I'll Take You There

by Joyce Carol Oates

  3

  Alone I drove to Crescent, Utah. Twenty-five hundred miles.

  It was estimated that my father might live another three or four weeks; I was in terror of flying to him; not of the flight itself (though I'd never flown in an airliner before) but of getting too quickly to my destination.

  I would spend days (and nights) on interstate highways in a Volkswagen bought for $535 the previous year, with faulty brakes, a faulty muffler, a noisy motor; a stick shift that operated with some resistance; unless I kept most of the windows rolled down at all times, an odor of carbon monoxide wafted from beneath the dashboard. Except: what you can detect, isn't the poison. Fresh air dispels it! It was a 1959 Volkswagen with no heat or air-conditioning, of course; what "heat" there was blew in through vents from the motor onto my legs. Yet I loved this, my first car; I was naive enough to love its very smallness and economy; its hunched-beetle shape; unless it was a fetal-shape; originally plum-colored but now weathered and rusted to no single hue. There was a spiderweb crack in the windshield in front of the passenger's seat as if a luckless ghost-passenger had been catapulted into the glass, striking headfirst.

  In the secondhand Volkswagen I would drive the width of New York State (for I'd been staying in northern Vermont when Hendrick's call came) and I would pass within fifty miles of Strykersville; I would continue west driving along the southern edge of Lake Erie and through Ohio and through Indiana and through Illinois and through northern Missouri and through Kansas and through Colorado and so at last into eastern Utah, on I-70 to the small town of Crescent, Utah, population 1,620. This, the journey of my life. I will get there on time! In New York, in Illinois, and in Colorado I'd telephoned the soft-spoken woman known to me only as Hildie Pomeroy, to ask after my father and to learn that he was in "stable condition" and "waiting for you." To save money, often I slept in the car; not at night but mornings or late afternoons in convivial roadside rest areas and parking lots of restaurants; not in the backseat (for a stranger might drift by to stare in at me open-mouthed and vulnerable in sleep as an infant); it was one of the haunting notions of my life, about which I'd tried to write, except not knowing how to seize the notion, the image, the riddle in order to write about it coherently, how we never see ourselves sleeping; we never see ourselves open-mouthed, vulnerable as a baby in sleep; in just such a way we never see ourselves, at all; we have no clear idea of ourselves; our mirror reflections reflect only what we wish to see, or can bear to see, or punish ourselves by seeing. Nor can we trust others to see us either. For they too see what they wish to see, with their imperfect eyes. In my car, often I remained in the driver's seat when I slept, my hands in a pretense of gripping the wheel so that (though deeply unconscious, head lolling like a stroke victim's against the seatback) I was primed for immediate action, escape. In public rest rooms I managed to wash myself, even my sweaty-sticky windblown hair; I didn't eat often in restaurants, but bought packaged food in stores because it was cheaper, and I filled paper cups with drinking water to take with me; I'd allotted myself a certain amount of money to take me from Vermont to Utah, and begrudged spending money on myself and not on gas, oil, services for my car. Already on the first day of driving, nearly eight hours, I'd become hypnotized; my eyelids drooped with a wish to sleep, unless it was a wish to dream without the interference of sleep; the Volkswagen was so small that it quavered in the wake of larger vehicles that passed in hissing contempt; even other Volkswagens sailed past me, though their drivers often waved or honked in a gesture of camaraderie. My car shuddered if driven at a speed beyond fifty-five miles an hour and there was such a maelstrom of winds whipping my head, I came to think that the Volkswagen was somehow myself; or, in its woundedness, my father. Amid traffic, I was less susceptible to irrational notions and hypnagogic images; on the open highway, median stripes to the left of my vision, gravel shoulder to my right, open countryside, empty sky, I began to sink into that seductive and treacherous state of mind that precedes sleep; I felt a pang of hurt, that Hendrick had refused to accompany me; I seemed to recall that I'd actually asked him, and he'd said no. He hadn't called me back; I told myself that I hadn't expected him to call back; I had no number for him, and so could not call him; nor did my brothers Dietrich and Fritz call me; I told myself that I hadn't expected them to call; I was not disappointed, and I was not hurt. To them, he's dead. They can't love a dead man as I can. I fell into the habit of speaking aloud in the car for the noise of the wind and the motor was such I could barely hear myself, this exempted me from embarrassment or blame. The soliloquy of the self, plotting what's to come. For what is life, its myriad surprises, except what's to come. I seemed to see my father as he'd been at my high school graduation except he was in the old farmhouse, in the kitchen where so often he'd sat, smoking cigarettes and drinking late into the night; he was willing to look at me, and to speak with me, and I could ask him any question I wished; but suddenly I was frightened, and could not speak. For what do you ask your father, if you have but one question? I might have asked, earnestly Is any future preferable to any past? Do we live only in time? I tried to recall what Vernor Matheius had said once about time but I could not retain both Vernor Matheius and my father simultaneously; I would not have wished Vernor to have met my father, or even to have seen him; nor would I have wished my father to have met Vernor, or even to have seen him; and so Vernor Matheius faded. Midway through the endless state of Kansas I began to hallucinate flat-land even in my sleep; my hallucinations and the landscape were identical; I could not escape the one without being swallowed up into the other; I would sink, I would drown, I would die. Midway through the endless state of Colorado I began to hallucinate mountains far ahead at the horizon; mirage-mountains delicate as watercolor mountains in a Japanese print; yet these mountains weren't mirages, they didn't fade but deepened; they didn't retreat with the horizon, but drew nearer; and suddenly it was evident that the mountains at the horizon were moving toward me; I was moving toward them along the highway; suddenly it was evident that the mountains would enclose me, in time; I would gaze out on all sides and see mountains on all sides; I smiled at the revelation—"The Rocky Mountains! They're real."

