The (Other) You

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Never let me go! Never.

  Disappointed to see that Schuyler Brothers with its shiny onyx-black facade has vanished and in its place is an office building with a dull stucco facade. What a loss! Vividly you recall the interior of the grand old store: high, hammered tin ceilings, brass lighting fixtures, floor tiles of a dark, dusty rose marble . . . With mounting excitement you remember strings of glittering Christmas lights, evergreen boughs, bright red berries, an almost unbearable excitement in the very atmosphere that seemed to promise Something important is happening here. You are important, because you are here.

  Farther along Main Street you see that Sears, Roebuck has vanished as well. Flanagan’s Shoes is gone, replaced by a nail salon. Where Brewer’s restaurant was once, there is Main Street Grill. Where South Main Books was once, a vacated space with FOR RENT / FOR SALE signs in the dusty front window. But the Palace Theater remains, if somewhat shabby, and with a marquee advertising a local fire sale. The Empire Building, a dour twelve-floor office building invariably smelling inside of something sickish-sweet like ether, where you’d endured years of dentist and doctor appointments, remains at the farther end of the street like a totem of a bygone era.

  The white-coated men whom you’d feared even as you’d hoped to placate—all vanished now. Harmless.

  The Mohigan Street bridge. And beneath the bridge, a pedestrian walkway along the river that was no longer maintained by the city and allowed to crack, crumble. Rusted girders, broken concrete in vacant lots. The girl—so small, frightened—what was her name?—in sixth grade—poorly dressed, snarled hair, hounded by boys, screaming for them to let her alone. A girl with tight-kinky hair, wet dark eyes, a girl with whom you’d sometimes walked to school but you have forgotten her name . . .

  Olive? Olivia? An unusual name . . . But no, you have forgotten.

  So much to forget, in Yewville.

  But you are recalling how, fewer than twelve miles from Niagara Falls, Yewville was discovered to have been contaminated, to a degree, by hazardous waste materials in that stricken city, by the time you were in high school. Headlines in the local paper. Downwind from Niagara Falls, Yewville was vulnerable to airborne toxins as well as seepage into the local water supply. Incidents of lead poisoning in very young children, an unnatural number of cancers, including leukemia, in the general population. You recall how officials of both cities as well as expert witnesses—scientists, professors—testified on behalf of the (notorious) chemical companies at the Falls that most common cancers were likely to be caused by smoking, secondary smoke inhalation, watching TV, and living in a “power grid” neighborhood.

  In recent years federal regulatory agencies have been weakened, their budgets reduced by a conservative Congress. No doubt the chemical plants in Niagara Falls are required to be less cautious in cleaning up waste. Soon the old pollutants will return to this part of upstate New York, that has never entirely recovered from the initial poisoning.

  Yet, you recall happy times. Something stubbornly resilient about the child-brain, that insists upon happiness.

  Sunday drives along the cliff above Lake Ontario, picnics on the rough-pebbled beach with your family. (Your parents, long deceased, were young then! Younger than you are now.) Visiting your grandmother after school in her house on Amsterdam Street, Yewville. Butternut cookies, pumpkin pie with whipped cream. In winter, hot chocolate with melted marshmallows. Library books in crisp plastic covers, which your grandmother was reading and into which you looked, curious, enthralled—What does an adult read? Yet, you don’t recall. As in a dream in which the eyes refuse to process print, you don’t recall a single title except—was it Anna Karenina? Life seemed to have unfolded in Yewville without incident like a Möbius strip that turns with almost imperceptible slowness, the long summers stretching to the very horizon.

  Now, your life passes with alarming rapidity. Each year is an acceleration.

  The future: a mirror in which you see no reflection.

  Impulsively you ask your driver to take a brief detour, past your old middle school—DeWitt Clinton. (You’d never even known who DeWitt Clinton was, as a child. A New York State politician responsible for the construction of the Erie Barge Canal.) On Amsterdam, a few blocks from where your grandmother lived—where she’d rented the upper half of a gray-shingled wood-frame house to be near the school for the three years you’d attended it. Passing the house in which your grandmother lived decades ago you feel a sensation of profound loss, yet also elation—for you’d been loved once, cherished.

