I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  When I was growing up, there were relatives who, at a distance, felt sorry for me. Feeling sorry was their permanent attitude toward me. The women would admonish If you'd smile more often, not frown. (What then? I'd be loved, as I wasn't loved for myself?) Such remarks cut me to the quick, though I showed not a ripple. But I am smiling, smiling constantly. Laughing in your faces!

  I wanted none of their pity, sympathy, or solicitude. They felt sorry for me because they took a certain pleasure in feeling sorry for one so deprived, so disfigured; because I had no mother, alone of the girls of my generation in Strykersville I had no mother; sometimes it seemed to my horror that my mother had actually died before I was born, not after; if such a fairy tale could be, it would apply to me as the cruellest of curses: The Girl Whose Mother Died Before She Was Born.

  No: I remembered Ida. I did remember Ida. More than just the snapshots. I did.

  My three older brothers. I was intimidated by them, and I feared them, and my secret may have been that I adored them, at a distance. Always I looked up to them: literally! Up at their handsome faces. Up at their unreadable eyes. They fascinated me even as I dreaded them. "You? What do you know? We know." They were custodians of memories; Dietrich had been twelve when our mother died, Fritz had been eleven, Hendrick eight; I'd been a baby, and helpless.

  By the time I went away to college, both Dietrich and Fritz were married, and had become fathers; they'd inherited our grandparents' farm, and were specializing, like many small farmers in Niagara County, in pears, apples, and peaches; Hendrick was more of a loner like myself, though never easy with me, resentful of me, my high school success, my college scholarship, for he'd gone to a vocational school in

  Olean to study electrical engineering, and he'd had to pay his own way. Now he boasted of a good job with a division of General Motors in Lackawanna. I most keenly remembered my brothers when they were growing up: their crude, derisive talk of girls and women, which invariably involved jokes; as if girls and women were jokes; from my brothers I learned that the male is all eyes; his sexuality is fueled through the eyes; he assesses through the eyes; judges swiftly and without mercy through the eyes. Sometimes, laughing coarsely, speaking of a girl or a woman of their acquaintance, my brothers would rub their crotches gleefully. You could see that the male's eyes and his penis are connected, perhaps identical; except the one is hidden from view.

  I understood that even when a man is alone, his sympathies are with other men, and with maleness. He doesn't feel himself alone as a woman might. His swift, unerring judgments are forged in boyhood and are a collective judgment. He has the power to see with others' eyes, not just his own.

  I did not expect mercy from those eyes. By the age of thirteen I'd been trained to shrink from their pitiless gaze.

  I understood that my body was not a body to be loved; and so I was not a girl to be loved. Had not my own father shrunk from me, with a look of faint revulsion? When I was thirteen, overnight it seemed to happen that brown tufts of hair fine as cornsilk sprouted in my armpits and in tight curls at my groin; my slender but hard-muscled legs, disproportionately long for my torso, were covered in a feathery down which, through high school and while living with the Kappas, I'd scorned to shave off, as other girls made such a fuss of doing. When I sweated, my smell was sharp and rank; there was something secret about it, and satisfying; I liked it that I could turn into a foxy little creature, with a creature-smell. After I left Strykersville and learned what it was to be alone, no family to define me, amid thousands of strangers who knew neither my name nor my face, let alone where I lived, whose daughter or granddaughter I was, I came to think of my body as invisible; a body to hide inside clothing; a body that was a continuous shrinking from being seen, defined; a body my brothers and other men could not jeer at, for they could not see it; a body from which, I believed, the great dead male philosophers -whom I revered would not turn in disgust. A body in the service of Mind.

  Impulsively I cut off my hair when I was eighteen. The summer following high school graduation and my valedictory speech; the week after my father, only just returned home after years of absence, had departed again abruptly with a vague promise of "keeping in touch." My hair was thick and wiry and inclined to snarl; it had become an animal-hair, a kind of pelt; a drab-dark brown enlivened here and there by streaks of lighter brown or dark red; heavy and inert it pressed against my back; heavy and inert it pressed against my soul; when I tried to comb it, my eyes filled with tears of annoyed pain; when I ran a brush through it, the brush sprang out of my hand and clattered to the floor. On the street, men looked at my hair; boys looked at my hair; women and girls looked at my hair; I was vain about my hair, at the same time I was deeply ashamed of my hair, and one hot-humid summer day I took my grandmother's sewing shears, the big shears used for cutting thick fabrics like felt, and I ran off to my room and began cutting; slowly at first and then with mounting glee, almost a kind of gloating, click! click! just missing my ears, and with each greedy click! of the shears I felt lighter, freer. And with each greedy click! I laughed aloud as a rebellious child might laugh. I threw away the clipped-off strands of hair like trash. I had no sentiment, I vowed I would never be so burdened again.

