Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Of course I don't,” she said in her parody of Bebe Hofstadter, lowering her voice until it seemed to scrape the back of her throat.

  She surprised me by driving down to the zoo, which was inside the city limits. We rarely descended into the “city,” though Father worked downtown. There was a tradition, stemming from Wateredge, when I had been recovering from rheumatic fever for many months, that I loved the zoo and that Nada and I, and not Father, visited the zoo whenever we could. This was all phony, because Nada hadn't taken me for several years, and I really did not care that much for the animals; abstract, ambiguous puzzles like the chess board now interested me, and the enigmatic conversations I overheard on the upstairs phone while Nada downstairs talked to some man in New York. I did not know it at the time but I was beginning the second stage of my disintegration, marked, as most degenerative processes are, by a false cheerfulness. Yes, I was cheerful!

  And, on that day, what else did we encounter? A gigantic silver balloon in the sky, like a remnant of some lost ahistoric age, a monster descending to gobble up my lovely mother and myself and keep us locked forever in his warm, dark belly. Just the two of us. But the balloon turned slowly in the blue sky and exhibited a most disappointing tail: Buy Baxters Buicks. I remember that the omission of the apostrophe annoyed me very much. There were the usual kids riding bicycles along the edge of the highway, real kids in blue jeans, canvas jackets, legs pumping with the kind of energy I was never to know. I remember touching my eyes and making my vision go slightly out of focus, so that the cyclists became cloudy and vague and no longer seemed children like myself, competitors. And the cloudiness did not go away but remained with me like magic, as if protecting and soothing me; it must have been the kind of mistiness Nada inhaled at her dinner parties here and in our other homes. If only Nada and I could have shared the same magical dream …

  Near the zoo we noticed a small crowd milling around a drive-in bank, and Nada, always adventuresome, turned in to the asphalt drive. “What's going on here, Richard?” she said. She had a polite, gallant habit of asking any man in her presence what was happening, though she could see for herself. This time it wasn't so clear what we were seeing though. Four teen-aged girls in slacks and boots and windbreakers stood in unnatural silence, staring at the front of the little bank (there's one near you: colonial brick with wide white shutters, very nice, a place just like home to store your $10,000), and a woman in a dazzling pink sports car was also staring. At the door of the bank were several men in trench coats, and it passed through my mind that the air was still too cold for coats like that. One man was carrying a small suitcase in an unnatural way, balanced up against his hip.

  Nada pressed a button and her window slid down jerkingly “Do you think something strange is happening here, Richard?” Her nose seemed to lengthen. The teen-aged girls looked around, puzzled. One of them was trying to talk the others into walking away. Nada leaned out the window, letting one gloved hand pat against the car door. “Good God!” she exclaimed. She jerked back and seized the steering wheel but drove nowhere.

  Out of the bank's wide white doors rushed three men, and the men standing outside in trench coats opened fire on them. I saw a blaze of fire from the barrel of a big hip-hugging gun. Two of the three men fell, and the door, which was slowly and automatically closing, was pushed open again; a woman in a white skirt and lavender sweater stood there with her hand to her mouth in an exaggerated gesture of awe. One of the men who had fallen jumped up and brushed off his clothes. He began to argue with the trench-coated men, and another man joined them from somewhere to the side.

  “Oh, Christ,” Nada said faintly, “it's a television show or something. A rehearsal.”

  I was trembling as much as she was but I didn't let on. “Oh, Nada, what did you think it was?” I said.

  When we got to the zoo we saw the disappointing sign, WILL OPEN MAY 10. “I should have known better,” Nada said. She glanced at me to see how badly I was taking this, but I was her darling, her good genius, and of course I didn't care about the zoo but only about her, and I was still upset from the fake bank robbery. I had never seen anyone killed in front of me, even if it did turn out to be make-believe.

  “We'll come by again on May tenth, Honey. I promise,” Nada said.

