Joyce Oates - Sourland

This hurt my aunt, I knew. (It hurt me, overhearing. Momma was so careless in her words slashing like blades.) So Georgia would say no she didn’t mean that, didn’t want that, Momma had to know she didn’t want that.

Through the winter and into January 1981, Momma sold perfume in a department store at the mall. Then, Momma was “hostess” in a restaurant owned by a new friend of hers. Then, Momma was “receptionist” at Herlihy’s Realtors whose glaring yellow and black signs were everywhere in Chautauqua County, and Mr. Herlihy (who drove a showy bronze-blond Porsche) was Momma’s new friend.

It seemed that every few days, a new friend called Momma. Male voices asking to speak with “Devra Stecke” but Momma wasn’t usually home. Some of the men left names and telephone numbers, others did not. Some of the men my aunt Georgia knew, or claimed to know, others she did not. This was an “old pattern” repeating itself, Georgia said. Complaining to anyone who would listen how her younger sister who’d already had such turmoil in her personal life was “growing apart” from her — “growing estranged” — “secretive” — and this was a signal of trouble to come.

Sonny roiled his mother by saying, in the way you’d explain something to a slow-witted child, “Ma, the fact is: Aunt Devra has got her own life. Aunt Devra ain’t you .”

The plan had been that Momma, Lyle, and I would live with my aunt Georgia only for as long as Momma needed to get a job in Ransomville, find a decent place for us to live, but months passed, and Momma was too busy to think about moving, and Georgia assured her there was no hurry about moving out, there was plenty of room in the house. My aunt’s daughters were grown, married, separated or divorced, and dropped by the house with their noisy children at all times, especially when they wanted favors from their mother, but Georgia liked the feel of a family living together day to day. “Like, when you wake up in the morning, you know who you’ll be making breakfast for. Who you can rely upon.”

It began to be that Momma “worked late” several nights a week at Herlihy Realtors. Or maybe, after the office closed, Momma had other engagements. (Swimming laps at the Y? Taking a course in computers at the community college? Meeting with friends at the County Line Café?) If Momma wasn’t back home by 7 P.M. we could expect a hurried call telling us not to wait supper for her, and not to keep food warm in the oven for her. Maybe Momma would be home by midnight, maybe later. (Once, our school bus headed for town passed Momma’s car on the road, headed home at 7:45 A.M. I shrank from the window trying not to notice and wondered if my little brother at the front of the bus was trying not to notice, too.) In winter months when we came home from school, ran up the snowy driveway to the old farmhouse so weirdly, thinly painted looking in twilight like a ghost-house, sometimes only our aunt Georgia would be home to call out, “Hi, kids!” Georgia would be changed from her cafeteria uniform into sweatpants and pullover sweater, in stocking feet padding about the kitchen preparing supper (Georgia’s specialties were hot-spice chili with ground chuck, spaghetti and meatballs, tuna-cheese-rice casserole with a glaze of potato chip crumbs); or, having lost track of the time, sitting in her recliner in the living room watching late-afternoon TV soaps, smoking Marlboros and rapidly sewing, without needing to watch her fingers, one of her crazy quilts — “Look at this! How it came to be so big, I don’t know. Damn thing has a mind of its own.”

Georgia tried to teach me quilting, but I hadn’t enough patience to sit still. Since I’d become Mickey, not Aimée, seemed like tiny red ants were crawling over me, couldn’t stay in one place for more than a few minutes. Momma said it would be good for me to learn some practical skill, but why’d I want to learn quilting, when Momma hadn’t the slightest interest in it herself?

