You Must Remember This

Excerpt

She had been waiting for a sign to release her into Death, now the sign was granted.
She swallowed forty-seven aspirin tablets between 1:10 A.M. and 1:35 A.M. locked in the bathroom of her parents' rented house.
She swallowed the tablets slowly and carfully drinking tepid water from the faucet.
She knew to go slowly and carefully not wanting to get overexcited feverish not wanting to get sick to her stomach.
Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness her father often said but she preferred the darkness.
She stood five feet three inches tall in her bare feet, she weighed eighty-nine pounds.
She was leaving no message behind.
Her tight fist of a heart beat hard, in pride in growing ecstasy she half believed it could never stop.
She had read about the subject at the library, she didn't intend to make the usual mistakes.
She waited until the others were asleep, she'd always been practical shrewd sly, Enid Maria thinking her own private thoughts.
She began to feel bloated from so much water but the nausea was only in her head.
She'd taken a long dreamy bath earlier that evening and washed her hair while the others were watching television: Arthur Godfrey. She could hear laughter far away downstairs.
She'd powdered herself with talcum powder, shoulders breasts belly even between her thighs quick and rough. Stark-white sweet-smelling Jasmine Princess from Woolworth's.
She was thinking of the undertow at Shoal Lake, that eel-like coil of icy water sliding up her body. The sun had been beating hard on her head, the water warm, even sluggish, she'd thought at first the icy water might be a fish or a water snake, it slid swiftly up her legs then disappeared.
The warning was, if you swam in that part of the lake and the undertow got you you wouldn't have time to cry out for help.
The water like an icy slippery eel had slid up her body then disappeared. She'd kept on swimming.
She remembered her sister Lizzie the other day singing "Wheel of Fortune" along with Kay Starr on television.
She dressed herself like a bride to die in her white cotton nightgown from Sibley's with the wide lace straps threaded with a narrow white satin ribbon. A white satin ribbon at the neck too, fixed in place by a safety pin.
She had no pity for the face in the mirror. The bony ridges of her chest, the familiar delicate bones.
She had no pity for the small breasts faint and hazy through the fabric of the nightgown as if seen through frosted glass.
She remembered the sky at Shoal Lake above l'Isle-Verte mottled and luminous like old wavy glass. She remembered the island that was two islands, two halves of an island, above the lake and below the lake in the colorless water.
She remembered the smell of tobacco smoke.
She remembered his voice, Don't tell anybody will you.
She remembered her father teasing her, lifting her in his arms long ago, his whiskers scratching her face.
She was an honors student too smart to die by accident.
She was in control. She didn't believe in accident.
She gagged several times swallowing the pills, by then she had lost count but she knew there would be enough.
Her mother had said, Are you sick Enid, is it your period again so soon?—peering frowning into her face.
Her mother said, Do you have cramps Enid, let me get you some aspirin.
She had towled her hair then let it dry loose on her shoulders. Chestnut-red crackling with static electricity. She brushed it slowly getting out all the snarls. She hated snarls. Tiny clots of hair in the brush she pulled out of the brush, quickly dropping them into the toilet bowl, her eyes averted.
She remembered a mourning dove the boys had caught in the vacant lot then dosed with gasoline then lit with a match. The bird's wild wings flapping flying in looping crazy circles, ablaze, its beak opened emitting a terrible shriek. It flew up into the air highter and higher then suddenly fell to the ground.
She said, I didn't tell anybody.
She remembered kneeling at the communion rail at St. James's, her eyes shut her fingers gripping one another tight, she hadn't been able to thrust her tongue forward like the others.
She remembered the communion wafer melting on her tongue. You weren't supposed to chew it, just let it melt.
Only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
She was wearing around her neck: a necklace of tiny mother-of-pearl beads a gift from her sister Geraldine, a thin gold chain, a thin silver chain with a religious medal on it the Virgin Mary stamped on it, a confirmation gift from her uncle Domenic who was a priest.
She lived at 118 East Clinton Street in Port Oriskany, New York, the east side of the city near the railroad yards and warehouses and the big factories along the lake—General Motors, U.S. Steel, Stubb Central Foundry, Swale Cyanamid. Mrs. Stevick, hanging wash in the back yard, complained of the stink in the air but most days you hardly noticed. The white sheets were dirtied the worst.
She was a virgin. He hadn't touched her there.
She didn't believe in God, she believed in Death.
She'd been waiting for a sign, now the sign was granted.
She hid the empty aspirin bottle in the wastebasket beneath the sink, she turned off the bathroom light before opening the door—be slow! be quiet! take your time!—she went back to bed slipping into bed holding her breath, but her sister Lizzie sleeping close by snoring faintly didn't hear.
She was fifteen years old. She was very happy. The date was June 7, 1953.

