Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

do? 1) Hit your mother 2) Hit your father 3) Burn down your house 4) Eat a worm”
    And: “If you came upon two cows mating, which would you do? 1) Hide your eyes 2) Take a picture 3) Call your friends to look 4) Chase the cows away”
    Ah, old familiar questions! I'd taken this part of the exam before, many times, and though I never knew what the answers might be there was a kind of comfort in recognizing the questions. And while I did this (as I was to learn) Nada was treated to an excellent luncheon by Dean Nash and his wife, a tall, husky, athletic person, the well-preserved golfer type who always came, in various forms, to my parents' social events. And innocently treated by the dean, yes. My fears turned out to be crazy. Nada was to declare to Father that evening, “They're both such wonderful people!” with the special glittering look that meant They had money and charm and taste and education, They (whoever they were) were to be added to the catch if it killed Nada, and Father had better help her if he wanted peace.
    But that was to take place at dinner, and I knew nothing of her happy, joyful, innocent luncheon, in an English Tudor home with pegged floors and two grand pianos and two Turkish rugs, having the usual flattering, mutually assuaging, affirmative conversation such people have. I was still taking my examination and I felt as if I were trying to fly with wings soaked in sweat, feathers torn and ragged, falling out, and on my shoulders Nada rode with triumphant, impatient enthusiasm, her high heels spurs in my ribs—me, the child, the shabby angel pumping his wings furiously and weeping with shame; Nada, the mother, digging in her heels and cursing me on. I kept strugglingup into the sky, my eyes bloodshot and my heart just ordinarily shot, waiting for the end …
    I threw up what remained of that breakfast between question nine and question ten of “Conceptional Coordination Skills Testing” but kept on bravely, trying to grind the mess away to nothing beneath my feet before Farrel noticed. The smell was bad but I was writing too fast, reading and gasping too fast, to move to another desk. Onward, onward! My blood vessels were singing in a chorus, like aged radiator pipes. I ground my heels into the floor in a kind of rhythm: in comes a breath, in comes a question, and around in a counterclockwise motion go my anxious feet; out goes a ragged breath, down goes a fast-scrawled answer, and back in a clockwise motion go my feet. In a while the vomit was gone, worn away or just plain evaporated, though there was an oval stain down there that keen-eyed Farrel might notice, and on I went to the last three pages, the last two pages, finally the last page, until I came upon a question dealing with the speculative coordination of conceptions: “X is related by blood to C, but C'is a relative by law. The relationship of X to the social unit MDJ is approximately that of the relationship of C to C' though the MDJ unit is a temporary crystallization. If X …” My mind bulged and nearly burst at this, seized control of itself again and read the question over, and over, until nothing at all was coming through and I began to weep, miserable failure that I was. I lowered my head to the desk and wept. My tears burst out onto the pamphlet, and everything would have been lost, drowned and smudged away by my incontinence, if Farrel hadn't come in. He walked softly, on ripple-soled shoes, and I could sense the awful embarrassment in the air before I even knew he was staring at me.
    “Are you finished?” he asked.
    * Let me question all that convincing crap and say—bravely, blurtingly!—that she might possibly have married him because she loved him. What then?

12
    And did I get into Johns Behemoth? Yes indeed, as you already know. And did I get kicked out again? Yes, sad to tell. But my expulsion belongs to the merry month of May and my memoir is still, more or less, on January 20.1 want to preserve a phony but