The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares

by Joyce Carol Oates

  HELPING HANDS

  1.

  He came into her life when it had seemed to her that her life was finished.

  He was not a volunteer at the charity thrift shop but an employee. You could see that he had no choice but to be working in this dismal place on this dismal November afternoon.

  DISABLED VETERANS OF NEW JERSEY HELPING HANDS—from the street the shop appeared to be little more than a storefront. She’d had a difficult time locating the weatherworn brown-brick building on South Falls Street, Trenton, amid a neighborhood that resembled a broken and part-disarticulated spine—small shuttered stores, pawnshops and taverns and rib shacks, vast rubble-strewn vacant lots as in the aftermath of a cataclysm.

  This was Trenton, the capital city of New Jersey! Only a few blocks from the Mercer County Courthouse and the New Jersey State Courthouse and the gold-domed New Jersey State House overlooking the Delaware River.

  The storefront window was layered in grime. On display were mismatched items of furniture, men’s clothing and boots. A faded poster depicting a pair of clasped hands beneath the words Helping Hands and a smiling crinkly-blue-eyed young soldier in a U.S. Army uniform regarding the onlooker with a look of disconcerting frankness—THANK YOU FOR ALL YOU CAN GIVE! WE WHO HAVE SERVED YOU ARE GRATEFUL.

  “Grateful!”—Helene felt the sting of irony. For the smiling soldier was disabled, presumably.

  Or—was she imagining the scorpion-sting of irony, where none was intended?

  Hesitantly she pushed open the heavy door half-expecting it to be locked, as the twilit interior seemed to suggest that Helping Hands wasn’t open.

  In her arms she was carrying several plastic bags neatly tied shut and containing gently used clothing—(socks, underwear, T-shirts formerly her husband’s)—awkwardly managing to open the door and to wedge her way inside in the hopeful way of one who expects someone to witness her struggle, and the goodwill behind the struggle, and to hurry to help her.

  He took no notice of her, it seemed: the single figure at the rear of the shop, behind a counter and barely visible to her.

  “Hello? Are you—open?”

  With difficulty—for one of the several bundles had begun to slip from her embrace, and the strap of her heavy handbag was looped around her weakening wrist—Helene made her way into the cluttered interior of the shop where at the rear, behind a waist-high counter, the clerk still hadn’t noticed her.

  Helping Hands at 821 South Falls Street, Trenton, was both a thrift shop and a drop-off location for donations to the disabled veterans’ charity. It was a drafty, inhospitable place—more a storage warehouse than a shop. Overhead was a high ceiling of hammered tin, an ancient ceiling from which paint had peeled and flaked like leprous skin. The floor appeared to be bare floor-boards covered haphazardly with rug- and linoleum-remnants like jigsaw puzzle pieces that had worked their way apart. And the smell—dust, grime, something acidulous, gingery-medicinal mixed with the outer, gritty smoky-chemical air of Trenton—that stung her nostrils. What chagrin she felt to be bringing her husband’s intimate articles of clothing to this place that was a graveyard of unwanted things: sofas that looked as if, if beaten with a broom, they would explode in a fury of dust; lamps with stained and drunk-tilted shades; rolled-up carpets stacked against the wall like cast-aside bodies; bins of heaped shoes and boots as in those horrific photographs taken after the liberation of the Nazi death camps; a small platoon of (men’s) clothes sagging on wire hangers on gurney-like racks, like hunched figures in a soup kitchen line.

  Behind the counter a radio was playing, turned low. Here was a comfortable if slovenly space someone had fashioned for himself, like an animal’s den. Here was a warm nimbus of light from a floor lamp, and in a sagging leather chair a man with a dark-stubbled jaw and straggling dark hair was sprawled reading a book—Euripides’ Plays.

  Belatedly—with a just-perceptible tinge of apology, unless it was annoyance—the stubble-jawed man glanced up.

  “Ma’am! Let me help you.”

  With a show of deferential haste he set the book down—facedown, not minding if the spine cracked—untwined himself from the leather chair without quite straightening up and scrambled around to the front of the counter. He moved—limped, lurched—as one with an artificial leg might move, pumping himself forward.

