Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The fight over Father's “baggy trousers.”

  The fight over Father's shirts, which were all dirty.

  The fight over Nada's correction of Father's pronunciation of “incognito.”

  The fight over Nada's na'ive admiration for the local and interna tionally famous HF, whom Father renounced with middle- class gusto, along with his wife.

  The fight following from this, when Father called Nada a parvenu.

  The shrieking fight over the mildew in the front lawn, which was gray-blue and deadly.

  The hysterical fight over my eyeglasses. (“Whose eyes did he inherit, whose? He'll have glasses like the bottoms of Coke bottles …”)

  The fight over the canned goods in the basement storeroom, whose labels had all peeled off mysteriously.

  The fight over the warped piano key—I believe it was G two octaves above middle C.

  The fight over …

  And, a week ago, another fight over—I believe it was over Jean-Paul Sartre, whom Father rejected as a “Communist writer.”

  And…

  And all the other fights that were about nothing.

  They always began like comic-strip fights, Father and Nada talking wildly and accusing each other of anything that came to mind. “Well, you looked at me as if I were dirt,” Nada would cry, and Father would say, panting, “Well, you turned your back on me!” And I could almost smile with the familiarity of it all though I was sick of the game they were playing. Would it strain your patience if I were to suggest that they weren't really this stupid? My mother wasn't stupid but for some reason I will never know she acted stupid most of the time. She was deliberately, spitefully, stubbornly, passionately stupid. Father bellowed and blustered and stammered, but really, he had made a marvelous career in business, somehow, don't ask me how. He wasn't stupid either. He was stupider than she, but when they fought their famous fights it was almost a draw. The accusations, the stuttered insults, the invisible blows of abuse and torment that rose up the laundry chute to my tingling, jangling ear!

  “Oh, you stupid man, you revolting vulgar bastard!” Nada cried. “How much longer can I take this? What are you doing to me? Why did you marry me if you hate me so much?”

  “Me? What? Jesus Christ, you always switch things around—”

  “You aren't even material for a good novel, you and those ignorant fools! It's just caricature, it's slop, I can't take it seriously and I'm losing my mind here—”

  ” You're losing your mind? What about me? You're starting the same tricks you used before—”

  “Don't use that word tricks”

  “The same fucking tricks,” Father boomed, “that you used two years ago, and this time if you pull out you can go right to hell and I'll bring up the poor kid my own way so he'll be safe from his nut of a mother—”

  “You dirty bastard,” Nada whispered, “you dirty filthy lying bastard!”

  “Yessir, his nut of a mother! It's well known that you're neurotic as hell, and I wouldn't be surprised if all our friends knew it, I wouldn't be surprised if they all sat around and talked about it…”

  When all their stage props were ripped away, they always showed that they needed no fresh reasons to hate. They simply hated.

  21

  I was too sick to go to school the following day, so Nada waited on me, brought my breakfast upstairs, pampered me. I noticed that her hair was long, brushed straight back from her forehead; it looked as if it hadn't been washed for a while. She brought me some magazines to read, anxious and apologetic, as if she knew I had overheard everything, and I leafed through the new Time and glanced at photographs, until my nausea rose suddenly at a picture of a mutilated Communist riot victim (the caption read, “After the dance, the piper to be paid”) so that I leaned back trembling against my pillow.

  Nada was looking out the window, distracted.

  Have I ever mentioned Nada's total lack of interest in politics, in events, in reality? She never read the newspaper, never listened to the radio. Never. She might have believed that only vulgar people kept track of history, I don't know. “For me, history is what is in this room, nothing more,” she had declared pompously to someone, sometime, within my hearing. She might have believed her brain too finely developed to be overloaded with the trivia of daily reality, daily suffering. Her brain was instead stuffed with books. What was “only real” couldn't be very important, and I have to confess to feeling this way myself. I have caught her solipsism from her, the way I used to catch colds and flu from her. A contagious woman!

