I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  My first glimpse of Agnes Thayer was at an open house during sorority rush the previous February. Not a member of Kappa Gamma Pi herself, Mrs. Thayer wasn't involved in the ritual of "rushing"; but she was an impressive presence among the Kappas, overseeing the pouring of tea with a look of benign, smiling confidence. I'd never met anyone who spoke like Mrs. Thayer, with so distinctly British an accent, thrilling to my ears. "Mrs. Thayer, our housemother, is British, you know. She's from London." So it was several times explained to me. When I advanced to the head of the line, taking a cup of tea in a slightly shaky hand, taking a small gold-rimmed plate with cookies on it, I smiled nervously at this woman of youthful middle age who smiled serenely toward me. I murmured, "Thank you," as others were doing, and Mrs. Thayer murmured in reply, her blue gaze passing through me as it's said those infinitesimal sub-atomic particles called neutrinos pass through solid matter continuously, "My dear, you are welcome."

  My dear! No one had ever spoken to me, even in jest, in such a way.

  Once I became a Kappa initiate, and moved into the Kappa residence, I became one of Mrs. Thayer's girl-subjects. Mrs. Thayer was our "house-mother": our adult-in-authority. Mrs. Thayer's dominion was supreme.

  Like royalty, or what I might have guessed of royalty, Mrs. Thayer could not be approached casually. A ritual of a kind had to be observed, before one could speak with Mrs. Thayer in private. (But what would one speak about with Mrs. Thayer, in private? I could not imagine.) Her quarters, a small suite of rooms on the ground floor of the Kappa house, were otherwise taboo.

  The suite opened out onto an inner parlor, a library, and ran parallel to the large dining room, to the rear of the house; this parlor, though a public room, was tinctured to some degree by Mrs. Thayer's proximity. Sometimes Mrs. Thayer's door was open, sometimes ajar; most of the time, snugly closed. If the door was open and you stepped into the library, you were immediately aware of Mrs. Thayer's inner quarters; you were immediately alert to the possibility of her presence. I recall standing in the parlor staring at the open door with a vague fixed smile and hearing, though not listening to, murmurous voices within, and even laughter; Mrs. Thayer was talking with one of the senior girls, a favorite. What are they talking about? Laughing about? When at last the girl appeared, and Mrs. Thayer behind her, they glanced toward me indifferently; Mrs. Thayer may have called over, in her brisk, brusque way that meant no reply was expected, "Ah, Mary Alice! How are you."

  I had not the audacity to tell Mrs. Thayer that my name was not "Mary Alice"; nor did it sound anything like "Mary Alice"; I knew Mrs. Thayer would be offended.

  The parlor was much smaller than the rather grand living room, papered in ebony and gilt in ingenious two-inch-square replicas of the Kappa pin, which gave to the interior a dizzying perspective such as one might experience swirling down a drain. Its fourth wall was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with aged, respectable books including sets of leather-bound classics, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, the Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott, the Complete Works of Edward Gibbon among others, which had the embalmed look of books unopened for decades. On the fiercely patterned walls were dozens of framed photographs of Kappa officers and members dating from 1933 when the local chapter of the sorority was first established on the university campus, consisting of only eleven determined-looking girls. (How does a sorority "begin"? I could not guess. Parmenides' famous question Why is there something, and not rather nothing? did not seem to me, in this context, more profound.) Everywhere in the room were brass-and-mahogany trophies, plaques, medals, congratulatory certificates in gilt lettering dating back to the mid-Thirties; mementos of long-ago formal dances, teas, one or two softball teams, picnics, and ceremonial occasions at which Kappas received awards from other, elder Kappas at national assemblies. So fleetingly did the proposition cross my mind, it wasn't a true revelation—These are all what's called white: to be among them, I too must be white.

