The Lost Landscape

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Even the first time at the Heikes’ house is blurred. Experience is lived under a microscope, but recalled through a telescope.

  Their house was a large stately red-brick colonial with white shutters and a steep shingled roof, set back from the road amid a scattering of evergreens. When I’d first seen it, from the rear seat of Mrs. Heike’s car as she’d turned into the driveway, I had stared in disbelief.

  “I hate living here. On the silly suburban golf course.” From the passenger’s seat Cynthia addressed me with an air of disgust.

  Was I jealous of Cynthia’s girl friends who lived in the Village (as it was called) as she did, and with whom she’d gone to school since kindergarten? Was I particularly jealous of her friend Lee Ann Krauser who lived near her in a prestigious residential neighborhood and who was, like Cynthia, a straight-A student and a serious young musician? (Cynthia had taken violin lessons since the age of six, Lee Ann had been taking clarinet lessons for nearly as long. Each girl played piano better than I did though in theory at least I was one of the designated “pianists” at school, and neither Cynthia nor Lee Ann would have considered herself a pianist—neither had had formal piano lessons.)

  Both Cynthia and Lee Ann were friends of mine. We gave one another little gifts at birthdays, sent one another valentines and Christmas cards, sat together at assemblies and belonged to the same after-school clubs—French Club, Quill & Scroll, Girls Chorus, Yearbook. (Cynthia and Lee Ann were also in the orchestra. I was in girls’ sports.) We published articles, short stories, and poetry in the school literary magazine quaintly called Willo’ the Wisp. But Lee Ann was never so close to me as Cynthia was, for not once in three years of high school did Lee Ann Krauser invite me to her home for dinner and to stay the night; and (I could not help but presume) Cynthia liked Lee Ann more than she did me since (for one thing) she’d known her much longer.

  Cynthia liked Lee Ann more than she did me. Here is the very blood-jet of jealousy, never more devastating than among adolescent girls.

  It was a certainty that each girl was the other’s best friend while Oatsie was second-best.

  (Mostly, I did not mind being second-best. I took for granted that, in my suburban high school, I could not ever be other than second-best. I had only to shut my eyes to recall the drab interior of the one-room rural schoolhouse on the Tonawanda Creek Road and the older, crude farm boys for whom profanities and obscenities were normal usage, and who so tormented me when I was a young child—I had only to shut my eyes to summon this painful vision and to feel that, at second-best, I was yet in a magical realm.)

  Since fifth grade, Cynthia and Lee Ann had been serious music students. They frequently performed in recitals and each was likely to accompany the other on the piano.

  Often I would hear on Monday morning that Cynthia and Lee Ann had attended a musical event over the weekend—concerts by the Buffalo Philharmonic at Kleinhans Music Hall, Bach’s The Messiah at St. Paul’s Cathedral. There were string quartets at the University of Buffalo, piano recitals, choral evenings. Belatedly I would hear of these wonderful occasions and would wish that I could have accompanied my friends; it was fascinating to me to determine, not by direct inquiry but by an accruing of incidental information, who had taken whom—Mrs. Heike had taken the girls; or, Dr. and Mrs. Heike had taken them; or, Mr. and Mrs. Krauser had taken them; or, both families had gone, in separate vehicles, but had had dinner together beforehand at the Buffalo Athletic Club to which the men belonged.

  My interest was such, one or the other of my friends would say adamantly: “Next time you can come with us, Joyce. We’ll plan for that.”

  Yes. I would like that. Thank you!

  The Heikes owned a beautiful Steinway grand piano. Just the sight of such a piano, close-up, was intimidating. To depress the (perfect, ivory) keys, to hear the immediate sonorous sound, brought tears to my eyes as I thought of how my father would have loved to it down at such a piano . . .

  Except, maybe not. Money people he’d have said.

