“How did you cure those people?” May said boldly, though her grandmother had always told her: don’t let me catch you talking to strangers in the store.
The little man swung round attentively. “Why I hypnotize them, young lady. I hypnotize them. Are you asking me to explain to you what hypnotism is?”
May who did not know what she was asking flushed red and had no idea what to say. She saw her grandmother looking straight at her. The old woman looked out of her head at May and the whole world as if they had caught fire and she could do nothing about it, she could not even communicate the fact to them.
“She don’t know what she’s talking about,” her grandmother said.
“Well it’s very simple,” the man said directly to May, in a luxuriantly gentle voice he must think suitable for children. “It’s just like you put a person to sleep. Only they’re not really asleep, do you follow me honey? You can talk to them. And listen—listen to this—you can go way deep into their minds and find out things they wouldn’t even remember when they were awake. Find out their hidden worries and anxieties that’s causing them the trouble. Now isn’t that an amazing thing?”
“You couldn’t do that with me,” the old woman said. “I would know what was going on. You couldn’t do that with me.”
“I bet he could,” May said, and was so startled at herself her mouth stayed open. She did not know why she had said that. Time and again she had watched her grandmother’s encounters with the outside world, not with pride so much as a solid, fundamental conviction that the old woman would get the better of it. Now for the first time it seemed to her she saw the possibility of her grandmother’s defeat; in her grandmother’s face she saw it and not in the little man who must be crazy, she thought, and who made her want to laugh. The idea filled her with dismay and with a painful, irresistible excitement.
“Well you never can tell till you give it a try,” the man said, as if it were a joke. He looked at May. The old woman made up her mind. She said scornfully, “It don’t matter to me.” She put her elbows on the counter and held her head between her two hands, as if she were pressing something in. “Pity to take your time,” she said.
“You really ought to lay down so you can relax better.”
“Sitting down—” she said, and seemed to lose her breath a moment—“sitting down’s good enough for me.”
Then the man took a bottle-opener off a card of knick-knacks they had in the store and he walked over to stand in front of the counter. He was not in any hurry. When he spoke it was in a natural voice but it had changed a little; it had grown mild and unconcerned. “Now I know you’re resisting this idea,” he said softly. “I know you’re resisting it and I know why. It’s because you’re afraid.” The old woman made a noise of protest or alarm and he held up his hand, but gently. “You’re afraid,” he said, “and all I want to show you, all I mean to show you, is that there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Nothing to be afraid of, I just want you to keep your eyes on this shiny metal object I’m holding in my hand. That’s right, just keep your eyes on this shiny metal object here in my hand. Just keep your eyes on it. Don’t think. Don’t worry. Just say to yourself, there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be afraid of—” His voice sank; May could not make out the words. She stayed pressed against the soft-drink cooler. She wanted to laugh, she could not help it, watching the somehow disreputable back of this man’s head and his white, rounded, twitching shoulders. But she did not laugh because she had to wait to see what her grandmother would do. If her grandmother capitulated it would be as unsettling an event as an earthquake or a flood; it would crack the foundations of her life and set her terrifyingly free. The old woman stared with furious unblinking obedience at the bottle-opener in the man’s hand.
“Now I just want you to tell me,” he said, “if you can still see—if you can still see—” He bent forward to look into her face. “I just want you to tell me if you can still see—” The old woman’s face with its enormous cold eyes and its hard ferocious expression was on a level with his own. He stopped; he drew back.
“Hey what’s the matter?” he said, not in his hypnotizing but his ordinary voice—in fact a sharper voice than ordinary, which made May jump. “What’s the matter, lady, come on, wake up. Wake up,” he said, and touched her shoulder to give her a little shake. The old woman with a look of intemperate scorn still on her face fell forwards across the counter with a loud noise, scattering several packages of Kleenex, bubble gum, and cake decorations over the floor. The man dropped the bottle-opener and giving May an outraged look and crying, “I’m not responsible—it never happened before,” he ran out of the store to his car. May heard his car start and then she ran out after him, as if she wanted to call something, as if she wanted to call “Help” or “Stay.” But she did not call anything, she stood with her mouth open in the dust in front of the gas pumps, and he would not have heard her anyway; he gave one wildly negative wave out the window of his car and roared away to the north.
May stood outside the store and no other cars went by on the highway, no one came. The yards were empty in Black Horse. It had begun to rain a little while before and the drops of rain fell separately around her, sputtering in the dust. Finally she went back and sat on the step of the store where the rain fell too. It was quite warm and she did not mind. She sat with her legs folded under her looking out at the road where she might walk now in any direction she liked, and the world which lay flat and accessible and full of silence in front of her. She sat and waited for that moment to come when she could not wait any longer, when she would have to get up and go into the store where it was darker than ever now on account of the rain and where her grandmother lay fallen across the counter dead, and what was more, victorious.
THE PEACE OF UTRECHT
I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success. Maddy and I, though we speak cheerfully of our enjoyment of so long and intimate a visit, will be relieved when it is over. Silences disturb us. We laugh immoderately. I am afraid—very likely we are both afraid—that when the moment comes to say goodbye, unless we are very quick to kiss, and fervently mockingly squeeze each other’s shoulders, we will have to look straight into the desert that is between us and acknowledge that we are not merely indifferent; at heart we reject each other, and as for that past we make so much of sharing we do not really share it at all, each of us keeping it jealously to herself, thinking privately that the other has turned alien, and forfeited her claim.
At night we often sit out on the steps of the verandah, and drink gin and smoke diligently to defeat the mosquitoes and postpone until very late the moment of going to bed. It is hot; the evening takes a long time to burn out. The high brick house, which stays fairly cool until midafternoon, holds the heat of the day trapped until long after dark. It was always like this, and Maddy and I recall how we used to drag our mattress downstairs onto the verandah, where we lay counting falling stars and trying to stay awake till dawn. We never did, falling asleep each night about the time a chill drift of air came up off the river, carrying a smell of reeds and the black ooze of the riverbed. At half-past ten a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrawls of blue and red and orange light that said BILLIARDS and CAFE; feeling as I recognized these signs a queer kind of oppression and release, as I exchanged the whole holiday world of school, of friends and, later on, of love, for the dim world of continuing disaster, of home. Maddy making the same journey four years earlier must have felt the same thing. I want to ask her: is it possible that children growing up as we did lose the ability to believe in—to be at home in—any ordinary and peaceful reality? But I don’t ask her; we never talk about any of that. No exorcising here, says Maddy in her thin, bright voice with the slangy quality I had forgotten, we’re not going to depress each other. So we haven’t.