Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (77 page)

She is muttering in a certain kind of woman-salesman way about how right she is as an oracle and a nurse, about how right she is about how I am to be tended; I’m a
gutes Kind
—she is right, I am to trust her, she is like God giving evidence about Himself in
the Bible
—the
hero-Ritter
must be hungry, I should eat. She ascribes to me and my voyage a high character: its character was” —uhnt he—didtt notTT wuhhhetttte him—sellllfuHf—” Toilet disciplines mark the hero.

I believe her, on the whole. Sometimes with an entirety that is both an ecstasy and a source of nervous panic. I am racked by a spasm of nausea and a spasm of love willfully applied, lured out of me, really, and by a spasm of knowledge of the world—i.e., taking care of me and how that will benefit her. I move and raise my hands to her hand and move the spoon slowly toward myself. I eye her. Her eyes get very large. I have never instructed her before, except with weak or vague cries or wriggles of unclear significance; but this is conscious and controlled; it is like talking to her.

She began to murmur statements about my nature. I am a flower, a soldier, a
good
soldier, a brave
Kind, das bes(te) chee-ild in der Veit;
and once again, to make sure I understand, she says I am
dry, your pants are clean like soap.
But she doesn’t say this excitedly or all at once; she is a master-mistress of tact such that it touches my soul—she speaks slowly as if she were as chary of words as I am of food. Now she is spooning applesauce into my mouth with daring skill and astounding grace—it’s not perfect, but it will do. For the moment.

For the moment, she understands my condition—the newness of the world for me, for someone unrooted in any familiarity at all. She is like a mother to me; she is my mother now, at this instant. She sees, she knows—for a while—“Yuhuu isst like(uh) dee hard(t)-Herz cut frumm-(ien), fromm, fuhrommm dee brusttt—dee breast—Vuhhhiiillllleeee—”

I have no real name, I am the best child in the world—the worst eater, heyeh, heyeh (she has an odd laugh)—she never saw such a terrible eater, such a good eater, such an
Engel-
angel.

Ann Marie often said I was the most normal person in the house; she says it now, gently, as she holds the spoon, as she averts her glance, as she tests my love and faith in her and in what she says and wants. I blink at her and push her hand away, and then I swallow what is in my mouth. This time it is easier to instruct her; will and affection have to have a velocity, have to be rehearsed, and then they go speeding along.

It works, I eat.

In her throat-clearing way (she’d been alone for two hours) she as if sobbed in her throat: this means she’s going to sing.

Ann Marie’s only usual daily surrender to large-scale feeling is vocal; she’s
A Good Singer, truly accomplished.
Part of what this means is that one has to watch one’s voice around her, because she shrivels and flinches at ill-pitched sounds as she does at non-Christian sentiment. She is forced to fight with others over this. And over other matters of
aesthetic honor—
she’s a prima donna if ever I saw one,
S.L. says—and so does Lila.

She gets up and she walks to the sink. Sort of humming to herself—it sounds like growling in a way. She walks with various rhythmic intonations of the hips and rump and of her back, elevatedly, sadly, happily, sort of, like a little girl. Now she skulks at the sink; now she has a swagger to her arms—she’s singing a song to herself, in her head, while she is rinsing the spoon to get rid of my, ah, bad stuff on it from a little spitting up I did just now, bits of half-vomit.

She returns, she is smiling to herself, she purses her lips, she does not look at me. She fills the spoon with applesauce and dips her head and angles it to one side—she is still singing in her head, and she is sad like a singer who’s out of practice, a ruined singer. This is nerves and self-pity, it is artistic of her.

She starts to sing out loud, looking at me over her cheeks as she tilts her head, she starts out superpianissimo and her eyes go out of focus. She is very self-pitying, but self-approval is quite near the surface; I like her self-approval a lot; it makes me laugh out loud with pleasure sometimes, her being conceited pleases me as water does when I’m thirsty.

She tests her might-and-power and her sense of key with a couple of louder notes after a little of the pianissimo, then sort of proceeds to do some notes mezza voce, while I let her maneuver the spoon of applesauce into my mouth. I am thrown partway into the air by a muscle spasm and she sharps an upward scooting note and sort of pushes it out. Twitch and agony.

