Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Close your eyes, Shell. Place your finger upon a certain day, the beginning of what you remember
. That was what Noel told me before he went away.
Write your father a letter.… Your father is a famous man, with such grave pouched eyes and a noble forehead, he deserves a letter of love! In your own voice, Shell, and not in mine. You have to do this yourself
.
Noel came running to me, Father, a pounding noisy weight on the stairs, his face bright and panting, his hair flying, his voice already threading into my head, my precious brain, and the buttons on my dress squirmed at the sight of his hands. My heart was already fattening up at the sight of him. Something unbearable about him, his purse of a mouth. A ringing sound set off by him next to me, oh I could not help myself—little Shelley thinking in terror
I could not help myself
. He wasn’t the first anyway. Not the first. Not the second or the third either but after that my mind fades away. Don’t ask questions.… Father, you don’t want to know! Don’t want to know how I could not help myself!
Of your two daughters it is Michele who cannot help herself. Jeanne does very well.
My father is a famous surgeon
, little Shelley giggles. Makes herself dizzy. Your eyes look light and transparent but mine look opaque—an imbecile is growing out of me—sometimes I can’t read, Father, it frightens me when I can’t read the billboards along the highway, the letters don’t add up to words and I think I am in another place like on another planet where the language has changed—but Noel tells me I will be all right, Noel sings in my ear and puts me to sleep—
Once I was terrified and couldn’t stop screaming but Noel brought me out of it. Made me laugh instead. Oh I laughed and laughed! The muscles of my sore face jumped around like crazy, careened off the walls, jumped back into me. I was terrified because a book was going to fall off your shelf and onto my head, the book was by a man named Lord Brain. I had to explain this to Noel but I couldn’t stop screaming. The book was about brains. I used to look through it in your study. It was by a man named Lord Brain and it was about brains. I saw the diagrams, I read the words.
Think of November 22, 1963.
Can you remember? Remember for me. Help me. Noel says I must remember and I must begin at the beginning.
Father, I love you, don’t call the police but help me, listen to me
.…
Noel wasn’t the first anyway.
November 22, 1963. We were in New York City. I was eight years old. Mother and Jeanne and I were at the back of a large room, sitting on folding chairs. You were standing at a podium. Talking. Your clear steady voice saying something about memory.
Memory
. The audience was nearly all men. Heavy heads, serious heads, heads stuffed with brains. Like yours. Eyes behind eyeglasses, aging men with fragile heads, men like bulls, so shaggy you can’t believe they are doctors.… They are all listening to you, to Dr. Vogel, on memory.
It is New York City. A hotel “ballroom.” Chandeliers of blinding crystal, turned on because the inside of this old hotel is dark. The walls decorated with velvet in strange designs, bright green like the green of pool-table tops.… You are talking about memory and what it is. The men are listening to you.
Dr. Vogel is my father
. Mother is listening quietly, her hands folded on top of her purse on top of her knees. Jeanne sits on her other side, her thumb pressed against the bottom row of her teeth, exerting great pressure there while she listens and listens. Jeanne, my ugly pathetic sister. She is trying to push her teeth back all the time because she thinks they stick out too far. She is a head taller than I am, always nudging me away, poking me with her elbows. Hating me.
Jeanne is clean outside and in. Distilled water. A clean light unbreakable jug of distilled water. No man has stuck a finger into it to contaminate it, you can bet on that.
Your voice penetrates all the corners of the room. Even and unhurried.
Dr. Vogel. Jesse Vogel. The Vogel Clinic
. Listening to you, Mother opens her purse quietly and takes out a tissue to dab at her nose, then at her forehead. Mother is always doing that. You can’t ask your mother why she is always dabbing at her face. She is afraid of grease oozing out of her pores, maybe. But her skin has no pores.
Mother dreaming out the window, kept perfectly clean by the maid. Waiting for you to come home? Waiting as the sun went down?
Don’t think evil of me, Father, but I don’t love her. I could never think of anything to buy her for her birthday or for Christmas. Once when I bought her that little village,
the “New England Village” made of cardboard and sparkling with fake snow, with Santa Claus and his reindeer flying over the church steeple, she couldn’t even pretend that she liked it—her face careful, unresponsive, as she bent to arrange it under the Christmas tree—I kept looking at her, looking, waiting for her to say that she liked it, but she was careful only to say
thank you, Shelley
.
