Beautiful Days: Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Eventually, the wife had stumbled from bed to answer the phone, in another room. She’d been so convinced that the call was a wrong number, she’d hardly reacted when the speaker asked if she was Mrs. Needham? Mother of Daphne Needham?

  In this way, for those ignorant moments, they’d been unwitting survivors of the daughter. It was shocking to think that the daughter had died, and they had not known.

  The wife felt tenderness for the bereaved man as one might feel for a wounded animal and yet the wife felt some fear, for the wounded may lash out in confusion, pain, and rage.

  The husband did not wish to speak of their loss. He was a very private person, as he was a quasi-public person; if Max Needham had medical problems, he would not confide even in family members, let alone friends and university colleagues. And he would not have forgiven his wife if she’d violated his privacy.

  Only to others did the wife speak of the loss of the daughter, in a voice of incredulity.

  “No premonitions. No ‘omens.’ Not a thing!”

  The wife spread her fingers wide as if to indicate—look, nothing hidden! The wife’s fingernails, that had once been neatly filed and polished a pale tasteful pearly-pink, had been allowed to become uneven and brittle.

  Now when it was too late she was becoming superstitious. She noticed that her hands sometimes shook. (Was this punishment? For deleting the message? For not calling Daphne back? Almost, she hoped so.) She could not bear looking into the future, any future—it was like confronting your reflection in a too-brightly-lit mirror. No! Don’t look. You will be damned sorry if you do.

  Yet, she would plan a trip for them in December. A kind of honeymoon, to Central America. This trip the husband had wanted to take separately, the wily wife would conspire to appropriate. They would be out of the country at the time of the daughter’s birthday. Maybe—(the wife’s brain spun crazily)—she could arrange travel across time zones, to avoid December 19 altogether.

  Each night the husband came to bed at a later hour, and each night the wife was waiting up for him, a light shining in her eager face.

  “Max? I have an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  It was the coolest, most neutral of responses. Not a question really for it expressed no curiosity.

  “It would be good for us, as you suggested. To be away—away from here—by mid-December.”

  She had not said by her birthday. The husband must have felt some relief.

  In the dark the wife dared to touch the husband as she would not have touched the husband by day. Her hand moved onto him—the slope of the man’s shoulder, his smooth broad back that was turned to her; the warm curve of his body, that had grown unfamiliar with time.

  In the dark in their bed the wife and the husband would appear to be together. Something had struck them a cruel blow, they had fallen and were lying very still in dread of being struck another time.

  As younger lovers the wife and the husband had lost themselves in each other’s bodies but with the passage of time each had become opaque to the other, and impenetrable. She knew that Max would have liked to sleep in another room, and not with her, but that he was too gentlemanly, too kindly, to hurt her; even if he didn’t love her, he did not want to hurt her. She would take advantage of this!

  Becca whispered, “Max? Darling? Please talk to me, I loved her too.”

  She felt him stiffen. She could imagine how his eyes flashed with hatred of her. What had she said—loved?

  “I mean—I miss her—so terribly . . .”

  Invisible in the dark her eyes brimmed with tears. Her hand blundered onto the husband’s thigh. She was dazed with love for him, her husband. A terrible need for him. She would explain herself to him, how frightened she was of what had happened and how frightened she was of losing him for if she lost him, she was not sure that she could bear to continue. She had failed as a mother, in the end she had been a stepmother merely, and that could not be amended. And he would understand, and he would forgive her. For there was so little time now. For time was running out, soon it would be mid-December.

  With the boldness of desperation she would touch the husband, caress him, slide her arm around him—she would stroke his stomach, and the slack skin of his lower belly, and between his legs . . . But he pushed her hand from him, with a little grunt of irritation.

  “Go to sleep, Becca. It’s late.”

  2.

  “There they are: right out of Diane Arbus. Look, Max!”

  It was a cruel witticism. The wife could not resist.

  The wife spoke in a lowered voice, an aside to the husband who smiled thinly, scarcely glancing up from the Ecotourist’s Guide: Panama & Pacific Coastal Islands in which he’d been making annotations, to see the family of fellow tourists approaching.

