The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age

by Joyce Carol Oates

  But for now the peasant fatalism—His time.

  I am too young to be angry on the behalf of my grandfather. In time, perhaps. But not now.

  For now, it is enough to make my way through the darkened sleeping house, very quietly open the back door, and step outside into the night . . . Sometimes, one of the cats will approach me. There is that curious way in which a cat will approach you when you appear outdoors at an unexpected time, with a kind of animated intensity, and an inquiring mew. As if for a moment there is some confusion of categories, and the cat must determine if you are (still) a person, or in some way a cat. Is this one of me?

  It is the headlights that captivate, on the road. The mystery of how vehicles seem to arise out of nowhere in the night and pass by me oblivious of me. I am hidden, and invisible. Yet I am here—and why? What has drawn me? Is it important somehow that I am here, and not in my bed?

  Most of the nighttime vehicles are cars. Mostly, there is but a single person visible in them—the driver.

  But sometimes I catch a glimpse of a second person in the passenger’s seat and I feel a sudden pang of envy—Who are you? Why are you driving together late at night? Do you love each other? Is that why you would be together late at night—because you love each other? And why are you driving along Transit Road? What do you look like, what are you thinking, where do you live, where are you going . . .

  In the next instant, red taillights receding.

  “THE BRUSH”

  ONCE, BEFORE I WAS born, he’d belonged to the IWW—Industrial Workers of the World. Though he’d had to shift his allegiance sometime in the 1920s from the Wobblies to the AFL (American Federation of Labor) in order to work at Lackawanna Steel, never did my Hungarian step-grandfather swerve from his vehement and profane conviction that workers—(by which he meant men, and men like himself)—should manage and profit from the “means of production.”

  That my swaggering barely literate grandfather John Bush could imagine that steel foundries might be managed by someone like himself, or indeed John Bush himself, was ever a source of amusement to my realistic-minded father (who belonged to the UAW—United Auto Workers); but my father did not “argue politics” with my grandfather who was profane, short-tempered, and derisive.

  He was called by my father, not exactly to his face, “the Brush”—for Grandpa’s steel-colored whiskers did suggest a stiff brush that stood out from his jaws. You would not want to disagree with this man whose grin of bared, badly stained teeth was a terror to behold. It was told of him that as a blacksmith John Bush had routinely struck resisting horses on their noses with his fists to subdue them, when he was shoeing them; he was that strong, and seemed to have no idea of the limits of his strength. He was graceless, obtuse, obstinate; he was a serious drinker (whiskey, hard cider drunk from a jug slung over his shoulder); he chewed (Mail Pouch) tobacco, and smoked cigarettes which he rolled himself with a crude device that left tobacco-crumbs scattered in his wake, always underfoot in my grandparents’ kitchen; he swung a sledgehammer in a mighty arc with a grunt and a just-perceptible swelling of the veins and arteries in his neck. Beneath bib overalls stiffened with dirt he wore long underwear of a gunmetal-gray color, that showed filthy at his wrists. You did not want to think how filthy, how stained, the rest of that long underwear was. He washed his (filthy) hands with a special grainy gray soap, 20 Mule Team Borax. (My mother cautioned me never to wash my hands with this soap, that contained tiny bits of grit—“It isn’t for a girl’s hands.”) He smelled powerfully—his tobacco-breath, with a smell of rotted teeth; his unwashed body, a palimpsest of sweats. Yet, unexpectedly, John Bush was a handsome man. He had dark, thick, tufted eyebrows and thick wiry hair. His eyes were very black “gypsy” eyes. His thick mustache drooped over his lips, his beard flared to mid-chest. His torso resembled a barrel filled with something heavy and unwieldy, like spikes. He spoke heavily accented broken English with a particular sort of vehemence as if speech, the very effort of speech, were a sort of ridiculous joke. And he could be playful; he could joke. His laughter mimicked the bellows of his smithy—sudden, expansive, loud. Though he seemed too blustering to be much aware of anyone or anything else he had a way of noticing a child who has been holding back, or hiding; for you could not hide from Grandpa Bush, ultimately. The Brush would find you.

