Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Too old, too old. Forget. Forget everything.

  At twelve-thirty she walked into the dim foyer of the restaurant, carrying the sound of the rock music in her head, a little dazed, irritated, frightened. A single unwanted glimpse of her strained face in a mirror—and then Mannie sprang forward to greet her.

  “I wasn’t sure—I thought you might not come—” Mannie said.

  He was eager, formal, very nervous.

  They shook hands like people newly introduced to each other. “I’m so happy to see you,” Mannie said.

  He was wearing a light suit and a shirt of some dark, coarse material that threw a shadow up onto the lower part of his face. He was a specialist at the Vogel Clinic in diseases of the spinal cord, especially those in children, in “floppy infants”; there seemed to be something miniaturized about him, his voice, his features, his manner. He was no taller than Helene herself, of a slight frame, his complexion olivish, dark, with a certain dusky, unhealthy pallor. His features were pinched and strained, as if he were constantly fighting a headache. Above his small, wise face his hair rose in stiff bunches, beginning to gray. He had given up a good private practice in New York to join Jesse here.

  Helene smiled at him nervously.

  As they talked, she found herself recalling the shopping plaza and the windy squares and the blare of music, the music of young people. She recalled the hurrying women, the shoppers with their purchases in colored paper bags and their hair blown in the wind that was not friendly to them. The rhythmic thumping of the guitar, the drums. What had it to do with these women shoppers, with their forlorn faces and mottled legs? She kept seeing herself hurrying away from the music but not escaping it. Too old. All of you are too old.

  She and Mannie were shy together. He talked about the clinic. Of course. About Jesse. Of course. Asked her about the girls, about her own life. Pausing politely to listen to her account of her own life. Asked about her father. Helene stiffened but managed to say, “He’s living in Palm Beach now. You probably heard that he married again.…” Mannie nodded eagerly. He asked her again about “things at home,” with the attentive, self-deprecating manner of someone who has no home himself and to whom “home” is sacred.

  Mannie chattered about his work, his problems, his gains, the words a kind of musical interlude meant to put them both at ease. Helene warmed a little. Listening to Mannie, watching him she wondered why he was attracted to her and what would come of them. The two of them: a couple in this restaurant of strangers, a couple sitting alone together. She felt herself sinking into a warm, puzzled, erotic daze, so that the music she had heard at the shopping plaza flowed, subdued and lyric and sweetened, in and out of her consciousness. Mannie seemed inspired by her, leaning forward, talking so eagerly that she could see small flecks of saliva on his lips.

  “You’re not unhappy about anything …?” Mannie asked.

  “No,” said Helene.

  “People who live alone are often unhappy because they think too much. They have nothing to do at home but think,” Mannie said with a smile. “That’s my trouble. I was very attached to my family, my parents, and now … now things are all changed.…” Ugly little man, with that monkeyish face! He was weak, charming, harmless. A brother. A child in the form of a small man, masquerading as a man. I want Jesse, Helene thought in a sudden misery. “It’s wonderful that your father has remarried, at his age. I imagine you’re happy about it …?”

  Helene hesitated. Her father, at the age of sixty-seven, had married a woman of no more than forty-five, a “speech therapist” in Boston with dyed blond hair, a regal, swaying, hard-corseted body, supposedly a widow. They had driven out to Chicago to visit, in an enormous black automobile. Cady had talked incessantly about the car and a boat he was buying and the home he had bought for his bride, with a quarter-mile frontage on the ocean. His face was tanned from Palm Beach, his clothes youthful and nautical in style, with brass buttons. He had retired from his work entirely.

  “Yes, I’m happy about it,” Helene said tonelessly.

  Mannie sensed her mood and fell silent, embarrassed. Then he changed the subject: “Did you see the antiwar demonstration across the street? The kids?”

  “Is it an antiwar demonstration?”

  “I don’t think they have a permit. There’s some complication.”

