Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Mrs. Baird?”

  “My name is Nancy.”

  “I’m Jesse Vogel.…”

  She stared boldly at him and said nothing.

  “I think my daughter is visiting your daughter …?”

  “Oh. Your daughter. Somebody with Babs. Oh, wait. Do you want to step inside?”

  The entryway was dim. A flagstone floor, a low-hanging chandelier of wrought iron. The woman was saying, “Somebody is with Babs, yes. I heard them come in. Now, let’s see. Let’s see,” she said, confused. She stumbled back against something—a piece of heavy ornate furniture, a Spanish chest that was very dusty. “I was taking a nap. I have my room now in the study, right up close to the front door. So I can answer the doorbell. Otherwise I wouldn’t hear it. I can’t get anyone to come fix the doorbell. Repairmen just laugh at me, they never pay any attention to a woman by herself.… Which one is your daughter, is she the blond? They have a place in the Bahamas?”

  “Shelley has red hair.”

  “Shelley. Oh, yes. Shelley. She’s very sweet. She’s Babs’s best friend. They went to St. Ursula’s together before Babs transferred …?”

  “You must be thinking of someone else,” Jesse said nervously.

  The woman was leading him into a long, dark living room, where the furniture was not quite in place, the sofas and chairs moved about into odd arrangements. A table was overturned in front of the fireplace. Most of the shades were drawn, but not evenly. “This room is a dungeon. I hate it. I want to do it all over in off-white, you know, oyster. But I can’t get started. This place has a curse on it,” the woman said rapidly. “First of all, I hate this style of house. It wasn’t my choice of a house.… Oh, I know where they are. They’re swimming,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it.

  She led him through the living room into a corridor, where the carpet was coming loose. It looked as if children had been running and skidding on it. “There’s a curse on this house, believe me,” the woman said peevishly. She led Jesse into a huge room of domed glass. The pool was empty, drained out, the air was very chilly. “Oh, they’re not here after all. Where are they? I thought they went swimming … I thought I heard them in here.…”

  Jesse walked to the edge of the pool and stared down. At this end it was cluttered with cans and bottles, debris from ashtrays, old newspapers, waxed milk cartons, bright yellow cereal boxes.

  Jesse could not speak.

  “Well, maybe they went out. To the roller rink maybe. They all wear these cute little skirts and colored panties and high-topped white roller skates. Aren’t they cute, those outfits? That’s where they are, probably.”

  “She isn’t here?”

  “Why don’t you relax? Are you new in the neighborhood or something? You look like you’re new. Why don’t you sit down somewhere, I’ll make us a drink.…”

  “They’re not here? My daughter isn’t here …?”

  “Why don’t you relax, please. I’ll make us both a drink and we can talk this over.…”

  Jesse stared at her. His head pounded with revulsion. That pale, out-of-focus face, her squinting eyes, her odor—It was so hard to keep a family, Jesse thought suddenly, that maybe it was better to give up. Better to give up, erase them all, destroy them, obliterate them and the memory of them, wipe everything out. A father could wipe out everything he had ever done and be free. A clean, pure, empty being, a void.…

  “You sure you’re not new in the neighborhood?” the woman asked, following him to the front door.

  Jesse went home. Seeing his face, Helene asked what had happened. He said nothing. “You didn’t check on Shelley, did you? You didn’t go to the house and embarrass her in front of her friends?” Helene asked anxiously.

  “No,” Jesse said.

  When Shelley came home, it was nearly dark. She let herself in the back door and he heard her speaking to Helene—the two of them speaking ordinarily, lightly, loud enough for Jesse to hear if he wished, so that he could know there were no secrets in this house.

  She appeared in the doorway. Jesse was sitting in the living room without the lights on.

  She stared at him. “Are you … is it … am I late?” Shelley asked.

  “No.”

  She was unbuttoning her jacket. It was made of some coarse beige material, lined with fake fur, an imitation of a farmer’s or a laborer’s jacket. She wore jeans and boots. Her face itself looked a little coarse, as if from hurrying, breathing hard.

