Peggy and Fred in hell Leslie Thornton She pressed her back hard into the chair and put her hand under her leg. He had no idea she was there. Finally her impatience took over and he turned as her hand shot up to her eye. What was the difference, she thought. He’ll stand there with his machine and think about good design until she lets something else happen. The breeze came in with the smell of the factory as she shuffled her feet, but all that mattered now was the way the window opened. Because the curtain was just beyond her reach she decided to forget about the hole and make an effort to speak. It started now. Speak. She looked around for a while, dropped her hands and swallowed her tongue. Except for a few breaks here and there everything seemed so oppressively even. Spinach omelet maybe? I don’t like spinach. I’m sick of spinach. How about pork chops? I’m sick of spinach omelets. We’ve had an omelet every day.
Her head flew into the farthest comer of the room, mouth opened involuntarily, sounds of moaning, blast of light off the curtain, then came another thunderous clap from the orchestra and they found themselves back in the wheat field. The door opened. They were received into the outer world with great joy. No. No. Don’t go. I’m afraid. I want to be alone. She felt the four walls with her hands then hung her head between her feet, into the hole, and cried.
Crash. The birds were at it again, but no matter because she hadn’t felt so relaxed in a long time. He put her hand under her leg while he turned on the machine. She kicked him (unintentionally) in the eye then looked out the window. Overall it hadn’t been a bad day. Wild. Things running all over the place. Objects. Hole bubbling. Charm-destroying and romance-killing odors. A window that opened by itself. The sounds of the soap opera next door. It was harrowing living here and it took all the strength they had. It was hell.
Other things happen in this room. There are huge mill wheels turning rapidly and the proud are attached to them with fiery hooks. The envious are immersed to the navel in a river of ice and are lashed by the biting wind. In the cave the wrathful are hacked by swords and knives. The slothful are shut in a cage full of serpents. The avaricious are plunged to the neck in cauldrons of boiling oil and metals. In a valley there is a foul river and a table heaped with filth upon its bank. Here the gluttonous are fed with reptiles and the water of the river. The lustful are sunk in pits full of fire and sulfur.
I can’t stand having only one chair, he said. I know what she is. That’s the way she is. She’s like that, she’s evil. Look at the way she stands there with her head flying off and her feet beneath the floor. And when I reach for her she’s just that much farther. She cried out, threw her hand against the wall. It cracked and fell away.
The light was so dim they had developed the habit of staring. Always moving, she was very strict about the kinds of things she would say. It was a glorious day, sun on the curtains, windows shut cutting the noise and the smell. Madness, simple like a headache, made a knot of their common efforts. (Deep down they were frozen with terror.) But the distractions in the room kept them busy and they did not suffer unduly. Her speech was elliptical and seductive, she thought, though very limited, still powerful, and filled with sound. At least I’m one person who appreciates the excesses of the body. She started to hum.
Now that the house had burned down they had a better view of the factory. He cut the acorn squash and sat down to read the funnies. She stood on his head to arrange the curtains. The slope of the floor toward the hole was causing trouble but what could they do? It interfered with walking and infected what little elegance there was in the room. So despite a rich fantasy life she felt thrown together in the insouciant tradition of most tropical constructions. Tropical. What a funny way to think of it. Insouciant. She didn’t even know what that meant.
La da da da, da da da.
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She longs for the fondness of the familiar. True, he is here, but they don’t care for each other and everything keeps changing, every instant. She moved the animals off the chair and turned it on its side. They ate acorn squash while she thought about oxygen. That machine. There was an extra there in the sentence and she couldn’t find it. It was driving her crazy. Ordinary. He collapses into the blue as she moves past the word on the warm blue wall. Anything can function as rhythm. They walked into the cave where the opera was being performed past eighty yards of rock walls lined with hundreds of speakers. The separations between sounds were so overpowering they thought they might have died and entered a new world. The frogs and cicadas were up, the planes stormed overhead. Your fingers begin to curl, you step on them to straighten them out and they stick to your feet. A great sense of urgency comes over her. She mimics the gestures of speech with her mouth. Shoulders back. Head back. Now start. Speak. Lift me up to the window, mom. Lift me up to the image with the sounds and the way it moves. It must be real but what is it called?
She frequently danced upon one leg, holding the other with one hand and occasionally changing legs.
