The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Joyce Carol Oates Secret, Silent from Boulevard

He was telling me he couldn’t drive me to the interview after all. Saying, “I know I promised, honey. But I don’t see how, things being what they are, this can be.” And I hear these words but can’t at first believe them. For I’m hurt as a child is hurt, slapped with no warning in the face, and I’m hurt as a seventeen-year-old is hurt, in my pride. Wanting to cry You promised! You can’t do this! I thought you loved me.

It was an evening in April. We were in one of the rooms of the upstairs house as we called it. And we were having this conversation that would alter my life, anyway Dad was having it, informing me on Thursday evening that he couldn’t after all drive me three hundred twenty miles across the daunting breadth of New York State for an interview at Albany State University where I’d been awarded something called a Founders’ Scholarship for tuition, room and board, provided I completed my application with an interview on campus; which interview had been scheduled, after numerous telephone calls, for Saturday morning at eleven o’clock. To arrive at the university by that time we would have had to leave home no later than four o’clock in the morning. Yet now Dad was telling me he’d have to work on Saturday morning; his foreman at the shop wanted him, for time-and-a-half wages, which couldn’t be turned down. Things being what they are meaning he needed the money, our family needed the money, he hadn’t any choice.

Nor could my mother drive me. “You know I can’t be away from Grandma for so many hours.”

I told Mom yes, I knew.

“Please look at me! I’m talking to you.”

I told Mom yes, I knew she was talking to me.

“I know you’re disappointed, but it can’t be helped. When you’re older you’ll understand, things happen to us that can’t be helped. Poor Grandma—”

I wasn’t listening. At the time I didn’t understand how my mother was terrified of her own mother dying, though Grandma was eighty years old and had been ill for years; how despite all circumstances, and some of them grim, there’s a profound distinction between being a woman who still has her mother and a woman who does not. What I heard of my mother’s plea was Things happen. Can’t be helped. When you’re older you’ll understand. That deadly refrain. That litany of defeat. My young heart beat hard in defiance Oh no I won’t, not me!

“I’ve figured out a way I can get to Albany, without Daddy driving me. By Greyhound bus.”

“So far? Alone?”

“I won’t be alone, Mom. There’s another girl in my class” — with ease I supplied the name, an acquaintance and not a friend, a name my mother might recognize — “who’s going to be interviewed, too. I asked around at school today. Her father can’t drive her either.”

All that day I’d planned this, these very words. To be spoken without reproach or rancor, simply a statement of fact. There are other fathers who can’t help their daughters at such crucial times. It’s an ordinary matter to be remedied in ordinary, practical ways. I’d called the Greyhound station: there was an overnight bus that left Port Oriskany at 11:10 P.M. that night, made numerous stops along the Thruway, and arrived in Albany at 7:50 A.M. tomorrow. Presumably, passengers slept on the bus.

My mother stared at me. I was so effervescent, so happy, all smiles; so very different from the way I’d been the previous evening, and from my truest, most secret self. I expected her to object to such an adventure, my traveling such a distance, overnight, meeting with strangers in a city where we knew no one, had no relatives, and in fact Mom did object, but weakly, saying she didn’t think it was a good idea for young girls to be traveling by themselves, but Dad shrugged and declared it was fine with him — “Hell, the girl’s no fool, she can take care of herself.” He was relieved, obviously. He needn’t feel any guilt now. Fondly he squeezed my shoulder, he called me “sweetheart.” In this way, it was decided.

Dad drove me to the Greyhound station that night. The bus, which looked massive, spouting exhaust in a bluish cloud, was already boarding when we arrived at eleven o’clock. Dad had been drinking after supper and his handsome, ravaged face was flushed but he was nowhere near drunk, only in good spirits; he’d probably be dropping by one of his taverns before returning home. First, he saw his daughter off for her interview, gave me a big hug and a wet kiss on the side of my face, and told me, “Take care, sweetheart! See you tomorrow.” There was no sign of my classmate, whoever she was supposed to be, but Dad wasn’t suspicious as Mom would have been. He seemed to believe me when I pretended to be pointing out someone on the bus, waving happily to her — “There’s Barbara. She’s saving me a seat.”

Most of the passengers were men traveling by themselves, but there were several women, among them, hurrying late to board, a striking young woman who might have been in her mid-twenties, with crimped auburn hair and thin arched eyebrows and a very red, moist mouth. She called out, “Driver, wait for me please!” This was intended as a flirtatious joke, for the bus driver wasn’t about to leave just yet; he laughed and assured the young woman she’d gotten there in time, and did she need help with her suitcase?

I was several passengers ahead of this woman, making my way along the bus aisle, but I observed through the windows that, as she hurried past my father out on the pavement, the two of them glanced searchingly at each other. Their gazes held for a long moment as if they were waiting to recall that they knew each other — but, too bad, they didn’t. So the young woman in staccato high heels climbed up into the bus, breathless, with an air of entering a space in readiness for her, like a stage; she took for granted that people would be looking at her, women and men both, and was careful to make eye contact with no one. By this time most of the single seats had been taken. I’d found one of the last ones, toward the rear of the bus; I glanced back at the auburn-haired young woman hoping she’d follow me and sit with me, but she didn’t notice me, and took a seat with one of the better-dressed men passengers who’d risen gallantly to give her the window seat.

