The pieces of Maureen’s body, damp and warm, are fitted together into the bulk of her body, a disguise. She sleeps uneasily. She is alert for sounds she doesn’t want to hear. Beyond the television’s droning she hears new sounds, outer sounds, people talking on the stairs, people outside…so many people…windows are open with warm weather, letting people out. Against her will she listens. Curious and shy and a little angry, afraid, she listens. Brock reads to her from the newspaper. Rex Morgan. Gasoline Alley. Brenda Starr. His favorites. Loretta goes out and Brock stays home to watch Maureen. He keeps her company. He talks for hours. He talks about Indiana, about getting rides on trains, about working on farms, about being in jail…he talks for hours, hours. Maureen falls asleep and wakes up to his talking. His bulk is like hers, safe. She begins to trust him. Her eyes focus upon him. He reads her letters from Jules, over and over. “I’ll read the one about the bus ride he took, that’s a nice letter,” Brock says. He takes the letters out of a cigar box and looks through them. He shows her the comics. He puts the television set by the end of her bed, on a card table. He tries to play cards with her but she won’t play. She lies stubborn and cold beneath the covers, awake but not willing to play cards, hiding. Brock plays solitaire. Loretta comes home, her high heels noisy in the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator door to see what’s what, on her way to Maureen’s room, and Maureen hears everything she says.
“Guess who I ran into downtown,” Loretta says.
My God, Maureen thinks, am I waking up?
She is afraid. She feels open, as if her legs have been yanked apart, anything can happen. She shuts her eyes, wanting to sink back, but it doesn’t work, and she lies instead with her heart pounding dizzily, unable to sleep, awake. She is awake.
One day she is impatient with her mother and Brock. They are out in the kitchen having coffee. Maureen sits up and listens; she can hear that the mail has come. She hears the mailman downstairs. Sweating, in a panic, she twists beneath the covers and mouths silent words. Why don’t you hear him downstairs? Is there a letter from Jules?
The silent words are painful. She feels them large in her throat, distending her mouth. Exasperated, exhausted, she tries to keep them back and to lie dead on the pillow, heavy and cold.Then suddenly she finds herself sitting up and calling out, “Is the mail here? Is there a letter from Jules?”
Loretta and Brock come to the doorway at once, staring in at her.
Out loud again she says, childishly and impatiently, ready to cry, “Please look downstairs. Don’t you hear the mailman has come? Maybe there’s a letter from Jules.”
She has awakened for good.
8
February 11, 1966
Dear Miss Oates,
Years ago I was a student of yours, you don’t remember me. I am writing this letter knowing you won’t remember me.
Why do I want to talk to you? You are in a hurry in your life and won’t listen to me. When I was your student I did poorly, why should you remember me? I was not fat then but changed back to what I had been. I had been fat before. Never mind. I want to send you a message but I don’t know what the message is.
I take hold of my skull and try to remember my life, how it happened, the order things happened in. But everything is a jumble. So I went to the library the other day and got out the newspapers for the time between April 1956 and May 1957 and read through them.
While I was asleep everything had kept on!—no end to it, a jumble of people and things—photographs of tanks and soldiers, people lying in the street, I don’t even know what people they were, lying dead in the street—everything keeps going, keeps going. The books you taught us didn’t explain this. The jumble was hidden somehow. The books you taught us are mainly lies I can tell you. But I am not criticizing you.
I think I am writing to you because I could see, past your talking and your control and the way you took notes carefully in your books while you taught, writing down your own words as you said them, something that is like myself. My name is Maureen Wendall. I hope you remember me but why should you remember me? I did not do well in your course and dropped out of school and should be ashamed of myself for writing to you like this. Please don’t think bad of me. Is it an insult to say that I am writing to you because there is something like me, in you?
