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The Lost Landscape
Joyce Carol Oates


A momentous memoir of childhood and adolescence from one of our finest and most beloved writers, as we’ve never seen her before.In The Lost Landscape, Joyce Carol Oates vividly recreates the early years of her life in western New York state, powerfully evoking the romance of childhood and the way it colors everything that comes after. From early memories of her relatives to remembrances of a particularly poignant friendship with a red hen, from her first friendships to her first experiences with death, The Lost Landscape is an arresting account of the ways in which Oates’s life (and her life as a writer) was shaped by early childhood and how her later work was influenced by a hard-scrabble rural upbringing.In this exceptionally candid, moving, and richly reflective recounting of her early years, Oates explores the world through the eyes of her younger self and reveals her nascent experiences of wanting to tell stories about the world and the people she meets. If Alice in Wonderland was the book that changed a young Joyce forever and inspired her to look at life as offering endless adventures, she describes just as unforgettably the harsh lessons of growing up on a farm. With searing detail and an acutely perceptive eye, Oates renders her memories and emotions with exquisite precision to truly transport the reader to a bygone place and time, the lost landscape of the writer’s past but also to the lost landscapes of our own earliest, and most essential, lives.












Joyce at her first desk, five years old. At home in Millersport, New York. (Fred Oates)

















Praise for The Lost Landscape: (#ulink_d7ebdd7c-546c-540d-b733-3e90bca32738)


‘As profound, as thorough and, at times, as dark as anything Oates has ever done’

Buffalo News

‘Offers a window into a highly original mind. While it is never a given that a writer’s personal story can illuminate her work, in Oates’s case, it very much does’

Minneapolis Star Tribune

‘A window into one of our most powerful writers’ coming-of-age and the forces affecting how she sees and writes the world’

Christian Science Monitor

‘Oates perfectly captures the unique confusion of childhood, brought on by the unsatisfying explanations of adults’

Elle (US)

‘An exquisitely rendered glimpse of Oates’s childhood in rural upstate New York’

Bookpage




Copyright (#ulink_99a4552f-55d8-5972-b458-874166a0e634)


Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by Ecco in 2015

Copyright © The Ontario Review 2015

Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Front cover photograph: Joyce Carol Oates in 1948, taken by her father, Fred Oates, and courtesy of the author

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008146610

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008146603

Version: 2016-09-08




DEDICATION (#ulink_6d8d57b3-ea14-50fa-aea4-c752007eae1b)


To my brother Fred Oates

And in memory of those who have gone away


CONTENTS

COVER (#u0cc4c50f-1206-50bd-b230-17ba73b07487)

TITLE PAGE (#u9e5ab97b-b91e-5e3d-92e5-fa7a75b537c6)

PRAISE (#u31a8d0a2-777e-50e7-9846-3d018645e106)

COPYRIGHT (#u25ea2d28-7c20-57be-8e41-cac9a3393fd2)

DEDICATION (#uc6e31339-2d81-56ca-b297-9e7cffeaf8d7)

AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_77e5813b-d4f4-5d95-9bf9-6fa3f52dd557)

I

WE BEGIN … (#ulink_a41e6255-605b-581f-9d4f-44a92ef93c17)

MOMMY & ME (#ulink_a2bc5d01-2512-5b2e-a518-8569e716baa0)

HAPPY CHICKEN: 1942–1944 (#ulink_4eb8a91b-67c7-50ae-b695-10ba19fa2d85)

DISCOVERING ALICE: 1947 (#ulink_88230c16-970f-5777-9b76-007fa90c6e0c)

DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK (#ulink_ec82062b-d4ac-5e80-8f32-ce0769283e78)

PIPER CUB (#ulink_81981e17-b782-51cb-800c-efff79d7b144)

AFTER BLACK ROCK (#ulink_f25d1c7c-e54d-577c-baae-af3c4d0d7dce)

SUNDAY DRIVE (#ulink_d22fc4d2-1539-5b40-a780-208672c7b728)

FRED’S SIGNS (#ulink_33e517b3-445c-5fe1-887f-a7360f19f9ba)

“THEY ALL JUST WENT AWAY” (#litres_trial_promo)

“WHERE HAS GOD GONE” (#litres_trial_promo)

HEADLIGHTS: THE FIRST DEATH (#litres_trial_promo)

“THE BRUSH” (#litres_trial_promo)

AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY: THE LOST FRIEND (#litres_trial_promo)

“START YOUR OWN BUSINESS!” (#litres_trial_promo)

THE LOST SISTER: AN ELEGY (#litres_trial_promo)

NIGHTHAWK: RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOST TIME (#litres_trial_promo)

II

DETROIT: LOST CITY 1962–1968 (#litres_trial_promo)

STORY INTO FILM: (#litres_trial_promo)

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” AND SMOOTH TALK (#litres_trial_promo)

PHOTO SHOOT: (#litres_trial_promo)

WEST ELEVENTH STREET, NYC, MARCH 6, 1970 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOOD MYSTERIES (#litres_trial_promo)

FACTS, VISIONS, MYSTERIES: (#litres_trial_promo)

MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, NOVEMBER 1988 (#litres_trial_promo)

A LETTER TO MY MOTHER CAROLINA ON HER (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVENTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1994 (#litres_trial_promo)

“WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL (#litres_trial_promo)

AND MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT ME” (#litres_trial_promo)

III

EXCERPT, TELEPHONE CONVERSATION (#litres_trial_promo)

WITH MY FATHER FREDERIC OATES, MAY 1999 (#litres_trial_promo)

THE LONG ROMANCE (#litres_trial_promo)

MY MOTHER’S QUILTS (#litres_trial_promo)

AFTERWORD (#litres_trial_promo)

PHOTO SECTION (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)

NONFICTION BY JOYCE CAROL OATES (#litres_trial_promo)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)




AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_70c480ec-1690-520e-a5d7-2929434b0cec)


The Lost Landscape is not meant to be a complete memoir of my life—not even my life as a writer. It is, for me at least, something more precious, as it is almost indefinable: an accounting of the ways in which my life (as a writer, but not solely as a writer) was shaped in early childhood, adolescence, and a little beyond. Its focus is upon the “landscape” of our earliest, and most essential lives, but it is also upon an actual rural landscape, in western New York State north of Buffalo, out of which not only much of the materials of my writing life have sprung but also the very wish to write.

Because it is essential to The Lost Landscape, “District School #7, Niagara County, New York” has been reprinted from The Faith of a Writer (2003), in a slightly different form. In a more substantially altered form, an updated “Visions of Detroit” ([Woman] Writer, 1988) has been reprinted under the title “Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968.” Other chapters have been revised significantly from memoirist pieces published in a variety of magazines, journals, and books, often in response to an editor’s invitation.

To the editors of these publications, heartfelt thanks are due:

“Mommy & Me” originally appeared, in a shorter form, in Civilization, February 1997.

“Happy Chicken” originally appeared in Conjunctions 61: A Menagerie, 2013.

“Discovering Alice” originally appeared in AARP Magazine, 2014.

“Piper Cub” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Rhapsody, November 2013.

“After Black Rock” originally appeared in the New Yorker, June 2013.

“Sunday Drive” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Traditional Home, March 1995.

“They All Just Went Away” originally appeared in a substantially different form in the New Yorker, October 1995. Reprinted in The Best American Essays 1996 and in The Best American Essays of the 20th Century. This essay incorporates “Transgressions,” originally published in the New York Times Magazine, October 1995.

“Where Has God Gone” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Southwest Review, Summer 1995, and was reprinted inCommunion edited by David Rosenberg, 1995 under the title “And God Saw That It Was Good.”

“An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Between Friends edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1994.

“Start Your Own Business!” originally appeared in substantially different forms in the New Yorker under the title “Bound,” April 2003; and in Conjunctions 63 (2014) under the title “The Childhood of the Reader,” which will be reprinted in Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses 2016.

“The Lost Sister: An Elegy” originally appeared in Narrative.

“Nighthawk: Recollections of a Lost Time” appeared originally in Yale Review, 2001, and in Conjunctions, 2014; reprinted, in a substantially different form, in Narrative, 2015.

“Story into Film: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ and Smooth Talk”appeared originally in the New York Times, March 23, 1986.

Detroit: Lost City 1962–1968” appeared originally, in a shorter form, in (Woman) Writer, 1988.

“Photo Shoot: West Eleventh Street, New York City, March 6, 1970” originally appeared, in a shorter form, under the title “Nostalgia” in Vogue, April 2006; reprinted in Port, 2014.

“Food Mysteries” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in Antaeus 1991; reprinted in Not By Bread Alone edited by Daniel Halpern, 1992.

“Facts, Visions, Mysteries: My Father Frederic Oates, November 1988” originally appeared, in a substantially different form, in the New York Times Magazine, March 1989; reprinted in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You, edited by Constance Warloe, 1996.

“A Letter to My Mother Carolina Oates on Her Seventy-eighth Birthday, November 8, 1994” originally appeared, in a slightly different version, in the New York Times Magazine, 1995; reprinted in this version in I’ve Always Meant to Tell You edited by Constance Warloe and in The Norton Anthology of Autobiography edited by Jay Parini, 1999.

“My Mother’s Quilts” originally appeared, in a slightly shorter form, in What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-One Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, 2013.



I (#ulink_417693a5-2c24-56c8-a219-450c64b225cd)




WE BEGIN . . . (#ulink_3e20d3fb-4e92-56be-b3c8-79fb25be409e)


WE BEGIN AS CHILDREN imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.




MOMMY & ME (#ulink_d7ecd258-73db-5c1c-b974-26e6a499b91e)







Carolina Oates and Joyce, backyard of Millersport house, May 1941. (Fred Oates)

MAY 14, 1941. IT was a time of nerves. Worried-sick what was coming my father would say of this time in our family history but who could guess it, examining this very old and precious snapshot of Mommy and me in our backyard playing with kittens?

LOOKED LIKE I WOULD be drafted. Nobody knew what was coming. At Harrison’s, we were working double shifts. In the papers were cartoons of Hitler but none of it was funny. The nightmare of Pearl Harbor is seven months away but the United States has been in a continuous state of nerves since Hitler executed his blitzkrieg against an unprepared Poland in September 1939; by May 1941, with England under attack, the United States is engaged in an undeclared war in the Atlantic Ocean with Germany . . . But I am two years, eleven months old and oblivious to the concerns of adults that are not immediate concerns about me.

MY TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD FATHER FREDERIC Oates, whom everyone calls “Fred” or “Freddy,” is taking pictures of Mommy and me behind our farmhouse in Millersport, New York; it is a day when Daddy is not working on the assembly line at Harrison Radiator, a division of General Motors seven miles away in Lockport, New York, involved in what is believed to be “defense work.” It is a tense, rapidly-shifting, unpredictable era before TV when news comes in terse radio announcements and in the somber pages of the Buffalo Evening News delivered in the late afternoon six days a week. But such global turbulence is remote from our farm in western New York where everything is green and humid in prematurely hot May and the grass in the backyard grows thick and raggedy. Here my twenty-four-year-old mother Carolina, whom everyone calls “Lena,” is cuddling with me in the grass playing with our newborn black kittens, smiling as Daddy takes pictures.

TAKING PICTURES WITH THE blue box camera. Of dozens, hundreds of pictures taken in those years only a few seem to have survived and how strange, how astonishing it would have been for us to have thought, in May 1941—These pictures will outlive us!

How happy we are, and how good and simple life must have seemed to that long-lost child Joyce Carol—(who did not know that she was to be the “firstborn” of three children)—with little in her life more vexing than the ordeal of having her curly hair brushed and combed free of snarls and fixed in place with ribbons, and being “dressed up” for some adult special occasion.

You can see in the snapshot behind Mommy and me a young, black-barked cherry tree and behind the tree the somewhat dour two-storey wood frame farmhouse owned by my mother’s stepparents John and Lena Bush. Built in 1888 on Transit Road, at the time a narrow two-lane country road linking the small town of Lockport with the sprawling city of Buffalo twenty miles away, and surprisingly large by Millersport standards (where some of our neighbors’ houses were single-storey, lacking cellars, hardly more than cabins or shanties), this steep-roofed farmhouse was razed decades ago yet resides powerfully—indomitably!—in my memory, the site of recurring dreams. (In a dream of the old farmhouse in Millersport I recognize, not a visual scene, but a sensation: a tone, a slant of light. Often, details are blurred. If there are human figures, their faces are blurred. I seem to know where I am, and who is with me, though I might not be able to name anyone. Just that sensation, both comforting and laced with a kind of visceral dread—Back home.) Note the exterior cellar door, a common sight in this now-vanished rural America, like the rain barrel at the corner of the house where rainwater was collected—and used for all purposes except drinking.

Behind Daddy as he takes our picture (and not visible to the viewer) is the farmyard: weatherworn barn with pewter lightning rod atop the highest pitch of the roof; chicken coop surrounded by a barbed-wire fence to keep out raccoons, foxes, and the wandering dogs of neighbors; storage sheds; fields, fruit orchards. To the right of the sliding barn doors is a smaller door leading into the corner of the barn that houses my grandfather Bush’s smithy with its anvil and hammer, blacksmith tools, small coal furnace and bellows that turns with a crank. Red-feathered chickens with no idea that they are “free range” are wandering about pecking in the dirt, oblivious of all else. All these—lost.

TAKING PICTURES HAS BEEN our salvation. Without taking pictures our memories would melt, evaporate. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century—and the “snapshot” in the twentieth century—revolutionized human consciousness; for when we claim to remember our pasts we are almost certainly remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a visual immortality.

TAKING PICTURES WAS AN adult privilege in 1941. My way of taking pictures was to scribble earnestly with Crayolas in coloring books and in tablets. Grass would be horizontal motions of the green crayon. Black kitten, black crayon. Chickens were upright scribbles, vaguely humanoid in expression. My parents, I would not attempt. No human figures would appear in any of my childhood drawings, only very deep-green grass and trees, kittens and cats with fur of many hues, Rhode Island Red chickens.

