when she took them to see the Continental Divide and a receding glacier in the state of Montana and unexpectedly found a species of clematis,
columbiana
, in bloom right outside the kitchen of the motel where they were staying, and inside their breakfast was being cooked and this was just before she learned that the path to a lake named to commemorate a woman who would have been a pain to have as a friend was closed because some German tourist had been knocked down to the ground by a grizzly bear the day before, the bear’s real purpose was to consume a baby elk that had been swimming in the lake with its mother. Herding her children to their rooms upstairs in the Shirley Jackson house, Shirley Jackson being a woman who had been long dead by the time Mrs. Sweet was living in that house and a woman Mrs. Sweet would never know, but her being nevertheless was all too present even as she was unknown to Mrs. Sweet as she went about the everyday: Mrs. Sweet tossed them into their beds without incident, for by that time putting the children to bed was such an ordeal for dear Mrs. Sweet, so full of bargains made around the packed lunch: would Mrs. Sweet put extra Oreos so the beautiful Persephone could share with Joree, whose parents did not allow her to have sugary things; would Mrs. Sweet allow the young Heracles to have a playdate with Gregory, whose parents were devout Christians attached to some branch and sect that Mrs. Sweet could not understand. And after all she allowed the young Heracles to go to Gregory’s house for a visit though at the same time she prayed or wished, prayers and wishes then being interchangeable and indistinguishable, that no harm would come to him, and no harm ever came to him when he visited Gregory’s house. All the same, Mrs. Sweet was so relieved to hear that Gregory was soon moving to Florida. But just before he could let go of her—because he sensed she was longing to go back to that much-hated room, the room just off the kitchen, the room in which she would commune with the vast world that began in 1492, the room in which lay her mother and her dead brother and her other brothers and all the other people whom she sought out even as they had turned their backs on her, that room, that room: burn it down, cried her children, burn it with her in it, cried Mr. Sweet, but Mrs. Sweet knew of no other way to be and in any case did not know that her existence and her way of being caused so much as a stir in others—but just before he could let go of her, just before he drifted off to sleep, a state of being he fought mightily against, for Heracles sought to dominate, not to be dominated, he said to his mother, Mom, Mom, oh Mom! Tell me again of the Dean and Mrs. Hess and he was referring to those tales of two deep-sea-dwelling creatures, a man and a woman who were married to each other and who did this without having gills and without having lungs. The Dean had grown up in a place called Oxnard, California, where for two or three or four generations his family made hats for all kinds of people and the people wore the hats to every kind of event: to church, to work in mines where they extracted from the seams of the earth all sorts of things that are featured prominently in the periodic table, to drink beer in a bar, to marry each other, to attend a funeral, a baptism, a bat mitzvah, a bar mitzvah, to assassinate someone, to pay a visit to someone recovering from a serious illness in the hospital, to go to the bank to repay a loan in installments, to attend ceremonies of customs that originated in not well-understood parts of the known world, Africa just for example; but the hats that were made by the Dean’s family were now integral to these customs and the people who wore the hats had no interest in the people who made them at all. Mrs. Hess had grown up in a place called Massachusetts and for generations her family made furniture from the trunks of maple trees and oak trees and ash trees and butternut trees and pine trees of various species and all kinds of people ate their dinners and had conversations and rendered judgments of a legal kind or of an everyday conversational kind; that was the world of Mrs. Hess. They now congregate within the pages of a book and their ups and downs, all taking place deep in the watery bowels of earth and even deeper than that, in places where the earth’s substance was not water at all but only something like it—liquid; and when Mrs. Sweet read that to the young Heracles, he would say, what does that mean, not water but only something like it, come on Mom, come on Mom, is it water or is it not water and Mrs. Sweet would proceed as if she had not been interrupted and the young Heracles would recede as if he had not interrupted. But in any case, the adventures of the Dean and Mrs. Hess, these two people, who without precedent inhabited and were familiar with the watery depths of the earth as if it were a surface and they knew depths beyond this depth, this so thrilled the young Heracles.

