The Lost Sister: An Elegy by Joyce Carol Oates
Story is about grief, shame, guilt, luck; the one that got away; the shadow self; the scary sibling; that which is taboo; family secrets; that which cannot be named, or written about, but now is.
Can you write about family members if they are still alive but do not know they are being written about? Can you do so in good conscience?
Family secrets make for great stories.
Page 1, sentence 1: Always good to write about the unexpected:
“She was not a planned birth.”
Page 1: Stakes raised, fear alluded to
We were thrilled, but we were also frightened.
pleasurable.
yet—
As if a radioactive substance had come to rest in our midst, deceptively small, even miniature, but casting off a powerful light.
At times, a blinding light.
And if light can be deafening, a deafening light.
Page 1: Help us name your baby sister, Joyce (she repeats this line on page 5, on last page, page 18, too)
Page 1: The power of names; she riffs on the power of names:
Names passing through my brain like an incantation.
Names that were fascinating to me, in themselves. Syllables of sound like poetry.
As a young child I had imagined that a name conferred a sort of significance. Power, importance. Mystery. Sometimes when my name was spoken—in certain voices, though not all—I shivered as if my very soul had been touched. I felt that Joyce Carol was a very special name, for it sounded in my ears musical and lithesome; it did not sound heavy, harsh, dull.
I knew that my parents had named me, and that their naming of me was special to them. I think I recall that my mother had seen the name Joyce in a newspaper and had liked the name because it seemed happy sounding. But both my parents had named me.
My father, who loved music, who played the piano by ear, who often sang, hummed, whistled to himself when he was working or around the house. You could hear Daddy in another room, singing under his breath. The name Carol to my father suggested music, song. Somehow this musical tendency in my father is bound up with my name.
Page 2 Good dialogue right away:
My high school friends were nothing short of astonished when I finally told them, as I’d been reluctant to tell them for months, that my mother was going to have a baby in June.
“But your mother is too old!”— one of my friends said tactlessly.
In fact, my mother was forty-two years old. I did not want to think that this was old.
Having to tell others of my mother’s pregnancy made me painfully self-conscious. I felt my face burn unpleasantly as my girlfriends plied me with questions.
“When did you know?”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“Isn’t it going to be strange—a baby in the family? So much younger than you?”
Pages 5-6: Part 2 (end of first third of story, stakes raised):
2.
No. I can’t speak of her.
It is not possible. The words are not available.
As she has no speech, so I have no ready speech to present her.
I am not allowed to “imagine”—and so, I am helpless.
There is no way. There is no access.
There is only distance, as across a deep chasm.
If there is a way it is oblique, awkward.
It is the way of one foot in front of another, and another—
plodding, cautious of the steep fall.
It is not exactly cowardly—(I suppose: for if I were cowardly
I would never undertake such a hopeless task but flee from it)—
but it is cautious. It is not the sort of pain that becomes
Reckless to press forward when you know you will fail and
you cannot go forward except by this route.
You cannot pretend: your sister was never born.
poken quickly and carelessly, autistic can sound like artistic.
Page 6: Stakes raised
Lynn doesn’t look at us. She doesn’t talk, or try to talk.
She doesn’t seem to recognize us. She will only eat certain foods.
She is getting to have a bad temper.
Page 7 Grandma brings specific objects for Lynn to play with; elevate and list objects; use of domestic detail brings story alive. Grandmother's love of sister is healing to the story---reader feels some brief respite and comfort, knowing someone is offering kindness and normalcy to damaged sister.
My grandmother Blanche Morgenstern did not seem to accept the diagnosis of autism, in fact. It seemed to be her (implicit, unargued) conviction that there was nothing seriously wrong with her younger granddaughter. Year following year she took the Greyhound bus from Lockport to visit her son’s family in Millersport, and with each visit she brought a present for Lynn, as she’d once brought presents for me—coloring books, Crayolas, picture books; each present, as my brother dryly remarked, our sister destroyed within a few minutes, with varying degrees of fury.
Page 7: Question repeatedly asked
What will become of Lynn, do you think?
What will become of Mom and Dad?
Page 8: Stakes raised, first bomb dropped. Husband would never meet sister!
None of my friends from high school or college would ever meet my sister. My husband would never meet my sister.
Page 8 :She is writing about taboo, about a subject that is avoided (good thing to write about):
Perhaps it was an expression of love, respect, dignity that you did not ever ask any question that would embarrass another or suggest that a facade of domestic happiness was not altogether sincere.
