The Best American Essays 2016 (32 page)

I read the police and autopsy reports repeatedly in an effort to understand the literal details of that last evening, but none of that really matters. What does is that all of the history that I’d managed to come to terms with, the years of abuse that I’d crafted into stories and fables, came boiling back to the surface. Had it just been a suicide, like the one my grandfather embraced with his shotgun, I think my reaction would’ve been different. But this scenario was too reminiscent. My father once held me at gunpoint when I came home from school. A slurred rant about teaching my mother a lesson, a shotgun steadied against the kitchen table to fix its aim. Luckily, his anger morphed into a sobbing grief, and he stumbled down the hallway, gun in hand, and passed out in his bedroom. But over the years, as I abandoned my youthful angst and anger and attempted to embrace a life that actually lets strangers in with a shred of hope, I always, deep down, believed that my father knew how to toe the line between abusive and sociopathic. Yes, he had threatened the lot of us, but he had never crossed over. This time he had.

I’d only met the girl he killed once, on Christmas, just before I told my father off that final time. Like my grandfather, my father shacked up with a replacement family dynamic that mirrored the one he’d lost. The woman was a brunette like my mother—though the similarities between the two stopped there—and the children, an older daughter and younger son, were about as far apart in age as my brother and me. The only reason the son survived the rampage was that he happened to be in juvenile detention at the time.

The girlfriend was troubled, and while I hate to write anything unflattering about the dead, she was an addict. My father told us that he’d had to lock up even cough medicine in his safe because she would drink a full bottle of it in search of a cheap buzz. When I first met her, she was braless in pajamas at four in the afternoon, hair unbrushed, slurring her way through holiday tidings. The son seemed to like my brother, whom he’d met before, but wouldn’t say a word to me. Then there was the daughter. She was sweet and introverted and liked to draw—like me in so many ways that watching her draw was like looking into a mirror to my past. Overall she was glum, but she perked up when she told me about her art classes, and when I got a look at her pitiful broken pencils and used paper, I drove back to my house and bagged up charcoals, oils, acrylics, pens, pads—everything I could to make the guilt subside. Jesus, did I feel guilty. I could see in her eyes that same desperation to be saved that I’d felt my whole life, like it was a language only we spoke, and much as I wanted to help her—to grab her hand and tell her we were making a break for it, that I’d never let her suffer through those parents again—I obviously couldn’t kidnap her. As I pulled away from my father’s house that night, that sinking, guilty feeling gnawed at me so ferociously that the only way I knew how to silence it was with a twelve-pack.

I never went back to my father’s house until after the deaths, until it was a crime scene, and I suppose the physical distance helped me repress the memory of the girl that I’d identified with so much that we could’ve been the same person—we were, in some ways, the same little girl. So later, much later, when I received the phone call and knew people had been killed, part of me hoped it was she who wielded the gun and killed my father like I’d wanted to so many times, but I sensed immediately and innately, directly from my gut, that she was dead.

I went to work tending bar the day after the news. No makeup on, barely functioning, eyes puffed, but I needed the distraction. After a night of describing my father into the phone to coroners and policemen, answering questions like “Did he have any tattoos, birthmarks?” I learned that it was far easier for investigators to throw around words like
estranged
than it is to hear them. I slept in tiny fits that week, passing out for twenty minutes or so at a time, deconstructing the scene, the words, my father, all of it. Estranged. Strange.
Well, he had a gold tooth. No, I don’t remember which side.
I tried to picture him smiling. Was it the left? I couldn’t be sure. Birthmarks? I considered telling them to shave his head, that surely there’d be a small cluster of sixes under that mass of curly black hair. Estranged. Stranger.

As the oldest surviving child, I became the executrix of his affairs, and spent a week, on and off, in my father’s house, Vicks VapoRub dabbed on the divot beneath my nose to mask the smell of decomposition that permeated the carpet, walls, and air. It had taken three days for the bodies to be discovered. My brother helped at first as we went through years of back paperwork in an effort to find something, anything, that would help us legally. A will, an insurance policy, the deed to the house, the titles to the four broken-down cars in the yard. The legal affairs fell into my lap, and it became my duty to sell off his possessions in order to maximize the estate. In retrospect, someone else may have been better suited for the task. I sold his boat at a bar for $500, though it was surely worth more. TVs and audio equipment I gave to friends, and I actually kept a CD player for myself. When I found that it enjoyed making songs skip only during my favorite parts, I took it into the street and smashed it as my neighbors looked on. I also adopted his fish, the only witnesses to the crime, but of course they have no memory. I gave them gangster names and begrudgingly cared for them until, thankfully, one year later, some kind of ichthyosis infected the lot of them and they went belly-up.

Although I did find two insurance policies and the title for a Chevy Blazer in my father’s basement, the other discoveries were far worse: dirty letters and sex toys, private fantasies that no one should commit to paper just in case their children one day have to sift through them. Barrels to guns and eleven boxes of ammunition that the police didn’t take sat in the open safe, I assume because the mishmash of parts weren’t usable without the triggers and grips—though I thought it terribly irresponsible of them to leave that stuff behind. Tax returns from fifteen years earlier. Smutty, bushy, Greek porn. Almost 1,000 empty trash bags on the metal shelves. Burned-out lightbulbs. Receipts of donations to the church. Evidence of bad spelling everywhere. There was a paper I’d written for Greek school on what Easter meant to me that I could no longer translate in its entirety, though I remembered having gotten in trouble for it when I’d gushed about candy and a bunny instead of penitence and Jesus. But the numbness I’d carried with me over the course of that week turned to tears for the first time when I discovered a stained manila folder with my name on it. My father had over fifty pictures of me as a child that I’d never seen—happy, smiling photos that served as evidence of a childhood I simply didn’t and don’t remember. And while he’d always made sure that I knew that he loved my brother more than me, he had only fourteen pictures of Mike.

