Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Tearful Mrs. Neukirchen stooped to hug her little girl. There was no escaping now, Mudgirl must stand still and unresisting in her mother’s anxious arms.

  And Mudgirl was a good girl, really. Mudgirl had learned to be a good girl in a trance of smiling terror stammering Y-yes. Y-yes M-Momma don’t cry.

  There is a day, an hour. When you understand that the swift-flowing river runs in one direction only, and nothing can reverse it.

  “Did you find me somewhere, Daddy? And bring me home?”

  Like little poison toads in a fairy tale these words leapt from the child’s mouth.

  Mr. Neukirchen drove—slowly, fussily—over the Convent Street bridge. For this was a narrow rattly old bridge and Daddy took care crossing any bridge as he said with any passenger on board and particularly his dear daughter. And how much nicer it was to drive—to be driven—over this bridge than to walk for inside the car you could shut your eyes and not have to see the slate-colored water rushing below or the iron railing close beside the car. And once they were on the far side of the bridge Meredith opened her eyes and there was no rushing water—no danger.

  This day—a Saturday morning in June—was some weeks after the walk with Mrs. Neukirchen across the bridge when Meredith had asked her strange question that had so upset her mother and in this interlude both Mrs. Neukirchen and her daughter had forgotten the words they’d exchanged as if these words had never been and so it was a surprise to Meredith, and unexpected, how these shocking words came to her again when she was with Mr. Neukirchen—Did you find me somewhere? And bring me home?

  For truly she could not recall. Only very faintly the names Jew-ell—Jedina—sounded in her memory like distant tolling bells.

  But Daddy was not upset by his daughter’s question as Momma had been. For Daddy rarely became upset as Momma did—it was his “phlegmatic soul” as Daddy said. For a moment not speaking sucking at his lower lip in a comical expression of hard-thinking and then he laughed and said, evenly, as if the child’s question were the most natural question in the world, “Meredith, of course! Yes! We found you! But not just ‘somewhere’—in a very special place. You wouldn’t remember—you were too little—we found you beneath a toadstool in our backyard, by the garden gate—not one of those puny little toadstools that grow everywhere but a big toadstool the size of”—Daddy cast his thoughts about like a loose net, seeing what sweet silly thing he could snag—“a Rhode Island red hen. That big.”

  Meredith giggled, Daddy was always so funny. A toadstool! A red hen! Even when you had no idea what Daddy was talking about, Daddy was so very funny.

  But Daddy squinched up his face in a frown. “What? What’s so funny? It’s the gospel truth—your mother and I discovered you, a wee little thing the size of a baby chick, beneath the toadstool by the garden gate. You wouldn’t remember, you see—and now the toadstool has vanished.”

  Meredith knew what a toadstool was—a stool for a toad—Daddy had explained. She had never seen any actual toad sitting on a toadstool but this was the purpose of the strange gray growths that festooned near the garden in the early morning that shattered to powder if you didn’t touch them very gently.

  But it was silly—wasn’t it?—to believe that her parents had found her beneath a toadstool. Even a big toadstool.

  Daddy insisted, “Oh yes! We did find you there, that’s exactly where you were when we first laid eyes on you.”

  Meredith giggled she was not.

  Daddy insisted yes she was.

  “Of course, we’d ordered you. The way we order pizza from Luigi’s—over the phone. Instead of tomato-cheese-pepperoni pizza we ordered a beautiful little baby girl the size of a baby chick—wavy brown hair, brown eyes, long narrow feet—Meredith Ruth—“Merry.”

  By now Meredith was giggling so hard, she nearly wet her panties. There was rarely any time when she laughed except when Daddy teased in his funny-Daddy way going on and on—and on—lifting his hands from the steering wheel to gesture and making his beard bristle; there was no way to stop Daddy or even to question him for in such a state Daddy was a vortex sucking everything into it faster and faster so that whatever Meredith had asked him initially was lost and lost even to Meredith who was weak and breathless and jittery from giggling and Daddy, too, was laughing and then abruptly—for it was Daddy’s way to be abrupt in such matters like switching off TV—Daddy was pressing his forefinger against his nose meaning something secret, that Momma need not know.

