See Now Then Page 4

  And so it was that one day, out of the blue, now, to be exact, Mr. Sweet said to her, you have said horrible things to me and to Heracles and to Persephone and to the other people that have not been yet born of you and me. On hearing that, Mrs. Sweet cried and cried, not wanting to believe that she was the kind of Mrs. Sweet who could say things that were not kind and sweet and she grew silent. On seeing her deep, black felt coat, her natural skin it was, for Mrs. Sweet by this time could from time to time be herself, Mr. Sweet wished her dead but she was so alive, mending the holes in the socks properly, filling them up sometimes, with patterns he did not like, patterns he so hated; she was so alive, when she walked down the stairs, after mending the socks, her shoulders held up and back, straight, as if they had never known burden and weight of any kind at all, no, not at all.

  You have said such horrible things to me, said Mr. Sweet to Mrs. Sweet as she walked in the door of their house, the very one in which Shirley Jackson had lived, and these words were new to Mrs. Sweet’s ears for she was just then returning from the synagogue with a Sweet’s kind of wisdom to share with him. The rabbi had told Mrs. Sweet of a biblical interpretation. The rabbi had said that in a vision it was revealed that all the bricks made by the slaves who had built ancient Egyptian civilization held a baby within them. Inside each brick was a full baby, and the baby cried out. Inside each brick, a perfect baby was curled up, lying there and not dead, not alive, Mrs. Sweet pondered, as she mended the socks, upstairs, on another floor from the studio, and as she mended the socks, she did not think of what was imprisoned in each stitch, each stitch being a small thing in itself that would make up a whole. I shall be a deathbed Catholic, Mr. Sweet said to her, and with such hatred, thought Mrs. Sweet then, but whether directed toward the baby who lay inside that ancient brick or a priest, she could not tell. I shall be a deathbed Catholic, and as the world turned, continuing in its mysterious way, mysterious to any human being trying to understand her place in it (that would be Mrs. Sweet), his place in it (that would be Mr. Sweet), not yet Heracles (he was still a boy), not yet Persephone (she was still a girl), and Mrs. Sweet turned those words over and over again in her mind.

  Mr. Sweet did not hate the rabbi and did not hate Catholics, so thought Mrs. Sweet to herself. Mr. Sweet does not hate the rabbi and does not hate Catholics but he does hate me, is not what Mrs. Sweet thought to herself. Her chin sagged down to the place just beneath her breasts and then came back up to its natural setting, which at her age was at the same level as her collar bones. How wearying was Mr. Sweet and his outbursts and making things of them, thought Mrs. Sweet, but then again, no one did that anymore, no one, Meg and Rob—just for instance—considered the outbursts, the ever-changing moods, the volatile emotions, of their companions wearying. Heracles asked his mother, this would be Mrs. Sweet, to make him a meal, breakfast, dinner, or something in between, and she took offense and they quarreled over this, the result was a great calm, silence even, and the calm and silence were filled up with many words.

  Hear then the young Heracles, still innocent of the notions of honor and glory: Dad, he said, do you want to go bowling? But Mr. Sweet could see the bowling alley, it had in it people who had eaten more than they should and this very thing was a badge of honor, and they spoke loudly and would die of diseases that were curable, they would never die of natural causes, but what would that be, for to die is natural. But in time will come a collection of events saturated with feelings and smells and the way someone remembered them and the way something, anything, felt like, and the sounds and someone experiencing the relation between sound and time and even space—oh, oh! Oh, oh, said Mr. Sweet, do we have to, do we have to, and he could see all the people in the bowling alley, throwing bowling balls with accuracy and finding satisfaction in that, and throwing bowling balls in a carefree manner and finding equal satisfaction in that, and he hated those people, for none of them knew of adagios and B flats and symphonies and boogie-woogie and all that, they only knew of the joy of the wooden ball knocking down wooden pins in the lanes. Dad, do you want to go bowling, said Heracles to Mr. Sweet and Mr. Sweet said, yes, bowl you out of existence, but Heracles skipped away to the car, an old Volkswagen Rabbit in which they would drive to the bowling alley, and did not hear his father say those words. Just before they entered the bowling alley, Mr. Sweet fell and broke the bone in the smallest finger of his right hand and so for a short time was unable to play on the pianoforte a melody written by a German man in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Mrs. Sweet stood still. She loved them both so much, the young Heracles, her husband Mr. Sweet dressed up in the brown corduroy suit which hugged his body so closely, he looked like one of the earliest mammals.

