was gone.
Given that he was a stranger, his sudden brief appearance didn’t much matter to me. But the sight of my mother perched on the edge of the sofa as the two of them spoke—her jaw tightened, her eyes wide and unblinking, her body rigid as a post—quickly and quietly destroyed the illusion of her perpetual sameness, of her having always been my mother and nothing else. She suffered for alien reasons, caught up in times I could never reach. I’d understood that people put on various manners: the soldier’s perpetual joking; my teachers’ punitive zeal; even my father’s brusqueness, which suggested everything was an interruption, could seem an act. But my mother had always been actual life, not prejudice or adaptation. She was the way of knowing anything to begin with. Until that afternoon. Air raids hadn’t frightened her. She would shoo my brother and me into the reinforced room, get the little bag of food from the cupboard, and tell us to sit under the dining room table while she and my father sat in chairs nearby, only occasionally whispering to each other. Her voice didn’t change then. It simply became more efficient. But here was an elderly gentleman having tea on a Saturday morning in our sitting room who could make her very speech and body foreign to me.
We didn’t talk about his visit once he’d gone. I presume she told my father about it, but not in my presence. It would have happened eventually, the revelation of her partialness, that she might need something, that her need could be a burden, but it came so suddenly and so starkly. I forgave her everything I had ever blamed her for and tried to love her more without saying anything. She lives on her own now in a pleasant market town outside Southampton, in a comfortable little brick-house development that my brother found for her. To the children she is Granny with the good dark chocolates and the strict table manners. She will blame Margaret.
“You didn’t say if I should ask for the raise,” Alec says.
And in my children’s eyes, how long have I been partial? How long have I been a burden?
“Why not?” I say, but my words have no life to them, and he knows it.
His cake has arrived and is already gone. He scrapes at the last smudges of icing. “Mom said you were better.”
His straight brown hair falls at a slant across his brow. I could reach over the table now and touch the top of his downturned head. The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.
The little agony of stillness is ended by the appearance in the diner of a boy whose name I should know; he’s one of Alec’s friends—Scott or Greg or Peter. I’m facing the door so I see him first. He waves and comes over to our booth. Like most of Alec’s friends, he’s dressed in dark, secondhand clothing—a black suit jacket and paisley shirt, both several sizes too large. When they’re together they look like a group of young hobos. If it’s meant as some kind of class transvestism it doesn’t much work; the air of the costume gives it rather the opposite effect, of boy actors affecting a pose. He and Alec greet each other with elaborate nonchalance. Yet I notice Alec is blushing. Something about the moment is making him nervous. He trips over a question about whether Scott or Greg or Peter is getting together later with others, and the boy, who’s greeted me with an upward nod of the chin, as if he and I were convicts meeting in the yard, replies to Alec with what I think he means to be a sardonic comment, but which instead comes off as a mixture of daffy and cruel. It’s a reference I can’t follow, about someone being lame.
He perches on the banquette beside Alec, who looks most uncomfortable now. They’re like harlequins, the two of them, young and droopy-faced and strange. As a little boy Alec would wake me from my naps by climbing up on the bed and rocking back and forth until I grabbed him and pulled him down
Given that he was a stranger, his sudden brief appearance didn’t much matter to me. But the sight of my mother perched on the edge of the sofa as the two of them spoke—her jaw tightened, her eyes wide and unblinking, her body rigid as a post—quickly and quietly destroyed the illusion of her perpetual sameness, of her having always been my mother and nothing else. She suffered for alien reasons, caught up in times I could never reach. I’d understood that people put on various manners: the soldier’s perpetual joking; my teachers’ punitive zeal; even my father’s brusqueness, which suggested everything was an interruption, could seem an act. But my mother had always been actual life, not prejudice or adaptation. She was the way of knowing anything to begin with. Until that afternoon. Air raids hadn’t frightened her. She would shoo my brother and me into the reinforced room, get the little bag of food from the cupboard, and tell us to sit under the dining room table while she and my father sat in chairs nearby, only occasionally whispering to each other. Her voice didn’t change then. It simply became more efficient. But here was an elderly gentleman having tea on a Saturday morning in our sitting room who could make her very speech and body foreign to me.
We didn’t talk about his visit once he’d gone. I presume she told my father about it, but not in my presence. It would have happened eventually, the revelation of her partialness, that she might need something, that her need could be a burden, but it came so suddenly and so starkly. I forgave her everything I had ever blamed her for and tried to love her more without saying anything. She lives on her own now in a pleasant market town outside Southampton, in a comfortable little brick-house development that my brother found for her. To the children she is Granny with the good dark chocolates and the strict table manners. She will blame Margaret.
“You didn’t say if I should ask for the raise,” Alec says.
And in my children’s eyes, how long have I been partial? How long have I been a burden?
“Why not?” I say, but my words have no life to them, and he knows it.
His cake has arrived and is already gone. He scrapes at the last smudges of icing. “Mom said you were better.”
His straight brown hair falls at a slant across his brow. I could reach over the table now and touch the top of his downturned head. The beast is a projector too, every day throwing up before me pictures of what I’m incapable of.
The little agony of stillness is ended by the appearance in the diner of a boy whose name I should know; he’s one of Alec’s friends—Scott or Greg or Peter. I’m facing the door so I see him first. He waves and comes over to our booth. Like most of Alec’s friends, he’s dressed in dark, secondhand clothing—a black suit jacket and paisley shirt, both several sizes too large. When they’re together they look like a group of young hobos. If it’s meant as some kind of class transvestism it doesn’t much work; the air of the costume gives it rather the opposite effect, of boy actors affecting a pose. He and Alec greet each other with elaborate nonchalance. Yet I notice Alec is blushing. Something about the moment is making him nervous. He trips over a question about whether Scott or Greg or Peter is getting together later with others, and the boy, who’s greeted me with an upward nod of the chin, as if he and I were convicts meeting in the yard, replies to Alec with what I think he means to be a sardonic comment, but which instead comes off as a mixture of daffy and cruel. It’s a reference I can’t follow, about someone being lame.
He perches on the banquette beside Alec, who looks most uncomfortable now. They’re like harlequins, the two of them, young and droopy-faced and strange. As a little boy Alec would wake me from my naps by climbing up on the bed and rocking back and forth until I grabbed him and pulled him down
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