  So this was a good ending, too. Meredith would never never never never ask her silly question again.

  Mudwoman, Bereft.

  April 2003

  Please could you call me. I am in need of. . . .

  In distant nebulae he was traveling. Through constellations whose very names meant nothing to her—Centaurus, Hydra. Light-years he was gone from her yet she called him, or tried to—the long-memorized numbers at Cambridge, and at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona—leaving terse and enigmatic messages in case the suspicious wife checked his voice mail.

  Please Andre could you call me. I am in need of . . . verification of . . . something.

  Her voice lifted in the cheery M.R. way for she could not help herself, M.R. must always assure the listener that beneath the raw plea was spiritual well-being, good common sense. Not any sort of hysterical female.

  Beyond Earth, there is no day, and there is no night. All is illuminated by “starlight”—the most beautiful light of all. And all is silence—the most beautiful music.

  At the University pool she’d become strangely exhausted swimming though she had not exerted herself in any uncommon way. A vigorous half hour swimming laps but soon her arms began to tire, her breath came short and ragged and her heart beat too quickly and staggering out onto the tile she’d found herself staring at a constellation of miniature bubbles in the water in the wake of the sleek-black-haired wide-shouldered undergraduate diver.

  But this bubble of time! This rapidly shrinking bubble of time in which we exist together . . .

  It was terror to her, this realization. That her life was passing swiftly and the time in which she might have loved and be loved in the intimate way of living with another person was passing yet more swiftly.

  The wide-shouldered boy who had not seemed to recognize her—or was too shy, or too aloof, to acknowledge her. It was a university in which undergraduates took on the roles of adults with precocious zeal and capability and were not reluctant to shake the hands of their elders and yet there was this boy, very possibly on the varsity swim team, a champion in his high school district in—where?—the Midwest, perhaps—and this hour wasn’t his practice time but additional time for himself, alone; and the sinewy-snaky ease of his body, his sculpted shoulders, narrow hips and the bulge of his groin and water streaming down muscled columnar legs and she felt again that thrill of terror, of loss—sexual loss—as the bubbles emerged out of the churning water and were gone in the next second. And she thought I am losing everything—am I? Why has this happened, that I am losing everything?

  Mudgirl, Desired.

  October 1977

  Those years Mudgirl moved among the others as if she were one of them.

  Meredith Ruth Neukirchen: a dull-earnest name that suited her.

  She was an athlete—but not a star athlete. On the girls’ basketball team the lanky long-limbed reliable guard who passes the ball to her faster and more aggressive teammates, to sink baskets—a great team-player.

  Of course, she was intelligent. Though shy and not inclined to speak readily in class yet she excelled in tests and written work and was so very “gifted”—at least as measured in the Carthage public schools—her more responsible teachers took care not to praise her excessively in the presence of her classmates, or even to her parents whom they recognized as hyper-vigilant parents who cared too much about their only child. The shrewder of these teachers
were even sparing of their praise to Meredith herself, sensing something over-zealous and just slightly frantic in the girl that might effloresce to consume much of her life. By her senior year at Carthage High School Meredith had accumulated numerous academic prizes and distinctions and was regarded by her classmates with the sort of condescending pride one might feel for the achievements of a big sister who is also lame, has a withered arm or a cleft palate.

  It was crucial to Mudgirl, that she not be disliked. That no one feel envy, jealousy of her. Only that, in the narrow Carthage High world, there was a place for Meredith Ruth Neukirchen that was hers, that would allow her to survive, and even to flourish.