They were three seats ahead of me on the other side of the aisle. I would hear them talking together for the next forty minutes as the Greyhound heaved its way through Port Oriskany streets and out to the Thruway. The man’s voice was indistinct but persistent; he did most of the talking; the young woman’s responses were few, and punctuated by nervous laughter. I wondered how it was possible to fall so quickly into conversation with a stranger; there was something thrilling in it, risky and dramatic.

I’d brought with me The Plays of Eugene O’Neill and was midway in that strange, surreal play The Hairy Ape, which was so different from the other O’Neill plays I’d struggled through, and fascinating to me, for I believed I would like to write plays someday; but my attention was drawn repeatedly to the couple several seats ahead, particularly to the auburn-haired woman. Who was she? Why was she traveling alone on an overnight bus to — where? The bus’s final destination was New York City. I wanted to think she was headed there. She had the looks and style (I thought) to be an actress or a showgirl of some kind. I’d had an impression of a fine-boned profile, a delicate nose and wavy shoulder-length hair, the sharp gleam of gold earrings. She’d been wearing a dark blue raincoat shot with iridescent threads which she’d removed with some ceremony when she took her seat, folding it and placing it in the overhead rack with her bags. Around her neck she’d knotted a stylish silk scarf, crimson peonies on a cream-colored background. I was curious to know what her companion was saying to her so earnestly, but there was too much noise from the bus’s motor; it was like trying to hear my parents’ murmurous voices through a wall, mysterious and teasing. I had the idea that the man was offering the young woman a drink from a bottle or flask in a paper bag and that she’d declined more than once. (Alcohol was forbidden on the bus.) My heart pounded with a sudden thrill of excitement. I’d deceived my parents, and they would never know. I would escape their plans for me, whatever those plans were, or were not: my mother had several times said plaintively that it was too bad my scholarship at Albany couldn’t be “cashed in” — we could certainly use the money to help pay my grandmother’s medical bills.

Most of the other passengers had settled in to sleep by midnight; only a few, like me, had switched on overhead lights to read. The auburn-haired young woman and her companion sat in semi-darkness. I’d begun to lose interest in them when I heard a woman’s voice sharply raised — “No sir.” A man said, “Eh? What’s wrong?” trying to laugh. But already the young woman was out of her seat, determined to leave. “Go to hell, mister.” She grabbed her coat and the smaller of her bags from the overhead rack and, incensed, began to make her way toward the rear of the bus. Behind her the man stood, protesting, “Hey, wait, hey c’mon — I was only kidding. Don’t go away mad.” The bus had begun to slow; up front, the driver must have been watching through his rearview mirror, ready to intervene. The young woman stood beside my seat panting and glaring at me. “D’you mind?” she demanded, and before I could tell her no, of course not, she swung into the seat heavily. “That bastard. That son-of-a-bitch.” She ignored the scrutiny of others close about her as, charged with outrage as with static electricity, she ignored me. Her oversized handbag of simulated lizardskin was crowding against my legs and her clumsily bunched coat was pressed against me. I’d moved over toward the window as far as I could. I was flattered she’d come to sit with me, even if she hadn’t exactly chosen me, and hardly dared speak to her for fear of being rebuffed. Finally, seeing that the man in the seat up ahead had given up, she stood, folded her coat and placed it in the overhead rack, smoothed the long sexy angora sweater she was wearing down over her hips, and sat down again. Her movements were fussy, showy, self-dramatizing. She said, with a sidelong glance at me and a tight smile, “Thanks! I appreciate it. That bastard mistook me for someone I’m not.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not sorry. These damned buses!”

I was somewhat overwhelmed by her. Close up, she was beautiful. Her smooth creamy skin that seemed poreless, unlike my own; her thick-lashed mascaraed eyes; that glisten of female indignation of a kind I could never express except in mimicry or parody. “I don’t know why I expect anything better on a damned bus,” she was saying. “It’s not exactly first-class travel accommodations on the New York Central Pullman. You’d think by now I’d know.” I was tempted to tell her that she hadn’t needed to sit with that man, or with any man at all. Instead I said again that I was sorry she was upset, but probably he’d let her alone now. “I’m not upset, I’m disgusted,” she said quickly. “I can take care of myself, thank you.”

But this wasn’t a rebuff evidently, for a moment later she asked, “What’s that you’re reading?” I showed her the opened pages and she frowned at the small print as if near-sighted. “ ‘Hairy Ape’? Jesus. Never heard of that, what’s it about?” I tried to explain, so far as I knew, which wasn’t very far, that it was a play set on an ocean liner and there was a fierce, muscular man named Yank Smith who worked with the furnaces and he was proud of himself as a man who made the ship go until — “He turns into an ape, huh? Sure! There’s been a movie made of that. I bet. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen him. Don’t tell me,” the woman said, laughing. I had to laugh with her. Amid a scent of talcum and warmed flesh there was a mild sourness as of whiskey lifting from her. “My name’s Karla with a ‘K.’ What’s your name?” I’d drawn back the heavy book that seemed embarrassing to me now. “I’m Kathryn. With a ‘K.’ ” She said, “I’m going to Albany, what about you?” I said, “I’m going to Albany, too.” She said, “I’ve got important business in Albany, what about you?” I said, “I guess I do, too.” She asked where I lived and I told her, and I asked where she lived and she said, stiffly, she was between cities — “But not Albany. That’s for damned sure.” She added, loud enough for her ex-companion to hear if he was listening, “We should sleep then, best we can, and not let any assholes trouble us.” Without waiting for my reply Karla reached up and switched out the overhead lights.