You came to the end of the paper you were reading. A period of questions. Glinting of eyeglasses, assessing frowns. I watched as men priced you, Father. Added up your parts. They asked you complicated questions and you answered them slowly, carefully, Dr. Vogel cautious as always: such an expensive man! I wanted to put my hands over my ears, afraid I would hear you make a mistake. Afraid someone would attack you. I looked around and saw them all pricing you, adding you up. Back home everyone knew what you were worth. Jesus, everyone knew. The kids at school knew, they knew everything, there was no place for me to hide. Even in the girls’ lavatory I couldn’t hide except in the toilet stalls. That’s the last place in the world. When you are alone there with the door latched, just standing there, you have come to the last place in the world and you can’t go any farther. That’s where you might go crazy if your head is uncertain. That’s why doors should not have latches. Or there should be a back way out of toilets. In the overnight jail the lavatories are all lit up all night long, and the doors don’t have latches, you can bet on that.
November 22, 1963.
I am eight years old.
It is a short while after the reading of your paper, but you are not with us. Mother and another woman have taken Jeanne and me out somewhere, to an ice cream parlor—it has a name out of a fairy tale—it smells of chocolate syrup and the warm perfumed whisperings of mothers and daughters—I remember the stuffed animals, the giant pink and white pandas and the rag dolls with their benign sunflower faces, all eyes and grins. Mother seems happy, as happy as I’ve seen her. But I don’t dare look too closely at her for fear I will see something about her face I will regret. (I told Noel my nightmare about Mother: her face smooth and hollowed out as if with a surgical instrument, nothing but slopes in the skin for eyes and nose and mouth, indentations that are thoughtful and shadowed, valleys in a pale bloodless face. But it’s not Mother I am dreaming about.) The woman with us … yes,
of course, it is Mrs. Myer, Lauren Myer, Dr. Myer’s cheerful wife … Dr. Myer is coming to Chicago to join you in your Clinic. You will become close acquaintances. You don’t make any friends, Father, but Dr. Myer will become a valuable acquaintance. Mother doesn’t make any friends, but Lauren Myer will become a name on her lips, a name Jeanne and I will hear often. I remember Mrs. Myer’s lime-green coat, her puff of hair, the watch with a thick wristband of platinum, with emeralds on either side of the face … I couldn’t have known they were emeralds at the time, someone must have told me later. Yet, I remember her and her watch, I remember it precisely and as I remember it I am erasing it.
I am erasing her. And Mother. I am erasing their talk. I am erasing that day.
“You must be very proud of your husband—” Mrs. Myer is saying.
An ice cream parlor decked out in expensive deep pinks and velvet-whites: wrought-iron chairs and tables, the smell of glop, vanilla, fudge, giant lollipops, giant teddy bears with their shining wise eyes, perched up on shelves. Their paws have been cut off and stitched over. Harmless blunt rounded paws. There are clowns with bellies of yellow and black stripes, their grins a little too wide. Boxes of candy that are as living as the clowns and the stuffed animals, wide crinkling bows, wrapping paper smooth and gleaming as satin. Mrs. Myer fusses over Jeanne and me,
you must be very proud
, she seems a little perplexed at Jeanne’s moodiness,
isn’t this a lovely place?
She has a face like one of those boxes of candy—heart-shaped, too brightly made up, a satiny sheen to her lips. Her eyes are slightly recessed, smaller than Mother’s. She is coming with her husband to Chicago to fall in love with you, but you won’t be bothered by this fact; probably you never knew it.
Sucking a thick syrupy concoction up a straw: my heart pounds with the pressure to get all this eaten, out of the way. The excitement of the trip has made me a little nauseated. It is some rich strawberry drink, a soda or a milk shake in an enormous frosted glass, too big for me, sickening, and around me everyone is chatting, laughing,
what are they saying?
Mother is looking around suddenly. Mrs. Myer stops talking. The place goes silent—up at the front, at the cashier’s counter, someone is talking loudly. Our waitress—a girl with hair curled like tiny sausages—walks toward our table without seeing us, staring at the front of the shop, blundering into a chair—
What, what are they saying?
