In Sunlight or In Shadow Page 18

  Her body, for example. She knew where it was—back in Greensburg in the family plot, at least that’s what she figured when she heard that Daddy had claimed it. She was a little surprised that she didn’t have to go where it did. In fact, she couldn’t—she tried, but then she realized she didn’t know how to do that, or even if that were possible—but she hoped it had been a nice funeral. Her aunt Connie loved a good funeral, but especially loved it when the next of kin would “take on,” weeping, wailing, throwing themselves at the grave, that sort of thing. Margaret didn’t figure that would have happened at her funeral—Mother wouldn’t have stood for it. Sorry, Aunt Connie. But it might have been nice to hear the music.

  Still, she was in New York, and being a ghost had some advantages. She didn’t have to pay rent anymore, and it didn’t make much difference to her whether she was inside or out, awake or, well, not asleep, exactly, because she didn’t get tired anymore. Sometimes, though, she would be looking around, or moving about the city, and then she wouldn’t feel like it, and she’d blink and it would be hours, or even a couple of days later. Either way, regardless of where she had been when she blinked, she’d find herself either in the office, or in front of Mrs. Daly’s rooming house, where she had—

  Well, where she had died. It wasn’t anything dramatic, she guessed, but it most definitely had been fatal. No crime in the street or being hit by a taxi, or anything, just falling the wrong way. She had been thinking about the new honeysuckle perfume she had bought at Macy’s, when her heel had broken on the curb, or maybe her knee had gone out again—she couldn’t really recall now, and the particulars didn’t especially matter—and she fell and as her head rushed toward the sidewalk she thought This is going to hurt but it didn’t, and the next thing she knew, she was behind Mrs. Daly, who was talking to a neighbor about that great tall girl who had fallen and just died, out like a candle (Mrs. Daly said, crossing herself), and how her poor father had come to take the girl’s things back to wherever she was from and left nothing but a room to rent again.

  And Margaret figured that was sad, but it didn’t bother her all that much, because it wasn’t like she hurt, and she could go to the shows and museums, the park, and really anywhere in the city, and she didn’t have to pay admission or anything, and no one bothered her, of course. She thought some of the animals may have noticed her—cats in alleys and windowsills, birds, and it seemed the squirrels in Central Park cocked their heads a certain way when she was around—but no people. And she could walk all day without getting tired or hungry, and that was fine with her as well.

  She saw other ghosts (the word still seemed strange, maybe even a little uncomfortable, like unwed mother or Negro, but it was the word she had) around the town, but if they had noticed her, they didn’t mention it—perhaps one didn’t do that sort of thing. They minded their business, and she minded hers, and that was fine, she guessed.

  There wasn’t much she could do, though, really. She could pass through things—that was one of the first things she had tried, once she had heard Mrs. Daly—but that also meant things passed through her, most of the time, anyway. As the days went by, she found that if she concentrated, she could ride in a streetcar, cab, or subway train and travel with it, instead of just standing there like a gump as it passed through her. But she couldn’t pick things up or move them, at least nothing more than specks of dust, and that took concentration and time, and when she was finished, she wouldn’t want to concentrate, and she’d blink and be back to the rooming house or the office, but later.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what she looked like, or what it was the animals, and perhaps the other, well, the others, saw when they encountered her. When she thought about it, looking down where her body had been, she thought she looked about the same—her favorite blue dress with the white collar (had she been buried in that? Died in it? She didn’t know, but she liked the dress), stockings, dark shoes. No girdle, but she hadn’t needed one before either, and alas, no one had ever been in a position to comment on it. She thought she had seen her reflection in a shop window once, a blue flower that matched her dress in her dark hair, but she couldn’t be sure, and perhaps it was a trick of the light. Perhaps she was a trick of the light as well, but she didn’t feel like such a thing.

  How did she feel? Like the third carbon of herself: legible but faint, perhaps a bit smeary. Useful for a file copy, but not something to send to a client. But she was still in the city that had become her city, the city where she had been Peggy, even if she had been betrayed by clumsy old Large Marge when she fell.

  She missed Walter, though. They had worked together for six months before she died, and she had liked being around him. It was work, yes, but he seemed like a nice boss, and he was terribly good looking, which didn’t hurt, but he was also a perfect gentleman.

  Darn it. She had been ladylike, of course—Mother wouldn’t have had it any other way—but she knew that some men had noticed her, seeing a flicker in their eyes as she walked down the street, or hearing some banter from the counter man at the deli. There were times she thought Walter had as well—to tell the truth, that was why she had bought the perfume.

  He had been in love once before, with a girl who had died of infantile paralysis when he was in law school, but he only talked about her once on a slow afternoon, and she had seen the pain in his eyes and changed the topic. Maybe one day something could have happened with Walter. She had seen it in dozens of picture shows, the boss falling for the secretary, and sometimes it worked out. Maybe it would have, eventually.

  But Peggy hadn’t gotten to eventually. Even so, she wondered if that was why she found herself at the office so often. Walter was there a lot, too, sometimes working late into the night. Had he done that when she had worked there, coming back after she had left in the afternoon? Probably not—a good secretary, she thought, made that unnecessary.