  As it happened, I had to attend my grandfather's funeral in a few days. He'd been driving a tractor in hot sunshine and had keeled over with a heart attack; he'd died almost immediately; it was shock more than grid the family felt; he and my grandmother had been emotionally estranged for some time, though of course they'd continued to live together and even to share a bed; my grandmother's reaction to me, to my Jagged cut hair, at such a public time, when others would see us, and comment upon us, was Isn't that just like you.

  The funeral was held at the Lutheran church. My grandparents, particularly my grandmother, had begun attending services there; she was a stoic with an unsentimental vision of life, and no doubt death, and yet she wanted to "be" a Christian, like her neighbors; like most Americans; in addition to being a Christian, you had to "be" some denomination, and the Lutheran church was the most logical choice, for those of German descent. And there was the fact that her daughter-in-law Ida was buried in the churchyard, as a kind of pledge that the rest of us would find our ways back there, too. I was made to wear black; a lumpy black nylon dress borrowed from an aunt; it was several sizes too large for me, which suited me; a sullen-faced brat who might have been thirteen, not eighteen; frightened of what had happened to my grandfather, and not wanting to think about it; not wanting to think about death, dying; not wanting to think about the burial in a grave site close by Ida's, in the cemetery that was only just a field, a place suited for tall grass and weeds. My female relatives stared at me appalled. Oh how could you! Your hair. The aunt who'd lent me the dress said At least let me trim it for you? I turned coldly away. I wasn't about to defend myself. My brothers looked at me and shrugged. This only confirmed their suspicions of me: I was weird, I was a freak, I would only get worse when I went away to college. Until leaving the cemetery my brother Hendrick nudged me saying in an undertone, almost admiringly You!—-you are capable of any thing. Now you really are ugly, that must make you feel just great, right?

  6

  VERNOR MATHEIUS.

  How many times in a trance that winter writing VERNOR MATHEIUS VERNOR MATHEIUS on sheets of notebook paper, in midnight-blue ink. VERNOR MATHEIUS traced with a fingernail in my flesh, the soft inside of a forearm, the palm of a hand. VERNOR MATHEIUS the mere sound of the syllables, like a melody distantly heard, immediately memorized if not understood. VERNOR MATHEIUS VERNOR MATHEIUS spoken in an interior voice in the presence of others, even as I was smiling, nodding, speaking quite normally with others who could have had no idea how distracted I was, how indifferent to them and even to myself. VERNOR MATHEIUS: what a strange, wonderful name! a beautiful name! a name like no other! VERNOR MATHEIUS like one of those riddle-names in a fairy tale, you had to guess the name, or what it might mean, to save your life; to become the fair you
ng princess, his bride.

  I hadn't the courage to ask others in our Ethics class about him. The articulate and argumentative graduate student at the back of the room. He was clearly a "personality"—everyone knew him, or was aware of him. I dreaded strangers reporting my interest to him. They'd smile in my direction. See that girl? She's been asking about you.

  Now when our professor spoke his name—"Mr. Matheius?" —I heard the name perfectly. I could not comprehend how I'd ever misheard.

  I looked up the name in a university directory, and so noted the Chambers Street address. Never would I be so reckless as to visit that address I told myself.

  7

  It was a morning in March when I first dared speak to Vernor Matheius. Unbidden, unwelcome, yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life.

  You are capable of any thing. This was now a prophecy, an encouragement, and not an insult.

  By this time I'd visited Chambers Street not once but several times. I'd passed the house, I'd lingered in the alley, I'd ventured into the foyer to examine the mailboxes, I'd contemplated his windows at the rear of the building, I was without shame as I was without hope. For it didn't seem to me at that time that I would ever actually make contact with Vernor Matheius; it was enough simply to contemplate him, at a distance.

  Yet I'd moved my seat in the lecture hall. Now I sat nearer the back, in such a position where I could turn my head unobtrusively and look at him, or in his direction; when he spoke, many in the class turned to look at him, and I was one of these; I didn't believe I was calling attention to myself; I was no lovesick high school girl.

