See Now Then (17 page)

Oh Mom, oh Mom, Mrs. Sweet heard those words, though to the person from whose being they came they were not words at all, they were life itself, and that person was the beautiful Persephone and that person was the young Heracles, and in those words, oh Mom, oh Mom, she could see and imagine herself as their mother and their protector and their navigator in a world in which the circumference was known: the children were calling out to their mother but Mrs. Sweet so liked to live in her garment: the shroud of her past, her childhood, her life before that, her life as it was interred in all the people she was descended and ascended from; her own life right then, right now, so sweet to her, each moment of her everyday existence so full of satisfaction: her two children who were to be woken up from sleep early in the morning to be dressed in clothes she had warmed up in the dryer, for they hated to put on cold clothes, and fed a breakfast of waffles, the batter made the night before and placed in the refrigerator, and on top of the waffles she poured maple syrup she had purchased from a man who lived on a farm on the road to Shaftsbury, a village that lay to the west of Lake Paran, and before pouring it on the waffles she warmed it up in the microwave oven; she made a fire in the fireplace and they sat before it, a screen placed between them and the flames themselves to protect the children from the hot flying embers; she bundled them into the car, a gray car of one make or another, not too expensive, a product of some country, not this one, drove them to the bus stop where they boarded the yellow school bus, entrusting them to a bus driver who might be in a bad mood or not, it all depended on the behavior of the other children who had boarded on the many stops before. And after she had seen the school bus disappear down Monument Avenue and pass the church in whose graveyard lay buried Robert Lee Frost and some of his children, she then got into the car and drove slowly back the way she had come, pass the Gatlin house, turning onto Silk Road, crossing the covered bridge on Silk Road, driving onto Matteson Road, turning onto Harlan and then coming to her own house, the house in which Shirley Jackson once lived. Inside now, it was as if the children, her own children, did not exist, only herself as a child did exist, and she now entered the temple, the sacred heart of her own life: See, Now, Then, and so it went on and on, these visitations, a holy journey into her past, around and around that room in which she sat and examined her life as it had been, as it was, and as it would be, for it was all the same, always just as it ever was and always just as it ever would be:

“To be abandoned is the worst humiliation, the only true humiliation, and that is why death is so unforgivable, for life has abandoned you and you are left all alone, by yourself, apart from everything, so that you are not even nothing, all that you used to subjugate, that person or thing or event, is lost to you in death, and no memorial, no in memoriam, no monument erected to you can erase the fact that in death you are powerless to act, you are no longer in Then and Now, you are no longer anything and only exist at the will of others and only exist if they desire you to exist, for your existence might be of use to them, and then when it is not you are abandoned again, put aside for something else, and that would be Now again, for Now is ongoing and never ceases, Now is unrelenting, impervious to everything known, and even unknown, impervious to all that can be grasped and held down firmly to all that can be grasped and held down firmly—and to be abandoned is the true, true nature of humiliation and to be in a state of humiliation is death and to be dead is to be humiliated, for then you cannot even know your situation and pity yourself. Now, Now, Now, which represents living itself, which represents life itself, defeats you and makes rubbish of you, the discarded, something caught in the wind on an empty street, aimless, aimless. Now, Now, and Now again: for that instant that is full of everything that makes up your true life but is always just out of reach, first seeming only an arm’s length away but forever out of reach, and the effort makes you tired but you can see it just out of reach and you try to catch it again but it is just out of reach, always it is out of reach, and you try again and again but the moments pile on top of each other and they are always out of reach, and then death itself is a moment that is never out of your reach but death itself makes you unable to make the effort of reaching”—so said and did say Mrs. Sweet to herself, as she entered her house, now empty of the children, now the fire before which they had eaten their breakfast was only embers, now beckoned her room, the infernal room in which she brought alive all that had made her, that room off the kitchen that had in it the desk Donald had made for her, and she knitted a garment for herself.