  But the wonderful day had not yet come to an end. We swung around and drove back home, seeing for ourselves how handsomely Fernwood emerged out of the anonymous miles of suburban wasteland that lay between it and the city. First you passed by a jumble of motels, gas stations, bowling alleys, discount stores, drive-in restaurants, overpasses, underpasses, viaducts, garished by giant signs of plump-cheeked boys holding hotdogs aloft, and one sign that caught my attention: a very American-looking man holding aloft a can of beer, with a puzzled expression, the caption being, Read a beer can tonight. Do you think I could have made up something so marvelous myself? Never, never! America outdoes all its writers, even its amateur writers!

  Then you made your way through the first suburb, proletarian and proudly white Oak Woods, a dinky, arrogant neighborhood with a preponderance of American flags waving in the wind, and many used-car lots along the “Miracle Motor Mile.” Then came the slightly better suburb of Pleasure Dells, as bereft of dells as Oak Woods was bereft of oaks, but decked out perhaps with pleasure and equipped with three vast, sprawling magnamarkets that sold not just food, apparently, but lawn chairs, cheap clothing, and all the drugs you might want to kill a vacant hour or so; an oceanic tide of automobiles was parked around these buildings.

  We sped up a bit for the next suburb, where the highway's shoulders fell back and buildings were built farther from the road. This was Bornwell Pass, inferior to Fernwood but acceptable for certain kinds of shopping. One shopping plaza here with its parking lot must have covered several acres. The stores were not “shoppes” like those in Fernwood but just plain stores. “Isn't that vulgar?” Nada said.

  Then we nearly broke through to the country, but it was an illusion—just a housing subdivision called Country Club Manor. As Nada raced by I glanced through the gate (not a real gate but just two pillars of red brick to match the red-brick colonials inside), and Nada said, “That awful Vemeer built this slum.” Her attitude cheered me.

  On the other side of the highway, which had branched out now to a magnanimous eight lanes with snow-encrusted grass in the center, were more subdivisions, one after another: Fox Ridge, Lakeside Groves, Chevy Chase Heights, Bunker Hill Towne, Waterloo Acres, Arcadia Pass … Real-estate salesmen with no taste had driven us under the red-brick archways of some of these settlements, and Father had had to explain apologetically, “I'm afraid that… this sort of thing just won't do.” Our English teacher up at Johns Behemoth, catering to the prejudices of his well-bred young pupils, kept referring to the “Fox Ridge mentality,” which we were to understand was a conformity of deadly intensity, a mediocrity which stopped precisely at the clean white-and-black sign that proclaimed: FERNWOOD VILLAGE LIMITS SPEED

  LIMIT 45.

  We sped past at sixty, and Nada said, more or less to me, “This is a lovely place to live.” Slowing reluctantly for a traffic light, she said again, “It's lovely here,” and after a few minutes muttered sideways to me, “Are you happy in Fernwood, Richard?”

  “Some of my classmates aren't happy,” I said, deliberately choosing the word “classmates” because it sounded so natural. “That boy whose mother drinks—”

  “But are you happy?”

  “Some of the kids who worry about their parents, you know, their parents fighting and maybe getting a divorce … well, they're pretty miserable, but not me.”

  “That's good,” Nada said vaguely.

  She swung off and into a parking lot, the one shared by the courthouse, the police station, and the library. All three buildings were constructed of the same red brick, with white shutters and trim and handsome broad chimneys.

  “I want to check something,” Nada said.

  We went into the library,
which looked just like a pleasant, homey home, with windows divided into many small white-rimmed squares and the words FERNWOOD PUBLIC LIBRARY in fancy wrought-iron letters, painted white. Coming out the door was Mavis Grisell, who smiled her fake exotic but perfectly friendly smile, showed an expanse of gums, and said, “Why, hello, Nada and Richard! Isn't it a lovely day?” Nada managed to get away from her, sending me a sideways glance that thrilled my poor nervous, fluttering heart. When she looked at me that way, inviting me to share a secret with her, I could not believe that she would ever run away from me again.

