The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  The Lost Sister: An Elegy

  FROM Narrative Magazine

  1.

  She was not a planned birth.

  She was purely coincidental, accidental. A gift.

  Born on June 16, 1956. My eighteenth birthday.

  “Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

  We were thrilled, but we were also frightened.

  Though my brother, Robin, and I had known for months that our mother was pregnant, somehow we had not quite wished to realize that our mother would be having a baby.

  In the sense in which having a baby means a new presence in the household, an entirely new center of gravity. As if a radioactive substance had come to rest in our midst, deceptively small, even miniature, but casting off a powerful light.

  At times, a blinding light.

  And if light can be deafening, a deafening light.

  “Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

  It was a great gift to me, who loved names. I took the responsibility very seriously.

  As I was “Joyce Carol,” so it was suggested that my baby sister have two names as well.

  Names passing through my brain like an incantation.

  Names that were fascinating to me, in themselves. Syllables of sound like poetry.

  As a young child I had imagined that a name conferred a sort of significance. Power, importance. Mystery. Sometimes when my name was spoken—in certain voices, though not all—I shivered as if my very soul had been touched. I felt that Joyce Carol was a very special name, for it sounded in my ears musical and lithesome; it did not sound heavy, harsh, dull.

  I knew that my parents had named me, and that their naming of me was special to them. I think I recall that my mother had seen the name Joyce in a newspaper and had liked the name because it seemed happy-sounding. But both my parents had named me.

  My father, who loved music, who played the piano by ear, who often sang, hummed, whistled to himself when he was working or around the house. You could hear Daddy in another room, singing under his breath. The name Carol to my father suggested music, song. Somehow this musical tendency in my father is bound up with my name.

  Now it was my responsibility to name my baby sister.

  (Did I confer with Robin? I want to think that I did.)

  Favorite names were Valerie, Cynthia, Sylvia, Abigail, Annette, Lynn, Margareta, Violet, Veronica, Rhoda, Rhea, Nedra, Charlotte—names of girls who’d been or were classmates of mine in Lockport or in Williamsville; girls who were friends of mine, or might have been; girls I admired close up, or at a distance; girls who were clearly special, and special to me.

  The writer/poet knows that names confer magic. Or fail to confer magic. The older sister of the newborn baby knew that the baby’s name would be crucial throughout her life. She must not be named carelessly but very carefully. With love.

  My high school friends were nothing short of astonished when I finally told them, as I’d been reluctant to tell them for months, that my mother was going to have a baby in June.

  “But your mother is too old!” one of my friends said tactlessly.

  In fact, my mother was forty-two years old. I did not want to think that this was old.

  Having to tell others of my mother’s pregnancy made me painfully self-conscious. I felt my face burn unpleasantly as my girlfriends plied me with questions.

  “When did you know?”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  “Isn’t it going to be strange—a baby in the family? So much younger than you?”

  With girlish enthusiasm, perhaps not altogether sincere, my friends expressed the wish that there might come to be a baby in their households. In their midst I stood faintly smiling, hoping to change the subject.

  Not wanting to think, Why are you smiling? Why are you so happy on my behalf? The baby is my replacement. I will be forgotten now.

  (Though in 1956, certainly forty-two was considered old for childbirth.)

  When my parents told Robin and me about the baby expected in June we’d been surprised, and embarrassed. We must have been somewhat dazed, but true to our family reticence, we had not asked many questions. We’d been mildly, moderately happy about the news—I think. At least, we hadn’t been unhappy.

  Neither of us had exclaimed to the other, Why are they doing such a thing!

  They don’t need a baby in the family, when they have us.

  (Indeed, it seemed to me not long ago that my parents told me the astonishing news that I had a “new baby brother” whose name was Robin.

  A baby brother! A baby!

  I’d been five years old. Five and a half. [Such fractions are crucial when you are a child.] I don’t recall whether I had known that my mother would be having a baby, or whether I knew anything at all about human babies. Though I would have seen barn cats heavily pregnant, which went on to give birth to litters of kittens, and it could not have been a total mystery to a sharp-eyed child like myself that the kittens had somehow come out of the momma cat.

  My brother was born at a preposterously inconvenient time, I’d thought: Christmas Day! Was it the baby’s fault? What could the baby be thinking? Interfering with a five-and-a-half-year-old’s long-awaited Christmas Day—December 25, 1943.

  His eyes had been robin’s-egg blue. A beautiful baby with soft, silky fair-brown hair. How astonished I’d been, and how betrayed I had felt by my parents!

  Soon afterward I came to adore my baby brother and was often photographed holding him or playing with him. There is a favorite photograph of us together in which Robin is tugging at one of my long corkscrew curls while I gaze down at him with a kind of prim alarm. But when my father brought my mother home from the Lockport Public Hospital with the new baby brother named Robin wrapped in a blanket, my reaction was to run and hide. In a drafty closet of the house I heard my name called—Joyce? Joyce?—but I refused to answer. I was determined not to answer for a long time.)

