Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (53 page)

She said, “I’ve never been the one who asked.”

And: “I don’t care what I look like—so long as my life is interesting—and I have a very interesting life.”

And: “I know what age I am—I adopted this child because I knew S.L. needed someone to admire—Nonie was fat and was going through a very bad phase.… I wonder why they call the devil the Lord of the Flies. I was itchy when I was young—I had a very good time—nothing
is as important as being good-looking: if you were never good-looking, then you don’t know what life is really like—you don’t know what life is all about—still, I for one am glad to get off that merry-go-round—it was a lot of work, believe me, and you have to take a lot of disrespect from everyone.”

She had had the immediate secular importance of someone who had entry to “important” men who were perhaps obsessed with her: their importance had been hers to some extent; she had been like a traveling court, the traveling court of a possibly illegitimate sovereign.

“Hearts used to beat faster,” she said ironically, “when I was around.…” She said, “Well, why not? I could do things for people!”

The physical thing for her was always a mixture of stink, confusion, and privilege, of power and secrecy and criminality—and acceptable, like so much else. I mean she accepted her exclusion—perhaps more than she had to. She said, “It’s wrong of S.L. to want me now—he’s bald and I’m not young: I’m his wife—he ought to know better—ha-ha.”

It had always been a matter of crimes, of men who shouldn’t have loved her, and who she said no to, men who were too old or were not respectable or who were her brothers. She had a lonely, steady, circumambient darkness, an aureole of sin that was also a floating nimbus of surprise at the unexpectedness of having people desire her.

What is desire worth?

Then her slyness, her bluff of taking desire for granted, all that stuff that she did to increase her leverage—what was
that
worth?

Her self-consciousness when she was young had been fairly secret or ironic but now she made it open: “I stopped playing dumb—people always get a shock when they find out I’m not a simpleton … when they see I know what I’m doing.…”

It had been that people who had visitors from out of town brought them to our house, and Momma would receive them; toward the end, if she thought she didn’t look good she’d haul me out, display me: she’d assume the sultry, ironic I-don’t-care-about-my-looks-I’m-getting-older-I’m-the-mother-of-this-boy role.

I mimicked her arrogance, but I was, by nature, different from her, and male.

S
HE HAD
helped Daddy and two of her brothers in their businesses; she’d meddled in politics.

Her looks, her disposition had given her some power over the people around her, many of them—a power that she had never been sure of and that had always been beyond her intellectual powers to be clear about.

“If you’re a certain type, some people have to like you—” She had theories like that: she wasn’t sure; it had been that she’d get overexcited, very heated, if they did like her. She knew that infatuation made people silly, and sometimes cruel, and dangerous.

Her power had never been absolute, and a power that is not always there, that is not always noticeable, is not easy to define to one’s self; and since it operates oddly, in silence, it is a source of corruption (and occasionally of amusement). It is
black magic, haste, what-have-you.
Sometimes it seemed never to have been there: “No one except S.L. ever changed his life because of me—they never gave me anything of their own that they valued, so what did their liking me mean?” (But they had listened to her and given her things, and helped her and S.L. make money.) “I ask you that; I always had to be the one to give everything—I’d rather people disliked me, to be frank about it.”

Tyranny is a crime in a state, but in a woman, intellectually, it simply means she insists she is right; emotionally, it means she is loved. In my mother’s case, it was part of her mind’s stumbling after the world. She was so unsure of her powers of seduction by the time I was adopted that she’d often dress up and comb her hair especially and wear perfume and a necklace to play with me.

When I was very young, she took me to see my real mother, who was ill and smelled like someone very ill, while Leila was in a dress that smelled good and she wore her daytime diamonds, and the child was more comfortable with her than with his mother; and another woman who was there said, thirty years later, “I thought it was terrible to see that—I could never stand Leila after that—she understood nothing about people’s feelings—she was a selfish woman—no one ever owed her a thing, if you ask me.”

Momma said, “The world’s not fair, but I don’t see what good complaining does.”

(Daddy said, “You never stop complaining.”)

It is assumed older women know a great deal, including how to act, but it’s funny, because few people ask their advice or imitate the way older women behave, and a lot of older women seem crazy and desperate.

Just a little while before, a year or two earlier, Momma’s advice,
intrigues, despairs had been considered interesting. There had been an intense narrative interest about her life. Part of that came from her audience’s forgiving her everything she did because she was
public.
Things were not like that now.