Awards

• Los Angeles Times Book Prize, finalist.
• New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Reviews

• Booklist, June 1, 1987, p1466
• Publisher's Weekly, June 5, 1987, p71
• Library Journal, July 1987, p97
• Chicago Tribune Books, July 19, 1987, p7
• USA Today, August 7, 1987, 5D
• New York Times, August 10, 1987, p17
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 16, 1987, p1
• New York Times Book Review, August 16, 1987, p3
• Newsweek, August 17, 1987, p68
• People, August 31, 1987, p12
• Time, August 31, 1987, p62
• Maclean's, September 21, 1987, p52
• America, November 14, 1987, p360
• New Yorker, December 28, 1987, p119
• Books, January 1988, p16
• Observer, January 31, 1988, p27
• Times Literary Supplement, February 19, 1988, p186
• Spectator, February 20, 1988, p27
• London Review of Books, June 23, 1988, p23
• World Literature Today, Autumn 1988, p658
• Southern Humanities Review, Spring 1989, p193
• Guardian Weekly, August 20, 1989, p28
• Queens Quarterly, Autumn 1989, p720

Epigraph

Everything is entirely in Nature,
and Nature is entire in everything.
She has her center in every
brute.

—Schopenhauer

The center of gravity should be in two people: he and she.

—Chekhov

Preface

A special message for the [Franklin Library] first edition from Joyce Carol Oates:

My working title was The Green Island, and so, during the approximately fifteen months of its composition, I thought of this chronicle of the Stevick family from 1946 to 1956, suffused, in a sense, with greenness: green of romance, of nostalgia, of innocence; green of an epoch in our American history that, for all its hypocrisies, and its much-documented crimes against its own citizens, has come to represent an innocence of a peculiarly American kind. And this greenness is an island: insular, self-contained, self-referential; doomed. Passion plays itself out on both the collective and the personal scale, and is best contemplated at a distance, by way of memory.

You Must Remember This, like Marya: A Life (1986), is one of the most personal of my novels; though it is not, except in its setting, and certain of its specific incidents, autobiographical. It takes place in a fictitious city, Port Oriskany, an amalgam of two cities in upstate New York—Buffalo (the first large city of my experience) and Lockport (the city of my birth, my paternal grandmother's home, suffused forever for me with the extravagant dreams of early adolescence; the city is probably more real to me, imaginatively, than any I have known since). While writing the novel I had a map of Port Oriskany taped to my wall so that, dreamy as all novelists are, when not in the throes of acute anxiety or the fabled and so often elusive white heat of composition, I could simply stare at it; and, like Enid Stevick, in fact very much like Enid Stevick, the contours of whose soul so resemble my own, traverse its streets, ponder its buildings and houses and vacant lots, most of all the canal that runs through it, as it runs through Lockport, New York . . . that canal that, in Enid's heightened and often fevered imagination, as in my own, seemed an object of utter ineffable beauty.

(It must be remembered that beauty does not mean mere prettiness but something more brutal, possessed of the power to rend one's heart.)

Where Marya: A Life grew slowly out of an accretion of memory, and did not take its final compositional shape until Marya's story was complete, You Must Remember This was immediately conceived as a family chronicle, of sorts; a memoir-as-narrative; its focus upon Enid Stevick and her uncle Felix, who loses his youth in the course of the novel, as Enid loses, by degrees, in a counter-movement, her attraction for death. By way of passion Enid exorcises an instinct for suicide; by way of passion, and its somber consequences, Felix exorcises an instinct for self-destructive violence. The one I think quintessentially female, the other male: poles of masochism and sado-masochism. Which is not, of course, to suggest that we are defined by such poles; only that they exert a gravitational pull, weak in some, powerful in others.

The novel's primary excitement for the author was its evocation of that now remote decade 1946-1956; its focussing upon certain selected areas of American life, notably politics (the antipodes of the Red Scare and the early, pioneering, anti-nuclear arms movement), popular culture (primarily music and Hollywood films), and professional prizefighting (when vast numbers of Americans routinely watched weekly boxing matches on television, and the great champions Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Archie Moore, Jersey Joe Walcott, Willie Pep, Carmen Basilio, and others, were in their prime). The Stevicks live through an era and, to a degree, embody it; but should not be thought of as representative. They are too real, in my imagination at least, and surely too idiosyncratic, to bear the weight of allegory.

—O—

Boxing is an American sport—a "so-called sport" to many—in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions—loathing, revulsion, righteous indignation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty. Freud spoke of taboo as evoking such ambivalent reactions, and it is probable that boxing, like few other legalized, or "civilized," activities, has the power to disturb because it violates taboo . . . or excites it. Like any ritualized action in which risk would seem to outweigh reward—that mysterious species of "play" to which the adjective "deep" has been assigned by anthropologists—its participants appear, to the neutral observer, to be, if not mad, touched with madness; yet boxing is, in another sense, the most fully conscious of sports since the agon at its very core is direct and acknowledged. To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion. Why do you love fighting? the boxer is asked, and his answer, in effect, is, Why do you love life?

—O—

Though one might claim any number of parallels, most of them theoretical, between the life of the fighter and that of the writer, it is probable that the writer conceives of himself, fundamentally, as a nurturer; a practical-minded dreamer; a creator who never creates out of nothing but out of a palpably living, immediate reality. By way of the imagination one world is transposed and given a unique aesthetic significance, into another world: the permanence, or semi-permanence, of art. You Must Remember This is a novel, rather than a romance, but it might be said that all novelists, in love with their material, still more with the inimitable voices their material yields, are romantics. Imaginative literature is meant to be a form of sympathy, as D.H. Lawrence saw it, and of all my novels this one seems, to its author at least, the most "sympathetic"—its vision large enough to accommodate seemingly disparate and even contentious impulses of love and war.

J.C.O.
Princeton, New Jersey

Note

Working title: The Green Island

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