  She sent me off vaguely in the direction of the children's bookshelf, me with an IQJiigh enough to impress the jaded Johns Behemoth, but I was agreeable and stood leafing through a book of big print and smudged illustrations, dealing with flying saucers. My nose had begun to run and I hadn't any tissue but I was cheerful just the same. Weren't the two of us together? I peeked around and saw Nada browsing through the Recent & Readable section, and then over to Literature & Classics, then twisting back around and surprising me, coming up to the Leafing Shelf where a few Fernwood ladies stood leafing through magazines and whispering together. Nada hunted around and found a magazine and opened it eagerly. I fixed the colors of the cover in my mind, so that I could look it up another time and see what had drawn her to it.*

  The library had a kind of front lounge area, with comfortable leather sofas and chairs. For Smokers, a sign said agreeably. Everything in Fernwood was agreeable! The area was clearly modeled after an outdoor cafe or a cocktail lounge, and perhaps this accounted for the slightly confused, disoriented faces of the women and the two or three men who were sitting there, browsing and smoking. When I saw Nada head for the lounge I joined her there. She opened a magazine and let it lie on her lap. “Isn't this library nice?” she said. She spoke with a fierce whisper that was like a threat, a test: did she really hate it and wondered what I would say? What did she mean? On a sofa near the wall sat a man leafing idly through a magazine. I saw Nada's eyes move toward him several times, then she opened her purse and searched through it. “Richard, ask that man for a match,” she said.

  “Maybe I can find them in there,” I said, reaching for her purse.

  But she drew it onto her lap and let her gloved hands lie primly on it.

  I approached the man shyly and whispered, “May my mother borrow a match?” The man did not glance up. I edged a little closer and said, “Mister”—and my voice gave a sudden croak so that the man jerked his head up and stared at me—”may my mother borrow a match?”

  He looked past my insignificant head and took in Nada and said, “Sure.” His hair was close-cropped, blond maybe, shading into gray, but he wasn't very old. He had startling blue eyes. The matchbook he gave me was from the Whispering Dunes Motel, in Pleasure Dells of another state. I came dutifully back to Nada with this prize, and she lit her cigarette, and after a minute or so the man came, long-legged and casual, over to join us.

  “Is that Fortune there?” he said, indicating something on a table.

  “I don't know,” Nada said.

  He sat down anyway and leafed through some discarded magazines. “Huh,” he said flatly coming across a headline on the yellow banner of the Reader's Digestthat struck him, “not that again.” With one tobacco-stained finger he moved the magazine so that Nada could see the title, and she showed her fine teeth in a smile of pleasant sarcasm, and the two strangers exchanged sideways looks rather like the one Nada had given me over Mavis Grisell. My nose began to run alarmingly.

  *It turned out to contain an article on “The State of American Fiction,” two-thirds of it concerned with the deaths of Faulkner and Hemingway, “which left a vacuum in our culture,” and one brief paragraph near the end busying itself with twenty-one new, young, promising writers, one of them being Natasha [sic] Romanov.

  18

  “There is this boy at school, whose parents live in Boston, who's so miserable and mean,” I told Father the next time he appeared at home. “His mother's an alcoholic and she fights a lot with his father, and he worries about them—”

  “Look, you ask that kid over for dinner,” Father said sternly. “You hear? The poor little bastard!”

  And he hurried upstairs, his scuffed shoes thumping heel-first on the carpeted stairs. He was in a rush: he'd just flown back from Ecuador and had to dress for a wedding reception out at the Vastvalley.

  19

  I'm sorry that the Vastvalley Country Club doesn't figure much in my memoir, because some people are interested in country clubs. Actually, my parents took me out there only once, for an expensive dinner in the presence of Mavis Grisell, the Spoons, a quiet, mousy, fawning couple named Hodge who had a fat boy my age, and an extremely charming man with a tiny mustache who later scandalized all of Fern-wood by publishing, in the Post, an inside story on the fortune he had made by bugging homes for jealous husbands/wives, and the pseudonyms he used to disguise his rich clients were impudently transparent.

