Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates

  If you are always alone, you will be thinking non-stop—your brain will never click off.

  It is not possible to live a life of thought continuously. . . .

  He’d warned her. She could not see his face though almost, she could hear his voice.

  A faceless man. A man of authority. But not Konrad, and not—obviously—her astronomer-lover who craved aloneness and yet was rarely alone.

  (Just as well, M.R. told herself, that she and Andre had never been together in any quasi-permanent way—Andre wouldn’t have been faithful to her, any more than he’d been faithful to his wife.)

  Serving others, you were spared brooding about yourself. Or anyway, that was the theory.

  As they entered the long-term neurology ward, M.R. remembered—not just that she’d been here several times previously but also she’d dreamt of the ward in the most curious and intimate of ways.

  In a recent dream she’d found herself here—that is, the dream-setting was supposed to have been the Herkimer County Veterans Administration Hospital though in fact it bore little resemblance to the hospital—and M.R. was supposed to have been—a bride?

  In some sort of bizarre paper bridal-gown. And high-heeled shoes, and bare legs. And—who was the bridegroom?

  She’d been strangely happy, in the dream. Or rather, she had not been unhappy. A warm sensation had suffused her chest, in the region of her heart. Mudwoman is loved. At last. It was absurd, the most pathetic sort of wish-fulfillment, clearly compensatory for her deprived life as a woman; the sort of raw shameless fantasy which, if she’d been in therapy, she could not ever have brought herself to relate to any therapist, her pride wouldn’t have allowed it.

  And her fear of being exposed, talked-of. Laughed-at, and pitied.

  “Konrad, hello! And—is it Margaret?”

  In an aggressively cheery voice the floor supervisor (female, middle-aged) greeted them. M.R. wouldn’t have troubled to correct the woman but Konrad said curtly, “ ‘Meredith’—my daughter’s name is ‘Meredith Neukirchen.’ ”

  The supervisor squinted at Konrad as if thinking it some sort of wonderful novelty, the feisty old white-whiskered gent took his adult daughter’s name so seriously.

  “Well—hello and welcome!—‘Konrad’ and ‘Mer’dith.’ As you can see there are familiar faces in the lounge this morning—old friends of Konrad’s—and two new faces. I know, you can introduce yourselves, but this gentleman has a little trouble speaking, that’s an ‘electro larynx’ you’re hearing—Sergeant Hercules Kropav from Castle Rock—a veteran of Vietnam—one of our longtime residents—and this gentleman is Corp’ral Shawn Barnburger—excuse me: ‘Barnbarger’—from Tupper Lake—veteran of the Gulf War—‘Operation Desert Storm’—1991?—1993? (Now it’s a video game, I am told—‘Operation Desert Storm’—the favorite of all of the younger men, here at Herkimer.) Corp’ral Shawn trained for the Special Olympics when he first came to us, he’ll tell you about his challenges I’m sure. . . .”

  Blindly shaking hands. Konrad was boisterous, clearly enjoying himself. In his wake M.R. followed not quite so emphatically but sensing that, as a woman, she had an advantage—amid so much maleness, the novelty of femaleness.

  She heard herself talking. She heard herself laughing. The men did seem happy to see her, those who could see. And the others—they too seemed happy, intrigued and enlivened by a female presence.

  Awkward, though, to be on her feet—towering over the wheelchair patients.

  A sensation of déjà vu swept over her like nausea.

  And pinpricks of itching on her skin, particularly the skin around her ankles, she had to resist an impulse to scratch violently with her nails and draw blood.

  “Excuse me, is it—Meredith?”

  She glanced around, and there he stood—the man in the white shirt.

  She’d forgotten him. She had not given him a second thought since he and his elderly companion had stepped into the elevator what seemed a very long time ago.

  And now, he was approaching her, alone—staring at her quizzically, eagerly. The elderly woman was nowhere in sight. In these drab surroundings the long-sleeved white shirt caught the eye like a daub of glimmering white paint.

  M.R. had the impression that he’d been watching her, from across the lobby. When she’d hurried into the first-floor restroom, in distress.