NO ROMANCE IS SO profound and so enduring as the romance of early childhood. The yearning we feel through our lives for our young, attractive and mysterious parents—who were so physically close to us and yet, apart from us, inaccessible and unknowable. Is this the very origin of “romance,” coloring and determining all that is to follow in our lifetimes? I am drawn to stare at these old family snapshots lovingly kept in albums and in envelopes. And so I am drawn too to snapshots of strangers’ families, sifting through boxes of old postcards and snapshots in secondhand shops—though these individuals are not “my” family, yet frequently they are not so very different from my family. Children in snapshots of long-ago, given a spurious sort of immortality by an adult’s love, and all of them probably now departed. The almost overwhelming wish comes to me—I want to write their stories! That is the only way I can know these strangers—by writing their stories . . .




HAPPY CHICKEN 1942–1944 (#ulink_b3e20788-5d99-5a52-aa60-7d28f5e5fc21)


I WAS HER PET chicken. I was Happy Chicken.

Of all the chickens on the little farm on Transit Road in the northern edge of Erie County in western New York State in that long-ago time in the early 1940s, just one was Happy Chicken who was the curly-haired little girl’s pet chicken.

The little girl was urged to think that she’d been the first to call me Happy Chicken. In fact, this had to have been one of the adults and probably the Mother.

Probably too it was the Mother, and not the little girl, who’d been the first to discover that of all the chickens, I was the only one who came eagerly clucking to the little girl as if to say hello.

Oh look!—it’s Happy Chicken coming to say hello.

The little girl and the little girl’s mother laughed in delight that, without being called, I would peck in the dirt around the little girl’s feet and I would seem to bow when my back was lightly stroked as a dog or a cat might seem to bow when petted.

The little girl loved it, my feathers were soft. Not scratchy and smelly like the feathers of the other, older chickens.

The little girl loved hearing my soft, querying clucks.

Early in the morning the little girl ran outside.

Happy! Happy Chicken!—the little girl cried through small cupped hands.

And there I came running! Out of the shadowy barn, or out of the bushes, or from somewhere in the barnyard amidst other, ordinary dark-red-feathered chickens. A flutter of feathers, cluck-cluck-cluck lifting in a bright staccato Here I am! I am Happy Chicken!

The Grandfather shook his head in disbelief. Never saw anything like this—Damn little chicken thinks he’s a dog.

It was a sign of how special Happy Chicken was, the family referred to me as he. As if I were, not a mere hen among many, a brainless egg-layer like the others, but a lively little boy-chicken.

For the others were just ordinary hens and scarcely discernible from one another unless you looked closely at them which no one would do (except the Grandmother who examined hens suspected of being “sickly”).

Truly I was Happy Chicken! Truly, there was no other chicken like me.

My red-gleaming feathers bristled and shone more brightly than the feathers of the hens because I didn’t roll in the dust as frequently as they did, in their (mostly futile) effort to rid themselves of mites. It wasn’t just that Happy Chicken was young (for there were other chickens as young as I was, hatched from eggs within the year) but I was also far more intelligent, and more handsome; your eye was drawn to me, and only to me, out of the flock; for you could see from the special gleam in my eyes and the way in which I came running before the little girl called me, that I was a very special little chicken.

The yard between the barn and the farmhouse was cratered with shallow indentations in which chickens rolled and fluttered their wings like large demented birds who’d lost the ability to fly. Sometimes as many as a dozen chickens would be rolling in the dirt at the same time as in a bizarre coordinated modern dance; but the chickens were not coordinated and indeed took little heed of one another except, from time to time, to lash out with a petulant peck and an irritated cluck. When not rolling in the dirt (and in their own black, liquidy droppings) these chickens spent their time jabbing beaks into the dirt in search of grubs, bugs. Stray seeds left over from feeding time, bits of rotted fruit. Their happiness was not the happiness of Happy Chicken but a very dim kind of happiness for a chicken’s brain is hardly the size of a pea, what else can you expect? This was why Happy Chicken—that is, I—was such a surprise to the family, and such a delight.

My comb was rosy with health, erect with blood. My eyes were unusually alert and clear. But each eye on each side of the beak, how’d you expect us to see coherently? We see double, and one side of our brain dims down so that the other side can see precisely. That’s how we know which direction in which to run, to escape predators.

Most of the time, however, most chickens don’t. Don’t escape predators.

Sometime, they’re so dumb they run toward predators. They do this when the predator is smart enough to freeze. They can’t detect immobility, and they can’t detect something staring at them.

I was not really one of them. To be identified as special, and recognized as Happy Chicken, meant that, though I was a chicken I was not one of them. And particularly, I was not a silly stupid hen.

SOMETIMES—AT SPECIAL TIMES—UNDER CLOSE adult scrutiny and always held snug in the little girl’s arms—Happy Chicken was allowed inside the farmhouse.

No other chicken, not even Mr. Rooster, was ever allowed inside the farmhouse.

Never upstairs but downstairs in the “wash-room” at the rear of the house—a room with a linoleum floor that contained a washing machine with a hand ringer, and where coats and boots were kept—this is where the little girl Joyce could bring me. But always held gently-but-firmly in her arms, or set onto the floor and held in place, in the wash-room or—a few special times—in the kitchen which opened off the wash-room, where the Grandmother spent most of her time. Here, the little girl was given scraps of bread to feed me, on the linoleum floor.

And here, I was sometimes allowed up in the little girl’s lap, to be fussed over and petted.

The other chickens would’ve been jealous of me—except they were too stupid. They didn’t know. Even Mr. Rooster didn’t understand how Happy Chicken was privileged. Sometimes Mr. Rooster stationed himself at the back door of the farmhouse, clucking and preening, complaining, fretting, fluttering his wings, insisting upon the attention of everyone who went inside the house, or came outside, shamelessly looking for a treat, and when he didn’t get a treat, squawking indignantly and threatening to peck with his sharp beak.

The little girl was frightened of Mr. Rooster, and hurried past him. The Mother and the Grandmother shooed Mr. Rooster away, for they were frightened of him, too. The Grandfather and the Father laughed at Mr. Rooster and gave him a kick. They thought it was very funny, a goddamn bird trying to intimidate them.

Sometimes Happy Chicken was allowed in the wash-room overnight, in a little box filled with straw, like a nest. And little Joyce petted me, and fussed over me, and fed me special treats.

Happy Chicken! You are so pretty.

. . . you are so nice. I love you

Happy Chicken. I love you.

The little girl whispered to me, that no one else could hear. The little girl had many things to tell me, all kinds of secrets to tell me, whispered against the side of my head where (the little girl supposed) I had “ears”—and when I made a clucking noise, the little girl spoke to me excitedly, for it seemed to the little girl that I was talking to her, and telling her secrets.

What are you and Happy Chicken always talking about, the Mother asked the little girl, but the little girl shook her head defiantly, and would not tell.

(Sometimes, there was an egg or two discovered in Happy Chicken’s little nest. The little girl took these eggs away to give to the Grandmother for they were special Happy Chicken eggs not to be mixed with the eggs of the hens out in the coop.)

(Yet still, though Happy Chicken produced eggs, it seemed to be taken for granted that Happy Chicken was a boy-chicken. For always, Happy Chicken was he, him.)

The little girl was given a gift of Crayolas! At once the little girl began drawing pictures of me on sheets of tablet paper. Russet-brown was the little girl’s favorite Crayola crayon, for this was the color of my beautiful red-brown feathers. The little girl drew and colored many, many pictures of me, that were admired by everyone who saw them. With the help of the Mother, the little girl carefully printed, beneath the drawings

HAPPY CHICKEN

Sometimes, visiting relatives would peer at the little girl and me from the kitchen doorway, as the little girl sat on the floor beside my box drawing me, and I was tilting my head blinking and clucking at her.

The little girl would overhear people saying Is that just a—chicken? Or some special kind of guinea hen, that’s smarter?

For it had not ever been known, that a “chicken” could be a pet, in such a way. At least, not in this part of Erie County, New York.

Between a chicken and a little girl there is not a shared language as “language” is known. Yet, Happy Chicken always knew his name and a few other (secret) words uttered by the little girl and the little girl always knew what Happy Chicken’s special clucks meant, that no one else could understand and so when the Mother, or the Father, or any adult, asked the little girl what on earth she and the little red chicken were talking about, the little girl would repeat that it was a secret, she could not tell.

Sometimes, at unpredictable moments, I felt an urge to “kiss” the little girl—a quick, light jab of my beak against the girl’s hands, arms, or face.

And the little girl had a special little kiss on the top of the head just for me.

I WAS A YOUNG chicken less than a year old at this time in the little girl’s life when she hadn’t yet learned to run on plump little-girl legs without tripping and falling and gasping for breath and crying.

If the Mother was near, the Mother hurried to pick up the little girl, and comfort her. If the Grandmother was near, the Grandmother was likely to cluck at the little girl like an indignant hen and tell her to get up, she wasn’t hurt bad.

If the Father was near, the Father would pick up the girl at once, for the Father’s heart was lacerated when he heard his little daughter cry, no matter that she hadn’t been hurt bad. (But the Father was not often nearby for he worked in a factory seven miles away in Lockport, called Harrison Radiator.)

But always if an adult wiped the little girl’s eyes and nose the little girl soon forgot why she’d been crying even if she’d bruised or scratched her leg—the little girl cried easily but also forgot easily.

When you are a little girl you cry easily and forget easily.

Nor is it difficult to appear happy when you are a young chicken and without memory as the smooth blank inside of an egg.

The Mother had chosen the little girl’s name Joy-ce Carol because this seemed to her a happy name, there was joy in the name, when people spoke the name they smiled.

The Mother was a happy person, too. The Mother was not much older than a schoolgirl when the little girl was born but the little girl had no notion of what “born” was and so the little girl had not the slightest notion of how old, or how young, her pretty curly-haired Mother was, no more than Happy Chicken had a notion of anyone’s age.

This was the time when the little girl was an only child and so it was a happy time for the little girl who had her own room (separated by just a walk-in closet from her parents’ room) upstairs in the clapboard farmhouse. One day soon it would be revealed that the little girl was just the firstborn in the family. There would come another, a baby brother with the special name Robin, competing for attention and for love the way the squawking chickens competed for seed scattered in the barnyard at their feeding time.

The little girl had no notion of this amazing surprise to come. The little girl had no notion of anything that was to come except a promise of a drive to Pendleton for ice cream, or a visit with the Other Grandmother (the Father’s mother) who lived in Lockport, or a holiday like Christmas or Easter, or the little girl’s birthday which was the most special day of all June 16 when dark-red peonies bloomed in profusion along the side of the house as the little girl was told, just for her.

On her fourth birthday, the little girl was allowed to feed cake-crumbs to me, while the adults looked on laughing. Happy Chicken was allowed to sit on the little girl’s lap, if the little girl held me snug, and my wings tucked in, inside her arms.

Pictures were taken with the Father’s Brownie Hawkeye camera.

Pictures of little Joyce Carol and Happy Chicken, 1942.

With a frown of distaste the Grandmother would say, in her broken English, A chicken is dirty. A chicken should stay on the floor.

The Grandmother did not like me though sometimes the Grandmother pretended to like me. In the Grandmother’s eyes, a chicken was never anything more than a chicken. And a chicken was only of use, otherwise worthless.

Outdoors, when the little girl was nowhere near, and the Grandmother approached, I knew to flee, and to hide. Always to flee and to hide away from the other chickens, so brainlessly scratching and pecking in the dirt, in the darkest corner of the barn or far away in the orchard.

A chicken is not dirt-y, the little girl protested. Happy Chicken is nice and clean.

And so when a small dollop of hot wet mess came out of my anus, which I could not help, and onto the little girl’s shorts, the adults pointed and laughed, and the Mother quickly cleaned it away with wadded tissues as the Grandmother made her clucking-tsking noise.

The little girl was embarrassed, and ashamed. But the little girl always forgave me. And soon forgot whatever it was I’d done, because she was such a little girl, and forgot so easily, and was soon again stroking and petting me, and kissing the bone-hard top of my head.

Happy Chicken—I love you.

BECAUSE SHE WAS SUCH a little girl the little girl was always hoping that all the chickens would like her, and not just Happy Chicken who was her pet. Naively the little girl hoped that the rooster—(who was even more handsome than Happy Chicken, and much larger)—would like her. And so the little girl was continually being surprised—and hurt—when the rooster ignored her or worse yet bristled his feathers indignantly and rushed to peck at her hands or bare knees sharp enough to draw blood.

Many times this happened, that the little girl cried Oh!—and ran away frightened, and sometimes Mr. Rooster would chase her, and if the Grandfather was watching he would double over in laughter as if he’d never seen anything so funny. The Grandfather had a loud sharp laugh like bottles popping corks. His barrel chest would shake, his small shrewd eyes would shrink in the fleshy ridges of his face, his laughter turned into snorts, wheezing, coughing. Such loud, protracted coughing. And still, the Grandfather was laughing. For nothing amused the Grandfather more than someone chased by that goddamn bird unless it was the sight of the Grandmother’s white sheets billowing on the clothesline so hard, in such wind, clothespins slipped and a sheet sank to the ground and the Grandmother came running out of the house, furious, agitated, muttering in a strange guttural speech the little girl did not understand and that frightened her, like the loud shrieks and squawks of the chickens when something threw them into a panic, so the little girl stood very still and cringing and shutting her eyes pressing her hands over her ears like one who is waiting for something distressing to go away, stop.

If the little girl was inside the farmhouse, and heard a sudden squabble outside, a sign that someone or something was agitating the chickens, the little girl would run outside immediately to search for me. Oh oh oh—where is Happy Chicken?

The little girl knew about foxes and raccoons and stray dogs that might drag away chickens and devour them—(though it would be very unusual for any creature to make such a foray in daytime)—and so the little girl had to find me amidst the commotion, scoop me up in her arms and kiss the top of my head and smooth down my neatly folded wings and carry me quickly away promising that nothing bad would ever happen to Happy Chicken.

WE WERE RHODE ISLAND Reds. Three dozen hens and a single rooster.

