Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“I don’t need to get one day older to form my own conclusions,” I said, hoping to provoke some telling response.
“No, really?” turning his slitted eyes on me.
I don’t know why I felt the strongest urge to hit him in the face with one of my already clenched fists, but knew I’d be overpowered in a flash, so I said with as bitter and worldly a tone as I could muster, “Look, Frank—I mean, Franklin. I already know the world stinks. I don’t need to go to Venice or any of your other fancy-ass places to figure that out. I’m not stupid any more than you’re a Hindu.”
Franklin thought about that, or pretended to, for a minute. Then said, mock cheerful, “Lunch break’s over, Einstein. Time to get back to painting.”
Life pressed on over the next months. Franklin arranged for the three of us to go to Radio City Music Hall to see a show featuring the Rockettes, and while my grandmother was thrilled, I couldn’t help but feel guilty about our grand adventure—he bought dinner at a ritzy restaurant, my first encounter with creamed herring—knowing it was something my mom would have given anything, but anything to do.
Being by now a total outcast, a shunned goat, at school, and not caring what others said about me, I started spending afternoons up at the cemetery, hanging out near my parents’ side-by-side graves, before heading down to do my daily walk around Grover’s Mill Pond. The role of mama’s boy, or daddy’s, was one at this point I relished rather than rejected, wishing the bullies could fairly taunt me with such labels again. What would I give if I could still fish the pond with my father, or row out to the middle for another picnic with my boozy mother. Answer is anything. But I didn’t have anything to give, nothing anyway that would bring them back. And so, I found myself hanging around as much at the cemetery as at the drowning pond, the ash-carpeted pond, because in both places I noticed my heart calmed and my chance at happiness improved. Or, not
happiness
—less miserableness.
The keeper of the graveyard, a pasty middle-aged fellow with gimlet teeth, unwashed hair, and a kindly sad look in his eye, asked me one Tuesday, when there was no funeral to oversee or vandals to chase away, what I was doing there so often.
“Why you asking?” I asked him back. “Am I breaking a rule or something?”
“No,” he said, shoving his hands into trouser pockets, shy, I thought, about talking to the living as opposed to the dead. “Just seems like a young fella like you ought to be having fun with your friends somewhere, instead of haunting an old boneyard like this.”
I shrugged.
Then he asked an unexpected question: “Well, seeing as you’re here so much, how’d you like to pick up a little extra walk-around money?”
So it was I was hired to mow the lawn, sweep leaves and other leavings off the oblong marble markers, pick up trash—I couldn’t believe all the junk, candy wrappers, discarded funeral programs, even a used condom—left behind by sloppy mourners and cemeterygoers. Ralph paid me in cash, and other than giving me my assignment for the day, didn’t pull a Franklin on me by expecting me to listen to dumb speeches or answer a bunch of questions, so we got along pretty well. He had a daughter about my age named Mollie, who tagged along with him to work sometimes, and because she seemed to share my outcast ways, we sat against one of the mausoleums and chatted during breaks or after work. Like me, Mollie had lost her mother. Not to death, but because she ran off with another man.
“She might as well be dead and drowned as your mom,” Mollie said, shaking her head as she looked at me with unblinking, pretty brown eyes, dark as wet bark. “Don’t hate me for saying so, but I sorta wish she
had
drowned. Least that way I could feel sorry for her.”
“Yeah. I know,” I said.
Because I didn’t have any costly hobbies, and didn’t care about going to the movies or buying burgers and malted milks—I would have treated Mollie, but she had no more interest than I did in these things—the money started adding up. I kept it hidden in the lining of a seersucker jacket I rarely wore, which was safely hung in the far back of my closet. My grandmother occasionally asked me what I’d been up to all day, and was perfectly satisfied with the hodgepodge of white lies I concocted for her benefit. As often as not, I even told her the partial truth—“I helped mow somebody’s lawn”—to which she would respond, “Good way to get some exercise,” and the matter would drop. While I was pretty sure Franklin knew I was lying half the time, he let it ride. So long as I kept
our
lawn mowed.
