The (Other) You Read online

  Dedication

  FOR BOBBY FRIEDMAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1.

  The (Other) You

  The Women Friends

  The Bloody Head

  Where Are You?

  The Crack

  Waiting for Kizer

  Blue Guide

  Assassin

  2.

  Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

  Hospice/Honeymoon

  Subaqueous

  The Happy Place

  Nightgrief

  Final Interview

  The Unexpected

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  The (Other) You

  Bought a bookstore. Mostly secondhand books.

  Never left your hometown on the Erie Barge Canal, upstate New York.

  Never wanted to leave because why?—you have family here, relatives. High school friends. Found a house just three blocks from the house you’d grown up in.

  Fact is, you failed to get the scholarship you’d needed to escape.

  So, after you graduated from the local community college you got married. First man you believed you loved, and certainly the first who claimed to love you. And you and your husband bought South Main Books where you’d spent so many enthralled hours as a schoolgirl.

  By the time the elderly proprietor died the stock had become primarily secondhand. Waterlogged, stained. Fire-scorched. Heaps of books assembled onto metal bookcases with hand-printed labels—MYSTERY & DETECTIVE, SCI-FI, FANTASY. POPULAR FICTION, CLASSICS. HISTORY, MILITARY HISTORY, HOW-TO. CHILDREN’S BOOKS. Teetering stalagmites of books rising from the floor waiting to be sorted, shelved. And in the cavernous basement a vast graveyard of moldering paperbacks in bins.

  Yet, there was romance in such a place. A universe of books. A universe of souls. Except unlike souls, books endured. You could hold a book in your hand, as you could not hold a soul in your hand. You could turn the pages of a book—you could read.

  In the act of reading you could enter another time, the time of the book. It had to be a past time—a parallel time. Such an act felt subversive, secret—like dreaming, except the dream belonged to another, not you. You could become one with sentences as they flowed like a thin stream of water over rock—rippling, transparent. You could become one with the stranger who had written the book, who was not you.

  You stared in wonder, mesmerized. How on the spines of books, including even the cheapest paperbacks, there was the imprint of a singular name.

  A book is something to be held in the hand. What a book is, is not so easy to summarize.

  Everybody predicted you’d go bankrupt in the first year. Then, they extended the time to two years. Three years? Five? Just wait.

  Unlocking the rear door of South Main Books each morning you see that wraith of a girl in the shadows, turning the pages of a book—staring at you with startled eyes, in the very act of vanishing.

  Yes. I love books. To read, not to write. I never wanted to be a writer, I will leave that to others more courageous and more reckless.

  Fact is, as long as you could remember you’d wanted to be a writer. You’d wanted to be a poet. You’d wanted to tell stories. You’d wanted to see your name on the spine of a book.

  You’d wanted to hold that book in your hand. You’d wanted to open that book, turn to the first pages . . . Only I could have written this. Here is my truest self!

  You’d begun before you could read. You’d begun with Crayolas, coloring books. Your favorite crayon colors were burnt umber, scarlet, purple. You’d begun by copying comics out of the newspaper by hand, on tracing paper. In grade school you illustrated your own fairy tales.

  Talking-animal stories. Space travel stories. Werewolf, vampire stories. Weird tales in the lineage of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft. In middle school, elaborate mysteries in the lineage of Ellery Queen.

  You published poetry and fiction in school magazines. In the local newspaper where there was a weekly poetry column on Sunday. Young, you’d gazed into that seductive abyss, the abyss gazed back into you. Deeply.

  Never failed to trip your heart, the sight of the front window shimmering with reflected light, and displays of books inside. SOUTH MAIN BOOKS NEW & SECONDHAND. BROWSERS WELCOME.

  After you bought the bookstore you never wrote again. Not enough time!—you said. Not enough hours in the day.

  Maybe it had been a mistake, you conceded. Buying a (failing) bookstore. In a (failing) economy. Like having kids which you’d done (also). Like getting married (also). Maybe it’s a mistake but you want to try it, see how it feels, when you’re young you think you have plenty of time to change your mind. You think.

  Not even a line of poetry, you wrote. Not for years.

  Well—in fact poetry sprang from you like wildflowers pushing through the (empty) eye sockets of a skull in the woods. Lines of poems, radiant as raindrops. Melting icicles. A bird’s high trill. Like love, a mystery. Like the very word mystery—how close to misery. Falling in love, falling out of love. And again, falling in love. All with the same man who’d had to work at a radiator factory in Niagara Falls, to help support the God-damned bookstore (as he called it, with exasperated affection) that was your first love.

  Shoveling books, there were so many. Needed a bulldozer to organize the basement. Needed to wear a gas mask, so many mold spores. So Gerard joked.

  (Except: Are there jokes? What is the secret meaning of laughter?)

  One autumn you repainted the interior: robin’s-egg blue. Cream-colored ceiling, trim. Iridescent suns, moons, stars on the (twelve-foot, hammered tin) ceiling. Likenesses of classic writers and poets on the walls—Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman. The old gods, gazing down upon you bemused, benign. You invited local artists to display their work on your walls. Sculpture in the front window.

