The World Is the Home of Love and Death (23 page)

S.L.—Sam Lewis—is panting slightly. He is a study in teeth and fabrics—he has studied in magazines, observed men in restaurants in St. Louis and Chicago. In bad dreams, the schools he went to, and then the army training, appear most often as mixtures of animals and machines—grunting cows and hippos among whirling knives—but sometimes as sharks, huge ones:
Everyone takes a bite out of you, everyone cuts his cut.

The enormous car and its fantastically styled sweep of metal is something historically new. The mind boggles at this extent of invention, it mimics no natural thing: it is pure will, pure wish, married by means of history and accident to that sense of time and distance that money is—so many inches, so many minutes at your disposal. Buy it. Buy it. Another kind of bite. S.L. who talked in his sleep had a recurring subject at night:
The Indians are coming.
He said it now, “Hey, kid-dykins, you think the Indians are coming back to get their land?” The only children’s toys he liked were Indian warbonnets and bows and arrows. I can feel his pulse jump with stage fright and nervousness about the women and with pride and daring and girlish-and-grown-up-male stubbornness about this inventory of success—of pleasures, this lawn even if weedy, this neighborhood, these trees,
this safety,
this bold and absurd and unimaginable car.

Pulse and eyes, posture, the set of his lips, the glare of his eyes—the happy hunter with his trophy shows
his SIMPLE pleasure
when the outcry of the slammed screen door makes him say, makes him whisper, “Here they come, won’t they laugh and smile now, to see you bought—what you wrought—”

Lila’s wife-voice from somewhere invisible to me on the porch says sharply, “Nonie! Don’t!”
Don’t slam the screen door.

Lila’s voice has that exposed nerve of physical pain and moral hurt that made her such a registrar of things.

A tiny breeze flicks here and there, a brief nervous pulse of wind, warm and steeply scented, as if Dad’s pulse and
SIMPLE happiness
had turned itself into breeze.

The sounds of rapid footsteps on the unsteady boards of the front porch are a rapid tattoo of drama for me. Swiftly gliding shadows race out from the women and fly over the gravel like the wings of goddesses and join the shadows under the tree. I see the New Car in its splendor of chrome, paint, and wax, radiator ornament and spare tire in its slick bisected case and chrome fastening, and the set of horns as a guarantee of pleasure.

But Momma’s face—the female reality—and Nonie’s shouts, “What is it, what did you buy? Oh not blue, not ugh-ugh
blue!”
suddenly hurl out lines of order and scale that change everything.

Both women have small, fine skulls; and Lila wore something with a floppy collar: she is hip-shot and glamorous, she has on a sort of turban, she is being both
cute
and sexual just now because she had intended to reward S.L., to show Sam Lewis she appreciates the car he got her—she’s sorry she racked up the other one, chewed up the engine block and so on.

Of course, this guilt-ridden and obstinate woman, good-looking and sexual, fine-nerved, open-nerved, as exposed as an almost lidless eye, she has the gleam and delicacy of an eyeball become a person—a woman—and in the round hole, the pupil at the center, perches a moody bird-goddess so to speak, patron of rationality, and thoroughly mad.

I mean, for me and Dad, sometimes, she is our talker, our dictionary—who else can we trust as much? But hers is a mad voice, she wants freedom, too; this jealous and willful eye can transmute itself into the cow-goddess Juno, with her great flanks and ill-temper, but the eyes still dominate that creation. She is less mad indoors—she seems unsuitable and frail out of doors on this unwalled lawn. She often says,
I know nothing about men—except a little bit about how to be romantic now and then.
But she’s bold and doesn’t hide because of her ladyish helplessness, although she is quick often to sadness because it’s useful to her to be pitied—she’s beside herself with amazement: with a kind of dangerous madness.

“That’s not the kind of car I wanted, S.L.”

