As children, perversely we would count our mosquito bites. Six, eight, a dozen? But when you are picking pears, the itchy swellings of mosquito bites are not a childish diversion.
Often I’ve wondered if pear trees, for all their beauty, are among the least resilient of trees, or whether it was just our pear trees that seemed to rot easily, to be infested with bees or swarming ants; to fall apart, crumple from within, as soon as ladders were set against their trunks. At least, pear trees are among the shorter fruit-bearing trees; it is less difficult to pick pears than to pick apples.
Still I am haunted by these beautiful and mysteriously elegiac lines of Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”—
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of the ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
At the roadside stand I would sit reading. Scarcely aware of my surroundings which is the consolation of reading.
Comic books—Tales from the Crypt, Superman, Classics Illustrated (Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, The Call of the Wild, Frankenstein), Mad Magazine.
Or, books from the Lockport Public Library with their crisp plastic covers—Ellery Queen, H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Illustrated editions of Iliad, Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. Great Dialogues of Plato.
(Yes, it is bizarre: I was reading, trying to read, Plato as a young girl. More bizarre yet, I was writing my own “Platonic dialogues”—though perhaps Socratic irony was lost on me.)
(Often the librarians at the Lockport library would look at me doubtfully. Who is this girl? Is she really reading these books? Trying to read these books? Who is giving her such outsized ideas? But I’d been brought to the library by my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern whom the librarians knew as a loyal patron with an impassioned love of books; since my grandmother had arranged for me to have my first library card there, the librarians may have felt kindly disposed toward me.)
Difficult to concentrate on any kind of reading in such circumstances! At a roadside stand you are distracted by vehicles approaching on the highway, and passing; for the majority of the vehicles pass by without slowing. Only now and then a vehicle will slow, and park at the roadside, and a customer will emerge, usually a woman.
“Hello!”
“Hello . . .”
“Is it—Joyce?”
A hopeful smile. Or is it a craven smile. When you are selling, you are smiling.
Quart baskets, bushel baskets of pears. How much did my parents charge for a bushel basket of pears, I have no idea; surely not much; their prices had to be competitive with commercial vendors, if not lower. If you were a small-time farmer you could pitch your goods so low that you made virtually no profit and worked for nothing. (All of the farms in our vicinity employed “child labor”—the farm owners’ children. Hours of such employment are not negotiable.) Yet I remember the sting of embarrassment when a potential customer, frowning over our pears, or strawberries, or tomatoes, deftly turning back the tight leaves of our sweet corn to examine the kernels, decided that our produce wasn’t priced low enough, or wasn’t good enough in some way, returned to her car and drove off.
Sitting at a roadside, vulnerable as an exposed heart, you are liable to such rejections. As if, as a writer, you were obliged to sell your books in a nightmare of a public place, smiling until your face ached, until there were no more smiles remaining.
MAKE MONEY! START YOUR Own Business! Mail-order catalogues flooded our rural mailbox bearing the magical name Joyce Oates. For in a fever of inspiration I filled out and mailed coupons from Sunday supplements, magazines and comic books, cereal boxes. From the age of twelve onward I was a natural target for such ploys though wanting to think of myself—and thinking of myself, still—as smart, skeptical, suspicious, not-naïve like others my age and even older. My father quoted P. T. Barnum—There’s a sucker born every minute. Neither my father nor I would have supposed that this insight might apply to anyone in the Oates family.
Like an actor bizarrely miscast for her role I bicycled from house to house for hours gamely trying to sell “beauty products” to neighbors who had little use for beauty, and especially for cosmetic beauty; the leading product was Noxzema, a night cream in a heavy midnight-blue jar with a powerful medicinal odor. (Unsold, these jars remained in the household for years.) For a season I dared to take orders for “costume jewelry” which I made myself with excruciating slowness, from a mail-order kit containing rhinestones, faux pearls, rubies, sapphires, tweezers and a tube of glue; for another season I dared to take orders for “artificial flowers”—bright red tulips, bright yellow daffodils, “waxed” lilies ingeniously fashioned from crepe paper and arranged in artistic bouquets. (My mother’s female relatives were my most faithful customers, after my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern who bought everything I made as well as extra items as gifts for friends.) In the interstices of these enterprises I sold magazine subscriptions (Reader’s Digest, Pen Pal, Argosy, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal); somehow, I acquired a jigsaw and was soon making what were called “lawn ornaments” out of plywood—sheep, cows, flamingos, windmills, dwarves and elves, bonneted girls with sprinkling pails—even, following a popular design, a chocolate-skinned boy eating a very pink slice of watermelon. (These “lawn ornaments” were laid on sheets of newspaper in the grass so that when I painted them, I did not deface any surface indoors or out.) The gift (from my grandmother Blanche) of a “wood-burning” kit allowed me to engrave letters and designs into blocks of wood suitable (as it was advertised) for displaying atop a fireplace mantel. (I can smell still the pungent odor of burning wood as I can feel still that sense of panicked loss, when the wood-burner realizes that she has burnt too deeply or too ineptly, and that a block of wood has been ruined, and will be suitable only for “displaying” at home.) In 4-H crafts club girls made aprons, pot holders, kitchen towels; we braided plastic bracelets, belts, and whistle-holders to be worn around the neck. Some of us learned—to a degree—to knit mittens, caps, sweaters, even socks. We made plaster-of-Paris platters and bowls—a sickeningly cold, slimy sensation of congealing liquid on my fingers, and a strong stench as of raw sewage; these misbegotten, often subtly misshapen objects we painted bright cheerful colors, to be sold, or more likely given to our mothers as presents. (For years, well after I’d gone away to college, my mother continued to use one of my earliest gifts—a Pepsi bottle ingeniously painted blue and fitted with a perforated rubber cap, used to sprinkle water onto clothes being ironed. Of the many gifts I would give my mother through her lifetime, this blue sprinkler-bottle was the most practical.) At 4-H sewing class I undertook to make a skirt—for myself—a “gathered skirt” (essentially, a “gathered skirt” is just drawing threads tight through a wide swath of cotton material, to constitute a kind of waistband); the hem was criticized by our instructor for being “unevenly stitched.” When I explained that no one would see the hem the instructor countered, with unassailable logic, “But, Joyce, you will know it’s there.”
