Joyce Oates - Sourland

“How old’r you?”

“Eighteen.”

“You got I.D.?”

The woman was slyly teasing, not exactly hostile. I wondered if there was a law about minors visiting residents of Seneca House without adult supervision. In my rumpled raincoat, looking exhausted and dazed from my journey, speaking in a faltering voice, I must have looked not even sixteen. I saw, just off the squalid lobby in which we were standing, a visitors’ room, or lounge, with a few vinyl chairs and Formica-topped tables, wanting badly to ask if I could wait for Sonny there, for it wasn’t yet 4 P.M. The woman repeated again, with a cruel smile, “There’s no visitors upstairs, see. That’s for your protection.”

I went away, and walked aimlessly. Outside a Sunoco station, I used a pay phone to call the latest telephone number I had for my mother in Ransomville, but no one answered and when a recording clicked on, a man’s voice, I hung up quickly. My latest stepfather! I could not remember his name.

I knew that I should call my aunt Agnes. I knew that, by now, the Amherst Academy would have contacted her. And she would be upset, and anxious for me. And she would know how mistaken she’d been, to put her faith in me. Her “favorite niece” who’d betrayed her trust.

“Fact is, I’m Devra’s daughter. That can’t change.”

The weirdest thing: I had a strong impulse to speak with my brother. Lyle was eleven now, a sixth grader at Ransomville Middle School, almost a stranger to me. We had Sonny in common, we’d loved our cousin Sonny in the old farmhouse on Summit Hill Road. Lyle would remember, maybe things I couldn’t remember. I called the school to ask if “Lyle Stecke” was a student there (though I knew that he was a student there) and after some confusion I was told yes, and I said that I was a relative of Lyle’s but I did not have a message for him. By this time the receptionist to whom I was speaking had begun to be suspicious so I hung up, quickly.

I walked slowly back to the mustard-yellow clapboard house with the handpainted sign SENECA HOUSE. It was nearing 6 P.M. I was very hungry, I hadn’t wanted to spend money on food and had had the vague hope that Sonny and I might have dinner together. I thought that I would wait for my cousin on the street, to avoid the Hispanic woman who suspected me of being Sonny’s girlfriend. At 6:20 P.M., a battered-looking bus marked CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY YOUTH SERVICES pulled up to the curb in a miasma of exhaust and ten, twelve, fifteen men disembarked. All were young, some appeared to be hardly more than boys. All were wearing work clothes, work boots, grimy-looking caps. Nearly all were smoking. A fattish disheveled young man with sand-colored skin and a scruffy goatee, several young black and Hispanic men, a muscled, slow-moving young Caucasian with a burnt-looking skin, in filth-stiffened work clothes, a baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead…The men passed by me talking and laughing loudly, a few of them glancing in my direction, but taking no special notice of me, as I stared at them unable to see Sonny among them, confused and uncertain. Waiting for Sonny, I’d become increasingly anxious. For soon it would be dark and I was in a city I didn’t know and would have to find a place for the night unless I called Momma and in desperation told her where I was, and why.

I had no choice but to follow the men into the residence. I saw that the young man in the filthy work clothes and baseball cap was Sonny, moving tiredly among the others, staring at the cracked linoleum floor. His jaws were unshaven. His hands were very dirty. I called to him, “Sonny? Hey, it’s Mickey.”

He hadn’t heard. One of the young black men, eyeing me with a smile, poked at Sonny to alert him to me. When he turned, the sight of him was a shock. His face had thickened, coarsened. The burnt-looking skin was a patchwork of blemishes and acne scars. I could recognize the pale blue eyes, but the eyes were hardened in suspicion. I’d expected that Sonny might smile at me, even laugh at the sight of me, in surprise; I’d expected that he would come to me, to hug me. But this man held back, squinting. There was something wrong about his gaze. I saw to my horror that his left eye seemed to have veered off to the side as if something had caught its attention while his right eye stared straight at me. His lips drew back from his teeth, that were discolored and crooked. “Dev’a? Are you — Dev’a?”

Devra! Sonny was mistaking me for Momma.

I told him no, I was Mickey. His cousin Mickey, didn’t he remember me?

I tried to laugh. This had to be funny. This had to be a joke. This had to be Sonny’s old sense of humor. But he wasn’t smiling, he continued to stare at me with his one good eye. The lines in his forehead had sharpened to creases. His nose was broad at the bridge as if it had been broken and flattened. However old you might guess this man to be, you would not have guessed twenty-one.

“Did you come to see me? Nobody comes to see me.”

Sonny spoke slowly, as if he had to choose his words with care, and yet his words were slightly slurred, like speech heard underwater. He’d been injured, I thought. His brain had been injured in a beating. But I came forward, to take hold of one of Sonny’s hands, so much larger than my own. Sonny loomed above me, six feet tall but somewhat slump-shouldered, his head pitched slightly forward in the perpetual effort of trying to hear what was being said to him. “I’m Devra’s daughter, Sonny. Remember, ‘Aimée’? I was just a little girl when we came to live with you and Aunt Georgia. You changed my name to ‘Mickey.’ ‘Mickey kicks ass,’ you said. You — ”

Sonny jerked his hand from mine, as if my fingers had burnt him. He might have heard something of what I’d said, but wasn’t sure how to interpret it. From what I could see of his hair, beneath the grimy cap, it had been shaved close, military-style, at the sides and back. His skin looked stitched-together, of mismatched fabrics like one of Georgia’s crazy quilts. His face shriveled suddenly in the effort not to cry. “You lied to me, Aunt Dev’a. That wasn’t the man, the man that I hurt, it was somebody else wasn’t it! Some other man you’d been married to. You lied to me, I was told you lied to me, Aunt Dev’a, why’d you lie to me? I hurt the wrong man, you lied to me.” Sonny spoke in the aggrieved voice of a child, pushing at me, not hard, but enough to force me to step backward. I was astonished at what he’d said. Though I’d heard something like this from my aunt Georgia, who’d had more than a suspicion that the man who’d actually hurt my mother had been Bob Gleason, not Herlihy. I couldn’t make sense of this, I couldn’t allow myself to think of it now. I was trying to smile, to laugh, in the old way, as if Sonny’s confusion was only teasing and in another moment he’d wink and nudge at me and we’d laugh together. I said, “Do you still like pizza, Sonny? We can have pizza for dinner. I have money.” Sonny said, “‘Piz-za,’” enunciating the word in two distinct syllables. His face shriveled and he clenched his fists as if he was considering breaking my face. A middle-aged black man who wore a laminated I.D. badge appeared beside us, laying a restraining hand on Sonny’s arm. “Hold on there, Sean. Take it slow, man.” I told this man who I was, I’d come to see my cousin, and the man explained to Sonny who listened doubtfully, staring at me. “I’m Mickey. You remember, your cousin Mickey. That’s me.” I spoke eagerly, hopefully. The filmy look in Sonny’s good eye seemed suddenly to clear. “‘Mickey.’ That’s you. Well, hell.” Sonny’s lips parted in a slow smile that seemed about to reverse itself at any moment. I said, “I’ll get the pizza. I’ll bring it back here. I’ll get us some Cokes, we can eat right there.” I meant the lounge area, where there was a table we could use. On the wall beyond, a mosaic of crudely fashioned bright yellow sunflowers in shards of tile that looked handmade.