  Many times my grandfather dragged his calloused fingers through my curly hair, and laughed at my fear of him. He tickled my sides—a sensation indistinguishable from pain. How funny, to make little Joyce run away whimpering!

  My grandfather was not an abuser of children. Rather, he was indifferent to a child’s feelings. He did not take notice of a child as he did not take notice of an animal; at the most, he was angered by an animal’s obstinate behavior, as by the behavior of horses he’d been hired to shoe; or, he was amused by animals, as by the strutting of Mr. Rooster.

  Do I remember my grandfather twisting off the head of a red-feathered chicken? One of the panicked clucking hens? If I shut my eyes I can see this hellish scene and so, it is better not to shut my eyes. It is wisest to look away, into the distance.

  There is relief, that the rough fingers are gone. And yet, there is a sick sort of fear, that the rough fingers are gone forever.

  AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY: THE LOST FRIEND

  1.

  AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY is a thorn in the heart.

  It has been fifty-seven years since her death! Yet I still think of my friend with a stir of anticipation and dread.

  As if Cynthia had not died, yet. As if there might be something I could do to prevent her dying.

  We were each newly eighteen, the final time we saw each other in the late summer of 1956. It has been that long.

  Joyce, what has happened to you! You are so much—changed . . .

  Tell me what has happened, all these years I’ve been gone.

  2.

  TU ES MON AMIE.

  In this way Cynthia spoke to me, elliptically. In our French class, scribbled on a sheet of paper.

  Et tu es mon amie. Daringly, with a flourish, I replied on the same sheet of paper.

  We were such good-girl students, ever prepared and ever reliable, our teacher Madame Henri would not notice us passing notes.

  In our own language we could not have spoken so openly. In French, it wasn’t clear what we’d said, still less what we meant.

  After her death it would seem to me that Cynthia had been my closest friend but that (this was typical of Cynthia) she had not known it at the time. It would seem to me that Cynthia’s death, her sudden and irrevocable dying, the angry self-loathing that had precipitated her death, even the choice of a particularly hideous and spiteful way to die—had been in some way my fault, or should have been my fault.

  Or was it just that, in my grief, which was suffused with anger too, badly I wanted it to have been my fault.

  Why did you kill yourself, Cynthia? Who else did you hope to hurt?

  3.

  “MY MOTHER SAYS . . .”

  Obliquely, with a shy smile, Cynthia would approach me with these words.

  My mother says if you want to, you can come for dinner anytime this week and stay for the night.

  So that, if Cynthia’s invitation were to be rebuffed, however unlikely this possibility, it would not be her invitation in fact but her mother’s that was rebuffed.

  Staying the night at a high school classmate’s house was for me an experience fraught with awkwardness, yet one that could not be declined. It was with a tremulous sort of pride that I told my mother of such invitations for I knew that she would be happy for me, if perhaps apprehensive as well. When I’d been invited to a birthday party at the home of another girl friend whose affable father owned a small parts manufacturing company in Buffalo, my normally good-natured father had said, with a frown, “They sound like money people.”

  Money people. I had never heard this expression before, nor have I heard it since. How callow it sounded, how mean-spirited! Though I loved my
father I felt a twinge of embarrassment that he should think in such terms, crudely and cruelly reducing the complexity of my several close friendships with girls who, despite the financial status of their parents, were not unlike myself in crucial ways.

  Yet it was always evident to me, as to my parents, that the distance between Millersport and the suburb of Buffalo to which I was bussed for high school was far greater than eighteen miles could suggest.

  My life had been altered irrevocably when the Niagara County school district made a decision after my ninth grade year at North Park Junior High not to continue bussing a half-dozen students from northern Erie County to Lockport public schools, though we all lived much closer to Lockport than to Buffalo. At once, by fiat, this quirk of fate, that had seemed devastating to me at the time, brought me from a mediocre public school district to a superior one in an affluent Buffalo suburb in which high school students were prepared for major universities and colleges. In Lockport, high school dropouts were common and virtually no one went to college; there, my fate would have been to hope for a scholarship to Buffalo Teachers’ College where I could prepare to teach high school in a public school district not unlike that of Lockport. Without having been transferred to this superior school district I could not have made my way to Syracuse University on a New York State Regents scholarship, and from there to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I met Raymond Smith whom I would marry in 1961; I could never have made my circuitous way to Princeton University, still less to a writing career of substance; it is highly unlikely that I would be writing this memoir now.

