Solstice

by Joyce Carol Oates

  A boy is reading a poem about death, and rain strikes in spirited little waves against the windows, and Monica is listening, Miss Jensen is listening, her own expression alertly attentive, her eyes glazing over with teacherly sympathy. (Most of the boys reading this afternoon are from her classes.) Absentmindedly she strokes the scar on her jaw, that secret pattern of striations in the flesh, hers, her. She concentrates on the boy and his poem but cannot hear the words because she is hearing other words, I hate you, I want to die, I loathe and despise you and I want to die, and her own voice lifting, shrill with weariness and despair, but which words had she uttered?—she could not now recall. Perhaps she said nothing, perhaps she has imagined everything.

  When the reading is over she will hurry to telephone Sheila.

  Unless—granted the distinct possibility of the phone simply ringing and ringing and ringing out there—it would be wisest for her simply to get in her car and drive to Edgemont.

  Now a boy, one of Monica’s most earnest students, is reading a prose poem, as he calls it, a “cubist collage” as he calls it, consisting of fragments of hallucinatory dialogue and description; and Monica tries to listen; and Monica tries very hard to care. The boy is someone of whom she has grown fond this past semester, one of the students who clearly admires her; perhaps, if it comes to it (will it?) such students will make a difference in her career at Glenkill. For Monica is not teaching quite so well as she once was, and Monica is not quite so . . . interested, it seems, in the school and its activities (“I was hurt, Monica, yes I was truly hurt, and I think I should tell you!—I was hurt,” Jill Starkie said a few days ago, cornering Monica in the library, “—you know you distinctly promised to drop by and James hurried back from Philadelphia just for the occasion—”). When she is present, however, as she is now (5:40 P.M. of this long long day) she gives every appearance of being intensely interested, doesn’t she; sympathetic; devoted.

  Monica notes the curious phenomenon that when daffodils pass their prime their petals become paper-thin. The colorful centers remain (yellow, orangish-yellow) but the outer petals turn transparent.

  Monica notes that the majority of boys in the Founders Room, scattered about on the sofas, the folding chairs, and the carpets, are dressed in the latest preppie fashion: school ties, of course; and white shirts; here and there a school blazer; but they are wearing shoes (loafers, jogging shoes) without socks—as they have been all winter, no matter the freezing temperatures.

  (“Don’t your heels get raw, without socks?” Monica asked them, amused, genuinely curious. “Doesn’t your skin chafe, and bleed?” The boys allowed her to know that such considerations did not matter at all to them—that Miss Jensen simply did not, could not, understand. If shoes are to be worn without socks then shoes are to be worn without socks no matter the discomfort.)

  Monica notes, waking from her trance, a sudden restlessness in the room; a flurry of whispers; muffled laughter. The boy solemnly intoning the cubist collage has made an error . . . a blunder of taste, or discretion . . . he has spiced his nearly indecipherable presentation with such disturbing words as vomit, entrails, semen, love . . . and it seems to be (can it be?) that his prose poem is a homosexual fantasy, a lyric celebrating “gayness.” . . . Monica, frightened, wants to lean over to him, to command him to stop: doesn’t he know how he is exposing himself, and in this intolerant company: doesn’t he know how the other boys, now listening closely, are smirking, staring, grinning in incredulous contempt. . . .

  But she cannot stop him, of course; and, in any case, he comes to an end a few minutes later; and there is a very faint round of applause—very faint, which he nonetheless acknowledges with a defiant little smile.

  Brian Farley stops Monica, as she knew he would, to say that she really should have checked with the boys in her classes, to see what they intended to read. “Leonard isn’t a very stable person, as you must know,” Farley said, “and this afternoon’s performance isn’t going to do him any good.”

  Monica knows that Farley is right; but her pulses leap in a fiery little rush of irritation. She says stubbornly that she couldn’t possibly have checked out her students’ material—she couldn’t possibly have censored any of it.

  And suddenly they are arguing, in the corridor outside the Founders Room.