Daddy knows her, knows her power over him: he breathes asthmatically with shock and then so quickly with a kind of hatred that you wonder about him and her: they are madnesses in a whirl, each startled by the other’s reality of madness: it is the most acute pain imaginable.

Nonie was supposed to be suffering over my anger with her and my being in bandages and she did look out of sorts, temperamental: but remorse didn’t show. The naked way she held her face into the air was pretty. She was bold, and she was playing dumb, and she looked rubbery and outdoorsy, practical, not a luxury like Momma. Her childlike prettiness had the effect of promising she would be pleasant. She was domestically available, not partyish like Momma but isolated.

An orbit of a third madness—leashed and bounded somewhat.

Sunlight lies in bands among the stripes of shadow on the steps to the porch where Momma and Nonie stand
en tableau,
with Momma’s fine, exposed face (under her turban) showing a faint softening of age compared to Nonie, to Nonie’s startling freshness. Nonie is a step or two lower. Momma’s face rides in the air above the shifty masses of her breasts. Her face seems to rise propelled by spirit and meaning into a higher reach of air above her contrary and downward body in the style for women’s flesh that she affected that month—small-town, her version, this small town, and the local availability of stuff, or in St. Louis, and so on, and influenced by the movies, the downward-flowing weight of breasts and thighs and then the fineness of ankle and wrist, the languorous whatever, the moody reality of primarily sexual flesh.

Lila’s face was made up to represent sweet, naked, fragile welcome—for Daddy who was bringing her her new car. Now her face was puckered and marred. She was very pretty but she was grotesque and absurd, overcostumed and witchlike, thoroughly crazy about what was going on, about what words could do, and will, and what men felt.

Between her body and Daddy’s ran innumerable strings—or even chains—of attachment, and awareness of each other’s character.

She said in a half-and-half voice (half pleading, half exasperated and threatening) and with a smile that jaggedly frowned instead of being a smile: “What kind of car is
that,
S.L.?”

He, his good humor already marred, even half-collapsed, but struggling on—
like a chicken with its head cut off
—said like a salesman and not exactly addressing Momma, or her tone (they never could talk to each other in public), he said pompously but without conviction and almost as if begging for corroboration: “That’s the Buick eight cylinder deluxe sport sedan.”

“S.L., that’s not the kind of car I asked for.” Of course, she wasn’t sure of that but she wasn’t “reasonable"—I mean she wasn’t
prepared to listen to him
—she had her hurt, her disappointment to deal with here. In a very mysterious and quite mad way, she demanded, “S.L., what is
that?
”

Still smiling, still salesmanlike but off at an angle, so to speak, into a now
Christian
and humiliated, thoroughly humiliated purity of offering himself and the car to her, he said: “That’s for you.”

“I want a small car.” Momma closed her mouth and twitched and twittered a little, moving toward being jocular, witty,
a fascinating Jewess
—some such role, I think—but it came out very young and vulnerable: “I told you I wanted a
small
car—” Then suddenly she manages to be
charming:
“I’m deluxe but I’m not up to a sedan, I’m not a playboy, S.L.” She paused, ran her hands over her hips to permit laughter, to encourage it—she was hardly a boy. Then seductively, mildly, she said, “Why did you get that one? It’s so big, it’s too big.” Then in a woman’s tone, flattering him but with a lot of creeping, flowing anger underneath, “It’s much too big for me.”

Is she going to burst into tears? Is she going to scream?

The child might: he had not, after all, imagined the possibility of
unhappiness
here.

Lila’s brightly red lipsticked mouth is half-threatening but flirtatious. Her breasts are like mad faces. Nonie’s voice is a bird-shriek: “I don’t like that color, Daddy!”

“How can I steer a car like that, Sam Lewis?” Momma asked. In those days, cars had no power devices and steering took strength.

The air trembled with possible further realities.

Suddenly Daddy said as if with a broken heart:
“Don’t be a bitch, sweetheart—your son Wiley picked it out.”

I.e., you have no manners, no heart.

