See Now Then (14 page)

The twelve rows of notes, each the same, each varying slightly one from the other, so it seemed to Mrs. Sweet’s untutored and Third World–attuned ears, came to a sharp end, the beautiful Persephone shut her mouth, and Mrs. Sweet brought the gray car, which was named by the carmaker to honor a rodent much loved by children and hated by anyone with an unfenced vegetable garden, to an abrupt stop! The children said, “Jesus Christ, Mom” and “Oh fuck, Mom,” as their bodies lurched forward and then were restrained by the seatbelts which Mrs. Sweet always insisted they wear, and this unexpected flirtation with disaster would have been a delight and a thrill were it to take place on a ride in an amusement park, but not in the driveway of their own home sweet home.

Oh then, oh then, but only to see it now: for the young Heracles rushed into the house, through the doors, into the world of a cavalcade of imaginary figures, Ninja Turtles, Ninja Bats, Ninja Boys who wore exquisitely styled capes in colors too vivid to be found in the known world and they fought and triumphed over creatures from the world to come, creatures from the world that was, and they were to be seen on television or VHS tapes, not at all on
Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
; and the beautiful Persephone rushed into the house to instant message Meredith and Samantha and Joan and Iona and Jenny and another girl with whom she shared special memories of Eisner Camp in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and another girl whose father looked at vaginas all day because he was a gynecologist, and another girl whose parents tended a bed and breakfast in North Adams, Massachusetts, and another girl she had not yet met in person and never would meet in reality, and this absence of reality saddened Mrs. Sweet, for reality made up Now and Then, and Now and Then were without difference! Now and Then were not the same and yet Now and Then: for here was Mrs. Sweet and now she had two children and Mr. Sweet was her husband, the father of her two children, that was her Now and that was her Then, all being separate, and the separated formed a straight line that would now converge then, so thought Mrs. Sweet, as she followed her children into the depths of the house in which Shirley Jackson used to live, and it is true that the young Heracles and the beautiful Persephone had never heard of that woman who had lived in that house with the great big Doric columns, Victorian and Greek revival architecture. And what now? For Mrs. Sweet was entering the house, and just before she did that she paused on the threshold and then she stood very still: at her feet lay her life, it lay buried deep in an infernal-darkness, wine-hued or not, and it was guarded by a flock of her winged fears: “Not long after I had been made to copy Books One and Two of
Paradise Lost
as a punishment for misbehaving in class, I went to visit my godmother, Mrs. DeNully, a woman so large that she was unable to walk from the sofa to the chair without support, and if she had no support she would not have been able to do it at all. When she was not asleep, she stayed in the room that contained the sofa and some chairs, Morris chairs, and many bolts of cloth in every imaginable weave, or every weave available to the haberdashers in the British West Indies. These bolts of cloth came to her from mills in England and they were very good quality and not everybody could afford them: the woman who cleaned the DeNullys’ house got from them as a Christmas present three yards of cloth. There were dotted Swiss and Irish linen and beautiful seersucker and embroidered cotton and silk faille and all sorts of things that would make a beautiful dress even more so in the room with Mrs. DeNully. Mrs. DeNully was married to Mr. DeNully and he worked as a manager at Mendes Dockyard, and it belonged to the family by that name and they sold all things to do with a ship and all things to do with a house. He had come from Scotland without money and without family to Antigua when he was a very young man, sixteen or so, and not long after that he met and married Mrs. DeNully. She was then the illegitimate daughter of a rich man; her mother was descended from slaves and her father was descended from masters and she looked more like the masters and less like the slaves. Her mother and father were never married. Her father was married to a woman with whom he had a daughter, his only legitimate child. This daughter and Mrs. DeNully looked very much alike, but they hated each other and the hatred was so firmly established that no one even knew really when it started or what was the cause of it. This daughter married a man named Pistana and I don’t know now where he came from but sometimes people said Portugal. But Mrs. Pistana was in the haberdashery business also, and though the two sisters never spoke to each other they often referred customers to one another if the customers were looking for a kind of fabric that the one of them did not have in stock. In truth, they carried the same kinds of cloth, the one did not carry for sale something that the other did not. The kinds of cloth they sold came in one same shipment of dry goods, in the same ship, that left the same port from England. But it is Mrs. DeNully I am thinking of now, and when I mention her sister Mrs. Pistana and her husband Mr. Pistana, who sold pots and pans and cups and plates in the other half of the establishment that he and his wife owned, it is only to make Mrs. DeNully alive to me now as she was then.

