Expensive People

by Joyce Carol Oates

  18

  That bare chest reminds me of a snapshot I have here in my desk drawer. I can find it easily enough—there's nothing in the drawer except snapshots and a few notes.

  Here it is. A photo of Father taken in Miami, many years ago. He is sitting squat on a beach blanket, under a lollipop umbrella, and that woman beside him must be Nada. She looks quite thin. Yes, this is an old snapshot, dated January 1948. Before my birth! Imagine Father and Nada, before my birth, in the Miami sun, and knowing nothing at all of what is coming: that's why Father is sitting so confidently, a cigar in his fingers, his big broad almost muscular chest posed for the camera, and Nada, dear Nada, is less confident, for she stares through her sunglasses at the camera as if it were a gun. Beside him, my mother looks small. I had never noticed that she was a small person; when I “saw” her in any public sense she was always in high heels. She is wearing a dark bathing suit, her hair is long. It makes me dizzy to think that the world of January 1948 was a world in which I did not even exist, I was not even a tiny seed in that woman's body—imagine me, not having existed! Imagine! I always start to weep, looking at this photograph. I hate my weakness but I can't help it. Because it is like staring up at the light from stars that are no longer there but have passed on in their mysterious orbits or exploded and turned to dust.

  The universe is encrusted with the dust of things no longer with us.

  19

  Next day I went to school, and then I did an extraordinary thing: I went out to the Main Street of Cedar Grove, which was also the Main Street of the city, and took a bus downtown. Downtown I wandered around a while in my usual daze and went to see a movie. The movie house was ancient and very large, and its offerings were advertised by shabby posters set out upon the sidewalk. A few bums stood around. I went inside the theater, hoping for a pleasant, cool darkness, but it was an ordinary warm darkness filled with people who did not smell very clean. The first movie was in black and white; don't ask me what it was about. Soldiers, music on the battlefield, shots of airplanes dropping bombs. When someone died I did not know whether to despair or rejoice because I could not remember who were the Americans, who were the enemy. Another movie, in technicolor, dealt with the horrors of a mad doctor's laboratory, secret beneath his Tudor house. One scene showed a woman being nailed inside a barrel, I don't know why; much blood. And yet another movie came on—what a wonderful theater! It was an Italian movie with subtitles but I liked it best, not having to understand the words. Actors in muted shades of gray, silhouetted against cloudy skies, walking about on an island. Hair blew in the wind. Eyes squinted. It occurred to me that Father and I had seen this movie one evening a few light-years ago. But still I did not understand it.

  When I came outside the sunlight bothered me. It was late afternoon, and the sun slants in an unpleasant way in our part of the globe at this time of day. I walked squinting past a newsstand and saw a headline that brought my eyes open wide: SNIPER CONFESSES. I stood trying to read the story while hands moved in, hurried and impatient, letting dimes fall in the slot and snatching out papers, and finally it seemed to me only right that I buy a paper myself, it was the only honest thing to do.

  Then I took the paper out tenderly and unfolded it, and there it was: SNIPER CONFESSES. The sniper turned out to be a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor who lived with his parents and his older sister. They were all Baptists and, believe it or not, the sniper was characterized as a “devoutly religious man.” He himself said, “I don't know why I did it. I don't know.” His photograph showed an apologetic little man with wild eyes.

  My brain reeled. I waited in a large, loose crowd for a bus, and inside I opened the paper and read feverishly. Yes, yes. But didn't they know he was lying? He had walked into a downtown police station to confess. His mother did not believe his story and refused to see him. His father and sister swore that he had been home when all the shootings had occurred. A neighbor lady said suspiciously, “He was always real quiet and kept to himself, but there was something funny about him …”

  Nada wasn't home when I got there; neither was Father. Libby hadn't turned up for days. Nada was out for cocktails or in bed with someone somewhere, and Father was drinking or maybe not drinking at all, but freshly shaven, spruced up, sparkling and jovial at a board meeting—who could tell? I felt how alone I was in this house and how alone I had always been, whether out running down the lane or jostled about on a city bus or safe at home in my own house.

