I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mrs. Jackson spoke vehemently. Her body exuded an odor of intense excited emotion. Hesitantly Kyle leaned toward her, frowning at the the snapshots. Some were old Polaroids, faded. Others were creased and dog-eared. In family photos of years ago it wasn’t immediately obvious which girl was Sabrina, Mrs. Jackson had to point her out. Kyle saw a brattish-looking teenager, hands on her hips and grinning at the camera. As a young adolescent she’d had a bad skin, which must have been hard on her granting even her high spirits and energy. In some of the close-ups, Kyle saw an almost-attractive girl, warm, hopeful, appealing in her openness. Hey: look at me! Love me. He wanted to love her. He wanted not to be disappointed in her. Mrs. Jackson sighed heavily. “People say, those drawings looked just like Sabrina, that’s how they recognized her, y’know, and I guess I can see it, but not really. If you’re the mother you see different things. Sabrina was never pretty-pretty like in the drawings, she’d have laughed like hell to see ’em. It’s like somebody took Sabrina’s face and did a makeover, like cosmetic surgery, y’know? What Sabrina wanted, she’d talk about sort of joking but serious, was, what is it, ‘chin injection’? ‘Implant’?” Ruefully Mrs. Jackson was stroking her chin, receding like her daughter’s.

  Kyle said, as if encouraging. “Sabrina was very attractive. She didn’t need cosmetic surgery. Girls say things like that. I have a daughter, and when she was growing up…You can’t take what they say seriously.”

  “That’s true, Officer. You can’t.”

  “Sabrina had personality. You can see that, Mrs. Jackson, in all her pictures.”

  “Oh! Christ. Did she ever.”

  Mrs. Jackson winced as if, amid the loose, scattered snapshots in the album, her fingers had encountered something sharp.

  For some time they continued examining the snapshots. Kyle supposed that the grief-stricken mother was seeing her lost daughter anew, and in some way alive, through a stranger’s eyes. He couldn’t have said why looking at the snapshots had come to seem so crucial to him. For days he’d been planning this visit, summoning his courage to call Mrs. Jackson. He’d nearly forgotten the painful episode with Vivian the night before: had scarcely thought of Vivian at all. No doubt, she would return to their marriage. No doubt, their marriage would endure. The time for a breakup was past: Vivian was right, people their age made themselves ridiculous very easily. Mrs. Jackson said, showing him a tinted matte graduation photo of Sabrina in a white cap and gown, wagging her fingers and grinning at the camera, “High school was Sabrina’s happy time. She was so, so popular. She should’ve gone right to college, instead of what she did do, she’d be alive now.” Abruptly then Mrs. Jackson’s mood shifted, she began to complain bitterly. “You wouldn’t believe! People saying the cruelest things about Sabrina. People you’d think would be her old friends, and teachers at the school, calling her ‘wild’—‘unpredictable.’ Like all my daughter did was hang out in bars. Go out with married men.” Mrs. Jackson’s ruddy skin darkened with indignation. Half-moons of sweat showed beneath her arms. She said, panting, “If the police had let it alone, it’d be better, almost. We reported her missing back in May. Over the summer, it was like everybody’d say, ‘Where’s Sabrina, where’s she gone to now?’ A bunch of us drove to Atlantic City and asked around, but nobody’d seen her, it’s a big place, people coming and going all the time, and the cops kept saying ‘Your daughter is an adult’ and crap like that like it was Sabrina’s own decision to disappear. They listened to her tape and came to that conclusion. It wasn’t even a ‘missing persons’ case. So—we got to thinking maybe Sabrina was just traveling with this man friend of hers. The rumor got to be, this guy had money like Donald Trump. He was a high-stakes gambler. They’d have gotten bored with Atlantic City and went to Vegas. Maybe they’d driven down into Mexico. Sabrina was always saying how she wanted to see Mexico. Now—all that’s over.” Mrs. Jackson shut the photo album, clumsily; a number of snapshots spilled out onto the floor. “See, Officer, things maybe should’ve been left the way they were. We were all just waiting for Sabrina to turn up, any time. But people like you poking around, ‘investigating,’ printing ugly things about my daughter in the paper, I don’t even know why you’re here taking up my time or who the hell you are.”