  Any time of day until 6 P.M. you were in the store. After Gerard died you extended the hours on Thursdays and Fridays for there was no reason to hurry home. You initiated poetry readings at the store, high school students, community college.

  You provided coffee. Cookies, brownies baked in the night when you couldn’t sleep anyway, empty house, no husband, no kids, hours before it made sense to open the God-damned bookstore and even then, when you arrived, you’d be the first merchant on Main Street to open.

  In wintry months, switching on lights. Sudden warmth of lights in the gloom. That wraith-girl, surprised in the act of turning away, clutching a book in her hand which no adult would have allowed her to see if they’d known . . .

  At last, aged forty-four you dared to read your own poems. At the conclusion of an evening celebrating women’s poetry. A published woman poet from the community college, several other local poets, then you rising hesitantly daring to read from a sheaf of typed poems in a low, hurried voice. Applause startled you, your eyes glanced up widened and affrighted.

  Were you naked, on display? How, why had you done such a thing?

  Your customers, your friends. Neighbors. Astonished that you’d written poetry. Astonished that you’d been camouflaged among them for all of your adult life. Applauding you, love for you shining in their eyes. (Re)creating South Main Books, this center for a community of loosely affiliated women and men in the very heart of the dying-out downtown of Yewville, perhaps it isn’t surprising that you who have urged books of poetry upon customers for years turn out to be a poet too.

  The women hug you, weep over you. How brave you’ve been, since Gerard died
! Keeping the store open, alone. So much effort you’ve expended, alone. They make too much of you, you think uneasily. As friends will do.

  But it is safe now. Your parents are no longer living. Your husband has died. Your children who haven’t moved away from Yewville rarely come to the store to be embarrassed by their silvery-gray-ponytailed mother in overalls and T-shirt emblazoned with a subtly demonic likeness of Emily Dickinson.

  Too late for poetry, for the sustained effort of poetry, the bookstore has become your life. What remains of your life. No intention of retiring—ever.

  Hell, no. First thing they’d do, a new owner of this property would dump our inventory into the trash, tear the place down and remake it into anything other than a bookstore. Never going to happen, I promise.

  * * *

  But really, what you did was—you had children. Babies sprang from your astonished body. Blood gleamed on their perfect skin, their cobalt-blue eyes opened in amazement. Who are you? What is this? Where have I come? What will happen to us?

  I am not like her, that childless woman.

  You’d grown up believing: children are a blessing. Children give meaning to life. If life has no intrinsic meaning nonetheless children provide meaning. Families provide meaning. Existence itself is the meaning. You give life, you sustain life. You feed, and you feed, and you feed this life. You dare not stop, for your own life would stop. You never question.

  You pity those who have not had children. That other self, the woman you are relieved you’d never become, is to be pitied—childless. Somehow you know that was part of her scheme, in escaping Yewville—to remain, to be, childless. She might have written books, established a career for herself but what is this set beside your accomplishments?—children, husband, bookstore beloved in a community.

  Yet more strongly, you resent those who did not have children for they have escaped the fearfulness of life.

  As soon as the first baby was born already in the hospital you understood—Oh God. This gift I have been given, I must keep alive.

  Your (young) husband, gripping your hand in the hospital. Beside your hospital bed. Wiping at his eyes wet with tears and with the panic of realization—We are responsible—“Parents.”

  Jointly you knew: so long as the child draws breath, you live in terror that that breath will cease. You pray to die first. In secret, you pray to die first. Cannot bear even to contemplate outliving your child.

  For your lifetime, this is the sentence. A life-sentence.

  The girl who’d wanted so badly to escape Yewville, and to become—somewhere, somehow—a writer: she has never experienced this clutching of the heart when the phone rings, late. She has never experienced absurd scenarios of accidents, premature deaths in the family. You pity her. You do not envy her.

  How you parted ways. In total innocence, ignorance.

  Anxiously preparing for the state regents exam at the age of eighteen. Determined to perform well. To excel. To fling yourself away from home as you might toss dice exuberantly onto a tabletop.

  But the snowy-bright morning of the exam you’d been distracted, exhausted. You had not slept more than an hour or two the night before. Your father had returned home late, his footstep heavy on the stairs. Your mother had spoken sharply to him and he had spoken sharply to her. There’d been a shutting of doors. Muffled voices within. Confused with the beating of your heart. Confused with your anxiety over the future. Dear God, help me. I will be a good person forevermore if . . .

  Since elementary school your grades had been high. Particularly in English, history, biology. You were not so strong in math. You gave up too quickly in math, you felt your eyelids flutter staring at problems, a kind of willful blindness. For it was predicted, girls do not do well in math. Girls should not feel anxiety, if they are not quite so gifted as boys in math. Or in science. For a girl, this is good work. No need to push yourself so hard.

  Light-headed, with a sore throat. Spasmodic coughing. Your balance seemed off, as if you were making your way across the pitching deck of a ship. Uncomprehending you stared at some of the exam questions. Words swirled, tangled like knots. The remainder of your life depending upon this performance: two hours on a January morning when you were a senior at Yewville High, eighteen years old.