  More jagged the horizon became. The interminable midwestern plains of farmland and dull-grazing cattle had fallen away behind me, now a different and more vigorous-seeming cattle were grazing in a different, harsher landscape; here the landscape was sepia-colored as if bleached by a harsher sun; in the distance, a lunar landscape of hills strewn with boulders, strange rock formations, mountains topped with streaks of white like paint. Here, you are made to realize that a landscape is a living thing; a landscape exerts life; a landscape enters through the eyes, and breathes into you; in the West, I could no longer be the young woman I'd been in the East; in Crescent, Utah, a place unknown to me, a young woman impatiently awaited me who was myself, yet altered; in Crescent, Utah, I was determined to be this young woman. My father's daughter. The temptation in such landscapes is to believe that beauty exists in a profound and secret relationship to you. The temptation is to believe that you are the first to have fully seen. I saw that the high-desert landscape shifted continuously in hue and texture with the rapid, skittish movement of light in the enormous sky; unlike the East, where the sky was diminished by treelines, and sometimes obscured completely. My eyes, accustomed to the foreshortened landscapes and horizons of the East, squinted at so much space in the West; impossible to see such vast space without seeing time; vast reaches of time before human history, human speech, the human effort to name such mute phenomena as mountains, rivers, canyons, plateaus, glacial troughs. Such mute phenomena as rock, sand, salt flats, buttes, mesas, bluffs, badlands. Crossing the Colorado River, driving into the Grand River Valley and westward into Utah I saw a world of desolation and beauty open up before me, and my heart quickened with hope; I'd forgotten that my mission was to sit at the bedside of a man dying of cancer; I would pay for such forgetfulness, but not immediately. In my little car that vibra
ted with excitement. Place-names romantic and exotic to my ear as poetry. Roan Cliffs, San Rafael Valley, Sand River, Dirty Devil River, Green River, Sego Canyon, Dimes Canyon, Death Hollow, Hell's Backbone, Calf Creek Falls, China Meadows, Desolation Canyon, Dead Horse Point, Islands in the Sky.

  And Crescent, to which I'd been summoned.

  I began to tell myself, fatigued by driving, that I might live in Crescent. Hypnotized by the highway, by the steady, numbing pressure of my sandaled foot against the gas pedal and by a continuous sun-glare I began to tell myself a story of how my father had summoned me to Crescent for a purpose. For the fact of his being in Crescent could not be an accident, could it?