  The only love that matters is the absolute unreasonable unqualified and unearned love—the love you’d absorbed into the very pores of your being as a child, scarcely aware of your good fortune.

  Imagining now how you might ask the driver to park at the curb. Run to knock on the door, hurry up the stairs as Grandma calls to you—Darling, I didn’t expect you. What a wonderful surprise . . .

  The old school has been renovated. Beige brick, stucco. Except for a wide expanse of patchy lawn in front it resembles a small-parts factory. You wait to feel something but can’t even remember which door you’d entered—who were your closest friends, with whom you walked to school. Abigail?

  Lorraine? Not Olive—or was it Olivia . . .

  Back on Main Street the driver is again required to detour, routed around a pedestrian mall. Here is an innovation for Yewville—a street without vehicles. Stunted trees, evergreen shrubs in pots, pastel-colored benches, a small (dry) fountain. The mall is only a block long and resembles a stage set composed of cheap materials. Several stores appear to be shuttered. FOR RENT signs in windows. Not many shoppers—not many pedestrians. Are those homeless persons? A truculent-looking woman in an oversized coat, knit cap pulled down over a bald scalp, beside a grocery store cart heaped with her possessions. You feel a twinge of panic—is this woman someone you know, or who knows you? A former classmate, a neighbor?

  A relative?

  But no. Most of your relatives are gone. It is a curious thing to realize that you are not relative to anyone any longer.

  The driver of the hired car has been surreptitiously turning up the radio volume. Raucous hip-hop music is just audible, breaking your concentration on the drive. You would ask the driver to turn down the radio, or better yet turn it off, but hesitate to offend him; at least until you are safely on your way back to the airport at Buffalo.

  It is the stately old Yewville Public Library to which you have been brought, to give a presentation and book signing. The head librarian, with whom you have been in correspondence, has spoken warmly to you of your many Yewville fans.

  But as you climb out of the limousine you are overcome by a sensation of dismay, despair powerful as vertigo. Yes, the Yewville library is virtually unchanged—a dignified sandstone building in the Greek Revival style of a bygone era. For what does Yewville mean to you without your mother, your father, your grandmother? It is true that their spirits seem to dwell here—in the very air, heavy with moisture—yet there is no denying the blunt crude fact that they are gone. And what does Yewville mean without your closest friends Abigail, Lorraine, Beth? The boy you’d (secretly) liked, a particular friend of yours in math class, what was his name—Roland Kidd? You’d heard a decade ago that Roland had been stricken with a terrible neurological disease that had paralyzed his legs. You’d heard that he had died . . . Or was this another boy, Peter Amo who’d been too shy to call you on the phone, in high school—with his acne-riddled face, too (maddeningly) shy to have called any girl.

  You give instructions to the driver: you will be inside the library approximately one hour. Then you will rejoin him, and he will drive you to the Buffalo airport as planned. Your single suitcase is in the trunk of the car. Your flight departs at 6:46 P.M. and you do not intend to miss it.

  A second night in this place!—no.

  Addressing the driver with a smile, always remember to smile, a rictus of a smile for it is your defense, the smile of terror, with which you have
learned to confront the world all the while thinking—now—of how so many people are gone from your life. And especially here in Yewville where (contrary to your wishful thinking) time has not ceased but moves at the same accelerating pace as elsewhere. No idea what the lives were of those whom you’d known here. No idea what has become of them. Where they have vanished. The teachers who’d praised you and imagined great things for you as if (wistfully, grandiloquently) speaking of themselves. Bearing you aloft on their wounded, faltering wings. Lighting a roadway for you with the uplifted torches of their hope, now gone; and the torches long gone, dropped by the wayside. All those lives, those particular persons, their mannerisms, habits of speaking, smiling, all vanished; erased; unreal, and lacking immediacy. What is immediate is the corrugated tin-colored sky that hurts your eyes, and a V-formation of planes passing high overhead, the grating radio music to which your driver will listen as soon as you leave him. What is immediate is your hand being shaken by a stranger—so often these days, a stranger—and your courteous robot-response: “Oh yes. Thank you! I am honored to be here, too . . .”