I’d shut the book anyway. I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate.

The romance of night travel by bus. When you’re alone, and no one. The thrill of such aloneness. The strange headachy insomniac nights of such aloneness. I tried to sleep, my eyes shutting upon a kaleidoscope of broken, bright images. I thought — My head is a doll’s head, my eyes are glass eyes that open and shut but not with my volition. Through my eyelashes I saw headlights appearing and disappearing like lone comets on the mostly deserted Thruway. Outside was a steep hilly landscape, dimly visible by clouded moonlight. Living in such a landscape as I’d done since birth you don’t need to see it to know it’s there. How happy lam. How scared, and how happy.

It was 3:10 A.M. when the Greyhound lumbered off the Thruway to stop at an all-night service station and restaurant. Karla, who’d been sleeping, woke and poked me in the arm with unexpected sisterly solicitude. “You awake? C’mon, we got ten minutes.” There was a parched taste like dried glue at the back of my mouth. It was a relief to be fully awake and on my feet. Only a few other passengers climbed out of the bus with us, most remained sleeping. Outside, the air was a shock, so damp and cold. Though this was the last week in April, a fine gritty sleet was being blown across the pavement. Beyond the dull-glaring fluorescent lights on their tall poles illuminating the service station and the restaurant there was nothing, as in a stage set. Neither Karla nor I had troubled to put on our coats and we ran shivering toward the restaurant. I saw that Karla was barely my height in her impractical high-heeled ankle-strap shoes. Her coral-pink angora sweater fitted her slender body snug at her breasts and hips; to emphasize her small waist, she wore a tightly cinched shiny black belt; her skirt, not quite reaching her knees, was some shimmery synthetic fashion, dark crimson. “Don’t look at that asshole, he’s poison,” Karla warned me out of the side of her mouth, like a tough girl in the movies. The man she’d been sitting with had gotten to the restaurant entrance before us and was standing by the door holding it open for us, staring at Karla with doggy reproachful eyes. I supposed he was drunk, he had that look. But it wasn’t possible for me to ignore him as Karla did. I couldn’t be rude. “Thank you,” I murmured as Karla and I slipped inside.

The man’s lips moved. His face remained expressionless. I didn’t exactly hear what he murmured after me — Don’t bounce your tits, honey.

I didn’t acknowledge this. So maybe I hadn’t heard. I was grateful that Karla hadn’t.

The restaurant was nearly empty, only a single section was open for service, and a single counterman in a soiled white uniform. Karla ordered “decaf” — “And make sure it’s decaf, man, not coffee, okay?” — and a large jelly doughnut covered in powdered sugar which she insisted I share with her — “I certainly don’t intend to eat this thing all by myself.” Consuming the jelly doughnut with the counterman and other customers looking on was a performance of some hilarity. I wasn’t hungry but managed, with Karla’s encouragement, to swallow a few mouthfuls, which tasted like mashed dough laced with sweet, vile chemicals. Close by at the counter, the youngish bus driver in his Greyhound uniform observed us smilingly. And other men observed us. “This night!” Karla exclaimed. Though speaking to me, she was speaking to be overheard. Yet she seemed sincere, her smooth forehead creased for the moment. Drinking hot coffee, even decaffeinated, diluted with cream and sugar, seemed to enliven her; her eyes, which were a hazy green-brown, were widened and oddly dilated. “Jesus God, Kathryn! I have crucial business in Albany and already it’s 3:20 A.M. Feels like I been awake and going for days.” Sitting on a stool at the counter, legs crossed, sheer black stockings giving a sexy glisten to her shapely legs. Karla turned in restless half-circles. She fell into a spirited conversation with the bus driver, who seemed to have known her from somewhere, and the counterman, a taffy-skinned young black or Hispanic with deep circles beneath his eyes but an infectious laugh. In the joking and laughter that followed — what was funny exactly, I didn’t know — especially with the dour doggy man from the bus, Karla’s ex-seatmate, sitting on a stool at the edge of our hilarity — the counterman asked me if I was Karla’s kid sister and what were “you girls” doing in the middle of the night in the middle of Nowhere, USA? He made an eloquent gesture with his hand to indicate the bleak, tacky expanse of the restaurant, all formica and plastic surfaces, a space large as a warehouse but semi-darkened now and nearly empty of customers. Near the bright-lit entrance to the restrooms a lone cleaning woman was mopping. What if this is all the world adds up to finally, I thought: a lone woman mopping a grimy floor in the middle of the night in the middle of Nowhere. I felt the horror of this vision but heard myself laugh in Karla’s bright way. I said, “We have secret business, don’t we, Karla? We can’t tell.” It was a clumsy, blushing flirtation. I might have been thirteen years old. Karla didn’t help me, saying with a frown as if distancing herself from a reckless younger sister, “I can’t tell. I sure as hell can’t see into the future that’s black as ink.”

