We Were the Mulvaneys. Joyce Carol Oates

heart would contract like a fist—what was wrong?—no joking?—no outbursts of laughter?—Dad and Mom not laughing? The memory of it makes me uneasy even now.

      Say Dad and Mom were upstairs in their bedroom with possibly the door ajar, but I’d be scared to eavesdrop, scared of being discovered. Or they’d be in the kitchen with the stove fan roaring and rattling to drown out their conversation. (At least I’d think that was its purpose.) Or they’d meet up (accident? not likely) in one of the barns, or out in the driveway, strategically far enough from the house or any outbuilding, and they’d talk, talk. Sometimes for as long as an hour. Serious adult talk. Once I was crouched peering over the railing of the screened-in back porch and Patrick crept up behind me and we observed Dad and Mom talking together, out of earshot, for a long time. They were standing in the driveway by Dad’s Ford pickup, one hot-gusty summer afternoon: Mom in manure-stained jeans and dirty T-shirt and a bra strap showing, raggedy straw hat, dabs of white Noxzema on her sunburned face, and Dad in his summer town clothes, short-sleeved sports shirt, loosened necktie, neat khaki trousers with a braided belt fitting him snug around the waist. Dad was rattling his ignition keys in that way of his (had he just returned home from Mt. Ephraim? or was about to drive out again?) and talking rapid-fire, and nodding, not smiling though not exactly grim either, like a stranger to Patrick and me, one of those adult men you’d see in town or on TV speaking with another adult man or woman not as he’d speak to a child or a young person but in that special way like it was a different language, almost. Dad was a good-looking man in those days built like a steer (we kidded him) with a thick neck, solid torso, somewhat short legs in proportion to his body; he always took up more space than anyone else; his speech and gestures, even when he was confused, had an air of authority. A man you would not want to cross. A man you would want to please. Probably he was discussing money with Mom—money-problems were a major category of such private conversations, or, what was about the same thing, some vehicle or machine or household appliance in need of repair or replacement (“Everything’s collapsing on this goddamned farm!” Dad would groan, and Mom would reply, “Not everything, Mr. Mulvaney!—speak for yourself”—a line that doesn’t sound so funny in retrospect but was guaranteed to crack up anybody who happened to overhear); or, maybe, what was most unnerving, one of us. That day I asked P.J. in an undertone what did he think Dad and Mom were talking about like that?—and P.J. said with a shrug, “Sex.”

      I was nine years old. Too young to know what “sex” was or even what a kid of fourteen, P.J.’s age, might imagine it was. I looked at my brother amazed. “Huh?”

      “Don’t you know, Babyface, everything is about sex? It’s the primary law of nature of living things—what keeps us going.”

      P.J. was the reader of the family, hidden away much of the time with science books and magazines and his “projects”; he’d discovered biology in eighth grade, and believed that a man named Charles Darwin who’d lived in the nineteenth century had had “the answer.” Half the things he said were purposefully inscrutable: you never knew if he was serious, or just being, as we’d say, Pinch.

      I asked, “Keeps who going? How?”

      “I don’t know how,” P.J. said loftily, looking over my head, “—I just know it’s sex. Like if a man and a woman are arguing, or whatever, it isn’t about money or needing to get things done or—whatever: it’s about sex.”

      Which impressed me, but also scared me.

      Because as I’ve said, you never could trust Pinch to say what was serious, or even what was true.

      But there was the time years before, when I was really small, maybe three years old, wakened at night by a bad dream or by the wind banging something against the house, I ran next door into Dad’s and Mom’s bedroom uninvited and unexpected and their bedside light was on and I climbed right in bed with them, burrowed against them, so focussed on my own childish fear I hadn’t the slightest awareness of surprising them, annoying or embarrassing them, in the midst of what I could not have named, at the time, robust lovemaking. I can remember only the confusion, the creaking of bedsprings and Dad’s exclamation (I think it was “What the hell—!”) and Mom quickly pushing Dad from her, his bare sweaty shoulders and back, covered in frizzy hair, his bare buttocks, and hairy muscular legs, both my parents breathing hard as if they’d been running. Mom gasped, “Oh Judd!—Judd, honey—is s-something wr-wrong?” trying to catch her breath, shielding herself, her naked breasts, with the sheet, even as I continued to burrow blind and whimpering against her, and Dad flopped onto his back beside us with a forearm across his eyes, softly cursing. I said I was afraid, I didn’t want to be alone, I kicked and wriggled and of course Mom comforted me, possibly scolding me a little but her naked arms were warm and her body gave off a wonderful yeasty odor. Above my head Mom whispered to Dad, “I thought you said you locked the door,” and Dad said, “You locked it, you said,” and Mom said, “Judd’s had a scare, Michael—he’s just a baby,” and Dad said, “Fine! Good night! I’m going to sleep.” And Mom whispered to me, and got me to stop crying, and we giggled together, and Mom switched off the light, and soon we all fell asleep together, a warm sweaty tangle. And it wasn’t until years later I realized how I’d intruded upon my parents in their secret lives, and it was too late to be embarrassed.

      And if I force myself to think of it, maybe I’d have to admit that I’d done this more than once, as a small child. And each time Dad and Mom relented, and took me in. He’s just a baby.

      (Corinne and Michael Mulvaney were so romantic! All the while we kids were growing up, until this time I’m telling of when things changed. Mike thought they were embarrassing but sort of funny, you had to laugh, smooching like kids like they were just married or something; P.J. was plain embarrassed, and sulky, turning on his heel to walk out of, for instance, the kitchen, if he’d walked in upon Dad and Mom kissing, or, as they sometimes did, breaking into impromptu dance steps to radio music appropriate or not—a dreamy-dithering fox-trot, or a faster, less coordinated step, what they called “jitterbugging,” poor Feathers in his cage trilling wildly. When Dad and Mom met in public, even if they’d been apart only a few hours, and where they were was a Friday night football game at the school, a hundred people milling around, Dad would greet Mom with a big grin and “Hello, darling!” and he’d lift her hand to his lips to kiss it tenderly—even Marianne cringed at the sight, it was too, too embarrassing. Once, one of Mom’s women friends asked what was the secret of her and her husband, and Mom replied, in a lowered voice, “Oh, that man isn’t my husband. We’re just trying things out.”)

      Secrets! As a child you come to see the world’s crisscrossed with them like electromagnetic waves, maybe even held together by them. But you can’t know. Not, as kids say, for sure. And if you blunder by accident into a secret it’s like you’ve pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you’re brave or reckless enough you can even step inside—taking a chance what you’ll learn is worth what it costs.

      This other time I’m thinking of, when Mike Jr. was a senior in high school, and a star player on the football team, his picture in the local papers often and the name “Mule” Mulvaney famous in the county—I did barge in on a secret, sort of. Dad was talking to Mike and P.J. in the family room, the door shut against intrusion (you’d have to know that our family room door was never shut, I’d have thought there wasn’t even a door to the room), and I came downstairs and overheard just enough to arouse my curiosity, something in Dad’s usually congenial jokey voice that was low and earnest and quivering with emotion and exciting because I understood this was not for Ranger’s ears. I went to crouch by the door and pressed my ear against it. Dad was saying, “—I don’t care who the girl is. What her reputation is, or people say it is. Or she herself thinks it is. No sons of mine are going to be involved in behavior like that. If anybody’s treating a girl or a woman rudely in your presence—you protect her. If it means going against your friends, the hell with your ‘friends’—got it?” Dad’s voice was rising. I could picture his creased forehead, the set of his jaws, his eyes that seemed, at such times, to snap. Just—snap! You’d feel the sting of his glance like a BB