The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age Read online

  Joyce at her first desk, five years old. At home in Millersport, New York. (Fred Oates)

  DEDICATION

  To my brother Fred Oates

  And in memory of those who have gone away

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I

  WE BEGIN . . .

  MOMMY & ME

  HAPPY CHICKEN: 1942–1944

  DISCOVERING ALICE: 1947

  DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK

  PIPER CUB

  AFTER BLACK ROCK

  SUNDAY DRIVE

  FRED’S SIGNS

  “THEY ALL JUST WENT AWAY”

  “WHERE HAS GOD GONE”

  HEADLIGHTS: THE FIRST DEATH

  “THE BRUSH”

  AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY: THE LOST FRIEND

  “START YOUR OWN BUSINESS!”

  THE LOST SISTER: AN ELEGY

  NIGHTHAWK: RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOST TIME

  II

  DETROIT: LOST CITY 1962–1968

  STORY INTO FILM:

  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” AND SMOOTH TALK

  PHOTO SHOOT:

  WEST ELEVENTH STREET, NYC, MARCH 6, 1970

  FOOD MYSTERIES

  FACTS, VISIONS, MYSTERIES:

  MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, NOVEMBER 1988

  A LETTER TO MY MOTHER CAROLINA ON HER

  SEVENTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1994

  “WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL

  AND MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT ME”

  III

  EXCERPT, TELEPHONE CONVERSATION

  WITH MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, MAY 1999

  THE LONG ROMANCE

  MY MOTHER’S QUILTS

  AFTERWORD

  PHOTO SECTION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NONFICTION BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Lost Landscape is not meant to be a complete memoir of my life—not even my life as a writer. It is, for me at least, something more precious, as it is almost indefinable: an accounting of the ways in which my life (as a writer, but not solely as a writer) was shaped in early childhood, adolescence, and a little beyond. Its focus is upon the “landscape” of our earliest, and most essential lives, but it is also upon an actual rural landscape, in western New York State north of Buffalo, out of which not only much of the materials of my writing life have sprung but also the very wish to write.

  Because it is essential to The Lost Landscape, “District School #7, Niagara County, New York” has been reprinted from The Faith of a Writer (2003), in a slightly different form. In a more substantially altered form, an updated “Visions of Detroit” ([Woman] Writer, 1988) has been reprinted under the title “Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968.” Other chapters have been revised significantly from memoirist pieces published in a variety of magazines, journals, and books, often in response to an editor’s invitation.

  To the editors of these publications, heartfelt thanks are due:

  “Mommy & Me” originally appeared, in a shorter form, in Civilization, February 1997.

  “Happy Chicken” originally appeared in Conjunctions 61: A Menagerie, 2013.

  “Discovering Alice” originally appeared in AARP Magazine, 2014.

  “Piper Cub” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Rhapsody, November 2013.

  “After Black Rock” originally appeared in the New Yorker, June 2013.

  “Sunday Drive” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Traditional Home, March 1995.

  “They All Just Went Away” originally appeared in a substantially different form in the New Yorker, October 1995. Reprinted in The Best American Essays 1996 and in The Best American Essays of the 20th Century. This essay incorporates “Transgressions,” originally published in the New York Times Magazine, October 1995.

  “Where Has God Gone” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Southwest Review, Summer 1995, and was reprinted inCommunion edited by David Rosenberg, 1995 under the title “And God Saw That It Was Good.”

  “An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Between Friends edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1994.

  “Start Your Own Business!” originally appeared in substantially different forms in the New Yorker under the title “Bound,” April 2003; and in Conjunctions 63 (2014) under the title “The Childhood of the Reader,” which will be reprinted in Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses 2016.

  “The Lost Sister: An Elegy” originally appeared in Narrative.

  “Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time” appeared originally in Yale Review, 2001, and in Conjunctions, 2014; reprinted, in a substantially different form, in Narrative, 2015.

  “Story into Film: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ and Smooth Talk”appeared originally in the New York Times, March 23, 1986.

  Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968” appeared originally, in a shorter form, in (Woman) Writer, 1988.

  “Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, New York City, March 6, 1970” originally appeared, in a shorter form, under the title “Nostalgia” in Vogue, April 2006; reprinted in Port, 2014.

  “Food Mysteries” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Antaeus 1991; reprinted in Not By Bread Alone edited by Daniel Halpern, 1992.

  “Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in the New York Times Magazine, March 1989; reprinted in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, edited by Constance Warloe, 1996.

  “A Letter to My Mother Carolina Oates on Her Seventy-eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994” originally appeared, in a slightly different version, in the New York Times Magazine, 1995; reprinted in this version in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You edited by Constance Warloe and in The Norton Anthology of Autobiography edited by Jay Parini, 1999.

  “My Mother’s Quilts” originally appeared, in a slightly shorter form, in What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, 2013.

  I

  WE BEGIN . . .

  WE BEGIN AS CHILDREN imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.