  “Sorry! Didn’t see you come in, way back here.”

  His smile was a quick flash baring small slightly uneven teeth and one dark space where a lower incisor was missing.

  From the widow’s arms he took the neatly tied plastic bags. For surely his work at Helping Hands had made him practiced at identifying widow, bereft woman. Alone.

  With care the stubble-jawed man positioned her bags on a table as if their contents were likely to be novel, precious. Helene wanted to explain that she’d brought just small articles of clothing—she hadn’t yet confronted the task of going through her husband’s larger things—but her voice faltered and failed and at last she stood staring at the bags in a kind of abashed silence. Before the catastrophe in her life she’d been a woman who spoke easily to strangers, as to friends—now, her voice unaccountably faltered, often she seemed to lose the thread of what she was saying. And now she was fearful suddenly that her husband’s things didn’t qualify as gently used, as the Helping Hands advertisement in the Mercer County yellow pages had requested—or weren’t clean; she was fearful that the stubble-jawed clerk would examine her donation and reject it.

  But he spoke kindly, as if sensing her distress: “You can call Helping Hands, y’know. To arrange for a pickup at your residence.”

  Residence. Why did he not say home.

  Probably just quoting from the Helping Hands brochure yet it seemed to Helene significant, he’d avoided saying home.

  She had no home now—only just a house she’d shared for more than twenty years with a man who had died.

  “I—I wanted to save someone a drive. All the way out to . . .”

  Her voice trailed off . Better not to say where she lived. For the suburban village contiguous with Princeton was so very different from Trenton, New Jersey, the very articulation of its name might strike an ironic note in this dreary place.

  “That’s our job, ma’am. My job, mostly.”

  Though his voice was grittily hoarse the clerk spoke cheerfully.

  The smile flashed, and vanished.

  Helene wondered: was the man a veteran? Disabled?

  He was older than he’d appeared at first glance. Probably he was thirty-five, at least. His right cheek was riddled and ridged with scar tissue and there were soft discolored indentations in his skin. His eyes were small, stone-colored, alert and alight. His hair was dark threaded with silver filaments and looked as if it had been roughly finger-combed, straggling over his collar like a pelt. The stubbled jaws gave him a look of boyish aggression, playful swagger. You could see that he thought well of himself, in secret. Yet always he was deferential to the woman, eager to please as the light, restless eyes played over her.

  He wore a rust-colored faux-suede sport coat too large for his narrow shoulders, a beige crewneck sweater with a stretched neck, “dress” gabardine trousers with cuff s that spilled onto the floor—mismatched articles of clothing surely appropriated from the Helping Hands rack a few yards away. And on his feet salt-stained hiking boots that reminded Helene of the hiking boots—better quality, in better condition—her husband had often worn when she’d first met him, nearly twenty-five years ago at the University of Minnesota.

  “And it’s a nasty day. Especially in Trenton.”

  Very lightly the word Trenton was accentuated, in irony.

  He’d cast a sidelong glance at the widow’s face and sensed the precariousness of her emotions which resembled unstable rocks on a hillside—the slightest nudge, an avalanche.

  “I—I wanted to see your headquarters. I was reading about Helping Hands and I thought . . .”

  Thought? What had she thought? In the pain-wracked haze fo
llowing an insomniac night leafing through the phone directory looking under CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS—struck by the drawing of tight-clasped hands that had roused in her a sensation of envy, yearning, conviction.

  Her husband would want his things given away, she knew. At his death he’d become a donor of body organs, eyes.

  She would recall his laughter at her unease, when years before he’d signed the organ-donor form, in their lawyers’ office. Where they’d gone to make out their wills.

  Helene had not wished to sign the form—just yet. And her husband had laughed at her, though not cruelly.

  What will you do with your beautiful brown eyes, your kidneys, liver, heart in the afterlife?

  She’d shuddered. He’d kissed her.

  Laughter, in the innocence—ignorance?—of those long-ago days.

