American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  They tell her, “Maybe you have an unknown admirer, Glynnis,” but Glynnis says, “No, the card says ‘Happiness to both.’ It must be one of you,” she says, looking at them half pleadingly—at Denis and Roberta, at Malcolm and June, at the Kuhns, at the Cassitys, at the Hawleys, at Leonard and Paul. But no: no one will acknowledge the pink roses.

  Later in the evening Glynnis whispers, in Denis’s ear, “Did you send them? Please tell me if you did.” And Denis says, guiltily, “Darling, I wish I had.”

  THE SURPRISE PART of the party is an unqualified success, Glynnis sees. Her husband is in as high spirits, as boyish, as flush-faced, as eloquent and witty and tender, as she has seen him in a very long time. And the appetizers are excellent, as Glynnis McCullough’s appetizers invariably are; Beluga caviar, and two kinds of pâté, and a fastidiously prepared vegetable platter. “But don’t serve them too much,” Glynnis instructs Marvis. “After all, there is dinner yet to come.”

  Leonard Oppenheim and Paul Owen, who have lived together in one of the old “historic” houses in Hazelton for nearly twenty years, have brought the McCulloughs a half dozen bottles of champagne, and a stunning champagne it is—Taittinger Blanc de Blancs 1976. (“Is this as good as it tastes?” Malcolm Oliver asks the room, holding his champagne glass aloft.) Others have brought bottles of Scotch, brandy, liqueur, candied fruits, chocolates; Ian’s fellow squash players—Denis, Malcolm, Vaughn, Vincent—have chipped in to buy him a “custom-sculpted” milk chocolate squash racquet, from the Hazelton Gourmet. There are birthday cards, most of them comical, one or two quite blackly comic, turning upon the theme of being fifty years old. (“I was really quite surprised, browsing through gift shops,” Roberta Grinnell confides in Glynnis. “The extraordinary number of joke cards, in very bad taste, that have to do with men turning fifty.” “Men, and not women?” Glynnis asks. “Men, and not women,” Roberta says. “Why, do you suppose?” Glynnis asks, frowning. “Wouldn’t the other kind sell?”) Glynnis had virtually pleaded with their friends not to buy Ian presents, not to be extravagant, but of course they ignored her, for what is a birthday celebration without presents, they protested, and, before dinner, seated in a high-backed chair rather like a throne, Ian McCullough unwraps these gifts, taking care, as Glynnis cautions him, not to rip the beautiful wrapping paper. And some of these presents are indeed more extravagant than Glynnis might have wished: a wheat-colored shetland sweater, for instance, from Meika and Vaughn, bought at Hazelton’s notoriously overpriced scotch Wool shop; an enormous art book, from the Olivers—Treasures of the Etruscans; and, of course, the costly liquors, the gourmet shop items. And then there are the funny gifts, the gifts that make Ian laugh, an ebony and brass dress cane, for instance, from the Hawleys, with a rolled-up backgammon set (board, chips, and dice) inside; an elegant silk tie in the shape of a stylized but aggressively ugly fish, from a friend, Leo Reinhart, who couldn’t be with them tonight; a gigantic roll of athletic support tape, also from Ian’s squash buddies—says Ian solemnly, brandishing the tape aloft, “This is just what I need.” And Glynnis’s present to Ian, fussily wrapped in tissue paper of all colors of the rainbow, is a ten-speed Schwinn racing bicycle: hardly an extraordinary surprise, since Glynnis and Bianca have been after Ian for years to replace his battered old three-speed bicycle with something newer and more à la mode; but Ian seems genuinely taken with it, and thanks her, and kisses her, and makes as if to ride the bicycle out the door. And there is a good deal of laughter, and more drinks are poured. Glynnis hears another of the Blanc de Blancs being uncorked.

  And this leaves Bianca, who had, pleading exhaustion from the flight and the general busyness of the day—“I had classes this morning, Mother, you seem to forget”—slipped away from the party after the initial toasts.

  But now, dramatically, as if on cue—for Glynnis is about to summon her guests to dinner; it is almost nine-thirty—Bianca reappears, in theatrical attire: a black cutaway coat and trousers, starched white shirt, black derby jauntily aslant on her head. The McCulloughs’ friends turn to her, make way for her—What on earth, Bianca! Ah, look at Bianca! Glynnis and Ian merely stare at their daughter, so suddenly the center of attention; they are taken totally by surprise. They know that Bianca has been involved in theater, dance, and “performance arts” at college; but they are not prepared, ah, they are not prepared, for this.