  MOMMY & ME

  Carolina Oates and Joyce, backyard of Millersport house, May 1941. (Fred Oates)

  MAY 14, 1941. IT was a time of nerves. Worried-sick what was coming my father would say of this time in our family history but who could guess it, examining this very old and precious snapshot of Mommy and me in our backyard playing with kittens?

  LOOKED LIKE I WOULD be drafted. Nobody knew what was coming. At Harrison’s, we were working double shifts. In the papers were cartoons of Hitler but none of it was funny. The nightmare of Pearl Harbor is seven months away but the United States has been in a continuous state of nerves since Hitler executed his blitzkrieg against an unprepared Poland in September 1939; by May 1941, with England under attack, the United States is engaged in an undeclared war in the Atlantic Ocean with Germany . . . But I am two years, eleven months old and oblivious to the concerns of adults that are not immediate concerns about me.

  MY TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD FATHER FREDERIC Oates, whom everyone calls “Fred” or “Freddy,” is taking pictures of Mommy and me behind our farmhouse in Millersport, New York; it is a day when Daddy is not working on the assembly line at Harrison Radiator, a division of General Motors seven miles away in Lockport, New York, involved in wh
at is believed to be “defense work.” It is a tense, rapidly-shifting, unpredictable era before TV when news comes in terse radio announcements and in the somber pages of the Buffalo Evening News delivered in the late afternoon six days a week. But such global turbulence is remote from our farm in western New York where everything is green and humid in prematurely hot May and the grass in the backyard grows thick and raggedy. Here my twenty-four-year-old mother Carolina, whom everyone calls “Lena,” is cuddling with me in the grass playing with our newborn black kittens, smiling as Daddy takes pictures.

  TAKING PICTURES WITH THE blue box camera. Of dozens, hundreds of pictures taken in those years only a few seem to have survived and how strange, how astonishing it would have been for us to have thought, in May 1941—These pictures will outlive us!

  How happy we are, and how good and simple life must have seemed to that long-lost child Joyce Carol—(who did not know that she was to be the “firstborn” of three children)—with little in her life more vexing than the ordeal of having her curly hair brushed and combed free of snarls and fixed in place with ribbons, and being “dressed up” for some adult special occasion.

  You can see in the snapshot behind Mommy and me a young, black-barked cherry tree and behind the tree the somewhat dour two-storey wood frame farmhouse owned by my mother’s stepparents John and Lena Bush. Built in 1888 on Transit Road, at the time a narrow two-lane country road linking the small town of Lockport with the sprawling city of Buffalo twenty miles away, and surprisingly large by Millersport standards (where some of our neighbors’ houses were single-storey, lacking cellars, hardly more than cabins or shanties), this steep-roofed farmhouse was razed decades ago yet resides powerfully—indomitably!—in my memory, the site of recurring dreams. (In a dream of the old farmhouse in Millersport I recognize, not a visual scene, but a sensation: a tone, a slant of light. Often, details are blurred. If there are human figures, their faces are blurred. I seem to know where I am, and who is with me, though I might not be able to name anyone. Just that sensation, both comforting and laced with a kind of visceral dread—Back home.) Note the exterior cellar door, a common sight in this now-vanished rural America, like the rain barrel at the corner of the house where rainwater was collected—and used for all purposes except drinking.

  Behind Daddy as he takes our picture (and not visible to the viewer) is the farmyard: weatherworn barn with pewter lightning rod atop the highest pitch of the roof; chicken coop surrounded by a barbed-wire fence to keep out raccoons, foxes, and the wandering dogs of neighbors; storage sheds; fields, fruit orchards. To the right of the sliding barn doors is a smaller door leading into the corner of the barn that houses my grandfather Bush’s smithy with its anvil and hammer, blacksmith tools, small coal furnace and bellows that turns with a crank. Red-feathered chickens with no idea that they are “free range” are wandering about pecking in the dirt, oblivious of all else. All these—lost.

  TAKING PICTURES HAS BEEN our salvation. Without taking pictures our memories would melt, evaporate. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century—and the “snapshot” in the twentieth century—revolutionized human consciousness; for when we claim to remember our pasts we are almost certainly remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a visual immortality.

  TAKING PICTURES WAS AN adult privilege in 1941. My way of taking pictures was to scribble earnestly with Crayolas in coloring books and in tablets. Grass would be horizontal motions of the green crayon. Black kitten, black crayon. Chickens were upright scribbles, vaguely humanoid in expression. My parents, I would not attempt. No human figures would appear in any of my childhood drawings, only very deep-green grass and trees, kittens and cats with fur of many hues, Rhode Island Red chickens.

  NO ROMANCE IS SO profound and so enduring as the romance of early childhood. The yearning we feel through our lives for our young, attractive and mysterious parents—who were so physically close to us and yet, apart from us, inaccessible and unknowable. Is this the very origin of “romance,” coloring and determining all that is to follow in our lifetimes? I am drawn to stare at these old family snapshots lovingly kept in albums and in envelopes. And so I am drawn too to snapshots of strangers’ families, sifting through boxes of old postcards and snapshots in secondhand shops—though these individuals are not “my” family, yet frequently they are not so very different from my family. Children in snapshots of long-ago, given a spurious sort of immortality by an adult’s love, and all of them probably now departed. The almost overwhelming wish comes to me—I want to write their stories! That is the only way I can know these strangers—by writing their stories . . .

