Sourland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The irony was, I wasn’t so moral—so “good”—that I couldn’t cheat like the others. And more cleverly than the others. But something in me resisted the impulse to follow the others who were crass and careless in their cheating. I am not one of you. I am superior to you. Finally, I’d written to the dean of students a brief letter of only a few sentences and I’d mailed the letter in a stamped envelope. Even as I wrote the letter I understood that I was making a mistake and yet I’d had no choice.

  I thought of my cousin Sonny whom I loved. Whom I had not now seen in years. My boy cousin who’d been beaten in the youth facility yet refused to report the beatings out of what code of honor or fear of reprisal, I didn’t know. I thought of Sonny who’d killed a man out of another sort of honor, to protect my mother. Sonny had not needed to think, he’d only acted. He had traded his life for Momma’s, by that action. But he’d had no choice.

  Dean Chawdrey persisted, “Who was cheating, Aimée? You’ve done the right thing to report it but now you must tell me who the girl is.”

  The girl! I wanted to laugh in the dean’s face, that she should imagine only one cheater at midterms.

  I mumbled, “…can’t.”

  “What do you mean, ‘can’t’? Or ‘won’t’?”

  I sat silent, clasping my hands in my lap. Mickey Stecke had bitten fingernails, cuticles ridged with blood. One of my roommates had tried to manicure my nails, painted them passionflower purple, as a kind of joke, I’d supposed. Remnants of the nail polish could still be detected if you looked closely enough.

  “What was your motive, then, Aimée, for writing to me? To report that ‘someone was cheating’ at midterms but to be purposefully vague about who? I’ve looked into your schedule. Perhaps I can assume that the alleged ‘cheating’ occurred during Mr. Werth’s biology midterm, last Friday morning? Is this so?”

  Yes. It was so. By my sick, guilty look, Dean Chawdrey understood my meaning.

  “I hope, Aimée, that there is merit to this? I hope that you are not making a false report, Aimée, to revenge yourself upon a friend?”

  I was shocked. I shook my head. “No…”

  “Or is there more than one girl? More than one of your ‘friends’ involved?”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. The buzzing in my head had become frantic. I wondered if a blood vessel in my brain might burst. I was frightened recalling how my aunt Georgia had described finding an elderly relative seated in a chair in his home, in front of his TV, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, blood “leaking” out of one ear.

  “Aimée, will you look at me, please! It is very rude, your way of behaving. By this time, you must certainly know better.”

  Through the buzzing in my head I heard the Dean chide me for my “mysterious subterfuge.” Wondering at my “motive” in writing to her. If I refused to be more forthcoming, how was the Academy’s honor code upheld? “I wonder if, in your mutinous way, you are not making a mockery of our tradition. This, perhaps, was your intention all along.”

  At this, I tried to protest. My voice was shocked, hushed. In classes, as Mickey Stecke, I was a girl whose shyness erupted into bursts of speech and animation. I was smart, and I was funny. My teachers liked me, I think. I was brash and witty and willing to be laughed at, but not rebellious or hostile; no one would have called me “mutinous” I did not challenge the authority of my teachers for I required them desperately, I adored my teachers who were all I had to “grade” me, to define me to myself and my aunt Agnes. Dean Chawdrey should have been one of these adult figures, yet somehow she was not, she saw through my flimsy pose as my cousin Sonny had once laughed at me in a Hallowe’en costume flung together out of Aunt Georgia’s cast-off fabrics What in hell’re you s’posed to be, kid?

  Dean Chawdrey had dropped my letter onto her desk, with a look of distaste. It lay between us now, as evidence.

  “I’ve looked into your record, ‘Aimée Stecke.’ You are a trustee scholar, your full tuition is paid by the Academy. Your grades are quite good. Your teachers’ reports are, on the whole, favorable. If there is one recurring assessment, it is ‘immature for her age.’ Are you aware of this, Aimée?”

  I shook my head, no. But I knew that it was so.

  “Tell me, Aimée. Since coming to our school, have you encountered any previous instances of ‘cheating’?”

  I shook my head, yes. “But I…”

  “‘But’?”

  “…didn’t think it was so important. I mean, so many girls were cheating, not such serious cheating as lately, so I’d thought…”

  “‘So many’? ‘So many girls’? What are you saying, Aimée?”