Yet to my shame I did not tear out the offensive stitches and resew the hem; probably, as I often did in those days, I gave up the project in childish despair. For it was typical of me to become intensely involved with projects for a while—occasionally accruing praise in the effort—only to lose interest abruptly and abandon them. Yet I have always remembered the pious admonition—But, Joyce, you will know it’s there.
Once, 4-H chapters were everywhere in rural America, particularly in the West and Midwest. (For the record: western New York State is “Midwestern.”) The cloverleaf is the 4-H emblem; 4-H colors are white (for purity) and green (for growth). As I had eagerly memorized Bible verses in order to attend Bible camp at Olcott Beach, that
had promised to be a great adventure, so too a scant year later I eagerly signed up for numerous 4-H projects in the hope of self-improvement and acquiring skills to make saleable items. My major agricultural project was to grow a special kind of jumbo-sized strawberry: though I set the plants carefully in rows, and was diligent about watering and weeding initially, soon I became bored and neglectful, and only with my mother’s help on the eve of a county inspector’s visit did “Joyce Oates” qualify for some sort of citation for having satisfactorily completed her 4-H project. (Did I win a blue ribbon, ever? At least a red ribbon? Surely not at the New York State Fair at Albany, but possibly at the Niagara County Fair for one of my ingenious “crafts” or indeed for the jumbo-sized strawberries.) The most thrilling 4-H competition was square dancing, at which I must have been fairly capable, since eight of us (four boys, four girls) from our 4-H chapter were selected to dance on a local Buffalo television show—the most astonishing sort of celebrity for all of us teenaged farm boys and girls, if short-lived.
Only vaguely can I remember my farm-boy square-dancing partner, whose first name was Harvey. Or perhaps his last name was Harvey. In the television studio, we were so tense, so frightened, so reluctant even to breathe, our clutching hands were clammy-cold, yet sweaty. The great achievement of our several minutes of local fame on WBEN-TV was that not one of us fell down in the dance.
Many times I’d recited the 4-H pledge, with fellow 4-H’ers and alone, as a kind of secular prayer. Years later the calm unquestioning words float through my mind like petals on a slow stream:
I pledge my head to clearer thinking,
my heart to greater loyalty,
my hands to larger service,
and my health to
better living for my club,
my community, and my country.
(Reciting the pledge, the 4-H’er uses earnest hand gestures to indicate head, heart, hands, and health; the hand comes to rest on the heart, as in the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America. Though religious piety left me restless and uneasy there was something thrilling to me about these words, that promised so much yet did not seem to seriously commit the pledger to any course of action and did not evoke any Savior toward whom one was obliged to feel gratitude or guilt. Indeed, it is surprising that the 4-H pledge conspicuously omits any reference to “God”—though in the early 1970s the closing line was expanded to include the words “and my world.”)
To recount the tireless energy of my early teenaged years is to feel again something of the fervor of an era when peddling things door-to-door was as common as trick-or-treating at Hallowe’en, and involved the same cast of characters. Though I could not have made much money, I was allowed to save everything that I made, and to have a bank account of my own in a Lockport bank; one of the great pleasures of my life was to contemplate the bankbook and to note the accretion of “interest”—in pennies.
As a slightly older teenager I took on babysitting jobs, like most girls my age; babysitting was more lucrative, less unreliable, than making and trying to sell things. But this career came to an abrupt end when, one evening at the home of a couple who lived about two miles away, on the Tonawanda Creek Road halfway to Rapids, I found myself terrorized for hours by a (drunken?) male relative of the family for whom I was babysitting, who appeared at doors and windows, knocking, teasing and tormenting, insisting that I let him in. I was too frightened to call home—too frightened to pick up the telephone since he could see me; I believed that he might break into the house if I did. And afterward I never dared tell anyone what had happened, for nothing actual had happened; I knew that reporting to my parents would initiate consequences in which I would be made yet more unhappy, and I could not bear being interrogated. But I never babysat again.
