Norman Rush - Mating

I interspersed my ablutions with periods of gazing at Tsau. I rinsed my face and hands, which felt insufficient, then began sponging myself inside my shirt, which was no better. And so step by step, out in the blazing open, I disrobed and patted this lovely water all over myself. My feet were in unspeakable shape. I loved something about being naked in this place. It was done in contempt of the Kalahari and was a way of saying to it Go back to what you were doing before I interrupted the even tenor of your ways. It was adolescent. I think I also did a passage of invented eurhythmics whose real purpose was to wag my lower self in the face of the Kalahari, which I was letting myself feel fully as the organism that wants you to suffer that it truly is. There was also personal justice euphoria. I was rhetorically thinking How many women could have done this, women not supported by large male institutions or led by male guides? and so on. I had improvised and won through.

I put on new underpants and a new tee shirt, despite the Potemkin character of my toilette. I put on clean socks. My hair was irretrievable, just a wad on my head.

I was as restored as I could hope to be.

So it was time, wreck that I was, to impersonate myself as well as I could for Denoon and to get my husk of a donkey to Tsau and into the hands of others.

Wayposts, No Garlic

The path to Tsau was defined by wayposts. Every few hundred yards on alternate sides of the route, a wooden waypost about a yard high was set into the ground. On top of each post was a crossbar, from the ends of which hung clusters of dark-colored disks of glass threaded on fishline. You approached Tsau down a corridor of darling crepitation. I asked myself what the idea could possibly be. Again, all this represented human effort. The standards and crossbars were carved, not elaborately but carved just the same, spiral channels gouged into them, for example. Was the idea simply to go out and interior decorate the howling waste for fun? The wayposts were spaced irregularly, so that no purpose of measurement seemed served.

The wayposts I found depressing until I realized why, and then I was even more depressed. I realized they had ominous associations for me because, miniature though they were, the wayposts were homologs of the crosses and gibbets set up by characters like centurions to warn travelers arriving at a conquered city that the reigning power was cruel and rebellion not a thing tolerated, as in decline of the Roman Empire and rise of Christ movies. From this follows another perfect example of how marginal my state of mind had gotten in the desert. I suffered an attack of anguish over the amount of time I had wasted in movies as a girl. Getting into movies unaccompanied had been one of the few benefits of being tall for my age. But I thought Wouldn’t I be calmer, and wouldn’t I have less prefabricated imagery inundating me, and wouldn’t I have somewhat less constant hubbub going on behind the arrases lining my mind if I hadn’t gone running manically to the movies as a sop to my preadolescent miseries, as huge as. they were? I could have taken out more records from the library instead, for example, and lost myself in music and at the same time developed a more systematic knowledge of the great composers, which would also have had the virtue of being free.

In the next breath it was an entirely new anxiety: I had the conviction, derived from nowhere, that there would be no garlic in Tsau. I felt I had to be able to look forward to garlic, by which I meant fresh garlic, not garlic powder or salt. I do inordinately love that herb. My mother abjured it for us because, she claimed, it didn’t agree with her. But truly it was because the poor she knew best, Italians, ate and smelled of garlic. We might be poor but we would never be accused of smelling of garlic. People would have to divine that we were poor via some other brilliant deduction, like putting together the rents in our garments and my mother’s missing incisor. Personal liberation for me was also incidentally culinary liberation, in which the great central discovery was the glory of garlic.

Never say I am not mine own social worker. My liberal self now gently tried to lead me to entertain the idea that my garlic urge was homeostasis speaking, my body crying out for phosphorus, say. But then my true self said that if I wanted phosphorus it wasn’t garlic I wanted, it was watercress, and that marching fixedly toward Tsau as if the main point of reaching it was to get a giant helping of boeuf en daube was silly. Denoon was absurd on liberals and had a sulk I ultimately detonated him out of after I told him his aphorism for liberalism — id est To alarm and soothe in the same moment of policy — was a fake and groundless. I think probably we should all be liberals. When things were disintegrating between us, and I regret this now, I even said I will give you a thousand dollars if you show me why you shouldn’t be defined as a liberal, given what we have definitively established as your political baseline. In any case my liberal incubus was now telling me that, la la la, maybe Tsau would be the place, like a spa, where I could stop being operated upon by the buried cultural mechanisms of my adolescence and/or absurd cravings like this one for garlic. I and my rough beast staggered toward Tsau. Meantime the chiming and jinking continued, the accompaniment.

I still, today, fault myself in the matter of Denoon’s vitromania, which I was just now beginning to endure the fruits of, all unknowing. Nelson adored glass. Blowing it, casting it, it didn’t matter: he loved it. If I had pressed something home on this subject it might have had a clarifying effect. This was an example of something I could have done more with. I don’t know why I didn’t, unless it was because I heard the keystone vitromania stories at a time when I was still grateful just to be receiving this crumb or that from the table of his mind, or because it was a time when he was feeling fragile in some other area and I refrained on vitromania to be considerate. His vitromania was central, somehow.

What is clearly the core incident involving glass goes thusly. Denoon is a boy, and his father has lately fallen, through alcohol abuse, from the high estate of working in an advertising agency to the low estate of being a salesman for a printing ink and industrial resins firm. The family is living south of San Francisco, on the peninsula. I think Nelson is fairly happy in school, and the house they’re renting abuts some nice ex-farmland or an abandoned orchard in the shadow of the Coast Range. I think their place is near Belmont.

Two conditions conjoin. Nelson discovers a bottle dump out in the orchard nearby. Secondly he inherits a binful of corks, since his father has backslid from an attempt to control his drinking through oenophilia and home winemaking. Nelson’s father was a devious drinker, a master drunk Nelson called him, who was at this point managing to spirit his empty fifths out into the woods and into this dump. I forget whether or not this might have been a preexisting dump with a trove of empty bottles already present when Nelson’s father began using it. I think this may have been the case.

Nelson is eleven or twelve and is only in the most elliptical way aware of the extent of his father’s drinking. He is on the verge of discovering how intense the war over his father’s drinking is, but as yet there are only rumors of war, supposedly.

He saw no secret or unconscious impulse working beneath the surface of what he did. He was certain. His project was aesthetic, accidental. Looking back, he could plainly see the part his project played in proving that the agreement between his parents about his father’s habit was a fiction. The agreement in force was that his father would drink set amounts at set times only. Obviously his father must have been drinking volumes of liquor in secret and using the permitted small amounts to mask his excesses. But Nelson’s proof that the ultimate project was innocent was the ad hoc way he had come to undertake it in the first place.