Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Sometimes I called home between classes, but Ginger answered, so I hungup. I tried desperately to hear if there was some sound of Nada in the background—drumming fitfully at the piano, clattering around in her high heels—but there was never anything and I didn't dare ask for her. When I was home and the telephone rang I always got to it before Ginger did and said no, Mrs. Everett was not home, but who, who was calling? Always women. I pumped them innocently, assuming a younger child's voice. “Oh, who is it? Who? Do you live near us?” Once a man called, and when I told him Nada wasn't in there was a curious silence. Then he said, “Where is she?” and this shocked me because in Fernwood no one talks that way. Out to lunch, I said. Bridge. I began to sweat, listening to him think and not knowing what he was thinking, and finally he hung up without giving his name.

  And one afternoon just as I came into the house the telephone was ringing and I rushed to it, outdistancing Ginger, and that man said again, “I want to speak to Mrs. Everett.” I slammed the phone down. Ginger adjusted the telephone receiver and said slowly, “He say some-thin' bad? One of them like that's always at my mother …”

  By now they were entertaining all the time, and often Father flew in, was brought to our door in a limousine from the airport, showered and shaved while guests were arriving, and then he'd thump happily downstairs, smoothing his hair back from his temples, quite the gay, welcoming host—nothing was too much for him! At such times Nada would be really beautiful, as if every pore and every nerve in her body had been bred for this sort of thing, her hair burnished and burning with excitement, her eyes like jewels, everything lean, smooth, lovely, and what anguish I felt, seeing one man after another arrive with wife in tow and not knowing whether there was one of them at whom she looked in a certain way. I would be lying flat upstairs on the landing, afraid to look over the edge. What I heard was just babble. “Isn't it a lovely…” “Isn't it…” “I'm so happy that…” If a woman arrived whom Nada had known from some other year and some other suburb, they would exchange chaste ceremonial kisses, like birds pecking delicately at each other.

  Sometimes Nada let me meet her guests if they arrived fairly early, and sometimes I could pass hors d'oeuvres around, wearing a little gentleman's outfit of dark, sharply creased trousers and white blazer with the Johns Behemoth shield on the breast pocket. God, I must have been cute! They didn't look at my thin, harassed face but only at my outfit, and I was said to be darling. They breathed their liquory per-fumy breaths in my face and exclaimed over Nada's eyes in mine, the men glancing up to Nada who stood behind me, as if they couldn't possibly bother with me if they had her to look at. “Say something in French, Richard,” Nada would say casually, having her cigarette lighted by some gentleman with silvery gray hair, and I would perform shyly and briefly. “II me I'a donne,” Nada would say, exhaling cigarette smoke and indicating the most recent trifle I had bought her—one time a little fake ivory elephant from a carving exhibit at the Art Museum. Everyone thought I was precocious and sweet.

  Our house at these times had a certain soft, magic, misty air to it, not just because of the candlelight and Nada's newest dress but because of something else, some sense of languorous adventure. If this were a story of Nada's I would mention the odd, sinister air I sometimes noticed too, but it was so intangible—perhaps it didn't exist except in my imagination. But there was the sense of adventure. Do you think people like those people are adventuresome? No, they are not. My readers, my far-flung readers, I eavesdropped for eleven years of my pathetic life, hiding behind doors, in closets, on landings, listening over telephone extensions, sneaking, skulking, holding my breath and wondering if the next second would expose everything, and I can tell you that the good people of Fernwood (and Brookfield and Wateredge and Charlotte Pointe and the rest) are not adventuresome. They do not swear. They do not drink beyond a certain point, because beyond that point they might come loose. They do not spill drinks, upset trays, burn holes in tables or rugs, because by doing such things they would come loose and these people never come loose. Watch them. Listen. They would never give you a sly sideways wink, they'd never tap your chaste foot with their own. True, you hear about them being divorced and being remarried, and occasionally someone dies and is never heard of again, but it is done in an orderly way. So where did our sense of adventure come from? Only from Nada. She was intoxicated with it. She was intoxicated with our house—with her new expensive furniture, her marble-topped table and her exquisite bookshelf, given to her by Father's great-aunt and worth—oh, let me tell you!—quite a bit. She was intoxicated with expensive tidbits Ginger had unfrozen not half an hour before, and she was intoxicated with her white, white dress and her emerald necklace, and the tinkling made by ice in drinks, and by the mystical sense of her being at last in power, in control, a part of the secret, invisible world that owns and controls everything.