  Kyle was taken by surprise, Mrs. Jackson had suddenly turned so belligerent. “I—I’m sorry. I only wanted—”

  “Well, we don’t want your sympathy. We don’t need your god-damn sympathy, Mister. You can just go back to New Jersey or wherever the hell you came from, intruding in my daughter’s life.”

  Mrs. Jackson’s eyes were moist and dilated and accusing. Her skin looked as if it would be scalding to the touch. Kyle was certain she wasn’t drunk, he couldn’t smell it on her breath, but possibly she was drugged. High on crystal meth, that was notorious in this part of Pennsylvania, run-down old cities like Easton.

  Kyle protested, “But, Mrs. Jackson, you and your family would want to know, wouldn’t you? I mean, what had happened to…” He paused awkwardly, uncertain how to continue. Why should they want to know? Would he have wanted to know, in their place?

  In a voice heavy with sarcasm Mrs. Jackson said, “Oh, sure. You tell me, Officer. You got all the answers.”

  She heaved herself to her feet. A signal it was time for her unwanted visitor to depart.

  Kyle had dared to take out his wallet. He was deeply humiliated but determined to maintain his composure. “Mrs. Jackson, maybe I can help? With the funeral expenses, I mean.”

  Hotly the little woman said, “We don’t want anybody’s charity! We’re doing just fine by ourselves.”

  “Just a—token of my sympathy.”

  Mrs. Jackson averted her eyes haughtily from Kyle’s fumbling fingers, fanning her face with a TV Guide. He removed bills from his wallet, fifty-dollar bills, a one-hundred-dollar, folded them discreetly over, and placed them on an edge of the table.

  Still, the indignant Mrs. Jackson didn’t thank him. Nor did she trouble herself to see him to the door.

  WHERE WAS HE? A neighborhood of dingy wood-frame bungalows, rowhouses. Northern outskirts of Easton, Pennsylvania. Mid-afternoon: too early to begin drinking. Kyle was driving along potholed streets uncertain where he was headed. He’d have to cross the river again to pick up the big interstate south…At a 7-Eleven he bought a six-pack of strong dark ale and parked in a weedy cul-de-sac between a cemetery and a ramp of the highway, drinking. The ale was icy-cold and made his forehead ache, not disagreeably. It was a bright blustery October day, a sky of high scudding clouds against a glassy blue. At the city’s skyline, haze of the hue of chewing tobacco spittle. Certainly Kyle knew where he was: but where he was mattered less than something else, something crucial that had been decided, but he couldn’t recall what that was, that had been decided, just yet. Except he knew it was crucial. Except so much that seemed crucial in his younger years had turned out to be not so, or not much so. A girl of about fourteen pedaled by on a bicycle, ponytail flying behind her head. She wore tight-fitting jeans, a backpack. She’d taken no notice of him as if he, and the car in which he was sitting, were invisible. With his eyes he followed her. Followed her as swiftly she pedaled out of sight. Such longing, such love suffused his heart! He watched the girl disappear, stroking a sinewy throbbing artery just below his jaw-line.

  The Deaths: An Elegy

  1.

  CRISSIE? HELLO.”

  The call came out of the void. That nasal voice so like her own. She could not have expected it, who had not thought of him in years. Instinctive now, unthinking, in the way in which we maintain our balance if we begin to slip on ice, was her response to well-intentioned queries about her family: she had none.

  Her mother had died of breast cancer when she, Crista, was six years old, and her father and nine-year-old brother had died in an automobile accident in Olcott, New York, her hometown, only a few weeks after her mother’s death.

  Such explanations, when she felt obliged to make them, she made, quietly. Th
e dignity of her manner—even as a child Crista had cultivated dignity, out of repugnance for its opposite—forestalled pity. More important for Crista, it forestalled further questions.

  How terrible for you…

  Well, I was very young. I was taken in by an aunt. I didn’t lack for love.

  All of this was both true and not-true. Certainly Crista had lacked for love, but she wasn’t one to have expected love. Her original family had not been loving. Her father, maybe. At times. When not drinking. Her mother, Crista could not remember clearly.