  (A bout of diarrhea, a swirl of nausea, and a tentative recovery, she thought. Running tepid water at the splotched sink and splashing it onto her face that was flushed, yet not unattractive, oddly—as usual, M.R. could imagine that no one was likely to guess her misery.)

  “You do remember me, I hope?—You were one of my star math students at Carthage High in the late 1970s.”

  Hans Schneider! M.R. had not seen the man nor scarcely recalled him in more than twenty years.

  “Oh yes—of course—‘Mr. Schneider.’ ”

  “And you are—‘Meredith’?”

  “Yes. ‘Meredith Neukirchen.’ ”

  “I thought that I’d seen you earlier today in the foyer, Meredith—I mean, I saw you but wasn’t altogether certain that—it was you. After so many years . . .”

  Clumsily Schneider extended his hand to M.R—she wasn’t sure if he meant to clasp her hand, or to shake it; instead, he gripped it between both his hands, pulling her off balance so that she nearly stumbled into him.

  “Oh, excuse me—”

  “Excuse me—”

  They were staring at each other, astonished. M.R. could not believe how her former high school teacher stood before her, and so altered—in middle age Hans Schneider looked more youthful than he’d looked as a young man. His face she’d recalled as narrow and unattractive had filled out—his forehead was less severely creased—his nose less prominent—though his eyes fixed upon her face were no less intense. His manner that had been so aggressive had softened. His smile that had been a sneer had vanished. And why had she ever thought he’d resembled a crow?

  Through the prism of derisive adolescent eyes the math teacher had been dismissed as Freaky, ugly. M.R. felt the injustice, in which she’d unthinkingly participated.

  Though it did seem clear, her former teacher was ill-accustomed to sudden gestures of intimacy. Perhaps to any kind of intimacy.

  “You aren’t—married? Or—?”

  How bluntly, blunderingly Hans Schneider spoke. His gaze dropped to M.R.’s left hand—her ringless fingers. She felt the absurdity of her predicament: she was in love with a man who was almost entirely absent from her life.

  “No. I’m not married.”

  “And I also—not married. Not now.”

  M.R. understood the murmured qualification—Now.

  M.R. understood the intensity in her former teacher’s face. She had not forgotten the bizarre proposal he’d made to her when she’d been a girl of sixteen and he’d been an adult man of twenty-nine. Contract. You could wait for me. We have an understanding.

  How shocked she’d been at the time! Yet, in her innermost heart, how deeply moved, flattered.

  “You changed my life, Mr. Schneider. You made my life possible.”

  “Did I!”

  “You encouraged me to apply to Cornell and not just to teachers’ colleges. ‘Somewhere distinguished’—you said. And so I did apply, and Cornell gave me a scholarship. . . .” M.R. heard the plaintive boastfulness in her voice. She hoped that Hans Schneider wouldn’t ask her what she’d done after Cornell, where her career had brought her: for she’d have had no idea how to reply.

  He smiled, uncertainly. As if he too were calculating what he might ask her, and what he had better not ask her. Some instinct urged him to step back, to return to the deeper past of Carthage High School which was their shared history.

  “I seem to remember that you were ill, Meredith? In the spring of your senior year?”

 
M.R. was taken aback by the question, and by the undisguised tenderness with which it was framed.

  “No. Certainly not.”

  “You had to stay out of school for several weeks. . . .”

  M.R. laughed, protesting: “No! I wasn’t ever ill, and I was certainly never out of school for several weeks. I graduated with my class—’79. In fact, I was class valedictorian.”

  Again, this plaintive boastfulness. Flea bites ringing M.R.’s ankles and feet were making her want to scratch violently.

  As if trying to recall this extraordinary bit of information Hans Schneider frowned thoughtfully. But of course he couldn’t recall Meredith Neukirchen as valedictorian because by the spring of 1979 he’d vanished from Carthage.

  By the spring of 1979 he’d been presumed dead.

  “Well. I must be thinking of someone else. . . .”

  Schneider spoke apologetically yet with an air of just perceptible stubbornness as if he believed M.R. mistaken, but wasn’t going to press the issue.

