I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I didn’t tell Daddy this. His left eyelid drooped as if winking at me. He was trying to smile, was he? Curly Red. How’s my girl? My hair wasn’t red any longer, and it wasn’t curly. I was a passionate AA advocate: one day at a time, the highest wisdom. You can eke out a life like that. Like Daddy’s labored breathing, in which desperation was put to good use. When you have less than 40 percent of your lungs remaining, you use every cubic centimeter of those remaining lungs.

  Of Daddy’s seven children, Leo was the one who hadn’t returned. Leo had served five years in prison, was released to parole at the age of twenty-four, choosing to reside in the Red Bank area; two years later he left New York State and never returned to Perrysburg. Where Leo was, somewhere on the West Coast, my mother and sisters knew, but I didn’t dare inquire. Why do you want to know? Why you?

  Mario had stayed away from Perrysburg for fifteen years, then he’d returned. He worked for a local construction company as a carpenter. He’d married twice, like me. Divorced twice. Like me, no children. I wondered if he’d given up drinking. He’d become a boneless-looking man of middle age, taciturn, purse-lipped, like an awkwardly hip high school teacher in tinted aviator sunglasses and suede leather jackets from Sears. We’d met on the front walk of the house on Crescent Avenue, by accident; Mario was leaving as I was approaching. I tasted panic seeing him, recognizing him immediately, my brother Mario I’d betrayed…I was frightened he might spit into my face. Or—the walk was slick with melting snow—he might kick my legs out from under me. My terror must have shown in my face. Mario laughed. He grinned, shaking his head, as if there was an old joke between us, moving past me on the narrow walk with no intention of speaking, certainly not of taking my hand, which I was holding out tentatively, but at the curb where his car was parked he called back, “Lili Rose, it’s O.K. Only just too bad about the old man, huh? Seventy-three isn’t old.” I said, “Mario!” But he was in his car gunning the motor.

  Now at Daddy’s bedside I’m thinking, suddenly excited, I’ll call Mario. Tonight. If he hangs up, I might drive by his place. I’ll get the address from Mariana. I’ll knock at his door, I’ll see Mario again. God damn, I will.

  I’ve taken Daddy’s unresisting hand. I believe I can feel his fingers tightening. I’m thinking the wild extravagant thoughts you think at such times: the world is a hospice, we’re all in it together. “Daddy, I love you. Even if…” Even if I’ve hated you. I lived with Aunt Bea and Uncle Clyde, who’d waited for me to love them like a daughter, but that hadn’t happened; I’d broken their hearts too, moving out on the June morning following my high school graduation, living in a half-dozen cities, two husbands and more lovers than I can recall and no children, whether by design or chance I couldn’t have said, but none of that sorry crap figures here. None of the rest of my life figures here.

  In Hiding

  NOT THINKING Is this a mistake, to begin? nor Will I regret this? Normally a guarded woman, she’d given in to impulse. Hadn’t considered any future beyond the gesture of an hour.

  His name was Woodson Johnston, Jr.—“Woody.” He signed this name with a thick-nubbed pen in black ink with a flair that suggested he wished to think well of himself.

  Where’d he get her home address? A directory of poets and writers?

  Please accept my poetry as a gift. I love your poetry truly. Even if you don’t have time to read my writings. Even if you don’t have a feeling for it. I understand!

  He was an inmate at Kansas State Penitentiary for Men in Fulham, Kansas. His number was AT33914. He’d sent her a packet of poems and a few pages of a prison diary. She was a poet, translator, part-time college teacher, and divorced mother of a fifteen-year-old son. For the past seven years, since the divorce, she’d lived in Olean, New York.

  A snowswept November. Swirling funnels of snow like vaporous human figures dancing across the snow-crust, then turning ragged, blown apart. She’d opened the packet, quickly read Johnston’s poems that had been published in a small smudgily printed magazine with a clever name—In Pen. The diary had been photocopied from a laboriously typed manuscript without margins. There were frequent misspellings and typographical errors and Johnston had written in corrections in a neat, crimped hand. Her heart was moved to pity, seeing these corrections. As if they mattered! But of course they mattered to the author.

