I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I…didn’t say.”

  “His I.D. says his last name is ‘Swann.’ What’s his relationship to you, your name’s ‘Halifax’?”

  “Officer, is this…necessary? I mean, is it necessary for you to ask…?”

  “Don’t get your back up, lady. Either this ‘Rickie’ is, or is not, your son. Which?”

  “Rickie is my…student.”

  “Student, ma’am?”

  “I am his eighth-grade teacher.”

  “Teacher? What’s he doing with you in your car, ma’am?”

  “I was…driving him home from school, Officer.”

  “After 6 P.M.? What kind of school would that be, ma’am?”

  “I was…you see, I was tutoring him. He’s behind in his studies. I was tutoring him after school, Officer.”

  “Tutoring! What kind of tutoring would that be, ma’am?”

  Mrs. Halifax was feeling faint. Her neck was aching from whiplash. A migraine headache had begun behind her teary eyes. Yet under duress in the presence of burly Jersey cops eyeing her with the alerted interest of fishermen who’ve netted a mermaid amid their catch of smelly wriggling fish she had lapsed into the stylized gestures of desperate female coquetry: lowered rapidly blinking eyelids, seductive/ shy gaze, soft husky suggestive voice.

  “Social studies, Officer.”

  It was then that Rickie intervened. All she’d taught him of winning friends and influencing people came into sudden improvised practice. He told the Jersey cops in a courteous frank voice that Mrs. Halifax lived in his neighborhood and often drove him home when he stayed after school for sports so his mom wouldn’t have to pick him up.

  And so they were spared. And so they were allowed to leave Metuchen. Mrs. Halifax hadn’t been the cause of the accident but her car had to be towed off the highway and she’d had to give a police report; she hoped to God the accident wasn’t significant enough to be written up in the local papers. (It wasn’t.) But she had to call a taxi to take her and Rickie Swann to East Orange, and she had to call her husband. Rickie had to call his mother. Excuses were fumblingly made. Rickie didn’t get home until 10:30 P.M. that night, and Mrs. Halifax didn’t get home until later. As soon as she entered the house there was Dwayne Halifax waiting for her, up from his Barcalounger and limping about the kitchen with fierce eyes and a hurt, bruised mouth. “Tutoring some kid? What kid? What the fuck’s going on here? Where’ve you been all this week? Where’s my station wagon? What the fuck’ve you done with my station wagon?”

  This was the first time Mrs. Halifax had reason to believe her husband might be deranged, and might be dangerous. For the station wagon wasn’t his, not any longer. How could it be his? Maybe it was registered in his name but that was just a technicality. She was the one who had a job, she was the one bringing in a paycheck she was the one who required transportation, it was her station wagon.

  “Whore! Think I can’t smell you!”

  Dwayne Halifax’s fist leapt out to strike Mrs. Halifax’s already lacerated face. She uttered a short sharp cry of pain. She thought, dazed It’s TV. It isn’t real. But there was Dwayne Halifax’s face contorted with rage. Mrs. Halifax turned, and ran heavily upstairs. Locked herself in the bathroom. Oh, she was bleeding again: where the nurse at the medical center had put Band-Aids on her face, blood was seeping out. Yet she knew she was lucky even so. The worst had not yet happened. Rickie Swann had not been taken from her. And lucky too that Dwayne Halifax wasn’t the strapping husky youth he’d been when she had first fallen in love with him. The blow he’d given her with his atrophied right hand hadn’t broken her nose or loosened any of her teeth.

  He knows. But he can’t know.

  Can he?

  NOW CAME THE time of renunciation. Now, the bittersweet time of chastity. Mrs. Halifax had long anticipated it.

  Explaining to Rickie who stared at her disbelieving that they must stop seeing each other. Until he was eighteen.

  Rickie protested, no! No no no.

  Mrs. Halifax spoke quietly. The world was preparing to destroy them, she feared. “My husband, your mother…”

  Rickie protested, no! His mom didn’t know a fucking thing.

  “But my husband, Rickie. He suspects.”

  Rickie knew nothing of Dwayne Halifax. His eyes registered blank at the mention of a husband. The very concept seemed to elude him. Mrs. Halifax hadn’t decided whether she would tell Rickie how Dwayne had struck her already lacerated face.