Other male chickens in the flock had been squashed as soon as it was evident that they were male. Our rooster had not a clue that he’d come close to oblivion. Or, our rooster had not a care that he’d come close to oblivion. Through the day Mr. Rooster strutted in the yard and roosted in the lowermost limbs of trees showing off his spectacular tail feathers, and the ruff around his neck; bristling red-brown, dark-red, yellow-red feathers that shone in the sun. Yellow-scaly legs, and nasty-sharp spurs just above the talon-claws. Though Mr. Rooster was as stupid as any hen pecking brainlessly in the dirt, or rolling in the dirt in the (mostly futile) effort of getting rid of mites, yet Mr. Rooster was fascinating to watch for you never knew what Mr. Rooster would do next. (You never knew what any hen would do next, but anything a hen can do is of so little significance there is no point in observing her.) Mr. Rooster could leap into the air fluttering his wings, for instance, and devour a dragonfly three feet above the ground, and Mr. Rooster could rush in a blind rage at an unsuspecting hen, or two unsuspecting hens, or, as if he’d only just thought of it, and now that he was doing it, it was a significant thing to do, throwing himself down and rolling over vigorously in the dirt until his gaudy feathers were dull with dust like those of an ordinary chicken.

Mr. Rooster gave no sign of knowing who I was—who Happy Chicken was! Ridiculous how this stupid bird seemed not to notice even as the little girl singled me out for special attention and treats in his very presence. (I’d have liked to think that Mr. Rooster was jealous of me, but the fact was, Mr. Rooster was too vain and too stupid for jealousy.)

That is, Mr. Rooster was indifferent to me unless I stepped brashly in his way, or failed to get out of his way quickly enough when he charged forward into the midst of the chickens at feeding time.

Sometimes for a reason known only to Mr. Rooster’s pea-sized brain he crowed loudly and irritably and flapped his wings in a show of indignation and flew clumsily to alight on a rail fence, like a person clumsily hauling himself up by a rope.

At dawn, Mr. Rooster woke everyone with his crowing. He was the first rooster to wake in all of Millersport—soon after Mr. Rooster crowed, you would hear roosters crowing at neighboring farms. No other rooster at any neighboring farm woke earlier than Mr. Rooster, and no other rooster crowed as noisily.

The hens took for granted that Mr. Rooster’s crowing tore a rent in the silence of the countryside-before-dawn that allowed the sun to appear. The little girl may have thought this also, but only when she was very little.

The Grandfather who took little interest in the chickens—(these were the Grandmother’s responsibility)—was yet proud of his goddamn bird. The Grandfather liked it that Mr. Rooster chased away other chickens and barn-cats who ventured too near and had to be disciplined.

How many dawns, the little girl was wakened by Mr. Rooster’s cries. Through her life to come, long after she’d grown up, and gone away from the farmhouse on Transit Road to live, she would wake to the faint, fading cry of a rooster just outside in the dark-before-dawn.

Is a rooster a harbinger of the Underworld? Does a rooster wake you so that you have no choice but to follow him into the Underworld?

After she’d become an adult older than the Mother and the Father of her early childhood, and the little scabs and scars caused by the rooster’s beak had long faded from her knees, frequently she would find herself touching her knees like Braille, when she was alone.

Very often, in bed. In the bright pitiless light of a bathroom she would examine her knees frowning and baffled, her childhood scars had so vanished as if they had never been . . . It is hard to disabuse yourself of the superstition that your skin is indelibly marked since childhood in a way known only to you.

Upsetting to remember how Mr. Rooster would single out a hen for no reason—(had she disrespected him? taunted him? dared to eat something meant for him?)—peck and jab at the terrified bird until she began to bleed, and chase her until she seemed to fall, or to kneel, before him. And then, Mr. Rooster might have mercy on her, and strut away. But a scab would form shiny and bright as a third eye on the hen’s head, that would attract the attention of another hen, and so soon—for some reason—(the little girl could not understand this, it frightened her very much)—this hen would peck at the afflicted hen, and soon another hen would hurry over to peck at the afflicted hen, and another, and another; and sometimes Mr. Rooster, attracted by the squawking, might return for the coup de grâce—a series of rapid beak-stabs until the poor afflicted hen was bleeding, fallen over and unable to right herself beneath the frenzy of stabbing beaks . . . And hearing the barnyard commotion the Grandmother would hurry out of the house scolding and shooing with the intention of rescuing not the struggling live hen but the limp hen-corpse for the Grandmother’s own purposes.

In her harsh guttural speech the Grandmother would curse the chickens and the rooster. Much of the Grandmother’s speech had a sound of chiding and cursing. And the Grandmother would take up the limp blood-dripping hen-corpse into the kitchen and boil a pan of water on the stove and drop the hen-corpse into it, so that the feathers could be plucked more easily.

At these times the little girl had run away and hid her eyes.

The Mother would say to her, Don’t pay any attention, help me in the kitchen, sweetie!

Mostly the little girl would not remember such things. The little girl’s memory of the farm on Transit Road was very selective like the colander into which the Grandmother dumped boiling water containing her thin-cut noodles, made out of the Grandmother’s noodle-dough, that trapped just the noodles but strained away the liquid.

In later years recalling with a fond smile very little of the farm, the barnyard, the flock of Rhode Island Reds—just, me.

THE LITTLE GIRL WAS so excited! She was five years old.

This was the summer the little girl was allowed to help the Grandmother collect eggs from the hens’ nests in the chicken coop (where the chicken droppings were so smelly, you had to hold your breath especially after a rain) and soon then, the little girl was allowed to feed the chickens by herself, twice a day, their special chicken-feed. Like tiny pebbles the chicken feed seemed to the little girl, seized in handfuls to toss to the chickens; to get the seed you lowered a tin pie pan deep into the feed-sack, itself contained inside a larger, canvas sack to keep out rats and mice.

So exciting! Almost, the little girl wetted her panties, with anticipation.

And when she began to call to the chickens in her high, quavering voice as the Grandmother had taught her—CHICK!-chick-chick-chick-chick-CHI-ICK!—chickens came rushing in her direction at once, and made the little girl feel very special—very powerful. It was not ever the case that the little girl felt powerful—nor could the little girl have defined the sensation, at the time; but calling CHICK!-chick-chick-chick-chick-CHI-ICK provoked such a feeling in her, set her heart to pumping and a warm, rich sensation coursing through her veins, the little girl felt very special, and very proud.

Oh, she could see—(for she was a quick-witted, smart little girl)—that the chickens were oblivious of her, in their greed to devour seed they took not the slightest interest in her, or in their surroundings; yet still it seemed to the little girl that the chickens must like her, and knew who she was, for they came so quickly to her, colliding with one another, scolding and fretting, pecking one another in a frenzy to get to the seed the little girl tossed in a wide, wavering circle.

The Grandmother had instructed the little girl to distribute the seed as evenly as she could. You did not want all the chickens rushing together in a tight little spot, and injuring themselves. The little girl understood that she had to be fair to all the chickens, not just a few.

But the largest and most aggressive chickens rushed and pecked and beat away the others no matter how hard the girl tried.

Of course, Joyce Carol always fed me, specially. In a safe little area, by the side of the house. This was Happy Chicken’s special meal, which was served ahead of the general feeding. If other chickens noticed, and ran clucking to this meal, the little girl stamped her feet and shooed them away.

Though he might have been prowling out in the orchard, soon there came Mr. Rooster running on his long scaly legs. Mr. Rooster could hear the Chick-chick-chick! call from a considerable distance. He pushed through the throng of clucking chickens knocking the silly hens aside and gobbled up as much seed as he could from the ground. Sometimes then pausing, looking up with a squint in his yellow eyes, and made a decision—(who knows why?)—to rush at the little girl and jab her bare knee with his beak.

So quickly this assault came, when it came, the little girl never had time to draw back and escape.

Ohhh! Why was Mr. Rooster so mean!

The little girl was always astonished, the rooster was so mean.

The rooster’s beak was so swift, so sharp and so mean.

Worse yet, the rooster sometimes chased the little girl, trying to peck her legs. If the Grandmother saw, she shooed the rooster away by flapping her apron at him and cursing him in Hungarian. If the Grandfather saw, he gave the rooster a kick hard enough to lift the indignant bird into the air, squawking and kicking.

It was one of the mysteries of the little girl’s life, why when the other chickens seemed to like her so much, and her pet chicken adored her, Mr. Rooster continued to be so mean. It did not make sense to the little girl that Mr. Rooster devoured the seed she gave him, then turned on her as if he hated her. Shouldn’t Mr. Rooster be grateful?

The Mother kissed and cuddled her and said, Oh!—that’s just the way roosters are, sweetie!

Plaintively the little girl asked the Grandmother why did the rooster peck her and make her bleed and the Grandmother did not cuddle her but said, with an air of impatience, in her broken, guttural English, Because he is a rooster. You should not always be surprised, how roosters are.

THE LITTLE GIRL WANDERED the farm. The little girl was forbidden to step off the property.

There was the big barn, and there was the silo, and there was the chicken coop, and there were the storage sheds, and there was the barnyard, and there was the backyard, and there were the fields planted in potatoes and corn, and there was the orchard and beyond the orchard a quarter-mile lane back to the Weidenbachs’ farm where there were big nasty dogs that barked and bit and the little girl did not dare to go. In these places chickens wandered, and also Mr. Rooster, in their ceaseless scratching-and-pecking for food, though it was rare to see a chicken in one of the farther fields or in the lane. Happy Chicken only accompanied the little girl if she called him to these places, or carried him snug and firm in her arms.

The little girl placed me on the lowermost limb of the lilac tree by the back door of the house, so that I could “roost.” The little girl urged me to try to “fly—like a bird.” But if the little girl nudged me, and I lost my balance on the tree limb, my wings flapped uselessly, and I fell to the ground and did not always land on my feet.

At such a time I picked myself up and tottered away clucking loudly, complaining like any disgruntled hen, and the little girl hurried after me saying how sorry she was, and promised not to do it again.

Happy Chicken! Don’t be mad at me, I love you.

(IT WAS TAKEN FOR granted, it was never contested or wondered-at, that our wings were useless. We could “flap” our wings and “fly” for a few feet—even Mr. Rooster could not fly farther than a few yards; though there were wild turkeys, fatter and heavier than Rhode Island Reds, who could manage to “fly” into the higher limbs of a tree, and there “roost.”)

NOT JUST THE CHICKEN coop and much of the barnyard but the grassy lawn behind the house—(“lawn” was a name given to the patch of rough, short-cropped crabgrass that extended from the barnyard and the driveway to the pear orchard)—was mottled with chicken droppings. Runny black-and-white glistening smudges that gradually hardened into little stones and lost their sharp smell.

You would not want to run barefoot in the backyard, in the scrubby grass.

And there was the ugly tree stump along the side of the barn, stained with something dark.

And surrounding the stained block, chicken feathers. Sticky-stained feathers in dark clotted clumps.

No chickens scratched and pecked in the dirt here. Even Mr. Rooster kept his distance. And the little girl.

GRANDMA WAS THE ONE, you know. The one who killed the chickens. No! I did not know.

Of course you must have known, Joyce. You must have seen—many times. . . .

No. I didn’t know. I never saw.

But . . .

I never saw.

In later years she would recall little of her Hungarian grandparents. Her mother’s stepparents. For few snapshots remained of those years. She did know that the Grandfather and the Grandmother were something that was called Hungarian. They’d come on a “big boat” from a faraway place called Hungary years before the little girl was born and so this was not of much interest to the little girl since it had happened long ago. The grandparents seemed to the little girl to be very old. The big-breasted big-hipped Grandmother had never cut her hair that was silvery-gray-streaked and fell past her waist if she let it down from the tight-braided bun. The Grandmother had been eighteen when she’d come to the United States on a “boat” and at age eighteen it had seemed to her too late for her to learn English, as the Grandfather had learned English well enough to speak haltingly and to run his finger beneath printed words in a newspaper or magazine. The Grandfather was a tall big-bellied man with scratchy whiskers who liked to laugh as if much were a joke to him. He had rough calloused fingers that caught in the little girl’s curly hair when he was just teasing.

Worse yet was tickling. When the Grandfather’s breath smelled harsh and fiery like gasoline from the cider he drank out of a jug. But the Mother insisted Grandpa loves you, if you cry you will make Grandpa feel bad.

The farm was the Grandfather’s property. Of farms on Transit Road it was one of the smallest. Much of the acreage was a pear orchard. Pears were the primary crop of the farm, and eggs were second. The little girl and her parents lived on the Grandfather’s property upstairs in the farmhouse. The little girl understood that the Father was not so happy living there, for the Father had been born in Lockport and preferred the city to the country, absolutely. The Father had tried his hand at farming and “hated” it. The little girl often overheard her parents speak of wanting to move away, to live in Lockport, where the Father’s mother who was the little girl’s Other Grandmother lived. Except years would pass, all the years of their lives would pass as in a dream, and somehow—they did not ever move away.

There was something strange about the Grandfather and the Grandmother but the little girl could not guess what it was. Later she would learn that the Grandfather and the Grandmother were not the Mother’s actual parents but her stepparents and it was worrisome to the little girl, that in some way steps were involved. Like the long frightening stepladder that only Daddy could climb to pick pears, apples, and cherries from the highest limbs of the trees.

The little girl noticed that, when her parents were speaking together, or any adults were speaking together, if she came near they might cease speaking suddenly. They would smile at her, they would say her name, but they would not reveal what they had been saying.

The little girl ran away to hide, sometimes. When the adults were speaking sharply to one another. When the Grandfather cursed at the Grandmother in Hungarian, and the Grandmother wept angrily and hid her flushed face in her hands.

The little girl had several times seen the Grandmother’s long coarse gray-black hair straggling down her back like something alive and livid. The little girl shut her eyes not wanting to see as she shrank from seeing the Grandmother’s large soft melon-breasts loose inside a camisole, that was wrong to see for there were things, the little girl realized, that it was wrong to see and you would be sorry if you saw.

