50
PARTISAN REVIEW
away, as if a telescope, wrong-ended, hid her: she was quaint with
distance:
my sister.
Her pain did not exist for me-nor did her plea–
sure. I did not care about it, I did not know it was there-her life, her
rights. She was a roughened blur, like an erasure where the paper grows
f4,rry and there is a yellowish oval and a hole where the light shows
through.
The bony fingers of winter air.
The smell of Nonie's navy blue schoolgirl coat. The smell of her
coat. Of her hair.
''I'm the good one-you're the pad one," she said as she hit
me-on the chest, with her stick.
But her face had a look of malice, meant to terrorize-look
and
fear me.
She is just a chzld
. . . .
How is she to avoid being enslaved?
She meant no harm. Yes, she did.
This is my first, uncertain knowledge of evil.
If I fell apart-and was guilty-and helpless.
There are fashions, standards, in crimes, in treatments.
Under the porch there was, as a form of anesthesia, a god's pres–
ence. She felt that too.
She will jab with the stick into my stomach hard enough that my
hands will float helplessly-and my head will loll-there is no air: she
has taken all the air, put it in a basket, put the basket behind her: I can
have no air ... Nonie says so.
Say that love animates her.
She said, "I have common sense."
Not on'this occasion-some other one, in a living room, in a car,
a movmg car.
She talks to keep it a world that she belongs in, that she is not
unsuitable for. The ego world of dreams extended into her waking life:
she was Baudelairean, Proustian.
If one established a this-is-bad-I-won't-feel-anything-I-won't–
cry-I'll-wait-until-it's-all-over (that is, I won't try to understand this
thing that's happening), it breaks the connection between you and
your tormentor: it ruins the game: everything your tormentor knows is
made into a pointless bludgeoning, a blundering craziness.
