The Blazing World

Harriet Burden Notebook A

May 4, 2001

Bruno is writing a memoir. I must not show that I am too happy about it. He’s just fooling around, he says, having a little fun. He’s waltzing. That’s what he should have done all along, the stubborn S.O.B., waltzed, had a little fun instead of bleeding out those verses for the millennium. But I must not gloat or preen or he may stop just to spite me. Dear Bear, what have you done with all those years of your life? I want you to write that caustic, tender, bullish man into a book. Make him up, darling, if you have to. He’s there.

A passage he read to me about ice cream on the boardwalk at Coney Island, about his mother pulling her hand away after he had reached for hers — the cold chocolate had run into his palm. So tiny, this moment, but taken as a slap, its sound reverberating over many years. What do they say? A difficult woman. She was a difficult woman. Heads shaking over difficult women. We are all difficult women. Was Bruno’s mother more difficult? No, but she was Bruno’s mother. Just now, this word difficult looks mad to me, an insane spelling of a word I cannot recognize anymore.

Aven told me that Julie said, “I won’t be your friend anymore.” Aven’s mouth stretched into a grimace. “But then,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe it. The next day she forgot!” Aven doesn’t forget. She is one of us.

Mother plays in my body like a tune. Her voice returns, old and hoarse, as she thinks through time. “He loved me more at the end.” And when I ask her what she means, she says, “More than he did in the beginning. I loved him. I put your father on a pedestal, but he ran away from me.”

And I see my father running away with long strides over hills and dales.

He punished her with silence.

“I rarely got a word in at a dinner party, you know. I brought in the food and I cleared the table and I listened, but when I began to speak, he would cut me off. Once, after a party, I brought it up. I said that I had felt bad about it, hurt. He didn’t answer me, but the next time we had a dinner, he said nothing, not a word.”

“That was cruel,” I said to Mother.

Dr. F. has heard it all now. I remember my mother.

“Don’t forget,” my mother said in the hospital. “You’re a Jew.”

“I won’t forget, Mother.”

The room in the hospital is ugly. My mother is recovering from septicemia. The nurse from Trinidad looks at me. “We were afraid she might leave us last night, but she’s tough.” My mother had roamed the hospital corridors, hallucinating with fever. She was back in Indianapolis in the old house, or rather parts of it, climbing the stairs at home in search of her room. “But I couldn’t find it. I opened door after door, Harriet.”

And I think to myself my father wanted his own kind, not me. His natural kind. No, Harry, sex is not a natural kind in philosophy.I Fish. Fowl. A two-headed calf.

Who would they have been, I wonder, the siblings that were never formed?

“What should I wear?” she asks.

“Wear, Mother?”

She is irritated, looking around. “To the faculty dinner. Where are my pearls? I will need my pearls. I don’t think that sweater suits you, Harriet.”

And I wished I could smile. I rubbed her feet because they were cold. Three pairs of socks and still cold.

I can see the East River, the gray waves, and the light, and inside the room, the IV drip, and the tape on my mother’s discolored arm, the sleeve of her lilac-colored robe pushed up.

Don’t die yet, I think.

Time is thick in the present, a distension, not a series of points, subjective time, that is, our inner time. We are forever retaining and projecting, anticipating the next note in the tune, recalling the whole phrase as we listen.II

I remember my protruding navel on my big, hard belly, the skin pulled tight in the last month — the strange push and pull of the life inside. My pink, swollen feet propped up on an ottoman before me. Felix with his ear pressed against the bump. Hey there, little fella, little chiquita. It was Maisie. Yes, I think it was Maisie.

I. Natural kind was first introduced by John Stuart Mill in 1895. Philosophy of Scientific Method, ed. Ernest Nagel (New York: Hafner, 1950), 303–4. The term implies that there are groupings in nature independent of human categories. There is considerable debate in analytical philosophy about whether natural kinds exist at all, and the question as to whether sex is a natural kind is part of that debate.

II. Burden is paraphrasing Husserl. The philosopher discusses listening to music as a primary example of the subjective experience of time, which includes more than is immediately present. It also includes succession and duration. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966).