I remembered a line I’d written in my journal, copied from a library book: the author was Thomas Mann (of whom I’d only just heard, had never read) and this was taken from a letter to his son. The secret and almost silent adventures in life are the finest.

“D’you mind?”

Back on the bus Karla climbed luxuriantly into the seat beside the window that had been mine, and curled up to sleep. Of course I didn’t mind, and wouldn’t have spoken if I had.

The remainder of the night passed in dreamy jolts and blurs. Karla slept like a cat; breathed deeply and evenly, low as a cat’s purr; before long she nudged her head against my shoulder. I was stirred that a stranger should so trust herself with me. On the floor was the lizardskin bag pressing against my legs. I would have liked to look inside. In the women’s room back at the restaurant I’d caught a glimpse inside the bag of a jumble of items including a plastic makeup kit, a bottle of red nail polish, the metallic handle of what might have been a knife but was probably a cheap hairbrush. And there was Karla’s wallet, thick with snapshots and a wad of bills.

In the stark solitude of the night I could hear the snores and occasional mutterings of strangers. Earlier I’d told Karla where I was going, hoping to impress her, but now I was beginning to feel anxiety about my plan. An interview that would decide my college career (for so I thought at that time) after a night spent like a vagrant on a bus; without even a change of clothes, because I hadn’t wanted to carry so much. I planned to use the women’s room at the Greyhound station in Albany to “freshen up” — my mother’s term; I’d remembered to bring a stick of deodorant, but didn’t have a toothbrush. Even if my nerves kept me alert and awake I was certain to be exhausted by eleven o’clock in the morning after virtually no sleep the night before. This is madness. Why did they let me do this. Did they know — I’d fail. Want me to fail. What a fool. Like the Hairy Ape. I missed my step on the stairs, cried out as I fell. Someone was poking my shoulder, hard. “Hey, Kathryn. Wake up.” It was Karla. I was groggy, confused. Somehow, it was morning: a bleak gray dawn beyond the bus’s rain-splotched windows. We’d left the Thruway and were passing through the outskirts of a city I guessed must be Albany. I murmured I was sorry, embarrassed; I hadn’t thought I was asleep. “You were grinding your back teeth,” Karla said. “Like you were having a bad dream.”

At the Greyhound station in downtown Albany I felt another wave of panic. I stood on the pavement not knowing where to go next. Karla too was looking quickly about as if in dread of seeing someone she knew. On the bus she’d powdered her face and fluffed out her hair; despite the rocky night, she seemed alert and enlivened. She was carrying a lightweight polyester suitcase as well as her lizardskin bag. “Say, Kathryn — I’ve got this place I’m going to, you could come with me, okay? Like if you wanted to wash up or whatever.” Though I didn’t think this was a practical idea I wasn’t sure how to decline. Karla said, as if impulsively, “Y’know what — I’ll make breakfast for us. I could get some things.” Still I hesitated. Karla seemed almost to be pleading with me. She added, with a nervous giggle, “This early in the morning, I don’t like to be alone with my thoughts. The rest of the day’s like a god damn desert.” “Thanks,” I said awkwardly, edging away, “I guess I can’t.” Karla must have stared after me as I hurried away almost colliding with people, to search out a restroom. I knew I was behaving strangely. I was desperate to splash cold water onto my eyes which ached as if I’d been crying (maybe in fact I had been crying) and I badly needed to use a toilet; my stomach churned with tension. I’d been overwhelmed by Karla’s powerful personality and wanted only to escape her.

Yet, when I emerged shakily from a toilet stall a few minutes later, there was Karla in the restroom waiting for me, briskly washing her hands at a sink and smiling happily at me through the clouded mirror like a kindly older sister. Had I agreed to go with her after all? “We’ll take a cab, Kathryn. You’re looking pale. This job interview or whatever it is — what time is it? Not till eleven? You need to be fed.”

Why I went with Karla, whom I didn’t know, when it was my adamant wish not to go with her, I could not have said. In the cab I nervously studied a city map the admissions office had mailed me on which I’d marked in red ink the locations of the Greyhound station and the university campus which appeared to be some distance away. Karla seemed annoyed that I was looking at the map. “I’ll take you there. It’s only a mile or so from my place. You have plenty of time.” She was speaking brightly and rapidly and tapping at my wrist with her red-polished nails which were uneven, some of the nails much longer than others. When I told her worriedly that I couldn’t seem to match the streets we were passing with street names on the map she laughed, took the map from me, and folded it carelessly and shoved it into her coat pocket. “There! No need to fret, I don’t like to be alone with my thoughts either.” This made no sense but I wasn’t in a mood to object. My hands were tingling warmly: I was thinking of how in the bus station restroom after I’d washed and dried my hands on a coarse paper towel, Karla had seized both my hands in hers, her hands that were startlingly soft, and rubbed Jergen’s lotion into them so that now my hands were fresh and fragrant as Karla’s though nowhere near as soft. Fall and winter I’d played basketball at school or practiced shots whenever I could. I wasn’t the most competitive girl player at school but there was something fascinating about sinking the ball through the hoop, dashing toward the basket and shooting, or shooting from the foul line, something deeply satisfying even as it was clearly pointless. But the palms of my hands were callused from gripping the ball. Compared to Karla’s hands they hardly seemed like a girl’s hands at all.

