Joyce Oates - Sourland

Lyle and I were crazy for our cousin like puppies yearning for attention, any kind of attention: teasing, swift hard tickles beneath the arms, attacks from behind. Sonny never hurt us, or rarely. He was sometimes clumsy, but never cruel. He was just under six feet, built like a whippet with shoulders and arms hard-muscled from outdoor work. His hair was the color of damp wheat and sprang straight from his head. By fifteen he had to shave every other day. His skin was often blemished and he wore grungy old jeans, Tshirts, sweatshirts yet girls called him on the phone after school, giggling and shameless. If Georgia happened to answer she spoke sharply, “No. My son is not available. ” Sonny basked in the attention but couldn’t be troubled to call any girls back. Still Georgia complained, “All that boy has got to do is get some silly girl pregnant. Wind up married, a daddy at sixteen.”

A flush rose in Sonny’s face if he happened to overhear. He hated to be teased about girls, or sex. Anything to do with sex.

“Chill out, Mom. Or I’m out of here.”

One day, Sonny changed my name: he’d had enough of “Aimée,” he said. Especially the way my mother wanted it pronounced: “Aim-ée.”

“‘Mickey’ kicks ass, see? ‘Aimée’ gets her ass kicked.”

It was so! Clear as a column of numbers added up.

Sonny called Lyle “Big Boy.” (Which was a sweet kind of teasing, since Lyle was small for his age at six.) Sometimes, Sonny called my brother “Lyle-y” if the mood between them was more serious.

Sonny had a formal way of addressing adults, you couldn’t judge was respectful or mocking. He could provoke my aunt Georgia by referring to her as “ma’am” in the politest voice. In town, adults were “ma’am” — “sir” — “mister” — “missus.” (Behind their backs, Sonny might have other, funnier names for them.) But he took care to call Momma “Aunt Devra” both to her face and to others. To Lyle and me he’d say, “Your Momma,” in a serious voice. The way his eyes shrank from Momma, even when she was trying to joke with him, which was often, you could see he didn’t know how to speak to her. Much of the time, he didn’t speak. Though he did favors for Momma, constantly. Climbing up onto the roof to repair a drip in Momma’s bedroom, changing a flat tire on Momma’s car, taking a day off from school to drive Momma to Chautauqua Falls seventy miles away. (Sonny had a driver’s permit which allowed him to drive any vehicle so long as a licensed driver was with him. What Momma was doing in Chautauqua Falls wasn’t for us to know. She would claim she “had business” which might mean she was interviewing for a job, looking for a new place to live or contacting a friend. So much of Momma’s life was secret, her own children wouldn’t know what she’d been planning until she sprang the surprise on us like something on daytime TV.) When Momma tried to thank Sonny for some kindness of his he’d squirm with embarrassment and scowl, mumbling O.K., Aunt Devra or Well, hell and make his escape, fast. Momma hid her exasperation beneath praise, telling Georgia her son was the shyest boy — “For somebody growing up to look like Sonny is going to look.”

Georgia said defiantly, “I hope to God he stays that way.”

A few months in Ransomville, we’d begun to forget Herkimer. The shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek we’d almost come to believe, as Momma said, had been flooded and swept away by Hurricane Charley. The glowering man who wasn’t my daddy and had no wish to pretend he was. Now I was Mickey and not Aimée, I behaved with more confidence. I became brash, reckless. I infuriated my aunt and my mother by careening around the house at high speed, taking the stairs from the second floor two and three at a time, slapping my hand against the wall for balance. (Unlike Sonny, I sometimes missed a step and fell, hard. Skidding down the remainder of the stairs to lie in a crumpled heap at the bottom. The pain made me whimper but embarrassment was worse, if anyone happened to have noticed.) Another roughhouse game if you could call it a game was running and sliding along the hall on my aunt’s “throw rugs” Lyle imitated me, in a shrieking version of bumper cars. When Momma was home she scolded and slapped at me — “Aimée! You’re too old for such behavior” — but more and more, Momma wasn’t home.

Aunt Georgia’s was the kind of household where a single bathroom had to suffice for everyone and the hot water heater was quickly depleted. The kind of household where a shower, a bath, was an occasion. I hid in wait to catch a glimpse of Sonny hurrying into the bathroom barefoot, bare-chested and in beltless trousers, pajama bottoms, or white Jockey shorts dingy from many launderings, quick to shut the door behind him and latch it. Slyly I would draw near to hear him whistling inside as he ran water from the rusty old faucets, flushed the toilet, showered. I drew Lyle into teasing Sonny with me, rapping on the bathroom door when Sonny was inside, managing to jiggle the latch-lock open and reaching inside to switch off the light, to provoke our cousin into shouting, “Put that light back on! God damn !” More daring, we crept into the steamy bathroom when Sonny was showering, pushed aside the shower curtain so that I could spray Sonny with shaving cream from his aerosol can, all the while shrieking with laughter like a cat being killed. Nothing was more hilarious than Sonny flailing at us, streaming water, trying to grab the shaving cream can out of my hand. Once or twice I caught a glimpse of Sonny’s penis swinging loose, limp and seeming not much longer than his longest finger, innocent-looking as a red rubber toy between his narrow hips. In his rage, Sonny wouldn’t trouble to wrap a towel around his waist. The sight of my cousin’s penis did not upset or alarm me. If I’d been asked I might have said Anything that is Sonny’s, anything to do with Sonny, could never cause me harm .

Furious and flushed with indignation, Sonny lunged from the dripping shower stall to shove Lyle and me out of the bathroom with his wet hands, and shut the door behind us, hard.

“Damn brats!”

Of course, Sonny would exact his revenge. If not immediately, in time. Somewhere, somehow. We would not know when. We trembled in anticipation, not knowing when.

It would be years before I glimpsed another penis on another young male. And more years before I saw an erect penis. In my naïveté taking for granted that adult men looked like my boy cousin surprised naked in the shower. In my naïveté taking for granted that, like my protective boy cousin, no man would truly wish to harm me.

That environment my aunt Agnes would say, after Sonny was arrested. Those people, that way of life my aunt would speak in disgust as if any sensible person would agree with her. And I would want to protest It wasn’t like that! I would want to say I loved them, we were happy there, you don’t understand .

“If I could trust you, Dev’a. My mind would be more at peace.”

It was difficult to interpret my aunt Georgia’s tone of voice when she spoke like this to Momma. She didn’t seem to be scolding or sarcastic. She didn’t sound reproachful. She laughed, and she sighed. (Fattish people sighed a lot, I knew. Like they were made of rubber pumped up like a balloon and when they felt sad, air leaked out more noticeably than it did with thinner people.) The way Momma murmured in reply as if she was too much in a hurry to be angry, “Georgia, you can trust me! I’m an adult woman,” I understood my aunt and Momma had had this conversation before and that, on her way out of the house, Momma would pause to kiss Georgia’s cheek, squeeze her hand and say, in her taunting-teasing way, “And you can mind your own business, Georgia. Any time you want us out, we’re out.”