Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  10

  The next morning when I came downstairs Nada was already up, wearing a flimsy yellow shift of a summer dress, her bare legs stretched out under the dining-room table. This memory brings to my mind exotic things—parrots, cockatoos, big bursting jungle flowers—because of the shiny green fabric, minutely textured, that covered the dining-room walls, and Nada's sunburst dress, and the peaches and bananas she was eating. She had quite a few long narrow sheets of paper out before her, which she touched gingerly with her sticky fingers. “Hello, Honey,” she said. “Going to school?”

  It was Libby's day off, and Nada sometimes thrust toward me a conspiratorial, intimate smile on such days, but this morning she was distracted. I asked her what the papers were, and she said nothing, nothing important. Was it a story? I asked. “Oh, nothing. You won't be late to school, will you?” she said. She brushed her hair back sunnily and indifferently from her face, smiling at me with that smile that meant nothing. It was strange how this gesture reminded me of one of the pretty, confident high-school girls at Dr. Muggeridge's lecture, a girl I hadn't even remarked upon at the time and who was only summoned back by Nada.

  So I went out to school, but somewhere along the way it occurred to me that I wasn't going to school that morning. I turned and came back by a side street, cutting through to the lane (not quite an alley) that ran behind the houses on Labyrinth Drive. The lane was lined with garbage cans, some new and some weathered, and one or two houses sported a mighty line of six, seven cans all their own! I am embarrassed to say that the Everett household could fill up no more than two healthy-sized cans in one week. Our house looked a little unfamiliar from this spot. I climbed up onto our back fence, which swayed slightly, and peered over onto our lawn. It was shaded, and the swimming pool glimmered a pale, delicate blue. Insects dotted its surface. The back of the long house was broken up into sections: a screened-in porch with lawn furniture, a glassed-in porch that was the Family Room and looked out onto a patio the former owners of the house had evidently thought highly of—there were hanging plants, hanging vines, flowerpots everywhere, which Nada hadn't bothered with and out of which now grew stunted little brown things. The patio floor was flagstone, larger than the kind I was familiar with, and around it were evergreens and a few rose bushes. The dining-room window was a kind of bay-window affair, but it was wasted because of the overgrown bushes. I could still see Nada in there at the table, and if I'd had my telescope with me I could have made sure.

  I entered the house by the front door. Doors are always unlocked in Cedar Grove. Just inside the door I paused, listening: a sound of rustling paper from the dining room. She was still at work.

  I tiptoed to the staircase and went upstairs. Nothing creaked. At the top I waited. I was good at waiting. A kind of sunny haze enveloped me, and I stood there waiting and not-waiting, thinking that Nada and I were alone in the house, all alone, and she did not even know it. I was in a kind of agreeable trance. Later, when I was to recount all this as part of my confession, they checked with my math teacher, Mr. Hale, and to my amazement he told them that I hadn't been absent that day! According to his records, this “Richard Everett” had had perfect attendance up until the time he stopped coming altogether. But I insist, my readers, that I was absent, yes, I was absent from class that morning and all but absent from even this perch at the top of the stairs, my mind was so drifting and wandering.

  Then the doorbell rang, or rather tolled. I must have been waiting for this, for I came awake at once as if everything had been planned. I heard Nada's bare feet padding to the door, or rather I felt them, and I shivered to think of the faint little indentations her feet would make in the thick white rug. Then two voices mingled, hers and a man's. I believed at the time it was the editor Malinsky's voice (but it turned out that he had flown back to New York that morning). They went into the dining room; I saw their shadows pass, but I was too frightened to peek over and look down at them. Nada's voice rose with a pleasant irony upon the word “Elwood.” The telephone rang. No one answered it. It rang and rang, and its ringing interfered with the wild beating of my heart.

  I ran down the hall to Nada's room. The door was open. Inside was the unmade bed; its white cover had fallen half onto the floor and looked both flouncy and soiled. The floor was covered with a rather thin but still lovely Persian rug Nada had picked up somewhere, under some lady's influence, and the furniture had an unmatched look. Nada had always been influenced by other women, led astray to antique shops, auctions, following up Regency pieces because some emphatic lady had told her they were the finest, seeking out Country French frauds because someone's mansion was decorated in that style. Of course, Nada had no style of her own.