Sincerely yours, Maureen Wendall
9
March 11, 1966
Dear Miss Oates,
Thank you for answering my letter. I was sorry I had written it and wished I could take it back, but now I’m glad, it’s just as well. I wish I could write down my thoughts not in a mess like most of my life but in some order—I want to explain something, I want to get it clear. Yes, it was in 1964 that I took your course at the University of Detroit. Did you remember that or did you look my name up in a class book? It would mean so much to me to think that you remembered me, but I don’t expect that, why should you remember me when I can almost not remember myself? I went to the library last Thursday after work and looked through newspapers again. You can’t see what has happened day by day, reading the newspapers, you must look at them for a whole year. Then everything comes rushing at you. You see how the year was a waste. Faster and faster the headlines come, one day has nothing to do with the next, suddenly someone has been killed or a nation is on the front page, the photographs change of people lying in the streets, the names change, everything goes up and down jiggling the eye. In the library I started sweating, so afraid. How can I live my life if the world is like this? The world can’t be lived, no one can live it right. It is out of control, crazy. I felt this right in the library though everyone was sitting quiet at tables. I looked around. Those people would like to throw the books out the windows, break the lamps and chairs, hit one another over the head with anything they could grab. But they are quiet, sitting and reading. I don’t want to sound crazy to you. I am only saying what I believe. The library is very clean and modern, I love that kind of place, there is nothing behind it or not much—not much history. I love people walking quietly and very polite. At my house nobody was quiet or polite.
I want to tell you about my family, how we lived. I want to tell you about myself. Now it is March 1966 and I can’t believe that date. It is like living in the future—not real. It is so many years later, after what happened to me, but I am still alive, and I am about to begin a new life, start over again with a new life. My heart is frozen so afraid at the thought of going out to begin again, I want to talk to someone. I want to send you a message.
What will happen after today? I am sitting here in my room in Detroit, writing this down for you to read. It is ten at night. I am alone, I live alone. My life is quiet. When I was your student in that night class I had a day job as a secretary, full time, now I have a better job and I am taking a course at Highland Park Junior College two evenings a week. It is supposed to be a much easier school than the University of Detroit. But I want to continue my college career. I want to learn whatever I can, maybe it will help me not to be afraid. Asleep or awake I am afraid, and how can you live that way, always afraid? I am afraid of men out on the street if I see them or don’t see them, I am afraid of cars hitting me, of people laughing at me, I am afraid of losing my purse, of throwing up in a store, of screaming out loud in the library and being kicked out and never allowed back. I keep sitting here thinking of the time. Fifteen minutes after ten on March 11, 1966, and I know that should be a sacred time because it will never come again, but I don’t feel anything for it, I am numb. What will happen in the future? I am afraid. I am afraid not just of my own future but of all the world. When I read the newspapers I feel that I am losing myself, my own self Maureen Wendall, and becoming like the world itself, not knowing what will happen the next day and never ready for it. Maybe I am writing to you not because you are like me—I sound a little crazy!—but because you are the exact opposite, you are never surprised, you foretell everything, and inside all the mess of the newspa
pers you live your own life in peace, prepared.
The students in our class, some of them, thought you were a little strange. They think most professors are strange. That was in 1964, January and February, the second semester. They thought you were very intelligent but cold. You were happy about the books we read, you were happy reading passages out loud to us, we could tell that the happiness in the room for you was in the book and not in us. I don’t know if I even liked you at first. Sometimes I like women a lot and other times I hate them. You were not much older than me so maybe I was jealous. I always wanted my teachers to be older than me, in fact I would like everybody to be older than me so that I can follow their example. Now I am getting old myself, I am twenty-six years old!—which seems a terrible age to be alone, not to have a career, not to be like everyone else with a definite life. But I have gone through so much that instead of being twenty-six I should really be forty or fifty. Inside my body and face I am an old woman, not even a woman or a man but just an old person; maybe I am writing to you to get rid of all this to make myself young again, to feel the way I should feel at the age of twenty-six about to fall in love.