  HAPPY CHICKEN 1942–1944

  I WAS HER PET chicken. I was Happy Chicken.

  Of all the chickens on the little farm on Transit Road in the northern edge of Erie County in western New York State in that long-ago time in the early 1940s, just one was Happy Chicken who was the curly-haired little girl’s pet chicken.

  The little girl was urged to think that she’d been the first to call me Happy Chicken. In fact, this had to have been one of the adults and probably the Mother.

  Probably too it was the Mother, and not the little girl, who’d been the first to discover that of all the chickens, I was the only one who came eagerly clucking to the little girl as if to say hello.

  Oh look!—it’s Happy Chicken coming to say hello.

  The little girl and the little girl’s mother laughed in delight that, without being called, I would peck in the dirt around the little girl’s feet and I would seem to bow when my back was lightly stroked as a dog or a cat might seem to bow when petted.

  The little girl loved it, my feathers were soft. Not scratchy and smelly like the feathers of the other, older chickens.

  The little girl loved hearing my soft, querying clucks.

  Early in the morning the little girl ran outside.

  Happy! Happy Chicken!—the little girl cried through small cupped hands.

  And there I came running! Out of the shadowy barn, or out of the bushes, or from somewhere in the barnyard amidst other, ordinary dark-red-feathered chickens. A flutter of feathers, cluck-cluck-cluck lifting in a bright staccato Here I am! I am Happy Chicken!

  The Grandfather shook his head in disbelief. Never saw anything like this—Damn little chicken thinks he’s a dog.

  It was a sign of how special Happy Chicken was, the family referred to me as he. As if I were, not a mere hen among many, a brainless egg-layer like the others, but a lively little boy-chicken.

  For the others were just ordinary hens and scarcely discernible from one another unless you looked closely at them which no one would do (except the Grandmother who examined hens suspected of being “sickly”).

  Truly I was Happy Chicken! Truly, there was no other chicken like me.

  My red-gleaming feathers bristled and shone more brightly than the feathers of the hens because I didn’t roll in the dust as frequently as they did, in their (mostly futile) effort to rid themselves of mites. It wasn’t just that Happy Chicken was young (for there were other chickens as young as I was, hatched from eggs within the year) but I was also far more intelligent, and more handsome; your eye was drawn to me, and only to me, out of the flock; for you could see from the special gleam in my eyes and the way in which I came running before the little girl called me, that I was a very special little chicken.

  The yard between the barn and the farmhouse was cratered with shallow indentations in which chickens rolled and fluttered their wings like large demented birds who’d lost the ability to fly. Sometimes as many as a dozen chickens would be rolling in the dirt at the same time as in a bizarre coordinated modern dance; but the chickens were not coordinated and indeed took little heed of one another except, from time to time, to lash out with a petulant peck and an irritated cluck. When not rolling in the dirt (and in their own black, liquidy droppings) these chickens spent their time jabbing beaks into the dirt in search of grubs, bugs. Stray seeds left ov
er from feeding time, bits of rotted fruit. Their happiness was not the happiness of Happy Chicken but a very dim kind of happiness for a chicken’s brain is hardly the size of a pea, what else can you expect? This was why Happy Chicken—that is, I—was such a surprise to the family, and such a delight.

  My comb was rosy with health, erect with blood. My eyes were unusually alert and clear. But each eye on each side of the beak, how’d you expect us to see coherently? We see double, and one side of our brain dims down so that the other side can see precisely. That’s how we know which direction in which to run, to escape predators.

  Most of the time, however, most chickens don’t. Don’t escape predators.

  Sometime, they’re so dumb they run toward predators. They do this when the predator is smart enough to freeze. They can’t detect immobility, and they can’t detect something staring at them.

  I was not really one of them. To be identified as special, and recognized as Happy Chicken, meant that, though I was a chicken I was not one of them. And particularly, I was not a silly stupid hen.

  SOMETIMES—AT SPECIAL TIMES—UNDER CLOSE adult scrutiny and always held snug in the little girl’s arms—Happy Chicken was allowed inside the farmhouse.

  No other chicken, not even Mr. Rooster, was ever allowed inside the farmhouse.

  Never upstairs but downstairs in the “wash-room” at the rear of the house—a room with a linoleum floor that contained a washing machine with a hand ringer, and where coats and boots were kept—this is where the little girl Joyce could bring me. But always held gently-but-firmly in her arms, or set onto the floor and held in place, in the wash-room or—a few special times—in the kitchen which opened off the wash-room, where the Grandmother spent most of her time. Here, the little girl was given scraps of bread to feed me, on the linoleum floor.

  And here, I was sometimes allowed up in the little girl’s lap, to be fussed over and petted.