Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  He pauses, breathing quickly. In his eyes a look of utter exasperation, righteousness.

  “It only proves that I was living a mistake, Jane. It proves that I don’t know why I did anything before I met you.”

  Courtney! The name makes me smile, in scorn. A pretentious name, for a plain dull unloved woman.

  After lovemaking that exhausts us, strains our hearts & chafes our skin—my most sensitive skin, the insides of my stump-thighs, & the soft pale cottony flesh of my breasts—sinking then into sleep, open-mouthed, quivering. The man breathes heavily, deeply—his face close up appears contorted—his forehead creased & lines in his cheeks like erosion in earth—his skin is a rough hot parchment-like skin—clammy with sweat, exuding a sharp pungent smell—by degrees I feel myself weakening I don’t want to love this man, I am not able to love any man. Still awkwardly my thigh-stumps are spread & fitted to the man’s thighs, & his arms around me are still tight, uncomfortably tight, as he sinks into a jagged twitchy sleep where I can’t follow except the love that passes between us—I think it is love—as in a single thrumming artery—whose thought is We are twins. In our souls. We are joined together at the heart.

  In the morning, he was gone.

  Very early in the morning, before dawn. While I lay dazed & groggy in sleep & he lowered his weight onto the bed beside me, stroking my hair, my naked shoulders & back saying he has to leave & he will call me—he will see me that evening—he will try to see me—there is so much happening in his life, a series of crises—“You are the central crisis of my life, Jane!—but you are not the only crisis”—& on his strong legs he goes away & for an hour or more I lie unmoving like a child trapped in a wreck—waiting to determine Am I alive? Or—am I dead? Rousing myself then & reaching for my Step Up! legs & my crutches & maneuvering myself into the day & at Barnegat library there is Jane Erdley reliable & professional as usual—in a lime-green velvet vintage dress, with a tinkling glass-bead necklace—her Step Up! legs stylishly encased in ivory eyelet stockings & her demure plastic feet in black patent leather Mary Janes. Yet sternly instructing myself through this long day—as for much of my life following the accident when drunk-Daddy fell asleep at the wheel—Look, Jane: you are alone. You will always be alone. No one will love you, & no one will desire you. And if there is love, & desire, it will be a sickness in the other, that will revolt you.

  Monday night following Easter Sunday when he had to be with his family—a large family gathering at his parents’ house on the Sound—& there seems to have been some stress at this gathering—he doesn’t speak of it, & I will not ask—he is morose, brooding—by the smell of his breath I understand that he has been drinking before he came to the library for me—complaining how his body hadn’t ever “fitted” him right—his left leg especially is “wrong-angled”—only with me, his darling Jane, does his body fit right; suddenly he confides in me, there was a girl in his grammar school, in fact in kindergarten he’d first seen her, she’d had to use crutches—children’s crutches—& when she was older, a wheelchair—bright steel braces on her legs which were her legs but withered, wasted-away—yet she’d been so pretty—& smart—her name was Wendy—Wendy Hauserman—he’d been fascinated by this girl whose family moved away from Barnegat when they were in sixth grade & later when he was thirteen at summer camp in the Poconos there was the wife of the camp director—a tall blond beautiful woman with a sullen face, wide mouth & gray eyes & rarely smiled—said to be “Swedish”—her hair long & straight & so pale it looked white in certain lights—at dusk, & by firelight—her name was Brigit & she was missing a leg—her left leg, below the knee—half her leg had been amputated after a skiing accident—yet she lay in the sunshine in a bikini on an outcropping of shale, her pale skin oiled & her eyes hidden behind dark glasses & sometimes Brigit wore her prosthetic limb, & sometimes not; sometimes Brigit smiled at the boy-campers, & sometimes not.

  “Then—when I first met you…I mean, when I first saw you—on the sidewalk, with your colleagues—I thought…”

  Holding my breath & trying not to stiffen in the man’s embrace. He has been stroking my breasts, my stomach, my thighs idly, as if not aware of what he’s doing; since Easter dinner at his family’s house, he has been in a strange unsettled mood; he has smoked several cigarettes, he has not asked if he can smoke in my apartment & I have not told him Please no! The smell of smoke makes me nauseated & numbly I listen to him revert to the familiar account of how he’d first seen me, he has told me this several times in virtually the same words, I am listening in dismay, in disgust & impatience & when he prepares to leave my apartment at midnight I tell him:

  “Maybe—please—you should not come back.”

