Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
One of these: she hadn’t had a “period” in weeks. (How she hated that word! Her nose crinkled in distaste.) Her last “period” had been before Easter: April 15. Long before her disastrous tenure as Mrs.
Erskine. Ariah didn’t doubt, she’d ceased menstruating because of panic and dread over her wedding. She’d lost weight, she’d never been what the medical literature calls “normal.” Her puberty (another ugly word) came late, she hadn’t developed breasts, hips, or begun to menstruate (this ugly word she hated most of all) until the age of sixteen. The last girl (anyway, one of the last) in her high school class.
And then she’d never been “regular.” (Yet another ugly humiliating word!) If Mrs. Littrell, a woman with ample bosom and hips, was concerned about her daughter’s physical condition, she must have been too embarrassed to speak of it. When Ariah began to miss “periods” in high school, Mrs. Littrell took her to their family physician who mumbled, staring at a paperweight on his desk, that Ariah was
“like some girls who grow up slow”—“mature slow”—she inclined to a condition called
amenorrhea
.
Amenorrhea!
The ugliest word yet.
Ariah sat mortified in Dr. Magruder’s office, staring at her freckled hands, with bitten-at nails, in her lap.
Amenorrhea
. This was nearly always, Dr. Magruder fumblingly said, typical of a girl who was underweight, “slow” to mature.
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Yes it did mean that Ariah might have difficulty conceiving, when at last she did get married.
(Or it might mean, as Ariah was guessing now, that the onset of pregnancy would be difficult to determine. Unless you rushed to a doctor to ask for a pregnancy test, which Ariah wasn’t about to do.) (Oh, God. She’d have been mortified to speak to Dirk Burnaby about such grim female matters. “Female troubles.” The Burnabys were a romantic couple like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. When one entered a room in which the other waited, you could hear dance music begin.)
They were married, and so became
husband, wife.
These roles awaited them in the house at 7 Luna Park like
his, hers
monogrammed robes which each slipped into, happily. And gratefully.
Dirk said in awe, “I can’t imagine my life before you, Ariah. It must have been so shallow . . . It must have been a life without oxygen.”
Ariah wiped tears from her eyes but couldn’t think how to reply.
She could well recall her life before Dirk, the minister’s daughter’s tidy busy circumscribed life like an apron tied tight over her body.
She’d had her music of course. Her students. Her parents, family. Yet thinking of that life now, she felt her throat constrict; she felt as if she might choke. No oxygen!
She ran to her husband (she was barefoot, they were in their bedroom dressing on a mist-muggy August morning) and pressed her wiry little body into his surprised arms, hugging him around the waist.
The man’s fist-sized heart thumping against Ariah’s ear like a metronome.
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Joyce Carol Oates
Dirk. Darling I think I’m
. . .
I might be
. . .
I have this sensation sometimes,
I might be
. . .
pregnant?
But no. Ariah couldn’t speak of her fear, and risk that look of alarm in her husband’s face. Not just yet.
They were married, and all of the remainder of their lives would be their honeymoon. They were certain!
They were married, and Dirk Burnaby gave his red-haired wife the most exquisite gift she’d ever received: a Steinway spinet made of cherrywood. He’d lighted candles in the living room and small flames were reflected in the burnished wood.
“But why? What have I done to deserve this?”
Ariah’s outcry startled her husband, it sounded so frightened.
The piano was an anniversary present, Dirk explained. Three months to the day since they’d “first laid eyes on each other.”
Three months. Ariah would not calculate what that might mean.
Three months
. No, she would not think of it.
She was feeling faint, dizzy, giddy. But probably that was the Chianti.
And that warm honey sensation in the loins. The Chianti.
Ariah kissed her husband, hugged him so hard he laughed.
“Whoa!” He eased her gently away. He wanted her to play for him, he said. She hadn’t played piano, not a note, since that day he’d driven to Troy to claim her.
