The World Is the Home of Love and Death (12 page)

You’ll have to cooperate.” She cheated when she negotiated; it was not a joke. Propping the child with one hand, she went ahead. She says, “Hold still,” and she moves toward the tub, an arm’s distance, and finds her arm is not long enough; and she glances at the trembling child, maybe incurably deranged, and she remarks, “You have a speaking face. Hold still.” And she takes her hand, her face, her eyes, the gorgeous bird consciousness in each of them, away—I am a mass of audiences, distant and near audiences. “I think you know what I’m saying. Now stay still; don’t fall. I’m turning on the water.”

I predicted to myself the sound of water coming from a faucet—part of the continuous sequences, now perhaps partially restored, of the world. An incomplete and strange restoration. My home for a long time now has been—madness. Catatonia. Autism. The movement is open at one end—inconceivably open. Memory hides it that the three walls of consciousness in a present moment have a fourth side open: perhaps I will die now. In memory, I am a child at the door of that room, with the figures in the room mostly stilled.

But in the real moment the child was sitting on the sink and staring unfocusedly at the ghostly distance between the back of her head and my eyes. The pain (of madness) was close and granular; a suffocating delirium. It compressed part of my consciousness so that the distance between sleeping and waking was no distance at all. My mother does not smell of the real belonging of before. Her breath is not one of the decisive terms of companionship in my language. I breathe in a rhythm that I share with no one. Any gamble I made may end in my return to madness: it is part of what gambling is, it is part of the stakes. Madness is at the open edge of the moment. My childhood sense of farce was not a joke but rested on the utter faithlessness of spirit in the flatness of madness and farce: a happy ending of a terrible kind. Vile. But to accept this woman means the absolute has rejected me. I have two mothers.…

Now I suddenly focus and see her, the softened volumes of Lila’s body busying itself with the tub.

I remembered the smell of linoleum and words such as “hot
wasser.”
This present version of my mother in a white room did not smell like the other one in a brown room. These walls did not smell like the walls in a country house at the edge of fields of mud and snow. The woman’s hair and arms—the softness behind the shoulders (where my hands rest when I am bathed in a sink in some kind of cloth-lined basin: this is from long before) are not the same.

The rhythm of illness and shock and the truth of death are the original terms of my life, and they make a faery music. The glamour and finely made tunefulness of so much oddity line the inside of my eyelids and the inside of my ears and the inside of my mouth with an unfamiliar sensation of newness as home, as the familiar thing now. The sound of water in the tub has, then, its own infinity for me which this woman notices.

“You like water, do you? Are you an Arab in the desert, are you a little sheikh?” The faithless and farcical little gambler stares—and listens.

I did not speak, because speech refers to absent things, and I could not tolerate absence: whatever is real is here, near me. Words are a category of extreme failure in these kidnaper-rooms, chambers of time unexpectedly askew. I was astounded to feel that any pardon extended by me toward the wrong woman caused a certain amount of cure. A state of pardon is unlike a state of illness. But I knew it was blasphemy … I
knew
it was violently wrong.

The paradoxes of observation heartbreakingly start with dissimilarities. I am wrenched into observing things; this woman is not the same as before. Something has killed me but I am not entirely dead: I have a seed of life in me. The mind’s limits are very clear in childhood. Madness and my mother are perched and gorgeous; one is a horrible bird outside the window and in the mirror about to fly redly in the room. And the other is a strange woman pretending to be the most familiar part of the world for me—this is farce, this is the farcical underpinning of my reality—my reality, such as it is.

Splashingly enormous, the water noise transports me. The sound in the earlier house was never like this. I begin to topple from the sink.

She is not looking at me; she is saying, “See how calm I’m being; some people would say that’s a miracle.” Then she looks and she cries out, “Whoa! Hold your horses!” She half rises and reaches; she restores my balance; when her hand touches me, the mood of prettiness from before makes her touch incandescent. The complications of her identity unlock me, and my openly thumping heartbeat authenticates the circumstance as interesting to me.

