“Happy” 1984

After clicking on the link to the story, scroll down to the page below the image of Vanity Fair Magazine.

 

 

Commentary

I wanted to do this story because I had an unanswered question: What does the new husband mean in the last sentence? I could think of some possibilities, but none seemed right. More close reading needed.

The mother is the least complicated and she talks a lot, so I’ll begin with her. She’s beginning to age, “veins in her arms ropier, . . . thinner,” pancake make-up (out-of-date, thick and obvious), though “blended skillfully.” But more to the point, she was happy. She described herself as “happy” twice and her daughter used the word twice to describe her. She was financially secure enough to send her daughter to a college that was an air flight away. Also apparent was her delight in sexuality, “Her Mother said in a husky voice He makes me feel like living again. I feel, you know, like a woman again.” She was “giggly,” in “high spirits,” “holding hands” with her new husband, while drinking steadily.

Oates reveals the daughter through the careful placement of silences and murmurs. She doesn’t speak at her arrival or in response later to the comments of her mother and step-father, suggesting a sense of detachment from them, at a loss of what to say. The narrator relates a long-distant phone call with her mother, taken place earlier, trying to explain to her daughter the suddenness of her marriage plans: ” The girl said very little murmuring Yes or I don’t know or I suppose so,” and, finally, “just so you’re happy.” Her reticence then and silence during the evening later make her feelings clear without description.

The new husband is a jolly, affectionate, heavy-drinking companion. We learn that he doesn’t have much money by the ring he gave the mother: “a small glittering diamond set high in spiky white-gold prongs.” But we know him better by his taste. His choice of a restaurant is “Easy Sal’s,” where the waitress wore a “tight-fitting black satin outfit” and served “beer nuts.” The entertainer was a comedian, dressed in “black fake-leather jumpsuit, pelvis thrust forward.” Her jokes were tasteless and so coarse she “muttered” them. After laughing, the new husband seems to remember that he’s in a “lady’s” company and he “confided he did not approve of dirty language issuing from women’s lips.”

Then he gets more confident. When the mother goes to the powder room, he moves closer to the girl, “leaned moist and warm, meaty, against her, an arm around her shoulders ” and I thought he was making a sexual move toward her, but that didn’t fit with the last sentence. And then, he begins protesting too much, she’s a “high-class lady” . . . “There’s nobody in the world precious to me as that lady,” as if there were some doubt. And he persists, “I want you to know that.” The girl complies, “Yes, I know it,” and he says, “in a fierce voice close to tears, Damn right, sweetheart, you know it.”

Why the “fierce” voice and why the tears? Going back to the 1st paragraph, when they are first introduced, we read, “in his handshake her hand felt small and moist, the bones close to cracking.” A signal of power. And now, having felt the daughter’s aversion, he commands in an outburst, “a fierce voice close to tears . . . Damn right, sweetheart, you know it,” and the girl realizes that she’s not to doubt his intentions in any way.

Have I answered my question? Maybe. He acts as if he’s afraid of losing his new wife, and his intensity reveals an aggressive, potentially violent nature. We guess that the mother will not be happy for long. Her new husband is not who he seems to be.

 

Comments are always welcome

 

“Where Are You?”

     A intriguing story. Although they share the same house, the husband and wife are unable to reach each other–he, unwilling to wear his hearing aid, cannot hear her nor can he find her, and she can never be sure where he is. “ ‘Hello, Hello? Where are you?’ he’d call repeatedly and she would call back, repeatedly, “Yes? What is it?” trying to determine where he was. ” They never seem to be where the other is. At one point, she does find him and she,” trying to remain calm, ‘What is it?’ ” His answer, introduced by “And he would tell her-” suggests monotony, weariness, followed by, “a complaint, a remark, an observation, a reminder, a query–” and later, call her again, “with a new urgency.” The gap between them not narrowed by their chance communications.

 

     The aggravation builds and here becomes the answer to where. “But I was here all along,” she says, and he responds, “No, you were not. I was here and you were not here,” unwittingly describing their relationship. Becoming more frustrated, she thinks of hiding from him, escaping, then decides to call louder, “I’m here, I’m always here,” but he continues questioning, “Hello? Where are you? Hello!, ” until, at last, she screams,” What do you want? I’ve told you, I’m here,” but here has now become nowhere. At this point, each one is angry and impatient and she, “had no choice but to give in.” On her way once more to find him, she falls down the stairs and dies. Her husband, unaware of this, goes on calling, getting no answer, and the separation is permanent.

     They live in a world without substance. No names, no descriptions, no details except the house and its rooms. The couple’s existence is made up of seeking and not finding, of answering and not being heard, of speech dominated by three empty words, Where, What, and Here. In an essay on Oates, Nasrullah Mambrol writes, ”Isolation, detachment, and even alienation create the obstacles that her characters struggle to overcome.” “Where Are You ?” demonstrates this condition in its raw experience, without context. In this story, their struggle was not enough.

Endnote: In the last sentence of the story, a curious change occurs: the omniscient narrator, our reporter, like the now-deceased wife, becomes uncertain, telling us that the husband is “in one of the downstairs rooms, or perhaps in the cellar, or on the deck at the rear of the house. . . . ” The narrator can’t locate him either; they are cut off from each other, suggesting that the narrator shares the couple’s condition– isolated, detached. And perhaps implying that the rest of us may, too.