Norman Rush - Mating

Whatever else there was in it, there was an impulse against waste. The child is father to the man. His project revealed him ab ovo as the demon recycler and reuser he would become in adulthood. It occurs to me that one source of strain in our relationship was his aversion to the use of innocent clichés on my part, as in The child is father to the man. He subtly communicated that he wished people would avoid them and talk more individually and aesthetically, like the Irish or his father. When I said that Irish rural speech was in fact full of clichés, but clichés he was unfamiliar with, it annoyed him. I also argued that there is an aesthetic involved in the self-conscious use of clichés, which was the case in my case. He only nominally agreed with me, and I could tell he continued not to like clichés to figure in my presentation of self. I gather his father was a very elegant speaker, even inter pocula. A consequence of his attitude was that I stuffed my inner discourse with clichés from time to time, because he was making me feel deprived of something innocent, and that I got him a few times to engage in a game where we would talk solely in clichés, with the loser being the one who ran out of clichés not previously employed first. I always won, but he never played the game as committedly as I did. The project began with discarded bottles and unemployed corks. I felt like pointing out the interesting fact that a child will take the most monstrous of parents and pathetically ferret out and seize on the one or two things that might be considered conceivably admirable, like freefloating eloquence. But to the bottles and corks he added another waste commodity, crepe paper.

The family lives near a high school. In the football season when home games are being played, cars and buses arrive wreathed in crepe paper in the visiting school’s colors. The home team is weak and usually loses. The custom is for the winners to drive through downtown Belmont afterward blaring their horns and lavishly strewing their crepe paper decor into the streets to demonstrate victory and contempt. He resents this for Belmont and decides that a response to it would be to go out and strip the parked cars and buses of their crepe paper while the game is still going on. He organizes teams of junior high boys soon to be in Belmont High to do this, including Peter, his brother.

This is risky, but he continues. He becomes the repository for the expropriated crepe paper, collects it in one of the outbuildings at his place, and then incidentally notices that when rained on, crepe paper gives up its color. So he begins soaking crepe paper in jugs to get different colors. In his mind is the pharmacy his mother goes to, with two giant apothecary jars in the window filled with lovely colored water. I noticed that he seemed to have been forever being dragged along by his mother when she went to druggists and doctors, which was frequently. This caught my interest. Why was he always dragooned? The astounding, to me, answer was that his mother was irresistible to doctors. The family lore, which he as a young boy was included in, was that his mother was so attractive that doctors would lose their ethics and propose things to her. Apparently she was quite beautiful, in a meek and delicate way. She felt better if her son was there, even if only in the waiting room. And she would also take him with her into the examining room if the consultation was for something modest like her chronic rhinitis. I said to him Haven’t you ever pursued the notion that with these doctor visits you were getting a specialized indoctrination in the notion that female beauty was powerful and dangerous? He hadn’t. He was always sorry for his mother, was as far as he had pursued it.

Nelson’s construct of his father was of a person using every ounce of his considerable intellect and force to maintain an outwardly middleclass productive exterior while secretly steadily raising the crossbar on the hurdles to accomplishing this by sinking deeper into the grip of alcohol. I granted that his father’s trajectory was not a straight-line descent, but I was hardly able to credit that at twelve Nelson was still so steeped in innocence as he protested. At that age I knew everything that was happening to me in the pathetic matrix I was in. Why did the beginning of wisdom, which Nelson precipitated with his bottle project, come so late?

Nelson idly started a bottle collection, or more precisely a tinted water collection. He took empty bottles from his father’s bottle dump, soaked the labels off, filled them with colored water of different hues created by soaking crepe paper in different permutations, and then corked them. All this industry was carried out in the depths of the property, not secretly, he said, but privately. At first it was desultory, but he began to work more concentratedly when he saw what the next phase of his project was going to be. These were not only liquor bottles, but any bottle with a mouth he could fit a cork into, such as fruit juice or soft drink bottles. It was a calumny that the bottle structure he made was composed entirely of liquor bottles, and one he would resent forever.

First there was simply an assemblage of bottles of colored water, an array he obscurely liked to look at. Then he began organizing them according to size and tint, variously. Then enter some stocks or samples of industrial resin made nugatory by his father’s reascending yet again into advertising. Definitely here was something else that shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste. What should be done with them, then? One thing several of the resins could do was bond glass solidly to glass. Out of this discovery came the objet d’art, a construction of bottles like a wedding cake, in tiers. It was open at the back in such a manner that you could install a sparkler or candles or a flashlight, or ultimately a Coleman lantern, into the heart of it, and sit back and enjoy the coruscations or whatever the ineffable effects were of lighting the thing up from inside. Nelson was even thinking ahead and considering introducing a phonograph turntable so that light sources could be made to revolve, producing even more formidable effects. This would be the ultimate. He was already saving his allowance to buy extension cords, of which many would be required. But the ultimate phase of his project was never to be.

I wish I knew why I keep worrying the question of Nelson’s innocence in this. Partly it may be a kind of mental body language against his having to go through what finally transpired. I considered it a Götterdämmerung for him, even if he didn’t. In a way I would have preferred his project to have been a conscious assault on his injurious parents. That would at least have made it slightly more bearable to relive. So I fixated on data like Nelson’s mentioning that one thing he had disliked about his father from an early age was the man being a precisian about which libations go into which kinds of glasses, id est champagne only into champagne flutes, brandy into snifters, and so on, which had led to the necessity of maintaining what seemed like an infinite repertory of drinkware, in which one glass was only minutely different from the next but which when one type of glass ran out through breakage or mislaying would produce violent complaints and blaming scenes involving his mother. I established that this was something he had feelings on long before he created his, as he called them, bottlements. He admitted these were painful scenes. He admitted that, in retrospect, possibly there was some disparity in having a collection of wineglasses appropriate for a marquis and a family car whose running board trailed in the road and gave off sparks. But his father had no interest in cars, was all. The bottle project was a disjunct thing. It was the art impulse, the automatic elaboration of available objects into more and more complex and recognizably aesthetic structures tout court. I asked him what it had been like when he broke wineglasses from time to time, as he must have, doing the dishes. Terrible, he said, until he got expert at handling them and it ceased to happen.