Freaky Green Eyes

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mom said, “Samantha, what’s that? What happened to your wrist?” and Samantha murmured, “I don’t know, maybe I . . . fell down, I guess.”

  “Fell down—where?” Mom asked, concerned, and Samantha shrugged away from her, not wanting Mom to touch her. She said contemptuously, “Where’s anybody fall? On the dumb ground.”

  This was June.

  June was a long month.

  I’d been supposed to spend two weeks at the Bainbridge Island Arts Camp, where some friends of mine from school were going, but I never got around to filling out the application, and Mom must have forgotten, too. Every week Dad was promising we’d go away for a few days to Cape Flattery, where some rich Seattle businessman had a place on the ocean, but (somehow I knew this) Dad was embarrassed to accept an invitation without his wife; how could he explain his wife’s absence, unless Krista could be talked into joining her family. (I overheard certain phone calls. I wasn’t eavesdropping, but I overheard.) But so many people wanted Reid Pierson to stay with them at their beautiful summer places, how could he choose? And it was baseball season. And Maria was fired (by Dad, for no reason we ever learned), so another woman had to be hired. And Samantha came down with summer bronchitis. And that was June.

  SIX

  cape flattery: july 4

  “We can have a good time, Franky, can’t we? Even if Mom isn’t with us?”

  For Fourth of July Dad finally drove us out to Cape Flattery, which is about as far west and north on the Olympic Peninsula as you can get. We were excited! It was the first outing we’d had with our father in a long time. The Blounts’ lodge, as it was called, was six miles south of the Cape, built on a high, rocky bluff overlooking the white-capped greenish waves of the Pacific Ocean. We’d be going sailing and whale watching, Dad promised. The Blounts had three children, two boys and a girl, so we’d have someone to “relate to.”

  There’d been the possibility of Mom joining us for the long weekend. At least, that was what Dad hinted. Except on the morning we left for Cape Flattery, Dad told us there’d been a sudden change of plans. “She changed her mind, girls. She just called and said she wasn’t coming.” Samantha cried, “Why? Why isn’t Mom coming?” and Dad said, shrugging, “Sweetie, you’ll have to ask her.”

  Later Dad said, in a voice meant to be forgiving, “Like I said, girls, she’s in her own zone now. ‘Skagit Harbor.’”

  Each time Dad spoke of Mom, his words seemed to take on newer and more mysterious meanings.

  (First they swear to you there’s “nobody else.” Then, later, you learn that not only is there “somebody else,” it’s this “somebody else” who’s the reason for the weird behavior: quarreling, crying, shoving-around, falling-down-drunk stuff that makes you ashamed you even know these people, let alone they’re your parents. And sure, there’s a divorce. And it drags on, and on. And it never ends, because it’s inside you, too. And you carry it with you wherever you go, like a turtle with a crooked shell.

  (This is what friends of mine have said. Girls at Forrester whose parents went through divorce. I’d hear, and I’d think, But not the Piersons. We’re special.)

  Samantha’s bruise bracelet was mostly faded now. You had to know what it was to notice it. On the drive to Cape Flattery, Samantha in the front seat of the car with Dad while I sat in the back, sprawled out, reading and scribbling in my diary, I’d see Samantha examine her wrist now and then, lifting her slender arm to the light.

  Since Dad had disciplined her, Samantha was better behaved in his presence. I guess I was, too.

  When we got to the Blounts’ lodge, it was midafternoon. Dad had trouble locating the property, it was set back so far from the road in a dense evergreen forest. He’d been telling us about the Blounts, who were strong supporters of his and loyal friends. Mr. Blount was a multimillionaire, and he was locally famous for his generous donations to civic causes and charities. As a distinguished alum of the U. of Washington he’d endowed athletic scholarships for both men and women, including, just last year, a scholarship in Dad’s name: the Reid Pierson Class of ’78 Football Scholarship. Dad marveled, “That was one of the great honors of my life, I can tell you. It was an absolute surprise.”

  When Dad spoke like this, I couldn’t tell if he was addressing just Samantha and me or other, invisible listeners. Sometimes I could almost see this audience, on the far side of blinding lights. I could hear their cheers and applause.

