Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The examiner asks another question and this time I can’t stay still. I run to the end of the table and back again, giving the answer as I run. Oscar thumps his elbows on the table as he gives the answer, racing me. His wheelchair trembles.

  “Yes, yes, that is correct … yes.…”

  The examiner smiles vaguely at Oscar and me. That look in his face: Oscar and I both recognize it.

  “The next question will involve a slightly more complicated process of thought,” the examiner is saying. What is this man’s name? I know he is a doctor, I heard his name only a minute ago, but I can’t remember.

  “What are the days of the week?”

  I answer at once: “M​o​n​d​a​y​T​u​e​s​d​a​y​W​e​d​n​e​s​d​a​y​T​h​u​r​s​d​a​y​F​r​i​d​a​y​S​a​t​u​r​d​a​y​S​u​n​d​a​y​!”

  But Oscar says nothing.

  He throws himself forward against the table. He begins to stammer and then cannot speak.

  After a pause the examiner says: “… the months of the year?…”

  Oscar cannot answer. I see this at once and I look away from him as I answer: “J​a​n​u​a​r​y​F​e​b​r​u​a​r​y​M​a​r​c​h​A​p​r​i​l​M​a​y​J​u​n​e​J​u​l​y​A​u​g​u​s​t​S​e​p​t​e​m​b​e​r​O​c​t​o​b​e​r​N​o​v​e​m​b​e​r​D​e​c​e​m​b​e​r​!”

  Everyone is silent.

  “And here is a quite different question.… What is the date of the second Sunday of August, 1941?”

  I—

  Oscar says at once: “August 12.”

  “Correct.”

  My mind is blank.

  “And the third Wednesday of June, 1444?”

  “June 20 on our calendar,” Oscar says quietly.

  “Correct.”

  Ashamed, I cram my mouth with something—some chocolate—I am ravenously hungry and dare not look at anyone.

  “Oscar, would you explain to us your ability to answer these specific questions?”

  Oscar says nothing.

  Now they are hooking up the wires on me again, on my forehead, on a mountainous arm, around my mountainous chest, deft and furtive, as if they are anxious to get away from me. I ignore them. A young doctor and a nurse, I think it is a nurse, I ignore them. I hardly bother to chew the chocolate in my mouth; it is my jaws, my perfect teeth, that do the work.

  “… Hilda and Oscar, will you tell us exactly where you are?”

  I look down at my hands sullenly. This is a joke. Oscar does not answer at all.

  “Can you tell us the name of the place you are now in?”

  “The MacLeod Institute,” I say. This seems to be the right answer, so I go on. “235 West Bryant Drive, Queens, New York.”

  “Yes. And what is the date today?”

  “April 23, 1941,” I say.

  But Oscar cannot answer.

  The audience buzzes. Am I happy?—why am I fighting to get up again, pushing myself away from the table? I bump against someone’s chair—the doctor next to me—and start to run to the end of the table, again, panting. I bend down to pull up my socks. Father calls out, “Hilda. Hilda, you are disturbing the examination—”

  “It will be over in just a few minutes,” the examining doctor says nervously, “just three or four minutes—”

  “Ah, it is the eccentricity of the gift,” Father says.

  I yank up my socks. Is Jesse watching? Is he proud of me? My socks are a little dirty from the chocolate on my fingers. I run back to Father and I know that everyone is staring at me. Oscar’s face working violently, as if he would like to get up too and run around the table. The wires on his forehead have slipped because his face is so damp.

  Father catches me playfully and makes me sit down.

  “The next several questions … the next several questions deal with feats of both memory and calculation,” the examiner says. He speaks slowly and apprehensively. “Would you, Hilda and Oscar, would you multiply the fourth number on the first card that was held up to you by the seventh number on the second card—”

  It takes me a few seconds to answer this question, but even so I am a little ahead of Oscar. But he too answers it, shouting. His eyes are darker now, as if the bruises have spread. His lips are trembling.