  Because Fernwood does control everything, like it or not.

  If these people ever mentioned her writing she would raise one lovely shoulder and smile and change the subject at once. She wanted nothing so much as to grovel and annihilate herself before these people, the only people in the world she admired because they were the only people she could not imitate. She could never compete with them, never. The most ignorant, most self-complacent, ugliest dowager of them all bowled Nada over simply because—guess why!—she had never read Thomas Mann, had never heard the name, and gave not the slightest indication of regretting her loss. My poor mother … Perverse and selfish as she was, I never for an instant doubted that she was my mother. It was my father I doubted. I kept waiting for another man to appear, not bounding into the room with that bulky, boyish, wet grin my father had but walking quite sedately and confidently in, taking over. Did that man, that phantom father, that real father ever appear? I'll deal with that in a later chapter.

  So they started giving parties and going to parties. It began suddenly, in one week. They “caught on” the way they had always caught on, in other towns. Father had the kind of easygoing swagger that made him welcome anywhere, as a lesser guest. He was the man hostesses thought of after they listed their main guests. Nada must have been a mystery to them; they were interested in her for her “mind,” though she never demonstrated much intelligence in their presence. She refused to discuss her writing, not understanding that Fernwood was a hundred years beyond the bourgeoisie that scorned the intellectual: today's Fernwood wanted to hug intellectuals and “artistes” to its matronly bosom until something of their mysterious dark charm smeared off. At the age of ten I could tell they were proud of Nada for being a “writer,” but she never caught on. Even after the women chatted energetically about their ballet classes, sculpting classes, theater groups, Great Books Round Tables, Creative Writing Clinics, she never caught on; she had a certain opaqueness, a failure of vision common to people who see only minute things well.

  There was this woman, a giant huntress type with a hairdo that looked like a fan, or like a Tudor get-up out of a history pageant; she lived in Fernwood Dells, a semi-good section, better than ours but not as good as Fernwood Heights. She was a widow, but very healthily and robustly a widow, as Fernwood widows are; she played tennis and golf, swam, paddled canoes, went “hiking.” She wore chiffon dresses that looked odd on her hefty frame, but I overheard Bebe Hofstadter say once, “No one dresses as well as Tia.” This woman's name was Tia Bell. She tried sweetly and insistently to draw Nada out, asking her about her writing. What were her themes? When did she find time to write? She invited Nada to the Fernwood Heights Episcopal Church, there to hear John Ciardi speak of the mystic force of Dante, and another time she took Nada to a popular and quite affluent synagogue in another suburb, famous for its intellectual life, where they heard Norman Mailer give a perfectly coherent, surprisingly pedantic talk on “The Great American Novel: When Is It Due?”

  And Bebe Hofstadter herself came over one afternoon, bringing her laconic son Gustave and a copy of my mother's second novel for her to autograph.
Nada flushed with pleasure and confusion and suggested that Gustave and I adjourn to the library. This “library” was just a pleasant room facing the south and hence sunny, with a fireplace in which no fire had been lit in my memory, and comfortable furniture that had no pretensions to the elegance and discomfort of the rest of the house. So Gustave and I wandered in awkwardly and tried to think of something to talk about.

  “Nice house y'got here,” he said. I could tell by the booming, husky voice of his mother, coupled with her strand of pearls, that he lived in a house just like this, or better. We sat heavily in leather chairs facing the empty fireplace, both of us pretending weariness since this was a kind of convention with Johns Behemoth boys.

  “Y'do the math yet?” he said.

  “No, you?”

  “No.”

  Another convention Johns Behemoth boys observed briefly when together was a certain sluggish colloquialism, an attempt at toughness that fooled no one. We sat moodily in silence.

  In the living room our mothers were chatting happily. “Just let me fix you one, just one,” Nada said. Gustave lifted his head as if listening. His mother's deep voice vibrated out to us, and one corner of his pale, thin mouth turned up.