On a farm, there are many such things. Wild creatures that have crawled beneath a storage shed to die, or the bones of a chicken or a rabbit all but plucked clean by a rampaging owl in the night.

“Joyce Carol! Come here.”

With a nervous little laugh like a cough the Mother would shield the little girl’s eyes from something she should not see. Between the Mother’s eyebrows, faint lines of vexation and alarm.

“Sweetie, I said come here. We’re going inside now.”

SOMETIMES THE LITTLE GIRL was breathless and frightened but why, the little girl would not afterward recall.

The little girl often took me with her to a special hiding place. Happy Chicken in the little girl’s arms, held tight.

My quivering body. My quick-beating heart. Smooth warm beautiful chicken-feathers! The little girl held me and whispered to me where we were hiding in the old silo beside the barn, that wasn’t used so much any longer now that the farm didn’t have cows or pigs or horses. Smells were strong inside the silo, like something that has fermented, or rotted. The little girl’s mother warned her never to play in the silo, it was dangerous inside the silo. The smells can choke you. If corncobs fall onto you, you might suffocate. But the little girl brought me with her to hide in the silo for the little girl did not believe that anything bad could happen to her.

Except the little girl began more frequently to observe that if a chicken weakened, or fell sick, or had lost feathers, other chickens turned on her. So quickly—who could understand why? Even Happy Chicken sometimes pecked at another, weaker chicken—the little girl scolded, and carried me away.

No no Happy Chicken—that is bad.

We did not know why we did this. Happy Chicken did not know.

It was like laying eggs. Like releasing a hot little dollop of excrement from the anus, something that happened.

Hearing a commotion in the barnyard, the little girl ran to see what was happening always anxious that the wounded hen might be me—but this did not happen.

Though sometimes my beak was glistening with blood, and when the little girl called me, I did not seem to hear. Peck peck peck is the action of the beak, like a great wave that sweeps over you, and cannot be resisted.

THE LITTLE GIRL GREW up, and grew away, but never forgot her Happy Chicken.

The little girl forgot much else, but not Happy Chicken.

The little girl became an adult woman, and at the sight of even just pictures of chickens she felt an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, sharp as pain. Especially red-feathered hens. And roosters! Her eyes mist over, her heart beats quick enough to hurt. So happy then. So long ago . . .

Still, she would claim she’d never seen a chicken slaughtered. Never seen a single one of the Rhode Island Reds seized by the legs, struggling fiercely, more fiercely than any human being might struggle, thrown down onto the chopping block to be decapitated with a single swift blow of the bloodstained ax, wielded by a muscled arm.

It was the Grandmother’s arm, usually. For the Grandmother was the chicken-slaughterer.

Which the girl had not seen. The girl had not seen.

The girl did recall a time when Grandfather was not so big-bellied and confident as he’d been. When the Grandfather began to cough frequently. And to cough up blood. The Grandfather no longer teased the little girl, or caused her to run from him crying as she’d run from Mr. Rooster. The little girl stared in horror as the Grandfather coughed, coughed, coughed doubled over in pain, scarcely able to breathe. The Grandfather would scrape phlegm up from his throat, with great effort, and spit the quivering greenish liquid into a rag. And the little girl would want to hide her face, this was so terrible to see.

It was explained that the Grandfather was sick with something in his lungs. Steel-filings it was said, from the foundry in Tonawanda. The Grandfather had hated his factory-job in Tonawanda but the Grandfather had had to work there, to support the farm. For the farm would not support itself, and the people who lived on it.

The Grandfather had liked to say in his laughing-bitter way that he and the other workers should be running the foundry and not the goddamn owners. Until the terrible coughing spells overcame him the Grandfather would say how the workers of the world would one day rise against the goddamn owners but that was not to happen, it would be revealed, in the Grandfather’s lifetime.

SELLING EGGS, SITTING OUT by the roadside. Sitting, dreaming, waiting for a vehicle to slow to a stop. Customers.

How much? One dozen?

Oh that’s too much. I can get them cheaper just up the road.

Always there were eggs for sale. And, at the end of the summer pears in bushel baskets. Sweet corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes. Apples, cherries. Pumpkins.

With a faint sensation of anxiety the little girl would recall sitting at the roadside at the front of the house behind a narrow bench. When sometimes the Mother had to go inside for a short while and the little girl was left alone at the roadside.

Hoping that no one would stop. Hoping not to see a vehicle slow down and park on the shoulder of the highway.

Some of the anxiety was over chickens, that made their blind-seeming way down the driveway, to the highway. Chickens oblivious of vehicles speeding by on the road, only a few yards from where they scratched and pecked in the dirt.

Anxiously the little girl watched to see that no chickens drifted out onto the road. The little girl knew, though she wasn’t altogether certain how she knew, for she’d never seen, that from time to time chickens had been killed on the road.

Sudden squawking and shrieking, and a flapping of wings. At first you rush to see what it is, and then you do not want to see what it is.

One of the constant fears of the little girl’s life was that Happy Chicken might be hit on the highway for the little girl could not watch me all of the time.

Each morning running outside breathless and eager to call to me—Happy! Happy Chicken!

And I came running, out of the coop, or out of the barn, or out of a patch of grass beside the back door, hurrying on my scrawny chicken-legs to be stroked and petted.

“Happy Chicken! I love you.”

THE LAUGHTER WAS KINDLY, and yet cruel.

Of course you ate chicken when you were a little girl, Joyce! You ate everything we ate.

No. She didn’t think so.

You’d have had to eat whatever was served. Whatever everybody else was eating. You wouldn’t have been allowed to not-eat anything on the table.

No! This was not true.

You hated fatty meat, and you hated things like gizzards, and we laughed at how you tried to hide these—beneath the rim of your plate!—as if, when the plate was removed from the table, the fatty little pieces of meat you’d left would not be discovered. But you certainly ate chicken white meat. Of course you did.

No. That was—that was not true . . .

Children ate what they were given in those days. Children ate, or went hungry. Your father would have spanked the daylights out of you if you’d tried to refuse chicken, or anything that your mother or grandmother prepared.

But no. She did not believe this.

It’s true—she does remember her Hungarian grandmother preparing noodles in the kitchen. Wide swaths of soft-floury ghost-white dough on the circular kitchen table that was covered in oilcloth, and over the oilcloth strips of waxed paper. She recalls the Grandmother, a heavyset woman with gray hair plaited and fastened tight against her head, always in an apron, and the white apron always soiled, wielding a long sharp-glittering knife, rapidly cutting dough into thin strips of noodle. And the Grandmother’s legs encased in thick flesh-colored cotton stockings even in hot weather. The surprise was, sometimes you could see a pleading girl’s face inside the soft flaccid Grandmother-stern face. And the little girl remembers something white-skinned, headless in a large pan simmering on the stove, the surface of the liquid bubbling with dollops of yellowish fat.

You loved your grandmother’s chicken noodle soup! You don’t remember?

She hides her eyes. She hides her face. She is sickened, that terrible smell of wet feathers, plucked-white chicken-flesh.

Protesting, I had nothing to do with that.

Trying to recall in a sudden panic—what had happened to her pet chicken, she’d loved so?

Our memories are what remain on a wall that has been washed down. Old billboards advertising Mail Pouch Tobacco, in shreds. The faintest letters remaining that even as you stare at them, fade. The Hungarian Grandfather who’d been so gruff, so loud, so confident and had so loved his little granddaughter he’d been unable to keep his calloused fingers out of her curls had died at the age of fifty-three, his lungs riddled with steel filings from the foundry in Tonawanda. The Hungarian Grandmother lived for many years afterward and never learned to speak English, still less to read English. The Grandmother died in a nursing home in Lockport to which the granddaughter was never once taken, nor was the granddaughter told the name of the nursing home or its specific location.

Why was this? The Mother had wished to hide the little girl’s eyes. Even when she was no longer a little girl, yet the Mother wished to shield her from upset and worry.

What happened to me? What happened to Happy Chicken?

Oh, the little girl did not know!

The little girl did not know. Just that one terrible day—Happy Chicken was not there.

She mouths the words aloud: “Happy Chicken.”

There is something about the very word happy that is unnerving. Happy happy happy happy.

A terrible word. A terrifying word. Hap-py.

Waking in the night, tangled in bedsheets, shivering in such fright you’d think she was about to misstep and fall into an abyss.

Happy. Hap-py. We were so hap-py . . .

In the cold terror of the night she counts her dead. Like a rosary counting her dead. The Grandfather who died first and after whom the door was opened, that Death might come through to seize them all. The Grandmother who died somewhere far away, though close by. The Mother who died of a stroke when she was in her mid-eighties, overnight. The Father who died over several years, also in his mid-eighties, in the new, twenty-first century shrinking, baffled and yet alert, in yearning wonderment.

Wanted you kids to have the best you could have, but that didn’t happen. We were just too poor. I worked like hell, but it wasn’t enough. Things got better later, but those early years—! The only good thing was, we lived in Millersport. We lived on the old man’s farm. You loved those animals. Remember your pet chicken—Happy Chicken? God, you loved that little red chicken.

Daddy brushing tears from his eyes. Daddy laughing, he wasn’t the kind to be sentimental, Jesus!

She was thinking of how they’d found the rooster—not Mr. Rooster then, but just a limp, slain bird—beautiful feathers smudged and broken—out back of the barn where something, possibly a fox, or a neighbor’s dog, had seized him, shaken him and broken his neck, threw him down and left him for dead. Poor Mr. Rooster!

Seeing the rooster in the dirt, horribly still, the little girl had cried and cried and cried.

And several hens, limp and bloody, eyes open and sightless. Flung down in the dirt like trash.

AND THERE CAME THE time, not long after this, or maybe it had been this time, when Happy Chicken disappeared.

The girl was stunned and disbelieving and did not cry, at first.

So frightened, the little girl could not cry.

For it seemed terrifying to her, that Happy Chicken might be—somehow—gone.

She’d run screaming to her mother who was upstairs in the farmhouse. The Mother who claimed to have no idea where the little chicken might be. Together they searched in the chicken coop, and in the barn, and out in the fields, and in the pear orchard. Calling Happy Chicken! Happy Chicken! Loudly calling Chick-chick-chick-chick-CHICK!

Other chickens came running, blinking and clucking. Yellow eyes staring.

And not one of these was me.

That morning the Mother had taken the little girl into Lockport to visit with the Other Grandmother, who was her father’s mother, who lived upstairs in a gray clapboard house on Grand Street just across the railroad tracks. The highway that was Transit Road that ran past the little girl’s house became Transit Street inside the Lockport city limits and was but a half-block away from the Other Grandmother’s house.

The Other Grandmother was named Blanche: but she was also called “Grandma”—like the (Hungarian) grandmother. The little girl tried to understand why this would be so. How could the two persons who were so different, be somehow the same—Grandma?

The Other Grandmother, who lived in Lockport, was much nicer than the (Hungarian) Grandmother who lived in Millersport. This Grandmother did not smell of grease, or chicken gizzards, or wet chicken feathers, or any other nasty thing, but rather of something pale and creamy like lilies—did this Grandmother wear perfume? Were this Grandmother’s hands soft from hand lotion? The little girl was always welcome to explore the Grandmother’s rooms which included the Grandmother’s bedroom that had such nice things in it—a shiny pink satin bedspread with white flowers, a “dressing table” with three mirrors and a mirror-top, many sweet-smelling jars and small bottles, a hairbrush with soft bristles that did not hurt the little girl’s hair when the Grandmother brushed it.

Most importantly the Grandmother who was Blanche did not speak angry-sounding guttural words in Hungarian, and would never have raised her voice to scream at anyone; you could not imagine—(the little girl could not imagine!)—this nice Grandmother being cruel to any chicken.

This was the Grandmother whom Daddy loved—for this Grandmother was Daddy’s mother. The little girl had been told this remarkable fact which she could not comprehend because Daddy was so much taller than the Grandmother it seemed to her silly—that her tall strong Daddy who was so forceful would have a mother.

This was the Grandmother who read books from the Lockport library, never fewer than three books each week. And these books smelling of the library in plastic covers. And these books smartly stamped in dark green ink LOCKPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY. This Grandmother took the little girl hand in hand into the children’s entrance of the library, to secure a library card for the little girl. For here was the surprise, that would be one of the great, happy surprises of the little girl’s life—“Joyce Carol” was old enough for a children’s library card: six. And she was allowed to take out children’s books, picture books, selected by the little girl herself, from shelves in the library—so many shelves! Such beautiful books! The little girl was so excited she could barely speak, to thank the Grandmother. Having her books stamped and discharged by the librarian made the little girl very shy but the Grandmother stood beside her so there was nothing to fear. And the little girl and the Grandmother-who-was-Blanche read these books together sitting on a swing on the front veranda of the gray clapboard house on Grand Street.

In all that day, the little girl did not once think of me.

Those hours, blinking and staring at the beautiful brightly colored illustrations in the books, turning the pages slowly, as the nice Grandmother Blanche read the words on each page, and encouraged the little girl to read too—the little girl did not once think of Happy Chicken.

But when the Mother took the little girl home again to Millersport, in the late afternoon of that day, and the little girl ran out into the barnyard to call for me, there was no Happy Chicken anywhere.

The little girl and the Mother would search the chicken coop, the barn, the orchard. . . . Oh where was Happy Chicken? The little girl was crying, sobbing.

The (Hungarian) Grandmother who was hanging sheets on the clothesline insisted she had not seen Happy Chicken.

The Grandmother had never really distinguished Happy Chicken from any other chicken—the little girl knew that. How ridiculous, the Grandmother thought, to pretend that one chicken was any different from any other chicken!

The Grandfather too insisted he hadn’t seen Happy Chicken! Wouldn’t have known what the damned chicken looked like, in fact. Anything that had to do with the chickens—these were the Grandmother’s chores, and of no interest to the Grandfather who was worn-out from the foundry in Tonawanda and couldn’t give a damn, so much fuss over a goddamn chicken.

When the father returned from his factory work in Lockport in the early evening he was in no mood either to hear of Happy Chicken. He was in no mood to hear his little daughter’s crying, that grated on his nerves. But seeing his little girl’s reddened eyes, and the terror in those eyes, the Father stooped to kiss her cheek.