  With her high-A average she was named valedictorian of her class. But though she was co-chair of the senior prom committee and worked tireless hours stringing crepe paper streamers and paper lanterns around the gym, setting up tables and chairs and ordering food and soft drinks, no one thought to urge any boy to invite her to the prom as his “date”—and so Meredith had stayed at home on senior-prom weekend as she often did on such occasions, with her parents. If she was disappointed, hurt, embarrassed or humiliated—she was too good-natured—or too practiced in stoicism—to give any sign. Mr. Neukirchen joked of taking Meredith to the prom, himself—“If Dads who can only fox-trot and have one wooden leg are allowed”—but Mrs. Neukirchen objected, that was an utterly ridiculous idea—“Merry doesn’t need their silly old ‘prom’ any more than she needs them. She has us.”

  Not in the late spring of Meredith’s senior year of high school but in the previous fall, this happened.

  Meredith was never to tell anyone. Certainly not the Neukirchens!

  He was her math teacher Mr. Schneider. By far the least popular of teachers at Carthage High for the difficulty of his subject, his “blitz” quizzes and severe grading and his general air of barely concealed disdain for his students, colleagues, the city of Carthage itself. He was a somber-brooding man who might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty, with vertical frown-lines in his forehead, a beakish nose and one nostril larger than the other, like an empty eye socket. Hans Schneider was tall, and thin; his shoulders were sloped, like broken wings; his clothes fitted him loosely, and were always the same clothes—long-sleeved white cotton shirt, striped necktie, gabardine trousers shiny in the seat. His eyeglasses were heavy black plastic frames that were often crooked on his nose. He smelled of chalk dust, faintly rancid milk or butter—or garlic; his teeth were uneven, grayish and thin-looking as a child’s teeth. Often he suffered from colds, or worse—in the midst of teaching he turned aside to sneeze, cough, snuffle, blow his nose in a succession of disgusting wadded tissues that accumulated on his desktop; at times, to the unease and embarrassment of his students, he was required to use some sort of plastic inhaler kept in a desk drawer.

  It was said of him that he was a “freak”—a “fag”—a “Nazi”—but in math class, no one dared to behave other than respectfully toward Hans Schneider. He was acknowledged to be very smart—the smartest of Carthage High teachers by far. He was certainly a strict disciplinarian. When he slouched to the front of the room to strike chalk against the blackboard in a rapid pattern of geometric figures, equations and numerals that left many in the class baffled, Meredith took note that her teacher seemed to be compensating for a leg that gave him pain, or was slightly shorter than the other leg; his evasive manner, his habit of heavy sarcasm, was camouflage of a kind, like her own.

  She’d begun reading “classics” in her father’s library—one of them was the massive Dialogues of Plato—and there she’d read, amid much else that meant little to her, but excited her with dogmatic certainties and paradoxes, that beauty is symmetry and exactness. And so she saw that Mr. Schneider was off balance somehow.

  Like her, Meredith thought.

  For often in mirrors Meredith saw, to her dismay, that one of her eyes was larger than the other, or set at a different angle in her face; her eyebrows would grow together thickly above the bridge of her nose except, secretly, without her mother suspecting, she plucked them with tweezers borrowed from Mrs. Neukirchen’s “vanity.” And in gym class it seemed to Meredith that she sometimes ran crookedly—though in the confusion and excitement no one was likely to notice.

  Though Mudgirl moved among the others as if she were one of them—though she’d learned, she had thought, to skillfully mimic their speech, their gestures, their ways of moving their bodies, the pitch of their laughter and their shifts of emotion rapid and seemingly random as the sudden flights of birds—of course she was readily detectable, by an observer shrewd as Hans Schneider, as an imposter, even apart from her high intelligence and classroom deportment.

  He’d been seeing her, Meredith knew. Seeing her as not even the Neukirchens could see her.

  And often staring at her, for no evident reason, during math class, with an intensity with which no other teacher stared at her.

  “Well, Mere-dith! You seem to have gotten some things correct, eh?”

  Handing back Meredith’s neatly executed homework assignments, tests and quizzes, Mr. Schneider went out of his way to lean over Meredith’s desk, just close enough that she could smell his body-odor, and his breath which other girls described as garlic-breath, or more cruelly, mummy-breath. He had a way of ignoring students as if their very existence annoyed him and here he was leaning over Meredith Neukirchen at her desk in the front row—squinting at her through crooked eyeglasses as if she were a rare species of being.

