Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Oh, you want help again today …?” she said ironically.

  The sun porch was a large airy room at the rear of the house. Two walls were made entirely of glass. Everywhere were Mrs. Pedersen’s plants—some in large earthenware pots, some hanging in delicate china bowls, pots of small-leafed ivy, pots of flowers, even an orange tree in a dumpy ceramic pot, all the plants erect and bright and mysterious to Jesse. They had about them the shiny, hopeful manner of Mrs. Pedersen herself, only wanting to please.

  Since the trip to New York, Hilda had grown more silent in Jesse’s presence. She had gained weight. Beneath her chin flesh was squeezed cruelly, as if held back. She helped him with his work in silence, scrawling answers for him. In the background Frederich was working at his music—always the slow notes, the single notes, falling with the precision of icicles, relentless and maddening. For many months Jesse had often shut his eyes hard, grimacing, in order to bear his brother’s music, but nothing changed, the notes did not stop or speed up, they did not blossom into anything, and after a while Jesse really stopped hearing them. What is a freak? Was he turning into a freak himself?

  When Jesse and Hilda worked together, Mrs. Pedersen sometimes hovered in the doorway, come to water her plants or to pinch off buds or to join them in a snack, tempting them with food. Hilda would often turn irritably away from her mother. “I can’t concentrate with you here, Mother. Your breathing annoys me. You make the floor creak.”

  Jesse was shocked at her rudeness.

  “Mother makes the floor sag,” Hilda said. “The whole house will collapse around her one of these days.”

  “She’s just teasing,” Jesse told Mrs. Pedersen.

  “She’s always teasing me, she’s always picking on me,” Mrs. Pedersen said hesitantly, but with a little smile, while her daughter sat looking away from her, drumming her fingers. “That’s because she spends too much time alone … she should get outside with other girls … she’s always teasing me because we’re home here together all day long, every day.…” She would laugh breathlessly, as if her daughter’s odd behavior were just a joke. But, once allowed on the porch, she became animated and jovial; she peered at Jesse’s calculus textbook and at the pages of numbers and symbols he had been working with, and shook her head. “At first it was just Hilda who could manage things like that, and now you too.… When you came to live with us, Jesse, I was grateful for you because you were just like me. I said to Dr. Pedersen, thank heavens he’s like me! He isn’t like those other two! But now—now you’re getting like Hilda herself—”

  “No, not like Hilda,” Jesse said quickly.

  Hilda snickered.

  “There’s a big difference between us,” Jesse said.

  “But at least you’re going to college. I’m so proud of you, skipping a year of high school and being accepted at college already, so fast.… Dr. Pedersen is very proud of you too. He might not say so, but he is. Our little friend here, Hilda, has refused to continue her education at all. It seems to everyone in the family that a genius might want to develop herself as far as possible, but not our Hilda.”

  Jesse had been accepted at the University of Michigan for the fall semester; he had written for syllabi for some of his courses and was preparing for them. But he was embarrassed to talk about this in front of Hilda.

  “Well, what do you say?” Mrs. Pedersen asked her daughter.

  “Suppose I left home,” Hilda said angrily. “You’d only try to get me back again!”

  “Would I?”

  “Yes, you would!”

  “Oh, would I miss you?” Mrs. Pedersen laughed. “All you do is sit out here and mumble to yourself … grumble … don’t even help me with my plants or with the cooking … always finding fault with me … can’t even put your clothes in the laundry before they’re filthy—”

  “Mother, leave me alone! Go away!”

  “Isn’t she saucy? She always was saucy,” Mrs. Pedersen said heartily. Jesse was embarrassed. He looked at the two of them, mother and daughter, two women with soft, rather pretty features that were similar, the same fair frizzy hair, the same tublike shapes. But Mrs. Pedersen’s skin was of a lively, tender color, while Hilda’s was sallow, even a little discolored, as if from ill health; Mrs. Pedersen’s manner was girlish and bouncy, Hilda’s was sluggish; Mrs. Pedersen was like a young girl at a party, crudely curious, looking around to see what she might be missing, ready to march up and intrude upon any group, while Hilda always hung back, cautious even when she sat in her usual chair here on the porch or at the dining room table. Her eyes swung around morosely to meet her mother’s smile.

  “You bring chaos in here. More than anyone else,” Hilda whispered.

  “What?”