  “What d'ya think of—” I began, but he interrupted me by making a silencing gesture. He was listening to his mother. As far as I could make out she was chatting about another woman, or a family, or a horse, nothing much, and I resented Gustave's manner. He was in a few of my classes but we did not know each other. Like me, he sat alone at lunchtime in the brick-entombed cafeteria, and like all Johns Behemoth boys who sat alone, he had the look of being very content. I knew very little about him except that he had an extraordinary method for cheating in math, an invention of his own that he sold to other boys for five dollars apiece. The price was said to be reasonable. Night after night I prepared my homework, night after night I studied for tests until my brain rattled, but when the time came for a test I usually cheated. I knew all the answers, yes, but it wasn't enough to know the answers. Most Johns Behemoth boys knew most answers. But that wasn't enough: you had to be steady enough to take the test, and the only way to be steady was to allow no room for error. Even a mild blood clot on the brain would not be enough to keep us from scoring 90 on an exam, with our ingenious cheating devices.

  “I want to hear what she's having. A little Scotch evidently,” Gustave said. He folded his arms, a twelve-year-old blond replica of myself, both of us with the same kind of glasses—clear, pinkish rims and lenses sadly thick for prepubescents. He glanced at me. “Your mother is a very beautiful woman,” he said. “What do you think of her writing?”

  “I don't have any opinion.”

  “Haven't you read it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Nada forbade me to look at anything of hers, of course, just as she forbade Father; neither of us could even enter her study. I made an impatient gesture as if Gustave were too stupid for me to bother answering.

  “Well, I think I understand,” Gustave said sympathetically. “It's too personal—she's your mother of course. But, Richard, you should understand that it's always an awkward situation. Having a mother, I mean.” Here he hushed suddenly, listening again to his mother. She was complaining about her maid. I heard her expression, “that little colored chit,” several times. Gustave crossed and uncrossed his legs restlessly. He said, “You're very fortunate. Your mother is young and beautiful, and you must know that most of our mothers, the mothers of kids at school, are sort of getting along. My mother is at that age now, you know, where I have to watch out for her.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, tag along like this, eavesdrop, make sure she doesn't lose something or burst into tears,” Gustave said casually. As if to demonstrate, he got up and went to the doorway, pretending to check a book on a shelf near the door.

  In the other room our mothers were sitting on the sofa, chatting. Nada's black hair was growing out; she had missed one of her appointments, and the salon owner, a Monsieur Freytag, refused to take her back. Bebe Hofstadter had silvery hair that was very stylishly done. She wore an expensive yellow wool suit and a few too many bracelets on one wrist.

  “My mother is inclined to hysteria,” Gustave explained. “It's the change of life, you know. You can't be too careful with them at that time.”

  “What's wrong with her?”

  He stared at me coldly. “It is a biological condition,” he said.

  Biological conditions of mothers always frightened me, so I said nothing.

  “It began a few months ago, and I knew at once what it was. I had had sense enough to be reading ahead. Father doesn't have the slightest idea what's going on—he wouldn't want to admit his own age—and I can't possibly tell him. How could you tell your father anything so personal? I've left a copy of the Reader's Digest around with a lead article on the subject, but… My mother gets upset all the time, she cries if the toast is cold for Father, she's always picking on our maid Hor-tense, and she's always on the telephone, it's embarrassing, and yesterday her parakeet Fifi died and she spent all day crying, then accused Hortense and me of not giving a damn about the parakeet. So she took the corpse into the kitchen and put it in the garbage disposal, and before I could stop her she had turned it on. She was hysterical about that. This is a difficult time of life for both of us,” Gustave said vaguely.

  “It's nice you … you're caring for her,” I said. I wanted to tell him that I too took care of my mother; but everything I did was a failure. I admired Gustave's strength. You got the impression that when the time came he would get up and go get his mother and lead her home, safely.

  After about thirty minutes of our leafing through old Business Weeks, Gustave craned his head around. “Uh-uh,” he said grimly. He did indeed get up and stride into the living room. He was a small, skinny kid, nothing much, but he knew what he was doing. “Mrs. Everett, thank you so much for an enjoyable hour,” he said to Nada, bowing his head slightly, “but Mother has to leave now. I think she's forgotten her hair appointment.”

