Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Jesse blinked.

  Mrs. Pedersen got to her feet with difficulty. “Here, Jesse. I think I have everything written down now.”

  “Will you be all right while I’m gone?”

  “Oh yes. Yes. I will be all right. Everything is all right. I’m not at all dizzy now, I’m perfectly well. Don’t I look perfectly well? I’m perfectly sober.”

  Jesse nodded sadly.

  He drove back to Lockport. It was four o’clock when he turned in the Pedersen driveway between the two wrought-iron spikes. He gave the list to Dora and said, “Mrs. Pedersen would like you to put these things in a suitcase, please.” Astonished, Dora took the piece of paper from him. His heart hammering, Jesse went out to wait in their driveway. He pressed his hand against the hot metal of his car. That was real, that heat. That metal. After a while Dora appeared at the screen door, opening it awkwardly. Jesse went to help her. He took a large tan suitcase from her. She said, “This ain’t all. There’s more.” Another suitcase. She went back to get an armful of dresses. So many dresses! What did Mrs. Pedersen want with all these dresses? One of them had a sequined bodice.

  “Thank you,” Jesse said.

  The car was packed. Dora stood watching him back away, her hand against her mouth as if she were staring at something terrible. As he drove back to Buffalo his head swam with the speed, the heat, the smell of Mrs. Pedersen’s clothes.

  He had to park some distance from the hotel. Carrying the two suitcases and the armload of dresses, he saw how openly people stared at him. Their expressions were guarded. Even in the hotel lobby people stared at him. He took the elevator to the fourth floor, and when he knocked on Mrs. Pedersen’s door she did not answer for several minutes. What was wrong? Then, at last, he heard her heavy footsteps. She slid the bolt and opened the door slowly, fearfully.

  “Oh, Jesse, thank God.… I thought it might be him.… I thought you might have told him about me, that you might have brought him back with you.… Oh, thank God, thank God.…”

  He helped her hang the dresses in the closet. Her mood changed and she chattered at him, excited, yet on the verge of tears still, occasionally lapsing into a shrill, surprising gaiety. Now he was certain she had been drinking. “Oh, wait until he finds out! Just wait! He doesn’t dream of the plans I’ve made, he could never believe that his wife, his stupid wife, could break free of him and begin her own life just like anyone else.… Oh, he’ll be so surprised.…”

  As she was unpacking one of the suitcases, the telephone rang.

  “What? But nobody knows I’m here.… Nobody knows where I am.…” Mrs. Pedersen cried.

  The telephone rang again. Jesse went over to it and stood above it, his hands clasped together in front of his chest.

  “Jesse, don’t answer it! It’s him!”

  “But—but it can’t be—”

  “I know it’s him. I know it.”

  “But how would he know you were here?”

  “He knows. He knows everything.”

  “It can’t be Dr. Pedersen,” Jesse said.

  Suddenly, grimly, he picked up the receiver.

  The voice at the other end, crying “hello,” was Dr. Pedersen’s.

  “Hello,” Jesse said blankly.

  “Who is this? Jesse? Where is your mother? Is she there? Put her on the telephone, please.”

  “She’s—she’s—”

  Mrs. Pedersen had backed away, shaking her head.

  “Jesse, put her on the telephone at once. I demand to speak to her!”

  “She can’t—”

  Mrs. Pedersen was shaking her head wildly.

  “Jesse, do you hear me? I know where you are. Dora called me at the Clinic and I know exactly where your mother went, it’s exactly where she would go. I demand to speak to her. At once. I know she’s there, I know exactly what is going on. I am not coming to get her. I refuse to drive up there. Put your mother on the telephone at once, Jesse.”

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Jesse whispered.

  “I told you to put her on the phone!”

  “I can’t—”

  “Jesse, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

  In a panic, Jesse slammed down the receiver.

  He and Mrs. Pedersen stared at each other.

  Finally she said in a quivering voice, “Thank you.… Thank you for saving me.…”

  The telephone began ringing again.

  “We’ll get out of here. We’ve got to get out of this room,” Mrs. Pedersen said. She hurried to the door. “Come on, Jesse. Please. We’ll go downstairs and let him call me, let him call all he wants. I won’t answer. He wants me to come back to him, to that awful life. He thinks he has power over me, but he hasn’t. Oh, listen to that telephone! He wants to drive me crazy!”

