Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Sourland

  Stories

  Joyce Carol Oates

  for my husband Charlie Gross

  Contents

  I.

  Pumpkin-Head

  The Story of the Stabbing

  Babysitter

  Bonobo Momma

  Bitch

  Amputee

  II.

  The Beating

  Bounty Hunter

  The Barter

  Honor Code

  III.

  Probate

  Donor Organs

  Death Certificate

  Uranus

  Lost Daddy

  Sourland

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I.

  PUMPKIN-HEAD

  In late March there’d been a sleet storm through north central New Jersey. Her husband had died several days before. There was no connection, she knew. Except since that time she’d begun to notice at twilight a curious glisten to the air. Often she found herself in the doorway of her house, or outside—not remembering how she’d gotten there. For long minutes she stared seeing how, as colors faded, the glassy light emerged from both the sky and from the Scotch pines surrounding the house. It did not seem to her a natural light and in weak moments she thought This is the crossing-over time. She stared not certain what she might be seeing. She felt aroused, vigilant. She felt apprehension. She wondered if the strange glisten to the air had always been there but in her previous, protected life she hadn’t noticed it.

  This October evening, before the sun had entirely set, headlights turned into the driveway, some distance away at the road. She was startled into wakefulness—at first not sure where she was. Then she realized, Anton Kruppe was dropping by to see her at about this time.

  Dropping by he’d said. Or maybe she’d said Why don’t you drop by.

  She couldn’t see his face distinctly. He did appear to be driving a pickup truck with indistinct white letters on its side. Out of the driver’s seat in the high cab of the truck he climbed down and lurched toward her on the shadowy path—a tall male scarecrow figure with a misshapen Halloween pumpkin for a head.

  What a shock! Hadley backed away, not knowing what she was seeing.

  The grinning pumpkin-head on a man’s shoulders, its leering cutout eyes not lighted from within, like a jack-o’-lantern, but dark, glassy. And the voice issuing through the grinning slash-mouth in heavily accented English:

  “Ma’am? Is correct address? You are—lady of the house?”

  She laughed, nervously. She supposed she was meant to laugh.

  With grating mock-gravity the voice persevered: “You are—resident here, ma’am? I am—welcome here? Yes?”

  It was a joke. One of Anton Kruppe’s awkward jokes. He’d succeeded in frightening Hadley though probably that hadn’t been his intention, probably he’d just meant to make her laugh. It was embarrassing that she’d been genuinely frightened for she had known perfectly well that Anton was coming of course. And who else but Anton Kruppe would show up like this, with a Halloween pumpkin for a head?

  Hadley scarcely knew the man. She felt a stab of dismay, that she’d invited him to drop by. Impulsively she’d invited him and of course he’d said yes.

  At the co-op, Anton was the most eager and courteous of workers. He was the one to joke with customers, and to laugh at his own jokes; he was boyish, vulnerable and touching; his awkward speech was itself a kind of laughter, not fully intelligible yet contagious. For all his clumsiness you could tell that he was an exceptionally intelligent man. Hadley could see that he’d gone to painstaking trouble carving the Halloween pumpkin-head: it was large, bulbous, weirdly veined and striated, twice the size of a normal man’s head, with triangular eyes, triangular nose, grinning mouth studded with fang-teeth. Somehow, he’d managed to force the thing over his head—Hadley couldn’t quite see how.

  “How ingenious, Anton! Did you—carve it yourself?”

  This was the sort of inane question you asked Anton Kruppe. For you had to say something, to alleviate the strain of the man’s aggressive-doggy eagerness to please, to impress, to make you laugh. Hadley recalled the previous time Anton had dropped by the house to see her, which had been the first time, the previous week; the forced and protracted conversation between them when Anton hadn’t seemed to know how to depart, after Hadley had served him coffee and little sandwiches made of multigrain bread; his lurching over her, his spasm of a handshake and his clumsy wet kiss on her cheek that had seemed to sting her, and to thrill her, like the brush of a bat’s wings.

  “Yes ma’am. You think—you will buy?”

  “That depends, Anton. How much…”

  “For you, ma’am—‘no charge’!”

  This forced joke, how long would it be kept up, Hadley wondered in exasperation. In middle school, boys like Anton Kruppe were snubbed by their classmates—Ha ha very funny!—but once you were an adult, how could you discourage such humor without being rude? Anton was considerably younger than Hadley, as much as ten or twelve years, though looking older than his age, as Hadley looked younger than her age; he’d been born in what was now called Bosnia, brought to the United States by a surviving grandparent, he’d gone to American schools including MIT yet had not become convincingly American in all those years.

  Trying too hard, Hadley thought. The sign of the foreign-born.

  In a kind of anxious triumph, sensing his hostess’s exasperation yet determined not to acknowledge it, Anton swung the lurid pumpkin-head down from his shoulders, in his chafed-looking big-knuckled hands. Now Hadley could see that the pumpkin wasn’t whole but only two-thirds of a shell—it had been gutted and carved and its back part cut away—the back of what would be, in a human skull, the cranium. So the uncanny pumpkin-head was only a kind of pumpkin-mask set on Anton’s shoulders and held in place by hand. Yet so lifelike—as the scarecrow-figure lurched up the walk in her direction the face had appeared alive.