She catches my arm, she presses me sturdily down into my chair and partly against her small but pillowy tit—she leans to one side to do this, she rarely is physical except in a very tender, slow, fingertip way, I think chaste but powerfully potent—we touch each other gingerly, usually. Racked with the aftereffect of spasm, I am suffocated in her flesh. Her tit. She is kind, firm, undramatic, and self-involved: she’s getting onto the outer rush of the slowly rushing melody, as into a kind of saddle. Melody encourages her to push suddenly into being expressive; but it’s too soon, her voice isn’t set.

I have tears running down my face from the vomiting spasms, and I have the taste of bile in my mouth, and the spoon with applesauce in it is wavering near. I feel sickness in me, but shallowly, like a silted pond with a queasy bottom and a lot of gripping weeds. I tremble in the noise. I am touched by the sounds and by the other circumstances of the
moment, but the sounds lure me, not into, but away from, maelstroms—“they should call them
femalestroms,
” S.L. used to say whenever he could, whenever the word came up—usually on radio, maybe only there. Listening is good for me. Our privacy, her intentness, these stir my lower body. When Momma hums to me off key, a melody with mistakes in it,
Blow blow western wind
with “Greensleeves” mixed in, she says,
Don’t tell anyone I sing, don’t tell anyone I sing to you; they’ll all laugh at us and you. People know I can’t sing, so just watch out going around telling everyone that what you appreciate about me is that I sing pretty songs in a sweet voice to you.
She minds not being expert. Ann Marie makes a shrill crescendo. A crescendo is a silence stood on end. A yell but much, much, much more willful.

Focused. She straightens out the sound until it is more music than hysteria. Ann Marie is a high alto. I can smell the cinnamon on the applesauce, I can smell it through the rain of sounds. She is at the point of singing more seriously, of attempting to. This music is in celebration of me and my heroisms today. It is for me but it’s for God, too, and the world, which is God’s in her view; and of course a lot of it, really a lot of it, is for herself.

She is singing. I scrunch down and squint. I have a headache, and my backside and chest and arms and legs are bruised; and my mouth and throat and stomach are sore and fouled somewhat. But Ann Marie’s music is concerned with having been sad and then having had a triumph, a triumph in the world of fact, I think; I think the song refers back to that. It’s not happening now in the song. I don’t like the sad parts; I like only the soft, happy parts; the triumph parts are too high and loud; and then I want to scream and howl like her. If I did, I would be an accompanying and enragingly inept echo.…

She eyes me at the edges of her vision: she is never unaware of me; she is indirect or somewhat distant but she never goes entirely away as Momma does. She knows I prefer lullabies to arias and hymns, but she often ignores that because it makes her sad—maybe it bores her. Anyway, in states of the profoundest nervousness, sometimes even when deep in panic, in justified panic, I can become dignified when I hear in music the evidence that it is kindly meant.

It’s like that now. It’s as if Ann M.’s fat arms are now partly a habitation of sounds while her warm-up music—the first hymn—clatters around in forecourts of anticipated dreaminess or nervousness in me. A push of tense energy in her voice makes me jump sideways in
my chair, but she pushes me down, she holds me in the chair while she brings the spoonful of applesauce near me; and she considers pausing to say something but she shakes her head; her eyes are uplifted oddly; she only glances at me from up there; and she sings, she sort of sings, she sings on; and I take a tiny, really tiny, bit of the applesauce; and I shudder and get nauseated only to a little extent.

I am in her protection and I hear about the God who protects her; I am a hero, not a bad child; at any rate, I am not a stubborn one—she means something like that in the way she looks at me. I am vomit-stained and teary-eyed, and salt tears—some of it is from the sweats of nausea—sting my eyes and bring rainbows to my lashes.

I remember how her arms felt, the fat messages of being in them. I am instructed by this woman at this moment in the somewhat tough tenderness available in
sounds,
in what is, after all, excited and exalted speech, somewhat grotesque, and perhaps unnecessary; but necessary for me. Her nearness, the pressures of the smells and perspectiveless reality of her fuzzed, ample self near my eyes blur out the pretty much sotto-voce singing for a minute. She is feeding me the applesauce again; laboringly, cautiously, I take a truly small bit—but she smiles as if it were a good helping. I remain immobile for a moment, merely holding the food, testing the ground—I have been told Ann Marie is not pretty, but, of course, she is amazingly beautiful—like her voice. I pass through various planes of attention as she sings louder now—I do it to cover whatever spasms ensue when I swallow. She is urging me on to drama: go ahead,
pisher
—that’s not her vocabulary, that’s her mood, she got it from Lila. Her voice, her soul, are cresting and are in motion, a different species of chamois among screech peaks and chest notes. And she has backed away from me on her chair and she gestures in the air with the spoon—fat woman on a green kitchen chair by electric light at noon.