  Mrs. Sweet was the mother of Heracles and this was as natural and certain as the daily turning of the earth itself. Mrs. Sweet loved the young Heracles, she loved him so and paid special attention to all his needs and indulged him in all his many amusing whims: wanting to see the machines that remove snow—snowplows—at rest in the municipal garage where they were stored when their giant blades were not pushing aside the high drifts of snow. How Heracles loved to see that, miles and miles of road covered with snow and the snowplows clearing this away, making a path through it. So too he loved to see tall buildings being assembled with machinery groaning so loudly that he could not hear Mrs. Sweet telling him how much she loved him. And he loved to put on only warm clothes and Mrs. Sweet would cause the sun to shine and make his clothes warm and, if not that, place them in the clothes dryer and warm them up. Heracles liked his clothes warm when he put them on and Mrs. Sweet would make them so. But it was Heracles who was natural to Mrs. Sweet not the other way around. Heracles regarded Mrs. Sweet with disdain and this was correct, for the weak should never be in awe of the strong.

  She fretted and worried and became vexed as she thought of his life as he would live it. What if Heracles wandered out of the yard in pursuit of one of those balls, be it golf ball, basketball, baseball, football, he playfully and violently made sail through the air? The yard of the Shirley Jackson house had a border. That border was the seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. But no matter the season, no matter the weather, Heracles played with those balls, Mrs. Sweet mended and knitted those socks, Mr. Sweet lay down on a couch in the dark studio.

  Heracles now bends down to pick up his shy Myrmidon, a gift he received in his Happy Meal that Mrs. Sweet had bought for him at McDonald’s. The shy Myrmidons, tiny figures in blue and green and red plastic, were shy; they clasped their shields to their breasts and held their spears aloft, always ready to strike out and inflict pain, imaginary death. When Heracles was four and five and six, he used to line them up against each other on the stairs just outside his room, battlefields, and these plastic figurines would demolish figments, brave figments, over and over again, and then would rest so weary were they from the fighting, and then an unsuspecting and innocent Mr. Sweet would step on their abandoned form and sometimes almost break his neck tumbling down the stairs from that encounter. Oh shit, he would say and then look quickly around, his eyes darting here and there quickly, as if controlled by a mechanical contraption, the little bastard, the little shit. But his mother loved Heracles and took him to McDonald’s to buy his Happy Meals, even when she was unhappy and did not know that she was so, happiness being the sphere of Heracles and his father and her daughter the beautiful Persephone and the shy Myrmidons, made of plastic or not, and any everything else as it came up in the Shirley Jackson house. Heracles then bends down to pick up a shy Myrmidon, Then being the same as Now, Then from time to time, becoming Now.

  The shy Myrmidons were sometimes lined up, set up in formations, ready to do battle with and triumph over a set of adversaries, whom Heracles could not see but neither could the shy Myrmidons and so it all went in this way, a way that would please Heracles now, then, then or now, being one and the same burden or pleasure. At other times the shy Myrmidons were separated from each other, scattered here and there, on the
floor of the room Heracles slept in all by himself; in the bin of the dirty clothes and then rescued from the wash cycle of the washing machine by Mrs. Sweet; on the stairs where Mr. Sweet was walking down just after he got out of bed on a beautiful morning, slipped, and broke his vertebra. The vertebra healed but Mr. Sweet himself did not. Heracles said, sorry dad, as he always did, and to say sorry was common to him, as if it were oxygen. Sagging into, sorry dad, and sagging into everything that was now, which would eventually become Then, to all that Heracles had strong feelings but the strong feelings would be dealt with then, not now, never now.