  It was a quiet day. I read, she read. But this quiet meant nothing because it was not a peaceful quiet. It was a heart-throbbing, pulsequivering quiet, more terrible than screams and crashes. I wanted to crawl out of bed and press my aching eyes against Nada's ankles, kiss her feet, her shoes, her stockings, and beg her not to leave. Oh, don't leave! Not again! When she ran away from us the first time Father had told me sadly that my mother had died; I wasn't quite old enough to understand this. The second time she ran away I overheard his conversation (via an upstairs extension) with the private detective who was on her trail; but this time—no, I didn't think I could survive another time. I was too old now. I knew too much. I knew what those certain looks meant, the casual, friendly, erotic glance between strangers in a library browsing lounge, and my heart leaped at mysterious phrases spoken in German over the phone, with that sinister voice from New York. I had journeyed too far, I was Nada's son, I couldn't let her leave me. I would rather see her die than lose her. I would rather see her dead, wax-white, her smiles and sneers vanished, drained of blood and energy and appetite …

  22

  In the days of Nero (forgive my mentioning that beast's name, but he is appropriate) there was an odd fellow who had found out an exquisite way to make glass as hammerproof as gold: shall I say that the like experiment he made upon glass I tried to make upon myself? A metamorphosis? Shall I bother to add that I failed? My friends, I never shattered in any obvious way. I never exploded into pieces. And, seeing my bulk as it is today, you would smile to hear me talk thusly Such a poor fat pimply boy …

  But yes, I am glass, transparent and breakable as glass, but—and this is the tragedy—we who are made of glass may crack into millions of jigsaw-puzzle pieces but we do not fall apart. We never fall apart. Instead we keep lumbering around and talking. We want nothing more than to fall apart, to disintegrate, to be released into a shower of slivers and have done with it all, but the moment is hard to come by, as you can see.

  23

  HOW TO WRITE A MEMOIR LIKE THIS

  Since my forlorn days as a child, so minutely investigated here, I've done some reading in an attempt to acquire the language needed for me to write this memoir. You ordinary people who read and do not write, who “like to read” and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are! You are truly blessed! My very brain ached with the agony of taking on Western Culture, and I fear very little of it got to me; if I were to dedicate this novel to anyone it would be to that other unfortunate traveler'from whom I have stolen so much. It's no noble gesture for the dead to be honest. I acknowledge my master.

  But I discovered something else, a depressing fact. Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents. They are not planned. You gentle readers who opted to take Humanities courses now and then in college, who set upon a course in Shakespeare with a hearty stoicism and a big notebook, little did you or your professor understand that the whole thing is an accident, the art product an accident, like the products of violent seizures of nausea that overtake many of us after an arduous dinner. The work could have come out in any form, but it happened to come out in one form, and that form has crystallized and seems now, hundreds of years later, somehow planned.

  But no, my friends, and no again, because once I thought as you do, once I assumed a majestic order and symmetry in art, thinking that, dear God, order and symmetry must exist somewhere. They must. But you don't find them in “ar
t,” because “art” is the most pulsating, rippling, seething, improbable, and unpredictable of all the creations of man, like those babies born after expectant mothers' exposure to certain drugs and diseases—if you'll excuse that only halfway accurate metaphor. (I am very conscious of metaphors.) No, I'm afraid that you start out writing a memoir that seems simple enough, wanting only to get the truth down and forget about it, or, if you're lazier, you try to write a novel, something capricious, but somewhere in the process everything breaks down, won't work, is just an illusion. I sought a language for my memoir and turned desperately to the works of our “culture” but found there the same kind of seething, tortured products as the one I am turning out. There is a surface order and beauty, yes, but don't let that fool you. It's all as Tennyson remarked wisely, “We poets are vessels to produce poetry and other excrement.”

