Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I sat at the foot of the stairs and hugged my knees. I watched. Father rushed at one corner, swinging the broom, and slapped it down hard. The chipmunk flew out to one side and, its tiny legs pumping wildly, ricocheted off the wall and fled in another direction.

  “Hyar, you little bastard!” Father yelled. His eyes bulged as he brought the broom around in a great muscular arc, this time scooping the chipmunk off the floor and slamming it hard against the wall. It fell with a soft plopping noise, and he hit it again and again with the flat of the broom, grunting. “Oh, you little bastard,” he said softly, in just the same tone Nada had once used on him.

  Then, flushed with victory, he turned from the lifeless and battered chipmunk and rushed into another corner, where another terrified creature darted out blindly—and he swung the broom around again in a most skillful, graceful arc, at the last moment scooping the broom up in the air so that he could bring it down flat on the chipmunk. And again. And again.

  After a few threshing minutes he got the third chipmunk, and then,panting wildly he whirled around to see yet another chipmunk making its cautious way in from the laundry room. “Stupid rodent!” Father yelled and rushed at it and chased it back into the laundry room. I did not follow. I heard the broom fall again and again. My heart beat calmly and regularly O my readers, and I will not be so sophisticated as to deny that I felt sorrow for those poor beasts, and something beyond sorrow.

  When it was over, Father appeared again, with the broom up over his shoulder like a musket. “Good Christ, what a workout,” he said, wiping his forehead. “That did me good. That really did me good.” He glanced at me and said, “You want to help me get rid of them?”

  “I feel a little sickish.”

  “Oh, sickish! Buster, you're always sickish! Poor kid.”

  He pitched the broom into a corner and it remained standing, as if by magic, then he turned and contemplated the battlefield with his hands on his hips. The three mangled and crushed chipmunks lay curiously close together. “Hah, hah,” Father murmured, rubbing his hands vigorously, “we'll just clean up this little mess and that's that.” But when he bent to pick the first chipmunk up, delicately by its tail, an unfortunate thing happened: the tail broke in two close to the body and what was left of the chipmunk fell to the floor. “Dirty little bugger,” Father hissed. It is no credit to me that I did not offer to help him. I thought of the newspaper in the corner before he did but hadn't the heart or the stomach to speak. I wanted to sit still, very still. But Father finally thought of the paper by himself and unfolded it near the chipmunks and kicked them onto the paper, gingerly enough. Then when he had them he folded the paper up neatly and took it to the incinerator.

  “Will this stuff burn, Dickie?” he asked, grimacing over his shoulder.

  3

  And did they fight that night? No, indeed, because Father did this: he emerged from his triumph with the chipmunks, washed his hands, had a bit of Scotch, sat in the living room for two hours, and finally said, “Richard, I will make a deal with you. I will take you out to all the Littie League tryouts you want, I'll pull strings to get you on the team, if you'll help me with this. You see, I don't want to upset your mother, so I think I'll spend the night at a motel. Then I'll come home tomorrow as planned, right? And she needn't know … well, she needn't know what you know. I mean, that I was … home tonight. Will you help me?”

  Yes, it was pathetic to watch, because he was still rather flushed from his workout and at the same time a chill had come over him. Poor Father! He looked like the mad maniac who had kidnaped a child in Vermont, held her captive and “molested” her for five days, and was finally shot down by police, a state militia, and many private citizens on foot. The whole story was in the current Post, a first-person tale told by the child herself of the peculiar apocalyptic mutterings of the madman, of the many times he did “it” to her, and how close he came to killing her! A most chilling tale indeed, and it did your heart good to see the child's newly curled locks and smile for the photographers, and to know that she had received many thousands of dollars for her exclusive story. But the photograph I speak of is the madman's: some daring cameraman got a shot of him just as he turned to meet a barrage of shotgun pellets and bullets, and his glittering, twisted, wet look was just the same as Father's look, though Father must not have really expected bullets to come tearing into his chest.

  “Is it a deal, Buddy?” he said nervously.

  “Sure, Dad.”

  We shook hands on our Secret.