  In fact she’d driven to Trenton because she’d been desperate to escape the house that she and her husband had so loved, and had lived in happily for so long—for not one room was safe for her, to glance into: when she did she saw the ghostly afterimage of her husband, seated in his chair in the living room, or at his desk in his study; it was terrible to enter their bedroom, and see—almost see—his figure in their bed, motionless beneath the covers as he’d been motionless in the hospital bed, when they’d summoned her to the hospital. . . .

  And there was the sound of his footfall on the stairs, and his murmuring voice now indistinct and no longer playful as so often it had been playful, for all jokes cease with death.

  Where am I, what has happened to me. . . . Helene!

  She shuddered. So clearly she heard the terror in her husband’s voice.

  “This isn’t our ‘headquarters,’ ma’am. There’s an office in Newark.” The stubble-jawed clerk was observing her closely.

  “Yes? What? Oh yes. Newark.”

  Her mind had gone blank. Newark?

  “Can I trouble you to please fill out this form? For our files.”

  She was given a form, and a ballpoint pen. The stubble-jawed man cleared a space for her so that she could write.

  Strange it seemed to her, the widow. To be in this place. But all places were strange to her now.

  A faint rising wind, driving rain. That sensation of acute and indescribable unreality rising like dark water, to drown her.

  She felt like an amputee uncertain which of her limbs has been severed.

  “Ma’am? Sorry.”

  The ballpoint pen—cheap, black plastic—stamped with a pair of tinselly clasped hands—had slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. With a muffled grunt—as if his back hurt him, or a stiff leg—the stubble-jawed man stooped to retrieve it for her.

  “Thank you.”

  She spoke softly. She felt tears sting her eyes. The slightest gesture of kindness was touching to her now. Lately it was happening, others were not so kind to her, or so patient—tapping their horns on the turnpike entrance ramp when she ventured too cautiously out into traffic, staring rudely at her in the post office when she blundered into the midst of a queue unaware of others who’d been waiting before her. At the Mercer County Courthouse where she’d held up the security checkpoint queue when a bag in which she’d been carrying her husband’s Last Will & Testament, her husband’s death certificate and other documents had spilled onto the grimy floor.

  Ma’am! Move along please!

  Ma’am you maybe need some assistance? Somebody from home, to help you?

  It was so, she could have used assistance. But she had not wanted assistance. She’d been stubborn, insisting she would go alone to Trenton. She was capable of executing the exhausting death-duties herself.

  She dreaded pity! Even sympathy is a form of pity.

  She dreaded the terrible intimacy of grief. She was a wounded creature preferring to crawl away, to nurse her pain, and not to share it with others.

  No one can help me in what is essential. No one can come near.

  At last she’d begun to sort through her husband’s things and to discard and to “donate”—to make available, to others in need, those things which her husband, deceased, would never again require. This was a ritual that needed to be done—(did it?)—and there was no one to do it except the widow.

  How many had died, and their clothing brought to Helping Hands! There were racks of crammed-together clothes, bins of carelessly folded shirts, sweaters, pajamas. . . . Hard to believe that anyone, let alone disabled veterans, would be helped much by this graveyard of cast-off things.

  At least, her husband’s clothing was in good condition. Some of the articles of clothing were new, or nearly new; most was of high quality. Some, little-worn. Some, still in dry cleaner’s bags. Helene had not brought those, that were too precious to be given away just yet.

  After she’d emptied her husband’s bureau drawers of socks (neatly bunched together, in pairs), underwear, T-shirts, she’d stared into the empty drawers with a strange fixed smile like one about to plunge into an abyss. Thinking But why? Why have I done this? It seemed madness to her, to have emptied her husband’s things onto their bed, so that she would have to place them in bags, for the veterans’ charity; madness, to empty drawers that had not needed to be emptied.

  She could not shake the conviction that, having signed the contract for her husband’s remains to be cremated, she had violated the deep, intimate bond between them: she had destroyed her husband’s body, for the sake of convenience.

  Of course her husband had wanted to be cremated. Matter-of-fact and seemingly without sentiment like all of their friends, this had been his clearly stated wish.