Why I went with Karla, and why I found myself a half-hour later ringing the doorbell of a house, Karla’s place as she called it, while Karla remained in the cab idling at the curb not in front of the shabby brownstone rowhouse but a few doors down; why I was with this woman I didn’t know, obeying her without question; I could not have said, for my head was a doll’s head rattling-empty and finely cracked beneath the hair. As I slid out of the rear of the cab Karla impulsively looped her silk scarf around my neck. “This will keep you warm, Kathryn!” I smiled at Karla not knowing what the gesture meant — if the scarf was a gift I’d certainly return it, for I couldn’t accept such an expensive gift from her, but maybe it wasn’t a gift exactly and in any case how could I hurt Karla’s feelings?

Yet on the sidewalk I’d hesitated, staring at the brownstone house with its four front windows in which blinds had been yanked to differing levels, a weatherworn rowhouse in a block of similar homes, and Karla leaned out the car door — “Just go ring the doorbell, Kathryn. Just to make sure. Nobody’s home, I promise.” I asked who might be home and Karla said emphatically, “Nobody! But we need to be certain.”

The narrow front yard was grassless and rutted and the front stoop listed to one side yet I found myself bounding up to the door buoyant and daring in my ballerina flats, wanting simply to please Karla, not thinking Where am I, why am I here? Who is this woman? The morning was raw and scintillating, patches of bright blue sky overhead and a rising sun so fierce it made my eyes water. Everywhere the pavement was wet and glistening. I rang the doorbell and heard the buzzer inside and it was an extension of the morning’s raw scintillating mood. I was nervous but not frightened exactly. In my good-girl shoes and nylon stockings that were beginning to run and my plain blue raincoat and Karla’s silk scarf around my neck, the long ends fluttering in the wind, the most beautiful scarf I’d ever worn. A scarf that seemed to confer upon me a new, strange, mysterious power, an invulnerability to harm or even distress. Though conceding that there was — there might be — an element of risk in what I seemed to be doing. A second time, and a third I rang the doorbell and there was no sound from inside the house; so narrow a house I imagined that I could stretch my arms across the entire façade. In the adjoining brownstone a dog had begun to bark hysterically. Claws scratching against a windowpane.

Karla hurried up the walk behind me and gave me a quick hug. “Good girl! You’re my heart.” It would occur to me later that by this time, in her state of excitement, Karla had forgotten my name. Her eyes were widened and despite the morning sunshine oddly dilated; there was a feverish glow to her skin. She seemed to me more beautiful than ever. She’d had the presence of mind to take from the cab both our bags and her polyester suitcase and she was brandishing on a strip of red wool yarn a key with which she unlocked the door and drew me breathlessly inside with her. We were confronted by cold stale air that seemed to rush at us, an underlying odor of something rotted, mustiness like damp newspaper. “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” Karla cried, as a guest might call out stepping into a house whose front door is open. Except for the dog barking frantically next door there was silence. Yet the interior looked lived-in, and recently — a pair of men’s boots in the narrow hallway at the foot of the stairs, a plaid shirt tossed onto a chair, in the living room a space heater, unplugged. In a glass bowl on a table, floating on the surface of scummy water, was a black-striped goldfish which upset Karla so she hid her eyes. Her lips moved almost inaudibly — “Bastard.”

In her staccato high heels, still carrying her bags, Karla marched back to the kitchen where a faucet was dripping loudly, jeeringly; here the odor of rot was stronger. She threw open the refrigerator door and recoiled with a curse from the stink. I didn’t want to look inside, in that instant I was beginning to feel nauseated; exhaustion was catching up with me; through a crudely taped-together windowpane above the unspeakably filthy sink I could see into the small back yard grassless as the front, and littered. A space the size of a large grave. By this time the sun was more fiercely blazing and the April day would rapidly warm except in the foul-smelling house where the air was still cold enough for our quickened breaths to vaporize. Yet even now not thinking, at least not thinking coherently Why am I here? And where am I? For Karla gave me no time to think. Scarcely time to breathe. I glanced worriedly at my wrist-watch, seeing with alarm that it was already past nine o’clock and Karla noticed, pinching my wrist, saying, “I promised I’d get you to wherever, didn’t I? Stop obsessing. You’re getting on my nerves.” Karla led me upstairs, my heart beat with anticipation. You could be trapped: up these stairs and no other way out. In a dim-lit bedroom smelling of soiled clothes and mildew and stale cigarette smoke Karla dropped her suitcase onto an unmade bed and opened it and began tossing in items from a bureau drawer, and from a closet, articles of clothing. “C’mon, hon, don’t just stand there, help me, huh?” So I helped, clumsy and hurried, my hands shaking. The bedroom was small and would have been depressing except for its lilac wallpaper, inexpertly laid on the walls (my father had wallpapered much of our house, which my grandmother owned, and I knew well how difficult it was to paper walls even if you know what you’re doing), and cream-colored organdy curtains on the back windows. The front-window curtains had been yanked down, it seemed, curtains and curtain-rods on the floor as if they’d been tossed there in a rage; these I kept tripping over. Karla said, whistling, “Jesus God! Look here.” She was holding a lacy red nightgown against herself; the front had been ripped nearly in two. She stared down at the nightgown smiling a peculiar smile as if the nightgown was her own mutilated self. By this time I was anxious to use the bathroom. My bladder ached, there was a loose hot rumbling in the pit of my belly, a threat of diarrhea like scorn. You’ll miss the interview. Fail the interview. To erase this shame you’ll have to kill yourself. Karla decided to laugh at the torn nightgown and ripped it further and threw it to the floor.