  That morning climbing three flights of stairs and entering the cavernous lecture room breathless and hopeful; several minutes before the professor arrived, and class would begin; I seemed to be stepping into a roiling, treacherous space, a space of vertiginous unease, like a room in a fun house that's tilted, or spinning upside down; for what if he was already there , and might glance casually at me, the lenses of his glasses winking like sparks of flame? (For so they winked in my imagination.) Most mornings, Vernor Matheius wasn't in the room so early. I timed my arrival to precede his so that I could take my new, strategic seat at the end of a row on the center aisle; the experience of the class had become for me, virtually overnight, an emotional and no longer an intellectual one. I felt the way I'd felt as a girl about to dive off the high board at the YWCA in Strykersville; I wanted to dive, I intended to dive, I was thrilled at the prospect of diving, yet frightened as well; as I strode to the end of the board, readying my arms and head, bending my knees, I would hear a malicious little voice Don't! You'll regret it. But on the high board, you couldn't turn back.

  There were perhaps forty students in Ethics, concentrated in the front rows and scattered elsewhere. Vernor Matheius sat by himself in the last row, beneath a wall clock. It may have been accidental that he sat beneath the clock. It was not a position one would wish, who liked to check the time. One of those old-fashioned institutional clocks with plain black numerals and black hour and minute hands, a moving red second hand, against a blank moon face. As a child I'd gazed at such clocks on the walls of classrooms. The inexorable forward-movement of time. My heartbeat. All the heartbeats in the room. Linked by mortality. And now seeing Vernor Matheius, I was seeing also the clock.

  Vernor Matheius's face. Covertly and slantwise I contemplated that face. To me it was beautiful as something carved out of mahogany; though it may have been, to another's cruder eye, ugly. It was not a comforting face. It was a face crinkled and even mutilated by thinking. Thinking as a physical, muscular act. Thinking as an act of passion. It was a face that, though technically young, the face of a man in his early thirties, had never been youthful. A mask-face. A flattish nose and wide, deep nostrils that looked like holes bored into flesh. A head that seemed too large for his narrow, somewhat sloping shoulders. Eyes hidden behind scholarly glasses except when abruptly he removed the glasses to rub the bridge of his nose with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. My heart contracted, seeing Vernor Matheius without his glasses. His face so suddenly naked, exposed.

  Negro. "Negro." A word, a term, that had come to fascinate me, too.

  Vernor Matheius's features were "Negroid" features, and Vernor Matheius was, if you were compelled to categorize the man in blunt racial, or racist, terms, "Negro." For his skin was the color of damp earth; sometimes it was dull, and without lustre; at other times it was rich and smooth with something smoldering inside; a coppery-maroon; skin I imagined would be hot to the touch. (Unlike my pale winter-chapped skin that felt cold to me, the tips of my fingers often icy.) Vernor Matheius's hair was a Negro's hair, unmistakably: dark, somewhat oily, woolly-springy, trimmed close to his head that looked to me wonderfully hard and resolute, a work of art.

  Because I had come to him through his voice, his language, his obvious intelligence, Vernor Matheius's race was not his predominant characteristic to me. I supposed that, if I'd seen him in the Hall of Languages previously, or on campus or in the city, my eye would have glided over him and my brain would have categorized him as Negro; but now the fact of his race (if "race" is a fact) was no more remarkable to me than other of his qualities. On the contrary, these qualities were remarkable because they were Vernor Matheius's. I may even have thought, with the primitive logic of one so deeply and so newly in love that her powers of reason have weakened, that Vernor Matheius had chosen his qualities. In which case, they were remarkable and valuable not in themselves, but because he had chosen them.

  In philosophy, you're trained to distinguish between -what's essential and what's accidental; in our personalities, it's believed that there are essential qualities and accidental qualities; yet so powerful a presence was Vernor Matheius, unique in my experience, it didn't seem that there could be anything accidental about him, as there is about most people. (My own life seemed to me a haphazard sequence of accidents.) I would not have isolated Negro-ness from any other of his qualities. True, it was a fact of his being, the first thing that struck the eye, but it wasn't a defining or definitive fact.

  Any more than I was a white girl, a Caucasian. What did that mean?

  If Vernor Matheius was Negro, and there was nothing accidental in his personality, then somehow he'd chosen Negro-ness. As I had not chosen my skin, or anything in my life.