The Dean and Mrs. Hess possessed neither lungs nor gills, for they did not live in water or on dry land, for they were not yet of this earth as we now know it, but they did see the earth grow dense and large and larger still; they did see an inner core become covered with an outer core and then that become covered over by a mantle. “Well, look at that,” said Mrs. Hess to the Dean, just as inner core disappeared beneath mantle. At that, the Dean adjusted his glasses. “This is exhausting,” he said and Mrs. Hess said, “You think so, just wait till we have children.” The Dean wanted to say, “What’s that?” but he knew that Mrs. Hess hated just then any unusual amount of irony and she might interpret his attempt at humor as inappropriate. He said nothing. He looked at his wife, her hair a beautiful rust, her eyes the color of a fire as it is reflected in the glass eyes of the two cats that decorated the andirons in the hearth of a fireplace in New England in mid-November; he looked at his wife as she spun around and around first in one direction, then in another in an effort to make herself at one with the earth’s own turning; she failed and sank to her own center. And the Dean said, “What’s that!” and then for a while, he turned molten and silent. And then he boiled up, not in resentment and anger but in laughter and much clapping with approval at his own happiness. He loved Mrs. Hess. He loved her so much! He bombarded her with kisses which she sensibly ignored but took note of nevertheless. “Is it time for dinner?” asked the Dean and Mrs. Hess replied firmly, “Not yet!” and time moved on in the way it always would, always will, then and now intertwined, losing uniqueness, difference, distinction, subject only to laws of human consciousness. “Mom, Mom, what’s happening? Where’s the time when the Dean eats the plate full of hot horse chestnuts, fresh from being roasted in the immortal fire, you know, the fire that is burning forever at the center of the earth, the one that is waiting to turn us back into the thing from which we came, that thing called the universe? Where is that? Can you get to that chapter, please? I want to hear about the millions of years of rain. Can you skip to that, please Mom, please Mom?” The young Heracles loved the sweet mellifluous tone of Mrs. Sweet’s voice as she read to him the story of creation, the story of how he Now was Then, the very story, the nature of any story, the story being the definition of chaos, of the unstable, of the uncertain, of the pause that holds the possibility of nothingness, empty. And Mrs. Sweet continued in a very steady voice, for the personality of the reassuring mother came readily and easily to her: she said, while speaking for Mrs. Hess, “It rained a kind of water that was so complicated with various elements and each of them separately or combined, it would not matter, would be inhospitable to the life of the mosquito who was a vector of the most virulent form of malaria and it rained for one hundred million years.” The young Heracles, said, “Oh Mom, oh Mom, can we go to Africa?” But Mrs. Sweet, still speaking as Mrs. Hess said, “Not yet is there an Africa, not yet is there an Africa,” saying it twice, for that would make it really so and it was really so then and it is really so now. “Well enough of this, young man,” said Mrs. Sweet, for she could see the to and fro of traveling to Africa undifferentiated from Now and Then, just a landmass emerging from billions of years of the earth’s relentless restlessness, the earth indifferent to a unique individual consciousness as it might manifest itself in Mrs. Sweet, the young Heracles, or anyone else; and she brought the bedsheets and down comforter, mixed up as they were, sheets and comforter, to his chin, and folded them around his body as if he were in a shroud but he was only going to sleep and would wake up the next morning, not going to sleep forever. He lay in the bottom half of his bunk bed that Mrs. Sweet had purchased from Crate & Barrel, and Mr. Sweet had objected to the cost of it; the top half was left for the young Heracles’ friends, Tad and Ted and Tim and Tom and Tut, and such were their names and they were not afraid to fall out of a bed so high up from the floor, or so they said, and the young Heracles did not believe them. And just before she left him, just before she showed him the moon and said goodnight, Mrs. Sweet said, “Tomorrow is another day and what will you do then?” for she was familiar with seeing now, in any case dreaming. Mrs. Sweet closed tightly the book that contained the adventures of the Dean and Mrs. Hess but the Dean and Mrs. Hess were not concerned at all, they continued as always, as before and after and as they do now: the Dean’s glasses slipped down from the thin banister that was his nose for a moment, a moment of millions of years in the realms of the batholiths and into formations of thickened fluids that solidified into granite, rocks becoming stilled through cooling. “Oh yes, oh yes!” said the Dean and Mrs. Hess to each other, as they traversed the deep realm, before there was any surface which was habitable, and they were creating a surface which could be made habitable, but they were not at all interested in that then.

