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Show A PROPER INTRODUCTION-23 I felt after the times I had gone to see her. It wasn't a matter of feeling upset, but more a state of being incapacitated. My gait would be oddly unsteady, my hands weak, and I'd have difficulty reading. For weeks afterwards I'd be preoccupied with such things as the precariousness of balance on subway platforms and the small margin of error permitted taxi drivers. I'd find myself gaping at the canyon walls of the city in wonder at the awesome power of the men who built them. How did they do it? How did they know where to place the bricks and the wires and cables and pipes-and the underground networks, miles of them, of still more wires and cables and pipes? I would reel from the terribleness of so much knowledge and my own limitless ignorance. The fact that I could survive at all seemed a matter of the sheerest good fortune, and as I crossed the narrow streets, I stepped carefully around the steam that hissed up from the buried pipes, braced for an explosion from all that held-under pressure. It was as if my visits to my mother tore off a mind-layer that kept me from feeling the world's dangers-or from a great rage and sorrow endangering from within. Or was it both? Uncovered, too, was the worry that I didn't really love her, not enough anyhow to stop avoiding her. Yet Mother had approved in her way. When I was "myself," I was competent, everyone said, talented even, and entirely independent. "You're the strong one in the family," she used to tell me. To remain so, I had avoided her. That, too, had its price. Although I'm staring straight ahead, I sense that the Bible woman is watching me, perhaps leaning towards me with her hand outstretched so that her hair falls across one of her huge eyes. I turn slightly away from her and pretend to sleep. |