Joyce Carol Oates
THE mistake must have been, the child woke too soon from her afternoon nap.
Really she knew better, for she’d been scolded previously for waking too early, and interfering with her mother’s schedule. And now, coming downstairs unexpectedly, in her fuzzy pink slipper socks, she hears her mother on the phone: “No, it is not postpartum bullshit. It isn’t physical at all. It isn’t mental. It isn’t genetic, and it isn’t me. It’s her.”
The voice on the other end of the line must have expressed surprise, doubt, or incredulity, provoking the mother to speak vehemently: “It’s her. She’s defective. She’s perverse. She hides it—whatever she is.” Another pause. “You can’t see it. Her father can’t see it. But I see it.”
And, as the child stands frozen on the stairs, in her fuzzy slipper socks, groping her thumb against her mouth to suck (though disgusting thumb-sucking is certainly forbidden in this household): “Of course my mother-in-law, the doting grandmother, refuses to ‘see’ it. The woman has a vested interest in denial.”
Now, the mother notices the child on the stairs. A flush comes into her face, her green cat eyes glare with fury that the child has (once again) wakened too soon from her nap and come downstairs too soon, intruding upon the mother’s private time. “I’ve told him, it’s her or me. Preferably her.”
Carrying the phone in one hand, the furious mother seizes the child by the wrist and tugs her down the remainder of the stairs—“You! Are you eavesdropping, too?”—giving her a small shake of rebuke while continuing to speak into the phone in an incensed voice: “I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t understand what was involved—‘motherhood.’ Before I knew what was happening she got inside me and kept growing and growing and now she’s everywhere—all the time. Always I’m obliged to think of her—sucking all the oxygen out of my lungs.”
Guiltily, the child tries to apologize. She is a small inconsequential girl, just four years old; tears leave her face smudged, like a blurred watercolor. She should know better by now—indeed, she does know better. Waking at the wrong time. Coming downstairs at the wrong time. Bad!
In a flurry of activity, focused as a tornado, the mother gathers the child together with the week’s trash to set out on the sidewalk in front of the buffed-brick rowhouse on Stuyvesant Street. In the neighborhood there has been a longstanding custom of setting out superannuated household items—old clothes, chairs with torn cushions, battered strollers, children’s toys, occasionally even a toilet seat, or an entire toilet—beside a hand-printed sign reading TAKE ME, I AM FREE. Mocking this phony-charitable custom, the mother sets the weeping child down amid a gathering of unwanted useless things, of which some have been on the sidewalk for weeks.
“Just sit here. Don’t squirm. I’ll be watching from the front window.” Trying not to sob, feeling her lower face twist in a spasm of grief, the child sits on the chilled pavement through the remainder of the day as strangers pass by, pausing to stare at her, even to (rudely) examine her, or to ignore her altogether, as if she were invisible. Some laugh nervously—“Well—hell! You’re a real girl.” A rusted tricycle, a soiled lampshade, a red plastic ashtray with a plastic hula girl on its rim, a box of old clothes, shoes, books are met with more enthusiasm than the shivering child who remains obediently where her mother positioned her even after a cold rain begins to fall.
If only she hadn’t wakened too early from her nap!—the child recalls with shame. That was the mistake, from which her punishment has followed.
Each time a pedestrian approaches her the guilty child peers up with an expression of yearning and dread—yearning, that someone will take pity on her, and bring her home with them; dread, that someone will take pity on her, and bring her home with them. Though she should know better, she can’t help but think that, in another few minutes, her mother will relent and lean out the front door of their house to call her in a lightly chiding voice—“You! Don’t be silly! Come in out of the rain right this minute.”
Eventually it is sunset, and it is dusk. There are fewer pedestrians now. The child has virtually given up hope when she sees a tall figure approaching—“Good God! What are you doing here?”
It is the child’s father, returning from work as he does each weekday at this hour. He is astonished to discover his beautiful little daughter curled up asleep on the filthy damp pavement beside the crude hand-printed sign TAKE ME, I AM FREE.
“Darling, I’ve got you now. Don’t cry—you’re safe.”
But the child begins to cry, clutching at the father’s arms as he lifts her and carries her into the house which is warmly lit and smells of such delicious food, the child’s mouth waters.
“Well! Nobody wanted her again, eh?”
In the dining room the mother has begun setting the table for dinner. She does no more than glance at the indignant father and the fretting child in his arms—their appearance hasn’t surprised her at all.
The father says to the mother: “You aren’t funny. You know very well that we wanted this child—we want her.”
“What do you mean—‘we.’ You—not me.”
“But did you want her? You couldn’t have known who she would be, could you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, come on—don’t be ridiculous. Do we ‘want’ what we are given, or are we merely resigned to it? In the matter of children it’s a lottery— losers, winners—‘blind fate.’ You can’t say that we deserve her simply because we had her, as you can’t say we had her because we deserve her. She has no say in the matter, either—but she doesn’t realize, yet. As one day she will.”
“You have no reason to come to such conclusions. In a civilized country like ours—each child is precious.”
“‘Civilized!’”
The mother laughs derisively. Her laughter is sharp and cruel as a cascade of falling glass.
The father says, stung: “I said—you aren’t funny. Just stop.”
“You stop. You’re the Platonist in this household.”
Though the mother speaks in a bright brittle accusatory voice, she is really not unhappy. She is not in what the child knows to be a bad mood. The glassy-green cat eyes gleam with less malice than before.
For it seems that while the child has been outdoors in the rain, the mother inside the warm-lit cozy house has prepared a special meal. Moist pink flesh upon a platter sprinkled with fresh parsley, which the child identifies as grilled salmon; wild rice with shiitake mushrooms, Brussels sprouts sautéed in olive oil—a feast. The mother has brushed her lustrous dark hair, brightened her sullen mouth with red lipstick, changed from the shapeless slacks she wears around the house into a soft heather-colored wool skirt that falls to her ankles; around her slender neck is a necklace of carved wooden beads carved to resemble tiny hairless heads.
How many places are set at the dining room table?—the child blinks back tears, desperate to see.