The time passed. But did time pass? Yes, it did and the Dean grew hungry and said to Mrs. Hess, “Dinner?” and she answered, “Not yet!” for it would be many ages before such a thing was possible, dinner: the purchasing of meat and vegetables from the supermarket, cooking them, setting the table, sitting down to eat them while going over the events of a day, the way we live now. The way we live now! Yes, the way we live now: the tawdriness of it, the small-mindedness in it, the importance of the self, the self degraded not properly valued, the self of no use, of no comfort to any individual. The way we live now! The Dean sighed and lay down, and Mrs. Hess, thinking this a secret from him, continued to turn this way, flip that way, in imitation of the earth’s magnetic field, but how could such a thing be unknown to this god of geomancy? Iron-nickel alloy, peridotite, gabbro, granite—all known to him by hand and heart. “Well, all right,” he said to her and the eras and periods and epochs, too, flew by in his mind’s eye: Cambrian, Devonian, Permian, the ’cenes, and there were many of those, the ’cenes. The green plaid of the duvet, under which lay the young Heracles, moved up and down in a constant perfect rhythm, the beat of his heart it was, but then he shifted violently and his hand swung out into the air and came to rest on the top of his covering, there his hand lay isolated like a part of a landmass, submerging or emerging, neither one nor the other. But he was dreaming of flowers, of fields upon fields of wheat in flower, and then flour, and flowering trees that would bear fruit, and then some that would bear nothing edible, and his whole night was like that: dreams of flowers and flours and fruits and flowers that were beautiful for their own sake.

8

When I was a child, said Mrs. Sweet to herself, speaking to herself in her mind’s eye, her lips that could be seen not moving at all, her eyes fixed on the stitches that the needles made as they slipped from one to the next under her guidance, for she had taught herself the ways of knitting, slipping the knitted stitch off the needle and then retrieving it by twisting it in the opposite direction, making it raised as if it were a pearl and this stitch was called a “purl,” and even so Mrs. Sweet understood that her method of doing this would meet with the disapproval of any Olympian authority; and Mrs. Sweet was making a baby’s blanket, following the instructions of the authorities that would frown upon her, producing a Vandyke check pattern, a series of stitch-and-purls, and at that time she was not expecting a child but: When I was a child, she said, I thought the world was first still and then all of creation had come into being solely for me and that I was born on the Seventh Day. I did think that, really and truly so, until I was about nine years of age and then something happened and what was that?

Before I was nine, before that, something happened. I do see now that there was much turbulence and upheaval in my life, but all this had to do with my own creative narration, my own individual creation: I was not allowed to cry when I was being scolded for some transgression or the other, and I had so many, for I was always being scolded, and I was so ashamed of my imperfections, though if I had been left to myself I would have been perfect: there was not a thing about me that I found wanting, not my thoughts, not my physical appearance, not my mother, not anything she did or did not do. All of my sadness and all of my longing and all of myself was accepted by me. But I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me, my own self, though at the time I did not know that myself constituted such a thing as an existence. I couldn’t please the people I knew and so I couldn’t please myself. A whole life is distilled from some event that occurred before you are three years of age or after three years of age but not past your sixth year; a whole life can span six thousand years and each year consists of 365 days excepting for a leap year, and it would remain so: that a whole life is made up of some small event, fleeting, something so small, deeply buried within itself, a catastrophe, not easily detectable to you or to the careful observer, but visible enough to a lover or a roommate or the person living next door who does not wish you well, the event, which in fact becomes your greatest flaw, occurs when you are most powerless to thwart its occurrence, when you are most unable to make its malignancy benign, when you are most unable to shrug it off, as if it were nothing more than a leaf falling off a tree in October, a change of seasons, a phenomenon that is quite apparent in parts of the earth’s atmosphere, yes, yes, that is what makes up a whole life, the small event that cannot be seen by you, but can be seen by random people, and that small event makes you vulnerable to the deep and casual desires of these people, random or select, you can never know, really know. All this said Mrs. Sweet to herself as she resided in her mind’s eye, and she knitted a garment, this time it was a sweater made up in a pattern to be worn by men who lived on an island adrift in the northern part of the Atlantic Ocean and this island was formed there in that period of time called the Lower Carboniferous and these men who lived on this island wore this garment to sea. The Aran sweater it was that she knitted, the stitches were knit two purl two and knit one purl two, or purl two knit one drop one, or drop two and then pick up one or pick up nothing at all, and in that way Mrs. Sweet continued: I was not allowed to cry; so many times I wanted to cry, so many times, but when I did, I was scolded so harshly, I was told that my tears were a sign that I was proud like the fallen hero of a paradise that was lost, that I was Lucifer or something like him, and when I was seven years of age my punishment for misbehaving in school was to copy by longhand Books One and Two of
Paradise Lost
by John Milton; and at that time I lived without artificial light, that would be light provided by electricity, I lived then in a little house with my mother and her husband, a man who was my father by association and that association made him more important to me than my father through biology; and I copied those chapters, Book One and Book Two, and I identified with Lucifer, who did not cry, but it was not something I knew in the way I knew I preferred to be hot than to be cold. But I did cry: I cried when my mother took me with her to the St. John’s Public Library when I could not yet read, and she read many books all to herself while I sat on her lap and looked up at her lips which never moved but her whole being, her body, was transformed, for she did not remain the same.