  June 16, 1956, which happened to be, purely coincidentally, my eighteenth birthday.

  But no one believes in the purely coincidental. There is a predilection in us to believe in symbolism, which is a kind of purposeful meaning.

  What did it mean, that my sister was born on my birthday?

  Apart from the coincidental date, it was natural to surmise that my parents had planned their third child to be born at about the time their oldest child would be leaving home.

  So I found myself thinking, though I knew better. As in later years it would be presented to me as meaningful in some benevolent astrological way that I’d been born on Bloomsday—I, who would grow up to admire James Joyce.

  (And did my parents name me for the great Irish writer?)

  (No, no, and no.)

  But among the relatives, and among my friends, and among those who thought they knew my parents, it was taken for granted that my mother and father had calculated to have a third child to replace the one to be leaving home. As if anyone could calculate a pregnancy with such precision!

  The fact was, as my (naturally reticent) parents would indicate, the pregnancy seemed to have been an accident. A surprise, possibly a shock to the middle-aged parents, but an accident with no hidden symbolic significance.

  A not-unhappy accident.

  As my parents would come to view it, a gift.

  “It will be easy to remember your birthdays. We can celebrate them both together.”

  “Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

  But I was having difficulty choosing. Among so many beautiful names, how to select just two?

  I understood, of course—asking me to name my baby sister was a kindly way of involving me in her presence in the family, so that I would not feel slighted, or cast away.

  Or perhaps my parents sincerely believed that I was the one in the family who had a way with words and was to be entrusted with this responsibility.

  Did I love my baby sister? Yes. For I could not help myself, seeing
the baby in my mother’s arms; seeing how happy my mother was, and my father; feeling my eyes fill with tears.

  Was I ever so small? Did they ever love me so much?

  It is claimed that the firstborn of a family will always feel, in an essential way, very special, chosen. Yet it seems logical that the firstborn is the one to be displaced, whether graciously or rudely, by the second-born; still more by the third-born.

  In a large family each sibling must feel not so very chosen—not likely to feel self-important. Yet, surrounded by brothers and sisters, wonderfully not-alone.

  It seemed natural to me that the new baby must nullify the others in my parents’ emotions: my brother, myself. The very vulnerability of a new baby is a displacement of the so-much-less-vulnerable older children. This was something to be accepted as inevitable, and desirable.

  As if my parents were nudging me to think, sensibly, You are an adult now, or nearly. You are ready to leave home. And now, you will leave home.

  The name I finally chose for my baby sister was Lynn Ann—for the gliding n-sounds.

  2.

  No. I can’t speak of her.

  It is not possible. The words are not available.

  As she has no speech, so I have no ready speech to present her.

  I am not allowed to “imagine”—and so, I am helpless.

  There is no way. There is no access.

  There is only distance, as across a deep chasm.

  If there is a way it is oblique, awkward.

  It is the way of one foot in front of another, and another—plodding, cautious of the steep fall.

  It is not exactly cowardly—(I suppose: for if I were cowardly I would never undertake such a hopeless task but flee from it)—

  but it is cautious. It is not the sort of pain that becomes pleasurable.

  Reckless to press forward when you know you will fail and yet—

  you cannot go forward except by this route.

  You cannot pretend: your sister was never born.

  Spoken quickly and carelessly, autistic can sound like artistic.

  It was not really true that I’d fled to college. More accurately, it was time for me to depart, and so I departed.

  And after I graduated from college, I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I met, fell in love with, and married Raymond Smith. And so I never came home again to live in Millersport.

  At the time it wasn’t known—it was not yet suspected—that my sister would have severe “developmental disabilities.” For such suspicions are slow to manifest themselves in even the most alert, responsible, and loving parents.

  After five or six years, when my husband and I were living and teaching in Detroit, I began to hear that my parents were taking my sister to doctors in the Buffalo area, having been referred by her Lockport pediatrician, who understood that there was nothing he could do, nor even confidently name.

  Lynn doesn’t look at us. She doesn’t talk, or try to talk.

  She doesn’t seem to recognize us. She will only eat certain foods.

  She is getting to have a bad temper.

  The term retarded might have been suggested. But never did I hear that word spoken in our household, nor did I ever speak this term in any way associated with my sister.

  There may have been a taboo of sorts, against the articulation of this word with its associations of poverty, ignorance, dementia. A crude word sometimes used as an epithet of particular cruelty.

  Eventually, the diagnosis “autistic” came to be spoken. (By my father, gravely. So far as I knew my mother would not ever utter this word, which would have greatly pained her.) Not much was known of autism at this time (in the mid-1960s) but there was a distinction between autism and mental retardation that seemed crucial to maintain.