Now she really had to know things. Now it was tactically sound not to expect to get away with anything at all. Now when people stared at her, it was as if they were like casual hoodlums toward her, whereas before they’d been like children of friends of her parents, they’d had that politeness and forbearance toward her.…

Daddy said she’d always been angry. I could never tell if her anger came from the way she was treated or if she had a natural aptitude for anger and now had an excuse. Perhaps part of her anger had always been part of her preparing to be older. She became so ferociously egoistic that those of us who watched her were cut off from her, were no longer her allies, were no longer implicated, minute by minute, in what she did, in having to hope she was happy because she was so pretty and she was ours to boot.

Perhaps we were competitive and glad to escape from her power and thievish toward the rights she’d once had and that could be ours if we could take and hold them. She handled badly what was happening to her. She rubbed your face in her moods, in part so she could feel the full extent of her problem. By making very clear to herself your impatience with her and exaggerating it, she imprinted the real situation on her nerves and looked at it, and felt it more: this was one way she was alive.

But it made you her enemy, her competitor.… Her moods were sometimes heavy now, like Daddy’s, masculine. Her sense of things wasn’t young; it wasn’t airy—or generous.

You could see how different she was in the way she walked, or just by looking into her face. Her self-consciousness had grown so that if you were me and got her attention you were looked at by a pair of eyes in a face of I-am-this-woman-now.

She came to conclusions every day about I-am-this-woman-now—and then she’d change her mind; and through that variety her attention would be directed at me—at anyone.

Part of what she had been was careless, or at least uncaring much of the time about what people thought about her and about what she did, and now she was enraged at having to worry about who she was.

By the time I started to speak, to enter on the difficulties of ideas
uttered and trafficked in, Momma, like everyone else, often mentioned that she was
getting older.

I
REMEMBER
Momma going on diets, changing her hairdos, not desperately but sighingly, using her mind, her wits; she was trying to be what she’d more or less casually planned for herself for when her “bloom” went, which was to be “smart,” angular, knowing, stylish,
older
(older and
striking
—strike, smite, deal a blow), to gain a new say-so to match the one she had lost.

She was not at all ill-natured when she worked on herself, but when it turned out her looks didn’t have the possibility of being modish she became moody, even quite wild with moods. Thin, her body was insignificant, not electrically sexual or stylish; and her face, bony, was not distinguished and romantic but was openly full of temperament—an overused face, ambitious, hot, restless: it looked bad-tempered even when she smiled. She said once, “One of the tragedies of my life was that I couldn’t be chic—I didn’t have the bones. I would have known how to use it, too—believe me—if I’d had the chance, but I didn’t have it.” Sigh. “I had to make do with what I had.”

Daddy said she was “a killer,” that she turned “murderous.” She got rid of Anne Marie, my nurse—I was pretty dependent on Anne Marie. Once Anne Marie was gone, Daddy found the house unpleasant and agreed to move to the suburb Momma wanted to live in. No one told me Anne Marie was leaving: one day she was gone. “Act like a man,” Momma said to me.

She told one of her brothers he was “an oily fool” and another that he was “an ignorant fool”—she did it in a polite voice; she didn’t mean “to drive them away—I want them to know I’m someone they have to consider; I protect them from looking like fools.” But she did drive them away: they began to avoid her. Her looks, with care, could have a local haute-bourgeoise, slightly plump prettiness, with a delicate aging romance to them, or a neat, serene, lyrical, and calm middle-aged prettiness, but nothing youthful or electrifying.

I remember periods off and on when she would suddenly adopt a spy lady’s glamour, an old expert’s glamour, slinky and instructed, and she would do it whether she was plump or not: she took to furs, hats that shaded her face. She did it
frankly
as an aging woman—“I’m at the age for overdressing: I have to strike while the iron is hot,” she’d say with
a sarcasm that somehow broke off or shaded into a strangely deep resignation, almost a placidity, a placidity of storminess so you had to blink, confused about how fierce she was being at the moment.

She said she needed money for beauty parlors, for clothes, for entertaining: “It costs a lot more when you get older just to keep up.…” Actually, she was climbing a little higher socially: she was bolder, pushier in a way. She would be furious about my pleasures—sports, for instance—but she wouldn’t raise her voice: she would mock in a resigned voice, and then forbid me wearily, boredly to take sports seriously. I fought her, and she’d back up into shadows and hold off, sort of; but she’d think of errands, household duties for me to do to keep me from my games—she wanted to run everything and everyone: she ran Daddy’s business. But in mood, in tone, in manner, she was
always
elegiac.