  But the many shy Myrmidons, the result of many trips to the McDonald’s restaurants to purchase many Happy Meals, were lined up and they did go into battle with some imaginary foes and they triumphed of course, again and again, they triumphed of course, and the imaginary battlefield was covered with blood, sheer blood, so much of it, covering everything; so Heracles thought, so he said to himself, so he imagined, also. The shy Myrmidons rule, is another thing he said, or imagined. And then he fell asleep. Wake up, wake up, his sister shouted at him, for he did have a sister and she had curly hair. Wake up, his sister shouted at him, a snake with nine heads is lying next to you in your crib. And the very young Heracles then turned over into somersault, and facing the nine-headed snake directly stuck out his tongue at all those heads; without making too much of an effort he tore off their heads and threw them over his shoulder, all nine of them, and they landed on the floor of Mrs. Sweet’s newly cleaned kitchen. Oh god, she said to herself, that kid is always up to something, what a mess he has made now. And she picked up the nine snake heads and put them in a bag, wiped up the floor clean, and she asked Mr. Sweet to please come and put out the garbage.

  But Mr. Sweet was in his studio above the garage, where he always liked to be, it was not a funeral parlor, it’s only that he was in mourning and conducting a funeral for his life, the one he had never led, and Mrs. Sweet’s calling him interrupted this mourning, she was always interrupting, his life or his death, she was always interrupting. The studio was dark, then, now, but not completely, everything could be seen clearly but as a shadow of itself. How Mr. Sweet liked that, everything a shadow of itself. But there was that voice of Mrs. Sweet, not the shadow of a voice, she was not capable of that, a whisper, conveying her deepest feelings with a glance, or just stopping her breathing outright, just stop, stop, stop, right now. Mr. Sweet, she would say at the top of her voice, her voice sounding louder than a town crier’s, louder than a warning of impending disaster, she was so loud, Mrs. Sweet was so loud. Mr. Sweet, can you please take the garbage out? Sl-aap. Sl-aap, came the sound of his feet that were snug in a pair of flannel slippers as he dragged them across the floor and his rage was so great that it almost brought the now-dead nine-headed snake back to life. In any case his rage was such that it caused his chest to rip open and his heart exploded into pieces but Mrs. Sweet, so used to mending socks, applied her skills to this task and soon had Mr. Sweet all back together, his heart in one piece inside his stitched-back-together chest.

  That little jerk almost killed me again, said Mr. Sweet to himself, and it’s not the last time, he said again to himself, and he was reminded of that time, not so long ago then, he was coming down the stairs and Heracles was going up the same stairs and they met in the middle and by accident collided and by accident Heracles, to steady himself from this collision, grabbed Mr. Sweet’s entire testicles and threw them away and he threw them with such force that they landed all the way in the Atlantic Ocean, which was Then and is so Now hundreds of miles away. The testicles then fell into that great body of water but did not produce typhoons or tidal waves or hurricanes or volcanic eruptions or unexpected landslides of unbelievable proportions or anything at all noteworthy; they only fell and fell quietly into the deepest part of that body of water and were never heard from again.

  Oh, the silence that descended on the household, the Sweet household, as it lived in the Shirley Jackson house: on poor Heracles, who paused for a very long time at the top of those stairs; on his sister as she curled up in her bed and went to sleep like a single bean seed planted into the rich soil of a treasured vegetable garden; Mr. Sweet removed his fingers from the strings of the lyre; on the dear Mrs. Sweet, who froze over her mending, her knitting, the darning needle in her hand, the knitting needles in her hands just about to pierce the heel of some garment, just about to make complete some garment. And then gathering up herself, surveying what lay in front of her, Mrs. Sweet sorted among the many pairs of socks she had been mending over and over again and removing a pair, she fashioned a new set of organs for her beloved Mr. Sweet, trying and succeeding in making them look identical to the complete set of testicles that had belonged to him and had been destroyed accidentally by his son, the young Heracles. And when Mr. Sweet fell into a sweet sleep of despair after not knowing what to do regarding his lost testicles, Mrs. Sweet sewed the mended socks into their place, the heels of the socks imitating that vulnerable sac of liquid and solid matter that had been Mr. Sweet’s testicles.