Bone Eating Insect Hell. Discriminative Fully Assumed Characteristic Hell. Hell Where Everyone Is Cooked Hell. Great Screaming Hell. Upside-downness Hell. Five Senses Hell. Hell of Repetition. Being Very Specific Hell. Bird Mouth Hell. Hell Where Everything Faces The Ground. Place of Great Tragedy. Why, Why Hell. Contemporary Superlative Hell. Tenderness Hell. Hell Where The Suffering Is 10,000 Times Greater Than In All The Other Hells Combined. All Kinds Of Hell. Telling The Difference Between Objects And Actions Hell. Not Telling The Difference Between Humor And Despair Hell. Hell’s Hell. Forever And Endless Hell. Philosophy’s Hell. Hell For All The People Who Perform Badly In All The Other Hells Hell.
Occasionally all the steps were so directed as to place the foot constantly where the stone flags joined to form the floor, particularly when looking downward. When she looked upward. there was an irresistible impulse to spring up to touch little spots or holes in the ceiling. When she looked around, there was a similar propensity to dart the forefinger into little holes in the furniture. One hole in the wooden screen received the point of the finger many hundreds of times, which was suddenly and involuntarily darted into it with amazing rapidity and precision. There was one particular part of the wall to which she places herself with the back to it, stood for two or three minutes. This was called “the Measuring Place.”
In the evening, the blows upon the furniture were perceived to be more continuous and to assume the regular time and measure of a musical air. As a strain or series of strokes was concluded, it ended with a more violent stroke, or a more violent spring or jump. Her favorite diagram was labeled simply “throws guitar against wall.” The motions are being evidently affected, or in some measure modified, by the strokes upon surrounding bodies. Chiefly a small slender door, the top of a chest of drawers, the clock, a table, or a wooden screen placed near the door. A measured step over the room, connected, with an air, or series of strokes, and beat upon the adjacent bodies as passing. The lips moved as if words were articulated, but no sound could be distinguished. Zeno’s animal.
(As these figures wheel around, the almost unbearable tension and exaltation which has gripped the spectators is suddenly relieved by the appearance of two grotesquely grinning masks, whose movements ape the dancers.)
All old pond. A frog jumps in. Plop. (Coro des Aves en perdido) Let’s dance. Strike the furniture violently. And more, repeatedly. Kneeling upon one knee with the hands upon the back, she often sprang up and suddenly struck the top of the room with the palm of the hand. To do this she rose fifteen inches from the floor, so that the family was under the necessity of drawing all the nails and hooks from the ceiling.
She shook her head, lifted up her foot, who cares, turned on the radio. I’m not going to build this up until something else happens, something overheard and unknown. Mouth wide open, no reason. Getting up, walking across the room, sitting down.
Her weak memory of the tornado Leslie Thornton Wrapped around her neck, two strings and a piece of gum. Waiting by the house, standing on the door, looking at the night, picking up the glass. Trying to lift the suitcase, feeling the back of her throat, turning on the light, sticking to the window. By the way, when I was talking to you the other night did you notice anything strange about the way your hand kept touching that object or the fact that I refused to be moved by your little drama of the self?
ing earnest. In the morning I will take the cat out for a short walk. The last two hours will probably be the hardest.” And the times were so troubled that when a soldier exposed himself to the crowd to indicate his displeasure, rioting broke out and thousands were killed, or so it is told. Moses, using an allegory, had described Paradise to be the womb, and Eden the placenta. Thus, the river flowing from Eden symbolizes the navel, which nourishes the fetus. Thus Exodus signifies the passage out of the womb, and the crossing of the Red Sea refers to the blood. A divine figure speaks: “I am the Voice, I am androgynous (I am both Mother and Father since I copulate with myself, and with those who love me). I am the Womb, the Thunder, Perfect Mind. I am first, last, honored, scorned, holy, mother, daughter. I am knowing, secret, shameless, shamed, strong and frightened, foolish, wise, blinded and insightful. I am the matro-pater, the serpent and the flood. The word is everything to the child. Only those who seek the word are truly happy. For this reason, seeking is also called sucking; to those infants who seek the word, the Father’s loving breasts supply milk.”
Scratched into a thin line, one box on top of another. A mood of gravity prevails. A hand, a rose, a book, a joke, a fly, a radio, a little figurine, a drawer of burnt-out bulbs, a patterned rug, a certain order. A rational description of compassionate acts (a murderous impulse toward the genius of words). I love wry humor, I lie very close to him at night to see what he does in his sleep, the way he moves. I know when it’s raining. And now she could see him down the hall and further down the hall a long word, drifting, and it was sucking, sticky deadly word, parasitic miasmus. Go to Hell. Flat to her face, fall down, her fingers point accusingly at him. “You go ride the old mule into the desert!” She collapsed laughing “And then will I know what to do? My flesh is damp; there are random facts, with sunlight moving, and the sweeping, blasphemous, sick sun resting, falling with yellow sky turning. And the crazy yellow sky.” And then you say, “How do you say ‘bananas’ in Spanish?” And “land of makebelieve calling.” Then you say. “send the unsaved to hell.” And I know, you don’t want to go.