  Bianca’s face is powdered a deathly white, like a geisha’s; her lips are a luscious bee-stung red; her eyebrows and lashes are blackened as if with soot. Her cottony fawn-colored hair has been pinned back under the hat, and dangling rhinestone earrings gleam in her ears. And she wears spike-heeled black patent leather shoes! Glynnis thinks, This is not like Bianca at all. This is not Bianca, at all.

  A space is quickly cleared at the far end of the room and a spot-light of sorts set up. Bianca has brought a tape deck and sets it going; tinny, discordant, cutely lurid music begins—a “symphonic poem” by a contemporary American composer of whom no one in the room has heard. (“Turn down the volume at least,” Glynnis pleads; “we’ll be deafened.”) With no word of explanation and no acknowledgment of her audience, Bianca begins her dance on a percussive note, strutting so heavily the carpeted floor shakes; she plays with her hat Charlie Chaplin style: dropping it, kicking it up with a foot, squashing it down hard on her head. She high-steps; she blows moist kisses at the audience; rolls her eyes, winks, smirks, leers; provokes her startled audience into laughter—though why they are laughing, Glynnis does not know. The makeup itself is comical, on a young girl with Bianca’s open, fresh, girlish face; it makes her look both innocent and depraved, like a performer out of Cabaret.

  Then, to Glynnis’s horror, Bianca begins to dance more suggestively, as the music itself shifts to another key. She throws her head back until the cords in her pale neck stand out; she moves her rather plump, fleshy body against the beat and the grain of the cacophonous music. In her demonic exuberance she collides with a chair and seems not to notice, gives the fireplace screen a glancing kick, nearly loses her derby hat when its elastic band breaks. She is mocking, funny, defiant, in her heavy-footed strut: swinging her hips clumsily, going through a routine of tics, twitches, salutes, winks, shrugs, and shudders, and a simulation of kisses aimed at her audience. As Glynnis and Ian stare in disbelief, Bianca begins to strip: throwing off the cutaway coat, tossing aside the hat, slowly and provocatively unbuttoning the starched white shirt, all the while smiling, smirking, winking at her audience of middle-aged men and women, most of whom are no longer laughing. For this is not funny, is it?

  But under the shirt Bianca is wearing another shirt, identical to the first; and under her trousers—no wonder they were so bulky!—another pair of trousers, identical to the first. And under her second shirt there is a third; and under the second pair of trousers—not a third pair, but a black leotard. The adults laugh, most of them, and applaud loudly, seeing that the joke is on them, on their lewd expectations. (Glynnis’s eyes have filmed over with moisture. She tries not to see how tight Bianca’s leotard is, how revealingly snug against the fatty quivering buttocks, the crotch, the bas relief of pubic hair . . . for this is not parody, or even metaphor, but the real thing, the stark defenseless unmediated flesh of an overgrown child, at which one should not look except in love.)

  The performance is over: the dissonant music comes, thank God, to an abrupt end; Bianca, flushed and exuberant, undoes her hair, which falls down past her shoulders, unglamorously yet sensuously, and bows low toward her father, who manages to clap as if he means it and to say, “Bianca, you astonish us!” as if astonishment were a good thing. Bowing low to the rest, Bianca backs out of the room, amid applause and seemingly sincere cries of “Encore! Encore!”

  And in the doorway, as if she too is on cue, stands Marvis, in her purplish-black velvety skin and her white maid’s dress, hors d’oeuvres tray in hand, staring baffled and unsmiling, uncertain of what she sees: is this funny, or is it not so funny? Bianca McCullough, n
ineteen years old, exhibiting herself, scarcely clothed, before a room of her parents’ friends on her father’s fiftieth birthday? Bianca nearly collides with Marvis on her way out, unintentionally provoking another outburst of laughter.

  Meika Cassity, meaning to be kind, lays a hand on Glynnis’s arm and says, “I never realized your daughter was so talented.”

  Glynnis laughs, and wipes her eyes, and says, “I don’t think Ian and I realized either.”

  “I CAN’T STAY for the actual dinner, Mother—I’m sure I told you that.”

  Bianca is out of breath from her performance: staring, not at Glynnis, but at her reflection in her dressing table mirror as, with quick, rough, impatient swipes of a Kleenex, she removes the lurid white makeup and the inky black mascara and the red lipstick. She is still wearing the black leotard; her hair hangs in her face; she is barefoot, crouched, the shirt damp and clinging against her back. She leans so close to the mirror that its surface steams faintly.