It was about this time, when Franklin announced his intention of painting and wallpapering the interior of the house, a project my grandmother embraced wholeheartedly, that I began to develop an idea of my own. My idea began small, like a baby worm inside an apple. But as the days rolled by, it slowly formed itself at the core of my raw existence. Here I’d been earning money for no reason, but now I needed money if I was going to run away and start a new life somewhere else. I didn’t know any other place besides Grover’s Mill, but my home wasn’t home anymore, it was being leached away from me. Now at least I had a plan, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And if I wavered, a particularly disturbing encounter with Franklin solidified my goal.
This occurred when we were nearly finished with stripping off the old wallpaper in the dining room, a stately leaf-and-floral pattern with Greek vases that I used to get lost in staring at when I was a kid, which was to be replaced by a more up-to-date geometric design. To me it was just more of the same business of erasing the past, but I had no will to get all hot under the collar over it. The two of them had gone into New York to pick the new paper in a showroom there, so it was a moot point.
Helping Franklin with this work during the mornings before heading off to my chores in the cemetery, where I could hang around with Mollie, left me little time for my loitering by the pond, and school was just a fading memory. I’d basically dropped out, without anybody making much of a fuss about it. I assured my grandmother I would finish high school later, after taking time off to regroup. Meantime, working both jobs—and let me say here, if I might, that I was a hard worker, despite any attitude issues I had regarding Franklin—left me a worn-out rag at the end of the day. It was everything I could do to get some supper into my belly, do the dishes, slip past Iris and Franklin as they listened to some variety program on the radio, and head upstairs to bed. A fast masturbation into one of my socks, and I was quickly in dreamland.
One night, I’d gone down the hall to take a pee. After I lay down again, for whatever reason, I was having a hard time getting back to sleep. I tossed and turned, punched my pillow, adjusted my blanket, then had finally started to drift off when I heard someone turn the knob on my door and softly glide into the room. Far too startled, not to mention frightened, to speak or scream or even move, I lay there listening, and waited. Some long minutes passed, my heart up in my throat, and I did hear shuffling, very soft, across the rug, and the delicate, awful sound of breathing. I could swear I heard the intruder reach down and lift something up from the floor and—I can’t say for sure because my ears were so full of the shush of my pounding heart—inhale. The next sound was not as indistinct. A floorboard creaked, only somewhat muffled by the braided rug. The silence that followed was, as the cliché goes, deafening—and it went on for such an excruciatingly long stretch of time that I began to wonder if I hadn’t dreamed the intrusion. I continued my vigil with a corpselike stillness, and after a time I heard the faintest thud—not a thud, more like a
poof
of air—followed by another unnatural silence, and then the expertly turned handle again, though oddly no footfalls from my bedside back to the door. Mortified, I didn’t move a muscle, barely breathed, hoping against hope that there would be no further activity. As the room began to lighten, the sun not yet risen outside but the sky pinkening the sheers in my window, I recovered my wits and began trying to sort out what in the world I’d experienced.
Franklin, who considered himself a bit of a chef, was making Irish oatmeal and Belgian waffles in the kitchen that morning, whistling, as I walked in and poured myself a glass of milk.
“Where’s my grandmother?” I asked.
“When I came down, she wasn’t up yet so I checked in on her and she’s a tad under the weather this morning. Would you mind taking that up to her?” pointing at a tray set out with a softboiled egg, unbuttered toast, orange juice. The unnecessary touch of flowers in a cream pitcher nauseated me, I must confess.
“Breakfast in bed,” I said, and proceeded to do as he told me.
Not that I suspected for a moment my grandmother had been the person who visited my bedroom during the night, but seeing her in bed, white as if she’d been soaked in bleach, feeble from flu, confirmed it hadn’t been her. I placed the tray on her bedside table, asked if there was anything else I could do.
“No, Wyatt. I just need to sleep, is all. I’ll try to eat some of that later.”
