We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781101213131
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 1996-10-14T07:00:00+00:00

It was late, past ten o’clock. Not late by Patrick’s usual schedule but it felt late, the visit with Marianne had drained so much energy from both. Yet, unpredictably, Marianne jumped up from the sofa saying she had a surprise for Patrick she’d almost forgotten—in fact, two surprises.

She’d brought dessert, lemon tarts, from Kilburn, another of her specialities. Patrick protested he wasn’t hungry but found himself eating three of the tarts. Marianne picked sparingly at hers, eating crumbs and licking her fingers. Her sallow complexion glowed as Patrick complimented her—“You never made anything like this at home, did you? Terrific.”

And she had a packet of snapshots of High Point Farm that Judd had taken to send her, at Easter.

Mulvaney family snapshots! At such a time.

Patrick swallowed nervously. He dreaded looking through these with Marianne—but how could he refuse?

Such family snapshots had always fascinated Patrick. The only ones he ever felt comfortable with were those he’d taken himself—there would be a reason, a logic, why he, Patrick, wasn’t in a picture. Any snapshot that included him was naturally of intense interest—though usually, being vain, and in his own eyes homely, gawky frowning bespectacled Pinch, he yearned to tear such snapshots into pieces; yet a snapshot that excluded him aroused even more anxiety. Where am I? Didn’t I get born? Has it all happened without me? He wondered if there was a region of the human brain, somewhere in the cerebral cortex, specifically in the visual cortex at the back of the brain, that was triggered to register metaphysical anxiety over such absences.

How close we’ve all come, to never having been born. Out of what unfathomable infinity of possibilities, the slender probability of a single egg’s fertilization by a single sperm.

It was something Patrick did not want to contemplate.

These two dozen Polaroids, taken by Judd over the past several weeks, excluded both Marianne and Patrick, of course. And Mike, now in the Marines. Patrick’s fingers were damp and shaky as he held them, each in turn, and Marianne, who’d surely looked at them a hundred times already, was breathless, wiping at her eyes. Repeatedly she exclaimed, “Look! Oh, Patrick, look here—” at familiar sights somehow unfamiliar, exotic. There was Troy with his narrow, intelligent head cocked at an odd angle, doggy-brown eyes shining; there were two drowsy cats luxuriantly lying together on one of Mom’s quilts—“I didn’t know Snowball and E.T. could get along so well, did you?” Marianne observed, as if this were quite a revelation. There was Mom, irrepressible Mom, clowning on the back porch in a shabby old plaid parka of Mike’s, gripping a thick five-foot stalactite icicle descending from the roof, grinning at the camera; overexposed in the sunshine of late winter, harsh lines bracketing her mouth. Another of Mom taken in the kitchen, apparently unaware of the camera, poised in chatty conversation with Feathers in his cage, the canary a blur of yellow. And there was Dad glimpsed unaware of the camera too, bareheaded, graying, in his

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