I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Sharon felt her cheeks blush, and said meanly, “You’re the one—you’re growing a beer belly.”

  “Yeah?” Ryan Voigt glanced down at himself. “That ain’t all I’m growing, sweetheart.”

  How old had Ryan Voigt been, when he’d said such things to a thirteen-year-old girl? Sharon would calculate, years later, that he must have been in his early forties. Yet he seemed a generation younger than her father, who would also have been in his mid-forties, who never teased his adolescent daughters, and seemed scarcely to look at them.

  FOR A WHILE, Eva, too, had liked to be teased by Ryan Voigt.

  Eva was a solid fleshy girl of sixteen with healthy olive skin and a dark downiness on her upper lip. Ryan Voigt’s eyes snagged on her; you could see there was something in Eva that attracted him, though he was wary of her, for of Karen’s girl friends Eva McGregor was the one least intimidated by him. He had to respect her way of standing with her hands on her hips and staring him down.

  One day, when the girls were ambling about the shop, testing out sofas and chairs by lounging in them, pretending to be prissy adult females, they overheard Ryan Voigt speaking in an unnerving voice, one they’d never heard before: he must have been talking to someone who owed him money, and he was using words like weapons (“fuck,” “asshole,” “son of a bitch”). It was frightening to hear yet also thrilling. When Ryan Voigt hung up the phone, the girls pretended not to have heard. Karen was chattering nervously. Eva had discovered crimson velvet scraps in the discard pile, and was holding them up admiringly. She asked Karen if she could have them, and Karen said, “Sure, I guess so. They just get thrown out.” Ryan Voigt lit a cigarette, came over, and asked what the hell Eva wanted with the scraps, and Eva said she wanted to re-cover a cushion she kept on her bed, this was a color that matched, and the fabric was beautiful, and Ryan Voigt pulled the scraps out of Eva’s hand and said, “I’ll make you a cushion, honey.” He was heated, nerved up from the phone call. His eyes dropped to Eva’s ankles and rose swiftly. “See, honey, I’ll make you a dandy cushion if you promise me one thing.”

  Eva said guardedly, “What?”

  Ryan Voigt said, “If you sit on it. Your sweet tender ass. I’ll make the cushion if you promise you’ll sit on it bare.”

  Eva turned away, muttering what sounded like, “I hate you.” The other girls sniggered. (Though Sharon felt a stab of jealousy. She knew what Ryan Voigt’s offer meant: he preferred her sister to her.) Flush-faced, Eva slammed out the front door of the shop, clanging the bell behind her.

  Ryan Voigt called after, “Hey, I’m serious, hon. You’ll see.”

  In fact, Ryan Voigt did make a cushion, covered in the splendid crimson velvet, with black silk tassels; Sharon would discover it on her sister’s bed in a week or so. “Where’d you get that?” Sharon asked, shocked. Eva shrugged, with an evasive smile. It was a Yewville High affectation at the time to repel unwanted questions with the airy rejoinder, “Who wants to know?”

  SHAME MAKES A haze of memory. Sharon still could not recall the precise chronology of what happened that evening at the Voigt home.

  Well, he came to the rear door. Rapped on the glass with his knuckles. Grinned at her. “Hey, toots: want some company?”

  Did Sharon open the door? Or had Ryan Voigt opened it? It was just past 9:30 P.M. The Voigts had driven to Buffalo to visit relatives and were due back, Mrs. Voigt had promised, around 11 P.M. Sharon had babysat for Mrs. Voigt twice before, she knew the house and felt comfortable in it. She would have locked the door from the inside (as Mrs. Voigt had instructed) but Ryan Voigt had his own key, didn’t he? He was part owner, wasn’t he?

  It was the sequence of small moments, remarks, actions that would elude her. She felt, now, that recollecting the events was like trying to piece together a sheet of broken glass. She did remember Ryan Voigt brushing past her in the kitchen, just a little too near, and the hairs on her forearm stirring. There was a feeling of wonderment as well as excitement, of elation and alarm. He was at the “fridge,” as he called it. “Hey, want an ale?” he asked, and Sharon laughed nervously and said no thanks. In fact she’d been drinking Pepsis. She had made popcorn for the Voigt children, and it was eaten except for a few greasy burnt kernels. In the living room she’d been doing math homework and watching TV, grateful to be alone and quiet, now that the children were in bed. As far as Sharon knew, even the restless four-year-old boy was asleep. Ryan Voigt grinned, pushing the bottle into her face. Practically into her mouth, bumping her teeth. “It won’t kill you, it’ll do you good.” His eyes were red-veined and his skin was coarsely mottled as if he’d been out in the sun that day. Sharon could smell his fierce, beery breath.