  You panicked, you were perspiring, trembling. You would blame your quarreling parents. You would blame your teachers who had always seemed to like you but (perhaps) did not take you seriously. Your poetry and short stories they praised, but in the way that adults praise young children. Without quite reading you, perhaps. Surely, without knowing who you were.

  Eventually, you would blame yourself. For who else was there to blame?

  It was your usual practice to answer exam questions swiftly. To answer the questions you knew, and knew that you knew, in order to give yourself time to spend on other, more difficult questions. But this time you ran out of time. Fumbling, faltering, you lost confidence in yourself. The final questions were rushed. Your head rang with pain. Within a few days you would be diagnosed with bronchitis which you would have, with varying degrees of intensity, for six weeks. You’d left the exam room dispirited, defeated. Next day and for days following you’d tormented yourself with thoughts of suicide. Hating yourself, in disgust with yourself. Expecting the worst. Finally talking yourself into accepting failure—defeat. Probably you hadn’t scored as highly on the exam as you’d hoped, that was only reasonable to expect.

  And it was true: your score was above average, but not exceptional. Others in your class scored higher, who were certainly not superior to you. It was a matter of shame to you, an outrage, unfair and unjust, yet irrevocable. You’d had your chance—that morning. And now that morning was past.

  One of your closest friends would attend Cornell on a regents scholarship while you remained in Yewville. Your friend had never had higher grades than you did but—somehow—she’d performed well on the exam. You congratulated her, you were happy for her. (Not for yourself. You were not happy for yourself. But for Sandra, you were happy.)

  Eventually, you would take courses at the community college. You believed yourself superior to your instructors at the college but you had no choice but to please them. To receive good grades, you had to please them. Flatter them. You hoped to transfer to a four-year college or university but that did not happen. Much you’d hoped for did not happen. Even if you’d received a scholarship to a university you might have had to remain in Yewville to help support your mother after the collapse of your parents’ marriage; in time, you had to look after your mother when she was ill with cancer, you’d had to take on some of the household duties of an adult. No fault of your own, you’d become one of the adults of the world by the age of twenty and the world was no longer open to you as it had seemed when you were eighteen.

  You remained in Yewville. Gnawing at your embittered heart.

  But no: not at all. You were not embittered, you were grateful to be needed. To love and to be loved. Eventually you would marry, as your girl cousins and friends married, in the years following high school. And you and your husband would make a down payment on South Main Books, you would secure a mortgage and put your life in hock for the next thirty years, as Gerard said.

  But that exam!—the morning of that exam! Waking in the night you recall. In the grocery store, pushing a cart—you recall. Shelving books, ringing up a sale. Leafing through a newly published book of poetry, you recall. Your fevered skin, sensitive to the touch. Swallowing with pain, unease. Others in the examination room, row after row of your classmates, strangers to you now, deadly competitors. Frowning, earnest, determined. For only those students who had some reasonable expectation of doing well on this lengthy exam troubled to take it. You’d always been one of the highest achieving girls in your class and yet—things did not turn out well for you after all.

  The other girl, the one you’d been meant to be, had scored very high on the exam. Upper one percentile of high school seniors who’d taken the exam th
at day in the State of New York. That girl had gone on to attend a first-rate university. She’d studied exactly the subjects you’d hoped to study: literature, philosophy, psychology. She’d been praised for her excellent critical writing and for her poetry and fiction. Her professors had encouraged her. No one had discouraged her. Her parents had not quarreled, her father had not been an alcoholic who’d walked away from his family when his wife was first diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. That girl was free of family responsibilities. That girl knew nothing of the dread of waiting for her mother to be discharged from the infusion room at the hospital, helping her walk down the hospital steps, trying not to be nauseated by the smell of chemicals on her skin, in her hair. That girl knew nothing of the fear of being pregnant when it was not a good time to be pregnant. That girl did not weep in a man’s arms that she might persuade him to marry her though (she guessed) he did not really love her, as she did not really love him. Unfettered as a child in a place other than Yewville where she would have been held captive as surely as an insect in an elaborate spiderweb that girl began to write seriously as an undergraduate: poetry, short fiction, novel. She began to be taken seriously by supportive adults. She had not even known how ambitious she seemed to others, and how fortunate. She’d believed herself to be no more exceptional than certain of her friends, particularly you; indeed she is you.

  You never think of her. Not in years.

  In Yewville, in the life you do not think of as left-behind, you have been happy. For happiness is measured differently here, in a quieter inlet opening onto a rushing river; life is slower here than on the great, rushing river, but perhaps it is deeper. (You want to think.)

  And now, at age forty-four, you have returned to writing, on a modest scale. The other girl, grown now into a woman, a “known” person, has certainly not been modest—she has published many books, she has been the recipient of awards. She has been translated into languages of which you have never heard. You don’t envy her, however. You don’t think of her at all. Would you trade your life for hers?—would you trade yourself for her?—certainly not.