PARTISAN REVIEW
273
the flash of beauty, but it was all a merciful disguise for my sense
of deprivation of an excess of ozone, almost as if Mother had been
here, (she who
thinks
of herself, in her married past, as a circus
equestrienne, standing on two horses), and played backwards as in a
reflection it goes like this: When the shot blasted and I fully noticed
this, I felt bullheaded with an extremely extended field of vision and
it
so happened that at the extreme left and right of my eyes like
streamers, were the wooden sign of a basement coffee shop figuring a
blue parrot on white and the red eye on white of the parrot and
on my right, the stairs up to street level with an open door and the
evening sky exactly the same blue and a red collapsible chair and
white table the same reds and whites;
all
of it in bright light the
early May brightness of artificial illumination.
Some days later gain -
pian' pianO'
here -
in
increasing mist
- I was invited to the country by some dry, sentimental souls of the
one-track minded, half self-protective kind of the desperate stutter
and laugh, (he with little pauses in between), saintly in half-recalled
behavior. Their friendly treatment of me there brought to life several
feelings and attitudes I hadn't known since childhood and which
my dreams had been powerless to evoke. Especially a certain hostility
common in children and adolescents, which
seems
to be there only
to be conquered: by an aunt who bade me pick raspberries: the mere
mention made me obedient. It was important in this that the aunt
be somewhat eccentric, I thought, never having met one before–
and hence felt as a counterpart to the child. For here as I played a
little game with myself while waiting for time to drive back to town
again, momentarily alone in the house while the others did last
things in the garden, I realized something of the concentric nature
of a family, and its happiness - things I would maybe not have
noticed in grey and distant Ankarea with its unenglish bitterness, but
which are true there also. Sitting at the window I pretended I was a
heroine in a book for young women, something I had never willingly
read,' (but I
will
have to read this many times), and this
is
how
I caught the light indoors over my childhood just the way it was.