  “Chaos will absorb me,” Hilda said, pressing her hands against her eyes as if to blot out her mother.

  Jesse was not sure if he had heard her correctly. “What are you mumbling about now?” Mrs. Pedersen said with an exasperated sigh.

  Hilda sat lumpish and still.

  Mrs. Pedersen went on brightly, “I’ll make her come around and be nice to us, Jesse, just watch! I spent all morning making peach ice cream, Hilda’s favorite kind. Just you watch her come around!”

  Hilda smiled.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “Would you like some ice cream, Hilda? Homemade peach ice cream?”

  “You know that my nature is coarse and greasy and bottomless. You know there is no end to me. You know I am always hungry,” Hilda said.

  And Mrs. Pedersen hurried out to the kitchen.

  “What did you mean—chaos?” Jesse asked.

  Hilda screwed the cap on her fountain pen angrily. She said nothing. She would not look at him.

  Sometimes Mrs. Pedersen brought them ice cream, sometimes fudge or cake, puddings, candies, slabs of pie with whipped cream; tall icy milkshakes in hot weather, or fruit drinks with scoops of sherbet in them. She brought these things in on a large silver tray, as if she were serving important guests. She always seemed pleased to sit with them. Sometimes Hilda remained at the table, but sometimes her mother’s lively chatter got on her nerves and she excused herself with an excessively polite smirk, and went up to her room as soon as she finished eating.

  Mrs. Pedersen wore bright colors, like her flowers. Big splotches of color—plaids and checks—straining enormously across her broad back, her hair pulled back cheerfully, tiny diamond earrings in her ears. She was always panting with merriment, eager to joke with Jesse and her daughter, ignoring Hilda’s odd pronouncements. If Hilda said flatly, “Mother, none of us washes often enough, not even you,” she pretended to have heard nothing or to have heard a joke instead; the flash of a smile she sent Jesse was pitiful. Once Hilda said, “Jesse will want to leave us, he’ll want to run away before it’s too late.” Mrs. Pedersen shook her head and caught Jesse’s eye, exasperated. “Yes, he will, Mother. He’ll run away. He’ll escape. He knows more than Frederich and I do,” Hilda said mockingly.

  When Mrs. Pedersen left them, Jesse said to her, “Why do you insult your mother? You know she loves you.”

  Hilda stared at him.

  “She loves you. You know it. They all love you. We all love you,” Jesse said.

  Hilda’s gaze moved slowly down, away from his face. Her face closed into an expression of inestimable sadness.

  “We all love you,” Jesse said, his heart pounding.

  As soon as Dr. Pedersen came home in the late afternoon, however, the mood of the house was changed. Everything changed. The dining table was being prepared for dinner. Dr. Pedersen sometimes went upstairs to change his shirt again, and reappeared with a freshened, robust complexion; he clapped his hands together, teased his wife, asked Jesse how the day had been. Dinner began promptly at six-thirty. The meal was like a race—everyone ate fast, skillfully, as if there might not be enough food—but it was also like a race because they were being questioned closely, eyed closely, by Dr. Pedersen. He would begin casually with his wife.
What did you accomplish today, dear? And Mrs. Pedersen would haltingly list the things she had done around the house: food prepared, closets cleaned, a telephone call to check on her father, letters written, some checks sent out, a call to the Reverend Wieden about some matter.… And then Hilda was examined briefly. Hilda’s replies were laconic. Jesse did not understand them and he began to see, as time passed, that Dr. Pedersen did not understand them either. When Frederich was questioned he replied at once, but his replies often did not make sense. Transcribing a Brahms string quartet into a parodic suite in the style of Ives …? Jesse did not know what this meant. It was a composition Frederich had been working on for the last several months. Jesse glanced at his brother and thought he could see, in Frederich’s courteous expression, a certain lidded, mocking, heretical look. Did Dr. Pedersen notice? Frederich was perhaps no longer the favorite son.… He had had several teeth extracted in June, and in July his gall bladder had become infected; he had not lost weight, but he looked smaller, like a partly-deflated balloon, the skin hanging sullenly and evilly about the sides of his face, down toward his neck, giving him the appearance of an intelligent frog. His voice was lazy and rather womanish. When he had been admitted to the hospital for the gall-bladder operation, it had taken five attendants, so Jesse had heard, to load him onto his bed, and his doctor, a colleague of Dr. Pedersen’s named Wascom, had complained of his behavior there—he hadn’t cooperated, he had been childish and demanding, he had insulted the nurses. Dr. Pedersen had defended Dr. Wascom, a member of his profession, against Frederich himself, who had wanted another doctor: “Why are you such an infant, at your age, with your powers! Do you want to degenerate, do you want your brain to turn into baby food? A son of mine!” Red-faced, very angry, Dr. Pedersen had been ashamed of Frederich’s behavior at the hospital, and in the several weeks since that time there had been a tension between them, so that Dr. Pedersen’s questions at the dinner table were put to Frederich in a detached, cool way, as if he did not really expect any sane reply.