  “Ma’am? I can take that.”

  It had taken Helene several minutes to complete the form. In the afterlife of the widow, time itself moves haltingly.

  The stubble-jawed man glanced through the form. Helene had been aware of him watching her, overseeing her effort as if he knew how difficult this small task was for her.

  He was breathing through his mouth, like an asthmatic. She wondered if this was a result of his being wounded—disabled. And his sloping shoulders, and slightly curved back—a certain wariness in the way he held himself, physically—suggested pain, or the anxious expectation of pain.

  Still he was taller than Helene by several inches, and seemed protective of her.

  The thought came to her He, too, has been wounded. Of course, he understands.

  And, with a sensation of relief Maybe it was meant—I would meet a friend today in this melancholy place.

  All of Helene’s friends—relatives, neighbors—had known her husband: and she could not bear seeing them, and seeing her grief reflected in their faces, as in a cruel fun house mirror.

  The stubble-jawed man stood close to her. This might have been accidental but Helene did not think so. She could smell his clothes, his hair—that needed to be washed. A salty-sweaty smell of his body—the man inside the secondhand, rumpled clothes—that was comforting to her, and not unpleasant.

  Her own skin was rubbed raw, and had become painful to the touch, by her frequent showers, which had begun during the hospital vigil when she’d showered twice a day, to rid herself of the strong hospital odor. And her hair, to which the hospital-smell still clung, in Helene’s imagination—her poor hair, that had been so thick and glossy, a rich mahogany color, less than two months ago, now falling out, thinning. . . .

  She saw the clerk’s practiced eyes move quickly down the page. She felt a small frisson of satisfaction, or of apprehension—now he would see that in fact she’d driven a considerable distance, and that she lived in Quaker Heights.

  “Ma’am—is it ‘Mrs. Haidt’? Thank you!”

  She hesitated. Was it accurate, or logical, that there could be a Mrs. Haidt, if there was no Mr. Haidt?

  “‘Mrs. Haidt’—yes. But please call me ‘Helene.’”

  “‘Helene.’ That’s a beautiful name.”

  A warm sensation rose in her throat, into her face. She smiled in confusion like one who has been pushed too
close to a mirror, who cannot see.

  “Good to meet you—‘Helene.’”

  The stubble-jawed man surprised her by reaching for her hand and shaking it vigorously. His fingers were strong and decisive and she had to resist the instinct to pull away. She didn’t quite hear his name—Nicolas? Jelinski? Zelinski?

  “Just—‘Nicolas’ is fine.”

  “‘Nicolas.’”

  This seemed to her a beautiful name, too. She was certain that she’d never heard it before, in quite this way.

  “Next time call us, Helene. There are Helping Hand pickups every three weeks in Quaker Heights.”

  It was so, she’d seen such pickup vans in her neighborhood—Rescue Mission of Trenton, Salvation Army, Goodwill Industries—possibly even Disabled Veterans of New Jersey Helping Hands. In this terrible recession there was much poverty, homelessness. In the ninth year of a folly of a war in which few American citizens believed any longer, yet which continued like a great grinding wheel crushing the innocent in its mechanical turning, there were many disabled.

  “Yes. Yes. I will. . . .”

  “You can ask for me, will you? ‘Nicolas.’”

  “Yes. ‘Nicolas.’”

  There was a precarious intimacy between them. Helene felt that if the stubble-jawed man were to touch her again, she would become faint.

  Now I must leave. Exactly now.

  But hearing herself say instead, in a bright curious voice: “I see that you’re reading Euripides. . . .”

  “Trying to.”

  He was embarrassed, was he?—self-conscious suddenly.

  “‘Eur-rip-id-des’—that’s how you pronounce it?”

  “Yes. ‘Eu-rip-id-dees.’”

  She thought of telling Nicolas that she’d once taught Greek tragedies in an introductory literature course in a small liberal arts college in Minneapolis—she’d taught Euripides’ Bacchae and Medea. A wave of vertigo came over her, a sense of her old, lost life.

  But she didn’t want to sound boastful. “Are you a—student?”

  “Not now.”