I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But how sad, was my immediate thought. I said, "Oh, I understand."

  He laughed for some reason, I hoped not at me; and I laughed with him. He was a man, I saw, who liked to laugh; yet didn't have much opportunity to laugh; for the professional study of philosophy doesn't inspire laughter, nor any degree of mirth; just as the earthy smell of death is excluded from the philosophical examination of finitude and death, so too laughter is excluded; it was a somber, sobering vocation. I thought I will help him to laugh. Inspiration, fueled by the giddiness of the moment. Several awkward swallows of beer. Trying not to gag. Yes, I would inspire laughter in this man; I refused to be one of the women who diminish, not increase, a man's laughter; I refused to be a woman who made Woman my life. Quickly I told Vernor what was only true: I agreed with him, I didn't want to marry, didn't want to have babies. (But was this so? Ida had married, Ida had had babies.) Vernor laughed carelessly saying he'd never met a "female" who wasn't maternal—"In her heart, if you could penetrate it. Or another organ." Hotly I said, "There are exceptions." "No exception 'proves the rule.' Only disproves it." I was left behind in all this. Vaguely I smiled lifting my glass. Vernor drained his glass, went to buy another. I sat basking, or dazed, in the aftermath of his words. Had he praised me? Had he made an exception of me?

  A couple now. Perceived as such.

  It hurt me to recall how, in the Kappa house, I'd overheard my Kappa sisters speak of "niggers." Not meanly, not with malice, but matter-of-factly. One of our house boys was a Negro, that's to say a "nigger." There were categories of girls whom Christian sororities automatically cut: "niggers," "Jews."

  A fractional Jew, I could pass.

  And there was Vernor Matheius. I am who I am, none of you can trap me with your language.

  Returning to our booth, Vernor began speaking in a new way. As if, standing at the bar, he'd glanced back in my direction and hadn't liked what he saw. For now he was antagonistic; asking me again what I wanted from him; what I thought I was doing, chasing after him— "Girl, don't wince. 'Chasing after' is it." I felt my face heat; I could not defend myself; I could not say that it was Vernor Matheius who drew me to him, not I who had the volition to be drawn. I could not say But I fell in love with your voice, your mind, before I even saw you. For it was preposterous, it would make him laugh in derision. He stared at me, frowning. Saying maybe I was just naive? inexperienced? too trusting? "There are men who'd take advantage of you, you must know. You're an intelligent girl, Anellia." I heard his words, I was thrilled by the sound of Anellia in Vernor Matheius's voice. I had no reply to his statement for it was not a statement that could be refuted. I liked it that I was being presented to myself as a problem to be solved; my face was hot with embarrassment and pleasure; it was like being teased by my brothers when they weren't being cruel, exactly; simply to be noticed was a thrill. In noisy Downy's there was happy brainless laughter for which I was grateful, I couldn't be expected to raise my voice against it. I smiled at Vernor Matheius shyly. Yes but I love you. That is the problem to which all other problems can be reduced. As if he'd heard my thoughts Vernor frowned again; he removed his glasses and polished the lenses with a tissue; without the glasses his face loomed above me with sudden startling intimacy; the contours in the oily dark skin around the eyes, the somewhat sunken sockets, the lashes long as a child's, the exaggerated flatness of the nose that would have been (I thought this without thinking) disfiguring in a Caucasian face. When Vernor Matheius shoved his glasses back onto his face, adjusting the wire frames behind his ears, he seemed to be glaring at me, seeing me more distinctly.

  Without a word he rose. Immediately I followed.

  In a haze of not-knowing what would come next I followed Vernor to the door as he shrugged on his sheepskin jacket, pulled his wool cap down on his head. He'd left me to struggle with my own coat. Not out of rudeness (I was certain), he just hadn't noticed. It was time for us to leave, ergo it was time for us to leave. The actual process of making our way through the crowd, to the door and out, was a secondary matter.

