The Lost Landscape

by Joyce Carol Oates

  For here was one who argued as if “with a hammer”—the very weapon to counter those years of enforced passivity as a quasi-Christian conscripted into an adult world of piety in which nothing was clearly explained, nothing was sincere, and all was obscured; my sense that, as a child, and as a young person, the elders of my world were conspiring to convince me of “beliefs” in which none of them believed, even as the pretense was Ours is the way, the truth, the light. Only through our way shall you be saved.

  To counter such smug pieties, the devastating voice of the philosopher—What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.

  AS A FRESHMAN I lived not in a dormitory but in a less costly “cottage” on Walker Avenue with approximately twenty other scholarship girls, all of us from upstate New York. (We were “girls” and not “young women”—in age, experience, appearance. This was an era when “girls” were under a kind of protective custody at universities, subject to curfews which male undergraduates did not have. It is an accurate description of the “scholarship girls” of Walker Cottage that none of us minded in the slightest that we had to be back in our residence by 11:00 P.M. weeknights—we had nowhere else we’d have preferred to be than in our rooms, studying.) My room was a single room, cell-like, sparely furnished, where I could work uninterrupted for long hours; for the first time in my life, I was free of the surveillance of my parents, however benevolent this surveillance might have been. And I could work in the university library, until curfew, at the long oak table that seemed magical to me, surrounded by shelves of “little magazines” I came to revere and even to love; I wrote by hand in a spiral notebook, sketches for fiction, outlines, impressions, which I then brought back to the residence to convert into typed pages. Stories, novels—even poetry, and plays—hundreds of pages of earnest undergraduate work which I would not have known to identify at the time as “apprentice work”—much of it discarded, some of it reworked and refined into the stories which I would submit to the writing workshops I took at Syracuse and which would eventually appear in my first book, a story collection titled By the North Gate (1963).

  If I open that book, composed and assembled so long ago, it’s as if I am catapulted back into that era—I can shut my eyes and see again the oak table in the library, the displayed magazines on both sides; I can see again the room in which I lived at the time, the plain table-desk facing a utilitarian blank wall.

  As the Lockport Public Library had been a sanctuary for me as a child and young girl, and a hallowed source of happiness, so the library at Syracuse University would be its equivalent, if not more, in my undergraduate years. Overall, Syracuse was a young writer’s paradise: my professors Donald A. Dike, Walter Sutton, Arthur Hoffman among esteemed others were brilliant, sympathetic, and unfailingly supportive. (Disclosure: not once was I made to feel, by any of my professors, that as a young woman I was in any way “inferior” to my male classmates. However, it did not escape my awareness that there was but a single woman professor in the English Department and no women at all in Philosophy.)

  If the university library was a treasure trove to a word-besotted undergraduate like myself, it was also, I suppose, a little too much for me. My memory of my work-place is of a labyrinth so dimly lighted—for stacks not in use were darkened: you had to switch lights on as you entered the aisles—as to inspire hallucination; here was a universe of books, overwhelming and intimidating and seemingly infinite as a library in a Borges fiction. One could never begin to read so many books—it invited madness just to think that each had been catalogued and shelved. Each had been conscientiously written!

  One day, I would convert some of these experiences into prose fiction—quasi-memoirist fiction, titled I’ll Take You There. But not for decades.

  “Seventy cents? Seventy cents?”—it was a shock to me to receive my weekly paycheck for the first time, to discover that I wasn’t even earning a dollar an hour but, after taxes, considerably less. My pride in attending Syracuse University and working in the library was undermined by such reminders of how desperate I was, or how naïve.

  When, after the first check, I expressed my dismay to one of the librarians for whom I worked, the woman said, curtly: “It’s the same for all of us, Joyce.”

  Yet I had no choice but to continue at the library. It has been the mantra of my life—I have no choice but to continue.

