Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  On the platform beside the Quiet Car he is trying to recover. His old poise, equilibrium. Though he is not so young and resilient as he’d once been, in his professorial days, in the days of the Dystopian seminar when a young woman had trudged through a blizzard on his behalf, and had not for a moment blamed him for scorning her.

  With a cool smile, like a performer in an Oscar Wilde comedy, R___ says archly: “Well! What did you feel, when you’d heard that I’d died?”

  Smiling at the silly woman through a haze of pain, an imminent headache. Yet it is crucial to continue to smile as if nothing at all were wrong, on the platform at Penn Station, as strangers pass around him and Carol Carson impatiently, like a rough current in which they are fixed as bodies trapped between boulders in the stream.

  “‘What did I feel?’”—The woman pauses as if seriously thinking, frowning. “Well. To be frank I guess I didn’t feel anything much.” Adding then, as if such a fine point might be appreciated by her listener, “I’d never known you well, Professor. When you were alive.”

  The Bereaved

  1.

  “We should go away. Separately.”

  Separately. Rhymes with desperately.

  Distinctly she’d heard her husband speak. But his back was to her—(it seemed now, her husband’s back always was to her: she would have to imagine a face imposed upon the back as in a Magritte painting)—and so, she could easily feign not-quite-hearing. For much of marriage is an affable not-quite-hearing.

  If the husband had wanted the wife to hear precisely what he’d said, he’d have faced her. So the wife reasoned.

  Also, the wife’s right ear was infected. She’d been putting drops into that ear for days. So, if the husband said My head is filled with mucus the wife heard My head is filled with music and smiled at the thought—for it was certainly a happy thought, like a rising balloon.

  Not mucus, music.

  Not separate, desperate.

  “Yes. You’re right. Oh yes—but where shall we go?”

  It was not subtle, this we. With the bright blind confidence with which she often addressed the husband, that so grated his nerves, the wife spoke as if we were singular and indissoluble as a fist-sized chunk of Kryptonite.

  Quickly adding, before the husband could turn to her, and protest—“Somewhere she’d never been. Somewhere without memory.”

  IT WAS THE SLAIN DAUGHTER of whom they did not speak.

  Slain because she had died so suddenly, the wife imagined the violent sweep of a scythe.

  “Yes, thank you. Thank you for calling. Yes, Daphne was my stepdaughter. You know she was my stepdaughter, why do you ask? Max’s daughter, and my stepdaughter. Thank you for your condolences but no—I don’t think that’s a good idea right now. Max has no interest in speaking to you.”

  Thank you and go to hell. Never call again.

  Soon it would be the first birthday after the death. Was there a particular, Latinate term for such an anniversary?—not the date of the (step)daughter’s death which had been October 11 but the date of the (step)daughter’s birthday which was December 19.

  The two dates would compete now, the wife thought. Birth-date, death-date. And the two numerals in perfect equipoise: 1992–2014.

  Since that night in October when the terrible news had come to them they were orphaned parents. The little boat of their marriage had come unmoored. The daughter had been their only child and the opportunity (the wife freely conceded) for the wife to have been essential in the marriage, in helping to raise the “difficult” daughter.

  Like putting your only egg in one basket, and dropping the basket.

  The wife did not utter this inanity aloud. The wife’s head was a Niagara Falls of inanities whose din seemed to be increasing but these were interior, private.

  Yet somehow, the wife understood that the husband sensed her words, and was repelled by her. For she felt obliged to turn all that she could into nervous jokes.

  “A maker of witticisms, a bad soul”—someone weighty had said that—Pascal, possibly.

  It was years since the wife had read Pascal’s Pensées in an advanced French course. In times of crisis she reached for Pascal as one might grope for a life jacket that turns out to be flawed or faulty in some way.

  The wife was not the mother of the slain girl but the wife had married the husband when the daughter was very young and when the husband had required a new wife with whom to raise the daughter.