  He goes away, he is gone.

  He doesn’t call me. He calls.

  He sends me a letter, Federal Express. A plain white envelope, a folded sheet of plain white paper.

  Dear Jane I love you!!! Only you.

  I will make you know this. I believe you know this.

  He returns to my apartment. He knocks at the door. His is a special knock, a kind of code. I have not answered his phone messages or his frantic emails & so he has driven to Shore Island & stands at my door & I have no choice but to admit him. On my crutches—I open the door. He is unshaven, his white shirt is rumpled & his eyes behind the (crooked) steel-rimmed glasses are ringed in fatigue. In triumph he says, “I left her. It’s over. I told her, I couldn’t continue to live with her, I’m in love with another woman.”

  The room is darkened, we grope for each other like blind persons.

  “I can change my life, Jane. The externals of my life. If I can be here with you.”

  In bed he fits my stumps to his shoulders. He is hot-skinned, trembling. He is rough, agitated—he hurts me, without knowing. His cries are like his nightmare-cries, he’d dismissed so lightly. I feel the jump of his seed inside me, the juice of the man, his most secret life. He is not a young man & yet every cell in his body yearns to impregnate me, the female; what remains of me, the stump-torso, legless & open to the male, vulnerable as a wound. “We could die together. I want to die with you. The two of us together, as in the womb. As if we haven’t been born yet.”

  Tangled in the bedclothes we fall asleep. In the night I’m wakened by his breathing, his harsh breathing & the mutterings of his sleep. I kiss his mouth, his breath is heated, moist & sour-smelling. I suck at his breath like a giant cat. His jaws are covered in silvery stubble. Beneath my groping fingers, his penis stirs. The stump-penis, soft & limp as a slug. I rub one of my stumps against it, the sensation is electric—the nerve-endings are not dead, or cauterized, only dormant, awaiting this touch.

  We could die together. I want to die with you. It would have been better—the two of us not yet born.

  That weekend in Atlantic City at the Trump Casino—where I’ve come alone, by bus. Friday night entering the vast glittering-humming casino & feeling eyes move upon me idly at first, & then—some of them—snagging. In a pool of fish I am a curious-shaped fish—I am a “wounded” specimen. Yet making my way swiftly through the Friday evening crowds—to the blackjack tables—here, my senses are alert—here, I feel a tug of hope—for the occasion I am wearing one of my velvet dresses—luscious dark crimson with a sharp V-neck & a scalloped hemline, lifted at the front to expose the knee—the knees—the steel-gleaming Step Up! knees—& my shoulder-length hair brushed & glossy & pinned back with tortoiseshell combs like a schoolgirl of another era long-ago & romantic & as a novelty—to set me apart from Jane Erdley Circulation—my skin is powdered geisha-white—my mouth is a damp crimson rose, or wound—in mirrors on the casino floor I’ve glimpsed my reflection, I am repelled by my reflection & fascinated thinking Oh is that me? Would Daddy recognize his Jane-Jane, now? I love the way strangers stare at me—the way they step aside, clear a path for me as I fly by them—there is respect for me, a young woman alone, on a Friday night, in Atlantic City, decked out in sleek white arm-support plastic crutches & prosthetic
legs—respect & repugnance in about equal measure but at the blackjack table I am a serious gambler—I am totally absorbed in the action—the blackjack dealer (male, mid-thirties, sharp-eyed) is stiff with me, stiff-smiling & avoiding my eye—as if warning me off but I am oblivious—I am not drunk, but I am oblivious—I pay no heed to others observing me—I have just two chips remaining, of five—each chip is worth fifty dollars—in less than an hour I have lost three hundred fifty dollars. At a nearby table a man has been watching me intently—his face is a blur—their faces are always blurs—his hair is a blur of sandy-white—though my impression is, his face is not old—I love the sensation of eyes crawling onto me like ants—unlike ants, these eyes can be shaken off—I can make my way past them defiant & graceful on my crutches—if I am patient at the blackjack table there will be one who will approach me carrying his drink in his hand, his chips in his other hand loose & jangling like coins & he will wait for the opportunity to slip in beside me at the blackjack table guessing it might be time for this rueful cripple-girl-gambler—who appears to be alone in the Trump Casino, 10 P.M. Friday night—to ask to borrow a chip—a chip, or two—to regain my losses—smiling to think how losses sounds like kisses—& bring a cheery smile to my face—such smiles flare up like a sudden struck match here in the glittery gaudy casino—the blurred-faced man is drawing closer, he is an older man yet not an old man & he is somber & sympathetic beside me now observing the blackjack cards from my perspective, observing my set-aside crutches, my lifeless but showy Step Up! legs in black patterned stockings all but hidden by the table & seeing the uplifted card & the flash of its numerals & if it’s a loss, very likely it is a loss, the girl-gambler will wince, suck at her crimson lips & wipe at her eyes & this is the strategic moment for the gentleman to lean a little closer & to say, just audibly above the hum & buzz of the casino—“Excuse me?”

