The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

Oates.”
    In such places there were jukeboxes. Clouded mirrors behind the bar where men who resembled my father turned to welcome him. Pervading smells of beer, cigarette smoke. Plastic ashtrays filled with ashes and butts. Small bowls in which greasy fragments of potato chips remained. If such places were on the vast, wind-lashed lake,there was a sandy beach littered with broken shells. There were picnic areas with tables, benches. Summertime smell of wet sand, wet bathing suits and towels. Burnt charcoal, grilling hamburgers, hot dogs and mustard and ketchup. Broken rinds of watermelon on the ground, corncobs buzzing with flies. Discarded Coke bottles, beer bottles. Music from car radios.
    If summer, and if near Lake Ontario, there was always a chance of lightning and thunderstorms. You started off in Millersport on a sunny blue-skied summer day, you ended at Lake Ontario in pelting rain beneath a boiling-black sky in autumnal chill. Even when we had plenty of time to return home, Daddy tended to ignore our pleas and continue driving. Or, if we were already at Lake Ontario, and the sky began to darken ominously, Daddy was likely to delay leaving until the last possible moment.
    There came flashes of heat lightning, soundless. Then actual lightning, thunder. Deafening thunder like cymbals crashing. We were chastened waiting for the storm to pass beneath the overhangs of strangers’ roofs, beneath tall windswept trees.
    At the Big Tree Inn on a promontory above the lake there was indeed an enormous tree—probably an elm tree. The novelty of the “big tree” was that it had been many times struck by lightning. My mother feared lightning, as her older sister Elsie (my “Aunt Elsie” who lived in Lockport) had in fact been injured when lightning struck a doorway in which she was standing: Elsie’s face, throat, and arm were riddled with slivers from the shattered doorframe; but my mother could not prevail against my father who thought a thunderstorm was an occasion for rejoicing and not cowering indoors.
    My mother was not an assertive person. Especially she was not assertive with my father. Mommy might suggest turning back to avoid a storm but she could not insist, and if she had, our fatherwould have ignored her; if she’d insisted more adamantly, our father would have defied her.
    Once, not at the Big Tree Inn but at a place called Koch’s Paradise Grove, by chance on my way to a women’s restroom adjacent to the bar, amid a barrage of loud music, a din of voices, laughter, I came across a sight that was shocking to me, and that I have never forgotten: my father speaking with another man, a man of about his age, a stranger whom I was sure I’d never seen before, and they were standing close together, faces flushed and voices raised in anger, and the frightening thought came to me— They are going to fight, they are going to hurt each other; but in the next instant my father turned, and saw me, and the expression on his face altered, and the moment passed.
    A child is very frightened—viscerally, emotionally—by the raised voices of adults. Even when anger isn’t involved but rather excitement, hilarity.
    I might have registered— They have been drinking. But Daddy is not drunk!
    It was not unknown, that men became drunk . But that was very different from being classified as a drunk.
    So often it seemed to happen in my life as a child and a young girl, such arrested and abbreviated moments—the scene that is interrupted by the girl blundering into it. If there were words exchanged the intrusion of the girl silenced these words and so it is not words that remain but the sound of a voice or voices, uplifted in anger or in hilarity, essentially indecipherable. It is the child’s experience to blunder into scenes between adults and to become a witness to something inexplicable to her though it is (probably) a quite ordinary episode in what are not