Her walk changed—it changed a lot; it became fluffy and more elegant; but in a year or two more it became purposeful, frightening, and knowing, a stalking as if she were Fate (she said, “I’m a very conceited woman, I admit it”). When I walked next to her, sometimes it was like being next to granite blocks tumbling slowly in melodramatic little avalanches. It was strange to me as a child when she changed. I used to laugh, inwardly but outwardly too, briefly, shocked or—something: amused, and she would say, “You don’t recognize me? You think I’ve made a mistake? I’m not sure I like the way I look today myself.” When she walked hipshot, it was not like before at all: now it was metronomic, now demanding; the shiftings of her body tended to be comic or comic-lyrical, startling and obvious (elegiac sexuality is comic, I suppose); for daytime
functions,
she was more and more careful to be girdled and serene.

There was a period of about two years when she would complain—jokingly—about getting older: “I
used
to be good-looking,” she would say; she would speak to other women of the loosening of the skin of her arms and of her neck; she would say to a man who was complimentary, “Oh, I’m getting past all that, Herb; we all are.” She said to people—she said it to herself, as if to herself; I would be there, sitting on the edge of her bed, swinging my legs, listening—“I want to grow old well; it’s a job like any other—it’s something you figure out.” She was competitive about it; she meant to do it better than anyone else.

People talked to her differently; they talked of their own affairs differently, not as if to a sibyl, not darkly and haltingly and embarrassedly
or with a rush; they took their time; they assumed she had to be “charming” (her whole social manner was more fluid, more polite, more outgoing, a serene and happy, resigned, semiretired woman); she listened with what seemed a calm attentiveness. She was supposed to. She was supposed to make up for her age by a seductiveness of attention and of concern for them, for their interests: she said in private, “They’re getting even with me now—I don’t blame them—I took advantage of everyone for years—I like thinking of it now.” (Sometimes she said, “I don’t like thinking of how selfish I was—I thought I owned everything. I was a terrible fool. I laid the wrong foundations.”) She said, “I knew what was coming—I used my time well—I only wish I’d taken more advantage of people.…” She had periods now of what seemed true kindness, of a wish to nurture others, of an interest in other people’s sadness—Daddy’s or Nonie’s or mine; but that was part of wanting to tell us what to do and of punishing us if we didn’t listen to her and do what she told us all the time; I resisted—one did resist her with a kind of guerrilla evasiveness—and she was grand, a full army, soft-bodied, carefully got up, or sometimes, now, messy and at-home, her full age, brown-lipped, hanging skin, masculine and strong-looking but tired and depressed, with sudden spurts of savagery. She rarely bothered with sarcasm; she attacked directly—my father in this fashion: “You’re dumb—you were always dumb—everyone knows you’re dumb—why don’t you grow up and face it, S.L.?” She said it almost wearily, looking up at him, without personal heat, with the heat of a rage too weary to become hysterical.

He said, “You’ve got a terrible mouth on you—you’re a terrible woman.” He said, “We’re getting older—the best is yet to be.”

“God, you’re a fool,” she said.

Her charities increased in number: she paid for them out of money meant for other things; she liked it that the household was in financial disarray. Nonie, cheated of clothes and allowances, screamed and threw tantrums; Momma tried to buy her off with other things: Momma thought “making sacrifices for a daughter is cheap—it’s what women do who have no lives of their own.” But sometimes she would make a big to-do of making sacrifices for Nonie, a sort of I-am-being-a-mother-wow-and-I-want-credit-for-it. Really, her temper grew worse and worse, more impatient and intractable. She ascribed everything she did to self-sacrifice—as in her charities, in
keeping up appearances,
in
running the family:
it was for our sakes—“certainly not for my sake: I don’t get
anything out of it, let me assure you.” She seemed to imply that only running away from home could have saved her life and could have been amusing. That or suicide or lunacy—any of the three would have been
amusing.
In her attacks on people, she said things that had been said before
in jest
and she said them again in a grating, direct, naked voice, or politely, with her face dragged down by gravity, or softly, flirtatiously, sort of idly threatening; and Daddy would twitch and say to her that she was “an awful woman—you come straight from hell—you’re a curse.…” When she attacked me, I laughed as I did when she changed her appearance: look-at-what-Momma-is-doing-now. Her ferocity was like the current superabundance of her underwear (she’d always worn, oh,
less
before) or her new smells (she smelled more grainy—granular, I should say). The laugh bordered on horror and on delight—the horror of seeing a dead bird, of seeing Momma-get-into-trouble (it didn’t take much vision to realize there’d be trouble for her soon when she acted like this), of having things go really rotten, and of being freed from loving her, of being turned loose as for a recess; the delight came from the same things and was ambiguous and despairing as well. I still loved her a lot but chiefly when I didn’t see her, when I was out of the house, or when she was talking to someone else; when she talked to me, I resisted, I became a knot and twist of resistance, an outward expression of an inner judgment of her as
she-is-impossible.