Don’t cry, he’ll come back. What’s his name—“Happy Chicken”?

Sure. “Happy Chicken” will come back.

SHE IS CALLING HIM-HAPPY Chicken. Her throat is raw with calling him—Happy Chicken!

She has wakened in a sick cold sweat tangled in bedclothes. The little red chicken is somewhere in the room—is he? But which room is this, and when?

But here I am—suddenly—crouching at her feet. Eager quivering little red-feathered chicken at the little girl’s feet. The little girl kneels to pet me, and kisses the top of my hard little head, and holds me in her arms, my wings pressed gently against my sides. And the little chicken-head lowered. And the eyelids quivering. Red-burnished feathers stroked gently by a little girl’s fingers.

Where did I go, Joyce Carol? I flew away.

One day that summer, my wings were strong enough to lift me. And once my wings began to beat, I rose into the air, astonished and elated; and the air buoyed and buffeted me, and I flew high above the tallest peak of the old clapboard farmhouse on Transit Road.

So high, once the wind lifted me, I could see the raggedy flock of red-feathered chickens below scratching and pecking in the dirt as always, and I could see the roof of the old hay barn, and I could see the top of the silo; I could see the farthest potato field, and the farthest edge of the pear orchard, and the rutted dirt lane that bordered the orchard leading back to the Weidenbachs’ farm where the big barking dogs lived.

For it was time, for Happy Chicken to fly away.




DISCOVERING ALICE: 1947 (#ulink_d374d4fb-71dc-5253-9013-e77994c9c18a)


THE SINGULAR BOOK THAT changed my life—that made me yearn to be a writer, as well as inspired me to “write”—is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. This beautiful, slightly oversized book published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1946 was a gift of my (Jewish) grandmother Blanche Morgenstern for my ninth birthday, in 1947. (My book-loving grandmother, my father’s mother, gave me books for birthdays and Christmas and at other times as well, including Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Grandma gave me my first typewriter—a toy typewriter—and she gave me a Remington typewriter at the age of fourteen as if foreseeing how I would need it.) To this day I treasure, and keep prominently on a bookshelf in my study, this gift book with its eerily beautiful quasi-“realistic” illustrations by John Tenniel.

The illustrations of Alice amid her bizarre wonderland world depict her as surprised and sometimes intimidated by that world but never overwhelmed by it. The great illustrator Tenniel gave to Alice a commonsensical gravity and a tender sobriety quite unlike most illustrations of children in American, contemporary children’s books; Alice is recognizably a young girl, but she is not childish. There is something responsibly mature in Alice, an inclination to be skeptical, at times, of the adults who surround her; an unwillingness to be bossed around or frightened into submission. Alice is a girl who “speaks her mind”—as few children are encouraged to do, then or now. When I was nine, I was much too young to comprehend the underlying themes of Alice’s astonishing adventures, which have to do with Darwinian evolutionary theory and the principle of “natural selection through survival of the fittest”—a controversial issue of the Victorian era that represented a challenge to conventional Christian theology, one not entirely resolved in the twenty-first century.

Like any child enraptured with a favorite book, I wanted to be the book’s heroine—I wanted to be “Alice.” It must have occurred to me that Alice was very unlike any girl of my acquaintance; she seemed to belong to a foreign, upper-class environment with customs (tea-time, crumpets, queens, kings, footmen) utterly alien to the farming society of Millersport, New York. I think that I learned from Alice to be just slightly bolder than I might have been, to question authority—(that is, adults)—and to look upon life as a possibility for adventures. If I’d taken Alice for a model, I was prepared to recognize fear, even terror, without succumbing to it. There are scenes of nightmare illogic in the Alice books—numerous dramatizations of the anxiety of being eaten, for instance—that suggest the essential gravity of the books, yet Alice never becomes panicked or loses her common sense and dignity.

It did occur to me that Alice is a character in a book—and that Alice was not telling her own story. The author of the book was named in gilt letters on the spine and on the title page: “Lewis Carroll.” Being Lewis Carroll was an aspiration, like being Alice-in-Wonderland, and soon I was drawing stories in the mode of the Tenniel illustrations, not of adults or even children but of cats and red-feathered chickens. These were “novels” on lined tablet paper, that captivated me for long hours as a child. (Decades later I would see facsimiles of the Brontë children’s miniature books, and feel a tug of kinship. The Brontë children may have been lonelier than I was in Reverend Brontë’s remote windswept parsonage in Haworth on the moors of England, though probably they were not more fascinated by storybooks than I was.) Out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have sprung not only much of my enthusiasm for writing but also my sense of the world as an indecipherable, essentially absurd but fascinating spectacle about which it is reasonable to exclaim, with Alice—“Curiouser and curiouser!”




DISTRICT SCHOOL #7, NIAGARA COUNTY, NEW YORK (#ulink_3f3ac71e-0218-58cf-b13c-befe691407d7)


I LOVED MY FIRST school!—so I have often said, and possibly this is true.

As a child I was filled with excitement, anticipation, apprehension, sometimes dread at the prospect of school. For the schoolhouse on the Tonawanda Creek Road in Niagara County, about a mile from my home, was a magical place to me, a place of profound significance, and yet it was not a place in which, as a young child, I could exert anything approaching what I would not yet have known to call “control.”

I took for granted then what seems wonderful to me now: that, from first through fifth grades, during the years 1943 to 1948, I attended the same one-room schoolhouse that my mother, Carolina Bush, had attended twenty years before. Apart from the introduction of electricity in the 1940s, and a few minor improvements, not including indoor plumbing, the school had scarcely changed in the intervening years. It was a rough-hewn, weatherworn, uninsulated wood frame building on a crude stone foundation, built around the turn of the century at the approximate time my grandparents’ farmhouse was built, twenty-five miles north of Buffalo and about six miles south of Lockport.

In late August, in anticipation of school beginning after Labor Day in September, I would walk to the schoolhouse carrying my new pencil box and lunch pail, gifts from my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, to sit on the front, stone step of the school building. Just to sit there dreamy in anticipation of school starting: possibly to enjoy the solitude and quiet, which would not prevail once school started.

(Does anyone remember pencil boxes now? They were of about the size of a small lunch pail, with several drawers that, slid out, revealed freshly sharpened yellow “lead” pencils, Crayola crayons, erasers, compasses. The thrill of a compass with its sharp point! The smell of Crayolas! Lunch pails, which perhaps no one recalls either, were usually made of some lightweight metal, with handles; unlike pencil boxes which smelled wonderfully of crayons and erasers, lunch pails quickly came to smell awfully of milk in Thermos bottles, overripe bananas, peanut butter, jam, or baloney sandwiches, and much-used wax paper.)

The school, more deeply imprinted in my memory than my own child-face, was set approximately thirty feet back from the pebble-strewn unpaved Tonawanda Creek Road; it had three tall, narrow windows in each of its side walls, and very small windows in its front wall; a steeply slanting shingle board roof that often leaked in heavy rain; and a shadowy, smelly, shed-like structure at the front called the “entry”; nothing so romantic as a cupola with a bell to be rung, to summon students inside. (Our teacher Mrs. Dietz, standing Amazon-like in the entry doorway, rang a handbell. This was a sign of her adult authority; the jarring noise of the bell, the thrusting, hacking gesture of her muscled right hand as she vigorously shook it. In my memory, Mrs. Dietz’s sturdy face was usually flushed.)

Behind the school, down a slope of briars and jungle-like vegetation, was the “crick”—the wide, often muddy, fast-moving Tonawanda Creek, where pupils were forbidden to play or explore; on both sides of the school were vacant, overgrown fields; “out back” were crudely built wooden outhouses, the boys’ to the left and the girls’ to the right, with drainage, raw sewage, virulently fetid in warm weather, seeping out into the creek. (Elsewhere, off the creek bank, children, mostly older boys, often swam. They dived from the sides of the bridge when the water was high enough. There was not much consciousness of “polluted” waters in those days and even less fastidiousness on the part of energetic farm boys.)

My memory of the outhouses is a shudder of dread. But lately, I am apt to feel an alarmed sort of sympathy for poor Mrs. Dietz, who had no choice but to use the girls’ outhouse, too.

At the front of the school, and to the sides, was a rough playground of sorts, where we played such improvised games as “May I?”—which involved “baby-” and “giant-steps”—and “Pom-Pom-Pullaway” which was more raucous, and rougher, where one might be dragged across an expanse of cinders, even thrown into the cinders. And there was Hide-and-Seek, and Tag, which were my favorite games, at which I excelled, at least with children not too much older than I was.

Joyce runs like a deer! certain of the older boys, chasing me, as they chased other younger children, to bully and terrorize, would say, admiring.

Inside, the school smelled of varnish, chalk dust, and woodsmoke and ashes from the potbellied stove. On overcast days, not infrequent in western New York in this region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, hazy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of which these desks were made seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. The blackboard stretched across the front of the room. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, so positioned to draw our admiring eyes to it, to be instructed, were cardboard squares of the alphabet showing the beautifully shaped script known as Palmer Method.

All of my life, though my handwriting has changed superficially, it is the original Palmer Method that prevails. In an era in which handwriting scarcely exists, and most signatures are unintelligible, those of us who came of age under the tutelage of the Palmer Method can be relied upon to write not just beautifully, but legibly.

Perhaps Palmer Method carried with it an (unwitting, unconscious) moral bias? If beauty and clarity and a wish to communicate are your intention in writing, are you not likely to be good?

Mrs. Dietz, of course, had mastered the art of such penmanship. She wrote our vocabulary and spelling lists on the blackboard, and we learned to imitate her. We learned to “diagram” sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating equations. We learned to read by reading out loud, and we learned to spell by spelling out loud. We memorized, and we recited. Our textbooks were rarely new, but belonged to the school district and were passed on, year after year until they wore out entirely. (How I would love to examine those textbooks, now! I have not the vaguest memory of what we were actually being made to read, and what our arithmetic books were like.) Our school “library” was a shelf or two of books including a Webster’s dictionary, which fascinated me: a book comprised of words! A treasure of secrets this seemed to me, available to anyone who cared to look into it.

Some of my earliest reading experiences, in fact, were in this dictionary. We had no dictionary at home until, as the winner of a spelling bee sponsored by the Buffalo Evening News, when I was in fifth grade, I was given a dictionary like the one at school. This, like the prized Alice books, remained with me for decades.

My early “creative” experiences evolved not from printed books but from coloring books, predating my ability to read. I did not learn to read until I was in first grade and six years old, though by this time, comically precocious as I seem now in retrospect, I’d already produced a number of “books” of a kind in tablet form, by drawing, coloring, and scribbling in what I believed to be a convincing imitation of adults. My earliest fictional characters were not human beings but zestfully if crudely drawn upright chickens and cats engaged in what appeared to be dramatic confrontations; of course, Happy Chicken figured predominantly. The title of one of these tablet-novels was allegedly The Cat House, which was set in an actual house in which cats lived as human beings might live. (When I was an adult my father would joke with me about this title, whose double entendre humor had escaped me. For years my mother saved the tablet-novel among her things, but I think The Cat House must be lost to posterity by now.)

In addition to the Alice books which I’d soon memorized we had, at home, the daunting The Gold Bug and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe, which was my father’s book: the title was in dull-gold letters on the book cover which was made of some odd, thick, dim material resembling mossy tree bark. What I could make of Poe’s belabored gothic prose, I can’t imagine. Though Poe’s classic tales seem to move, in our memories, with the nightmare rapidity of horror films, the prose in which Poe cast most of these tales is highly formal, tortuous, turgid if not opaque; his masterpiece “The Tell-Tale Heart” is unique in its head-on fluency. Yet, somehow, perhaps because I had few other books close at hand, I persevered in reading Poe as a young child, and must have absorbed, along with the very different prose-consciousness of Lewis Carroll, something of that writer’s unique sensibility. (No wonder my immediate kinship with Paul Bowles, whose first story collection, The Delicate Prey, is dedicated to his mother, who had read Bowles the tales of Poe as a young child.)

My child’s logic, which was not corrected by any adult because it would not have occurred to me to mention it to any adult, was that the mysterious world of books was divided into two types: those for children, and those for adults. Reading for children, in our grade-school textbooks, was simpleminded in its vocabulary, grammar, and content; it was usually about unreal, improbable, or unconditionally fantastic situations, like fairy tales, comic books, Disney films. It might be amusing, it might be instructive, but it was not real. Reality was the province of adults, and though I was surrounded by adults, as an only child for five years, it was not a province I could enter, or even envision, from the outside. To enter that reality, to find a way in, I read books.

Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

One of the earliest books I read, or tried to read, was an anthology from our school library, an aged Treasury of American Literature that had probably been published before World War II. Mixed with writers who are mostly forgotten today (James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Helen Hunt Jackson) were our New England classics—though I was too young to know that Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Melville, et al. were “classics” or even to know that they spoke out of an America that no longer existed, and would never have existed for families like my own. I believed that these writers, who were exclusively male, were in full possession of reality. That their reality was so very different from my own did not discredit it, or even qualify it, but confirmed it: adult writing was a form of wisdom and power, difficult to comprehend but unassailable. These were no children’s easy-reading fantasies but the real thing, voices of adult authenticity. I forced myself to read for long minutes at a time, finely printed prose on yellowed, dog-eared pages, retaining very little but utterly captivated by the strangeness of another’s voice sounding in my ear. I tackled such a book as I would tackle a tree (a pear tree, for instance) difficult to climb. I must have felt almost physically challenged by lengthy, near-impenetrable paragraphs so unlike the American-English language spoken in Millersport, and totally unlike the primer sentences of our schoolbooks. The writers were mere names, words. And these words were exotic: “Washington Irving”—“Benjamin Franklin”—“Nathaniel Hawthorne”—“Herman Melville”—“Ralph Waldo Emerson”—“Henry David Thoreau”—“Edgar Allan Poe”—“Samuel Clemens.” There was no Emily Dickinson in this anthology, I would not read Emily Dickinson until high school. I did not think of these exalted individuals as actual men, human beings like my father and grandfather who might have lived and breathed; the writing attributed to them was them. If I could not always make sense of what I read, I knew at least that it was true.