  “Those vulgar Jersey cops, Rickie. You heard them. If they hadn’t believed you. If they’d called your parents. Our love would be exposed, now. I would lose my job, and…” Mrs. Halifax paused. She had no wish to ponder what would be her fate, professionally and legally; though she must have known that having sexual relations with a minor constituted statutory rape, and being involved with any of her students intimately constituted grounds for immediate dismissal, yet she hadn’t thought of these matters, for it seemed to her that such sublunary things didn’t apply to her. Gently she said, “No one can understand our love but us, Rickie. You know that, darling, don’t you?”

  Rickie nodded, yes! He knew.

  Rickie had come round to believing as Mrs. Halifax did, they’d been lovers a thousand years ago. In more than one lifetime they’d been lovers. He didn’t understand it completely, as Mrs. Halifax understood it, but he knew it had something to do with “incarnation”—or maybe “reincarnation”—and “transmigration of souls.” It was a fact, how their eyes had met and sort of melted into each other that afternoon in Mrs. Halifax’s classroom. And the way each time they made love Rickie felt safer in Mrs. Halifax’s arms like her white soft body was a big balloon floating in warm water and as long as he clung to the balloon he was safe, he wouldn’t drown. But at the same time—he knew this was weird, even kind of freaky—he felt stronger, too, like he was empowered to kill, to take any life, the way a god is empowered.

  Mrs. Halifax was saying terrible words. Yet so calmly, gently.

  “It’s the only way, Rickie. For now. To preserve our love, we must say good-bye temporarily.”

  “ ‘Temporarily’—what’s that?”

  “Until you’re eighteen, darling.”

  “Three fucking years—isn’t it?”

  “Those years will pass swiftly, darling. I promise.”

  “I could kill him! Your h-husband.”

  “Excuse me, Rickie? What?”

  “I could! I have the power.”

  Mrs. Halifax felt a thrill of almost sexual pleasure. He does love me. Adores me. Here’s proof.

  But she insisted no, no. Better that they never see each other again than that Rickie commit so reckless an act. Better to renounce their love. They must say good-bye, and they must not seek each other out. They must not even call each other on their cell phones. At school, they must not make eye-contact. This, they must vow.

  IN HIS STEP-DAD’S tool box covered in cobwebs Rickie located the claw hammer. Heavy! In his mind the hammer had been more of some kind of idea of a hammer but in actual life, it was heavy, and bigger than he’d expected. Must’ve weighed ten pounds. He swung it in his hand. He wondered, would it fit into his backpack?

  IT WAS RICKIE who weakened. He called Mrs. Halifax on his cell phone. His voice was so raw, at first he couldn’t speak. Mrs. Halifax had been drinking (at midday, not like her!) and immediately she succumbed. The Chevy station wagon had been repaired, she swung by to pick her eager young lover up behind Home Depot and they drove to one of their secret places, a marshy area off the Turnpike north of Newark Airport where an access road led to a cul-de-sac amid six-foot rushes that rustled romantically in the wind and dank pools of standing water in which part-submerged tires crouched like alligators.

  It was then and in that place that they knew: their love was hopeless and yet it was hopeless to resist their love.

  WHEN THAT EVENING Mrs. Halifax returned to her wood-frame and brick home on Cedar Drive in which she continued to live with Dwayne Halifax
she steeled herself for her husband’s accusatory or caustic or threatening remarks but a surprise awaited her: it was Dwayne’s new strategy to ignore her. In the Barcalounger in the TV room the balding pot-bellied man did not deign to glance around at her as if she, the sole breadwinner in the family, the one to pay their insurance premiums, were nothing but a servant! Still, Mrs. Halifax murmured an excuse. Where she’d been, and why. For always she had an excuse. And in her arms a stack of student folders. “Guess I’ll be up late tonight.” Mrs. Halifax spoke earnestly, innocently. Her nipples were still erect from her lover sucking at them and the soft white flesh of her inner thighs chafed as if on fire.

  “MRS. HALIFAX, I have the means.”

  Have the means. Such a strange phrase from the boy’s lips.

  “Oh, Rickie. Noooo.”

  Kisses to stop his mouth. But he wrenched his mouth away. He was panting, stubborn. “A hammer. That’s all you need.”

  A hammer? What was Rickie talking about? Mrs. Halifax pressed her hands against her ears, her brain was blanking out.