  “What’s wrong …?” she whispered.

  “Is anything wrong?” Jesse asked ironically.

  They stared at each other. It was nearly dark. Light from the hallway fell past Shelley and into the living room, all the way to Jesse’s legs. He stood. He was not going to do anything.

  “Did you go there?” Shelley said faintly.

  “Go where?”

  “To the Bairds’.”

  Jesse said nothing.

  “You … you want to kill me.…” Shelley whispered.

  She turned and ran upstairs.

  That was on Saturday. The next morning she did not get out of bed; she complained of a cold, a sore throat. She looked feverish. Jesse went up to her room and she was sitting propped up in bed, the Sunday papers scattered about her, a few pages fallen onto the floor. She wiped her nose with a tissue that was already crumpled and damp.

  “How do you feel?” he asked carefully.

  “It’s just a cold. I’m all right.”

  Her hair had been brushed away from her face; near the hairline there was a row of small dull pimples.

  The next morning she did not go to school. At the clinic, preparing for an operation, Jesse thought of her red-rimmed eyes and he froze, he could not move. He had been washing, scrubbing for the operating room. A minute before he had been eager to get in there, to peel out some poisonous little beads of flesh he knew he would find … in just a short while he would find them, he’d peel them out and destroy them … but now he froze, he heard someone talking to him but he could not bring himself to make the effort to listen—

  He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t take the risk. Someone else would have to do the operation.

  That afternoon at two the telephone rang and he knew it would be his wife. He listened to her careful, calm voice like a man in a dream, his eyes closed. “I only went out for half an hour. She was gone when I came back. There’s no note, nothing. Nothing. It’s just like the last time.…”

  7

  Jesse drove down into Chicago, on the lookout for girls of a certain age, a certain height. He seemed to see them all over. He saw them walking along the street or waiting for buses or lingering in doorways. His eye jumped onto them. Occasionally they noticed him, his cruising automobile, and stepped out to see him better, to give him a better look at them—some of the girls even younger than Shelley, some of them black, with that same hip-rocking sardonic flirtatiousness he had noticed in the high school girls. It meant nothing, he thought. Nothing. Or it meant everything.

  He stopped from time to time to telephone his wife, but there was no news at home, no good news. The police hadn’t found her. The police were sympathetic but busy; they were on the trails of a thousand girls like Shelley, so they said.

  At her high school he tried to talk to her teachers, her friends, tried to learn something about her. Her teachers didn’t seem to know her well. Yes, a pretty girl, a redheaded girl, not very responsive … day-dreaming.… Their pity for Jesse embarrassed him. Shelley’s “friends” were no more helpful. They were embarrassed and a little sullen. Babs Baird said coolly, “Shell had a mind of her own, she didn’t really run with us. She did what she wanted to do. Nobody could boss her around.”

  “Who wanted to boss her around?” Jesse asked.

  “Oh, you know. Guys.”

  “Who?”

  “People. Just people. They always want to boss you around,” Babs said.

  She was a lean, round-shouldered girl, insolent in an impersonal, weary way. Jesse would
have liked to shake her by the shoulders, but he spoke to her politely. Where did she think Shelley had gone?

  “Look, I didn’t know her that well. She sort of used me, you know? She used my name. She had more on me than I had on her. She’ll probably be back.”

  “Why do you say that? When will she be back?”

  “Who knows?” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

  Jesse drove around other high schools in the city, cruising slowly. His eyes had begun to ache. He saw crowds of high school students, boys and girls, a tide of them, the sexes confused, mixed together, surging across school lawns and intersections. He saw a hundred girls who might have been his daughter. He strolled along the sidewalk, letting the girls overtake him, pass him, his heart lurching at their shadows, which skidded past and touched him deftly, boldly.… Snatches of their conversations: “Oh, Louise told me that already. What else? Who’s kidding who?” A mysterious, fluid jumble of words that seemed sacred to him. If he turned to glance at these girls he saw how vacuous they were, how easy with one another, not guessing at the sacred quality of their words, their faces.… Girls with colored stockings, ornamental stockings stitched into diamond shapes, even into shapes of tiny hearts, some legs so tight with flesh that the black stitching was uneven in places, starting to unravel. Their voices were occasionally flat and harsh, even the voices of the prettiest girls. But Jesse had faith in their inner music, which paused and stalled and rushed onward, mocking and derisive, while their long hair flicked with the wind, their heads snapping like horses’ heads to get the hair out of their eyes. Any one of them could have been his daughter.