  I would work at the library until it closed at 11:00 P.M., then I would return to my room and study until 1:00 A.M. or 2:00 A.M. It is not uncommon for undergraduates to suffer sleep deprivation. To be chronically short of sleep is akin to being chronically short of money—you have a sense of something crucial missing from your life, that can scarcely be defined for it is not only material and actual, but spiritual. Not in my freshman cottage of scholarship girls but elsewhere, and generally, the student body of Syracuse University was affluent, if not showy. These were conspicuously well-to-do young men and women from New York City and environs, very different from the residents of upstate New York. To be poor amid affluence is to feel oneself both an outsider and yet oddly privileged: as a scholarship girl I was a spy in the house of mirth. I was not alone, yet I was of a distinct minority; on Saturday afternoons in my room in Walker Cottage or in the stacks of the university library I would hear the sound of crowds cheering in the football stadium some distance away, like the cries of another species. How happy they seemed, and how detached I was from their happiness! My aloneness was precious to me if it meant that I could accomplish something—anything. My concern about failing my courses must have inspired over-compensation for I was valedictorian of the Class of 1960.

  Forty years later, going through my recently deceased father’s papers, I would discover the amount of the New York State Regents scholarship that had made my parents so proud and had so changed my life: it was five hundred dollars a year.

  THE LOST SISTER: AN ELEGY

  1.

  SHE WAS NOT A planned birth.

  She was purely coincidental, accidental. A gift.

  Born on June 16, 1956. My eighteenth birthday.

  “Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

  WE WERE THRILLED, BUT we were also frightened.

  Though my brother Robin and I had known for months that our mother was pregnant, somehow we had not quite wished to realize that our mother would be having a baby.

  In the sense in which having a baby means a new presence in the household, an entirely new center of gravity. As if a radioactive substance had come to rest in our midst, deceptively small, even miniature, but casting off a powerful light.

  At times, a blinding light.

  And if light can be deafening, a deafening light.

  “HELP US NAME YOUR baby sister, Joyce.”

  It was a great gift to me, who loved names. I took the responsibility very seriously.

  As I was “Joyce Carol” so it was suggested that my baby sister have two names as well.

  Names passing through my brain like an incantation.

  Names that were fascinating to me, in themselves. Syllables of sound like poetry.

  As a young child I had imagined that a name conferred a sort of significance. Power, importance. Mystery. Sometimes when my name was spoken—in certain voices, though not all—I shivered as if my very soul had been touched. I felt that “Joyce Carol” was a very special name for it sounded in my ears musical and lithesome; it did not sound heavy, harsh, dull.

  I knew that my parents had named me, and that their naming of me was special to them. I think I recall that my mother had seen the name “Joyce” in a newspaper and had liked the name because it seemed to her a happy-sounding name. But both my parents had named me.

  My father who loved music, who played the piano “by ear,” often sang, hummed, whistled to himself when he was working or around the house. You could hear Daddy in another room, singing under his breath. The name “Carol” to my father suggested music, song. Somehow, this musical tendency in my father is bound up with m
y name.

  Now, it was my responsibility to name my baby sister.

  (DID I CONFER WITH my brother Robin? I want to think that I did.)

  FAVORITE NAMES WERE VALERIE, Cynthia, Sylvia, Abigail, Annette, Lynn, Margareta, Violet, Veronica, Rhoda, Rhea, Nedra, Charlotte— names of girls who’d been or were classmates of mine in Lockport or in Williamsville; girls who were friends of mine, or might have been; girls I admired close-up, or at a distance; girls who were clearly special, and special to me.

  The writer/poet knows that names confer magic. Or, names fail to confer magic. The older sister of the newborn baby knew that the baby’s name would be crucial through her life. She must not be named carelessly but very carefully. With love.

  MY HIGH SCHOOL FRIENDS were nothing short of astonished when I finally told them, as I’d been reluctant to tell them for months, that my mother was going to have a baby in June.

  “But your mother is too old!”—one of my friends said tactlessly.

