54
PARTISAN REVIEW
forehead: the eyebrow of a child is twitchy: the eyesocket, the eye are
quick to close, to squint. Disbelief-(Nonie is a floor, is not
human:
then finally anger and rage and hurt:
she hit
me)-continued, without
a seam, into vertigo, not a clean vertigo: one was at the edge of a fall
into crawling slime.
It could have been a mistaken notion of what the
air
had turned
into: a return to some earlier-in-childhood sense of severe or extreme
pain-a sense of the roughness and foreignness of the air, as after
birth, maybe. My comfort had been entirely destroyed.
Some children learn quite early to live as hawks, to circle and be
cold, to stride as best they can on their short legs.
Others have a more complicated relationship to pain-in-the–
world: they stride as a bluff, safe in their charm or in their hardness:
they are vulnerable then so that pain, destruction seem entirely
instructive.
I was already sufficiently old-four, I'd say-to resent and to be
reluctant to permit, the baby in me to reemerge: a certain casting back
in time, to an earlier self, was something I resisted as best I could.
Perhaps too I did it to taunt
her-to
resist the coercion of
the
floor.
I did not shrivel up, or scream-later, I learned, as a tactic, to yowl
at once, to overact, to suggest immediate death, that my death was at
hand.
But now I held the posture of pride, pride in a tableau: you-have–
not-broken-me: I-can-still-rebuke-you.
The stick entered the eyesocket, the shallow, childish cup of bone
around the soft eye. My mouth opened wide.
My scream (and perhaps what I looked like) immediately changed
the game, the atmosphere, the meaning: my scream tore Nonie open:
or shoved a scream out of her: what she yelled was, "YOU MADE ME
DO IT!"
She also yelled, "YOU WALKED INTO IT! YOU DID IT ON
PURPOSE!"
It
is possible that she was biologically geared to be a lookout for a
herd of animals, to see and be frightened and to shout, to change at
once; and I was geared to be a hunter, to receive blows and ignore
them while attacking game.
It
is, of course, hard to say.