  For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

  Now the call. “Crissie? It’s Henry.”

  As if he’d needed to identify himself.

  For there was his voice, nasal, reedy, disagreeable to her ears, the unmistakable accent of western New York State she’d long tried to obliterate from her own speech. At once she’d recognized that voice. And there was “Crissie”: no one had called her “Crissie” in the life after Olcott, New York. Meaning no one had called her that childhood name in more than twenty years.

  Rapidly she calculated, even as she held the receiver to her ear trying to make sense of his imploring urgent words: it was June 2002 now, the deaths had occurred in June 1981. This meant, Henry was thirty years old. Thirty!

  She tried to envision him: a spindly-limbed nine-year-old with eyes dark and luminous as their father’s, and their mother’s fair, carroty-brown hair. Henry, an adult. In a way, it was not possible. Her brain clamped down, against it.

  Crista herself was twenty-seven. This seemed to her fully possible, probable. In fact, she felt older. Never would she become one of those tiresome individuals who profess, and perhaps actually feel, disbelief at their age. As a child of six she’d become an adult, and she had liked it. To be an adult—even as a child—is to exercise judgment, control. It’s to successfully resist self-pity and to forestall pity, the most despicable of human responses, in others.

  No one, not even a lover, in a succession of lovers, had been encouraged to call her “Crissie.”

  Yet there was the name, repeated. Punctuating her brother’s conversation. Forcing her to acknowledge, yes she was the sister he could think of only as “Crissie,” for indeed it would have been unnatural for him to have called her “Crista,” as it would have been unnatural, impossible, for either of them as children to have called their parents by their first names.

  Young parents they’d been. Married young, and having their babies young. Very young to have died: in their early thirties.

  Crista was “Crista Ward.” Her aunt had adopted her. Henry remained “Henry Eley,” the old surname. She would wonder how he’d looked her up but supposed their aunt had informed him, where Crista had moved. She resented it, but would never speak of it to their aunt who had only meant well.

  Henry was asking, “Can we see each other? I think it’s time.”

  Crista’s response was instinctive, unthinking. “Why?”

  An unexpected response, and unanswerable. Henry was silent for a moment. If their conversation was a Ping-Pong game, Henry had failed to return his opponent’s fiercely placed ball, he’d failed even to see it flying at him.

  Henry said, not so much arguing as presenting his case, and the logic of his case, “Because I’m here, in the northeast, Crissie. And it’s been so long. Mostly I live in the Bay Area. San Francisco. I was thinking I’d like to rent a car, and drive to see you, and the two of us could drive up to Olcott together, to the lake. We could do that.”

  Crista could not believe the words she was hearing.

  “You haven’t been back, have you?” Henry paused, as if hearing Crista’s murmured reply, though in fact she said nothing, nor even framed words of reply. “I haven’t, either. Of course.”

  Crista said, “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Wouldn’t you want to? Revisit Olcott? After so long? June nineteenth, 1981.”

  Crista hung up.

  No. Never.

  Though she understood that, through her life, she’d been awaiting such a call. From her lost brother Henry, or from someone. (In that twilight consciousness between sleep and waking, surely it was her parents she awaited. Their voices, their hands on her. Where their young attractive faces had been, Crista’s memory could provide only blurs, like faces seen through wavy glass, or underwater. In the worst of the dreams, Crista opened her eyes wide and was blind. The wider she opened her eyes, the more helplessly blind.)

  Possibly some of the belligerence in her character originated in this: she’d been awaiting a call, an explanation. She was owed this. A revelation. It was like waiting for a phone to ring—the phone would not ring. Except if you left, the phone would ring, and you would miss your opportunity, if only to repudiate the call and the caller and to replace the receiver. Thank you. No.

  Now the phone had rung. The call had come. But it was her brother who knew no more than she, why what had happened to them had happened. Her brother who could not know more than she knew. (For how could he? She refused to believe this might be possible, though he was three years older.) Her brother who could not tell her what she wanted to hear. Your father did not kill your mother. Another person killed her on the beach. Your father died because he couldn’t bear the loneliness. His death was an accident.

  Yet that call, that revelation, had never come. She was ready, long she’d been ready to hear it. But it had not come. Another call had come in its place, unwanted.