“Mrs. DeNully had four children, three boys and one girl, but the girl died a long time ago, how long ago I did not know then, and the time the girl was alive was never mentioned at all. It was around the time I was going to the Moravian school and so I must have been around five years of age or six years of age, when I began to see her every day. I went to her house to have my lunch, for her house was right next to the Moravian church and my school was built on the grounds of the church in the eighteenth century by Moravian missionaries from somewhere in Germany. It was all right to approach her house for my lunch, for then the two dogs that were the pets of one her sons were locked up. They were not guard dogs, they were pets, and to show that they were pets and not just mere animals they were fed food that people ate, not spoiled food or food scraped from the bottom of the pan or other food that no one wanted to eat. But then, in the afternoons, after school when I was expected to stop by and say a thank you and good-bye to my godmother, that would be Mrs. DeNully, the dogs often were no longer locked up; the son, whose pets they were, would have returned home from his school and the dogs were then let out. From a distance, they could see me leaving my school and crossing the field and the old graveyard and the lawn of the Moravian minister’s house and then, when I was not too far from the old cistern, they would run toward me and pounce on me and throw me to the ground and then stand over me panting. Their names were Lion and Rover. Lion was the color of a lion, a lion I had seen in a book; Rover was just a dog and it was he who would always put one of his front paws on my small trembling body and then rest his own bodily weight on it, then lift himself up and hold the other front paw aloft and as he did this he breathed heavy and fast. I then wanted to cry but not with tears from my eyes or a sound from my mouth, I wanted to cry from my stomach, because all my feeling was in my stomach but I didn’t know how to do this. Then the owner of the dogs would appear, magically, for I had not seen him at all, and he would look down on me and rub his dogs’ heads and call to them by their names and feed them hard-boiled duck eggs as he walked away from me.”

Seeing then now, that small child that she was, vulnerable like the young bean vines that she should remember to water, for she was starting her own vegetables from seeds this year, and if they were not taken care of, if they were not looked after, they would shrivel and die, as that small child shriveled and died only to become Mrs. Sweet’s Now, and to live on forever inside her. Unreachable, is that child; inconsolable and unreachable, but there she was, Mrs. Sweet, little pleats of fat girdling her not-so-youthful-anymore waist and no amount of running the four miles around the Park McCullough house with Meg could help that; her upper arms were the size of the pig’s tenderloin on sale at the Price Chopper, her legs were still enviable, if only you could see them beneath those dreadful overalls purchased from the Gap and Smith and Hawken, and when Mr. Sweet was saying his eternally last goodbye to her, he looked at her in her overalls and said, I will be interested to see the man or woman who would find you desirable; and at that, Mrs. Sweet wept once more again and again also; and at the knees, the pants permanently blackened from her kneeling on the ground, weeding or planting something with a hard-to-pronounce Latin name. There then was Mr. Sweet intruding into Mrs. Sweet’s line of accounting for her own being, there in her mind’s eye, and she crossed the threshold into the mudroom of the Shirley Jackson house, opening the door to the kitchen, walking across the pinewood floors, standing in front of the stove, washing some dishes at the sink, preparing the ingredients for a crab soufflé, while the voice of the beautiful Persephone was cascading down the stairs, for she was in her own bedroom, and in that very tone that she had sung on the way home she sang: why are we having French food, is this a French restaurant, this is not a French restaurant, I want to go to McDonald’s; and then she sang on: you think you are with us, you think we think that you are with us, but we know that you are really inside your own head and only what’s there is real to you and you live in that little room with the big desk and we mean nothing to you, only your childhood with all its pain, as if no one had ever suffered in childhood, as if only your mother had ever been cruel to her own child before; and then, right then, all her words swelled into the high whine of a powerful body of water falling down through rocks that have been cast asunder by a violent eruption from the earth’s belt itself or somewhere nearby and now were resting precariously with the uninterrupted flow of water passing over and around and below it and all this was situated at an altitude feeble with oxygen, and the girl’s voice was painful to the ears, the pattern of rows and rows of notes, repeated in order and the order repeated again, was so painful to the ears. But Mrs. Sweet proceeded to make a crab soufflé, following the recipe of a woman who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but who was a specialist in French food that no French woman Mrs. Sweet ever met was interested at all in cooking. However, and this was one of the ways Mrs. Sweet had of making See Then Now neutral, robbed of its power to cast powerful feelings and shadows over the people gathered at the dinner table, or the basketball tournament organized for the children who can’t play very well, or the argument that will eventually lead to the divorce courts and the realm of child support, or the injustice of child support for someone who had children but had never given serious consideration of how to buy bread for them, or the ways in which to make a violation mute and dismiss its consequences! However, and even more contemptible: whatever! Mrs. Sweet continued on her way, deliberately ignoring the serpentine contempt in which her very being was wrapped and strangled as she entered that world of Mom and Mommy and Mother and so on; and she made dinner and set the table herself, for the children refused to do it, they were busy with making a replica of Hadrian’s Villa for Latin class, replicating the viaducts that brought water from the Tiber to the Roman home, and household objects, useful or simply decorative, that were to be found in that Then known as Roman civilization: and all this homework was to be presided over by a teacher named Mr. McClellan.

