Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (52 page)

Momma gave me the impression that in her there were certain serious purposes, earnest errands, life-and-death projects, charities that concerned whole lives, serious plots, finaglings about money that occupied her mind. Also, there were certain serious gloomy honesties in her, a pessimism, and dark insights into people that served as a form of somewhat lazy omniscience (“No one’s
really
nice,” she would say), and a dark forgiveness and wonder that a child oughtn’t to know about, so she would say to me at times, “Don’t pay attention to me. Go away now—live your own life.” (Sometimes I would obey that injunction.)

She was said to have helped cause my real mother’s death—by breaking
her spirit when she was ill, by enticing my affections from my real mother: “You were your mother’s only reason to live.” (Leila said to me once, “The one thing I’m afraid about is what I did to your mother.”) And then she had her public prettiness—sort of interrupting and dominating everything with
All right, now all hands waver toward me—all eyes light on me—now stop—don’t touch me—oh all right, touch me a little—now go back—I don’t know—I have to laugh—my God, what a mess.…

Her particular style of moral defiance was that of a Jewess, I think, but she overlaid that, for the sake of appearances, with an imitation of certain small-town Protestant women who arrogated social power and guiltlessness to themselves and the right to ascribe guilt. Momma never managed the latter; the closest she could come to it was the exposé: “The truth is—if you ask—me—”

I would guess her defiance began with her snubbing the Jewish principle that a woman ought not be the occasion of anyone else’s sinning. She said, “I’m no goody-goody; I don’t like goody-goodies; no goody-goody can get along with me.… I don’t put myself in a special category—I’m not a saint—that’s why I’ve always been popular—that’s why men come to me for advice.”

(Sometimes she said, “They come to me for advice because I have nice eyes.”)

She had many modes of cliché; one of the most common patterns of her speech was a spiel—she liked to make new friends, to seduce and re-seduce and re-re-seduce someone (often she seemed to alienate people in order to have the game, the hunt of re-seducing them—or of seeing what she could get away with: another big interest of hers that blotted out and got mixed up with other things in her); the spiel implied
I know the sort of person you are, I don’t mind, you can’t fool me much and there’s no reason you should, I’m not a big blamer, you don’t have to lie to me, so why don’t you tell me the truth, I’m not a child, tell me the truth and then we’ll know where we stand, come on, trust me, include me in—look, you don’t have to respect me, I’m just like you, I’m on your side, you can count on me to understand what it takes to get along in life—
it was this that was the center of her being seductive.…

Her being a good sport, her energy, her looks, and her obvious respectability, her care for being protected, for getting away with fraud, added up to a surprising impression of militant aristocracy, one of personal quality, of open, successful greed, rank, and mercilessness.

*  *  *

S
HE WAS
very conservative and yet she encouraged everyone—men, women, children—to rebel. “Be yourself,” she’d say. “You’d be amazed at what people will put up with.”

She said, “Plain people have to lie to themselves all the time, but I was never plain—I know what the truth is—I know what I know—I can’t help what I know.”

(Other women said, “She’s not as attractive as she thinks she is—she puts up a good front and she gets away with it.”)

She said, “Frankly, I want to be the real winner—all the time—I try to give everybody their money’s worth.… But in the end, I want to win. I don’t think taking a back seat to someone is any fun—ha-ha.”

Sometimes she seemed to be mysteriously at a focus of heat, at a point of convergence of rays, on purpose, as if she demanded such heat as a matter of personal quality, a measure of her status as a woman; warmth, heat—like being wrapped in sables or spotlights or infatuations.

She said of independent women—many of whom she liked and visited and had visit her—“They live like prostitutes.” That is, they had no protection, no helplessness: they weren’t
given
things. In a year or two, when Daddy gets mad at me, he will say, “You’re not fit to live with decent people,” and “You’re a little
whore!”
He means I’m too tough and independent to deserve
a home.

Momma says to her daughter, “You’re not likable and you hate me, but I’ll see to it you always have
a home
—give me credit for something—I’ll see to it you always have that backing.…”

When Daddy said I was a whore, he meant I didn’t deserve to be given things.

