Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The next morning he would have to operate: a patient at nine-thirty, another at twelve. A third in the afternoon. He would have to operate on them no matter how exhausted he was. And yet, exhausted, almost stunned with cold, he felt a certainty that he would perform well; he would not fail. He would never fail.

  Excitement stirred in him at the thought of operating. He would peel out those poisonous little beads one by one.…

  He slept.

  … Shelley’s great anxious eyes. Her nervousness at the dinner table. Stared at, observed, even when no one was looking at her. Jesse thought, seeing her through a film of pity and apprehension, a kind of film over his vision, that she was taking on the manner of an animal that knows it cannot avoid its fate. Furtive and gracious, as if squirming under the pressure of her father’s concentration, even when Jesse did not dare look at her; a boyish, neutral inclination to her head, with that heavy rope of hair that she wore now braided and straight down her back. She seemed much younger than she had before running away. She had lost ten or fifteen pounds.

  In Toledo she had been given a V.D. test. It was negative. A V.D. test.

  His mind turned upon that fact giddily and would not release it, as it turned upon this house he had bought for his family, his wife and two daughters, Shelley static in the center of it.

  He telephoned the principal of her high school himself, not wanting his receptionist to make the appointment. His voice sounded uncertain, timid. But it was not the principal he would see; instead he must make an appointment with the “guidance counsellor.” Someone named Miss Kesey. So he made the appointment and learned with surprise that his wife had been in to see this woman a few months before.…

  Miss Kesey turned out to be very young, a disappointment to Jesse. Too young. She was staccato-voiced, with an arm-load of tests and transcripts and notations pulled out of a file. “Michele Ellen Vogel,” the young woman said, frowning, wetting her lips as she leafed through these records, “in ninth grade she scored exceptionally high, with an I.Q. rating of 144 (verbal 141, performance 132) … but her grades were never quite up to her ability.… In her sophomore year she slipped a little … yes … the I.Q. rating is 140, but there is a notation from her examiner that she was extremely nervous during the testing session. Her performance in mathematics was not very good, and this was the semester she failed mathematics … failed plane geometry.… She shows an excellent sense of the manipulation of words. The Madden Language Skills score is very high.…”

  Jesse squirmed in his chair. “May I look at the records myself?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Vogel, but that isn’t allowed.”

  “I would like very much to examine them myself,” Jesse said tensely.

  “That’s out of the question, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry but there are rules.…”

  Jesse tried to smile.

  “There are rules,” the young woman said, frowning, “we must have rules.… Parents are always coming in here, they’re upset and angry and … And we have to follow certain rules.…”

  “I understand,” Jesse said.

  He got to his feet. The young woman was saying something further, her voice gone helpful and bright again, as if eager to please him, but Jesse paid no attention to her. He walked out into the corridor. A bell had just rung and students were changing classes. Warm-faced, a little out of breath, Jesse was conscious of dozens of girls who might be his daughter. They glanced at him, frankly and with curiosity, their eyes strangely keen, sharp—these were exaggerated eyes, outlined carefully in black. Like eyes drawn onto eyes. All the girls wore long, straight hair. They were thin, in sweaters dragged down over their hips, wearing stockings of all colors—bright red, bright yellow, green, black. They dawdled in the corridor between classes, carrying books and purses up against their small chests. The high school boys, looking much younger than the girls, ducked in and out of their birdlike clusters.

  He was forty-four years old now.

  He lingered in the hall as if waiting to see her, his daughter, to catch her by surprise in this strange context. Where was she? Had she already sighted him? These girls were tall, so agile. They moved with a peculiar internal cunning; their voices and their laughter were light, mocking. When they happened to notice Jesse their eyes went opaque, as if sighting an enemy. He was forty-four years old now. Some of the girls were sloppily, slovenly dressed, their shoes scuffed the floor, they let their hair swing loosely and messily forward across their faces. Staring at Jesse, sizing him up. There were hundreds of students in this school, Shelley was hiding somewhere among them … all the legs, the flashing colors, sword-like legs of girls, the laziness of their bodies, their smiles, their lips outlined in preposterous glowing pale colors, almost white, like the lips of corpses … shoulders slightly rounded, chests small, flat, concave with coyness, that strange internal cunning that governed their bodies … little stomachs hollow, the bones of the pelvis showing as if to emphasize the boyish fragility of their bodies.…

  This was a very new school, very expensive. The halls were enormously wide. The walls appeared to be made of ceramic tile—multicolored and striking—and the floor was carpeted. A dark blue carpet. There were open spaces, lounges, with furniture of transparent plastic, faintly fluorescent orange and green “chairs” in which students sat, very much at home. Windows of Thermoplex glass reached nearly to the ceiling, looking out upon the vast snow-stubbled front lawn of the school and the enormous black-topped parking lot, where the students’ cars were parked in long rows, with a regularity that seemed remarkably adult. Jesse’s heart yearned suddenly.…

  He walked along through the thinning crowd of students. Passed beneath the portraits of Lincoln and Kennedy in their modern sleek pale-blond wooden frames. Sick with yearning, he was heartsick, lovesick.…

  Jesse loves …

  There were no little messages of love scribbled on the ceramic walls. No messages at all, unless they were wiped off by a janitor every night. Everything was polished and clean, all surface. You couldn’t carve anything into the walls. Jesse loves … loved.…

  He had never seen Reva again, after that morning in Wisconsin.

