I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The school nurse asked why I was crying, why I was so nervous, what were the bite marks on my wrist, she would keep my secrets if I had secrets she promised. But she lied.

  I know, it’s better for Jorie now. It’s better for all of us.

  Mom said Thank God. It’s over, thank God.

  But in the jail Mom is on “suicide watch.” I want to see my mom, and so does Calvin. Today. Right now!

  You promised.

  Mrs. Halifax and

  Rickie Swann: A Ballad

  It has all happened before. A thousand thousand times. Like drowning, your life flashing in front of your eyes. Something like that.

  WHY RICKIE SWANN was only just in eighth grade at his age of almost fifteen towering over younger classmates was he’d been kept back twice and each time unjustly Rickie believed. The first time, so long ago he could barely remember, his mother hadn’t been married yet to Dexter Swann and he’d been “temporarily placed” in a foster home in Jersey City so he’d had two years of first grade and the second time, fifth grade in East Orange, he’d had to take the year over for reasons of tension decifit disease or some bullshit like that. So by junior high at Grover Cleveland Rickie was the tallest boy in all his classes and by eighth grade he was as tall as some of his teachers who were uneasy in his presence and tended to assign him a seat at the very rear of the classroom. Also Rickie was skinny and twitchy as a snake balanced on its tail. His eyes often glittered with fury and obscure hurt like chips of mica. His jaws glittered with a silvery fawn-colored stubble. His hair looked like broom sage straggling past his collar. He had an Adam’s apple like something stuck midway in his throat. He had few friends at Grover Cleveland and his teachers rarely called upon him in class because he had a disconcerting habit of staring blankly at them as if unhearing, and if he did manage to mumble an answer it was likely to be wrong. Nor did his teachers discipline him when suddenly he might unwind his long legs from beneath his desk and walk out of the room wiping his nose on the edge of his hand.

  Rickie’s grades were unpredictable. Sometimes he did surprisingly well in math. He wrote slowly in upward-slanting sentences with large balloon-like letters. Teachers encouraged him but often he gave up midway in a test, crumpled up his paper, and lurched out of the room muttering to himself.

  In Mrs. Halifax’s fourth-period social studies class Rickie Swann had been assigned a seat at the rear of the room. Rarely did Mrs. Halifax call upon him. Not that she was afraid of him. (Mrs. Halifax wasn’t afraid of any student!) Before their love affair his grades were C, C-. None of Mrs. Halifax’s colleagues at Grover Cleveland would recall her having mentioned Rickie Swann in their hearing when in the teachers’ lounge they spoke of their students and compared notes.

  What do you think of Rickie Swann?

  Disturbed kid. Waiting to explode.

  Ever seen his mother?

  In fact Mrs. Swann never came to Grover Cleveland to meet with her son’s teachers though she’d been so advised. Never came to PTA meetings. She had a distrust of anything to do with the government and this included public schools. Yet Mrs. Swann had her own standards of decency and these were exacting. Often she commented on Rickie’s failure to adequately wash and the fact that his underarms, newly bristling with hairs, swam in slime. His boy-equipment as Mrs. Swann quaintly phrased it was growing, she knew, and would soon cause problems. By eighth grade, Rickie had begun to shrink from mirrors. His face was often broken out in flaming rashes. Though since he’d shot up to five feet ten there were shameless females who winked at him in the street murmuring in his wake what sounded like Sexy boy kiss-kiss! making him want to howl and pound his fists and tear at somebody’s throat with his teeth.

  You had to admire Rickie’s mom. The few friends Rickie had in the neighborhood thought she was some character. Not bad-looking for a woman so old (she was maybe thirty-five) and funny like some TV comedian. She’d toss a wash cloth at Rickie: “Wash.” When a patina of grime had been building up on Rickie’s hands, forearms, neck of that sickly gray hue of the air of industrial New Jersey she’d toss a steel wool pad at him: “Scrub.” The same high-potency deoderant she purchased for her husband Dexter Swann she was likely to shove at Rickie: “Use this. Now.” Before Rickie grew taller than his mother and outweighed her by twenty pounds Mrs. Swann would dare to seize his chin in her hand and examine his teeth as you’d examine a horse’s teeth: “Brush.” Now that Rickie towered over his mom and flared up sometimes in bad temper, she’d ceased this practice.