  Could have sworn, the eye-sockets had glared merrily at her.

  “Is good? Is—surprise? ‘Happy Halloween’—is right?”

  Was it Halloween? Hadley was sure it was not. October thirty-first wasn’t for another several days.

  “Is for you—Hedley. To set here.”

  Flush-faced now and smiling in his shyly aggressive manner that was a plea for her, the rich American woman, to laugh at him, and with him; to laugh in the spontaneous way in which Americans laughed together, mysteriously bonded in their crude American humor. On his angular face and in his stiff-wiry hair that receded sharply from his forehead were bits of pumpkin-flesh and seeds at which Anton wiped, surreptitiously, like a boy whose nose is running, wiping at his nose. Hadley thought If he kisses me he will smell of pumpkin.

  Her husband had died and abandoned her. Now, other men would drop by the house.

  Anton presented Hadley with the misshapen pumpkin. The damned thing must have weighed fifteen pounds. Almost, it slipped from her hands. Hadley thought it would have served Anton Kruppe right if she’d dropped the pumpkin and it smashed on the brick. No doubt, he’d have offered to clean it up, then.

  “Anton, thank you! This is very…”

  Their hands brushed together. Anton was standing close beside her. He was several inches taller than Hadley though his posture was slouched, his back prematurely rounded. Perhaps there was something wrong with his spine. And he breathed quickly, audibly—as if he’d been running. As if he were about to declare something—then thought better of it.

  At the organic food and gardening co-op where Hadley had once shopped frequently, when she’d prepared elaborate meals for herself a
nd her husband, and now only shopped from time to time, tall lanky Anton Kruppe had appeared perhaps a year ago. He’d always been alert and attentive to her—the co-op manager addressed her as Mrs. Schelle. Since late March in her trance of self-absorption that was like a narcotic to her—in fact, to get through the worst of her insomniac nights Hadley had to take sleeping pills which left her dazed and groggy through much of the day—she’d scarcely been aware of Anton Kruppe except as a helpful and persistent presence, a worker who seemed always to be waiting on her. It was just recently that he’d dared to be more direct: asking if he might see her. Asking if he might drop by her house after the co-op closed one evening, to bring her several bags of peat moss that were too heavy and cumbersome for Hadley to remove from the trunk of her car by herself. He’d offered to spread the peat moss wherever she wanted it spread.

  Hadley had hesitated before saying yes. It was true, she was attracted to Anton Kruppe, to a degree. He reminded her of foreign-born classmates in her school, in north Philadelphia; pasty-faced skinny boys with round eyeglasses, tortured ways of speaking as if their tongues were malformed. Hadley had been attracted to them, but she’d never befriended them. Not even the lonely girls had she befriended. And now in weak moments she was grateful for anyone who was kind to her; since her husband’s premature death she’d felt eviscerated, worthless. There is not one person to whom you matter, now. This is the crossing-over. For long entranced minutes like one in a hypnotic state she found herself listening to a voice not her own yet couched in the cadences of her own most intimate speech. This voice did not accuse her nor did the voice pass judgment on her yet she knew herself judged, contemptible. Not one person. This is the crossing-over.

  She had signed the paper for her husband’s cremation. In her memory distorted and blurred by tears as if undersea her own name had been printed on the contract, beside her husband’s name. Signing for him, she’d signed for herself as well. It was finished for her, all that was over—the life of the emotions, the ability to feel.

  Yet with another part of her mind Hadley remained alert, prudent. She was not an adventurous woman, still less was she reckless. She had been married to one man for nearly twenty years, she was childless and had virtually no family. She had a circle of friends in whom she confided sparingly—often, it was her closest friends whom she avoided, since March. Never would she have consented to a stranger dropping by her house except she’d learned that Anton Kruppe was a post-doc fellow in the prestigious Molecular Biology Institute; he had a Ph.D. from MIT and he’d taught at Cal Tech; his area of specialization was microbial genetics. She’d seen him at a string quartet recital on campus, once. Another time, walking along the canal towpath, alone. Wearing earphones, head sharply bowed, his mouth working as if he were arguing with someone and so lost in concentration his gaze drifted over Hadley unseeing—his favored co-op customer in cable-knit sweater, wool slacks and boots, a cap pulled low over her head, invisible to him.

  She’d liked it that Anton Kruppe hadn’t noticed her, at that moment. That she could observe the young man without his observing her. Thinking He’s a scientist. He won’t see anything that isn’t crucial for him to see.

  Now, in her house, Hadley felt a frisson of power over her awkward visitor. He could not have been more than twenty-nine—Hadley was thirty-nine. She was certain that Anton hadn’t known her husband or even that she’d had a husband, who had died. (Hadley still wore her engagement and wedding ring of course.) Her power, she thought, lay in her essential indifference to the man, to his very maleness: his sexuality clumsy as an odd-sized package he was obliged to carry, to proffer to strangers like herself. He had the malnourished look of one who has been rebuffed many times yet remains determined. There are men of surpassing ugliness with whom women fall in love in the mysterious way of women but Anton Kruppe didn’t possess anything like a charismatic ugliness; his maleness was of another species altogether. Thinking of this, Hadley felt a swell of elation. If he kisses me tonight he will smell of—garbage.

