The World Is the Home of Love and Death (15 page)

In her freedom, she saves me, although she cannot ever save me.… She says so, “I can’t save anyone.… God helps those who help themselves.…” Her pride, her blasphemies, her sultriness of temper are those of the first free person—that is how she acts. But that freedom hardens year by year with the statistics of event. In an insistent uneducatedness, in her insistence on not having to study anything as she goes along, she advances like a river—and like a river scow—in a tormenting roiling of crosscurrents. The bow wave is a whitening of her face, a hysteria. The toughness that carries her is not any ordinary faith or soft maternity, it is just a hard refusal to be shamed. She pulls the child up largely by his neck. She pounds on his back. She says in a tensely musical voice,
“Don’t do that. Don’t be a fool. Don’t do that to yourself.
”

Then she says in a heartless tone—but it is partly a joke, a tactic—"You’ll live.” She says it again, in a different tone, more musically, with a thread of ridicule in it—she is ridiculing me—or herself: “You’ll live.” Then a third time, thoughtfully, with her hand on my head, “You’ll live,” while she stares into space.

Then a fourth time, having removed her hand, she says it as poetry, ironic and pessimistic, acknowledging that I am laughing at her (I breathed before she rescued me), she says in a melancholy tone: “You’ll live.”

She moves me so that I ache for her: I don’t want her humiliated. Embedded in water, I feel my heart race bumpily at the vital sweetness of my being a dishonest trademark for her view of herself.

Lila says, “Don’t give me a scare like that: my heart! My God, you want to kill me? I don’t like that kind of thing. Are you listening to me? I don’t want it; don’t do it to me.”

The distant term
my mother
proceeds among the summarizing sense of other women’s faults and virtues. Echoes throb and tinkle among the tile walls and the glass of the mirror and of the window. Her hair has grown lank, partly disarranged in the damp; I remember that
from before.
Her eyes are intent, emotional, deranged and passionate, deranged with passion, with flickers of lawfulness. Her eyelids flutter; they are shiny in the steamy bathroom. Her shoulders are a curious brown, almost a twig color—probably a shadow caused by the way she is sitting. The true potency, though, is the infinite white seduction, the persuasiveness, of her smell of fear and hurt and anger, softened for me, laid aside for me. The gentleness such as it was seemed to be focused in her soft breasts, the facelike nipples peering through her nightgown.

That is not all the child saw: he saw the momentary strengthlessness of her throat. I felt no larger than her knee. I could feel my having a face. And that the expression on it turned her mood but could not control it, her mood. It is infinitely sophisticated, childhood, being a child.

She sees ill health and the child being doubting, and she refuses to identify with her pain and reproach—or hatred even. The expressionless, or kneelike, face the child has at the moment is not innocent. It is partly malicious, and comic, if it is seen, if she sees the malice. His will is separate from hers.

The movements of the water in the white tub, the recent suffocation hurts still and induces a particular round-eyed memory of pain. Perhaps it is a form of the presence of pain; it rends the child; perhaps the boy is mad. There is some quality of space about my mother now: she does not want me dead; she does not want me to be company for her; she is ignorant and closed-off; she does not want me to suffer; she wants me to have a good time; she wants me and my life to make xsense—it is odd how much that meant, that wish in
this woman, my mother, my mother now.

The moment consists of an un-ideal reality of being
loved
by someone who cannot love but within limits, in sheer unadulterated moderation, in common sense woundedness. The moment failed to be intense, although it was much too intense; the woman here, combined with my errors and my true perceptions about her, is far odder as substance than water is: my mother is odder than water. An intense, quasi-lyrical laughter fills me. I hadn’t known the water had sections to it such as surface and inside; and that the inside could leak if you licked it; that it could crawl into you in a dully willed way.

She has no idea who I am. But she knows she does not know, and that is hugely different from before, and it is a great relief; this one knows how bad I am; it is soothing not to be claimed and forgiven. I mean the way water enters you is by a law of some kind but not a law having to do with sin and ultimacies of wrath and anathema. And Lila’s love was effective enough, according to laws of a frolicking but dangerous sort, more dangerous in the surfaces and interiors, less stable, more overt, with no grounding in hidden laws—only in difficult, real ones of the actual moment.