  Walter was thinking out loud again. He had done that when she worked for him, and she enjoyed being a sounding board. He was looking over a client’s files, but it was incomplete. One of the Ajax girls must have messed it up—Peggy saw the steno book sitting in the chair by the filing cabinet. Sloppy; she had always placed it next to the typewriter, so she didn’t have to hunt for it later.

  The whole office looked a little shabbier than she remembered it being. Had it really been this small, this worn? It took a moment to understand the difference. The room had once held all these things, but had also held room for her opportunities. Now those were gone. She was gone. For the first time, really, since she had died, she felt cheated.

  But only for a moment. She had come to the city without knowing what was ahead, and it had taken her in, and even in a short time, she had felt a part of it. She had been someone she never could have been in Greensburg—she had been Peggy Dupont.

  And what could she be now? She didn’t know, but she hadn’t known before, either. But she had found her way to the city, and had found her way in it, if briefly. She could find a way to whatever came next as well. She thought about the others she had seen, flickering through the city, not speaking to her, doing whatever errands they felt called to do. Why had she seen so few of them? Maybe they were there because they didn’t realize they didn’t have to be.

  She had been trapped in Greensburg, until she chose not to be. She had been stranded, alone, until she chose not to be. And if she chose not to be here anymore? Well, she didn’t know, but she had liked what she had found before. Why not see what else was there?

  And with that, Peggy Dupont knew what she had wanted all along—to be free, and she was. Free of Greensburg, free of Mother, free of the large body that had betrayed her, and now, free to go wherever she could imagine. She remembered lines from a long poem in high school:

  The world was all before them, where to choose

  Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

  She had a feeling that there was more than the world before her, just as the city had been bigger than the small offi
ce, and she knew that her travels before then were the tiniest clumsy steps. She had other journeys. But there was Walter, who had been kind. Had she loved him? She no longer knew, but she knew he had been kind. Perhaps she could do him a small kindness in return.

  She saw the missing sheet of paper, resting askew in the open file drawer. She concentrated harder than she ever had before, and maybe it was that or maybe it was the breeze and vibration of the passing train, but the paper fluttered to the floor near the desk. Walter didn’t see it, studying the rest of the file, but he would soon enough.

  And he did, a few minutes later, but Peggy was gone, and it wasn’t until the next morning, as he gathered the file for the closing, that Walter Schroer caught the faintest scents of dust and honeysuckle.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of a number of novels and story collections including, most recently, The Man Without a Shadow and The Doll-Master: Tales of Terror. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, the National Book Award, the O. Henry Award, and the National Medal in the Humanities, among others.

  Eleven A.M., 1926

  28 × 36 in. (71.3 × 91.6 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,

  Smithsonian Institution; Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966.

  Photography by Cathy Carver

  THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Beneath the cushion of the plush blue chair she has hidden it.

  Almost shyly her fingers grope for it, then recoil as if it were burning-hot.

  No! None of this will happen, don’t be ridiculous.

  It is eleven A.M. He has promised to meet her in this room in which it is always eleven A.M.

  She’s doing what she does best: waiting.

  In fact, she is waiting for him in the way that he prefers: naked. Yet wearing shoes.

  Nude he calls it. Not naked.

  (Naked is a coarse word! He’s a gentleman and he feels revulsion for vulgarity. Any sort of crude word, mannerism—in a woman.)

  She understands. She herself disapproves of women uttering profanities.

  Only when she’s alone would she utter even a mild profanity—Damn! God damn. Oh hell . . .

  Only if she were very upset. Only if her heart were broken.

  He can say anything he likes. It’s a masculine prerogative to say the coarsest cruelest words uttered with a laugh—as a man will do.

  Though he might also murmur—Jesus!

  Not profanity but an expression of awe. Sometimes.

  Jesus! You are beautiful.

  Is she beautiful? She smiles to think so.

  She is the woman in the window. In the wan light of an autumn morning in New York City.

  In the plush blue chair waiting. Eleven A.M.

  Sleepless through much of the night and in the early morning soaking in her bath preparing herself for him.

  Rubbing lotion onto her body: breasts, belly, hips, buttocks.

  Such soft skin. Amazing . . . His voice catches in his throat.

  At first, he scarcely dares touch her. But only at first.

  It is a solemn ritual, creamy-white lotion smelling of faint gardenias rubbed into her skin.

  In a trance like a woman in a dream rubbing lotion into her skin for she is terrified of her skin drying out in the radiator heat, arid airlessness of The Maguire (as it is called)—the brownstone apartment building at Tenth Avenue and Twenty-third where she lives.

  From the street The Maguire is a dignified-looking older building but inside it is really just old.

  Like the wallpaper in this room, and the dull-green carpet, and the plush-blue chair—old.

  Dry heat! Sometimes she wakes in the night scarcely able to breathe and her throat dry as ashes.

  She has seen the dried-out skin of older women. Some of them not so very old, in their sixties, even younger. Papery-thin skin, desiccated as a snake’s husk of a skin, a maze of fine white wrinkles, terrible to behold.

