Dis Mem Ber and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In Professor Schrader’s house we did not often encounter one another. Perhaps we avoided one another. Yet sometimes in the first-floor corridor encountering one another could not be avoided.

  On a table in the foyer Professor Schrader placed our mail in two distinct piles. Neither Candace Durstt nor I ever received much mail, and what we did receive was mostly advertising flyers, or notices from the University.

  Professor Ida Schrader had lived in a high-gabled faded-peach-colored Victorian house at 22 Humboldt Street for nearly forty-seven years, she’d told us. The house had been a “family inheritance”—a “beautiful domicile, originally”—that had suffered in the “moral, cultural, and political collapse” of the late 1960s.

  “You never know around here when you might be stabbed in the back or dragged off into an alley or your house broken into or torched. You can be wary and cautious—you can be a ‘good girl’—but you will never know.”

  Seeing the look in my face Professor Schrader said quickly, “Oh, it isn’t just colored people—’persons of color’—who are hostile to us. I know this as a fact. It’s our fellow ‘whites’ too, the ones on welfare and drugs. And ‘hippies’—whatever they call themselves today. ‘Street people.’”

  Professor Schrader spoke vehemently, with an air of bitterness and chagrin. Yet, she was capable of reversing herself by seeming to laugh at her own words—”Oh, listen to me. Just an old white ‘intellectual’ fulminating, in an age of digital illiteracy.”

  Professor Schrader was a retired professor of anthropology, once chairman of her department. She was a heavy woman with wild white hair, pendulous breasts and upper arms, legs as thick (nearly) as my waist, and a squeezed-together, almost childlike face. She wore enormous billowing “slacks”—as she called them—with stretch waists and short-sleeved T-shirts for she perspired easily, even in cold weather. Her eyes were all but hidden behind the thick lenses of her plastic harlequin glasses yet you could sense their cunning and you could see in the set of her mouth a withheld smirk, a look of deep suspicion. Yet often, she seemed bemused by me—”My apparition”—(glancing at me over her bifocal lenses with a look of mock-fright). “Heavens! You are always sneaking up on me, Lide.”

  Her name for me was “Lide”—(“lied”). Why this was amusing to her, I don’t know.

  “Candace” was “Can-dace” to her—sometimes “Can-dance.” This too was amusing, to Professor Schrader.

  I had had few conversations with Professor Schrader. She seemed to prefer a kind of banter as if I were one of her students, but not a prized student.

  I did not know how to react to her remarks—her witticisms. Was she being insulting, or teasing?—or friendly, in a bullying way?

  On the subject of the drowned girl she was particularly vehement. It was clear that the drowned girl preyed on her mind a good deal.

  I could not understand why Professor Schrader and now Candace Durstt were so unsympathetic with Miri Krim whose very name they seemed to have forgotten, as if she, and not her murderer or murderers, were a threat to them. Speaking of her with disdain as the drowned girl who deserved the terrible thing that had been done to her. (Though I was certain that neither Professor Schrader nor Candace knew the details of the death.)

  At last I said: “Miri Krim was nineteen years old. She was a student at the University who was raped and drowned—murdered.” My voice was shaking badly but I continued, as Professor Schrader and Candace Durstt stared at me in astonishment. “No one was ever arrested for the crime. The police didn’t seem to have looked very hard for the murderer. Miri Krim was not a drug addict—that is just a rumor. She was an honor student.”

  Hurrying then to the stairs. Not a backward glance. For I knew the two were staring after me and I knew that, as soon as I shut the door to my room, the Professor would make an unkind, witty remark about “Lide”—”poor Lide”—”lied”—and Candace would snort with laughter through her wide dark horse’s nostrils.

  It was not true, strictly speaking, that Miri Krim had been an honor student at the University. But Professor Schrader and Candace Durstt would not know this.

  I had read (online) that Miri Krim had been an honors student at Allegheny Community College, and that she’d graduated salutatorian of her high school class. At the University, however, for reasons not known, Miri Krim had ceased attending classes in the last several weeks of her life.