The window breaks. I watch our boat get caught on rocks, then try to climb them like a crab. We turn around to see if anyone is looking, dart for the door, stuck, threw my weight against it, water rushes in knocking us over. Something hard, like vinyl, lodges in my throat, almost choking me as I try to regain my footing. I grabbed for your hand and blindly thrashing slowly eased my way to the door. I didn’t know if you were alive but I pulled your big body behind me, thank goodness it floated along. I thought about how I had been mean to you at breakfast and tried to understand why. My anger and determination were fierce, though as I reached the exit, I let go, gasping. If I hadn’t caught the railing we would have drowned.
She put one foot in front of the other, shifted her weight slowly forward, the top part of her body, her shoulders would collapse backwards producing a sensation of weightlessness, but the momentum of her stride would carry her and she would suddenly move forward. I looked up in surprise, but you didn’t see me. I was there. I almost tripped when you stumbled, then turned and tripped myself, until I grabbed for the staircase and found my way, I chased you across the room. Why didn’t you tell me? I knew the room was flooding and didn’t like your expression as you descended into it blindly.
Calm down, I know you are insightful, he spoke these words to her, but you must be driven. He had no insight. He was numb. She was lying down, waiting for something to happen. No, this will never do, you moving away, me measuring the distance in the dark. Her love for him was winding up, and up. An ancient light filling the room. “You always hurt the one you love. It will be fresh and soothing to your skin. The one you shouldn’t hurt at all. It will enter the room in spurts. twirling ...so if I broke your heart last night ...it will turn you around ...it’s because I love you most of all ...and then you will see the other side of the valley. There will be a war and disaster in our house. There will be dead animals, broken flesh, missing phrases. You will forget
(I’ don’t-want-you-to-get-hurt) (That’s-the-final-straw) “Oh yes, well in that case, I’ll take everything we had that was good. You can have the rest, the goats, the barn. I’ll take the carefully placed accouterments of life, which you managed with a bilious economy. I’m sure the rest will hold you, now listen to me closely. You go on be-
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how to talk, you will have only forethoughts. You will become tense and feel anger when the windows are broken.”
What do you expect in a small midwestern town in 1951, hours before a devastating tornado?
She will tell you what this is about. It is about walking into a hold, simple, a woman who goes out and discovers she cannot believe the bus will ever come – she is exceedingly distressed, she pants, moving like an animal side to side. She says to her children. “I have finished discussing everything with you. I have told you everything for you to share secretly with your friends. I have sealed the sleeper in luminous waters that death might not prevail.” Her slippery thoughts, the children wanting more. She played dead.
She walked through that room thousands of times, bored, making a lot of noise. And when the bottle crashed through the ...it was impossible...her weak memory. It took all the strength she had just to move across the floor, over and around an assortment of things, half-organized piles of stuff that might slip suddenly, stacked right up to the ceiling at odd angles and casting strange shadows. Turn around and put your head against the wall. Wrap your arm limply, like this, about the neck and let your hand drape on to your back. Place your other hand on your hip and hold still a minute.
And that is what saved her. There was a fantasy. There was an old woman who was very small, lived across the way, shorter than the banister on her back steps. Her house was peach and she wore a green vest. She was much too small. I knew there was something wrong when I saw her and relaxed, why should I care? Get too close and I, well ...Watch her down the block, and the way the light comes off her, and the way I want to be nearby, it is a mystery. Back yard, dark alley. A slight movement caught out of the corner of my eye, either eye. Later that night at the grocery store I find that I have no breath. My eyes flash bolts of lightning: le chapeau, le tapis, un fauteuil. Une pendule, un tableau, la suspension.
For dinner she would have a little goose liver paté on rye crisp and an orange. For breakfast she would have whole grain cereal with wheat germ, raisins and milk. For lunch she would sometimes have coffee, otherwise an American cheese sandwich. Lick your finger and touch, there, precisely. But all this is too far into the future. All right then, right then. You can take the goats. Grim, hostile, grotesque. The light will dim the darkness. The wind, the sky, the glories of nature. The tornado.
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