Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

dull father—but she isn’t, I think, frightened of him.”
    Was this so? Candace never asks Kimi about her weekends with Philip out of a sense of—propriety, you could say.
    Or dignity, indifference. Rage so incandescent, it might be mistaken for an ascetic purity.
    But mostly boredom. Candace is so bored by all that—enormous chunk of her “life”—like a clumsily carved male-likeness on Mount Rushmore—the features crude, forgettable.
    You can’t just erase me from your life. How can you imagine you can do such a thing . . .
    Easily. Once Candace makes up her mind, breaking off relations with certain people, it’s like an iron grating being yanked down, over a storefront window. And the store darkened, shut up tight.
    “She sees her father, you’d said, on alternate weekends? Does she seem happy with this arrangement?”
    “ ‘Happy’? For Christ’s sake, no one I know is ‘ happy. ’ This is the U.S.A. Are you ‘ happy ’?”
    Candace is perspiring—something she never does! Not if she can help it.
    Relenting then, before Weedle can respond, “Well—yes—frankly yes, I think Kimi is . Happy, I mean. She’s happy with her classes, her teachers—her life . . . She’s an only child—no ‘sibling’ ”—(with a fastidious little wince to signal that, in normal circumstances, Candace would never utter so tritely clinical a term)—“therefore, no ‘sibling rivalry.’ ”
    Weedle allows Candace to speak—fervently, defiantly. Hard not to concede that what she is saying mimics the speech of the mother of an adolescent who doesn’t know what the hell she is talking about—hasn’t a clue. Can’t even remember exactly what the subject is except she’s the object of an essentially hostile interrogation and not doing so well—Lee W. Weedle, Ph.D., is one of those individuals, more frequently female than male, to whom Candace Waxman is not so very impressive.
    When she escapes back home she will take another thirty-milligram lorazepam with a glass of tart red wine and maybe go to bed.
    Except: what time is it? Not yet 11:30 A.M . Too early for serious sleep.
    “And what about boys, Candace?”
    “No—no boys. Kimi doesn’t hang out with boys.”
    “She doesn’t have a boyfriend? She says not.”
    “You’ve seen Kimi. What do you think?”
    A sharp crease between Weedle’s unplucked brows signals that this is not a very nice thing for Kimi’s mother to say, however frank, candid and adult-to-adult Candace imagines she is being. Quickly Candace relents: “I’m sure that Kimi doesn’t have a boyfriend—even a candidate for a boyfriend. She’s—shy . . .”
    “And what about other boys? In her class? Or older boys, from the high school, possibly?”
    “Kimi never mentions boys. The subject hasn’t come up.”
    “You are sure, Candace?”
    “Yes, I am sure.”
    Poor Kimi! Candace is embarrassed for her.
    Grimly Weedle says: “Of course, there are boys even at Craigmore who intimidate girls—harass them sexually, threaten them. There have been—among the older students—some unfortunate incidents. And there is this new phenomenon—‘cyberbullying.’ Has Kimi ever mentioned being upset by anything online?”
    “No. She has not.”
    “It’s a strange new world, this ‘cyberspace’ world—where children can ‘friend’ and ‘unfriend’ at will. We are committed to protecting our students here at Craigmore from any kind of bullying.”
    “Committed to stamping out bullies. I like that.”
    They will bond over this—will they? Candace feels an inappropriate little stab of hope.
    “But Kimi hasn’t mentioned being harassed? Bullied? ‘Teased’?”
    “I’ve said no. ”
    But Candace is remembering—vaguely, like a photo image coming into just partial clarity—something Kimi mentioned not long ago about older boys saying gross things to the ninth grade girls, to embarrass them; pulling at their hair, their clothes; bothering them. On the school bus, this