The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-05-14T19:25:59+00:00

Sure she could concede, Seigl was kind. Sure Seigl was courteous.

Sure Seigl was a gentleman not like every other asshole she’d worked for in the past ten years. Sure he paid her well and always on time.

Never bossed her around mean and sarcastic like other men.

( Like Dmitri Meatte sometimes? But Alma was in love with Dmitri Meatte.)

The Jew never touched her, brushed against her. Anyway not yet.

She hardened her heart against him not wishing to feel sorry for him. Whatever was wrong with him. Seeing his shaky hands and the glisten of sweat on his face she turned away with a smile of childish cruelty. Good! Now you know.

Her father Delray Busch had had the shakes as long as she could remember. Raising his hand to his children in threat and the hand shook but you cringed just the same for that hand could strike, and strike hard. So too her uncle Mason, a tremor in both hands. And there was grandpa with something the doctor called Parkinson’s.

Half the men in the Busch family had emphysema. And Alma’s mother was always coming down with bad colds, bronchitis. You couldn’t blame just the mines the men worked or the smoky air, common sense told you it was cigarette smoking, too. Not that anybody gave a damn enough to stop.

There was asbestosis some people had, too. Like emphysema.

You ended up hooked to an oxygen tank, sucking air twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life. If you were lucky.

The Tattooed Girl was one of the lucky ones in fact. Why Alma was prone to be in a good mood. A single beer, a single joint, some guy feeling her up and saying kind words to her, Alma’s in a party mood. What you’d call a party girl. Would’ve made a fantastic Playboy bunny! A guy she’d known in Pittsburgh took some photos like for a centerfold to send to Playboy, Penthouse . . . See, Alma left Akron Valley and never a backward glance.

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Her father might be dead by now. Coughing out his lungs. For sure, her grandfather. Nobody’d sought the Tattooed Girl to invite back for any mourning or funeral not that they could’ve located her anyway. Nobody’d sent out Have You Seen Me? flyers seeking the Tattooed Girl.

Not that Alma cared. Fuck, no.

Not that she gave a thought to it. Back there. It was hard enough to remember last month, last week. Yesterday. And now there was this new thing in her life, this new job. In this new place.

Hate hate hate him: the Jew.

She could not have said if it was Mr. Seigl’s Jew-ness she hated, or hating him, and knowing he was a Jew, that was why. Which came first. Maybe she’d never have guessed he was a Jew except Dmitri made so much of it. (She’d never have guessed the sister “Jet” was any Jew for sure.) Or was it maybe instinct? Something you could

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