  Was my mother even forty? I did not want to think that she was old.

  Having to tell others of my mother’s pregnancy made me painfully self-conscious. I felt my face burn unpleasantly as my girlfriends plied me with questions.

  “When did you know?”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “Isn’t it going to be strange—a baby in the family? So much younger than you?”

  With girlish enthusiasm, perhaps not altogether sincerely, my friends expressed the wish that there might come to be a baby in their households. In their midst I stood faintly smiling, hoping to change the subject.

  Not wanting to think—Why are you smiling? Why are you so happy on my behalf? The baby is my replacement. I will be forgotten now.

  WHEN MY PARENTS TOLD my brother Robin and me about the baby expected in June we’d been surprised, and embarrassed. We must have been somewhat dazed but true to our family reticence, we had not asked many questions. We’d been mildly, moderately happy about the news—I think. At least, we hadn’t been unhappy.

  Neither of us had exclaimed to the other—Why are they doing such a thing!

  They don’t need a baby in the family, when they have us.

  (INDEED, IT SEEMED TO me not long ago when my parents had told me the astonishing news that I had a “new baby brother” whose name was Robin.)

  A baby brother! A baby!

  I’d been five years old. Five and a half. (Such fractions are crucial when you are a child.) I don’t recall that I had known that my mother would be having a baby, or that I knew anything at all about human babies. Though I would have seen barn-cats heavily pregnant, that gave birth to litters of kittens, and it could not have been a total mystery to a sharp-eyed child like myself that the kittens had somehow come out of the momma cat.

  My brother was born at a preposterously inconvenient time, I’d thought: Christmas Day! Was it the baby’s fault? What could the baby be thinking? Interfering with a five-and-a-half-year-old’s long-awaited Christmas Day—December 25, 1943.

  His eyes had been robin’s-egg blue. A beautiful baby with soft, silky fair-brown hair. How astonished I’d been, and how betrayed I had felt by my parents!

  Soon afterward I came to adore my baby brother and was often photographed holding him or playing with him. There is a favorite photograph of us together and Robin is tugging at one of my long corkscrew curls while I gaze down at him with a kind of prim alarm. But when my father brought my mother home from the Lockport Public Hospital with the new baby brother named Robin wrapped in a blanket, my reaction was to run away and hide. In a drafty closet of the house I heard my name called—Joyce? Joyce?—but refused to answer. I was determined not to answer for a long time.

  JUNE 16, 1956, WHICH happened to be, purely coincidentally, my eighteenth birthday.

  But no one believes in the purely coincidental. There is a predilection in us to believe in symbolism, which is a kind of purposeful meaning.

  What does it mean, my sister has been born on my birthday?

  Apart from the coincidental date, it was natural to surmise that my parents had planned their third child to be born at about the time their oldest child would be leaving home.

  So I found myself thinking, though I knew better. As in later years it would be presented to me as meaningful in some benevolent astrological way, that I’d been born on Bloomsday—I, who would grow up to admire James Joyce.

  (And did my parents name me for the great Irish writer?)

  (No, no, and no.)

  But among the relatives, and among my friends, and among anyone who thought they knew my parents, it seemed to be taken for granted that my mother and father had calculated to have a third child to replace the one to be leaving home. As if anyone could calculate a pregnancy with such precision!

  The fact was, as my (naturally reticent) parents would indicate, the pregnancy seemed to have been an accident. A surprise, possibly a shock to the middle-aged parents, but an accident with no hidden symbolic significance.

  A not-unhappy accident.

  As my parents would come to view it, a gift.

  “It will be easy to remember your birthdays. We can celebrate them both together.”

  “HELP US NAME YOUR baby sister, Joyce.”

  But I was having difficulty choosing. Among so many beautiful names, how to select just two?

  I understood, of course—asking me to name my baby sister was a kindly way of involving me in her presence in the family, so that I would not feel slighted, or cast away.