  II.

  THE BEATING

  Still alive! from the doorway of the intensive care unit I can see my father in his bed swaddled in white like a comatose infant, and he is still alive.

  So long I’ve been away. So long I’ve traveled, and so far.

  Yet nothing seems to have changed in my absence. My mother and two other visitors are standing beside my father’s bed, their backs to me. From their demeanor you can deduce that my father is still “unresponsive” after the morning’s surgery to reduce swelling in his brain; he is unmoving except in random twitches and shudders; he is breathing—arduously, noisily—by way of a machine; his every heartbeat is being monitored on a screen above his bed; on this screen as on a TV screen an erratic scribble is being written, accompanied by an electronic beeping that reminds me of the cheeping of baby chicks. Grotesquely my father’s wounded head has been swathed in white gauze exposing a single bruised eye like a peephole someone has cruelly defaced so you can’t see in.

  Earlier that day my mother had asked me to leave, there wasn’t room for me at my father’s bedside. Descending then three floors to the first floor of Sparta Memorial Hospital where there was a small visitor’s lounge adjacent to a small cafeteria beneath dim-flickering fluorescent lights. Such a depressing place! Such chill, such smells! This was July 1959. That long ago, you have to smile—I don’t blame you, I would smile in your place—to think that people like us took ourselves so seriously. You think But you’re all going to die, why does it matter exactly when? Yet this was the time, and this was the place, when my father was still alive.

  Madelyn! heard the news about your father, what a terrible thing, what a shock how is he?

  Madelyn! tell us all you can remember, all that you must have seen?

  Hadn’t changed my clothes since my father had been brought to the hospital two and a half days before. Slept in the clothes I’d been wearing at the time of the beating, Rangers T-shirt, khaki shorts, sneakers without socks, we’d been visiting my grandmother earlier that afternoon and we’d dropped by the Sparta Blues Festival on the river on our way home, and after that, a detour, as my father called it, to his office on East Capitol Street, and now my clothes were rumpled and smelly for I’d slept in them sprawled on top of my bed without the energy to undress and anxious to be prepared should someone from the hospital call in the night, if my mother came to wake me Hurry! get up! they want us at the hospital, your father may be dying. This terrible call had not yet come and yet every breath I drew was a preparation for it, I was fourteen years old and found myself in one of those cruel fairy tales in which a daughter must perform certain rituals and tests without question, that her father will be allowed to live. And when we were at my father’s bedside in the chill of the ICU where your fingernails turned blue without your noticing, and you could fall asleep on your feet like a zombie, and begin to crumple to the floor without your noticing, it could not happen that the terrible call would come waking us from our exhausted sleep for already we were awake and we were at the hospital. Softly my mother spoke my father’s name: Harvey? Harvey? I love you. And in an urgent undertone I said: Daddy? Daddy? It’s Madelyn. For to say I love you was not possible. For so desperately I loved my father, to have spoken such words I love you was not possible. I could not have explained why, there were no words to explain why. Seeing me you’d have thought, A sulky girl, when she should be a good girl. My mother who was ordinarily very alert to my moods and to my “personal appearance” hadn’t seemed to notice that I’d been sleeping in my clothes and smelled of my body for having washed only my sticky hands and rubbed a washcloth over my feverish face, my red-rimmed pig eyes. (Those pig eyes in the mirror, I could not bear to see. Brimming with hot-guilt tears that spilled and burned like acid.) In the past two and a half days I hadn’t been able to sit down at any table to eat and had not been able to eat much as a consequence but I made certain that I brushed my teeth until my gums bled for I could not bear the sensation of anything between my teeth.