  I don't know what area of study I would have pursued had I not disintegrated; like Gustave, I might have “gone into” math or something similarly solipsistic and unhurried. But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention (I am anticipating alert readers for these metaphors!), I began to burrow and mutter through volumes of such works as are famous in our “culture.” Therefore the technical devices I, as a writer, use, I readily admit them. I want to admit them, and everything. Maybe there are a few of you who want to write also, who have a lesser tale to tell— lesser, I should hastily qualify, in terms of moral cess-matter. Maybe there are some of you who have, in your homes, dog-eared copies of The Writer with earnest articles that will see you through crises of mental blocks, third-person narration, limerick verse. If so, I should call your attention to these short, cheerfully blocked-out, and fast-moving chapters. Or aren't they fast-moving? No matter. I have based some of them on an article concerned with “building suspense” and— you see how honest I am—even dull stretches can be used to build suspense if there is the promise of some violence to come. I do indeed promise violence, yes. VIOLENCE … VIOLENCE (this is for people standing at Browse & Leaf shelves in clean suburban libraries). I offer to them also ECSTASY … MORAL ROT … ANGST … KIERKEGAARD … and other frauds that bring a sardonic smile to your lips and mine, my university-educated readers, but that will snare lesser folk, FLAGELLATION interests some, those who know what it means, those who suspect what it means, and the great nation of those who want to look it up in order to use it three times and make it “theirs.”

  (All this is taken from an article called “Just What Is Reader Interest?”)

  Now you are wondering, what good did it do me to read a great deal? Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Neoclassic, Romantic, Victorian, Modern, Avant-Garde—everything, what good did it do? Not much. My feverish mind, sieve like and pulsating constantly, loses most of what it takes in just as my stomach once lost most of its intake. I am a mess and messes don't take well to culture; they somehow distort it to look like themselves. But I learned enough to take the following steps for my memoir:

  1 know my characters. (Christ, I should know them!)

  1 know “where my story is going.” (How could I not know?)

  1 am addressing a certain audience that shares with me a disdain for or outright rejection of murder, committed by a child or by just anyone at all. (If murder becomes acceptable again my memoir will be tossed upstairs in attics to molder quietly with Penrod Jasper, Uncle Term's Cabin, U.S.A., and other forgotten works.)

  1 provide some possibility—don't I?—for “reader identification.” (My theory is that we have all been children, each of us. I hope this common experience is enough.)

  1 provide a moral stance. (Indeed I do, and this stance I am taking with poor, blistered, sweating, swollen feet flat on the earth is that crime does not pay. It is not very original, I know.)

  1 write in a clear story line, with specific illustrations and description limited to “what's really necessary.” (See January 1967, Amateur Penman, “Just What Is Really Necessary in Your Writing?”)

  1 am wringing for all it's worth the “device of emotional preparation,” that is, letting the readers come to know the characters. Will they give a damn about some poor bastard who is killed on page one? They will not. They are hard-hearted and cynical. But move that poor bastard's death to page 300, build a story around him, and they will care if you've done your job and they have any tears left to be wrung out of their skulls, those selfish bastards.

  1 hide my hostility toward you, my readers, though I know beforehand that you are glancing through this book as you sit in the bathroom attuned to other activities, or as you wait in someone's downstairs den for that someone to announce he's ready, or as you wiggle and waggle around the library Browsing & Drowsing shelf, thinking Expensive People must be a social guidebook to Philadelphia highlife.

  1 observe just as much parallelism of paragraphing and sentence structure as I dare. (Note that each of these remarks begins with “I.” Or did you already notice it, you clever son-of-a-bitch?)

  1 hide my hostility toward my readers. Desiring change, counterpoint, contrast, or whatever it is called, I sometimes vary paragraphs, sentences, and even chapters, that is, one chapter carries forward the story line but another retards it spitefully,building up “background” and human interest, if there are any humans to interest.