  An angry flush lifted into the Dean’s fleshy face. I tried to explain but my voice trailed off miserably. So stared-at, by an adult who clearly disliked me, I seemed to have lost my powers of even fumbling speech. Thoughts came disjointed to me as to one tramping across a field of mud half-conscious that her boots are sinking ever more deeply into the mud, being actively sucked into the mud, not mud but quicksand and it’s too late to turn back.

  “But why then, Aimée, did you decide just the other day to come forward? If it has been so long, so many instances of ‘cheating’, and you’d been indifferent?”

  “Because…” I swallowed hard, not knowing where this was leading. “…I’d signed the pledge. To uphold the…”

  “To uphold the honor code, Aimée. Yes. Otherwise you would not have been permitted to remain at the Academy. But the honor code is a contract binding you to report cheating at all times, and obviously you have not done that.” Dean Chawdrey’s small prim mouth was creasing into a smile.

  I was sitting very still as if paralyzed. I was listening to the buzzing in my head. Remembering how, in the late winter of our first year of living with my aunt Georgia, Lyle and I had heard a low, almost inaudible buzzing in the plasterboard wall in our room. Above the furnace vent where, if you pressed your ear against it, you could hear what sounded like voices at a distance. My brother had thought it might be tiny people inside. I’d thought it had something to do with telephone wires. It was a warm dreamy sound. It was mixed in with our warm cozy room above the furnace, that Sonny had given up for us. Then one day Aunt Georgia told us with a look of amused disgust that the sound in the wall was only flies—“Damn flies nest in there, hatch their damn eggs then start coming out with the first warm weather.” And so it had happened one day a large black fly appeared on a windowpane, then another fly appeared on the ceiling, and another, and another until one balmy March morning the wall above the furnace vent was covered in a glittering net of flies so groggy they were slow to escape death from the red plastic swatter wielded in my aunt’s deft hand.

  “You were one of them, Aimée. Weren’t you.”

  This wasn’t a question but a statement. There was no way to defend myself except to shake my head, no. Dean Chawdrey said in the way of a lawyer summing up a case, “How would you know, otherwise? And until now, for some quaint reason, you haven’t come forward as you’d pledged you would do. What you’ve alleged, because it’s unprovable, is dangerously akin to slander. Mr. Werth will have to be informed. His integrity has been impugned, too.”

  I said, faltering, “But, Dean Chawdrey—”

  “The only person who has reported cheating at midterms is you, Aimée,” Dean Chawdrey paused, to let that sink in. “Naturally, we have to wonder at your involvement. Do you claim that, since coming to the Amherst Academy, you have never participated in ‘cheating’?—in any infraction of the honor code?”

  It was as if Dean Chawdrey was shining a flashlight into my heart. I had no defense. I heard myself stammer a confession.

  “…sometimes, a few times, freshman year, I helped other girls with their term papers. I guess I helped my roommates earlier this fall, with…But I never…”

  “‘Never’—what?”

  I lowered my head in shame, trying not to cry. I could not comprehend what had gone wrong yet I felt the justice of i
t. Honor was a venomous snake that, if you were reckless enough to lift by its tail, was naturally going to whip around and bite you.