  4

  Father said I was always sick and I want to defend myself. I wasn't always sick. There were many days when I was well, ordinarily well, and many other days when I was well enough to drag myself around. On other days I suppose I was “sick,” but not really ill. There is a difference.

  I hope you won't think that I ever played sick, begging a quiet morning home from school with Nada. It was not necessary for me to play sick, though I played many things. I played healthy, for instance, which could be a tiring task, and I played an eleven-year-old with some success. But I never needed to play sick because sickness, or a mild queasiness, was my natural state. After I confessed to my crime at least one doctor, attracted as they all are by the most choice exhibitions of corrupt flesh and spirit, made a study of my various diseases and ailments and termed me a “medical catastrophe.” Another doctor, a psychiatrist, declared that I was a hopelessly neurotic/psychotic hypochondriac with some respectable overtones of the Kress syndrome— that is, some real disorders. Still another physician, a Dr. Saskatoon, combined the two diagnoses and pronounced my physical organism to be supplying my mad mind with the basis for its madness or, on the other hand, my mad mind so despised itself for lying (no one believed my confession, of course) that it summoned up physical disorders to punish the body. I like that theory! I like the eerie, primitive magic behind it—the mad mind “summoning up physical disorders” as if by telephone. Dr. Saskatoon was a genial and intelligent man, and his professional decline saddens me.

  And what precisely were my troubles? I will list them in an order dictated by a poetic association of ideas. My readers, I suffered from chronic toothache, mysteriously begun and mysteriously ending. I suffered from twelve-hour flu, four-day flu, two-week flu, and common intestinal flu that could shoot incredible pains through my abdomen for half an hour, then vanish. I suffered from watery eyes, sore eyes, sensitive eyes, weak eyes—and all the same two eyes, of course. I suffered from mild and severe headaches, sometimes simultaneously (the mild ache throughout my brain and the severe one above my left eye). I suffered from frequent sore throats, from various kinds of asthma (I was allergic to cats, to chicken and turkey feathers, to pollen, poppies, birds' nests, fox stoles, etc.), from rashes both scabby and flaky, from bumps, itches, and undefined swellings. I suffered from all kinds of colds: head, chest, stomach, muscle, anywhere. My eyes watered and my teeth chattered. I was subject to severe shivering fits in the winter if I went outside too scantily dressed. I coughed, I hacked, I sneezed. I was always falling down too, even at the age of eleven. As a smaller child I always had bruised and scab-marred knees and elbows. I could fall from tricycle, wagon, tractor, pushcart; I even fell out of my baby buggy once when no one was looking. I could fall while standing flat-footed on a sidewalk, don't ask me how. I fell down stairs and stumbled up stairs. I fell over my own shoelaces, tied or untied. But nothing ever hurt me, much. It was as if my bones were too unshaped, too limp and malleable, to break.

  And I had the usual boring run of diseases. Measles, chicken pox, mumps, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever (a mild case). I almost died with one attack of flu, however. Something had been wrong with my tonsils, and I think my appendix flared up once, years ago.

  Now I am a bundle of worse troubles, but I don't go to doctors and I don't know what's wrong. I don't care to know. My body is just a vessel or instrument I am using, as this typewriter is an instrument I'm using, and when I am finished with this memoir I will be finis
hed with this body. That's all.

  5

  Sometimes I could hear the invisible grit in the air singing around my ears, sometimes not. I was a good student at Cedar Grove Junior High Summer Session. I studied math. My mathematical steps were always sensible, though my conclusions were often wrong. It was as if, led to the very brink of the inevitable, my pencil somehow swerved and whimsically snatched at an impossible answer.

  I think I woke up totally at times. I don't know. Squealing brakes warned me to jump back up on a curb, yes, but whether this qualifies as “waking” me I'm not sure. There were pressures that kept me tired and dopey. For instance? Walking into a room in which Father and Nada were and having them stop at once their conversation to smile daz-zlingly at me. That pushed me down a little. Nada had moved out of the big bedroom again and left Father there alone, retiring as she always did to her “study.” Four days in a row she asked me what I was studying in summer school, and Father kept mentioning the Little League as if it were something I should be teasing him about, nagging him into taking me. I didn't mind this because at such times my gaze would meet Nada's and we would share a silent contempt for such nonsense—imagine me acting out the farce of childhood athletics!