  Everywhere there were books and papers. Off to the side was her “powder room,” painted pink, and a big long closet filled to bursting with her clothes. I opened the closet door and the light went on. I went inside and hid among her fragrant, perfumy clothes, though some of the things should have been dry-cleaned, it seemed to me.

  What instinct! Dr. Muggeridge had taught me more than I had realized. In a short while, a half hour, I heard them come into the room. Nada's voice was very close to the closet door when she said, “It's a pattern. Sometimes I'm drowning in it. It's all whirls and spirals, like a diagram of the ear.”

  “Anytime you want, you can get out.”

  “Oh, shut up, what do you know? What point is there living without being normal? A world like this is shit without money, don't be pretentious.” Then she said something I couldn't make out, a phrase sharp and whip-like.

  The man's voice said, “Natashya, that Russian of yours has always been a farce.”

  “Like everything else, then. Well…”

  My sanctuary, my hiding place that was so clever, then turned into my prison. It happened slowly enough. I crouched in there behind something long and silky, listening, sweating, and it occurred gradually to me that I might be sick if I listened any further. No, I cannot type out what I heard and it isn't important, I mean not to you. To you nothing is important, this is just something to read and discard, but to me, even now I writhe in agony and humiliation to have to remember, but… I crouched in there with my eyes shut and my hands pressed against my ears, but not hard enough, not hard enough! I could hear much more than I wanted. I pressed my sweaty palms against my ears so hard that a ringing began that was like the ringing of a telephone, and static sounded in my brain, and …

  After a while I heard nothing. I let my aching hands come away from my bruised, aching head, and for a moment I thought I might be deaf, I heard nothing at all. Then it came to me: voices. They were talking about something, but very gently. I could not hear what they said. Maybe they spoke in another language, the language of lovers, who could tell? Their talk drifted off, drifted on again. It was all very gentle and casual. Then there was a sudden sound of bedsprings and Nada said, “Yes, please, it's blue, some frilly blue thing.”

  I knew the man was coming to the closet, and I began to breathe fast through my mouth. My eyes narrowed. I brought my hands up to my head again and crouched down low. Have I mentioned that I spent all this time, an hour or more, with my backbone hunched in two and my thighs aching under me? Have you ever crouched on top of a pile of women's shoes thrown all over a closet floor, suffocating and writhing in shame, hardly daring to breathe? Have you? Have you ever squatted down just for five minutes, so that your legs ached desperately beneath you and you wanted nothing, nothing so much as to stand up straight?

  None of this flashed to me, of course. I thought nothing. I was frozen with terror and baked with terror, and only now in writing this memoir (God, what shame even to write it!) am I able to remember just what I felt. But then, back then, I had no time to think about anything. The closet door opened suddenly and the light came on. I was crouched back of her things, you know, and I hoped desperately that I would be hidden, but this abrupt, hurried man began going through the clothes hanging on the rack as if impatient of all
that was offered him, and when he came at last to Nada's blue bathrobe he moved five or six hangers full of clothes aside, and there, there he stood looking down at me: a naked man with short, damp, curly hair on his chest, a face I had never seen before, eyes that were mildly incredulous. The most horrible thing about a naked man is his face. This naked man stared down at me, and I hunched down farther on my small mountain of shoes, my hands now on top of my head, staring up at him. A second passed. Then he yanked the blue robe off the hanger, the wire hanger nearly swung off, and he turned away and closed the door and the light went out. That was that.

  11

  In that way I became a Minor Character. I slipped out of focus. It's difficult for you readers to understand my becoming a Minor Character because 1) you can't imagine anyone except yourself being Major, hence my becoming Minor should be no great shock; 2) you don't believe a genuine Minor Character should exhibit so much anguish, pain, tedium. It's ridiculous, like a vehement pamphlet put out by an organization of white laboratory mice.