It was the first-person voice, the (seemingly) unmediated voice, that struck me as truth-telling. For some reason, children’s books are rarely narrated in the first-person; Lewis Carroll’s Alice is always seen from a little distance, as “Alice.” (Yet we see everything through Alice’s amazed eyes, and we never know anything that Alice does not know.) But many of the adult writers whom I struggled to read wrote in the first person, and very persuasively. I could not have distinguished between the (nonfiction) voices of Emerson and Thoreau and the (wholly fictional) voices of Irving and Poe; even today, I have to think to recall if “The Imp of the Perverse” is a confessional essay, as it sets itself up to be, or one of the Tales of the Grotesque. I may have absorbed from Poe a predilection for moving fluidly through genres, and grounding the surreal in the seeming “reality” of an earnest, impassioned voice. Poe was a master of, among other things, the literary trompe l’oeil, in which speculative musings upon human psychology shift into fantastic narratives while retaining the earnest first-person voice.

One day I would wonder why the earliest, most “primitive” forms of art seem to have been fabulist, legendary, and surreal, populated not by ordinary, life-sized men and women but by gods, giants, and monsters? Why was reality so slow to evolve? It’s as if, looking into a mirror, our ancestors shrank from seeing their own faces in the hope of seeing something other—exotic, terrifying, comforting, idealistic, or delusional—but distinctly other.

Of Mrs. Dietz, I think: how heroic she must have been! Underpaid, undervalued, overworked. (I am guessing that a female teacher in this rural outpost in the 1940s was “underpaid.”) Not only was it the task of a one-room schoolteacher to lead eight disparate grades through their lessons, but also to maintain discipline in the classroom, where most of the older boys attended school grudgingly, waiting for their sixteenth birthdays when they were legally released from attending school and could work with their fathers on family farms; these boys were taught by older male relatives to hunt and kill animals, and they were without mercy in “teasing” (the more accurate term “harassing” had not yet been coined) younger children. Mrs. Dietz was also in charge of maintaining our wood-burning stove, the school’s only source of heat, in that pitiless upstate New York climate in which below-zero temperatures weren’t uncommon on gusty winter mornings, and we had to wear mittens, hats, and coats through the day, stamping our booted feet against the drafty plank floor to keep our toes from going numb . . . I can only imagine the emotional and psychological difficulties poor Mrs. Dietz endured, and feel now a belated kinship with her, who had seemed to me a very giantess of my childhood. No other teacher looms as archetypal in my memory, for no other teacher taught me the fundamental skills of reading, writing, and doing arithmetic, which seem to me as natural as breathing. I am grateful to Mrs. Dietz for not (visibly) breaking down, and for maintaining a certain degree of good cheer in the classroom. The schoolhouse for all its shortcomings and dangers became for me a kind of sanctuary: a precious counter-world to the chaotic and unbookish roughness that existed outside it.

Years later, revisiting the Lockport area, giving a talk sponsored by the Lockport Public Library, I was approached by a woman of my approximate age who looked familiar to me, to a degree; when the woman introduced herself, I remembered her at once, as a girl who’d lived on a farm a few miles away on one of the creek-side roads; she spoke of how, outside the school at recess, I would sometimes “teach” her and a few other children, who hadn’t understood our teacher Mrs. Dietz . . . What a pleasure to meet again, after so many years, Nelia Pynn! I love the name, out of that lost past, and must write it again: Nelia Pynn.

FOR A LONG TIME vacant and boarded up, District #7 school was finally razed in the late 1970s. And for a long time afterward, when I returned to Millersport to visit my parents, I would make a sentimental journey to the site, where a collapsed stone foundation and a mound of rubble were all that remained. Soon such one-room schoolhouses will be recalled, if at all, only in photographs: links with a mythopoetic “American frontier past” that, when it was lived, seemed to us, who lived it, simply life.




PIPER CUB (#ulink_75ed0fb0-7ef5-5506-a70a-545189a5e30f)


“DON’T BE AFRAID. DADDY is right here.”

Yet, Daddy was not visible to me, for Daddy was behind me. It did not seem natural to me that my father, who always drove our car from the position of authority behind the steering wheel, was seated behind me in the Piper Cub that was a beautiful bright yellow like a butterfly’s wings.

It was a summer day in the late 1940s. I would have been nine or ten years old. My young, adventurous father Fred Oates had earned a pilot’s license a few years before, and this was my first trip with him.

Daddy had not been drafted into the army as he’d feared. He had not served in World War II due to deferments he and his fellow workers at Harrison Radiator had been given, since they were involved in “defense manufacturing.” And now, after the war, planes belonging to the government had passed into private ownership, and men like my father began to take flying lessons.

How and why my father took flying lessons at Lee’s Airfield on Transit Road north of Buffalo, New York, I have no idea. There wasn’t much money in any household in which he’d ever lived. To help with expenses my father not only worked at Harrison’s but also painted signs for commercial businesses in the area. Yet somehow he’d been able to afford flying lessons as early as 1935 (when he was twenty-one) and had acquired a pilot’s license by 1937, the year before I was born, which enabled him to fly not only small planes like Piper Cubs, Cessnas, and Stinsons but also eventually the sporty Waco double-winged biplane, and even ex–Air Force trainers—a Fairchild with 175 horsepower, a Vultee basic trainer, 450-horsepower, with a canopied open cockpit that could fly at twelve thousand feet.

My first time in the Piper Cub would be one of the great memories of my life.

Initially, immediately, there was the strangeness of my father “dressing” me—(which he never did; only my mother dressed me)—as I was outfitted with goggles and a helmet, which were much too large for me. (My father wore a parachute, but I did not, which might have seemed ominoua if I had thought about it. But of course—I could not have used a parachute.) Next, I was half-lifted by Daddy into the single front seat of the plane, and buckled in; the door which seemed to be made of some metal much lighter than a car door was shut and secured. Next, the Piper Cub propeller was turned manually by a boy who worked at the airfield until it began to spin with a loud roar, and the motor kicked in. Next, I was being driven along the bumpy airstrip, past rows of larger planes, at an ever-accelerating speed, totally terrified, dry-mouthed and astonished as I stared through the windshield at a world that was rushing at me much too quickly, and without any adult to shield me from it as if I, and not my father behind me, were the pilot.

Suddenly then, and sickeningly, the quaking little plane was in the air—rising above a row of trees, and above open fields.

Like any ten-year-old I trusted my father, absolutely. As I trusted my mother. (And now I wonder what my young mother must have been thinking, watching us from the runway. Did she, too, have complete trust in my father? Was she frightened when he took her up into the air, and did she really want to accompany him?—or was she, perhaps subtly, coerced? Should my father, with his newly acquired pilot’s license, have taken up a ten-year-old child?) There was a daredevil recklessness to life in those days which seems in our more cautious era, in which children are likely to be over-protected by their parents, very remote indeed. Recall that this was a time when seat belts in vehicles were unknown and virtually everyone (including my parents) smoked.

Through his life my father would always say, “Flying is safer than driving a car.” Statistically, this is (evidently) true, yet not quite a consolation for some of us.

My most vivid memories of that first trip are the fields opening beneath the plane, the blur of the spinning propeller close in front of me, the buffeting rush of the wind, and the quaking of the plane. In small aircraft you are very conscious of the wind. You are very conscious of the sky. Below, every detail seems heightened. You have suddenly an entirely new, unexpected perspective—you are looking down, bizarrely, from above. It is something of a miracle to see the roofs of houses and barns not so very far below as you pass over.

Pilots of small planes invariably head for home to fly over their houses and property. My father never failed to do this, a quick trip of only a few minutes, since our farmhouse was no more than three miles away. What is more pleasurable than to “buzz” the houses of friends and relatives?

Such playfulness suggests the youth of my father at this time, as it suggests the youth of the era. “Buzzing” low over houses and property was viewed as a sort of practical joke and not a dangerous annoyance as we would be inclined to see it today.

In the Piper Cub my father was likely to fly us to Lockport, where we could see the Erie Barge Canal stretching out below; he was likely to fly us in the direction of Niagara Falls, and the Niagara River; we would never fail to see the Tonawanda Creek, that stretched past our house on Transit Road and would enter my dreams for a lifetime. All these waterways were fascinating to me like the wind-buffeted airborne perspective itself. Safety is a small price to pay for such a perspective!—so my father might have said.

To be in the air—airborne! There was nothing like it for my father and his pilot-friends.

Returning to the airfield: that thrill in the pit of the stomach as the Piper Cub circles the runway and begins to dip down. (Sometimes, if the plane isn’t in the ideal position, the pilot decides not to land. And so you sweep up again, rapidly up into the air again, the nose of the plane lifting into the sky so that for an unnerving moment there is nothing to see but sky.) Then, circling back, and trying again as the nose of the plane is lowered by a movement of the pilot’s stick.

Landing is the most dangerous maneuver. A mistake at that time can be fatal . . .

A reassuring jolt as the plane’s wheels strike the runway and within an instant the plane is on the ground, bouncing and bumping along the runway.

Returning to the hangar in a kind of triumph. And my mother hurrying forward to greet us with a tight embrace and a little sob of relief as if to say Thank God! You are returned to me safely.

IN SUBSEQUENT YEARS MY father would take me up in some of the larger and more intimidating airplanes at Lee’s Airfield. There was at least one picture of Daddy and me in the Fairchild PT-19 with its cockpit open and both of us, in helmet and goggles, smiling and waving at the camera, presumably held by my mother—but this precious snapshot (for which I continue to search) seems to be permanently lost. It is embarrassing to recall that within a year or two of the first Piper Cub flight I had become so habituated to flying with my father, and so utterly trusting of him, that I dared to bring a tablet with me into which I scribbled “stories” while airborne . . .

(What was I always scribbling in those days? My mother would keep a selection of my school tablets that were filled with drawings of chickens and upright cats like human figures; I have seen these, but through a haze of embarrassment I lost a clear memory of them. There seemed to have been in my life as a writer a seamless transition from pre-literate activities of vigorous drawing in tablets with Crayolas to my first childish “stories” when I’d learned to write as adults write; from there, a seamless transition to my first typed stories when I was fourteen, and beyond.)

Though my father could never afford to own his own plane he remained an avid flier for decades; eventually he would log over two hundred hours of flying time. Indeed, “Fred Oates” was famous in Millersport and environs for his love of flying. Only reluctantly, when his eyesight began to weaken in his late sixties, did he give up flying.

(In the mid-1970s when a West German film crew preparing a documentary on my writing career for public television came to Millersport to interview my parents, the director arranged for my father to fly him and his cameraman over the terrain of my childhood, in a Cessna 182 horsepower single-prop plane. How courageous these Germans were! Or did they not quite comprehend how courageous they were being to entrust their lives to a stranger, Fred Oates, who could claim only a pilot’s license from a rural upstate New York airfield? And how truly bizarre it was for me to see the film footage of my father in the cockpit of the plane flying again over that familiar landscape!)

Many times Daddy has said that for the pilot there is nothing in life on land to quite compare with life in the cockpit, at his instruments, aloft.

IN LATER LIFE, MY father and mother often visited my husband Raymond Smith and me in Princeton. On these trips they always flew, and sometimes they flew in a small plane to the small Princeton airfield about ten miles from our house.

Though being flown is nothing like flying—(as my father insisted)—these flights were exhilarating to him. Daddy never failed to comment on the pilot’s performance and, if he had the opportunity, he congratulated the pilot on a “good landing.”

Sometimes, when I am alone, and aloft, in my window seat staring out at a sea of clouds, or at land or glittering water far below, I feel a sudden pang of loss—for what, I don’t know.

For Lee’s Airfield, perhaps. For the shining little Piper Cubs and the boys who’d helped to start their propellers. For my beloved father, a young father, with tufted dark hair and a widow’s peak, laughing as he adjusted helmet strap beneath my chin, for I must have looked very silly in my flying gear, as a child. And for my beloved mother, scarcely daring to breathe until the shining little yellow plane returned to the airstrip, and made a “successful” landing.

The long-ago romance of small planes. Daddy as pilot.

But I have only to shut my eyes to see the airfield bumping and jolting outside the windows of the Piper Cub and to feel again how we are being lifted into the air, wind-buffeted but bravely continuing to rise . . .




AFTER BLACK ROCK (#ulink_fefee3da-a137-529d-8305-4d1f3f6b89ba)


DO ALL FAMILIES HARBOR secrets? Do all families conspire in secrets, if not cultivate secrets? The family is the social unit that seems to depend crucially upon a clear separation of those who are in power and those who are subordinate; those wielding power are required to know more than those who are subordinate to them, and there almost seems, at times, a kind of taboo in sharing such knowledge. Before you were born is both a neutral designation and a way of shutting a door in your face which you would wish to open at your own risk.

Of course, all that children are not told, children somehow know. Not the words to the song but its melody, and its tone. A writer might be one who, in childhood, learns to search for and decipher clues; one who listens closely at what is said, in an effort to hear what is not being said; one who becomes sensitive to nuance, innuendo, and fleeting facial expressions.

And there are the abrupt silences among adults, when a child comes too near.

IN HIS PREFACE TOWhat Maisie Knew, Henry James ponders the “close connection of bliss and bale”—the irony of “so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease, the other somebody’s pain and wrong.” Nowhere is this paradox more true than in the matter of a premature and violent death, for example the murder of my mother’s father which was also, in effect, the murder, as it was the irrevocable dissolution, of a family.

All this happened long before I was born, in 1917. In a Hungarian community in Black Rock, now a part of Buffalo, New York. My mother’s father was in his forties at the time, a Hungarian immigrant from the countryside near Budapest, who worked in a factory in Buffalo; one night, in a tavern in Black Rock, he was killed by another Hungarian immigrant, allegedly “beaten to death with a poker.”