  Prominent in this room was a large glass-topped piece of furniture—the proctor's desk. On this, affixed by an actual chain, was the official "sign in/sign out" ledger of the residence. Every evening at 8:00 p.m. the Kappa house, like all university residences, was locked; the rear door was not only locked but bolted; the designated proctor for the evening would sit at this desk; her task would be to answer incoming telephone calls, buzzing girls in their rooms (for individual telephones were forbidden), and above all making certain that girls did not slip out the front door without signing the ledger. "Under my roof curfew will be strictly enforced," Mrs. Thayer gravely warned. This meant 11:00 p.m. weeknights, 12:00 a.m. Fridays, 1:00 a.m. Saturdays, and 10:00 p.m. Sundays, university regulations that applied solely to undergraduate women. (No curfews at all were imposed upon men, who might be absent from their residence for days without being reported to authorities.) Since the parlor was adjacent to Mrs. Thayer's quarters, loud talk, laughter, and "carrying on" of any kind were forbidden. On elected tables were arranged Kappa yearbooks and other publications adorned with the Kappa insignia, and on a coffee table newspapers and magazines were arranged in a fan-like spread, mainly back issues of Mrs. Thayer's Harper's & Queen, Punch, Manchester Guardian, and other British publications she received in the mail. The very paper, thin as tissue, exuded an air of the elite. It had to be conceded by anyone acquainted with Mrs. Agnes Thayer that anything British in origin was of a higher quality than its American equivalent. No doubt the Kappa alums who had hired her, impressed with her accent and bearing, had this in mind. Yet virtually no one apart from me so much as glanced into, let alone read, these publications, apart from glossy Harper's & Queen, which was occasionally leafed through and tossed back down. None of these publications was to be removed from the parlor, nor were they to be left in a "disordered" state. Even the daily Syracuse newspaper, which a few girls glanced into, had to be replaced on the table pristine in appearance, each page in alignment with the others, and in the exact arrangement which Mrs. Thayer favored.

  Eagerly I read the British publications, exotic as no other printed matter of my acquaintance. I was from a remote wedge of rural upstate, western New York. I scrutinized the Guardian, especially its arts and culture sections, I tried to decipher the obscure codified cartoons in Punch. It was amazing to me that the English language into which I'd been born was yet a foreign language, and its truest culture a foreign culture. In Harper's & Queen I contemplated photographs of "home county estates"—enormous manor houses such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte had written of, acres of radiantly green grass, enormous beds of daffodils, iris, and tulips rippling in the wind; elegantly if absurdly costumed men and women on horseback, "riding to hounds." (Hunting foxes? Such small, beautiful creatures? These were not photographed.) I contemplated stiffly posed photographs of the Queen and the Royal Family adorned in heraldic regalia and looking like ordinary, rather plain people at a costume party. Something twisted in my heart: I felt suddenly that I despised such pomp and pretension, I was an American to my fingertips and did not believe in inherited privilege. Yet I was careful to replace the British publications exactly as Mrs. Thayer had positioned them.

  The parlor, the proctor's desk, the nearness of Mrs. Thayer's private quarters—this was a space soon fraught with anxiety for me. To envision it now, years later, is to feel my temples ache with the dizzying pressure of the Kappa insignia-wallpaper. As a sophomore I was required to do proctor duty every ten or twelve days, and I was so intimidated by my elder "sisters" that when they boldly left the house, laughing and waving at me, or blowing kisses, or ignoring me altogether as they ignored the official ledger book, I didn't dare call after them, let alone run outside after them; nor did I report them to our housemother as I was required to do. Under my roof curfew will be strictly enforced Mrs. Thayer warned repeatedly, yet out of cowardice and a yearning to be liked, I could not bring myself to enforce it. The first night of proctor duty, which set precedent for months to follow, a half-dozen girls blithely ignored the ledger book, and, y
et more defiantly, trailed in after 11:00 p.m. curfew, delivered giggling and swaying-drunk to the door by their dates; to disguise the situation, I turned out the parlor lights so that Mrs. Thayer would have no suspicion, and assume that everyone was safely inside for the night; in fact I crouched on the foyer steps by the front door trying desperately to read, in weak light, fifty pages of Spinoza's Ethics for my European philosophy class the next morning. Again and again reading without comprehension By cause of itself, I understand that, whose nature cannot be conceived unless existing. I had no idea what in do: suppose some of my Kappa sisters stayed out all night? Suppose something "happened" to them? I understood that I would be partly to blame; I would have accepted this blame; in a way I was more guilty than the absent girls for I'd failed to report them to Mrs. Thayer, endangering her authority as well. But the girls returned. At 1:15 a.m. , at 1:40 a.m. , at 2:05 a.m., and the last at 2:20 a.m., none of them ringing the doorbell (which would have wakened Mrs. Thayer immediately) but stealthily rapping on the leaded-glass panel beside the door, for they seemed to know that I would be waiting for them, uncomplaining and compliant as a handmaid. The last girl to return was a glamorous, popular senior named Mercy (for Mercedes), a sorority officer whom I'd admired for her brash good looks, infectious laughter and "personality." Mercy was delivered on shaky legs to the door by a football player Deke to whom she was "pinned"; this hefty blond boy squinted at me like a dazed, good-natured ox as I opened the door quietly—"Thass a goo' girl." Mercy's blond hair was disheveled and her elaborate makeup smeared; she looked as if she'd hurriedly thrown on her clothes in the dark, or had been thrown hurriedly into her clothes by another; she reeked of perfume, beer, and vomit. As she shakily ascended the stairs she tripped and giggled, "Damn!" and I caught her, for I'd come up close behind her, and dared to touch her hot, humid body; she drew away from my cold fingers with a look of dazed dignity and said in a slurred, contemptuous voice, "You?—who in hell're you? Take y'r goddam handsoff me!"

