Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (51 page)

We drove into the driveway of our house: the gravel scattered.

“Honk the horn for your mother,” Daddy said.

I did.

The sound flew out, at my instigation. I was the-boy-on-my-father’s-big-lap. The buttons of his suit pushed against my behind as I pushed against the horn.

“That’s enough,” he said.

My sister, Nonie, appeared at a window and called out, “What is it? Why are you honking?”

“Get your mother and come outside and see what we have here, see what we have for
you,
” Daddy said.

I heard the house door open—oh my God, those long-ago domestic sounds! Then the screen door slammed—and Momma said, “Nonie, don’t slam the door.” Then there were
FOOTSTEPS
. On the front deck.

Shadows appeared, jerkily half racing over steps, over gravel. Those sounds are clear, are not like voices in memory, and the sight, too, is clear of Momma wearing a black outfit with a big, big lacelike collar; and she had a look as if she required immediate shelter, immediate, from the sun, from heat: she was moist and busty and succulent and frail. (Nonie had fat legs and hips and a babyish face; she was rubbery, outdoorsy.)

Momma often had a gentle look of
the-pain-has-begun.
It was a look of fierce but softened exasperation. Momma was affected by—
everything:
she was sensitive to—everything: she was endlessly active in being affected; she was melodramatic in appearance: blacks, whites, reds, a lusciousness, a temper, a heated blooming, a heat of expressiveness—how can one convey the out-of-date way, the coquetry, the highly codified and elaborate style of her being
out-of-doors
(in sight of the neighbors), ready to flirt with S.L.? And then the exasperation taking control of her, a sneering, crazy temper: she didn’t like that car. When she and Nonie reached the second-to-bottom step, from which they could see the car, I saw Momma’s face was made up, and sweet—to welcome Daddy—but it puckered; and she said in a half-and-half angry voice, the exact tone of which is lost but it was full of rebuke,
“What have you done now, S.L.?”
Perhaps one oughtn’t to ascribe words to her but only an astonished anger. The sunlight made shadows under Momma’s eyebrows and in her mouth and under her chin: the shadows over her eyes were like a mask: she was a masked, soft bandit. She had told S.L. she wanted a small car, easy to handle and park. I remember her anger or perhaps her voice as being like a flock of crows that blackly sail out and attack, peck at, eat everything—even one’s eyes. I blinked. Or she was squeezed—not by tragedy: by
minor
tragedy: squeezed by
aggravation:
squeezed so hard that rudeness squirted from her, even outdoors, where the neighbors might hear; she went slightly mad with exasperation. I could not believe at first that after my having been cheered up, anything unpleasant could happen right away like this, and I was seized by that dreadful-to-grownups hilarity which is partly embarrassment or horror—but not serious horror; if one laughs aloud at such times, if there is someone not really angry, just
aggravated,
as
Momma was, they will say, as I think she did, “I suppose it’s nice to be a child after all.”

Sometimes when I laughed, Momma would stare at me. “He thinks we’re entertainment,” she would say.

Daddy said something like “Leila, it’s a good car, it’s a Buick, it’s the best—”

She protested that he never listened to her. When Daddy told her she was hurting my feelings, that I had selected the car, she said she didn’t want to have her car selected by a child. She said she and Daddy weren’t children anymore. She said Daddy made a joke of everything and that life wasn’t a
joke.

I turned from one grownup to the other. My bandages made a sound as I moved my head.

Momma said, “I told you I’m not good at parking. All that machine is good for is carting old women to Jewish funerals—” She said, “I’m not that kind of woman, S.L.” I remember those words: she was trying to soften the occasion and her rage and to get everything back to coquetry.

Daddy said, “Can’t you ever be grateful? What’s wrong with you—do you have to make everyone unhappy? Don’t you love anyone?”

Nonie said, “I don’t like it, either, Daddy—I don’t like the color.”

I rushed forward to kick her. She dodged. Momma said, putting her hand on my shoulder, “Leave her alone, Alan; if I had light eyes like you, I’d like a blue car, too—you look good in that color.”