  “Would you divide the sum of the numbers on the third card by the cube of the forty-third number on the eighth card.…”

  Five, six seconds pass. Where is the answer? And then the answer comes to me: I give it, fast. Oscar is answering at the same time. Before the doctor can ask us another question, I take a piece of candy out of Father’s pocket and tear off the wrapper. Oscar’s eyes are bulging. He is skinny as a crow, Oscar, with a caved-in chest. Poor Oscar!

  “Oscar, are you all right? Should we terminate this session?”

  He moans, shaking his head from side to side.

  “Perhaps we should terminate …?”

  Everyone looks at Oscar. But why should I believe in those faces? In my own face? Behind Oscar’s face someone is hiding and I see him, in the shadowed eyes, in the tic in his cheek, struggling.

  “No you don’t!” Mrs. DeMott cries.

  Oscar says nothing.

  “But is your son … How is your son?” the doctor asks.

  “You just ask him the next question. He’s fine.”

  Oscar takes the handkerchief from her and wipes his own face. He seems better now.

  “… this final question … involves a number of distinct assumptions and processes. Would you please, Hilda and Oscar, add to the date of the third Wednesday of April, 1265 by our calendar the total of your two ages multiplied together.…”

  Choking.

  The chocolate is choking me.

  Oscar begins to whimper.

  I am choking, suffocating. My eyes bulge like Oscar’s; but he is moaning, shaking from side to side—

  “Oscar!” his mother cries.

  She falls across him. Someone shouts. There is confusion, people are moving around, the big stage lights go out. Like the blinking of an eye! We are suddenly in shadow, in an eclipse. Good. Now they will not stare at me. I manage to eat the last chocolate while everybody is standing, moving. Father himself springs to his feet. Oscar has fallen over sideways, blood is streaming from his nose, one of the doctors is bending over him. I can’t see. I don’t want to see. I shut my eyes hard and my mouth chews away on something soft, a sweet gushing circle of chocolate. Is it Mother weeping over me? That sound of a woman weeping?

  They are bringing in a stretcher for Oscar. Mrs. DeMott is yelling, “Oh, this always happens! He’s a freak, a curse! You keep him, you people take care of him! Wets his bed, can’t feed himself. Call him a genius! Well, he is a freak no matter what the newspapers say and you bastards can have him for good! Put him in a cage with that other one!”

  I run over to the other side of the stage.

  Father comes after me, saying my name. But I turn away from him. A fountain of numbers shoots up in the air.…

  I am saying No. No. Father takes hold of my arm. I jerk away from him. No. The numbers spin into a tower, fatter and fatter at the top, not like an ordinary tower. “Get away! Leave me alone! I have to figure it out!” I scream. Father’s face is white, white as uncooked dough. “Add to the date of the third Wednesday of April, 1265 by our calendar the total of your two ages multiplied together—” I shove something in my mouth, I press it into my mouth with both hands—

  Someone is screaming. It is a girl’s voice. She is screaming up into the white shocked face of Dr. Pedersen. “The tower will give me the answer! It will figure itself out if I wait! Don’t touch me, don’t come near me—nobody come near me–” And still the tower floods upward, a galaxy of numbers. How can I make them into a single number? How can I still the bursting of these numbers? She clutches her own head, her own face, squeezing it hard. Must stop that screaming. Must make the numbers slow, slow, come
to a stop, turn into a single number.…

  “Hilda, you are going to be sick—”

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Screaming. Stumbling backwards. The faces in the audience are scattered now. Hilda is baffled. Hilda clutches her own head. Her father tries to quiet her, but she jerks away from him. “You want to stuff me inside your mouth, I know you! I know you!” she cries. “You want to press me into a ball and pop me into your mouth, back where I came from! You want to eat us all up!”

  “Hilda—”

  And now another face appears—a boy has run up on stage—

  “Don’t touch me, any of you!” I cry.

  “Please, Hildie—” says this boy.

  Jesse.

  “No—”

  “It’s all right, Hildie, it’s all right—”

  Add to the date of the third Wednesday of April, 1265.…

  Father is going to take me home now, Jesse says.

  “No, don’t touch me! I don’t want—”

  I am crying.

  Jesse takes hold of my hands.

  “You hurt Father’s feelings,” he whispers.