  “Your colleagues took time to glance through their students’ material, and no one ‘censored’ anything,” Farley says. “It was only a matter of good taste and judgment.”

  “Our students aren’t children,” Monica says, “—they can hardly be told what to do. Leonard thinks of himself as a writer—he’s very serious about everything he does—I don’t see how I—”

  “Never mind about Leonard,” Farley says angrily. “The fact is that while our students aren’t children they aren’t adults either, they’re adolescents, some of them are extremely immature, they look to us for adult supervision which is the point, isn’t it,” he says, as Monica begins to draw away, her face stiff with opposition, “—the point of the school? Of people like us?”

  Monica’s rage carries her for some distance, for some miles, until, suddenly, braking her car to a stop on the Poor Farm Road, she feels a wave a dizziness, vertigo—a sense that the world is too vivid and solid and hard-edged to contain her.

  The panic attack lasts for approximately ten minutes.

  And when, finally—slowly—it lifts she finds herself drenched in perspiration; chilled and shivering. She cannot remember at first where she was coming from or where, with such a sense of desperate urgency, she is headed.

  13

  Sheila telephoned to apologize, hours later.

  Hours later, Sheila telephoned to say she’d been off her head, she hadn’t known what she said or what she meant, she hoped Monica would forgive her.

  (But what had she said? She couldn’t remember.)

  She was wretchedly lonely, she said.

  She said she would continue with the plans, the arrangements, if Monica thought that wise.

  She said it would be over with soon.

  She said that her basic wish was simply to die and get the entire business finished but (this in a voice trembling with hilarity) she was balked by the thought of a memorial service of some kind . . . rows of solemn “mourners” . . . sappy banalities that were sure to be said aloud and perhaps even published.

  Finally, after a pause, Monica spoke.

  She said, gripping the receiver tight, that she very much doubted that Sheila wanted to be dead. “Think of how dull it would be,” she added.

  Sheila agreed. But the problem was how to get through the next hour, the next half-hour, the next five minutes. “If I can manage that I can manage anything,” she said slowly. “One breath and then another and then another. . . .”

  “Yes,” said Monica. “One breath and then another.”

  “And once the show is over . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, then . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll be free,” Sheila said. “And I’ll make it up to you, all you’ve endured for my sake.” She paused; Monica could hear her harsh quickened breathing. “I’ll be able to love you then,” she said. “I can’t love anyone now. But then . . . If you don’t betray me . . .”

  14

  Monica took an entire day off from school—her excuse being, quite legitimately, she thought, a sick friend—a friend who needed her help—and drove Sheila to Philadelphia, to her doctor; but, as Monica was parking her car, Sheila informed her suddenly that she couldn’t see the man; she wouldn’t see him. He would only tell tales about her, making out that she was sicker than she was, and, in any case, she wasn’t sick: she felt fine.

  So they sat in the car and quarreled.

  Ten minutes. Fifteen. And Monica’s voice shook, and Monica began to cry, and Monica screamed at her, finally, why hadn’t she thought of any of this before, back home.

  “. . . I wanted to please you, Monica,” Sheila said softly. “
I know you’re angry with me and I wanted to please you, it was all for you.”

  Monica made an appointment with a young doctor in Edgarsville whom someone at school recommended highly, but, this time, she was shrewd enough to make the appointment without telling Sheila. And, promptly at 9:00 in the morning, she arrived at Sheila’s studio to tell her that she was scheduled to see a doctor at 10:00 so would she please get ready, they were leaving immediately. Sheila protested feebly, but acquiesced. And this time she actually saw the doctor: Monica waited a good forty-five minutes while she was examined: and when she finally emerged she was smiling, reproachful, triumphant: she told Monica that it was as she’d expected all along, she was in exemplary health.

  “Don’t you have to go to a hospital for tests?—for a blood test, at least?” Monica asked doubtfully.

  “Not at all,” Sheila said. “My blood is fine.”