  Glynnis is hurt, and Glynnis is angry; but she says, calmly, “‘Can’t’? But why not? You know I’ve set a place for you.”

  Bianca shrugs guiltily, assumes another angle at the mirror. She plies the tissue against her skin as if she were scouring herself.

  “Beside your father,” Glynnis says. “I’ve set a place for you beside your father.”

  “But I thought I’d explained,” Bianca says, evasively, “that last time we spoke on the phone? Last Thursday? Kim has invited me over, and Greg O’Connor is going to drop by; he’s home from MIT for the week, and Scott will probably be in town too, you know, Scotty Simon—”

  “Can’t you go over to Kim’s after dinner? I’m sure your friends will understand.”

  “Mother, we’ve made these plans.”

  “But, honey, when did you make them?”

  There is an edge to Glynnis’s voice which she has not intended; Bianca, tossing down the wad of filthy Kleenex, gives her a guilty sullen sidelong look. “When did I make them? I don’t know, for Christ’s sake. Is this an interrogation or something?”

  Glynnis says, as if this were the issue, “You do have to eat, don’t you?” and Bianca says, shrugging, embarrassed, “Mother, I’ll eat.” And within seconds, though Glynnis has vowed not to be drawn into a quarrel that evening—has vowed not to lose her temper with Bianca, no matter how the girl tempts her—they are quarreling: their old quarrel of years, in a new or, in truth, not so new guise, turning upon Bianca’s thoughtlessness, her forgetfulness, her surely deliberate selfishness. “You want to spoil the evening, don’t you,” Glynnis says, her eyes filling with tears. “You want to spoil your father’s birthday, and all my plans.”

  Bianca says meanly, “Mother, the universe does not turn upon you and all your plans.”

  She seems to be daring Glynnis to slap her: to slap her in the face as she deserves to be slapped; as, not so very long ago, mother slapped daughter, not often, not with any regularity, but often enough.

  I hate you, daughter would then scream. As if a lever had been thrown, a lock clicked into place. I wish I was dead, and I wish you were dead.

  Glynnis says now, carefully, “I’m sorry you feel that way, Bianca.” she leaves her daughter’s room, closes the door, her heart beating quickly and her hands trembling, as if she has narrowly escaped danger. From the other end of the house comes laughter and raised voices, that familiar, gratifying, so very consoling sound of friends: friends enjoying themselves at one of the McCulloughs’ parties. It is always the same party, Glynnis thinks, happily; from even so short a distance as this, always the same. And, pace Bianca, the universe does turn upon it.

  In the kitchen, she sips from what remains of her glass of champagne. She must begin her last-minute sleight of hand; she and Marvis planned to serve the first course before nine-thirty, and now it is nearly ten.

  4.

  It would turn out to be three-thirty in the morning, a Sunday morning, the previous September, hardly a week after Bianca had left for college (though there was no relationship between the events, of course), that the McCulloughs were wakened from their sleep by a knocking: more than a knocking, as they’d afterward describe it, a violent hammering, at the front door. What in God’s name? Ian said, and Glynnis, terrified, clutching at his arm, whispered, We can’t answer it! Don’t let them see us!

  The McCulloughs’ house, designed by a prominent local architect, was set back from the road, even more reclusively than most houses in this part of Hazelton; it had a good deal of glass—plate-glass windows, sliding doors, skylights. It consisted of eight units, four of which were built around an open atrium; one entered the atrium to approach the front door. The bedrooms, the “private” quarters, were of course hidden from the others yet not, in terms of distance, so very far from them. The terrible hammering at the front door was probably not more than thirty feet from where the McCulloughs, now fully wakened, were sitting up in bed, not knowing what to do: for what, in such circumstances, such frightening and wholly unprecedented circumstances, should one do?

  Glynnis wanted to call the police; Ian thought he should go to see who it was; Glynnis begged him no, no—Then they’ll see you; they’ll know we are here. Ian said, practically, fumbling for his glasses, But they know we are here; the cars are in the driveway. (The hammering had stopped; then began again, as if with renewed ferocity.) The McCulloughs were on their feet now, Glynnis with the telephone receiver in hand, pleading with Ian not to leave the bedroom. It could be kids, she said, half sobbing, kids on dope; we could be murdered, she said, but Ian was at the bedroom door, Ian had opened the door. Call the police, he said, and lock the door after me; I refuse to hide in my own house, for Christ’s sake.

