I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Then I remembered: yes, the house had been cleaned. Of course! How could such a property be sold, otherwise? After the police took away what they wished. Nobody in the McEwan family wished to do such a task, so the janitor at the high school was hired, and scrubbed the floorboards and the walls and whatever. And the filthy old blood-soaked carpet had been hauled away by police, for their investigation. So the “parlor” might now be clean. But we would never step into that place of death of course, I never meant that Holly would see that room! This I would have explained to Irish except—where had Irish gone?

  Out in the driveway I heard the pickup start. He’d be gone through the night probably, and one day, some years into the future, when Holly was in junior high, he wouldn’t come back at all.

  That night I watched Holly sleeping in her little bed as often I did. Not in concern that she would cease breathing, as nervous mothers do, but in a trance of love for her. Your grandfather had to die the sudden thought came to me that you might be born. A great happiness filled my heart. A great calmness came over me. What I knew seemed too great for what I could comprehend in an actual thought, as a mother knows by instinct her child’s need. As when I was nursing Holly, in a distant room I could feel her waking and hungry for the breast, and my breasts would seem to waken too, leaking sweet warm milk, and in my trance of love I would hurry to her.

  For my life is about her, my baby. It is not about Irish McEwan after all.

  Nedra. Those nights! When I couldn’t sleep. When Kathlee didn’t want to share a room with me any longer, saying I made her nervous, so I had to sleep in a tiny room hardly more than a closet, in the upstairs hall. When my eyes began to go bad, from so much reading. Bright-lighted pages (from a crook-necked lamp by my bed) and beyond the pages darkness. My eyes stared, stared at the print until it melted into a blur. And a faint buzzing began I would refuse to hear knowing it was not real. Sometimes then I would jump from bed to use the bathroom, or I would tiptoe to a window on the landing where some nights, by moonlight, you could see the lake a few miles away, a thin strip of mist at the horizon. Most nights there was only a thickness like smoke and no moon, and no stars.

  For my niece Holly’s second birthday I would give her a big box of Crayolas. Like the crayons I’d loved when I was a little girl. And we would draw together, my niece and I, and tell each other silly stories.

  Holly used to laugh, and touch my cheek. “Auntie Nedra, I love you!”

  The story of what I saw but had not seen. And what I had not seen, I would see and tell myself all my life.

  Fire

  HAD IT BEEN arson? After the funeral she drove past the burnt-out wreck of her father’s house at 819 Church Street, slowly. It was four days after the fire. But it was hard to imagine a fire where all was stillness, deadness. And a cold November wind. To her surprise she found she’d driven her car into the cul-de-sac at the end of Church, had to back the car up awkwardly, circle the block and drive past the burnt house a second time. She’d been warned not to do this. Still, she was doing it. She’d even brought a Polaroid camera from home, intending to take photos. But the sight of the ruin, which had once been her family’s house, repelled her. There was death. A stink of burnt things, an odor of damp organic rot beneath. Perrysburg Township authorities had partly boarded up the doors and windows, ugly yellow tape stretched across the soot-blackened cobblestone posts of the veranda. CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER. Seen from the street, the doctor’s old house still looked impressive, with its wide, squat veranda and stone facade, but from the side you could see how the bulk of the house was gone, stucco and wood collapsed in upon itself. The downstairs rear, where the fire had begun, was a blackened shell. Something whitely gauzy like a tattered flag blew in the wind from a broken window on the second floor, where Vivian’s room had been. The back stairs were exposed, and skeletal. The adjoining garage, that in another era had been a stable and carriage house, was mostly destroyed. The tall splendid oaks beside the house, that Dr. West had so loved, were ravaged. The eight-foot redwood fence at the front of the property, erected as a barrier against increased traffic and noise on Church Street, had been knocked down by firefighters and lay in sections. For much of a night the fire had “raged out of control” as the local papers had reported. “Thousands of gallons of water” had been dumped on the residence by Perrysburg firefighters. The cause of the fire was “under investigation” but “faulty” electrical wiring, commonplace in older homes in the city, was suspected. An elderly retired physician, Dr. Maynard West, 83, sole occupant of the house since his wife’s death in 1994, had “lost” his life in the blaze.

