John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

I told him he smelled old, and it was true, but he should have defended himself. She told him that when he made love to her the stink of his breath made her sick. She had told him that he was like an animal and that when friends came to the house she was ashamed of him. She told him he was stupid and that all their friends knew it. “They mention it to me,” she said, “they ask how I stand it.” “You’re angry and upset,” he said. “We mustn’t say harsh things and then tomorrow—” “I’ll say what I please,” she said. “For years I’ve said only what you please,” she said to him. “I’m sick of it. You stink. I don’t want to live with you. I just walk into a room where you’ve been sitting, filling the air with your stink … I don’t want to live at all!” Sobs. “Esther,” he said, “my poor, poor dear—” She locked the bedroom door that night and wouldn’t let him in, and he slept on the couch. But in the middle of the night she went down and asked him to come up where he belonged, but he was grieving and wouldn’t come — it had come to his poor slow wits, finally, that though all she had said she had said in rage, and the words had nothing to do with the rage, they were incidentally true. He had committed no crime, the crime was, as usual, life itself, the immemorial curse, and she had raged at him because life itself is impossible to seize in one’s two bare hands and choke. But though he was innocent, he smelled. That was true. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I love you, Freddy.” “Just go to bed,” he said. When she got up the next morning he had already fixed himself breakfast and washed the dishes and left the house, and she sat and wept. That time too she wanted to die, and she said to herself with conviction, I am going to kill myself, but she was afraid. She wanted to be even with him, balance the score once for all, but it was impossible, so impossible that she began to laugh as though her mind had slipped: “How can you balance the score with a policeman? — with the Law?” she said, and laughed and cried. It was he who had wanted children — both of them had, but he more than she — and because she could not give them to him she had turned on him in rage, and now to punish him for her rage she was thinking, like a maniac, of killing herself. It was life she wanted to settle with. She wanted to smash through this bungling idiotic darkness into peace, but the hope was pure madness. There is a moral to this: The operation inevitably fails.

Mother would sit by the window and her fingers would move slowly over her upper lip, where there was colorless hair like the peachfuzz on the cheek of a boy ( I could not see it under her fingers but in the fingertips of my own hand I had the memory of it) and I would smell the burning leaves, but I could not see what it was she looked at — outside the window it was too bright, a wide whiteness like the heart of a fire with vague shapes being consumed in it like kings with melting crowns burning up on a pyre: I put my arm around her and said, “I love you, Mommy.” She said nothing. My father said, “She can’t hear you, Essie. Go and play.” When winter came she would be well again, but would watch me as though she were about to go away on a long long journey and never come back, or would come back only when I was grown and we had forgotten one another. It was I who went. The train wound up through the Catskill Mountains where the air smelled of oil and beyond the spackled train window the world swam with blue. I cried, and at night I was cold. There was no one with me on the train because my father couldn’t leave the milking and the wheat harvest, and my mother had to feed thrashers. I wanted to write to them and tell them I loved them and wanted to come home, but I had nothing to write with and no paper but the note my father had printed, bending down to it, squinting through the thick gray glasses that made his eyes seem larger than chickens’ eggs. I had a dream, I remember — a kind of waking dream — in which my mother seemed to speak to me very clearly, saying “Essie, can you make us some tea?” I started and looked all around me; the voice had been clear as could be; but there was only the half-empty car swaying on the mountains’ turns, and vague faces like objects in a fire, and rainbows at the edges of my glasses.

I did not like Batavia — the funny way the people talked, the bright red brick streets that a half-blind child could barely cross without falling, the stores where no one knew your name or, for that matter, cared, and in winter the snow drifts where sighted children squealed and played and blind children floundered and grimly pretended to laugh. And as for the Blind School itself, a horror! It was not their fault. The halls were long, and for what seemed a long time I could never remember where they went: the light that came in through the windows at the ends was gray, filtered through the shade of elms, and whatever direction you looked — north, south, east, west — the light was the same. I walked slowly, keeping to the wall, running my fingertips along the cool, smooth, painted cement, and the others ran past me, shouting (it seemed to me) angrily, and sometimes bumped me. I stood once by a door beneath a high wooden arch — I could just make it out in the dimness of the place — and I couldn’t remember where the door went. A boy came through it, holding his hands out toward me, a boy no older than myself, I think, and I watched as he came closer and closer, and I couldn’t speak. He bumped into me and jerked his head toward me, a face without eyes or nose or mouth, as far as I could see in that murderous light, and he held my arm tightly, as if to keep me from getting away, and with his free hand ran his fingers over my cheeks and eyes; then he released me as though I were a thing not alive, and he went around me, silent and indifferent, and felt his way on down the hall. Every night I prayed that my father would let me come home again, not because the people were unkind to me — it was not that — and the other children all prayed the same. I didn’t want to learn braille: my fingertips were stupid, every form felt exactly the same to me, and the very idea of reading a coarse page of scattered bumps seemed as hopeless as reading the stipple of a plaster wall. I did not believe I needed to learn. At home I sat in the front row of the one-room schoolhouse where I went, and if I concentrated I could see what the teacher printed on the blackboard. I had listened carefully, and at home, sitting with my mother at the diningroom table, I had worked carefully, painfully, with the books I brought home from school. I was getting better, I thought. But in the Blind School they put me in the next to the last row, and the room was dimmer than our schoolroom at home, and sometimes I could not see the teacher. I felt sick, as if I were sinking in quicksand or endlessly falling through empty space, and I said to the teacher one day, “I can see, Miss Ford. Please, please. I can see.” She took my hand — she was an old woman, kind — and bent her face to me, gentle. She had no eyes or nose or mouth. You can see what sort of dreams I have.

“It would be inhuman,” I said. “One has no right to bring blind children into the world.”

He said nothing, puffing away at his cigar, and I knew that in his deep, dim-witted way he was mulling it over.

“Freddy,” I said, “for heaven sakes!”

“I don’t know,” he said and reached to touch my hand.

“Suppose your parents had had the choice — suppose their doctor had known and had warned them. Would you want—”

“Don’t ask,” I said.

“Now Esther that’s foolish,” he said. “We all have our handicaps. Nobody’s life is perfect.” Cross as a bear. It was all so simple, so right and obvious and true: I am happy ninety-eight per cent of the time, as Mother was, and I let the two per cent poison the rest. And so he is good, yes; the minister’s talk of how no one but God is perfect is just like atheism, like denying there’s sunshine because you’ve lost your sight.