Joyce Oates: Sourland

Beyond the door she could hear Kolk talking to the bulldog, in a cheery-chiding manner. Having a guest in this remote place — a female guest — seemed to please and excite Kolk even as it provoked him to feeling, like his guest, edgy and apprehensive. Sophie listened closely but could hear no distinct words through the door. She wondered how soon — if ever — Kolk would speak to her in the intimate way in which he spoke to the barrel-shaped little bulldog.

As if nothing were yet at stake, all had been decided between them.

You summoned me. I came to you. It has been decided!

Hesitantly Sophie pulled back the blue-striped comforter. She saw with a stab of dismay that the comforter was more badly worn than she’d believed, though it had been — hadn’t it? — recently laundered; Kolk had washed it by hand — had he? — and hung it up to dry outdoors, which would have required days.

Beneath the comforter, bedsheets worn almost transparent from laundering. The sagging mattress beneath, and no mattress cover. Sophie snatched up the single pillow on the bed to fluff it out — tiny bits of down exploded into the air. Out of the bedclothes wafted a musty odor, that pinched her nostrils. She thought She has died here. My predecessor. Allowed to starve to death, to die and become mummified.

Sophie saw that the single window in the room was too small for an adult to push her way out — no more than two square feet.

So tired! She had no choice but to stretch out warily on the bed. No choice but to sink into the bed. This musty-yeasty-smelling bed. In her clothes and socks — she’d removed only the shoe-boots. It was terrible to be sleeping fully dressed but she could not risk undressing nor had she the strength to remove her clothing. She had not the strength to open her suitcase and hang up her things — she’d forgotten the suitcase entirely. The satin robe on the peg was hers to wear, she supposed. Though she would have to be naked beneath it, she supposed. She’d begun to pant, her eyeballs felt seared as if she’d been staring into the sun. She could never sleep in this terrible place! A grave-smell, wetted ashes, grit. If you breathed in too deeply you breathed in microscopic bits of skin, cell-particles. You breathed in the death of another. Her skin crawled with this knowledge. Hairs at the tender nape of her neck stirred. She felt an almost sexual yearning — the dark pit was opening beneath her, the tar pit, beneath the low-slung bed. In her haste to sleep she’d neglected to switch off the light, from a bedside lamp with a milk-glass base, an attractive little girl’s-room sort of lamp which Kolk had switched on: the bulb couldn’t have been more than sixty watts, not enough to keep Sophie from sinking into the tar pit which was the identical tar-pit that was beneath her bed back home…Gratefully she shut her eyes. Something black washed over her brain. Almost immediately she began to sleep. She was sobbing in her sleep, in relief. Her limbs twitched, she was gripping herself in a tight embrace, arms crossed over her chest and fingers at her rib cage. O hold me! help me! I am so alone and I don’t want to die please help me! She saw the man approach her — the man with the melted-away face, the exposed and grinning teeth — whose name she could not recall, at the moment. It was a name she knew, but she could not speak it. He had removed his tinted glasses, his soot-colored eyes were glassy, dilated. His soot-colored eyes moved over her caressingly. She saw the mouth inside the bristling beard. It was a scarred mouth and a mutilated mouth but it was a mouth she wanted to kiss, to comfort. Yet she could not move, exhaustion so gripped her in all the cells of her being.

“Sophie?”

There came a man’s voice, at a little distance. Someone was speaking her name through a shut door.

Now he opened the door, just slightly. Not wanting to upset or offend her he spoke through the crack, that mutilated mouth she couldn’t see from where she lay.

“Sophie? Can you wake up? It’s almost nine.”

In a daze Sophie opened her eyes. The lashes were crusted together with dried mucus. Her mouth was parched, aflame. In her stuporous sleep she’d been breathing through an opened mouth, for hours. How long? Nine o’clock? The wicked little two-foot-square window framed a tarry-black night.

Asprawl she lay in tangled bedclothes smelling of her body. At first she couldn’t recognize her surroundings, this cave-like interior she was certain she’d never seen before. The ceiling overhead was low like heavy clouds pressing near to the earth. Tendrils of cobweb trailed from the ceiling. Something wispy crawled across her forehead — Sophie brushed it away with panicked fingers.

“Sophie — hey? You must be starving. We should eat soon. I’ve made us something to eat. D’you need anything?”

Quickly Sophie said No! No she didn’t need anything. She was awake, she would join him in five minutes.

Her joints ached. Her neck ached. Her upper lip itched, badly. Beneath the rumpled linen shirt and sweater, a flaming sort of rash across her belly.

In a rush it returned to her — memory of where she was, and with whom. Who had summoned her.

The heavy down comforter had slid partway onto the floor. Sophie’s shoe-boots were tangled in it — she fumbled to put them on. She dreaded walking on this floor, without shoes.

In the tiny lavatory that smelled of drains and disinfectant she peered at her reflection in a mirror so cheap it appeared to have warped. Its lead backing had begun to poke through, like leprosy. She saw that her eyes were bloodshot and swollen and her mouth — her upper lip — was terribly swollen, enflamed.

Something had bitten her, in that bed.

“My God! A spider bite…”

She shuddered, in revulsion. She ran cold water into the sink, and wetted her swollen lip. How it throbbed, and burned! In the mirror she saw with dismay her dazed and sallow face, the bloodshot eyes with deep shadows beneath, the shiny-swollen upper lip.

The man would not find her attractive, sexually. Yet that morning early when she’d set out on her journey — her pilgrimage? — she’d been an attractive dark-haired woman with a ready if unfocused smile of whom it was said by those who wished her well How rested you’re beginning to look, Sophie! How young.

How rested was a sort of code, Sophie supposed. Such words were only pronounced to widows, convalescents, survivors of terrible disasters. How rested and not rather how devastated.

How rested and not rather how dead.

Hurriedly Sophie combed her hair, that was snarled at the nape of her neck. She fumbled to put on makeup squinting into the leprous mirror. Her fingers were oddly clumsy, she dropped the tube of lipstick not once but twice onto the grimy linoleum floor.

Blood rushed into her face as she stooped to retrieve the lipstick. Groping in the cobwebby corner of the tiny lavatory. So it has come to this, Sophie! Such desperation.

No time to unpack her suitcase. Kolk was waiting for her. She could hear the panting little pig-dog snuffling and clawing at the base of the door she had no choice but to force open.

“ S’reebi ! Come over here, damn you sit. ”

Kolk growled at the dog, that reluctantly obeyed him. How like a TV sitcom this was — was it? Sophie’s mouth smiled, hopeful.

Kolk had lighted a fire in the fireplace. He’d laid cutlery, plates, swaths of paper towels on a crude wood-plank table in front of the fireplace. Not a TV sitcom but a romantic scene, this was. In the Sourland Mountain Preserve, in snowy April.

Sophie would have thought that the prospect of eating would nauseate her. In fact, the aroma of something meaty and gamey stewing on the stove made her mouth water.