The Lost Landscape (18 page)

In fact, I get high grades too. So go to hell.

“Not so high as Cynthia.”

Nor was this true, overall. But it was the right move, as slamming a volleyball across a net, at the level of an opponent's face, and “accidentally” into the face, can be the right move for the moment.

Soon then, Mrs. Heike intervened with a query about the progress of Bach/Schumann and the conversation swerved, like a blind bull, in another direction.

14.

A WEEK BEFORE THE
recital Cynthia told me suddenly that she'd changed her mind –“Lee Ann is going to accompany me, after all. It just seemed easier.”

I was stunned by this information.
It just seemed easier
—what did that mean?

Obviously it must mean that I wasn't playing well enough, after all our practicing. I was not a “real” musician like Cynthia and Lee Ann—I could not be trusted with Cynthia Heike's violin solo.

Yet I stood mute staring at Cynthia as if I had not entirely heard. Or if, in another moment, there would be another phrase from her, that refuted the first. Seeing the look of shock in my face (which perhaps she had not anticipated) Cynthia murmured an apology of sorts, not very convincingly; for Cynthia could not lie convincingly. An individual of pride and dignity
cannot lie.

“It just seemed easier,” Cynthia said, evasively. “Lee Ann knows the piece pretty well. She can play by ear, you know . . .”

I went away shaken. I did not hear Cynthia calling after me. We were at school, in the corridor outside our homeroom, a tunnel of slamming lockers, contorted faces. Yet soon, when I was alone, and calmer, I understood, and did not blame Cynthia. For one with my musical limitations, a “perfect” performance could only be a fluke. I could not play a composition identically each time; each time, I played differently; I could not “keep time”; I had not a sense of pitch; I could memorize notes, and repeat passages until I'd seemed to master them; essentially, I was untrainable and no amount of practice could remedy that. The fact that I'd had inferior piano teachers in Lockport (whose modest weekly fees my grandmother had paid, happily for years) could not be disguised, for fatally they had allowed me to play piano badly, as they had praised me irresponsibly, and a sharp-eared music student like Cynthia Heike or Lee Ann Krauser could detect such deficits, she had but to listen closely.

THEY WERE FRIENDS AGAIN
. Cynthia Heike, Lee Ann Krauser.

They would perform the Bach/Schumann piece beautifully at the recital. And I would wear the navy blue jumper and the white silk blouse that my grandmother had lovingly sewed for me, seated in the audience, and it would not seem evident to anyone who knew
the circumstances, even Cynthia herself, that I was disappointed to be seated not onstage at the piano, but in the audience.

Long I would ponder the Zen koan—
It just seemed easier.

15.

“WE'LL GO TO KLEINHANS
. At Christmastime.”

Yet, soon after she went away to college, Cynthia Heike ceased to behave like a friend to me.

If I wrote several letters and cards, Cynthia might be provoked into writing a letter—a lengthy, handwritten letter brimming with sardonic insights and witty observations of her sorority/fraternity classmates at the University of Rochester whom she seemed both to despise and envy. Her stationery was adorned with tiny caricature-cartoons in the borders, some of them so small I could not decipher their meaning. Often, she wrote of the “surreal” size of the Rochester campus; she complained of the “vast” lecture courses she was taking, and the “claustrophobic” science labs. If I'd asked questions of her in my letter, she rarely replied to these questions as if she had not read the letter closely but was simply writing to someone to whom she could write intimately, yet not personally.

I hate it here. I think it was a mistake to come here. I don't have any friends here. Just because Daddy got his medical degree here. My silly roommates whisper & laugh among themselves & when I come back late from the library, they roll their eyes and get very quiet. Everyone cheats! In the pre-med courses especially—the profs must know but don't give a damn or don't know how to stop it. C'est de la merde!

Vaguely we'd made plans for mutual visits to our campuses but neither of us seemed to have time. My visit to Rochester, a bus trip
of an hour from downtown Syracuse, was several times postponed, then forgotten. At Thanksgiving, when we were both back home, we spoke over the phone briefly; over the long Christmas break, when we might have seen each other, Cynthia didn't call, and when I called her I was hurt by her affected coolness—“
Who
is calling?”—as if she didn't recognize my voice. Half-accusingly Cynthia said that I didn't sound “like myself” somehow. After the new year we stopped calling and writing each other. With the childish spite born of hurt I thought—
If she does write to me, I won't write back.