  Lost! The poignancy of the word struck Dr. West’s daughter.

  She wondered: How do you lose a life, where do you lose your life to, if your life is lost can it ever be found? If so, by whom? Or will it remain simply lost, in perpetuity? Vivian smiled, considering. Maybe there’s a cyberspace of lost lives, lost souls. Like Hades, where bodiless wraiths drift about like stroke victims, baffled by the cruelty of their fate.

  “Oh, shit.” Another time, she’d unknowingly driven her car into the cul-de-sac and would have to turn it around. As if she didn’t recognize these familiar surroundings. As if she hadn’t lived in that house, on this street, for eighteen years; as if the old, lost neighborhood of her childhood in Perrysburg, New York, wasn’t more real to her than where—wherever—she lived now.

  THIS SENSATION OF floating. This dryness in the mouth. Like a drug rush except no drug coursed in her veins. Maybe it meant, now both Vivian’s parents were gone, she was—what? Free?

  She’d stammered something like that to her brother Harvey when he’d first called. The shock of it. The wrongness. And the suddenness. “They’re both gone, Harvey? Our parents?”

  At the funeral home relatives warned Vivian not to check out her old house just yet. They knew her shaky medical history. “You’ll only upset yourself, Vivian.” She’d said, with the brashness of a twelve-year-old, “It’s appropriate to be upset, isn’t it, when your father has just died?” She spoke louder than she’d meant to speak, attracting attention. Anger flared up in her swift as flames, now she wasn’t medicated against such fits of emotion, and wasn’t drinking. But she hadn’t said When your father has died a horrible death, burned to death. She’d stopped herself before uttering these words.

  In fact he’d died, according to the coroner’s report, of smoke inhalation which had precipitated cardiac arrest. He’d died in terror, maybe that was worse than being burned alive, unknowing in his bed.

  In the Perrysburg Journal, it was grimly noted that the “badly charred remains” of Dr. West had been recovered from the fire. Vivian was wondering how a pathologist could examine such remains. She was wondering, staring at the closed casket, what those remains looked like. But her mind wasn’t capable of such a feat. She couldn’t even recall clearly what her father had looked like in life: the last time she’d seen him, six months before, and he’d hugged her good-bye and she’d involuntarily steeled herself against the new, peculiar smell of his breath that was like copper pennies held in the moist palm of a hand…She did think it was strange, a matter for ironic commentary, that the “badly charred remains” of an elderly man who, frail with myriad illnesses, had weighed less than one hundred forty pounds at the time of his death, required such a large, lavish, gleaming-ebony receptacle. Dr. West had ridiculed such excess. And seeing that he’d died in a fire, why hadn’t Harvey and the other relatives arranged to have his remains cremated? Vivian’s father had been the most practical and unsentimental of men, and he’d had a sense of humor.

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The poetry of death.

  Vivian began trembling badly. There was something here so large she couldn’t get her mind around it. The compulsive swallowing was getting worse. She knew that people were regarding her critically. Clinically. She was too thin in a shapeless black jersey dress that fell nearly to her ankles. She’d hidden her raw-aching eyes behind oversized black-pla
stic-rimmed very dark sunglasses that gave her, a lanky, pasty-skinned woman of fading beauty, the druggy-chic look of a rock singer of some bygone, depraved era. The seventies? She’d been born in 1966, which seemed to her, in a galaxy hurtling through space at a vertiginously fast speed, a very long time ago.

  “Viv. C’mon, don’t be like that. They’re only trying to be nice.” It was her brother Harvey, speaking in an undertone, gripping her arm. In this gathering, Harvey was the only individual, male or female, who had the right to grip her arm at the elbow and exert the pressure of authority; a pressure that hinted at coercion, actual pain. “They’re in a state of shock, too. You’re not the only one.”