Georgia Brandt’s quilts were famous locally. She’d made quilts for every relative of hers, neighbors, friends, friends-of-friends. For people she scarcely knew but admired. Georgia’s most spectacular quilts sold for two hundred dollars at the women’s co-op. She was modest about her skills (“I’m like the momma cat that’s had so many kittens, she’s lost count”) and scowled like Sonny if you tried to compliment her. It was difficult to describe one of Georgia’s quilts for if your first impression was that the quilt was beautiful, the closer you looked the more doubtful you became. For there was no way to see the quilt in its entirety, only just in parts, square by square. And the squares did not match, did not form a “pattern.” Or anyway not a “pattern” you could see. Not only did Georgia use mismatched colors and prints but every kind of fabrics: cotton, wool, satin, silk, taffeta, velvet, lace. Some quilts glittered with sequins or seed pearls scattered like constellations in the sky. Georgia said she could see a quilt in her mind’s eye taking form as she sewed it better than she could see a quilt when it was spread out on the floor. A “crazy” quilt grew by some mysterious logic, moving through Georgia’s fingers, grew and grew until finally it stopped growing.

People asked my aunt how she knew when a quilt was finished and Georgia said, “Hell, I don’t ever know. I just stop.”

May 1981 my cousin Sonny turned sixteen: bought a car, quit high school, got a job with a tree service crew.

Aunt Georgia had begged him not to quit school, but Sonny wouldn’t listen. He’d had enough of sitting at desks, playing like he was a young kid when he wasn’t, in his heart. The tree service job paid almost twice what he’d been making working part-time and he was proud to hand over half of his earnings to Georgia.

Georgia wept, but took the money. Sonny would do what he wanted to do, like her deceased husband. “Now I got to pray you don’t kill yourself, too.” We picked up the way Georgia’s voice dipped on you .

Sonny, the youngest member of the tree service crew, soon became the daredevil. The one to volunteer to climb one hundred feet wielding a chain saw when others held back. The one to work in dangerous conditions. The one to be depended upon to finish a job even in pelting rain, without complaining. He liked the grudging admiration of the other men some of whom became his friends and some of whom hated his guts for being the good-looking brash kid who clambered into trees listening to rock music on his Walkman and was still fearless as most of them had been fearless at one time, if no longer. “Hey Brandt: you up for this?” It was a thrill to hear the foreman yelling at him, singling him out for attention.

Sure, Sonny wore safety gloves, goggles, work boots with reinforced toes. Sure, Sonny insisted to Georgia and to Momma, he never took chances and didn’t let the damn foreman “exploit” him. Yet somehow his hands became covered in nicks, scratches, scars. His face looked perpetually sunburnt. His backbone ached, his muscles ached, his pale-blue eyes were often threaded with blood and his head rang with the deafening whine of saws that, on the job, penetrated his so-called ear protectors. Away from a work site, Sonny still twitched with vibrations running through his lean body like electric charges. One evening he came home limping, and Georgia made him take off his shoe and sock to reveal a big toenail the hue of a rotted plum, swollen with blood from beneath. Momma cried, “Oh, sweetie! We’re going to take you to a doctor.”

Sonny waved her off with a scowl. Like hell he was going to a doctor for something so trivial.

Drinking, the men were apt to get into fights. With men they met in bars, or with one another. Sonny was an accidental witness to an incident that might have turned fatal: one of his buddies slammed another man (who’d allegedly insulted him) against a brick wall so hard his head made a cracking sound before his legs buckled beneath him and he fell, unconscious. (No one called an ambulance. No one called police. Eventually, the fallen man was roused to a kind of consciousness and taken home by his friends.) On the job, Sonny tried to keep out of the way of the meanest men, who’d been working for the tree service too many years, yet once, in the heat of mid summer, one of these men took exception to a remark of Sonny’s, or a way in which, hoping to deflect sarcasm with a grin, Sonny responded, and before he could raise his arms to protect himself he was being hit, pummeled, knocked off his feet. His assailant cursed him, kicked him with steel-toed boots and had to be pulled away from him by others who seemed to think that the incident was amusing. Sonny was shocked, thought of quitting, but how’d he quit, where’d he work and make as much money as he made with the crew, so he reported back next morning limping, favoring his right leg that was badly bruised from being kicked, a nasty cut beneath his left eye, face still swollen but Sonny shrugged it off saying, as he’d said to his mother and his aunt Devra, “No big deal, O.K.?”