  So Glynnis locked the door after him and dialed the police emergency number; and Ian inched along the corridor until he was in a position, himself unseen, to see through the glass walls that two—or was it three?—men were standing on the doorstep, and that they had unusually strong flashlights, which they were beaming into the house. Could the men be police? Hazelton police? Their police? But why? Why at this hour? And why such furious pounding, as if they wanted to break down the door?

  As Ian would afterward recount, in his numerous telephone calls and letters of complaint, he had wanted to call out, “Who is it?”—but the words stuck in his throat. For Glynnis was in the house, and vulnerable; and he was vulnerable, God knows, an unarmed middle-aged man whose vision was poor without glasses, lithe and sometimes fairly impressive on the squash court but not, otherwise, in extraordinary physical condition: no match, in any case, for two or three able-bodied men. (And, though he could only make out their approximate shapes, the men on his doorstep certainly did appear to be able-bodied.) Though the men hammered on his door they did not identify themselves in any way.

  While Glynnis was speaking with police headquarters and being told, in a mysteriously circumlocutious manner, that the situation was “under control,” Ian watched the men in the courtyard: now prowling about, shining their flashlights rudely into the living room and into the dining room; one of them rapped on the kitchen door; then, for no apparent reason, as abruptly as they arrived, they decided to leave. They backed their car out of the driveway so carelessly, Glynnis discovered in the morning, that there were tire tread marks in the wildflower garden bordering the driveway.

  It turned out, however improbably—for Hazelton-on-Hudson is hardly the Bronx—that the intruders were police, not Hazelton police but state police, investigating, at this late and surely unnecessary hour, a “reported act of vandalism” on Pearce Drive. They would claim to have mistaken 338 Pearce for 388, where, allegedly, a sixteen-year-old boy lived who had been involved in acts of vandalism in the past. They would claim that no harassment of the McCulloughs had been intended; there was “absolutely no connection” between the episode and the McCulloughs’ involvement in a recent American Civil Liberties Union case charging police brutality against two young men. (The Thiel-Edwards case, it was called: both Glynni
s and Ian had signed a petition, and Ian had helped Malcolm Oliver, an officer in the local branch of the ACLU, organize a protest hearing at the Cattaraugus County courthouse the previous spring.)

  At the time, though, the McCulloughs had been quite baffled by the incident and badly shaken. Glynnis wept in relief, in Ian’s arms, when the men left. For what, after all, weaponless, unprepared, merely the two of them—and Ian, for all his well-intentioned courage, was hardly a physically imposing man—could they have done, had the three men chosen to break in? Our house is made of glass, Glynnis thought, and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

  NOW GLYNNIS SAYS, half to herself, “Must we talk about this again? It will only upset us all.”

  They are at the dinner table, midway in the chicken ballotine; and in a general and quite animated discussion of crime, violence, false arrests, and police corruption—for Malcolm Oliver is researching an article on one or another or all of these subjects—the episode of September 21, 1986, is renewed. The “McCulloughs’ harassment,” it is called; for naturally their friends know all about it in detail. (Ian in particular was outraged by the incident and talked of little else for days. He made numberless telephone calls, demanded a formal explanation and apology from the state commissioner of police, enlisted the aid and advice of friends in the ACLU about whether he should file charges. For, after all, as he argued, his and Glynnis’s civil rights had been violated.) Glynnis would rather talk about something else but knows the subject must be allowed to run its course. Malcolm has much to say, most of it new and quite interesting; Vaughn tells an anecdote, buttressed by Meika, which Glynnis does not remember having heard before; Denis, an old, fiery SDS radical of the sixties, speaks with vehemence of the “encroaching police state”; Ian has something to add, of course; and Amos Kuhn; and the others. Glynnis listens, or half listens; warmed by drink and gratified by the success of her dinner thus far—the seviche, the chicken, the vegetables, the sourdough bread, the Bernkasteler Doktor Auslese 1982 and the equally superb Château Mouton-Rothschild 1976—she allows her thoughts, for very pleasure, to drift. The table is elegantly set, beautifully set: with her finest tablecloth, white embroidered Irish linen-lace, and the pair of pewter candelabra inherited from her grandmother, and the lovely pink roses in the Waterford vase, in the center. Because they are Ian’s favorites, Glynnis set the table with the Italian earthenware plates they had brought back years ago from Florence. And the finestemmed crystal wineglasses and goblets bought a few weeks ago at Neiman-Marcus’s post-Christmas sale. And the beautiful thick Tunisian napkins, a gift from the Grinnells. And, for fun, Glynnis’s great-grandmother’s gold-plate service . . . really quite beautiful, if a bit, as Glynnis always says, much.