Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

"You!-what are you doing here? How dare you?"

I turned in terror to see Mrs. Thayer in the doorway behind me, staring with widened incredulous eyes. She too had escaped the Kappa festivities. She'd entered her suite from the rear. For a long moment I was paralyzed; a wave of horror passed over me, like filthy water; yet I felt too a kind of relief; for now it was over between us, or nearly. Mrs. Thayer strode to the cupboard and shoved in the drawers with such force that the bottles clattered together. In her bulging eyes I saw fury. Loathing and fear. "Bloody beastly gurl! Sick disgusting gurl ! Out of my room, out! Out!" Yet when I moved to ease past her, Mrs. Thayer struck at me; grabbed at me; clung to both my arms, beginning to cry. I could smell the fumes of her labored breath. Her powdered face was streaked with tears, rivulets like acid in the caked powder. I tried to speak, but my throat had shut tight. I was helpless as a child trapped in terror; in desperation trying to escape by crawling across Mrs. Thayer's bed but the older woman seized me in her arms that, though fattish and flaccid, were surprisingly strong, and she held me fast, sobbing angrily,"-of all the gurls! These demon gurls! Only you I could trust! In this hellish place only you! And now! How could you! Betray me! You are a pawn, a pawn in their bloody game! Run, run for your life!" Mrs. Thayer's voice rose in hysteria, her words were senseless for even as she cried for me to run for my life she was clutching me against her, we were two swimmers drowning together; her arms so tight around me, I was in tenor of suffocating. Sobbing, cursing, so terribly strong for a woman of her age, I struggled against her crazed and yet unable to break her grip, in that instant I felt the madness rush out of me like dirty water and into Mrs. Thayer. I could not have named her: only she was she , the female, smelling of talcum, sweet wine, sweaty desperation, this person clutching at me. Uncontrollably she wept, knocking her head against my head, suddenly I was too weak to struggle, I ceased to resist. My face was contorted like an infant's though I could not cry, I had no tears left, I was a child, penitent, a child who has been punished, my heart broken. Beyond the bed as in a nightmare scenario faces had gathered aghast and avid in the doorway-my Kappa sisters. At first there were only a few, then more faces crowded in, and yet more. Astonished glittering eyes, bouffant heads bobbing like cobras' heads. Moist parted scandalized lipsticked lips. Behind these, yet more pushed forward eager to see. Kappas! Their thrilled sibilant voices lifted like the winds that blow across our glacier-tortured hills. What is it? What has happened? What are those two doing? Who is that girl - the Jew ?

The danger of falling in love, in winter.

… a voice of logic, reason, conviction; a voice of irony, cajoling; a seductive voice; an arrogant voice; a young impetuous voice; a voice of occasional hesitation, uncertainty; a voice that provoked, annoyed, beset like the bared teeth of an attack dog; a shrewd voice; a Now just listen to me, I'm the one to tell you voice; a voice of humility; a voice of (mock) humility; a voice sharp and cruel as a knifeblade; a voice like warm butter; a low throaty trombone voice; a voice of hurt; a voice of sorrow; a voice of pain; a voice of yearning; a voice of rage; a voice sinewy and sly as a glimpsed glittering snake; a voice I would have wished for myself if I'd been born male , and not female; a voice I did wish for myself though born not male but female; a voice that so seeped into my consciousness that it began to emerge in the late winter of my second year at the university in my most vivid, ravaging and exhausting dreams.

Deceptive from the start: he lived in the most ordinary of places. Very quickly I saw, I'd tracked him to his lair. A second-floor rear apartment in a squat three-story lard-colored stucco apartment building at 1183 Chambers Street, Syracuse. In this "mixed" neighborhood beyond the showy complex of university hospital buildings; in the harsh shadow of new, cheaply stylish high-rise buildings and multi-level parking garages; a sublunary region of small storefront businesses, shamefaced wood frame houses partitioned into rooms for university students, many dark-skinned and foreign. There can be no beauty here, therefore no hurt and no hope .

