Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
I turn the page and here is another beautiful woman, with shoulder-length wild hair and large sunglasses over her eyes. She is the Duchessa of Vilesia, wife of Silas Hobbit the movie-maker, and she is modeling her custom-made ermine hunting outfit in preparation for an expedition to the Arctic. The lovely Duchessa of Vilesia! Even her knee-length boots are of soft ermine, and her pale, pale skin has the downy look of some magic texture, hardly ordinary skin. Careless in the crook of her arm is a rifle with a powerful scope. Behind her on a wall, slightly out of focus, is an enormous moose's head, stuffed, upon whose nose someone has jauntily stuck a pair of sunglasses that are the exact copy of the Duchessa's—how truly conquered is that beast!
I look up. A few yards away appears a handsome lady of about fifty. She takes off her fur-trimmed coat and gives it to an attendant, she approaches one of the chairs and is welcomed into it by another male stylist, much like Mr. Stanevicus; a solid lady with thick, shining blond hair and platinum fingernails. But, alas, at once the wig comes off in the young man's hands: out come pins, fixtures, and the wig is rigorously brushed while the lady herself sits pallid and suddenly ugly in her chair, with her own flat, skimpy brown hair reflected back to her in the mirror. She is given the wig and brushes it herself, fondly and vigorously, while her stylist begins to brush her hair, her own hair, and the
two of them perform exactly the same motions, their arms moving in exactly the same rhythm, one brushing a wig and the other brushing a head.
I turn the pages of my magazine. It is all I have, all I've been given. Time passes. An hour passes. Another hour passes, very slowly. My eyes are puffed up from the hairspray in the air, or the smoke, or the perfume, or the swampy female heat that is everywhere about me. At last Nada appears, a new Nada, with her dark hair cut short and shaved on her neck but teased up to a peculiar height and looped down upon her pale forehead in snaky ringlets. My Medusa! I am leaden but her appearance wakes me; I manage to get out of the chair by myself, but I look so feeble that Nada stoops and says, “Are you having an attack?” The finest moments of my life have been those when I was able to tell my mother truthfully that I was not having an attack.
When we get to the car Nada notices with alarm the packages of food—forgotten all these hours!—and marred now with watery, sticky streaks of blood. In disgust she throws them out. She throws all three packages in a barrel marked
FILL ME UP.
… And so she did exist outside me, I can see her or half-see her, she did exist, she was a quite independent being. Two Nadas existed—the one who was free and who abandoned me often, and the other who has become fixed irreparably in my brain, an embryonic creature of my own making, my extravagant and deranged imagination—and I loved them both, I swear that it was both of them I craved. And so when Nada said to me on that day, “There is nothing personal, never anything personal in freedom,” I understood that the free, restless Nada was asserting herself, and that I could not hold her back.
If you leave this time, don't bother to come back…
Father had flown to South America again on a Wednesday, and when he returned on Saturday Nada was gone. On Friday afternoon I jumped down from the Johns Behemoth school bus (a station wagon without markings) and ran boyishly up our front walk, to show a possibly watching Nada that I was healthy again, and when I opened the
front door the foyer smelled of her luggage, a smell I didn't know I knew so well, and there came Ginger shuffling apologetically toward me, rubbing her nose with a wretched, distracted, embarrassed air that told me everything I needed to know.
I took from her the letter Nada had left me and went with dignity up to my room. I did not cry. I lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling of this strange house, wondering how I had come here, who I was, to whom I belonged—which harnessed set of adults—but knowing there was a hard, sharp kernel of fire in my stomach that had to be kept from bursting out into flame. And did it burst out? Did it?
Everywhere else in my body, flooding into my brain and my poor aching eyes, there was a desire for sleep, for heavy, inert, dry-mouthed sleep of the kind drowned men sleep, tossing and turning gently on the ocean floor. So I slept and I did not dream. Ginger scratched and snuffled outside the door and finally knocked, but I told her in Nada's precise stagey voice that I was “all right, thank you,” and finally she left, and the day turned into night and I slept, I slept peacefully, and the next day dawned without my noticing, and I woke to hear Father yelling into my face unintelligible nightmare words about some bitch who had run out on us for the third time.