  Quickly she read the poems, and reread them. She read the prison diary excerpt. Johnston was talented, she thought. Her pity became sympathy. Impulsively she wrote back to him, just a card. Thank you for your intriguing, original poetry. And your disturbing diary with its vivid details. Mailed off the card, and that was that!

  EXCEPT: WOODY IMMEDIATELY wrote back. More poems, and more diary excerpts, and a snapshot of himself. A black man of about thirty-five, with faint Caucasian features, curly dark hair parted on the left side of his head, and plastic-framed glasses with lenses so thick they distorted his eyes. Woody was smiling hopefully, but his forehead was deeply creased. He wore a shirt open at the throat, and a jacket. On the back of the snapshot he’d written In happier times—6 Yrs. ago.

  She hesitated, this time. But only for a few minutes.

  She sent Johnston a package of paperback books including one of her own and one by a young black poet from San Diego. (Though afterward wondering was that a condescending gesture? perhaps even racist?) She didn’t send him a snapshot of herself but there was one, blond-blurred and smiling, the poet at the age of thirty-nine, a few years back, on the back of her book of poems.

  SOMETIMES, THESE LONG winters in upstate New York, she couldn’t recall any previous life. Couldn’t recall having been married, or before that. And her son Rick barely remembered a time before Olean. In her memory there’d been a young, wanly blond woman who might’ve been a next-door neighbor, a shyly smiling, self-conscious young wife secretly astonished that she was loved by any man, a man’s wife, in time a young mother, all this blind-dazzling as winter sunshine on fresh-fallen snow and in truth in the deepest recesses of her heart (as she’d written in her frankest poems) she had never believed in such happiness; and so it had been revealed to her, in time, that her happiness was unmerited after all, the man who’d loved her had departed, withdrawing his love.

  But leaving her with a son she adored.

  A cheerful good-natured boy. A natural athlete, a smart if inconsistent student. Rick had friends, he didn’t mope. His good luck, his acne was all on his back; his face was smooth. What an acrobat on a skate-board! Though sometimes when his mother happened to see Rick and he didn’t see her, she was troubled at his boyish face so melancholy in repose. His mouth worked, with unspoken words. She loved her son, and her son loved her, yet it was all she could do to keep from begging his forgiveness. I’m to blame. I must be. I couldn’t keep him, your father. Try not to hate me! Yet she knew that Rick was embarrassed by her sentimental outbursts. He liked his mom droll, wisecracking like a high-minded Joan Rivers. In sheepskin jacket, jeans, and hiking boots in winter. Chunky dark glasses obscuring half her face. The admiration of his teachers when she visited the high school. For she was something of a local celebrity, to her embarrassment. A poet published with a respected New York press, translator of slender volumes of German verse, Rilke, Novalis. She was a popular teacher of poetry and translation workshops at the State University of New York at Olean.

  Since the divorce she’d been involved with few men. Her romantic liaisons flattened quickly into friendships. It was as if her sexual life, her life as a woman, had ended.

  Rick’s thoughts on the subject of whether his mom should “see” men, or remarry, were ambiguous. Of the sexual behavior of a parent, no adolescent can bear to speculate. If the subject came up, Rick winced, laughed nervously, rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. And blushed. “Hey, Mom. It’s cool, O.K.?”

  Meaning what? She had no idea.

  She thought Some illusions are too much strain to uphold, in any case.

  Olean was a community of married couples, many with y
oung children. The divorced departed, or died. She was no threat to anyone’s marriage. She was well-liked by both sexes equally.

  Stalled in writing, she studied Woodson Johnston’s snapshots. (He’d sent her several by this time.) In one, she saw a small vertical scar like a fish hook just above his upper lip. In another, she saw a curious asymmetrical alignment of his eyes, and the left eye just perceptibly larger than the right. (A trick of the camera?) He spoke of himself as a lone soul. Even before prison he’d been, he said, condemned to solitary confinement.

  She didn’t query Johnston about his personal life, nor did she answer his polite but persistent queries about her personal life. If he’d read her poems (as he claimed to have done) he would know a good deal about her. More than she was comfortable with him knowing, in fact.