  My Lockport piano teacher, a retired church organist with floating snowy-white hair like Einstein, a creased melancholy face and hands covered in liver spots, owned a much less impressive quasigrand Knabe piano with yellowed keys that stuck. A sensation of giddy elation came over me, as of utter recklessness, when Cynthia’s father Dr. Heike insisted that I play something on his piano, since Cynthia had told him that I was a piano student; and so I’d played for the Heikes several of my meticulously memorized pieces—a Mozart rondo, Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” and the first two movements of Beethoven’s Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp Minor, the so-called Moonlight Sonata. (The first, dreamy movement of the sonata was my grandmother Blanche’s favorite piano music which I’d played for her each time she visited us, for years, rarely less than once a week; so totally had I memorized this famous piece of music, my fingers could play the notes without interference from my brain—even the demanding stretches, which my hands were too small to execute smoothly, were factored into my memory so that without thinking I steeled myself for the tiny spasms of hand-pain without flinching and without quite missing a chord.)

  Playing the piano for this small audience was so stressful for me, I could scarcely breathe as I played; when I could not hold my breath any longer, my fingers faltered against the keyboard—just perceptibly, as only another pianist might have noticed. By the time I struck the final chords of the Beethoven sonata’s second movement I could feel perspiration trickling down my back, and I was exhausted. But Cynthia’s father had been surprised by the bravura of my performance, it seemed, and clapped loudly. “Great! That’s great, Joyce. I really like that—Moonlight Sonata. Yes. A piano always sounds good, a damn violin can squeak and hurt your ears.” Cynthia laughed wincingly as if Dr. Heike had reached over and pinched her.

  At first I’d thought that Dr. Heike might be applauding me out of playful mockery, but it appeared that he was serious. Blushing badly, I thanked him.

  I was sorry that, to compliment me, Dr. Heike had felt it necessary to take a swipe at his daughter. Soon you sensed in Dr. Heike’s presence that he was an energetic man who looked upon life—even social life, domestic life—as rivalry, competition; it would not mean much to compliment one young person without suggesting a critique of another young person. Also, he seemed determined to “like” me—as if there might have been a history of his having been impolite to Cynthia’s friends and so he meant, emphatically, to be friendly to me, that his daughter could have no complaint to make of him that night. Feathery-haired Mrs. Heike praised me also, and Cynthia made one of her terse comments: “Not bad. Lighten up the pedal.”

  But it seemed that Cynthia did think I played piano well—for a sixth-year student. (Cynthia had been taking violin lessons for more than ten years.) She’d been taken in by my canny, calculated performance of memorized pieces, my entire repertoire. Casually she asked if I’d ever accompanied another music student, a violinist for instance, and I said not yet, but I would certainly like to try.

  Here was an impulsive and heedless statement like so many I have made in my lifetime—I would certainly like to try.

  For our spring music recital at school, Cynthia was going to play a Bach sonata for solo violin with piano accompaniment composed by Robert Schumann. Now more pointedly she asked—maybe I could play the accompaniment?

  Cynthia appeared to be sincere. I saw that I could not say no to my strong-willed friend.

  It was a flattering request. It was an opportunity for me to partly pay back Cynthia’s generosity. Yet, nothing could fill me with more dread than the prospect of accompanying a violinist as accomplished as Cynthia Heike on the high school stage before an audience of students, teachers, relatives. For this would be a musically sophisticated audience, at least in part; nothing like the warmly uncritical Methodist congregation in Pendleton who never failed to praise my “organ-playing” to which, as they loudly sang their beloved hymns, they barely listened. The horror presented itself to me as some
thing akin to appearing naked in public—worse, having to remove my own clothes in the effort; like most less-than-gifted musicians I knew how poorly I actually played and how desperate were my stratagems to sound as if I did in fact know how to play.

  (One of the comical nightmares of my young life had occurred in sixth grade when I allowed myself to be coerced by a well-intentioned teacher into playing piano in the school auditorium as students tramped into our weekly assembly; while I was playing one or another memorized piece with such a title as “Song of the Volga Boatmen” or “The Smithy’s Anvil” my mind went blank as I approached the end, and I could not remember the final bar—so that in a state of commingled panic and paralysis I simply kept playing, repeating passages multiple times until at last in desperation I struck a chord—any chord—and dropped my hands from the keyboard in chagrin and shame. No one had noticed.)

  “Are you sure you want me, Cynthia? What about Lee Ann . . .”

  “Lee Ann! No. I want you.”

  Cynthia was incensed, that I should seem to be doubting her judgment. It was like her to speak vehemently, even angrily, when she sensed even mild opposition.