  Whoever Rickie’s mom once was, she was now Mrs. Dexter Swann. Rickie called her Mom and her husband Dexter Swann (who was Rickie’s step-dad, not his actual dad, but had adopted Rickie as his own son) called her hon. She had a shrewd ferret face and elbows sharp as hammer prongs. Many times during the nine years they’d been alone together, a family of “two survivors,” she’d told Rickie of how she had been abandoned by her unknown mother as a week-old infant, left to be eaten alive by rats in a Dumpster behind a Taco Bell in Jersey City, New Jersey—“But I sure as hell didn’t abandon my kid.” Rickie was made to know that she’d had the opportunity and possibly the wish to abandon him not once but many times. Mrs. Swann’s eyes were glittery like her son’s, vigilant and derisive. Growing up an orphan with no “siblings” or anybody in the world who “gave a shit” about her had given her an air of suspicion tinged with mirth. Her customary stance was hands on her hips, palms up in mockery.

  Rickie tried to love his step-father who spent most of his time now indoors in a Barcalounger noisily sucking oxygen through tubes in his nose and flicking through ninety-nine TV channels. Mr. Swann suffered from emphysema caused by years of inhaling the toxic stink of hogs bound for slaughter. Mr. Swann said the hogs, unlike cows, knew where they were headed and so shat in a continuous diarrhetic stream you could smell not only in the cab of his truck but everywhere in the truck’s wake. Something of the brooding diarrhetic melancholy of the doomed hogs clung to Mr. Swann even in his retirement years with his “new family” which he’d hoped would have been a happy time. Over the years Rickie had grown accustomed to the smell of his step-dad and hardly ever noticed it any longer.

  What was weird was: how Rickie loved his mother but was so nervous of her he couldn’t sit still for more than two or three minutes at mealtimes for instance. Couldn’t watch TV with his step-dad because his mom was likely to be present not watching TV herself but seeing it through Rickie’s eyes so if for instance a sexually provocative female appeared on screen Rickie’s mom would know exactly how this looked to Rickie and would tease: “Eyes wide shut, kiddo.” Mrs. Swann seemed to be on intimate terms with Rickie’s boy-equipment and sensed its every quiver and throb. Rickie had come to think he’d have to murder his mom just to stop her X-ray eyes on him, her disgust and her derision which he knew was warranted, or to protect her from disappointment in him when he brought home the kind of report cards Rickie Swann hadn’t any choice but to bring home for her signature. Not just low grades for his studies but poor for such mysterious categories as deportment, citizenship, peer interaction. They were like Siamese twins, Rickie thought, him and his mom, that kind of twin where one is growing out of the spine of the other like a misshapen tree, or, the scariest sight Rickie had ever seen, one night on the Discovery Channel, one twin growing upside-down out of the other’s skull.

  Rickie loved his mom but if he had to kill her it would be her skull he’d smash, with maybe a hammer. His step-dad kept tools in the basement and among them a claw hammer. Not something sharp. Not a knife. It made him queasy to think of stabbing and of blood. Rickie guessed a skull could be smashed like crockery and without pain. You come up behind the unsuspecting victim and bring the hammer down hard and the person would fall unconscious in an instant like a struck steer and would be dead and never know what had happened, still less who’d done it.

  Rickie would never do such a thing, though. Rickie loved his mom too much.

  SOME OF HER pupils hated and feared h
er. Some of her pupils loved her. Mrs. Halifax was cool, they had to agree.

  What she was mostly was a tease. She teased her favorite pupils but she teased pupils who pissed her off. So you never knew where you stood with her. If Mrs. Halifax winked at you that was usually a good sign, though not always. If she winked at the class over your head that was definitely not a good sign. What sounded like praise at first—“Why, Jimmy, did you write this report all by yourself?”—had a way of turning sarcastic with a sly slippage of her voice and a downward pucker of her mouth.