Momma said, “I’m an executive by nature.” That is, she always wanted other people to do things she told them to do, she handed out responsibility. She would say to Nonie, “Don’t push me too far or I’ll make real trouble for you—” She never bothered confronting Nonie head-on. “Live and let live is my motto—if Nonie wants to be stupid, let her—she’ll learn—it’s up to her—her husband will teach her, old age will teach her, my mother learned a lot when she got old.” She would say, “Let the school handle her without coming to me—I have better fish to fry.” She will try to charm people into doing things for Nonie or she’ll nag them into it, particularly Daddy: “You think I like doing this—I’m not doing it for myself, S.L.”

Momma will say, “I can’t do it, my hands are tied, people don’t trust me, because of my looks.”

And: “I can’t afford to get indebted—they take advantage of me as it is.”

(Daddy will say, “You give me no rest.” Momma will say, “There are things I have to do—things are expected of me, S.L.”)

“No one can teach you how to live if you’re an outstanding person,” Momma said. “You have to find out for yourself and hope it’s the right thing.”

She said, “Being married to me makes S.L. someone in this little town: I’m S.L.’s recommendation—I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but I’m somebody around here—the truth is the truth.”

If she is angry and no one placates her sufficiently, she becomes large and sloppy with threat, sort of a don’t-think-I’m-a-shy-lovely-woman-who’s-afraid-to-hate-and-make-a-mess.

When we are at the shopping center, people hurry over to her to speak to her. When she steps out our front door, neighbors call her name, they start to trot toward her.

She says, “They want to make a little time with me.”

She said to me, “If people only knew how little they offer and how much they ask when they have a crush on you, they wouldn’t be so surprised they have only themselves to blame for how they get treated—I want you to listen to me: I have a lot to teach you, even if you are a boy.”

She plays no sports. She is very intense; her heartbeat, unexercised, is always, even when she is sitting down, rapid and huffy, intense: it sounds like muffled hammer blows: when her heart pounds, it means she is angry and will lecture us; people say she has “a bad mouth.” Perhaps she is made angry by too many things—although often she is angered by something and hides it and then shows anger over the next thing that happens, whatever
it
is. She likes really only very cool people—good gamblers, tough, respectable, or semireputable, or disreputable men and women who get their own way and are careful and distant toward emotion, who laugh at it, and who are dogged and who “accomplish” things: people who can fool other people and can “get their own way” and can be patient, hiding any tremor of ignorance, or seeming to, within the confines of what they know “for a certainty.” They can calm her down, such people: she has an addiction to people of that sort; but when she is with them she maneuvers in much the same way she does
with other people—she does not want to fall into their hands; she wants to be the winner with them, too.

She likes Daddy’s bland ruralness and egoism, but he is too humid—his looks, too: his coolness lies next to a heat in him: she pities him.

When she is not in the presence of calm people, if she isn’t near someone who damps her down (someone probably cruel and egocentric and compulsive in his or her calmness), then Momma’s momentum, her trajectory, her sultriness go more and more awry. “I don’t know anyone worth it, to test myself against!” she will cry: in her shapeliness and restlessness and quickness of speech and her puffed-out added-on glamour-importance of being pretty and in her thirties, she is short of breath often, unless she is sitting still and is all dressed up.

She sits down passionately: she starts slowly or languorously and then she gets bored and throws herself backward or falls with a proud carelessness.

She used to say, “I still have my looks—I haven’t lost my nerve.”

Her hair was shiny and long; she had a widow’s peak, soft white skin, high arched eyebrows (the shape of which she changed daily), a direct look, which, if you kneeled on the couch and peered into her eyes, you saw wasn’t there at all: her eyes were unreadable, murky, filled with purposeful teasing, with veils, baffles, a peculiar maze or lightlessness behind a surface clarity—a tumult on an ill-lit stage where an actress with a rifle occasionally assassinated this one or that one in the audience but where the lights never came up: the scene never was explained.

She and Daddy both said of her when she was dressed up that she was “on the rampage” or “on the warpath.”

She says sensitive people are “obnoxious—all they care about is their feelings; they don’t give a damn about your feelings.”

She said, “Women don’t have good lives,” and “It’s only interesting to be a woman.”

