Free See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

Mrs. Sweet loved her husband so much until the end of time and time would never end. Next to her was his body, the size of a young Tudor prince, buried beneath white cotton sheets purchased from somewhere and a blanket and a duvet, all draped over him in such a way, he looked like a living and breathing sacred relic, a sarcophagus, lost to her world, the world in which she lived in the Shirley Jackson house and beyond, lost to the Arctics, and the Elwells, and the Jennings, whose mentally unstable son drowned their dog in urine he had collected from many sources, and the Pembrokes sending their workers to mow the lawn; and the Atlases, who lived in a house near the Walloomsac River; and the Woolmingtons, whom Mrs. Sweet loved, for just their sheer existence made her life a joy; the Josephs, who went hunting each hunting season and would return with a shot-dead deer and then after removing its skin would hang it up on the door of the barn, a display for communal adoration; and this scene of deer hunting admitted Homer Now and Then, then there were the two old ladies who sold newspapers, or so they said, but also sold a collection of magazines, with varying titles, devoted to motorbikes, and the illustrations to accompany the articles were many pictures of naked women, posed in positions that would make anyone want to have sex with them; and then there were the others, families who experienced happiness and despair, but right then, just then. At dawn Mrs. Sweet was up, out of bed, and looking around her and seeing nothing really, or seeing the bed in which she lay, her husband next to her, the sun about to pour too much of itself into the day, no cries of hunger or any other deep, essential need came from the newborn Heracles, the birds were singing, the bats, whose graceful sweepings about in the unknown and so therefore matterless air frightened Mrs. Sweet, were returning to wherever they concealed themselves during the day; a rumble from the engines of cars with passengers going to some destination that made up the world in which the Sweets and their acquaintances, or people they depended on, was very loud and then flew by like the sound coming from a wind instrument that was so elaborate, its base rested on the floor and the person playing it had to sit on a sturdy chair; Mrs. Sweet wanted to make a cup of coffee, but had been warned that an essential ingredient of that delicious beverage could harm a newborn’s development if it turned up in her breast milk, and so she made herself a cup of tea from fresh mint leaves she had gathered from an ineradicable patch of mint and let it steep in the water heated in a fragile electric water-heating pot she and Mr. Sweet had bought at KMart, and drank the tea when she felt it was good to do so.
    Oh, what a morning it was, that first morning of Mrs. Sweet awaking before the baby Heracles with his angry cries, declaring his hunger, the discomfort of his wet diaper, the very aggravation of being new and in the world; the rays of sun were falling on the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, causing the innocent dew to evaporate; the sun, the dew, the little waterfall right next to the village’s firehouse, making a roar, though really it was an imitation of the roar of a real waterfall; the smell of some flower, faint, as it unfurled its petals for the first time: oh what a morning! A time for reflection, for remembering the past, that way of seeing Then Now: an afternoon in winter, the middle of February, and Mrs. Sweet was not Mrs. Sweet yet, though she and Mr. Sweet were married by then, she was still young and had a personality that was not yet Mrs. Sweet; she wore strange clothes, dresses that were fashionable years ago among housewives who lived in that area called the Great Plains and that they had made themselves from patterns they ordered and received through the post office. Mrs. Sweet would find these garments in stores named Enid’s, Harriet Love, stores that