492
JOYCE CAROL OATES
tusks, perhaps an animal invented right at that moment.... But
you fathers want to be newer gods; you want to interfere
with
our souls, your children's souls. But you won't succeed. We no
longer have any souls.
FATHER
(as the first slide flashes onto the wall. It is a snapshot of a
man and a woman, black and white):
Shelley, this is my mother
and father. The year is
1922.
SHELLEY
(angrily):
What do
I
care about your mother and father?
FATHER: Your grandparents....
SHELLEY: I don't have any grandparents! Anyway I've seen that
picture before. I don't know those people, I have nothing to do
with them! They're dead!
PETER: They're strangely ugly people, aren't they?
SHELLEY: They're dead!
FATHER: My father was about twenty-five when this was taken. He
was a very energetic man, a wonderful man . . . he liked to hunt
. . . he bought a gas station and worked very hard, but he lost
money ... everything went wrong. . . . He lost everything in the
thirties. He lost his will to live.
SHELLEY
(hysterically):
I don't want to hear this! It's
all
dead,
all
finished! It's like breathing into me, opening me up the way Peter
did. They want to pump love into you. Everyone wants to pump
love into everyone else.
FATHER
(as another slide comes on):
My family. My parents, and
my two sisters and my brother. . . .
PETER: And yourself. I would recognize you anywhere.
FATHER: This was taken in
1935.
PETER: You were a skinny kid. Look at those eyes! Christ, you're
staring at us - everything is in those eyes!
(walks up to the waU,
peering at the picture)
FATHER
(as another slide appears):
Your mother and
I. ...
SHELLEY: I don't want to see this!
FATHER: ... before we were married. I was twenty-four then. Wasn't
your mother pretty? She was such a pretty woman.
PETER: Is she dead now?
FATHER: Of course not. She's waiting for us back home.
PETER: I thought all those people were dead.
FATHER: They're living, they're not dead. . . .
(as another slide ap–
pears)
And this - this
is
Shelley - only a few weeks old–
There is silence.