  Though she wasn’t much taller than most of her students, Mrs. Halifax exuded the authority of a giantess. She was a compact little woman with a bosom that looked, in profile, like nubs of extra limbs protruding from her body. Her face gave off a perpetual dramatic heat though her skin was pale as cold cream. Her eyes were a warm glistening brown. She licked her lips that were full and shinily red like plastic cherries. Often she stroked her bare, downy forearms and her bosom as she might pet a cat. The least mature boys in her classes staring at Mrs. Halifax’s sensuous caressing hands were made to feel anxious. The more mature boys were made yet more anxious, antsy. Her rust-colored hair was sometimes twisted into some kind of teacher top-knot on her head but at other times fell loose and wavy to her shoulders. Though her official subject was social studies, Mrs. Halifax sometimes read poetry to her classes, and there was the belief that, though she credited these poems to actual poets, they were her own efforts, mysterious to even the brightest students. When Mrs. Halifax read these poems, which were laced with such words as tempest—sorrow—destiny—soul—soul-mate—beyond the grave— her beautiful brown eyes filled not with mockery but with tremulous tears.

  Because we were fated. What a soul-mate is, is fate.

  Which is why I am not guilty. Never will anyone convince me in any way I AM GUILTY.

  SO IT FIGURED: Rickie Swann was fated, too. In that habit of drifting downtown after school instead of returning home where his step-dad Dexter Swann who wasn’t a bad guy was wheezing through plastic tubes in his nose and surfing the TV and his mom was—well, but you never knew, did you? Maybe Mrs. Swann would be waiting for her son to drift back home or maybe, which was happening more frequently lately, Mrs. Swann wouldn’t be home herself but at the grocery store so she’d return sometimes after dark with that icepick look signaling to her men You two mouths are hungry? Me, too. If they were lucky they got TV dinners heated up in the microwave. To avoid these encounters in the fall of his fifteenth year Rickie fell into the habit of hanging out at the 7-Eleven or he’d prowl a nearby mini-mall hanging out at Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Shamrock Lounge & Bowling Lanes where older guys who were friends of his, sort of, had jobs. And one evening back of the Shamrock Rickie saw a car like his mom’s secondhand Mazda including the license plate number beginning TZ and he thought, What the fuck? and entered the bowling alley by a rear door little knowing how this was destiny, as Mrs. Halifax would later explicate to him, his life was to be changed forever for a reason.

  “Mom?”

  Like it was a movie scene where edgy music comes up Rickie stood staring and gaping at Mrs. Swann in a gold lamé turtleneck and tight-fitting black nylon trousers as she was laughing, drinking beer, bowling, and obviously having a terrific time in the company of a coarse-skinned man of about her age with a chunky ferret face and icepick eyes like her own except this guy was muscled and tattooed and wore his graying ginger hair tied back in a ponytail, and he had sideburns that looked gouged into his cheeks, and a beery belly laugh as with a swaggering rush he sent a black bowling ball sliding, slipping, careening down the alley to crash squarely into the pins and send them all flying—“Stri-ike!” Mrs. Swann protested, “Hey! How’d you do that?” swiping at the guy’s bared bicep with her fist like she seriously doubted he’d rolled a perfect strike legitimately except: how can you cheat in bowling? In plain view of any spectator? Rickie saw through a shimmering haze that the ponytail guy wasn’t alone with his mother but there was a fattish girl of about eleven with them, her sturdy right leg in a brace, and the girl’s face was so soft and pie-shaped and her mouth so slack, you had to figure she was mentally disadvantaged as you were taught to say at school not retarded or a moron. Who were these people? Why was Mrs. Swann hanging out with them? Rickie figured the girl was the daughter of the ponytail guy judging by how tenderly he regarded her clumsy antics as she took her turn at bowling, tottering and lurching forward dragging her stiff leg, swinging and releasing her ball (child-sized, speckled orange) to drop onto the alley like a rock that rolled forward slowly—slowly!—toward the pins and after several slow seconds the orange-speckled ball veered into the gutter failing to knock down a single pin. Which Rickie was thinking scornfully was fucking hard to accomplish.

  Yet the girl was loved, you could see. Her second ball too she threw like the first, and it rolled into the gutter. Yet her daddy grinned and applauded her.

  “My turn!”

  Now came Mrs. Swann all elbows and bared gums. Whom Rickie had never seen bowling in all their life together and who’d for fucking sure never taken him bowling. Mrs. Swann in her gold lamé turtleneck reckless and show-offy as a teenaged girl for the benefit of the ponytail guy, yet with unexpected skill gave her ball a twist of the wrist as she released it so that it rolled swiftly and unerringly down the alley to strike the pins with such force that eight of them went flying; and with her second ball she knocked out the remaining two to score what’s called a split, pretty damned good, Rickie had to concede, though Rickie was upset, and Rickie was resentful, seeing how the ponytail guy and the fat girl with her leg in a brace were applauding his mom. His mom! The guy called her “Lenore” and the girl called her “Aunt Lenore.” Was that his mom’s fucking name, Lenore? She’d never told Rickie her own son.