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Oh Mom, oh Mom, cried the young Heracles, so broken he was then, lying on the couch where before the events that led to him saying, oh Mom, oh Mom, he had been watching: basketball, tennis, golf. Oh Mom, oh Mom, he cried and he crumpled as if he had actually been defeated by all his labors, all the tasks that had been set before him, one after the other: the Nemean Lion, the Lernaean Hydra, the Cerynitian Hind, the Erymanthian Boar, the Augean Stables, the Stymphalian Birds, the Cretan Bull, the Mares that belonged to Diomedes, Hippolyte’s Belt, Geryon’s Cattle, Hesperides’ Apples, capturing Cerberus, when it is well known that in every telling of these tales he triumphs again and again, but not so now, and his mother wept and wept to see him so crumpled up, like rubbish, a piece of paper waiting for a light breeze to dispatch it to its destiny; and their tears, his own and his mother’s, remained separate, for she wept from a sense of failure, she had failed to keep him from knowing the bitterness of a weak and jealous father, she had given him a father who knew nothing of it, who knew not at all how to love a son, how to treasure a son and keep him whole, keep him one complete being, whole and intact, each seam of himself tight, impermeable, and all meant to give him a sense of his own inevitability to become a whole man, to see him become a father of fathers, gentle and kind, full of love and generous in this, and not become a tyrant, a traitor, mean in body and in soul; but she had not found for her young Heracles a father who could love him so much that he would rather be extinguished and not ever be known to human consciousness, a father who would rather be dead than to cause him to crumple on the sofa just when he was in the midst of watching Sunday-afternoon football on TV. Oh Mom, oh Mom, and he folded up as if he were a croissant, that was something he loved and Mrs. Sweet used to make them for him, even though they could be found in the frozen-food department of the supermarket made by Sara Lee, and she made the children a pound cake, using the recipe from
The Art of Fine Baking
by Paula Peck, even though a pound cake could be found right next to the croissant manufactured by that same entity, Sara Lee. And he folded up and so did his mother, the dear Mrs. Sweet, for she was dear when loving her children, even if she could from time to time be misguided, or irrelevant, or hopeless, and she couldn’t bear to see them suffer, and it was all this that made her create the room off the kitchen into which she would enter and disinter her past, what used to be her Now and had naturally become her Then, as in Then I was, Then I did, Then I became, and as she folded and crumpled into a heap of pain and hurt alongside the young Heracles, who was then folded up into the shape of part of his breakfast and the representatives of his imagination inside and outside the room, and by that time her own mother was dead and she was glad that such a person who had been so instrumental in her own existence was no longer alive, such a person who could and would have rejoiced at this significant moment of Mrs. Sweet’s abandonment, was not alive, was dead, and death has no Then and Now.

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And Mr. Sweet said, I love your mother, I loved your mother, I will always love your mother, she is so dear to me, the dear Mrs. Sweet, but she is so awful, did you hear the way she talked to the waiters, she is so objectionable, I would never tell you this because I really couldn’t, in our house we celebrated Christmas and Easter and we were never rude to people who waited on us and your mother would be of the people who waited on us but she your mother was so interesting, when I first knew of her, she was interested in the arrangement of the firmament and I bought her a telescope for her birthday and she loved insects, butterflies especially, and I gave her a net to catch them for I knew of Nabokov and she didn’t know of Nabokov and it was such a pleasure to see her delight in all that I could show her, she really rewarded my efforts but then she grew into a monster and one day I noticed that she was rude to waiters and I could have been rude to waiters but I knew that such a thing was wrong; but one day she went to Alldays & Onions to get special capers and she saw the waitress speaking kindly to a man, an ugly man, and the waitress said to that ugly man, hello handsome, what can I get for you today? and after the transaction your mother said to the waitress, how can you speak so to such an ugly man, and the waitress said, that was my husband. And your mother returned to me and she was filled with a description of fields of pink flowers that were shaped like fists and it was to see this, the fields of pink flowers like fists, that made her take that route to the Alldays & Onions, and it was there she insulted the waitress and her husband and that was the final straw, it was then I wanted to be with someone who wouldn’t instinctively be unkind to people who waited on me and my mother and father and my brother and his familiar, and your mother was someone who couldn’t make such a distinction. I wished she minced words, I wish she would bite off her tongue, I wish she would simply become dead. Oh young Heracles, Oh young Heracles, where are you? Are you under the blanket of my despair that is your mother, that truly abominable woman, your mother Mrs. Sweet?