  It was unfair, the wife thought. Sometimes the husband appreciated the wife’s acerbic wit, other times he seemed to be inwardly wincing.

  Once he’d laughed heartily at her jokes, even her silly, childish jokes. Now, he was likely to regard her as if he’d never seen her before—a woman who happened to be seated at his table in the ship’s dining room, or who boldly sat beside him on the deck when it was clear he preferred to be alone.

  A woman who followed him into their cabin, when it was clear he preferred to be alone.

  Why do you try to make me laugh? Do you think that will make me love you?

  She did not think so. But yes, she must have thought so.

  Hard to resist a cruel, cutting remark, to make someone laugh. The less likely the person was to laugh, the more desperate the joke.

  The wife understood the psychology of the stand-up comedian: Though I am nothing, a black hole, please acknowledge that I am alive—laugh, clap. Laugh.

  Swathed in sunscreen, in crisp long-sleeved white shirts, mosquito-repellent cargo pants and wide-brimmed hats, the bereaved wife and husband were seated in wicker chairs in thinly white tropical sunshine on the third-level deck of a small cruise ship called the Boca Brava. It was the second day of the six-day cruise: they were somewhere in the balmy waters of the Gulf of Chiriquí, off the western coast of Panama.

  The wife had made virtually all of the arrangements. In their marriage it was the wife who oversaw such routine tasks as paying bills, renewing subscriptions, the reliable cycle of household maintenance and repairs. (It was the wife who’d dealt with the funeral home on Massachusetts Avenue, the funeral arrangements, the purchase of a grave site and a small granite marker. It was the wife who would oversee giving away the daughter’s clothing and other possessions to the local Goodwill in a few months’ time.) The wife had not dared to trouble the husband with many queries—if there’d been the slightest difficulty with their travel plans the husband would have insisted upon calling off the trip. She’d had to go alone to a medical clinic for immunizations (typhoid, yellow fever, hepatitis A and hepatitis B, malaria) since the husband was sure, having traveled to Asia and Africa within the past several years, and having been immunized then, that he didn’t need these renewed.

  The daughter’s birthday—the first since the death—was in two days. It was possible—almost—to think that the birthday, like the death-day, was a matter of geography: now they were no longer in freezing Massachusetts but in tropical waters off the coast of Panama, approximately eight degrees north of the equator.

  Travel is relocation, dislocation. The wife found herself unaccountably happy at times—like a new, young wife on a honeymoon with a husband who is (yet) a virtual stranger—their shared history thin as a sickle moon.

  They’d traveled a number of times with Daphne to England, Scotland, Ireland and to Europe. But not to the Caribbean, and not to Latin America. These waters were pure and unsullied by memory.

  Not going away from home, but returning. The wife realized suddenly—That will be the hard part. The emptiness.

  In waves panic swept over her. It was the terror of utter, irrevocable loss: she would never see the daughter again as she would never feel
the exasperation, frustration, hurt, and hope the daughter had roused in her.

  And it was panic too, that their lives had been changed irrevocably. Bizarre that they should find themselves, indistinguishable from other affluent American tourists with a fashionable interest in “ecotourism” on the dazzling-white Boca Brava, an attractive married couple of middle age, unencumbered by children, childless.

  “D’you mind if we take this chair? Thanks!”

  In a bright grating voice the rotund little woman addressed Becca even as her heavyset daughter rudely dragged an unoccupied chair away from the Needhams’ table. There was something aggressive in the way the girl appropriated the chair as if she were snatching it from the wife and the husband against their wishes, to bring to the table where her parents and younger brother were sitting.

  “Of course not. Please take it. You’re welcome.”

  The wife spoke with thinly veiled sarcasm, for the girl had already taken the chair without even acknowledging her. What was bizarre was that the girl’s tongue protruded from between pursed lips as if the act of taking the chair, gripping it and hauling it away, required extreme mental concentration. The wife’s heart beat hard, as if her territory had been invaded; how did the rotund little woman know that the wife and husband had no one else coming to join them, thus no need of the chair?