  20

  In Nada's room things were scattered. As usual, the bed was unmade. An odor of powder and ink distracted me from what I was trying to figure out: but yes, there it was—inside her closet lay a suitcase, opened, but with nothing in it. I was not surprised by any of this. It registered upon my mind that the suitcase was there and she had not left yet.

  I went down to the basement and hunted up, in a cardboard box no one had bothered to unpack for the last two moves, a pair of Father's old hunting boots. Don't ask me what he was doing with hunting boots. I put these on right over my shoes and the fit was about right. I stomped around, testing them. Our basement was very large and rather damp, divided up into several sections: a kind of apartment, filled with unwanted furniture and various junk, a pool table with a stained top, and lesser rooms filled with things like a freezer, washer and dryer, cases of food in tin cans. I saw no signs of life in the basement. A mist seemed to rise up about me, suggested perhaps by the damp air and a leaking pipe that had sent a rivulet of water across the floor. I went upstairs with the boots still on and had the idea that as I ascended I would be walking up out of the drizzle that surrounded me. But the drizzle was deeper than I imagined.

  Now the next thing I did was to peek cautiously into the kitchen. No one was there. I went to get my rifle and returned to the kitchen, which I haven't described for you, but no matter, I am past describing it. I did not see anything as I sat out there. I could have been sitting in a country cemetery or down in a sewer, beneath a Christmas tree, anywhere— wherever I sat there was the drizzling vacuum. Consider me sitting there with my rifle, a child of eleven, pale, overwrought and yet curiously quiet, much too quiet, and you have penetrated one of the opaque secrets of life: how do these things happen? You ask with chaste dismay how they could have been allowed to happen, and this is the answer—just this simply!

  But don't get the impression that I was thinking anything like that. I was not thinking at all. I was in a suspended state some call waiting, when they see it from the outside. I was “waiting” in the way the frog (a statue that was also a sprinkler) on the lawn across the street is “waiting”—that is, I just was. I wasn't existing in addition to anything else. And then, when the door did finally open (hours later), I remained in the same state as if I knew it wasn't yet time for me to act. My body has always known what it planned before my brain has caught on.

  I heard Nada running up the front stairs. Was anyone with her? For some reason I did not think so. (This turned out to be right.) So I reached for the telephone with my cold steady hand and dialed Gus-tave's number. It never occurred to me that Gustave might not be in. I felt no relief or surprise when he answered, “Hello?” in his cautious voice. Always a shy child, I nevertheless blossomed like a depraved flower in the tension of this moment: you should have heard me talk to poor Gustave! I talked about my mother and father, their fight of the evening before. I talked about my math class. I asked him how he was, had he heard anything more about the sniper? And we chatted casually but aimlessly, the way children do over telephones, Gustave sighing occasionally to indicate that he had better things to do but not really wanting to hang up.

  You are going to be skeptical about my timing. But the timing seems clever only because it turned out well. It might not have turned out well, whereupon it would have been bad timing, but, as you'll see, it turned out very well. At a mysterious instant I suddenly cried out to Gustave, in the midst of a conversation about math, “Did you hear that? Somebody shot a gun right nearby!” And
I slammed the receiver down. And, losing no time, I ran out the back door with my rifle, heavy and ludicrous in Father's boots, and around the house away from the driveway—which was too open—so that I could inch along between our evergreens and the wall of the house. Near the front, at the corner, I waited for only a few seconds, and then the front door opened and Nada appeared on the walk with her suitcase. Her car was parked out at the curb and the driver's door was half open. But of this I took little notice, and indeed I hardly took notice of Nada herself, as if she no longer existed for me, except to raise the rifle and fire at her, the barrel of the gun swerving up to bring the telescope to my eye as if some terrible force were sucking it from me. And I didn't need to see what happened because I knew.

