Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“I just knew it.”

She countered her fear of patronage with a kind of smugness. Calmly helping my father and me to cauliflower, she said with a little warning laugh, “When you’ve got a home of your own, you can do what you like. But while you live in my house… I don’t see why your father and I should pander to one of your fads. It’s just another idea you’ve got into your head, like all the others.”

I cannot explain how her tone affected me. Perhaps it was because I was so uncertain of the validity of much that attracted me and that I believed in, and this small help that I wanted to give was one of the few things that had come so spontaneously and simply to me that there was no possibility that it was part of a pose or an attitude, something within the context of what I wanted to be rather than what I really was. To question it, to lump it with all the rest was like doubting my own reality. That the questioning should come from my mother was painful and frightening. It was as if she had said: Have I really got a child? Is she there? And in the end, no authority could speak above hers.

She had no idea of the enormous power to hurt that she retained. I could not have told her, I could not have explained. She would only have laughed again, missing the point: Of course, my opinion matters so much to you!

I felt sick with the impossibility of getting her, anyone, to understand what she did to me. I sat there trembling with a frustration like suppressed desire. And my voice went on, irrelevant and out of control. “You let Anna have her cousin here while she was looking for work.”

“Look, I’ve said no and that’s the finish of it.”

“You haven’t really thought about it at all,” I said, sitting back slowly from my plate. “You’re simply terrified of anything I ask you, no matter what it is, if it’s something I ask, you must say no on principle. Because it’s bound to be wicked, crackpot, not respectable. You wouldn’t really mind having the girl here at all. But I ask it, so, no, no — it must be suspect.”

My mother said, noticing my agitation: “That’s right, you were always good at turning on the drama.”

“Look,” said my father, “must we argue at the table?” Of course, he was thinking of one of the tenets of his latest theory: Digestion is impaired by emotion.

My mother climbed slowly and mightily into her anger like a knight putting on his vestments before mounting for battle. “Of course, you let her do as she likes. And grumble to me afterward. Well I won’t have it. I’ve had enough. I don’t know her friends and their ways and I don’t want to. Nobody’s good enough for my daughter here. How do you think it looks, her keeping herself aloof from the Mine, never wanting to do the things other young people do? I’m ashamed, always making excuses—” She stopped, breathing hard at us. But once it was released, all that she had not said for months, all the preserve of her cold silences, her purposeful ignoring, could not be checked.

It pushed up against her throat and she had to say it; it seized her and poured out of her with something of the uncontrolled violence of the emotional babble that comes out of a person under gas. “What do you think people think of you? The girls you went to school with, you won’t look at. Of course not. They’re content with their jobs and the decent people they’ve known since they were children. And I have to have Mrs. Tatchett saying to me, What’s wrong with Basil? — Yes, I’m telling you, she came to me the other day and asked me straight out, and I admire her for it. What’s wrong with my Basil, she said, that Helen stayed at home rather than go to the Halloween dance with him and she never came to the cocktail party we had for his graduation? After all, he goes to the University the same as she does, why doesn’t she consider him good enough?”

“Good enough,” I flashed out. “That’s all they ever think of, the petty snobs. The only reason why one should be friendly with anyone is because they’re good enough.”

My mother turned on me. “No, you like to roll in the mud. Anything so long as it’s not what any other reasonable person likes. You’d rather be seen running about with the son of a Jew from the native stores, that’s much nicer, someone brought up among all the dirt and the kaffirs. He must be a finer person, of course, than anyone decently brought up by people of our own standing.”

A kind of thrill of getting to grips with real issues went through me. “Ah, I thought that would come. You’ve had that on your chest a long time. And you’ve always pretended to be so polite to Joel. And all the time you’re as bigoted as the rest. Worried because all the old crows of the Mine saw your daughter out with a Jew. Well, you can tell them to mind their own damn business, I’ll be friendly with whom I choose. And I’m not interested in their standards or who they think would be suitable for me. You can tell them.”

“We’ve got nothing against the boy,” said my father. “No one’s saying anything against the boy. But why him, rather than anyone else?”

“Why?”—I was almost laughing with excitement. “Because he’s alive, that’s why. Because he’s a real, live, thinking human being who’s making his own life instead of taking it ready-made like all your precious little darlings of sons on the Mine.”

“Have him,” said my mother shrilly. The venom between us seemed like a race that we were shouting on. “Why don’t you marry him? That would be nice. You can sit on a soapbox outside the store and shout at the natives. That’ll be nice for your father, after he’s worked himself up to a decent position to give you a background.”

I looked at her. “It would kill you, wouldn’t it? It would kill you to have the Manager ask after your daughter, who married the Jew from the Concession store. Well, don’t worry. He wouldn’t have me. He can find something better than the half-baked daughter of a petty official on a gold mine. He’ll want a richer life than a person with my background can give him.” I did not knaw where this came from in me, but all at once it was there, and it seemed to become true in the saying.

“After all, Helen, be reasonable,” my father was insisting, on the perimeter of this. “How can you have a native staying in the house? I’ve got to think of my position too, you know. It’s our bread and butter. What does it look like? I can’t do things like that. I’ve got a responsibility, my girl. Next thing is it will be going round the Group that I’m a Communist.”

“You disgust me. You both disgust me,” I said fiercely, half-weeping, half-laughing in shame at the shrill crescendo of pettiness of the scene that, inescapably, caught us all up for what we were. Like a certain shape of nose or tone of skin it showed in all of us. I had it, too. I burned for the dignity and control my blood betrayed. “Do you hear? You disgust me.”

“That’s all right,” said my mother. Her anger seemed to tremble meltingly through her, like a fire lambently consuming a bush. “That’s all right.” It was as if I had handed my words to her like a knife. The danger of them seized us both, but it was done. She would not give it back to me; I could not take it from her.

At that moment Anna walked in with the sweet, and her detached and servile presence, a kind of innocence of ignorance, showed up by contrast the peculiar horror that was in the room. She came in on her sloppy, shuffling slippers, and went out again, looking at no one. In the sudden, mid-air silencing of her presence, the intensity of the room was like that of a room enclosed by a hurricane. And all the stolid evidence of ordinary things, the familiar furniture, the food on our plates, the crocheted cover with the shells over the water jug, took on the awful quality of unknowing objects in a room where violence has been done.