  Her first-year grades had been uneven—sprinkling of B’s, C’s. In chemistry, a forlorn D.

  My grades, too, have been “uneven.” But I am determined to excel.

  My attendance record at the University is perfect. On my graph of all my courses, for each class day I have noted this. Usually I arrive early for lectures to sit in the front row. (It is not clear to me, however, if attendance is taken in University courses. For we do not have assigned seats as in high school. I do not want to think Of course, nobody cares if you attend a lecture, or not. Why on earth would anyone care about you?)

  It is crucial to sit in the front row in lecture halls for at the University lecture halls are immense holding as many as three hundred students.

  I am the girl who sits in the front row in Hall of Languages 101 directly in front of the podium. So that, if the Intro to Psychology lecturer (Professor Gee) happens to glance out into the audience, he will be likely to see me, and it is possible that he will wonder who I am, who is this girl so serious, so attentive, so concentrated upon note taking in a spiral notebook, amid rows of bored and distracted undergraduates with laptops opened before them, or cell phones semi-hidden in their hands.

  Professor Gee may make inquiries. He may make a notation in his class file.

  Lucash, Alida. Pre-med.

  Passing The Magellan on Pitcairn, and around the corner on Humboldt Street. Resisting the impulse to glance up, to squint and smile at the face in the window that fades—(but not slowly: teasingly) even as I stop dead on the sidewalk like a figure caught in a rifle scope.

  A faint, fading voice. Alida! I am so lonely.

  A disturbing scene this evening at the University Medical Clinic.

  An older student came to sell his blood, and was lying on a table near me, on his side; his eyes were tight-shut, and his hands were fists; but when the attendant came to him, it was with bad news—he was not to be allowed to give blood any longer, for he was HIV-positive.

  (Did I overhear something I was not supposed to overhear? I shut my eyes tighter, and tried not to hear. For I am not an eavesdropper and I take no pleasure in the sorrows of others.)

  He objected: “No. That’s wrong. That’s a mistake!”

  Yet the young man was refused by the clinic. He was instructed to roll down his sleeve and depart. For he would not be allowed to sell his blood at the Medical Clinic, not ever again.

  “You are fucking mistaken, I am not HIV-positive.”

  A furious young man of my approximate age, though his hair was badly thinning and his hands shook. No one wanted to look at him—it was clear that this was a sick person, and that his blood was infectious and unwanted.

  Such persons are infectious and unwanted. Their medical files are flagged.

  He continued to speak loudly, threateningly. A security officer was called. His words were rapid and slurred. The irises of his eyes were dilated. The eyeballs of his eyes were jaundiced. I did not want to be seen observing him for I recognized the terror in his voice, and I knew that a terrified person can turn on you like a maddened dog as if you are an enemy and not a friend.

  Out in the corridor, the young man began to cry. “Please! You should help me—shouldn’t you? Somebody has to help me.”

  Faintly we heard him as he was escorted away: “Please—I don’t want to die….”

  It is surprising, the “hidden fees” in the University’s monthly bills.

  For instance, all enrolled students, even those who are part-time in the School of General Studies, are being charged a (new, unexpected) three-hundred-dollar “student c
enter” fee. (There is a capital campaign, the University is hoping to raise one hundred million dollars for new development including a “palatial” student center.)

  I can’t pay this fee. I just can’t. My expenses are budgeted and there is no extra three hundred dollars….

  Eventually, the fee will be added to my loan. With interest.

  “I hate them. I don’t trust them at all. Especially her.”

  It is Professor Ida Schrader whom I most distrust. I have reason to think that the Professor charges me more for my room each month than she charges Candace though Candace’s room is larger than mine, and the ceiling appears to be higher than the ceiling in my room, and there is a far nicer view from her single window than there is from mine which looks out upon an alley resembling the College Avenue underpass.

  In September, I might have moved into another University-approved rooming house, or into an apartment building (like The Magellan—but I did not know the history of The Magellan then)—except the rent in Professor Schrader’s house was attractively low and “kitchen privileges” were included; plus, I would need to share a bathroom here with only one other tenant, another “female” like myself.