  “You’re sure—?”

  “My blood is fine and I am fine,” Sheila said.

  Driving fast along the curving country roads, her head ringing, her eyes glazed over with fatigue, Monica thought suddenly: Both of us might die.

  The logic (radiantly simple, blinding as a sunburst) was that: if one of them died the other would survive and everything would be thrown off balance. But if they both died equilibrium would be reestablished.

  15

  Monica liked to think without warning, as the cliché would have it, but no doubt she had warning, she had warnings, which she chose to ignore.

  His face an immense creased moon, his eyes bright with hatred.

  The veins in his forehead standing out.

  Furious red worms, those veins; pulsing; giving off heat.

  “. . . So why the hell did you come up here, then,” he said, the heel of his hand striking her bare shoulder, his voice incredulous, mocking, meant perhaps to be light, “. . . a big girl like you. A big growed-up girl like you.”

  Later he said, crouched over her: “I know you’re judging me, how can I do anything if you’re judging me. . . .”

  Monica’s lips were so bruised, so numbed, she couldn’t answer.

  She might have apologized but she couldn’t answer.

  The ruddy dimpled flesh, the ridges of fat quivering at waist and thighs and belly. Monica had misplaced his name, a nickname; a fond sweet chummy name. And he seemed in the exigencies of his travail to have forgotten hers. He murmured, “Oh honey, Jesus . . . honey . . . you sweet cunt . . . you sweet, sweet . . .”

  A bedside clock was ticking loud and fast.

  Monica thought: He won’t strangle me, he isn’t the sort.

  Monica thought: His name is either Win or Hen, it’s all a code.

  She tried not to cry out with the pain but at last she did, it simply wasn’t to be prevented, she was in terror suddenly that her insides had never healed (the abortion, the scooping out, the menstrual periods that had lasted for ten, eleven days) and that she would begin hemorrhaging. He was now grinding his mouth against hers, teeth bared against her teeth, a grin of sorts, he was saying, “Why did you come up here if . . . You bitch. . . .” parting her lips, bruising them. Monica tasted blood but (perhaps) it was only her imagination. So much is imagined, so much is mere hysteria. Hen, Win. Win, Hen. Though the silly drunken golden girl meant only to accommodate and certainly did not resist, her lover was impatient nonetheless, keenly disappointed nonetheless, and bent upon exacting punishment. And there was his tongue, grown immense, poking. His gigantic tongue. And his not-quite-erect penis grinding against her.

  The clock ticked, Monica went limp, an old strategy, an old wifely habit. She was thinking of Ariadne’s thread. You took hold of it, you trusted in it, and then it snapped in your fingers. . . . She was thinking of something dreamy and fluid, an element through which one had to thrust oneself, with great effort. The danger of suffocation, of a heart stopping in midbeat. . . .

  She was sobbing helplessly, shamelessly. It was all over but she couldn’t stop sobbing.

  Her breasts, her nipples, had been sucked and bitten until they bled. The insides of her thighs were raw. He’d done something, hadn’t he, with his fingers, his nails, she was bleeding but dear God what did it matter, it was all over, he hadn’t meant (he said) to be rough, he hadn’t meant to get carried away, why hadn’t she told him if he was hurting her.

  “Jesus,” he said, staring, “—a big growed-up girl like you, a friend of Sheila Trask’s—”

  16

  Sheila cradled her head, rocked her, asked if she wanted to be taken to a doctor. If she wanted Sheila to report that bastard to the police.

  Because he’d forced her, after all. Technically and legally it was rape.

  Monica started laughing, then Monica was crying again, huddled in Sheila’s arms.

  No she didn’t want to be taken to a doctor and no she didn’t want to report Win to the police it was her own fault primarily, just let it go.

  Sheila held her; rocked her; lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke over Monica’s head, stroking her hair, murmuring, telling her she should never have consented to see Jack Winthrop—she should never have introduced them—it had all been a bloody mistake. If Monica had only—

  Monica drew away from her, stiffening in opposition. She whispered that Sheila could go home whenever she wished; the emergency, such as it was, was over; all she wanted to do was sleep.