So Ariah sat at the spinet and played for her husband. Sipping wine between pieces, from a sparkling crystal glass. This spinet was quite the most beautiful instrument Ariah had ever touched, let alone played. Tears flooded her eyes and ran down her cheeks. As Dirk listened gravely, his big head bowed and nodding with the beat, Ariah treated him to a concert of her old favorite girlhood recital pieces. A Mozart minuet, Chopin waltzes and mazurkas, Schumann’s
“Träumerei,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” As each piece ended, Dirk exploded into applause. He was deeply and sincerely moved. Truly he
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believed that his wife was a gifted pianist, not only just a moderately talented girl pianist from Troy, New York. He often went to concerts in Kleinhan’s Music Hall in Buffalo, he said. He’d heard performers in Carnegie Hall in Manhattan. He’d gone to the Metropolitan Opera where he’d seen spectacular productions of
Carmen
and
La Traviata
. His father, the deceased Virgil Burnaby, whom Ariah would never meet, had owned Caruso records which Dirk had heard often as a boy. Caruso singing
The Barber of Seville, The Flying Dutchman.
Caruso as
Otello
.
Ariah couldn’t see how her polished, earnest piano technique had led them to the great Caruso, but the connection was flattering.
He loves me. He’d believe anything.
A strange precious truth this was. Like opening your hand and discovering in the palm a tiny, speckled robin’s egg.
They were married. Abruptly, and without apology. Without giving notice. Without a thought for
how things are done.
Or
how things are not
done.
“At least,” Ariah said, “we didn’t elope.”
Dirk threw down the newspaper he’d been reading, in mock-disgust.
“God damn, Ariah, why didn’t you think of it in time?”
They were married, and some weeks later there came for
Mrs. Ariah
Burnaby
at 7 Luna Park, Niagara Falls, a handwritten letter with the return address
Mrs. Edna Erskine
. The three-cent stamp on the envelope was upside down.
“Gilbert’s mother. Oh my God. She wants to know. If I am pregnant. No, it isn’t possible!”
Cowardly Ariah threw away this letter without opening it.
They were married, and the woman who was Ariah’s mother-in-law, Claudine Burnaby, gave notice, through Dirk’s sisters Clarice and Sylvia, that she was “thinking seriously of disinheriting” her renegade son.
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They were married, and lived in Dirk Burnaby’s townhouse at 7
Luna Park where, it came to seem to Ariah, other women had, from time to time, visited, if not actually dwelt. She knew this was so because neighbors allowed her to know. Mrs. Cotten who lived next-door, Mrs. Mackay who lived across the Park.
Such glamorous women,
some of them! Showgirls, evidently.
Dirk’s older sisters whom Ariah had met only twice had allowed her to know.
We never thought Dirk would
break down and marry anyone. Our kid brother was always such a spoiled immature brat.
“ ‘Clarice and Sylvia,’ ” Dirk said, as if reading engraved names.
“Two of the three fates. And Claudine is the third.”
From time to time in the early weeks at Luna Park the telephone would ring and if Ariah answered “Hel-lo?” there was a grim reproachful silence on the other end. “This is the Burnaby residence, hel-lo?” (For possibly Ariah was a little lonely in these new quarters.
In this city at the edge of the Niagara Gorge where once the Widow-Bride of The Falls had captivated the public imagination, but where Ariah Burnaby was unknown.) “I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing. Who is it?” Ariah’s hand trembled, holding the receiver.
No, she wasn’t frightened: she was annoyed. This was her home, and this telephone number was hers, as well as her husband’s. She could detect female breathing through the phone. “If it’s Dirk Burnaby you want to speak with, I’m afraid he isn’t here.” Ariah considered, but refrained from, adding
He’s married now. I’m his wife.
The calls came sometimes when Dirk was home. Ariah was determined not to listen. Not even to “overhear.” (She wasn’t going to be that kind of wife. She knew her husband had had a bachelor life before meeting her but that was long ago. Months ago.) There was someone persistent named Gwen, and there was someone really persistent named Candy. (“Candy”: a showgirl name, if ever there was one.) Once or twice, someone named Vi who actually identified herself to Ariah before politely asking to speak with “your husband, the litigator.” A perfumed, lavender letter postmarked Buffalo came for
Mr
.
Dirk Burnaby
from someone obviously female with the initials
H.T.,
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but Ariah wasn’t a witness to her husband opening it. (If in fact he opened it? Possibly, out of respect for Ariah, he’d tossed it away instead.) When the phone began to ring persistently in the early hours of the morning, and Dirk, grumpily awakened from sleep, answered,
“Hello?