  Online pictures of the high-gabled Victorian house at 22 Humboldt Street are very attractive, also. You could not see the peeling paint like decaying skin. You could not smell the bathroom drains, or the stark stale graveyard smell of the interior of the refrigerator.

  Alida, take care. Do not trust them.

  This faint, sweet voice I knew to be her voice. But I did not reply to her, just yet.

  Often I am stricken with shyness, when a friend approaches. A new friend, the promise of a new friend, a new love—vertigo overcomes me.

  They are not your friends. They do not wish you well.

  If you could take my hand …

  In the solace of sleep, sometimes. Warm fingers brushing mine beneath the bedclothes.

  It is always a shock, bare feet on bare linoleum floor, a wailing sound in the water pipes when I dare to turn on a faucet. To avoid the others, I have begun to wake early, while it is still dark.

  In the bathroom that is adjacent to my room and to Candace’s room on the second floor of Professor Schrader’s house, I take pains to wipe the toilet seat several times with toilet paper. (Such an old toilet seat—made of wood! A cheaper, white-plastic seat would be preferable, I am sure. Bacteria cling to a porous surface like wood, and breed in its microscopic cracks. Bacteria are exposed on the sleek surface of plastic, and more easily extinguished.)

  Professor Schrader will complain of water wasting but I am obliged to run the water until it gushes steamy-hot from the faucet. I am obliged to use as much soap as necessary to clean the toilet seat and other areas of the bathroom. My dread of germs in communal places has grown in recent months, since my arrival at the University.

  In my former life before the University, there did not seem to be a fear of contagion—there did not seem to be an awareness of the possibility of contagion in our small town in Adirondack County.

  I do not like “sharing” space with the other tenant, or indeed with Professor Schrader. Sharing a bathroom with Candace Durstt is particularly unpleasant, for I do not like this young woman, and I do not trust her; I know that, with Professor Schrader, she laughs at me behind my back, and jeers at me, and (possibly) Professor Schrader gives her a key so that she can prowl in my room, and go through my things; if she could, she would peer into my computer (as into my soul) and learn all my secrets, except that my computer is malfunctioning, and a rainbow icon spins obliviously, maddeningly, whenever you raise the screen.

  Often, the screen to my laptop is black. Blank-black. The power cord malfunctions, too.

  It is strange, though I dislike Candace Durstt, and shudder at having to touch the toilet flush handle, faucets, shower knobs, etcetera, which Candace also touches, I do not (truly) think that Candace is a bearer of lethal bacteria, as Professor Schrader may be; Candace Durstt exudes an air of dryness, not of moisture, in which bacteria thrive. But there is a particular unease in imagining the heavyset perspiring older woman lowering her buttocks onto the (cedar?) toilet seat…. It makes me feel faint to imagine those fleshy, pocked buttocks, a pale doughy flesh creased and cracked and oozing.

  No! I do not want to envision such a sight.

  Professor Schrader has her own bathroom of course, which is attached to her bedroom at the rear of the house, on the first floor. (Which I have never seen. I have no wish to see.) But she (sometimes) uses “our” bathroom, when it is convenient for her. (Professor Schrader has difficulty walking, and does not move about the interior of the house any more than is necessary.) Sometimes Professor Schrader murmurs an apology of some sort, which is hardly sincere, and horse-faced Candace will say, with a braying laugh—”Oh Professor, of course we don’t mind! This is your house.” (As if the bullying old woman needed to be reminded!)

  Did I mention that Candace is an anthropology graduate student? She is tall and spindly-limbed like an arachnoid; you have to look twice at her, to see that she has only two arms and two legs. There is something cobwebby about her mouth, a trace of spittle in the corner of her lips. Truly, I try not to look.