  I believed this! For already I idolized the man, who was all that I could never be, nor even imagine.

  Vernor Matheius and the professor were having one of their spirited exchanges. You could see that the professor was flattered by this brilliant young man's attention; at the same time, the professor was wary of being outpaced, like a middle-aged man playing tennis with a man forty years his junior. They were discussing "idealism"; which, in philosophical terms, differs considerably from ordinary usage; "idealism" vs. "realism"; the subtly argued idealism of Immanuel Kant in contrast to the less subtly argued realism of Plato. The professor pronounced X, and Vernor Matheius at once rebutted with Y; not impudently, though almost so; with a lightness of touch that discomforted the older man, and provoked a ripple of laughter in the room. The professor visibly recoiled; he realized his blunder; his authority had been challenged, if only in play; he'd surrendered that authority, if only for a moment; he had to reclaim his authority, or lose the respect of the class; or so it might have seemed to him, in his quivering vanity. He was a flush-faced man with a skin that appeared loosened, as if he'd lost weight too quickly; his graying-brown hair parted on the left side of his head and brushed damply over his skull. In the philosophy department, which was one of the strongest departments in the liberal arts college, this professor was perhaps the most highly regarded; he had an advanced degree from the University of Edinburgh, his books were published by distinguished university presses, he reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement. (An English publication to which Mrs. Thayer hadn't subscribed.) Even his undergraduate courses were frequently audited by graduate students. Yet he felt the sting of Vernor Matheius'
s irreverent wit, and spoke coldly and curtly to him—"Mr. Matheius! Your sophistry ceases to amuse." So the indulgent father at last chides the favored son, revealing that, maybe, the favored son isn't so favored after all.

  I saw the hurt and humiliation in Vernor Matheius's face. I saw him shut up his face as he might've clenched a fist. In a quick, rough gesture he shoved his glasses against the bridge of his nose, slouched in his seat, shoved out his lower lip. Which was a fat, fleshy lip. His skin was so dark, so without light or lustre, you couldn't imagine it darkening with a rush of hot blood. There was a moment's pained silence before Vernor Matheius politely muttered, "Sorry, sir."

  The rest of the class looked on, thrilled and vindicated.

  Even I, infatuated with Vernor Matheius, felt that mean little thrill.

  Thinking He has been wounded to the heart. He, too!

  It was as if, an intimate witness, I'd had a hand in that wounding.

  After class, I found myself standing in the aisle beside Vernor Matheius's row of seats as, tall and lanky and slope-shouldered, whistling a faint, just subtly derisive tune, Vernor Matheius was making his way into the aisle. He didn't see me. He wouldn't have seen me. He seemed oblivious to, indifferent to, every undergraduate student in the room. I wanted to—what?—offer words of sympathy and commiseration. Even as I knew (of course I knew) that Vernor Matheius didn't want words of sympathy and commiseration; not from anyone, and certainly not from me. There was a roaring in my ears. The hardwood floor tilted. Of course I didn't dare utter his name—"Vernor." I had no right to that name, I shouldn't have known that name. For a moment, staring at him, I couldn't speak at all. The man's physical presence confused me; his height; he was at least a head taller than I, towering over me; a powerful throbbing heat lifted from him, as if he were sweating inside his clothes; his skin dark and smoldering with blood; close up, his skin was darker and coarser than I'd imagined. Behind the smudged lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses his eyes were damp and glaring. He wore a white shirt and even a necktie, both rumpled, not-clean; with an air of sullen dignity he was shrugging into the bulky sheepskin jacket and with rapid deft motions winding the crimson wool scarf around his neck; as if, in his fury, he would have liked to strangle himself; his fingers remarkably long, his hands rather narrow, the palms curiously pinkish-pale as if they might be soft, even tender to the touch. I saw that he wanted only to escape the lecture hall, the last thing he wanted was to speak with anyone who had witnessed his public humiliation, yet I followed beside him as he pushed into the aisle, I stammered words meant to console; to my astonishment I saw my hand reach out timidly to touch his—his hand; but at the last second I dared touch only the soiled cuff of his jacket; if I'd touched his skin he might have flung my hand off in sheer nervous reaction; and all the while I was smiling, trying to smile, a fixed ghastly grin, in longing and terror seeking the very source of terror for solace, protection. I can love you, I am the one who can love you. Who am I except the one whose sole identity is that she can love you?