After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away

by Joyce Carol Oates

  My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Terricotte, takes me out into the hall to ask about my hat. “Jennifer, why? Is there some reason why you are always wearing that hat?” Mrs. Terricotte’s pebble-gray eyes are wary. There’s something in my face and in the set of my jaw. Maybe she’s been warned by Mr. Goddard or by my other teachers. Explaining the reasons for the school dress code. How most of the boys would be wearing baseball caps, reversed on their heads, so there has had to be a regulation against any kind of cap, hat, or scarf, a regulation that was established by the school district years ago…

  I’m wearing my grimy sailor cap. I will wear my grimy sailor cap. I tell Mrs. Terricotte that I have to wear it, my head was shaved a few months ago, my skull was sawed open to reduce the pressure of cerebral bleeding, my scalp is covered in ugly, ripply scars that my hair isn’t thick enough to hide, my voice is low and rapid and almost Mrs. Terricotte can’t make out my words, she has to stoop to hear me, it’s an awkward moment, she’s feeling sorry for me, very likely she has heard about me, why I’ve come to live with my aunt and uncle, why I have transferred to Yarrow Lake High from a private school in Tarrytown, how lonely I am here, how unhappy, until finally Mrs. Terricotte relents: “Jennifer, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. Of course wear the hat if you’re more comfortable wearing it.”

  Touching my arm in a gesture of comfort. Warily.

  15

  Another secret. No one will ever know.

  In the local telephone directory I discover two listings:

  Saint-Croix, Roland

  655 Deer Isle Rd, Yarrow Lake

  Saint-Croix, Roland

  Carpenter & Cabinetmaker

  39 S Main, Yarrow Lake

  On a map of Yarrow Lake and vicnity I locate Deer Isle Road north of town. This isn’t an area of Yarrow Lake that I know. My aunt and my uncle don’t seem to have any friends there. On a Saturday afternoon in early October, kind of windy-blustery and threatening rain, I bicycle approximately a mile and a half to Deer Isle Road and another half mile to locate Crow’s house, which surprises me. It’s in a mostly rural area of small wood-frame houses and shanties, mobile homes propped up on cement blocks, ramshackle old farmhouses like Crow’s, which is set back from the road on a long rutted lane, partly hidden behind a stand of scrubby pines. This time of autumn in New Hampshire, sumac is blazing crimson, goldenrod is blazing in the fields, when the sun is shining it’s a kind of dazzling-beautiful setting, but today is sunshine, then clouds, more sunshine and more clouds, windy and unpredictable. At the front of Crow’s property is a pasture in which a single swaybacked gray-speckled horse is grazing, her only companion a black goat with a wispy beard. Straddling my bicycle at the end of the rutted driveway, I see the horse and the goat eyeing me with interest. I’m hoping that Crow doesn’t suddenly appear in the lane or come up behind me on Deer Isle Road.

  “So this is where you live. Crow.”

  Deer Isle is a romantic name for the potholed blacktop country road leading out of town, away from the upscale neighborhoods near Yarrow Lake. Crow lives in what is called the foothills of the White Mountains. Poor whites comes to me, a term I’ve heard frequently since coming to live in New Hampshire. Worse, trailer trash.

  At Tarrytown Day almost everyone came from the same sort of background though there were rich girls, even “really rich” girls, among us. At Yarrow High it’s surprising how there is such a mixture: jocks, preppies, nerds/dorks, “trailer trash.”

  Crow’s family doesn’t live in a trailer, but this Deer Isle Road is trailer territory. I’m thinking, You’re poor! You don’t matter.

  I’m ashamed to be thinking this way. I wasn’t brought up by my mother to think this way. But Crow hurt me, I need to be avenged. This is a crude kind of revenge, but it’s all I have.

  By this time the shaggy black goat has trotted to the fence to peer at me closely. His eyes are a luminous gray-glimmering with irises like thin black rods. So strange! Suddenly he opens his jaws and emits a loud bossy baaaing, shoving his snout through the fence in my direction. Like saying, Hey, I’m hungry. Feed me. To my alarm, the mare is approaching the fence, too. Back at the farmhouse somebody could be observing.

  “Oh, I don’t have anything for you. I’m sorry!”

  Hurriedly I pedal away. Don’t want to be seen. Behind me comes a loud baa-baa-baaing like disappointment.