  Anyway I, Richard Everett, became a Minor Character. This is the opposite of schizophrenia and yet closely related, according to Dr. Saskatoon: there is no splitting of the ego in two or three but a curious case of disappearance, like a snake swallowing itself or a pocket pulled out when there's no pocket there to be pulled out. (My digressions are getting more desperate: I have to fight back an impulse to type out a list of the things I ate this evening, so you can judge for yourself the depth of my degradation. But who wants to hear about Wong's Chop Suey in the can, of Teutonic Stewed Tomatoes, and canned spaghetti, crumbly cookies, greasy potato chips … and … everything else? A far cry from Nada to crumbs!)

  But if I had it to do over again, and thank God I don't, I'd pay more attention to food. Hanley Stuart Hingham's advice is good advice, for though this is nonfiction, all writing is selection and I haven't selected the right details. I should have told you of the pies, both fresh and frozen, the custard cups, the ice-cream cones, the strawberry and cream tarts, the chocolates, the mints, the fine sweet cake Nada sometimes made (from a mix), the bottles and bottles of all those beverages you see tanned teen-agers holding aloft in advertisements, the meat, the potatoes, the gravy, the lobster, the shrimp, the chicken (fried, baked, stewed, barbecued, diced, quartered, fricasseed), everything— everything I stuffed into my voracious mouth from the time of my Disintegration until the time of my Death. I should have reprinted menus from Cedar Grove's most exclusive restaurants, and from the country clubs, and from Nada's kitchen, to give you not simply a sense of my sinking into a slough of food but an idea of social conditions as well.

  But all these digressions are useless. I am running out of time. I am one of those people who talk faster and faster as the pain mounts in them. At first you feel shock, then sympathy, then you swallow a yawn, then you don't bother swallowing a yawn.

  But listen …

  12

  That evening I did twenty math problems. You do not recall pure and useless math from your youth—the safety of step-by-step procedures, the baroque luxury of numerals slowly and lovingly shaped by pencil; these fade. But through the maze of slow-motion steps and half steps, a parody of my slowing brain, I kept seeing and hearing things I did not want to remember. No matter what they were, you can guess. I felt as if I were falling headfirst into the blackness contained by those innocuous drawings, but I could do little to stop the fall. I could reach out and grab a triangle's sides the way you grab the sides of a window to keep from plunging out. But none of this was enough.

  I went into my bathroom and ran cold water. I put my hands under it, but that wasn't enough either (cold water closes the pores). So I turned on the hot water and let it run until the mirror was steamed;then I lathered soap between my hands and washed. I washed my hands and face and as much of my arms as I could manage without taking off my shirt. In the steamy window I could see this strange child gazing at me, nearsighted without his glasses, and I washed slowly and dreamily. There was no thought of what was coming next.

  Then I went back into my room, which I haven't described and hardly remember now: a boy's room painted blue, with a vaguely nautical air about it. Out the window the evening sky reminded me of lavatories in public places: pale gray floors. Something seemed to be waiting to happen. They say of children like me, “But he was such a nice boy, so quiet and polite,” but they don't go on to say something they've half thought: that children like me seem to be waiting, always waiting. Even now, I suppose, I am waiting, and it is clear to me that all of my childhood was a period of waiting.

  After a while—I don't know how long—I pulled my rifle out from under my bed and went to the door. A quiet evening, both parents at home. Nada was down the hall in her room typing, and Father was two floors away in his basement “workshop.” Someone had told Father once that busy executives should exercise their hands, so Father made bowling pins (or did he call them Indian clubs?), smooth, handsome things that sometimes stood up by themselves. If I dropped an anchor through this house it would sink forever before it would come into contact with my father. So I walked noiselessly down the hall to the back stairs, with the gun, not even sneaking and not even in a hurry, and no one was to see me go out or come back.

