Joyce Oates - Sourland

More than a half hour had passed, and we were still waiting to be seated for lunch. Adelina went to speak with the harried young hostess who told her there might be a table opening in another ten-fifteen minutes. “The wand will light up, ma’am, when your table is ready. You don’t have to check with me.” Adelina said, “No? When I see other people being seated, who came after us?” The hostess denied that this was so. Adelina indignantly returned to the bar. She ordered a second Bloody Mary and drank it thirstily. “She thinks that I’m not aware of what she’s doing,” my mother said. “But I’m very aware. I’m expected to slip her a twenty, I suppose. I hate that!” Abruptly then my mother decided that we were leaving. She paid the bar bill and pulled me outside with her; in a trash can she disposed of the plastic wand. Again she snugly linked her arm through mine. The Bloody Marys had warmed her, a pleasant yeasty-perfumy odor lifted from her body. The silver-vinyl sheath, which was a kind of tunic covering her legs to her mid-thighs, made a shivery sound as she moved. “Never let anyone insult you, darling. Verbal abuse is as vicious as physical abuse.” She paused, her mouth working as if she had more to say but dared not. In the Boathouse she’d removed her dark glasses and shoved them into her handbag and now her pearly-gray eyes were exposed to daylight, beautiful glistening eyes just faintly bloodshot, tinged with yellow like old ivory.

“ Cherie , your shoulder! Your left, you carry it lower than the other. Are you aware?”

Quickly I shook my head no .

“You don’t want to appear hunchbacked. What was he — Quasimodo — A terrible thing for a girl. Here — ”

Briskly like a physical therapist Adelina gripped my wrists and pulled them over my head, to stretch me. I was made to stand on my toes, like a ballerina.

Adelina scolded: “I don’t like how people look at you. With pity, that is a kind of scorn. I hate that!”

Her mouth was wide, fleshy. Her forehead was low. Her features seemed somehow in the wrong proportions and yet the effect of my mother was a singular kind of beauty, it was not possible to look away from her. At about the time of their divorce my father had painted a sequence of portraits titled Bonobo Momma which was his best-known work as it was his most controversial: enormous unfinished canvases with raw, primitive figures of monkey-like humanoid females. It was possible to see my beautiful mother in these simian figures with their wide fleshy mouths, low brows, breasts like dugs, swollen and flushed female genitalia. When I was older I would stare at the notorious Bonobo Momma in the Museum of Modern Art and I would realize that the female figure most closely resembling Adelina was unnervingly sexual, with large hands, feet, genitalia. This was a rapacious creature to inspire awe in the merely human viewer.

I would see that there was erotic power greater than beauty. My father had paid homage to that, in my mother. Perhaps it was his loathing of her, that had allowed him to see her clearly.

Approaching us on the path was a striking young woman — walking with two elegant borzoi dogs — dark glasses masking half her face — in tight designer jeans crisscrossed with zippers like stitches — a tight sweater of some bright material like crinkled plastic. The girl’s hair was a shimmering chestnut-red ponytail that fell to her hips. Adelina stared with grudging admiration as the girl passed us without a glance.

“That’s a distinctive look.”

We walked on. I was becoming dazed, light-headed. Adelina mused: “On the catwalk, it isn’t beauty that matters. Anyone can be beautiful. Mere beauty is boring, an emptiness. Your father knew that, at least. With so much else he did not know, at least he knew that. It’s the walk — the authority. A great model announces ‘Here I am — there is only me.’”

Shyly I said, “‘There is only I.’”

“What?”

“‘There is only I.’ You said ‘me.’”

“What on earth are you talking about? Am I supposed to know?”

My mother laughed, perplexed. She seemed to be having difficulty keeping me in focus.

I’d meant to speak in a playful manner with Adelina, as I often did with adults who intimidated me and towered over me. It was a way of seeming younger than I was. But Adelina interpreted most remarks literally. Jokes fell flat with her, unless she made them herself, punctuated with her sharp barking laughter.

Adelina hailed a taxi, to take us to Tavern on the Green.

The driver, swarthy-skinned, with a short-trimmed goatee, was speaking on a cell phone in a lowered voice, in a language unknown to us. At the same time, the taxi’s radio was on, a barrage of noisy advertising. Adelina said, “Driver? Please turn off that deafening radio, will you?”

With measured slowness as if he hadn’t quite heard her, the driver turned off his radio. Into the cell phone he muttered an expletive in an indecipherable language.

Sharply Adelina said, “Driver? I’d prefer that you didn’t speak on the phone while you’re driving. If you don’t mind.”

In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes fixed us with scarcely concealed contempt.

“Your cell phone, please. Will you turn it off. There’s a law against taxi drivers using their cell phones while they have fares, you must know that. It’s dangerous. I hate it. I wouldn’t want to report you to the taxi authority.”

The driver mumbled something indistinct. Adelina said, “It’s rude to mumble, monsieur . You can let us off here.”

“Ma’am?”

“Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are, monsieur ! You understand English perfectly well. I see your name here, and I’m taking down your license number. Open this damned door. Immediately.”

The taxi braked to a stop. I was thrown forward against the scummy plastic partition that separated us from the furious driver. Pain like an electric shock, fleeting and bright, throbbed in my spine. Adelina and the swarthy-skinned driver exchanged curses as Adelina yanked me out of the taxi and slammed the door, and the taxi sped away.

“Yes, I will report him! Illegal immigrant — I wouldn’t be surprised.”

We were stranded inside the park, on one of the drives traversing the park from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. We had some distance to walk to Tavern on the Green and I was feeling light-headed, concerned that I wasn’t going to make it. But when Adelina asked me if I was all right, quickly I told her that I was fine.

“Frankly, darling, you don’t look ‘fine.’ You look sick. What on earth is your father thinking, entrusting you with a housekeeper ?”

I wanted to protest, I loved Serena. A sudden panic came over me that Adelina might have the authority to fire her, and I would have no one.

“Darling, if you could walk straighter. This shoulder! — try . I hate to see people looking at my daughter in pity. ”

Adelina shook her head in disgust. Her ash-blond hair stirred in the wind, stiffly. At the base of her throat was a delicate hollow I had not seen before. The bizarre thought came to me, I could insert my fingers into this hollow. I could push down, using all of my weight. My mother’s brittle skeleton would shatter.

“ — what? What are you saying, darling?”

I was trying to protest something. Trying to explain. As in a dream in which the right words won’t come. Not ten feet from us stood a disheveled man with a livid boiled-beet face. He too was muttering to himself — or maybe to us — grinning and showing an expanse of obscenely pink gum. Adelina was oblivious of him. He’d begun to follow us, lurching and flapping his arms as if in mockery of my gorgeous mother.