Joyce Carol Oates - A Fair Maiden

AN OTTO PENZLER BOOK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON NEW YORK
2009

OTHER Otto Penzler Books
BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

The Barrens

Beasts

Rape: A Love Story

The Female of the Species:
Tales of Mystery and Suspense

The Museum of Dr. Moses

Copyright 2009 by The Ontario Review, Inc.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777 .

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oates, Joyce Carol, date
A fair maiden / Joyce Carol Oates.lst ed.
p. cm.
"An Otto Penzler Book."
ISBN 978-0-15-101516-0
1. Teenage girlsFiction. I. Title.
PS3565.A8F34 2009
813'.54 dc 22 2008029359

Book design by Brian Moore

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for
Jeanne Wilmot Carter

So slowly, slowly, she came up
And slowly she came nigh him.
And all she said when there she came,
Young man, I think you're dying.

The Ballad of Barbara Allen

I NNOCENTLY IT BEGAN . When Katya Spivak was sixteen years old and Marcus Kidder was sixty-eight.

On Ocean Avenue of Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, in the thickening torpor of late-morning heat she'd been pushing the Engelhardts' ten-month-old baby in his stroller and clutching the hand of the Engelhardts' three-year-old daughter, Tricia, passing the succession of dazzling and dreamlike shops for which Ocean Avenue was knownthe Bridal Shoppe, the Bootery, the Wicker House, Ralph Lauren, Lily Pulitzer, Crowne Jewels, the Place Setting, Pandora's Gift Box, Prim Rose Lane Lingerie & Nightwearwhen, as she paused to gaze into the Prim Rose Lane window, there came an unexpected voice in her ear: "And what would you choose, if you had your wish?"

What registered was the quaint usage your wish. Your wish, like something in a fairy tale.

At sixteen she was too old to believe in fairy tales, but she did believe in what might be promised by a genial male voice urging your wish.

With a smile she turned to him. In Bayhead Harbor, it was generally a good idea to lead with a smile. For possibly she knew this person, who'd been following her, keeping pace with her in the periphery of her vision, not passing her as other pedestrians did as she dawdled in front of store windows. In Bayhead Harbor, where everyone was so friendly, you naturally turned to even a stranger with a smile, and it was something of a disappointment to her to see that the stranger was an older, white-haired, gentlemanly man in a seersucker sport coat of the hue of ripe cantaloupe, white sport shirt and spotless white cord trousers, sporty white yachtsman's shoes. His eyes were a frank icy blue, crinkled at the corners from decades of smiling. Like a romantic figure in a Hollywood musical of bygone daysFred Astaire? Gene Kelly?he was even leaning on a carved ebony cane. "Well! I'm waiting, dear. What is your wish?"

In the Prim Rose Lane display window were such silky, intimate items of apparel, it seemed very strange that anyone who passed by could see them, and yet more unnerving that others might observe. Katya had been staring at a red lace camisole and matching red lace pantiessilk, sexy, ridiculously expensiveworn by an elegantly thin blond mannequin with a bland beautiful face, but it was a white muslin Victorian-style nightgown with satin trim, on a girl mannequin with braids, to which she pointed. "That," Katya said.

"Ah! Impeccable taste. But you weren't looking at something else, were you? As I said, my dear, you have your choice."

My dear. Katya laughed uncertainly. No one spoke like this; on TV, in movies, maybe. My dear was meant to be quaint, and comical. You are so young, and I am so old. If I acknowledge this with a joke, will I come out on top?

He introduced himself as "Marcus Kidder, longtime Bayhead Harbor summer resident." This too sounded playful, as if Kidder had to be a joke. But his smile was so sincere, his manner so cordial, Katya saw no harm in volunteering her name, in abbreviated form: "I'm Katya. I'm a nanny." Pausing to suggest how silly, how demeaning the very term nanny wasshe hated it. She was spending July and August until Labor Day working for a couple named Engelhardt, from Saddle River, New Jersey; the Engelhardts had just built a split-level house on New Liberty Street, on one of the harbor channels. "Maybe you know them? Max and Lorraine? They belong to the Bayhead Harbor Yacht Club."

"Doubtful that I do," Mr. Kidder said with a polite sneer. "If your employers are among the swarm of new people multiplying along the Jersey coast like mayflies."

Katya laughed. Dignified Mr. Kidder didn't like the Engelhardts any more than she did, and he didn't even know them.

Was he going to offer to buy her the nightgown? It seemed to have been forgotten, for which Katya was both grateful and mildly disappointed.

Though there was no doubt in her mind how she'd have reacted: Mr. Kidder, no thanks!

"Well, I have to leave now," Katya said, edging away. "Goodbye."

"And I, too. In this direction."

And so Mr. Kidder fell into step with Katya, walking with her on Ocean Avenue and making sparkly conversation with Tricia, a shy child, now a not-so-shy child, beguiled by this charming old white-haired man who, so far as a three-year-old could know, might be a grandfatherly friend or acquaintance of her parents'. Now in the succession of shop windows Katya was aware of two reflectionsher own, and that of the tall, white-haired Mr. Kidder. You would think, An attractive pair! Katya smiled in the hope that passersby might imagine them together, maybe related. She was thinking how unusual it was to see a man of Mr. Kidder's age so tall, at least six feet two. And he carried himself with such dignity, his shoulders so straight. And his clothesthose were expensive clothes. And that striking white hair, soft-floating white, lifting in two wings from his high forehead. His skin was creased like a glove lightly crushed in the hand and was slightly recessed beneath the eyes, yet no more, Katya thought, than her own bruised-looking eyes when she had to push herself out of bed at an early hour after an insomniac night. Mr. Kidder's face was flushed with color, however, as if blood pulsed warmly just below the surface of his skin. He appeared to be of an age far beyond that of Katya's father, yet she couldn't believe that he was her grandfather's age: that terrifying limbo of free fall when specific ages become, to the young, beside the point. To the young there are no meaningful degrees of old, as there are no degrees of dead: either you are, or you are not.

Katya noticed that Mr. Kidder winced just slightly, walking with his cane. Yet he meant to be entertaining, telling her and Tricia that he had a "new, one-hundred-percent nonorganic plastic" right knee: "Have you ever heard of anything so amazing?"

Katya said, "Sure we have. People can buy new kneeshipsheartslungsif they have the money. Nothing needs to wear out, if you're rich. Tricia here will live to be one hundred and ten. Her parents expect it."

Katya laughed, and Mr. Kidder joined in. Exactly why, neither could have said.

"And what of you, dear Katya? How long do you expect to live?"

"Me? Not long at all. Maybe until I'm ... forty. That's old enough." Carelessly Katya spoke, with a shiver of distaste. Her mother was over forty. Katya had no wish to resemble