See Now Then (9 page)

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So Mrs. Sweet loved her husband, their two children—Now, Then—the girl, who Mr. Sweet had made his close companion and kept hidden from Mrs. Sweet among his musical notes; the boy, young Heracles who was growing so rapidly, outgrowing the need to wear diapers, first of all, then no longer needing to be soothed by the sight of men operating large, noisy machines, no longer excited by the sight of the snowplow as it makes its way through a blizzard, no longer losing his balance if he walked too fast, no longer mispronouncing words, no longer an infant, just a boy, a little boy growing rapidly, his every Now becoming Then, his every Now a Then to be. And she loved them and loved them and thought of her love for them as a form of oxygen, something without which they would die.

But now, regarding Mrs. Sweet and Mr. Sweet then did just that: her voice in particular annoyed him, especially the sound of it, for she liked to sing in the high-pitched way of a boy and she wasn’t a boy, she was a woman, and her voice sounded like a boy; she was not a soprano, she was his wife, as common as fish or beef or vegetables on his plate for dinner, or the postman who brought the bills from the household utility companies. Mrs. Sweet could not sing, no one thought her voice, as it suddenly burst into song, a joy, a pleasure, something to long for again; only Heracles loved it as she read to him in a singsong way from the books
Goodnight Moon
or
Harold and the Purple Crayon
or
No Jumping on the Bed
and then, he—Heracles—would say, “Oh Mom, read that again,” and when she did, by the time she came to the end, he was snoring, so loud and in a way that she had never heard before, she would laugh hysterically to herself, but smile, if you were observing her. But most certainly she could not sing in a way that could have pleased Mr. Sweet, a man, who as a boy had been taken to venues by his own mother and father, and they listened to people trained to sing in different modes: alto, soprano, and all the formal rest of that; Mrs. Sweet sang like a milkmaid, like a girl singing to domesticated animals, trying to distract both the animals and the girl from the reality of the situation—life and living and death and dinner! And for Mr. Sweet, her voice and all that it contained, all that it reminded him of, all the things in the world of music as he was educated to know and understand, this singing of hers was a violation: like, synonymous to, as if it were a crime worth bringing before a court of justice composed of the world of culture and civilization, whatever those might be, thought Mrs. Sweet to herself, always to herself, she had such thoughts. The sound of her voice, as she read to the young Heracles, made him want to kill her, take an ax (as a child, he lived in an apartment, and he had never seen such a thing) and chop off her head and then the rest of her body into little pieces, pieces so small that a crow could devour them in pleasure, never having to worry about the size of the morsels he was devouring. Mrs. Sweet’s voice, her voice! So nauseating … the sound of it often made Mr. Sweet want to empty himself of the contents of his own stomach or remove his stomach altogether but of course he could not live without his stomach; her voice, Mrs. Sweet’s voice, so full of love for everything and everybody that she loved, so repulsive to Mr. Sweet, for he did not love her; the sound of her voice reminded him of the sound of a single nail raked along the side of a pane of glass; of the sound of a steel spatula against the bottom of a frying pan, as a perfectly fried egg was removed to a breakfast plate; and with that voice, she liked to sing “Beauty’s only skin deep, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

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But now, for Mr. Sweet was still regarding Mrs. Sweet, her voice was like an unwanted alarm clock on a day that fell in the beginning of the week; a red light on the uninterrupted smooth, long, easily manageable curved road through some green mountains—her voice was the red light, irritating and interrupting everything that was pleasant: an example being Mr. Sweet’s well-being. She was so very annoying, that woman who was his wife, just now, that time after the young Heracles had come into the world: her chest was made up of two sacs filled with milk, and its contents were consumed by that new person, the young Heracles; her torso like a very old tree—a silver maple—whose curiously twin trunks were all that remained after a violent storm that cut a broad swathe through a hillside, a dale, a meadow, and such; her broad and fat feet could only fit into her Birkenstock sandals; her head, and that brought to mind her voice, for it resided somewhere inside her head—and at the thought of that, Mr. Sweet carefully combed through the many operas, or plays, he knew by heart or his own personal memory—in any case, he hated the sound of her voice as he heard it, talking to him or reading a goodnight story to the children, and he hated the sound of her voice, because she could not sing on key the songs she liked, “This Old Heart of Mine” in particular, and he hated the sound of her voice for reasons that were not reasonable at all, the sound of delicately cooked tender flesh parts of a cow trapped inside her jaws—she was eating a piece of steak, it was the sound of her chewing. He loved her, oh yes, yes, so he did, and he hated her, especially the way in which she did things, small things, necessary things: like getting out of bed in the middle of the night to pee.