  Initially Candace had seemed (almost) friendly to me—she had come upon me looking very distressed (but not crying, I think), holding in my shaking hand a letter from home, one of my mother’s misspelled and ungrammatical but razor-sharp letters; Candace had encouraged me to speak to her of the sorrow in my heart, that my parents had had a change of mind and wanted me to return home, that they had decided they could not “afford” me to be away from them, and to be “costing so much money”—(which was a cruel joke for they were not paying a penny toward my University expenses); I had confided in Candace, that the University was to be my “salvation”—(knowing even as I spoke that I might regret such extravagant words in which, to a degree, I did not actually believe; for I understand that, even with a University degree, and strong letters of recommendation from my professors, I will have a difficult time securing decent employment in this era of rampant unemployment). Another time, reeling from my first math quiz, in which I had received a grade of 17, Candace had insisted upon examining the sheet of paper crudely marked in red ink like slashes in flesh, to see if possibly there was some mistake; she’d been kind, assuring me that she had no aptitude for math at all, and admired me for daring to take such a course which was not, strictly speaking, a course usually taken by students in the School of General Studies.

  Yet soon after this, seeing an advantage in aligning herself with our landlady against me, Candace turned disdainful and aloof to me, and will often stare bemusedly through me when, by chance, we happen to meet on campus.

  In one of my University courses it has been suggested to us, in terms of scientific causation, with its (essentially) materialist foundation, that there is no chance, or accident; there is only determinism, necessity.

  Of course, there is no free will in such circumstances. I did not want to raise my hand to ask the Professor—Is everything decided, then? Why are we studying here? Why do you bother to test us, when our grades are determined beforehand? And all of our lives?

  Here is another question: why have Professor Schrader and Candace Durstt bonded together, in their dislike of me?—I am trying to comprehend.

  Is it because they are each quite unattractive, in very different ways? The one obese, and asymmetrical (the Professor limps, favoring a swollen right knee); the other tall and spidery-limbed. While Miri Krim was (judging from photographs) a very beautiful girl with classic features: wide-set eyes, a small straight nose, a small sweet mouth. Her hair seems to have been just slightly wavy, and wheat-colored; it fell to her shoulders, and she often wore it brushed behind her ears. Not carelessly, but casually. Her eyes were dark, and intelligent if just slightly dreamy.

  Did she know? Did she foresee? Was it determined?—”fate”?

  Did she go willingly with her abductor/murderer?—did
she resist?

  Was there no one to hear her cries, no one to save her? Was this determined, also?

  The more you gaze into the eyes of the drowned girl, the more you peer into her soul. The experience is—well, it is very unsettling.

  Before her death Miri Krim weighed (approximately) one hundred pounds; after her death her poor, ravaged remains weighed scarcely fifty pounds. Before her death, Miri Krim stood approximately five feet, one inch; after her death, her remains were so decomposed, they could not be helpfully measured.

  Unlike Miri Krim I am not a beautiful girl—indeed. I know and accept this.

  Yet, it is a coincidence that I appear to be approximately Miri Krim’s size—my weight is one hundred six pounds, and I am five feet two inches tall.

  Yes, petite. How I hate petite!

  My hair is brown, a very ordinary color, and it is not wavy; my eyebrows and lashes are unusually pale, as if invisible; my mouth is small and unassertive and my smile (if I dare to smile, in the presence of Professor Gee, for instance) is a very shy smile.

  It is easy for large persons to dismiss me. My professors at the University scarcely notice me at all.

  Also, (large) persons like Professor Schrader and the sycophant Candace Durstt.

  “It’s an honor to be your tenant, Professor Schrader. I am so grateful!”—shamelessly Candace flatters our obese landlady.

  Candace is always asking the Professor if she can borrow a book from one of the Professor’s bookshelves, which are crammed with books on obscure subjects. (Professor Schrader has an impressive collection of books! But most of them are old, and quite a few appear to be waterstained and warped.) The Professor never fails to be flattered—though she sometimes pretends to be annoyed. “Yes. Of course, dear. If you promise to return the book to exactly the same position you’ve taken it from.”

  As if she does not trust Candace, even while allowing herself to be flattered and manipulated by her, Professor Schrader records the title of the book to make sure that it is returned.