  Ryan Voigt wandered into the living room and stared derisively at the TV screen, switched channels, and then turned the set off—“Load of crap.” He’d just dropped in to see his little nephew and niece, he said. Play with them. They were terrific kids, crazy about their uncle Ryan. Why would he want kids of his own? Why’d anybody want to get married—y’know what Elvis Presley said, Why buy your own cow when you can get milk through a fence? Ryan Voigt laughed at this witticism, staring at Sharon. He seemed not to know her name, but he knew who she was: he began to ask her about Eva, describing her as “your big sister”—“that gal with the boobs and the sweet ass.” He asked if Eva had a boyfriend, and then asked if Sharon had a boyfriend, and that was when she began to feel, not frightened exactly, not yet, but disoriented. She’d been accustomed to moving in another direction, a direction she’d taken for granted. Except now she wasn’t up front in the upholstery shop, it wasn’t daytime, and she was alone with Ryan Voigt.

  He sat heavily on the sofa, partly crushing her math textbook. He snatched it up, leafed through it, tossed it onto the floor. He patted the cushion beside him, inviting her to sit. He was wearing a pullover sports shirt through which he’d sweated across his chest, and he was in need of a shave. He smiled; his smile was boyish, lopsided, and he held onto it too long. Sharon stood smiling, too; there was a roaring in her ears, like laughter at a distance. Ryan Voigt drank from his bottle of ale in large thirsty mouthfuls. He teased Sharon, telling her she looked like she “had a stick up her ass.” He asked her what his sister-in-law paid her for babysitting, and he said he’d pay her double that to babysit him, over at his place. He asked her if she was one of those girls who wanted to get married young and have babies, if she knew how babies were made, and if she thought it sounded like fun. He got up suddenly and went to get another ale from the fridge, brushing past Sharon, who took an instinctive step backward. He smiled at her, leaning close. There was a choked look to his face, as if something he’d swallowed was backing up on him, and Sharon could smell his breath, could almost taste it. He asked her which was larger, her shoe size or her bra size. He asked her if the tops of her thighs rubbed together when she walked wearing only panties. She laughed nervously, her face very hot. She hadn’t the capacity to think I don’t want him to like me, I guess. She hadn’t the capacity to think, as an older girl like Eva would have thought, I’ll wake the children, he’ll have to go home then. Nor did it occur to her simply to tell him, Go home. Leave me alone.

  She escaped to the bathroom. She had to use the bathroom, in fact. And Ryan Voigt lumbered after her, teasing and chortling like a small boy, except there was a meanness in his voice that wasn’t a small boy’s meanness. Sharon shut the bathroom door quickly and fumbled to lock it. Ryan Voigt sniggered on the other side. “Don’t be long, I’m listening, toots. Need some help getting your panties down?” She was frightened now. She was trapped, and she was having difficulty thinking. Ryan Voigt said, “Don’t be shy. You know you aren’t shy. You girls.”

  She saw the doorknob turning, and said, “No! Leave me alone. Please.” Suddenly she was begging. She didn’t know what to call this man: Ryan? Mr. Voigt? A few times she’d echoed Karen, calling him “Uncle Ryan,” but that was in play, and this wasn’t play. Ryan Voigt laughed, bumping against the d
oor. “Darlin’, I’m waiting. You didn’t fall in, did you?” The bathroom had a single window, and this window was jammed partway up; only a very small child could have squeezed through it. Yet in her panic Sharon considered the possibility. Better yet, she might smash the glass, and crawl through, where there was more room, climbing up onto the toilet, then the sink, then the windowsill. Amid slivers of broken glass she could escape. But the Voigts would be angry with her. Her parents would be angry. Ryan Voigt would claim he’d only been teasing, which was possibly true. After all, Sharon hung about the upholstery shop often, and never minded when Ryan Voigt teased her then. She would be laughed at, ridiculed. Everyone in the neighborhood and everyone at school would know. So she stood, crying. At some point she’d begun to cry. Possibly Ryan Voigt could hear her crying. He’d ceased rapping on the door. Then he turned up outside the bathroom, speaking to her through the window. There were bushes just outside the window, and the ground was lower than the floor, so he couldn’t see her very well. Quickly, Sharon switched off the light.