But he used to enjoy her company so, for he had the stature of a prince from the Tudor era and the ability to regard the rest of world as if it existed to satisfy his interests or to be vulnerable to his interests and all his interests belonged to him; yes, yes, in the life of the mind he used to love her and enjoy her way of wearing fruits and vegetables as if they were actual clothes, the way she walked into oncoming traffic, certain that it would halt before it turned her beautiful human form into something mushy, dead, something quickly forgotten; the way she would find the simplest thing extraordinary: she once caught forty-six mice in traps she had set and then could not believe that so many of something she hated and feared could exist; the way she towered over him, not physically, just her presence, her reality, she came from far away, she loved things with spices, she had never eaten grapes, apples, or nectarines when she was a child, she loved and she loved and she loved and Mr. Sweet fell in love with her because of the passion with which she could love all the many things that truly made up her true self, even though nothing about her would make him weigh his very own solid existence and judge himself wanting and decide that his existence, his life, his anything should be secondary to hers. But Mrs. Sweet did not know that, did not know of the ways in which Mr. Sweet’s imagination, his Now and his Then, his ways of seeing the present, the past and the future, colored the ways in which he saw her.

Here she is again: her naturally black hair, thick and coarse as ropes that were usually found in the hands of stevedores, cut off so short that she might be mistaken for a stevedore himself, the color of her hair was the color of new rope in the hands of a stevedore—blonde; her eyebrows removed with a razor and in their place a line drawn in the colors: blue—if she felt like it; green, if she felt like it; gold, if she felt like that then; her lips painted red, a red meant to reflect the color of the fires that burnt in one of the many lower circles of hell; her cheeks daubed with an orange goo that was the same color orange as the daylily,
Hemoracallis fulva
, a flower native to China but that now grows wild, unencumbered, without inhibition, in the northeastern part of the United States, an area in which the Sweets lived now, though it was unknown to Mrs. Sweet then, and revolting to Mr. Sweet’s consciousness then, and a nightmare for him now! But Then: when Mrs. Sweet was young and so ignorant, she, this lovely person now, then thought that to grow old was a mistake the person who had grown old had made, she thought that all the people who had grown old, had walked through a door, the wrong door, and if only they had chosen the correct door, that thinning and embarrassing folding up of the flesh would not have taken place, they would have continued to be as freshly made as the day they’d turned twenty-one or somewhere around then now, and not be a creaky something, complaining about their failing organs, just the way you do about a car that goes on and on and up and down the roads for a long time and the engine needs a new something, needs many new somethings and the muffler is doomed but can be replaced too and—well, was a person not like that, something useful then, and now not so, but a person was not like a car, a car aged naturally but a person walked through the wrong door: grow old or not! When Mrs. Sweet was young, the not was beyond assuming, like drinking water and not cyanide, and Mrs. Sweet had no true understanding of Now and Now again, and then was in the lower regions of holy grammar. And her youth, before she knew the Tudor-sized prince, Mr. Sweet, was a carnival of sexual activity: all the men on one side, all the women on the other side, dressed in clothes made from the skin of an animal—domesticated or not—or wearing nothing at all, only swirling around to the sound of music coming from a special source or the sound of music which was made up inside their head; and all her youth was a giant atmosphere of sensation, sensation, and sensation again, and her Now (which becomes Then, as is all Now, eventually), she is the mother of the well-hidden Persephone and the young Heracles and even before that, the wife of Mr. Sweet, a master player of the lyre, is not then known to her; her Now is the scrupulous Mr. Sweet, a man (Tudor prince in size) who understood Wittgenstein and Einstein and all such persons. All such persons!