Thereupon followed a strange idyllic interlude lasting ten days. If Father received any communication from Nada he did not tell me about it. We journeyed about together, he and I, two feckless, energetic bachelors, taking in movies, having dinner out at sunny, friendly restaurants in which children like myself were welcome, going to a “live” wrestling match all the way downtown where the very air about us stank of sweat and silky shorts and cigar smoke and everything fake and honest in its fakery dreamily honest! And we took in late late movies on the television set in Father's room (he and Nada, sad to tell, had not shared a room for several years) and ate potato chips and pickles and other slop together until two in the morning, sleepy, slow, oddly pleased with each other, the way men on a slow, sinking ship must be pleased with the companions fate has doled out to them—who are they to complain,
after all? And we went for odd meaningless drives in and around Fern-wood Heights, Father with a cigar stuck in his teeth and his sad, pouched eyes roaming about the late-winter hillsides.
One evening, coming out of the Fernwood movie house, we encountered Tia Bell and a middle-aged woman who looked like an aunt, and Tia strode over to us and seized Father's hand. “Elwood, is it true?” she said. Father withdrew his hand with dignity—the most dignity I had seen in him—and said he had no idea what she was talking about. But hadn't Natashya … hadn't she … ? Father explained that his wife had gone east to visit relatives, that was all. He stared into Tia's widened, sympathetic eyes and lied with no skill, so abrupt and reckless that Tia must have admired him for it. No doubt she went home and called all of his and Nada's “friends” to praise Father for his stoicism.
Father took me down to work with him. He had his own office, and there was a hallway of smaller offices that were “under him.” He had his own pert, cute little clipped-haired secretary, so much more pleasant than Nada that it was painful to see. He was a vice-president of some kind, I have yet to explain. I don't know what he did though he explained it to me several times that day. He showed me his company's product, a strand of very thin, nearly invisible wire that glowed in the light from the window behind him. (This company was GKS, I think. Before this he worked for OOP, and afterward for BWK.) Oh, he was a fine giant of a man still, with his hair grown a little thin on one side of his head but thick on the other, and one shoulder maybe sinking a little more than ever toward the earth, and his suit was rumpled and twitching with good humor, and the tip of the white handkerchief in his breast pocket was drooping, and one of his socks was royal blue and the other navy blue, and his teeth looked stained, for when Nada left us ordinary sanitation measures were suspended, and as he held the wire up for me to see, his big thick fingers were trembling. We were grim and happy together, like two bachelors. Sometimes I caught him glancing at me as if thinking, Who is this scrawny little bastard I'm stuck with? But then he would smile like a large Boy Scout and offer me some Sweet Peach chewing gum, which he carried around all the time, to give to office girls and all the other simple, eager-to-please souls of the sort that swarmed in the part of the world he controlled.
Here he had a handsome, broad desk cluttered with things that looked important, and a buzzer system, a few telephones, many loose
plastic pens, a letter opener of brass, a paperweight of heavy purplish stone, anything one might want in an office. At home he had nothing. Here the other men and the office girls smiled at him and knew who he was; at home there was no one to smile, and anyway he was nothing. But he was a brave comrade for me in those days, allowing me to skip school, as if Nada's escape were a kind of holiday, and I want to record how good he was to me up until the time he too cracked.
This happened one evening after we came home from a bowling alley. We were both lousy bowlers, and I think that might have precipitated his breakdown. Father was the sort of man who cannot bear to be outdone at anything. I had heard about him from boys at Johns Behemoth whose fathers knew him, or who had friends who knew him, and the rumor was that Elwood Everett admired men like himself, young men, who did everything he had done at that age except for the one final fatal step that suggested they were perhaps equal to him—then the game was over. This was a joke among people who knew, but Father never knew, thinking himself broad-minded and fair as any American. The fist-striking, back-slapping, ale-drinking bowlers at the Oak Woods bowling lanes we went to got on his nerves, not because of their lower-class happiness, but because of the way their pins crashed and flew and fell, rolling helplessly at the back of the alleys, like creatures fallen with side-splitting laughter. Ah, we both hated those men!
And he kept ducking back into the sleazy bar off the alleys while I bravely plodded around in my too-large and ludicrously stiff bowling shoes, carrying my too-heavy bowling ball balanced against my chest, so that on the way home his driving was extravagant and caused people to honk their horns at him. All this got him into the mood, but it wasn't until he had downed a glass of some special Irish whisky that he began to blubber.