It suggests the desperation, and the quixotic nature of such desperation, that I applied for a job in a canning factory in Lockport—indeed, the canning factory in which Helen Judd’s mother worked; I applied for a job in the Niagara County Tuberculosis Sanitarium, a ghastly forbidding place on the outskirts of Lockport, set far back from the country highway that led to Olcott Beach. Neither of these applications, and others, resulted even in interviews, for I was too young, and had no experience. I did work—for a single day—at a food tent at the Swormville Volunteer Firemen’s picnic, an exhausting and wholly unrewarding experience; other waitresses, my age and older, quit one by one during the interminable day until only a few of us remained, staggering on our feet. Yet my most humiliating experience was another single day as a “cleaning girl” for a woman who lived in a large house in Pendleton: here, under the instructions of the woman, I was obliged to dust, sweep, vacuum, scrub; clean and polish linoleum floors; wash some windows; polish silverware. It was not work for which I had any natural aptitude but I had thought I’d done fairly well and was surprised and hurt that I was never asked to work for the woman again. (Through a 4-H friend I inquired what was wrong and was told that the woman had said: “Joyce’s attitude. She looked like she wanted to be somewhere else.”)
THE MOST CONTINUOUSLY DESPERATE period of my life, financially speaking, was intermittent through my undergraduate years at Syracuse University. Here, I’d been awarded a New York State Regents scholarship, which enabled students whose parents could not afford the relatively high tuition of private universities to attend universities that, like Syracuse, matched the public scholarships. Still, there were myriad college expenses, not least room and board and books. My parents were very proud of my scholarship but must have felt the economic strain. Though I was the most conscientious of students, I lived in constant anxiety of doing poorly academically and losing my scholarship; any grade below an unambiguous A seemed to me a harbinger of loss to come, and utter defeat. (It should be noted that I was hardly alone in such fears. Virtually every undergraduate whom I knew on a scholarship like mine felt the same way, and some of these, despite their anxieties, did in fact have to drop out.)
At Syracuse, I was grateful to work as a “page” in the university library for as many hours a week as I could manage—for one dollar an hour. This was my first authentic job; I could consider myself now an adult. Alone, stationed on one of the upper floors of the library (that seemed immense to me, for whom a “library” was the Lockport Public Library), as I pushed a cart to reshelf books like an enthralled Alice in Wonderland I could explore the stacks—rows upon rows of stacks—English Literature, American Literature, Philosophy; there was an open reading area with a long wooden table that was usually deserted and here I could sit and read with fascination what are called “learned journals” and “literary magazines”—an entire category of magazine utterly unknown to me before college. Discovering these journals was the equivalent of my discovery at age nine of the wonderful Alice books. For here was Poetry—(in which I read Hayden Carruth’s harrowing autobiographical poem “The Asylum”)—Epoch (the first literary magazine in which a story of mine would appear, under the name “J. C. Oates,” in 1960)—Journal of Metaphysics (which I read avidly, or tried to read, as if “metaphysics” were as firm and respectable a discipline as physics)—Modern Fiction Studies (the first academic literary journal of my life). Equally intriguing were Philological Quarterly, PMLA, Romanticism, American Literature, American Scholar. A treasure trove of original fiction, poetry, essays and reviews—Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, Dalhousie Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, The Literary Review, Transatlantic Review, Quarterly Review of Literature—the very “little maga zines” in which, over the next several decades of my life, my own work would appear.
(My first published story in a national magazine wasn’t in one of these, but in Mademoiselle, in 1959. Like Sylvia Plath in a previous year’s competition I’d received an award from this chic fashion magazine in which, in those days, writing by such distinguished contributors as Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Paul Bowl
es, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Jean Stafford, Truman Capote routinely appeared. How improbable this seems to us, by contemporary standards! Yet high-quality fiction appeared in many glossy magazines of the era, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, intermittently even in Saturday Evening Post and Playboy, as well as in the more likely Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, and New Yorker. It did feel to me, at the age of nineteen, that my life had been magically touched, if not profoundly altered, by the Mademoiselle citation.)
One of the great reading moments in my lifetime—if it isn’t more accurately described as a life-altering moment—occurred in the second semester of my freshman year when I entered a classroom in the Hall of Languages, and idly opened a book that had been left behind—a philosophy anthology in which there was an excerpt from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. A sentence or two of this German philosopher of the nineteenth century, of whom I’d never heard, and immediately I felt excitement, and a kind of rapport; after class I ran to the campus bookstore where with reckless abandonment for one who had virtually no spending money I bought paperback copies of Nietzsche—Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil—which I have on my bookshelves, heavily annotated, to this day.
The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Page 17