  Yet, at the door, he remembered me; he paused, to let me pass through the doorway ahead of him; I felt his fingers lightly on my shoulder; again, I had the sense that he was herding me; impatient with me; I didn't think at the time It's a gesture of possession in this public place. Even if no one is looking. Not that Vernor Matheius wants me sexually or in any other way but he wants to make a public claim, a proprietary gesture. Behind us I felt the net of eyes and disapproval and I laughed stepping out into the cold; into a damp wind bracing as a slap in the face when you've been a little dazed, giddy. I would have expected Vernor Matheius to say good-bye to me on Allen Street but instead he walked me to my residence hall, several blocks away, an old brick building undistinguished as an old shoe, and no words passed between us; I could think of nothing valuable to say, and nothing I dared say; Vernor Matheius seemed to have run out of words, too; for there are problems that may be too snarled to be solved. At Norwood Hall, outside the lighted front entrance, Vernor Matheius said, "I won't come in. I'll say good night here. I want you to know, Anellia, you're not new to me." He smiled at my look of confusion. I said, stammering slightly, "Not n-new?To you?" He said, backing off, "I saw you a while back. It was you. Scavenging in the garbage behind the Mohawk Bakery." Vernor laughed at my look of distress. How long he'd been waiting to tell me this, I would have to wonder. My face burned with shame, I had no defense.

  "Hope you're not scavenging with me, girl."

  Vernor walked off. He knew I would stand stricken behind him, staring as he strode away. Other girls and their escorts passed by me, I had no awareness of them. There went Vernor Matheius in his sheepskin jacket taking long strides across the street, away from me without a backward glance to see how I gazed after him.

  Yes but I love you, nothing can shame me.

  14

  I'd wanted to be independent. I'd wanted to earn money, at the age of fourteen. So I could say like my brothers that I worked, I had a job. If my father telephoned, and if he asked to speak to me, I would tell him about my work, my job. For work on the farm and in my grandmother's house didn't count, earned me no money or the small respect that comes with earning money. And so I did housework for several Strykersville women, well-to-do by local standards, exhausting daylong jobs arranged for me by a great-aunt of my father's who lived in town and whose relationship to my rural, diminished family was sympathetic, though condescending; one of the women for whom I worked was Mrs. Farley the doctor's wife, an entire Saturday in June just after school ended for the summer; there I was vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing, mopping, and scouring through the Farleys' six-bedroom Colonial on Myrtle Street; Myrtle Street was Strykersville's most prestigious street; I'd never been inside one of the houses on that street; and now my heart beat in resentment, and yet in admiration and envy. There were classmates of mine who lived in this neighborhood and I'd never thought so clearly of what it might mean in one's soul to live on Myrtle Street as if one were entitled to Myrtle Street.

  Mrs. Farley's soul had been plumped up living on Myrtle Street, like a hen's breast feathers.

  As I worked inside, I could see the Farleys' lawn bay working outside. In fact he was no boy but a hump-backed Negro in his fifties with a skin coffee-colored like Joe Louis; he had something of Louis's furtive, watchful manner, carrying his arms high, as if like the boxer he was practiced in the art of self-defense. From the kitchen I could see him; from the upstairs windows I could see him; from the laundry room I could see him; from the rear porch I could see him; he was spading and weeding in Mrs. Farley's flower beds, and not once did he see me; he never glanced toward the house; he worked in the sun fully absorbed in his own consciousness like a man who knows that, if you happen to glance at him, you won't see him. You'll see the lawn boy.

  Mrs. Farley was a fussy, watchful employer. She'd had problems with other cleaning girls and would have, she seemed to know, a problem with me. She was concerned that I might break on
e of her pieces of Wedgwood china, or a Dalton "figurine"; grimly she oversaw me as I sat, dirtied and bored, at the dining room table polishing silver: silverware, silver candlestick holders, absurd little cream and sugar bowls, heirlooms as Mrs. Farley called them; how she and Mrs. Thayer would have liked each other, in their common passion; still, I didn't hate Mrs. Farley until I heard from her thin-lipped mouth the expression, which was the first time I'd ever heard it—Negro-lover. She didn't say nigger-lover; this wasn't a term a woman of her pretensions would have said. Instead she said Negro-lover in reference to something that had been reported that morning on the radio; the acquittal of white murderers of a black man in Georgia, by an all-white jury; the protests by a scattering of church leaders and politicians in the wake of the acquittal.