Nonie, meanwhile, was opening the car door, the rear door; but the hinges had never been fastened, and the door continued to open, it wavered, began to separate from the car; while Nonie stared, screamed—screamed again—the whole door teetered into the air, turned horizontal, seemed to both float and fall—heavily—to the ground, to the gravel, where it crunched and slid and tore its paint with a grating and continuing sound.…

When the silence returned, I felt a grimace on my face. I was staring at the door on the ground. Momma said, “My God! Will they take the car back now? Why did the door do that, S.L.? What do you call it when a door does a thing like that?”

Daddy, thinking it was someone’s fault—it had to be someone’s fault—shouted blindly to Nonie, “
WHAT DID YOU DO TO THAT DOOR?
”

Nonie shouted back, “I
DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO IT!
”

Poor Daddy. He came over and grabbed my shoulder and pulled me away from Momma. He had a look of great sternness and don’t-lie-to-me-ishness on his face. He shouted at
me,
“
WHAT DID
you
DO TO THAT DOOR?
”

He was trying to get to the truth of the matter.

Daddy used often to say, “We’re all fools and clowns—we have to make the best of a bad business.”

M
Y MOTHER
thought real citizenship in a real country—as opposed to ghetto awfulness and claustrophobia and helplessness—real middle-classness in America and getting-away-from-the-rabbis, meant being
modern,
hypocritical, sort of criminal according to Old Testament notions, criminal-in-a-way, with style, in deep respectability, while keeping-your-nerve, showing you knew how-the-game-went, and living with consequent ironic near-a-nervous-breakdown high amusement and speed and astuteness and duplicity.

She was willing. She was a semipro. She admired people who were better at being American than she was: “Frankly, I’m a social climber—I’m learning.” Her sincerest and most earnest regard was for people who were overtly and gaudily successful in the way she admired: “No flies grow on her—she knows what’s what.”

We lived in a small town—a Midwestern small town but not a constricted, airless one: a semi-wide-open river port with a noticeable upper class who took their pleasures mostly in near or distant cities, with a sense of freedom and of sophistication.

Momma changed the way she looked according to the season and time of day, to whether we had company or not, to her mood, to the social standing of who was coming to the house: of course, something is the same, or many things are, in the woman no matter how she is dressed, but the things that are the same are inexpressible, are The Unexpressed where Momma is concerned so far as I know. When I was little, while she was precisely visible at any one time, over a period of hours she was blurry in a rain of transformations: she dressed differently and wore no makeup or different makeup and her hair was different at breakfast, in the afternoon, at dinner, in the evening, at bedtime. There
wasn’t anyone else who changed so noticeably, so richly. She said, “I don’t know, it’s all a lot of work—I think I have to work harder than S.L. does—no one gives me credit for the work it is.” Her physical expressiveness was one of caroming inside various fashions and off mirrors and in self-preparation on the way to
getting things done
—that was her phrase.

The way she was dressed and the social thing she was embodying at a given moment affected the way she kissed me: it was obviously a different kiss you got from the sore-footed peasant girl-woman relaxing at home than you got from the dressed-up-and-with-diamonds-lady-on-her-way-to-a-dinner-party, and it amused her that you preferred the kiss of one to that of the other—of the less sincere and more abstracted one to the more serious one, for instance. She was openly businesslike about having to have so many styles; she had or professed or displayed an overtly self-conscious, heated, ironic glamour in the years when I first knew her:
I get things done; I’m someone people jail in love with;
and then a glance asked,
Are you hooked?

Her features were good—regular and unstylized. The quality of her particular looks was discreet but sultry, hot and soft, midnight-pallor-and-darkness. Suggestive, I’m not sure of what. Romance. Passion. Knowing-how-to-have-a-good-time. Watch-out-I’m-temperamental-and-a-power. This was all set off socially, when she was dressed up, by a self-conscious sense of humor that she adopted and by a Middle Western, taut, contingent politeness that changed like her humor according to the circumstances of the moment and the rank of whomever she was with and how much she wanted to impress them.

When I first knew her, she was thirty-three years old: she told everyone she was thirty-one. And then thirty-four years old was what she was. And thirty-five. The years she had “under her belt” (she said that) kept getting added on to.