  But there has been a change in plans, you are informed. In fact, your presentation at the Yewville library has been canceled.

  Indeed, a yellow band with rude black letters CANCELED has been taped over a poster announcing your visit, displayed at the front entrance of the library. The N obliterates your face in a grainy photograph of years ago.

  You are too surprised to be indignant, hurt, or even relieved. You ask why?—why has your presentation been canceled?—even as you suppose it would be better not to ask. Better not to know.

  It seems that the library felt obliged to cancel your event because more people were expected than the library could accommodate safely. The terms fire code, fire marshal are uttered with an air of finality. You listen in disbelief. Too many people?—in Yewville, of all places?

  The head librarian who’d written such gracious letters to you is not here to explain. Instead, an assistant librarian has taken her place. With a look of mild vexation the woman informs you that a few people have showed up after all to meet you, so you can sign books for them in a back room—“If you are up to it. We understand, you are probably exhausted after your travels.”

  You protest, you are not exhausted at all! You have traveled only nine miles that day. You have come to Yewville instead of returning home immediately after the commencement because you’d looked forward to the visit, and had been assured that there were readers of your books here, who are eager to meet you.

  How petulant you sound, like a hurt child! And how nasal your voice in your ears, as if in mimicry of the western New York State accent you have been hearing since your arrival the previous day.

  The assistant librarian listens to you politely. She introduces herself as “Marian Beattie”—as if this were a name that might mean something to you. The woman is middle-aged, stout, somewhat disheveled, with a doughy, oddly familiar face. Her bulky pants suit is a wry cranberry color, in a fabric synthetic as vinyl; her feet appear to be swollen, in bandage-like socks worn with open-toed sandals. Behind bifocals her eyes are blurry with moisture and a kind of malicious merriment. She exudes an air of ashy, unlaundered clothes, stained underarms.

  How disappointed you are! You realize that you must have been anticipating this visit to Yewville with something like—hope? For it was here, long ago, that the elusive emotion was first kindled in your soul.

  Soon short of breath, panting and puffing, and walking with difficulty on her bandaged feet, Marian Beattie leads you into the interior of the library. You see that it has been altered considerably since your girlhood, with an eye for the practical and utilitarian. The ceilings are no longer so magisterially high. The floor is obviously not marble but inexpensive tile meant to resemble marble. The chandeliered lights you recall have been replaced by tubes of ugly fluorescent lights that flicker as if on the verge of extinction.

  “We’re particularly proud of our computer reference room”—Marian Beattie tells you.

  What had been the Reading Room, one of the happy places of your life, has been transformed into a hall for computers. Three long tables, six computers at each table, rapidly you calculate—eighteen computers for the relatively small Yewville library. At these are a few adults, mostly older men with sad, slack faces, and long-limbed teenagers scrolling through websites. No one glances at you in the doorway.

  You recall how in this room on shelves reaching to the ceiling were books designated as Classics—tall, illustrated books which did not circulate like most library books, but were required to be read in the library, at one of the long polished tables, or in one of the leather chairs in a corner of the room. Naively, as a girl you’d tried to read Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, even Plato’s Republic. Even Plato’s Great Dialogues. You smile to think of how little you must have grasped of these great works, like a child trying to climb a stone wall by the desperate effort of her small fingers, her weak muscles. Now, the shelves of Classics have vanished, presumably into another region of the library.

