Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “You kids settle down back there,” Dad said, a note of surprise in his voice, and his eyes searching for them in the rearview mirror, “—it’s too hot to fool around.”

  Bim thought, Fool around!

  Fool around!—fool around! That’s what people do.

  Those years, how many?—until he was thirteen, at least—Bim saw so vividly a magnificent black stallion galloping by the roadside, keeping pace with the car, though often a little in the lead, flowing black mane and tail, flashing hooves, he had to pinch himself to realize the stallion was not real; and no one else, not even nosy Ann-Sharon, could see it.

  That Sunday too the stallion was galloping alongside Dad’s car, oblivious of Dad, and Dad oblivious of him, when, at the outskirts of Yewville, in the slummy shantytown area by the train yard, the female hitchhiker appeared. By this time Dad had slowed the car because the speed limit was thirty miles an hour, and the black stallion had faded, vanished even as Bim forgot him, the way, waking, we lose our dreams not to daylight but to consciousness. Dad peered at the woman through the windshield, and the woman peered at Dad with a peculiar grin, a jack-o’-lantern grin, too wide for her face.

  “A shameful sight,” said Dad stiffly, “—a female drunk—and at this hour of the day—Sunday!”

  “Drunk? Oh, what a pity,” Mom said, staring, “—oh, then we can’t—mustn’t—”

  “Of course we can’t,” Dad said, steering the car around the swaying figure in the road, “—don’t be silly!”

  Ann-Sharon and Bim cringed as the Packard passed so close by the woman she might have leaned in the rear window and touched them. And when the car was past her, how awful that she began yelling at them, shaking her fist, her ugly face distended like putty and her mouth a furious O wide and gaping as a fish’s so scary to see!—Ann-Sharon would dream of that mouth for years, black flying-darting things issued from it, hurtled in the direction of the fleeing car bearing Dad, Mom, Ann-Sharon, and Bim to Grandma’s white clapboard house on Prospect Street where, arriving for Sunday dinner, or for Thanksgiving dinner, or for Easter dinner, no sooner did you step into the vestibule with its frosted-glass windows than the warm delicious aroma of a roasting chicken, or turkey, or ham, or beef, would fill your nostrils and cause your mouth to water so you were giddy crying, “Grandma! Oh, Grandma!—WE’RE HERE!”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  ANOTHER TIME. The following summer. That day Mom was driving the Packard, and not Dad. Mom, Ann-Sharon in the front seat, Bim in the back with the groceries from Loblaw’s, staring out at the black stallion galloping through the fields, leaping ditches, lanes, though when Mom drove the black stallion’s speed was lessened, and at the Elk Creek bridge (when Mom drove, she took the long way home from Yewville: the fast-moving traffic on Route 31 made her nervous) there was a hitchhiking couple!—a scruffy bearded young man and a long-haired young woman with a filthy khaki bundle (a baby?) slung over the man’s back. There they stood, bold as daylight, by the bridge’s steep ramp, and as Mom approached the man shot out his thumb staring into Mom’s face as she eased the bulky car past, “Hey lady, how’s about a ride? Where ya goin’ lady?” but Mom paid him no heed, nor glanced at his defiant companion. The man, fierce-eyed up close, sunburned, with rotted teeth, made an obscene gesture and leaned over grinning to spit onto the car’s roof—but Mom, stiff with fear, simply kept driving, crossing the single-lane plank bridge at four miles an hour which was her normal speed for crossing such bridges, whether in the presence of danger or not. Poor Mom!—Bim saw how her face was dead-white and the creases and lines in her forehead were exposed, she was panting, her jaw trembling yet resolutely, stubbornly she stared straight ahead, bearing her children to safety.

  Saying, afterward, when she could catch her breath, “We won’t tell your dad about this. Not a word!”

