American Appetites

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In a fairy tale, Ian thought, he might be allowed to exchange his life for Glynnis’s. But the somber logic of this world held no such recourse.

  That morning he ran a little farther than usual, drawn, in fact, to the grassy, uneven path that circled the reservoir, though running here was tricky, hard on one’s feet and ankles. The water’s surface was placid, as always, mirroring a cloudy, mottled sky, that look of density in a single flat plane; Ian stared at it, willing himself to be consoled, transformed. When Glynnis was recovered . . . he would be a better man. When Glynnis came home from the hospital . . . when she was recovered . . . they would travel, to Italy perhaps. It was a decade at least since they had taken a trip not related to—indeed, centered upon—a professional commitment of Ian’s.

  He left the reservoir, headed home, running up the long slow incline back to Pearce Drive, the rhythm of his stride slightly broken, his back and sides drenched with sweat. Midway along a narrow curving street called Lombardy one of Ian’s neighbors drove by and might have waved a tentative hand in greeting, but Ian stared resolutely at the ground before him and did not acknowledge it.

  It gave him pain to remember, as, at such times, he could not help remembering, that their neighbors the Dewalds had called the police . . . and that the entire neighborhood must know. All of Hazelton must know. Glynnis would be furious, her pride greatly wounded. How dare the Dewalds, who were not even friends of theirs, poke their noses into a private quarrel; how dare they go so far as to telephone the police? Glynnis had always distrusted Audrey Dewald’s intermittent attempts at friendship: the way, uninvited, the woman dropped by the house at an inconvenient hour with a question for Glynnis or a favor to beg of her; it maddened Glynnis that she borrowed cookbooks and was careless about returning them. Jackson Dewald, her husband, a man of Ian’s approximate age, was a highly successful stock market analyst who seemed to have taken an obscure offense at a casual remark of Ian’s made at a cocktail party years ago, to the effect that Ian hadn’t time to think about money; he hardly even had time to think about things that mattered. Really, Dewald had said stiffly, it must be lovely to be so superior to us all. Ian had laughed, taking the exchange as a joke, and said, Why, yes, it is.

  Ian’s heart beat hard in dislike. Goddamn them: I will never forgive them.

  IT HAD BEEN eighteen days thus far; today would be the nineteenth.

  At the house he would shower, shave, dress, make coffee—not fresh, of course: that was Glynnis’s province—unless Bianca had already done so. He would get in the Honda and drive the familiar route to the hospital and park in the familiar high-rise garage and take his place at Glynnis’s bedside and resume his vigil. How long can you keep this up? one of the nurses had asked, meaning, Ian was sure, no harm, but Ian was stung and said curtly, As long as my wife needs me.

  Ian turned up the graveled drive to his house, running rather sluggishly now, his legs aching and eyes stinging with sweat. He had gone out at 6:10 and was returning at 6:55, slower than yesterday’s time: an ordeal to no specific purpose, like so many, now, in his life, but one that must be done. He saw Bianca waiting for him, in the driveway, and knew that something was wrong. Standing there, barefoot, in the gravel, in jeans pulled up over her nightgown (it appeared) and a shirt carelessly buttoned. Something was wrong, for why otherwise would the girl’s hair be so disheveled, and tears shine on her face, with a look of anger?

  THE POLICE

  1.

  Bianca wept in a fury of hurt: “I didn’t say goodbye to her, Daddy! I didn’t say goodbye to her!”

  As if, she seemed to be thinking, he had. There came then the logic of what must be done, and what would be done, whether he wished it to be done or not, whether he was capable of doing it himself or not. And of course Ian McCullough was capable: assuming the role in their household that would in ordinary circumstances be Glynnis’s . . . dealing with an emergency situation that required numerous telephone calls, and calm in the face of others’ emotion, and decisions made without much, or any, deliberation; for there was no time for such a luxury now. The old habit of deliberation, of Ian McCullough’s former life.