  Hadley was smiling. She saw how Anton stared at her, as if her smile was for him.

  She thanked him for the pumpkin another time. Her voice was warm, welcoming. What an “original” gift it was, and so “cleverly” carved.

  Anton’s face glowed with pleasure. “W-Wait, Hedley!—there is more.”

  Hedley he called her. At the co-op, Mrs. Schelle with an emphasis on the final e. Hadley felt no impulse to correct him.

  With boyish enthusiasm Anton seized Hadley’s hand—her fingers must have been icy, unresponsive—and pulled her with him out to the driveway. In the rear of the pickup was a large pot of what appeared to be cream-colored chrysanthemums, past their prime, and a long narrow cardboard box of produce—gnarly carrots with foot-long untrimmed greens, misshapen peppers and pears, bruised MacIntosh apples the co-op couldn’t sell even at reduced prices. And a loaf of multigrain bread that, Anton insisted, had been baked only that morning but hadn’t sold and so would be labeled “day-old” the next morning. “In this country there is much ignorant prejudice of ‘day-old’—everything has to be ‘new’—‘perfect shape’—it is a mystery to me why if to 6 P.M. when the co-op closes this bread is good to sell but tomorrow by 8:30 A.M. when the co-op opens—it is ‘old.’ In the place where we come from, my family and neighbors…” Moral vehemence thickened Anton’s accent, his breath came ever more audibly.

  Hadley would have liked to ask Anton more about his background.

  He’d lived through a nightmare, she knew. Ethnic cleansing. Genocide. Yet, she felt uneasy in his presence. Very likely, it had been a mistake to have invited the eccentric young molecular biologist to drop by her house a second time; she didn’t want to mislead him. She was a widow who had caused her husband to be burnt to ashes and was unrepentant, unpunished. Since March declining invitations from friends who had known her and her husband for years. Impatient with their solicitude, their concern for her who did not deserve such concern. I’m sorry! I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to leave the house. I’m very tired. I don’t sleep any longer. I go to bed and can’t sleep and at 1 A.M. I will take a sleeping pill. At 4 A.M. I will take another. Forget me! I am something that is finished.

  Thinking now that possibly she didn’t have to invite her awkward visitor into the house, a second time; maybe Anton wouldn’t notice her rudeness—wouldn’t know enough to interpret it as rudeness. He’d set the mums and the box with the produce onto a white wrought-iron bench near Hadley’s front walk and was now leading Hardley around the side of the large sprawling stone-and-timber house as he’d done previously, as if he’d been summoned for this purpose. He’d boasted to Hadley of being “Mister Fix-It”—he was the “Mister Fix-It” of his lab at the Institute—his quick, critical eye took in the broken flagstones in the terrace behind Hadley’s house which he’d “repair”—“replace”—for her, on another visit; with the scrutiny of a professional mason he stooped to examine corroding mortar at the base of the back wall of the house; he examined the warped and lopsided garden gate which he managed to fix with a deft motion of his hands—“Now! It is good as ‘new’—eh?”—laughing as if he’d said something unexpectedly witty. Hadley was grateful that Anton had made no mention of the alarming profusion of weeds amid a lush tangle of black-eyed Susans, Russian sage and morning glory vines in her husband’s garden that had not been cultivated this year but allowed to grow wild.

  “Thank you, Anton! Truly you are—‘Mister Fix-It.’”

  Hadley spoke with more warmth than she’d intended. It was her social manner—bright, a little blurred, insincere and animated.

  There was something admirable—unless there was something daunting, aggressive—about her visitor’s energy—that brimmed and thrummed like rising yeast. Hadley would have supposed that after a day presumably spent at the molecular biology lab—work-weeks in such labs could run beyond one hundred hours during crucial experiments—and several hours at the co-op Anton would have been daz
ed with exhaustion; yet there he was, tireless in his inspection of the exterior of Hadley’s house—inspecting windows, locks, dragging aside broken limbs and storm debris. You’d think that Anton Kruppe was an old friend of the family for whom the discovery that one of the floodlights on Hadley’s garage had burnt out was something of a coup, arousing him to immediate action—“You have a bulb to replace—yes? And a ladder with ‘steps’—‘step-ladder’—? I will put in—now—before it is too dark.”

  So adamant, Hadley had no choice but to give in.

  And no choice except to invite Anton Kruppe inside, for just a while.

  Politely and with regret explaining that she had a dinner engagement, later that evening. But would he come inside, for a drink?

  “Hedley yes thank you! I would like—yes so much.”

  Stammering with gratitude Anton scraped his hiking boots against the welcome mat. The soles were muddy and stuck with leaves. Though Hadley insisted it wasn’t necessary Anton removed the boots with a grunt and left them on the front step carefully placed side by side. What large boots they were, like a horse’s hooves! The sodden shoelaces trailed out—left, right—in perfect symmetry.