Little bits of applesauce fly off the spoon. Her hymn, its intervals, its darkness, flies off her mouth—the singing deforms her throat, her lips. Here’s her tongue being odd and sickening in her open mouth in sickening, fast tremors—she is seen from the accidental angle of me sitting here while she musically dings and buh-dums along. The soft fuzzed movement of her cheek is insanely actual and persistent in its trembling, in what are actual, resonant patterns of the noise. She sings carefully—she would never shout in my ear; she’s steady in a lot of ways. She’s steady out there in the uncertain world and its erratic veerings. It’s real.

“ ‘
DUHOOO GOOOODDTTT
—blah, blah—devil bad(t)—’ ” or something. Maybe it’s a local hymn, this one.

S.L. says she is “a fiend about goodness.” He says she is “a punisher.”

She is teaching me to be
good (das ist richtig)
and to not be
bad;
badness has categories starting with toilet stuff and naughtiness and then mounting to hauteur and ill grace, and other manifestations of pride toward good people; then came
THE TERRIBLE, THE I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT IT
(in a heavy accent: I don’t really mean this as a joke; I mean it was a strain for her to talk about anything that wasn’t easy or a cliché). And beyond that lay treachery and those follies that are the same to her as treachery. And so on.

Lila says, “A lot of women won’t think about what’s good and what’s bad, but Ann Marie and I are alike in that, we’re like one person there.”

Spiritual honor involves service and cleanliness; Ann Marie and I are a community of “ordinary” righteousness. I like this very much. And I believe in it and its goodness.

Momma will separate us on the grounds of “It’s now or never; they’ll never get away from each other if I don’t do something soon. I don’t want him to be a little
goy
—if he lives: he looks strong but you never can tell—and it’s not good for her—”

And so on.

Ann Marie pauses and says,” —
ein kleines Kussel für einen kleinen Engel—”

Her short kiss is a burning moth on the top of my head. Then she exercises her throat with large breaths for more than a minute. She has a certain look of sarcasm which has to do with the throat—perhaps with Lutheran American choir singers and choirmasters who do not understand good vocal production. Who do not perhaps understand God, either.

America is full of prophets—Ann Marie is homesick for Alsace on Sundays. Everyone says she is somewhat crazy. I breathe sweetly—comically—at her, alongside her. She is awesomely present. I feel a kind of pale wind coming from the arcs of attention of her face. Of her eyes.

She sings a line and looks off into the air. And she breathes some more; she listens to how she sounded a second ago.
“Nein, non,
no—” Which I sometimes heard as “I don’t know”: mostly I heard with considerable acuity but without knowing what to do with what I heard. She is rational in spite of being crazy. She tries the note again, and stops and breathes.
“Ja,
yes,
oui,
” she says.

Yes-I-like-it, no-I-don
’t, yes I believe (I do), no I don’t (I don’t want to). This is my holiest state—the being very clear, very clearly defined, a simple creature of
yes or no:
it is for being with grownups.

She sees me in my yes state. I see her give up on her throat—she is satisfied with her throat for the moment. We look at each other on two slants and with an overlap of haphazard directness—as I said earlier, we cannot look at each other easily—right now, she begins to bark with German laughter. She averts herself—face and torso. She bends over slightly. Usually, her laughter is decent, sociable—a mere uncontrollable bubble beneath a controlled surface. Now it erupts and is crazy for a moment—
American.

She is an awful—awesome, gaping, yawning—
chaos of amusement,
she is a hurtling and burning body—a bonfire, an asteroid pausing—of a marvelous amusement of an anarchic kind, a beauty: she is about to become very grave—but first she is hauled, gaspingly, into American laughter, into girlish uproar because she laughed a moment ago—at my dwarfishness, in part, my vomiting and so on. I cannot manage the beauty of the meaning involved, her confidence that I will live, her self-praise and faith, her mockery, her boredom.…