American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates

now, Glynnis with the telephone receiver in hand, pleading with Ian not to leave the bedroom. It could be kids, she said, half sobbing, kids on dope; we could be murdered, she said, but Ian was at the bedroom door, Ian had opened the door. Call the police, he said, and lock the door after me; I refuse to hide in my own house, for Christ’s sake.
    So Glynnis locked the door after him and dialed the police emergency number; and Ian inched along the corridor until he was in a position, himself unseen, to see through the glass walls that two—or was it three?—men were standing on the doorstep, and that they had unusually strong flashlights, which they were beaming into the house. Could the men be police? Hazelton police? Their police? But why? Why at this hour? And why such furious pounding, as if they wanted to break down the door?
    As Ian would afterward recount, in his numerous telephone calls and letters of complaint, he had wanted to call out, “Who is it?”—but the words stuck in his throat. For Glynnis was in the house, and vulnerable; and he was vulnerable, God knows, an unarmed middle-aged man whose vision was poor without glasses, lithe and sometimes fairly impressive on the squash court but not, otherwise, in extraordinary physical condition: no match, in any case, for two or three able-bodied men. (And, though he could only make out their approximate shapes, the men on his doorstep certainly did appear to be able-bodied.) Though the men hammered on his door they did not identify themselves in any way.
    While Glynnis was speaking with police headquarters and being told, in a mysteriously circumlocutious manner, that the situation was “under control,” Ian watched the men in the courtyard: now prowling about, shining their flashlights rudely into the living room and into the dining room; one of them rapped on the kitchen door; then, for no apparent reason, as abruptly as they arrived, they decided to leave. They backed their car out of the driveway so carelessly, Glynnis discovered in the morning, that there were tire tread marks in the wildflower garden bordering the driveway.
    It turned out, however improbably—for Hazelton-on-Hudson is hardly the Bronx—that the intruders were police, not Hazelton police but state police, investigating, at this late and surely unnecessary hour, a “reported act of vandalism” on Pearce Drive. They would claim to have mistaken 338 Pearce for 388, where, allegedly, a sixteen-year-old boy lived who had been involved in acts of vandalism in the past. They would claim that no harassment of the McCulloughs had been intended; there was “absolutely no connection” between the episode and the McCulloughs’ involvement in a recent American Civil Liberties Union case charging police brutality against two young men. (The Thiel-Edwards case, it was called: both Glynnis and Ian had signed a petition, and Ian had helped Malcolm Oliver, an officer in the local branch of the ACLU, organize a protest hearing at the Cattaraugus County courthouse the previous spring.)
    At the time, though, the McCulloughs had been quite baffled by the incident and badly shaken. Glynnis wept in relief, in Ian’s arms, when the men left. For what, after all, weaponless, unprepared, merely the two of them—and Ian, for all his well-intentioned courage, was hardly a physically imposing man—could they have done, had the three men chosen to break in? Our house is made of glass, Glynnis thought, and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
    NOW GLYNNIS SAYS , half to herself, “Must we talk about this again? It will only upset us all.”
    They are at the dinner table, midway in the chicken ballotine; and in a general and quite animated discussion of crime, violence, false arrests, and police corruption—for Malcolm Oliver is researching an article on one or another or all of these subjects—the