  “Please leave me alone, please go away and leave me alone,” she said. She might now have left the bathroom and gone to wake the children, she might have run to the phone and dialed 911, but her brain seemed caught in knots. She was sobbing, she was pleading. Her bladder pinched with the need to pee.

  The siege lasted forty minutes. Then, with no word, he was gone.

  THERE STOOD EVA MCGREGOR, fifty-one years old; in her high school principal’s navy-blue gabardine pants suit, frowning at her younger sister. “Sharon, you are not going back to New York tonight.”

  Eva spoke with the air of one accustomed to giving orders and to being obeyed. It must be an axiom, Sharon thought: adult children, especially sisters, are expected to quarrel over their parents’ more valuable possessions. To be indifferent is to be unloving, unnatural. And there were plenty of these possessions—valuable and otherwise—to be sorted out before the property could be sold. That, after all, was the purpose of Sharon’s visit. So she kept telling herself. It was duty, it must be done.

  In the car, Eva pointedly asked Sharon what she’d done all day. Sharon murmured something vague and evasive: she’d gone for a long walk in their old neighborhood. “It must have been long,” Eva said. “All those hours.” Wasted hours, you could almost hear Eva say. Squandered hours.

  They were headed west on Main Street in a stream of early-evening traffic. It was mid-September, a season of drought. Sharon saw out of the corner of her eye the Voigts’ old house, where, a few hours before, she’d been walking. She said, offhandedly, “The Voigts. What’s become of them?” Eva shrugged. Sharon said, encouragingly, “I always liked Karen. I was always jealous of you and Karen.”

  Eva sighed. “Karen’s a nurse. We send cards. My closest friend—it all seems so long ago.” The upholstery shop, she said, had gone out of business in the 1980’s, as Sharon must know; they’d had to sell. “They were considered first-rate upholsterers, the Voigts. The things they did for Mom, you’ll see they’ve really held up. Thirty years!”

  Sharon was trying to remember what those things were. Ryan Voigt hammering at an upended chair. The living-room sofa: a rich winy-dark brocaded fabric that Sharon had liked to pet, like fur. She heard herself ask Eva what had become of Karen Voigt’s uncle.

  Eva said, “Him! Karen’s crazy uncle. He was a drunk. I think he’s somewhere in Buffalo, institutionalized. Alzheimer’s, I think Karen said.”

  “Alzheimer’s! But—is he that old?”

  “He was an alcoholic for years. And, yes, he’s that old.”

  Eva parked in the driveway of the old house. Sharon stared as if, for a moment, she didn’t know where she was. There was the spacious white Colonial in which the sisters had grown up. Entering the house by the rear door as they’d always done, Sharon heard katydids in the tall grass, loud as cymbals, castanets. She knew she had to guard herself: the house was filled with their things—cumbersome objects and useless memories. She was thinking of Ryan Voigt, how his fingers had tugged at her hair, how he’d made a crude pinching gesture at her breasts and a joke about crab apples. Outside the bathroom, in the bushes, he’d urinated noisily. He’d wanted her to hear, and she’d heard. Sharon had never told anyone what happened that night at the Voigts’. But she never babysat for the Voigts again. She’d ceased trailing after Eva and Karen. And she’d never again entered the upholstery shop, or heard the brass bell jingle overhead.

  Well, Sharon had glimpsed Ryan Voigt a few times afterward. Once, home from college, she’d seen him on the street in downtown Yewville, big-bodied, ruddy-faced, with that look of a swerving vehicle, and possibly he’d seen her, but hadn’t recognized her because she’d changed so much, or hadn’t let on he’d recognized her. Flushed with excitement at being home, knowing herself at the age of nineteen or twenty to be so much more than Ryan Voigt could ever have guessed, she’d actually lifted a hand to wave at him, whether in sincerity or mockery she couldn’t have said. But Ryan Voigt had already been turning away, disappearing into the noontime crowd.