  A. J. Braun & Sons, Funeral Directors, came highly recommended by those friends who knew about such things, and so Ian telephoned A. J. Braun & Sons and made the preliminary arrangements. (A $300 deposit would be sufficient, payable by check.) Then there was the task of securing a plot in the Hazelton Memorial Cemetery, which abutted on the fifty-acre Institute woods. (Another modest deposit was required, and, yes, Ian readily agreed, it would be practical to buy a family-sized plot of course.) Next he located the “last will and testament” of Glynnis McCullough, crammed inside a bloated file labeled, in Glynnis’s precise hand, HOUSEHOLD RECORDS—that somber document Glynnis confessed to having signed without reading thoroughly. (Yet it was Ian’s will that depressed her more. She could not bear to think that she would probably outlive him and end her life as a widow—“Isn’t that the usual story? the statistically fated story?”—remembering their happiness together, and even their bouts of unhappiness, as the absolute core of her life, her life’s very meaning.)

  Friend after friend spoke of arranging for a memorial service for Glynnis, and of course Ian agreed, bemused at how immediately that prospect, so communal, so celebratory, came to the fore, as if to deflect them from the rawness of grief; as if a memorial service, weeks after the funeral, had the power of keeping Glynnis from completely dying, or from being declared dead.

  (Roberta Grinnell and June Oliver volunteered to make the arrangements, with, of course, Ian’s approval. This meant a consultation about dates, not unlike the circle’s frequent consultation about dates for social occasions, and Ian found himself, as Ian often did, staring at the much-annotated calendar tacked to Glynnis’s bulletin board in the kitchen. This document unnerved Ian with its suggestion of countless future commitments, its appearance, which the most superficial glance could not fail to absorb, of being a domestic variant of spinoza’s fully determined universe, in which free will could not possibly exist, even as a speculative luxury. Though Glynnis’s accident had occurred before the month had even begun, the majority of its days were taken, some with two- and even three-tiered obligations: mornings, afternoons, evenings, initials and abbreviations, some notations in ballpoint ink, others in pencil, with question marks; the final weekend was marked, simply, BETTER HOMES & GARDENS—the deadline, Ian assumed, for one of Glynnis’s food articles. His instinct was to tell Roberta and June that there was no room in Glynnis’s schedule for the memorial service, but he caught himself in time. The thirtieth, he said, looked fine.)

  IT WAS NOT Ian McCullough’s own grief that frightened him but his daughter’s.

  His own, secreted inside him like a tumorous growth, he believed he could contain; there would be time for the thing to take root, to flourish, to dig down deep into the marrow of his bone, to seed itself throughout him: plenty of time. But Bianca’s emotion was so immediate, so violent, so frenzied—she oscillated between periods of relative calm and sudden manic outbursts that seemed to take her, no less than her father, by surprise: throwing herself around the room, screaming, screaming at the top of her lungs, No no no no no, pounding at her thighs with her fists, tearing at her hair, at her clothes, No no no no no! Ian had to constrain her, hug her tight, tight, tight; he would not have thought he had more tears but tears sprang nonetheless from his eyes, and his face contorted, like Bianca’s, in the rage of infantile grief: No no no no no.

  She might lock herself in her bathroom, she might lock herself in her bedroom, or, repentant, apologize for “going crazy—I just don’t know what comes over me.” She might drift about the house, or wash her hair, or stand in Glynnis’s closet burying her face in Glynnis’s things, or open a can of beer and swig it out of the can like a man, or run the vacuum cleaner until Ian’s teeth grated, or make a quick telephone call to one of her friends, speaking in a low rapid undertone Ian had no urge to overhear. After one of her wor
st bouts of hysteria, when Ian feared she too might go crashing through a plate-glass window, the telephone rang and Bianca volunteered to answer it, panting, swollenfaced, disheveled, yet with enough presence of mind to speak clearly and even courteously—in Glynnis’s very voice, in fact. “Yes, thank you. . . . Yes, we are, and yes, that’s right, it’s set for tomorrow morning, eleven o’clock . . . the Unitarian church on South Main, just past the square. . . . Yes, that’s the one.”

  IAN DRESSED HIMSELF with slow dreamy fingers in his old pinstriped suit, the darkest suit he owned: Glynnis’s choice and once quite handsome, though now the lapels were of an unfashionable width and the shoulder pads were bulkier than he recalled. A long-sleeved white cotton shirt that required cuff links, a dull darkly shiny tie; and as he stood before the mirror trying to knot the tie he saw Glynnis’s shadowy figure behind him and steeled himself for her voice, raised more in surprise than in censure: Ian, are you serious? Why on earth are you wearing that?

