Joyce Oates - Sourland

“Lift your head, cherie. Your chin. You are a pretty girl. Ignore if they stare. Who are they !”

With singular contempt Adelina murmured they . I had no idea what she was talking about but was eager to agree.

It was a sunny April day. We were headed for the Boathouse Restaurant to which Adelina had taken me in the past. On the paved walk beside a lagoon excited geese and mallards rushed to peck at pieces of bread tossed in their direction, squawking at one another and flapping their wings with murderous intent. Adelina crinkled her nose. “Such a clatter ! I hate noisy birds.”

It was upsetting to Adelina, too, that the waterfowl droppings were everywhere underfoot. How careful one had to be, walking beside the lagoon in such beautiful shoes.

“Not good to feed wild creatures! And not good for the environment. You would think, any idiot would know.”

Adelina spoke loudly, to be overheard by individuals tossing bread at the waterfowl.

I was hoping that she wouldn’t confront anyone. There was a fiery sort of anger in my mother, that was fearful to me, yet fascinating.

“Excuse me, cherie : turn here.”

With no warning Adelina gripped my arm tighter, pivoting me to ascend a hilly incline. When I asked Adelina what was wrong she hissed in my ear, “Eyes straight ahead. Ignore if they stare.”

I dared not glance back over my shoulder to see who or what was there.

Because of her enormously busy professional life that involved frequent travel to Europe, Adelina had relinquished custody of me to my father at the time of their divorce. It had been a “tortured” decision, she’d said. But “for the best, for all.” She had never heard of the private girl’s school in Manhattan to which my father was sending me and alluded to it with an air of reproach and suspicion for everyone knew, as Adelina said, that my father was “stingy — perfide .” Now when she questioned me about the school — teachers, courses, classmates — I sensed that she wasn’t really listening as she responded with murmurs of Eh? Yes? Go on! Several times she turned to glare at someone who’d passed us saying sharply, “Yes? Is there some problem? Do I know you?”

To me she said, frowning, “Just look straight ahead, darling! Ignore them.”

Truly I did not know if people were watching us — either my mother or me — but it would not have surprised me. Adelina dressed like one who expects attention, yet seemed sincere in rebuffing it. Especially repugnant to her were the openly aggressive, sexual stares of men, who made a show of stopping dead on the path to watch Adelina walk by. As a child with a body that had been deformed until recently, I’d become accustomed to people glancing at me in pity, or children staring at me in curiosity, or revulsion; but now with my repaired spine that allowed me to walk more or less normally, I did not see that I merited much attention. Yet on the pathway to the Boathouse my mother paused to confront an older woman who was walking a miniature schnauzer, and who had in fact been staring at both Adelina and me, saying in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “Excuse me, madame ? My daughter would appreciate not to be stared at. Merci!”

Inside the Boathouse, on this sunny April day, many diners were awaiting tables. The restaurant took no phone reservations. There was a crowd, spilling over from the bar. Adelina raised her voice to give her name to the hostess and was told that we would have a forty-minute wait for a table overlooking the lagoon. Other tables were more readily available but Adelina wanted a table on the water: “This is a special occasion. My daughter’s first day out, after major surgery.”

The hostess cast me a glance of sympathy. But a table on the lagoon was still a forty-minute wait.

My disappointed mother was provided with a plastic device like a remote control that was promised to light up and “vibrate” when our table was ready. Adelina pushed her way to the bar and ordered a drink — “Bloody Mary for me, Virgin Mary for my daughter.”

The word virgin was embarrassing to me. I had never heard it in association with a drink and had to wonder if my capricious mother had invented it on the spot.

In the crowded Boathouse, we waited. Adelina managed to capture a stool at the bar, and pulled me close beside her as in a windstorm. We were jostled by strangers in a continuous stream into and out of the dining area. Sipping her bloodred drink, so similar in appearance to mine which turned out to be mere tomato juice, my mother inquired about my surgery, and about the surgeon; she seemed genuinely interested in my physical therapy sessions, which involved strenuous swimming; another time she explained why she hadn’t been able to fly to New York to visit me in the hospital, and hoped that I understood. (I did! Of course.) “My life is not so fixed, cherie . Not like your father so settled out there on the island.”

My father owned two residences: a brownstone on West Eighty-ninth Street and, at Montauk Point at the easternmost end of Long Island, a rambling old shingleboard house. It was at Montauk Point that my father had his studio, overlooking the ocean. The brownstone, which was where I lived most of the time, was maintained by a housekeeper. My father preferred Montauk Point though he tried to get into the city at least once a week. Frequently on weekends I was brought out to Montauk Point — by hired car — but it was a long, exhausting journey that left me writhing with back pain, and when I was there, my father spent most of the time in his studio or visiting with artist friends. It was not true, as Adelina implied, that my father neglected me, but it was true that we didn’t see much of each other during the school year. As an artist/bachelor of some fame my father was eagerly sought as a dinner guest and many of his evenings both at Montauk Point and in the city were spent with dealers and collectors. Yet he’d visited me each day while I’d been in the hospital. We’d had serious talks about subjects that faded from my memory afterward — art, religion? — whether God “existed” or was a “universal symbol” — whether there was “death” from the perspective of “the infinite universe.” In my hospital bed when I’d been dazed and delirious from painkillers it was wonderful how my father’s figure melted and eased into my dreams with me, so that I was never lonely. Afterward my father revealed that when I’d been sleeping he had sketched me — in charcoal — in the mode of Edvard Munch’s “The Sick Child” — but the drawings were disappointing, he’d destroyed them.

My father was much older than my mother. One day I would learn that my father was eighteen years older than my mother, which seemed to me such a vast span of time, there was something obscene about it. My father loved me very much, he said. Still, I saw that he’d begun to lose interest in me once my corkscrew spine had been repaired, and I was released from the hospital: my medical condition had been a problem to be solved, like one of my father’s enormous canvases or sculptures, and once such a problem was solved, his imagination detached from it.

I could understand this, of course. I understood that, apart from my physical ailments, I could not be a very interesting subject to any adult. It was a secret plan of mine to capture the attention of both my father and my mother in my life to come. I would be something unexpected, and I would excel: as an archaeologist, an Olympic swimmer, a poet. A neurosurgeon…

At the Boathouse bar, my mother fell into conversation with a man with sleek oiled hair and a handsome fox face; this man ignored me, as if I did not exist. When I returned from using the restroom, I saw the fox-faced man was leaving, and my mother was slipping a folded piece of paper into her oversized handbag. The color was up in Adelina’s cheeks. She had a way of brushing her ash-blond hair from her face that reminded me of the most popular girls at my school who exuded at all times an air of urgency, expectation. “ Cherie , you are all right? You are looking pale, I think.” This was a gentle admonition. Quickly I told Adelina that I was fine. For some minutes a middle-aged couple a few feet away had been watching my mother, and whispering together, and when the woman at last approached my mother to ask if she was an actress — “Someone on TV, your face is so familiar” — I steeled myself for Adelina’s rage, but unexpectedly she laughed and said no, she’d never been an actress, but she had been a model and maybe that was where they’d seen her face, on a Vogue cover. “Not for a while, though! I’m afraid.” Nonetheless the woman was impressed and asked Adelina to sign a paper napkin for her, which Adelina did, with a gracious flourish.