Beyond these blunt bare facts, nothing more seemed to be known. The killer must have been identified, maybe even arrested and charged, and very likely the killing would have been described as “self-defense”—possibly, this was true. All I would ever know of my mother’s father was that he was, like other Hungarian males in the family, an individual of whom it might be said that he was not slow to flare up in anger, if not rage, and that he was a “heavy drinker.” The word peasant is a disallowed word, a shameful usage to contemporary ears, but Hungarian peasants is probably the most objective description of my mother’s relatives who’d immigrated to western New York in the early 1900s. By contemporary standards these immigrants were desperately poor people of the class of those about whom Upton Sinclair wrote so compellingly in The Jungle (1906), set in the Chicago slaughterhouses.

The sudden death of my mother’s father left her family destitute. Her parents had had eight children, the older of whom were already working. (Recall that this is 1917, when immigrant children rarely went to school but worked in factories, mills, and slaughterhouses, for wages much less than those of adult men.) My biological grandmother, whom I would never meet, nor even see a photo of, gave away at least one of her children at this time, the youngest, my mother, who was nine months old.

The infant was given to the couple whom I would know as Grandma and Grandpa Bush—Lena and John Bush. (“Bush” was the name the immigrant couple had been given at Ellis Island, as it is an approximation of their Hungarian name “Bus.”) One day it would be told to me, or suggested, in the casual way in which such genealogical information was likely to be provided, that John Bush may have been a brother of my mother’s deceased father—in which case, my mother had been sent to live with an uncle and his wife, which does not seem quite so desperate as being given away to strangers. There were no “adoptions” in those days—at least, no government agencies that were concerned with the fate of immigrant children of whom, in heavily Roman Catholic communities like Black Rock, there were many. My mother was taken in by a couple who not only wanted a child, but also needed another farm-helper in their household; as soon as she was old enough, she was given farm chores; for a few years she attended a one-room schoolhouse a mile away from the small farm in Millersport, across Tonawanda Creek in Niagara County—the very one-room schoolhouse I would attend years later.

Briefly too my mother attended a Roman Catholic school taught by nuns, in Swormville, from which she graduated after eight grades, at which time her education ceased. Eight grades were considered more than sufficient at this time in our history, in rural communities especially, where the designation “high school graduate” was a matter of pride.

When my mother Carolina Bush was eighteen or nineteen years old, and working part-time as a waitress in a restaurant on the Millersport Highway, she and my father Frederic Oates met. This would have been 1935 or 1936. Fred Oates was three years older than Carolina; he’d been born in Lockport, a small city seven miles north of Millersport, on the Erie Canal. Like my mother’s early life, my father’s early life had been shaped by the premature and violent death of a relative, in this case his maternal grandfather, a German Jewish immigrant who’d tried to kill both his wife and his fourteen-year-old daughter (my grandmother-to-be) with a shotgun, and ended up killing only himself. My father, too, had had to quit school young, and began work in a “machine-shop” (Harrison Radiator) in Lockport. He would work at Harrison’s for an astounding forty years before retiring, though by degrees he was to be promoted from the assembly-line machine shop to tool and die design.

Since such family secrets were shrouded in mystery, as in mortification and shame, I never knew, nor had I any way of substantiating, whether these two (very attractive) young people confided in each other, or commiserated with each other; both sides of my family were notable for reticence, and a stubbornness in reticence; these were not individuals for whom openness came easily, still less anything approaching “full disclosure.” The ardor of confession for which our era is known would have been astonishing to them, scarcely believable and in no way desirable. There seemed the fear among my adult relatives that something misspoken could not be reclaimed; if you spoke heedlessly, you would speak unwisely and you would regret it. In much of my fiction there is a simulacrum of the “confessional” but to interpret it in these terms is misleading. Not literal transcription but emotional transcription is the way of the writer.

While we were growing up, my brother Fred, Jr., and I had no idea of our parents’ backgrounds. We had no idea that my mother had been given away by her mother, after her father’s murder; we had no idea that my father’s mother had nearly been murdered by her raging father. We had no idea that my father’s mother Blanche Morgenstern was Jewish. (In western New York State of those days, we had no idea what “Jewish” was.) We would be adults before we learned even the skeletal outline of these old, shameful secrets that had both altered the trajectories of our parents’ (impoverished) lives but also made our births, in 1938 and 1943 respectively, possible.

It was fascinating—I suppose. To live among adults who must have frequently spoken to one another in a kind of code. (My mother’s stepparents with whom we lived would certainly have talked about my mother’s biological mother and her siblings, who lived less than ten miles away; there were Bush uncles and aunts and cousins who appeared at a little distance, and gradually became known to me in my teens.) Much of adult life was forbidden of entry to children—not just family secrets of this sort but financial crises, health crises, problems with work. Outside the brightly-lit “home” there is the murky penumbra of adults who don’t especially care about you, and are not obliged to wish you well. It may be that the writer/artist is stimulated by childhood mysteries or that it is the childhood mysteries that stimulate the writer/artist. Sometimes in my writing, when I am most absorbed and fascinated, to the point of anxiety, I find myself imagining that what I am inventing is in some way “real”; if I can solve the mystery of the fiction, I will have solved a mystery of my life. That the mystery is never solved would seem to be the reason for the writer’s continuous effort to solve it—each story, each poem, each novel is a restatement of the quest to penetrate the mystery, tirelessly restated.

The writer is the decipherer of clues—if by “clues” is meant a broken and discontinuous subterranean narrative.

I WAS WELL INTO adulthood and living far from Millersport by the time the Bush family secret came to light, and even then it was a faint, glimmering light, about which no one wished to speak without averted eyes, an air of embarrassment and shame, and a wish to change the subject. Growing up in their household, on that farm in Millersport, my brother and I may have had a vague awareness that John and Lena Bush were not my mother’s “real” parents—beyond that we couldn’t know, and in the way of family reticence, which is a kind of dignity, we could not ask, any more than children of that era would have boldly asked their fathers what their incomes were and their mothers whether they’d really wanted children.

But here is the surprise: my mother’s account of that traumatic time in her early life did not center upon the murder of her father (whom she had not known—after all she’d been an infant at the time) but on the mortifying fact of having been “given away.” When for a special feature in O, The Oprah Magazine in the late 1990s several women writers were commissioned to interview their own mothers, I learned of some of this old, sad story, still upsetting to my mother so many decades later. All my mother seemed to know was: her father had been murdered, her mother had given her away. Several times she said, “My mother didn’t want me. I used to cry and cry . . .” I was stricken to the heart—my mother was eighty years old! This trauma of 1917 was as recent and fresh to her as if no time had intervened.

Of all the relatives on both sides of our family my mother Carolina Oates had the reputation of being the most generous, the most kind, the warmest and “sunniest”—I did not want to think that, in her innermost heart, Mommy thought of herself as a child whose mother had not wanted her.

Crimes reverberate through many years, and through many lives. It is a rare homicide that destroys only one person. And it is a paradox to accept that, had a Hungarian immigrant not been murdered in 1917, I would not be alive today; how many of us, many more than would wish to speak of so sordid a fact, owe our births to the premature deaths of others whom we have never known but to whom we are linked by that mysterious shared fate called “blood.”

Here is the ironic equipoise of which Henry James wrote: this catastrophe that was for my mother, through her life, a source of acute sorrow and shame was for me, her daughter, the very genesis of my life.




SUNDAY DRIVE (#ulink_ec78bc48-e6b0-5a82-8a7c-4107b70eeed9)


ONCE UPON A TIME, the Sunday drive.

In our succession of Daddy’s wonderful cars!

(Were Daddy’s cars wonderful, or did my brother and I just imagine this? They were all American cars of course and all built by General Motors for my father worked for Harrison Radiator in Lockport, New York, an automotive supplier for GM. Though technically these were not “new cars” but “used” they were always “new” and spectacular to us.)

Where are we going, I would ask.

And the answer was enigmatic, Wait until we get there. You’ll see.

Our car was our principal means of adventure, exploration, and entertainment; our lengthy, looping, seemingly uncalculated Sunday drives with sometimes my father, sometimes my mother, at the wheel were our primary means of experiencing ourselves as a family.

Of course, we did not know this. We would scarcely have articulated such a notion, at the time.

Where weekday drives were always purposeful, Sunday drives were spontaneous and improvised. If Daddy was driving it was not unlikely that we might drive south on Transit Road in the direction of Lee’s Airfield just to see who was there; if Mommy was driving it was not unlikely we might drive west or east on narrow curving country roads along the Tonawanda Creek, where Mommy knew who lived in every house. Our car was like a small boat, or maybe a small plane, blown like the perpetual cumulus clouds of the sky above the Great Lakes, in any of these directions, by chance and not choice; the drives were familial daydreams, dreams somehow made conscious and translated into landscape. Unknowing, we were enchanted by the mystery of the (familiar) landscape and our place in it.

The writer is one who understands how deeply mysterious the “familiar” really is. How strangely opaque, what we’ve seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.

IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL landscape in some way haunted.

Millersport Rapids Swormville Getzville East Amherst Clarence Rapids Pendleton Wolcottsburg Lockport Middleport Wrights Corners Gasport Ransomville Royalton Medina Wilson Newfane Olcott—a strangely comforting poetry these place-names of our Sunday drives. Open, uncultivated countryside; stretches of dense deciduous woods; pastures bounded by barbed wire in which dairy cows, beef cattle, sheep and horses grazed; fields planted in corn, wheat, potatoes, soybeans; miles of fruit orchards—apple trees, pear trees, cherry trees, peach trees; farmhouses that resembled my grandparents’ house, large hay barns, dairy barns, silos and corncribs. Single-span wrought-iron bridges over the Tonawanda Creek or the Erie Barge Canal whose planks rattled as we crossed high above the water; smaller bridges over narrow streams, only just wide enough for a single vehicle. (The particular terror of the larger bridge was the possibility that a wide vehicle—truck, tractor—might be crossing at the same time, in the other lane; the driver of our car might then be required to back up, slowly and laboriously, to let the other pass. The fear of the smaller bridge was that another vehicle might suddenly appear around a blind curve and collide head-on with us.) Two-lane blacktop roads sticky as licorice in hot summer; narrow rutted dirt roads winding like strips of fraying ribbon between plowed fields; those attractive and beguiling unpaved roads through dense countryside that dwindled into mere lanes bordering farmers’ fields, bumpy and eventually impassable ending in what my parents called dead ends . . . We learn our awe of the world as children staring eagerly out the windows of a moving vehicle.

If we began our Sunday drive along the Erie County side of the Tonawanda Creek to Pendleton a few miles away we might cross the wrought-iron bridge at Pendleton and enter Niagara County; if the drive was to be a relatively short drive we might turn right, or west, onto the Tonawanda Creek Road, return to Transit Road a few miles away and cross the bridge into Millersport, and so to our house which was the first on the right, beside a small Esso gas station (operated by my mother’s brothers Frank and Johnny Bush). Or, we might drive along the creek to Rapids, a few miles in the other direction, cross the bridge there and so return to Transit Road along a more circuitous route following the curves of the Tonawanda Creek, past the single-room schoolhouse which I attended for five grades, and which my mother had attended twenty years before, and so home. (“Tonawanda Creek Road” is a confusing term because, in effect, there were four roads with the same name, that might more accurately have been designated “Tonawanda Creek Road North-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road North-West”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-East”—“Tonawanda Creek Road South-West.” These were country roads narrow and minimally paved, bisected by the wider Transit Road running north and south.)

When my father drove, my mother sat beside him in the passenger’s seat. But whenever my mother drove, it meant that my father wasn’t coming with us because my father would never have consented to be a passenger in any vehicle in which he was not the driver.

(In this Fred Oates was the quintessential American male of his time. It wasn’t a question of “equality”—that my mother was a woman was not the issue; it was a question of who had authority in a vehicle, and this was likely to be the man of the family, in whose name the vehicle had been purchased.)

These least adventurous/most familiar Sunday drives nonetheless intrigued my brother Robin (Fred, Jr.; born on Christmas Day 1943) and me, for our mother knew the inhabitants of virtually all of the houses along the Tonawanda Creek, if not personally then by reputation, or rumor; my fascination with people, as with their houses and “settings,” surely began with these Sunday drives and my mother’s frequent, often quite startling and elliptical commentary. Six years in the one-room schoolhouse containing eight grades of often unruly “big boys” had enabled my mother’s generation of young people to know one another intimately, if not always fondly; sometimes my mother’s reticence was all that was forthcoming as we passed a house. (“Yes. I know who lives there.”)

This was an era memorialized by Edward Hopper of shingle-board houses with front porches and people sitting on these porches keen to observe people driving past in vehicles observing them. Narrow, winding creek roads were best for such sightings, for vehicles were likely to be driven at unhurried speeds on these roads; sometimes my mother would be stuck behind a slow-moving tractor or even a horse-drawn hay wagon.

Once, on the creek road to Rapids, when my father wasn’t with us, my mother behind the wheel suddenly said: “In that house, a terrible thing happened.”

Mommy slowed the car. No one appeared to be visible in the house, observing us.

(Had this been an ordinary-seeming dwelling? Not a farmhouse but a smaller, shanty-like structure with a tar paper roof, set back from the road on a badly rutted driveway. In the front yard, straggly trees. Rusted hulks of cars in the scrubby grass. Decades later the name of the family who lived there is still vivid in my memory—not Reichling but a name that slant-rhymes with it.)

A man had been murdered, my mother said. The father of a girl with whom she’d gone to school.

At first it was believed that the man had “disappeared”—his wife claimed not to know where he was. But then his body was discovered in the creek behind the house; it had been forced inside a barrel, and the barrel had been nailed shut, and rolled down to the creek where it only partially sank in about five feet of water close to shore.

“The wife and her man-friend murdered him. Stabbed him. It was a terrible thing.”

Why did they kill him, I wanted to know. Were they arrested, were they in prison, who had discovered the body in the barrel—many questions sprang to my lips which my mother was vague about answering, whether because Mommy thought I should not be so curious, or because she didn’t know. Enough for our mother to have surprised us by saying—It was a terrible thing.

