Invited me to her place for a dinner, two weeks before Christmas. Some friends of hers I’d met before I think, though maybe not—Junie’s teacher-friends look all alike. & talk alike. & a new faculty member at Junie’s school named LUCILLE. Another big woman with tits like hub-caps & a round smiling face & lots of “personality” like Junie. Teaches eighth grade. Handshake like a man’s.
It’s a dinner sitting at a table. Big seafood “paella” Junie made. & white wine. I arrived in the Dodge Ram a little late drinking en route, & mellowed out on ’ludes & this soft buzzing in my head like a dial tone. So I can tune out, & my face seems like I am listening. Junie & “Lucille” & the others all animated talking of politics in the state & in Washington, Clinton’s health plan & etc. & one guy, runty but talking like he’s sure of himself saying health care is the number one issue of our time, & we are not a civilized nation at present, & somebody else saying crime is the number one issue, Americans have become terrified of being victimized & are thus susceptible to dangerous right-wing paranoid politics. & from there to gun control, & abortion. & I’m O.K. drinking wine & I can see my cellar & cistern I have returned to their state before the cops came to harass me. Dinette table back in the cistern, & extension cord & 150-watt lights & the bandages, gauze etc. Ice pick, dental pick, knife, etc. & waiting for a plan to form. & excited knowing it will form, like a dream. No specimen beneath this roof. Forbidden. Except say it’s the start of vacation, or one of them is returning home for good. To India, to Zaire, to the West Indies. O.K.? & he’s all packed & his room cleared etc. & Q__ P__ CARETAKER volunteers to drive him to the airport. Not Kalamazoo but Lansing, the international airport. O.K.? & that’s cool, & kind. & as far as anybody in the house or at the University knows, he’s gone. Left the United States. & they don’t think of him anymore, he’s history. & on the way to the airport Q__ P__ gives him something to drink or eat & he falls asleep & the van is prepared again for a passenger in the rear & that’s cool. & after dark we return to 118 North Church. & it’s the middle of the night, & everybody asleep. & Q__ P__ carries his ZOMBIE down into the cellar & the door is locked behind him. & on the operating table the first procedure this time is not the transorbital lobotomy but “severing” the vocal cords. So if the ZOMBIE is O.K. or not he will at least be silent & trustworthy in that way. & I will get a diagram of the larynx or whatever it is from the biology library. & if I use a razor maybe. A light touch. You can feel them. They vibrate when you speak.
Junie & her friends are talking about religion now I guess. & one of the men says religion is tyranny, & delusion. & responsible for much of the cruelty of mankind. & Lucille all huffy & excited saying no that is not religion, that is power, political power, & religion is spiritual, & inward. & Junie agrees & she’s excited too saying the struggle of our species is between outward & political, & inward & spiritual. & maybe the upcoming millennia will be the salvation of Homo sapiens. & I’m listening & watching them. Big Sis & Lucille. & the idea comes to me: if you sliced off a female’s breasts she would then be not much different than a man, say if you sliced off a man’s cock he would not be much different than a woman. The breasts are mainly fatty—no bones? & Lucille sees me looking at her & she’s blushing a little like women do. & seeing me turning my wristband round & round sort of compulsive like I do she asks what is it?—my memento of SQUIRREL which is part of his blond-brown hair from his little pigtail & some of my own hairs braided together with leather thongs & red yarn.
So I say, “It’s an Indian thing. Chippewa. I got it at the reservation upstate.”
& Lucille says, touching it, “It’s unusual. Does it have any symbolic meaning? Is it some Chippewa custom?”
& I say, “I guess so. I don’t know.”
& Junie butts in dry & teasing, Big Sis reaching over to lay a hand on me too, “Quen is some kind of hippie, you know? Born thirty years too late.”
& Lucille is smiling saying, “His hair is too short for a hippie’s.”
& Junie says, “It didn’t used to be, though.”
57
Mom called & left a message & the answering tape screwed up & erased most of it. Asking would I come for Christmas dinner probably.
Acknowledgments
Some of the material used in Chapter 13 is taken, in abbreviated form, from Neuro-: Life on the Frontlines of Brain Surgery and Neurological Medicine by David Noonan (Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 200-202.
Sections of Part I appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker, October 1994.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
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