She glances at me, and she shoves me—settling a doll in place on a couch. “Now, let’s have a little hot water on the subject. Watch my dust … as they say. Listen, I think you’re just too cunning for words; now it’s your turn to flatter me and be nice and just keep your balance, Mr. Rag Doll,” she says as she tests and alters the proportions of hot to cold in the water.

The noise of the water is louder and steadier than anything I had ever heard; it makes me heave with excited vomit. “You don’t have to throw up; count to ten; put your head down.” But I don’t know what she means.

Still, her voice has ten thousand times the power of my sleep and of my blinking and of my thoughts to think and see and to change things. I listen to her
before
I think, if you know what I mean. “I have no talent as a nurse, I’m no good with plants, either.” I simply stare at her. And the heaves stop. Her voice is a mixture of brilliant little tones; it is bruisedly soft. “But I’m a real lifesaver, many have said so, and I tend to agree; I don’t mind tooting my own horn: I’m not the worst person to have in your corner.”

I’m a child: I don’t know very much. I can have very odd forms of truth.

No will in her exists to lift me into any abrupt buoyancy of childhood based on knowledge. I am a foreign lump in her life. But her will does draw me into contemplation of her shameless incandescence like the bathroom light, and which I imagine as being in her and as being passed into me, like milk. In her will is some intention toward my being a living child, but not a childish or a moody one. Her will is meant by her, consciously, to illuminate the world. She thinks herself a
genius—
a
wicked
genius …

“I think you’re watching me,” she says. “Believe me, first thing in the morning is not my best time. I’m not eighteen. They tell me I’m not bad to look at. You think I’m O.K. to look at? Maybe I should have put on my diamonds for you. That usually gets the men going, I don’t know why. Maybe it means I know a thing or two. Now, sit up. I get tired of having to hold you up every two minutes. Smile and be pretty. You look like something the cat dragged in. I guess you don’t smile. Well, I can’t do it alone. You have to help me …
pupik.”

Pupik!

“If you’re too cute for me, I can get rough; I’m not a sweetheart in those ways: listen to me. A word to the wis
?, pupik.”

Pupik?

“I had two sons.” They died as infants. “They’re gone: it ruined my
life, pupik.
… I don’t know if I like you.… When they died it ruined my life, but I don’t give up easily.”

I was fascinated by her strong-willed cleverness, her harsh dreams, her purposes, her self’s mix of charity, deathliness, and shameless
calculation.

On my skin is partly wiped-off salve. I have a rash that burns. She stands up and takes a handful of toilet paper, and she energetically but haphazardly sets to work, wiping me here and there. The rash, when I look down, resembles the heads of kitchen matches.

“Are you looking at yourself?” She moves her head forward, and she is looking directly into my eyes from halfway to one side, and I explode again inside myself: my mouth opens as if to vomit, and I gag and shudder. My eyes, at first all right, go blank, and perhaps they roll.

She is gone. Her breath, her nearness have pulled away. Her hands still hold me. She has no tenderness of a nurse’s sort: she is sexual and intelligent and cold. She is my fate.

When I don’t throw up, when I calm down, she becomes suddenly gasping-breathed and intent, and she uses handful after handful of toilet paper on my skimpy buttocks and my thighs. She rinses me off with her wet hand first, and that isolates me in a blind state of screechlike response. Then she uses a washcloth—she wants to keep the washrag clean.

As she does these things, she talks: “You’re worse than a dog. Of course, I wouldn’t know. I’m allergic to dogs; they don’t like me.” Bubbles of breath move in me. What she’s doing is physically interesting to me—
comfort
is a word that is part of being sane. Sanity seems riskier, colder, harsher, a more excited state than madness. It resembles her.…

“This isn’t comfortable for me, either, kiddo-kiddoo, but we have to get a few things accomplished. You’re filthy, believe me. And I get things done. I’m a doer—”

My life is now a dream about meanings even when I am awake.