But Then: in those days when Mrs. Sweet was young and beautiful to him, he then wore shirts and trousers and a navy-blue corduroy jacket, and in the pocket of the navy-blue corduroy jacket was the note from his father, the note that told him how to lead his life: two households, two wives, two sofas, two knives; but he had not found it yet. He then played the pianoforte in a room all by himself, and there was a small audience, then Mr. Sweet, in his full Tudor Princely–ness, would sit down and play some music written by Ferdinand Morton and Omer Simeon and Baby Dodds and Wolfgang Mozart, and if compelled to he would play the music written by his overwhelming favorite, Igor Stravinsky. His mother, a Mrs. Sweet in her own right, was as dutiful and misinformed as Mrs. Sweet—the now Mrs. Sweet, mother to the well-hidden from her Persephone and the young Heracles—adored his performance and led the applause of family and assorted friends, and everyone bowed before him, curtsied, and some of them kissed the ground. Mr. Sweet was then ten years old and for the rest of his life he would be so, ten years old, always in that now moment—that room of playing the music of Ferdinand Morton and sometime the much beloved W. A. Mozart, but how was Mrs. Sweet to know that when she fell in love with the young man who bore himself as if he was a young Tudor prince, how was she to know that at thirty years of age, forty years of age, fifty years of age, sixty years of age, seventy years of age, Methuselah’s age now, he lived in the world as it was then, when he was ten?

Mrs. Sweet took a deep breath, then and now, and plunged ahead in the dark—for to live in any Now and any Then (they are always the same) is to do just that, plunge ahead in the dark, placing one foot in front of the other—and hoped that there would be some solid, not to mention fruitful, ground to meet her feet, really or metaphorically. As a young woman she had been like a flower found in the deep jungles of the new Americas: a black dahlia, a brown marigold, a sea-green zinnia; when she was a young woman, the world was not her oyster, did not harbor her like its oyster, providing a sweet space in which she became a pearl; when she was a young woman, younger than the young Heracles, it was her fear of death that kept her alive.

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Plunge ahead or buck up—so Mrs. Sweet’s mother would say to her when she was a child, a tall thin girl all bones covered with skin, and she was afraid of the larger girls and the larger than anything boys, and would be so afraid of them that just to walk past them on the street was impossible; and earlier than that, when she was afraid of cows, for no reason at all, only that they were cows and had horns, so she was afraid of them and to walk by a pasture where these animals were fenced in and tethered to iron stakes driven into the ground was impossible for her to do: plunge ahead, put one foot in front of the other, straighten your back and your shoulders and everything else that is likely to slump, buck up and go forward, and in this way, every obstacle, be it physical or only imagined, falls face down in obeisance and in absolute defeat, for to plunge ahead and buck up will always conquer adversity, so Mrs. Sweet’s mother had said to her when she was a child, thin in body and soul, and this caused her mother much pain and great shame, for her child—the young Mrs. Sweet—needed to have drummed into her very being the clichéd words of the victorious.

And so: plunge ahead, buck up, aim for a triumphant outcome, death being superior to failure, death is sometimes a triumph, and all this made up the amniotic fluid in which Mrs. Sweet lived when she was a child: in this way Mrs. Sweet learned to drive a car, learned to love the stark realities of her life with Mr. Sweet (he never loved her, not then, not now, she accepted it, now then and now again), took out a loan from the bank to buy the Shirley Jackson house, the house in which they lived, and it was a nice house, with views of mountains and waterfalls and meadows of flowers native to the New England landscape, and farms that cultivated food especially delicious to animals who would then be slaughtered and eaten by someone quite familiar to the slaughtered animals, friends of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their children: the young Heracles and the hidden Persephone; in the far distance, Mrs. Sweet could see the beautiful Mrs. Burley—her long yellow hair in a braid cascading silently down her back and coming to rest just below her shoulder blades—a young cheese-maker milking her cows and her goats, and from this milk she would make some rare cheese and delicious yogurt that Mrs. Sweet would purchase and the rest of her family would hate: Mr. Sweet, because he hated everything about Mrs. Sweet, especially her enthusiasms and these were: growing species of rare flowers from seeds she had gone hunting for in temperate Asia, cooking, and knitting, especially that infernal knitting. Oh Mom! Oh Mom! That would be the sound of young Heracles. And the love and contempt and indifference that came toward Mrs. Sweet from her beloved Heracles seemed at once to be as natural as a sweetly cool breeze that will unexpectedly change the mood of a group of people justifiably angry, or a group of people whose every need and expectation is satisfied and still they search for happiness! By that time (then, now, and then again), Mrs. Sweet had buried her past—in the cement that composes memory, even though she knew quite well that cement deteriorates, falls apart, and reveals eventually whatever it was meant to conceal.