I knew her differently from any way that she spoke of herself—I knew of her in a dreamlike or isolated or inward way: or from outside, as just a person but one who acted out being the-friendliest-woman-imaginable-although-I-am-pretty, and who acted out being tormented and unhappy, and with a defiant, parochial status of being a local woman of undeniable romance and glamour. She was someone I saw every day, a mother, a person, who went out visiting.

She had been a girl, of course. A very young girl soon learns she is innocent-and-helpless, vulnerable—as does a boy—but no one thinks
the girl is a failure that way, whereas a little boy is given a sense of being girlish. Nothing is expected of girls except things they can do almost right away (except for childbirth), so that nearly everything a girl does is greeted as well done, as precocity; there is hardly a woman who does not have, by male standards, an undeserved and crippling sense of her own precocity. Momma had that—maybe more than most women have.

Momma sometimes claimed she’d invented her good looks and it was hard work and required “nerve”: sometimes she said she just happened to be good-looking. She couldn’t make up her mind whether she wanted to be thought of as lucky or clever. The way she stood, dressed, smiled served to remind people of her good looks: Why is that woman holding her head to one side? Oh, she’s very pretty, isn’t she?

“I get away with it—I know how to get away with it,” she said.

She had a temperamentally grandiose, genuinely grand, if local, set of moods that had to do with her “getting the most out of” (her phrase) her looks “while they last” (also her phrase), and she had a sly, obstinate, sort of crazy set of moods, inside a thing of I-am-a-prophetess: I-am-crazy-but-I-know-things-and-I-ought-to-be-listened-to.

Momma was honest, but in different ways every few minutes, depending on circumstances and who she was with and her mood. She also lied, but rarely with absolute guile—when she lied, it was more a thing of
take it or leave it.

She always said, “Women have terrible lives,” but her tone was different depending on her age. There was a harem smell about her always—she’d never stepped outside the protection of her family and then of her husband—and the harem smell had a tinge of connivance, shadows, and often complaint: it was in her tones of voice, in the varying degrees of defiance or of boastfulness or of seduction in her speaking voice. The complaint went from mild, almost languorous, to maenad-savage, to I-would-kill-you-if-I-could-get-away-with-it. She would say, “No one can force
me
to do anything.” She would give warning that she was not a mere toy by remarking with quaint good humor or with wild-eyed, lunatic temper, “I have a lot of say-so in this town.”

She never claimed logical rigor, only intelligence. She said, “No one taught me how to think—I had to teach myself,” and besides, her sense of life was made up of illogicalities and inconsistencies: she would say, “Everything’s a big joke, if you ask me,” and “The joke is nothing’s a joke—you can’t let anything pass.”

She built a great deal of her public and private politics on having her
unhappiness matter: she would be happy as a social gesture, as a form of flattery to you. Sometimes she would refuse to be unhappy in order to claim that defeat was impossible for her. Sometimes defeat was the only idea she wanted people to have of her—that she failed and failed and failed and had to be given help at once—help or forgiveness.

“I’m queen of this little town,” she’d say musingly, or threateningly, or as a joke, or as a cruel joke on herself: I couldn’t tell when I was a child; and in memory she seems always to be feeling at least two emotions when she says it—maybe three, counting boredom. (She also expressed disappointment in herself for not “trying my luck in a big city.”)

She had a hipshot stance and walk, very daring. She was quick—quick and ruthless in style of movement and of mind—but sometimes memory reduces her walk to a wind-pressed slow motion, with her movements bunching her body in soft self-clappings and then wicked, partly inhibited openings out, or archings, to the public view.… People stared at her: children. Dogs barked at her—at the dramatic disturbance she threw out into the air. She said, “All my life, people kowtowed to me because of my looks—and, if you’ll pardon me for boasting, my brains—it was all a lot of foolishness, if you ask me—it was all—what’s the word—superficial.”

She told me, “I was always the beauty of the household.… One thing I’ll say for my mother: she let me be my father’s favorite—she never fought me for him.”

Of her own daughter she said, “I was lucky—it means a lot to a girl: let Nonie have her turn.” That is, she let Nonie, my sister, be close to Daddy. Daddy couldn’t always get along with Nonie, and Momma often was bored with Daddy, so it was funny to try to figure out the generosity involved. Nonie was eleven years older than I was.