  M.R. wondered if it was possible—Hans Schneider didn’t remember what had happened to him in Carthage? His “breakdown”—“physical and mental collapse”—so like her own recent breakdown.

  “Well! I do remember, Meredith, you were an excellent math student.”

  “Actually you told me, Mr. Schneider, that I was only just a ‘good’ student—I hadn’t any ‘natural gift for math.’ ”

  A hot flush rose into M.R.’s face as if she were sixteen years old again and vulnerable to the man’s judgment.

  Schneider protested: “Surely not! I’m sure that—I didn’t say that.”

  “You did. And of course you were right, Mr. Schneider. I was capable of high school math including elementary calculus but—I had no ‘natural gift for math.’ ” M.R. had intended her previous remark to be a rebuke but the mood between her and Schneider was edgy, giddy; their words were a kind of magical banter; she felt her heart beating with an absurd anticipation and childlike wonder—Can this be happening? After twenty years—this?

  Schneider protested: “Please don’t call me ‘Mister,’ Meredith—my name is ‘Hans.’ ”

  Hans! M.R. pressed the knuckles of her hand against her mouth, trying not to laugh.

  “But—what is so funny?”

  “I—I’m not sure. I don’t know.”

  “It’s a kind of—miracle—or maybe that’s too strong a word: coincidence? Though not a coincidence, either. I mean, our meeting each other like this, in this terrible place. . . . I did think of you from time to time, Meredith, after I left Carthage, but—I didn’t think it would be appropriate for me to contact you. And then, as time passed—I suppose I ‘forgot’ you. I mean—another life intervened.”

  You fell in love again. More appropriately. Of course.

  M.R. spoke more soberly now. She had to resist an impulse to touch Hans Schneider’s wrist.

  “What I remember about our math class was how you taught me to ‘teach’—Hans. You sent me to the blackboard to work out problems in front of the class. I was very shy—at first . . . I felt so clumsy and self-conscious! But you gave me faith in myself. You forced me to see that I could do something I would never have imagined I could do, and that I could enjoy it.”

  “Well—did I! Really! I suppose . . . I’d hoped it might have that effect. You seemed somehow to require ‘affirmation’—some sort of infusion of strength. Did you become a teacher? Are you a teacher now?”

  Schneider was smiling at M.R. as if he hoped his question wasn’t intrusive. That he hadn’t blundered in asking it. M.R. murmured yes in a way to forestall further questioning.

  That she had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard was not information she wanted to provide Hans Schneider, just yet. Her history at the University she did not want to provide Hans Schneider just yet.

  Though she was relieved—though also somewhat hurt—that Hans Schneider seemed totally oblivious of the public career of M. R. Neukirchen, its small triumphs and small disasters.

  Maybe later. If I see him again. Inevitably, then.

  “Where are you living now, Meredith?”

  Hesitantly Schneider asked. As if sensing that something unfortunate had happened to M.R., painful to reveal.

  “Now? Right now—for much of the summer—I’ve been living in Carthage, with my father.”

  “Carthage! Somehow I wouldn’t have thought . . .” Schneider paused, as if the possibility of Carthage, the very sound of the word, was somehow incomprehensible. At close quarters, M.R. could see that the man’s white cotton shirt wasn’t so fresh any longer, damp with perspiration beneath the arms. A smell of his body—anxiety mixed with hope—mixed with the faintly urinous/disinfectant smell of the hospital, that was without hope. “I—I left Carthage—as maybe you know—and never returned . . . I broke off all contact with my ‘colleagues. . . .’ Secondary school teaching isn’t for the fainthearted! I went back to graduate school at Boston University and got a Ph.D. in math—expanding on work I’d done for my M.A.—a year as a post-doc at Penn—then I taught at the SUNY branch at Potsdam—then to St. Lawrence, in Canton, where I’ve been for seventeen years—still an associate professor and still toiling away at my ‘original’ research, that I’d begun as a master’s candidate in the early 1970s! (That has turned out to be a dead end, I’m afraid. But who could have predicted, when I’d begun? Not even my adviser, long since emeritus and deceased.) Sometimes I feel—especially here in this hospital—(to which I’ve been bringing a neighbor, a widow, to see her son since the poor woman hasn’t anyone else to drive her to Herkimer)—that my life hasn’t yet—really—begun. As if somehow my life had careened off course—taken a wrong turn—a detour—and any day now, if I am attentive and alert, and don’t succumb to despair, it will revert to what it might have been.” Schneider had been speaking ever more rapidly in a voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used, in such a way, in some time; he paused now, wiping at his face with a handkerchief. (M.R. took note: not a tissue to be tossed away but a cotton handkerchief.) (Oh, what did this mean about Hans Schneider? That he wasn’t a careless throw-away sort of individual, but one inclined to permanence? Or that he was a fussy middle-aged bachelor fixed in insurmountable habits, unnavigable as a vehicle arthritic with rust?) Now he spoke earnestly, stepping so close that M.R. instinctively stepped back:

