Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  AS I’D SAT in my seat among the other presenters, each of us formally dressed, women in black, men in tuxes, I had not been at all apprehensive, for I feel safest in public places. If fifteen hundred people are watching you, not to mention many times more over TV, you are defined by their perception as you can never be by your own. The more people who are viewing you at a given moment, the more “real” you are. “If I could die in front of an audience, a large, sympathetic audience, I wouldn’t feel the slightest tinge of fear. It would all be part of the performance”—I’d once made this remark to a man with whom I’d been living, or almost living. (We’d each kept our own apartment, of course.) He’d laughed, startled, as if I’d meant to be funny, for I often joke, but I was serious, too, and would like to have been able to speak frankly with him on the subject. How much easier is death in public, than in private. It’s self-evident, isn’t it? Hasn’t everyone come to this realization?

  These “sleep fugues” come upon me abruptly, without warning, like fainting spells or epileptic attacks. Yet no neurologist has found any sign of pathology. Since the age of ten I’ve been vulnerable to these mysterious fits, which seem to have nothing to do with where I am, what I’m doing, with whom I might be speaking. Yet rarely do they happen in a public place, perhaps because I feel relatively safe in public, as I’ve said. I once had a sleep fugue overtake me while driving on the upper tier of the George Washington Bridge and I had to pull over immediately into the emergency lane; my eyelids were already shutting and I slid by rapid degrees into a dark, bottomless pit. The windy, thrashing Hudson River below was confused with the more familiar pit into which I sank and a voice consoled me, Yes, this is good. It will be over soon. That fugue lasted no more than two or three minutes, but others have lasted as long as ten minutes, leaving me dazed and disoriented as if I’d been sleeping for days, for weeks. You realize how “time” is purely a matter of consciousness: when you aren’t conscious, “time” doesn’t exist, for days and even weeks in a coma state can pass swiftly as a finger snapping. And where there’s no memory, is there a “soul”?

  Onstage at Lincoln Center I was somehow able to deflect the fugue by a desperate effort of will. I forced my eyes wide, I breathed so deeply my lungs ached, I was clenching my fists to make my nails dig into the soft flesh of my palms. The vision of the old farmhouse in the Chautauqua Valley, upstate in New York hundreds of miles away and thirty years ago, rows of hulking six-foot cornstalks and dried, crumbling dirt beneath my running feet—these were superimposed upon the bright, blinding scene around me like a film transparency. There came a loud trumpet fanfare, audience applause. I was blinking rapidly to stay awake, shook my head to clear it, heard my voice as if it were a stranger’s performing my rehearsed role—reading “spontaneously” from the TelePrompTer, turning to present the shiny plaque to the Canadian documentary filmmaker, shaking the man’s hand, trying not to notice how his face was pale as a corpse’s. It was a big, formerly ruddy face, now the color had bled out of it as everywhere, everywhere I looked, the color had bled out of faces, things, surfaces. The roaring in my ears increased and I knew I must sleep. We were off-camera now, the master of ceremonies loomed beside me, quick and deft and kindly, gripping my elbow to walk me from the stage, murmuring in my ear, “You okay?” It was a rhetorical question; he knew I wasn’t okay. The touch of this man whom I knew only slightly, his kind, concerned words jolted me awake temporarily as with a shot of adrenaline. Instead of returning to my seat as we’d rehearsed, I was escorted offstage; it seemed natural, easy, and no one would take much notice of my absence, though my chair would remain vacant for the remainder of the program.

  What happened next isn’t clear, and isn’t important: as soon as I was safely backstage, evidently I lay down on some folded canvas on the floor, back behind the heavy fireproof stage curtains. I lay down, curled up like a child, and slept. I remember only that my consciousness went extinct like a candle flame blown out. Yes, like this. This is good. Dimly I was aware of concerned voices, being touched, a cold, damp cloth pressed against my forehead. At the same time I was sleeping, the sweetest, most consoling and refreshing sleep, a sleep of hours packed into minutes. And when I woke, revived, it was as if nothing, or almost nothing, had happened—I had no trouble standing, smiling in embarrassment, apologizing. I brushed at my clothes, my chic short-skirted black velvet suit, I smoothed my hair, I didn’t want or require medical attention, I was eager just to go home, I explained that I’d been exhausted lately, under stress, but it was nothing—“A sleep fugue. They come out of nowhere, and they vanish. And I’m fine.”