From mutual friends whose parents were neighbors of the Heikes came rumors that Cynthia was having “emotional problems” away from home for the first time. Her classmate/rivals in pre-med at Rochester represented a very different sort of competition than our high school classmates; organic chemistry was a particularly challenging course in which Cynthia received the first C's of her life. Even an advanced French course was challenging, to one who'd been so fluent in Madame Henri's low-stress class. And there was the shock of Cynthia's closest friend Lee Ann Krauser, a freshman at Wells College, engaged to be married to a young law student at SUNY Buffalo Law School whom she'd met only the previous summer.

Not just why Cynthia Heike took her own life in February 1957 in her dormitory room at the University of Rochester but, for some time, how—this was part of the terrible mystery. Sleeping pills, slashed wrists, poison?—none of us knew, for the Heikes kept such information confidential. Rumors raged, but no one
knew
. This was an era when universities suppressed news of student suicides; newspapers and TV did not report such deaths unless the suicide was famous and press coverage unavoidable; obituaries were circumspect, and did not include such details. There was a private funeral for Cynthia at her church to which only family members, relatives,
and the closest family friends were invited, which did not include me. From a distance I mourned my lost friend, but I made no attempt to get in contact with her family.
It just seemed easier.

SOME TIME AFTER HER
death I would learn that Cynthia had swallowed a corrosive chemical taken from her chemistry laboratory, with the property of a powerful cleanser like
Drano.

There it is: I have typed that word at last, after fifty-seven years:
Drano.

A PREVAILING NEED TO
make money
. For never was there
enough money.

Always the fear that we would lose the farm. This was a fear no less audible for being unarticulated.

It was because the small farm in Millersport did not prosper, that my grandfather John Bush and my father Fred Oates worked in factories in Lackawanna and Lockport respectively. As John Bush died fairly young of emphysema, so my father too would be stricken by emphysema in middle age, but advanced medical treatments allowed him to live well into his mid-eighties—“Half a lung is damn better than no lung.”

Clear-minded and cheerfully stoic to the end of his life. My dear father who lived in the country in his in-laws' house initially to save money, and finally because he'd come to love the solitude of Millersport which was—indeed, is—no actual place but rather a mere intersection of Transit Road with Tonawanda Creek Road.

In Millersport, farmland surrounded by a no-man's-land of open fields and forests. And the wide creek (that is actually a small river) snaking through the countryside to join with the Erie Barge Canal and the Niagara River some miles away.

It was no idle fantasy, to fear losing your house and property. For
others whom my parents and grandparents knew had lost their land, and finally their houses; no one who'd lived through the Depression ever quite overcame the fear that everything can be lost virtually overnight and even minimal prosperity was a chimera in which one scarcely dared believe. To possess something is to be vulnerable to losing it: possession is audacity in the face of imminent loss.

It was sometime in the late 1950s when my father was inspired to invest in pigs—to start his own business “on a small scale at first.” Very likely, Fred Oates had been talked into this adventure by a friend for, being city-born, knowing little of farm life and having little aptitude or enthusiasm for it, he would not have thought of so desperate a measure by himself. Whatever our farm had once yielded by the time I was in high school its primary products were chickens, eggs, corn and Bartlett pears; we also sold apples, cherries, strawberries, cranberries, and such common vegetables as peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, in small quantities. We had never owned cows, sheep, or pigs. (Long ago, my grandfather had owned a team of horses but these had passed into oblivion by the time I was born; only their badly weathered wagon remained, abandoned at the rear of the barn.) The saga of the pigs was not a happy one. Though decades later my father would fashion it into an entertaining anecdote there was nothing amusing at the time about raising pigs to butcher and sell their meat.

Not only do pigs stink to a degree that makes the smell of chickens—droppings, wet feathers—seem quaintly “rural” but perversely, pigs are much smarter than chickens and try to resist their destinies as chickens do not; my father was no match for the sagacity of alert young pigs especially, who burrowed beneath the fence he'd built to contain them, and escaped into the countryside. Vividly I can recall my father chasing after pigs along the highway, shouting and cursing and trying to catch them by hand. (Though possibly I
never saw this but only heard it described.) Perhaps some of the pigs were never captured. As my Hungarian grandmother had learned to cannily hide wounded or dying pheasants that had fluttered onto our property, shot by hunters in the woods adjacent to our property in the fever of hunting season, so surely our neighbors hid Fred Oates's escaped pigs for their own purposes.

Yet more ironically, after the pigs were slaughtered—not by my father but by a butcher in Lockport—their meat unaccountably spoiled and could not be sold or eaten, for evidently it had been inadequately cured. Fred Oates's entire pig-project, a considerable expenditure of money, time, and spirit was a loss.

Years later my father would transform this humiliating episode in his life into a bittersweet/funny anecdote like a scene in a comic movie, to make people laugh. “Better laugh than cry”—this came to be Fred Oates's belief.

And it was so: we never saw Daddy cry.