From the top shelf of the closet Karla took a small but heavy cardboard box and handed it to me to dump into the suitcase. A cascade of loose snapshots, printed documents, and letters. One of the snapshots fluttered to the floor, I reached for it and glancing up saw a man standing in the bedroom doorway. He was just standing there.

Though I was staring directly at this man and though he was surely aware of me only a few feet away he didn’t seem to see me at all. He was watching Karla. And he was smiling.

A good-looking man in his mid-thirties, compact and muscled as a middleweight, not tall, with dirt-colored oily hair curving over his ears and thinning at the crown of his head, and a glittery stubble of beard on his jaws; his eyes were coppery as a stove’s coils, heated. This was a man who looked as if, if you made the mistake of touching him, your fingers would burn. Karla came out of the bathroom adjoining the bedroom with an armful of toiletries and when she saw this man she gave a little scream like a kicked cat, and dropped the toiletries, and the man said to me out of the side of his mouth without so much as glancing at me, “Get out of here, you. This is between her and me.” Karla cried to me, “Don’t leave me!” and I stammered I would not, even as the man pushed past me to grab Karla’s arm, and Karla was screaming, shoving at him, he gripped her shoulders in both hands and shook her and she punched and kicked and used her elbows against him as in a clumsy violent dance. I picked up one of the curtain rods from the floor and swung it at Karla’s attacker, striking him on the side of the head; he turned to curse me and in desperation I swung the rod back this time striking him on the neck, and he grabbed the rod and tossed it aside, the torn curtains still dragging with it as in a comic cinematic sequence, and as I stood paralyzed he punched me with his right fist, a blow to my jaw that knocked me backward, legs dissolving beneath me, and I fell heavily to the floor. There I lay unable to move. I’d been knocked unconscious, concussed, like a boxer who’s been struck a blow he has seen flying at him yet hasn’t comprehended, and now he’s out though his eyes are open and he’s staring blankly, not seeing anything, not even the proverbial black lights that mimic death: and by the time vision and comprehension return you understand that a very long time has passed in your life, if only a few seconds by the clock.

Always afterward recalling How close to brain-death, extinction. The snap of a finger more and you’d be gone.

And what would they have done with my body, Karla and the man who was her ex-husband, or husband? I’ve never wanted to speculate.

But this happened instead: as the man turned to me, Karla drew out of her lizardskin bag a knife, a steel-handled eight-inch steak knife, and in a fury began stabbing at him, and the astonished man backed off saying, “Jesus, Karla! Give that to me!” He was actually laughing, or trying to laugh. As if he thought it might be a joke. And there was something comical about Karla’s rage, the awkward way she wielded the knife, as a child might, the handle gripped tight in her fist and her blows overhand like a windmill’s blades; so that the man, quick on his feet, shrewd and strong, had reason to think he could take the knife from her without being cut even as, trying to wrest it from her by the blade, he was being cut; blood ran down both his hands in quick eager bright streams. They were shouting accusations at each other. Cursing each other. Karla had the man backed against the edge of the bed, the flashing blade struck him in the shoulder, in the upper chest, he fell clumsily onto the bed and yet more clumsily onto the opened suitcase, trying to shield his head with his arms and pleading for her to stop as blood spilled like a garish crimson blossom down his chest, darkening his shirt and unzipped suede jacket. “See how you like it! See how you like it! I hate you! I’ll kill you! Why are you here! You’re not supposed to be here! You have no right to be here!” Karla cried. But seeing then what she’d done, she threw down the bloody knife; in an instant her fury changed to horror and repentance. “Arnie no — I didn’t mean it. Arnie—” She knelt beside the bed, now desperate, asking was he all right, saying he’d made her do it, she was sorry, don’t die on me, Karla was begging, don’t bleed to death, Karla was sobbing. By this time I’d managed to get to my feet though reeling with dizziness; I leaned over coughing, and a thin scalding stream of vomit issued from my mouth. When I could speak, I told Karla I’d call an ambulance and went to a phone on a bedside table, began to dial 911 when the wounded man Arnie told Karla, “Take that fucking thing from her,” and Karla stumbled to me, one of her high-heeled shoes on and the other off, and snatched the receiver out of my hand fixing me with her widened blackly dilated eyes. “He’s all right! He isn’t going to die! We can take care of him ourselves!”

And so we did.