  Uncanny how she’d been so absolutely the dominant one at the first, by degrees Rickie Swann was taking on a new ardent urgent role. His voice cracked less frequently. It was becoming a man’s voice. He’d gained weight. He called her on her cell phone at all hours though weakly she’d asked him not to call her at home, at night.

  “Like, ‘household accident.’ I was reading some statistics.”

  “Rickie, what statistics? Where?”

  Dwayne was insured for $90,000. Not much, with inflation. But wasn’t there double indemnity or something, accidental death? A man in his physical condition, atrophying limb, slipping in the bathtub. Falling down the stairs. Falling down the cellar stairs. There were diverse means.

  “They always suspect the spouse, Rickie. On TV.”

  “You wouldn’t be there, Mrs. Halifax. You’d be, like, at school.”

  “Even so…”

  “Let me! Mrs. Halifax, I want to.”

  She’d told him about Dwayne striking her that night. Other times, before he’d decided to give her the cold shoulder, shoving her and threatening her. Maybe she shouldn’t have told Rickie. The boy was so excitable and protective where Mrs. Halifax was concerned.

  “Oh, Rickie. Sweetie. I don’t think so.”

  That was one evening. Another time, maybe ten days later, Rickie showed up wearing the black backpack she’d bought him at the Nickel and a look in his young fierce face warned her He’s got the hammer. He’ll kill you then somehow himself and she felt a sensation of drowning, but this turned out to be ridiculous paranoid thinking for all Rickie wanted to do that evening was go bowling! At the Shamrock, he suggested, but Mrs. Halifax said definitely no, she drove them to the Starlite Lounge & Bowling Alley in New Brunswick. Whatever would happen, would happen. She was resigned by this time. She’d had a pregnancy scare, and she was all right now but during the scare she’d been resigned. She seemed to know they’d had children together in the past. Of course, they’d had children together in the past. And it had happened not once but many times. Better for them to know nothing of what’s to come. Her colleagues at Grover Cleveland were watching her covertly she knew. Entering the teachers’ lounge, she’d hear them go suddenly quiet. She’d see the exchange of glances. She knew. Though no one would confront her. No one dared accuse her. Better for her not to imagine: lurid news headlines, tabloid TV. Possibly she’d be arrested. Possibly, arrested, she would be several months pregnant with Rickie Swann’s child. She would have the baby in the women’s prison. Or maybe, her sentence would be suspended by the court, she’d be on probation. An injunction not to see her former student ever again. Or maybe—oh God, this was scary!—Rickie Swann would hammer out Dwayne Halifax’s brains and track through the house incriminating prints from his Nike jogging shoes in blood, tissue, brains, and splintered skull fragments while she, Mrs. Halifax, was at a teachers’ conference in Trenton! Or maybe, and she was leaning in this direction, they would another time and more permanently renounce their love. They would become celibates, saints.

  But tonight was bowling. Tonight they drove to New Brunswick to the Starlite Lounge & Bowling Alley. Where nobody knew them, nor gave them more than a fleeting glance. A still-young mother and her teenaged son, they looked like. Except these two got along really really well. Laughing and teasing, even kissing. Naturally Rickie was the better bowler, long-limbed, fast, giving the ball a deft twist of his wrist as he released it, but Mrs. Halifax wasn’t bad considering she hadn’t bowled since she’d been a girl. Gripping the heavy ball against her breasts she hurried forward in quick mincing steps like a shore bird, breathless, blushing, stooping to release the ball without giving it much momentum so amid the brutal festive sounds of other balls striking pins her own made its slow way forward only to thunk! in the gutter. Mrs. Halifax sighed, “Oh damn!” but Rickie told her, “It’s okay, Mrs. Halifax, try again. You get a second chance.”

  Part Four

  Three Girls

  IN STRAND USED BOOKS on Broadway and Twelfth one snowy March early evening in 1956 when the streetlights on Broadway glimmered with a strange sepia glow, we were two NYU girl-poets drifting through the warehouse of treasures as through an enchanted forest. Just past 6:00 P.M. Above light-riddled Manhattan, opaque night. Snowing, and sidewalks encrusted with ice so there were fewer customers in the Strand than usual at this hour but there we were. Among other cranky brooding regulars. In our army-surplus jackets, baggy khaki pants, and zip-up rubber boots. In our matching wool caps (knitted by your restless fingers) pulled down low over our pale-girl foreheads. Enchanted by books. Enchanted by the Strand.

