See Now Then (5 page)

Mrs. Sweet was the mother of Heracles and this was as natural and certain as the daily turning of the earth itself. Mrs. Sweet loved the young Heracles, she loved him so and paid special attention to all his needs and indulged him in all his many amusing whims: wanting to see the machines that remove snow—snowplows—at rest in the municipal garage where they were stored when their giant blades were not pushing aside the high drifts of snow. How Heracles loved to see that, miles and miles of road covered with snow and the snowplows clearing this away, making a path through it. So too he loved to see tall buildings being assembled with machinery groaning so loudly that he could not hear Mrs. Sweet telling him how much she loved him. And he loved to put on only warm clothes and Mrs. Sweet would cause the sun to shine and make his clothes warm and, if not that, place them in the clothes dryer and warm them up. Heracles liked his clothes warm when he put them on and Mrs. Sweet would make them so. But it was Heracles who was natural to Mrs. Sweet not the other way around. Heracles regarded Mrs. Sweet with disdain and this was correct, for the weak should never be in awe of the strong.

She fretted and worried and became vexed as she thought of his life as he would live it. What if Heracles wandered out of the yard in pursuit of one of those balls, be it golf ball, basketball, baseball, football, he playfully and violently made sail through the air? The yard of the Shirley Jackson house had a border. That border was the seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. But no matter the season, no matter the weather, Heracles played with those balls, Mrs. Sweet mended and knitted those socks, Mr. Sweet lay down on a couch in the dark studio.

Heracles now bends down to pick up his shy Myrmidon, a gift he received in his Happy Meal that Mrs. Sweet had bought for him at McDonald’s. The shy Myrmidons, tiny figures in blue and green and red plastic, were shy; they clasped their shields to their breasts and held their spears aloft, always ready to strike out and inflict pain, imaginary death. When Heracles was four and five and six, he used to line them up against each other on the stairs just outside his room, battlefields, and these plastic figurines would demolish figments, brave figments, over and over again, and then would rest so weary were they from the fighting, and then an unsuspecting and innocent Mr. Sweet would step on their abandoned form and sometimes almost break his neck tumbling down the stairs from that encounter. Oh shit, he would say and then look quickly around, his eyes darting here and there quickly, as if controlled by a mechanical contraption, the little bastard, the little shit. But his mother loved Heracles and took him to McDonald’s to buy his Happy Meals, even when she was unhappy and did not know that she was so, happiness being the sphere of Heracles and his father and her daughter the beautiful Persephone and the shy Myrmidons, made of plastic or not, and any everything else as it came up in the Shirley Jackson house. Heracles then bends down to pick up a shy Myrmidon, Then being the same as Now, Then from time to time, becoming Now.

The shy Myrmidons were sometimes lined up, set up in formations, ready to do battle with and triumph over a set of adversaries, whom Heracles could not see but neither could the shy Myrmidons and so it all went in this way, a way that would please Heracles now, then, then or now, being one and the same burden or pleasure. At other times the shy Myrmidons were separated from each other, scattered here and there, on the floor of the room Heracles slept in all by himself; in the bin of the dirty clothes and then rescued from the wash cycle of the washing machine by Mrs. Sweet; on the stairs where Mr. Sweet was walking down just after he got out of bed on a beautiful morning, slipped, and broke his vertebra. The vertebra healed but Mr. Sweet himself did not. Heracles said, sorry dad, as he always did, and to say sorry was common to him, as if it were oxygen. Sagging into, sorry dad, and sagging into everything that was now, which would eventually become Then, to all that Heracles had strong feelings but the strong feelings would be dealt with then, not now, never now.

But the many shy Myrmidons, the result of many trips to the McDonald’s restaurants to purchase many Happy Meals, were lined up and they did go into battle with some imaginary foes and they triumphed of course, again and again, they triumphed of course, and the imaginary battlefield was covered with blood, sheer blood, so much of it, covering everything; so Heracles thought, so he said to himself, so he imagined, also. The shy Myrmidons rule, is another thing he said, or imagined. And then he fell asleep. Wake up, wake up, his sister shouted at him, for he did have a sister and she had curly hair. Wake up, his sister shouted at him, a snake with nine heads is lying next to you in your crib. And the very young Heracles then turned over into somersault, and facing the nine-headed snake directly stuck out his tongue at all those heads; without making too much of an effort he tore off their heads and threw them over his shoulder, all nine of them, and they landed on the floor of Mrs. Sweet’s newly cleaned kitchen. Oh god, she said to herself, that kid is always up to something, what a mess he has made now. And she picked up the nine snake heads and put them in a bag, wiped up the floor clean, and she asked Mr. Sweet to please come and put out the garbage.