  Father is standing a few feet away—staring at us. Father is staring.

  “Father wants to kill me. Eat me,” I whisper.

  “No,” says Jesse.

  I am very cold. Someone is shivering on the surface of my skin.

  “I don’t want anyone to touch me.…”

  And now I am weeping.

  Like a girl. Fourteen years old. My new dress is soiled, wrinkled, I am ashamed. I have been saying crazy things. Now the tower of numbers has faded … the last number has left my head … I am standing here with my brother, who is trying to talk to me, to explain something.…

  “… over to Father now? You don’t want to hurt his feelings,” Jesse says.

  “Yes.”

  Jesse gives me a handkerchief. But I am too clumsy to use it. So he pats my forehead with it himself. Forehead, cheeks, chin. A thread of saliva hangs down from my mouth and Jesse wipes it away. He is very nervous—a tall, stout boy, the freckles on his face glowing from perspiration—but still he cleans me up as I stand here in my heavy hot body, weeping.

  “Now you’re all right, Hildie. Everything is all right,” he says.

  He takes me to Father.

  I stumble, almost lose my balance. I have to stop my mind from scattering and flying back to—to what?—to a question that doctor asked me? But now Father is speaking gently to me. There are tears in his eyes. He takes the handkerchief from Jesse and wipes my nose with it. I go into myself, coiling inward. Inward. Back to that small hollow space beneath my heart, where I will be safe.

  “My poor girl.… You don’t know what you said to your father … the awful things you said to your own father.…”

  I am walking between Father and Jesse. Faces in the hallway peer at me but I don’t care. I am already deep inside myself. I am a good girl. I will not scream at Father ever again in my life.

  A drinking fountain. Oh, I am so thirsty! So thirsty! “Everybody loves you. You are a good, good girl,” Father is saying. “You are a genius and a very pretty young lady.” The water bubbles up onto my face, into my nose. I begin to cough.

  Now we are riding somewhere. Pavement, traffic. At the airport I sit without seeing anyone. I run the numbers back and forth in my mind, all the numbers on all the cards, rearranging them, multiplying them, dividing them by one another. Father reads to Jesse and me from a newspaper—an article about a woman in El Paso, Texas, who had five babies and named them One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. Father laughs at this. Must clip it out for the Book of Fates, he says. Hilda laughs like any fourteen-year-old girl, but I sit puzzled and silent and frightened. Where did those babies come from? What is a baby, exactly?

  The seat belts do not fasten across our laps. Father and I are sitting together in the plane; Jesse sits across the aisle from us. The plane rises into the air. Hilda looks out the window, interested and perky, but I sit very still, in a panic. Panic. Hilda is a good, good girl, but I am not a girl at all, not even a woman. I don’t know what I am. Is there a part of the soul that is not male or female? Hilda loves Jesse, her own brother, but I am not Hilda and I do not love Jesse or even know who he is. I don’t understand him. “Look, Hilda,” Father says, to cheer me up, and he points out the window at what I am already looking at—a city down below of buildings, so many buildings—enormous buildings—a city of walls and streets and strangers—and they multiply out to the horizon, they cannot be held back, they have been created by Father, or men like Father, all over America—

  “Beautiful! Isn’t it beautiful?” Father says happily.

  I am eating peppermints, light, wafer-thin peppermints, because I am not really hungry. Hilda eats, knowing that she will get an appetite as she eats; I am not hungry at all. I am dead. Down below there is a stretch of land that is made up only of buildings and houses, crisscrossed by roads, streets, avenues, highways, everything multiplying itself as we rise higher—

  We are at the center of the universe.

  “Jesse has promised not to say anything to your mother or to Frederich about what happened today,” Father says. “They wouldn’t understand. Hilda, don’t you want these? Aren’t you hungry?”

  He hands the peppermints to me.

  No.

  “Yes, thank you, Father.”

  I eat. I am curled up in a sac, in a body. A mountain of flesh on a cushioned seat. Stumps of legs ending in ankles and feet and shoes. Oh, I am resting here with my father; I am very tried.

