Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 6. Whole No. 778, June 2006
Babysitter
by Joyce Carol Oates
Copyright © 2006 Joyce Carol Oates.
Joyce Carol Oates’s latest book is one readers of dark suspense won’t want to miss. The Female of the Species (Harcourt, 1/06) includes some EQMM stories, but most of the tales are from other sources. Ms. Oates has been writing suspense novels as Rosamond Smith and, more recently, as Laura Kelly, for years, but as far as we know, this is her first mystery story collection.
Midday, early spring, sunshine in steel bars flashing on the river, she drove to meet him where he’d summoned her. Wind swept in roiling gusts from the Canadian shore.
Suburban life: appointments! Mornings, afternoons. And then the children’s appointments. Dentist, orthodontist. Gynecologist, hair salon, yoga. Architect, community relations forum, library fundraiser for which she’s a committee co-chair, flattered to be invited, yet uneasy. Suburban life: Each calendar day is a securely barred window, you shove up the window and grasp the bars, grip the bars tight, these are bars that confine but also protect, what pleasure in shaking them!
My appointments this afternoon, she’d told them. Two o’clock, then three, after the library I must drive downtown.
It was a journey: downtown. Twelve miles south and east on the thunderous expressway.
She drove without haste. She drove like a woman already fatally stricken, resigned. She drove at a wavering speed, in the right lane. Calm as a woman in a dream the outcome of which she already knows though in fact she did not know. What will happen? I will never go through with this — will I?
She didn’t think so. It would be her first time, she hadn’t such courage.
Out of the leafy suburbs north of the Midwestern city she drove. Massive vehicles passed on the left, her station wagon shuddered in their wake. The nape of her neck was bare, her pale hair swung in scissor-cut wings about her face. Suburban villages were passing beyond the six-foot chain-link fence above the expressway, barely visible from the highway that seemed to be sucking her into it, by degrees downhill in the direction of the river, what was called, as if it were a self-contained place, City Center.
The air was clamorous, like an argument among strangers you can’t quite hear. It was a gusty April, not yet Easter. There was something she meant to remember: Easter. Something about the children. Her skin burned in anticipation of him.
He was her friend, she wished to think. He’d touched her only once. The imprint of his fingers on her forearm was still visible to her, in secret.
The station wagon was a new model, handsome and gleaming and paneled in wood. A sturdy vehicle, in the rear strewn with children’s things. Still, gusts of wind rocked it, she gripped the steering wheel tight. Such wind! In their hillside house in Bloomfield Heights that was an old fieldstone colonial, wind whistled in the chimneys, rattled the windows with a furtive sound like something trying to get in. Doors were blown open by the wind, or blown shut with a crash. Oh, Mommy! their five-year-old daughter cried. The ghost!
My appointment downtown, she’d told Ismelda, who had her cell phone number in any case. Should anything happen. Should you need me. You can pick up the children at the usual door, at their school. I will be back by five-thirty, I’m sure.
Five-thirty! This was a statement, a pledge. She wondered should she tell him, as soon as she stepped inside the door.
I can’t stay long. I will have to leave by...
It was astonishing to her, how the city began to emerge out of a muddle of wood-frame houses, aged tenements, flat-topped roofs, and debris-strewn pavement. Suddenly in the distance, two or three miles ahead, were a number of high-rise buildings, some of them quite impressive. City Center was ahead, a narrow peninsula at the tip of downtown, on the restored riverfront: Renaissance Plaza. She would exit there.
The city had once been a great Midwestern city, before a catastrophic “race riot” in 1967. Since then, the white population had gradually declined, like air escaping from a balloon.
I won’t have the courage, I’m not a reckless woman. I will only just talk to him. I will tell him...
The next exit was City Center. Last Exit Before Tunnel to Canada. Her heart quickened like the heart of a creature sensing danger though not knowing from which direction danger will spring.
...I want you as a friend. Someone in whom I can...
She’d driven the children to school that morning, as she did most mornings. Mommy in a bulky car coat. She had been married for nine years. That morning the children had been unusually fretful, tugging at her. Mommy! Mom-my! That sound of reproach in a child’s voice, your heart is lacerated. It was a summons to her blood, she could not resist. The children adored her, they were insatiable. Perhaps they sensed something. The little girl was in kindergarten, the little boy in second grade. Mommy, kiss-kiss! She laughed, she was wounded by their beauty that seemed to her fragile like something tiny that has fallen from its nest, or something that has been expelled from its shell, its protective armor.
She shuddered with the knowledge, Mommy was their protective armor. She was not wearing the bulky car coat now but a coat of soft black cashmere with a blank mink collar, that fell in loose folds about her slender legs.
In the rearview mirror above the windshield her face gleamed pale as a moon. Fine lines at the corners of her eyes not visible in the glass. She smiled, uneasy. For a long time she’d been one of the young wives, one of the younger mothers, now no longer. She thought I am a beautiful woman, I have a right to be loved.
Lying beside her heavily sleeping husband, nights in succession for nine years. She could not remember their first time together, it seemed as if they had always known each other, as children perhaps. Her husband was a man who shook hands forcefully, looked you in the eye. A man you could trust. A man you wanted to know. She had seen him look appraisingly at women, she’d seen the way women looked at him. He was careless, there was something imperial about him, he was a six-foot boy, confident of being admired. He was a man who could not love her quite so much as she loved him, he’d admitted this. Even in wounding her, saying such a thing, he seemed to be granting a blessing, tossing gold coins at her.
In all marriages there is the imbalance: one who loves more than the other. One who licks wounds in secret, the rust-taste of blood.
Now she was no longer on the expressway, she was uncertain where to turn. The streets of the city center were narrow, one-way, congested with delivery trucks. A dying city, why was there so much traffic? She could see the gleaming tower of the hotel that was her destination. She could not possibly get lost in a maze of streets so close to the hotel! She regretted she hadn’t left home earlier. Her pride in not having left home earlier. She had stared at the clock mesmerized, she had held herself back. Then calmly telling Ismelda: I have an appointment, downtown. I will be back by... Her eyes shone like the eyes of one unaccustomed to emotion, taking care not to stammer.
In this season of their marriage, her husband often returned home late. He was an enormously busy man, he had both an assistant and a secretary. He had business luncheons, dinners. He was in New York City, in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles. Yet he was one of the younger men in his firm, his elders looked upon him with admiration and approval. The children loved Daddy emptying his pockets for them, pennies and nickels, dimes. She was fearful of lying to this man, he might hear the quaver in her voice with indifference.