  Finally Dad found the Blounts’ driveway. Bumpy, bouncy, you needed a Jeep to navigate it. Dad was cursing under his breath, and Samantha and I were very quiet. But there was a clearing after a quarter mile, sunlight flooded in, and the Blounts’ lodge lifted above us, so impressive we just stared. Dad murmured happily, “Now there’s class, girls. Wealth and taste.” The “lodge” was the size of a small hotel, made of redwood logs and stone, with numerous sliding doors, balconies, and open decks. There were beautiful stone chimneys and what appeared to be Indian gargoyles and totem poles used for decorative purposes. Beyond the house was the bluff, and an enormous sweeping view of the ocean. For once the mist wasn’t obscuring the horizon.

  There were at least eight vehicles in the Blounts’ horseshoe driveway. My heart sank—I hadn’t anticipated so many Fourth of July guests. Somehow from the way Dad had talked, it had seemed as if Reid Pierson and his family would be the only guests.

  Dad was in a great mood immediately. Shaking hands, kissing cheeks, and hugging. Everybody knew Reid Pierson, and everybody was drawn to Reid Pierson. From time to time Dad would remember that Samantha and I had come with him, and he’d wave us over, or snap his fingers like a magician, “Girls! Sam-Sam and Franky, c’mere.” For Dad was proud of his daughters, he wanted everyone to know.

  Samantha was an honor student at Country Day. Franky was a star swimmer and diver on the girls’ team at Forrester. Todd, who hadn’t been able to join us today, was into serious football at Washington State.

  When Dad was asked about his wife, he smiled and shook his head wryly. “Krista sends her regrets. She’s so terribly sorry not to be with us. She has an extremely dependent family down in Portland; they’re forever calling upon her to help them with ‘crises.’ . . .”

  For a moment I wondered: Is this true? Mom isn’t in Skagit Harbor, but in Portland? Maybe that was why Aunt Vicky had called and e-mailed me?

  As soon as I saw the Blounts, especially Mrs. Blount, who was about Mom’s age but sleekly blond and glamorous in that way Mom no longer wanted to be, I was lonely for home, and for Mom. In this beautiful place on the ocean, on the Fourth of July. I felt lonely, gawky, self-conscious. Samantha and I were like orphans at this house party where everybody knew everybody else and there were children running in and out and strangers carrying drinks drifting by, crying, “Happy Fourth! Great weather, isn’t it? For once.” A witty variant of this was “Great weather, isn’t it? Bud ordered it.”

  Mrs. Blount seized both my hands in hers and said, “Franky, is it? I’m sooo sorry your mother wasn’t able to join us. I hope the ‘family crisis’ isn’t terribly serious?”

  “Just some people dying, maybe.”

  This was a Freaky remark—I couldn’t resist. The look on Mrs. Blount’s tight, manicured face!

  “Oh, dear. I hope—it isn’t—” Still, Mrs. Blount meant to be upbeat at her party and needed my help; we were clumsy as canoers struggling with outsize paddles, about to capsize.

  I mumbled a vague reply that might have been interpreted as It’s okay, it won’t last much longer, and Mrs. Blount pretended to feel relief hearing this, and smiled at me and squeezed my hands in a gesture of maternal sympathy. But her gaze slipped past my head to fasten eagerly upon another, more promising guest who’d just arrived.

  “Excuse me, dear! We’ll catch up later.”

  There came our host, Bud Blount, to say hello to me. He was a hearty, red-faced man of about fifty with thick graying hair on his head and a darker patch of hair at the deep V of his sports shirt. “Your fathe
r says you’re quite a swimmer, eh? Diver? Me too. I mean, I used to be. In college. C’mere, darlin’.” He wanted to show me his Olympic-size pool, which was visible from one end of the redwood deck, but he was distracted by other guests, including my father, who were praising the wine he was serving and asking about its vintage. I would have slipped away while they were talking, but Mr. Blount had hold of my arm. He said, “My sixteen-year-old, Sean, is a helluva diver too. Sean? Where’s Sean, Leila? Tell you what, I’m going to propose that you two sexy kids change into swimsuits and put on a little performance for us, eh? I bet you’re terrific. My diving days are over.” He chuckled, patting his hard-looking stomach that protruded over the belt of his khaki shorts. “All I can do now are belly flops, but kids like you, you’re in terrific shape.” Mr. Blount not only tugged my ponytail fondly, like I was five years old, but made a playful swipe as if to pinch my bare midriff.