  I’m halfway back home when the sky darkens and rain begins to pelt down. By the time I turn onto Plymouth Street, my flannel shirt and sweater, my jeans, my sailor cap are soaked. But I’m smiling. Don’t know why, I’m smiling. When I come dripping into the kitchen, Aunt Caroline scolds: “Jenna, where on earth have you been? Becky said you went out on your bicycle but—why now? When we invite you to come bicycling with us, on beautiful days, you’re ‘too busy.’ When it rains, there you go.”

  Aunt Caroline isn’t scolding exactly. All this while she’s dabbing at my wet hair with a towel.

  “I was going to visit a friend out in the country,” I tell her, breathless. “Except it started raining, so I had to turn back.”

  16

  “Know what they are, those bikers? Trailer-trash meth heads.”

  These words erupt from Ryan Moeller so vehemently I’m taken by surprise. I know what crystal meth is, but I pretend not to so that Ryan will tell me. She’s a big-boned girl with a broad freckled face and a penchant for moral indignation that seems to mark her as older somehow, though she’s my age, a sophomore like me, and a loner like me. Ryan first befriended me in Mr. Farrell’s class, where, when our vinyl desks are dragged into circle “modules,” Ryan and I invariably wind up side by side since no one else is eager to sit with us.

  “They snort the stuff or inject it into a vein like heroin. Can you imagine? Ugh.”

  I tell Ryan no, I can’t imagine.

  In fact I can. But I don’t want to.

  Taking pills orally, that seems safe. The way people drink. But any kind of injecting with a needle is scary.

  “…It’s supposed to cause brain damage. Every time they use it, brain cells die. The way those bikers behave, Trina Holland especially, you can see it’s so.” Ryan laughs disdainfully but with an air of excitement, craning her neck to better see into the corner of the parking lot where the bikers are hanging out in their usual territory that’s off-limits to anybody else. You can’t blame Ryan for being jealous of Trina Holland, who’s the most eye-catching of the bikers’ girls, ash-blond hair trimmed short as a guy’s, a sexy size zero in really tight-fitting jeans, skinny little sweaters, leather boots to the knee, and a heart-shaped face to die for. “…her parents have, like, disowned her. First she hooks up with Gil Rathke, practically a known drug dealer, next it’s Rust Haber, who follows her around like a lovesick puppy though Rust is vicious as a pit bull with anybody else. Today it looks like T-Man has scored with her—see them fooling around out there? Dis-gusting! How d’you think it starts?”

  “What?”

  “Being like…you know. Trina.”

  Ryan has folded her arms protectively across her large soft breasts, frowning and shaking her head as if a wrong-size idea has come into it. She wears loose-fitting sweaters over shirts, size-fourteen slacks in careful drab colors like beige and gray. Her hair is faded brown-red, she has splotches of freckles like rust-colored raindrops on her face and arms.

  Ryan means Like Trina, not-a-virgin. I think this is what Ryan means, but I don’t help her, it isn’t a subject I want to discuss.

  “…and Kiki Weaver, she’s a sophomore, you see her making out with this senior guy Dubie by her locker? This morning.”

  I feel my face blush. I’m self-conscious enough eating my lunch in the cafeteria. (It’s starting to make me nervous, eating around other people. Why’s it so important, such a “custom,” to have to eat with other people?)

  You’d think that Ryan Moeller and Jennifer Abbott are best friends, sitting together at a table in a far corner of the cafeteria. A table for people like Ryan and me w
here we can sit with our backs defiantly to the noisy crowd and ignore them. Guys who sit at this table aren’t the kind of guys we would wish to speak with, so we ignore them, too.

  Why Ryan seems to like me I’m not sure. She is a big, slow, brainy girl with poor motor coordination, which makes gym classes hell for her, rouses her contempt for athletes as well as for sexy girls like Trina Holland. Maybe she places me in a category like her own, whatever that is. Actually half the time I avoid Ryan by avoiding the cafeteria altogether. I avoid Ryan by slipping out of Farrell’s class, seeming not to hear her calling, “Jen? Jen—” (I haven’t told Ryan that “Jenna” is my true name.) Ryan has invited me to her house after school, but I shrug and tell her thanks, some other time.