ON A FARM EVERYONE
works. Farmwork is seasonal and accelerates to a fever pitch in the autumn, at
harvesttime.

Harvesttime
is the time of reaping what you have sown. Or, it is the tragic time when what you have sown fails to be reaped for it has atrophied, or died. Perversely, as if to spite the very persons who labored so hard to bring what has been sown to fruition, it has
failed to thrive.

Through the summer and well into September we had a small roadside stand fronting Transit Road. Mostly it was Bartlett pears we sold, in season. I helped my mother at the stand, for my father had no interest or perhaps no wish to present himself as a merchant hoping to sell his produce to wayward and unpredictable customers among whom might be people whom we knew; it was Daddy's more difficult,
far more frustrating and occasionally dangerous task to pick the pears, climbing a ladder to reach into the higher branches of the trees.

Bartlett pears! On the trees, the pears were greeny-hard as rocks for weeks as if reluctant to ripen; then, overnight, the pears were “ripe”—very soon “over-ripe”—fallen to the ground, buzzing with flies and bees. Apples are hardy and resistant to rotting, apples can be stored in a cool place for months, but pears seem no sooner pale yellow than they are bruised and softening, of no worth. Why did my grandfather John Bush buy a farm with a pear orchard, and not an apple orchard? We had only a few (McIntosh) apple trees, and still fewer cherry trees, both sweet and sour. But rows upon rows of Bartlett trees stretching to the very rear of the property.

It is tempting to think that my grandfather John Bush didn't know that pears are more difficult to harvest than apples. Before moving to the “north country” from Black Rock, in Buffalo, he'd had no experience as a farmer; so far as we knew he'd had little experience as a farmer in Hungary. But perhaps Grandpa thought that his experience with pears would be exceptional.

In spring, the fruit orchard was ablaze with blossoms. Pearly-white pear blossoms, pale pink and white apple blossoms, rosier pink cherry blossoms. And out of these blossoms, fruits were to form, to be one day harvested; out of the luminous beauty of the field of blossoms, the practical matter of
pears, apples, cherries
to be translated into cash.

Often I helped my father pick pears. I could climb the stepladder while Daddy climbed the taller ladder. The rough, vertically-striated bark of a pear tree is permanently imprinted in my memory: its texture is harsh, not pleasant to touch with your fingertips, very different from the smooth skin-like bark of apple trees. There is not much romance in fruit-picking for to reach continually overhead is to soon feel dazed, dizzy; and if you are scouring the ground for fallen
fruit that isn't obviously bruised, and so disqualified to be sold at the roadside, you are continually shrinking back from yellow jackets and other buzzing insects. How many bee stings! Filling bushel baskets, one after another. Your right hand begins to ache, then to cramp. Your right shoulder aches. In the heat of September, swarms of gnats, mosquitoes. Harvests of small young mosquitoes biting arms, legs, face.

As children, perversely we would count our mosquito bites. Six, eight, a dozen? But when you are picking pears, the itchy swellings of mosquito bites are not a childish diversion.

Often I've wondered if pear trees, for all their beauty, are among the least resilient of trees, or whether it was just our pear trees that seemed to rot easily, to be infested with bees or swarming ants; to fall apart, crumple from within, as soon as ladders were set against their trunks. At least, pear trees are among the shorter fruit-bearing trees; it is less difficult to pick pears than to pick apples.

Still I am haunted by these beautiful and mysteriously elegiac lines of Robert Frost's “After Apple-Picking”—

At the roadside stand I would sit reading. Scarcely aware of my surroundings which is the consolation of reading.

Comic books—
Tales from the Crypt, Superman, Classics Illustrated (Ivanhoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, The Call of the Wild, Frankenstein), Mad Magazine.

Or, books from the Lockport Public Library with their crisp plastic covers—Ellery Queen, H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov. Bram Stoker's
Dracula
. Jonathan Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
. Illustrated editions of
Iliad, Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Oliver Twist
and
David Copperfield. Great Dialogues of Plato.

(Yes, it is bizarre: I was reading, trying to read, Plato as a young girl. More bizarre yet, I was writing my own “Platonic dialogues”—though perhaps Socratic irony was lost on me.)

(Often the librarians at the Lockport library would look at me doubtfully. Who is this girl? Is she really reading these books?
Trying
to read these books? Who is giving her such outsized ideas? But I'd been brought to the library by my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern whom the librarians knew as a loyal patron with an impassioned love of books; since my grandmother had arranged for me to have my first library card there, the librarians may have felt kindly disposed toward me.)

Difficult to concentrate on any kind of reading in such circumstances! At a roadside stand you are distracted by vehicles approaching on the highway, and passing; for the majority of the vehicles pass by without slowing. Only now and then a vehicle will slow, and park at the roadside, and a
customer
will emerge, usually a woman.