  Aloud she vowed, “No. Never.”

  YET: THREE DAYS later, there was Crista Ward waiting on the front stoop of her apartment building for her brother Henry Eley whom she had not seen in twenty-one years. He’d called back, and Crista must have weakened and changed her mind. Somehow, this had happened.

  It wasn’t like Crista, such a reversal. Still, it had happened.

  She was dressed casually yet elegantly. Pale linen trousers, a silk blouse, and a fine-knit cotton sweater. These were designer sports clothes of understated quality, not conspicuous. She wore her hair that was a faded red-brown, prematurely threaded with silver, trimmed very short and curled against her head tight as a cap, needlessly clamped in place with a rod-like silver barrette behind her left ear. This was Crista Ward’s distinctive look: calculated, stylish, nothing left to chance.

  She was bringing a single overnight bag. For they had to stay overnight, the drive was too far otherwise. Crista supposed they would find a motel at Olcott Beach. She seemed to remember motels in that area, a middle-income resort area. Along the pebbly southern shore of Lake Ontario, numerous small motels. They’d made no definite plans beforehand, at least Crista didn’t know of any plans her brother Henry might have made. They would revisit the old cottage on the lake—from a distance, probably, since strangers would be living in it now—and they would walk along the beach. They would talk together, become reacquainted. Why? Crista wondered. It was just as well, Crista had no lover at the present time. She could not have explained to him, why.

  My lost brother. I must love him.

  Olcott Beach retained in her memory an aura of festivity, excitement. There was a boardwalk overlooking the lake, there were amusement rides: Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, bumper cars. High-pitched tinkly music. Food smells, hot and greasy. She and Henry had been taken on the rides by—who? The adult figures were blurred. One was meant to be Mommy, the other had to be Daddy. When she tried to see, she could not. Vividly she recalled the taste of pink cotton candy, though. Root beer, chocolate Tastee-Freez in cones. She never ate sweets now, disliked the taste of sugar. Rather swallow a mouthful of ground glass than a mouthful of sugar.

  Henry had planned to arrive by 11 A.M. He was driving north to Albany from New York City where he’d been staying for several days. Yet it was 11:20 A.M. when at last he drove up to the curb. By which time Crista was feeling fierce, indignant. Her first words to the man she took to be her brother were: “You’re late. I’ve been waiting out here, and you�
�re late.” Why she’d chosen to wait outside, instead of in her apartment on the sixth floor, she had no idea.

  The bearded man, grayer-haired than she’d envisioned, and thinner-faced, stared at her for a long moment as if disbelieving. Then he smiled, a smile that struck her as both boyish and aggressive, and said, “Crissie? You? Climb in.”

  She did. She would think afterward she’d had her choice of telling him she wasn’t going with him after all, she’d changed her mind, but instead, face smarting as if she’d been slapped, she climbed into the car. Cheap compact rental car, she’d bumped her head on the door-frame. She could have wept. This isn’t Henry. I don’t know this man. She fumbled to take the hand extended to her. For a moment she was fearful of crying. Her heart beat in fury, refusing to cry. The bearded man was marveling, “Well. Crissie. Look at you.” His eyes may have glistened with tears. His teeth shone with smiling. He was trying to embrace her, while Crista held herself stiff, not pointedly resisting yet not acquiescing, holding her breath against the sudden smell of him, unkempt hair, straggly beard, T-shirt and denim vest that needed laundering, if she’d retreated somewhere inside herself, that familiar place, a light becoming smaller, ever smaller, close to extinction.

  Look at you. It was an adult voice yet immediately recognizable. The voice of Crista’s lost brother, she had not seen since she was six years old.

  AFTER the deaths, the children were taken in by relatives. Crista went to live with her mother’s older sister whom she knew as Aunt Ellen and Henry went to live with his father’s parents. There may have been a wish expressed by the children—Crista seemed to remember this, for she’d loved her brother very much—that they might live together. But neither Aunt Ellen nor Grandma and Grandpa Eley wanted both children. There was the expense. There was the responsibility. There was the belief that, so long as the children were raised apart, they would cease to remember the deaths more readily.