Free I Am No One You Know by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

wasn’t New York he was leaving, but a proximity to Detroit. For often there were calls from his mothers, his sisters. Requests for money (which, so far as she knew, he usually sent: rarely did he confide in her about his family and never did she feel comfortable about inquiring), appeals to him to come visit.
    He was too busy, he had his own life. He’d been gone from Detroitsince the age of seventeen and didn’t even, he claimed, dream about it any longer.
    So they moved across the continent to northern California, twenty-five hundred miles from Detroit. In their new community which was mainly white, Asian-American, and affluent they were an attractive, popular couple, as they’d been in New York. Two such special people they were spoken of, sometimes even within their hearing. And she thought Yes. I’ve become special as his wife.
    Yet that was to underestimate herself, surely? For she, too, had an advanced degree. She published poetry, essays in first-rate literary magazines. She taught a poetry workshop at the university, was active in parent-teacher events at the prestigious day school their children attended. Not a beautiful woman (she knew) yet in her husband’s company she became beautiful, her face shining, exalted. Sometimes by chance she glimpsed her husband at a distance striding along a sidewalk, entering a public room, her breath caught in her throat, she felt a sense of unreality sweep over her, a vertigo. It was love, it was terror of the man—his maleness, his blackness. For perhaps without her understanding it, his maleness was his blackness, and his blackness his maleness.
    She was not a vain woman so she did not think, seeing him, Can I keep him? A man like that? for in her innocent egotism she retained un-examined the secret knowledge He is black, and I am white: no black woman can take him from me because no black woman is so attractive to him as I am, and another white woman would be frightened of him.
    And then one night, when they’d been married for nine years, a call came.
     
    A ND VERY LATE that night, at 2 A.M. while the children were sleeping, her husband’s brother D. arrived, now twenty years old and unrecognizable to her, who had not glimpsed him nor heard his voice since the day of the wedding; unshaven, disheveled, smelling of his body, driving a car with Ohio license plates which would turn out to have been stolen, in Toledo; his eyes dilated, snatching at her for a moment without recognition. As if he’d forgotten his brother was married to her, a white woman. As if he’d forgotten her existence.
    The call, the arrival of D. had not been entirely unexpected. He’dbeen missing from home for five weeks, wanted by Detroit police for questioning in a nightclub shooting-murder. And her husband had not turned D. away, could not turn him away, how could he? Saying to her You know white cops are after a black kid’s ass, he wouldn’t have a chance back there.
    She would prepare a meal for D. She would not object to him sleeping in the family room for how could she who was the wife of D.’s older brother, the mother of his beautiful children, object. Her husband was angry with D. and frightened for D. and bitter and protective, the brothers shut in together in the family room talking in subdued, rapid voices until past 4 A.M. while she cleaned up in the kitchen rinsing plates to set in the dishwasher, carefully wiping with a sponge the Formica-topped breakfast table where D. had ravenously eaten without a further glance at her, hunched over his plate, young-looking for twenty, scared. And afterward quietly slipping from the house, descending the grassy slope to the river; her breath quickened, shallow; her feet in open-toed sandals wet from the grass; sitting then at this undefined twilit hour of early morning on the lowermost, just slightly rotted wooden steps leading to the dock. (Their house was a handsome multi-level structure with numerous plate-glass windows, sliding doors,