  “If you’re sure you will be all right,” Sheila said uncertainly. “If you don’t want a doctor. . . .”

  “No thank you, Sheila,” Monica said. “I think you’ve done enough.”

  17

  The day of Sheila Trask’s opening was a Wednesday, the champagne reception began at 5:30 P.M., but Monica made her excuses and stayed away; Monica was teaching her classes.

  And afterward she sat in her empty classroom, staring into space.

  She knew she was sick but she didn’t know the degree to which it was commonplace, a matter of spring flu, the usual malaise, passed from student to student and among the faculty members. One big happy family at Glenkill, James Starkie had joked, months ago, which means too, he said, winking, we pass our diseases around, and Monica and another of the guests (his face and name long forgotten) exchanged a startled amused glance. The unintentional wit of James Starkie’s remark passed otherwise unnoticed: it was a noisy festive evening at the chaplain’s house, fragrant with Jill Starkie’s Chanel No. 5 and the smell of too-sweet sherry. New York State wine, James Starkie said, as if the fact were noteworthy. Monica remembered how James had kissed her: how suddenly, how impulsively: that good-natured comradely kiss that threatened nothing and had not given pain. Now the Starkies disliked her. Their smiles were strained, their greetings subdued. She had disappointed them by failing to do something or other and then by failing a second time, she had hurt Jill, perhaps she had irrevocably offended Jill, but should a Christian woman be so easily offended. . . .

  Monica looked up dry-eyed to see one of her fifth-form boys standing in the doorway. Clearly embarrassed, his voice slightly trembling, he asked if anything was wrong. “Some of us were wondering, you know, if, well, you didn’t leave after class and now it’s pretty late and we were wondering if . . . if anything is wrong,” the boy said. He was not one of Monica’s very best students but he was a reliable A–student, helpful in class, sweet-tempered, attractive. He wants me to break down in front of him, Monica thought, they are all waiting for that. So she said quietly: “No. Nothing is wrong. Please close the door when you leave.”

  18

  The telephone rang and rang, and finally Monica answered it, her mouth stale from sleep. Sheila was speaking—Sheila was speaking excitedly—and Monica tried to make sense of her words—such a buzz, such a flurry!—and such pretense (“Monica, why the hell aren’t you here, I don’t understand”)—and after a while, after many minutes, Monica interrupted to say she couldn’t talk on the phone any longer: she was going back to bed.

  Calmer now, Sheila thanked her for the flowers—a dozen l
ong-stemmed red roses; but Christ did she miss her! The opening had gone well enough, considering. Sheila had held up well enough, considering. But there were such marvelous people Sheila would have liked Monica to meet, old friends of hers, a handful of younger artists as well, one of them, a kid named Peck, a fantastic talent—

  Monica repeated that she was going back to bed. When Sheila gave no reply she simply hung up the receiver; and the remainder of the night passed undisturbed.

  19

  Now my punishment has begun, Monica thought.

  She lay shivering and sweating in her bed. She was unable to sleep—her head ached, her stomach cramped violently—yet suddenly it seemed she was being wakened, by a fierce wintry wind, and rain slashing against the windows. In the morning, dragging herself from her bed, she saw that most of the blossoms in her crab apple trees—four comely little trees, beautiful fleshy-pink flowers—had been blown off during the night.

  They telephoned her from school, solicitous, prying.

  She told them in a calm distinct voice that, at the moment, she wasn’t feeling well. But she would certainly be back the next day; she intended to meet her 8:00 class as usual. Surely, she said, she was guilty of no great criminal neglect.

  Lying back, she felt Win’s heartbeat—she remembered it, suddenly, an angry pumping that communicated itself to her own body. As if his heart, at that crucial instant, were hers; in the cavity of her chest where her own heart might have been.