My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

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       “Boys Will Be Boys”

       W AS IT WONDERFUL TO HAVE BROTHERS WHEN YOU WERE growing up? Older brothers? Who could look out for you?

      Girls lacking older brothers would ask me. How wistful they were! Having to fend on their own.

      I didn’t just adore my brothers, I was proud of them. Just the fact—My big brothers! Mine.

      For girls are keenly sensitive of needing to be looked after. In certain circumstances, like school. Not to be alone, exposed, unprotected. Vulnerable.

      Not measurable but very real—the power of older brothers to forestall teasing, bullying, harassment, threats from other boys made against girls. The protective power of older brothers by their mere existence.

      The sexual threat of boys is greatly diminished, by the (mere) existence of a girl’s brothers.

      Unless of course the girl’s brothers are themselves the (sexual) threat.

      Parents have not a clue. Cannot guess. The (secret) lives of children, adolescents. Thinking that, because we are quiet, or docile (seeming), because we smile on cue and seem happy, because we are no trouble, that our inner lives are placid, and not churning and choppy and terrifying as the Niagara River as it gathers momentum rushing to the Falls.

       Did you adore your brothers, Vi’let?

       Sure, you had to!

      IT’S TRUE. I ADORED MY BROTHERS.

      Not so much Rick, the youngest, who resembled me temperamentally, and who was a reasonably good student, as I was, and sweet-natured, but the other, older boys—Jerr, Lionel, Les.

      They were quick-tempered and loud and impatient and bossy. Out of the earshot of adults they were profane, even obscene. They were funny—crass and crude. And loud—did I say loud? Voices, footsteps. On the stairs. Opening and shutting doors. Colliding with me if I didn’t get out of their way.

      Ignoring me, usually. Of course, why’d my brothers take note of me?

      They were not so polite to Mom, sometimes. Mouthy, she’d call them. But in our father’s presence, they were watchful, wary. They behaved.

      If Daddy became annoyed with one of them he had ways of disciplining: sometimes a sharp, level look; sometimes an uplifted hand, the flat of the hand, a fist.

      Flick of Devil-Daddy tongue which the boys could not miss. Hot red, sharp-pointed tongue like a blade slicing their hearts. But in the next instant, gone.

      Even so, outside the house the older Kerrigan boys sometimes got into trouble.

      Almost there was a hushed reverent air to the phrase—into trouble.

      The first time I was too young to know what had happened. Nor did Katie know. And if Miriam knew, she wouldn’t tell us.

      On the phone with relatives our mother spoke derisively: “It’s nothing. It’s a stupid rumor. Those liars.”

      Though sometimes her voice quavered: “It’s her word against theirs! That’s what everybody says, and that’s a legal fact.”

      Near-inaudibly Mom would speak into the phone, in the kitchen. Seated, hunched over, pressing the avocado-plastic receiver against her ear as if trying to keep the words inside from spilling out.

      If Katie asked what was going on Mom said, scolding: “Never mind! It’s no business of you girls.”

      You girls. Often we’d hear from Mom’s mouth.

      Her gaze avoiding us, skittering away across the linoleum floor.

      We were mystified but we knew better than to persist in questions. We knew better than to ask our brothers who were the ones in trouble. (And if we asked Rick he’d shrug us off—Don’t ask me, ask them.) No possibility of asking our father who was the custodian of all secrets and didn’t take kindly to being questioned about anything. And eventually we learned what had happened, or some version of what had happened, as we learned most things not meant for us to know, piecing together fragments of stories as our mother sometimes, with a curious sort of self-punishing patience, fitted together broken crockery to mend with glue.

      The girl whose word was against theirs was a fourteen-year-old special-needs student at the middle school where Lionel was in ninth grade. Jerr was sixteen, a junior at the high school.

      Liza Deaver was the name. Liza Lizard she was called for her face was splotched like a turtle’s shell.

      At fourteen she had the body of a mature woman, fattish, slow-moving, with thick plastic-rimmed glasses and lenses that magnified her eyes. She wore slacks with elastic waistbands and plaid shirts that billowed loose over her big soft breasts and belly. We’d overheard our brothers imitating her speech which was slow and stammering and whining like the speech of a young child.

      Liza’s mental age was said to be nine or ten. And it would remain that age through her life.