46
PARTISAN REVIEW
clear-but surprising-that she is this person.
The various doublenesses of experiencing this, of being hurt–
and knowing it-make my heart beat in earnest.
Nonie kicked me again-in the stomach. I sat down in a bubble of
asphyxiation.
Momma will say,
'T
m not going
to
take sides! I can't defend
him-I have other things to do-he's the boy-he's got to learn to live
with her-let him learn
to
take life as it comes."
She will, however, blackmail Nonie and regard her coldly, even
with disgust.
Nonie
decides
to laugh-you can see her face meeting in commit–
tee and coming
to
a decision-at my airlessness. When she laughs,
although I have partly blacked out and can't breathe, I throw myself at
her. Suddenly the mop handle-she holds it in one hand-is against
my chest: then she uses two hands on the mop handle and thrusts me
back. When she then thrusts the mop handle and hits me in the chest,
it is almost in curiosity, or emphasis, an experiment, a particular kind
of joke: he's-a-baby; it's a form of tidiness, of cleaning up-intellec–
tually, perhaps-as of making things coincide geometrically.
Her tidiness and joking give me a sense of rage and dismissal, her
dismissal from my childish consciousness: she is no longer real: she is
an
enemy.
The acceptable justification, acceptable to her, is
he's spoded
and
he was bothering me.
Oh ha-ha, look what I am doing-then
a look of seriousness on
her face-and then, in earnest, but superior:
he's such a pest.
She was convinced, morally, that I ought not offer her any diffi–
cuIty, ever.
She hit me lightly on the chest and then a little harder. Small
lumps, knobs of being bumped, like thickened mosquito bites,
formed: they did not engulf my consciousness but made me blink,
surprised. She hit me harder, she drove the stick harder perhaps as an
experiment in correcting my facial expression, my attitude, in making
my affection more correct: she meant to put an end for once and for all
to
her being horrified by me.
It
was like that.
When one is in pain of a sort-not ovetwhelmed, only partly
maddened by it-having had the wind knocked out of one, being hit