  With a condescending smile Miss Beattie leads you to the small room at the rear of the library where “fans” have gathered—fewer than a dozen people seated on folding chairs that look as if they have been hastily set up. Most of these are older individuals and one is in a wheelchair, formally attired in a tweed jacket, head crooked to one side with an expression of acute interest. Many are carrying books, presumably yours. In the front row is a middle-aged frizz-haired woman leaning far forward on her knees staring at you so intensely, her face is furrowed with fine white lines.

  In a bemused nasal voice Miss Beattie introduces you by saying that you need no introduction. There is a smattering of applause.

  No podium here, no place to stand except awkwardly at the front of the room. You are far more uneasy here than you’d been at the commencement that morning, on a stage facing hundreds of people.

  Hesitantly, you greet your audience. Your modesty is not feigned. You are very, very self-conscious. You cannot not see eyes fastened upon you or, worse yet, drifting downward to your feet, rising to your face, as you stammer that you are “very honored”—“very excited”—to be back in your hometown after thirty-six years.

  You decide not to explain why you are in the vicinity of Yewville. Calling attention to the fact that you’d received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the community college would seem at once boastful and pathetic and there would be the bewilderment—what are humane letters?

  A poster in the corridor claims that the Yewville Public Library was to have hosted a “conversation with Yewville’s best-selling author”—(not “most distinguished literary figure” after all)—this afternoon; and so at once several hands are raised in the audience. You are asked where you get your ideas, and how old were you when you published your first story. Do you make an outline for a novel beforehand, or “just start writing.” You are asked if you type directly onto a computer or do you write by hand. You are asked if you revise. You are asked how you know when you are finished with your revisions. What advice do you have for beginning writers. What advice do you have about getting an agent. What was the best advice anyone ever gave you. What is your morning schedule. Do you ever suffer from “writer’s block.” What is your remedy for “writer’s block.” Do you have children. Are you sorry that you don’t have children.

  A heavyset woman in a sleeveless, tent-like dress who has come late sits in a chair by the door, panting. She lifts an arm from which slack flesh hangs in a tremulous web to inquire of you what tips you have for poets “just starting out”—and “do you have children?”

  When you tell her that you don’t have children she smiles pityingly at you, as the others have done. “Ohhh! That’s too bad. Are you sorry?”

  Politely you explain that it would depend upon the children you might have had, whether you are sorry never to have had them; but, since you don’t know who they might have been,
it is impossible to answer the question.

  A shrewd reply, you think. Yet your little audience looks baffled, dissatisfied.

  “None of us knew what our children would be like, before we had them,” the heavyset woman points out sensibly. “But we had them anyway. And now we have grandchildren.”

  This meets with murmured approval. “Yes! Now we have grandchildren.”

  A bushy-bearded man who has been smiling at you declares that he has a bag of books for you to sign—“For next Christmas.” The bag is made of burlap, oil-stained. Covers on the books don’t look familiar. Several books are very old, smelling of mold.

  The youngest person in the room is a teenager with a grimly earnest oblong face. She has been sitting with a pen poised above a notebook but hasn’t yet written a word. Now she raises a hand to ask how to “break into publishing” but scowls at your answer as if she suspects you don’t know the answer.

  “Yes, but what about an agent? How d’you get a good agent?”

  Your lips move numbly. You hear your voice echoing from a corner of the room mingled with the retreating roar of jet planes in the sky.

  “Yes, but I mean a good agent. Not just anyone.”

  Soon then, the skeptical teenager shuts up her notebook, exits the room.

  A person with a wizened face asks brightly: “Do you think your life was worth it? All those books!”

  Now you realize, everyone in the room is older—old. Most—all?—are (former) classmates of yours whose names you should know, but have forgotten.

  Not high school but earlier—middle school, grade school. Their faces are blurred with time. Several faces look as if they have begun to melt, decompose. The very air in the small space is sepia-toned, gluey. Yet eyes are alight, alert.

  “Are you proud of yourself, exploiting your past here in Yewville?”

  “Are you ashamed of yourself, exploiting your past here in Yewville?”

  “Do you consider yourself underrated?”