  Precarious as they were with each other, their good spirits bubbled over onto everyone else. Many people visited them. I won't bother with the list of names; it's different from the Fernwood list but only superficially One interesting man stands out: Mr. Body. You have heard the name Body before (the advertising man who bought our house in Fernwood), but this is another Body family unrelated, I'm sorry to say. I'm sorry because I like unity of one kind or another, however foolish or arbitrary. Mr. Body loved to sit in Nada's gold Queen Anne chair, cross his legs, and talk about the loss of freedoms in America. “Soon they'll be taking away from us the right to bear arms, to protect ourselves with rifles,” he declared.

  Everyone agreed with Mr. Body, even when they weren't listening. Everyone agrees with everyone else in Fernwood, or Cedar Grove, wherever we are.

  And there was another interesting man, one who did not fit in, one whose coming was contrived and suspicious: an old friend of Nada's. He was a professional intellectual whom Nada had brought to town, under the auspices of the Village Great Books Discussion Club. Each year a speaker came to speak at their luncheon, the good literary ladies' luncheon. They had money, and in the past they had flown out to them James Dickey, Bennett Cerf, a very top narrative-writer for Walt Disney, even Paul Goodman, even Pearl Buck, and many others. But this year Nada had snagged for a mere $500 the editor of The Transamerican Quarterly, who was also a book reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and also the somewhat notorious and flamboyant “film critic” for a prestigious men's magazine to which Father subscribed. I missed his name, though I believe it ended in a complicated swish, a “-sky” that was not Polish but Russian-Jewish.

  He was a house guest of Nada's, a fact that agonized me, and a scant two hours after his arrival by jet there was a cocktail party for him, with all the literary ladies and their unliterary but very friendly husbands—the elite of Cedar Grove—present in his honor and anxious to make him feel at ease; even Mavis Grisell, in town to visit her sister, was present with her winning, girlish smile. I, Richard, was allowed to parade around with plates of hors d'oeuvres (tiny smoked oysters, tiny anchovies, shrimp with shrimp sauce, glazed crackers, cheesed crackers, cheesebits, onionbits, flaked, blown, browned, and homogenized potato chips, and of course roasted cashews), and I took advantage of my role to observe this stranger from another part of my mother's life. It was so rare that I was allowed to peek into that life.

  Let us draw nearer to this man. He was in his forties but not young—I have to add that “but,” for in Cedar Grove all men under sixty are spry and young, demons on the golf course (until that fatal day at the ninth hole), as they are behind desks and alighting from jetliners; in the intellectual world they evidently head downhill fast after forty. This editor had short, thin, wirelike hair that stood up straight from his skull; his hair was blond. His face was an aggressive blank to me the first time I served him some smoked oysters (he scooped up several and ate them greedily), but the second time around I was able to look at him more closely. Face an oblong, rather bony, and eyebrows gray and patchy; a band of small pits along his cheeks (acne scars, smallpox? not important anyway). His skin was sallow and heavy. An argumentative nose; jaw darkened as if with shadow or a bluish beard about to pop out at any moment. His voice was rapid and assured, and his eyes were nervous, darting, and critical. He began to talk at once about the hypocrisy of American society, and he ate large, soft shrimp from a plate beside him as if to emphasize his words.

  “Our culture, my friends,” he said, “is based upon competition and greed. Who can deny this? It is inhuman, totally inhuman. It is terrified by love—not just sexual love, my friends, but all love. Paradoxically enough, or rather not paradoxically at all, this culture is obsessed with brutality: in its fixed aesthetic forms, the police state and the television set.”

  Mavis Grisell clinked her Egyptian jewelry in agreement; she was always agreeable. Nada sat a distance away and crossed her legs. Her vagueness that evening puzzled me, and it was only years later that I realized she took Cedar Grove so unseriously that even her old friend, placed in it, became unserious; she hardly listened to what he said and therefore had no idea that he might be insulting her guests. Of course her guests had no idea either.

