The World Is the Home of Love and Death (16 page)

Momma rubs my wet, shivering shoulders. Momma and her will. Silently, as I hang from the
meer-uh
, propped by Ma’s hands, the wordless, and illegal, attachment—not a sacrament—proceeds. Nothing in it is a
hidden
fatality. We always knew we were merely human. Nothing is or was ideal. Nothing. And I don’t care. She holds me with one hand and towels my hair and my rump, my trembling self, the thinness of my skull. She likes power. I am accustomed to death. I can feel it in her—how she likes running things.

She says, “Handsome is as handsome does; I’m telling you,
pupik
, you’re not fooling anybody. Don’t make me laugh.”

Twice an infant, pale with unvoiced utterance, the child slides back and forth to her movements in a sacrament only of the puzzled and the puzzling.

She says, “I didn’t think you were like this.”

The child does not speak. His mother is cynical, not sentimental and not appalled, and so he is not, either. He and she are nonplussed and knowing: mother and son. He has entered her life, which is populated by people who preceded him. Where am I in that web of jealousy? (What detectives we have to be.)

She is patting me. I leaned finally, heavily against her shoulder. Her shoulder pushed me erect. She says aloud, “Ha, ha.” The distances in her mind and mine are unalike; the differences are amusing to us. We are matter-of-fact, she and I, and we are hysterical and astounded, and we are antagonists, independent of each other and full of mutual mistrust and blame and amusement.

She is a tremendous egoist. “You like me enough, you think I’m so wonderful you’re ready now to meet the world? You look like hell to me, you know that? You’ll depress S.L. I know it. I’m too conceited to do a botched job, I’m the best there is, I’m the Queen of the May, still, I can’t say I’ve done too good a job on you. We’ll have to wait; we’ll give it a day or two; I’ll make a date with you: we’ll try it again to see if you can cheer up and put on a little weight. I want you to be a credit to me. I have a position in the world. The truth is the truth,
pupik.
I like you too much to lie to you. You’re not ready for anything but a funeral home. Well, time heals all wounds. At least we’ve made a start. Isn’t that a step in the right direction? I think it is, and I’m the boss here, I’m the Queen of the May. Do you mind or do you think you can put up with the way we do things around here?”

She looks at me in the mirror—I am a bruised, meager, naked child. She wraps a towel around my weak body. She moves my hand to hold the towel; she folds my hand around the towel. At first, I can’t do it; then I won’t. Then at last I do it. “We’ll try again tomorrow,
pupik.
I like you. I have faith in you. Is that all right with you?”

When Lila looked at me, a movement of feeling in me was a speech of sorts; she read my face and posture: I gripped, like a small Roman, my towel. A rough translation of that as speech would be a reply to her of
I don’t mind.

Momma pretty often displayed me naked to visitors. Even when I was four years old, she would still dress me in front of people who were strangers to me or she would let them do it under her supervising eye. I was, the child was—well, the term back then was
cupid
—I was part cupid, a dohickey meant to excite, sweetly erotic, gently obscene, gently compared to some things: but people breathed hard sometimes, there was a lot of genteel fiddling, a lot of sentiment and affection had a kind of nostalgia that was strictly nerve-caressing to it. Hands were on me all the time. The child was a creature who was useful in giving pleasure in this way; this may be out of style now; but then it was a social use he had.

So, my mother’s daughter, Nonie, eleven years older than the child and a little backward in school, and often upset, often
hurt
—lonely and embattled on a level of immense suffering and anger in the way some women have who seem gifted early in life with sexual rage—Nonie offers me clothed or naked to girls or boys if they will play with her. Here she is enticing three children, two girls and a boy, with a life-size and reasonably intelligent but mute thing with a human anatomy and “a sweet smile, a million dollar smile"—so Momma used to say. But come to think about it, she got the terms from her husband: he said it first.