  They went downstairs to the coffee shop. Mrs. Pedersen ordered cheeseburgers and French fries for both of them. Eating quickly, as if she were very hungry, Mrs. Pedersen began to revive. “I’ll tell you things about him nobody knows, Jesse. Secrets. Terrible secrets,” she said in a low voice. “Oh yes, he’s a genius. Yes, a wonderful man. All of Lockport is proud of him, yes. They write stories about him. Yes. But there are secrets nobody knows except me.… He takes morphine, Jesse. Yes, morphine! Not every night, but often he gives himself an injection of morphine the way other people take a drink—and then he looks down upon people who drink; he said some nasty, unforgivable things about my mother, just because she liked to drink now and then. The hypocrite!” As Jesse stared, she wiped her mouth hard, as if to emphasize the truth of the words she spoke. “Yes, he takes morphine, all in secret; I’m the only person on earth who knows about it.… And the things he’s done to punish me! Once when we were married only a year he refused to speak to me for a month. To this day I don’t know why. I offended him somehow. He’s incredibly vain and proud. He won’t let me buy anything unless he has seen it or gives his approval of it. Once he took all my clothes away and I had to stay in the bedroom naked for three days … he brought my food up on a tray and left it by the door, as if I were an animal.… I thought I’d go crazy in that room! He did it to drive me crazy, Jesse. He likes to make me cry. Yes, it’s true, don’t look so surprised! He made me shave all the hair off my body for a long time, for years, and if it wasn’t shaved off well enough for him he took his razor and went over me.… He enjoys making me cry. Did you ever see that locked cabinet in his study? It’s always kept locked because he has certain books in it, awful books, with photographs of awful things. I can’t tell you what they are. There are photographs of men and women—you know—and other photographs of dismembered bodies, with captions beneath them like jokes. Books that make fun of everything. I almost fainted the first time he showed them to me. We were only married a few months … he made me read them and he stood behind me, watching.…”

  “I don’t believe it,” Jesse whispered.

  “Oh, you don’t believe it!” Mrs. Pedersen said. “Well, you weren’t married to him for nineteen years, like me. And why did he marry me? Because my father was a doctor, and my uncle, and because my family has money and land and he knew he could get it. All his life he’s been talking about this clinic of his, the Pedersen Clinic. He thinks it’s going to be famous all over the world. He’s crazy. He wants to save everyone from dying. My father has given him thousands of dollars, has lent him thousands of dollars, because my father is foolish enough to believe him. He’s crazy, my husband, he wants to save everyone from dying! He thinks he will eventually be famous in every country of the world! Then he talked Father into retiring. He has destroyed my father. He wanted Frederich to become a doctor so that he could inherit the Clinic, but Frederich was never well enough to go to school and so … and so … he adopted you … it’s all part of his plan, the one I’ve been hearing about for nineteen years.… These are things that don’t appear in the news stories about Dr. Pedersen,” she said, smiling bitterly. The food had rejuvenated her. She talked almost merrily and seemed about to wink at Jesse,
amused at his surprise. “Ask him to tell you about his secret philosophy. He talks all the time about his public philosophy, but what about the secret one? Once a patient has come to him, he believes the patient is his. The patient’s life is his. He owns the patient, he owns the disease, he owns everything. Oh, he’s crazy. Ask him about these things. Just ask him. Not all his patients survive, you know. Ask him about the ones who die. His diagnoses are not always right. The great Dr. Pedersen has made mistakes. But he talks his patients into believing him so that they would rather die than go to another doctor, they have such faith in him, they get sicker and sicker and die, actually die, rather than call in another doctor … and he watches them die and won’t bring in anyone else … right until the end he thinks he is right, he’s unable to believe that he might be wrong.… He is literally unable to believe that he might be mistaken. Now do you still love him more than you love me?”

  Jesse stared at her face, her moving jaws.