  “Yes, thank you. Yes, I am the stepmother. No, the ‘birth mother’ is not living, we think. Thank you so much, you are very kind, but no—that’s not a great idea. Max is too distracted to speak to you right now.”

  To be a stepmother is to feel like a figure in a fairy tale. Not a benign but a wicked figure.

  From the first the wife had anticipated such an impasse. To put it bluntly, the “difficult” daughter had not much liked her though with the passage of time, not unlike erosion, the girl’s particular dislike for the stepmother had softened, in the face of the stepmother’s protracted and indefatigable campaign to win her heart.

  She had loved the girl, or had tried to. Badly she’d wanted to love the (step)daughter!

  At the same time it was true, she’d badly wanted to have a child with the husband. Yes, you might have said A child of her own, or rather A little sister or brother for Daphne. But the husband, all but overwhelmed by the lone daughter, had been adamant in opposition.

  “One child is enough! As William Blake says, ‘Enough? Too much.’”

  Max had joked but Max’s jokes were sharp-edged as the fancy Japanese knives he owned, displayed in his kitchen though rarely used.

  The wife saw nothing funny in such jokes. The wife rarely saw much that was funny in other people’s nervous jokes.

  As a young, uncertain wife she’d foreseen the possibility of loss. Nothing mattered to her so much as her marriage, more profound to her than the love she felt, or believed she felt, for the husband who made the marriage possible.

  If she dies, we die. If but one, then—none.

  “And now there is—none.”

  The wife felt a rush of fury and resentment that the husband had denied her, the second wife, the consolation of her own child. Their child.

  Becca was nineteen years younger than Max—a generation, and more. He’d been forty-six at the time of their marriage, she’d been twenty-seven. The daughter who was to be the stepdaughter had been eight years old but precocious as a child twice that age in the more subtle skills of manipulation.

  Precisely what had happened to Max Needham’s first wife, Becca had not been told. A late marriage for him, a mistake from the start. A bright, even brilliant young woman, a Russian translator and poet for whom having a child had been a disaster, much bitterness, separations and reconciliations, finally a departure so abrupt that the husband had returned home early one evening to find the forlorn child, five years old at the time, waiting alone on the front stoop of the house and her mother gone—“One day, I will tell you more. But no one must tell Daphne.”

  Suicide, Becca thought. The possibility made her shudder.

  Futile to make inquiries of Max Needham’s friends and colleagues for either they knew, and protected him; or did not know, and protected him. All that was understood about the first Mrs. Needham was that she’d “disappeared”—“abandoned” her family.

  Badly Becca had wanted to be married to Max Needham, nothing else meant much to her.

  There were reasons for this, no doubt. She didn’t want to look into reasons.

  She’d had a career of some promise. So it was said.

  She’d been a graduate student in Max Needham’s seminar on the psychophysiology of linguistics at MIT when she’d dropped out of the program to live with Needham, and eventually to marry him.

  “Yes, that’s correct—Max’s daughter is my stepdaughter. If you’re wondering about the mother, I can’t help you. Maybe ask Max.”

  It had been a challenge to love th
e willful little girl, but Becca had succeeded, to a degree. For Becca was no delicate orchid but a tough, resilient cactus, that could survive in arid and inhospitable places without complaint. At least, she’d succeeded in convincing Max that she loved Daphne, and could care for her like a proper parent; while Max was urgently elsewhere, teaching at MIT and lecturing across the country, moderating panels on PBS, serving on the president’s bioethics advisory committee, Becca was on hand to drive the child to and from a succession of private schools, child psychiatrists, medical appointments, and “activities”; Becca was the parent to intervene with school administrators, to hire tutors, and arrange for “playdates.”

  In this role the wife was never heard to complain. Always the wife was cheerful, upbeat as the female lead in a Broadway musical. With a smile declaring to the daughter I love you, sweetie!—and not seeming to mind when the daughter muttered evasively—Yeh. OK.