  For mental retardation was not uncommon in the North Country in those years. I have not spoken of the numerous examples of “retarded” persons I’d encountered in the vicinity of Millersport and in Lockport, mostly school-age; how there would seem to have been a disproportionate number, compared to my experience elsewhere, later in my life; so that, when I think of mental retardation, immediately I am thinking of certain rural families, and of their offspring, routed into special education classes in school, and generally shunned, avoided, or in some unhappy cases teased and tormented by the presumably normal.

  In the Judd family, for instance, there was very likely mental retardation. But I did not want to dwell on this likelihood in writing about my friend Helen Judd, for that was not my subject; that mental retardation, sexual abuse of children, and incest were related in crucial ways seems to us obvious, but requiring greater length and space to examine.

  My grandmother Blanche Morgenstern did not seem to accept the diagnosis of autism, in fact. It seemed to be her (implicit, unargued) conviction that there was nothing seriously wrong with her younger granddaughter. Year following year she took the Greyhound bus from Lockport to visit her son’s family in Millersport, and with each visit she brought a present for Lynn, as she’d once brought presents for me—coloring books, Crayolas, picture books; each present, as my brother dryly remarked, our sister destroyed within a few minutes, with varying degrees of fury.

  What will become of Lynn, do you think?

  What will become of Mom and Dad?

  It may be difficult for others to understand that very little of this was ever discussed in our family, at least not among my parents and my brother and me. By degrees Lynn Ann became my parents’ unique and in a way sacred responsibility, as it is said children afflicted with Down syndrome are particularly loved by their parents; not as a problem but as a sort of gift. You might ask after Lynn in the most casual and sunny of ways—“How’s Lynn?”—and the answer was likely to be “Good.” But the matter of Lynn Ann Oates was a private one, and such privacy was inviolable.

  None of my friends from high school or college would ever meet my sister. My husband would never meet my sister. For nearly fifteen years my parents lived in a kind of quarantine with my sister; few people visited them, for few would feel comfortable in a setting in which a seemingly deranged/retarded girl roamed freely, running in and out of rooms. Or perhaps my parents simply didn’t want anyone to visit, which is equally likely.

  Until her final illness, my grandmother Blanche continued to visit Millersport bearing her symbolic gifts. My grandmother deeply loved her son and his family, for she had no family otherwise; what we knew of her remarriage, after her young, handsome Irish husband Carleton Oates had abandoned her decades before, did not seem happy, and did not bear examination. (Is it my family’s reticence, or is this not-wishing-to-violate-another’s-privacy commonplace?) Perhaps it was an expression of love, respect, dignity that you did not ever ask any question that would embarrass another or suggest that a facade of domestic happiness was not altogether sincere.

  Certainly no one spoke of Lynn in any way other than casual. In my memory, any discussion of Lynn was not welcomed at all.

  What will become of us! We are badly in need of help.

  Foolish to have left my paperback copy of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl on a table in my parents’ living room. I’d come home to visit for a few days and, unthinking, left some of my books where Lynn could find them. All the books were destroyed but it’s only The Golden Bowl I recall, the irony, the pathos, James’s great web of words, printed words, as inscrutable to my sister as Sanskrit would be to me, and for that reason richly deserving of destruction.

  Or, more plausibly: my rampaging sister destroyed the book not knowing it was a book or even that it was Joyce’s book but only that it was an object new in the household, therefore out of place, offensive to her sense of decorum and order.

  It is painful to recall: my sister would tear pages in her fists, she would tear at the pages with her teeth. She would make high-pitched strangulated cries, or she would grunt, in her misery, frustration, desperation. She would not ever—not once—so much as look at me, thoug
h she must have sensed my presence.

  (Though she could not have known how uncannily she resembled me, and I resembled her. Like twins separated by eighteen years.)

  It was inanimate objects my sister would attack, generally. She would never attack me.

  (And yet—one day she might have attacked me. As a pubescent child, older, taller, stronger, very likely Lynn would have attacked me, as she would one day attack my mother.)

  How vivid it is still, the ravaged copy of The Golden Bowl with its eloquent, elaborate, and all but impenetrable introduction by R. P. Blackmur. Badly torn, and the lurid imprint of small sharp teeth on what remained of the pages.

  “Oh, Lynn! What did you do.”

  I was acutely aware of my mother in the kitchen doorway a short distance away, who’d come to see what was wrong. If words were exchanged between my mother and me at this time I have forgotten them.

  Very likely my mother had suggested that it was my own fault for having left the books in that vulnerable place where Lynn would find them. And of course this was true. If there was fault here, it could only be my own.

  In the kitchen my excited sister was on her feet but hunched and rocking from side to side making her strangulated Nyah-nyah-nyah sound. It was not laughter, and it was not derisive or taunting—it was purely sound, and meaningless. At this time Lynn might have been eight, nine, ten years old—a child who grew physically, but not mentally.

  The confrontation with The Golden Bowl had been the child’s triumph but it had left her dangerously overexcited; there was the danger that she might attack something else now, or someone.