was afraid of cows, for no reason at all, only that they were cows and had horns, so she was afraid of them and to walk by a pasture where these animals were fenced in and tethered to iron stakes driven into the ground was impossible for her to do: plunge ahead, put one foot in front of the other, straighten your back and your shoulders and everything else that is likely to slump, buck up and go forward, and in this way, every obstacle, be it physical or only imagined, falls face down in obeisance and in absolute defeat, for to plunge ahead and buck up will always conquer adversity, so Mrs. Sweet’s mother had said to her when she was a child, thin in body and soul, and this caused her mother much pain and great shame, for her child—the young Mrs. Sweet—needed to have drummed into her very being the clichéd words of the victorious.
And so: plunge ahead, buck up, aim for a triumphant outcome, death being superior to failure, death is sometimes a triumph, and all this made up the amniotic fluid in which Mrs. Sweet lived when she was a child: in this way Mrs. Sweet learned to drive a car, learned to love the stark realities of her life with Mr. Sweet (he never loved her, not then, not now, she accepted it, now then and now again), took out a loan from the bank to buy the Shirley Jackson house, the house in which they lived, and it was a nice house, with views of mountains and waterfalls and meadows of flowers native to the New England landscape, and farms that cultivated food especially delicious to animals who would then be slaughtered and eaten by someone quite familiar to the slaughtered animals, friends of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their children: the young Heracles and the hidden Persephone; in the far distance, Mrs. Sweet could see the beautiful Mrs. Burley—her long yellow hair in a braid cascading silently down her back and coming to rest just below her shoulder blades—a young cheese-maker milking her cows and her goats, and from this milk she would make some rare cheese and delicious yogurt that Mrs. Sweet would purchase and the rest of her family would hate: Mr. Sweet, because he hated everything about Mrs. Sweet, especially her enthusiasms and these were: growing species of rare flowers from seeds she had gone hunting for in temperate Asia, cooking, and knitting, especially that infernal knitting. Oh Mom! Oh Mom! That would be the sound of young Heracles. And the love and contempt and indifference that came toward Mrs. Sweet from her beloved Heracles seemed at once to be as natural as a sweetly cool breeze that will unexpectedly change the mood of a group of people justifiably angry, or a group of people whose every need and expectation is satisfied and still they search for happiness! By that time (then, now, and then again), Mrs. Sweet had buried her past—in the cement that composes memory, even though she knew quite well that cement deteriorates, falls apart, and reveals eventually whatever it was meant to conceal.
Plunge ahead, buck up, and Mrs. Sweet did just that, as she gathered up Mr. Sweet’s dropped clothes and the soiled bath towels and the sheets and the children’s clothes, blouses from Wet Seal for Persephone and trousers from somewhere else she could not pronounce, T-shirts for young Heracles bought at a store called Manhattan, though it was located in a city far from the actual place known as Manhattan, and all the articles of clothing and dry goods that a seemingly prosperous American family might use. Mrs. Sweet washed all the clothing and other such things in the washing machine (known to her now, but unknown to her then, when she was that easily defeated child) and dried them in a clothes-drying machine and then folded the towels and other such things, and she got out the ironing board and ironed all of Mr. Sweet’s shirts and trousers too, for she loved him so, and wanted him to appear to everyone who glimpsed him for the first time as if he had just stepped out of a display in the
And so: plunge ahead, buck up, aim for a triumphant outcome, death being superior to failure, death is sometimes a triumph, and all this made up the amniotic fluid in which Mrs. Sweet lived when she was a child: in this way Mrs. Sweet learned to drive a car, learned to love the stark realities of her life with Mr. Sweet (he never loved her, not then, not now, she accepted it, now then and now again), took out a loan from the bank to buy the Shirley Jackson house, the house in which they lived, and it was a nice house, with views of mountains and waterfalls and meadows of flowers native to the New England landscape, and farms that cultivated food especially delicious to animals who would then be slaughtered and eaten by someone quite familiar to the slaughtered animals, friends of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their children: the young Heracles and the hidden Persephone; in the far distance, Mrs. Sweet could see the beautiful Mrs. Burley—her long yellow hair in a braid cascading silently down her back and coming to rest just below her shoulder blades—a young cheese-maker milking her cows and her goats, and from this milk she would make some rare cheese and delicious yogurt that Mrs. Sweet would purchase and the rest of her family would hate: Mr. Sweet, because he hated everything about Mrs. Sweet, especially her enthusiasms and these were: growing species of rare flowers from seeds she had gone hunting for in temperate Asia, cooking, and knitting, especially that infernal knitting. Oh Mom! Oh Mom! That would be the sound of young Heracles. And the love and contempt and indifference that came toward Mrs. Sweet from her beloved Heracles seemed at once to be as natural as a sweetly cool breeze that will unexpectedly change the mood of a group of people justifiably angry, or a group of people whose every need and expectation is satisfied and still they search for happiness! By that time (then, now, and then again), Mrs. Sweet had buried her past—in the cement that composes memory, even though she knew quite well that cement deteriorates, falls apart, and reveals eventually whatever it was meant to conceal.
Plunge ahead, buck up, and Mrs. Sweet did just that, as she gathered up Mr. Sweet’s dropped clothes and the soiled bath towels and the sheets and the children’s clothes, blouses from Wet Seal for Persephone and trousers from somewhere else she could not pronounce, T-shirts for young Heracles bought at a store called Manhattan, though it was located in a city far from the actual place known as Manhattan, and all the articles of clothing and dry goods that a seemingly prosperous American family might use. Mrs. Sweet washed all the clothing and other such things in the washing machine (known to her now, but unknown to her then, when she was that easily defeated child) and dried them in a clothes-drying machine and then folded the towels and other such things, and she got out the ironing board and ironed all of Mr. Sweet’s shirts and trousers too, for she loved him so, and wanted him to appear to everyone who glimpsed him for the first time as if he had just stepped out of a display in the
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