  The rest of the visit passed in a blur. Dean Chawdrey did all the talking. You could see that the woman was skilled in what she was doing, other girls had sat in the chair in which I was sitting and had been severely talked-to, many times in the past. Behind the rimless bifocals, Dean Chawdrey’s eyes like watery jelly may have glittered in triumph. Her flat, nasal voice may have trembled with barely restrained exhilaration but it was restrained, and would remain restrained. I heard myself informed that I would be placed on “academic probation” for the remainder of the term. I would be summoned to appear before the disciplinary committee. More immediately, Dean Chawdrey would notify the headmistress of the Academy about my allegations and the confession I’d “voluntarily made” to her, and the headmistress would want to speak with me and with a parent or legal guardian, before I could be “reinstated” as a student. The buzzing was subsiding in my head, I knew the visit was ending. The terrible danger was past now that the worst that could happen had happened. I saw Dean Chawdrey’s mouth moving but heard nothing more of her words. Behind the woman’s large head an oblong-shaped leaden window glared with the sullen rain-light of October. It was no secret that the Dean of Students wore a wig that fitted her head like a helmet: the color of a wren’s wet feathers, shinily synthetic, bizarrely “bouffant.” Her right hand lay flat on my letter, that incriminating piece of evidence, as if to prevent me from snatching it away if I tried. I gathered my things, and stood. I must have moved abruptly, Dean Chawdrey drew back. I tried to smile. I had seen Momma smiling in a trance of oblivion not knowing where she was, what had been done to her or for her sake. I seemed to be explaining something to Dean Chawdrey but she did not understand: “It was a test, wasn’t it—‘promtly.’ To see if I would say something. The misspelling. ‘Promptly.’” Dean Chawdrey was staring at me in alarm, with no idea what I meant. I turned and ran from the room. In the outer office, the Dean’s secretary spoke sharply to me. Under my breath I murmured Get the fuck away. In my stocking feet (I’d had to kick off my muddy boots in the vestibule of the administration building, all this while I’d been facing the Dean like a child in dingy white woollen socks) I ran down a flight of stairs, located my fallen boots covered in mud and bits of hay and kicked my feet back into them. I ran outside into the rain, across a patch of hay-strewn muddy lawn that sucked at my feet with a lewd energy. Somehow, it had become dusk. The edges of things were dissolving like wet tissue. A harsh wind blowing east from Lake Erie tasted of snow to come that night but for the moment it continued to rain as it had rained for days. Raveling-out was my word for this time of day, after classes, before supper. Neither day nor night. I thought of my aunt Georgia in the days before her son had been taken from her humming to herself as she’d unraveled knitting, cast-off sweaters, afghans, energetically winding a ball of used yarn around her hand. My aunt would use the yarn again, nothing in her household was discarded or lost. I would pack my things while the other girls were in the dining hall. What I wished to take with me of my things, my clothes, a few books to read on the bus, not textbooks but paperbacks, and my notebooks, my journal to which I trusted the myriad small secrets of my life in full knowledge that such secrets were of no more worth than the paper, the very ballpoint ink, that contained them. In a flash of inspiration I saw that I would leave a message of farewell on the pillow of my neatly made bed for my roommates and I would leave the residence hall by a rear door and no one would see me. I would never see them again, I thought. Aloud I said, preparing the words I would write: “I will never see any of you again.”

  No time to dawdle! This is an emergency.

  I had money for a bus ticket, even a train ticket. I had money to escape.

  This was money scrupulously saved from the allowances my aunt Agnes sent me to cover “expenses” at the Amherst Academy. And money from Momma, five-, ten-, twenty-dollar bills enclosed as if impulsively in jokey greeting cards. Lyle & I say hello & love & we miss you. Your MOMMA. I’d hardened my heart against my mother but I’d kept the money she sent me, secreted away in a bureau drawer for just such an emergency.

  It was my cousin Sonny I wanted to see. Somehow, I’d become desperate to see him. Not my aunt Agnes who loved me, not my mother who claimed to love me. Only Sonny whom I hadn’t seen in almost five years and who never replied to my letters and cards. I’d been told that in September, when he’d turned twenty-one, Sonny had been released into a probationary work program and was living in a halfway house in Chautauqua Falls. Momma had sent me the address and telephone number of Seneca House, as the place was called, saying she hadn’t had time to see Sonny yet but she meant to take the trip, soon. Sonny’s work was something outdoor like tree service, highway construction—“That boy was always so good with his hands.”

  Momma was the kind of woman who could say such a thing in utter unconsciousness of what it might mean to another person. And if you’d indicate how you felt, Momma would stare in perplexity and hurt. Why, Aimée. You don’t get that sarcastic mouth from your mother.

  The Greyhound bus that passed through Chautauqua Falls didn’t leave until the next morning so I hid away, wrapped in my raincoat with the hood lowered over my face, in a corner of the bus station. This night unlike any other night of my life until then passed in a delirium of partial sleep like a film in which all color has faded and sound has been reduced to mysterious distortions like waves in water. In the morning it was revealed that a gritty snow had fallen through the night, glittery-white like scattered mica that melted in sunshine as the bus lumbered into the hilly countryside north and east of Buffalo. Repeatedly I checked the address I had for Sonny: 337 Seneca. I hadn’t yet written to Sonny at this address, discouraged by his long silence. It was sad to think that it was probably so, as my mother had said, Sonny’s writing skills were crude and childlike and he’d have been embarrassed to write to me. I had the telephone number for the halfway house but hadn’t had the courage to call.