  Cynthia’s left eye, that was a weak-muscled “wandering” eye, did not engage me like her right eye, fierce, shining, fixed upon my face so that I could not look away.

  I’d noticed that she and Lee Ann were not together so much lately at school. In the cafeteria I saw Lee Ann sitting with other friends, including boys; several times, I’d seen Lee Ann walking with a tall lanky-limbed boy whom I knew slightly from math class. If Lee Ann passed by Cynthia and me she would greet us warmly while Cynthia looked stonily away.

  Lee Ann Krauser was a petite girl, scarcely five feet tall, with transparent pink plastic-framed glasses, pale bangs that fell to her eyebrows, the small sweetly naïve face of a precocious child. She wore her shoulder-length hair fixed with barrettes. She wore plaid jumpers with white long-sleeved blouses. She wore cashmere sweater sets in eggshell pastels, and white-and-brown saddle shoes with white woolen socks. From Cynthia’s teasing remarks to her I gathered that the Krausers were well-to-do: indeed, “Krauser” was the name of a Buffalo manufacturer. In every class there is at least one girl like Lee Ann: child-sized, rather plain, very smart, but so innocent-seeming she is likely to be the favorite of her teachers, and attractive to a particular sort of brainy, socially maladroit boy who will fall in love with her and trail her about if she allows him.

  In disgust Cynthia said of Lee Ann: “She’s getting boy crazy. Which is to say—just plain crazy.”

  I thought this was unfair. It was not Lee Ann’s fault that boys were attracted to her when, Cynthia would have to concede, girls were attracted to Lee Ann, too.

  More obscurely Cynthia said, “She twists everything she touches and ruins it. I hate her.”

  This was a preposterous accusation. Cynthia was so vehement, I knew better than to ask what she meant.

  Thinking—Now I am her closest friend. Now there is no one else.

  10.

  SHE SAID, “YOU’RE THE writer.”

  Tearing up stories, poems she’d written. The clever little caricature-cartoons that never seemed to please her the way they pleased others, for Cynthia discounted what came easily to her and the cruelty of satire came easily to her.

  It was a time when I’d fallen under the spell of Hemingway. In a succession of stories set in a fictitious Millersport in imitation of the terse sculpted prose of in our time. For Hemingway is the great artist of the unsaid, the withheld. Hemingway is the great artist of silence, in the early stories most poignantly. (And how had I found my way to the esoteric in our time? The previous year in Mr. Stein’s junior English class we’d read stories in the paperback Great American Short Story Masterpieces and in this wonderful collection I discovered not only Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” but stories by Ambrose Bierce, Ring Lardner, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, Conrad Aiken (“Silent Snow, Secret Snow”), and Eudora Welty that would be imprinted nearly as deep in my memory as the Alice books and The Secret Garden.) Some of my stories in the mode of in our time I showed to Mr. Stein, and some to Mrs. Ordway, another of my high school English teachers; some I showed to Cynthia Heike. (None I showed to my parents or my grandmother. Secrecy has always seemed most precious to me, among those with whom we are closest.) Eventually there came to be a manuscript of about two hundred pages of these stories, each neatly typed on the wonderful Remington typewriter my grandmother had given me for my fourteenth birthday, each ending irresolute and dramatically poised in the cool Hemingway manner, and this manuscript I would give to Mrs. Ordway to read, at her request; and though Mrs. Ordway promised that she would return the manuscript, weeks and eventually months passed and by graduation in June 1956 she had not returned it.

  To recall the frustration and (even) despair of having lost this schoolgirl manuscript is to recall the way the ground could shift beneath your feet at any time, in adolescence; the way you lived under the (wayward, capricious) authority of adults who did what they wanted to do because they had the power to do it. Just as one teacher (Mr. Stein) could be encouraging, kind, thoughtful, “devoted to his students”—so another teacher (Mrs. Ordway) could be subtly discouraging, impatient, secretive and willful, given to provoking rivalries among students. To recall childhood and girlhood is to recall that sense of the unpredictable when any adult had the power to uplift, or to undermine; to reward, or to punish; to praise, or to withhold praise for his or her mysterious purposes.

  Why did Mrs. Ordway behave so strangely?—I would never know.

