Will You Always Love Me?

Contents

I

Act of Solitude
You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home
Good to Know You
The Revenge of the Foot, 1970
Politics
The Missing Person
Will You Always Love Me?

II

Life After High School
The Goose-Girl
American, Abroad
The Track
The Handclasp
The Girl Who Was to Die
June Birthing

III

The Undesirable Table
Is Laughter Contagious?
The Brothers
The Lost Child
Christmas Night 1962
The Passion of Rydcie Mather
The Vision
Mark of Satan

Preface

"A Special Message for the [Franklin Library] First Edition from Joyce Carol Oates"

It had been an accident, of that he was convinced.
This thing that happened to them,...it was like nothing that'd ever happened to them before.
How the subject came up no one would recall afterward.
Is a foot male or female? they were asking.
A woman had come to save his soul, and he wasn't sure he was ready.

Each of the stories in this volume springs directly from its initial sentence, and has been written, in a sense recorded, to move as swiftly as possible granted the complexities of the story, to its final sentence. Each of the titles—"American, Abroad," "Life After High School," "Is Laughter Contagious?", "The Revenge of the Foot, 1970" among others—has been deliberately, purposefully chosen. Each of the stories is a variant on a single universal theme suggested by the book's title Will You Always Love Me?

All my life, I've loved the short story form, the very essence of storytelling. Its relative brevity compared to the novel, its shapeliness, its sharp focus, its mimicry of the human voice. Here is something you haven't heard before! a short story seems to be telling us, in excitement. Not in this way, not like this!

It might be theorized that, for the writer, a story is a "haunting." Something lodges deep inside us, or springs from memory, or a dream; we can't rid ourselves of it; we become obsessed by it. The strangest story in this volume, to me, is "The Brothers." Though I wrote it, I can't quite understand why; I don't know what provoked it; swiftly skimming it, I'm never quite prepared for what comes next. Another strange story, to me, is "The Revenge of the Foot, 1970" which sprang full-blown as a dream out of a reverie while driving from Stratford, Ontario a few years ago; I've visited Toronto numerous times, lived in Windsor, Ontario from 1968 to 1978, yet would surely not have written this story but for that drive, that day, through that country-side. "You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home" sprang from an experience with a "little lost dog" and from the eerie, unnerving remark made to me by an acquaintance (You petted me, and I followed you home murmured with an air of possessiveness and reproach), but the strangeness of the dog himself and his effect upon a young married couple was a surprise to me. Equally mysterious, to me, is "Mark of Satan"—which seems to have sprung from its very setting, rural Pennsylvania in the heat, a stand of bamboo in a back yard. (Yes, bamboo grows in my own back yard. But what does it mean?)

Other stories can be traced to their historical origins with no difficulty, though they have been transposed into fiction. "American, Abroad" happened, or almost happened, in the American embassy in Amsterdam, a few years ago. "Will You Always Love Me?" is based upon a tale told me twice removed, in a very different venue. "The Track" is based upon personal experience; extremely intense personal experience; if I reread it, I begin to feel apprehension at about the same place each time, just as I did that autumn afternoon, propelled around a dirt track behind a high-stepping harness racing filly in sudden fear of being killed, in a setting of surpassing beauty at a horse farm in northern New Jersey. "Good To Know You" is a dramatized, succinctly embellished account of a heated exchange of male-female voices to which I was a participating witness, in a Chinese restaurant in Princeton New Jersey perhaps three years ago. (I never return to the restaurant without sharply re-experiencing the exchange, and the emotions that led to the story. For the record, the couples are still together.) The visit from a Detroit lawyer, the threat of a subpoena, the melancholy "work-in-progress" of a former student—all provide the very real core of the more mythical "The Handclasp" with its, to me, unexpected ending. The exquisitely beautiful abandoned fawn of "June Birthing" was my own obsession one evening in early summer a few years ago, here in semi-rural New Jersey where I live. "The Lost Child" and "Christmas 1962" are largely fiction, but set in a region of vivid memory in upstate New York, like "The Girl Who Was to Die." "The Undesirable Table" is a What if—? tale for people very like my friends an myself, a parable for our time of sharply divided affluence and poverty almost too painful to contemplate; like "Is Laughter Contagious?" which explores an affluent suburban world identical to our own except for the terrifying fact that the solicitude born of human sympathy and decency has been lost, supplanted by the most primitive instinct of laughter.

Will you always love me? I don't know of a more unnerving question. It's question, put to us, which we immediately answer, like the lover in the title story, confronted with the desperate woman in his arms, Yes. In assembling the stories, I began to see an unexpected pattern of love-relations, some quite ironic ("The Vision," "Mark of Satan," "The Passion of Rydcie Mather"), but some quite forthright. A number of the men and women in these stories discover that they are loved, whether they entirely deserve it o not: the emotionally distraught woman writer of "The Handclasp"; the guilt-ravaged husband of "Act of Solitude"; the young divorcee of "June Birthing" so fearful of again falling in love, and being hurt; the lonely middle-aged widow and her difficult step-daughter of "The Girl Who Was to Die"; the childless married couple of "The Track," who've had a glimpse a imminent mortality; and the hopeful lovers of "The Missing Person" who find themselves in an embrace that might mean love. Even stories that end ironically, like "The Vision" and "Mark of Satan" seem to have brought their distraught protagonists to a renewed definition of self, a surprising renewal of spirit.

Excerpt

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1995, p1724
• Publisher's Weekly, January 1, 1996, p58
• Library Journal, February 1, 1996, p102
• San Francisco Chronicle Review, February 4, 1996, p1
• Booklist, February 15, 1996, p989
• Denver Post, March 3, 1996, F, 8
• New York Times Book Review, March 10, 1996, p7
• Chicago Tribune, March 10, 1996, 14, 6
• Seattle Times, March 10, 1996, M2
• BookPage, April 1996
• Tulsa World, April 14, 1996, G4
• Daily Iowan, April 24, 1996, p6B
• San Francisco Review, May 1996, p6
• Commercial Appeal Memphis, TN, May 5, 1996, G3
• Calgary Herald, May 25, 1996, G8
• Ottawa Citizen, May 26, 1996, C9
• Jerusalem Post Books Magazine, July 4, 1996, p1
• The World and I, August 1996, p274+
• The Event Newspaper, August 29, 1996, p13

Awards

• Best American Mystery Stories, 1997: "Will You Always Love Me?"
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1996: "Mark of Satan"
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1995: "You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home"
• The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 1995: "Brothers"
• Prize Stories: The O Henry Awards, 1993: "Goose-Girl"
• Best American Short Stories, 1992: "Is Laughter Contagious?"
• Best American Short Stories, 1991: "American Abroad"
• The Pushcart Prize, XX: "The Undesirable Table"

Other Editions