  Negro-lovers these individuals were, in Mrs. Farley's vocabulary. In Strykersville, there were few Negroes; in our county there was no "civil unrest"; in nearby Buffalo there'd been "race riots" some years ago, following the end of World War II; but there was no threat of racial strife in Strykersville, and so Mrs. Farley uttered Negro-lover in a bemused voice, as one might speak of garbage-lovers, mud-lovers. I said at once, in my bright girl-student manner, "Christians are supposed to love everybody, aren't they, Mrs. Farley?" The stab of emotion I felt was mixed in my memory with the stink of bright pink silver polish and the greasy, disgusting feel of rubber gloves; it was mixed with the startled expression on Mrs. Farley's face as she stared at me, half-smiling as if uncertain whether I was joking. Her cheeks mottled; her eyes filled with hurt; I was rubbing savagely at a badly tarnished little spoon; I was thinking how, as Mrs. Farley watched, I might push the handle into a crack in the table and bend it, at the same time splintering the beautifully polished rosewood table; yet I did nothing like this, nor did I say another word; perhaps my courage had run out abruptly. Mrs. Farley left the room, and when we next spoke she was curt and polite and cool; if she'd been trying to like me, thinking to befriend me as a poor farm girl lacking a mother, she would try no longer. I'd offended her, and just possibly I'd frightened her. For never again was I hired to clean the Farleys' six-bedroom Colonial on Myrtle Street for eighty-five cents an hour.

  I was glad of this. I told my father's great-aunt so. She said, annoyed with me, that Mrs. Farley was spreading the word in Strykersville, I wouldn't be offered housework anywhere—"She says you're sloppy and careless and arrogant. She says you're too smart for your own good."

  It was true: I was too smart for my own good, or for anyone else's.

  Negro-lover, nigger-lover. That epithet of the times believed to be unspeakably obscene. Like cock-sucker which was an expression of abuse also used exclusively by men in speaking of, or to, other men; like-minded men; men who understood one another because they "were men; and not cock-suckers who might resemble men but who were not men. No woman would be called a cock-sucker though the practice (I had only the dimmest, repelled notion of what this practice might be) was not limited to men. Would a woman be called a nigger-lover? When, in fact, many women loved Negroes? It had not escaped my notice that in most interracial couples, the woman is white, the man black. Was I now a Negro-lover, was I a nigger-lover? When the color of Vernor Matheius's skin was to me of no more significance than the color of a shirt he wore, or the color of his vivid red scarf.

  15

  Above the gorge of Oneida Creek a mile from the university campus, north and east of Auburn Heights, there was a footbridge made of raw wooden planks. The footbridge was approximately fifty feet across. The gorge was approximately thirty feet below. To look down into the gorge was to feel a wave of dizziness that seemed to rush up from the folds and creases of rock below. The footbridge was maintained by the city and led to a wilderness area at the crescent of which, approached from the other side of the hill by a lane, was a tall water tower. Often that winter, when I had time, I went for walks on that hill, to clear my head; to clear my head of Vernor Matheius; to lose myself in a dream of Vernor Matheius; to replay in compulsive detail each of our conversations and to see again, more vividly in memory than I'd seen in life, every nuance of expression on Vernor Matheius's face. I would wake from a trance and find myself on the bridge, gripping both railings; gazing down at the creek-bed below. Always on the footbridge I thought of Vernor Matheius, and always on the footbridge I thought of Ida. What linked them was a riddle. What linked them was the terrible loss to the world of their deaths: the one a possibility, the other a fact. On cold mornings thin columns of tendril-like mist rose from the creek like mysterious exhalations of breath. To stare at such vaporous columns was to stare into emptiness. Between one and none there lies an infinity. So Nietzsche had written tenderly of Schopenhauer. It was the most profound statement of love and of the possibility of loss I had ever encountered.