  Vivian had no idea what Harvey was talking about. She whispered, “It was arson, wasn’t it? In that neighborhood.” For there’d been a number of suspected-arson fires in past years in the old Church Street neighborhood, which had changed, deteriorated you might say, since Harvey and then Vivian had left home in the mid-eighties. The large, handsome, single-family homes had been mostly converted to multi-family dwellings or office buildings; there were scattered vacant houses taken over by drug users and prostitutes in the grungy blocks near downtown Perrysburg and the river. After their mother’s death Harvey and Vivian had urged their father to sell the house and move elsewhere, to a condominium or retirement village in a suburb, and for years he’d resisted. Harvey had arranged for a burglar and fire alarm system to be installed in the house but, perversely, their father neglected to activate it. He wasn’t a paranoid old man, he said. He got along with his neighbors. And this house is the house of my happiness, he’d told them. My happiness that isn’t likely to come again.

  Harvey was telling her not to bring that subject up. Not here.

  “Arson means murder. Somebody murdered our father.”

  A sudden scissor-flash of light on the ebony basket. A line of poetry drifted into Vivian’s mind, as if out of that light. In times of stress, poetry was her consolation. But only stray lines, like shreds of cloud blown across the night sky. Things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar.

  Meaning what? That the blue guitar was impervious to fire?

  AFTER THE BURIAL Vivian left the cemetery without a word to anyone. Without a backward glance. Unlike Lot’s wife, she wasn’t going to be turned, in a heartbeat, into stone. Not Vivian West! She was observed to be unsteady in her high-heeled black shoes. Her hair that looked dyed black, too jet-black and lustrous for a woman on the down-side of thirty-five, was windblown, disheveled. Her crimson lipstick was smeared too thickly on her mouth and she was breathing through her mouth. Though she wasn’t medicated, and had not been drinking. Not yet that day.

  Harvey said, in explanation, “Viv’s in a state of shock. Let her alone.”

  DRIVING ALONG CHURCH STREET, gripping the steering wheel of her car tightly …I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of Vivian’s girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint.

  For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you’ve done it you can’t say clearly if that was what you’d wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.

  Three times she circled 819 Church before parking at the curb. The driveway was blocked by a sawhorse festooned in ugly yellow tape. CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER. At a nearby corner children were playing in the street, young black children shouting at one another. This had become a neighborhood of many children. And adolescents staring after Vivian’s car. When she got out of the car, carrying the Polaroid camera, someone shouted in her direction.

  It was a shout she decided to interpret as playful, impersonal. Something like, “Hey lady!” She acknowledged it with a quick wave of her hand, turned away. Probably they’d think she was an official photographer. The camera belonged to her husband. Don’t you think I should come with you? he’d asked uncertainly.

  No. Vivian wanted to be alone with this grief, and with the guilt of grief.

  It was still strange to her. She was married again after years of living more or less alone. He was assistant superintendent of the Rochester public schools. Twelve years older than Vivian, with two near-adult sons. Harvey had whistled at this news when Vivian told him. How’d you meet this guy? When did all this happen? Sounds good, Viv.

  Harvey had meant, this one sounds safe.

  Vivian was having difficulty holding the bulky camera steady. The smell of burnt things frightened her. She was trying very hard not to become nauseated. No medication, never again. Raw reality for me. She’d never been a junkie, she’d taken only legally prescribed drugs and yet those drugs had nearly destroyed her so you could argue that the rawest of reality was less of a risk. This, she’d vowed to her father who had seemed to believe her.

  A perverse thought came to her: Did firefighters often smell the odor of burning human flesh? Cooked flesh? Obviously, yes. You get used to it, she supposed. Like everything.

  The ruin of a house loomed above her. Before prices in the Church Street neighborhood began to fall in the mid-seventies, such a property in this revered residential neighborhood of Perrysburg would have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Built today on the outskirts of the city, on the Niagara River, it would be worth as much as $1,000,000. Beautiful hardwood floors, elegant moldings and wainscotting, silk wallpaper, regal ceilings, French doors opening out onto a landscaped terrace…Vivian thought with a shudder that if her father had survived the fire, losing the house would have killed him.

  Never leave the house of my happiness, how could I.

  In the past year or two Vivian’s father had become an aged, ailing man. A doctor doesn’t expect to succumb to the commonplace symptoms of his patients. Vivian had invited him to sell the house and move to Rochester to live with her and her husband, but of course he’d refused. And she hadn’t insisted. Because of course Vivian hadn’t really wanted her father with her. She loved him, but at a distance. Dr. West had been restless, easily bored. No Florida retirement for Dr. West. He’d only reluctantly retired from his practice at the age of seventy-six, for health reasons, yet he’d continued to treat neighborhood patients gratis. He consulted at a local women’s health clinic. He would have been miserable living with Vivian, or with anyone.

