Read Online Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
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room and ate until the lining of his stomach burst. Did he die in agony? I don't like to think of that. I like to think of that supreme moment when he broke through the slippery, stubborn wall of his own stomach and entered eternity at once—I don't like to think of lesser details. He did it, Nada said, to rob his family of dignity and to make fun of the way they gorged themselves. They were such gluttons—she laughed—and they had to move away from that city out of shame, though they did not stop being gluttons as far as she knew. Behind all her mysterious, melodramatic contempt she was proud of that family of hers.
The anecdote always inspired in those who heard it, and in me, astrange jealousy along with our natural admiration. I suspect we are all very suspicious and jealous of those who commit suicide, anxious to prove that it was “cowardly” or “painless,” we could do better, indeed we will do better, wait and see.
10
And so we came to Fernwood, the town of my disintegration. There I bade farewell to myself as a child. Should I bother to describe Fern-wood, or can you imagine it? Fernwood and Brookfield and Cedar Grove and Charlotte Pointe are always the suburbs farthest out, but don't confuse yourself by thinking they are the newest. No, they are the oldest. They are the “country,” where the country houses of the past had been built for the wealthy of the city many horse-drawn miles away. Now, of course, in between these suburbs and the city are those absurd new towns and villages, row after row of clean, respectable houses and maze after maze of buff-brick housing developments, all overpriced and treeless, the slums of tomorrow. The hell with them. The “country” was where Father always took us, sure in his instincts and surer still in his bank account, for nothing more was demanded of one than money in this world. There was a jolly camaraderie because of this fact. Fine. Great. Fernwood had been the site of these old country estates, and enormous estates they had been too; it would make your heart swell to the danger point to see one of them. A few were left, but most of the land had been divided up into, say, three-acre plots for other houses, and in the more citified part of the village plots as small as two acres. Our Fernwood house, on a winding street called Burning Bush Way, was one of these lesser homes, of course.
Imagine Fernwood like this: an odor of grass, leaves, a domesticated river (with ducks, geese, and swans provided by the village, and giant goldfish swimming gracefully), blue skies, thousands of acres of faultless green grass, not Merion Blue but the low creeping type used on golf courses, and an avalanche of trees everywhere!—and enormous stone houses, brick houses, fake Scandinavian houses, English, French, Southwest, Northeast houses, a sprinkling of “modern” architecturethat never manages to look more than nervously aggressive in this conservative environment. And mixed in with the odor of lawns being sprinkled automatically on warm spring mornings is the odor of money cash. Fresh, crisp cash. Bills you could stuff in your mouth and chew away at. My mouth is watering at the thought of that tart, fine blue-green ink, the mellow aroma of the paper!
Should I digress and tell you a strange little incomplete tale about cash? Bills? Raw money? One morning back in Brookfield, my eight-year-old self was dawdling on the way to school when I happened to see one of Nada's friends drive up. I could tell by the way she braked her car and slid into one of our evergreens that she was distracted, and when she jumped out of the car she left the door swinging ponderously. So I followed her quietly back to our house. She burst in the back door without knocking, into the kitchen, and cried, “Natashya! Natashya!” I peeked in through a window, inclining my ear to the screen. The gauzy kitchen curtain hid me perfectly. Nada came in, and the woman said, before my mother had a chance to
The anecdote always inspired in those who heard it, and in me, astrange jealousy along with our natural admiration. I suspect we are all very suspicious and jealous of those who commit suicide, anxious to prove that it was “cowardly” or “painless,” we could do better, indeed we will do better, wait and see.
10
And so we came to Fernwood, the town of my disintegration. There I bade farewell to myself as a child. Should I bother to describe Fern-wood, or can you imagine it? Fernwood and Brookfield and Cedar Grove and Charlotte Pointe are always the suburbs farthest out, but don't confuse yourself by thinking they are the newest. No, they are the oldest. They are the “country,” where the country houses of the past had been built for the wealthy of the city many horse-drawn miles away. Now, of course, in between these suburbs and the city are those absurd new towns and villages, row after row of clean, respectable houses and maze after maze of buff-brick housing developments, all overpriced and treeless, the slums of tomorrow. The hell with them. The “country” was where Father always took us, sure in his instincts and surer still in his bank account, for nothing more was demanded of one than money in this world. There was a jolly camaraderie because of this fact. Fine. Great. Fernwood had been the site of these old country estates, and enormous estates they had been too; it would make your heart swell to the danger point to see one of them. A few were left, but most of the land had been divided up into, say, three-acre plots for other houses, and in the more citified part of the village plots as small as two acres. Our Fernwood house, on a winding street called Burning Bush Way, was one of these lesser homes, of course.
Imagine Fernwood like this: an odor of grass, leaves, a domesticated river (with ducks, geese, and swans provided by the village, and giant goldfish swimming gracefully), blue skies, thousands of acres of faultless green grass, not Merion Blue but the low creeping type used on golf courses, and an avalanche of trees everywhere!—and enormous stone houses, brick houses, fake Scandinavian houses, English, French, Southwest, Northeast houses, a sprinkling of “modern” architecturethat never manages to look more than nervously aggressive in this conservative environment. And mixed in with the odor of lawns being sprinkled automatically on warm spring mornings is the odor of money cash. Fresh, crisp cash. Bills you could stuff in your mouth and chew away at. My mouth is watering at the thought of that tart, fine blue-green ink, the mellow aroma of the paper!
Should I digress and tell you a strange little incomplete tale about cash? Bills? Raw money? One morning back in Brookfield, my eight-year-old self was dawdling on the way to school when I happened to see one of Nada's friends drive up. I could tell by the way she braked her car and slid into one of our evergreens that she was distracted, and when she jumped out of the car she left the door swinging ponderously. So I followed her quietly back to our house. She burst in the back door without knocking, into the kitchen, and cried, “Natashya! Natashya!” I peeked in through a window, inclining my ear to the screen. The gauzy kitchen curtain hid me perfectly. Nada came in, and the woman said, before my mother had a chance to
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