I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
     
    Got your number, got your number. Just ahead the sunken-chested old man with the singed face, the thick-lensed glasses taped to his head, was leaning on his cane. Again we must pass close by him. For he would not give way. For he wished to block our way. The white-haired old woman was gone. The gnome-sized individual was sitting,back against the wall. Here was Mr. M—wizened as a scrawny child. His face had lost its fat, his cheeks were papery thin and flushed as if with fever. I saw how, as his eyes lighted upon us, Mr. M—’s expression turned hopeful, shrewd. For the first time I saw how his dentures glared like cheap porcelain. Boys? Take me with you? Take me with you? He lurched near me, his palsied hand groped for my arm, and I shoved him from me. Mr. M—’s fetid breath in my face, that made me gag. Don’t touch me, I said.
    Shoving him from me I said, You’re not going anywhere with anyone, you old bastard. Your place is here, you get to die here.
    My brother turned an incredulous face to me. Yanking at my arm to pull me away from the tottering old man who gaped at me as if he hadn’t heard a syllable of what I’d said.
    Norm! For Christ’s sake.
    My brother was so rattled, he had trouble punching in the code to unlock the doors.
    Second time, he got it. There was a bleating and pleading behind us we ignored. As soon as the doors opened we stepped through. We walked swiftly along the corridor to the lobby not looking back. My brother was cursing me under his breath. I’d never heard him so angry at anyone. God damn, God damn you, are you crazy, God damn you.
    Why didn’t you warn me, I asked my brother. You knew who he was.
    Who who was? What? That pathetic old guy? He’s nobody.
    You knew. You know. God damn you.
    We burst through the lobby doors. We walked to my brother’s car in the parking lot without speaking. Without glancing at each other. Not a backward glance at the Manor. Inside the car it would be hotter than hell. My brother had insisted the windows be shut, the doors locked. At Meadowbrook Manor! Disgusted my brother threw himself behind the driver’s wheel not looking at me and I had a choice, to climb inside that car beside him or to walk back to his house which was at least three miles, and along the country highway in the sun.
    It wasn’t much of a choice.

Aiding and Abetting
    T HERE!—THE PHONE is ringing.
    The call usually comes between six and seven, weekday evenings exclusively. Steven will hear the phone and Holly, in the kitchen preparing dinner, will answer it quickly, before Steven or their eleven-year-old son Brandon can get to a phone. He’ll hear his wife’s urgent voice, an anxious hello and then subdued murmurs of sympathy or encouragement, finally silence, for the person on the other end of the line is doing most of the talking.
    The conversation will never last less than twenty minutes. Once, Steven recalls, it lasted nearly an hour, and might have gone longer if Steven hadn’t come into the kitchen to interrupt.
    Tonight Steven is sitting in the family room adjacent to the kitchen with four-year-old Caitlin in the curve of his arm, listening to his daughter read aloud from one of her new, beautifully illustrated story-books, a tale of imperiled but magically empowered talking animals, and he tries not to be distracted by Holly in the kitchen. He loves these reading sessions with Caitlin with a fierce, fatherly sense of privilege; he remembers with what stunning swiftness Brandon’s early childhood passed, how abruptly his son became a boy, no longer a littleboy, whose measure of self-worth is drawn from his boy-classmates and not from his adoring parents.
    Steven resents this caller who interrupts Holly in the kitchen though she has asked him not to call her at that time; she loves cooking for her little family, as she calls the four of them; every