Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

wonderful how my father’s figure melted and eased into my dreams with me, so that I was never lonely. Afterward my father revealed that when I’d been sleeping he had sketched me—in charcoal—in the mode of Edvard Munch’s “The Sick Child”—but the drawings were disappointing, he’d destroyed them.
    My father was much older than my mother. One day I would learn that my father was eighteen years older than my mother, which seemed to me such a vast span of time, there was something obscene about it. My father loved me very much, he said. Still, I saw that he’d begun to lose interest in me once my corkscrew spine had been repaired, and I was released from the hospital: my medical condition had been a problem to be solved, like one of my father’s enormous canvases or sculptures, and once such a problem was solved, his imagination detached from it.
    I could understand this, of course. I understood that, apart from my physical ailments, I could not be a very interesting subject to any adult. It was a secret plan of mine to capture the attention of both my father and my mother in my life to come. I would be something unexpected, and I would excel: as an archaeologist, an Olympic swimmer, a poet. A neurosurgeon…
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    At the Boathouse bar, my mother fell into conversation with a man with sleek oiled hair and a handsome fox face; this man ignored me, as if I did not exist. When I returned from using the restroom, I saw the fox-faced man was leaving, and my mother was slipping a folded piece of paper into her oversized handbag. The color was up in Adelina’s cheeks. She had a way of brushing her ash-blond hair from her face that reminded me of the most popular girls at my school who exuded at all times an air of urgency, expectation. “ Cherie , you are all right? You are looking pale, I think.” This was a gentle admonition. Quickly I told Adelina that I was fine. For some minutes a middle-aged couple a few feet away had been watching my mother, and whispering together, and when the woman at last approached my mother to ask if she was an actress—“Someone on TV, your face is so familiar”—I steeled myself for Adelina’s rage, but unexpectedly she laughed and said no, she’d never been an actress, but she had been a model and maybe that was where they’d seen her face, on a Vogue cover. “Not for a while, though! I’m afraid.” Nonetheless the woman was impressed and asked Adelina to sign a paper napkin for her, which Adelina did, with a gracious flourish.
    More than a half hour had passed, and we were still waiting to be seated for lunch. Adelina went to speak with the harried young hostess who told her there might be a table opening in another ten-fifteen minutes. “The wand will light up, ma’am, when your table is ready. You don’t have to check with me.” Adelina said, “No? When I see other people being seated, who came after us?” The hostess denied that this was so. Adelina indignantly returned to the bar. She ordered a second Bloody Mary and drank it thirstily. “She thinks that I’m not aware of what she’s doing,” my mother said. “But I’m very aware. I’m expected to slip her a twenty, I suppose. I hate that!” Abruptly then my mother decided that we were leaving. She paid the bar bill and pulled me outside with her; in a trash can she disposed of the plastic wand. Again she snugly linked her arm through mine. The Bloody Marys had warmed her, a pleasant yeasty-perfumy odor lifted from her body. The silver-vinyl sheath, which was a kind of tunic covering her legs to her mid-thighs, madea shivery sound as she moved. “Never let anyone insult you, darling. Verbal abuse is as vicious as physical abuse.” She paused, her mouth working as if she had more to say but dared not. In the Boathouse she’d removed her dark glasses and shoved them into her