  Hey! I didn’t like this. But it happened fast, and Mr. Blount was obviously not a bad guy, just gregarious and trying to be funny the way Dad was sometimes when he’d been drinking. So I resisted the impulse to push away from him. I gave him the excuse that I wasn’t “swimming or diving right now”—it was “that time for me.” This was a Freaky trick: acting like I was really really embarrassed, and causing Mr. Blount to be embarrassed, too, after he caught on. His heavy face was flushing a deeper shade of pink. He mumbled, “Well. I’m—sorry.”

  “Some other time, maybe. Invite us back.”

  Samantha and I had a nice bunk-bed girls’ room on the second floor of the lodge, and Dad’s room was just across the way. It seemed strange to be in a place like this, like a hotel, without Mom close by to supervise us. Samantha whispered, “We could call her, Franky, couldn’t we? Just to say hello.” But the cell phone was mine, and I vetoed the idea.

  I didn’t bother unpacking most of my things. Left them in the suitcase. We were staying only three nights.

  There was to be an outdoor barbecue, a suckling pig roasted on a spit. The smell of roasting flesh permeated the air and was both mouthwatering and sickening. (Twyla was a vegetarian. I was fully intending to become a vegetarian, too, except I knew Dad would be annoyed: he called it a “hippie affectation.”) I was feeling more and more Freaky-restless, wondering why I was here. Wondering why I hadn’t had the courage to tell Dad I’d prefer to spend the Fourth of July in Skagit Harbor with Mom.

  You wouldn’t, ever. You don’t have that courage.

  Know what you are? A hypocrite.

  Freaky’s derisive voice in my head.

  Before the barbecue, while it was still daylight, Mr. Blount took some of his guests out on his forty-foot sailing yacht Triumph II to look for whales. I was excited about going—I loved those smallish killer whales that relate so strangely to human beings—but the air was cold on the water; the wind blew spray into our faces, and the season was no longer summer but felt more like November. And Samantha was frightened of the way the boat bounced and bucked sideways against the waves.

  Mr. Blount was at the helm, and Dad was his cocaptain. The two men were laughing and shouting, “Whale! Whale ahoy! To the starboard, keep your eyes open.” We kept our eyes open but didn’t see any whales; or, if we saw them, we didn’t know what we were seeing in the roiling water because they surfaced and sank again in nearly the same motion. I wondered if the whales were teasing us, laughing at us. After about fifteen minutes Samantha’s lips and fingernails were turning blue and she was shivering so badly, I hunted up a sweater for her in the cabin and wrapped it around her. Samantha tried gamely to see what Dad was pointing at, but she was dazed and vacant eyed. The boat dipped and heaved, rocked and rolled. The wind sucked our breaths away. I couldn’t even see the Blounts’ lodge above the bluff, there was so much spray and mist. But the mood on Triumph II was mostly festive, since the adults had been drinking. This was a party after all. Fourth of July.

  The Blount brothers, Sean and Chris, had come with us. Sean was a familiar high school type: one of those guys who look slantwise at you like they’re assessing you, maybe liking what they see, but maybe not. Ever since we’d been introduced up at the house, Sean seemed undecided about me, impressed that I was Reid Pierson’s daughter but unconvinced that I was pretty enough, or sexy enough, for him to waste time on. I was only a year younger than Sean, but probably he thought I was even younger. Still, he seemed to like me. He wanted to impress me. He had a pair of binoculars for me to look through, to see whales in the distance, surfacing and leaping up to flash their sleek, glistening faces in the air, then disappearing again. “See? They’re cool, whales.” I thanked Sean and handed the binoculars to Samantha.

  Sean said he wished they could hunt whales like in Moby-Dick. With harpoons. “Know what I’d like to do someday? Catch a baby whale in a net and train it in our pool. And videotape it.”

  I wondered, could this guy be serious? He seemed to be.

  “That’s illegal, isn’t it?”

  Sean grinned and shrugged. “Who’s to know? The Coast Guard? The FBI?”

  After thirty minutes of bucking the waves, Mr. Blount turned the boat around and we headed back to his dock, where the sweet-sickening odor of roasting pig greeted us.

  The adults returned to the party on the redwood deck, but Sean had something to show me, his “private zoo.” It was a hike uphill from the dock to a grassy area behind the Blounts’ three-car garage, where Sean and Chris had a number of cages. Samantha and I were quiet, seeing the brothers’ collection of animals: a hare, a fox cub, two nervous raccoons, and a young owl. “Pretty cool, huh?” Sean boasted. “The fox especially. The mother comes around, making these barking, mewing noises.” He laughed. “If she doesn’t watch out, we’ll catch her, too. See this trap?”

