Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Lily of the Valley: her name. A silly, lovely, extravagant name, on her birth certificate.

  And her sister—Rose of Sharon.

  Since their father had died five years before, two years after their mother’s death, Lily had lost all practical connection with her past, rural life as the daughter of a minister of an obscure Protestant sect; she sometimes seemed, in certain of her dreams, to have lost her way in time. In a flurry of wonder and mounting panic not knowing how old she was, in which house she was, in which bed. Or whether Sharon was close by—her blond curls on the very pillow beside Lily’s. And hadn’t she a husband, and—who was her husband?

  Lily supposed that, in the human brain, deep in the cortex of memory, there is no such thing as “time”—“chronology.” Everything is present tense; nothing is “past.” We may be numerous selves simultaneously. Adult, adolescent, child, infant. Was she six years old, sixteen years old, thirty-six years old? Shrewdly she guessed that no one was ever older than his or her actual age, in dreams. Because you can’t yet remember.

  Lily’s flannel nightgown was damp with perspiration, and her hair was heavy and warm at the nape of her neck. Her heart was still beating quickly as if in the presence of invisible danger. Outside, the wind blew, blew! A northerly wind, down from Lake Ontario, and Canada. A sound like rage, jeering. I can get into that house of yours, that house you’re so proud of. I can come through the windows that have been caulked, I can come through the walls that have been insulated.

  “No. No. No.”

  Lily switched on a light, saw it was 2:10 A.M.

  She was standing in front of the bedroom closet looking for—what? Her robe, slippers. She couldn’t seem to locate her slippers. As if someone, a mischievous child, had kicked them into the shadowy rear of the closet.

  You’re my slave, Lily.

  Do what I say: inside. I command you.

  Like bile in Lily’s mouth it came to her, then: the dream, the nightmare, had been a memory of her twin sister Sharon tormenting her, more than thirty years ago.

  The dreams she’d been having intermittently for weeks, that left her so dazed and exhausted in the morning—all were remnants of memories. The sweet clear cruel relentless child’s soprano voice was the voice of her sister Sharon. “Sherrill.” Whom Lily hadn’t seen for fifteen years and hadn’t spoken with since their father’s death and the funeral Sharon had been so terribly, terribly sorry she couldn’t attend—she’d had a “professional commitment” she couldn’t break.

  The sisters were twins, though not identical. “Fraternal.”

  I am Rose of Sharon Donner, you are Lily of the Valley Donner!

  We can’t ever be lonely like other people. We have each other.

  But that wasn’t true, once they started school. Already in junior high Sharon had been eager to detach herself from Lily. She wore her hair differently, “glamorously.” She spoke, laughed, moved her body differently. On the sly, she wore bright lipstick. The sisters weren’t mirror-twins and didn’t in fact closely resemble each other. Sharon’s hair was ashy-blond, Lily’s a darker blond; Sharon was an inch taller than Lily, though always more slender; Sharon was the “pretty one”—the “one with the boyfriends.” It came to seem by the time they were in high school that Sharon was an older sister of Lily’s and this was an assumption Sharon was keen to promote. Just say we’re sisters if anybody asks, I’m older and that’s a fact. We don’t look anything alike!

  Never caring how she hurt Lily’s feelings, never much aware of others’ feelings. Disappearing into Manhattan to pursue her “career” and no looking back except when she wanted favors from the family. Pursuing the kind of people, powerful, well-to-do, exclusively male, she believed could advance her in her career. Falling in love with the wrong men again, and again.

  Sharon had returned home only a single time, since leaving to become a model. And then only for a reason. Lily, promise me. You are the only person in the world I can trust. The only person I love.

  Then she’d gone away again, of course. She’d been out of touch with Lily at the time of their mother’s sickness and death; hadn’t come to their father’s funeral; when Lily got married to Wesley Merrick, Sharon hadn’t even sent a card. It bewildered and exasperated Lily that her own sister had no interest in, not the slightest curiosity about, the man Lily had fallen in love with and married.

  And Deedee. How bizarre, Sharon’s attitude toward Deedee. As if she’d forgotten the child altogether. When she called home, which was infrequently, hardly remembering to ask about her. Oh, yes—and how’s my little niece? With the exotic name—“Deirdre”?

