See Now Then (18 page)

Authors: Jamaica Kincaid

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: See Now Then

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Listen to this right now, Mr. Sweet was saying, I love you but I don’t love you in the way I love someone so superior to even myself, someone I shouldn’t be allowed to even speak to she is so wonderful and outside any realm I have ever known, and Mrs. Sweet heard all these words but couldn’t understand them really and could only see Mr. Sweet as he would one day be covered with small worms crawling and crawling though going only from his head to his toes and no further than that and then his whole body was like lacework, beautiful and useless, waiting to be turned into something, the bodice of a dress or the top border of curtains, something seen in passing and in the end annoying: listen, Mr. Sweet was saying, and now Mrs. Sweet turned into not stone but a mound of mud, and sorrow became her middle name if she possessed one but she did not then and not now, and she sank into her ancient landscape and that would be memory and that would be her mother and that landscape had a horizon and she longed again and again to see the end of it, to see the horizon and stand on it and see the thing it held or the nothing within it: my mother was very beautiful and I was so ashamed of this, I was so ashamed of my mother’s beauty.

“I used to be ashamed of the very day on which I was born, for it was the twenty-fifth of May, not the twenty-fourth, and on that day, the twenty-fourth of May, there was a fete on the grounds of the Moravian church, it was called a May Fair, and girls, beautiful girls whose features even then made no permanent impression, for they were subjects and their very being, their existence, depended on this event, the twenty-fourth of May; and the fete had a main event, which was the maypole and the dancing around it of those girls of unstable beauty and it was such an honor at that time, then and now, as the case may be, and they danced holding ribbons of red or white or blue, attached to the pole, and they went toward the pole and away from the pole and toward each other and away from each other and made a pattern around the pole so that the pole was covered with the blue and white and red ribbons; and then when I didn’t know I could love the clothes I was wearing, when I didn’t know that the way I appeared to other people was something to think about, that time then, when my mother had a friend who was a stevedore and he lived down at Points and my mother and I lived on Dickenson Bay Street in a house with two rooms, just the two of us, and we used to go and visit her friend the stevedore; he was a short man and thick and wide, like a figure I might see in an illustrated children’s book: a stevedore, and he lived in a house from which I could see the loco full of the product that had come from freshly harvested sugarcane going from the factory to the ships waiting to receive it and take it to England, which was far away, way, way beyond the horizon; and then my mother and the stevedore would be swallowed into his house, the house in which the stevedore lived, a darkness, and I was never allowed inside it; and when my mother and the stevedore disappeared into that house and left me alone, I played with my shadow, I imagined my shadow was a girl, and we played with each other and read to each other books we had written, and sometimes we were two girls in England, and we were in a garden with flowers but only flowers and that was enough, for flowers are the furniture of a garden wherever the garden may be, and the stevedore’s garden had only portulaca, though then I was told, how I can’t tell now, it was a rose that spread around. Then in the stevedore’s yard, where I was left alone while my mother disappeared with him into his house that was so dark inside that my mother never allowed me to enter, I would dance around on the spots where the portulaca, or so I call it now, grew and those spots were far apart and between that and watching the loco pass by and seeing the Points School where one day I would be a student and seeing the silhouette of Rat Island in the distance, I kept myself, my true self, though I did not know her then, together and all in one piece and so when my mother emerged from the stevedore’s house and took my hand and we walked back together to the house in which we lived and she carried a sack of brown sugar, the kind of brown sugar that was just granulated from molasses, the kind of sugar that was to be used every day, for on Sundays we used white sugar, but in any case my mother never allowed me to eat anything with sugar of any kind, except on special occasions. But what was a special occasion?

“Oh, and she was so beautiful, I was so ashamed to be seen with her; she had very long hair and she wore it rolled up and pinned to her head as if it were a kind of treasure and then I came to know that it was the way women in Guadeloupe and Martinique styled their hair and she also spoke patois and wore clothes that the other mothers didn’t wear, tight skirts with a split in the back starting at the hem and ending a third of the way up; and men looked at her and then stopped and talked to her and she never looked at them but then would stop and talk to them and walk on and everybody knew, she was my mother and I knew she was my mother and loved her and all of that: the stevedore, her hair, her clothes, her smell after I bathed her back in the galvanized bathtub full of water that she had perfumed with bush, her red lips, her cruelty to me, the way she left me aside when something new came up, something I didn’t know could exist: one day she fell in love with a man and they had children, three boys eventually, but before the first one was born, I understood, no not understood, for even now I don’t understand what Then was Now, even now I see then as translucent, as if it is all taking place on a pane of glass and sliding that way and just when it is about to disappear into nothing the pane of glass tilts this way, back into seeing Now and Then there as it all is just before it goes into another Then and Now, another Then and Now and seeing all of it only in a blink.”

