Read Online Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A

contemplate Jesse with their pitying eyes and seem reluctant to let go of him. He yanks on his boots, noticing that they are beginning to wear out above the heel, where he has kicked them against the porch steps to get them off. Too bad. The hell with it. He puts on his mittens, which his mother had knitted last year, runs feverishly to the door, his boots flopping about him. No time to fasten them. He doesn’t care, he only wants to get out of that school, as if he senses he is finished with it.
    Cold driving snow, no longer hail; it strikes against his warm face like a blow. A command. Leaving the high school, he senses himself floating, free, abandoned, strangely adult. He runs the several blocks to Harder’s store, where a truck is already parked and Jimmy, a boy of sixteen who has quit school, is helping unload. Jesse runs up to him. “I got out of school early,” he says breathlessly. “You want me to help?”
    Jimmy works with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He stares at Jesse as if there is something odd about Jesse’s face.
    “Sure. Go tell him you’re here.”
    So he begins work early, not certain of the exact time. Work. He will work hard. He has been working at Harder’s three days a week after school since September, and he is proud of being able to work as hard and as long as Jimmy. They are unloading cases of tinned goods. Case after case … his arms ache in their sockets, his shoulders ache with a sharp, sweet sensation … as long as he works he does not have to think, his mind is too pressed upon by the heavy cases, too burdened. Snow flies against his face and numbs it. Good. The sensation is good. He needs the empty white cold of the snow to heal his face.
    Inside, they work a little more slowly, stacking the shelves. Perhaps they work slower because their hands feel swollen with the relative heat—the fingers bulky and clumsy. Jesse has the idea that someone is watching him. But when he looks around he sees no one special, just a woman shopper at the end of the aisle. Where is Mr. Harder? Up front at the cash register. Jesse drops a can on the floor and it rolls down against Jimmy’s feet. Jimmy kicks it back toward him.
    “Hey, you sick or something? You look sick,” Jimmy says.
    He is a short, squat, muscular boy with a ruddy face.
    “I’m all right,” Jesse says.
    “Yeah, you look like hell.”
    Jesse finds himself staring at a can; its label has peeled off. Just a blank—all surface—a mystery. It has come out of a case of canned corn, so probably it’s corn, but still he stares at it, turning it slowly. Jimmy reaches over and grabs it away from him and puts it on the shelf.
    At three o’clock Jesse is finished with this chore; now he is sweeping the floor at the back. The broom is very big, a man’s broom, not like the small frayed broom his mother uses at home. With this he can stride across the floor and push dirt and papers ahead of him in massive strokes. He is working fast, nervously. From time to time a prickling at the back of his head makes him think someone is watching him, but he does not turn around. Women are shopping in the store, their children are running around, but no one is watching him. He keeps seeing more dirt, loose dirt. It has collected in corners, in the aisles beneath the counters, in places that are difficult to get at. A cousin of his mother’s comes in—a heavy, beet-faced woman who nods briefly at him. Unfriendly, that side of the family. There was the argument over money, the choosing of sides between Jesse’s father and Grandpa Vogel when the motorcycle race turned into a fistfight, and other things, other squabbles. Anyway, his mother is not friendly with her relatives. Too many of them, she says; it’s like seeing yourself come around every corner.
    He turns suddenly and there is his father, watching him.
    They both start, as if unprepared for this. His father is standing in the aisle, between shelves of cans, his fists stuck in