  Lily had learned not to be hurt by her sister. Which is to say, Lily had learned long ago not to expect anything other than hurt from her sister. She would have thought that she’d eased Sharon out of her mind entirely. She would have thought that she was free of their shared past.

  Except, what to make of these disturbing dreams? Beginning last October and continuing through the winter, until this very night. Riddlesome dreams, prankish dreams. Dreams that left a brackish taste at the back of her mouth. Lily knew the Goya engraving, “The Nightmare”: an ugly creature squatting on a sleeper’s chest. So were her nightmares ugly creatures burrowing their way up out of her body, squatting on her chest and gloating. You have to, you’re my slave! I command you. The creature was her sister Sharon as a young child. As if somehow she and Sharon were still children, somewhat lonely children, no sisters or brothers except themselves living with their parents in a ramshackle farmhouse in Shaheen, less than one hundred feet from their father’s church and the hilly cemetery of plain stone markers and crosses behind it. You know what that is?—a boneyard. You know who’s there?—dead people. That’s a nasty place.

  Before they’d been bused to town schools, Sharon hadn’t any outlet for her energy, her amazing vivacity. So she’d “teased” Lily as their mother called it, unwilling to concede that one of her girls was tormenting the other with the relentlessness of a pilgrim. The nightmare that had wakened Lily this night was a confused, heightened memory of the cemetery; the wooden storage shed behind the church where groundskeeping equipment was kept; a dank shadowy ill-smelling place into which Sharon had forced Lily upon more than one occasion when they were playing together. Inside! Go inside! On your hands and knees like a puppy-dog! And there was the yet more dank and ill-smelling cellar of the church, a virtual tomb of oozing rocks, cobwebs and rot where of course the girls were forbidden to “play.” Slave, I command you! It was meant to be a game, it was meant to be fun—wasn’t it? Lily often laughed, giggled shrilly; wet her pants with squealing; scrambled on her hands and knees, wanting only to please her sister, who had an unpredictable temper—the more readily Lily gave in to Sharon’s whims, the more likely Sharon was to relent, sometimes even to join her. For the test seemed to be the act of command and the response of obedience in themselves. Like the unpredictable God of the Hebrew Bible (as Reverend Donner called the Old Testament out of deference, he said, for his brethren the Jewish people), the scourge of Judah and Jerusalem and the sinful cities of the plains, little Rose of Sharon needed to know she was master.

  There were times in fact when Sharon had taken the lead. Boldly and recklessly scrambling up onto the steep roof of the church, for instance, and commanding Lily to follow; making her way across a rock dam in the creek, to the opposite shore; venturing out onto the frozen creek in winter; crawling on hands and knees through a tunnel of wild rosebushes alive and buzzing with honeybees. You have to follow me. Lily. I command you. And Lily followed, or tried to. She’d been like one entranced, hypnotized. Frightened to obey, yet more frightened not to obey. She remembered one time when they were a little older, perhaps nine, in the presence of other children, country neighbors, and in a clearing on the creek bank, at the bottom of the cemetery, Sharon had lighted a small brush fire and intoned over it “magic” words—ZEKIL-HOSEA-OBADIAH-HABAKKUK-ZEPHANIAH-ZECHARIAH—and commanded Lily to put her hand in t
he flames, and Lily had hesitated, and Sharon commanded her more forcibly, and still Lily hesitated, for she wasn’t such a silly fool she didn’t know what fire was, and how it hurt to be burnt; and, conscious of the other children’s eyes upon her, she’d shaken her head, no. Sharon cried You have to do what I say, slave! and pushed Lily toward the fire, pushing her head down, her hair dangerously close to the flames, and Lily screamed and wrenched away and said No! No I don’t! and ran back up to the house.

  Lily quickly put on her robe, struggling with the sleeves as if, behind her back, a prankish child were twisting them.

  She was barefoot, in the hall outside the bedroom. Shivering and clammy with perspiration and her heart still beating disconcertingly fast. Wes, just hold me. I’ve had the most upsetting nightmare.