  Shelley?

  Yes, Father?

  How do you feel today? Are you getting over that cold?

  Yes. I stayed out from swimming class today. I’m much better.

  He talked with her after dinner, even when he had work to do. A calm level unangry unfrightened conversation like a period of prayer. His eyes suddenly filled with love for her: he could not help himself. The V.D. test was negative. Runaway. She had not given her name in Toledo. Had not answered to Shelley Vogel.

  Every afternoon Jesse called his wife around four-thirty to see if Shelley had come home yet. She always came home, yes. Yes, Helene reported, yes. Shelley was home. Up in her room. If Jesse did not call he could not concentrate on his work—if he was talking to someone he could not follow the conversation. The other Dr. Vogel leaped up from his desk, paced the room anxiously, demanded that he pick up that telephone and dial home.

  Shelley?

  Yes, Father?

  I was very pleased with your grades … your grade in Art.…

  Thank you.

  He tried to imagine her in her room—a room with pink-and-white wallpaper, a girl’s room, sweet and fresh and pleasing to him when he looked in it during her absence; he imagined her sitting on the edge of her bed in the short nightgown she wore, a white gown dotted with pink rosebuds that had faded from many washings, Shelley brushing her hair, one, two, three, a hundred strokes, two hundred strokes, safe in her room at ten o’clock every night, unangry, his daughter brushing her hair before bed. The V.D. test was negative.

  Shelley?

  Yes, Father?

  Who are your girl friends now? Why don’t you ask them over to the house? Don’t you see that tall girl with the freckles any longer …?

  Who? Sandy? Oh, yes.…

  Who were you talking on the telephone with just no
w?

  Oh, nobody, just Babs Baird.…

  Who?

  Babs Baird.…

  He had the idea she was lying to him.

  At the clinic he worked quickly, excitedly. He could not fail. His poor-risk patients did not always die, not even from the anesthetic; urged on by that other Dr. Vogel, who was always eager to operate, Jesse dissected aneurysms and ran the risk of hemorrhages; he never hesitated, he worked as if still under the cautious, shrewd eyes of Dr. Perrault himself, daring Perrault to find fault with anything he did. The brain damage was never so bad as it might have been. His patients were never so bad as they might have been. At staff conferences, Jesse’s associates worried and argued and hinted at squabbles Jesse did not know about, glancing at Jesse’s thinning, perplexed face and seeing in it a centrality of all their wonder, a sense of growing neutral amazement over the problems of diagnosis, the frequent hopeless cuttings, even the habits of the cleaning women—Mannie Breck was always bringing this odd point up—who left scouring stains in the sinks.

  Breck and Ronald Myer could never agree on what they called a matter of ethics. When should nerves be snipped to put a cancer patient out of pain?

  Though Jesse was paying attention, he was also aware of small, striking details that somehow confused him. Mannie’s frizzy hair and wise, worried face. Ronald Myer’s hefty, high-colored face. The window behind them, darkly glaring with winter sunshine—a tinted window. Traffic moving out on the street. He recalled a hypodermic needle someone had stolen at LaSalle, years ago; he had always suspected a certain young nurse.

  Silence in the room told him that he was expected to say something.

  At other times he heard everything, heard too much; words stayed in his head but floated without connections, without the syntax of ordinary language to tie them together. That was why he was anxious to work, to work with his hands. His hands forgot nothing. He could do five, six difficult operations in a couple of days—operations that lasted for hours; one of them ran from nine in the morning until eleven-thirty at night and released him buoyed and excited by success, ready for the next day, the next problem.

  He found himself wasting many minutes with letters that came to him at the clinic. After an article appeared in a local paper there were always stray letters that Jesse opened personally, fascinated, knowing this was a waste of his time; and yet he had the feeling that someone might be trying to reach him, with a message meant only for him.

  Dear Dr. Vogel:

  Can you tell me the explanation of this: my fingers get numb like ice and it spreads up my arms to my elbows, but my face is very hot. I hear roaring in the ears. When I was sixteen I had a burst appendix. Is the poison still in me? Sometimes I taste a substance that is green, like poison, and gritty. What I want to know is: do other people taste this poison, or only me? Is it something in the air.

  Dear Dr. Vogel:

  My telephone number is below. Please call me any night after seven. I have long times of blindness and have to stay in bed. I am not a drinker. I have a good appetite and since a child I have always concentrated on good green vegetables and very little red meat. My spells of blindness will interfere with my job. I am waiting for your call.

  Dear Dr. Vogel:

  I am sixty-two years old and recently my periods began again, a heavy period of blood that lasted five days. I stayed in bed all that time. Is my body going backwards to where I could have a baby again. I am afraid to go to a doctor to talk about this. Please answer on this postcard which I have stamped.