  In the darkness I walked alongside the house with my rifle drooping casually before me. I walked like any hunter out for humble sport in any suburban darkness, and when I came to the fence at the back of our property I remembered to put the rifle down while I climbed the fence. That was instinct, perhaps. It was important that I didn't blow myself up yet, I knew. Though I wasn't really awake I knew this. I had a dull pain everywhere in my head and a sharper pain right behind my left eye. In short, I felt more or less normal. Once in the alley I began to walk faster. I had no idea of where I was going. It was a pleasant July night—July 23, 1960.

  At the end of our block I crossed the street. Everything was quiet, empty. I began to walk faster. I felt vaguely harassed, as if I were late for an appointment. Above, the sky was still faintly overcast but a smattering of stars had appeared. Mr. Grenlin back at Johns Behemoth had told us that the stars did not exist but they did represent—they represented “stars” from the past. So you could really look into the past, after all, one of the boys had said. But Mr. Grenlin had replied, with Johns Behemoth's easy superiority, “You are only looking into a concept of the past which is your concept of the past, once you have been told that the stars do not exist as they seem to exist. But since you are only looking at your own concept, it's rather whimsical to suggest that you are looking into a past that is anyone else's past, let alone a historical past. Any questions?” No, no questions.

  I came to a larger street and now I had a vague idea of my destination. This was Broad Road, and it divided the rather ordinary section of Cedar Grove in which we lived from an enormous area called Pools Moran (a name I do not understand) which was roughly equivalent to Fernwood Heights. As you crossed Broad Road your taxes mounted, and by the time you trod on the other side, the pebbles and grit beneath your feet were worth nickels, dimes, even quarters. I was running now. I turned up a lane called Melon Lane and yes, this was familiar, and inside my chest a pulse began to come alive. I was coming alive! Before me the lane turned and flipped like a lazy snake, and just around the corner would be the Bodys' estate, which Nada had pointed out to me several times. It was accessible from back or front because of the winding lane. Through a small pine forest, posted against trespassers, I could see the Body house and a glow of activity around the swimming pool. Though Pools Moran is supposed to be quiet, what a lot of noise came cascading through the demure night! Music and shrieks. There were many people around the swimming pool, some swimming. Lanterns strung around the pool were glowing like moons. It must have been a party given by one of the Bodys' college-age children. I walked quietly through the little woods with my rifle up to my shoulder, so that I could look through the telescopic sight. I saw energetic figures, three-dimensional shadows. The sight brou
ght me up so close that I had no fear of being seen. My heart was pounding with excitement! I did not remember it having pounded so well since my mad spell in the flower bed, which had been a child's tantrum. Now it was pounding again and sending precious blood through my veins, and … I saw a woman patting powder on her face with a white fluffy puff, and as she did this she spoke sharply to a dog whining at her feet. The powder puff was very large and white; it was an effort for me to turn away from it. Someone was doing a trick on the diving board: a muscular young man who achieved a perfect somersault. A few girls applauded. By the steps to the diving board a group of young people were anointing a girl, who jumped up daintily onto the board, stretched her young body (which gleamed in the lantern light), and pointed with the tips of her fingers up to the sky. Her bathing cap looked made of gold. I felt the night air grow humid, just watching her. Then someone clicked a cigarette lighter and touched the flame to her ankle and she burst all at once into flames! And as I stared in bewilderment and from all parts of the patio came a wondrous murmuring, the girl walked on tiptoe to the end of the board, aflame, and did a perfect dive into the pool.

  When her golden head appeared once more the fire was extinguished and only a few people applauded. I felt as if I had gazed upon something forbidden.

  But it was not these people I seemed to want. I went quietly by them in the dark, jostled by friendly giggling girls who never noticed me; the rifle I carried was nothing alarming (it could have been a walking stick or something to pry a sunken bathing cap out of a drain). I made my way up the hill to the big house itself. Windows there glowed with light. The kitchen was filled with young people in bathing suits. Past the kitchen was a series of bathrooms evidently—the windows were glass bricks. Then a hallway with a great potted plant, then a darkened living room, then—and here my heart began at once to throb—then a kind of Family Room, and there sat Mr. Body himself. I understood that it was this man I'd been seeking.