  There was Deedee’s room: thank God no light shone beneath the door. Sometimes Deedee stayed up late, studying, or reading, or writing in her journal; experimenting with her computer. She wasn’t Wes’s child biologically but she often seemed his child temperamentally: restless, twitchy in her sleep. As an infant she’d had bouts of severe colic and as a toddler she’d been high-strung, a dynamo of energy and impatience with fixed routines, bed-, bath-, nap-, mealtimes. Her cries had been lusty, ear-shattering and protracted. Yet she’d been a happy child, anyway. Husky, bold, inquisitive. Until the age of twelve or thirteen when she’d begun to change, her personality becoming more tentative, uncertain. Entering ninth grade had been sobering for Deedee; entering high school this past fall had been traumatic. All of life that had meaning was a popularity contest which only a very few pretty, self-assured “popular” girls could win. And only boys were to judge.

  It angered Lily, as it angered the mothers of other teenaged girls of her acquaintance. What can you do, it’s adolescence! Adolescence in America!

  Deedee was Wes’s adopted daughter; it was difficult to know if he loved her “as if she were his own” for how could Lily judge? She’d entered Wes’s life as a twenty-two-year-old “unwed mother” with an eighteen-month daughter; a young woman with a confused and never very explicable past, who’d moved away from overly protective, God-besotted parents in the remote countryside south of Yewville. Lily sometimes thought, I am a figure in a fairy tale whose origins and whose ending I don’t know.

  Lily, promise! Never never go back on your word.

  Someday, she would. But not yet.

  Downstairs, Lily made her way to Wes’s office on the far side of the house. By night, the house seemed unfamiliar; it might have been a stranger’s house; and she an intruder. She stubbed her toe against something sharp-edged. “Oh—!”

  The house was a woodframe and brick colonial originally built in 1919 and several times remodeled; the first house in which Lily had lived as an adult, and as Wesley Merrick’s wife. When she’d moved away from Shaheen, where her parents had assumed she’d remain, as the mother of Deirdre, she’d lived in a small apartment in downtown Yewville, and worked at a succession of modestly paying part-time jobs, and taken courses at Yewville Community College. She’d met Wes Merrick almost immediately and had been astonished by his interest in her, his kindness and generosity. Yet somehow Lily had had faith that things would turn out well for her; if she didn’t believe passionately in Jesus Christ as her parents had taught her to believe, she did seem to believe in a benign providence.

  When Lily had been introduced to Wes, by a woman in an office in which she’d worked as a part-time secretary, he’d been presented to her as a quiet, difficult-to-know man; never married, an ex-Marine who’d had trouble readjusting to civilian life after being discharged from the service; though born and raised in Yewville, something of a mystery. He was thirty-one at the time, nine years older than Lily, but he’d looked older; not a handsome man, yet, to Lily’s eye, an attractive man; with a slightly coarse, creased skin, thick dark hair sharply receding at his temples, broad sloping shoulders. He was a self-employed carpenter and builder: his forearms were dense and wiry with muscle. His eyes were of the color of stone and appeared lashless, stark with melancholy knowledge. What I’ve seen, I’ve seen. What I know, I know. Just don’t ask. Yet Wesley Merrick wasn’t cynical, didn’t seem pessimistic. If he liked you, and he’d liked Lily Donner from the start, he trusted you. If not, not. No way he could be coaxed into smiling if he didn’t want to smile; he shook hands sometimes in silence, which made other men, accustomed to the exchange of glib, meaningless but assuaging banalities, uncomfortable. Lily noted Wes’s habit of frowning at individuals as they spoke as if trying to decode what they were saying beneath their chatter, and this made people yet more uncomfortable. A woman who’d gone out with Wes a few times before giving up on him had warned Lily that he didn’t care to be questioned about his Vietnam years, which set well with Lily, who didn’t care to be questioned about Deedee and her own past.

  When people inquired about Deedee, hoping to pry out of Lily one or another illuminating detail, Lily would feel her face burn, not exactly unpleasantly, and say quietly that her daughter’s father was not involved in their lives, by choice. Implying that the choice wasn’t hers, of course; still less was it Deedee’s; but they would make the best of it, here in Yewville in a “new” life.