  "Daddy? This car, I bought with part of the advance a publisher gave me for a book. A book of stories. My first." I tested these astonishing words and my voice began to quaver. For how would the man I'd known as my father whom I'd never called Daddy, Dad receive such news? Would he be proud of me? Or indifferent? Would a book of stories, and such elusive "poetic" stories, mean anything to a man, a laborer, who rarely read more than newspapers, so far as I knew; a man born to semi-illiterate farming people who owned no books as if in repudiation of any intellectual or spiritual life beyond the dumb stares of farm animals? (Except: in my grandmother's parlor there was a Holy Bible, as this revered book called itself; unread, except by me, out of curiosity and skeptical wonderment; unread, yet kept in a conspicuous place on a lace-covered tabletop; my German-born grandmother's grudging concession to America, and to Christianity which was synonymous with America. The Holy Bible's simulated leather covers and many of its pages were covered with a powdery, smelly mushroom-colored mold in the humidity of Strykersville summers.)

  Now in Utah, that hitherto unimaginable state, on a well-traveled I-70 approaching Crescent, where I hoped to find an inexpensive motel, already I was praying (I, who'd never believed in the God of the Holy Bible, nor even in the God of Spinoza) that my father would live to see this book of mine published, at least. Another six months! He would live to see my name, which included his name, on the dust jacket of the book; he would hold the book in his hand and tell me how beautiful it was, and he loved me.

  4

  "Yes, Erich wants to see you. But he doesn't want you to see him." How intimate my father's name, on this stranger's lips. A hunched little woman with a fussily made-up doll's face and a breathy, girlish voice, yet a voice of steely resolve, this woman who'd introduced herself as Hildie Pomeroy, my father's friend. At 3 Railroad Street she'd opened the front door of the clapboard bungalow as if she'd been waiting for me just inside. There was muted surprise in her face, seeing me; for, however my father must have described me, I didn't look like that young woman; and Hildie Pomeroy, who stood no taller than four feet ten inches, and who appeared to have something twisted in her upper spine, wasn't the woman I might have expected, my father's friend and protector. We stared at each other blinking. At the Economy Motel (Singles $6) I'd had a bath for the first time in memory, soaking in a hot tub; I'd washed my hair, combed damp and wavy and shapeless to my shoulders; I'd changed into a fresh but rather wrinkled long-sleeved cotton shirt and cotton slacks, and I smelled of soap, shampoo, toothpaste; I was visibly nervous; surely I didn't resemble the literary-minded intellectual daughter of whom my father might have spoken. And here was Hildie Pomeroy in nurse-white: rayon shirt, rayon pants, crepe-soled canvas shoes that looked freshly whitened. Brisk and efficient except so unexpectedly made up, like a showgirl: distinctly rouged cheeks, oily crimson mouth, black mascara beading her eyelashes; and her hair!—savagely dyed black, quite long and unwieldy, but coiled and crimped about her head with plastic flower-barrettes. The woman looked like a painted windup doll whose back had been cruelly broken. Seeing the surprise in my face she said, drawing herself up to her full height, "You can talk to him, dear, but he won't be able to talk to you. I will do that for him."

  "But he—he is—conscious? He isn't—?"

  "Your father is sick, dear. He's had three operations in the past year, for cancer of the throat and esophagus." Hildie spoke in hissed sibilants, pausing. "He has lost fifty pounds and he—has been disfigured by the surgery. He's only himself, dear, for a few hours at a time. Most visitors he won't let in, no more. Only me 'cause I'm his friend and he trusts me." Hildie flashed defiant eyes at me. "I'm his only friend."

  This was a rebuke to me and my brothers; a rebuke I accepted as our due; I would not protest. "On the phone you said he knows he's— dying?"

  Hildie shook her head sadly. "Oh, he knows, but he don't know. Or don't want to know. Sick people are like us only just different. Their minds play the same kinds of tricks on them our minds play, but more pathetic. A person sick like your father, sometimes he's so weak he can't move his head, can't open his eyes to see, can't talk even if he wanted to talk, and gets confused where he is, who's with him, what's happening… I had nursing classes," Hildie said, as if I'd challenged her. "In Salt Lake City I was studying to be a nurse."

  "I see. That's so—fortunate. For my father."

  I smiled foolishly at my father's friend in white. I didn't know what to say to her, to placate her anxiety about me.

  Hildie snorted with derisive laughter, mirthless and startling. "Oh, yeah! But he'd a whole lot rather be well."

