We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

      How could you let me drive you home that day, not knowing what you were feeling. What you were enduring.

      By 5 P.M. the sky was streaked in dusk. Plum-colored crevices in patches of cloud. Blowing, flying high overhead. Patrick tried not to be spooked by the sight of snow-covered vehicles on the roadside, abandoned days before during a blizzard. The Haggartsville Road was fair driving but High Point was basically a single crudely plowed lane. He’d gotten out, so he supposed he could get back. And school again in the morning. That damned school bus he was bored by the sight of.

      Saying something of this to Marianne, who was clutching her pink-angora hands on her lap and didn’t seem to hear or in any case didn’t reply. The stiffness, the tension in her. Was she frightened of her brother’s driving? The heavy car skidding? Beneath loose powdery snow the hard-packed snow of High Point was smooth as satin. Treacherous.

      That satin dress: cream-colored, with strawberry chiffon trim: St. Valentine’s. Mrs. Glover the senior English teacher speaking coyly of Cupid, “romantic love,” Eros. Does anyone know what “Eros” means?

      At the curve in the road just beyond the Pfenning farm the station wagon’s rear tires did spin for several sickening seconds. Patrick quickly shifted gears, pumped the brakes. He knew not to turn the steering wheel in the direction instinct suggests but in the opposite direction, moving with the skid. And in a moment the vehicle was back in control. He’d reached out to shield Marianne from the dashboard but there hadn’t been that much momentum and her seat belt held her in place. He saw, though, how stiffly she held herself, oddly hunched and her mittened hands gripped together tight against her knees. Her pale lips were moving silently—was she praying? Patrick had broken into a quick nervous sweat inside his sheepskin jacket.

      “Marianne? You all right?”

      “Oh, yes.”

      “Sorry if I shook you up.”

       Why didn’t you tell me about it then? Why, not even a word?

       Was it that you didn’t want me to become contaminated, too?

      Frankly, by this time, miles of driving, Patrick was becoming annoyed, hurt by his sister’s silence. And now this silent-prayer crap! An insult.

      High Point Road, haphazardly plowed, wound along the ridge of the ancient glacial striation. Out of the northeast, from the vast snowy tundra of northern Ontario, came that persistent wind. Rocking the station wagon as it frequently rocked the school bus. Like ridicule, Patrick thought. Like jeering. Invisible air-currents plucking at your life.

      He remembered, in ninth grade. In the boys’ locker room. Boys talking of their own sisters. Maybe it was one boy, and the others avidly listening. Patrick had not been among them, rarely was Patrick among these boys but at a little distance from them, swiftly and self-consciously changing his clothes. In that phase of his early adolescence in which the merest whisper of a forbidden word, a caress of feathers, a sudden sweet-perfumy scent, the sound of fabric against fabric, silky, suggestive—the mere thought of a girl’s armpit! nostril! the moist red cut between the legs!—would arouse Patrick sexually, to the point of pain. He’d hidden away in disgust, in shame. Hadn’t yet cultivated the haughty Pinch-style, staring his inferiors down.

      Patrick Mulvaney a genius? Come on! His I.Q. was only 151. In tenth grade he’d taken a battery of tests, with a half dozen other selected students. You weren’t supposed to know the results but somehow Patrick did. Possibly his mom had told him, absurdly proud.

      Not a genius but still rumors spread. Like the rumor that he was blind in one eye. Did Patrick care, Patrick did not care. Telling himself he’d rather be respected and feared at Mt. Ephraim High School than liked. Popular!

      His heroes were Galileo, Newton, Charles Darwin. The Curies, Albert Einstein. The scientists of whom he read voraciously in the pages of Scientific American, to which he subscribed. You couldn’t imagine any of these people caring in the least about popularity.

      It did upset him, though, that everyone seemed to know his secret: he was in fact blind in one eye. Almost.

      Mom had surely confided in his gym teacher, when he’d started high school. She’d promised she would not but probably yes it had been Mom, meaning well. Not wanting his other eye to be injured—that would have been her logic, Patrick could hear her pleading, could see her wringing her hands. Patrick had had an accident grooming one of the horses, in fact his own horse Prince he’d loved, young high-strung Prince who was both docile and edgy and somehow it happened that the two-year-old gelding was spooked in his stall by something fleeting and inconsequential as a bird’s whirring wings and shadow across a sunlit bale of hay and suddenly to his terror Patrick, at that time twelve years old, weighing not much more than one hundred pounds, was thrown against a wall, found himself down beneath the horse’s terrible malletlike hooves screaming for help. His left arm had been broken and his left eye swollen shut, the retina detached and requiring emergency surgery in Rochester. Of the experience Patrick recalled little, out of disgust and disbelief. It had long wounded his pride that of the Mulvaneys he was the only one obliged to wear glasses.

      Driving, Patrick shut his left eye, looked with his right eye at the snowy road ahead, the waning glare of the snow, the rocky slope down into the Valley. This should have been a familiar landscape but was in fact always startling in its newness, its combination of threat and promise. He was never able to explain to anyone not even to Marianne how fascinating it was, that the world was there; and he, possessed of the miracle of sight, here. He would no more take the world there for granted than he would take being here for granted. And vision in his right eye at least. For the eye was an instrument of observation, knowledge. Which was why he loved his microscope. His homemade telescope. Books, magazines. His own lab notebooks, careful drawings and block-print letters in colored inks. The chunky black altimeter/barometer/“illuminator” sports watch he wore day, night, awake, asleep, removing only when he showered though in fact the watch (a birthday gift from the family, chosen by Marianne out of the L.L. Bean catalogue) was guaranteed waterproof—of course. And he loved his shortwave radio he’d assembled from a kit. Plying him on insomniac nights with weather reports in the Adirondacks, Nova Scotia. As far away as the Canadian Rockies.

      You could trust such instruments and such knowledge as you could not trust human beings. That was not a secret, merely a fact.

      Patrick was driving his mom’s Buick station wagon carefully along this final stretch of High Point Road. He was thinking that the horizon he’d grown up seeing without knowing what he saw here in the Chautauqua Valley, 360 degrees of it, was a hinge joining two spaces: the one finite, a substance inadequately called “land” that dropped to the Yewville River, invisible from this distance, and the other infinite, a substance inadequately called “sky” overhead. Each was an unknown. Though Patrick tried to imagine the glacier fields of millions of years ago, an epoch to which had been given the mysterious name Pleistocene which was one of Patrick’s words reverently spoken aloud when he was alone.

      Pleistocene. Mile-high mountains of ice grinding down everything in their paths.

      You could see Patrick was hurt, obviously it showed in his face. If Marianne had noticed.

      Gunning the motor as he turned up the rutty-snowy drive, racing the station wagon in the home stretch to announce Here we are! And parking noisily in front of the antique barn inside which Corinne was working. Marianne might have begun to say, “Thank you, Patrick—” but she spoke too softly, already he was out of the vehicle, in one of his quick-incandescent and wordless furies, and there came Silky exploding comically out of the rear of the vehicle too, to dash about in the snow, urinating in dribbles, shaking his ears as if he’d been confined for days. Marianne was carrying her garment bag in the direction of the back door and somehow the plastic handle slipped from her fingers and Patrick hesitated before helping her to retrieve it and Marianne said quickly, her voice quavering, fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall, “No!—it’s fine, I have it.” Marianne smiled at him, unconvincingly. Her tall impatient brother loose-limbed and