Before leaving my father’s house for the last time—the last time either of us would set foot indoors, anyhow—my brother and I stood in the living room, scanning the panorama of violence. Just above the couch hung the framed painting of Crete that had been in my parents’ bedroom for so many years, and our gazes seemed to stop on it at the same time.

“We should smash that piece of shit,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” Mike agreed. “Absolutely.”

He hoisted it off the wall and held it between us so that the painting faced us, the end of it resting against the floor.

“Ready?” he asked.

We each lifted a leg and stomped down. To our surprise, our feet returned with a bouncing jerk.

The painting, that embodiment of everything my father stood for, was nothing but a framed beach towel.

“What the fuck?” Mike asked, laughing. “Who frames a towel?”

I laughed too. In the moment it seemed absurdly funny, like a great practical joke from beyond the grave, so we fell into that contagious, ridiculous laughter, cackling until our stomachs cramped and tears crept down our cheeks, but simultaneously we quieted. Our business wasn’t finished.

Turn after turn we furiously stomped the cloth, our legs springing back to us repeatedly in failure, so we retaliated with a flurry of stomping, with anger and determination to drive a hole straight through that impossible, goddamned towel. Exhausted, we paused and stared at one another. Finally Mike said, “I got it,” and opened the Swiss Army knife on his key ring. He looked at me as though for approval, so I nodded quickly, and he jabbed his stubby knife clean through the towel.

“Oh, you’ve gotta try this,” he said.

And so we stood in that house, the scent of decomposing bodies still thick in the air, taking turns stabbing the beach towel my father had often pointed to when recalling tales of his home. I pierced the Minotaur’s forehead, slicing from the tip of one horn down to the center of its dark and broad torso, while Mike took to the lettering, slashing through the words Crete and Greece, splitting the Hellenic alphabet in two. Had anyone looked in the front door, I’m sure they’d have thought that our mania, our temporary fixedness on destruction and violence, was some depraved family tradition, but we passed the knife back and forth, not speaking a word, carving the faded blue fabric of the Aegean Sea into foamy white shreds until finally there was no decipherable picture left.

JOYCE CAROL OATES

The Lost Sister: An Elegy

FROM
Narrative Magazine

1.

S
HE WAS NOT
a planned birth.

She was purely coincidental, accidental. A gift.

Born on June 16, 1956. My eighteenth birthday.

“Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

We were thrilled, but we were also frightened.

Though my brother, Robin, and I had known for months that our mother was
pregnant
, somehow we had not quite wished to realize that our mother would be
having a baby
.

In the sense in which
having a baby
means a new presence in the household, an entirely new center of gravity. As if a radioactive substance had come to rest in our midst, deceptively small, even miniature, but casting off a powerful light.

At times, a blinding light.

And if light can be deafening, a deafening light.

“Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”

It was a great gift to me, who loved names. I took the responsibility very seriously.

As I was “Joyce Carol,” so it was suggested that my baby sister have two names as well.

Names passing through my brain like an incantation.

Names that were fascinating to me, in themselves. Syllables of sound like poetry.

As a young child I had imagined that a name conferred a sort of significance. Power, importance. Mystery. Sometimes when my name was spoken—in certain voices, though not all—I shivered as if my very soul had been touched. I felt that Joyce Carol was a very special name, for it sounded in my ears musical and lithesome; it did not sound heavy, harsh, dull.

I knew that my parents had named me, and that their naming of me was special to them. I think I recall that my mother had seen the name Joyce in a newspaper and had liked the name because it seemed happy-sounding. But both my parents had named me.

My father, who loved music, who played the piano by ear, who often sang, hummed, whistled to himself when he was working or around the house. You could hear Daddy in another room, singing under his breath. The name Carol to my father suggested music, song. Somehow this musical tendency in my father is bound up with my name.

Now it was my responsibility to name my baby sister.

(Did I confer with Robin? I want to think that I did.)

Favorite names were
Valerie
,
Cynthia
,
Sylvia
,
Abigail
,
Annette
,
Lynn
,
Margareta
,
Violet
,
Veronica
,
Rhoda
,
Rhea
,
Nedra
,
Charlotte
—names of girls who’d been or were classmates of mine in Lockport or in Williamsville; girls who were friends of mine, or might have been; girls I admired close up, or at a distance; girls who were clearly special, and special to me.

The writer/poet knows that names confer magic. Or fail to confer magic. The older sister of the newborn baby knew that the baby’s name would be crucial throughout her life.
She must not be named carelessly but very carefully. With love.

My high school friends were nothing short of astonished when I finally told them, as I’d been reluctant to tell them for months, that my mother was going to have a baby in June.

“But your mother is too old!” one of my friends said tactlessly.

In fact, my mother was forty-two years old. I did not want to think that this was
old
.

Having to tell others of my mother’s pregnancy made me painfully self-conscious. I felt my face burn unpleasantly as my girlfriends plied me with questions.

“When did you know?”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Isn’t it going to be strange—a baby in the family? So much younger than you?”

With girlish enthusiasm, perhaps not altogether sincere, my friends expressed the wish that there might come to be a baby in their households. In their midst I stood faintly smiling, hoping to change the subject.

Not wanting to think,
Why are you smiling? Why are you so happy on my behalf? The baby is my replacement. I will be forgotten now.

(Though in 1956, certainly forty-two was considered old for childbirth.)

When my parents told Robin and me about the baby expected in June we’d been surprised, and embarrassed. We must have been somewhat dazed, but true to our family reticence, we had not asked many questions. We’d been mildly, moderately happy about the news—I think. At least, we hadn’t been unhappy.