  My fear was that Sonny wouldn’t want to see me. There was a rift between Momma and the Brandts, I didn’t fully understand but knew that I had to share Momma’s guilt for what she’d caused to happen in Sonny’s life.

  I stored my suitcase and duffel bag in a locker in the Chautauqua Falls bus station. I located Seneca Street and walked a mile or so to the halfway house address through an inner city neighborhood of pawnshops, bail-bond services, cheap hotels, taverns and pizzerias and X-rated video stores. In the raw cold sunlight everything seemed heightened, exposed. I felt the eyes of strangers on me, and walked quickly, looking straight ahead. Seneca House turned out to be a three-story clapboard house painted a startling mustard yellow. Next door was Chautauqua County Family Welfare Services and across the street a Goodwill outlet and a storefront church, New Assembly of God. I rang the doorbell at Seneca House and after several minutes a heavy-set Hispanic woman in her thirties answered the door. I said that I was a cousin of Sonny Brandt and hoped that I could see him and the woman asked if I meant Sean Brandt and I said yes, he was my cousin.

  The woman told me that Sean was working, and wouldn’t be back until six. “There’s rules about visitors upstairs. You can’t go upstairs.” She must have assumed I was lying, I wasn’t a relative of Sonny’s but a girlfriend. My face pounded with blood.

  “How old’r you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “You got I.D.?”

  The woman was slyly teasing, not exactly hostile. I wondered if there was a law about minors visiting residents of Seneca House without adult supervision. In my rumpled raincoat, looking exhausted and dazed from my journey, speaking in a faltering voice, I must have looked not even sixteen. I saw, just off the squalid lobby in which we were standing, a visitors’ room, or lounge, with a few vinyl chairs and Formica-topped tables, wanting badly to ask if I could wait for Sonny there, for it wasn’t yet 4 P.M. The woman repeated again, with a cruel smi
le, “There’s no visitors upstairs, see. That’s for your protection.”

  I went away, and walked aimlessly. Outside a Sunoco station, I used a pay phone to call the latest telephone number I had for my mother in Ransomville, but no one answered and when a recording clicked on, a man’s voice, I hung up quickly. My latest stepfather! I could not remember his name.

  I knew that I should call my aunt Agnes. I knew that, by now, the Amherst Academy would have contacted her. And she would be upset, and anxious for me. And she would know how mistaken she’d been, to put her faith in me. Her “favorite niece” who’d betrayed her trust.

  “Fact is, I’m Devra’s daughter. That can’t change.”

  The weirdest thing: I had a strong impulse to speak with my brother. Lyle was eleven now, a sixth grader at Ransomville Middle School, almost a stranger to me. We had Sonny in common, we’d loved our cousin Sonny in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road. Lyle would remember, maybe things I couldn’t remember. I called the school to ask if “Lyle Stecke” was a student there (though I knew that he was a student there) and after some confusion I was told yes, and I said that I was a relative of Lyle’s but I did not have a message for him. By this time the receptionist to whom I was speaking had begun to be suspicious so I hung up, quickly.

  I walked slowly back to the mustard-yellow clapboard house with the handpainted sign SENECA HOUSE. It was nearing 6 P.M. I was very hungry, I hadn’t wanted to spend money on food and had had the vague hope that Sonny and I might have dinner together. I thought that I would wait for my cousin on the street, to avoid the Hispanic woman who suspected me of being Sonny’s girlfriend. At 6:20 P.M., a battered-looking bus marked CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY YOUTH SERVICES pulled up to the curb in a miasma of exhaust and ten, twelve, fifteen men disembarked. All were young, some appeared to be hardly more than boys. All were wearing work clothes, work boots, grimy-looking caps. Nearly all were smoking. A fattish disheveled young man with sand-colored skin and a scruffy goatee, several young black and Hispanic men, a muscled, slow-moving young Caucasian with a burnt-looking skin, in filth-stiffened work clothes, a baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead…The men passed by me talking and laughing loudly, a few of them glancing in my direction, but taking no special notice of me, as I stared at them unable to see Sonny among them, confused and uncertain. Waiting for Sonny, I’d become increasingly anxious. For soon it would be dark and I was in a city I didn’t know and would have to find a place for the night unless I called Momma and in desperation told her where I was, and why.