See Now Then (7 page)

But the telephone did ring and Mr. Sweet answered it and it was someone from a utilities company—one of the many in the now-known world—someone from a company who supplied an essential component that kept the Sweet household a reasonably comfortable place in which to find yourself. Mr. Sweet gave reassuring answers, explaining the delays of payment in a way that never brought up the truth that the Sweets could not at that moment pay their bills, and he did it with such conviction and in any case what he was saying was believed, and this convincing falseness made him feel that he had gotten away with murder; not the murder of Mrs. Sweet or the young Heracles, because he only wished to kill them, not murder them.

And so that passed in the moment, the Sweets, Mr. and Mrs., with their respective positions regarding their young son, from very different perspectives, as the boy lay in his crib, clad in his little tunic that had been wrought with loving purpose by Mrs. Sweet, his tunic that was a shield from the natural elements from which a newborn child must be protected. But Mr. Sweet was much vexed, for bills and such everyday matters interfered with how he thought the world, you know, the everyday, should progress: for instance, when you, or anyone for that matter, turn on the light switch, the light, be it in the ceiling or a lamp on a table, will come on; when he wanted hot water for his coffee (he liked instant coffee, Maxwell House) he had only to turn on the stove and a brilliant flame would appear and make the water hot and then he would have his beverage and this is how he began each day; when he wanted to call his mother and father, who were at that time in the grave, he picked up the phone and dialed: who should pay for it all, who should pay for living itself, this was a question that so concerned Mrs. Sweet and why did Mr. Sweet not know her, not know who she really was, not know she was a virus, the cold that brought you low in summer.

I hate her, thought Mr. Sweet, but she billowed toward him, in a long white nightgown she had bought from the Laura Ashley store on Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues in New York City; the cost of this garment could have paid for a month’s worth of telephone calls to her relatives who lived far away, or a day’s worth of drugs that could keep a person who was dying of AIDS alive for weeks then, or the fee of the copyists who copied the complicated jumble of notes that Mr. Sweet said was music. That nightgown, so light in fabric, for it was woven from cotton grown in Egypt, so romantic in the imagination of the person who made it and who later died after falling down some stairs, could so easily be transformed into a noose, but how to get Mrs. Sweet to put her neck into it? Mr. Sweet came into the room, looked down at the baby Heracles, and kissed his wife. See Now Then, See Then Now, just to see anything at all, especially the present, was to always be inside the great world of disaster, catastrophe, and also joy and happiness, but these two latter are not accounted for in history, they were and are relegated to personal memory. And she looked at her son again lying in his baby bed and in no particular order and also all at once these thoughts and accompanying feelings overwhelmed her. The episiotomy, a necessary wound made by the doctor (Barbara was her name) in charge of the safe delivery of the young Heracles, caused Mrs. Sweet much pain, a pain that she had not imagined ever, but should have had a memory of it because that same gash had been made in her vagina when she was giving birth to the boy’s sister, but this kind of pain, this particular kind of pain, another person living comfortably inside you and then, after a while, forcing themselves out into the world, and in doing so tears apart your body, and you will love them more than anybody else will love them, such pain, so much of it, and sometimes it had a texture, rough, undulating, sharp, and stinging, intermittent, then flat and cold and constant.

