Free See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid Page A

cold and constant.
    The curtains were drawn and yet through them Mrs. Sweet could see that the light in the Yellow House, a house painted a yellow so clear and untinged with any other colors, a color yellow that Mrs. Sweet had once seen in Finland and Estonia, places not at all near the equator; in the Yellow House lived a family, a mother, a father, and six children and all those six children were so wonderfully well adjusted to life as it was, so well behaved, so polite, so kind (there were four girls and two boys and the boys have never been known to drown a hamster just to see what that would be like or cut off a cat’s whiskers and then let him be alone in the woods to see what that would be like), that Mrs. Sweet wished that her family—Mr. Sweet, Persephone, the young Heracles—would be just like the children of the family who lived in the Yellow House and their name was Arctic. Until she was thirteen years of age Mrs. Sweet wet her bed every night while she was asleep and it made her afraid to fall asleep even until now, this now, and it is why she counts an imaginary flock of sheep as she tries to fall asleep each night and fails and so swallows a capsule of Restoril. Every Halloween Mr. Arctic transformed himself into a very attractive woman, his legs free of hair and his underarms too, and that could be seen, for he wore panty hose and a dramatically sleeveless dress; and he wore a pair of shoes with very high heels, heels so high they made Mrs. Sweet laugh, she thought shoes in that shape were a form of amusement, that even when women wore them they were meant to make everybody who saw them laugh, not outright, not to themselves a secret, not altogether, only just say to themselves, here is a laugh. But that was Mr. Arctic, every Halloween, wearing a costume of a dress and a beautiful wig and earrings and bracelets and false pearls and stockings (fishnet sometimes, sheer flesh-colored or not sometimes); and sometimes when Mrs. Sweet saw him, for it happened year after year, a long time, and this time, year after year, a long time is five years, which to Mrs. Sweet was a forever; she said to herself: how does he do it? What does his wife think? Are his children, all six of them, four girls, two boys, pleased to see their father, so unusual in our small world confined and defined by the presence of the Shirley Jackson house, looking more like a beautiful woman than most beautiful women can manage, and asking of us all to find nothing in it except delight, delight, and more delight? And, each year after Mr. Arctic and Mr. Sweet had done taking the children trick-or-treating, Mrs. Sweet would sit with Mr. Arctic at the dining-room table and they would drink Cavalier rum from small glass tumblers.
    Every morning is the next morning of the night before: and the night before is Now and Then at the same time is the morning after the night before: the young Heracles crying loudly, as if he meant to wake up the whole world, and Mrs. Sweet had to give him milk from those sacs attached to her chest and he drank from her as if he were the earth itself on which rain had not fallen for three or seven or ten years.
    And all that while during the time of the birth and then infancy of the young Heracles Mr. Sweet had fallen asleep, ignoring his wife in her beautiful nightgown, sleeping through the faint cries of the baby, though any passerby might perceive this cry as coming from the throat of an army of murderous men, who meant to kill or be killed, he slept peaceably, in contentment, in a state of sleep that any scientist who has studied sleep would declare ideal, perfect, a state of sleep to be universally prescribed. And he slept through the nights, satisfied completely in the world of sleep, dreaming of a universe in which every conscious being was a triumph and all that they imagined themselves to be was all they would be; and there was harmony in matters of every kind: physical, emotional, mental; and in such a universe,