  Thinking of Cynthia Heike who died so young, at eighteen, I am thinking of that other life. For each of us, a succession of other lives, unlived.

  For Cynthia the unlived life would very likely have involved medicine, medical science. For me, the more circumscribed life, the less ambitious career, probably confined to Niagara County and public school teaching, would have seemed nonetheless ambitious enough and rewarding enough to one from a family in which no one had (yet) gone beyond eight years of schooling.

  Quirk of fate—turning the doorknob of a door you’d presumed to be locked. But it opens, and you step through.

  4.

  “I HATE MY BODY. I wish there was a way to get out of my damn body like a snake shedding its skin.”

  In the darkness of her bedroom Cynthia spoke suddenly, vehemently. Wide-awake I’d pretended to be asleep for this seemed the safest course.

  5.

  “RESEARCH BIOLOGIST. I THINK. Or maybe—a clinician like my father.”

  It was the first time I’d heard the term “clinician.” Puzzling to me, that Cynthia Heike didn’t describe her father as a “doctor.”

  Scientific American came into the Heikes’ household, addressed to A. Emmet Heike, MD. Cynthia brought the magazine with its striking glossy covers—(many-times-magnified photographs of microbes, for instance, dazzling-beautiful photographs of distant galaxies)—to pass along to me.

  When I was reading long, somber, antiquated-sounding tragedies by Eugene O’Neill, Cynthia gamely tried reading one or two—The Hairy Ape, Mourning Becomes Electra.

  Did we discuss the articles in Scientific American? Did we discuss the O’Neill plays?

  For me, the enchantment with O’Neill began with the playwright’s titles. Anna Christie. The Iceman Cometh. The Emperor Jones. Desire Under the Elms. Strange Interlude. Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The hardcover collection was enormous, at least eight hundred densely printed pages; when I’d withdrawn it from our school library, I saw that the card was blank—my name would be the first. Stubbornly I read even when I had only a vague idea of what I was reading. I certainly had no conception of how such unwieldy-seeming plays could be performed onstage.

  The Hairy Ape was the O’Neill play I’d read with most fascination, for it reminded me painfully of my Hungarian (step)grandfather John Bush.

  Reading The Hairy Ape, it was “the Brush” I was seeing. Brute animal vanity and pride and sudden physical collapse. Defeat and despair. My eyes welled with tears. I had not ever known my Hungarian grandfather, and had not really cried when he’d died; the spectacle of my wildly grieving grandmother and my suddenly agitated mother had badly shaken me.

  Of one of the plays she’d read Cynthia said coolly, “It’s about sex.”

  Sex? I had not grasped this.

  “All these speeches that go on forever, whoever these people are if it’s a man and a woman, that’s what it’s about.”

  I was shocked by Cynthia’s matter-of-fact remark. In our girls’ world, one did not utter the word sex so candidly—one did not utter the word sex at all.

  Such simplicity in great literature didn’t seem plausible—the O’Neill plays were so complicated, it would require much conscientious thinking just to figure out who the characters were, how they were related to one another; what had happened between them, to which they allude, at times heavy-handedly, yet not clearly . . .

  Bluntly Cynthia interrupted, “In biology, everything is sex. Reproducing the species. Men and women are ‘biology.’”

  6.

  THE FIRST PERSON I knew to commit suicide.

  The first person my own age, of my acquaintance, to die.

  7.

  HERE IS THE PARADOX of the memoir: its retrospective vision, which is its strength, is also its weakness.

  For the shadow of what’s-to-come falls over the subject.

  Like cloud-shadows, rushing across the earth. The shadow of the premature death-to-come falls over Cynthia Heike.

  And now how hard it is, to envision Cynthia smiling! But when we knew her as our high school friend of course Cynthia was often smiling. No one would have predicted suicide, so young—the possibility would have left us incredulous.