The child can be dressed and undressed for use in various games, medical or adventure some, sentimental, impassioned or cooing, intent or giggly. The child would do it. I would do it. I did it. This stuff was not really secret so I guess it was accepted but it was discreet so I guess it wasn’t really shameless. It was only partly shameless. I remember doing it mostly on porches, front and back and side porches—sometimes in garages and even in the cars in the garage—but sometimes behind shrubs and in basements and in girls’ bedrooms on the far side of the bed, unseeable from the doorway.

It was taken as innocent. It was taken as innocent in that stubborn way that means real trouble if any part of the situation is tampered with. The child didn’t speak. He was mute until he was four and a half years old. This stuff was ignored in part or was permitted as a temporary and minor local corruption although I cannot imagine why that was so, why the neighborhood was sophisticated rather than puritan unless it was that it was, for the locality, a rich neighborhood and not church-ridden.

Anyway, when I began to speak, Nonie, who by then was fifteen, but admitting to people only to being thirteen and a half (this was sometimes even done with family), was confronted by speech in what had been a dumb (mute) child, dumber than she, certainly. She has the loss of her pleasures and of the use of the child’s body with other children and the loss of love, the end of a love affair to contend with. She does not know what to do.

I was no longer a cupid: I had become a ghost. What I know and remember and will do has some of the effect for her of ghostliness, a haunting by someone, by something of insubstantial reality, of unreal body. A child. A boy child.

Until now she has been the chief authority on my wishes:
I know what be wants, he wants thus-and-thus.
I usually acceded to that—out of curiosity and politics (she knew better what one could get by asking than I did)—but no longer do accede; she is not sure the situation is irreversible—she will imagine until she dies that the child is enclosed in silence and obedience to her hurt, her will.

She is thirteen. She takes me outside on a day when the enormous vanes of our famous wind turn and creak. My nurse watches for a while from the kitchen window. We look at a snail, at a grasshopper. We go around to the far side of the house, and there we make our way through the branches of the yews to the trellis that hides the square brick-and-mortar columns that support the porch on this side of the house, and there, inside the furry and itching wall of those conifers, we come to a place where the trellis is broken, where the broken edges of the diagonally nailed lathes are pale, sharp, silent guardian flames that bite you if you are incautious at the gate to darkness.

She knees me forward, she pushes me with the side of her leg as if in memory of the first time, a long time ago, and I half-understand with her that if she plays with me, I have to be younger than I am, and I don’t protest.

One crawls through and gets pricked by splinters, and one comes to the windlessness of
here-under-the-house.
The house stretches above, wood-walled, monstrous, echoing above us. A plaid automobile rug, a dented kettle, a mop handle without the mop, tin spoons and two tin knives, a dirtied doll are here, near a hole eight or nine inches deep; dust whispers, slides, falls into it, blown when we move and create a stifled force of air in the windlessness here. Children play here. She gives the plan of the story, she gives orders, some description, threats, blandishments. With a twig of yew, she dusts my lips—“You are a little girl-baby—I am making you pretty.…” She says, “Now stand up—I will make you pretty some more.” Resting her face against my ribs, she unbuttons my pants, she removes them and has me lie on her lap. Face up. She pokes at my belly with the twig: “You have appendicitis—”

She inserts the twig into my mouth—I turn my head away; she grabs my nose, presses the nostils together. I open my mouth. The twig, its bark, its smell of dust, its needles enter my mouth, scratch on my palate—I gag and wiggle and then convulse: Nonie slaps down my struggling arms and legs. “Do what I tell you, you have to do what I tell you—this is a game—we’re playing a
game!”
A moral value in a world of children. She pours dirt on my lips: “This is food—you have to eat it—” Intent with interest, she digs with the twig, a fake stethoscope, into the soft flesh between my legs behind my balls. I roll over on her leg and push at her with both my hands. She sits on the blanket, a fat-thighed girl, she says consoling and argumentative things, she makes promises, she turns me away from her and lies me sort of across her lap, her folded legs, her plump thighs. My bared bottom seems to develop vision, to look up in a way at the air. She says, “You’ve been bad—I have to spank you.” I behave as if I still don’t speak. I shake my head no. She has never hurt me before—not very much—not so that I am certain of malice.