And at dinner: the soufflé had not enough salt in it, too much salt in it, not enough crab in it, too much crab in it, the crab was stale, that was certain, frozen, for how can there be fresh crab in a village in a state that is landlocked? There are no land-dwelling crabs here. The salad was limp, Mrs. Sweet had poured the vinaigrette over the tender leaves a long time before it was eaten. The beautiful Persephone made an island out of her salad as it sat on her plate, the collapsed portion of soufflé was a beach where a vicious pirate of Elizabethan times ruled or where vicious people who came from Haarlem sunned themselves because winter in Holland can sometimes be vicious. The world is vicious, thought Mrs. Sweet to herself, as she sat with her husband and two children at the dinner table. Mr. Sweet said in a loud voice, as if he were on a stage and addressing an audience: all the tulips your mother planted last autumn were eaten by the deer, a deer with six antlers, a clever old deer with good and malicious taste; the deer came and ate them all, just as they were about to bloom, just as they had reached that point in budding before bursting into bloom, the deer came and ate them, each bud a delicious juicy morsel of something that was perhaps holy, perhaps not, but they ate them, chowed down on them, devoured them, leaving your poor mother nothing but tall stalks of green, where there should have been, glistening with dew, “Queen of the Night,” “Holland Queen,” “Black Parrot,” the little
clusiana
“Cynthia,” “Lady Jane,” the
humilis
“Alba Coerulea,”
turkestanica, kolpakowskiana, linifolia,
Kaufmanniana hybrids and Greigii; where there should have been single, early blooms of “Purple Prince,” “White Marvel,” and “Christmas Orange”; where there should have been double, early blooms of “Mondial,” “Monsella,” and “Monte Carlo”; where there should have been lily-flowering blooms of “Mariette,” “Marilyn,” and “Mona Lisa”; where there should have been Mrs. John T. Scheepers, especially Mrs. John T. Scheepers, for that is your mother’s favorite tulip of all tulips; where there should have been all these treasures that she had looked forward to all winter, sitting in the bathtub and drinking ginger ale and eating oranges way into the middle of the night, dreaming of tulips and dreaming of ways to be alive that only enrage me (Mr. Sweet), and she does it solely to enrage me, for I (Mr. Sweet) want her dead, beautiful Persephone and I want her dead, beautiful Persephone and I would ask young Heracles to kill her but he loves her so much, but now, at this moment, this now, what happiness, for the deer ate her tulips just as they were all about to open in a glorious bloom. And the two children burst into applause and clapped their hands and raised their glasses of milk in the air, even spilling some of the liquid onto their plates, the food now looked like something to be described by people interested in the obscure and unusual, and then they burst into a chorus of: who got her turban, deer got her turban, who got her turban, deer got her turban, who got her turban, deer ate her turban, call and response, response and call, and it all reached a crescendo that broke to the ground, twelve discordant notes, none of them meant to be together. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy! Mom! Mrs. Sweet’s children sat across from her, their breath was her breath, and it smelled of all the sweet things she had given them, and their names were Persephone and Heracles, not Rover and Lion, and in any case they had never heard of and so could not have eaten the eggs of ducks.