  In the early years of the marriage there’d been far too much emotion focused on the girl. The husband’s fevered attention was like a blinding light shining into her face and how could the child not be—blinded?

  The wife had learned not to interfere with most household decisions, particularly those involving the daughter. Not to express an opinion even when, for Max Needham was a publicly committed liberal, a staunch supporter of the rights of women and minorities, he invited her to speak “freely and openly.” Max’s love for the daughter was so suffused with guilt and something like remorse, it was not possible for Becca to suggest that such love was not healthy for either the girl or the father—or her.

  The wife understood that if the husband were forced to chose between the daughter and the wife he would choose the daughter—inevitably. This seemed to her altogether natural and not to be regretted.

  The wife also understood that it was not the daughter’s fault that she’d grown into adolescence without comprehending that the universe did not revolve around her, whether for good or ill. As there are no “bad dogs”—(so the wife, who’d grown up in a family of dog-owners, knew)—but only “bad trainers.” The daughter had lied to both parents equally, and raged at both equally, and, when she was young, injured herself so frequently in falls, collisions, and household accidents, Becca worried that authorities might suspect the parents of child abuse.

  “Yes, there is child abuse in our household. Not abuse inflicted on the child but by the child.”

  Such witticisms the wife uttered to friends who were not likely to repeat them to the husband.

  After some years the wife gave up telling the daughter that she loved her. For there was never any response except an embarrassed smile or frown or smirk and the evasive mumble—Yeh. OK.

  (Did anyone notice? Did Daphne notice? Certainly, the husband would not have noticed.)

  Eventually, Daphne graduated from one of the prestigious private high schools in the Boston area to which she’d been sent at considerable expense. Though she’d been tested with an I.Q. of 153, and had been admitted to Wellesley, her grades were erratic at college and she dropped out after her sophomore year. She had spells of anorexia, and lost so much weight that her collarbone nearly protruded through her skin; she contracted hepatitis, and her beautiful pale skin turned sallow; her thick lustrous wavy dark hair turned thin and brittle. The following year she enrolled at Boston University but after a single unhappy semester dropped out again. It was not unusual for the daughter to disappear for days and to be indifferent to the parents’ anxiety over her. The wife suspected that the daughter was involved with drugs but did not dare tell the husband for she knew that the husband would denounce her.

  Jesus, Becca! Try to love Daphne, at least.

  Try to be on the girl’s side for once.

  The wife had learned: you do not, ever, intervene between a parent and a child. If you are not the parent, and the child is not your child, you dare not presume, for both will despise you.

  Alone sometimes the wife wept bitter tears for the child—her child—she’d been denied by the husband. The difficult, exhausting daughter had made a second child unimaginable.

  And yet she loved the husband, and could not imagine ever leaving him. (Though in weak moments she fantasized how, one day when she was no longer so urgently needed by him, the husband might leave her.)

  In the twelve months before her death the daughter was living with friends in a loft in TriBeCa, university dropouts like herself who worked at low-paying quasi-glamorous jobs in fashion, art, or the theater; with financial assistance from her parents she was taking courses at the Parsons School of Design, or so they believed. It was rare for Daphne to call home, or even to email or text her parents, and often it was impossible for them to contact her except to write to her at the Varick address, enclosing checks.

  It fell to the wife to make out the checks and mail them. Thinking—You can’t ignore us! You need us for this.

  Even so, the daughter rarely thanked the wife. The wife imagined the daughter eagerly ripping open the envelopes and extracting the checks without noticing the handwritten little notes inside.

  So far as they knew Daphne was living, working, and taking courses in New York yet when the call came announcing her death it would be revealed that she was living in Jersey City, and had no current job; she’d never enrolled at the Parsons School, but must have kept the tuition for herself; she’d been involved with an unemployed actor named Jorge of whom she’d spoken from time to time—“My stalker.” She’d thought it funny, her parents’ alarmed reaction.