Pages 9-10: Elevated object, copy of Henry James’ Golden Bowl destroyed: Scene built around destruction of elevated, beloved object: Also, hint of the danger Lynn would eventually pose to mother and second bomb dropped (this is the last time narrator sees her sister):
Foolish to have left my paperback copy of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl on a table in my parents’ living room. I’d come home to visit for a few days and unthinking left some of my books where Lynn could find them. All the books were destroyed but it’s only The Golden Bowl I recall, the irony, the pathos, James’s great web of words, printed words, as inscrutable to my sister as Sanskrit would be to me, and for that reason richly deserving of destruction.
Or, more plausibly: my rampaging sister destroyed the book not knowing it was a book or even that it was Joyce’s book but only that it was an object new in the household, therefore out of place, offensive to her sense of decorum and order.
It is painful to recall: my sister would tear pages in her fists, she would tear at the pages with her teeth. She would make high-pitched strangulated cries, or she would grunt, in her misery, frustration, desperation. She would not ever—not once—so much as look at me, though she must have sensed my presence.
(Though she could not have known how uncannily she resembled me, and I resembled her. Like twins separated by eighteen years.)
It was inanimate objects my sister would attack, generally. She would never attack me.
(And yet—one day, she might have attacked me. As a pubescent child, older, taller, stronger, very likely Lynn would have attacked me, as she would one day attack my mother.)
How vivid it is still, the ravaged copy of The Golden Bowl with its eloquent, elaborate, and all but impenetrable introduction by R. P. Blackmur. Badly torn, and the lurid imprint of small sharp teeth on what remained of the pages.
“Oh, Lynn! What did you do.”
I was acutely aware of my mother in the kitchen doorway a short distance away, who’d come to see what was wrong. If words were exchanged between my mother and me at this time I have forgotten them.
Very likely my mother had suggested that it was my own fault for having left the books in that vulnerable place where Lynn would find them. And of course this was true. If there was fault here, it could only be my own.
In the kitchen my excited sister was on her feet but hunched and rocking from side to side making her strangulated Nyah-nyah-nyah sound. It was not laughter, and it was not derisive or taunting—it was purely sound, and meaningless. At this time Lynn might have been eight, nine, ten years old—a child who grew physically, but not mentally.
The confrontation with The Golden Bowl had been the child’s triumph but it had left her dangerously overexcited; there was the danger that she might attack something else now, or someone.
Still, they kept Lynn at home until she was fifteen. And taller and heavier than my mother, and very excitable. And dangerous.
And that would be the last time I saw my sister, at about the age of fifteen.
Page 12: Beginning of part 3 (18 page story)
Page 13: Lot of tension producing exposition
One day my sister had turned on my mother in the kitchen. Since neither of my parents wished to speak in any way negative or critical about Lynn, and did not willingly respond to queries about their safety in continuing to keep her at home, I never learned any details of the attack. But I had long worried that something like this might happen, and that my mother, who spent virtually all her waking hours caring for my sister, might be badly injured; or at the very least that my mother would be exhausted and demoralized.
You could not simply say to such devoted parents—But you have to put Lynn in a home! You are not equipped to take care of her.
My normally reasonable father was not reasonable when it came to discussing this domestic crisis. It was not advised to bring the subject up, for Daddy would quickly become defensive and incensed. To speak in even a hushed and apologetic voice was to risk being disloyal, intrusive. The strain on my mother, who was Lynn’s primary caretaker, day following day and week following week for years, was overwhelming; eventually her health was undermined. I would one day learn that my mother was taking prescription tranquillizers to deal with the stress of taking care of Lynn, and this with my father’s approval. My father, of course, spent most of his time at work—out of the house.
By this time my parents were living in a small ranch house they’d had built on the original farm property; the old farmhouse and the farm buildings had been demolished. My Hungarian grandmother Lena Bush had died. My brother Robin—that is, Fred Jr.—was in his late twenties, married, and living some miles away in Clarence, New York. The old life of the farm, the life of my childhood, was irrevocably lost, and in its place, it sometimes seemed, was a surreal nightmare of domesticity: my beloved parents, no longer young, in a single-story clapboard ranch house like so many others on Transit Road, obsessively tending to their mentally ravaged daughter who so uncannily resembled the elder daughter whose place she had taken.
Page 14: Third bomb dropped (narrator quietly reveals she has still not seen sister in years)
I would think she has a horrible life but she does not seem sad—so my brother has said.
Page 14 Elevated object of the helmet is used as story telling device—-it protects the sister, but also hints at her destructiveness
The shiny helmet looks heavy and unwieldy but in fact it is made of a very light plastic. The interior is padded and is (said to be) comfortable, like the interior of a bicycle helmet. The chin straps are easily adjustable and (it is said) not likely to cause strangulation or injury except in the most freakish of circumstances when the afflicted individual is bent on injuring himself.
