So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

What I didn’t say, across the few feet that separated our two beds, was that I couldn’t understand how it had happened to us.

His sadness was of the kind that is patient and without hope.

What the family friends said is true. For some people. For others the hands of the clock can go round till kingdom come and not cure anything.

if we were careful not to take a step in any direction from the place where we were now, we would somehow get back to the way it was before she died.

irremediable.

What strange and unlikely things are washed up on the shore of time.

In some way his happiness was at that time (and forever after, it would seem) a threat to me. It was not the kind of happiness that children are included in, but why should that trouble me now? I do not even begin to understand it.

equanimity.

The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice,

If they hadn’t disappeared then, they would have on some other occasion, life being, as Ortega y Gasset somewhere remarks, in itself and forever shipwreck.

I did not so much miss the old house as blot it completely out of my mind.

We had gone down in the world and there didn’t seem to be anything to do but make the best of it.

Now was the moment to forget about that door I had walked through without thinking, and about the void that could sometimes be bridged in dreams, and about the way things used to be when my mother was alive. Instead, I clung to them more tightly than ever, even as I was being drawn willy-nilly into my father’s new life.

It was not easy to tell when the houses were built, because their age was so frequently disguised by subsequent additions, and so they seemed timeless and as inseparably a part of the people who lived in them as their voices or their names or the way they combed their hair.

The mystery of her long black dress touching the floor troubled me; it seemed to me like a part of her body, and aroused in me a feeling of fear and confusion.…”

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

My father represented authority, which meant—to me—that he could not also represent understanding.

Anyway, I didn’t tell Cletus about my shipwreck, as we sat looking down on the whole neighborhood, and he didn’t tell me about his.

reticences

implement

simple truth is that though so much is made of the woman’s beauty in love stories, passion does not require it.

Plato’s idea that lovers were originally one person, the two parts having become separated and desiring to be joined, is as good an explanation as any for what cannot in the mind of an outsider ever be convincingly accounted for.

Between the time that Cletus and I climbed down from the scaffolding and went our separate ways and the moment when he was confronted with the broken gun in the sheriff’s office, he must have crossed over the line into maturity, and though he is referred to as a boy, wasn’t one any longer.

The house was too new to be comfortable. It was like having to spend a lot of time with a person you didn’t know very well. And I missed the way it used to be when there was no roof yet and the underflooring was littered with shavings and bent nails and pieces of wood I could almost but not quite think what to do with. Now there was nothing on the floor but rugs and you couldn’t do daring things because if you did you might leave a mark on the wallpaper.

knickerbockers.

jocosely

It was an all but passive, wholly private passion that turned me into two boys,

As I looked out of the window at Sheridan Road they looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.

Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.

I think now—I think if I had turned and walked along beside him and not said anything, it might have been the right thing to do. But that’s what I think now. It has taken me all these years even to imagine doing that, and I had a math class on the second floor, clear at the other end of the building, and there was just barely time to get there before the bell rang.

I was of an age to appreciate anything that looked like something it wasn’t, and when we passed a cluster of mailboxes I would turn and look back. Long-legged wading birds is what they put me in the mind of, though we were a considerable distance from anything that could be called a body of water.

I became aware of a richness that wasn’t visual but came from the way the smells were laid on: dried-out wood, rusting farm machinery, the manure pile, the pigpen, yarrow, and onion grass, quicklime from the outhouse, in spring the frost leaving the ground, in summer the hay lying cut in the fields.

You could see that they were not at ease in town and that they clung together for support. The women’s clothes were not meant to be becoming but to wear well, to last them out.

If any part of the following mixture of truth and fiction strikes the reader as unconvincing, he has my permission to disregard it. I would be content to stick to the facts if there were any.

prestidigitation;

I don’t know how it is now—farm

Anyone can see what used to be reserved for the eye of the hawk as it wheeled in slow circles.

do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And they cling together when they are in town largely because they cannot imagine a situation in which the people they see in the stores or on the sidewalk (and who do not appear to see them) could possibly need their help. It is different in the country.

She has made him a present of herself and nothing he does or doesn’t do will make her take it back.

Wooden surfaces that have been scrubbed to the texture of velvet.

mired

hod carrier

As people get older they get more alike in character and appearance and could all be leading the same life.

When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well.

There is, even so, something buoyant in her nature that makes people pleased to see her coming toward them on the street, and usually they stop to talk to her and hear about the catastrophes. She winds up the conversation by saying cheerfully, “Life is no joke.” What sensible person wouldn’t agree with her.

pollarded

The darkness outside presses against the windowpanes here also, but they are too accustomed to this to notice it.

sleeping the sleep of stones.

The north wind howling around the corner of the house only serves to deepen this unknowing.

Since the preacher said that the point of the parables is mysterious and needs explaining, they have no choice but to believe him.