But Mr. Sweet was in his studio above the garage, where he always liked to be, it was not a funeral parlor, it’s only that he was in mourning and conducting a funeral for his life, the one he had never led, and Mrs. Sweet’s calling him interrupted this mourning, she was always interrupting, his life or his death, she was always interrupting. The studio was dark, then, now, but not completely, everything could be seen clearly but as a shadow of itself. How Mr. Sweet liked that, everything a shadow of itself. But there was that voice of Mrs. Sweet, not the shadow of a voice, she was not capable of that, a whisper, conveying her deepest feelings with a glance, or just stopping her breathing outright, just stop, stop, stop, right now. Mr. Sweet, she would say at the top of her voice, her voice sounding louder than a town crier’s, louder than a warning of impending disaster, she was so loud, Mrs. Sweet was so loud. Mr. Sweet, can you please take the garbage out? Sl-aap. Sl-aap, came the sound of his feet that were snug in a pair of flannel slippers as he dragged them across the floor and his rage was so great that it almost brought the now-dead nine-headed snake back to life. In any case his rage was such that it caused his chest to rip open and his heart exploded into pieces but Mrs. Sweet, so used to mending socks, applied her skills to this task and soon had Mr. Sweet all back together, his heart in one piece inside his stitched-back-together chest.

That little jerk almost killed me again, said Mr. Sweet to himself, and it’s not the last time, he said again to himself, and he was reminded of that time, not so long ago then, he was coming down the stairs and Heracles was going up the same stairs and they met in the middle and by accident collided and by accident Heracles, to steady himself from this collision, grabbed Mr. Sweet’s entire testicles and threw them away and he threw them with such force that they landed all the way in the Atlantic Ocean, which was Then and is so Now hundreds of miles away. The testicles then fell into that great body of water but did not produce typhoons or tidal waves or hurricanes or volcanic eruptions or unexpected landslides of unbelievable proportions or anything at all noteworthy; they only fell and fell quietly into the deepest part of that body of water and were never heard from again.

Oh, the silence that descended on the household, the Sweet household, as it lived in the Shirley Jackson house: on poor Heracles, who paused for a very long time at the top of those stairs; on his sister as she curled up in her bed and went to sleep like a single bean seed planted into the rich soil of a treasured vegetable garden; Mr. Sweet removed his fingers from the strings of the lyre; on the dear Mrs. Sweet, who froze over her mending, her knitting, the darning needle in her hand, the knitting needles in her hands just about to pierce the heel of some garment, just about to make complete some garment. And then gathering up herself, surveying what lay in front of her, Mrs. Sweet sorted among the many pairs of socks she had been mending over and over again and removing a pair, she fashioned a new set of organs for her beloved Mr. Sweet, trying and succeeding in making them look identical to the complete set of testicles that had belonged to him and had been destroyed accidentally by his son, the young Heracles. And when Mr. Sweet fell into a sweet sleep of despair after not knowing what to do regarding his lost testicles, Mrs. Sweet sewed the mended socks into their place, the heels of the socks imitating that vulnerable sac of liquid and solid matter that had been Mr. Sweet’s testicles.

By then, oh yes then, the beautiful brown hands of the beautiful and dear Mrs. Sweet had turned an unhappy white, all bony and dry. The rest of her remained beautiful brown, a brown that glistened and shone, a brown so unique to her, no other Mrs. Sweet could ever be brown in that way, so glistening, so shiny, so glowing, making her sometimes seem as if she were a secret form of communication, a point of light colliding with the tip of her ear might signify something, might be a signal that enormous changes should be set in motion; or the morning light, briefly coming through the window that was just above the kitchen sink, and for a moment landed on the flat point that was the tip of Mrs. Sweet’s flat nose, as she stood there drawing water to make breakfast coffee; the light then would cause such a flash that it could have been taken as a warning against impending cataclysms. But the unhappy whiteness of the bony and dry hands was of no interest to Mrs. Sweet, they blended so well with the worn socks that had to be constantly mended. So Mrs. Sweet went on from then to now and back again.