  Who was this? A woman, a heavy, perspiring, excited woman; a stranger, or his mother? or a great piece of flesh that, shaken hard enough, might reveal the small pretty face of an ordinary woman? Jesse was losing control of his own thoughts. She sucked them out of his brain; it had something to do with her chatter and the hungry grinding of her jaws and her small winking mischievous eyes. “When we were married, he examined me to make sure I was a virgin. Ask him about that. Ask him about the experiments he makes on his patients without telling them. His hypnotism. He can hypnotize a person at any time, did you know that? Ask him. These things are not in the Book of Fates, they’re written in his secret ledgers, kept in a safe. I don’t know how many ledgers he has now—he began keeping them when he was in his twenties. He might have five hundred ledgers by now. Five hundred secret ledgers. He’s going to will them to some international science foundation after his death, he thinks they will revolutionize medicine.… Just ask him! Ask him about his idea for using germs in bombs—germs and bacteria—it’s his latest invention, he wants to patent the idea and sell it to the United States government. He’s really crazy. He wants to drive me crazy. Just ask him about these things, you admire him so much! You!”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Jesse said weakly.

  His plate was clean. Only a smear of ketchup and a dill pickle. He picked the pickle up and slowly wiped the ketchup off his plate with it and ate it.

  Mrs. Pedersen had finished her cheeseburger. She checked her lipstick, looking into a small gold compact. She was breathing quickly; a hectic flush had risen into her face, giving it a vigorous, flirtatious look. “What is that saying he’s always repeating when he is hunting me down, trying to destroy me? What is buried will surface. Yes. I’ve been hearing that for years. He whispers it into my ear. I tell him the truth always—I don’t know how to lie to him!—but he never believes me, he’s always threatening me, he’s always jealous. What is buried will surface, he says. He asks me about my dreams. All about my dreams. I have to confess every thought to him. He hypnotizes me, he gets into my head, he says I belong to him. He says that a husband owns his wife. Hilda and Frederich belong to him too, but he can’t do much with them because they’re too smart. I think he’s a little afraid of them—once he tried to spank Frederich and Frederich bit his hand, sank his teeth right into Dr. Pedersen’s hand like a dog and wouldn’t let go! then he went into convulsions. He’s afraid of Frederich and Hilda and so he goes after me. He thinks I have some secret plans against him. He’s always asking me to confess. What is buried will surface, he says, waiting for me to confess. I can’t go back to him. I would rather die.”

  She called the waitress over and ordered two more cheeseburgers and two more Cokes.

  “But aren’t you afraid of living alone?” Jesse said. “Alone …? When everybody else in the world lives in a family?”

  She snorted. “A family! What do I care about a family!”

  “But …”

  A sense of terror was spreading in Jesse. He tried to clear his mind. What was she saying, what was this woman saying to him? A family! For a moment he could not remember what a real family was. The terror grew, a terror at being excluded from the family of men, jostled about on the streets by people in a hurry, people in crowds, with their own families back home, private lives that excluded him permanently.…

  “I’ll come to Ann Arbor with you,” Mrs. Pedersen said simply.

  Just then a man appeared in the doorway of the coffee shop—such broad, thick shoulders that Jesse thought at first it must be Dr. Pedersen—and then, behind him, out on the sidewalk, another large man appeared, but this was not Dr. Pedersen either.

  The cheeseburgers were brought. Mrs. Pedersen began eating at once, quickly but daintily, as if she were conscious of Jesse’s attention. “Yes, I’ll move to Ann Arbor. We’ll have a house there. I can buy a lovely house and I’ll cook for you and do all your clothes and I won’t bother you at all. That’s what we’ll do. It’s all clear to me.” Then she hesitated, staring. “Oh … shoes. Jesse, I forgot my shoes. I left home this morning and forgot my shoes … I forgot to write them down on the list.… I have only the pair I’m wearing.”

  Jesse was chewing his cheeseburger without tasting it.

  “First I forgot my dresses and now I forgot my shoes,” Mrs. Pedersen said. “How could I be so silly …?”

  After a while Jesse said, sighing, “I’ll go back and get them for you.”

  11

  When Jesse drove up to the Pedersen house this time, he saw Henry already in the driveway waiting for him. He had a large suitcase at his feet.

  Henry said evasively, not wanting to meet Jesse’s expression of surprise and dread: “Mrs. Pedersen’s shoes are in here. Dr. Pedersen says for you to take the suitcase and good-by to you.”