  And so it was.

  HOURS LATER, at home, I listened with dread to a half-dozen messages on my answering machine. Friends who’d guessed that something had been wrong with me, calling to inquire. I was touched by their solicitude. I was moved almost to tears, yet I felt guilty, too, arousing their alarm. One of these was the man with whom I’d almost lived, whom I no longer saw now, or no longer “saw” in the old way, and I replayed his message several times, thinking, But of course you didn’t know me, that’s why you’re calling now. There were three hang-ups on the machine, so I supposed that my parents had called; they weren’t comfortable with answering machines and never left messages. In fact they rarely called me at all, not wanting to intrude upon my life away from Ransomville. She has her own life now, my mother once remarked almost out of my hearing, at a family occasion, her own life now, own life now echoing strangely, as if in subtle hurt and reproach, though at the time Mother’s voice had been brisk and matter-of-fact.

  Is it wrong, I wonder, for a daughter to have her own life at any age? A daughter who loves her parents, I mean.

  Is it even possible? For what is one’s own life exactly?

  The telephone rang. It was late, past midnight. This could not be my mother, I thought, for my mother goes to bed early while my father often sits up past midnight at the kitchen table, reading, smoking, sipping ale out of a can, but when I picked up the receiver it was my mother’s voice I heard, and I began to cry, like a hurt, angry child, “Why did Grandma Wolpert hate me? I have to know.”

  FOR HOURS that night I lay awake unsleeping staring at the ceiling of my bedroom, which appeared gauzy in the dark, of no substance. At last I gave up, went to this desk and began to write, began to write feverishly in my journal, in my schoolgirl hand so conscientiously legible, each T neatly crossed and each I neatly dotted and not a comma, colon, or semicolon misused. A long, urgent entry that brought me safely through the worst hour of the night, the hour that yields to dawn, an entry beginning This happened less than twelve hours ago, in New York City.

  2.The Edge of Nowhere

  RANSOMVILLE, NEW YORK, where I was born and grew up, and where my parents and numerous relatives still live, was named for Joseph Edgar Ransom, who’d established a mill and fur-trading post on the Chautauqua River in the early 1700s when everything here was wilderness. Little is known of Ransom, this original settler, except that he’d died in 1738 and there’s a mossy, melted-looking old stone marker in the Lutheran churchyard to commemorate this fact. Ransom had thirteen children with three wives of whom only a single son (who knew how many daughters; daughters couldn’t bear the Ransom name and so didn’t count) was said to have survived his death; this son became an itinerant minister in one of those Scots-Protestant sects whose most impassioned leaders ended in asylums. All this was so long ago it might have been a dream. For certain landscapes, especially in the mountains, must generate their own dreams. At school there were quaint old maps of the “original settlement of Ransomville,” there were lists of Indian names we were made to memorize, to spell correctly. Out along the river there were broken stone foundations in the overgrown brush.

  Does it matter where we’re born? For we aren’t after all made of the soil beneath our feet—are we?

  I don’t want to think this, I realize it’s a high-flown, poetic way of thinking. Grandma Wolpert, who couldn’t abide such talk
from anyone, would’ve flared her big, black nostrils like a snorting horse.

  In the early 1950s Ransomville was a small, thriving country town on the Chautauqua River, its population at a zenith of 3,700, but by the time I went to Ransomville Consolidated High School in the late 1960s, all but two of the half-dozen mills were shut down and you’d see FOR LEASE and FOR SALE signs on deserted gas stations out on the highway.

  My Wolpert grandparents, my dad’s parents, lived on a small farm eleven miles north and east of Ransomville in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains. You couldn’t get there directly; you got there in a zigzag fashion first on the Falls Road, then turning off onto Church Hill, which was blacktop with a tendency to melt in heat waves, then a series of unpaved gravel and dirt roads. Shutting my eyes I can find my way to my grandparents’ farm, unable to anticipate any of the roads until I actually see them. The names of these roads have long faded in my memory, or perhaps they had no names even then. That sprawling farm, most of its twenty acres too rocky and hilly to cultivate; the house that was the color of damp wood, the weather-worn hay barn, silo, outbuildings; a hill like a clenched fist looming behind the house cutting off half the sky so in winter there were days of virtually no sun. The edge of the world my mother called it, wrinkling her nose. Out back of nowhere. It wasn’t a complaint exactly, more what you’d call teasing, a pretend-astonishment that this remote place was my dad’s boyhood home and these people were his people.

