We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

the shears slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor.

      Not just that Marianne of all her children had spoken these harsh words but that Marianne had broken the code. When Mom or Dad addressed you by way of an animal, you always replied the same way. Yet, suddenly, Marianne had not.

      Mom said, defensively, drawing herself up to her full height as if her very integrity had been challenged, “Why, Button! What do you mean? Feathers is a canary bred for the cage, and so were his parents and their parents going back for generations! Feathers wouldn’t have any life if he hadn’t been bred for the cage. He was born in that cage, in fact. You could say that the cage is Feathers’ life. And it’s a lovely nineteenth-century brass cage, an antique.” Mom’s voice was tremulous with hurt and indignation, as when she argued politics with Dad, rising on the reverential word antique.

      Marianne said, almost inaudibly, “Mom. It’s still a cage.”

      Turning then, with a sigh of exasperation, or a muffled sob, taking no heed of me but hurrying out of the kitchen before Mom could protest any further. Mom and I stared after my sister in mutual astonishment as she pushed blindly through the swinging door into the dining room, and was gone.

       Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?

       DIRTY GIRL

      Mike Mulvaney Jr. was a senior at Mt. Ephraim and he was on the football team and some of his buddies were involved with the girl but he had not been involved. “Mule” heard all about it, for sure. But he had not been involved.

      What can you expect of a girl like that. That kind of a girl. Her mother, her sisters. County welfare. Runs in the family.

      What the Mt. Ephraim guys did after the last game of the season. Three or four guys on the team and some older guys who’d graduated the year before. Sure, they were all friends of Mike Mulvaney’s but Mike Mulvaney had not been one of them, that night.

      Getting a retarded girl drunk. Doing—you know, things—to her.

       Hey: she isn’t retarded. Who says that?

      The whole family, the Duncans—the mother’s an alcoholic, she’s got Indian blood. Comes from the Seneca reservation.

      That’s not what I heard. I heard they’re—you know, Negro.

      Well it’s all the same. That kind of people. At that—what d’you call it—trailer court—

      Trailer village. On the Haggartsville Road.

      Mule knew all about it, or maybe just a little about it. Guys exaggerate. They were all drunk. In the Mt. Ephraim Cemetery—wild! You can’t believe everything you hear. Della Rae Duncan went out with all kinds of guys including guys in their twenties, and older. Or it was her sister, or one of her sisters—the one with the baby. Baby pitch-black as tar. No, that’s the one that died. Wasn’t it a hole in the heart?

      On Monday morning we began to hear of it. First on the school bus, then at school. Nobody knew exactly. None of the younger kids knew. Their older brothers wouldn’t tell and it wasn’t clear if their older sisters knew: they’d frown, look away. There was the exciting promise something had happened which was a still more exciting promise somebody’s going to get into trouble. Either Della Rae Duncan had had something happen to her or she was going to get into trouble or both.

      Della Rae was one of the big girls on the bus. Fifteen years old and still in ninth grade. She wasn’t in special ed like a cousin of hers, a tall hulking boy with a harelip. Some of us believed she’d started off in special ed, in seventh grade possibly, but she was in regular ninth-grade classes now.

      Della Rae was a dirty girl we’d hear. It was just something you knew. There were certain dirty girls and Della Rae Duncan was one of them. Some of us thought that Della Rae was a dirty girl because her skin was dirty, and her clothes. Her skin looked stained, like wood. She was a short heavyset girl with sizable breasts. A bulldog face. Large thick-lidded eyes and a snaky scar on her swollen upper lip. She was almost nice-looking except she was ugly. She was shy except for her quick temper. She wore boys’ jeans and a khaki jacket every day through the winter and she smelled of woodsmoke and underarms. She smelled of the inside of a trailer that doesn’t get aired. Her hair was stiff with grease and fitted like a cap over her head, not like normal hair we thought. You could see it was black hair yet it didn’t look black exactly, more like it was coated with a thin film of dust.

      Della Rae wasn’t waiting for the school bus with the other kids at the trailer village, Monday morning. Nor Tuesday. Nor Wednesday. Thursday she was back again, same bulldog face. Dark-stained skin. Puffy-lidded eyes. That pea-colored jacket with a drawstring hood that looked like it’d been used to wipe hands on. Della Rae stared through us making her way to the back of the bus where she sat with another girl they said was part Indian or possibly part Negro. Or both.

      At the senior high there was talk, but only in secret. Whispering, sniggering. Guys told one another in the lavatories or at their lockers, heads bent, faces creasing in amazement, lewd grins. There was much laughter. There were expressions of incredulity. How many? How long? When? The girls, of course, knew nothing about it. Especially the nice girls knew nothing about it. They did not want to know for just to know of certain things was to be sullied by the knowledge. It was possible to pray sincerely and passionately for an afflicted person (like Della Rae Duncan) to be aided by Jesus Christ without knowing exactly why.

      Maybe, in fact, it was better not to know why? You could feel sorry for that person, and generous. You didn’t shrink away in disgust.

      A year or so before, an older brother of Della Rae Duncan’s was reported killed in Vietnam. His name would eventually be engraved, with other “casualties” from Mt. Ephraim, on a granite marker in front of the post office.

      His name was Dwight David Duncan and he was a private first class in the United States Army, twenty years old at the time of his death. Since dropping out of high school he’d worked for Mulvaney Roofing. When his picture appeared on the front page of the Mt. Ephraim Patriot-Ledger, Dad exclaimed, “Son of a bitch! Dwight Duncan! Poor kid.”

      We gathered around to stare at the picture and read the columns of print. Dwight David Duncan was no one we knew, but the fact that Dad knew him, and was so upset, seemed to bring him into the house with us; into the kitchen, where even the dogs moved about uncertainly, worriedly. Private First Class Duncan was a burly, swarthy-skinned boy with heavy-lidded eyes like Della Rae’s and lank, straight, Indian-seeming hair. He’d been photographed in his dress uniform, his cap tilted back rakishly on his head; a cigarette slanted from his mouth. Dad was saying what a good, hardworking kid, very quiet, not too bright maybe but able to follow orders with no questions asked, and no complaints. “God spare us, Mikey-Junior never gets called,” Dad said, sighing. There was a pause, and he added, as always when he was on this subject, “Still, the war needs to be fought.”

      This was like tossing a lighted match into a can of gasoline.

      Mom said, “Why does it need to be fought?”

      Dad said, “Darling, we’ve been through this already.”

      Mom said, “Yes, but you never change your mind!”

      Dad said, calmly, with a wink at us kids, “Well, you never change your mind.”

      By this time Mom would be pacing about, arms flailing, eyes hot with anguish. If there were cats in the kitchen they’d rush out, ears laid back. If Little Boots was present, the most anxious of the dogs, he’d dance about clicking his toenails on the linoleum floor and whimpering up into his mistress’s and master’s faces, vivid to him as balloon faces. Mom who’d given impromptu, stammering speeches on the subject to relatives,