The curtains were drawn and yet through them Mrs. Sweet could see that the light in the Yellow House, a house painted a yellow so clear and untinged with any other colors, a color yellow that Mrs. Sweet had once seen in Finland and Estonia, places not at all near the equator; in the Yellow House lived a family, a mother, a father, and six children and all those six children were so wonderfully well adjusted to life as it was, so well behaved, so polite, so kind (there were four girls and two boys and the boys have never been known to drown a hamster just to see what that would be like or cut off a cat’s whiskers and then let him be alone in the woods to see what that would be like), that Mrs. Sweet wished that her family—Mr. Sweet, Persephone, the young Heracles—would be just like the children of the family who lived in the Yellow House and their name was Arctic. Until she was thirteen years of age Mrs. Sweet wet her bed every night while she was asleep and it made her afraid to fall asleep even until now, this now, and it is why she counts an imaginary flock of sheep as she tries to fall asleep each night and fails and so swallows a capsule of Restoril. Every Halloween Mr. Arctic transformed himself into a very attractive woman, his legs free of hair and his underarms too, and that could be seen, for he wore panty hose and a dramatically sleeveless dress; and he wore a pair of shoes with very high heels, heels so high they made Mrs. Sweet laugh, she thought shoes in that shape were a form of amusement, that even when women wore them they were meant to make everybody who saw them laugh, not outright, not to themselves a secret, not altogether, only just say to themselves, here is a laugh. But that was Mr. Arctic, every Halloween, wearing a costume of a dress and a beautiful wig and earrings and bracelets and false pearls and stockings (fishnet sometimes, sheer flesh-colored or not sometimes); and sometimes when Mrs. Sweet saw him, for it happened year after year, a long time, and this time, year after year, a long time is five years, which to Mrs. Sweet was a forever; she said to herself: how does he do it? What does his wife think? Are his children, all six of them, four girls, two boys, pleased to see their father, so unusual in our small world confined and defined by the presence of the Shirley Jackson house, looking more like a beautiful woman than most beautiful women can manage, and asking of us all to find nothing in it except delight, delight, and more delight? And, each year after Mr. Arctic and Mr. Sweet had done taking the children trick-or-treating, Mrs. Sweet would sit with Mr. Arctic at the dining-room table and they would drink Cavalier rum from small glass tumblers.

Every morning is the next morning of the night before: and the night before is Now and Then at the same time is the morning after the night before: the young Heracles crying loudly, as if he meant to wake up the whole world, and Mrs. Sweet had to give him milk from those sacs attached to her chest and he drank from her as if he were the earth itself on which rain had not fallen for three or seven or ten years.

And all that while during the time of the birth and then infancy of the young Heracles Mr. Sweet had fallen asleep, ignoring his wife in her beautiful nightgown, sleeping through the faint cries of the baby, though any passerby might perceive this cry as coming from the throat of an army of murderous men, who meant to kill or be killed, he slept peaceably, in contentment, in a state of sleep that any scientist who has studied sleep would declare ideal, perfect, a state of sleep to be universally prescribed. And he slept through the nights, satisfied completely in the world of sleep, dreaming of a universe in which every conscious being was a triumph and all that they imagined themselves to be was all they would be; and there was harmony in matters of every kind: physical, emotional, mental; and in such a universe, Mrs. Sweet loved her husband so much until the end of time and time would never end. Next to her was his body, the size of a young Tudor prince, buried beneath white cotton sheets purchased from somewhere and a blanket and a duvet, all draped over him in such a way, he looked like a living and breathing sacred relic, a sarcophagus, lost to her world, the world in which she lived in the Shirley Jackson house and beyond, lost to the Arctics, and the Elwells, and the Jennings, whose mentally unstable son drowned their dog in urine he had collected from many sources, and the Pembrokes sending their workers to mow the lawn; and the Atlases, who lived in a house near the Walloomsac River; and the Woolmingtons, whom Mrs. Sweet loved, for just their sheer existence made her life a joy; the Josephs, who went hunting each hunting season and would return with a shot-dead deer and then after removing its skin would hang it up on the door of the barn, a display for communal adoration; and this scene of deer hunting admitted Homer Now and Then, then there were the two old ladies who sold newspapers, or so they said, but also sold a collection of magazines, with varying titles, devoted to motorbikes, and the illustrations to accompany the articles were many pictures of naked women, posed in positions that would make anyone want to have sex with them; and then there were the others, families who experienced happiness and despair, but right then, just then. At dawn Mrs. Sweet was up, out of bed, and looking around her and seeing nothing really, or seeing the bed in which she lay, her husband next to her, the sun about to pour too much of itself into the day, no cries of hunger or any other deep, essential need came from the newborn Heracles, the birds were singing, the bats, whose graceful sweepings about in the unknown and so therefore matterless air frightened Mrs. Sweet, were returning to wherever they concealed themselves during the day; a rumble from the engines of cars with passengers going to some destination that made up the world in which the Sweets and their acquaintances, or people they depended on, was very loud and then flew by like the sound coming from a wind instrument that was so elaborate, its base rested on the floor and the person playing it had to sit on a sturdy chair; Mrs. Sweet wanted to make a cup of coffee, but had been warned that an essential ingredient of that delicious beverage could harm a newborn’s development if it turned up in her breast milk, and so she made herself a cup of tea from fresh mint leaves she had gathered from an ineradicable patch of mint and let it steep in the water heated in a fragile electric water-heating pot she and Mr. Sweet had bought at KMart, and drank the tea when she felt it was good to do so.