At some point in adolescence Lynn began to suffer seizures that resembled epileptic seizures. Though these are controlled to a degree by medication, she is obliged to wear a safety helmet at all times except when she is secure in her bed.
Doctors have said—She isn’t angry. As we understand anger.
Carefully they have said—Your sister does become frustrated. It is typical of those with her condition, to become frustrated. Her face is sometimes contorted in what appears to be a look of rage or anguish but it is not a psychological or emotional expression of the kind one of us might feel. It is an expression caused by a muscular strain or spasm in the face.
Do not think that it is hostility directed toward you.
Do not think that she is aware of, or in any way responding to, you.
Pages 15-16 Sister is an echo, a ghost of the narrator: At its core, this story is about luck—-the luck of the narrator—-and shame (Does she feel shame? Or do we feel it on her behalf?)
Disconcerting how with her dark-brown eyes, wavy dark-brown hair, and pale skin, your younger sister so resembles you.
Anyone who sees her, and sees you—looks from one to the other—feels this frisson of recognition: how your sister who is eighteen years younger than you and who has never uttered a word in her entire life so strikingly resembles you.
She will not meet your eye no matter how patiently, or impatiently, you wait. For she is not like you.
She is an individual without language. It is not possible for you to imagine what this must be, to be without language.
For nearly sixty years she has lived in silence. She does not hear the voices of others as we hear voices; but she has learned to hear in her therapeutic classes at the facility. Her own speech is grunts, groans, moans, whimpers, and cries of frustration and dismay. She does not laugh; she has not ever learned to laugh.
In the presence of the brain damaged we find ourselves in the Uncanny Valley. It is we who are made to feel unease, even terror. I am made to feel guilt—for I have had access to language, to spoken and written speech, and she has not. And this, by an accident of birth.
Not what we deserve, but what is given us.
Not what we are, but what we are made to be.
Page 16 Bomb dropped: narrator has not seen sister since 1971 (story published in 2015 so 44 years). Is this rationale or reality?
I have not seen my afflicted sister since 1971, when she was fifteen years old. Tall for her age, wiry-thin, gangling, with pale skin, an expression on her face of anger, anguish—or as easily vacancy and obstinacy. A mirror-self, just subtly distorted. Sister-twin, separated by eighteen years. Though I have thought of Lynn often in the intervening years, I have not seen her; initially, because my parents would not have wished this, and eventually, because such a visit would be upsetting to her, as to me. And futile. She would not know me, nor even glance at me. What I would know of her, I could not bear.
Pages 17-18: The candid admission/guilt of the narrator
In April 2014, fourteen years after our father’s death, in response to a query, my brother brings me up-to-date on our sister’s condition, which seems unchanged: Lynn is totally nonverbal and does not talk at all. She has frequent seizures and wears a helmet at all times to protect her when she falls. . . . She does not recognize me nor do I think she recognizes anyone at all. She is shy, and does not like it when her routine is changed.
It would have startled and displeased my parents, if I’d suggested going to visit Lynn in her facility; it would have seemed intrusive to them, for they would have surmised that, if I visited my sister, it might be for the purpose of writing about her; and they would not have wanted me to write about her, not then, not ever. And so, I had not ever inquired about visiting her—though I had many times fantasized about visiting the now-adult woman who very likely closely resembles me as I would have been if at birth some neurological catastrophe had occurred to render my brain impaired. And after sixty years, as I contemplate visiting Lynn at last, with my brother Fred, I feel faint with dread, and guilt.
For the fact is, the visit would not benefit Lynn, only me. The visit would be intrusive and upsetting to her, who is upset by any break in her routine. Only my brother has visited Lynn, in the years since my parents’ deaths. But Lynn does not recognize him, has no awareness of him, and for him too, such visits are futile; except as Fred Oates Jr. is Lynn’s guardian, he has no role in her life. Yet my brother has (heroically, I think) acquitted himself fully as her guardian, and has borne the responsibility he’d accepted at my father’s request.
Page 18: End of story ominously circles back to the beginning, which was strangely hopeful.
“Help us name your baby sister, Joyce.”
It was a festive time. It was, in fact, my birthday: my eighteenth birthday. I had not been forgotten after all.
My parents smiled with happiness. It was their hope, if I helped to name my sister that I would love her too.
This was long ago. Yes, it was a happy time.
For so much lay ahead, unanticipated. No reason to anticipate the wholly unexpected of years to come.
After days of deliberation I presented my parents with the name that seemed to me the ideal name—Lynn Ann Oates.
A very nice name, they said. “Thank you, Joyce.”
