It Will End with Us (2 page)

Watching her in the mirror while she brushes with long vigorous strokes that I have to strain against to keep my head from being jerked backwards.

Feeling it still, when I think about it, in the muscles of my neck, remembering it there.

She stops in mid-stroke, hovering the brush above my head. My hair makes a crackling noise and floats up to it. “Electricity,” she says.

I remember “You Live Better Electrically” in large italic letters on the back of a magazine beneath a picture of a young woman in a tiny ruffled apron smiling down at a gleaming white electric cook-stove on which someone has drawn a big red valentine heart, in lipstick we are supposed to think.

Lila, and Mama when she was in the kitchen, wore long white bib aprons with pockets.

I remember calling the burners on an electric stove
eyes
. Everyone I knew called them that when I was a child, while almost no one does now. Even people who have never left the South have stopped calling them eyes. I stopped without really meaning to, it was just that one day I began to say
burner
instead.

Thinking about that this morning, at the stove waiting for the kettle to boil.

The mirror had a wooden frame of carved acanthus leaves. I remember knowing that it was very old and had belonged to my grandmother. Several of the leaves were chipped or broken off and there were black spots and speckles in the glass.

The dresser lamps, one at each end, had tasseled shades and tall fluted bases of blue-tinted glass. I remember Mama telling me that years of sunlight falling through the large windows on either side of the dresser had tinted the glass that pale blue.

I was an adult before I learned that this was not true.

The windows had white muslin curtains that lifted and floated in the slightest breeze, like ghosts, I remember thinking then, the same kind of curtains I have on my windows here.

No image remains of my grandmother. A fox-fur stole is the only bit of enduring figment I am able to attach to the word
grandmother
. This matching pair of fox pelts complete with glass-eyed heads and bushy tails must have produced on me an impression so dazzling it has completely obliterated the face of the woman around whose neck they once dangled, and what floats above them now is a visage-less oval, like the featureless face of a certain type of department store mannequin.

I remember a framed reproduction of
Whistler’s Mother
hanging on a wall in my mother’s bedroom above a blanket chest that smelled of mothballs when you opened it.

I remember thinking the severe-looking seated figure in black was a picture of my grandmother, and being disappointed when I found out it wasn’t.

I remember always knowing that mothballs were poisonous.

Now that I am at my desk again for more time than it takes to write a postcard, I am fond of mornings in particular, especially when the sky is clear and the white of the building across the way is splashed with sunlight, splashing back onto my face.

Writing on typing paper in pencil. A little something, even if only a sketch.

Resolving to be wary of the false objectivity of words, having learned from my failures, hauling something to the surface and having words batter it beyond recognition.

The desk stood beneath a much larger window at Spring Hope in a downstairs room we called the library.

Spring Hope was the only house I have ever been in that had a room called a library.

With the door closed I barely hear the television in the kitchen. With the window open, as it is now, I have the sound of a marching band practicing somewhere far off, birds singing, and the usual noise of traffic and people from the avenue at the end of a narrow passageway three stories below.

The subdued murmur or rumble is quite pleasant, even reassuring at times, being the sound of busy people going hither and thither on the errands of life, as I think of it sometimes.

A busy, busy world that I have never been quite entirely a part of.

The window has not been fitted with bars. Obviously no one, meaning none of the people who constructed this building, expected someone to jump out of it, though I might in fact jump out of it.

Having considered jumping from here, and from other windows in places I inhabited in the past, and from rooftops, as well, on the two occasions I climbed up on one of those.

It is amazing that I have reached the age I have with all four limbs, not to mention other even more vital segments, reasonably intact.

Without including here the so-called normal and expected alterations to my person that are usually grouped under the rubric
ravages of time
.

I once wrote an entire book that I called
A History of My Suicides
.

It was a work of fiction, of course.

I am quite old, it feels to me now, older than my mother was when she died.

Her last years spent in another room with this desk, a larger room with tall windows and muslin curtains.

I am quite like her in appearance, I believe, more so as I age, becoming gaunt, as she was.

Calling it a desk gives a wrong impression, I am sure, summoning images of a squarish, practical sort of item. It is actually a delicate Chippendale desk, rather like a small table, with elegantly curved spindly legs and a pair of shallow drawers fitted with ormolu pulls hanging from the jaws of escutcheon lions. It was my mother’s desk and it is the only piece of furniture I have from Spring Hope.

I haven’t used the desk for writing before. It is too rickety to type on and for many years typing was the only manner of transcribing thoughts and images that I felt suitable to the fluid and rapid progression of those thoughts and images across
the clearing in my mind that I, following what I believe is standard usage among philosophers, mean to indicate with the word
consciousness
.

Only since living here have I used it for writing—not because I think writing in longhand will make a difference, though I do think it might make a difference, but because it was my mother’s desk and sitting at it I feel that I am sitting in for her, so to speak.