Mother gets to her feet.
“What happened to him? Is he shot? Where is he shot?” Mother cries.
But the waitress does not answer her, and now other customers are standing, bewildered, frightened, someone puts his napkin down slowly and is very white, very distracting … an old woman wanders out into the center of the restaurant, staring.…
Mother and Mrs. Myer hurry us out. Now there is a hurry to get out of here, everyone hurries, at the door people glance at one another, their eyes snatch at one another’s faces … Jeanne is whining at Mother, wanting to know what is wrong, I am excited and frightened and relieved not to have to finish all that ice cream.… A radio has been turned up high. A man is speaking as if he has just rushed in with a terrible sight in his head. He is almost shouting. Behind the counter the cashier has begun to cry, a middle-aged woman with layers of make-up on her face, crying, I am frightened to see how her make-up stays on the top of her face while the face itself contracts and changes—
“Is the President killed?” Jeanne whines. “Is he here in New York? Where is Daddy?”
Out on the street we are being hurried along. Mother and Mrs. Myer hurry us, their heels clattering on the sidewalk, must hurry, hurry, and everything has a different look—people are hurrying like us, or else they are standing oddly still, with nowhere to go. Looking around. Waiting to hear news. Waiting. “What if there’s an uprising? A revolution?” Mrs. Myer says.
Mother drags us along. At a newsstand she pauses to glance at the newspapers, but their headlines tell her nothing. We cross over to the hotel, its enormous entrance, enormous sprawling steps, and everywhere people are strange, they stare at us and at one another—I hear someone say, “Is he dead yet? Is he dead yet?” There are whistles around us, sirens, horns of automobiles, someone crying, or is that Shelley crying? like a baby, crying? so that Jeanne gives me a push. We hurry through the revolving door and other people are hurrying out. Eager. Pushing hard. Inside the big hotel lobby there is a rush of people. I am panicked, I pull at Mother’s gloved hand.
The ornate lighting of the lobby makes faces look like masks. Unused to this condition, this noise. The women’s clothes seem put on
crooked.
Is he dead? Is he dead? A
young man with an overcoat flapping around him rushes through the crowd, knocking people aside. Men stare sternly from face to face as if searching for someone responsible—I know that look—I am fearful of it in your face—
Father, I love you I want to come back to you
—the elevator doors open and a stream of men jostle by, men’s legs and arms brushing close to me, I start to scream, Mother’s hand slips from mine and I am pushed to one side, I see you across the lobby, Father, and I start over to you—I am pushed against a chair, a leather chair, and I slip under it and get free of the crowd—and a man in uniform is opening a plate-glass door to let someone hurry through, wild-eyed himself but very stiff, straight—I run in a panic, not seeing you but running toward you, toward where you were, people brush against me without seeing me and take no notice of my screams—
Yet I am screaming.
Noel says, waking me out of bad dreams:
You’re only imagining pain, Shell. Pain is a fiction
.
Yet I am screaming.
I overheard you telling someone about a patient of yours who began to scream when the tubes were put in him. A man who weighed only eighty pounds but fought everyone off and crawled under the bedcovers to the foot of his bed to hide, to hide from you.
We are all screaming.
Here in the lobby it makes no difference if you scream out loud or inside. Nobody can hear. The screams rise in a pyramid but still they are silent, caught inside the faces. A current is dragging us all. There is a wind inside this building that lifts us, pushes us hard, cuts off our screams, suffocates us, we stampede back and forth, trapped, and yet we are all free here, nobody knows us, we are all children running loose without adults to hold us back, we see people who look familiar to us like people in a dream, but they turn out to be strangers—
And then you have hold of me. You are crying, “Shelley! Stop that!”
You catch me in your arms.
I stare up at you and see the fear in your face, even in your face.
“Shelley, stop that! Shelley!”
I am trying to get away from you, throwing myself backward, striking something hard, being kicked by someone—and you try to pick
me up, you are struggling with me—I can’t stop screaming—you shout at me to stop but I can’t stop, I can’t stop—
I am still screaming.
In the early morning of November 23, 1963, Dr. Vogel lay awake in his room in the Plaza Hotel beside his sleeping wife, and he thought of things failing, crumpling, the bone of the skull collapsing, and his body was rigid with terror.