Robert Coover - The Brunist Day of Wrath

“If the girl’s who I think she is,” Sally says, “it should be the perfect match. She also has crisp chest hairs.” That cracks Stacy up, but even at full throttle her laughter’s of a wistful sort, her green eyes still melancholy. “Ever read Madame Bovary?”

“No. Is it good?”

“Well, it’s about a woman who reads too many romance novels.”

“I probably just said something stupid. It’s a famous novel, right? I’m not much of a reader, I guess. Mostly I read stock reports and spreadsheets. When I read books like this, I tend to read them like financial statements, in terms of risks, margins, potential returns. Emotions as intangibles, collateral, character as intrinsic value. Winning the love game is knowing when to hazard your resources, take the plunge, make the crucial investment decision. Some win. Most lose.”

“Is that how you play it, Stacy?”

“Me? No, I’m a spendthrift gambler. After a drink or two I’ll bet the house on the next roll.”

“Well, you can always pull back and reload. The emotions aren’t finite.”

“Yes, they are,” she says sadly, and looks away.

Sally believes she’s just heard something true. Straight out of one of those ladies’ novels perhaps, but nonetheless true. But she doesn’t understand it. “I guess I don’t know much about the love game. I mostly throw snake eyes,” she says. “Or the money game either, for that matter. What little I have from allowances and carhopping and babysitting you guys have in an account there. Every month you give me a few pennies of interest, which doesn’t cover the resoling of my shoes from the walk to the bank and back. I suppose the bank is making a lot more than I am out of it.”

“Yes, it is. Come in and see me some time and we’ll see if we can’t work out something better. Come soon, though, while I’m still here.”

“Thanks. What’s in that account won’t last long enough to matter. But are you leaving town?”

She sighs. “I’m afraid I’ve already stayed too long. Oops,” she adds glancing at her watch. “I’ve stayed too long on my lunch break, too. Have to get back and save the bank, which according to my boss is the same thing as saving the world.”

“I’ll walk you there. I’m going that way.”

On this balmy mid-May early afternoon, after being buried all morning in an airless dead-paper morgue (more suffering, more love), that way was at first any which way, but now, sitting on a playground swing with her notebook on her lap, her Chronicle memorabilia on the swing next to her, Sally realizes, or discovers, or decides (who’s running this life?) that she’s on her way to the Royal Castle to visit the Dying Queen, as her mother has often asked her to do. She has not had to deal with a lot of death and has held back because she doesn’t know what to say to a dying person. Probably she’ll tell a lot of well-intentioned lies like everyone else. And how will she herself face such a moment when it’s her turn? Better not to think about it. Not on a day like this.

She doesn’t remember noticing the weather much as a kid, but this lush sexy day has reminded her of innumerable unspecific others, going all the way back to her childhood parks and playgrounds. Certain patches of sunshine. The smell and pale summery glow of a dusty sidewalk on which she was playing jacks, even the weedy grass growing in the cracks. The red dot on a spider. On a certain raggedy leaf. While she was squatting behind a bush. Because? Hide and seek? These memories, if they are memories, don’t arise by trying to think about them consciously but bubble up spontaneously out of the unconscious the way dreams do and may have just as little to do with the real world. Probably stored and cooked in the same curtained niches of the mind. She has the feeling these are the sorts of memories useful to writers. Vivid, but imprecise and totally unreliable composites of a possible past, not that literal past itself. She wanted to write down these thoughts, but there was nowhere to sit. At college she’d have found a bench somewhere where she could jot notes, have a smoke, read a page of something. This town has no benches. Then she passed this empty playground offering her a swing. What from this scene will sink into her memory bank to return, unbidden, years down the road? The coaltown cinders underfoot maybe. Remember when…when she could rock on a swing and write to the world and still believe it was something meaningful to do…

She pushes off and swings back and forth a few times, a cigarette bobbing in her lips, her notebook in her lap, but finds she doesn’t like it as she once did. She feels heavy, unbalanced. Her feet scrape the ground, even when tucked under. Didn’t used to. She remembers how the boys would wander nonchalantly in front of the swings, hoping to get a glimpse under girls’ skirts as they swung, thinking they were stealing something, not realizing that, for the girls, having their skirts fly up was fun, though you had to pretend you didn’t see the boys out there. Is nostalgia about the past or only the past self? Whatever, she feels little of it, wants to leave this place, does not expect to miss it.

Riding the Hood, a.k.a. Raggedy Red, steps out of the forest, a.k.a., the dark night of the soul, leaving mother, grandmother, wolf, and woodcutter behind. Let them duke it out with each other.

Soul. As a slapstick comedian? Soul clowns it up: pratfalls of the dead image. Soul and Body as a comic duo on the vaudeville circuit? The vaudeville circuit: a.k.a., the self.

Something Dreyer said: We possess nothing but selfhood and that is on loan, as it were; the whole point in life is to realize this self wholly in the world. (She agreed. They shook hands on this note.)

But what about the little girl who thought the forest was her friend and was devoured by wolves? The Hood will remember her and show others how to avoid her fate. Thus, she too is an abuser of innocence.

History. Memory. Nostalgia for the dead past. Its illusions, falsifications. Documentations of the dead past. Their illusions, falsifications. Themes of the day. Here, it’s Tommy’s mother’s photo albums. What she has of the life she is leaving. Her own bonneted childhood accompanied by doting parents and relatives, her transitions through carefully costumed adolescence and young womanhood, her European travels, her young family. Never doing much of anything, really — just being. Some photos gone astray from their tiny black corner pockets like memory lapses, others torn asunder. A kind of editing going on. A paring down. When Sally asks to see the wedding photos, Mrs. Cavanaugh waves her frail hand dismissively, gazes about absently, as if the album might be hiding somewhere. There are some photos of when she and Tommy were little. Sometimes his brother and sister are in them too, as well as other children and their mothers — but she and Tommy are never far apart. There’s one picture of them in front of a bed of flowers holding hands. Two little kids, the girl taller than the boy. She doesn’t remember that, but she feels it now as if it were happening. In another, Tommy is bawling, holding his arms up to the photographer, she off to one side with a guilty half-smile on her face. What has she done to him? Bad girl.

She wasn’t sure what she’d say when she arrived, but what came out was, “I’m so sorry you’re so sick, Mrs. Cavanaugh.” Plain and from the heart. To which Mrs. Cavanaugh replied, her voice unfamiliarly harsh and gravelly: “The worst has been losing my hair, dear. I hate it. I’d rather have died sooner than to go through that awful treatment. And what good did it do? It made me awfully sick for a while and added at best a miserable month or two. Still, we do so desperately hate to give it up, don’t we?” She sighed, looked up at Sally, looked away again. “I try not to cry, but sometimes I cry.”