  “Would you explain that further, please, Frederich?”

  “I am extending the atonal scale; I am seeking to dramatize, by means of tripartite harmony, the essential suicidal nature of the traditional quartet. The quartet is notoriously difficult to write, you know.”

  And then it was Jesse’s turn.

  If Dr. Pedersen could not make much sense of his other children, he could always make sense of Jesse. Jesse had a great deal to report: halfway through the calculus textbook, then all the way through it, all the way through the syllabus for one of his Michigan courses, chapter after chapter of a book on organic chemistry, the memorization of innumerable charts in the physiology book Dr. Pedersen had given him, charts showing blood pressure, the size and admixture of tissues in the walls of the different blood vessels, everything about the heart and its properties.… He could recite for minutes at a time, while the family sat and listened: “The primordia of the heart are contained in the mesoderm on either side of the foregut invagination of the mammalian embryo. The embryonic cardiac tube is formed …” He saw the glaze in Frederich’s eyes—now it was Frederich who did not know what he was talking about!—he felt Hilda’s restlessness, Mrs. Pedersen’s awe. He could talk about the endocrine system, answer Dr. Pedersen’s most minute questions on it, he could recite the gross anatomy of the various glands. Sometimes dinner was halted temporarily while Dr. Pedersen, growing taller at the head of the table, pursued Jesse with enthusiastic questions. He was always asking, “Well, then, how can life be maintained if …” and Jesse always had a reply, slow and firm as the steps he took in his mathematical problems, his brain working without much imagination. He groped his way, he crossed a dangerous stream stepping on big round firm stones, he rarely made a mistake; if, finally, he did not know the answer to Dr. Pedersen’s question, he admitted he did not know.

  “Ah, that is the beginning of wisdom,” Dr. Pedersen would say.

  On Sundays, Grandpa Shirer often came for dinner if he was well enough; and the Pedersens often invited some of Jesse’s teachers from the high school. Once Dr. Pedersen had Jesse recite an entire chapter from a text on physiology. Jesse spoke easily, slowly; he obeyed his father in everything. But he believed he could sense uneasiness around the table—were they bored by his knowledge or disturbed by it? Was he beginning to frighten people the way Hilda frightened them?… When he finished, everyone congratulated him. Frederich smiled a kind of smile, curt and frosty; Hilda with her heavy-lidded mocking smile, whispered, “You sound just like Father!” Dr. Pedersen was so pleased with Jesse’s performance that the next day he drove downtown to an automobile agency and bought him his own car.

  Now that he had been admitted to the University of Michigan he already thought of himself as a college student and therefore a very serious person; so, in midsummer, he began driving the twenty or so miles to the University of Buffalo library, conscious of the beginning of a new segment of his life. And yet it was a seamless break, a gentle transition from the Pedersen household to this car—a black Dodge, modest in its trim and equipment—and to the university library in Buffalo. Driving the car his father had given him was a precious responsibility. He was conscious of Dr. Pedersen with him, in the car with him, guiding him, warning him of oncoming speeders and tricky intersections; he carried the presence and the power of Dr. Pedersen with him all the way to Buffalo, Dr. Pedersen’s being extended in Jesse’s no matter how far he might drive. He went to Buffalo two or three times a week.

  On other days Mrs. Pedersen begged him to take her out for little drives below Lockport, down toward Lake Ontario and Olcott Beach. She could not drive; she had never learned, and Dr. Pedersen believed now that it was too late for her to learn; anyway, she told Jesse apologetically, she was a nervous person so perhaps it was better that she had never gotten a driver’s license. Didn’t he agree? He avoided answering this question, and to offset it he agreed to take her out for drives. It took so little to please her—she loved the look of warm summer fields, the orchards of apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees, peach trees, the farmers’ roadside stands where she could buy baskets of fruit, eating them right in the car as Jesse drove along the dusty country roads, his mind half attending his mother’s happy chatter and half attending its own concerns, his work, his studies, which had nothing to do with the heat-riddled landscapes of Niagara County. Sometimes on the warmest of days when the sun porch was stuffy and Hilda’s round, pale face was blotched with heat rash and even the numbers in her head were not enough to absorb her interest, Mrs. Pedersen talked Hilda into joining them.