  “Her shoes …?”

  “Mrs. Pedersen called up and said you were coming. She said to get the shoes all ready for you and you’d be here in half an hour.”

  Jesse kept staring at the Negro’s face, as if he feared looking anywhere else. Hilda might be watching him from her bedroom window. Dr. Pedersen himself might be watching. The thought of Dr. Pedersen inside the house, calmly inside the house, made Jesse tremble. “You mean Mrs. Pedersen called home …? She called home to say I was coming …?”

  “Talked to Dora. She talked to Dora and told her.”

  “Oh. Yes. That’s good. That’s good.…” Jesse said vaguely. He had picked up the suitcase, found it surprisingly heavy, but did not move away. Henry seemed anxious to leave. What had Henry just said? Jesse could not quite remember.

  “Thank you for the shoes,” said Jesse.

  “Well.…”

  Jesse wanted to ask Henry to repeat his message. He had told him something that Dr. Pedersen had said—what was it? Jesse couldn’t remember. He felt his eyes pounding with the desire to look away from Henry’s face, to the door of the house, to any of the windows where Dr. Pedersen might be standing, watching him.…

  “Yes, thank you.… Mrs. Pedersen will be very happy.…” Jesse said.

  Henry backed away. There was nothing for Jesse to do except put the suitcase in the car and drive back to Buffalo again.

  This time he drove slowly. For some reason he felt exhausted; it was an effort to press down upon the gas pedal, to keep a consistent speed. His foot began to get numb. He was vaguely conscious of the highway—Transit Road—and other traffic and stretches of farmland, but from time to time he felt his mind slipping off, dozing off, and it was perplexing to him to remember where he was going. Back to Buffalo, yes. To that hotel. He had a suitcase in the back seat of his car, a car Dr. Pedersen had given him, and the suitcase was filled with Mrs. Pedersen’s shoes, and she was waiting for him to bring the suitcase to her.…

  His body had itched violently but he had been unable to scratch it then, because other people were around. Now the itching seemed to have gone away but his body, especially the right side, felt numbed, heavy, aged. Jesse knew that people sometimes fell asleep wh
ile driving. But he could not understand why he was so tired, so drugged, when he had so much to do—many more miles to drive!—and so much responsibility. He wasn’t driving well. Sometimes he drove at fifty miles an hour, sometimes he noticed that he was driving only thirty miles an hour; his foot seemed to ease up automatically on the gas pedal; it would take him forever to get back to Buffalo.…

  A high bridge ahead. He slowed, cautious of oncoming traffic on this narrow bridge. He drove over the bridge slowly: a creek below, mud-colored and shallow with the heat of early September. The creek was beginning to be familiar to him now. He had driven over this bridge many times. On the other side of the creek was a large building, an old mill of some kind; sloping down from this building to the creek bank was a hill of a peculiar, rich orange-brown color. A cider mill. Jesse’s foot slipped from the gas pedal, numbed. He had to rest for a few minutes. He had to stop.

  He turned his car up a lane by the mill. For a while he sat in the car, resting. He smiled at the odor of the apples … there had been a smaller cider mill outside Yewville on one of the creeks, and he had sometimes gone with other boys to dig for worms in the rich apple refuse behind it. It was the best place to dig for fishing worms. He stared at the mill, which was boarded up, and it seemed to him that the mill had meaning for him, that he had been meant to stop here. He got out of his car wearily and looked around. The mill was dilapidated. Two stories high, with an old stone cellar that protruded above the ground, and two rotted cellar doors, spread open permanently, showing the dark damp blackness of the cellar. An ornate cobweb was strung across the opening. The smell of damp moist earth and the smell of apples pleased him. Behind the hill, sloping down to the creek, was the rich dark orange soil that had formed from the apple waste; on the creek bank there were those Y-shaped sticks stuck into the caked earth that meant fishermen, maybe boys like himself, as he had been in Yewville.… The apple waste smelled rich and warm. It seemed to shimmer in the light of the sun’s setting, nearly the same glowering color, illuminating a bank of clouds. The clouds were pocked as if with many shallow, shadowy eyes.