  “Unless you have a father at home who helps you, this is very good work.” His manner was awkwardly jovial—a crude imitation of the way he supposed other teachers at Carthage High spoke to make their students laugh. “And if you have a mother at home who is helping you, she is very good—for a Carthage, New York, housewife.”

  Meredith laughed uncomfortably. Was this meant to be funny? Meredith didn’t quite dare to insist that she’d done her homework herself—of course, she did all her homework herself—for that would seem to be challenging her teacher.

  He’d relented, finally. Seeing the look of alarm in Meredith’s flushed face and the way in which the other students in the class were staring at him, in disbelief, as if a zombie had roused himself to life: not that the zombie can mimic a human being convincingly, but that the zombie can rouse himself to life at all.

  Another time, when Mr. Schneider waylaid Meredith at the end of class as the others trooped out of the room.

  “Mere-dith! Tell me—do you like geometry?”

  Yes. Meredith did like geometry.

  “And why do you ‘like’ geometry, Meredith?”

  Because geometry involved drawings of figures as well as numbers—you could see the problems not just think them. And because—she thought—geometry was always the same.

  “But how do you know that geometry is ‘always the same,’ Meredith? Have you experienced geometry in China? India? On Mars?”

  Meredith had to admit, she had not.

  “Then how can you be so certain that geometry is ‘always the same’? There are ‘laws’ of nature that don’t apply to distant galaxies, you know. Such regions where time doesn’t exist or, if it does, befuddles us all by running backward—so that it is never bedtime no matter how tired and bored we are.”

  Meredith smiled uncertainly. She had no idea how to reply to this. She tried to think how Plato, or Socrates—or Isaac Asimov—might reply; but her mind was blank.

  She did not say to her teacher Because geometry is a game and nothing real—that’s why I like it. Because there are rules you can learn to play this game.

  Though he must have seen that his student was stricken with shyness and self-consciousness, eager to slip away from him, yet Mr. Schneider persisted in the interrogation: “And—Mere-dith!— what of the singular year A.D. 1111?”

  The singular year A.D. 1111? Was this too some sort of joke?

  When
Meredith’s other teachers spoke with her the substance of what they had to say was immediate and accessible and there was no need to try to decode it—but whatever Mr. Schneider was talking about had little to do with the words he uttered in his forced-jovial voice.

  Meredith murmured she had no idea about A.D. 1111.

  “And what of the singular year A.D. 3011?”

  And no idea about A.D. 3011.

  “How can you be certain that geometry will ‘be the same’ then, as it is now?” Mr. Schneider chuckled, triumphantly.

  Politely and gravely Meredith listened, for it was Mudgirl’s way to placate her elders.

  You did not want to think that your elders were deranged, ignorant, stupid, or malicious. You did not ever want to think such a thought for fear that one of these elders would read your mind, behind the polite grave good-girl smile.

  “Mathematics is supposed to be always and forever—permanent—for that is its beauty. Yet how can one know—not think but know—that it is always and forever permanent? In quantum physics . . .”

  Meredith understood that Mr. Schneider was teasing her schoolgirl sobriety, as her father often did. Though with Mr. Neukirchen you knew that his teasing was affectionate, and with Mr. Schneider you couldn’t be certain for there was a coercive nature about him. An uneasy sense that, if Meredith made a break to leave the room, Mr. Schneider might speak harshly to her, or reach out to restrain her.

  “ . . . the impossible becomes necessary, to believe. Because the merely possible is inadequate.”

  Students were trooping noisily in, for the next math class. Meredith didn’t run from the room but departed quickly.

  “Mere-dith. Please see me after school.”

  More frequently then, in October of that year, Hans Schneider began to murmur these words to Meredith in a lowered voice, as if not wanting other students to hear.