Oh, what a morning it was, that first morning of Mrs. Sweet awaking before the baby Heracles with his angry cries, declaring his hunger, the discomfort of his wet diaper, the very aggravation of being new and in the world; the rays of sun were falling on the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, causing the innocent dew to evaporate; the sun, the dew, the little waterfall right next to the village’s firehouse, making a roar, though really it was an imitation of the roar of a real waterfall; the smell of some flower, faint, as it unfurled its petals for the first time: oh what a morning! A time for reflection, for remembering the past, that way of seeing Then Now: an afternoon in winter, the middle of February, and Mrs. Sweet was not Mrs. Sweet yet, though she and Mr. Sweet were married by then, she was still young and had a personality that was not yet Mrs. Sweet; she wore strange clothes, dresses that were fashionable years ago among housewives who lived in that area called the Great Plains and that they had made themselves from patterns they ordered and received through the post office. Mrs. Sweet would find these garments in stores named Enid’s, Harriet Love, stores that sold old clothes that were fashionable long ago, and other things too: a lamp, a chair, a desk, her typewriter, drinking-water glasses and coffee cups, cast-iron pots, a table with a top made of thickly layered white enamel that had been baked, and many other things, all useful and all had been used by other people who had been alive not so long ago, these things were secondhand, or thirdhand, numerous unknown hands had claimed them before—yes, all that Mrs. Sweet lived with in her Then, had a Then before her; now, she smiled, not to herself, she smiled openly, her fat and wide lips spreading across her face, and to see it would be to see a definition of gladness or a picture of happiness or a person enjoying herself completely; and an afternoon in a winter that had appeared unexpectedly to Mrs. Sweet in the early morning—Then, Now—made her remember the color of the sun’s light, as it shone down on the concrete walls of an empty building which she could see while sitting at her used desk, in her used chair, in front of the used typewriter and trying to see a Then—because there is always a Then to see Now—the light was a soft mauve (though she thought of mauve as a soft purple), like a semiprecious stone (amethyst), like a field of lavender (
L. officinalis
) that had not been harvested … and at the time, then, Mrs. Sweet dissolved in a sweet sadness, for she could not find any more similes for this light that fell on the wall of the empty building and she sat down and wrote a short story about her childhood and it took up no more than three pages, for just then she could only bear the memory of her childhood for that amount of time and space.

But that morning was just the beginning of that day, and after watching the whizzing by to their purposeful destinations of many of the people who made her life run smoothly (not less difficult), and after experiencing a moment of Then, Now (the memory of being young and living in New York, at 284 Hudson Street, just married to Mr. Sweet, being in love with him, and everything that he knew, because he so well understood the many theories, the theories that made up her Now). And then the adorable, shrieking, panic-causing, irritating cry of the young Heracles reached her ears, not in a winding motion but like the strike of a thunderbolt sent from a god, then came Mr. Sweet and he asked if she could make his breakfast of toast Chernobyl (he liked his toast burnt), a bowl of Cheerios with canned peaches, and a cup of instant Maxwell House coffee with creamless milk. The baby, said Mrs. Sweet to Mr. Sweet. The baby? he answered, and then he said, oh yes, poor Heracles, I had a dream about him last night, and Mrs. Sweet fled to the upstairs of the Shirley Jackson house and found the room in which lay the young Heracles in his little crib, and she picked him up and brought him to her bosom, where the overflowing sacs of milk sat. He drank from them with a ferociousness only possible in a fable, he drank from them as if the future of some great but not-yet-known civilization depended on this act, he drank as if he knew there was a Then and a Now, and a Now from which a Then could would come, time being completely beyond human understanding. And Mrs. Sweet was drained, exhausted, depleted, but how she loved the young Heracles as she looked down on him and he did not know that his life depended on her.