  Weekends, we’d drive out. Especially in summer. Always there was the excitement of driving into the country, not the tame countryside bordering Ransomville where we lived but the faraway countryside headed into the mountains. Grandpa’s farm it was called, or just the farm. I was too young and heedless, too hopeful to realize that these visits were tense for both my parents, particularly my mother. For always there was the not-knowing beforehand if a visit would be one of the good visits or one of the awkward, uncomfortable ones at which Grandma Wolpert wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t look my mother in the face, or smile, only set platters of food on the table, working her jaws in silence. She was a husky, mannish woman with a face that could look swollen as a goiter. Sure Ma likes you, hon, and the kids. It’s just, you know—she’s never been one to show her feelings. No one is, in her family. Mom would turn from Dad when he said such things so he couldn’t see her face. While she was young, it was a pretty, unlined face with a wrinkly-sniffy snub nose like a rabbit’s. She’d wink at me and I could almost hear her thoughts. What! Grandma Wolpert shows her feelings clear enough. You would not want those thoughts much clearer. My older brothers sometimes bicycled out to the farm, mostly to fish for rock bass in a creek that ran through Grandpa’s property, but by the time they were teenagers they’d lost interest, rarely rode out with us in the car. The summer she turned thirteen my sister refused to come along though she’d been a favorite of Grandpa’s. “Oh, that, that place, it’s so boring. It never changes.”

  Of course it changed. The way she changed, and my brothers who moved away from Ransomville and my cousins Joey, Luke, Jake joining the navy one by one as each turned seventeen, gone for years and then returning as adult men so that seeing them on the street in Ransomville you’d hardly know who they were. By the time I was in high school, Grandpa Wolpert had had his first stroke, and by the time I graduated, he was dead. By the time I was a junior in college, Grandma Wolpert was dead of a kind of cancer (it must have been cervical or uterine) no one in the family wished to identify, and her youngest son Tyrone, who’d been working the farm, immediately sold it and moved away to Lackawanna to work in a factory and so there was no longer any reason for any of us to make the drive to the old farm ever again.

  All this seems so long ago, too, it might’ve been a dream. But whose dream, I would not know.

  BRISKLY SNIPPING STEMS, arranging zinnias in a vase, Mom might remark in that airy, poking way of hers to Dad, “I miss it, I do. I really do. It was always an adventure, visiting your folks. And that drive.” She’d shake her head, smiling. “Out back of nowhere! But it was beautiful, in its way. And the kids used to love it, it was a place to take them. Your father—what a good, kind man in his heart even if he could be a little difficult at times. And your mother—” Mom’s idle voice trailed off like a moth hovering in the air. I waited for my father to reach over and swat it with the flat of his hand, but he never did.

  “YOUR GRANDPA loves you, honey. He doesn’t mean any harm by just teasing.”

  I loved Grandpa Wolpert, too. His name for me was Big Kitten, but I was afraid of him; you never knew when his teasing and tickling would turn rough, his fingers that smelled of manure poking my ribs and catching in my hair and his laughing breath exploding in my face like rotted apples. “How’s my Big Kitten? What’s Big Kitten up to, eh? What you got to say to your Grampa, Big Kitten?” I shrank from him, shrieking and giggling, hiding beneath the table (so I was told, in later years) but quickly crawled out again if Grandpa didn’t squat down to reach for me. He was a stout, whiskery man in overalls, soiled flannel undershirts that smelled of the barnyard, with a loud wheezing laugh, a creased dark-tanned face like a grinning moon. Where Grandma Wolpert was silent, Grandpa Wolpert was noisy as a blue jay—talking, laughing, whistling, humming to himself. He talked to animals as he’d talk to people. He was a practical joker: for instance you might be helping to clear the table after a meal and pick up an innocent-seeming plate or saucer and water would spill out—of where?—onto your legs. You’d open the closet door and a mop would tumble out, upside-down, causing a fright. Grandpa had three or four flashy card tricks that left his grandchildren blinking in amazement, and tricks with his big, gnarled hands, thumbs curled inside fists, an acorn in the palm of his hand—“Now you see it, now you don’t, eh, Big Kitten?” Nothing delighted him more than a child’s small smile of puzzlement. Grandma Wolpert disapproved of these silly tricks, as she called them, sniffing and snorting under her breath, but Grandpa paid her no heed, or he’d make a show of staring around the kitchen as if Grandma weren’t there or as if she were invisible, leaning his head toward me, saying, “Feels like the floor’s shaking, there’s some kind of big fat cow in here, eh? But I don’t see ‘er, do you?” And I’d giggle as if he’d tickled me. It was funny pretending Grandma wasn’t there.

