Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

At the Health Services building Vernor Matheius waved good-bye to me without breaking stride, or breaking off his whistling; blindly I turned in to the building on my fictitious errand; wandered the corridors for five, ten minutes before daring to return to the street; to a pearlescent-gray, windy March day; and when I did, stepping out onto University Avenue, to my astonishment there stood Vernor Matheius, waiting.

His mouth smiled at me, a sly-glistening gap-toothed smile, and said, "Find what you were looking for?"

Aged eighteen I'd left home, Strykersville, New York, with no idea of who I was or who I might be; knowing only who I was not, and did not wish to be: all that, until that time, I'd known. At Syracuse, I haphazardly cobbled together a personality out of scraps; like my grandmother's quilts made of mismatched scraps of cloth. You don't inquire into the origin of scraps but only of the shrewd use of which they are made.

From my brother Dietrich (who'd been a Marine immediately out of high school, before returning to farm) I borrowed a way of carrying myself with dignity; from my high school history teacher, a way of questioning others' remarks without being rude (though in fact, I suppose I was sometimes rude); from a girl named Lynda who'd been my closest friend in high school, a way of being "good"-"generous"-without seeming silly; from the Lutheran minister's grown daughter, a way of regarding people with flattering widened sincere-seeming eyes, not the narrow, veiled eyes natural to me; from my father I borrowed a habit of skepticism and doubt, the loser's distrust of anyone who has more money than he has, or even the appearance of more; yet from my father, too, a contradictory impulse, for he had a weakness for card playing and gambling, which attests to reckless optimism. The gambler's philosophy is a simple one. So little hope of things going right for you, why the hell not bet all you've got ?

At Syracuse there were so many new models for me. At any rate, possibilities.

My most articulate, persuasive professors (who were exclusively male); scattered residents in my freshman dorm, known to me only by name; a number of the Kappa girls who now, when they saw me on campus, stared through me with expressions of undisguised loathing. (The more inventive of the Kappas had spread fanciful rumors of my "congenital leprosy"; my "mixed racial background"; my "disgusting" grooming habits; my "selfishness" is not tutoring them; my "public nervous breakdown" in the presence of Kappa alums. Of these outrages, the last was truly unforgivable.) My so-called personality had always been a costume I put on fumblingly, and removed with vague, perplexed fingers; it shifted depending upon circumstances, like unfastened cargo in the hold of a ship. Periodically in high school I would make a desperate effort to be "nice"-"normal"-"well-liked"- "popular." When I was once elected to a class office, vice-president of my senior class, I resigned in a panic. I couldn't explain that the sunny-seeming good-girl citizen my classmates had elected to office wasn't me, but an experiment I had not expected to succeed.

The personalities I assembled never lasted long. Like quilts carelessly sewn together, I periodically fell apart. Sometimes the collapse was brief, a siege of exhaustion, nausea and sleeplessness that left me stunned, but purged; at other times, and such times were becoming more frequent, the collapse was more serious, involving a period of manic, nervous behavior followed by a physical breakdown-"flu" I would call it, or that popular undergraduate malady "mononucleosis." I was too weak to get out of bed, too weak and demoralized to read, write or think coherent thoughts; my bowels churned and ached with diarrhea, though I hardly ate; all appetite for food vanished; my body burned with fever and my head with pain. Yet there was a curious solace in such a collapse, a sharp, sour pleasure; for I would be compelled to think Now you know what you are, now you know . Stark and simple and beautiful as gleaming white bones picked clean of all flesh. Now you know . Yet I lived in dread of the one day I would fall utterly and irrevocably into pieces and would lack the strength, the will, the purpose, the faith to reassemble myself another time.

I never doubted that others, those others I admired, were solid and whole, not made of scraps and pieces like me. I never doubted their natural superiority, only that I could emulate it. Yet there were those like me with whom I felt a surreptitious kinship. One morning in the Ethics class after Vernor Matheius had ceased attending, the professor had been lecturing with a strained, forced energy on "the perennial problem of good and evil"-the "tragedy of man's divisiveness"-and of how such great thinkers as Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel had dealt with this "problem"; and it came to me-how hollow, how halting the man's voice; how little any of this mattered, without Vernor Matheius to respond. The wintery glare from the tall leaded-glass window beside the professor's podium fell upon the aging man so cruelly it looked as if his skin was about to crumble into bits, and his eyes that were brave and hopeful were about to dissolve into water. I heard his old-man's voice as he must have heard it himself and felt a rush of confused emotion for him, and pity: for the arc of his life was waning, and even had Vernor Matheius remained in our midst it would not have mattered for long.

To win Vernor Matheius's attention, I understood that I would have to make myself visible to him, and "attractive"; I would have to reinvent myself; I shopped for secondhand clothing in the city, choosing things I myself would never have wished to wear, or dared: a lime-green suede jacket in a bygone style, only slightly worn at the cuffs and elbows; a ruffled red long-sleeved silk blouse that looked like an explosion on my narrow torso; a tartan plaid wool skirt several sizes too large for me made of an exquisitely beautiful fabric; a sleek-sexy black linen dress with a V neck and a dropped hemline and an unraveling hem. Out of bins marked $3-$5 I pulled a sweater, a gauzy scarf, a belt made of linked silver ornaments. Each of the items had been many times reduced-the suede jacket, for instance, had been marked down from $95 to $43 to $19-and was certainly a bargain; these were quality clothes of the kind I could never have afforded new; but I could not really afford even these bargains, and had had to borrow money from girls in my residence, even as I suspected I would never be able to repay it-I'd become reckless, shameless. And my hair that had grown out unevenly and fell now to my shoulders in an untidy rippled-curly mass needed attention: trimming, shaping, "styling": I found myself one Saturday morning in a neighborhood beauty salon spending $ 12 on my hair; staring amazed at the transformed girl in the mirror as the beautician (a heavily made-up, glamorous woman of approximately the age my mother would have been had she lived) said cheerfully, "Some improvement, eh?"

" 'Anellia'-a strange name. Never heard it before."

Frowning, with a skeptic's habitual narrowing of his eyes, Vernor Matheius uttered this name as if doubting it.

I said nothing, and the moment passed.

In the gloomily romantic coffeehouse Vernor Matheius spoke almost exclusively of philosophy. It was his true passion. It might have been his only passion. Such a ferocity of commitment and concentration excited me, for I felt the same way, or nearly; I'd grown to distrust all that was mere emotion, fleeting and ephemeral; the world of sliding, collapsing surfaces; the world of my father's drifting cigarette smoke, vanishing into the ceiling of my grandparents' old farmhouse; the world of clock time. And there was the thrill of a common language. A common religion. Almost, I could think, As if we were a couple. Lovers. Vernor was known in this place, and seemed not to mind when his name was spoken familiarly; it struck my ear as risky, and wonderful, that others, strangers to me, could call out "Vernor" so readily, and Vernor Matheius would smile and wave a greeting. Beside a wall of hammered tin squares painted the hue of pencil lead, we sat in a booth with a sticky tabletop; Vernor ordered coffee for us both-very strong, black, bitter-almond coffee of a sort I had never tasted before; swift as a shot to the heart caffeine flew through my veins; my pulse quickened, my very eyeballs began to throb. As if. Lovers. Long ago I had sternly instructed myself that sexual yearning is impersonal; though it may seem so, it is not; sexual yearning is the yearning of nature to reproduce itself, blindly.