William Gass - Middle C

For a long time, he had regarded himself — if not the sole proprietor of these estimations — to be fairly divided from his fellow man as freethinkers always are, and perhaps quietly but thoroughly detested by them the way someone whose teeth are mired in caramel hates being asked a chewy question. Moreover, preachers of all kinds have always been eager to proclaim the importance to God of every Jack, Jill, and stage-door Johnny whose pitiful belongings they were about to ransack and pilfer. God, they say, sets the value of the poorest insignificant wretch beyond the worth of any natural element (oil), object (house), or entity (bank). The wretch weighs not only as much in God’s scale as a cloud of gnats, or perhaps a field of flowers, but grander than a mountain lake or fruitful valley, more than a symphony of psalms or a philosopher’s system of ideas; because a single human being is of infinite worth; he is filled with soul like a bowl with soup and must not be demoralized or damaged or denied his needs, whatever the cost to lakeside or coastline, forest, ionosphere, rainbow, or geyser; not a hair of the head or of the chinny chin chin should be harmed, since even nail clippings, phlegm, and footprints have magical powers; so glorious is man, so beyond mere price, whatever his cost, so amazing his muscles and other achievements, that he surpasses the worm who makes silk, the beaver who builds dams, and the bird who flies miles and miles on its own over empty seas.

Was there ever a more laughable hypocrisy? when daily men with women, women with children, children with dolls, dolls with dresses, are attacked as you might an infestation of rats and slain as if there were a bounty on each bone.

Should humans die or survive, disappear or endure? his indecision rattled like a die in a cup; but at the moment it tended to tilt toward the latter.

Skizzen pondered man’s real place, based on his actual experience of him, and concluded that the human race was like a gang of small-time goons parading a big-time attitude through a midtime town.

From the only attic window he hadn’t pasted over with posters advertising bullfights, Skizzen could see the garden, now in its utmost refulgence — borders and beds abloom and buzzing — his mother’s small back bent over a tea rose, one hand holding a small brush and painting the bush’s leaves with canola to admonish aphids, Joseph supposed, to ward off hoppers, intimidate rollers and sawflies. Her footsteps, darker where the dew had been stepped on, marked the morning grass and showed how she’d come from the path to bedside. She wore her wide hat now in shade and shadow. It went on when she went out like every article of clothing the work required: her gloves, her plurally pocketed apron, her white absorbent wiping scarf — each leaf was dried before the oil was offered — her woolly red blouse and her knickers like Japanese gardening pants, padded at the knees with inserts of sponge and lashed about her waist with elastic.

The garden had come to her rescue, there was no doubt of that. As soon as Skizzen’s salary was able to support them both, he had insisted that his mother quit her rubber-works job and retire into enjoyment. She might read, relax, cook recipes she remembered from the old country, putter about, visit friends; but with an alacrity he hadn’t expected, Miriam had allowed her interest in gardening, which had gradually grown to a full-fledged hobby, to consume and define her. The seasons were like semesters: full of plans and preparations, periods of supervision, training, continuing care, sometimes painful evaluations, and other duties aimed at aiding her plants to realize their true potential — to “strut their stuff,” a phrase Miriam picked up at work, for some reason liked, and now overused. Thus regularity reentered her life, though it was now one of her choosing, in partnership of course with the climate, as fickle and ruthless as she would become herself. She was also fond of quoting the passage from Ecclesiastes about there being a time and a season for everything, until — trite for centuries before it came to her — its banality wore on Joseph’s nerves.

He felt a little mental unpleasantness like the pang of an errant tooth. A distasteful memory had been recovered from its attic storage: of a time when “strut their stuff” was “strut her stuff” and was said of Debbie, the vain and zealous cheerleader. She should be allowed to strut her stuff if she wants, all the girls do — and she sure has the stuff to strut with, Miriam would add with a kind of pride and a show of salacious satisfaction Joey loathed. He had been so angry when Miriam had spent their precious money on that silly uniform — pleated skirt and letter sweater, one Debbie whirled and the other she joggled — that he had refused to go to the games and watch her make an exhibition of herself, although he had not offered that as a reason but had declared, rather, his indifference to football amounting to dislike. Actually, Joseph had a hatred of sports, based on his inadequacy, that he disguised as apathy.

In any case, he complained of having to witness her performance every day when she practiced leaping and twisting in the backyard, the skirt rising around her higher thighs as if blown from below so that her hair flew up and down about her shoulders and her neck, Woodbine’s red W undulating as though it were sewn on rapid water. If you don’t like it, don’t look, he was told, as if that were possible.

Of course, it was their large Victorian house with its wide porches and ample back and side yards that made his mother’s new vocation possible, because she had cultivated the patch of ground their first house sat on about as far as root and branch would take her: lining the short front walk with Joey’s first gift of seeds, then placing beds in customary fashion like a moat around the building before digging up every inch of the front and back except for a few narrow paths paved by thin wobbly boards and marked at metered intervals by geraniums in sunken coffee cans. She was a drillmaster in those days, and her flowers knew they should fall into straight lines and salute as she passed.

For a time, the size of plants defeated her; they began so daintily as bulbs or rhizomes or seeds sunk out of sight in the anonymous earth that she felt they would all have the same adulthood, but they ended flopping on the ground like alyssum or raising their flags like iris and looking silly standing all alone waiting for the marigolds to arrive. Daisies shaded asters and asters denied violas their share of the light. Glads were a major defeat. She stuck them around like sentries, and those that bloomed stood at funereal attention in nearly barren patches of moss roses that hadn’t made it or in thickets of ragged robin that unfortunately had. They were also all orange. After Miriam had scraped them from her palette, Joey told her that, like Easter lilies, glads were largely florist flowers and sent by the living to the dead.

There was nothing shy or particularly nice about violets, Miriam — and Joey, through her — learned. At first admired, they invaded what little lawn was left, and every other area that offered an opening … well … like immigrants, pushing out established plants and covering the earth with an impermeable carpet of dainty-looking but devilish little flowers whose rootlets, in their eager exercise of total war, throttled worms in their runnels. These darlings, when poisons failed, she had to dig up inch by inch, ripping apart the dirt in a search for bits of root as if she were after patches of seasonal drifters. Over the years she had forgotten about her own alien history, even her present status, and had begun to resent the Mexhex, as she called them, because they worked for potty and were taking positions at her place of work.