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON DRIVES. Just Mom, Ann-Sharon, and Bim. Dad never took the family for Sunday drives, he’d had enough of driving five days a week to Yewville to work, nine miles in and nine miles back, plant manager at Woolrich’s Masonite, Inc., and after his first heart attack, the “silent” one as it was called, Dad took Sundays easy, stopped going to church, too. But Mom loved Sunday drives, even on overcast or sultry days, long dreamy looping drives through the countryside of her girlhood along Elk Creek to Lake Nautauga and a stop there for refreshments at the Tastee Freeze then across the bridge and home along the Canal Road. Or along the Chautauqua River to Milburn or Tintern Falls, over the bridge and home again on the other side of the river. Ann-Sharon rode quietly listening to Mom speak of the old days, of who lived in which house, whose farm that used to be, which girlfriend of hers from grade school had married and lived where, but Bim was an excitable child with odd, unpredictable worries—what if they got lost? ran out of gas? Mom laughed frowning at him, “Bim, don’t be silly!”

  Later saying, as they neared home, as if Mom could read Bim’s innermost thoughts, of which he, a nine-year-old, was unaware, “Now you know, children—your dad isn’t exactly his old self yet, but he will be, soon.”

  THAT SUNDAY THEN in May, when on the way home after the Tastee Freeze Mom decided to park in the weedy drive of an old collapsed farmhouse where a family she’d known had once lived, and she and Ann-Sharon and Bim poked about the ruins, and loaded their arms with wild lilac (rich, deep purple and white lilac, grown to a height of fifteen feet, so fragrant!), turning then amazed to see a stranger, a woman, near the car—a swarthy-skinned thick-bodied woman of no age you could guess, and there was a skinny child with her, about four years old, a little boy, the woman’s eyes were slow and dull and her stained-looking face was a maze of wrinkles and her words clotted as if there were pebbles in her mouth, “Ridemizzus?” she seemed to say, and Mom stared at her and said quickly, politely, “I’m sorry, my husband doesn’t allow me to pick up hitchhikers,” and the woman blinked and grinned and repeated what sounded like, “Ridemizzus?—eh?” and Mom took Ann-Sharon’s and Bim’s hands to lead them to the car parked at the top of the driveway, as the woman stared at them flat-footed in the cinders where they’d dropped the lavish sprays of lilac they’d been picking. “Come along, come along, children,” Mom whispered, her eyes bright, her fingers squeezing theirs icy-cold and strong, and the woman stared after them, and the little boy gap-toothed and spiky-haired dark like an Eskimo stared too. “Ridemizzus?” the woman was whining now, gesturing at the car, as Mom, Ann-Sharon, and Bim hurriedly got inside, Ann-Sharon in the passenger’s seat, Bim in back, and Mom started the car after two tries when the engine turned over and went dead and now the woman took a step toward them, and another, raising her voice saying what sounded like “Gimme ridemizzus?—hey!”—but at last the Packard was in motion, tires flinging up cinders out of the weedy drive and this time too, headed home, Mom didn’t so much as glance back.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  HOW THINGS END!—the last time, rarely can you guess it will be the last time. For that afternoon, the day of the lilac-picking, was to be the last Sunday drive that Ann-Sharon went on, grown bored with the memorized landscape and wanting to be with her friends. And soon, too, Bim decided he had other things he’d rather do, boys to play with he preferred to the Sunday drives, so Mom’s feelings were hurt and sometimes she went alone but not far, and not with much enthusiasm, and eventually the Sunday drives ceased. And at last too the old Packard was traded in for a new 1958 Studebaker, four-door, canary yellow, and one December evening driving home from work in Yewville Dad was alone and braked for a red light at the Transit Street intersection by the trainyard and out of the shadows how suddenly, unexpectedly a figure appeared!—a gaunt ragged man whose face Dad wasn’t to see clearly, he was wearing a dark wool-knit cap low on his forehead, a vagrant pleading for a ride, and Dad said, “Sorry, no,” and the man repeated his request, and now it was a demand, “Mister, I need a ride! hey mister gimme a ride!” but Dad said, louder, “Sorry—no.” The light changed to green and he pressed down on the gas pedal and exactly at this momen
t the man grabbed the handle of the passenger’s door, opened it, and Dad yelled at him leaning over to yank the door shut, and there was a struggle, and the man cursed and struck at Dad but the car leaped forward lurching and Dad kept his foot on the gas to accelerate so his attacker was thrown off and Dad escaped driving in a fury nine miles home with the passenger’s door bumping and rattling, this was the night of Dad’s second heart attack which was a serious one and so that spring he retired from Woolrich’s and never again would he be completely well, tired easily and prone to melancholy moods never again his old self though Mom continued to wait faithfully for this old self to reappear and Dad would live to be eighty-three years old to die one snowy afternoon napping on the sofa.