Then he said it: “Don’t you have any manners, don’t you have a heart—I guess you don’t—you don’t have manners and you don’t have heart,
sweetheart.

I can’t remember him ever calling her by her name. Lila, ever.

Her body now displayed a trembling that he was attacking her right to be considered an irresistibly attractive and knowing woman who was sensitive and rarely wrong, and so on.

“What do you mean? What are you saying to me?” Her hand flew to her breast: “Wiley picked it out?”

Daddy says now, “What do you think I mean? Are you getting so old, you don’t speak English anymore? Do you belong in a ghetto with your ugly mother? I’m telling you, he bought the car, I gave him the money, and he picked out the car he liked for his mother—he was an unhappy child, sweetypie, you bitch, and if you weren’t so self-centered, you might just have taken a look and seen for yourself that your son had a smile on his face which you have ruined again—look, sweetheart, he
was
happy—”

“I don’t want a child picking out a car for me, S.L.!”

I was staring at them. Momma looked at me. Daddy did too. Daddy blinked, grew tired at once, cautious and slack: “It’s a bargain—it’s cheap at the price, this year—it’s a special model, it’s a real good buy. So we bought it—they’ll really see you coming in this one.”

“They’ll hang me! There’s a Depression on—where’s your common sense, S.L.?”

“Bitch, don’t ask me about my common sense, where’s your heart, what common sense do you have, you’re all meanness.” Then as if in a bored attempt to make Lila generous, after all: “Wiley presents, with his compliments, a new car he bought with his very own money for his lady mother whom he’s unfortunate enough to think is a lady who cares about nice things.”

“S.L.! What are you saying! You let a child pick out a car for me! A car that’s too big for me to steer! People will laugh at me in that thing!”

“Goddamn it, pussycatkins, that’s a good car!”

“Good! Maybe it’s good. But that’s not a small car! I have to have a small car, I told you I had to have a small car.”

“Be nice—you look good in a big car!”

“I can’t steer it. I can’t handle a big car. A car is a practical thing, you can’t make jokes about a car. I’m through with showing off for you, I don’t want a car because it tickles you, I have things to do, I have to live, too.”

We are in the air-and-light by the corner of our house, in shadow, at the edge of reaches of outspread, burning, and sparkling air.

“Darling—”

“I have to have a small car! I’m not good at parking. I get all
upset
—I told
you. ”

Momma’s breast heaves. Her breath catches in her throat, in her mouth. The swift excitement of her dealing with the event is like a large fire in dry grass, hot and sucking out the air in her. She might die then and there. Her sun-and-shadow masked face was broken and reckless—practiced and complex—and airless and suffocated. Because of him. Her having been pretty has gone on for a long time. Her being something of a girl still and “adorable” and “redoubtable” gave her an unfair degree of fascination. The shadows under her eyebrows, in her mouth, under her chin made her a soft bandit, helmeted—turbaned. Sunlight sizzled on the gravel of the driveway. She is squeezed by the perpetually recurring injustice of not being listened to—but she has never listened to Daddy except with her body. She isn’t listening now. Her behavior is crazed, considering her desires. In her posture is a hint, a set of signs showing her as not to be taken as
sweet
as well as signs saying
I’m not meek:
it’s unpleasant; it rends you, that such a fragile and exposed system believes itself capable of things it is not capable of.

Daddy stiffened. Anyone’s anger, anyone’s hurt is an attack on him, her upset especially.

I blinked. I saw less well. I breathed noisily because I couldn’t really breathe at all if Momma couldn’t. I had no depth in me to accompany the disappointment in S.L. I have no compartments in me that open onto depths: I am a child. I reflected them—I am a satellite.

In the sunny and shaded Midwestern air, among the fat trees, I began to jerk with an explosion of pre-hilarity. The near and looming white clapboarded wall of the house jumps up into the air and the stippled hills and gullies of the graveled driveway leap out toward the shining street as my head jerks with the onset of nausea or madness or laughter.