(I HAVE TO CONCEDE that I scarcely remember myself as a child. Only as an eye, an ear, a ceaselessly inquisitive center of consciousness. For instance, I can remember my mother’s tantalizingly brief account of the murder on the Tonawanda Creek Road in the direction of Rapids only a few miles from our house but I can’t fit this memory into a sequence of memories of that drive, that day, that week or even that year; our memories seem to lack the faculty for chronological continuity, in which case an episodic and impressionistic art most accurately replicates the meanderings of memory, and not chronological order. What is vivid in memory is the singular, striking, one-of-a-kind event or episode, encapsulated as if in amber, and rarely followed by the return home, that evening’s dinner, exchanged remarks, the next morning; not routine but what violates routine.

Which is why the effort of writing a memoir is so fraught with peril, and even its small successes ringed by melancholy. The fact is—We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time.)

WHEN MY FATHER TOOK us on Sunday drives, it was more likely that he would take us much farther, as he drove faster; on Transit Road, which Daddy traveled all too frequently, he was inclined to drive above the speed limit, and to pass slower cars with some measure of irritation. My sense of maleness, based solely and surely unfairly upon my father Fred Oates, is that the male more than the female is inclined to impatience.

Where Mommy drove us on country roads never very far from the Tonawanda Creek, that cut through her childhood, as through mine, and fixed us comfortingly in place, Daddy had little interest in the familiar countryside of Erie County, apart from his visits to Lee’s Airfield. The landscape of Fred Oates’s boyhood was Niagara County: he’d been born in Lockport, in the least affluent area of the small city known informally as “Lowertown,” and had lived in Lockport all of his life until he’d married my mother and came to live with her in Millersport. (There had been an earlier domestic life in Lockport, about which I knew nothing, and which had always seemed to me romantic, as it had to have been short-lived. Only a scattering of snapshots allowed me to see my young parents, an infant bundled in their arms, photographed in a waste of snow behind a rented apartment in Lowertown near the canal. Where we lived before Millersport—was the terse description. Before we came to live with your grandparents.)

Daddy’s drives may have reflected his restlessness. The same restlessness that motivated him to fly airplanes, even to experiment one summer with a glider at Lee’s Airfield. (Gliders are far more dangerous than small aircraft and Daddy may have had some close calls with this glider, about which my brother and I would not have been told.) Though Daddy did not drive slowly past houses and name to us their inhabitants and hint to us of the mysteries of lives within, yet Daddy’s drives into Niagara County were more interesting than Mommy’s drives in Erie County, as they were farther-ranging, and fraught with the kind of urgency my father brought to most things.

Daddy liked to follow the Erie Barge Canal westward in the direction of the beautiful turbulent Niagara River or eastward into hilly Orleans County, in the direction of Brockport and Rochester; he liked to drop in on a small airfield in Newfane, where he had friends; he liked to drop in at the Big Tree Inn near Newfane, or the Inn at Olcott Beach on Lake Ontario; there was the excitement of the Niagara County Fair at the Fairgrounds, and the excitement of volunteer firemen’s picnics scattered through the county where food and drinks—especially beer—were served. Daddy’s drives were not without direction like Mommy’s but intended to bring him to places where, when he approached, voices lifted happily—“Fred! Jesus, here’s Fred Oates.”

In such places there were jukeboxes. Clouded mirrors behind the bar where men who resembled my father turned to welcome him. Pervading smells of beer, cigarette smoke. Plastic ashtrays filled with ashes and butts. Small bowls in which greasy fragments of potato chips remained. If such places were on the vast, wind-lashed lake, there was a sandy beach littered with broken shells. There were picnic areas with tables, benches. Summertime smell of wet sand, wet bathing suits and towels. Burnt charcoal, grilling hamburgers, hot dogs and mustard and ketchup. Broken rinds of watermelon on the ground, corncobs buzzing with flies. Discarded Coke bottles, beer bottles. Music from car radios.

If summer, and if near Lake Ontario, there was always a chance of lightning and thunderstorms. You started off in Millersport on a sunny blue-skied summer day, you ended at Lake Ontario in pelting rain beneath a boiling-black sky in autumnal chill. Even when we had plenty of time to return home, Daddy tended to ignore our pleas and continue driving. Or, if we were already at Lake Ontario, and the sky began to darken ominously, Daddy was likely to delay leaving until the last possible moment.

There came flashes of heat lightning, soundless. Then actual lightning, thunder. Deafening thunder like cymbals crashing. We were chastened waiting for the storm to pass beneath the overhangs of strangers’ roofs, beneath tall windswept trees.

At the Big Tree Inn on a promontory above the lake there was indeed an enormous tree—probably an elm tree. The novelty of the “big tree” was that it had been many times struck by lightning. My mother feared lightning, as her older sister Elsie (my “Aunt Elsie” who lived in Lockport) had in fact been injured when lightning struck a doorway in which she was standing: Elsie’s face, throat, and arm were riddled with slivers from the shattered doorframe; but my mother could not prevail against my father who thought a thunderstorm was an occasion for rejoicing and not cowering indoors.

My mother was not an assertive person. Especially she was not assertive with my father. Mommy might suggest turning back to avoid a storm but she could not insist, and if she had, our father would have ignored her; if she’d insisted more adamantly, our father would have defied her.

Once, not at the Big Tree Inn but at a place called Koch’s Paradise Grove, by chance on my way to a women’s restroom adjacent to the bar, amid a barrage of loud music, a din of voices, laughter, I came across a sight that was shocking to me, and that I have never forgotten: my father speaking with another man, a man of about his age, a stranger whom I was sure I’d never seen before, and they were standing close together, faces flushed and voices raised in anger, and the frightening thought came to me—They are going to fight, they are going to hurt each other; but in the next instant my father turned, and saw me, and the expression on his face altered, and the moment passed.

A child is very frightened—viscerally, emotionally—by the raised voices of adults. Even when anger isn’t involved but rather excitement, hilarity.

I might have registered—They have been drinking. But Daddy is not drunk!

It was not unknown, that men became drunk. But that was very different from being classified as a drunk.

So often it seemed to happen in my life as a child and a young girl, such arrested and abbreviated moments—the scene that is interrupted by the girl blundering into it. If there were words exchanged the intrusion of the girl silenced these words and so it is not words that remain but the sound of a voice or voices, uplifted in anger or in hilarity, essentially indecipherable. It is the child’s experience to blunder into scenes between adults and to become a witness to something inexplicable to her though it is (probably) a quite ordinary episode in what are not extraordinary lives after all; it remains that the child or young adolescent will make of these broken-off and mysterious fragments some sort of coherent narrative. What is fleeting and transient in time, no doubt soon forgotten by the adults, or rendered inconsequential in their lives, may burrow deep into the child-witness’s soul, whatever is meant by “soul” that is not fleeting and transitory but somehow permanent, and inextricable. And so, decades later I am still seeing my father and the unknown, unnamed man, a man who resembled my father, and both of them flush-faced and prepared to fight; I am remembering how my mother’s father died, in a tavern fight in Black Rock in 1917, though long before I was born; I am remembering a casual remark of my father’s—A man never backs down from a fight. You just can’t.

And there were other occasions, like this. Like the Sunday drives, beyond estimation. A child sees her father at a little distance, a figure among other figures; a man among men; a child is baffled and thrilled by her father in precisely those ways in which the father eludes the child. It is as if my father had said to me—You will not ever know me, but it is allowed that you can love me.

The mother is the known, or so the child imagines. (This would turn out to be not exactly true, or not true in the fullest degree, but it was not the case that my mother was inaccessible to me emotionally, as often, in those years, my father was.) But the father is the lesser-known, the more obvious figure of romance.

How many times returning late from Sunday drives into the countryside beyond Lockport, in Niagara County; a nighttime drive back to Lockport and up the long steep glacier hill to the wide bridge over the Erie Canal at the junction of Main Street and Transit Street; and so onto Transit Road (NY Route 78) and another long, steep glacier hill and our house seven miles away in the countryside just across the Tonawanda Creek. Often, my brother and I would drift off to sleep in the backseat of the car. Often, it seemed to be raining. We would hear the slap of windshield wipers, and my parents’ lowered voices in the front seat. Headlights of oncoming cars sweeping into the back of our car, across the ceiling and gone . . .

On a map of the region—(I would not examine a detailed map of Erie and Niagara counties until 2014 while composing this memoir)—the space of our Sunday drives is compressed like something in a children’s storybook. Lake Ontario, that had seemed so romantically far from our home, is fewer than twenty miles away, to the north; Niagara Falls is only twenty-five miles away, to the west. The landscape of my childhood that had seemed so vast, so fraught with mysteries, could be contained within something like a thirty-mile radius.

Sunday drives! You’d think they would continue forever but nothing continues forever. Like gas selling for twenty-eight cents a gallon, that’s gone forever.




FRED’S SIGNS (#ulink_a80832de-559e-50ed-9c1e-43e1ae2ee121)


“DADDY! CAN I TRY?”

And your father will hand you one of his smaller brushes, its thick-feathery tip dipped in red paint, and a piece of scrap plywood, and on the plywood you will try conscientiously to “letter” as your father lettered—precisely and unhesitatingly, with deft twists of his wrist. But in your inexpert hand the paintbrush wavers, and the lettering is wobbly—childish. The bright red flourish of Daddy’s letters, the subtle curls and tucks of his brushstrokes, will be impossible for you to imitate at any age.

This evening after supper in a season when the sky is still light. When you have left your room upstairs in the farmhouse and crossed to your father’s sign shop in the old hay barn—not a “shop” but just a corner of the barn that has been converted to a two-vehicle garage with a sliding overhead metal door. The shop isn’t heated of course. Your father seems virtually immune to cold (never wears a hat even in winter when icy winds lower the temperature to below zero, often doesn’t wear an overcoat) though he has to briskly rub his hands sometimes when he’s painting signs. When he isn’t working at Harrison Radiator in Lockport, forty-hour weeks plus “time-and-a-half” on Saturdays, Fred Oates is a freelance sign painter whose distinctive style is immediately recognizable in the Lockport/Getzville/East Amherst area, particularly along the seven-mile stretch of rural Transit Road from Lockport to Millersport.

It is fascinating to you, to observe your father preparing his signs. Some are so large they have to be propped up on a bench against a wall, smooth rectangular surfaces on which he has laid two coats of shiny white paint. Then, bars straight-penciled with a yardstick, between which he will inscribe his flawless letters:

GARLOCK’S FAMILY RESTAURANT

5 Miles

EIMER ICE

We Deliver

FULLENWEIDER DAIRY

KOHL’S FARM PRODUCE

2 Miles

CLOVERLEAF INN

He’d begun as a sign painter for the Palace Theater in Lockport, when silent movies were shown there. In fact, he’d begun as an usher at the Palace, and a Wurlitzer player. (Silent movies were not “silent” of course but required live music initially.) How, at age fourteen, had Fred Oates been hired for such responsibilities? Soon he was working at the Palace and painting signs for local businesses—“I don’t remember how I got started. Just one thing led to another.”

The lives of our parents, grandparents, ancestors—Just one thing led to another.

Vertiginous abyss between then and now.

After the Palace, Fred Oates went to work in the machine shop at Harrison’s, a short block or two from the Palace Theater on Main Street, Lockport. There he would work for the next forty years until retiring at sixty-five, all the while painting signs in his spare time, to amplify his income.

Difficult not to feel unworthy of such parents, who’d come of age as young adults in the Great Depression. Their lives were work. Their lives were deprivation. Their lives have led to you.

As he paints, Daddy hums. He has never complained of the circumstances in his life for possibly it has not occurred to him that there might be legitimate grounds for complaint. Work has been much of his life, and in this, his life is hardly uncommon for its time and place. Painting signs is work of a kind but it is also pleasurable, like playing the organ at the country church or, when he’d been a boy, playing the piano at the Palace Theater. Work to do is not, as some might think, a negative but rather a strong positive for work to do means purpose, and the pleasure of having completed something. In this case, something for which Fred Oates will be paid.

You must be quiet when Daddy is wielding the paintbrush, and you must be still. A restless child isn’t wanted here in Daddy’s “sign shop.” You are fascinated by your father’s utter concentration as he paints. You can see that there is a distinct pleasure in precisely shaping the subtly curving letters and you will absorb this pleasure in precision, in “lettering,” that might translate into a pleasure in “writing”—for a writer is after all someone who writes words in succession, and words are shaped out of letters.

In the sign shop there is a strong smell of paints, turpentine. And a smell of damp earth—(the barn’s floor is hard-packed dirt). On Daddy’s work bench are paintbrushes of varying sizes, and all kept in good condition. For Daddy can’t afford to use brushes carelessly; each brush is valuable. There is no excitement quite like taking a camel’s-hair brush from your father’s fingers and dipping it into paint to “letter” on a piece of plywood—-Joyce Carol Oates.

Is it a magical name, that Daddy and Mommy have given you? That has often seemed a gift to you, out of the magnanimity of their love.

“Can I try?”—not once but many times.

As long as you can remember as a girl, the landscape within an approximate fifteen-mile radius has always contained your father’s signs. Mommy will point as we drive past—“See? That’s Daddy’s new sign.” In a vehicle with others, someone might say—“See? That’s one of Fred’s signs.” To a neutral eye these signs are of no special distinction. One would not even know that they are hand-painted and not rather manufactured in some way. They are mere signs, distractions that interrupt the mostly rural landscape of Transit Road. Yet, to you, the sign-painter’s daughter, these signs are beautiful. There is something bold and dramatic about a hand-painted sign nailed to a tree. On the side of a barn. You can pick out Fred Oates’s signs anywhere—the curve of the S’s and O’s that suggest almost human figures. The way Daddy crosses his T’s. Once you asked your father, “Why is there a dot over the i?” and your father gave this childish question some thought before saying, “Maybe because without the dot the i would look too small, like something was left out.”

For many years after he’d ceased to paint them Fred Oates’s signs remained on Transit Road. Then, one by one, they were removed, or replaced, or faded into the oblivion of harsh weather and time. And now, I have not driven along Transit Road in years in fear and dread of what I will not see.




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