Oh now, oh now, that was Mrs. Sweet making a tale of the events that had been Now, which always soon became Then, as she tried with resounding success to keep the young Heracles from approaching and so entering the gates of Austen Riggs or some such institution, or approaching the gates and then occupying the rooms and hallways for people who had been abandoned by their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and radiating outward as far as is possible and then going downward as far as is possible, and it was from such a situation that his mother sought to save him, as he sat on the couch, folded into the shape of something delicious to eat at breakfast, and his father told him that he no longer loved his mother, and that his mother was a lovely person but he no longer loved her, he loved someone else; and the young Heracles had no other way to understand this except in this way: the beautiful Persephone would ridicule Mrs. Sweet’s love of flowers because Mrs. Sweet would buy plants in quantities that exceeded the space in the garden in which she could place them and the young and beautiful girl would observe her mother’s dilemma and pretend that she was a purchaser of plants ordering them on the telephone: “Hello, do you have Madonna detroittii disgustiphilum? And how much is that? Ninety-nine cents per one hundred? Can I have a million of those please?” and this would cause the whole family, that being Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles, all to explode in laughter at Mrs. Sweet’s extravagance, Mrs. Sweet’s foolishness, and in any case Mrs. Sweet believed that to provide amusement and laughter to her family was not unlike providing dinner. But then there was the ridicule at dinner and that was Mom’s roast, like something at a gathering of comedians who said mean but true things about each other and the event was impersonal and profitable in all sorts of ways, but at the Sweets’ dinner table Mrs. Sweet could see the laughter that her vulnerabilities provided but she was not made happy to hear her faults and flaws presented with fondness: the plants that cost so little individually but then when presented in a bundle were expensive and her family could reveal that she did not really understand the true cost of the material of her daily life; and this was so devastating to Mrs. Sweet, for her history, her very being, her current existence, was deeply involved and could be used as an illustration of the true cost of daily life, not a precise daily life, but an approximation of one. But there at the dinner table, with the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles and Mr. Sweet himself, was Mom’s roast, as if they were at some event in which Jonathan Winters would make an appearance and say funny, memorable things and there in attendance would be other people like that too, but this was Mrs. Sweet’s dinner and the other diners were her daughter and her son and her husband, and her husband no longer loved her, her husband hated her, and this was not unusual in the fragile structure, made up of bones and muscle and blood and a soul too, known as a husband, and this was not unusual in the fragile structure made up of a woman, a man, two children or more, known as Family Life.

Oh Now, oh now, said Mrs. Sweet to herself, for she was then looking into an abyss, but that would be literature; for she was now looking into the shallow depths, a structural depression, but that would be geology; and at the bottom of this metaphor or just a true representation lay her life, the remains of it, the facts of it, the substance of it, the summation of it, the finality of it, the good-bye for now and see you later maybe of it, the end in the beginning of it, and Mrs. Sweet wept, for she had loved her life so much; and this was a surprise to her, that she had loved her life so much: the life with Mr. Sweet and his foul breath after a good night’s sleep, his slight stature, the hair on his beautifully pear-shaped head disappearing in a calculated way, as if it was being harvested for a purpose unbeknownst to human imagination; her dead mother lying in a coffin and being looked at by all the people she had made feel small and all those people were so glad to have outlived her and Mrs. Sweet was among them. And seeing then: the portraits of them, Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, the day after they were married, which had been taken by Francesca, and on the day they received the canceled check they had paid Francesca with for the expenses incurred for the film and other things, a sum of fourteen dollars it was, that very day Francesca had jumped off a building, and Mrs. Sweet made herself forget that the building was situated on a street in the narrow landmass of the lower part of Manhattan; Mr. Sweet’s fear of growing trees, with the cycle of budding and leafing out and becoming themselves for a season and then their growth dimming and eventually coming to a temporary pause, growing dormant and resting and then budding forth again, and Mrs. Sweet found this process a joy, its inevitability a mystery, unexpected, unimaginable even, and she would order even more plants then, but Mr. Sweet said to her not once but again and again, I only love dead trees, and she hadn’t paid attention that he was saying that he didn’t love her, that he didn’t love her, that he didn’t love her, she only thought that he loved trees when they were dead, for it is so that when you love someone you make them say the things that are pleasing to you, the things that will make you love them more, and you never hear what they are saying right then and now, right now and then; but there was Helen and her paintings of night with its quarter moon, and a lone woman looking up at a dimly lit sky, and then Helen and Mrs. Sweet going for a run on the still-elevated West Side Highway and running and running and then while doing so they could see men having sex with each other and they had never understood how men had sex with each other until then, until then, and Helen said, wow! but she said, wow! about everything, so Mrs. Sweet said to herself, Then and even Now!, that is how Helen spoke; yes, that was Helen and is Helen now and also then.