  He kept calling the police station. Yes, they were looking for her. So they said. They had a thousand girls to catch up with, so they said.

  On April 15, Jesse drove downtown again to watch the crowds gathering for an antiwar demonstration. He got there early in the afternoon so that he would miss nothing. It was a fairly cold spring day, but the crowd grew rapidly. Thousands of people. Most of them were young, kids in their twenties, teenagers in groups, the girls with their usual long straight listless hair, the boys with greasy hair in shoulder-length strands, their faces pasty and wild and set for excitement. A slow surging march along the street. Policemen lined the sidewalks to hold back the spectators.

  Jesse’s eyes jumped everywhere, looking for Shelley.

  The stamp of marching feet. Chanting. Random shouts. Bright splashes of sound—pure voices, without words. Jesse’s heart ached to hear those voices, the girls’ voices, so pure and bodiless and angry. He was elbowed, shoved, pushed by people on the sidewalks, spectators who were getting impatient. A gang of Negro boys ran through the crowd, ducking and giggling. A girl with a picket sign was knocked down. She shrieked. A policeman on horseback started through the marchers, the horse’s tail swishing, aristocratic and unhurried; people strained to get out of the way, a few of the younger girls cried out in alarm.… Someone was being pressed up against a building. Help! Stop! The policeman continued without looking down. Jesse had been pushed along himself and could not see what had happened to the girls.

  A surging, milling crowd, the stamping of feet, picket signs waving in the light—END THE WAR IN VIETNAM! END THE KILLING! Jesse stared at the faces, knowing how necessary it was to see each face. His own face must have been brilliant with desire, like a beacon, because people occasionally glanced at him, struck by something they saw in him. He sensed in the young people who were marching a curious impersonal contempt for him, perhaps because of his clothes. Or his age. It was not personal, it was not bodily or physical or sensual, this contempt. It was an abstract, spiritual hatred of him, a dismissal that was frightening. A man like Dr. Vogel might die and it would not matter.

  He felt their hatred, it made him lightheaded, fearful. He did not understand it. He thought of cancerous protoplasm: that fatal spreading essence. He had seen it many times through a microscope. Eating away its own boundaries, no limits to it, an inflammation seeding everywhere—to the spinal fluid, to the brain. How they surged in the chill open air of Chicago, roused as if by godly chimes—the bells of sunken churches, pealing and pulsating in a rhythm that people like Jesse could feel only remotely, being too old. It was a rhythm that beat in the loins of the young and showed in their faces. Their eyes were glazed, filmed over by the cold wind—in a hurry, they were in a hurry! They were shouting with the need to hurry! They were so young, they could push everyone else off the edge of the continent, being in such a hurry!

  Girls younger than his daughter were tramping around downtown in this mob, being pushed and shoved and pressed against, all elbows themselves, ducking under arms and squirming away, running, chanting, taunting the police and their own hecklers, their faces wind-blown and arrogant. Jesse was out of breath and could not keep up with them. He was behind the police line, safe with people his own age and older, not in the surging crowd that had taken over the street. He watched. No good to shout at them to wait. No good to shout at all. They would not hear, waving their signs in a communion of noise. They were children’s faces in the street, rising and blossoming and on the verge of detonation. Their faces strained to explode. Mouths and eyes out of shape, distorted, a lovely sleeping yearning to them as they pressed forward into the backs of other kids.…