  Noise in the Shamrock was deafening. Not just the bowlers but country rock music blaring overhead. Or was it a roaring in Rickie’s ears. Not knowing if he should duck out of there before his mom saw him or should he saunter over and say “Hi, Mom!” and let the bitch know he knew, and as Rickie hesitated Mrs. Swann glanced around to see him and her face froze and for a terrible moment—Rickie would remember this all his life, he knew—it seemed almost as if his mother would not acknowledge him. Then she relented. In a kind of guilty voice, but grinning—“Kiddo, hey. Long as you’re here, this is my big brother Stan and my sweet little niece Cleopatra.”

  Big brother? Little niece? What?

  It was like that, who was it that Bible person turned to a pillar of salt for seeing something forbidden by God, how Rickie stood rooted to the spot blinking at his mother who was smiling so widely at him her pale pink barracuda gums were exposed like some private part of her body. Rickie was too shocked to protest But Mom: you always said you were an orphan! No family! Like a TV switched off his brain had gone blank. “Stan”—the tattooed muscle-guy with the ponytail who must’ve been Rickie’s uncle—nodded at him and muttered a greeting. “Cleopatra”—the fattish girl who must’ve been Rickie’s cousin, the only cousin known to him—smiled shyly sticking a finger in her mouth. But Rickie couldn’t croak out any kind of greeting. Oh shit, was he tongue-tied. Mrs. Swann was advancing toward him with a warning icepick look, “This is our secret, Rickie, okay? No need to rat to your dear old dad.” In the next alley a bowling ball black as pitch rushed into pins with a deafening clatter. Rickie felt as if he’d been hit in the gut backing out of that hellish place stammering what sounded like, “Sure, Mom. I guess…” though his words were lost amid bowlers’ shouts and hyena laughter.

  Run, run! Running into the night Rickie was panting and sobbing in a marshy field somewhere near the Turnpike where he ran until the soles of his sneakers were layered in mud the size of elephants’ hooves and what came into his dazzled head was lines of a poem his social studies teacher had recited to them that day Run run though I await you run little rabbit run from your fate, you but he couldn’t remember the rest of the words, he sank to his knees, filled
with a murderous rage for that woman who was his mother he’d trusted who’d betrayed him but mostly Rickie was bawling like a baby, oh Christ he wanted to die.

  NOW RICKIE WAS staying out of school, didn’t give a fuck if they sent a notice to his mom. His mom! And when he did show up, he was sullen-faced and disheveled like some kid with a gun in his backpack you wouldn’t want to cross. (There was no metal detector checkpoint at Grover Cleveland. The school was only a junior high!) Rickie’s teachers nervously took note of him, and were secretly relieved when he cut their classes. Except Mrs. Halifax, Rickie’s fourth-period teacher, began at last to notice him. That woundedness in the boy’s face…

  Seeing how the skinny gangly boy she’d never paid much attention to previously sat slumped in his desk at the back of the room staring into space with hooded eyes and his boy-face haggard as a skull. She was tempted to tease him, to wake him up, but something held her back. He was one of those Mrs. Halifax who hadn’t an ounce of liberal sentimentality in her veins and was color blind on the issue filed away under lost cause. But now she became distracted by him. His presence. A tragic presence it began to seem. Among the ordinary boys and girls who were her pupils. And how ordinary, how banal, the day’s lesson, the textbook in her hand, how ordinary Mrs. Halifax’s own life she’d borne bravely like a burning candle aloft in wayward winds determined it should not be blown out, it should not be extinguished until she’d come to a fulfillment of her destiny thinking That Swann boy, he’s beautiful shocked at what she was seeing at the rear of her familiar fluorescent-lighted classroom on the second floor of Grover Cleveland Junior High in East Orange, New Jersey, as in the monumental works of Caravaggio a holy redeeming light radiates not from celestial sources but from the potent Mystery of the inner spirit. Dazed by this vision Mrs. Halifax stood for a moment speechless at the front of the classroom slowly stroking her downy forearms and the undersides of her heavy breast in a white angora sweater and and there came a sting of moisture in her eyes now tender, not-mocking and she said, “Rickie Swann. Please see me immediately after class.”