  At such moments you think of nothing. Nothing. Things come at you—low-hanging branches, doors, and you duck or reach out your hand appropriately and take hold of them or fend them off. They come singly and so you can handle them. I ran back alongside our house, through the dense shrubs, to a spot that had caught my eye earlier: a long bank of shrubs that screened us from our neighbors, or screened our neighbors from us. The soil was dark and rich and moist; lawn men had tilled it just the other day. I stood on the lawn and plunged the barrel of the rifle into the soft soil, on our neighbor's property now, and nosed it in with desperate strength. In the end I had to scoop up dirt with my fingers to cover the gun, and then I had to pat and smooth everything over, but finally it was hidden, and then, still without thinking, I ran back to the house and sprinted into the kitchen where the telephone was ringing.

  It was Gustave. He started to ask what was wrong and I screamed, “They shot my mother!” And again I left the phone, dangling this time, to run down to the basement, where I hit Father's boots together over a sink and got most of the dirt off, and tossed them back in the box. By the time I was upstairs again and ready to look out the front door I was really crying the way an eleven-year-old would cry. There was no stopping what happened to me after that point.

  21

  I suppose there is no need for me to say that when I pulled the trigger that time the world cracked in pieces around me? I did not come alive as I had in the past. No great heaving clots of blood rushed to my heart, to stir it into activity. I felt no surge of strength. What had been in the innermost hollow of my being dimmed to a spark, a pinpoint, and very slowly went out. Through the mist that rose above me I was able to make out certain faces, certain voices. Father, for one, and kindly official men who were policemen, though not dressed in uniform, nurses, a doctor. I must have been in a hospital. At times I drifted, free and helpless, at the bottom of the ocean, far from their ability to touch me, and at times I lay on a windswept desert far to the west of Cedar Grove.

  Well, this memoir is about Nada, and with her death it comes to an end, more or less. Since I cannot do anything gracefully, you won't be surprised that the memoir keeps on for a few pages, and it isn't just that I am afraid to die. Why should I be afraid to die? I have nothing to live for, after all.

  There is no point in a fake chronological report, because in the hospital I lost all sense of chronological time. Time was compressed and exploded in my brain. But outside me, in the real world, time did progress ordinarily, and someone must have called the police, after I pulled the trigger, someone did run up to her and to me, and out of the silent houses of Labyrinth Drive came maids and children, to watch the usual vehicles drive up and the usual uniformed people jump down. In my own delirium I caught sight of a boy of about four, crying hysterically; the Negro woman with him had to pick him up in her arms and run down the street to their house.

  You'll notice how I refrain from mentioning my mother. I am not going to look at the center of that circle, any more than I really looked at it through the telescope. And, later that day, the final edition of the evening paper was quick enough to have as a headline, CEDAR GROVE WOMAN SLAIN BY SNIPER, and a photograph not of Nada but of our home, described as a $95,000 home in the heart of Cedar Grove, but the photograph was a poor one and did not do our house justice. A baroque X marked the spot where she had fallen. Subsequent editions followed with photographs of Nada, described variously as a “beautiful woman,” a “writer of national reputation,” a “figure in local society.” But I don't want to go on with this. You can dig up those papers yourself.

  22

  Yes, she did die, and no, she won't be back again. It is as simple as that. I have used up years of my life trying to realize how simple it is. But let me call your attention to these photographs—quite simply stolen from Father, who forgot about them in a few months. They are photographs taken from Nada's room, pictures I had never seen, a little creased with my handling because I look at them constantly. The first one is of Nada as a young bride, and note the happy smile but the rather serious, suspicious eyes. Or am I imagining this? Her hair is fixed in a style that looks old-fashioned now. I like this snapshot very much though. Nada is wearing a spring suit and she is squinting into the sun. Perhaps it is Father she's looking at, Father with a loaded camera like a loaded gun, and if I could only reach out and warn her—tell her to get out, escape! But she squints and smiles forever at me, the son she is going to have and cannot escape having, as far from me in that snapshot as she ever was in life.