Chambers Street was one of the most cruelly steep hills in the vicinity of the university; cars parked with their wheels turned shrewdly inward to the curb; the pavement was cracked and potholed and littered; a number of the curbside elms, blighted by Dutch elm disease, had been chainsawed into oblivion, only their stumps remained. Yet Chambers Street was a place of fascination and romance. Yet Chambers Street had entered my imagination. Imprinted in my brain like an ink stain on something white, moist, boneless as a mollusc was the facade of the stucco building at 1183 Chambers: I understood that it was not beautiful, nor did it possess even the diminished melancholy of those dream-like city buildings painted by Edward Hopper; it was a purely functional setting, a place of mere expediency; the sign beside the front entrance never changed, as if to confirm its futility-apts for rent inquire within. My sharp eye took note of a row of badly stained and battered metal garbage cans at the curb; a shingled roof that looked as if it must leak; a fractured concrete walk leading to the front entrance, but also forking around the side of the building to the rear, and to a flight of outdoor steps that led to the second floor of the building; a stairway of raw planks with a makeshift roof. Up those stairs he sometimes climbed.

I told myself I am only just passing through this neighborhood, I have a true destination .

In those months I walked everywhere, I was restless, a prowler. Never did I walk on University Place, though. I'd been cured of the Kappas. I'd been cured of my Kappa-yearnings forever. My walking, wayward and seemingly improvised, took me often to the eastern edge of the sprawling campus, though my residence hall was in another direction. Sometimes I passed 1183 Chambers twice: there might be a plausible reason for twice. Sometimes I passed 1183 Chambers three times, for which there could be no plausible reason. And so I walked swiftly, guiltily. Eyes averted from the object of my interest. I had no way of knowing if he was home unless light shone through his windows, and I had no way of knowing if light shone through his windows unless I went around to the rear of the building, at twilight or after dark; though solitary walking by young women in this part of Syracuse was discouraged. (Once, a patrol car slowed at the curb, its occupants stared at me without expression as quickly I continued to walk glancing toward them with a small frightened smile I am a good girl, I am a university st u dent, don't arrest me!) To linger in the vicinity of 1183 Chambers was tricky, for he might be on his way home and might recognize me; if he recognized me, I might not know since, given his secrecy and arrogance, he would not have allowed me to know that he'd recognized me; and so I would not know if in his eyes I'd been exposed, or if, in fact, he'd taken not the slightest notice of me, and so I remained innocent. Sometimes, seeing a man approaching on the sidewalk, I panicked and fled into the trash-littered alley; sometimes this was the very alley beside 1183 Chambers, and I was forced to pass close by the outdoor wooden stairs; so suddenly tempted to climb those stairs, or to sit on the lower stairs as if I belonged there. Usually he entered the building from the front, to get his mail I supposed, for there were rows of battered metal mailboxes just inside the foyer, with names inked onto adhesive tape to identify them; but if luck ran against me, as I could not assume it would not, for possibly I deserved luck to run against me, behaving as I was, he might decide to enter the building from the rear, for the stairway was for the convenience of tenants like himself who lived on the upper floors of the building at the rear; he was a tenant like any other, most of them dark-skinned and foreign with smiles that seemed uniformly flashing-white and eyeballs of unnatural glistening whiteness; if these young men saw me, sometimes they paused to stare as if they hoped I might know them; they hoped that there was some reason for me to be where I was, and that this reason might extend to them; what they'd been told of American college girls intrigued them, perhaps, though surely I didn't fit any likely description of an American college girl. Behind his building, if no one was around, and if I dared, I lifted my eyes to the windows I had reason to believe were his, the windows of apartment 2D; I'd learned that his was apartment 2D by examining the mailboxes in the foyer where, on a grubby strip of adhesive tape on the box for 2D, V. MATHEIUS had been inked. It intrigued me, his blinds were so often drawn to the windowsills. Sometimes I saw a shadow passing behind a blind, the fleeting silhouette of a man; yet so indistinctly, I knew that I was gazing at the idea of V. Matheius and not at the man himself; I thought of Plato's allegory of the cave, and of how mankind is deluded by shadows; mankind is infatuated by shadows; and yet, what solace is there, otherwise? And his not knowing that I am here, that I exist. For I am invisible to him.