Have you ever seen a large man blubber? Well, perhaps blubbering always indicates large men; small men whimper, I suppose.
I'm
large now myself, and I blubber every night and sometimes while I write this memoir, when a word or two releases in me whole floods of salty tears. Father did indeed blubber, wiping his nose on the edge of his forefinger, but he did more than that—goddam him, excuse him, forgive him—he began to talk.
“Now, Dickie, your mother is unstable. We know that. We are rational about that, we understand,” he began. He was looking at me man to
man; nothing terrifies a boy more. “But we are human beings too, yes, we are human, and human beings can't always control themselves. Look, I'm not ashamed of crying. Don't be embarrassed, Son. I'm not ashamed and don't you be ashamed. I'm an honest man. I have nothing to hide.”
He poured himself more whisky and seemed about to offer me some, then remembered who I was. “We want to understand her sickness and forgive her and make her well, Dickie, my poor kid, but it's awful hard when she's such a … she's such a bitch, why hide it? Everybody knows it, why hide it?” He laughed. His laughter at such times was bearlike and wheezing. “Women in this country, Dickie, this good old America, are all trying to be like Natashya, and Natashya has succeeded, oh yes, she has succeeded, she has everything she wants and then doesn't want it, she doesn't know what she wants, she never does any work—good sweet Jesus, never, never!—even though she was living in a room with a hotplate and cockroaches when I found her, but you won't hear about that! Bebe and Mimi and Fifi and Tia and all the girls won't hear about that, and you can bet your ass that Dean what's-his-name, that fairy with the English accent, you can bet he won't hear about it, that phony son-of-a-bitch with his phony vocabulary!
Aggrandizement,
he said the other night—what the hell kind of talk is that? He pulled it out of the air! And talking about some poem to Lesbia—what the hell kind of talk is that with women present? Those intellectual bastards always get onto things like that. Their minds are filthy, and it comes out disguised as a joke. Where I come from, Buster, you don't joke about serious things like that, anyway not with women around, and I'll warm your skinny little ass if I ever hear you talking smart. You understand? One of us is going to teach you some manners and it won't be your bitch of a mother, that's for goddam sure—
“Now, look. Look. Sit still. I want to tell you how things are, I want to make it all clear and aboveboard,” he said, sobbing again so his nose began to run, and I sat in an agony of terror at what he might say. “One of us is going to tell the truth! Oh, not her—not her! Fancy little Natashya with one hand in my pocket and the other inside my trousers—not her, she won't tell it, but I will! I don't lie! All your life you can look back on this talk and think how your daddy told you the awful truth, no matter how it hurt him, and how your mother wouldn't give you the time of day if you were drowning in the bathtub, and you remember that—
“What's wrong, where are you going? Sit down. Sit still. It all began when she was going to have a baby, and that baby was you,” he said, slowing a moment to get his bearings and bending over me with one arm out behind me along the back of the sofa and the other extended, his big fingers closed about the glass. “Yes, that baby was you! Jimmy— I mean Dickie—what the hell am I saying? Jimmy's my kid brother, he's forty now, how's that for a scream? My kid brother is forty! No, you're Dickie—Dickie—that baby was you. Now you know where babies come from, don't you? They teach it in school now or somewhere, so you know… Stop crying for Chrissake, I'm not going to hit you, you think I'm like your mother? Shut up that crying! It started with her pregnant, and maybe she wanted to flit around a little more and blush over the compliments she got for her ass, or her stories, or both—you know her!—and she started acting nuts right then, a lovely young girl of twenty and already cracking up, selfish like an oyster you can't pry open and the only way you can get it to recognize you is to smash it against the wall! Well, she was pregnant and stayed out late, sitting around brooding in the park and maybe picking up stray niggers that wouldn't object to a round back in the bushes, even with a nut that wouldn't wear stockings to her own wedding until I said to her, What the hell are you pulling? What the hell? Just what the hell? So she knuckled under and wore them no matter how hot it was that day, and that was that, but then when she got pregnant she went nuts again and said how she wanted to have an abortion and stayed away in some goddam hotel and had the doctor all lined up—