She says she is smarter than Daddy and that “the wrong things are in books—what’s in books doesn’t help someone like me—I want to do something in life, I want to do something with
my
life.” She says, “Anyway, I have no time to read.”

Momma in sunlight scowls usually and squints and proposes temperament to distract people from what is happening to her face year by year—the knowledge, the lines maybe; she proposes herself restlessly as an object
and
a force.

By the time she is thirty-five, she is swifter and more given to assertion,
and she outrageously and easily shows hate—even to me: “You dropped your napkin? Well, I’m not going to pick it up. I’m going out of my mind with you; I can’t stand it; you have to eat without a napkin now; go ahead, get food all over yourself so everyone that thinks you’re so wonderful can see what a pig you are—I’m tired of being your nursemaid and your hairdresser and public-relations man—” I stare at her when she’s like that—and sometimes I laugh. Or I stick out my tongue at her. I have some secret with her—I don’t know what it is—but the matter of that secret comes up suffocatingly from time to time.

She was taut and rustly with temper more and more, sometimes like a shrieking bird with dusty feathers or, more lightly, like a used and frail paper kite with thin wooden struts on a blowy, gray day, crackling and groaning in the wind that pushes at it.

She would say of me, “He gives me reason to like
him
—he’s the only one who doesn’t blame me.”

Her defiance grew dark and muffled, and more violent, I think.

She’s not too honorable. So her feelings for me are amusing, unreliable; she is not without a kind of honor; and so, although I do not trust her, there is some way in which I trust her more than I do anyone else—which is maybe sad, maybe not sad.

She was the only one of the people I knew who did not care what I thought, who did not insist that my mind had to be a certain sort of thing. She said, “Plain people don’t know how to leave anyone alone.”

And: “Most people are afraid of being lonesome—that was never my problem.”

She said, “My looks are going now—I’m boring to look at. Frankly, I’m not sorry; I’m not going to do anything to keep my looks—they go, they go—I had a run for my money—I never liked it—I want to be a woman who’s important to other women now—women will take me more seriously now that I’m a little older—I’m more sure of myself.… To tell you the truth, I don’t mean to boast about my looks, but the whole time I was young and good-looking, if I say so myself—but it’s foolish to talk about it—but it always made me a little sick to my stomach.… I’m not a bad person, you know: people can say what they like about me; jealousy is not exactly rare; but I’m not bad, as people go.”

“Leila,” some woman would say, “you have a lot of sense—a lot of sense—I have to hand it to you, I have to admire the way you look at things.”

“Well, no matter what people say, looks and brains go together—people talk to you—I was always good at talking to people—you get a chance to learn that way. I don’t like to boast, but I will say I don’t know anyone who knows as much about life as I do. Oh, I don’t say I know it all: you, as well as anyone, can back me up; I go to a lot of people, a
lot
of people, for advice; I know what I don’t know; but I know about
life
—I had a lot of it.… I intend to teach what I know—to my children.… Is it too dark in here for you? You want me to turn on another lamp? I would like to help people with what I know.”

And: “If I had a choice between ten million dollars and being president of the Jewish Charity League, I wouldn’t hesitate. If women—smart women, who do something in the world—women who know me—if they respect me enough to elect me treasurer—which means, as we all know, that I’ll be president then in two years—I would feel that made my life worthwhile.…”

H
ER FACE
became only slightly loose: it became prettier maybe: but it fell, if I may say it like this, outside history now. She burned all the photographs of herself.

She had been three years old and five and sixteen and twenty-five. Now there was no documentary evidence of any of it.

She said, “There’s a time to flirt and a time to stop.”

She said, “S.L., let’s move to—” She named a suburb, closer to the nearby city. She said, “I don’t want to grow old in the same town I grew up in.”

She said to me once, “I knew the right time to leave—go back there and ask anyone, and they’ll tell you how good-looking I was. They remember. They never saw me later.” And: “I don’t like people’s eyes—I don’t like looking at their eyes—or their eyes looking at me.… Listen to me: people aren’t nice; maybe they’re nice to you when you’re a child, but if you’re smart you won’t trust them.”