  Who was it? they’d asked. Who did this to your father?

  Try to remember if you saw. Must’ve seen.

  Hospital rules for ICU differed from rules for the rest of the hospital: no more than three visitors at a time were allowed at a patient’s bedside. And so when my father’s older brother and his wife came to see my father, my mother asked me to leave. Of course this was a reasonable request. Of course I was not angry at my mother, or my relatives. Yet quickly I walked away, avoiding the friendly smiles of the ICU nurses who’d come to recognize me and my family Don’t look at me! Please don’t smile at me! You don’t know me! Leave me alone. I took the stairs down to the foyer, not the elevator. I dreaded being trapped inside an elevator with strangers, still more I dreaded encountering someone who recognized me as Harvey Fleet’s daughter who would take my hand in sympathy or hug me, and I would push rudely away, my face would break and turn ugly with tears glistening like snot.

  How small the Sparta Hospital was, in 1959! Yet no one then seemed to have known.

  Such silly people. It’s easy to laugh at us.

  The very air exuded a spent, sepia cast as if faded by time like an old Polaroid photograph. Though the hospital was air-conditioned, cold as a refrigerator, yet there was a just-perceptible odor of stale urine, fecal matter, rot beneath the sharper odor of disinfectant. Visitors to the hospital and hospital staff appeared stiff and clumsy as mannequin figures in a painting by Edward Hopper. Voices were overly shrill and emphatic as TV voices and if there was laughter it was not convincing laughter but reminded me of canned TV laughter. Of course I was one of those figures myself, a solitary girl of fourteen in rumpled clothes sitting at a table, at the edge of the cafeteria. My eyes stung with fatigue, my head ached, and there was a sour, dark taste at the back of my mouth. Badly I did not want to be in this place but had nowhere else to go, for if I left the hospital, and went home, my father might die, and I would not be at his bedside. I’d brought a library book with me but couldn’t concentrate, how insubstantial were printed words, passages of type in a book of dog-eared pages, I could think only of my father trapped i
n his hospital bed in the intensive care unit, unconscious, made to breathe in anguished gasps by a machine, his ravaged head and face swathed in white gauze and a single bruised and bloodshot eye exposed…. And I thought of how I had found him lying on the floor of his office on East Capitol Street. Thinking at first that he had lost his balance somehow and fallen, struck his head on the sharp edge of the desk, for he was bleeding from a head wound, and he was bleeding from injuries to his face. He was whimpering and moaning through clenched teeth. The door to my father’s office had been left open and so I stood in the doorway for an astonished moment uncertain what it was I was seeing. Before I had time to be frightened the thought came to me Daddy would not want me to see him like this. He would not want anyone to see him like this.

  I began to see how memory pools might accumulate in such places as this cafeteria and in waiting rooms through the hospital. In corners, in the shadows. Beneath tables like mine. These memory pools made the worn tile floor damp, sticky, discolored as by mildew. And maybe there were actual tears, soaked into the floor. I felt a shiver of dread: you could not walk anywhere in such a place without the anguished memories of strangers sticking to your shoes. Their dread of what was to come in their lives, what ruptures, what unspeakable losses. Early that morning my father had undergone emergency surgery to reduce pressure on his brain, into which burst blood vessels had been bleeding since he’d suffered “blunt force trauma” to the head. Yet my father was but one of how many thousands of patients who’d been hospitalized at Sparta Memorial Hospital over the years…. One day with precise scientific instruments certain of these memories might be exhumed, I thought. Like organic matter identified from the stains of long ago. And so there might be a future time when these thoughts that so tormented me now would be calmly recalled; when all this, in which I was trapped—the hospital, the visitors’ lounge, the slow-ticking afternoon in July 1959—would be past.