  Or perhaps my parents sincerely believed that I was the one in the family who had a way with words, and was to be entrusted with this responsibility.

  Did I love my baby sister? Yes. For I could not help myself seeing the baby in my mother’s arms; seeing how happy my mother was, and my father; feeling my eyes fill with tears.

  Was I ever so small? Did they ever love me so much?

  It is claimed that the firstborn of a family will always feel, in an essential way, very special, “chosen.” Yet it seems logical that the firstborn is the one to be displaced, whether graciously or rudely, by the secondborn; still more, by the thirdborn.

  In a large family each sibling must feel not so very “chosen”—not likely to feel self-important. Yet, surrounded by brothers and sisters, wonderfully not-alone.

  It seemed natural to me, the new baby must nullify the others in my parents’ emotions: my brother, myself. The very vulnerability of a new baby is a displacement of the so much less vulnerable older children. This was something to be accepted as inevitable, and desirable.

  As if my parents were nudging me to think, sensibly—You are an adult now, or nearly. You are ready to leave home. And now, you will leave home.

  THE NAME I FINALLY chose for my baby sister was “Lynn Ann”—for the gliding n-sounds.

  2.

  No. I can’t speak of her.

  It is not possible. The words are not available.

  As she has no speech, so I have no ready speech to present her.

  I am not allowed to “imagine”—and so, I am helpless.

  There is no way. There is no access.

  There is only distance, as across a deep chasm.

  If there is a way it is oblique, awkward.

  It is the way of one foot in front of another, and another—

  plodding, cautious of the steep fall.

  It is not exactly cowardly—(I suppose: for if I were cowardly

  I would never undertake such a hopeless task but flee from it)—

  but it is cautious. It is not the sort of pain that becomes pleasurable.

  Reckless to press forward when you know you will fail and yet—

  you cannot go forward except by this route.

  You cannot pretend: your sister was never born.

  SPOKEN QUICKLY AND CARELESSLY, “autistic” can sound like “artistic.”

  IT WAS NOT REALLY true that I’d fled to college. More accurately, it was time for me to depart and so I depar
ted.

  And after I graduated from college, I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I met, fell in love with, and married Raymond Smith. And so I never came home again to live in Millersport.

  At the time it wasn’t known—it was not yet suspected—that my sister would have severe “developmental disabilities.” For such suspicions are slow to manifest themselves in even the most alert, responsible, and loving parents.

  After five or six years, when my husband and I were living and teaching in Detroit, Michigan, I began to hear that my parents were taking my sister to doctors in the Buffalo area, having been referred by her Lockport pediatrician who understood that there was nothing he could do, nor even confidently name.

  Lynn doesn’t look at us. She doesn’t talk, or try to talk.

  She doesn’t seem to recognize us. She will only eat certain foods.

  She is getting to have a bad temper.

  THE TERM “RETARDED” MIGHT have been suggested. But never did I hear “retarded” spoken in our household, nor did I ever speak this term in any way associated with my sister.

  There may have been a taboo of sorts, against the articulation of this word with its associations of poverty, ignorance, dementia. A crude word sometimes used as an epithet of particular cruelty.

  Eventually, the diagnosis “autistic” came to be spoken. (By my father, gravely. So far as I knew my mother would not ever utter this word which would have greatly pained her.) Not much was known of autism at this time (in the mid-1960s) but there was a distinction between autism and mental retardation that seemed crucial to maintain.

  For mental retardation was not uncommon in the north country, in those years. I have not spoken in this memoir of the numerous examples of “retarded” persons I’d encountered in the vicinity of Millersport and in Lockport, mostly school-age; how there would seem to have been a disproportionate number, compared to my experience elsewhere, later in my life; so that, when I think of mental retardation, immediately I am thinking of certain rural families, and of their offspring, routed into “special education” classes in school, and generally shunned, avoided, or in some unhappy cases teased and tormented by the presumably normal.