house as ours but with lots more things in it, lots nicer: and
her mother was always cheerful and upright and never up dying
in bed, which was as pleasant as anything could be. We
weren’t real close friends but there was some wild streak that
matched: she had it by being real funny, crazy funny, and I
had it some other way, I don’t know how I had it or how she
knew I had it, but she always liked me so she must have.
One regular Saturday afternoon H ’s mother went away and
her father was working and she and her bratty brother were
being baby-sitted and I went there to visit. The baby-sitter was
some gray gray teenager with pimples and a ponytail, and we
just got wilder and wilder until we ended up on top of her
holding her down and punching her and hitting her and
taunting her and tormenting her and calling her names and
telling her how ugly she was: and then the bratty brother came
down and we got scared for a minute that he was going to tell
or she was going to get up because we were getting pretty tired
but he came right over and sat right on top of her and we kept
hitting her and laughing like mad and having so much fun
making jokes about hitting her and calling her names and then
making jokes about that. H was at her head holding her down
by pulling her hair and sitting on her hair and slapping her in
the face and hitting her breasts. The bratty brother was sitting
sort of over her stomach and kept hitting her there and tickling
her there and grinding his knees into her sides. I was at her
feet, sitting on top of them and digging my nails into her legs
and punching her legs and hitting her between her legs. We
kept her there for hours, at least two, and we never stopped
laughing at our jokes and at how stupid and pathetic she was:
and when we let her up she ran out and left us: and when H’s
mother came home we said the baby-sitter had just left us
there to go see her boyfriend: and H’s mother was furious with
the baby-sitter for leaving us alone because we were just
children and she called to complain and call her down and got
some hysterical story of how we had tortured her: and we
said, what does that mean? what is that? what is torture? she
left to see her boyfriend, that’s what she said to us: and the
baby-sitter said we beat her up and tortured her and we said
no no we don’t know what she means: and no one ever believed
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her. She wasn’t Jewish was the thing. It was incredible fun was
the thing. She was dumber and weaker than we were was the
thing. Especially: it was incredible fun was the thing. I never
laughed so much in my life. She wept but I’m sure she didn’t
understand. You can’t feel remorse later when you laughed so
hard then. I have never— to this day and including right now—
given a damn. Why is it that when you laugh so hard you can’t
weep or understand? Oh, little girls, weep forever or understand too much but be a little scared to laugh too hard.
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Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
There was a stone fence, only about two feet high, uneven,
rough, broken, and behind it the mountains: a hill declining,
rolling down, and beyond the valley where it met the road the
mountains rose up, not hills but high mountain peaks, in winter
covered in snow from top to bottom, in fall and spring the
peaks white and blindingly bright and the rest underneath the
pearly caps browns and greens and sometimes dark, fervent
purples where the soil mixed with varying shades of light
coming down from the sky. The building near the stone wall,
facing out in back over the descending hill to the road and
then the grandeur of the mountains, was white and wood, old,
fragile against this bold scenery, slight against it. When it
snowed the frail building could have been part of a drawing, a
mediocre, sentimental New England house in a New England
snow, a white on white cliche, except exquisite: delicate, exquisite, so finely drawn under its appearance of being a cheap scene of the already observed, the cliched, the worn-down-into-the-ground snow scene. In the fall, the trees were lush with
yellow and crimson and purple saturated the distant soil. Green
got duller, then turned a burnt brown. The sky was huge, not
sheltering, but right down on the ground with you so that you
walked in it: your feet had to reach down to touch earth. Wind
married the sky and tormented it: but the earth stayed below
solid and never swirled around in the fight. There was no dust.
The earth was solid down in the ground, always. There was
no hint of impermanence, sand. This was New England, where
the ground did not bend or break or compromise: it rested
there, solid and placid and insensitive to the forms its own
magnificence took as it rose up in mountains of ominous
heights. These were not mountains that crumbled or fell down
in manic disorder. These were not mountains that slid or split
apart or foamed over. These were mountains where the sky
reached down to touch them in their solid splendor with their
great trees and broken branches and dwarfed stones, and they
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stayed put because the earth was solid, just purely itself, not
mixed with sky or air or water, not harboring fire or ash: no
ice sliding down to kill anything in its path: no snow tumbling
to destroy: just dirt, solid ground, made so that humans could
comprehend it, not die in awe of it, while snow packed itself
down on top or rain pelted or punched or sun burnt itself out
or wind flashed through the sky, torturing it. These were
mountains meant to last forever in a community of human
sight and sound: not mountains meant to swallow cities and
towns forever: and so one was surrounded by a beauty not
suffused with fear, splendid but not inducing awe of the divine
or terror of the wild, intemperate menace of weather and wind
gone amuck. These were mountains that made humans part of
their beauty: solid, like earth, like soil. One felt immeasurably
human, solid, safe: part of the ground, not some shade on it
through which the wind passes. The mountains could be one’s
personal legacy, what the earth itself gave one to be part of:
one simply had to love them: nothing had to be done to deserve
them or survive them: one could be innocent of nature and not
offend them.
The wooden house, so white and old, underlined the