  It was so petty! So annoying.

  The husband had taken no notice—of course. An exchange so fleeting and trivial had not the power to break Max Needham’s concentration on his reading.

  In times of stress, and at other, quite ordinary times, the husband disappeared into such intense spells of reading, as into his work. To the wife this was a place not unlike a black hole into which she could not follow nor even peer inside—it was his.

  As if to spite the wife, who found them painful to look at, and more painful to listen to, the family out of a Diane Arbus photograph—(there were several families on the Boca Bravo, affably smiling, relentlessly friendly, attractive adults and adorable freckled children, who looked as if they’d stepped out of a Norman Rockwell illustration for the old Saturday Evening Post; there was only one family Arbus might have photographed)—had not moved farther along the deck to an area where there were unoccupied tables and chairs, but had decided to sit close by the Needhams. So close, the back of the husband’s chair was being jostled by the brother, so that the husband, with a flicker of annoyance, moved his chair forward, and continued to read.

  “Should we move somewhere else? Max?”—the wife leaned forward to murmur in the husband’s ear.

  “No. Just relax.”

  Just relax. As if the wife were the cause of her own discomfort!

  The obtrusive family were obviously Americans, though there was something “foreign” about them, too—an obese couple with an obese young-adult daughter and an obese pubescent son who took up a good deal of space even outdoors. The wife had sighted them within the first hour of boarding the Boca Brava, and seemed all too often to be seeing them since. They were always together, like a colony of biological organisms. You looked from one to the other to the other as in a four-way mirror, sensing something wrong with each of them, a shared genetic flaw.

  The father was tall, big-shouldered, big-headed, with a protruding belly carried high like a drum above his belt; he didn’t walk so much as lumber from side to side like a collision about to happen. He might have been in his early fifties, but he appeared much older, petulant and querulous, like one who is accustomed to getting his way, yet wary of insubordination. Each time Becca had seen him, he’d seemed displeased about something. His pudgy face was flushed and his rimless eyeglasses gave him the look of one who can barely contain his rage. He wore boxy striped sports shirts of a kind no one had worn for decades, and Bermuda shorts that fell below his knees; on his immense feet, Birkenstocks with white socks. His voice, addressing his wife, his daughter, or his son, often in rebuke, resembled a low-pitched aggrieved barking.

  The mother, who barely came to the father’s shoulders, was a very stout woman who wore her faded-brown hair in braids tightly wound about her head as in a Grimm’s fairy tale, and over these a sun-visor of dark green plastic, that cast a faint, lurid-green shadow on her moon-shaped face. Her skin was flushed like the father’s, but relatively unlined; her eyes were small, close-set, and lashless. Her figure was a single, soft-solid mass like something that has melted—bosom, waist, hips. It was impossible to imagine this woman as a girl, let alone a sexual being; she must have been born middle-aged. She wore beltless shifts—muumuus?—that fell to mid-calf and on her small, fleshy feet open-toed sandals. Her public expression was one of strained affability—she was the one of the four to glance about smiling, hoping to make eye contact with strangers, that she might exchange greetings and pleasantries. When the father addressed her in his aggrieved barking voice she stood very still and cast her eyes down like one who is receiving instructions, or chastisement, from above. She did not reply to the father (at least, so far as Becca had seen) except by nodding meekly. In the family, it was the mother to whom much was entrusted—everywhere she went she carried a shiny tote bag filled with articles of clothing, towels, sunscreen, camera equipment, tissues, antibacterial hand sanitizer, bottled water and snacks. The others were always requiring something from her which she handed over with a smile, and for which (at least, so far as Becca had seen) she received no thanks. The mother’s upper arms, exposed in the sleeveless shifts, were raddled and slack and terrible to behold and so Becca turned her eyes from the sight as from the head of Medusa.