  Why I’m like this I don’t know. Like wearing my grimy sailor cap every day, it just happens. Do I care what people think? These people? At Tarrytown I wasn’t like this. I liked my teachers, I had lots of friends. I had close friends even.

  Before the wreck. When having friends seemed worth the effort.

  Since that day at the start of the school term, Christa Shaw and her friends have kept their distance from me. I guess I’m a little ashamed at how rude I was to them, but lots of times I’ve had opportunities to apologize and I haven’t. Easier to look away, compose my stony face.

  Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t you dare!

  Ryan doesn’t have a clue about me. She hadn’t better try to pry either.

  Watching the bikers outside in the parking lot, I’ve lost interest in my lunch. When I eat in the cafeteria, it’s always the same lunch: fruit–cottage cheese salad. A roll comes with it, plus a pat of butter, which I pass on to Ryan. If the fruit is canned and syrupy, like the repulsive peach slices are today, I scrape it off my plate for Ryan, who seems never to have enough food on her own plate.

  I wish I could eat just white food. There’s a purity in white.

  Plus Diet Coke. I couldn’t live without Diet Coke to fill me up, wash down my pills.

  If it’s one of those depressing days, I will swallow a Tylenol or two, or some Advil, to deaden the ache in my head that seems always to be there, waiting like a dial tone when you lift the receiver. Aspirin washed down with Diet Coke makes my heart kick and jump in a way that’s kind of consoling. And there’s the one remaining OxyContin tablet, like a gold coin neatly wrapped in aluminum foil, in my backpack.

  (Uncle Dwight has never noticed his old painkillers missing. If he does and accuses me, I have rehearsed what I will say to him: If he thinks that I would steal from him, maybe I shouldn’t be living in his house.)

  Thinking about the painkiller hidden in my backpack.

  Wondering how long I can keep from taking it, knowing its effect will last only a few hours, not the rest of my life.

  “Ohhh. Look.”

  Ryan’s voice dips with fierce disgust. A biker has just driven into the parking lot, and Trina Holland and the other girls rush to greet him: hugs, kisses. Serious kisses.

  Has to be Crow. In his black leather jacket, even wearing gloves.

  The way my heart is kicking, it’s Crow.

  I’ve told myself how silly I am being. Crow is such a ridiculous name; Gabriel Saint-Croix is even worse. He’s what Ryan would call poor white/trailer trash. I know this.

  Since the second day of classes—weeks ago now—I haven’t seen Crow except at a distance. Seniors’ lockers and classes are in another wing of Yarrow High. Though I see Crow’s friends frequently, I’m not always sure if Crow is with them because I look quickly away before he can see me. It’s the reflex of someone who has recklessly stared into a blinding light and doesn’t want to make the same mistake twice.

  Sometimes when I think I see Crow, he’s alone. Sometimes he’s with his friends. It hurts only when I see him with a single girl, leaning close together, laughing and talking like lovers. There is Trina Holland but also Kiki Weaver with her purple-streaked hair. There is a senior named Dolores who’s drop-dead gorgeous like Jennifer Lopez. And other girls whose names I don’t know, with pierced ears, noses, eyebrows.

  I’m remembering the last time I saw Crow, when I knew it had to be Crow, it was a few days ago, my free study period, which I was spending in the library. I happened to be staring out a second-floor window in one of my zombie moods, not knowing or especially caring where I was, since one place is pretty much like another place, one time is pretty much like another time, and suddenly there was Crow leaving school, running across the grass to the parking lot to his stripped-down Harley-Davidson, not taking time to buckle on his crash helmet before he roared away. As if someone were calling him and it was an emergency.

  And I thought, Wait! Your helmet! You almost killed yourself once.

  Ryan, on her feet to see more clearly what’s happening outside, is muttering, incensed, “Oh! Will you just look at that!” After a flurry of excitement it’s the ash-blond girl, Trina Holland, chosen by Crow to climb onto the back of his motorcycle, slide her arms around his waist, and hang on tight as Crow drives out of the lot and out of sight.

  I grab my tray and walk away without a word. Ryan looks after me, surprised and hurt. I’m feeling too emotional, just want to be alone. The buzzer bell is ringing for one-o’clock classes, and in the commotion in the hall I can be alone, huddling into my locker I can be alone, invisible. In the midst of a classroom I can be alone huddling into my desk. As long as I don’t have to see Crow, and think about Crow, and how it would feel sliding my arms around Crow’s waist on the back of that motorcycle, I can be alone…and safe.