  Her death was now publicly official: an obituary had appeared that morning in The New York Times, accompanied by a photograph Ian did not immediately recognize. Glynnis Ann McCullough, writer of popular cookbooks. Cause of death, complications following surgery. Married to the political scientist Ian J. McCullough, of the Institute for Independent Research in the Social Sciences, Hazelton-on-Hudson, New York. Survived by husband, daughter, sister.

  Bianca carefully clipped the obituary. She said, with her short breathless laugh, “Mommy looks so beautiful here, doesn’t she? Thank God.”

  There had been nothing in the Times about a police investigation, which did not mean of course that there was no investigation, or would be none, only that the information had not been given. Ian thought, They will arrest me in the cemetery; that’s the proper place.

  Bianca’s mourning costume, as she called it, consisted of a black silk shell and a matching jacket, quilted, with slightly puffed sleeves and tight cuffs, and a skirt of many ambiguous layers, black cotton, not altogether free of wrinkles, that fell unevenly to midcalf. The silk had belonged to Glynnis; the cotton was Bianca’s own. She had brushed her long hair so harshly and flatly against her head it seemed devoid of color, and fastened it behind her ears with gold clips that struck Ian as familiar—hadn’t he bought them for Glynnis, many years ago, when Glynnis had worn her hair to the waist? Marching in student antiwar demonstrations, picketing Dow Chemical? Bianca said, “What are you staring at, Daddy? Is something wrong?” Then, with a shift of direction very like her mother’s, she said, “Daddy, what’s that on your jaw? Did you cut yourself shaving?”

  He had, he had. Tiny nicks in the flesh that emitted a few drops of blood and merely stung.

  He went away and dabbed at his face with a wadded tissue, and when he returned some minutes later Bianca was still at the mirror in the front hall, still regarding herself critically. Her face was carefully made up, powdered, with a pale oysterish powder, and her eyes were outlined in black; her lips seemed fuller than usual, and thicker, an eerie frosted scarlet. Ian was startled, as he so often was, by what the popular press might call the miracle of cosmetics, strategically applied: no one could guess how his daughter had looked only the night before, red-eyed, puffy-faced, defiantly ugly. She had transformed herself into a good-looking, if rather hard-looking, woman in her early thirties.

  As soon as Ian reappeared she said loudly, “One thing about a funeral in the morning—the rest of the day is likely to improve.” She laughed and leaned closer to the mirror, running a finger along the lower rim of an eye. If she caught her father’s disapproving gaze, his look of hurt, she gave no sign; she wasn’t that sort of daughter.

  OF GLYNNIS’S FAMILY so few remained extant, to use the expression Glynnis was in the habit of using, that notifying them of her death, and of the funeral, involved only a few telephone calls and a second telegram sent to the Tokyo Hilton, where, Ian had been given to understand, Glynnis’s older sister, Kate, and her husband, Richard, were staying. Richard Kirkpatrick was an official with the World Bank, and the trip to Japan was primarily for business purposes, though, as it turned out, he and Katherine had already left for Kyoto; by the time they returned to Tokyo, discovered the first telegram, and made arrangements to fly home, Glynnis was already dead. If it arrived at all, the second telegram arrived after their departure.

  Katherine, whom Ian had not known well, and with whom Glynnis had not been close, was greatly upset by Glynnis’s death, came close to breaking down when she viewed the body, and, with her husband, had a good many questions to ask, both of Ian and of the hospital authorities, about what had happened to her. An accident involving a plate-glass window, emergency neurosurgery, the patient’s regaining consciousness only to lapse into a coma and die within nineteen days—Katherine said repeatedly that she did not believe it, simply could not believe it: could not accept it. In private Richard Kirkpatrick asked Ian if his sister-in-law had been drinking, and Ian hesitated so long before replying that he said, curtly, “Never mind—I can find out from the medical report.”

  In all, only six members of Glynnis’s family made the trip to Hazelton: the Kirkpatricks, a woman cousin of Glynnis’s whom Ian had never met before, and a sad trio of elderly aunts. Ian invited them to stay with him and Bianca—he would happily sleep on a couch in his study—but they preferred accommodations in a Holiday Inn near the Thruway. At such a time he couldn’t possibly want houseguests, Katherine said.

  She knows, thought Ian.