  Mannie talked about the war for a while, shaking his head sadly. Helene did not pay attention to him, wanting to ask about Jesse, her husband—what was he like?—what was he really like? Another man might know him. As they ate lunch self-consciously, Mannie went on to talk about the effect of the war on America and what it had done to people he knew. His small, dark face would be matched by a small, dark body; there would probably be dark curly hair on his chest, swirls of hair on his stomach. Short, pale legs, knobby feet. He would be a gentle lover, fearful of failing her.… Jesse was not afraid of failing her. He did not think of her at all.

  “Even in my own family something happened that would not have happened a few years ago,” Mannie said. “My sister’s girl, who is only twenty, dropped out of Smith to get married. She and the boy bummed around Europe and when they came back they had an infant with them, which they plan on giving away for adoption—in fact, I think they already have given it away. My sister is heartbroken. This is her only grandchild. She didn’t even know her daughter had had a baby, and now the girl is giving it away, coldly and deliberately … she won’t even let my sister bring the child up, she wants it given to strangers.…”

  “Why does she want to do that?” Helene asked, genuinely surprised.

  “We don’t know. It’s killing my sister. The baby is only a few months old, a boy.…”

  “Women shouldn’t be allowed to do things like that,” Helene said slowly.

  “Exactly, she shouldn’t be allowed, because in a few years she will regret it. When she grows up. She will regret it the rest of her life. Nobody can talk sense to her.”

  “But what about her husband?”

  “He wants to get rid of the baby too. Neither one of them wants to be held down. My niece says she isn’t interested in being a mother. She isn’t interested!”

  Helene felt her face warming with anger. An abstract, mysterious ferocity. Ah, how she hated—

  But she did not know exactly what she hated.

  “Did I upset you with that news? I shouldn’t talk about such ugly things,” Mannie said uncertainly.

  “We always wanted to adopt another child, a boy. Two more children. Jesse wanted two more children,” Helene said vaguely. “I wanted to have another baby but … but there was some risk.… I shouldn’t have listened to my doctor. I don’t think he was right. And so we were going to adopt another baby.…”

  Mannie nodded sympathetically. “Yes?”

  “But it was never the right time, I don’t know why … Jesse was always so busy with the clinic, and for a while Jeanne’s health was bad … she had pleurisy one winter.… I don’t know what happened. But we never adopted a child.”

  They had finished their lunch. Helene had hardly eaten hers.

  “We wanted to give love to a baby, a strange baby,” Helene went on, a little giddy with the intensity of Mannie’s interest, “but we could never decide which baby it should be, we could never decide upon the right time, Jesse and I.… Jesse always wanted a son. He used to talk about having a son. I think he loved me best when I was pregnant. He loves the girls very much, especially Shelley … he was meant to be a father.… He could be a father to a whole crowd of children. A hospital of children. Did you know that when he was an intern he had intended to work in public health?”

  “It’s necessary work, but ordinary men can do it,” Mannie said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Helene said quickly. “Jesse is not an ordinary man. He is …”

  “Yes?”

  Mannie’s face crinkled, as if resisting the strong glare of Jesse Vogel; but he smiled shyly, encouragingly.

  “He is a jumble of men.�
� There are many people in him,” Helene said. She felt a little drunk. The rhythm of that music sounded in her, deep in her loins. “And he wants more. He wants his daughters, and he wants me … I mean he wants us in him.… He wants to be us. I can’t explain. He wants to own us, to be us.… Are there types of neurological disorders in which people are multiple …? Their personalities are multiple …?”

  “They’re considered psychological disorders,” Mannie said.

  “No, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean people who think they are more than one person, but people who really are multiple. Real units of personality, tissue or atoms or nerve cells,” she said vaguely, wildly, “bits of flesh that are real and not imaginary, not insane.…”

  Mannie smiled at her, sympathetically and baffled.

