Free Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates

their writing, but any society matron or business executive with the smell of money about them rendered her helpless. It was a good thing she never made it into high society! What could she do? She was as much a child as I was, now that I think of it. She had married Father the way a girl goes on a date with a man she does not at all like, or even know, simply because he will take her to a special event where the verylights and the very sweetness of the flowers set everywhere make up a world—no people are really needed. * Father knew nothing, but where his imagination should have been, in that emptiness, where his sensitivity and taste should have been, in that larger emptiness, there was a crude common sense as reliable as a dime-store bottle-top opener.
    JOHNS BEHEMOTH
FOUNDED 1880
    That was impressive to both of us, and the cobbled streets that wound through Faculty Row (a quaint long building of one-story houses joined amid a surplus of evergreens and pines), and the large snow-dappled opening that promised a park or a green in warmer months, where bemused bright boys might read Latin verse, and the many elms (some of them dead, but in the winter no one could tell), and the enormous library, and a building with its own modern steel sculpture out front: an angular, emaciated human being, perhaps a man, holding erect a globe that has become skeletonized but evidently no less heavy. A symbol of Science, and that was the Science Building. The Humanities Building was the big one, with a surly, encrusted look, its windows like multiple eyes with thick, leafless vines over them like eyebrows. Nada and I liked this building best. Here there were no deceptions about the torment knowledge promised, the way there was in public schools where knowledge was shuffled in with dances and basketball games and camera clubs.
    “We'll get you in here, Richard, the two of us,” Nada said. The exquisite, muted ostentation of this place had unnerved her a little, but her voice simply lowered itself and went on, grimly and confidentially. “When we go in for the interview, please remember to sit straight. But don't look rigid. And don't, for God's sake, look like your father, as if you're ready to fly out of the chair and slap someone on the back. Look reserved and a little abstracted. Look intelligent. How do you look today anyway?” And she turned to stare at me.
    It was the first time that day she had bothered to look at me, and Ifelt the anxiety of her solemn dark eyes though she tried to show nothing. Nada had fine clear skin, rather pale. Suburban style dictated her hair, which was “done” once and sometimes twice a week so that from behind or at a distance she looked like an ordinary resident of Fern-wood, a housewife who had no housewifely chores but wasn't “society” either and was terrified of seeming pretentious—short hair, set to rise above her elegant head in feathery sections that fascinated me, everything smooth and disciplined and rather familiar. Nada's hair was very dark, almost black. Suburban style dictated her entire face, actually, because she wore nothing on her eyes—no messy black goo, no blue or green eyeshadow of the kind up in her bedroom awaiting the minute she would tire of this life—and her mouth was a handsome, wholesome, unsurprising red. Her manner this morning was suburban and wholesomely nervous, American as the flag that rose above the frigid evergreens in the park at the center of enormous Johns Behemoth.
    She said, “What's that on your face? Nothing? Fix your hair, push it back. Darling, you look fine. You look”—and she cast her mind about for the best word—”you look like a little scholar.”
    We parked the car in an area designated for visitors. Walking up the cobbled path to what had once been the Behemoth mansion, we drew in the fresh air as if we expected strength from it. I had to hurry to keep up with her. If Nada and Father had nothing else in common, they both walked fast.