Karla commanded me to help her and I obeyed. Afterward I would conclude I’d been in a state of shock. And I would wonder at the logic of bringing a badly bleeding man into the bathroom as he’d insisted, as I would wonder at the logic of not calling an ambulance. I would wonder Did he live — or did he die? Was I a witness to manslaughter? Was I an accessory? Stumbling and swaying like drunks, Karla and I walked the wounded man into the bathroom. Each of us grasped him around the waist and how heavy he was, how his terrible weight pulled me down. My head and jaw were pounding from the blow I’d taken, the left side of my face beginning already to swell. Karla was saying in a dazed voice, “You’ll be all right. Honey, you’ll be all right. It’s just flesh wounds, I think. You’ll be all right.” Her face looked coarse, makeup streaked in unflattering rivulets, mascara smeared beneath her eyes like ink; I saw that Karla wasn’t a young woman only a few years older than me but well into her thirties and now looking her age. In the dank, ill-smelling bathroom with no window and a single bare light bulb overhead the wounded man sat down heavily on the rim of the bathtub, whimpering and cursing with pain. He was panting, yet couldn’t seem to take his injuries seriously, impatient with himself for being weakened and slowed down. I would never know if this man, Arnie, was Karla’s ex-husband or still her husband but it seemed they’d been married; there may even have been a child involved, and this child may even have died — from what they said, elliptically, and in fragments, and from what I was able in my distracted state to comprehend, this seemed to be the case. Clearly they were lovers even if they’d wanted to hurt each other badly; clearly Karla was appalled at what she’d done to him, the dozen shallow wounds on his hands, forearms, and neck and the deeper wounds in his chest and shoulder. Karla commanded, “Don’t just stand there, help us for God’s sake.” I fetched towels, pillowcases, even soiled sheets from the bed. Clumsily we made bandages, thick wads of cloth to stanch the bleeding, or to try to stanch it; for blood soaked through the makeshift bandages within seconds, glistening on our hands and splattering onto our legs. Star-bursts of blood collected on the tile floor. The wounded man demanded cold-water compresses which may have helped a little. His impatience with his bleeding wounds reminded me of my father’s angry impatience with his own infrequent illnesses and gave me a sense of the man’s personality. I would never know more about him. I would never know Karla’s last name. Though involved in this terrible episode, like sisters baptized in another’s blood, I would never see Karla nor hear of her after that morning.

The wounded Arnie was deathly pale but insisted to Karla for Christ’s sake he was all right, she hadn’t struck deep with the fucking knife and he’d had worse than this happen to him, he’d been shot for Christ’s sake and it hadn’t killed him. He gave her a wincing grin, saying, “So you did it, eh? Got guts, eh?” — which made Karla cry harder. She was crouched beside him with her arms around him and her forehead pressed against his. I stood in the doorway not knowing what to do. Next door, the maddened dog was barking furiously at us through the plasterboard wall, only a few feet away. The wounded man at last squinted at me asking Karla who I was, and Karla said, “Nobody. A friend,” and the man asked, “A friend who?” and Karla said, “I don’t know! Nobody.” Karla didn’t so much as glance at me. The wounded man was panting, scowling; he stared at me for a long moment before saying, “You, you better leave. Don’t make any fucking calls, just go.” So I did.

On the bedroom floor amid the wreckage of the curtains I discovered Karla’s beautiful silk scarf which I carried away with me. I deserve this, I thought.

As in a nightmare it was 11:25 A.M. when I finally arrived for the interview.

I’d had to run several blocks after leaving the brownstone to find a pay phone in a drugstore so that I could call a taxi, and I’d waited with mounting anxiety for a taxi to arrive, and the ride itself seemed to take forever, and at the university I had to ask directions to the admissions office, and once in that building at the top of a steep hill I had to spend frantic minutes in a women’s room in a state of physical distress; afterward trying to make myself presentable for meeting the associate dean of admissions who would be interviewing me: for the front of my raincoat was stained with both vomit and a stranger’s blood, and there was a wide, wet stain on the skirt of my navy blue wool suit which I cleverly disguised by shifting the front of the skirt to the side and covering the stain with my raincoat which I’d carefully folded so that the stain didn’t show, and hung over my arm. It looked quite natural, didn’t it, for me to be carrying my coat over my arm, on a warm April morning? Of course I had to wash my hands and my face; without removing my nylon stockings (which were now marred by runs) I managed to lighten the blood stains on my legs. The left side of my face was swollen so that I looked as if I had mumps on just that side, and there was an ugly bruise taking shape but this too I disguised, or believed I disguised, by looping Karla’s long scarf around my neck and tying it in a bow at my jawline. In the mirror I saw an unnaturally pale girl with stark, shadowed, blood-veined eyes and windblown hair and a look about the mouth that might have been desperation or triumph. I’m here. I’m here!

I’d missed my appointment of course. The dean was interviewing other students. His receptionist advised me to reschedule my interview for the following Saturday but I said that wasn’t possible — “I’ll wait.” Staring at my swollen jaw and rumpled clothes the receptionist tried to discourage me but I said I couldn’t come back to Albany another time — “I’m here now.” I must have spoken sharply, for the woman pursed her lips and said nothing more.

You can’t deny me, I’ve come so far.

Waiting in the dean’s outer office as other students my age, glancing at me curiously, came and went. Pacing in the corridor outside. And more than once retreating to a women’s restroom to stare at my reflection that seemed to waver in the glass. A ghastly radiance shone in my skin. My eyes resembled Karla’s — glittery and dilated. And the silk scarf with the crimson peonies was so beautiful, the most beautiful item of clothing I’d ever worn.

