My wife and I find it strange that they should all run home. It seems perverse, unnaturally sacrificiaclass="underline" the self leading itself, as in a great propelling crowd, blind over cliffs, stupidly to the sea. We’d run away, we affirm in our adulthood to one another, knowing, as we make the affirmation, that even old as we are, adult as we claim to be, we would return to the poisonous nest as they return, children still largely on turned-out feet, the girl unbreasted, the boys inadequate and bare for manhood. We would chew on our hurt and feel the pain again of our beginnings. We would languish for the glory of complaint in the old ties. The eldest Mean child may someday say, confronted by a meanness that’s his own, by his own mean soul, that he was beaten as a boy; and he may take a certain solace from the fact; he may shift at least a portion of his blame to the ages. “This shit’s not mine.” “Mann ist was er isst.” “Alas for the present time!”
We wish they would run off, certainly, as we wanted to run off, for had we run away, had we had the courage we so easily wish for them and the necessary resource, we feel we’d be as much as moral now, clear of the need to disclaim our dirt, round, holding our tail between our teeth. For that, we must exaggerate the past. We inflate it with our wrongs. Fortunately for us then, unfortunately for us now, it was really not so bad. We were not pursued and beaten. We were not beggared in our own yard. We were not flayed within the hearing of the world. Our surprise is symbolic. It is a gesture of speech. It expresses a wish of our own; and if we really felt the indignation and disappointment we put into words when we see the Mean children flying to their hive, my wife and I; if we ever borrowed to apply to them any anger from our feelings for Mrs. Mean, it would be an injustice on our part almost as great as in our power as mere observers to do them; although I am not above injustice and must confess, despite my knowledge of the dreadful circumstances of his life, a dislike of Ames, the eldest Mean child, especially upon his bike, as deep as my dislike for his cow-chested, horse-necked, sow-faced mother. “It may have been put in him, but he is nasty, unnaturally nasty,” I’m afraid I often say. “He can’t help it,” my wife replies, and I glare at the children too, as Mrs. Mean flushes them one by one and they run or toddle to the house, because I know my wife is right. I exclaim at their stupidity, their lack of character, their lack of fight — I have my list as Mrs. Mean has hers — for I am, in these remote engagements, as fearsome, as bold and blustering as a shy and timorous man can be.
But after all there must be corners in that little house for each of them, corners that are personal and familiar where the walls come together like the crook of a soft, warm arm and some hour has been passed in quiet love with a private treasure. There must be some sight, some touch, that is a comfort and can draw them to the trap. We haven’t been suckled, thank god, by Mrs. Mean, or bathed or clothed or put to bed or nursed when we’ve been ill. Perhaps her touch is sometimes tender and her tone is sweet. My wife is hopeful.
Really I am not. Their house is chocolate. The paint is peeling badly. It has a tin roof. The front porch is narrow. The house is narrow. The windows are low and small. The gutters need repair. There are rust stains on the side of the house. There are cracks in the foundation. The chimney tilts. I cannot think of it as sanctuary for very long. I try. I see the children orbiting. They vanish within and I try to think they could, like Quasimodo, cry their safety. But is there any reason for us to suppose that life inside is any better than the life outside we see? My wife wishes to believe it — for the children — but I cannot imagine the deep shadows of that little house full of anything warm except perhaps the rolled, damp fat of Mr. Mean, squatting like a toad in his underwear, his bright, hard eyes pinned like beads to his face, his tongue licking the corners of his mouth, his fingers rubbing softly up and down his other fingers, his legs gliding against themselves, his pale skin bluish in the bad light.
But then my wife is subject to failures of the imagination. I have tried to carry her but her sentiments are too readily aroused. Her eyes stay at the skin. Only her heart, only her tenderest feelings, go in. I, on the other hand, cut surgically by all outward growths, all manifestations, merely, of disease and reach the ill within. I conceive the light, for instance, as always bad, of insufficient strength and a poor color, as having had to travel through too much dust and too much muslin, as having had to dwell too long in the company of dark rugs and mohair chairs and satin-shaded lamps. The air, I feel, is bad too. The windows never open. The back door bangs but the breeze is metaphorical. All things in their little house that hang, hang motionless and straight. Nothing is dirty, but nothing feels clean. Their writing paper sticks to the hand. Their toilet sweats. The halls are cool. The walls are damp.
I was playing with toy cars and digging roads around the supports of the family porch when I accidentally placed my hand upon a cold wet pipe which rose out of the ground there and saw near the end of my nose, moist on the ridge of a post, four fat white slugs. I think of that when I think of the Means’ house and of pale fat Mr. Mean, and the urge to scream as I did then rises strongly in me. I bumped my head, I remember, scrambling out. I was afraid to tell my father why I’d yelled. He was very angry. Even yet I have a distaste for the odor of earth.
My wife maintains that Mrs. Mean is an immaculate housekeeper and that her home is always cool and dry and airy. She’s very likely correct as far as mere appearance goes but my description is emotionally right, metaphysically appropriate. My wife would strike up friendships, too, and so, as she says, find out; but that must be blocked. It would destroy my transcendence. It would entangle me mortally in illusion.
Yes. The inside of the Mean house is clear and horrible in my mind like a nightmare no one willingly would want to enter. It may be five rooms. It can’t be more. And into these five rooms, at best, the six Means are squeezed with the machinery to keep them alive, with the gewgaws she buys, the bright blue china horses which trot in the windows, and some of the children’s toys, for they do not lack for toys, at least the kind you ride. They have a scooter, a small tricycle, a large tricycle, one that has a wagon welded to its rear, and a sidewalk bike with which the eldest Mean child rides down flowers, people, cats and dogs. I must salute their taste this once. They haven’t bought their children cycles shaped by great outriding fenders of tin and paint like rockets, airplanes, horses, swans or submarines. They have an eye for the practical, the durable, in such things. I remember with fondness my own tricycle, capable of tremendous speed or so it seemed then, and because it was not fangled up by paid imaginations, it could be Pegasus, if I liked, and it was.