  And look at this one—this is a surprise. When I first saw it I must confess I was very upset. It is a snapshot of a girl of sixteen or so, standing on a porch, a front porch of a frame house. But if you look more closely you see that the girl is Nada, and her hair is cut short, she is smiling too widely, and the shadow of the porch cuts very unprofessionally across her face. On the back of the snapshot Nada's mother had written in her cramped hand, “Nancy June 1945.” But who is Nancy? And who is Nada's mother?

  They came to the funeral and they stayed around afterward, Nada's parents. No, they weren't dead as I had always thought, and they weren't peculiar either; they were just ordinary people. Nada's father had worked in a rubber plant for many years and was now retired; he was a janitor in a parochial grade school. Nada's mother was a thin, sickish, whining, rather deaf woman who had Nada's hawk-like nose but nothing else, nothing else! Their name was not Romanov but Ukrainian Rotnanow, and it had not been out of political necessity that they had come to America but for ordinary reasons: not emigres but immigrants. The father was neither madman nor genius but just an ordinary, very ordinary, apologetic, slow man with the slightest suggestion of a hump between his shoulders. Nothing more. I don't want to go into the details of those visits with them. Father handled it well enough, but it's better to forget about it. And Natashya was never Natashya but Nancy Nancy Romanow, born and baptized and confirmed in the Catholic Church, and therefore, according to their notion, saved in spite of everything. The Catholics believe that one can make a swift last-second prayer of repentance or something, and Mrs. Romanow argued with us about this as if we were selfishly holding Nada's soul back from its rightful place in heaven.

  This Nancy, this sudden intrusion of another person, was born in a small town in upstate New York with a ludicrous name: North Tona-wanda. Yes, it must be an Indian name. I have lulled myself to sleep many a night with that name, which hints of mysteries and beauties that are no doubt betrayed by a sky full of smoke from rubber plants, but anyway, North Tonawanda was the town she was born in, and there she went to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school, and Mrs. Romanow said, “She was always a good girl, not wild, a good girl? though her tone would change in a minute when she moved on to the subject of her good girl Nancy's running off to New York City. When Nancy at last bothered to write she explained nothing; she did not even ask for money, which of course meant the worst. Some time later she wrote her parents to announce her marriage and to promise them they'd be invited out soon, as soon as she and Elwood (“What a name, Elwood!” Mrs. Romanow said sourly) were settled, but of course no invitation ever came. So Nancy was a bad girl after all, and when she turned up as Natashya, slain by a sniper who was never to be appr
ehended, it would seem that North Tonawanda should have been the limits of her world after all.

  Other snapshots I have here—let's see—this dog-eared one of an even prettier Nancy, who holds up her chin aggressively and is surely contemplating New York City and its wonders, the darkness of which will allow a rebirth and a rebaptizing—this Nancy is standing with an obscure and anonymous girl friend, both in white summer dresses and looking rather coy. This time the background is the side of a garage with a few scrawny rose bushes. No background at all. My mind swirls to think of the leap Nancy-Natashya made, from the bland wooden-frame world of North Tonawanda to the bland headiness of Cedar Grove. Wonderful! Wonderful! But look closely at the snapshot, look at the face that girl had. This is in 1946, so she's seventeen and ready to graduate from high school and take off, and look at the face she has already—fine, serious, intelligent, the lips coy and closed. How beautiful she is! Her girl friend is smiling and showing her teeth, but not Nancy. Nancy's lips are closed. I have such an urge, such a desperate urge, to go to North Tonawanda and look up this girl friend, talk with her, force from her all of Nancy's secrets …

  You are wondering what happened after Nada's death? Well, nothing happened. This is a memoir and not a novel. I can't fabricate anything. The search for the sniper continued without success, dropping out of the newspapers with a stunning swiftness, and when I was well enough to talk I told Father that I had done it. I remember him bending to me, his ear moving toward my mouth—the pink swirls and coils of that ear—but he only laughed loudly, then he stopped laughing. He thought I was crazy. I told my doctor that I was the person who had killed my mother, and he too thought I was crazy, and I began shouting and screaming that I had done it, no one else, and everyone thought I was crazy, the bastards!