  THERE WAS pretty Ann-Sharon who grew up and married out of high school and had four children within the space of six years and lived in Yewville all her life. And Bim who went away to college where his professors knew him by another name though his closest friends called him Bim. And returning home for Thanksgiving his senior year driving ten hours in the rain, in the gathering dark, a foolhardy thing to do in a car borrowed from a roommate, Bim was late and so was speeding on Route 31 taking the underpass by the new shopping mall at fifty miles an hour, sheets of water spraying out winglike from the car’s tires when Bim saw someone, or thought he saw, a figure hunched and huddled there in the underpass, all his life he would recall a fleeting impression of something crinkled and shiny (a cheap plastic raincoat?) and a pale startled grimacing face lifting in the car’s bright beams then somehow, it made no sense how, there was a thunk! and the car lurched, there was a muffled cry, unless Bim imagined it, but already the car had righted itself and was speeding up out of the underpass, back into the pelting rain, onto a stretch of deserted country highway, and gone.

  Twelve minutes later entering the house, his home, shaky and smiling and an aroma of roasting turkey making his mouth water, and they’re waiting for him crowding to embrace him, Dad rising from his leather chair by the TV, “Bim, thank God!—we were worried about you.”

  THE STALKER

  After it happens. She will quit her job, and perhaps her profession. She will move away from Detroit and she will break off relations with her colleagues and even her friends who will speak of her for years afterward pityingly, wonderingly, Does anyone ever hear from Matilde? and What has happened to Matilde, do you know? and We warned her, didn’t we? We did! As soon as she recovers from the episode, she will put her aunt’s house on the market (after eight years of occupancy she still thinks of the brownstone at 289 Springwood, Mittelburg Park, as her deceased aunt’s and not her own) and accept the first offer any buyer makes no matter how low. Because she isn’t a woman to care much about money. Nor is she a sentimental woman. After it happens she will never be inclined to sentimentality again; she will have earned that distinction.

  The handgun. She’d already had the permit, issued by the county, when she went to the Liberty Gun Shop on North Woodward—a cream-colored stucco building in a mini-mall between Adult X-Rated Videos & Supplies and House of Wong Restaurant & Carry-Out. Liberty Gun Shop advertised handguns and long guns, new and used, sales and purchases. The manager’s name was Ted, call me Ted OK? but Matilde did not call him anything except a cool murmured schoolgirl sir once or twice. His eyes lighting on her, the tall poised height of her. Her forward-tilting head, slender neck, eyes that pebbly-gray gaze her first lover, twenty years ago, had called the hue of infinite regret, though possibly he’d said infinite regress, it had been something of a joke. (Between Matilde and her lovers there had always been odd, awkward, ongoing jokes she’d never quite got, though like a good sport she’d laughed on cue.) The gun shop owner pressed Matilde to consider high-capacity semiautomatic pistols, but Matilde insisted on considering only the most conventional and economic handguns. A used .38-caliber Smith & Wesson was what she wanted, ex-police issue and good enough for her purposes. Ted was disappointed, she could see. And when she took up the gun in her hand, and found it heavier than she’d anticipated, and her hand shook until she steadied it with the other, Ted expressed doubt he should sell the gun to her at all—it went against his “code of ethics” to sell any weapon to anyone who might not be capable of using it. Because a gun can be taken from you and used against you. Because to freeze with a gun in your hand can be a worse predicament than to be caught unarmed. Because you have to be prepared not just to shoot but to kill—and she didn’t look like she’d be tough enough. But this, too, was a joke—of course. Matilde had her checkbook in hand. There was never any doubt that she, who believed in a total ban of firearms to private citizens, would be sold the revolver of her choice in the Liberty Gun Shop on North Woodward: a medium-barreled, six-shot, second-hand .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. And a small box of ammunition, two dozen bullets. Though Matilde knows, if she uses the gun at all, she will use it only once.