* * *

“Things change,” Mr. Sweet was saying to Mrs. Sweet, “Things change!” But that was the harsh version, for he was in a state of rage, his voice was like a Wilkinson razor blade, newly emerged from that ironmonger’s factory, his arms jabbed at her but stopped short of making contact with the inconsolable mass of flesh, heaving with sorrow and then resting from that. “Things change, Sweetie, things change.” And he twitched his hips and shook his head vigorously, dancing to a music that was heard only by him, or so Mrs. Sweet said to herself on seeing him then, and then he began to hum out loud parts of
The Rite of Spring
,
The Sea
,
The Cat
,
The Spider’s Web
,
The Rat
,
The Dog
,
The Child’s Bed
, and after he was done with that he said to his wife, now shorn of her former dignity, Mrs. Sweet, and she was wearing a lovely brown dress made by Lilith, I never loved you, you know, I never loved you, not because you were unlovable, though really you are, no one could love you, not even me who knew nothing about love then but now I do and I see that I never loved you, for you are like walking into barbed wire in the dark, you are like an invitation to a tea party in an ant nest, you are like, you are like, I can’t any longer right now think of what you are like, so said Mr. Sweet to Mrs. Sweet, and just then, right then, she was so beside herself with grief and she wept and her tears watered the
Primula capitata
, which she had planted under the giant white pine tree and so her tears were most welcome by that delicate plant, native as it is to the moist regions of the Himalayas. And she wept and wept and Mr. Sweet spoke to her as she was bent over the parched primroses, themselves wilting and prostrate on the ground, suffering from the harsh conditions under which they were forcibly being cultivated, in the crotch of the roots of an evergreen native to Canada though they came from the Himalayan region of the world; and Mrs. Sweet wept and wept and wept some more, for Mr. Sweet said then to her, you are just crying because you know the children and I will never forgive or forget the terrible things you have said and done, and that made her die a death in which she was still alive, not dead at all, but still alive, and yet dead, for he showed her life as she had been living in it, the moment when the beautiful Persephone had to be put to bed at dusk but she resisted it always, for she wanted to be with her parents, they did things that were mysterious to her, and she would delay that moment when she would be placed in her crib, for she had not yet outgrown it, and the thickly woven cotton blanket would be drawn up and carefully arranged under her chin, for her arms were folded up into her body like a bird if you were baking it as a delicious dish to be served for dinner. Mrs. Sweet died and died and in this way she lived for a long time, dying over and over again, never coming to a rest, a state of not then, not to come, not to have been, only now, only die and die and die, and Mrs. Sweet died, she did die and never again wore the denim jodhpurs that had been given to her by her friend Rebecca who had seen them being worn by municipal workers in Japan when she was on a visit there.

Each day has twenty-four hours, each week has seven of those days, each year has fifty-two weeks, and it is so, and the age of the earth is made up of more than four billion years, of those years and weeks and days and hours, then, now and then again, forcibly enclosed in it, and it was and is and will be so, Mrs. Sweet said to herself over and over again, as if it were a song that been carried on the wind and she had heard it and taken it to heart, a song heard while walking along the banks of the Battenkill River for twenty-eight miles, and she stood still then, seeing in her mind’s eye the winding course the river would take ending with it emptying itself into the Hudson River some distance away from that place where the sea’s tides influence the river.

All that is to come will change the way right now is seen; right now is so certain, right now is forever; what is to come will make, distort, and even erase right now; right now will be replaced by another right now: and right now is all there is and all there is over and over again and no welling up of the fluids in the individual stomach, a universal metaphor for the unstableness of the whole human enterprise as it is experienced by the person making breakfast for the litter of domesticated mammals before her or him, and the boy and girl with Game Boy or Super Mario in hand, as the case may be, no matter how it is heard, no matter how it is felt, and it is such a disappointment, right now, for right now is always so incomplete, or so we feel, and that is a blessing, for it transforms then into what will come, all that will come, even though all that will come must contain right now and the unfathomable longing for the then, that time to come after the earth was Precambrian, Hadean, Proterozoic, Paleozoic, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Cretaceous, and Lower this and Lower that and then Upper that too, and then Cenozoic and rifting and volcanic, that time to come after the earth was itself, that time to come was the time that had been before, for beyond the earth’s boundaries, was all that had made it, was all that it had been and is and the future was the past and the past, which is then, it is always then, could be found in the periodic table and Mrs. Sweet looked up and saw that pinned to the doors of the pantry was a map illustrating the principles of that thing itself, the periodic table, the beautiful Persephone showed an interest in chemistry and her mother had purchased it and placed it there and then Mrs. Sweet looked out the window, through the panes of glass that separated and shielded her from all that lay outside the Shirley Jackson house, the house in which she lived with her children and her husband and she could see a landscape so different from the one in which she was formed: that paradise of persistent sunshine and pleasant weather, a paradise so complete it immediately rendered itself as hell; outside now there was spring and in it, on the banks of the river Paran and stretching out onto the flanks of the Taconic and the Green Mountain ranges, were large trees, some of them evergreen, some of them deciduous and right then in bud.