  In our classes Cynthia’s hand was often raised. Teachers respected and admired her and in some cases were wary of her sharp tongue, her drawling remarks that evoked smirks and giggles in the classroom. Her intelligence was a kind of armor not easily penetrated. (Did I think—Of course, she is a doctor’s daughter. Did I think—That is the confidence of money. You have no idea.)

  Yet, Cynthia Heike did not give the impression of taking herself too seriously.

  Taking yourself too seriously—no one wanted to be so accused.

  Full of yourself—this was no ideal.

  Cynthia Heike laughed often—at herself. Her caricature-cartoons did not spare the cartoonist who exaggerated the size of her nose and its flaring nostrils, the “wandering” left eye, the frizzy brush of hair—(other physical impairments were left unacknowledged). Rapidly executed in her spiral notebook, in the school cafeteria, in classes, these little drawings were remarkably mature to our eyes—as good, we’d thought, as professional cartoons or comics like “Pogo” and “Dick Tracy.” It was revealing (if humbling) to see myself in a deft caricature by Cynthia Heike, in the school newspaper—deep shadows beneath owl-eyes, beak-like nose, simpering smile and a big dimple in one cheek—“Oatsie.”

  (The first caricature you see of yourself is indeed a revelation: all those facial flaws and idiosyncrasies you’d imagined you had hidden, and had learned not to see in mirrors, are publicly exposed for all to laugh at—“Looks just like you!”)

  (How strange it is, to type that name—“Oatsie”! No one before—no one since—my high school classmates has ever called me this name that suggests a comical sort of affection, and makes tears come into my eyes. I have not glanced into my high school yearbook in a long time but I would guess that “Oatsie” is the caption beneath my picture. And beneath Cynthia’s more dignified and stern-smiling picture, just the name—“Cynthia Heike.”)

  In fact, just possibly Cynthia Heike was very slightly—justifiably—arrogant about her intelligence, as about her high grades in science and math; as a doctor’s daughter Cynthia dared to consider herself the equal of anyone—any boy—in our class.

  It was an era in which, on the whole, boys were naturally presum
ed to be smarter than girls. Yet it was simultaneously an era in which unusually smart and talented girls—Cynthia Heike, Lee Ann Krauser, a few others in our class—were accorded “exceptional” status as if they/we were honorary boys.

  In spring of our senior year Cynthia Heike was awarded a scholarship to the University of Rochester where she intended to study biology and prepare for medical school; I was awarded a scholarship to Syracuse, where I intended to study American literature and journalism. So close were the Rochester and Syracuse campuses, it seemed certain that Cynthia and I would visit each other often.

  We would attend concerts, we promised. We would see foreign films.

  8.

  BACH SONATA FOR VIOLIN Solo with Piano Accompaniment by Robert Schumann No. 1 in G minor. Cynthia Heike, violin. Lee Ann Krauser, piano.

  In the second row of the school auditorium I sat alone. In the second row of the school auditorium I sat alone scarcely daring to breathe.

  As if my head were clamped in a vise I could not look away from my friend Cynthia Heike so exposed on the bright-lit stage in a black jersey dress that fell to her ankles, right shoulder raised, head bent and forehead creased as deftly she drew her bow across the strings of the gleaming violin; through a haze of beating blood I heard the clear, fluent notes, flawlessly executed, though rather rapidly, as if the violinist were breathless and her blood quick-beating too. And in the background at the piano the girl accompanist who seemed barely tall enough to reach the pedals with her feet, also in black, but a crisp taffeta-black, with a black bow at her waist, thin shoulders hunched and small blond head bent, striking quieter notes, near-inaudible notes, so familiar my fingers twitched involuntarily.

  It is always a mild shock when music ends—abruptly. That beat of anxious silence before applause begins, and swells.

  9.

  JEALOUSY. NOT-JEALOUSY.

  It is likely that if I tried I could count the times Cynthia Heike invited me to her home for dinner and to stay the night. (Because the Heikes’ house was so far from my house in the “north country” it was not reasonable, in those days at least, to make so long a drive at night.) But I can’t force myself to undertake this melancholy count, my memory begins to break into pieces like a distant radio station.