Hello
?” and “If this is who I think it is, please desist, this isn’t behavior worthy of you,” the time had come finally for Dirk Burnaby to have his number changed, and unlisted.
The mysterious calls abruptly ceased. And no more perfumed letters.
Seated at the Steinway spinet, picking at the perfect ivory keys, Ariah lifted her head hearing, or imagining she heard, the phone ringing. But no.
3
Amenorrheic. Slow to mature.
Telling herself it meant nothing that she was weeks late.
In fact, months late . . .
Always she’d been a thin, you might say a scrawny girl. One of those jumpy all-elbows girls. Such girls
do not get pregnant.
Yet: Ariah had to concede, she was gaining weight. Her belly was strangely bloated. Her hard stingy little breasts were filling out and the nipples were becoming sensitive, she had to concede though this was absurd and she
would not think of it
.
She’d been a virgin. Gilbert had splattered his hot furious acid-seed on the outside (
not
the inside) of his bride’s body. She knew! She would swear! She had been an unwilling witness.
“It couldn’t make an actual baby. I don’t think so.”
God you wouldn’t be so cruel would you! Thank you God
.
It was 1950. Ariah Burnaby stayed home.
She was
wife
who stayed home while
husband
drove each weekday morning into the city to his law office.
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A successful lawyer, Dirk Burnaby was. A “litigator.” He had no great passion for the law, he acknowledged, but it was likely work for him, and he thrived on competition.
Ariah wasn’t by nature a shy woman but she heard her voice go shy, soft, tentative one evening at dinner asking, “Would you mind, darling, if I gave piano lessons here? And voice lessons? I’m a little lonely during the day and I miss my students and I need something to occupy me until . . .”
Ariah ceased speaking, appalled. Almost she’d said
until the baby
.
Dirk didn’t hear this, of course. Ariah’s unsaid words.
Ariah wondered if she’d made a blunder in any case. The way her husband was contemplating her. It was the way he gazed at her while she played piano for him, most recently Beethoven’s sonata in C-sharp minor, the so-called
Moonlight Sonata
she knew Dirk Burnaby would be a sucker for, that slow dreamy opening movement in particular, he’d said he had never heard anything so beautiful, and he meant it. But now Ariah wondered if she’d gone too far. It was 1950, not 1942. American women didn’t work. Especially, married women of Ariah’s social class didn’t work. She could imagine how such a proposal, made by Ariah’s mother, would have been met by Ariah’s father. No women in the Littrell family worked. Not a one. (Except an unmarried aunt or two, elementary schoolteachers. They didn’t count.)
But Dirk surprised her by taking up her hand, and kissing it, and saying with boyish eagerness, “Ariah, please do whatever you want to do. Whatever makes you happy, makes me happy. I’m gone so much, and this place must get lonely. You’re a ‘career woman’—I knew that.
I’m proud of you. I’ll spread the word in town. I have lots of friends, they have pretensions for their children, and they can afford lessons.
You’re in business, darling.” He raised his wine glass in a toast, and Ariah raised hers. They drank. They kissed. Dirk said, “Until we start a family, anyway.”
God you wouldn’t. Not so cruel. Not twice.
It was Ariah’s logic that the longer she waited, the more times she
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and Dirk Burnaby made love, the more likely it would be, must be, that the baby she might (or might not) be carrying was his, and not
the other’s
.
She could not bring herself to see a doctor. Could not. For then she would know, inescapably. She would know if she was pregnant (or not) and she would have to tell Dirk and what exactly could she tell him?
She knew she was becoming a little crazy with this. Brooding!
The pale peaky face in the mirror. The banshee-streaks of silver in the hair.
Kneading the pale, tight flesh of her belly. Pinching her breasts.
(Well, admit it: her breasts were fuller. Still small, but fuller. And
“sensitive.” Possibly that was the consequence of Ariah’s amorous husband kissing, nuzzling, sucking at her nipples like a big mischievous baby. Gently, she would have to discourage him.) At the spinet, she heard herself playing those slow exquisite noc-turnes of Chopin. Easing-into-sleep, like lullabies.