The water is toothed and grabby. It slaps your hand and smashes your breath. It is a crushing and uncrushing weight on my legs. I can manage. My emotions are toothed and grabby, too, and shy, very shy. They are frolicsome, too, perhaps obtuse—and devious. The medium of personal attachment slows my heart and seems almost to crush it.

I’m staring, appalled and fascinated at the woman who is odder than water. The woman, in a watery, watchful way, watches me while she moves and leans forward and, with inordinate skill, kisses my head and says again, “You’ll live,
pupik
, won’t you? It’s true, isn’t it?”

I look at her. I don’t want to hide it that I am awake. Are you sure of what you’re doing, Momma? No. Of course not. She does it
anyway.
She says, “Do you know the philosophy of
anyway?
People told me,
Don’t do it
, but I did it
anyway
, and that’s my philosophy.” She says with a little snort or whistle (the tiles make the sounds sharper; I’m amazed at the sharpness of the sound in my head and throat at the back of my mouth), “Let’s be friends. Lean forward and I’ll scrub your back.” She says, “I bet you’re the one who kills me.…”

I don’t turn and look at the disarranged and startling woman. She jerkily and energetically rubs my back with a washcloth; her movements with the cloth splash into the water at one end and rise wetly along the bumps of my spine; the pressure of her strokes forces me near the water that choked me so that the water throws splayed paws on my face. The cloth moves down into depths of water, and into the cleft in my buttocks, which suddenly exist in my mind as dulled spaces around a glaring light moving around rubblingly down there.

Momma’s breath is like a cap over my round skull—such purposeful breath—the washcloth moves into the hole and tenderly cleans it; and then, shifting her finger, she touches the tiny beans—the future testicles—then the penis that feels like a fine glinting blanlcness, a hint of how the soul might try to draw its own image in a rowdy future.

No part of me is forbidden this woman. Her breath, my being a test of her merit, the peculiar home feeling of this, fills me—my chest and skull—just as my damp hair and her breath cover my skull rufflingly. Her touch explodes in me as nauseated and then quickly denied pleasure, verging on extreme delight, which induces passivity and yet a violence of feeling and of light in me. I hate the sensation and yet I collect it and ponder it and hold myself in readiness to receive it again. Imbecile child. Sense has departed from the present moment in order to exist in the burning thickets of the touch sensorily.

A pressure in him grows; it pushes and tugs at his mouth, at his eyes. And at his behind, which squirms. He closes his eyes in fright. The present is warm and immediate, burning and sexual, filled with presentiment, with the possibility that this is humiliation; one breathes suspiciously at the cold edge of the large dark of futurity. An exhilarated terror. One likes it. The jumble of illness and grief, delight and horror, and moderated grief—I am furrowed and implanted—I am a cornfield already partly grown or stubbled, itchy and streaming with light. I am clenched, with light hustling in me without reason or caution—it is not exactly my will. Her face is like an eye opening and closing when I look up at her; it discloses and sharpens itself, fish-faced moon goddess, monumental, absurd. I see her split and faded rose-mouth. Her smart and ignorant meddling touch moves over my rash-bitten, half-starved, meager, frightened body. I put my wet hand up in the air; it is clearly a willed movement. I think I pulled her forward, or I gestured and she came forward; or she didn’t move at all; and it didn’t matter. But with my other hand, with poor sick-child clumsiness, I splash the water; sickness makes the motion thin and shy; still, the water rises; it has the extraordinary broken beauty of glass and whispers and of an outcry; but the child is silent, and it is only the noise and then the echo of water being splashed that one hears.

And irrational tracks and arcs appear on her nightgown—small trails. Some appear on her face. The child stares and stares. The climax is in seeing the defacement, the rain or tears, or spit, the water of the future, the mark of the rock in a tide branding an enormous liner sailing by—no: halted there. The marks look like handprints, or twig prints on snow or sand or mud, or red marks on skin. Her steam-pale face and one breast and its nipple, the latter through wet fabric, peer at me. I gaze at the drying and elemental painting I have made.

