Joyce Oates - I’ll Take You There

Hildie had invited me to the Rendezvous Cafe where she worked five nights of the week. The owner was an old friend of hers, and knew about my father; everyone who knew Hildie in the Cafe seemed sympathetic with her situation, asking after the man they called Erich; to a few of these people Hildie introduced me as Erich's daughter-"She's come to visit him, for now. She's a good girl." Hildie had apologized for not offering me supper at home; most nights, she ate at the Cafe; she'd gotten out of the habit of making meals for herself, only for my father. She'd been working at the Rendezvous Cafe as a waitress, then as cashier, for twenty-two years; she'd lived in Salt Lake City for a while after high school-"But that didn't work out."

A small painful drama in those elegiac words. It didn't work out .

Twenty-two years at the Rendezvous Cafe! Amid the single row of fake leather booths against a wall, the dozen tables and the sticky linoleum floor and the walls of mirror panels alternating with advertisements for beer and cigarettes; a radio permanently tuned to a local station except when the TV was on, blaring news and sports and weather and advertisements. The grease-filmed front window of the Cafe was covered partly in aluminum foil to keep out the sun, and a dully throbbing air-conditioning unit jutted out of a rear wall; a smell of beer, cigarette smoke, fried foods prevailed. Outside, pink neon tubing rendezvou cafe. In this place, Hildie Pomeroy was at home: a hunchedback little doll-woman painted and powdered and her dyed-black hair coiled around her head and affixed with showy rhinestone barrettes; wearing, for the evening, a frilly sunflower-splotched dress that outlined her shapely bosom. How like a crayon drawing Hildie looked, executed with a flourish. Seated, her head high, she might have been a normal-sized woman; so long as you faced her, you couldn't see her poor deformed spine.

When I asked Hildie whether my father had a doctor in Crescent, she shrugged her shoulders irritably. Drinking beer, and muttering what sounded like "Bastard!" Awkwardly I said, "It's very kind of you to take care of him. It can't be easy-"

Hildie flared up as if I'd insulted her. " 'Kind'! What d' you mean, 'kind'? Erich is my dear friend ."

"Oh, I know. I-"

"Look, before he got so bad, we were planning to marry ." Hildie spoke with an air of incredulity, as if the thwarting of such plans was difficult to comprehend. "It happened so goddam fast . After the last operation he just was-was-never himself again."

Hildie drained a beer glass, and her bright damp eyes seemed to wink at me over the rim. Marry? But why not? I had no right to doubt her word.

A customer had come to the cashier's counter to pay and to buy a pack of cigarettes. Hildie quickly heaved her trim little body out of the booth, teetered on high heels to perch on a stool at the cash register. Basking in the attention of male customers, Hildie fairly quivered with pleasure. It was as if a camera were turned on her. "H'lo, Petey! How's things?" Casual banter, long-running jokes, flirtations. In the Rendezvous Cafe, Hildie Pomeroy was a fixture, a "character"; over the years she'd been in love with Rod, with Garry, with Ernest, with Tuck; possibly with Pete, complaining jocularly about something, and picking his discolored front teeth with a toothpick. Hildie nodded vehemently, sympathetically. You listened, you nodded, you smiled and you laughed, it was what you did with your life, for, otherwise, what?

Before I returned to my motel that evening the manager of the Cafe, whose name was Rod, a burly man in his fifties with an oily pitted skin and watery eyes, shirt partly unbuttoned to show a swath of graying chest hair, that male-sexy manner that has nothing to do with a man's age or his actual interest in any woman, leaned over me in the booth, dropping his voice so that Hildie at the cash register wouldn't hear, "It's real good for you to be with Hildie right now, the poor gal's gonna be hard hit."

Three times I would be brought into my father's presence, and three times cautioned not to turn to look at him.

Three times I would be brought into the presence of Death, and three times I would escape.

And the white-garbed woman in attendance upon Death assuring me, plucking at my wrist with talon fingers, "The way he is now isn't him . It's what has happened to him. Oh God!"

She never wept in my presence except quick hot startled tears of rage. The tears of one whom life has cheated, how many times!

Strange that, during the seven days I was in Crescent, Utah, and Hildie Pomeroy and I were so much together, she never spoke my name. Even on the telephone, she hadn't called me by name. Often it was dear , as in the Cafe she called customers dear, hon in an airy flirty voice. Often she called me nothing at all. I'd told her my name more than once but she chose not to hear it. For I was a stranger to her, an intruder; a girl with pale worried eyes whose natural response to distress was silence, not chatter; the books I'd brought with me to read and underline, while waiting for what Hildie called the right time to see my father, were books that, when she leafed through them, made her face crinkle in playful derision. " This is never gonna be made into a movie, eh?" Or: "How come nobody talks in these books you read? Just thinking ?" Hildie laughed at me, as if to make a joke of me. Or stared at me, in assessment.

I was evidence of the dying man's former life. I was his daughter, I could claim his heart. I'd been named by another woman, long ago. How could Hildie trust me?

Coming to me breathless and urgent where I was sitting on the front steps of the bungalow staring at the beautiful blank pitiless sky-"He's awake, dear! Oh, he's good . His eyes so clear! He wants to see you!" And I dropped the heavy book I was reading and stood, shivering with anticipation. Now Hildie looked at me greedily with her bright, brimming eyes as if I were a gift to be brought to her lover, proof of her devotion.

"Don't be afraid, dear! C'mon"

Hildie Pomeroy suddenly roused to action, brisk and efficient as any nurse in dazzling rayon-white and soundless crepe-soled white shoes, twining her fingers through mine just tightly enough to indicate who was boss. "Remember, dear: keep your head turned. Respect your father's wishes!" Leading me through the shadowy house and to the rear porch where the invalid lay still as Death, and as I stepped across the threshold and into his space my head was turned from what I most yearned to see, in reversal of the fated Eurydice, or Lot 's wife. In her breathy girlish voice Hildie cried, "Here we are, Erich! Here she is."

This second time I was better prepared of course. For the harsh wheezing breath that threatened with each inhalation to cease, and the sweet-rancid odor as of wet, rotted leaves, and the anguished Uh-uhhh-uh like water rushing over pebbles in a shallow stream. I was aware in my confusion that Hildie had sprinkled a flowery cologne around the porch to counteract the odor.

"Daddy? Good m-morning!" A voice cheerful as any TV weather girl's. My smile desperate and girlish though no one saw.

There came then a faint whimpering groan, a squeaking of springs. Hildie translated excitedly, "He says isn't it a nice day? It is !" Strong fingers gripping my shoulders from the back, Hildie sat me in a wicker chair a few feet from the sofa upon which my father lay, and she would remain standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder and the other gripping my father's hand. Hildie was our mediator: we could not communicate without her. Happily she chattered to us, translating. I tried to hear my father's Uh-uhhh as not guttural sounds but individual words; it was painful to think that speech could become so twisted and tortured, yet remain speech of a kind; at times, almost I thought I could understand what he was saying, but the meaning eluded me as in a dream that fades rapidly when you wake. I was staring at a cob webbed corner of the porch ceiling. I was staring at the Japanese screen, and seeing nothing. That hideous sound! The guttural cry of Laocoon in the grip of the sea serpents.