  Jesse hated this formlessness. He was seized with a sudden hatred for it, almost a nausea. He hated it, hated them. Hated the crowd and its joy in being trampled. Hated the noise. The communion. The sensuous rising heat of the faces, the shapes of the mouths … hated that merging, that mobbing.… Better to destroy them all, Jesse thought. Better to die than to descend into this frenzy, to be lost in this anonymous garbage. This strange mass consciousness revolted him. He hated it, hated all these people, even those watching from the sidewalks. So much garbage in the world! And most of it human! Heaving, pulsing, sighing, surging with blood, their common breaths congealing in the used-up air, forming a sooty, smoggy, warm breath that was human and guttery, the comfortable odor of sewage.… Jesse could not help but think that this crowd was about to part and reveal something, a single figure, a truth. Wasn’t there a truth, a single truth, a single human being at the center of this mob? A single eye that would see everyone, everything, and pronounce judgment upon it?

  But nothing. Only noise. Only bodies.

  Jesse fought his way out of it. Back to where his car was parked, a mile away. Panting. Breathless. Stunned by the smell of them, this human flow, this avalanche, his head rocky with their chants, their feet. Yet his eyes still darted about hotly. He had to find her. He would find her. He had been tempted to lose himself in that crowd, yes, to pass into its frenzy as if his brain had burst, but he would not give in to it: he would return to the world in which he was a single human being, a single consciousness with a destiny he must fulfill.

  The next week, a postcard came to him at the clinic postmarked Savannah, Georgia. Very faint scrawling, in pencil, which he could hardly read. It said something about a head, a “fast-moving head,” something about an operation, about brains. He turned the postcard over in his fingers: an ordinary street scene, a boulevard with palm trees, in Savannah. So she had gotten that far. Georgia.

  He knew he would never find her.

  8

  In July he received a letter from Florida, a long letter on tablet paper, covered with Shelley’s slanted handwriting. And, in the envelope, part of a broken fingernail.

  He read the letter several times. The voice must say I love you. If it does not say I love you it is not an authentic voice. Trembling, unable to control his trembling, he read about Noel, read about someone named Noel, his daughter’s lover.

  He read the letter and yet he had the idea that she was dead: that the police were hiding information from him. Somewhere they had discovered her decomposing body, in a ditch somewhere, strangled and left by a man, a man named Noel.

  He called the police. Went to the station and showed them the letter but would not surrender it to them, wouldn’t
let them read it all the way through. “She’s with a man. Someone named Noel. Named Noel,” Jesse said.

  “If she writes you letters she’ll be coming back. Don’t worry,” he was told.

  And Helene told him: “If she writes you that means she’ll come back. I know it. I’m certain of it.”

  He tortured himself with certain passages from this letter: Noel says, Noel rubs his forehead against mine, Noel weighs me down.… He waited for another letter but nothing came until October: again postmarked Florida, a small city on the western side of the state. I am “the Fetish.” Noel dressed me up … led me around the beach naked.… Jesse read this letter and a flame passed over his brain, paralyzing him. She was teasing, taunting him. This couldn’t be true. He told Helene about the letter but would not let her read it. She did not insist. She kept saying gently, unconvincingly: “If she writes you, Jesse, she’ll come back. Why else would she write?”

  The next month another long letter came, an almost unintelligible letter, and Jesse read it with a stiff angry smile, sitting at his desk at the clinic, where he spent most of his time though he no longer operated. He went to the clinic mainly on the chance that a letter from his daughter might arrive—she never sent any of the letters home. Ronald Myer had taken over much of his work. Jesse’s “work.” Jesse’s “patients.” He waited for the mail each morning and afternoon, waiting for Shelley to write, but when her letter did come he thought at first it must be a trick: he was sure that she was dead. Her murderer was writing these letters to drive him mad.

  Then, in January of 1971, he got a letter from New York City, and he wondered if she might be on her way home. Coming north, coming back to him. He no longer bothered to call the police. No use to show them the letter. He kept it at the clinic, in the center drawer of his desk, where he could read it slowly through again and again. You hypnotized me, Shelley said. Or someone said, in Shelley’s voice and in her childish handwriting.

  She was teasing him, taunting him. Like the girls in the street that day last April: their faces savage with the delight of teasing, taunting.