  Other devices—for instance, my elaborate scheme of symbolism— I will leave unexplored, for my friends in the academic world to sniff out. But one influence I will admit is Melville, since I want to invest my story with as much significance as possible, taking two steps back for each single step forward, and therefore …

  Therefore you will allow me certain rhetorical flourishes and tricks, and the pathetic Melvillian device of enormous build-ups for flabby walk-ons—opening paragraphs and even entire chapters that pave the way concretely enough while frisking about on a kind of ethereal abstract level in order to relate my confession to things sublime and infinite. I wouldn't mind a hesitant essay called “Rousseau and Everett: Liars or Saints?” or “Stendhal and Everett: Incest and Inscape,” for instance. Since I plan on committing suicide immediately after this memoir is finished I won't be around to throw a damp blanket into the cogs of any critical/scholarly machinery and ruin anyone's theories. You can trust me! (Did I mention the suicide plan yet? I don't think so. More of that soon.)

  And my style too, bogged down with adjectives and adverbs and a wistful reluctance for verbs and nouns—this is my “grand style.” I have another, “colloquial style” or “just-a-good-kid style.” This is self-explanatory. The grand style, though, may well get on your nerves (my stomach quivers when I embark on one of my Ciceronian tightropes), but it's necessary, and I'll explain why. I should have liked to write this memoir in epic form, in melodic and oratorical verse, preceded by the strumming of a lute, but unfortunately the time is past for such epics just as they all say the time is past for tragedy, and “Just How Dead Is the Novel?”* So the best I can do to summon up the beauties of a past age is to juggle my syntax as well as I can, feeble though it turns out, at times closing my eyes and giving my fingers license to probe out what they will on the typewriter, splattering out loose spines of sentences with as much frantic desperation as one steers a soap-box cart down a sharply inclined plane, hoping for the best but not expecting it, with a pale bravado of a grimace, a grin, for the spectators standing uneasily on the sidewalk: yet conscious of the many times the splatter falls short, dribbles, vomited out with the sort of asthmatic gasp that emits rusty water from antique faucets or rusty blood from panting fat-encrusted hearts.

  This chapter must at one time or another throw up its hands in defeat (“throw up” is a deliberate pun, part of a pattern of puns, my dear squeamish readers!), and as good now as later; indeed, it can have no natural ending because it has no beginning, being just an off-the-keys aside to aspiring writers who have never “taken the plunge.” I can't think of any final sentence for it. If I had it to do all over again—and I don't—I would omit t
his chapter altogether. Yes, I think I would omit it, but I don't want to mess up my page numbering. Ideally, I would go on at once from that pleasant little paragraph of a chapter, Chapter 22, to the following:

  * Chapter from Leu Write a Novel/by Agnes Sturm. See also the much more chic Waiting for the Endby Leslie Fiedler.

  24

  So Nada stayed around the house and nursed me. She was the kind of woman who looks at you only when something has gone wrong—eye blackened, a length of stark white bone piercing your skin. But maybe I'm being too hard on her. She was like any mother, I think, if this hypothetical mother had a prodigious intelligence, a romantic restlessness, and confused memories of a childhood that was, so I gathered, soured with tales of Russia, a dark planet all to itself. And if this mother was beautiful too, that's important. Don't crab about beautiful women and their immoral lives if you're too ugly to have had the opportunity for immorality; psychology, homegrown and professional, has exposed all that. So she was intelligent and imaginative and beautiful, and let's blame a few hyperfunctioning glands and nodes as well. I think she was what most American women would like to be. Don't sneer, don't hiss. I am an amateur at life, and would it surprise you to know that I am only eighteen years old? Eighteen, yes, but precocious. And I think that most American women would like to be Nada, just as Nada thought she would like to be Nada—that is, the image, the dream-self that was Nada, not the real, unhappy, selfish, miserable, and rather banal person.

  You women, wouldn't you like to be Nada as she appeared to outsiders? I hope you noted the coats, the clothes, the yellow cars, the house, furniture, parties, country club, etc. And she was also a writer! “Why, I think that's just wonderful!” “How do you find time?” “What does it feel like to be so talented?” “And what does your husband think?”