  Wolf’s Head Lake

  IT’S AN EARLY dusk at the lake because the sky’s marbled with clouds and some of them are dark, heavy, tumescent as skins of flesh ready to burst. It’s an early dusk because there’s been thunder all afternoon, that laughing-rippling sound at the base of the spine. And heat lightning, quick spasms of nerves, forking in the sky then gone before you can exactly see. Only a few motorboats out on the lake, men fishing, nobody’s swimming any longer, this is a day in summer ending early. In my damp puckered two-piece bathing suit I’m leaning in the doorway of the wood-frame cottage, #11, straining the spring of the rusted screen door. You don’t realize the screen is rusted until you feel the grit on your fingers, and you touch your face, your lips, needing to feel I’m here! Alive and you taste the rust, and the slapping of waves against the pebbled beach is mixed with it, that taste. Along Wolf’s Head Lake in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains the small cottages of memory, crowded together in a grid of scrupulous plotted rows at the southern edge of the lake that’s said to be shaped like a giant wolf’s head, sandy rutted driveways and grassless lots and towels and bathing suits hanging on clotheslines chalk-white in the gathering dusk. And radios turned up high. And kids’ raised voices, shouting in play. He’s driving a car just that color of the storm clouds. He’s driving slowly, you could say aimlessly. He’s in no hurry to switch on his headlights. Just cruising. On Route 23 the two-lane blacktop highway, cruising down from Port Oriskany maybe, where maybe he lives, or has been living, but he’s checked out now, or if he’s left some clothes and things behind in the rented room he won’t be back to claim them. You have an uncle who’d gotten shot up as he speaks of it, not bitterly, nor even ironically, in the War, and all he’s good for now, he says, is managing a cheap hotel in Port Oriskany, and he tells stories of guys like this how they appear, and then they disappear. And no trace unless the cops are looking for them and even then, much of the time, no trace. Where do they come from, it’s like maple seeds blowing. And you think What’s a maple seed want but to populate the world with its kind. He’s wearing dark glasses, as dark comes on. Circling the cottages hearing kids’ shouts, barking dogs. He might have a companion. In the rooms-by-the-week hotel in Port Oriskany, these guys have companions, and the companion is a woman. This is strange to me, yet I begin to see her. She’s a hefty big-breasted woman like my mother’s older sister. Her hair is bleached, but growing out. She’s got a quick wide smile like a knife cutting through something soft. She’s the one who’ll speak first. Asking if you know where somebody’s cottage is, and you don’t; or, say you’re headed for the lake, in the thundery dusk, or sitting on the steps at the dock where older kids are drinking from beer cans, tossing cigarette butts into the lake, and it’s later, and darker, and the air tastes of rain though it hasn’t started yet to rain, and she’s asking would you like to come for a ride, to Olcott where there’s the carnival, the Ferris wheel, it�
�s only a few miles away. Asking what’s your name, and you’re too shy not to tell. Beneath the front seat of the car, the passenger’s seat, there’s a length of clothesline. You would never imagine clothesline is so strong. Each of them has a knife. The kind that fold up. From the army-navy supply store. For hunting, fishing. Something they do with these knives, and each other, drawing thin trickles of blood, but I’m not too sure of this, I’ve never seen it exactly. I’m leaning in the doorway, the spring of the screen door is strained almost to breaking. Mosquitoes are drawn to my hot skin, out of the shadows. I see the headlights on Route 23 above the lake, a mile away. I see the slow passage, he’s patient, circling the cottages, looking for the way in.

  Happiness

  In the harsh sunlight on the pebbly southern shore of Lake Ontario. All objects are sharp and clear as if drawn with a child’s crayon. Colors are bright, bold, unambiguous. Always there’s wind. No shadows. Maybe the wind blows shadows away?

  This story is written with a child’s crayon. Matte black, or purple, with a faint oily sheen. Crayolas like the kind we played with when we were small children.

  What did you see that day?

  Kathlee. What did I see that day, I saw nothing. I saw the sharp edges of things. I heard a dog snarling and whining but I saw no dog. I was headed into the house because I was looking for Irish. He wasn’t my fiancé then. He was not. Somehow I was in the house. And passing through the kitchen, and saying Irish? Where are you, Irish? because maybe it was a game, Irish was a boy for games, you couldn’t look at him for more than a minute before he’d get you to smile, and there came Irish stepping out of nowhere, behind me I guess, in the hall, and catching my arm, my bare forearm, between two of his big calloused fingers, and I stopped right there on my toes on the threshold of that room (did I smell it, yes I guess: the blood: a rich dark-sickish smell and the buzzing! yes I guess it must’ve been flies, on the McEwan farm there were horseflies big as your thumb) like a dancer, and his arm around my waist quick to turn me toward him, and he said Kathlee, no you don’t want to see and right there I shut my eyes like a scared little girl, pressed against his chest and he held me, oh I felt his heart beating hard and steady but what did I see that day at the McEwan farm, I saw nothing.