  When I set my tray onto the cafeteria counter, I glance back to see Ryan Moeller still staring out the window, greedily lifting leftovers to her mouth from somebody’s plate.

  17

  Here’s why it’s crucial to stay alone.

  Some stranger crowds in, starts to suck away your oxygen.

  Like the Yarrow High girls’ gym instructor, Dara Bowen. A dark Indian look, loud lilting voice, loud laughter, a way of clapping her hands like a young girl when somebody sinks a basket, skillfully volleys the volleyball, executes a pretty good dive into the swimming pool.

  Bowen is a popular teacher. Popular track/field sports coach.

  Not with me, though. Immediately I was wary of Bowen.

  Half the girls imitate Bowen’s infectious laughter. Not me.

  It is said of Dara Bowen she came close to qualifying for the U.S. Olympic team when she played field hockey for U-Mass. She runs every year in the Boston Marathon and has placed among the first twenty women runners.

  In Yarrow Lake, population 11,300, that is impressive. An aura about Dara Bowen.

  “Jen—is that what people call you?”

  People? My shoulders lift in a neutral shrug.

  Maybe yes. Maybe no. My wan weak smile suggests Who cares?

  “Jen. Well. I’ve heard…my friend from college Meghan Ryder…your track team coach at…”

  Meghan Ryder. I’m not prepared to hear this name. I feel like I’ve been tricked, Ms. Bowen is watching my face for a reaction.

  Ms. Ryder. Staring at me from beside my hospital bed. Gripping my hand in her strong fingers, urging me to believe I will walk again, I will run again, physiotherapy can work miracles.

  Urging me to believe what her damp pitying eyes seemed not to believe.

  “…on the team, Meghan says…until you had, until the accident, then of course, then…but still…if ever you’d like to talk to me about it, Jen, I’d be happy to…do what I can. Also, if you’d like to drop by track practice some afternoon. See how you feel. Meghan recently e-mailed me saying what a terrific team player you were at Tarrytown, how reliable—”

  Quickly I say, “I was okay, Ms. Bowen. I wasn’t the best.”

  “You don’t have to be the best, Jen. Okay is more than enough.”

  “At meets, in competition, okay isn’t enough.”

  “Don’t think about competition, Jen. Just come out with us sometime. We could use another girl on our t
eam, frankly. How about tomorrow afternoon? Of course, no pressure, you could maybe just hang out a little…”

  I can’t believe this exchange. That I’ve exposed myself so.

  Can’t believe I would speak so openly to a stranger who has no right to intrude into my life.

  I guess I’m rude, turning to walk away from Ms. Bowen. Not a backward glance. Not a word of apology. Just a wave of my hand, signaling maybe yes, maybe no, maybe Who cares?

  18

  Two days later, something happens.

  On the Sable Creek trail crusted with snow something happens. Something doesn’t happen. Something that should happen, doesn’t. The railroad trestle bridge above the creek. My legs give out, I’m panicked. I can’t cross it.

  An old wooden trestle bridge. A bridge with a narrow walkway for pedestrians. A smell of wet iron, rotted wood. A smell of winter cold. A smell of snow. A smell of dark churning water rushing beneath the bridge. A smell of froth on the water. A smell of ice at the rocky shore. A smell of sick, sweaty panic. A smell of my body in panic inside my clothes.

  This is the first time. This is the first time I have tried to cross any bridge on foot. This is the first time I haven’t been in a vehicle driven by my aunt or by my uncle. Since the wreck this is the first time I have not been able to shut my eyes. Like a small child shut my eyes. Like a small child hold myself very still. Hold my breath.

  And this bridge! This bridge! A fraction of the size of the Tappan Zee!

  The Tappan Zee is three miles. High above the Hudson River, a bridge of three miles. Three miles.

  A lifetime. A deathtime.

  Three miles. And this bridge above Sable Creek is maybe one hundred feet. A wood-plank railroad bridge with a narrow walkway for pedestrians. A sign warns NO MOTORCYCLES.

  A sign warns BICYCLES MUST BE WALKED.