  Grandpa played a harmonica; Grandpa liked to sing. Especially when he’d been drinking. He liked to gamble—dice, poker, euchre. “God whispers in my ear. Tells me what not to do, mainly. Like He’ll say, seeing the hand I’m dealt, ‘Uh-uh, Wolpert. You’re a horse’s ass if you do.’ So I don’t.” Grandpa winked, telling such tall tales, yet it seemed clear he believed what he said. He was proud of himself, in fact; he had a reputation for being the shrewdest card player in the Ransomville area. Strange for me to learn when I was a little older that Grandpa Wolpert had numerous friends and was considered a good-looking man, tall, broad-shouldered, with curly silvery hair and whiskers that bristled not only over his jaws but beneath his chin, sprouting out of his throat. His big chunky teeth were stained with nicotine, and his breath often stank from hard cider (which he distilled himself in one of the barns) and Old Bugler tobacco (which he chewed lustily in juicy wads the size of a baby’s fist), but this made no difference apparently; Hiram Wolpert was a man others regarded with respect, even a bit of a ladies’ man for the racy way he spoke with women, teased them and made them laugh with pleasure. What drew people to admire a man, I came to see, was a man’s way of admiring himself. Grandpa Wolpert had a manly swagger, opinions he wasn’t shy about expressing, a habit of interrupting others while never allowing himself to be interrupted. (My father had inherited some of this but on a smaller scale; he was in fact a smaller man, more tentative and more self-conscious than his father. And not a drinker.) Grandpa was a loyal friend and (it was said) an even more loyal enemy. If he liked you, he loved you; if not, better stay out of his way. He was a part-time blacksmith at a time when ‘smithing’ was nearly extinct and farmers would come from everywher
e in the Chautauqua Valley to have their horses shod in exchange, sometimes, for nothing more than one or another bartered item—a crock of whiskey, a handful of cigars, an unwanted piglet. Once, it was said, Grandpa shod a half-dozen horses for a well-to-do farmer and would accept from him no cash, only a used tire for his John Deere tractor. Grandma Wolpert cursed him for being the worst kind of fool—“Thinks he’s everybody’s friend. Giving away what he hasn’t got.”

  Grandpa’s blacksmith equipment was kept in a dank-smelling, earthen-floored barn behind the house. I never knew the names of things—a kind of circular free-standing fireplace made of nailed-together strips of tin, a bellows operated by a crank that required strength to turn, heavy cumbersome implements. There were an iron anvil, a pair of enormous tongs, a twenty-pound sledgehammer with a coarse, splintery handle that was too heavy for me to swing, tugging painfully at my arm muscles even when I was twelve years old. When my brothers still came out to the farm, my grandfather let them help him, stoking the smoldering cinder fire, hammering heated semisoft iron horseshoes into shape, clucking and talking to the horses that, easily spooked, had to be tightly tethered, their staring eyes shielded by blinders. I begged to be allowed to help, too. I was fearful of the gigantic horses but determined to be as brave as my brothers. I was stroking a mare’s shivery, surprisingly furry side while my grandfather sat, back to the horse, on a wooden box with the horse’s left rear leg, ankle, and hoof secured tightly between his knees as he hammered nails into the horse’s hoof; what a thrill of pride I felt until without warning the horse snorted in alarm, shook her head and lurched toward me, and her left front hoof came down on the edge of my foot, causing me to scream as if I were being killed. “Grandpa! Grandpa! Grandpa!”