The sagging, slightly dark bulge in the ceiling — a dark spot that defeated all the layers of paint that tried to cover it — rained down the age of six-seven, the letters of the age of six-seven, in a ceaseless shower, the precise notes of the choreography of the movement of the hand and the ungainliness of the movement, and the thing that was abandoned, the crooked abandoned letters that were abandoned precisely because they remained as they were, in the frozen quivering of the movement that is never completed and never grows and remains behind in its awkwardness, even when the speech is nice or as-if nice, Corinne’s as-if nice speech, and Sammy’s don’t-want-to-be nice speech, and the too-nice speech of the child, who saw the fall of the letters, the imperative of the ungainly, not-nice letters that was right like the groan was right, the groan of the shack renewing itself and regretting its ceaseless renewal, trailing behind, dragging behind itself as it ran forward in the wake of the mother, who gave birth to the command of the crooked letters and the unintelligible writing, but gave birth to it from the rear, not the front, like a stepchild, and, without seeing, either the command or the denial of the command, nailing us to the rain of crooked letters that were the duty of loyalty to the mother and the mother’s shame, which the shack remembered in every one of its stages of accumulation, because it never stopped being itself for a moment at every stage, in height, breadth, and length, carrying the one unchangeable, remembering face, under all the other faces stamped on it, against the mother’s will or in obedience to it, remembering the debt of shame and the debt of the handicap of the weak, limping handwriting, growing fainter until it almost disappeared, and turned into a transparent thread tying the four of us together.
HANDWRITING (3)
SAMMY DOESN’T WRITE because he doesn’t write. There is no pen or pencil in the world that fits the non-grip of his knotty, swollen fingers: coarse, wounded skin on coarse, wounded skin, knotty layer upon knotty layer. He consumes whole tubes of Nona’s Veluta and scarcely succeeds in bending his stiff fingers, only a little and only for a while, until they forget how to be soft and go back to being hard again. Sometimes they burn. Sometimes he wakes up at night from the burning of his hands. This goes together with the burning of his eye, which was penetrated by a chip from the welding. He lies in the light of the night lamp. There is the murmur of sick people in the room, murmuring shadows of sickness against the walls. Poultices soaked in tea on the burning eye and cool, greasy cream on the burning hands, but not the cream prescribed by the doctor, which he forgot to buy, lost the prescription. He hasn’t got what’s called a “touch.” Only a scratch. “Better I don’t touch,” he says. And also: “Bring me a pencil to write something down.” The pads of his fingers fail to grip the pencil. Again and again they try, and again it slips and drops. Someone else writes for him: me, or Corinne, or the worker, or me. He always complains: “How did you write it, tell me, how?” he cries, lounging in the chair, devouring the soft part of the bread and imagining out loud: “Just imagine if I was a tailor, threading those thin needles all day.”
HANDWRITING (4)
EVERY MORNING, WHEN she went out earlier than early, she said to Sammy: “Make the child her sandwich for school, you hear?” He didn’t hear, he covered his head with the thick blanket, his face scrunched up in pleasure. The child woke him, stood next to the bed dressed in the clothes that would have gotten her in big trouble if the mother had seen them: a fancy dress of bright colors, pulled out of the closet and patched together. He mumbled, pulled the blanket higher over his head so that his legs were exposed to the knee. At the big recess he’d turn up in the schoolyard with the sandwich he would have liked for himself, only the kind he would have liked for himself, wrapped in plastic and crammed into his pocket — two slices of bread, each about four inches thick, generously smeared with a pink paste of cream cheese and half a jar of strawberry jam. She threw it in the trash and bought herself a roll with sour pickles on credit at the kiosk next to the school, which she ate bite by bite: one bite for her, one for Havatzelet. Havatzelet pushed back her heavy black curls a little when she bent over the roll and held them loosely to her cheek. The child looked in wonder at Havatzelet’s slender fingers gathering a tress of hair, her hollowed hand hovering for a moment over her cheek, touching and not touching. Everything Havatzelet did or said cast a stone into a lake, leaving circles of wonder on the surface of the water. But she didn’t say much, and what she did say sounded like ground graveclass="underline" she was deaf and mute, Havatzelet, she sat in the front row to read the teacher’s lips, with the child always at her side, watching with bated breath as the lines of the notebook filled with Havatzelet’s writing, line after line, a pattern of embroidery.
The perfection of her handwriting was almost sublime, so superior that it left no room for envy, only gave rise to a desire to kneel in adoration: the letters were pure and clear even in their moments of greatest convolution, following each other neatly at a slight, even slant, continuing each other but not joined together, as if they had given birth to one another by breath or by sound, similar but not identical, attentive to their place in the word and at the same time to the broad tapestry of the line and the page, which was whole and symmetrical without being monotonous. The child brought Havatzelet gifts: Rosemarie chocolate, a bead bracelet she stole from Corinne, and the musical box in the form of a Swiss chalet that Maurice had once sent. Every day after school the two of them went to the child’s house, where nobody was home, took off their clothes and draped themselves in the mother’s ironed tablecloths and sheets, sipped the wine the child boiled in the coffeepot and served, because that was what the children drank in Model Little Girls by the Comtesse de Ségur. Their heads heavy with the hot wine, they stretched out on the lawn outside, still wrapped in the tablecloths and turbans, closing their eyes in consent when the pine tree shed its needles on their faces. Nona stood on her concrete steps and called to the child in a loud voice, but the child didn’t answer, she went on listening to the ugly obscure speech emerging from Havatzelet’s mouth, the words ground into a thick, coarse growl, strained, rising and falling, repulsive and fascinating at once, so foreign to her fragile wrists, to the etched, quivering lips that produced these sounds. She brought Havatzelet her notebook from her schoolbag, and opened it: “Write, Havatzelet, write,” she requested, putting a sharpened pencil in her hand and almost forcing it onto the paper: “Write.” Havatzelet wrote. There was a silence, which Nona’s stubborn calls only emphasized. Once more the rows of pearls flowed from Havatzelet’s hand, the slanting letters stretched their long necks like proud young colts.
The child kept on spoiling new notebooks. The first half of the first page, so fresh and pure, bore letters and words that tried to tame themselves, to aspire to emulate those of Havatzelet, but in the middle of the gleaming expanse of the page they collapsed, became themselves, broke with one jerk of the elbow the beautiful glass cage in which they had been placed, and galloped off wildly in all directions, distorted, clamorous, and blind as a famished mob falling on crusts of bread thrown to them on the road: one letter screeched, gaped with a black, toothless mouth or grew a monstrous growth on its forehead, another bent down to gather its scattered limbs, a third was spiky as a porcupine, a fourth lost the force of gravity and flew, while another bit its ankle with a sharp tooth. The child looked and saw filth: that’s what it was, filth. At night, when she lay with her eyes open, adding penny to penny — the money she had stolen from Nona’s purse and the money she would steal tomorrow from the mother to buy more new notebooks from Levy — assailed by the memory of the filthy writing from which there was no escape, she felt in full force the existence of the thing inside her and its constant expansion, the source of the contamination with which she was wholly infected, inside and out, expressed in the letters whose ugliness was evil, a sin that clung to her, that turned her into someone else and gave birth in her place to that other, corrupted child with the monstrous handwriting.