Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

My naked face, raw female yearning.

… that voice.

In my Ethics class. In a large lecture room on the topmost floor of an ancient and revered building, the Hall of Languages. It was not the classroom in which the sickly girl in the soiled coat, smeared eyeshadow and bitten lips made such a fool of herself some weeks before, it was another, larger room; it was a place of hope. At the conclusion of his lecture on Plato, the professor made a show of inviting questions, perhaps truly he wanted questions, hoped for questions, intelligent and provocative questions, to alleviate the unnatural stillness of the lecture hall; perhaps, on his raised platform, behind the podium, as an avatar of long-vanished Plato, he was lonely. Questions from undergraduates interested him far less than questions from the several graduate students who were taking, or auditing, the course, for these were fellow professionals; clearly he was enlivened when one or another of these voluntered to speak.

"Yes, Mr. ____________________" the professor would say, with an expectant smile, pronouncing a name that sounded like "math"-"mathes."The young man who'd raised his hand sat at the back of the hall, out of my range of vision; when he spoke, as he did nearly every class period, I noted how students around me turned, to frown; with disapproval, and yet with admiration; with curiosity, interest, and resentment. "-how Plato can promote the strategy of the 'noble lie'-as if any lie can be anything other than ignoble-" And the professor tried to smile, to argue in defense of Plato: "The Republic is best understood as a myth, a dialogue about justice," and he at the back of the hall objected, "'Justice'? How can there be 'justice' in a totalitarian state?" Like a musical instrument, a horn of subtle modulations, clarinet, trombone, the voice was both respectful and insolent; the voice was searching, and earnest, and yet (almost you could hear this) quavering with indignation. Where the professor argued, "-myth, allegory, parable-" the younger voice argued, "-nightmare fascist state-slave-state-" The professor frowned, not liking it that he was in danger of losing the allegiance of the class to an interloper thirty years younger than he, "That's a common fallacy, Mr.____________________. To interpret Plato literally. When clearly the entire dialogue is a metaphor, a-" By this time few in the class were listening to the professor, we were listening avidly to him .

The curious proportions of that lecture hall: imprinted in my memory like any space in which our lives have been altered. There were fifteen rows of seats in steeply rising tiers that curved far to each side in the shape of a crescent, so that the room was much wider than it was deep. The ceiling was extremely high, and water-stained; fluorescent tubing hummed and quivered overhead like racing thoughts. Beside tin professor's podium was a ten-foot leaded-glass window that yielded pale wintry glare. On a badly scuffed hardwood platform the professor sometimes paced, lecturing on Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquina Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Locke; he was in his early sixties, perhaps his manner congenial, but authoritative; his near-bald head like an eggshell, his mouth like something that has been mashed; his eyes watery but shrewd, alert, deep-set beneath kindly grizzled-gray eyebrows

An attractive man, I thought, for his age; though I did not wish to judge the appearances of those of my elders whom I revered. For what were appearances, as the Greek philosophers taught, but illusory, deceiving? Who but the very young, and fools, put their faith in "appearances"? Nor did I want to be reminded of my father, by contemplating a man who was my father's age, or a little older; my father who'd disappeared into the West as if following the passage of the sun, beyond the western range of mountains and into oblivion.

As if I could compare them! I thought with a smile. This learned man and my poor uneducated alcoholic and embittered father.

One morning following the professor's lecture on philosophic idealism there was a protracted exchange between the professor and an articulate if rather dogged young man who sat at the back of the room; I felt a collective wave of dislike directed toward the young man, from my fellow students; but I simply listened in fascination, excitement and apprehension; thinking Who is that, what kind of person is that? Like no one of us . Behind me a male voice muttered sullenly, "Oh for Christ's sake shut up," and another what sounded like "N'ggg shut yo mouth," and both laughed unkindly. By this time the professor was speaking defensively and at length; he would punish the entire class by keeping us behind the end of the hour. I thought We should not have such power over one another . When finally the class dispersed I was slow to rise to my feet, and to stumble into the aisle; still I had not allowed myself to look at the back of the room; I did not yet understand that I was in love; I'd fallen in love with a man I did not know; with a man's mere voice; and that was a kind of illness; not a radiant idea as I'd imagined but a physical notion, like grief.

That night in February 1963, the night his voice first entered my world.

You! You are capable of any thing . My brother Hendrick once told me.

Any thing . How strange these words: any thing and not anything . As if that of which I was capable was a thing, a palpable thing, and not an action.

It was at my grandfather's funeral that Hendrick told me this. Yet my brother had no idea what I was capable of, nor did anyone in my family. They distrusted me; around me there glimmered a dark, mysterious aura; I carried both the fact and the possibility of doom. He blames her. We all do. For Ida's death. I escaped from them, yet I bore their condemnation. Perhaps I accepted it. I was so lonely! Yet I thought Loneliness is my due. It's only just .

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. At nineteen, to my disgust, I continued to look much younger. I would be mistaken for a high school student through my undergraduate years. I went in my winter boots (not of the leather of a kind worn by my better-dressed classmates but clumsy rubberized boots from Sears, wonderfully practical for deep snows and torrential spring rains.) I stood about five feet three inches. I never weighed myself but, at the time of my "crisis," when I departed the Kappa Gamma Pi house, I was put on a scale by a nurse in the university infirmary, and my weight noted as ninety-six pounds. "Have you stopped eating? Do you vomit up your food? This isn't your normal weight, is it?" the woman asked disapprovingly. I told her I didn't know what my "normal" weight was; I wasn't interested in my "normal" weight; I had other things on my mind, matters of pressing significance. The meaning of life. The possibility of truth. The analysis of consciousness as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids. I did not wish to consider that I was a body, and that I was in some way responsible for this body. (And what in fact is a body? Descartes had hypothesized that a mysterious and unknowable substance constituted mind, and an entirely other mysterious and unknowable substance constituted body.) In the infirmary I was forced to look at myself as an act of penance. I avoided the sunken eyes in the face, but looked frankly at the rest of myself: the papery-thin tallow-colored skin stretched tight upon slender bones, breasts the size of Dixie cups and hard as unripe pears, nipples the size of wizened peas and nothing at all like the warm roseate aureole of those girls' breasts I presumed to be "normal"; the heavy, full breasts of other girls which looked as if already they held liquid, sweet milky precious liquid, the shy elixir of life. I remembered how in junior high I saw older girls in locker room laughingly peeling off their outer clothes, yanking sweaters over their heads in a single quick gesture that exposed their boobs even as their heads and faces were obscured; you could see that these girls were sisters; these girls were "female"; standing defiant or proud or indifferent in their burgeoning bodies while I turned away in embarrassment, not that I felt inadequate or inferior in my spindly body, but of another species altogether. I stood outside their category entirely, a marginal sub-species, girl .