  And there were the notes from Mrs. Perrault. She telephoned and left messages for Jesse to call her; one week Jesse counted eleven messages. He dreaded calling her, but one day, at noon, already feverish from a morning of work that was not going well, he picked up the phone and dialed her number. When she answered, her voice sounded stale and sleepy. “Oh, Jesse, thank you for calling, I have to talk to someone and you’re the only one who would understand,” she said. “It’s about my son Bruce and his wife.… I don’t like to complain, Jesse, but I’m alone now and I don’t have anyone who understands me.… I remember how courteous you always were, Jesse, to Dr. Perrault, and how he loved you … yes, we both loved you, and … and … For Christmas they gave me a bowl of cut glass, you know, for flowers and things … they’re living in Sacramento, you know, and she hates to fly so they never come visit … I never see the grandchildren … and … and, Jesse, they sent me this cut-glass bowl from a department store, it was packaged and wrapped and mailed from the store, for Christmas,” Mrs. Perrault said, beginning to cry in hoarse ugly gulps, “and it shows they gave no thought to me at all, just ordered something from a store, maybe Bruce wasn’t even along but she picked it out and it was the only present they sent me for Christmas, it was the only chance they had to send me something for Christmas and I might not be around next Christmas … it was just that one chance, when I opened the present, and it turned out to be that.… Dr. Perrault is dead now, Jesse, he’s dead,” Mrs. Perrault said, sobbing, “do you know what that means? He’s dead, do you know what that means?”

  For half an hour Jesse listened in misery, to this, unable to hang up.

  Once, in March, he telephoned home to check on Shelley, and Helene explained to him that she had given Shelley permission to stay after school for a meeting of some club—the journalism club, she thought, or the drama club. Jesse hid his irritation. He called back in an hour and this time Shelley was home. He asked his wife to put her on the telephone. “How are you, Shelley?” he asked. For a few seconds she was silent. He had the idea that she was about to scream at him. Then she said in her light, rapid voice, the voice of any high school girl, “I’m just fine, Father. When will you be home tonight?”

  He put the receiver back slowly, knowing that he was going to lose her.

  But he had to be certain of her. He had to prevent her from being misused by strangers, by men. The world could get at his daughter through the orifices of her body, pushing into the willing elastic streams of her blood, and she would smile dumbly, enticingly. Yet at the same time he had to think about the clinic. It could not handle all the patients who were referred for tests and treatment. It must be expanded. More money. A new wing, a new group of doctors. A further extension of Jesse’s brain, his energy. And his own field was expanding all the time; he could hardly keep up with the journals and papers that came to him. He spent an extra night trying to make sense of a long monograph on isotope encephalography, “brain-scanning,” by means of a radioactive isotope injected into the blood, but he could not concentrate because he kept thinking of Shelley upstairs, sleeping; or, rather, not thinking of her but envisioning her. Yet he did not really envision her, not the girl Shelley, but rather the ghostly “scan” of his own brain, Dr. Vogel’s brain, a photograph of a grainy oblong in which a certain area was heavily shaded by the radioactive isotope in the form of his daughter’s face, like a tumor … located in the frontal region of his brain. A posterior frontal tumor in Dr. Vogel’s brain.

  He forced himself to read: Abnormal tissues show abnormal scans.

  The first Saturday in April, Shelley was allowed to spend an afternoon at a girl friend’s house about a mile away. She left the address and the telephone number. Jesse went down to the clinic to check on some patients of his; then, on an impulse, he called the number. A girl answered. He asked to speak to Shelley and, with a breathless little laugh, the girl said that she was Shelley: didn’t he recognize her voice?

  Jesse hesitated. Yes, it was her voice. Of course. His daughter. He felt as if his head were slowly being squeezed out of shape.

  He stayed at the clinic for another hour, but the other Dr. Vogel was eager, anxious to get going, to do something, to get out from behind that desk. No operations scheduled for the next day. Nothing until Monday at nine-thirty. Nervously, he opened two or three letters and glanced at their contents, let them fall back onto his desk.… Finally he could stand it no longer. He drove back to Winnetka, to the address S
helley had given him. The house was handsome, large, a fake English Tudor with a garage big enough for four cars. The lawn was oddly raw, torn up, as if repair work had been done on it last fall and had never been completed. There was a large shallow pit near the front steps where a pipe lay exposed, partly covered with leaves and debris and dirty patches of snow. When Jesse rang the bell he heard nothing inside—the bell must be out of order.

  Fighting his panic, he waited quietly. The material of the front porch had begun to crumble. The mailbox was an ordinary dime-store mailbox, rusty and bent, and in it were stuck shopping circulars, their colors run together.

  Finally he knocked on the door.

  And now … now … someone was coming. He heard a voice.

  But the door was not opened. Jesse rapped again, gently. He did not want to frighten this person away. He heard someone speaking, asking a question. But he could not hear what it was. My God, Jesse thought in misery, wanting to bring his head forward and smash it against the door.

  He knocked again. Gently. Courteous. And, after another long wait, he heard the lock being undone.

  A woman his own age stood there, staring at him. She wore a bathrobe of some violet quilted material.

  “Yes? Who is it? What do you want?” she said.

  Her face was pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes pale, undefined. Messy hair. A smell of disuse about her.