  Three nights before her death Daphne had called home and left a rambling and incoherent message for her father to call her back; the wife had been hurt and annoyed that the daughter had wanted to speak not to her but to the husband to whom she referred in her childish whining voice as Dad-dy. Angrily the wife had deleted the message. So many years of enduring the daughter’s indifference, or scorn; so many years of trying to be loved as a mother and not merely tolerated as a stepmother; so many years of disguising her hurt, resentment, and her dislike—I am so tired of you! Go to hell, you spoiled little brat. I am finished with you.

  The wife hadn’t meant this of course. It was but one of the thoughts that flashed through her brain many times a day, an expression of exasperation, impatience, self-disgust—of no significance except its timing.

  After the daughter’s death the wife checked the voice mail in a trance of horror. Several times listening to the tape terrified that the husband would discover the message, which had been for him; the message would have been Daphne’s last words, to her father. But the message had vanished as if it had never been.

  Details of Daphne’s death would remain unclear. She’d been struck and killed on I-278 south of the Verrazano Bridge at 2:30 A.M. of a weekday in October. Witnesses reported having seen a young woman jump from a minivan that braked to a rolling stop on the shoulder of the roadway a few minutes before, but no one could describe the minivan or could recall the license plate numbers; the minivan had immediately sped away. It was a night of mist and a lightly falling rain. No one could explain why the young woman had stepped onto the roadway where she was believed to have died instantaneously of injuries sustained when a vehicle traveling at a high speed struck her except—“She’d been looking around kind of confused. Like she didn’t know where she was, or couldn’t see well in the fog. Or she thought the guy in the van would come back to get her, and she wanted to get away from him.”

  There was no preventing the disclosure, in the press, that the twenty-two-year-old woman who’d died in the rain on I-278 had had traces of alcohol and amphetamine in her bloodstream.

  The driver of the minivan, eventually located, had not been named “Jorge.”

  There had been a “Jorge” with whom Daphne Needham had been staying in Jersey City—not living with, but staying with as he’d made clear when questioned by police officers. This “Jorge” refused to meet with the Needhams nor would he speak with them on the phone.

  The wife meant to consol
e the husband, who was inconsolable. Yet the wife could not herself comprehend that the daughter was gone.

  “I keep thinking she’ll call. The phone will ring, I will pick up the receiver . . .”

  The wife seemed not to know: did she grieve for the daughter, or was she (secretly) relieved that the daughter was gone? If she fell into fits of sobbing it wasn’t clear why.

  But now we have no daughter. Now there is—none.

  She saw how the husband regarded her, across that abyss. Somehow it had happened, they were on opposite sides of the abyss.

  She was sick with grief but also with (secret) shame. The knowledge that she’d deleted the message, in fact she’d deleted other, earlier messages from Daphne, from time to time, over the years . . . Max would never have forgiven her if he’d known.

  She’d thought they would grow old—older—together. They would laugh together at muddled words. Not long before the catastrophe as in another lifetime the wife had said asparagus and the husband who was hard of hearing in one ear had heard Asperger’s. The wife had said charisma and the husband had heard miasma and they’d laughed together as if nothing could be funnier.

  Yet, Max resisted getting a hearing aid. His reasoning was, he was too young.

  Becca had laughed at him, and kissed him. He was quite right, he was too young.

  Among their wide circle of friends there’d been several abrupt, seemingly senseless and unanticipated breakups of marriages that had seemed as secure as their own. More secure than their own.

  Fourteen years the daughter had pulled at her, like gravity. And how often she’d hoped that the daughter would simply—go away.

  There’d been an interregnum of some forty minutes after the daughter had died on I-278 before the parents had been notified. The land phone ringing in the night, such a rarity they’d scarcely registered it for their crucial calls came now by cell phone; there was not even a land phone extension in their bedroom.