There is a man I want to marry—I want to fall in love.
We were curious about you, your marriage. You were so calm and intelligent and your sense of humor kept us afraid. How could you be in love and married? That’s what I wondered. You reminded me something of my brother Jules. Jules could have been intelligent like you—I mean, he could have been educated except for the way things turned out. I have told Jules about you. My brother Jules is the most important person in my life but what can you do with people who mean a lot to you? Love them? How do you love them, exactly what does that mean? Is it sitting and thinking about them, wanting to protect them? In that case to keep Jules safe he would have to be dead and buried. I want to marry a man and fall in love and be protected by him. I am ready to fall in love. But my heart is hard and my body hard, frozen.
Probably you don’t remember me. The course I took with you was “Introduction to Literature.” I always loved reading books but in that classroom, in the Commerce and Finance Building, everything seemed cold and strange, a threat. The other students were a threat. It was a night class, that made it worse. At night everything is exaggerated. We could tell you resented teaching a night class. I sat in the third row and I had long hair then, long dark hair, but now I have short hair and I noticed from a photograph of you in the paper that you also have short hair now, short dark hair. That was all three years ago. Did you ever look at me and think about me? Did you think That girl is something like me?
One night you read something from Madame Bovary, which was our assignment, about the woman going for a walk in a field with her dog. You seemed to think that was important. Out in the field she looks around, she sees—I don’t know what. I don’t remember. Then she feels a cold wind starting to blow, and she goes back home. You read that passage to us and pointed out something about it, and I could tell you were thinking That woman is something like me, like you yourself, a stranger to us, and I sat there hearing myself think, This is not important, none of this is real. I felt weak and dizzy, thinking of it. Those days I liked to fast, to make up for the days I ate so much, so I got dizzy sometimes at night. I ate crackers in the morning and some bread after work and a banana or orange or something, that was all. I liked to feel my stomach ache with hunger, knowing that I was hungry and not filled up, not fat any more. I used to get dizzy in your class a lot. Why did you think that book about Madame Bovary was so important? All those books? Why did you tell us they were more important than life? They are not more important than my life.
I loved books when I was a different person, before I went crazy. I was crazy for thirteen months. Nobody put me away, they let me stay at home. I lay in bed crazy. I could hear things but I wasn’t listening. I was not Maureen Wendall but a certain mass of flesh, lying on a bed. All of my life I could have lain there, but I came back, I woke up. I don’t know why I woke up. It happened.
Now I am writing this in a library, not my room. It is dark out. Tomorrow night I will see the man I plan to marry, the man I want, but tonight I am a young woman in a library in Detroit, a small library, alone, sitting alone at a table, writing a letter to a woman named Joyce Carol Oates, a former teacher of mine. There are only three other people here tonight because it is snowing hard out. Almost a blizzard. There is a woman with an overcoat on, still buttoned, with a fake-fur collar that is matted and ugly, a coat that looks like a man’s coat; and a man who is maybe seventy, bent over the Detroit News, with a very empty face, reading the paper very slowly; and another man, around fifty, I don’t want to look at him much because his nose is running and he doesn’t have a handkerchief, he wipes it on his fingers. Then there is the librarian, with her white-rimmed glasses. I come in here all the time but she pretends not to know me. She works at her desk. We are all in here and outside it is snowing hard and we should feel close together but we don’t. We don’t talk or look at each other.
This letter is a crazy idea but I don’t care. I don’t care what you think. Maybe you get lots of crazy letters. I have given up on what people think, I can’t change them. All around me there are shelves with books on them and none of those books are worth anything, I know that now, not the books by Jane Austen I used to love or the book about Madame Bovary you liked so much. Those things didn’t happen and won’t happen. None of them ever happened. In my life something happened and I have to keep thinking about it, over and over. For a while I was very sick. It was my mind that was sick, it gave up, it got cloudy and slow, it drew back from people talking. You always talked too fast in class, that was a bad thing about you. We would sit trying to make sense of it, your words, and faster and faster you would talk, getting away from us. Did you hate us, that you talked so fast? You left us behind. I wanted to come up to you after class and ask, “Why do you want to leave us behind?” but I had no nerve for that.