  “Very interesting point,” a man in a dark suit said with enthusiasm. This was Mr. James Bone, a manufacturer of garage doors.

  The editor popped a shrimp into his mouth and his jaws ground with vehemence. “Certainly it's interesting. It happens to be true. America, my friends, is based upon money. And money is based upon man's natural selfish desire for power. So we may say that the basis of our evil is the selfish desire for power.”

  Mrs. Bone, a writer of “light verse” for local newspapers, said politely, “I read something like that just this week in The New Yorker, an essay by a Negro, I think—”

  “Power is deadly, disintegrating,” the editor interrupted. He accepted some mushrooms on sticks passed to him on a silver tray. “We have lived for so long, my friends, in the shadow of propaganda put out by the West that we have no conception of objective truth.” He swallowed the mushrooms with a mouthful of Scotch. “Consider yourselves, frankly. Today I flew out here from New York City, a fantastic but utterly real city, totally integrated, totally alert. I flew out here and in two hours I can see that the suburbs of America are doomed. I am, frankly, amazed at the artificiality of this suburban world. Your very children look artificial, do you realize that? Type-cast, healthy, well-fed, tanned children with no cares, no problems, no duties, no responsibilities, no sufferings, no thoughts, children out of a Walt Disney musical! And these children are your products, my friends. Think of what you are creating!”

  I had the idea that Nada glanced at me, vaguely, but I might have been mistaken.

  “That's fascinating,” a woman said. “Is it tied in with your work?”

  He wiped his mouth. Excited, passionate, a little overwrought— was it the liquor, or the airplane flight, or the prospect of his speech the next day? (for, alas, he gave a very poor, shaky, nervous speech and disappointed the Cedar Grove ladies)—he began glancing apprehensively around the room. “Did you speak ironically?” he said to that lady.

  “Did I what?” she said graciously.

  “Ironically. Did you speak ironically?”

  “My heavens no. I don't know how to speak ironically,” she said, surprised.

  He grinned at her, then stopped grinning, then glanced around for Nada. Nada was scratching the base of her head idly, off in a corner. Silence fell.

  “Some of us have been meaning to ask,” another lady ventured shyly, “whether there is much intellectual excitement in the New York world? Do you think that we in the Midwest are missing much the best part of life?”

  “
Is this the Midwest?” he asked vaguely. “Oh yes. No. I don't know.

  Of course we go to boxing matches in New York. That sport is marvelous. It's so contained. Within a comparatively small area, it tests manhood and skill. It… it's very much like writing. I had a workout the other afternoon with Norman Mailer—”

  “Ah yes,” said a gentleman, “didn't he write … ? And then didn't he go downhill afterward?”

  “John, for heaven's sake,” said a woman, “don't you know they all go downhill? After all! Didn't Tolstoi go downhill after War and Peace and Anna KareninaT

  The gentleman turned seriously to the editor. “Well, I'll put that up to you. Did Tolstoi go downhill after War and Peace and Anna Kareninai”

  The editor was taking another drink. “I think he did. Yes, I believe so,” he said gloomily. After a few minutes of silence he began again, as if from another angle, telling us about his latest discovery, a disturbed and alienated young man who wrote film reviews for various New York publications. This young man had just made an underground movie called Dentist which was forbidden exhibition even in a private East Village hangout… a fantastic event, unparalleled, a raw comment upon the psychosociological inertia of contemporary America … and a very gifted young man too …

  Unfortunately, just then Father arrived from the airport (“Held up by fog!” he explained), rushed and happy, and strode into the living room already agreeing with the editor.

  “Yes, yes, interesting, fascinating!” Father declared loudly.

  The editor got to his feet and they were introduced. Father chuckled with sheer good feeling. “Yes, very fascinating words I heard just now!” he said, looking around the room. Everyone agreed. He drew up a chair and sat facing the editor as if he'd flown in from Holland just for this talk.