Joyce Oates - Sourland

We began to notice, Sonny was getting mean. He was short-tempered with his mother, even with his aunt Devra. The kinds of silly jokes Lyle and I had played with him only a few months before just seemed to annoy Sonny now. One evening Lyle crept up on Sonny sprawled on the sofa, drinking a beer and clicking through TV stations with the remote control, and Sonny told him, “Fuck off.” His voice was flat and tired. He wasn’t smiling. His jaws were bristling with dark stubble and his T-shirt was stained with sweat. Whatever was on TV, he stared at without seeming to see. Compulsively he poked and prodded a tooth in his lower jaw, that seemed to be loose.

Poor Lyle! My brother crept away wounded. He would never approach Sonny again in such a way.

I knew better than to tease Sonny in such a mood for he didn’t seem to like me much any longer, either. I hate you! I don’t love you. Fall out of some damn tree and break your damn neck, see if I give a damn.

These brash-Mickey words I whispered aloud, barefoot on the stairs a few yards away. Where I could watch my boy cousin through the doorway, slumped on the sofa poking at a tooth in his lower jaw.

In the fall, Momma had her hair trimmed in a feathery cut that floated around her face and made her eyes, warm liquidy brown, look enlarged. She was living her secret life that left her moody and distracted vehemently shaking her head when the phone rang and it was for her and whoever wanted to speak with her left no name and number only just the terse message She’ll know who it is, tell her call back.

She was still working at Herlihy Realtors. Unless she’d quit the job at Herlihy Realtors. Maybe she’d been fired by Mr. Herlihy? Or she’d quit and Mr. Herlihy had talked her into returning but then after an exchange she’d been fired, or she’d quit for a second, final time? Maybe there’d been a scene of Momma and her employer Mr. Herlihy in the office after hours when everyone else had departed, when the front lights of HERLIHY REALTORS had been switched off, and Momma was upset, Momma swiped at her eyes that were beginning to streak with mascara, Momma turned to walk away but Mr. Herlihy grabbed her shoulder, spun her back to face him and struck her with the flat of his hand in her pretty crimson mouth that had opened in protest.

And maybe there’d been a confused scene of Momma desperately pushing through the rear exit of Herlihy Realtors, blood streaming from a two-inch gash in her lower lip, Momma running and stumbling in high-heeled shoes to get to her car before the man pursuing her, panting and excited, could catch up with her.

Maybe this man had pleaded Devra! Jesus I’m so sorry! You know I didn’t mean it.

Or maybe this man had said, furiously, snatching again at Momma’s shoulder Don’t you walk away from me, bitch! Don’t you turn your back on me.

It was 9:50 P.M., a weekday night in December 1981. Aunt Georgia picked up the ringing phone already pissed at whoever was calling at this hour of the evening (knowing the call wouldn’t be for her but for her sister Devra who’d been hiding away in her room for the past several days refusing to talk to anyone even Georgia, even through the door, or her son Sonny who’d been out late every night that week) and a voice was notifying her that it was the Chautauqua County sheriff’s office for Mrs. Georgia Brandt informing her that her sixteen-year-old son, Sean, Jr., resident of 2881 Summit Hill Road, was in custody at headquarters on a charge of aggravated assault. It seemed that Sonny had confronted Mr. Herlihy of Herlihy Realtors in the parking lot behind his office earlier that evening, they’d begun arguing and Sonny had struck Herlihy with a tire iron, beating him unconscious. Georgia was being asked to come to headquarters as soon as possible.

Aunt Georgia was stunned as if she’d been struck by a tire iron herself. She’d had to ask the caller to repeat what he’d said. She would tell us afterward how her knees had gone weak as water, she’d broken into a cold sweat in that instant groping for somewhere to sit before she fainted. She would say afterward, over the years, how that call was the second terrible call to come to her on that very phone: “Like lightning striking twice, the same place. Like God was playing a joke on me He hadn’t already struck such a blow, and didn’t owe me another.”

Sonny would say Well, hell.

Sonny would swipe his hand across his twitchy face, he’d have to agree Some kind of joke, like. How things turn out.

Cupping a hand to his ear, his left ear where the hearing had been impaired following a beating (fellow inmates at the detention center? guards?) he refused to speak of, refused to allow Georgia to report saying You want them to kill me, next time? Chill out, Ma.

Each time we saw him, he was less Sonny and more somebody else we didn’t know. In the orange jumpsuit printed in black CHAU CO DETENTION on the back, drooping from his shoulders and the trouser legs so long, he’d had to roll up the cuffs. The guards called him kid. There was a feeling, we’d wished to think, that people liked him, Sonny wasn’t any natural-born killer type, not a mean bone in that boy’s body my aunt Georgia pleaded to anyone who’d listen. If only Mr. Herlihy hadn’t died.

I only just hate that man worse, God forgive me.

Georgia made us come with her to church. Not Momma (you couldn’t get Momma to step inside that holy-roller Church of the Apostles, Momma proclaimed) but Lyle and me. Pray for your cousin Sonny, may Jesus spare us all.

I wrote to Sonny, saying how I missed him. How we all missed him. We missed him so ! But Sonny never answered, not once.

Aunt Georgia said Sonny meant to answer, but was busy. You wouldn’t believe how they keep them busy at that damn place.

Momma said maybe Sonny didn’t “write so good.” Maybe Sonny hadn’t paid much attention at school when writing was taught, maybe that was it. So he wouldn’t want to show how like a little kid he’d write, that other people might laugh at.

Laugh at Sonny! I was shocked at such a thought. I could not believe that Momma would say such a thing.

Still, I loved Sonny. My heart was broken like some cheap plastic thing, that cracks when you just drop it on the floor.

“Aimée.”

Mrs. Peale’s voice was low and urgent. My heart kicked in my chest. I saw a look in the woman’s eyes warning Take care! You are a very reckless girl. Later, more calmly I would realize that Mrs. Peale could not have been thinking such a thought for Mrs. Peale could not have known why the dean of students had asked her to pass along the pink slip to me, discreetly folded in two and pressed into my hand at the end of music class.

My trembling hand. My guilty hand. My tomboy-with-bitten-finger nails-hand.

It was a rainy afternoon in October 1986. I was sixteen, a junior at the Amherst Academy for Girls. I had been a student here, a boarder, since September 1984. Yet I did not feel “at home” here. I did not feel comfortable here. I had made a decision the previous day and this summons from the dean of students was in response to that decision I could not now revoke though possibly it was a mistake though I did not regret having made it, even if it would turn out to be a mistake. All day I’d dreaded this summons from the dean. In my fantasies of exposure and embarrassment I’d imagined that my name would be sounded over the school’s loudspeaker system in one of those jarring announcements made from time to time during the school day but in fact the summons, now that it had arrived, was handwritten, terse:

Aimée SteckeCome promtly to my office end of 5th period.M. V. Chawdrey, Dean of Students