Joyce Oates - Sourland

Aunt Agnes was a slender quivery woman in her early forties. She did not much resemble her younger sisters in her appearance or in her manner of speaking. Her face was thin, heated, vivacious. Her teeth were small, like a child’s teeth, and looked crowded in her mouth that was always smiling, or about to smile. Where Momma would have been awkward and defensive meeting my teachers, having to say quickly that she “never was very good” at school, my aunt smiled and shook hands and was perfectly at ease.

At the Academy, it may have been assumed by girls who didn’t know me that Agnes was my mother.

Even those girls to whom I’d introduced my aunt seemed to hear me wrong and would speak afterward of “your mother”: “Your mother looks just like you, Mickey” — “Your mother is really nice.”

My mother is a beautiful woman, nothing like me. My mother is a slut.

My first few months at the Academy, I’d been homesick and angry and took the stairs to the dining hall two or three at a time slapping my hand against the wall for balance not giving a damn if I slipped, fell and broke my neck. I’d glowered, glared. I was so shy I’d have liked to shrivel into a ball like an inchworm in the hot sun yet there I was waving my fist of a hand, eager to be called upon.

I was Mickey not Aimée. Fuck Aimée!

I tried out for the track team but ran too fast, couldn’t hold back and so became winded, panting through my mouth. Staggering with sharp pains in my side. I helped other girls with their papers though such help was forbidden by the honor code we’d solemnly vowed to uphold. I said outrageous things, scandalizing my roommate Anne-Marie Krimble confiding in her that I didn’t have a father like everyone else: “I was conceived in a test tube.”

Anne-Marie’s mouth dropped softly. She stared at me in disbelief. “Mickey, you were not.”

“ In vitro it’s called. My mother’s ‘egg’ was siphoned from her and mixed with sperm from a ‘donor male,’ shaken in a test tube the way you shake a cocktail.”

“Mickey, that did not happen! That is gross.”

Anne-Marie had taken a step back from me, uncertainly. I was laughing in the way my cousin Sonny Brandt used to laugh, once he’d gotten us to believe something far-fetched. “ In vivo , that’s you: born in an actual body. But not me.”

Tales quickly spread of Mickey Stecke who said the most outrageous things. But mostly funny, to make her friends laugh.

“These are very serious charges, Aimée.”

Aimée . In the Dean’s flat, nasal voice, the pretentious name sounded like accusation.

Dean Chawdrey was peering at me over the tops of her rimless bifocal glasses. In her hand she held the neatly typed letter I’d sent to her the previous day. I was sitting in a chair facing her across the span of her desk, in my damp rumpled raincoat. I heard myself murmur almost inaudibly, “Yes ma’am.”

“You saw, you say, ‘someone cheating’ last week at midterms. Who is this ‘someone,’ Aimée? You will have to tell me.”

M. V. Chawdrey was a frowning woman in her early fifties, as solidly fleshy as my aunt Georgia but her skin wasn’t warmly rosy like my aunt’s skin but had a look of something drained, that would be cold to the touch. Her mouth was small, bite-sized. Her eyes were distrustful. It was rare that an adult allowed dislike to show so transparently in her face.

“Aimée? Their names.”

I sat miserable and mute. I could see the faces of the girls, some of whom were my friends, or would have believed themselves my friends as I would have liked to think of them as my friends. I could see even the expressions on their faces, but I could not name them.

Of course, I’d known beforehand that I could not. Yet I’d had to report them. It was the phenomenon of cheating I’d had to report, that was so upsetting.

At the Amherst Academy much was made of the tradition of the honor code. Every student signed a pledge to uphold this “sacred trust” — “priceless legacy.” The honor code was a distinction, we were repeatedly told, that set the Amherst Academy apart from most private schools and all public schools. On the final page of each exam and paper you were required to say I hereby confirm that this work submitted under my name is wholly and uniquely my own . You signed and dated this. But the honor code was more than only just not cheating, you were pledged also to report others’ cheating, and that was the dilemma.

Punishments for cheating ranged from probation, suspension from school, outright expulsion. Punishments for failing to report cheating were identical.

Who would know, who could prove. You have only to say nothing.

I knew this, of course. But I was angry and disgusted, too. If I did not want to cheat, I would be at a disadvantage when so many others were cheating. My heart beat in childish indignation It isn’t fair! It wasn’t just incidental cheating, a girl glancing over at another girl’s exam paper, two girls whispering together at the back of a room. Not just the usual help girls gave one another, proofreading papers, pointing out obvious mistakes. This was systematic cheating, blatant cheating. Especially in science classes taught by an affable distracted man named Werth where notes and even pages ripped from textbooks were smuggled into the exam room, and grades were uniformly A’s and B’s. In English and history it had become commonplace for students to plagiarize by photocopying material from the periodicals library at the University of Buffalo that was within walking distance of the Amherst Academy. Our teachers seemed not to know, unless they’d given up caring. It was easier to give high grades. It was easier to avoid confrontations. “Well, Mickey: I know I can trust you,” Mrs. Peale had said once, mysteriously. The emphasis on you had felt like a nudge in the ribs, painful though meant to be affectionate.

My first few months at the Academy, eager to be liked, I’d helped girls with homework and papers but I’d never actually written any part of any paper. I’d wanted to think of what I did as a kind of teaching. This isn’t cheating. This is helping. Uneasily I remembered how at freshman orientation questions had been put to the Dean of Students about the honor code, those questions Dean Chawdrey had answered year following year with her so-serious expression Yes it is as much a violation of the honor code to fail to report cheating as to cheat. Yes! A ripple of dismay had passed through the gathering of first-year students and their parents, crowded into pine pews in the school chapel. Aunt Agnes had accompanied me and now she murmured in my ear Remember what that woman is saying, Aimée. She is absolutely right.

I felt a stab of guilt, thinking of my aunt. Agnes had such hopes for me, her “favorite” niece! She wanted to be proud of me. She wanted to think that her effort on my behalf was not in vain. I seemed to know that what I was doing would hurt Agnes, as it would hurt me.

For nights I’d lain awake in a misery of indecision wondering what to do. In Ransomville, nothing like this could ever have happened. In Ransomville public schools there was no “honor code” and in fact there hadn’t been much cheating, that I had known of. Few students continued on to college, high grades were not an issue. Here, I’d come to think, in my anxiety, that our teachers had to know of the widespread cheating and were amused that girls like me, who never cheated, were too cowardly to come forward.

The irony was, I wasn’t so moral — so “good” — that I couldn’t cheat like the others. And more cleverly than the others. But something in me resisted the impulse to follow the others who were crass and careless in their cheating. I am not one of you. I am superior to you. Finally, I’d written to the dean of students a brief letter of only a few sentences and I’d mailed the letter in a stamped envelope. Even as I wrote the letter I understood that I was making a mistake and yet I’d had no choice.