  Wes had been charmed by Deedee, as by Deedee’s spunky young mother. It must have surprised and impressed him that Lily was so cheerful, so optimistic and outgoing; no moping about, no reproachful remarks about men. Why, Lily seemed to like men as—people. She’d never been a girl to arouse violent romantic passion in boys and had thus been spared emotional turmoil herself. (That province belonged to Sharon.) But she’d had a few friends who were boys in high school, and she related to men in a frank, sisterly fashion. When she took time to style her hair and wear makeup, she could be “pretty”; when she smiled, she was “prettier” still; but “prettiness” seemed hardly the point of Lily Donner, as you knew within a few minutes of meeting her. Wes had said afterward that Lily had been the only woman he’d met in years who seemed to know who she was. “You don’t just invent yourself for any guy who comes along.” Lily was flattered but thought, Invent? I wouldn’t know how.

  Wes had a small office downtown and an office in the house, in a long narrow first-floor room formerly a sunporch. There he sat, past 2 A.M., at his aluminum desk, illuminated as if on a screen by a single lamp. Lily was going to call out to him but hesitated. No. You might regret it. He was frowning at a computer screen, and at a swath of papers and documents spread across his desktop. His stiff, thinning steely-brown hair was disheveled as if he’d been running his hands through it, his jaws were unshaven, stubbled; he looked older than forty-five, clearly tired, in an irritable mood. Wes was a physically direct, blunt man who loved to work with “materials”—with his hands; who disliked the financial side of his business, the continuous and relentless task of trying to extract money from clients who owed him so that he could pay his own creditors on time. (This side of his life Wes rarely discussed with Lily, who wished she might be of more help to him.) Yet he was ambitious, as a contractor; he specialized in the restoration and renovation of old, solidly built family houses like the one they owned, not because there was money in such work (the money was in new “luxury” houses on two-acre lots in the suburban countryside) but because it was work he could respect, work with a purpose.

  Lily saw then, suddenly, with a stab of disappointment and hurt, that Wes was smoking. He picked up a cigarette burning in an ashtray and inhaled with a savage sort of intensity. A pocket calculator in one hand, the cigarette in the other. He hasn’t quit after all. Or he’s begun again. In fact, Wes had quit smoking a dozen times since Lily knew him: quit, and began again; and again quit, and began again; he hated the habit but couldn’t seem to overcome it. He’d smoked heavily in Vietnam, he said, and had “done some drugs,” too. He was a man who disapproved of weakness in himself and others but particularly in himself; he smoked when he was angry with himself, and he was angry with himself when he smoked. But only last week h
e’d declared to Lily and Deedee that, this time, it was permanent. He hadn’t touched a cigarette in nineteen days, twelve hours.

  So sheepish, so boyish and proud, Lily and Deedee had laughed and broken into spontaneous applause.

  And now. Not only smoking: drinking. Look! Lily saw to her dismay that Wes was lifting a glass to his mouth even as he continued to stare at the papers on his desk. Whiskey? Somehow, Lily doubted it was a soda drink or fruit juice. Wes was a man who enjoyed drinking, beer, ale, wine, hard liquor, he’d acknowledged a drinking problem before their marriage but so far as Lily knew he had no problem now, he drank only moderately she was sure. Yes but can you be sure? Do you really know that man, at all? She was frightened, suddenly; she shrank back into the shadows, and did not dare call attention to herself. How angry Wes would be, to discover her spying on him. He had his pride, his sense of privacy. Though Lily would never have admonished him for smoking—and drinking—he would not have accepted her silence, either.

  You’re alone, you see? Like me.

  Slave!

  Lily stumbled away from Wes’s office, not knowing where to go except back upstairs. What a poor, misguided idea it had been, to rush downstairs with her fear carried like precious crystal to present to Wes, her protector. What a fool she was. She groped her way half-blind through the downstairs, unsteady as if she’d been struck a blow to the head.

  The wind, the wind! Roaring overhead like a freight train with endless rattling cars. And in every car windows framing faces of the dead, the damned and dead! Lily was shivering, her heart pounding absurdly. She saw herself as a woman in a medieval woodcut possessed by spirits, devils; running mad tearing at her hair, her face, her clothing until there came Jesus Christ in a white robe to calmly cast out devils except Lily didn’t believe in devils. She was a civilized woman, she didn’t believe seriously in evil.