  “We won’t take you on another trip like this for a while,” Father says. “Until you’re ready.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Until you are more mature, perhaps. Perfection is difficult, Hildie, but ultimately it is not as difficult as imperfection. The demands we make upon ourselves constitute our salvation. It is necessary to be perfect. It is not necessary to live.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “How do you feel now, Hildie? Are you better?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You are a little tired?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Well, then. Sleep. Sleep, my dear.”

  Hilda lays her head on Father’s shoulder and sleeps. I do not sleep. I do not think.

  I am dead.

  9

  He was aware of her in the house with him, treading on the stairs heavily, sighing. When he worked at his mathematical problems—he was studying calculus on his own, with the help of one of the teachers at his school—he thought of her, in her room or downstairs where she often worked, and he thought of her mother, the two of them mixed up in his mind, pressing against him with their soft, gelatinous bodies.

  Hilda.

  Mrs. Pedersen.

  Sometimes his mind went blank. He did not like calculus; it seemed to him like a dream; there was nothing behind it, its formulations. Other textbooks did not trouble him like this—he could memorize anything that had a reality behind it. He did not have to touch this reality, to move his fingers across it, he had only to know that it existed somewhere and might be measured, might be cut out and held up triumphantly to the light.… But mathematics disturbed him. A stunning whirl of numbers, insubstantial numbers, signs with nothing behind them that somehow corresponded to ideas in the brain.… No, he could not understand. He sat in his room at the large, glass-topped desk Dr. Pedersen had bought for him, his hands kneading his face, until he gave up and went to ask Hilda for help.

  What was a freak?

  No, he did not ask her that. He asked her about his calculus problems, shyly, knowing that she was contemptuous of him. Each afternoon Hilda worked downstairs on the sun porch at the rear of the house, and Frederich worked in the music room, off and on, out of sight. When Jesse knocked on the opened door politely, he saw how severely his sister looked at him—her face strained, her small, close-set eyes leaping upon him. Jesse thought of the mother of that other prodigy, Oscar, who ha
d called both her son and Hilda freaks. But what was a freak, exactly? Jesse was uneasy in his sister’s presence, unnerved by her solid, silent, ponderous face, her pudgy ink-stained fingers, her ironic smile, which was an exaggeration of her mother’s generous smile. She had a face drained of blood, of energy, and yet it was intensely alive, alert, suspicious, as if she could read his mind or was aware of him listening for her heavy footsteps on the stairs—Jesse listening for her sighing, her wistful, lonely sighing—Jesse conscious of her contempt. When she lowered her eyes, he gazed at her bluish lids, which were shaped like half-moons or thumbs, like her mother’s, quite thick and prominent against the bone above her eye. He stared at these eyelids, sensing the rapid movement of this girl’s mind, the incredible flash of illumination that always gave her the correct answers to any mathematical questions.

  Always the correct answers.…

  She was never wrong. But it gave her no joy, he saw. She was like an instrument to provide answers to questions; always polite to him, coolly polite now in the months since that examination in New York, always patient with him while he sat and tried to work out the problem in orderly, logical steps, using a normal method. He sat across from her at the table on the porch, his ankles linked around the bottom rung of his chair, his face turned down to the paper before him. He was slow and firm, pressing down hard with the point of his pencil, staring at the blank white paper and the numbers that slowly filled the page, always ending with the number Hilda had given him minutes before.

  And he would sit back, dazed, exhausted.

  What was a freak?

  She was like a princess in this part of the house, “her” part of the house. She liked the sun porch and worked down there every afternoon, sitting with a piece of long yellow scrap paper before her, doodling with a fountain pen, thinking. Occasionally she wrote down a number. But most of the time she drew lines and circles and meaningless figures. It was impossible to know what she was doing. She could not explain. She had no interest in explaining. Dr. Pedersen had encouraged her to begin a correspondence with someone in England, and she had answered a few of this unknown man’s letters, but then she gave up, bored. She was always alone like this, always thinking. Fallen deep in thought. Jesse came to the doorway with the tentative note of Frederich’s piano behind him, and he saw how sharply Hilda’s eyes swung up to him, as if out of a dark, somber spell; her face became more guarded and strained.