  No bookstore of merely “new” books with elegant show window displays drew us like the drafty Strand, bins of books untidy and thumbed through as merchants’ sidewalk bins on Fourteenth Street, NEW THIS WEEK, BEST BARGAINS, WORLD CLASSICS, ART BOOKS

  50% OFF, REVIEWERS’ COPIES, HIGHEST PRICE $1.98, REMAINDERS

  25¢—$1.00. Hard-cover/paperback. Spotless/battered. Beautiful books/cheaply printed pulp paper. And at the rear and sides in that vast echoing space massive shelves of books books books rising to a ceiling of hammered tin fifteen feet above! Stacked shelves so high they required ladders to negotiate and a monkey nimbleness (like yours) to climb.

  We were enchanted with the Strand and with each other in the Strand. Overseen by surly young clerks who were poets like us, or playwrights/actors/artists. In an agony of unspoken young love I watched you. As always on these romantic evenings at the Strand, prowling the aisles sneering at those luckless books, so many of them, unworthy of your attention. Bestsellers, how-tos, arts and crafts, too-simple histories of. Women’s romances, sentimental love poems. Patriotic books, middlebrow books, books lacking esoteric covers. We were girl-poets passionately enamored of T. S. Eliot but scornful of Robert Frost whom we’d been made to memorize in high school—slyly we communicated in code phrases from Eliot in the presence of obtuse others in our dining hall and residence. We were admiring of though confused by the poetry of Yeats, we were yet more confused by the lauded worth of Pound, enthusiastically drawn to the bold metaphors of Kafka (that cockroach!) and Dostoevsky (sexy murderer Raskolnikov and the Underground Man were our rebel heroes) and Sartre (“Hell is other people”—we knew this), and had reason to believe that we were their lineage though admittedly we were American middle class, and Caucasian, and female. (Yet we were not “conventional” females. In fact, we shared male contempt for the merely “conventional” female.)

  Brooding above a tumble of books that quickened the pulse, almost shyly touching Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Crane Brinton’s The Age of Reason, Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Mann’s Death in Venice—there suddenly you glided up behind me to touch my wrist (as never you’d done before, had you?) and whispered, “Come here,” in a way that thrilled me for its meaning I have something wonderf
ul/unexpected/startling to show you. Like poems these discoveries in the Strand were, to us, found poems to be cherished. And eagerly I turned to follow you though disguising my eagerness, “Yes, what?” as if you’d interrupted me, for possibly we’d had a quarrel earlier that day, a flaring up of tense girl-tempers. Yes, you were childish and self-absorbed and given to sulky silences and mercurial moods in the presence of showy superficial people, and I adored and feared you knowing you’d break my heart, my heart that had never before been broken because never before so exposed.

  So eagerly yet with my customary guardedness I followed you through a maze of book bins and shelves and stacks to the ceiling ANTHROPOLOGY, ART/ANCIENT, ART/RENAISSANCE, ART/MODERN, ART/ASIAN, ART/WESTERN, TRAVEL, PHILOSOPHY, COOKERY, POETRY/MODERN where the way was treacherously lighted only by bare sixty-watt bulbs, and where customers as cranky as we two stood in the aisles reading books, or sat hunched on footstools glancing up annoyed at our passage, and unquestioning I followed you until at POETRY/MODERN you halted, and pushed me ahead and around a corner, and I stood puzzled staring, not knowing what I was supposed to be seeing until impatiently you poked me in the ribs and pointed, and now I perceived an individual in the aisle pulling down books from shelves, peering at them, clearly absorbed by what she read, a woman nearly my height (I was tall for a girl, in 1956) in a man’s navy coat to her ankles and with sleeves past her wrists, a man’s beige fedora hat on her head, scrunched low as we wore our knitted caps, and most of her hair hidden by the hat except for a six-inch blond plait at the nape of her neck; and she wore black trousers tucked into what appeared to be salt-stained cowboy boots. Someone we knew? An older, good-looking student from one of our classes? A girl-poet like ourselves? I was about to nudge you in the ribs in bafflement when the blond woman turned, taking down another book from the shelf (e. e. cummings’ Tulips and Chimneys—always I would remember that title!), and I saw that she was Marilyn Monroe.