Then, the time came, out of the blue, when Mr. Sweet fell upon his anger, for he had to face an unavoidable fact, Heracles had grown half a foot in one year, and if he did not stop doing that right now he would soon be much bigger than Mr. Sweet. How Mr. Sweet raged quietly in the sunless studio above the garage. To commemorate these feelings, his loneliness, his solitude, his everlasting bereavement, Mr. Sweet wrote a fugue for an orchestra made up of one hundred lyres. “There,” he said to Mrs. Sweet presenting to her the score in its entirety, one hundred pages long, “isn’t that original, isn’t that something no one has ever done before.” And Mrs. Sweet, so dear and so sweet she was, knew and so did not have to be told, that she knew nothing at all about music and wondered to herself, where would she find, within the vicinity of the Shirley Jackson house, one hundred musicians who specialized in playing the lyre. The lyre! As she sat at the desk Donald had made for her, a green grasshopper found its way into her sanctuary and she immediately wished it to be a turtle, but it did not become so, and it rubbed its hind legs together, and she winced at the resulting screech. Screech!

The pages and pages of the score for Mr. Sweet’s fugue were so heavy they caused Mrs. Sweet to bend over under their weight. What to do? What should she do? Mrs. Sweet scoured the surrounding area of villages and hamlets, looking inside their churches and synagogues and homeless shelters, and then sought advice from heads of households and homeless wanderers until, after years and years, she gathered together one hundred distinguished musicians who specialized in playing the lyre. They assembled and made a crowd on the small green area that was just off the house in which Shirley Jackson had lived for a time. But then Mr. Sweet came down with a cold and also his shoulders froze and his throat was red and sore and his feet fell flat and a great fear of open spaces overcame him.

The shy Myrmidons were lined up side by side, their plastic yellow hair flowing in the same direction as their plastic green tunics, away from their bodies, giving them a look of never-ending and prompt motion. Across from them were the legions of plastic men wearing turtle shells and bearing swords ready to strike the shy Myrmidons. Heracles had gotten the legions of plastic men who wore turtle shells and carried swords as a bonus with his Happy Meals too and again he never ate the meals themselves, only he so liked the things that came with them: shy Myrmidons, men wearing turtle shells, or sometimes a cape draped over their shoulders, horses with wings, birds with men’s feet. The shy Myrmidons now attacked the legions of men wearing the turtle shell and there was blood everywhere mixed up with bones and shell and other kinds of bodily matter, and amid all the imaginary cries and shrieks of imaginary suffering, there was the sound of Mr. Sweet revising and rewriting parts of his fugue, the sweet notes becoming bitter, the bitter notes becoming more so. Standing high above the blood, the bones, and the other kinds of bodily matter (for he was so tall, the young Heracles), the young Heracles spun around on the ball of one foot, the other foot perfectly crooked in midair to lend him balance, and he laughed a big and loud laugh that rippled all across the valley and came to a stop on the side of the mountain that rose above this same valley and came back toward Heracles and his home in the old Shirley Jackson house but not before touching down lightly on the Jewish graveyard where his ancient ancestors were buried and the golf course and Powers Market and the Paper Mill Bridge.

Heracles, Heracles, said Mrs. Sweet to herself, but though no one else could hear this, to her the sound of his name then was as if she were in a small room with all sensation shut out, only the name, Heracles, filling up that time then and that space now. Often, the name of her son left her with such a sensation, his name and so he himself, took up, filled up everything, time or space, space or time, one or the other. For Mrs. Sweet, his name then caused the shallow furrow in her brow to deepen but this deepening could only be seen with the help of a microscope. And Mr. Sweet, on hearing this big and loud laugh, wished his son a safe passage to the edge of the universe in a faulty space capsule; how he would like to see the look on Heracles’ face after an event like that.

But then: one hundred lyres, one hundred musicians to play them, thought Mrs. Sweet and she went about her duties, making the instruments and the musicians. Her concentration was unwavering, her devotion was without question, her love had no limits. How the dear Mrs. Sweet loved Mr. Sweet and so too she loved all that he produced, fugues, concertos, choral pieces, suites, and variations. But the one million lyres and musicians to play them! Mrs. Sweet set about her task. She planted field upon field of cotton and sugarcane and indigo and dispatched many families to the salt mines. Mrs. Sweet brought her produce to market as cash crops, as manufactured goods, as raw human labor, and made an outlandish profit and with her profit she then made lyres and people who could play them and then she built a concert hall, a concert hall so large that to experience it required the fanaticism of a pilgrim. On that day when Mrs. Sweet gathered the lyres and the people who could play them in the great concert hall in which that elaborate and complicated and unique and earth-changing fugue of Mr. Sweet’s was to be finally played, Mr. Sweet came down with a case of sore tendons in his heels. And it was very true, his heels were sore they hurt so much, and on top of that what rage came over him to see that the dear Mrs. Sweet had made his impossible demand possible. In this atmosphere of Mrs. Sweet’s accomplishments, so magical they were, Mr. Sweet grew, but in resentment and hatred, not in love, not in gratitude.