  “I wonder, Meredith—could I call you? Maybe we could—if you’re in Carthage—see each other sometime? I would drive down of course. . . .”

  “I think—I don’t think . . .”

  “We have so much to say to each other! After so many years it can’t be just a ‘coincidence’—I mean, meeting here, today—even if it’s this place of misery.”

  “Yes. I mean, no—”

  M.R.’s ankles itched violently. Yet she could not stoop to scratch them, while Hans Schneider spoke so passionately. And she’d been distracted seeing Konrad observing them from across the lobby. Her father had emerged from the men’s restroom but had stopped short sighting his daughter in what appeared to be an intense conversation with a stranger—or possibly not a stranger; canny Konrad, at times so blustery and intrusive, at other times so sensitive to the subterranean intricacies of situations.

  “I’ll give you my number, and you can call me, Meredith, if you wish. It will be your choice, if you call.”

  Graciously Hans Schneider spoke. His smile had become forced, fixed. Perspiration glimmered on his face highlighting the ghost-rivulets in his forehead, those odd vertical frown-lines descending from his hairline that had seemed to have faded but were now reappearing. M.R. was deeply moved, tears stung her eyes. She felt an impulse to clutch at her old teacher’s hand, to kiss the knuckles in gratitude.

  “I hope—I do hope—we can see each other again? Sooner than another twenty years? Yes?”

  He gave her the little scrap of paper upon which he’d neatl
y printed crucial information. M.R. folded it and put it into her pocket quickly in the hope that her sharp-eyed father would not see.

  “Yes! Thank you.”

  Blindly M.R. turned away. She had a dread of Hans Schneider clutching at her in a clumsy embrace—and how would she have responded, if he had?

  Crossing the heat-sweltering parking lot to their car, Konrad observed to M.R.: “A suitor in Birkenstocks sandals is every dad’s dream for his daughter. Even with socks, in August.”

  It was Konrad’s provocatively terse wit calculated to surprise. For one naturally expected Konrad to be anything but terse.

  M.R. laughed. A wild sort of laughter. Wiping at her eyes, and not daring to look at her father’s face.

  Ridiculous! You have already invested your adult life in one man.

  Too late! Too late! Too late for another folly.

  Next morning M.R. telephoned the University president’s office.

  Next morning M.R. spoke with the acting president for nearly ninety minutes.

  By the end of which without being more than half-conscious of what she was doing M.R. had savagely scratched the damned flea bites ringing her ankles, bare feet and legs to the knee, so that she was bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds.

  Mudwoman: Moons beyond Rings of Saturn.

  August 2003

  Unexpectedly he called.

  Saying calmly, bemused as one reporting a fact in a Universe of facts and no fact of more profundity or significance than the infinity of others She has kicked me out at last. She has asked me to leave.

  And he said I’m sick, Meredith darling. I’m damaged goods.

  She didn’t ask what her astronomer-lover meant. She didn’t ask if this sickness would be fatal, and how soon; she didn’t ask if he was in pain, or even if he needed her; without hesitation she said I’ll come to you.

  And he said No, darling. It will be better if I come to you, in some way we can reasonably work out, for now.

  Mudwoman Not Struck by Lightning.