“Hello!”

“Hello . . .”

“Is it—Joyce?”

A hopeful smile. Or is it a craven smile. When you are
selling
, you are
smiling.

Quart baskets, bushel baskets of pears. How much did my parents charge for a bushel basket of pears, I have no idea; surely not much; their prices had to be competitive with commercial vendors, if not lower. If you were a small-time farmer you could pitch your goods so low that you made virtually no profit and worked for nothing.
(All of the farms in our vicinity employed “child labor”—the farm owners' children. Hours of such employment are not negotiable.) Yet I remember the sting of embarrassment when a potential customer, frowning over our pears, or strawberries, or tomatoes, deftly turning back the tight leaves of our sweet corn to examine the kernels, decided that our produce wasn't priced low enough, or wasn't good enough in some way, returned to her car and drove off.

Sitting at a roadside, vulnerable as an exposed heart, you are liable to such rejections. As if, as a writer, you were obliged to sell your books in a nightmare of a public place, smiling until your face ached, until there were no more smiles remaining.

MAKE MONEY! START YOUR
Own Business!
Mail-order catalogues flooded our rural mailbox bearing the magical name
Joyce Oates
. For in a fever of inspiration I filled out and mailed coupons from Sunday supplements, magazines and comic books, cereal boxes. From the age of twelve onward I was a natural target for such ploys though wanting to think of myself—and thinking of myself, still—as smart, skeptical, suspicious, not-naïve like others my age and even older. My father quoted P. T. Barnum—
There's a sucker born every minute
. Neither my father nor I would have supposed that this insight might apply to anyone in the Oates family.

Like an actor bizarrely miscast for her role I bicycled from house to house for hours gamely trying to sell “beauty products” to neighbors who had little use for beauty, and especially for cosmetic beauty; the leading product was Noxzema, a night cream in a heavy midnight-blue jar with a powerful medicinal odor. (Unsold, these jars remained in the household for years.) For a season I dared to take orders for “costume jewelry” which I made myself with excruciating slowness, from a mail-order kit containing rhinestones,
faux
pearls,
rubies, sapphires, tweezers and a tube of glue; for another season I dared to take orders for “artificial flowers”—bright red tulips, bright yellow daffodils, “waxed” lilies ingeniously fashioned from crepe paper and arranged in artistic bouquets. (My mother's female relatives were my most faithful customers, after my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern who bought everything I made as well as extra items as gifts for friends.) In the interstices of these enterprises I sold magazine subscriptions (
Reader's Digest, Pen Pal, Argosy, Collier's, Ladies' Home Journal
); somehow, I acquired a jigsaw and was soon making what were called “lawn ornaments” out of plywood—sheep, cows, flamingos, windmills, dwarves and elves, bonneted girls with sprinkling pails—even, following a popular design, a chocolate-skinned boy eating a very pink slice of watermelon. (These “lawn ornaments” were laid on sheets of newspaper in the grass so that when I painted them, I did not deface any surface indoors or out.) The gift (from my grandmother Blanche) of a “wood-burning” kit allowed me to engrave letters and designs into blocks of wood suitable (as it was advertised) for displaying atop a fireplace mantel. (I can smell still the pungent odor of burning wood as I can feel still that sense of panicked loss, when the wood-burner realizes that she has burnt too deeply or too ineptly, and that a block of wood has been ruined, and will be suitable only for “displaying” at home.) In 4-H crafts club girls made aprons, pot holders, kitchen towels; we braided plastic bracelets, belts, and whistle-holders to be worn around the neck. Some of us learned—to a degree—to knit mittens, caps, sweaters, even socks. We made plaster-of-Paris platters and bowls—a sickeningly cold, slimy sensation of congealing liquid on my fingers, and a strong stench as of raw sewage; these misbegotten, often subtly misshapen objects we painted bright cheerful colors, to be sold, or more likely given to our mothers as presents. (For years, well after I'd gone away to college, my mother continued to use one of my earliest
gifts—a Pepsi bottle ingeniously painted blue and fitted with a perforated rubber cap, used to sprinkle water onto clothes being ironed. Of the many gifts I would give my mother through her lifetime, this blue sprinkler-bottle was the most practical.) At 4-H sewing class I undertook to make a skirt—for myself—a “gathered skirt” (essentially, a “gathered skirt” is just drawing threads tight through a wide swath of cotton material, to constitute a kind of waistband); the hem was criticized by our instructor for being “unevenly stitched.” When I explained that no one would see the hem the instructor countered, with unassailable logic, “But, Joyce, you will know it's there.”