  The heartbeat is her own, of course. Yet so frequently now she seems to be hearing it, feeling it, at a distance. Like the myriad unnamed noises of the city, ceaseless grinding-thumping, ceaseless drilling you hear without listening, planes passing high overhead in the night, invisible contrails of sound, ceaseless. I can feel your heartbeat!—Jesus. And then he’d laughed, she didn’t know why, doesn’t know why. Was he laughing at her, or in sympathy with her. She has thought of it, of him, obsessively. But she doesn’t know.

  The heartbeat is her own, of course. Yet it’s his, too. Look, my name is—what sounded to her ear like Bowe, Bowie—I’d like to see you, soon. Tomorrow? Tonight? Lying in this bed with its bone-hard mattress (Matilde has had a tricky back for the past several years) her eyes shut tight and sticky sweat-pearls glistening on her face, I see him: the rain-splattered blue Volvo with a frayed Clinton/Gore sticker on the rear bumper, he’s behind the wheel parked at the entrance to the high-rise garage where Matilde parks her car while she’s at work and she sees him then quickly not-seeing hurrying to the elevator to take her to C-level, to her car. And his telephone messages, Matilde, Please call—his home number, office number (he’s a lawyer, a litigator, does volunteer work for Legal Aid)—which Matilde replays and erases. Not ever again, please God. I can’t. She sees the Volvo slowly passing the brownstone at 289 Springwood with its wine-dark, slightly corroded facade, its single splendid bay window, she isn’t watching, still less is she waiting, but she sees. What does he want of her, what is the connection between them, their blood commingled, she guesses Bowe, Bowie?—first name Jay, or was it the initial J?—he’s married, she’d caught a glimpse of a ring on his left hand. He’d been breathing quickly, she felt the heat rise from him. No. Not ever again. I can’t.

  Fate. Why, Matilde Searle has often wondered, do we so crave romantic love as if it were our destiny—our private, secret, individual fate? As if romantic love, yes let’s be candid and call it sexual love, the real thing, might define us in a way nothing else (our families, our hard-won careers) can define us. I’ve never known who I am except when I’ve been in love, Matilde has said, and I haven’t recognized that self and I haven’t admired that self and I can’t bear being that self again.

  Vital statistics. Born November 11, 1953. Ypsilanti, Michigan. First daughter, second child of a Roman Catholic family that would burgeon—the word “burgeon” is Matilde’s, she’d used it perhaps one thousand times while growing up to speak with fond contempt of her parents and their restricted, to her restrictive, world—to six siblings. Six! people say, smiling. Your parents must have liked babies! and Matilde used to roll her eyes and say, dryly, I think it just took my mother that long to figure out what was causing it. (Now she’s an adult, and her mother has been dead for three years, Matilde never jokes like that. She rarely jokes about family at all.) But the unexamined and wholly unquestioned Roman Catholicism of her parents and grandparents was a heavy, tacky wool overcoat that never fitted her; she’s proud of having given up even the pretense of belief at the age of twelve. Went to Ypsilanti public schools, graduated summa cum laude from Michigan
State University, 1976 (B.A., American history, politics), received a master’s degree from the University of Michigan, 1978 (social work). Positions in East Lansing with the Michigan State Bureau of Youth and Family Service (1978–1982) and in Detroit with the Wayne County Clinic of Counseling of the State of Michigan (1982–present). At the Wayne County Clinic, one of the state’s most massive and bureaucratized agencies, Matilde Searle is an assistant supervisor for Family Services, but she is also “on the floor”—she has a caseload of never less than twenty families, involving never less than one hundred individuals, and frequently twice that number. Her annual salary, determined by the Michigan legislature’s budget allotment, is $41,000 and she has not had a raise in two years. There is no medically recorded “nervous breakdown” in the file on Matilde Searle, nor do rumors circulate among her colleagues that she has tried to commit suicide, as certain of her colleagues, over the years, have: the Clinic is notorious for burning out its social-services staff, female and male, but mostly female, on the sixth floor of the ancient buff-brick Wayne County Agencies building at Gratiot and Stockton where Matilde Searle has a corner-window office shared with another social worker with a master’s degree from Ann Arbor, also female, five years older than Matilde, but black-Hispanic. She is Caucasian, a distinct minority in the city of Detroit.