  Never did she reply to his letters immediately. Always she put them aside on a windowsill or on an edge of her desk.

  He’d been sentenced to life in prison. He’d sent her printed information about his case, his appeals, a photocopy of a letter from his attorney. She’d glanced quickly through these. She did not want to discover, and to be embarrassed by, Johnston’s inevitable claim of innocence. Mistaken identity. Police coercion. False testimony.

  Did Rick know about his mother’s prison admirer, as she thought of him? She’d mentioned Johnston to Rick only that first time, and then not by name or very specifically; since then, not a word. Nor had Rick the slightest interest in the treasures on her cluttered desk, whether hard-won drafts of poems, translation projects, or poems and letters from others. Now he was in high school, he rarely troubled to enter her study at the rear of the house, a winterized porch overlooking a shallow ravine. She’d glance around to see him leaning in the doorway—“Hey, Mom. I’m back.” Or, “Hey, Mom. I’m out of here.” She smiled and waved him away, pushing her glasses against the bridge of her nose.

  Oh, she adored her son! Now he’d become untouchable.

  THERE WERE WEEKS, even months, when she forgot Woodson Johnston, Jr. Or would have forgotten him, except Johnston didn’t give up, and continued to write to her. I wish to live through you! I see so much through your eyes. It was a rainy spring, a heat-paralyzed summer. She went away, and Rick went to visit his father. She returned to Johnston’s letters, packets of new poems and prose pieces. She read his poems guiltily. Was he improving? Had the man any talent, really? (But what did “talent” mean, wasn’t this a middle-class, possibly racist supposition?) Johnston asked her for honest criticism but she shrank from remarks more specific than “very good!”—“excellent!”—“original image!”—“inspired!” Once, when she wrote “Unclear?” in the margin of a poem, Johnston fired back a two-page handwritten letter of defense and she thought, Never again. She had no right to interfere with the man’s imagination, in any case. His use of black street talk, jazz and rap rhythms, obscenities, a zig-zag poetry she thought it, brash and childlike in its dramatic contrasts, innocent of poetic strategies.

  She wondered if she was, unknowingly, a racist? Is this how a racist thinks?

  She gathered Johnston’s poems, some fifty new and printed, into a collection, and sent the manuscript to her New York publisher. She told Johnston nothing of this, but mailed to him, as if in parting, a popular paperback anthology, These Voices: Black American Poetry & Prose. She departed for three weeks in South America on a USIA reading tour, and when she returned letters from Johnston awaited her. She forestalled opening them. She forestalled replying. Her publisher declined Johnston’s manuscript with regret—“No market for this, I’m afraid”—and she sent it out to another publisher, a small press specializing in quality poetry. Weeks passed, and months. There came an early autumn, a fierce, dry winter. At her desk, she observed the ravine filling up with storm debris and a thin crusting of snow. When she won a literary prize, Johnston wrote to congratulate her. When she lost another, he sent condolences. You are a beautiful woman. A beautiful poet-soul. She laughed, and felt her face burn. What kind of fool does he take me for? This letter of Johnston’s she tore into pieces and threw away. What a horror if Rick should discover it. He’d be shocked, worse yet he might tease her. Hey Mom—beau-ti-ful? Cool! She hadn’t been beautiful as a smooth-faced girl in her early twenties, she wasn’t beautiful as a mature, rather worn woman in her early forties. She thought I should break this off, with him. This isn’t a wise thing.

  She ceased answering his letters. He continued writing to her, but at increasing intervals. (Had he found another correspondent? Another sympathetic white-woman poet? She hoped so.) The small press declined Johnston’s manuscript with regret, explaining they were cutting back on poetry by unknown poets, however talented. She made inquiries with other presses, hoping to send the manuscript out again, but weeks passed, no one was much interested, she began to grow tired of her own effort. She placed Johnston’s papers in a closet in her study. That summer, she went to Ireland as a guest of the Aran Islands Literary Festival, taking Rick with her, and when she returned there was a letter from the American Innocence Defense Fund in Washington, D.C. A lawyer representing Woodson Johnston, Jr., was asking her, in what appeared to be a form letter, for a contribution to help in the man’s defense. She thought, Am I surprised? No. She did feel manipulated. But why, manipulated? After all, a man is fighting for his life. Of course, she was sympathetic. Possibly he was innocent. Mistaken identity? Police coercion? False testimony for the prosecution? She made out a check for $500 and sent it to the fund and received a form letter thanking her for her generosity; she felt a wave of shame, for she’d given so little, and impulsively she made out a second check, for $1,500, and sent this to the fund; and received a duplicate of the previous letter, thanking her for her generosity. But nothing from Johnston. She realized she hadn’t heard from Johnston in some time. Was he too busy for her, now? Had something in her last, rather brief letter offended him?

