430
ALAN
FRIEDMAN
miracle. But something about Mother's eyes being closed, as though
upon her own private version of the deed, warned me and stopped
me.
I said nothing at all.
It was a habit of hers. She had large eyes, and she kept them
closed a lot of the time, when she was playing the piano, or when
she was just sitting, and under the taut lids you could see her
eyeballs moving. I felt she was never of this moment or in
this
room. And then the upper surfaces of her forearms were covered
with
fine black hair; I used to struggle when she hugged me, as though
I were being dragged backward in time against my will. Hugging
me,
she would tell me long stories of the slums in which she had lived
as
a girl until Daddy found her, of the nuns who gave cocoa and graham
crackers to the girls every Wednesday, of the pitiful dresses she
had had to wear. (She made lovely dresses for me, of taffeta and
embroidered cotton, with crinoline slips often, and little aprons,
of which I was very proud, partly because I thought they helped
hide my stout shape.) And we laughed regularly and immoderately
together whenever she told how she once spit from the third floor
landing of a great marble library staircase onto the glittering bald
pate of a gentleman in the lobby, because she admired its gleam
so.
At the "splat" of the hit, which sound she imitated, we shrieked.
There was a strange absence of logic in Mother, or the presence
of a personal anti-logic, which appealed to me when I was extremely
young, but which began to disturb me even by the time I was seven.
Once, I recall, she was washing the dishes with her eyes closed and
broke a plate; she walked across the room to where Sandy was quietly
reading, and slapped him hard, telling him he talked too much–
which was certainly true.
I pondered Mother a long while, and more as I grew older.
Father and Sandy trying with their arguments to sew up our daily
life with the threads of persuasion; Father trying with his law
practice to spin the affairs of men generally, and crime in particular,
into a cocoon of rules and consequences; and Mother,
with
her
eyes closed and a flick of her hand, destroying their webs. I have
always pretended (even to myself) to be of Father's and Sandy's
party, trying to trap life in the nets of my own reason and expres–
sion-especially in the poorer parts of my poetry, but also in talking
to friends, and even in thinking alone-but I see now that I have