  At least it was a Havahart trap, not a leg-iron trap.

  A feeling like flame passed over me. I was so disgusted! But I managed to speak calmly. “Where’d you get all these?” I asked, as if I was truly impressed.

  Sean gestured toward the forest. “Right around here. It’s a wildlife refuge, that way. We trapped them. There’s thousands of them—it’s no big deal. I mean, they’re not endangered species or anything.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  Sean shrugged. “Who cares? It’s cool.”

  Chris echoed his older brother, grinning. “It’s cool.”

  “Your parents don’t care?”

  Again, Sean shrugged. “No big deal.”

  Samantha was staring at the hare. He was much larger than a bunny of the kind you see in pet stores at Easter. He was a beautiful, sad-looking creature with dark moist eyes and a quivering nose and strangely short, collapsed-seeming ears. She said, “Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

  “Hell, no. We feed them real well.”

  They didn’t, though. The plastic water bowls were almost empty, and not very clean. The cages were dirty. Chris was poking a stick at the raccoons and laughing at their terror. Except one of the raccoons bit the stick and nearly pulled it from Chris’s hand. “Hey! Watch it!” Chris scolded. For some reason, this was funny: both brothers laughed. Samantha and I were trying to feed the hare grass, but he was apathetic and shrank from us. Sean spilled some pelletlike dog food into the cages, but none of the creatures ate. The fox cub, which was the size of a full-grown cat, was panting, crouched with his back against the wire enclosure of its cage, staring unblinking at us with tawny eyes. His narrow chest rose and fell rapidly. The owl, too, stared unblinking. We need help. We need you. Save us! I thought of how my mom might react. Again that hot, flamy sensation passed over my brain, a freaky feeling that excited me. Samantha was saying worriedly, “They’re lonely here just by themselves. I wouldn’t want to be in a cage! You should let them out—they could go back home.”

  Sean said, “Sure. When we feel like it.”

  I didn’t want to arouse their distrust. I asked a few questions sort of politely, like I was impressed, and then we went back up on the deck, where people
were beginning to eat from a big buffet.

  As soon as it was dark, Mr. Blount’s fireworks display began. He’d hired somebody from Seattle for it. People were ooohing and aaahing like small children, staring up at the multicolored flaring lights that exploded like stars and pressing their hands over their ears, the noise was so loud. I couldn’t find Dad at first, then saw him at the far end of the deck surrounded by admirers. He was in a festive mood, one arm loosely slung around the bare shoulders of a very young woman with dramatically straight blond hair. From time to time he called over to Samantha and me, “Hey girls. Having a good time?” and “Terrific display, eh?”

  I remembered the promise No divorce. Not ever.

  Freaky-quick and shrewd, I slipped away from the party while everybody was gaping at the fireworks.

  Immediately I went to our car in the driveway. I knew that Dad kept a flashlight in the glove compartment, and I took this flashlight and crept behind the Blounts’ garage to the “private zoo.” “Fourth of July! Independence Day! Here you go.”

  One by one I unlatched the cages. First the raccoons, then the fox cub, then the hare, then the owl. My heart was pounding like crazy. I didn’t know if I was scared to death or excited. My hands were shaking. At first, not one of the creatures stirred. They were fearful of me, huddling in their cages. The little fox’s eyes glared tawny yellow like reflectors. The hare was visibly quivering. I drew back from the cages and lowered the flashlight. “Go! Go back home! You’re free.”

  Still, no one moved.

  In the sky above the Blounts’ house the fireworks were bursting and blooming. The ooohs! and ahhhs! were louder, people were drunker. I was so disgusted! If animals could think, what would they think of our species? Capable of such silly, extravagant behavior, but at the same time cruel and selfish. Like the Blount brothers. Cruel because they were selfish and ignorant, behaving as if animals weren’t “real”—didn’t have feelings just like they did.

  At last, the larger raccoon leaped down from his cage and went lumbering frantically toward the woods without a backward glance. The other raccoon was more cautious but followed him. The hare seemed paralyzed, his bulging dark eyes blinking spasmodically, but the fox cub was approaching the opened door of his cage, sniffing as if he suspected a trick. The owl hadn’t moved, not a feather. I backed away farther and switched off the flashlight.