  “I don’t believe in delusions of the spirit,” Helene said, trying to speak more calmly. “I believe in real events, statistical events, things that can be measured. The blood count is real, the secretions of the glands are real, the chemical composition of our bodies is real; the ideas we have are not real and are sometimes dangerous … I think we have an instinct for dangerous ideas, for errors.…”

  They sat in embarrassed silence. Helene was agitated and yet she felt the need to keep on, to keep this man’s bewildered attention, not to surrender him. “Years ago I found some scribblings of Jesse’s,” she said, “just pieces of scrap paper with strange designs all over, resembling human faces, and the word homeostasis written over and over again, maybe a hundred times.… Homeostasis. Homeostasis. Is that an idea, or is that real?”

  “I don’t know,” Mannie said. His tone was cautious, as if he feared being hurt by her.

  They left the restaurant. Helene felt that she had prevented him from loving her, as if she had pressed a brisk, unwomanly hand flat against his chest. Yet she was excited, agitated, she had to continue.

  “Homeostasis. It’s just an idea, the idea of a man,” she said.

  “I suppose so.…”

  “Inside the body—equilibrium. Outside the body—equilibrium. Either equilibrium or death, isn’t that it?”

  “Yes,” said Mannie. “Equilibrium or death.”

  He looked at her sadly.

  “I don’t suppose … I don’t suppose we could talk a little more, we could go for a ride …?” he said.

  She smiled suddenly, surprised at him. They had come out into the sunshine now and Helene shaded her eyes.

  Across the street there was a commotion—a small crowd of people, some of them dressed bizarrely, carrying picket signs, others dressed in ordinary clothes. Several policemen on foot, one on horseback. A squad car was parked nearby.

  “What are they shouting about?” Helene said.

  “It looks like trouble. We’d better leave,” Mannie said.

  “But … what are those people shouting at them?”

  Helene started across the street and Mannie followed reluctantly. On the outside of the small group of young people, in a loose, unruly ring, were men in ordinary working clothes and a few men in suits, even a few women in housedresses and slacks. A number of people were shouting. Helene saw a picket sign tilted at an angle—something about “war”—the young man who carried it wore an Indian headband. He was arguing with one of the policemen.

  “Who says so? Who says so?” someone was yelling.

  Helene approached the crowd, fascinated. She was struck by the strange silence that fell between isolated shouts. She had never heard that silence before. Mannie was saying something to her but she paid no attention—she was staring at the girls here, their hair long and uncombed and ratty, skinny girls of no definite age. Sixteen, twenty, twenty-five? They glanced at her in their confusion. Their faces were pale and frightened and angry. Their mouths twisted with hate.

  Helene could smell it in the air.

  Hate. We hate you. We hate you.

  Another squad car pulled up to the curb. A few people cheered. Helene noticed a girl with long shining black hair, black as an Indian’s, who stood with a cigarette in her mouth, angrily jerking a picket sign up and down. The sign showed a crudely painted skull and crossbones, with the initials LBJ beneath it. She was shouting something, shouting around the stub of a cigarette; she wore a sacklike outfit of some very fine, almost gauzy material, exposing much of her bony chest. She happened to notice Helene and stared hatefully at her. Helene, catching the strange hot weight of this stare, felt them all look at her as she approached.

  “Helene—” Mannie said.

  One of the policemen seemed to be saying something to her too. But she paid no attention; she went right into the center of the crowd, fascinated by their faces, their droopy soiled clothes, their blank faces. They were young and they hated her.

  “Take your fucking war and shove it!” the girl shouted.

  Was she shouting at Helene?

  Helene took several steps toward her. The girl with the picket sign did not back up. She hated Helene; here was hatred; here Helene had finally found it! It is over for you, they all seemed to be saying, ready to shout murderously at her, it is over, over, over for you! For you!

  Helene whipped her hand around and knocked the cigarette out of the girl’s mouth.

  The girl cried out in surprise and amazement. The cigarette flipped up high into the air.

  Someone cheered, and someone else pulled Helene back—it must have been Mannie—and one of the boys grabbed hold of the girl, who had started to rush forward. She was screaming at Helene. Screaming. “Let me go, let me go!” But Helene turned and began walking away quickly. People parted for her. Back on the sidewalk, where the crowd of shoppers and men in shirtsleeves stood, she waited for Mannie to catch up with her.

