Tableaux

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

—Oscar Wilde, “Di Profundis”

She stands at the bedroom window watching her boys; they cannot see her. A trick of the light, the way the sun renders the glass opaque from an outside vantage. Her boys play Cowboys and Indians on the lawn: the two oldest are cowboys with index-and-thumb guns, the youngest is bound up in the garden hose, leaves smashed in his hair to resemble feathers. Jeremy, her oldest son, brags about his skill with a rifle; her middle son, Jason, challenges him to prove it at the carnival tomorrow. She pries apart the louvers of the blinds, her fingers taking up the gritty dust there. Josh, the youngest, verges on tears as his brothers hoot and holler: he is so sensitive, her youngest son.

—They were clowning around, her husband would say. Stop coddling the boy.

—We were just playing, didn’t mean nothing by it, her oldest sons would say.

She knows what they would say, how they would react were she to step in, so she does nothing. The louvers are horizontal bars, she imagines. She imagines herself as both guard and prisoner, suspended between two roles. The scene before her seems frozen in time, framed by the window, a tableau of small cruelties. She does not move until the youngest escapes, gets pushed to the street, bleeds.

Her child cries. The scraped skin of his knee is black with asphalt. The iodine makes him cry and he squirms to get away from the pain his mother bestows. She holds on to prevent him running out the door. She thinks about signals, the division between sender and recipient. Children know pain, this is given. Josh is closer to her than his brothers, who seem now so much like their father: Jeremy and Jason mime smoking together with twigs, they talk about baseball and airplanes and cars, they pounce on the youngest at the remotest sign of weakness. All things her husband does: they absorb it. Every action an utterance, the children align these utterances—the signal—with the sender, their father or their mother.

And what transmission does Josh receive now? Pain, necessary but inescapable pain that originates from his mother. She wishes to avoid this alignment, but he is wounded, and wounds must be cleaned lest they deepen, fester, consume.

She knows exactly what her husband would say: —Nice one, rub some dirt on it. But a fine line exists between masculine nonchalance and callousness. Better she teach him different, impart on him some other lesson.

She folds her legs under her and bends down to kiss her son’s knee. Her lips press soft against the pink, wet part of his scraped skin, the smell of iodine catching her nose and leaving a metallic taste reminiscent of seafood on her lips. —There, she says, looking up at him. —There. All better?

He keeps his lips tucked in and tight, drawing down the corners of his mouth. He nods without speaking.

—You’re fine, love, you’re fine. She sweeps his hair, feels something swelling inside her: like love, perhaps, or the choke before a sob.

When her youngest leaves, she begins cleaning the bathroom. She wears yellow rubber gloves, cleans the grout of the shower tiles with the toilet brush and bleach, wiping up dirt, hair, fingernails, soap scum, spilled iodine, and what might be congealed semen. Suffering, she thinks, relies on second-order thought. There is grime in the shower—fact. She is aware there is grime in the shower: fact. The former prompts reaction (disgust comes first to mind) while...