  Vastvalley is not the oldest or quite the best country club, if I am to believe the kids at Johns Behemoth and not Nada, who was much too defensive about the whole matter. I think she felt that she had leaped too quickly at the Vastvalley, and might well have held off for the Fernwood Heights. But anyway the Vastvalley was expensive enough to be reasonable, and rather hideously constructed. Imagine a very long building tugged in at each end to form a kind of semicircle, everything built of aged red brick and trimmed with black wrought iron in Englishy style. Imagine many gas lamps, and uniformed Negroes in quiet, efficient attendance, and the Ladies Lounge (again no apostrophe!) so thick with scarlet carpet that I could see, from outside, how Nada's high heels made a track in it, crossing and crisscrossing the tracks of other fair ladies. Imagine a pointlessly long hall, not quite straight (remember the construction of the building), and raw-looking but really quite finished wooden benches, redolent of English manors and primitive hunting halls now vanished from the earth, and wrought-iron lanterns dangling from the walls on spear-like devices. An odor of cleanser, perfume, and tobacco. In the lounge a pleasant odor of alcohol. Voices muffled by the thick rugs everywhere, and from distant rooms the sounds of billiard balls clicking, ice cubes clicking, cards being thrown on invisible tables with a clicking noise.

  It was a dizzying trip for me, following all the adults and the one waddling fat boy along corridors, up and down short meaningless flights of steps, until we emerged into a great gold-ceilinged dining room that was not very crowded, out of which white-coated waiters moved hesitantly toward us like ghosts welcoming us to a graveyard. It was all very velvety, very nineteenth century, overdone with chandeliers and too many dusty plants in the corners, not quite far enough away for one to believe they were real. This was my dinner at the Vast-valley on one lucky Sunday of my miserable life. It was just as bad for the fat boy, who had been promised (as I had) a “new friend” but who (like myself) was too shy or too stubborn to make the first gestures of friendship. After dessert he broke out into hives. While the adults had coffee and smoked luxuriously around the big table the fat boy reverently fingered his blotches and I sat waiting to leave, distracted from Nada's animated face by a furtive movement back in a corner—a shy cockroach trying to ascend the gold-papered wall.

  20

  When we got home Father said to me, eyebrows raised, as one man to another, “Buster, you certainly didn't contribute much to the conversation.”

  Nada said at once, “This child is ten years old!”

  “Almost eleven.”

  “He's ten years old and extremely sensitive. What on earth do you mean by attacking him like that?”

  “Tashya, I didn't attack him. I only said—”

  “He hardly had his muffler off and you attacked him. Why should a child of ten, as intelligent as our son, bother with the drivel that went on around that table today? God! And that pimply-faced fat boy—”

  “I only said …”

  I took off my muffler miserably and hung it in
the closet. Behind my back they were probably making signals to each other, to delay the argument for my “sake,” and when I turned, Nada was brushing her angry hair back from her face and Father was smiling the way he smiled when guests were pouring in our front door.

  “Guess I'll go up and do my math,” I said.

  I went upstairs, and Nada said gently, “Richard, you should stand straighten” I was no sooner out of sight when I heard Father say, “That's the fourth time today you've told him that! Do you want him to …”

  Upstairs I made my feet trudge along the familiar path to my room, and once I reasoned that they had moved to another room I kicked off my shoes and went back into the hall. I hope you won't think I was one of those round-foreheaded, pipsqueak, smart-aleck little brats if I tell you that I was certainly a genius—the devices I had for spying! And none of them suspicious, none of them likely to call attention to itself. In the kitchen, which was my parents' favorite refuge for serious talks, I had long ago known enough to leave the laundry-chute door slightly ajar. The door was painted green, like the wall, so it was very subtly camouflaged, my spying—standing up in the hall, with my head stuck inside the laundry chute, I could hear everything they said …

  The fight over a stained silk cushion on a Queen Anne chair, on our first day in the house.

  The fight over Father's Negro jokes at a party.