I kept my wits about me, though. I kept my counsel. And in my apartment, just three rooms, one is reserved for concocting spells. I also make my own valentines, Christmas cards, and those that wish ill people well and those that anoint them with a curse, as well as little stuffed figures I pretend to puncture with pins. The pleasure is not major, but it is quietly lasting. It cools the soup spite spits in. But I am speaking far too frankly, more and I shall have to prick myself — ha ha — ha ha — you see I am not serious about any of this, none of it is really true. And these days, Joey, how are you?
• • •
I sing one language Mr. Skizzen, but I speak several, depending upon the circumstances, just as I hold down several jobs in several different towns. I speak teddy bear, just to cite an instance. I can make my words as white as marshmallows. I can niggerate so thick you’d think I was from Africa last minute or a tar pit in Haarlem. As well as all seasons of speech in between depending on the climate in which I find myself. Honey, you are a baby in this world and don’t know how to howl yet.
• • •
We is a bod-ie. When we sing, we is one heart, one heart the shape of one lung, we make moves froms the movies, we sway, we shout it out, we clap the beat, we unison ourselves right into reality. We casts spells. And that’s how I sells cars.
• • •
I know all about the geography of money.
• • •
People call me Witch Hazel. I sorta like that. I rub myself all over with the stuff. What a lot of me there is. You know, you play better when you just play. My husband used to say my ears looked like my head was melting. You hold your ears in as if you had just heard something alarming. He’d say, Hazel, you can sell anything. You have a nice dark-chocolate tongue. He died of his weight and I expect to die of mine.
• • •
I can be aggravated, but if I’m aggravated, I make sure, right then, that the causes are aggravated back. Even if it’s a fender. Rusting when it shouldn’t, like this morning in the wet air, overnight it seemed, and it was there, orange as the fruit, a wide patch like you’d sew on pants. Damn bad for business. Baked bad, the paint was, on it. So I scrape off as much of the color as I can with a finger file. I swear at it, too, a long complicated swear that would have peeled its paint if it weren’t orange as orange gets already. Poop. I’m nice in front of you. You such a baby. But don’t aggravate me by bawling about life. I’ll send you to sit my teddy bear. My teddy bear, darlin, don’t care.
• • • •
You just fuss and find fault, Joey, I know you from womb to past noon, from even when your father lay upon me, if you can bear the truth. Well, I bore you and so I know you. Maybe I’m the only one who knows you because people think now you are a mal — a malcontent — a malcontent man of middle age — well, when you are really old the way I’m supposed to be really old, you know how harmless your kind of malcontentedness is.
But your seed started me off down the garden rows, remember? Your packets of alyssum and other scrounged stuff you gave me for my birthday back when you hadn’t a penny for a pinch of sugar even, well, who knew what it would lead to, me with the spoon digging in the dirt like a child, but it was the miracle of that gift that gave me the peace your father took away from us all when he — they say here — vamoosed, a likable word. You helped make that maternal me you see in the garden, caring for my little sweet things and my big shameless blooms on stalks thick as thumbs. Your father, God rot his soul, used to walk me through the city gardens when we were — when I was betrothed, and in the hillsides, too, he would say the names of the flowers as we passed, the little yellow flavorings that came up between the sharp white rocks like surprises in the spring.
My plants are fastened to the ground. I like that. There’s no running off out of my garden except by the butterflies and bees, and they come back again as soon as they get thirsty. Then when all my beds are quiet — when there’s no humming or buzzing or waving from the breeze — and the heat is even heavy as the past is — all my beds are still green.
So you should be nice to your sister, Joey, even if she’s making a profit from potatoes because she is growing good things, too, or her husband is, since he’s always in the fields with poison to protect them. He and poison do make a pair, don’t they? Handkerchief across his face like a bandit so as not to breathe the foul fumes. But I say who can complain when it is beans and potatoes he is doing? who can put that profit down? so long as he’s there to spoon his soup and comes to bed like a person prepared to sleep, because most men aren’t like you, Joey, devoted to your mother the way you are, and I love you for it, God knows, though gardener you aren’t, but a man of peace and steady as a broom near to hand. You’ve done well by yourself and by me, with an upstanding reputation at the college, yes, you’ve grown respect, and that’s a splendid proud crop, Joey, no backseat to take there, spreading music around, too, like peat. Who knows what will come of it?
Then again it rains on sodden fields. Then again the rabbits make their meals out of my asters. Black spot and beetles, worms and rots and weevils, cut my yields. It rains on wet beds, on sodden fields. There is a sudden uncalled-for freeze. The daffs are snowed on till the stems bend, weary of the feathered weight of all those flakes. Then again the blooms brown beneath the relentless sun. Day after day goes by dry. Then again there’s hail. I want to cry and you don’t carry any sympathy for me because you think everything I do is futile, my trees and bushes fruitless as rocks. The weather will always worsen, you say. Due proportion is impossible, restraint, proper measure, are never nature’s way; it’s either heavy stillness or brief tornado. It’s either rags or riches, you say, while I curse the four corners of the sky, each one a Karlkrautkopf. Ach, but then again, Joey, in every year comes May. Gott! what did I just say? In every year May comes.
30
Some of us used to wonder whether the human race would escape the consequences of its own folly, but now we worry that our species will somehow go on indefinitely regardless of how wickedly it behaves.
This world is made of three kinds of stupid. The commonest stupid is so stupid it doesn’t know it is stupid but is content to be stupid; the second sort is the stupid who denies it is stupid and claims to be wiser than whiskey; the third bunch is convinced it is stupid, too, but knows it knows that much and wisely fears the worst. Among the stupidest of stupids, not knowing any better, a few will luck out because they won’t have the wit to perish properly.
Once upon a time there was a professor of music whose best instrument was hypocrisy, and who pretended to be concerned about the fate of the human race, when, in fact, he hoped it would vanish from the face of the earth the way a fog dense enough to obscure the landscape slowly diminishes, rising like steam from a damp land, so that the earth could smile again as it must have once, in the days of simple cells, titanic trees, or even reptiles with necks grown long in order to reach the leaves.
Joseph Skizzen wanted to go into his mother’s garden and shit upon the ground, but he realized that his shit would only aid the garden’s growth. Moreover, what he wished for was impossible because he could barely think shit let alone say it let alone deposit it or even shush it before it became evidently present.