Joyce Oates - Sourland

“Your face, Yvonne. What are you thinking?”

“What am I thinking? You.”

“Me? How?” Woody was happy, giving off heat as if he’d been running, panting and stumbling to get to her.

“How, you know, you’d get excited. I mean, you know, turned on. Like a match tossed into gasoline.” Yvonne made an explosive gesture with hands, mouth.

“Yeah, well. I was a kid then, practically. Now, maybe not.”

“Don’t be faux -modest, Woody. It isn’t you.” She was calculating whether she dared mash the heel of her hand against his groin in the khaki shorts. How Woody would react. He could be unpredictable. Just when you were loving him like one of those big clumsy sheepdogs that want only to lick your face and thump their tails, he’d turn on you and say with wounded dignity Don’t ever patronize me .

“Now what’re you thinking? Your face is fantastically transparent, Yvonne.”

“If it’s transparent, you tell me what I’m thinking.”

Woody flashed his left incisor, a snaggle tooth that looked as if it belonged in someone else’s jaw. The laugh-lines around his mouth sharpened like sudden blades. “Is old Woody good for a quick screw? For old times’ sake? Or is it, maybe, too much of a hassle? What’ll he expect from me, afterward? The poor slob.”

Yvonne blushed. She was laughing, but her face flooded with blood. “Woody, come on . The last thing I’d ever think of you, for Christ’s sake, ‘poor slob.’ You know better.”

“Hey, I am. A slob. I’m fat.” Woody clutched at his waist, the fleshy knobs. He was ignoring his stomach, that pushed against the T-shirt in a way Yvonne hadn’t seen before, in him. But then, there was his baby-dome of a head. This was new, too.

Woody was saying, “You, you’re in your own class. There’s only one of you, baby. And maybe I’m wrong, you’re not too thin. I guess it’s healthy, you read about low-calorie diets, the leanest laboratory rats live longer. I mean, ’way underweight rats, anorexic rats, not that the poor bastards have any choice about being starved, but — ” Woody could digress for long interludes. He had a mind like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up miscellaneous information, often “scientific,” that was forever on tap. Instead of a post-coital smoke, with Woody Clark you got a post-coital lecture. Yvonne had found this charming and exasperating in about equal measure. Once, she’d relied on Woody to fill her in on news — what to think, be incensed by. Movies, music, even who to vote for. Later, she’d stopped listening. She’d stopped even watching his mouth move. But now she was watching, and she was listening. And she felt a sick, sinking sensation. We could. We could, again .

“ — after this, we could have lunch? There’s this terrific new restaurant on the river, I doubt you know. A decent wine list, improbable as it sounds.”

Quickly Yvonne said, “I can’t, Woody. I have to get back.”

“Fuck you do. You don’t.”

“Woody, I do .” She’d come close to calling him honey . And her tone, too, was familiar as if they’d had this conversation before, more than once. Yvonne was practically in tears, she was so sincere. Her daughter Jill would be waiting for her back home and already she’d lost time, having failed to factor in a one-hour wait for the damned clerk’s office to open. “I’m a chauffeur for Jill right now. She’s had a ‘crisis’ and I need to be reliable for her since of course Neil is otherwise engaged.”

“God! Jill must be how old?” Woody had heard Jill and not Neil .

“Fourteen. But a young fourteen.”

Woody shuddered. He had two sons, Yvonne calculated they were still in middle school. Jill, fourteen going on twelve, was over her head in ninth grade.

Woody asked about Jill, as he always had. He’d been sweet that way, and seemingly sincere. Yvonne, asking about Woody’s boys, had not always been sincere for she’d been jealous of anyone, even Woody’s children, making emotional demands on him. Only rarely had Yvonne asked after Woody’s wife and yet more rarely, out of tact Yvonne had thought, had Woody asked after Neil.

Now Woody was asking, as if he’d only just thought of it, why Yvonne was in Mount Olive waiting for the county clerk, and Yvonne hesitated, and said evasively that she had to pick up a death certificate. And Woody’s blue eyes widened. “You do ? Jesus, so do I.”

“You?”

They stared at each other. This was too strange! There had to be something ominous about it, such a coincidence.

Woody was frowning and shaking his head muttering he didn’t want to “go into it,” the circumstances of his death certificate. Yvonne felt a clutch of fear, also distaste. Woody (who could read minds, when it suited him) would know that she didn’t want to know who in his life had died, and that annoyed her. Always he’d known more about her than she felt comfortable with his knowing while at the same time, for this was Woody Clark, he’d behaved as if he was the naive one of the two of them, innocent because three years younger.

“Oh, Woody. Is it — family?” She paused, biting her lower lip. “Not your — father?” In a moment of panic she couldn’t remember whether Woody’s father had died years ago, and she’d heard the news second-or third-hand, or whether — well, she couldn’t remember. In the eight years, seven months since she’d lived in the large white Colonial on Washburn Street her thoughts of Woody Clark had become comfortingly tattered and smudged as a poster on a billboard. Maybe you could see a face on that billboard, and maybe the face was smiling, but you couldn’t recognize the face.

“No.” Woody was frowning, not very attractive now.

Yvonne drew back. She could see herself in the very short very white cord skirt and high-heeled sandals stepping backward in her own imprudent footsteps. In damp sand. Don’t go farther, you’ll regret it .

She said, awkwardly, for her tongue seemed to twist when she lied, “I’m here to pick up a document for tax purposes. My mother’s mother who was, maybe you remember, her stepmom? Not a blood relative of hers, or mine. Oh, she was a nice woman, she was a sweet old lady, but — ” Yvonne spoke quickly and carelessly to indicate that her reason for being in Mount Olive on such a mission was not important. It was sad, someone had died, an elderly woman not a blood relative had died, but it wasn’t interesting. Woody’s death certificate was much more interesting, obviously. But they wouldn’t go there.

“ — Caroline? Is it —?”

The words leapt out. Again it was winged things out of Pandora’s box. Yvonne wanted to clamp her hands over her mouth like a comic-strip character but Woody wasn’t in a mood to be entertained.

Staring at his feet, enormous silver-gray Nikes with bands of rotting black reflector tape, Woody said nothing. Veins and tendons in his muscled neck visibly pulsed.

Suddenly Yvonne was remembering, she’d been hearing about Woody’s wife. They’d been separated, and they’d reconciled. And maybe they’d been separated again. And there was some medical problem. Probably breast cancer, for that was the cancer everyone had, everyone female who had cancer, as prostate cancer was male, and for this reason Yvonne who had long resented, been jealous of, hated, disdained and envied Woody Clark’s wife couldn’t be certain now if she’d heard such grim news about the woman because if she had she’d have blanked it out, blocked it like the kind of caller ID Neil had bought for their phones, where you’re spared even knowing who is trying to call you.

Yvonne swallowed hard. She was frightened suddenly. If Caroline had actually died, was that, somehow, though years later, her fault ? Would Woody, unfairly, or fairly, blame her ? Or, blaming himself, in his clumsy-blundering-belated way, inadvertently stumble, like a drunk careening across a dance floor, and bring her down with him? Where a minute before he’d been grinning like a high school athlete who’s scored the winning point now Woody was glowering. His mouth was down-turned at both corners. Yvonne thought in dismay Why’d I go there? She could have bitten her lower lip until it bled.