  Hildie Pomeroy was so much shorter than me, she stood with her neck sharply craned; her head, that seemed disproportionately large for her stunted body, was crooked upward at a painful angle. I felt that simply by standing before her, looming over her, I was discomforting her; my very presence must have been an impediment; the poor woman spoke breathlessly, stroking her hair and fussing with a little gold cross on a chain around her neck. (Her neck, too, had been powdered, but less effectively than her face; you could see a cross-hatching of lines in the powdery surface.) It seemed to me that Hildie Pomeroy had rehearsed some of her remarks; she'd repeated things she'd told me on the phone; her need was to establish absolutely and beyond my questioning her connection with the man who was my father though this connection was a mysterious one, not to be spelled out, neither was it to be doubted by me, an intruder. Hildie fixed me with bright, damp, intensely brown eyes; startlingly beautiful, thick-lashed brown eyes; I could see that a man might fall in love with such eyes.

  I must have seemed to Hildie to be in a state of shock; instead of expressing anguish, or grief, I was smiling; my smile felt as if it had been stapled into my face. A remote, ironic voice sounded in my ears And I've come so far! Hildie was saying, matter-of-factly, "Your father has told me, dear: you remember him as he was. That is his hope. I'll take you to where he's lying, out on the back porch, during the day he likes the back porch, the TV's out there, too, it's a portable TV I can move real easy, and the porch is a comfortable place for him when he wakes up and doesn't know where he is, it's consoling. You know, your father did not have an easy life. Even before this, before the operations. When you're bad sick, and go a little out of your head, and your legs and sometimes even your arms don't feel like they belong to you, what you want most is to be consoled. So your father -wants me to bring you out back to where he is, dear, he's been waiting for you all day. But you'll have to close your eyes. Or I will hide your eyes somehow. So he can see you. Then you can maybe turn around, your back to him, or you can sit, dear, there's a nice chair I brought out for you, and I can help you talk to him, because he can't say words now, not words you would understand but I understand; but only for a few minutes because he gets so exhausted, this time of day he's usually asleep. He sleeps through a hot afternoon and I feed him around dusk, his special foods, then he sleeps. See, dear, I know this is a surprise, the way he is, but it's his wish, and it's for the best." Hildie paused, smiling. "For you, too, dear, it's for the best."

  This was a warning. I understood. A dying man. Death. You don't want to see. You're too young.

  I had in fact been envisioning my father as he'd appeared to me four years before. Middle-aged but still swaggering-young, in the way that men w
ho work with their hands and their bodies out-of-doors seem somehow to remain young; except if you look too closely into their leathery, lined faces. I'd envisioned my father waiting for me here in Crescent, Utah, a little older, more ravaged, but eager to see me, and in a different setting: an airy, high-ceilinged bedroom with a window looking out upon mountains, and a cobalt-blue sky. Crescent, Utah. The West. But Railroad Street was a narrow, poorly paved street that intersected with the town's attenuated Main Street, and the peeling sparrow-colored clapboard bungalow with the grassless front yard was on a block of similar bungalows and trailer homes; the backyard ran into a raised railroad embankment of cinders and weeds. Straggly, diseased-looking cotton woods surrounded the house. Somewhere close by, a chain saw was being used. This might be Strykersville. Near the railroad tracks. And the town of Crescent! So ordinary. Only the name was beau-tiful as poetry. Looking for a motel, I'd been stunned at how small Crescent was, how diminished its communal life, a scattering of wood frame churches, a downtown of about two blocks, fake-brick facades of a few newer businesses but otherwise everything was old, decades old, older than Strykersville though it must have been settled far later; farther on, the state highway was a jumble of the usual gas stations and drive-in restaurants, sports equipment stores, a derelict A & P, Discount Carpets, a drive-in theater with a broken marquee, beer and liquor stores, taverns. To have come so far: Strykersville! Except the small upstate New York town of my girlhood had had a surprisingly good public library, and a YWCA where I could swim, and I could see that Crescent, Utah, was too small for such amenities. A few minutes beyond the town limits was open country, flat and treeless and ungiving; a harsh hot wind blew; even the mountain range, on my Esso map romantically called Roan Cliffs, were dull as eraser smudges in the heat haze.