  Her own mother. Her grandmother.

  Telling herself don’t be silly, it will never happen to her.

  She wonders how old his wife is. He is a gentleman, he will not speak of his wife. She dares not ask. She dares not even hint. His face flushes with indignation, his wide dark nostrils like holes in his face pinch as if he has smelled a bad odor. Very quiet, very stiff he becomes, a sign of danger so she knows to retreat.

  Yet thinking, gloating: His wife is not young. She is not so beautiful as I am. When he sees her, he thinks of me.

  (But is this true? The past half-year, since the previous winter, since the long break over Christmas when they were apart [she was in the city; he was away with his family in some undisclosed place very likely Bermuda for his face and hands were tanned when he returned] she has not been so certain.)

  She has never been to Bermuda, or any tropical place. If he does not take her, it is not likely that she will ever go.

  Instead, she is trapped here in this room. Where it is always eleven A.M. Sometimes it feels to her as if she is trapped in this chair, in the window gazing out with great yearning at—what?

  An apartment building like the building in which she lives. A narrow shaft of sky. Light that appears fading already at eleven A.M.

  Damned tired of the plush-blue chair that is beginning to fray.

  Damned tired of the bed (he’d chosen) that is a double bed, with a headboard.

  Her previous bed, in her previous living quarters on East Eighth Street, in a fifth-floor walkup single room, had been a single bed, of course. A girl’s bed too small, too narrow, too insubstantial for him.

  The girth, the weight of him—he is two hundred pounds at least.

  All muscle—he likes to say. (Joking.) And she murmurs in response Yes.

  If she rolls her eyes, he does not see.

  She has come to hate her entrapment here. Where it is always eleven A.M. and she is always waiting for him.

  The more she thinks about it the more her hatred roils like smoldering heat about to burst into flame.

  She hates him. For trapping her here.

  For treating her like dirt.

  Worse than dirt, something stuck on the sole of his shoe he tries to scrape off with that priggish look in his face that makes her want to murder him.

  Next time you touch me! You will regret it.

  Except: at work, at the office—she’s envied.

  The other secretaries know she lives in The Maguire for she’d brought one of them to see it, once.

  Such a pleasure it was, to see the look in Molly’s eyes!

  And it is true—this is a very nice place really. Far nicer than anything she could afford on her secretary’s salary.

  Except she has no kitchen, only just a hot-plate in a corner alcove and so it is difficult for her to prepare food for herself. Dependent on eating at the automat on Twenty-first and Sixth or else (but this is never more than once a week, at the most) when he takes her out to dinner.

  (Even then, she has to take care. Nothing so disgusting as seeing a female who eats like a horse, he has said.)

  She does have a tiny bathroom. The first private bathroom she’d ever had in her life.

  He pays most of the rent. She has not asked him, he volunteers to give her cash unbidden as if each time he has just thought of it.

  My beautiful girl! Please don’t say a word, you will break the spell and ruin everything.

  What’s the time? Eleven A.M.

  He will be late coming to her. Always he is late coming to her.

  At the corner of Lexington and Thirty-seventh. Headed south.

  The one with the dark fedora, camel’s-hair coat. Whistling thinly through his teeth. Not a tall man though he gives that impression. Not a large man but he won’t give way if there’s another pedestrian in his path.

  Excuse me, mister! Look where the hell you’re going.

  Doesn’t break his stride. Only partially conscious of his surroundin
gs.

  Face shut up tight. Jaws clenched.

  Murder rushing to happen.

  The woman in the window, he likes to imagine her.

  He has stood on the sidewalk three floors below. He has counted the windows of the brownstone. Knows which one is hers.

  After dark, the lighted interior reflected against the blind makes of the blind a translucent skin.

  When he leaves her. Or, before he comes to her.

  It is less frequent that he comes to her by day. His days are taken up with work, family. His days are what is known.

  Nighttime there is another self. Unpeeling his tight clothes: coat, trousers, white cotton dress shirt, belt, necktie, socks and shoes.

  But now the woman has Thursdays off, late mornings at The Maguire are convenient.

  Late mornings shifting into afternoon. Late afternoon, and early evening.

  He calls home, leaves a message with the maid—Unavoidable delay at office. Don’t wait dinner.

  In fact it is the contemplation of the woman in the window he likes best for in his imagination this girl never utters a vulgar remark or makes a vulgar mannerism. Never says a banal or stupid or predictable thing. His sensitive nerves are offended by (for instance) a female shrugging her shoulders, as a man might do; or trying to make a joke, or a sarcastic remark. He hates a female grinning.

  Worst of all, crossing her (bare) legs so that the thighs thicken, bulge. Hard-muscled legs with soft downy hairs, repulsive to behold.

  The shades must be drawn. Tight.

  Shadows, not sunlight. Why darkness is best.

  Lie still. Don’t move. Don’t speak. Just—don’t.

  It’s a long way from when she’d moved to the city from Hackensack needing to breathe.

  She’d never looked back. Sure they called her selfish, cruel. What the hell, the use they’d have made of her, she’d be sucked dry by now like bone marrow.