  Now it was too late, now he was dead, Vivian felt repentance, and she felt guilt. The luxury of guilt that sweeps over us too late.

  She stumbled in the churned, grimy snow. Looking for a way in? This was madness. Everywhere were warning signs. CAUTION: DO NOT ENTER. BY ORDER OF PERRYSBURG FIRE COMMISSIONER. Charred boards swung loose overhead, creaking in the wind. Broken glass lay underfoot. If she ventured inside what had once been the kitchen, debris might fall on her head. Why the hell are you doing this, didn’t I warn you, Harvey might ask. Vivian had no reply except, This is my grief.

  Overhead, ghostly shreds of curtains seemed to beckon to her, coyly.

  She was breathing hard, through her mouth. The first several Polaroids she’d taken were something of a disappointment. They might have been of any burnt-out house, conveying no special significance or emotion. She hadn’t counted on that.

  Maybe she’d expected the spirit of her dead father to be dwelling in this place? Absurd.

  There would be an official investigation into the fire but, apart from that, the stately old house at 819 Church Street, residence of Dr. Maynard West for more than forty years, no longer had meaning. Things as they are are changed. The property, two acres of land abutting a ravine and a wooded area at the rear belonging to the township, would be sold. The burnt-out ruin would be razed. Those heavy, round cobblestones rarely used as building materials any longer would be hauled away in dump trucks. The magnificent old oaks, taller than the house, would be uprooted, chainsawed, and ground to oblivion. Vivian was thinking that, if her father had died a natural death, the house would have been left to her and Harvey, jointly. That was the provision in Dr. West’s will. Neither would have wanted to live in it, even Harvey who’d remained in Perrysburg, and lived in a high-rise condomin
ium on the river, yet neither would have wanted to sell it, either. For once the past is gone, it’s gone. Vivian had not been especially happy in that past but it was hers. As, stricken by nightmares in her late twenties, she’d still cherished such visions, for they were hers.

  She smiled suddenly at an old memory. How, when they were children, Harvey and two friends had terrorized other neighborhood children, playing at jungle warfare along the banks of the ravine. The boys had carried sharpened spears decorated with black turkey vulture feathers. Harvey, ten years old, the chieftain, had striped his cheeks with red clay from the ravine. He’d been a husky, sly kid. Very smart, but rebellious at school. His gang had spared little Vivie because she was his sister. The reign of terror had ended after a boy nearly drowned in ditch water in the ravine, shoved and kicked over the side by Harvey and his gang…

  Now Harvey West, thirty-eight, was a responsible adult, an investor in the successful Shop-Rite Mall at the edge of Perrysburg, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotarians. He’d followed their father’s lead in investing in real estate and, Vivian supposed, he’d made some money. Always Harvey had been close-mouthed about his private affairs, including his love affairs. So she couldn’t be certain.

  Now the insurance money will come to us? Jointly? The thought was an unpleasant one: she didn’t want to profit from her father’s death. She didn’t want an ounce of happiness, of pleasure, from an elderly man’s suffering and death.

  She didn’t want Harvey to profit from it, either.

  As she was waiting for the last of the Polaroids to develop, watching as mysterious shapes, lines, faint colors emerged out of a chemical-smelling void, the thought came to her: Maybe Harvey had set the fire?

  The Boathouse. The Roostertail. Davy Deezz Gent’s Club. Café a Go-Go. The Starboard. Good Times. First & Ten Sports Club. Mitch’s Tavern & Bowling Lanes. Cruising Perrysburg’s riverfront district as dusk came swiftly on. There was a shabbily romantic cocktail lounge called Blue Guitar in one of the downtown hotels, she seemed to remember. She’d been taken there years ago by a man whose name she couldn’t now recall or didn’t wish to recall though she recalled vividly that he’d been a married man, and she’d liked that: the thrill of trespassing, of taking something belonging to another. If only temporarily.