  “My hair appointment is Thursday,” Bebe said.

  “Mother, it's today at five-thirty You always do forget,” Gustave said.

  “It isn't. It's tomorrow,” said his mother. “I can't have a moment to myself. He's always … he—”

  “Mother won't have time for that drink,” Gustave said. “I'd better be getting our coats.”

  And he went to get the coats and, still chatting away while his mother whimpered, he helped her into her mink coat and stooped to pick up one of the gloves that had fallen from a pocket to the floor, doing everything smoothly and confidently, simply raising his voice to drown out his mother's complaints.

  “Very nice to have met you, Gustave,” Mother said.

  “Enchante,” Gustave murmured at the door.

  We could hear his mother whimpering as they walked down our bone-dry walk. “Isn't that strange,” Nada said, closing the door slowly.

  That was one of her “friends,” Bebe Hofstadter. In a novel you would get to know such a woman better, but in real life you never do— women like her are perennially about to age but never quite do, they're always at a distance no matter how close, etc. Though Mrs. Hofstadter will return again in this memoir she will never develop, never get any clearer. And we saw a little of her husband, Gregory, but not much; he was always traveling. And there were many other interesting people. Let me see—Charles Spoon, who designed automobiles and was always six years ahead of the current season, consequently irritated and distracted by the present, a balding, intense loud-laughing man with a considerable fortune, most of it made in the last decade, and a lank, quiet wife from the Upper Class, one of the season's choicest debutantes many seasons ago. And Mavis Grisell, one of the area's few active divorcees, a dark-blond woman with exotic eyes and an interesting Aztec profile, given to Egyptian and Indian jewelry and the exclaiming of monosyllabic words from unintelligible foreign tongues. She had traveled
a great deal since her divorce from a rather odd man who, for some reason, had cleared their large home of all its furnishings and objects of art one day when Mavis was visiting her sister in Cedar Grove (you'll become acquainted with Cedar Grove in good time), leaving her nothing but her clothes and a mattress in what had been their bedroom. It was a sensational Fernwood scandal, and the divorce settlement, for Mavis, had been generous. Nada didn't like her but Father thought she was a “good sport.”

  “In our society it's impossible for a woman without a man,” Father said gallantly. Or maybe he was warning Nada. “We should do all we can for poor Mavis, who's been through so much.”

  And there were the Nashes (Dean Nash and his good wife Hattie), and the Griggses from down the block, and Harrison Vemeer, whom Nada admired extravagantly without knowing, as I did, that he was considered no me by our other guests. Mr. Vemeer was a successful contractor whose rise to fortune was legendary in Fernwood. He operated out of gulleys, swamps, small woods, hopeless eroded land, erecting identical colonial houses—you've seen his trademark, a red-brick colonial with navy blue shutters and navy blue windowboxes and a white wrought-iron kitty-kat crawling up the chimney, all for only $39,900?—which often tilted, or sank, or cracked in twos and threes after the new owner moved in. Mr. Vemeer sometimes was prudent enough to change the name of his company, and continued to build “Distinctive Modern Colonials,” sometimes across the street from the outraged homeowners. I say “street” but I mean rutted muddy lane. His most amazing coup was the draining of a swamp so that he could erect fifteen more “distinctive Colonials,” resulting in a nearby lake (“Picture Lake,” in the center of another housing subdivision) filling slowly and mysteriously with black mud. It oozed out through a twenty-four-inch pipe. The outraged homeowners took Mr. Vemeer to court but somehow he escaped. There were suits and countersuits. But perhaps his really masterful venture was the flood-plain episode. Mr. Vemeer owned land everywhere, being by now enormously wealthy and having a zest for adventure, and so he moved truckload after truckload of dirt from a flood plain which he “owned” to another lower, sunken area near a road which he also owned, in order to build houses on this site. When the spring rains came a creek overflowed and houses near the original flood plain were flooded, exactly as anyone could have foreseen, and Mr. Vemeer was again taken to court but declared innocent by dint of an obscure, helpful article of the law which says that one may improve his own property.