  She had finished everything for herself, she thought. Good! It was good! Her heart was pounding fiercely. The erotic glow in her loins, so teasing and warm, had spread lightly through her body now, light as May air, harmless. She was fulfilled. She was free of the man who hurried beside her, who could not love her now, and she was free of her husband, her daughters, the people in the park, her own youth. It was over: the tyranny of her body, the yearning for other bodies, for talking and touching and dreaming and loving. She had freed herself. It was over for her.

  5

  January 1971

  Noel? Are you awake?

  There are no lights here and the daylight fades and opens again and opens us to each other. The day is stretched out of shape because it begins so early—before dawn—and ends so early, always confusing me. But there are no real days, Father. Days are an invention of the newspaper, which has to have a date at the top of each page.

  Noel?

  Yes?

  Do I exist, Noel?

  No, Shell.

  Is there anyone here?

  No.

  Then why do I dream, why is my head all filled with dreams?

  Because people are walking through your head, Shell.

  How can I stop them?

  Dream back over them and murder them, Shell.

  Father you have got to let me go. You have got to stop thinking about me and let me go.

  You hypnotized me. I am like a deer standing in the road, hypnotized by the headlights of a car. Noel shakes me to get me loose of you, he slaps my face—one side, then the other—he would like to enter my head and fight you there, but his own head is filled with people walking in it too, his own people.

  Since we left the South, Noel carries a little kit of surgical equipment everywhere with him. He sleeps with it under his pillow, which is a rolled-up towel we got from somewhere. Not just the needle and the spoon, but the other spoon—a sharp filed spoon he uses to open locks—and a file that is really a knife, and a leather belt with a big buckle. He walks like anyone in New York now. You would never guess he is a stranger here.

  I told him that my father carried a gun with him everywhere.

  I knew about that gun for years. It was no secret.

  A man named Jethro was traveling with us but he g
ot picked up by the police; Noel and I turned a corner just in time. Noel grabbed my arm up near the shoulder and we ran, we ran.… Tears flew sideways out of my eyes; it was so cold on the street here, the tears were like little slivers flying out. I love you I am coming home. Jethro stuttered and when he stuttered he got angry. I was afraid Noel would kill him with his file, which is really a knife, but now he is in jail somewhere and we won’t see him again.

  I am not going to jail again.

  I am thinking tonight of that day in 1969 when you came to Toledo to get me. Did you love me then? Why did you cry? I am thinking of that rainy September day that went on for so long. I am thinking of Shelley in her bleached-out blue jeans, her hair ratty from no sleep and no hairbrush, her face puffed up with crying, everything babyish about her except the dark rings under her eyes. I am thinking of that jail, which I remember so clearly—the Clinton Street Jail—the county jail and its rich, ripe, dark odors, where the lights never really went off but were only dimmed, but never really came on again either, so that we could sleep all the time and stir in our sleep, whimpering and sniffing. We all had colds. We could bang around in our sleep. We could seize the bars and bang our heads against them. Wake up! Wake up! But you can’t wake up no matter how fast your heart goes, because it is all a dream, the other girls prowling for loose change and complaining and blowing their noses and whispering and screaming at one another in a dream, begging to make telephone calls or to be released ahead of time, begging in babyish, awful voices, over and over: “Miss Goldie, I got to get hold of a certain party. I got to make contact. Miss Goldie, this is a matter of life and death, you got to take me seriously.”

  The matron, Miss Goldie, was tall and wise and her hair was snipped short; her head was too small for her body. That way she could move her head around fast, without any fuss. Whip her head around to see what was going on behind her. When I turned my head, all my hair had to come with it, a mane of hair, it got me down. Miss Goldie smoothed down my hair and tried to make me smile. My teeth chattered. Miss Goldie said, “Well, if you won’t tell us your name, we’ll have to make one up for you. How about Honey? A honey of a name for a honey of a girl.”