  When I mentioned to my friends that Mrs. Ordway seemed unwilling to return my manuscript even as she continued to promise to return it they were indignant on my behalf—like good high school friends!—but seemed not to comprehend why on earth I hadn’t made a carbon copy of it. (That a flat box of twelve sheets of carbon paper was “expensive” could not have occurred to them.) They speculated that Mrs. Ordway had not (yet) read the manuscript, or had lost it.

  Meanly, or perhaps funnily, Cynthia said: “Maybe she’s waiting for you to become famous, Joyce.”

  11.

  “I HATE MY BODY. Sometimes I think—I’m being led out into a prison yard, to be shot by a firing squad. Because when you are so ugly, you don’t deserve to live.”

  In the darkness when I’d thought Cynthia was asleep she began suddenly to speak of the most private things.

  She was a freak, her spine was twisted. And her eye—her pathetic eye—that made people think she was cross-eyed but she was not.

  People looked at her with pity and scorn. Boys whistled at her out of meanness. Boys said terrible things to her which she would never repeat. She hated boys, and had a plan to one day carry a concealed gun, and shoot them in their jeering faces.

  Or, maybe: she’d get some acid. From chem lab. Toss it in their hateful faces so they’d know what it was like to be freaky afterward.

  Everything about her body was hateful except her hands. Her fingers. These allowed her to play the violin, that made her so happy.

  “But that’s almost all. Sometimes school, some of my courses—biology, chemistry. It’s fun in French conversation—avec mon amie très rusée. But school itself—c’est de la merde. Seeing how people look at me and feel sorry for me.”

  It was astonishing to me that a girl of Cynthia Heike’s reputation could feel like this about herself. A doctor’s daughter, who lived in a beautiful house. Whose sarcasm could be withering, even as a sudden smile from her could be thrilling.

  “Cynthia, nobody feels sorry for you! People admire you . . .”

  “Adults maybe. Some adults. But nobody would want to be me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? Would you want to be me?”

  The question was vehement, childish. I had no idea how to respond.

  In the twin bed beside Cynthia’s bed in the glimmering dark of her peppermint-striped girl’s room as inapp
ropriate for Cynthia’s fierce spirit as a pink satin bow would have been in her thick unruly hair I could only murmur feebly protestations—she couldn’t possibly mean what she was saying . . .

  “I do! It began back in grade school, being stared-at, laughed-at—called a freak.”

  “Nobody has called you a freak.”

  “Yes! I have been called a freak.”

  “I—I don’t believe that.”

  Of course, I believed what Cynthia was saying. The crude, cruel, stupid and unvarying insults of boys were not unfamiliar to me, though I’d never been called a freak—I had been spared that at least.

  Now I was led into confiding in Cynthia as I had confided in no one else how I’d been “teased” pitilessly at the one-room country school when the school had had eight grades; after my third year the school district transferred older students elsewhere, and the teasing stopped. Cynthia listened intently and asked if any of these boys had “done things” to me and I told her no—not exactly.

  I explained to Cynthia that in the country school the oldest boys were fifteen, still in eighth grade, because New York State law did not allow anyone to quit school until his sixteenth birthday. These were farm boys deeply resentful of being kept in school who took out their antagonism on anyone weaker than they were.

  I thought of their jeering eyes—the stupidity in those eyes, and the cruelty—for cruelty is a kind of stupidity: I knew that. I thought of how they had tormented me but I did not want to think that they had tormented me—that is, not exclusively me. For their meanness and brutality were indiscriminate, directed against several of us, because we were younger, and hadn’t older brothers or sisters to protect us at the school. It is true, by contemporary standards some of this abuse would be categorized as sexual, but in fact it had seemed just roughness—physical roughness—not unlike the tormenting these same boys inflicted upon helpless animals (cats, rabbits, raccoons, snakes) they managed sometimes to catch. Much of the time they threw things at us—stones, mudballs, snowballs. Decades later reading of the horrific stonings of Muslim women and men condemned as “adulterers” I would feel sick at the memory of being harassed by these boys, my friend Helen Judd and me running, breathless and running for our lives (as we’d thought) along an overgrown path by the Tonawanda Creek, behind the schoolhouse where the teacher never went.