When I got well my uncle took me out for walks. He brought me back from where I was, crazy. He woke me up, my uncle. I haven’t seen him for years now but never mind, it is Uncle Brock of 1957 I remember, and my mother of 1957 I remember, otherwise everything will be a jumble. My face was a mess. He brought me back by talking to me. He had a sad, serious face, a mess himself, a failure of a man, with no nerve. Ma made hints that he had done something once, something bad, and had to leave town. I don’t know. But he brought me back from where I was. I love him no matter what a wreck he is in his own life or no matter that he doesn’t even have a life himself.
Why do I keep remembering a lady walking in a field in France, somewhere in the country, walking a dog and shivering in the wind? I don’t want to remember that when I’ve forgotten so much else. You read it to us, you read it with a certain serious look and serious sound to your voice that almost made me shiver, it meant so much to you, and you never talked like that to us; that was because you believed the book was more important than your students were. Isn’t that true? You hung onto your books and we students came and went, night students and day students, in and out, and you quit that school and went somewhere else, but you took your books along with you and they all had your name written in them, I bet, and they were more important to you than any of us. That’s all right. I didn’t know the other students, I didn’t have time for them. My life was a flurry. I wanted to succeed in school and find a place, make my way along, get married, but my life was a flurry and I was too nervous to do well. One year I was crazy in bed and a few years later I was in college, in your class, sitting there in the third row staring at you, afraid of you and of school. One year I lay in bed in silence and a few years later I was writing papers for you, trying to write. You failed me. You flunked me out of school.
I don’t blame anybody. I never blame anybody. I am like a piece of wood being carried along in the water, drifting along, meeting things and passing by, not judging, not calling anybody names. The man across at the n
ext table sniffs that loud fast sniff that certain men do, in public places, so that you want to scream at them, Get a handkerchief, you filthy pig! but I think, No, he’s just aman, don’t pay any attention. My father was like that. Clearing his sinuses in the morning, in the bathroom next to the room Betty and I shared. Let them. They do such things, they do other things with you, hurt you, breathe their private breaths into your face, and then they die, it’s all right. I don’t blame them. I don’t blame you.
My other English teacher at that school, Mr. Kovack, was very hard when he corrected my papers and I thought he had to be pretending, making things hard when nobody gave a damn, when outside on Livernois brakes were always squealing and the air stank and the Negroes were standing out on the street corners all day long, thinking what to do, making plans. Fires and shootings. Burn Detroit down. But he handed my papers back marked D and F, and in red ink he explained all my mistakes. You gave me F, for the only paper I handed in, but you didn’t bother explaining what was wrong. Lack of coherence and development, you wrote at the bottom of the paper. You wrote in blue ink, Mr. Kovack in red. Your handwriting was, it still is probably, large and dreamy with circular letters and long crossed t’s slanting straight up and down and very clear, but what did you say? I couldn’t understand your meaning. You knew what you meant but I didn’t. You are not a woman who would lie paralyzed for thirteen months because a man tried to kill you, you are not a woman who would give herself to men for money or for anything, not even love, you don’t spend your nights like this in a library writing a letter to a stranger.
I don’t ask to turn into you but to see myself like this: living in a house out of the city, a ranch house or a colonial house, with a fence around the back, a woman working in the kitchen, wearing slacks maybe, a baby in his crib in the baby’s room, thin white gauzy curtains, a bedroom for my husband and me, a window in the living-room looking out onto the lawn and the street and the house across the street. Every cell in my body aches for this! My eyes ache for it, the balls of my eyes in their sockets, hungry and aching for this, my God how I want that house and that man, whoever he is.