  IAN AND BIANCA McCullough and the Kirkpatrick contingent were driven to the First Unitarian Church on South Main, and then to Hazelton Memorial Park, in two hired cars: “stretch limos” as they were known in the trade, elegantly black of course, and smartly gleaming of course, with darkly tinted windows, to match the hearse. Ian had spoken of driving his own car but Bianca had objected strenuously. “You know Mommy would want things done in style,” she said. Once in the limousine Ian had been grateful enough for it: for being spared the effort, in this instance a public effort, of driving his own car; grateful for the tinted windows, which spared his eyes from the achingly bright spring sunshine, and for the space that allowed him room to stretch his long, rather stiff legs. The limousine was surely empowered by gasoline yet made virtually no sound; it passed by familiar sights as if effortlessly, like a car in a dream. Bianca said, striking the cushioned seat beside her with a fist, “This is the life!”

  Their driver wore a uniform and a visored black cap with a military look; had it been royalty he bore along Hazelton’s streets he could not have been more deferential. He introduced himself to the McCulloughs: “Poins is my name.” Ian smiled in surprise but could not, for the life of him, figure out why.

  THE FIRST UNITARIAN Church of Hazelton-on-Hudson, one of the village’s officially designated historic buildings, was plain, even spartan, both outside and in; wood-frame and foursquare and painted a shade of white so subdued as to resemble pearly gray. The windows were tall and narrow and emitted light that too seemed subdued. All was sobriety, a sort of cerebral calm: the pews were oak and comfortingly hard, the minister’s pulpit no more despotic than a lecturer’s podium. Ian, who had never stepped inside the church before and had, until the other day, never exchanged with Reverend Ebenbach, or, as he wished to be called, Hank Ebenbach, more than a dozen casual words, felt both relief and disappointment: if the church did not embarrass, neither did it excite. Ian thought it sad and perplexing that, drawn to Christianity as she was, in resistance to the genial humanism-atheism of her community, Glynnis should have chosen this church; should have chosen Hank Ebenbach, who might have been a colleague of Ian’s at the Institute, rather diffident, scholarly in manner, earnest and self-effacing, over other possibilities. Did a Unitarian minister, Ian wondered, conceive of himself as a man of God, or was such a notion simply too extravagant and histrionic to be taken seriously? Ebenbach seemed to say, Trust me; I will never lie to you.

  But there was the terrible casket bearing Glynnis’s bod
y, and here was the family of the deceased, and here, filing into the church, filling up the pews, the many friends and acquaintances who had come to mourn: half of Hazelton-on-Hudson, it almost seemed. Surely, Ian thought, they required more than simply not to be lied to. . . . Once, speaking impulsively, Glynnis had told a gathering of friends, I don’t believe in God as such and I don’t want to believe if it requires the usual anthropomorphic crap, but I want some sense of there being, you know—and here her voice trailed off self-consciously, defensively—a little more than just us: just here.

  She had not, however, attended church regularly or even, in a sense, irregularly; her own family had been nominally Episcopalian and she’d seemed to retain, like Ian, few haunting memories to contend with of a specifically religious nature: no familial sense of obligation or duty. When Bianca had been a small and therefore tractable child, Glynnis had sometimes taken her, but this custom was eventually discontinued; Glynnis had once or twice invited Ian to join them, but never, it seemed to Ian, sincerely—as if churchgoing, so against the grain of Hazelton-on-Hudson and, in a sense, of Glynnis’s own nature, were too private a matter to be shared with another adult. In recent years Glynnis had probably not attended Sunday morning services with Reverend Ebenbach more than a dozen times, but, to Ian’s considerable relief, this seemed not to have offended the man in the slightest. “Even when I hadn’t seen your wife in months I always thought of her as a member of the congregation,” Ebenbach said, “and I’m reasonably sure she thought of herself in those terms too.”

  Ian stared at Ebenbach, struck by the notion—of course it was absurd, and instantly dismissed—that this man had been Glynnis’s lover. But he said only, quietly, “Yes.”

  At eleven-fifteen, though most of the pews were filled and Reverend Ebenbach was waiting to begin, people were still crowding into the church. Ian felt a moment’s anxiety, that he had made a mistake; it might have been better to have kept the ceremony private and small. He had not quite considered Glynnis’s local popularity and her measure of local fame, nor had it occurred to him that most of his Institute colleagues and their wives would turn out, as if in a solid phalanx of sympathy. That it must have been sympathy for him, and not for Glynnis, whom some of his colleagues scarcely knew, pierced him to the heart.