Writing at the desk I sometimes get the feeling that I
am
my mother.

I have no idea what the sentence I just wrote means.

I remember my mother reading to me from “The Waste Land”: “Darling, it doesn’t matter that you don’t understand what it means so long as you can
feel
what it means.”

We were seated in white wicker armchairs on a side porch at Spring Hope when she said that.

The house had two porches on that side, one above the other, and wisteria vines climbed the columns of the first porch and hung drooping from the banisters on the second.

I don’t remember that from when I first knew the porch.

From that time I remember only the green-tinted air on the vine-darkened lower porch. Sunlight penetrated the leaves and cast trembling patterns on the brick floor. I remember ants coming out of a crack between the bricks.

I don’t remember when I began to know that there were two porches, that the vine would produce clusters of blue flowers in spring, that it was called wisteria.

I remember the fragrance from the flowers made me dizzy and I was afraid to put my nose close because of bees, but I don’t remember the precise moment when those things became so.

Later I learned there was a word in another language for the color of the air on the porch behind the wall of wisteria—
verdâtre
—and now the memory of the air is colored by that word, as if the color of the word had bled on it.

I remember (much later) my mother’s collection of lavender dresses.

I have (an imaginary) painting of my imagined mother sitting in a white chair, a wooden white-painted kitchen chair this time, not one of the wicker porch chairs, in the yard at Spring Hope, wearing a lavender dress, in front of a wall of blossoming wisteria that reaches all the way to the top of the frame.

She is sitting up very straight, feet together, hands folded in her lap, the way she did in fact sit often.

I want to say that my mother sat primly, often.

Putting my eyes close to the canvas, so to call it, I see that she is smiling faintly, the way she smiled when downcast, or “in the dumps,” as we liked to put it, wanting to minimize or even belittle, when one of us—where by “us” I mean one of her children, not Lila or Papa—would say something we thought cheering or comical or, I suppose, even endearing, not exactly to comfort her so much as to entice her back from whatever place she had wandered off into.

I want to say that in this picture her mind is
elsewhere
and that she is smiling
distantly
.

The painting is called
Portrait of the Artist’s Mother with Wisteria
, I think.

And then I think of hysteria, of course.

She dressed in lavender every day and for every occasion except funerals.

People must have thought this predilection for lavender was wildly eccentric, I imagine now, though I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning it.

By the time I was old enough to understand what was being said she had become just one more odd thing that people had grown used to, I suppose.

The white chair, the one my mother is sitting on in the picture, was in the kitchen until it broke, and then it was leaning on three legs against the back wall of the chicken house, where the paint curled off it and termites chewed up the feet.

I remember (later) dragging the chair over to the wire incinerator so Verdell could throw it in.

Baudelaire and Mallarmé were crazy about Poe.

Baudelaire and Mallarmé were great writers, supposedly, but they were not very good readers, it seems to me.

Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud all sit together in a little drawer in a corner of my mind, as “French poets I have read a little of.”

James McNeill Whistler is also in that drawer, as a friend of Mallarmé’s, even though he was not a French poet.

James McNeill Whistler sits with Claude Monet and Michelangelo in another little drawer as well, this one labeled “Painters my mother had books about.”

In talking of these people I am of course referring to the memory images of them that I have carried
with me from childhood—images and figments that include not just pictures, but words, smells, and so forth—and not to the actual historical persons about whom I could, were I so inclined, find accurate information in an encyclopedia.

The figments and images are not information about anything except the furniture of my memory, and were I to learn tomorrow that Whistler and Mallarmé were not friends, had never encountered each other even once, they would continue to sit together in the same little drawer.

Though I am in fact quite certain that they—meaning now the actual historical persons—really were fond of each other.

I remember thinking Whistler was a funny name for a painter.

None of us thought it funny that Lila’s last name was White.

Why is human the name of a race?

I am a member of the human race. I am a member of the National Audubon Society.

If you pronounce Audubon’s name in the correct way it sounds funny.

Audubon changed his first name from Jean-Jacques to John James so as not to sound funny, presumably.

I became a member of the human race in 1940.

I became a member of the National Audubon Society in 1951 or 1952, on my birthday.

It was the birthday after the one on which I became a member of the National Geographic Society.

My parents thought of it as nourishing the mind.

The National Audubon Society was not founded by John James Audubon, I found out later, sadly.

Lila’s husband was named Alvin Junior.

I don’t pay dues to remain a member of the human race.

Standing at the living room window, I watch Maria walk away down the street, a sturdy diminutive woman rendered dwarfish by my height above her, going off with quick, determined steps, a large black handbag cradled in the crook of an arm, a broken strap dangling. A beetle-like shadow creeps at her feet.