She says, “I see that Meanness is going to be your middle name.”

Oh, I hate her. I also loved being named.

My head went so far back in my looking up at her that I fell backward, infantlike, against the curved porcelain of the back of the tub. I did not cry. Lila observed that silence of the child. She says, “Well, gentlemen are quiet about things—it’s a useful trait.” Then, in a peculiarly distant voice: “I can see that Too Much Mischief is going to be your middle name,
too
.”

Rage and mindliness and interest in each other (at times) and flirtation and seduction—and death, death, of course, numberless deaths—she says, that madwoman to that mad child, “Am I your first love? Or are you just willing to play with me?”

Not very lovingly but with a great amount of complicitous duty or alliance, or teasing amusement, she helps bring the child upright in the water again, to a sitting position, and she says, “Here. I’ll kiss it and make it well.”

I am unfenced. Scramblingly, I faint a little. I misplace my senses. She can feel it and observe it: “You’re quite the Beau Brummell,” she says. “I think I can like you. Maybe you’ll do. We’ll have to wait and see. Here, it’s time to get dry; let me give you a hand; I like someone who knows how to cooperate; here we go,” and, dropping the washcloth in the water, she puts both her arms around my chest and she wetly lifts me. She says, “Hold still! What are you doing? Be careful; don’t be a fool; you always were a fool—I bet.” She hauls and tugs and lifts and succeeds; she is in command of epic force; she might as well be a goddess or an angel, as far as I can see.

I drip with water onto her. My wet, meager chest lies against the nightgown over her far from meager chest. “Being affectionate, that’s always a plus in this world,” she said.

I have wild reasons and mystical ones for the ways I’m a fool. Many of hers are planned and have to do with complications springing from her friendliness and from what friendliness was for her. She shudders, but only a little. I like when she blinks inwardly and physically, when the darkness in her is in place, and she and I seem to be dreaming simultaneously, when our dreams seem to grow out of each other and then to be entangled again and then to be halves of the same thought. In certain neural corridors in me, her touch ignites a pink-fiery sense of cleanliness and a sense of secrets as well. I burn in the darkness in me with being cleaned. I am wet between my legs and on my tight scrotum and dick and on my buttocks and spine and between my shoulder blades. This is among the rubbles of fear and the pressure of unease.

She is like a wooden board that I sat on and that hit me in the head somehow and smashed the soft, fluid textures of the mind and soul and the more heated affections. Nothing between us is complete or settled; but since everything in her is brilliant or is deep and dark, like a pit, the dangerousness and the comfort form a reality of mothering that the child accepts. I grip her weakly, which is to say gently; but in me is a male rage of affixing myself to her. Much of that rage is a melancholy languor—she half-understands this sort of thing.

I say now that she had a sense of infuriated tragedy, and of bitterness and irony; and this was
affectionate
; and the child knew it. It is not very different from before. Maybe it is Jewish. In her is also a deep infuriated tic of harshness and ridicule toward what-is-not-her-child. That is swathed in flirtation now. And I despise the change in her and her lust for change. But I am not angry and never will be again.

For each of us, the woodenness, the horror of affection—dead mother, dead sons—makes an area where we perch and watch and also perform in this odd way of ours, muscleless and without music but intimately and with fatality.

She and I share a peculiarly full and not very joyous and yet happy enough (or savory) nakedness. The window and the mirror are glazed with steam. Holding me, Momma takes a towel and wipes the window and the mirror and throws that towel on the floor, too. And she takes yet another towel—she is showing off: this is many more towels than the other house had. “Get hold of the mirror, here; hold on to the mirror while I dry you,” she says in a cranky mean voice. She wants me to stand in the sink and hold on to the upper edge of the small mirror, but I can’t stand up very well. She pronounced the word
mirror
as “meer"—breath—"uh.” It used to be glottal and dark and less airy: “mirrr—errrrr.” Halfway between the sounds is the streaked mirror, is the pupil of a ghost’s eye in front of me.