Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

himself—stunned him. He stared at her. He felt perplexed, resentful,cheated. The food he had been eating was cold. What he’d eaten was a cold hard little ball in his stomach. The hell with food. The hell with breakfast, this breakfast table, these people sitting and staring at one another, their faces flushed and frightened.
    “All right,” Jesse said, “I will.”
    “You damn little loudmouth!” Jean said savagely.
    “Watch your mouth yourself,” their mother said. Her face was weary and yet bright, as radiant as Jean’s. It was as if she were dancing closer and closer to a central, furious heat, a core of brilliance she did not dare touch. Once or twice she glanced over her shoulder, to the window Jesse had been staring at. Did she expect to see
his
face there …? Yet when she looked back at them it was Jean she looked at. Always Jean. Jean, two years older than Jesse, with the figure of a small, mature woman, her lipstick too brightly red, her breasts pushing too aggressively against the front of her dress. Jesse felt how they excluded him, his mother and his sister. He hated Jean. He hated his mother too when she was like this—united in that fierce, sullen, silent understanding with Jean, the two of them selfishly shut off from everyone else.
    “If you’re going out, go on and go,” Jean taunted Jesse.
    Jesse got to his feet.
    “I hope he lays your fat mouth open,” Jean muttered.
    “Jesse,” said their mother.
    “What?”
    “Sit down.”
    He remained standing, his legs apart. He stared at his mother.
    “Sit down and finish your breakfast.”
    “Why?”
    “I said sit down.”
    “I finished it, I’m through.”
    “Don’t you go bothering your father, not this morning. Get it out of your head. He wants to be alone.”
    “I’ll ask him.”
    “I said not to bother him.”
    Jesse was so angry, so agitated, that a flame seemed to pass over his brain. He seemed to see his father’s face, right here at the table, an ordinary suppertime and his father’s reddened, muscular face, his cheeks bunched with food, his jaws moving with the effort of grindingup food—chewing, chewing, eating hungrily, eating fast, never getting enough—his neck not clean, lined with grease from work in the garage, the cords of his neck standing out strong and hungry.
    “Why?”
    Around the table in this kitchen, all of them frightened. Outside there was air so cold it might hurt. Inside, their breaths mixing hotly together, and Jesse standing above them, staring at them, around at the faces, looking from face to face, his own eyes powerful, as if protruding slightly from their sockets, pushed forward by an enormous angry hurt.… They were all quiet. Even Bob. Even the dog. Jesse wanted to shut his eyes and turn away from them.
The hell with this, all of this
. But something tickled in his throat, the beginning of a sob. He could not speak. He loved them and he could not speak. He did not want to see, so clearly, his mother’s tired, frightened face, the way her head lifted from her neck, birdlike and wary and sharp, as if listening all the while to that sound that was behind the static on the radio, the sound of someone’s boots outside on the crusty ground.… He did not want to see his little brother’s face, his silky hair, he did not want to trade looks with Jean, who always knew more than he did, and whose scared, bold, make-up face might tell him more than he wanted to know. He did not even want to look at Shirley—her dumb freckled face, her brown hair in snarls, her amazement at the way this breakfast had turned out.
    “All right, I’ll go live with Grandpa!” Jesse shouted.
    He had not known he would say this. He had never even thought about it before.
    But his mother accepted his words, his ugly shout, and with an ugly shout of her own brought the flat of her hand down hard on the table.
    “Go to hell, then, if that’s how you feel, go right to hell and get out of here!” she cried.
    Jesse ran out