A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

showed up again.
    Inside, the teacher was ringing the bell. It was a loose, rusty bell the teacher shook angrily by hand.
    They ran back in. Clara's head had begun to ache. She sat at her desk and picked up her book and looked again at the white house and the man who was a father but who did not look like her own father or any father she knew, and kept looking at it as if trying to figure it out, until the teacher told her to put it away and do her writing. Penmanship. Clara felt heavy and hot and sad, imagining already school over in the afternoon and the way she would have to run to get away from the stones and mud balls. She and Ned wouldboth have to run, cutting across muddy fields, with the boys laughing behind them.… “White trash!” They were white trash, everybody knew that, and what it meant was that people were going to throw stones: you had to get hit sooner or later.

5
    New Jersey:
tomato season. They came up together in a rickety old school bus. Carleton sat with Nancy, and across the aisle Clara sat with Rodwell and the baby, Roosevelt, on her lap. The bus was noisy and everyone was eating or smoking; Carleton took a bottle out of a canvas bag on the floor now and then, and he and Nancy drank from it.
    “I never been this far north before,” Nancy said.
    “Well, I been here before,” said Carleton.
    His voice was flatter than it used to be; sometimes it surprised him. When Nancy acted like a young girl and made her eyes get big, he wanted to grab the back of her neck and shake her. He knew she was pretending and he hated people who pretended anything.
    “You been everywhere, the whole world over. I never knew anybody like you,” she said.
    In the other seat Clara was holding Rodwell and Roosevelt apart. Rodwell must have been teasing the baby. “She's a real cute kid,” Nancy always said of Clara. “I never seen any kid nice like her, her age.” Clara was nice because she made supper if Nancy didn't feel up to it: she could make macaroni with melted cheese, and hot dogs fried in the pan, and rice with tomatoes and chopped field corn. She could sweep out the single room they'd be living in, place after place, and if she was fearful of Nancy she gave no sign. “She's done real well considerin her ma,” Nancy said.
    “Her mother taught her a lot,” Carleton said sharply.
    He stared out the window. In patches life came to him now. More and more in tattered patches like clouds—every time you looked, clouds were different-shaped, some of them weird and beautiful to knock your eye out, laced with sunlight like veins, but all of them swift-changing, forgettable. Christ, it was getting hardto stay sober: to want to stay sober.
Carleton! Help me.
Pearl had called for him like a woman waking from a dream but too late.
    Nancy: a pretty oily-faced girl with a stale, sweet odor that Carleton liked all right, made him feel jumpy and sexy and almost-young, but shit she chattered all the time, wore a man out. In a group she was her best: when everyone was drinking, she could make them all laugh and men liked her, and Carleton felt a thrill of possession he hadn't felt in years, since Pearl had begun letting herself go.
    When a woman does, that's the end. Like letting a garden go to weeds. Overnight it happens. Till you can't see what there had ever been in the garden to make it special, choked with weeds.
    Carleton leaned his head against the window, that was cloudy with a light film of grease from where somebody else had been leaning his head. Outside there was nothing: countryside. Farmland, scrubby woods, hills in the distance. Carleton imagined a horse thundering along outside, keeping pace with the bus but oblivious of it. A high-stepping Kentucky Thoroughbred. The kind you never saw up close, only in pictures. A white star on his forehead, a long streaming shiny-black tail. Three white stockings, and the rest purely black. Carleton smiled feeling the horse's muscles plunge and jerk, admiring the ease of