  She thought, relieved That’s that.

  IN MAY, in the sudden warmth of a glowing mid-morning sun, she happened to glance out a front window of her house to see a car being driven slowly past. Out-of-state license plates. Was the driver looking toward her house? She watched as the car continued along the road, gathering speed, took a right turn and disappeared.

  She lived, in Olean, in what was called a “development” at the edge of town, a suburban neighborhood now at least twenty years old, of medium-priced, attractive homes, split-level contemporaries, mock-colonials, with identical acre-lots and disfiguringly wide two-car garages and asphalt driveways. Her house was stucco and brick, somewhat shabbily overgrown with wisteria and English ivy. Forsythia bloomed in the front yard. Along the road were newly budded spruce trees planted at measured intervals. In the air was a heady fragrance of wet grass and sunshine.

  She’d opened the front door, to look out. She closed it, and retreated to the living room, indecisively, watching through the plate-glass “picture window” (as the realtor had called it) without knowing what she was watching for. She saw herself, a figure in a split-level American house on a suburban street she could not have identified. She saw herself, a woman both girlish and middle-aged, straggling shoulder-length blond hair faded to a smudged-looking gray-brown, her face plain, shiny, with puckers beside her mouth and lashless eyes, her quite fit, healthy body grown thick-waisted, and her upper thighs disconcertingly heavy. She wore a soiled white Orlon pullover sweater, her usual jeans, and badly water-stained running shoes. She backed away from the window to observe, from a short distance, the out-of-state car, an economy Toyota, returning, this time parking at the curb. She saw a man climb out of the car, in a canvas jacket, a baseball cap, jeans, a lean dark-skinned man with glasses; his knees appeared to be stiff, he walked with a limp, self-consciously up the flagstone walk to the front door. His movements were deliberate and slow. He held his arms oddly, bent at the elbows, fingers slightly out-spread. In the harsh sunshine, the lenses of his glasses shone. See how I am being open about this? I am not dangerous. My hands are in
full view. Unarmed.

  Quickly she retreated to the rear of the house, to her study. She shut the door. She was breathing with difficulty, a roaring in her ears. Morning light flooded the study, somehow she’d expected darkness, a refuge. On her computer, on her desk, a screen saver dreamily whirled pastel planets.

  She heard Rick answer the door. Rick! She’d forgotten he was home, this was a Saturday. She heard no voices, only a murmur. Then came Rick loping along the hall. “Mother? Mom?” Without hesitation he pushed the study door open. She was standing very still. Not by her desk, nor by one of the crammed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but in an alcove of the L-shaped room, on the far side of the closet, where cartons and excess books had long been gathering dust. Rick stared at her. She saw the shock in his smooth boy-face. “Mom? Why are you hiding?”

  I’m Not Your Son,

  I Am No One You Know

  DON’T MAKE EYE contact my brother warned.

  They’ll be waiting just inside. Don’t look at them.

  Deftly my brother punched in the code. Knew the code by heart. I had to be impressed, this was my younger brother and seemed possessed of a grim knowledge of which I was ignorant.

  A hefty double door with inset wire-lattice windows. Overhead, a video monitor. As soon as my brother punched in the code, the doors slid open and we stepped inside and at once the doors slid shut behind us. Two, three seconds you were granted, no more. Like the sliding doors of airport trains. Like a maximum-security prison. For already the figures waiting just inside pressed forward. There were three of them. Dad won’t be among them, my brother had promised. Yet my heart began to clamor, I felt sweat breaking out in all the pores of my clumsy body.