  “Hilda is hungry, I know,” Mrs. Pedersen would tease. “Let’s stop right away for some ice cream!”

  And they would stop—at ice cream stands, fruit stands, at roadside diners, anywhere. Food bought on the road, the surprise of food bought from strangers: what a joyous summer! Jesse was pleased that he could make his mother happy so easily. He wanted to think about his work, he yearned to get back to the university library, and yet he found himself with Mrs. Pedersen constantly.… Her own children had grown morose and strange, and so Mrs. Pedersen had herself become childlike. Even her puffy legs in their silk stockings—tight to bursting—had a childish, innocent appearance, sticking out like gay light-tinted sausages beneath the hem of her flowery dresses. If Hilda accompanied them, she directed her remarks to Hilda so that Jesse might overhear: “Why can’t you and Frederich be more like Jesse? He has such good manners. He doesn’t go around with a long face, moping all day like a certain young lady I know. Grandpa Shirer always says, If you make a face, it’ll freeze that way.” And Hilda might reply at once: “My grandfather never said such rubbish in his entire life.” If they were alone, Mrs. Pedersen talked to Jesse endlessly and wistfully as she ate cherries and spat the pits out carefully into her stained palm and then put the pits in a paper bag; she talked of Dr. Pedersen’s many projects—it seemed they were always passing land he had just bought or was trying to buy, or a roadside poste
r put her in mind of a new invention of his he was having patented—or she talked of her girlhood, which had evidently been spent exclusively in Lockport, or she talked of her children and how she suddenly felt so lonely now, in her forties, of how the big house frightened her even though Hilda and Frederich were always at home, of how she feared that Dr. Pedersen might overwork himself and have a heart attack, she feared that Frederich would become seriously ill, that Hilda would become more silent, more abrasive, until, like one of Dr. Pedersen’s brilliant younger brothers, she would have to be “put away”—this terrified Mrs. Pedersen and she did not even dare to talk about it with her husband.

  “I don’t have anyone to talk to, Jesse,” she said softly.

  Sometimes she came across a tiny white worm in one of the cherries she was eating and, with a stifled scream, she threw the cherry out the car window.

  Jesse brought along books to read, and on a deserted stretch of beach on Lake Ontario Mrs. Pedersen would wade in the cold water, avoiding the small dead fish, shrieking with pleasure as if to call Jesse’s attention to her; but Jesse turned off his mind politely. He had work to do. He felt, uneasily, that time was running out for him. Mrs. Pedersen would stroll up the beach a quarter of a mile, gathering bits of driftwood and odd-shaped stones, walking barefoot so that her feet made deep prints in the sand that filled slowly with water, while Jesse read or tried to read, conscious of something strange in the crashing of the waves, something inexplicable and dangerous in the loneliness of the beach.

  When they drove back home, Mrs. Pedersen was always reluctant to return to the house on Locust Street, and so Jesse would find himself driving slowly up and down the hills of Lockport, along Clinton Street and Gooding Street, Water Street, Plank Road, down by the sewerage disposal units, out by the city dump, out by Atwater Park and the gorge; he sometimes parked at the “world’s largest single-span bridge” while Mrs. Pedersen stood at the railing, watching for barges to come through the locks. If a barge was actually partway through the locks, Mrs. Pedersen exclaimed as though she were a tourist and had never seen such a sight, and had to wait until the boat got all the way through. Her posture was arch and expectant, as if she believed that at any moment something extraordinary was going to happen. The barges and the occasional tugboats were drab and ugly, loaded with coal or steel or scrap metal, or not loaded at all, riding high upon the canal waters. They made their passage through the series of locks very slowly, like ancient vessels. Jesse got out to stand beside Mrs. Pedersen at the railing, recalling how he had stood there many months before, when he had been a stranger to Lockport and to his new family.… How long ago that was! And how different he was now, how totally changed he was—for his face had matured, and certainly he looked different, having gained over eighty pounds.