HAROLD BRODKEY
43
I would think the thing of being suited to give birth would go
along with an innate patience with, oh, physical explorations, curiosity
about pain, about courage and submission. And nothing middle class
approves of that ; being middle class consists of privileges, of being
spared pain . Maybe middle-class women become angry, impatient,
secretive, somewhat crazed because they are separated from pain and
effort and women must not be separated from pain and effort. Noth–
ing in middle-class men shows they have equally bloody dichotomies
and difficult fates and transformations in store for them (lower-class
men are the soldiers: but perhaps there will be no more war). Maybe
Nonie's mouth tasted of death, stank of dirt unaccountably: and so
she hungered to force dirt between my lips to see if I would choke on
the taste of burial , until I shared her fate with her and was a true
brother-or maybe she simply hated
things
or she wanted to see acted
out what filled her often, as in thunderstorms, that horror .
She always headed toward this in our games ; sooner or later, she
always
said
to
me , "Be brave-why aren ' t you brave?"
She thought of herself as a hero.
The grownups keep her occupied with shopping and horseback
and tennis and music lessons and carefully arranged afternoons with
Jewish girls from other suburbs in order to prevent Nonie expressing
herself in boredom, prevent her from becoming a duchess in an old,
bloody play.
She dug, with the twig, a fake stethoscope, into the soft flesh
between my legs, behind my balls.
I suddenly remember-I enter a continuum-of knowledge ,
urgent but without expression-sort of
Nonie-sometimes-does-bad–
things-and-this-is-a- time-when-she-is
not
to
be accepted, perhaps.
I have a limited repertoire ofwarlike things: I struggle to my feet,
in my wrappings, with my bared belly-or no: I rolled over, onto her
leg, or rather right next to it, partly on it, and pushed at her with my
mittened hands : she pushed my head back-my neck was bent-it
hurt : not a lot : but it drew nets, sieves of being maddened: I was
strained through a sieve and became a buzz, a hive of animus: I peed
on her leg .
She didn't know-she didn't notice; and then she merely stirred
because she didn't know; and then she suspected-and pushed me
away from her so sharpLy, I lost consciousness briefly-and she yelled,
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