  The obese boy of eleven or twelve resembled the father to an uncanny degree—oversized head, fleshy face, peevish expression—though he was wearing a snug-fitting T-shirt, khaki shorts and running shoes without socks, as a normal American boy might wear; his toad-like lower face seemed to have melted into a succession of chins but his eyes, small in the fatty ridges of his face, were alert and attentive, fixed on the tiny screen of his iPhone, which he took care to hold below the father’s sight.

  “Ee-gor! Put that away and look up here. This is the ‘Gulf of Chir’quíi’—out there is the Pacific Ocean.”

  Ee-gor—Becca supposed the name was “Yegor”—paid little heed to the chiding mother.

  But it was the obese daughter who made the family a Diane Arbus family, in her mimicry of her parents as in one of those psychology texts of the 1950s in which the photographs of generations of genetically impaired individuals were published in a parody of a family tree. Here was a defiantly homely girl of about twenty who squinted through thick glasses rudely at strangers, and furrowed her forehead, and, when she grimaced, which was often, her plump pink moist tongue emerged out of her mouth like a sea creature out of its shell. Like the father she was tall, big-shouldered and big-headed, and seemed often perturbed; like the mother she had small close-set lashless eyes and a shapeless body—breasts, belly, thighs and hips run together like a sinewy gelatin. Her brown hair was limp and lank, brushed behind her ears and fastened with bobby pins. (Bobby pins! Becca had no idea that bobby pins were still sold.) Her ears were prominent, with pointed knobs. Like the mother the girl wore a sleeveless and beltless shift but it had become too tight for her heavy thighs and haunches, and rode up to her massive dimpled knees as she sat; like the father she wore Birkenstocks with white cotton socks. In repose her face was round and blank as a plate with a suggestion of mental retardation or idiocy yet when she spoke, often irritably, to the brother, she appeared more or less normal; the small wet eyes flashed with sisterly dislike and indignation.

  “Becca?”—the husband nudged the wife.

  “Yes? What?”

  An embarrassed expression on Max’s face suggested that Becca was—what?—staring too intently at their neighbors? But Becca had not been staring at them at all, she’d been reading the paperback Endangered Species of Central America she had brought from their cabin.

  Reading and rereading the same paragraph on the Panamanian golden frog which
was now believed to be extinct in the wild, though specimens were preserved in captivity in North America.

  Becca wanted to protest to Max—she felt immense pity for the obese girl. She wasn’t staring.

  Thinking what a nightmare it must have been for the obese girl to have endured an American childhood looking like that. Imagine—middle school, high school!

  Yet she felt too something crueler, and cruder—a kind of physical repugnance, and resentment. How ugly she is! How can she bear her life—

  Something slipped from Becca’s hands, and fell to the deck—the book she’d been reading, or trying to read.

  At the next table the rotund little woman made a sympathetic little cluck with her mouth, the equivalent of a maternal nudge, and at once, with a grunt, the obese girl shifted her haunches in her chair, leaned over awkwardly and picked up Endangered Species of Central America to give to Becca. So quickly she’d obeyed her mother, you could not tell if she was resentful, reluctant, or—simply clumsy. Her forehead furrowed and her plump pink moist tongue protruded between her lips as in a parody of concentration.

  “Here, mam.”

  Becca was taken entirely by surprise stammering—“Oh—why—thank you.”

  She would recall later, in the aftermath of shock, how the four of them were staring at her—the freak-family whom Diane Arbus might have photographed.

  Next morning dinghies took passengers from the Boca Brava to a succession of islands in the Gulf of Chiriquí. To Becca’s relief, the obese family hadn’t been assigned to their dinghy.

  In the ship’s dining room that morning the wife had resolved not to seek out the freak-family. She feared the husband’s awareness of her obsession with them—it would be one more wifely flaw in his eyes. Yet, to her dismay, without knowing how it had happened, she found herself staring at the obese girl in the buffet line, slowly shuffling along heaping eggs, sausages, waffles, French toast, syrupy prunes and large croissants onto her plate. There was a terrible, obscene hunger in the girl’s face, as if she had not eaten in days. And what was she wearing?—not a beltless shift (like her mother, also in the buffet line) but ridiculous bib-overalls, that emphasized her immense belly, thighs, hips.