  And did it begin then, the unraveling.

  Or had it begun months and even years before and at this late, exhausted hour the clarity of it: the absurdity: waking to discover yourself in this place among strangers indifferent and impervious to you who wished only to adore them, in desperation clutching a textbook of ethics set forth in seventeenth-century theorems and propositions like geometry. And trying not to cry. For you are not a child. Nineteen years old, an adult. Yet so hurt! heartbroken! fated to recall the sting of that rude drunken rebuff for a lifetime.

  Sisters! Always I'd yearned for sisters of my own. From first grade contemplating with undisguised envy and wonderment the large farm families of most of my classmates. For even when sisters quarreled—and sisters were always quarreling!—the fact remained they were sisters. The fact remained: they lived together, ate meals together, shared rooms, often beds. They wore one another's clothing. Mittens, scarves, and boots freely mingled. They shared facial features, ways of moving their eyes and heads, ways of gesturing. They shared a last name. And I had no sister, and would never have a sister. Except in my memory, which others derided, I had no mother. I was pitied as a freak, without a mother. My brothers were much older than I and took no interest in me except sometimes to tease and taunt, as big dogs might play with small dogs, injuring them occasionally but without rancor or intention; my father who was "in construction" was often absent from home for weeks, even months—it wasn't clear where he went, or wasn't clear to me. My brothers and I lived with my father's parents on their twelve-acre dairy farm near Strykersville, in Niagara County, New York, thirty miles northeast of Buffalo and three miles south of Lake Ontario.

  The Snow Belt as it's called.

  A childhood of snow. Blank amnesiac patches of snow. Beside the window of my small room beneath the eaves, a cave-like opening in snow formed by the drooping limbs of a juniper tree; after the fiercest snowstorms, there was yet this sheltered space outside the window, I could look out and see, beyond, a blinding expanse of white like a frozen sea transforming the familiar terrain of our farm.

  My mother died when I was eighteen months old. I would be told Your mother has gone away. In time, I would be told that my mother had wanted a daughter so badly she'd "kept trying" after three sons—and two miscarriages—and at last had had a baby at the age of forty-one, and never recovered. This would be told to me with an air of disapproval, reproach. For in those years, forty-one was a repugnant and even obscene age for a mother. It seemed fitting then that my mother had not been able to give birth "normally" but had had a caesarian that failed to heal; her milk-laden breasts developed cysts like tiny pebbles; the gossamer-thin web of nerves that constituted her mysterious and unknowable self grew tight, tighter, tighter until one day it broke and could never be mended; the way a spider's delicate web, once broken, can never be mended. When I was eight, having annoyed my grandmother in some childish way, she told me in a bitter yet gloating voice that my mother had died of something eating her up: cancer. My grandmother gestured clumsily, shamefacedly, at her own big, sunken bosom, saying, "They had to cut off her…" She fell silent. I was speechless with horror. Her breasts? My mother I loved so much, and missed so badly, her breasts had been… cut off?

  I ran from the house and hid in a field. It was not winter then: I hid in a cornfield. I ignored them calling for me. I hated them all, I would never forgive them.

  After that day my grandmother seemed to have forgotten what she'd told me. Or behaved as if she'd forgotten. Yet it was tacitly assumed that I knew this shameful secret about my mother, and must take responsibility for knowing. Sometimes I'd overhear my grandmother speaking to relatives or neighbors, careless of whether I might be within earshot, in her dour, dogged voice, "He blames her, you know—the little one. For Ida dying." Even as a small child I understood the fatal juxtaposition of that he (my father) and that her (the "little one" who was myself).