  In April, the frozen creek began finally to unlock. Roiling black water rushed below like a furious artery. The artery was narrow but deep; above the creek, leaning on the railing, I couldn't determine in which direction it flowed. I thought I should be facing that direction. Facing the future. If I fell by accident, I should have liked to know in which direction my body would be carried.

  16

  In the very place of seductive death. A miracle.

  One day nearing sunset, a bright balmy April afternoon erratically splotched with rain, I saw, or believed I saw, Vernor Matheius a short distance ahead of me on the dirt path descending to the Oneida Creek footbridge; I was suffused with excitement, and dread; for it was by chance that I was here yet if Vernor Matheius saw me surely he would think I'd been chasing after him—wouldn't he? And I was innocent (I believed I was innocent). It had been eight days since we'd been together in Downy's and I had promised myself that I would not pursue the man further; would not chase after him like an infatuated schoolgirl; though in fact I was an infatuated schoolgirl, and could not perceive a time when I would be anything other than an infatuated schoolgirl. As, in the throes of nausea or the delirious lassitude of fever we are unable to imagine other states of being. I had vowed never again to humiliate my-self and annoy and embarrass Vernor Matheius—telling myself I must wait for him to call me, or approach me; knowing as if it were a death sentence that he would neither call me nor approach me. It was true: I'd returned once or twice to the coffeehouse, relieved to see that Vernor Matheius was not among the chess players; nearly every day I worked in the library and often I found myself on the third floor; but like an early Christian ascetic renouncing all worldly life that gave pleasure I refrained from approaching the graduate students' carrels and did not know whether in fact Vernor Matheius was there in his carrel seventh from the aisle; I may have weakened and passed by the apartment building at 1183 Chambers Street once or twice, but only at such hours when Vernor Matheius couldn't have been there; and I didn't pause to stare openly at the building, still less did I prowl the alley behind it. So it was purely chance that Vernor Matheius and I had come to the gorge at the same time: never had I seen him in the vicinity before, and never had I mentioned to him that I came here. (If I had a life apart from my attentiveness to Vernor Matheius, neither he nor I would have thought it worth mentioning.) I saw him stroll out onto the footbridge; I saw his lips pursed, in a tuneless whistle; he was wearing a rumpled stone-gray sport coat that fitted his shoulders tightly, as if he'd outgrown it, and russet-brown trousers with a crease. He began to slow his pace, as if realizing where he was. High in the air on a wind-rocking footbridge. He shaded his eyes: this view captured his attention. To the north, a small mountain, outcroppings of granite dense and convoluted as if to some mysterious purpose, like folds in the human brain. I saw Vernor Matheius lean against the railing and stare down; lean over the railing and stare down; a thrill of horror touched me—What if he Jails? I was frightened suddenly and stepped out onto the footbridge. I knew this might be a mistake, he'd think I had been following him, but I couldn't resist; I told myself I would pass behind him, as if unaware of him (for his back was to me, I might not have ident
ified him in ordinary circumstances), and maybe he would notice me, and maybe he would not; in that way, our meeting was left to pure chance. But my heart was beating so hard, the very footbridge must have vibrated! I will not, I will not speak. Will not reveal myself. The wind buffeted us on the footbridge as if in mockery. Vernor Matheius, leaning far over the railing, holding his wire-rimmed glasses with both hands as if concerned they might fall off, wasn't going to notice me… except my shadow must have brushed against him; and with the instinctive reflex with which one would glance back at someone or something passing close behind him on a swaying footbridge thirty feet above a gorge, Vernor Matheius glanced back at me; I saw his worried face, his creased forehead; I thought naively He doesn't trust the world! I lacked the insight to realize He doesn't trust the white world. But in the intoxication of the moment neither of us had time for such revelations: our eyes locked, recognition shone in his like a lit match. "Anellia. Again."