Not until 1:20 P.M. would the associate dean have time to “fit me in.” And then I was allowed to know it was something of a special favor. The man’s name was Werner — I was careful to address him as “Dr. Werner” — perceiving him as one of a sequence of adults in my adolescent life who must be judiciously courted, placated, seduced. This man was frowning yet kindly, with deep dents and fissures in his middle-aged, claylike face; he’d have been willing to forgive me for being late if only I might have explained myself yet I couldn’t seem to explain myself except to say tersely that I’d come from Port Oriskany on the Greyhound bus and had been unavoidably detained. “ ‘Unavoidablya’s—? You didn’t have an accident, did you, Miss—” he peered through bifocals at documents on his desk and pronounced my tricky ethnic name with elaborate care. Tell him yes! Arouse the bastard’s sympathy. This was a reckless voice not my own which I ignored. I thanked Dr. Werner politely and told him no, I was fine. “Is this your first visit to Albany?” he asked, as if such a fact might help to explain me, and I murmured yes it was. I believed I was speaking normally despite the stiffness in my jaw and a fiery ache that ran along my gumline as if every tooth there was abscessed. Dr. Werner shuffled through documents in my folder, now and then making notations with a pen. Though I knew there were bookshelves in his office it seemed that my vision was narrowed as if by blinders and I could see only Dr. Werner clearly. I was very tired suddenly and yearned to rest my arms on the edge of his desk and my heavy head upon my arms for only just a moment. I saw the man’s fleshy lips move before I heard this question — “Why do you believe you would make a good, dedicated teacher, Kathryn?” But I didn’t recall having said I wanted to be a teacher or that this subject was the purpose of our conversation. Tell the man something. Out of pride, you must not fail. So I spoke. Falteringly at first and then with more confidence. I saw that Dr. Werner stared at me, my dilated eyes and swollen jaw, but I’d long been an articulate child and though I might stammer under pressure, words rarely failed me; especially adult words of a lofty, abstract nature. I spoke of what my own education had meant to me so far, how it had “saved my life by giving purpose to my life”; I spoke of how my grandparents, Hungarian immigrants, hadn’t had the opportunity to be educated beyond grade school and were barely literate in English; I spoke of my parents, growing up during the Depression, who hadn’t graduated from high school — “I want to be part of the world beyond that. A world of the intellect and of the spirit.” Tears stung my eyes, these words so moved me; even as, pandering them to a stranger as I was, in the hope of winning his approval, I felt deeply ashamed. Dr. Werner was nodding, and frowning. Perhaps he was moved, too. Or embarrassed for me. His wide dark nostrils pinched. He’s sniffing you. Smells blood. Menstrual blood, he’d think. Oh, shame!

My voice, stricken, trailed off into silence. The ache in my jaw was fierce. Mistaking my hesitation for shyness, and liking shyness in a girl, Dr. Werner was deciding he liked me; he concluded the interview by praising my scholastic record which was spread out before him on his desk like the innards of a dissected creature — and my teachers’ “glowing” letters of recommendation — and assured me that I was exactly the kind of dedicated young person the university hoped for as Founders’ Scholars. The interview was over: Dr. Werner had heaved himself up from his swivel chair, a shorter and stockier man than I’d believed; he was smiling, showing an expanse of pinkish gum, and congratulated me on the scholarship which was, he hoped I knew, highly competitive, awarded to no more than twenty students out of an entering class of eleven hundred; my final acceptance forms would arrive at my home within a few weeks. I said, stammering, “Dr. Werner, it might not be absolutely true — that I want to be a teacher. That I know what I want to do with my life.” Dr. Werner snorted with laughter as if I was joking, or he wished to think I was joking. He repeated that the final acceptance forms would arrive within a few weeks and he hoped I’d have a good return trip home. I said, “Then I am — admitted? I’m in?” I felt a stab of dismay. Was my life decided? Had I agreed to this? Dr. Werner said, with just perceptible impatience, “Yes, of course. Our interview is only a formality.” He extended his hand for a brisk, firm handshake and sent me on my way.

Hurrying down a flight of vertiginous stairs — so like the stairs in my dream of the previous night! — I realized that there might have been blood on my hand, still; that I hadn’t been able to scrub every stain off. I could envision Dr. Werner, his claylike face creased in revulsion, contemplating his own blood-sticky hand.

But I won’t come back here. Not here.

Returning to Port Oriskany on the 5:35 P.M. bus I was sitting alone, my head slumped against a window. My face was throbbing with pain but it was pain at a distance, for I’d swallowed a handful of aspirins to numb it. Much of that day would be lost to me in cloudy amnesiac patches like strips of paper torn from a wall. How I would explain the silk scarf to my mother, I didn’t yet know and wasn’t much worried. I was in a state of exhilaration. A state of certitude. On the mammoth lumbering bus like a prehistoric creature vibrating with energy. I wanted to sleep yet my eyes wouldn’t close. Far to the west as if at the end of the Thruway, there was a horizon seething with red like the flames of an open furnace.

The countryside darkens by rapid degrees. I begin to see my face reflected in the steamy window. A face-to-come, the face of my adulthood. And beyond it my parents’ faces subtly distorted as if in water. For the first time I realize that my parents are a man, a woman: individuals who’d loved each other before they’d ever loved me. And they do love me, only they can’t protect me; nor do they know me. I realize that I will leave home soon. In fact, I’ve already left.