She says, “This is making me sick,
pupik.
I’m not a softy, but sometimes I’m not at my best. I can do it. Just watch my smoke, boop-boop-a-doop. My God, my God, I bet you think I don’t have a mind—well, I’m not
a little woman;
I’m not a stay-at-home. A word to the wise. I’m the I-Don’t-Care Girl. When I get going, I’m a house afire.” Then: “I set the house afire …”

Generally, it was like madness having my mother speak with another voice, in another vocabulary. In some form, it happens to everyone; a woman’s life changes, and so does her voice and vocabulary; or you hear her differently. But probably not as completely as this. The word
Momma
is now shorter and paler than it was, and it does not utter any of the old words of endearment—
Liebe, bubeleh
, Aaron.… Where have my earlier names gone to, the first ones?

Puzzles and something tentative, and a tinge of mutual animosity form a large-scale abstract error. Mother is murderous and adorable. Momma’s infinite unlawfulness is what killed me. The vastness of her absence had its own absolute character, erasing all law. You might find your missing mother in a drawer, or the sky might release her from a haze of blue light—that has happened; she has appeared in that way before: in two places at once—in the odors of a drawer and from inside a closet where she was placing things.

The ill body is formal, taut and wary with etiquette, with limitations. The worst parts of the past are forgiven if I am soothed. She talked to be
nice
—a form of illicit intention. “A short life but a busy one. What do you think? Tell me honestly—ha, ha; that will be the day.…”

I stared and stared at the illustrations and definitions of my mother now.

“Did you have bad dreams? I had bad dreams last night, I’m a poor sleeper: that’s bad for the skin.”

The pain of trusting her threatens me and then becomes a fall, a collapsing floor, a shrieking matter—that short-lived—comic—in a lyric vein. At any rate, it ends that way. “Here’s to you; mud in your eye; up we go, a short life and a
happy
one,” she says. She gasps: she lifts me. Of the people I heard speak after my mother died, Lila was the easiest for me to hear.

One can love a woman for the terrific clarity of purpose in her talk. The lies are life. My degree of error was painful for me. Old knowledges that I have now grew from her presence, but she never believed that—she believed she seduced me with the reality of her breasts. That was all. But my consciousness is alight with her. The light in the grained, opaque window, frosted in a pattern like overlapping gingko leaves, means that morning is within reach, that I might be able to walk as far as its milk edge. A lurking boy inside his consciousness, I feel I am actually inside the sleep-ship, in its hold, where the cargoes are, its freight of replicas, real, but I am awake even though my real mother is dead … She says, “You’re dirtier than dirt. You’re going to stain the water. You’re worse than Lady Macbeth.”

She stands erect; and she pants … I feel the ends of her hair as tingling sharpnesses that poke and move tinglingly on my shocked skin. Her weighty real self makes my reality that of a leafless twig. My vulnerability becomes a high whisper, obscene and continuous, not happiness but good enough.

The slumped, bare-buttocked, emotionally palsied, and intent kid and Lila are not much like a Madonna and Child. She holds me while water noisily and mistily pours into the tub. She’s no athlete; she mutters under her breath at my weight and smell. “I’m going to pull my back if I’m not careful.”

She lowers me; she holds me by the shoulders and turns me and lowers me—she is going to stand me and prop me on the edge of the tub—and it is as if her arms were slow, straining wings, my wings. And her breath stiffens into a caw. I descend at the end of my featherless wings; the obscene high whisper extends. My feet slide on the curved white porcelain rim of the tub; she stoops and folds me into her side, me facing outward; and she leans over and reaches toward the splashing water; and as she does this the child’s eyes pinch the volumes of Lila’s back into morsels of reality; the ghostly and ambitious fingers of a child’s sight do this.