  Yes but I remember her. I am the only one who remembers.

  "Ida"—the name was magical to me. In whispers, in the dark. Beneath bedcovers. Forehead pressed to a windowpane coated with frost. "Ida." What a strange, beautiful name: I could not say it often enough: it was easy to confuse "Ida" with "I"—the sharp simple sound I learned to make with my mouth and tongue when I meant myself.

  In the interests of truth, with the rapacity of an invading army, my brothers belittled my childish claim of remembering my mother. "You! You were too little, only a baby when she died. We knew her." They hated me for having been born; having been born, I caused our mother's death; yet they could see I was just a little girl; I wasn't a worthy enemy. They argued it was only in snapshots of my mother that I knew" her, not in my own true memory; confusing the sallow-faced mature woman with the younger, much prettier woman of the snapshots in the family album, dark hair bobbed in the sexy-boyish style of the Twenties, hands on her hips, knuckles inward. A brash smile flying to the camera like a bird flying toward a window. I did not wish to consider that this striking young woman was not, precisely speaking, my mother. But these early snapshots were the ones I adored. Others, taken in the Thirties, my mother with my brother Dietrich who was eleven years my senior, my mother with my brother Fritz who was ten years my senior, my mother with my brother Hendrick who was seven years my senior—these engaged me far less, though they were nearer in time to my own birth. For I couldn't bear to see my mother with babies not myself. Young children in her lap, clambering about her legs. She was beginning to look tired, drawn, her smile had become forced, in the later snapshots. Her chic bobbed hair was gone, now flyaway hair, or skinned back severely from her face and knotted at the nape of her neck. Her body had thickened, grown shapeless. After my birth, my mother's health was so poor that no snapshots of her with me were ever taken. No snapshots of the little one at all. Yet I claimed to remember my mother and held firm in my obstinacy against all detractors. My German grandparents who were old, old, old all my life like trolls peering at me in pity and reproach. It was clear that they ha
dn't liked my mother yet they liked me less for killing her and for making their only son deeply unhappy. Muttering together in that language I could not comprehend, and had no wish to comprehend, would never study in college, though sometimes they spoke in heavily accented English for me to overhear—"That one! Where does she get her ideas!" Inwardly I answered, "Not from you. None of you."

  Rarely did my father speak of such personal matters to anyone. He was hurt, sullen, angry, and baffled. He was a big man, well over six feet, weighing perhaps two hundred twenty pounds. His footsteps made the house vibrate. A deep inhalation of his breath could suck most of the oxygen out of a room's air. My mother's death was a livid wound in his flesh. He would not have wished it healed, though it maddened him. He would seem to forget my name; never would he call me by name; "you" would have to do; "you" was as much as I could hope for; "you" was much more desirous than "I" for "I" was uttered only by me, and "you" might be uttered, if only in a slurred, negligent voice, by my father. "You!—didn't see you in here." Or, "You?—not in bed?" My eagerness to be with my father, even if he collided with me in a darkened hallway, or stepped on my feet entering a room, was not matched by a corresponding eagerness on his part to be with me. It was not just (I believed) that I had killed my mother but, without my mother, a woman, to mediate between him and me, there was no way for him to comprehend me. A girl? A little girl? And those eyes! He was wary of me as one might be wary of a puppy that might leap against legs and dribble saliva onto hands and whine piteously when abandoned. If my father discovered himself alone in my presence his startled eyes would shift a few inches above my head as if seeking out—who? (Our vanished Ida?) My father smoked Camels, lighting them with kitchen matches scraped noisily against the iron stove; I can see still, always in my mind's eye I will see the sudden leaping bluish flame that turned at once transparent orange, the mysterious and indefinable color of fire. At such times my father was obliged to squint against the smoke he himself exhaled; it was a curious ceremony, hurtful, yet profound, the way my father squinted, coughed, sometimes coughed at some length, as a result of this smoke. (My youngest brother would claim he'd never smoked, never wanted to light a single cigarette, having heard my father "cough his lungs out" every morning he'd been at home, but I had only a vague memory of such protracted coughing; my relationship to my father's cigarettes, like my relationship to my father, was hopeful, never critical.) If I dared to squint or cough myself or wave weakly against the drifting smoke, my father would say at once, flatly, "You don't like smoke, better go somewhere else." It was not a command, still less a threat: it was a statement of fact.