Back downstairs in the kitchen, I certainly wasn’t going to give Franklin the pleasure of hearing me ask if he happened to notice any burglars in the house last night. Best, I knew, just to leave him thinking I was dumb as a brick. One thing that continued to bother me as the day wore on was how my intruder, surely Franklin, managed to exit the room without making a single hint of sound. He’d deftly stolen into the room. Stood over me silent as death for a long time. But then it was as if he’d simply floated to the door when he made his escape. How did he do that? I took to leaning one of my schoolbooks—which I secretly read on evenings when I had enough energy—against the inside of my bedroom door before going to bed. This way, I figured I’d know if he had snuck in again in the middle of the night. I kept my father’s wooden leg beside me under my blanket too, with which I planned to bash in his skull if the chance arose. But every morning I saw that the book was still there, so I gathered he had lost interest or decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
As work in the rooms continued, the wariness and hostility I felt toward Franklin only grew, despite his apparent decision not to trespass further on my privacy while I was sleeping. Grandmother’s health improved, in no small measure because of Franklin’s doting, but rather than making me glad this only irked me. One could reasonably argue I had no right to feel competitive with him, but any natural instinct—granted, piddling—I had about being a good grandson was crowded off the stage by Franklin. He was like a landgoing octopus with tentacles wrapped around nearly every part of my life. When she was sick, confined to her room, my grandmother had instructed me to do whatever Franklin said—that until she was back up and out of bed, he was head of the house. The only problem was, this edict remained in effect even now that she was back to her old, cold self. I found myself living with a strange new father now, one with whom I didn’t share a drop of blood in my veins and toward whom never a kind thought ran through my mind. Had my real father been alive to see what was happening here, or so I fantasized, he’d have beaten Franklin to within an inch of his life and then dragged him—one leg powering the way—down to the pond to finish the job. Sweet dream, but just a dream.
The only time I felt free from the so-called freeman these days was when I was with Mollie. Much the same way the rich like hobnobbing with other rich people, loners are drawn to loners. Mollie and I were living proof of this. One might think that with his wife having run off on him, her father Ralph would have been extra strict about letting Mollie out of his sight. But from the first he seemed to trust and like me, so my wandering off from the cemetery to the pond with his daughter, our spending every spare hour we had in each other’s company, didn’t bother him. I felt like we had his silent blessing, and while he was rough-edged, unshaven, and stained by melancholy, I thought of him sometimes as a surrogate father, though I never told him such. Besides Ralph, nobody knew a thing about me and Mollie, because nobody cared. It was the only part of my life I inhabited with perfect independence, and as such it was my greatest joy.
Once, lying in the tall grass with Mollie, secluded from everyone and everything but a red-tailed hawk circling high overhead, she asked me, “How come you hate that man living in your house so much?”
“I never said I hated him,” and kissed her again, hoping that would be the end of it. Franklin was the last person I wanted to talk about here with Mollie.
When she pulled her lips away to breathe, she said, gently, “But you don’t need to say it in words, Wyatt. Whenever he comes up, the look in your eyes says it all.”
Mollie wasn’t someone I wanted to lie to, so I told her, “Look, he just gives me the creeps, all right? He treats me like I’m his slave or something, and my grandmother goes along with it all. I just need to get out of there, the sooner the better.”
“What’s he done to give you the creeps? You don’t seem to be afraid of anything, from what I know.”
I told her about the night in my bedroom, and how every time Franklin was near me he got too close. I told her how even the way he smoked his cigarettes had a wickedness to it, how his endless stories seemed like a madman’s fictions, and that every favor he’d done for us seemed to have strings attached. “It’s like he’s a virus, taking over our lives and making us sick. I feel like I’m living in his house now, instead of the other way around.”
The idea I’d been harboring, and the mounting hatred that fueled it, took a giant leap in a more dangerous direction when my sixteenth birthday rolled around. Franklin got it in his head that this was too important a milestone in my life not to celebrate in grand style. I’d have preferred to eat pizza out of a box, but he would have none of that.
“We’re throwing you a party,” he announced a couple of weeks before the big day, knowing it was the last thing I wanted. “Oh, yes. Cake, candles, champagne, the works.”
“I don’t care if he is turning sixteen, Wyatt’s still too young for champagne,” my grandmother objected, if meekly.