The first blow was soft: time continued. The second, sharper blow disordered me as if I had a covering of dust that now each particle ticklingly and stingingly glowed and disposed of feeling in me.
“Too hard,”
I said indignantly. It was not within the range of things we did when we played, my being hurt except in casual ways, the sideways brutalities as of the splinters coming through the trellis to this windless darkness.

She hits me again.

“No—I don’t want to do this!”

Partly undressed, I now feel for the first time that embarrassment, or even chagrin, that will enter my dreams, of having been lured or having gotten myself further into the role of baby than was sensible. The third blow perhaps surprises her, too, it has no meaning as part of a game as I have known games until now.

I turn an angry face toward her—she looks triumphant and studious. She presses her knees against my sides and squeezes so that I vibrate.

In a singular unity of self, the child wriggles and kicks. Nonie says, “You’re just a baby—you have to do what I say.” She wants to enjoy me as her parents do. She is curious about why I am loved the way I am. She pushes my head back—my neck—her having more strength than I do turns me into a creature of animus such that I grunt and let loose my urine. I pee on her leg. She yells,
“What have you done! Did you dare do that? I’ll teach you a lesson!”
She holds my wrist while I wriggle and kick at her in a rage that I am here under the porch, in this dusty place with her, this cave of games.

I pry at her fingers and I succeed in loosening one fìnger. She lets me go. I turn. She scoots on the blanket and gruntingly she gets her fleshy, round legs around me from behind, she corrals me and turns with her legs and knees and feet, I am captured by the giant woman squid or titan.

My ignorance, my not knowing what is coming next, has that special taste it has in one’s childhood. I scowl into her face. The inability to hurt someone locks you into hysteria, into being an audience—a kind of farce-prison.

I stoop and scrabble at the loose blowy dust; I throw it at her. The thrown dust moves in the air with a weak delicacy and Nonie waves it off, blows at it. It is terrible; none of it stains her. She leans back on her arms and kicks at me, she says,
“Don’t fight with me!”
Her plump leg knocks me in the chest and then squeezes me: a knot of wood forms there, then that place becomes rough-edged, and as if discolored it feels blurry and bilious, it blocks my breathing. Nonie kicks me in the stomach:
“You shouldn’t throw dirt at me!”

I sit down in a bubble of asphyxiation. You can see her think and decide to laugh. Although I can’t breathe, I throw myself at her. She grabs the mop handle, she holds it with both her hands and pushes me back with it, she pushes with it against my rucked shirt, my chest. I am naked below. She pushes in such a way that it is like a blow—the problem of her power in the world, of its limits is hard: she cannot make its elements coincide with her notions about
good sense
and what is practical and
what-is-bearable
as far as she is concerned.

She says, “You’re spoiled; you were bothering me—oh, ha-ha, you’re just a pest.” My feeling dishonored is what she wants: she is convinced I ought not be a source of pain or hurt for her at all. She is morally self-assured—a form of moral hysteria since moral questions are painful, all of them, steadily.

The child says,
“You stop this!”

She hits me with the mop handle to correct my facial expression and to make my state of mind acceptable to her.

Then she keeps hitting me rapidly so that the yell she sees I am about to make, I can’t utter—my yell is halted mid-throat: and this, too, interests her. I am penned in and netted by her ability, her reflexes and her harshness.

Her face, her eyes wince and are averted; and I stare at her. My pain echoes in her pleasurably. I begin to be piled with sensations as with rocks piled in a heavy, smelly, stained canvas sack. It feels
dirty.
I want to be clean. Inside me it stinks of shaken bile. My eyes jerk and bug out to see tiny, barely comprehensible areas of the visible. Momma will tell me one day that women hope to kill you by means of what they make you feel—it is normal, she insists.