  By then, oh yes then, the beautiful brown hands of the beautiful and dear Mrs. Sweet had turned an unhappy white, all bony and dry. The rest of her remained beautiful brown, a brown that glistened and shone, a brown so unique to her, no other Mrs. Sweet could ever be brown in that way, so glistening, so shiny, so glowing, making her sometimes seem as if she were a secret form of communication, a point of light colliding with the tip of her ear might signify something, might be a signal that enormous changes should be set in motion; or the morning light, briefly coming through the window that was just above the kitchen sink, and for a moment landed on the flat point that was the tip of Mrs. Sweet’s flat nose, as she stood there drawing water to make breakfast coffee; the light then would cause such a flash that it could have been taken as a warning against impending cataclysms. But the unhappy whiteness of the bony and dry hands was of no interest to Mrs. Sweet, they blended so well with the worn socks that had to be constantly mended. So Mrs. Sweet went on from then to now and back again.

  Then, the time came, out of the blue, when Mr. Sweet fell upon his anger, for he had to face an unavoidable fact, Heracles had grown half a foot in one year, and if he did not stop doing that right now he would soon be much bigger than Mr. Sweet. How Mr. Sweet raged quietly in the sunless studio above the garage. To commemorate these feelings, his loneliness, his solitude, his everlasting bereavement, Mr. Sweet wrote a fugue for an orchestra made up of one hundred lyres. “There,” he said to Mrs. Sweet presenting to her the score in its entirety, one hundred pages long, “isn’t that original, isn’t that something no one has ever done before.” And Mrs. Sweet, so dear and so sweet she was, knew and so did not have to be told, that she knew nothing at all about music and wondered to herself, where would she find, within the vicinity of the Shirley Jackson house, one hundred musicians who specialized in playing the lyre. The lyre! As she sat at the desk Donald had made for her, a green grasshopper found its way into her sanctuary and she immediately wished it to be a turtle, but it did not become so, and it rubbed its hind legs together, and she winced at the resulting screech. Screech!

  The pages and pages of the score for Mr. Sweet’s fugue were so heavy they caused Mrs. Sweet to bend over under their weight. What to do? What should she do? Mrs. Sweet scoured the surrounding area of villages and hamlets, looking inside their churches and synagogues and homeless shelters, and then sought advice from heads of households and homeless wanderers until, after years and years, she gathered together one hundred distinguished musicians who specialized in playing the lyre. They assembled and made a crowd on the small green area that was just off the house in which Shirley Jackson had lived for a time. But then Mr. Sweet came down with a cold and also his shoulders froze and his throat was red and sore and his feet fell flat and a great fear of open spaces overcame him.

  The shy Myrmidons were lined up side by side, their plastic yellow hair flowing in the same direction as their plast
ic green tunics, away from their bodies, giving them a look of never-ending and prompt motion. Across from them were the legions of plastic men wearing turtle shells and bearing swords ready to strike the shy Myrmidons. Heracles had gotten the legions of plastic men who wore turtle shells and carried swords as a bonus with his Happy Meals too and again he never ate the meals themselves, only he so liked the things that came with them: shy Myrmidons, men wearing turtle shells, or sometimes a cape draped over their shoulders, horses with wings, birds with men’s feet. The shy Myrmidons now attacked the legions of men wearing the turtle shell and there was blood everywhere mixed up with bones and shell and other kinds of bodily matter, and amid all the imaginary cries and shrieks of imaginary suffering, there was the sound of Mr. Sweet revising and rewriting parts of his fugue, the sweet notes becoming bitter, the bitter notes becoming more so. Standing high above the blood, the bones, and the other kinds of bodily matter (for he was so tall, the young Heracles), the young Heracles spun around on the ball of one foot, the other foot perfectly crooked in midair to lend him balance, and he laughed a big and loud laugh that rippled all across the valley and came to a stop on the side of the mountain that rose above this same valley and came back toward Heracles and his home in the old Shirley Jackson house but not before touching down lightly on the Jewish graveyard where his ancient ancestors were buried and the golf course and Powers Market and the Paper Mill Bridge.