The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

house there would be a glimmer of movement in the corner of my eye: the figure of a person passing through a doorway. He had hurt her badly, we knew. And the children. For they were his to hurt.
    We knew though we did not know, for no one had told us.
    The sky in such places of abandonment was of the hue and brightness of tin. As if the melancholy rural poverty of tin roofs reflects upward.
    No one had told me and yet I knew: it was a dangerous place to be a woman if you were not a woman protected by a man or men. Ifyou were not a child protected by a father, a mother. If you were not of a family that owned a house—a “home.”
    A HOUSE IS A structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, and these rooms divided from one another by walls, ceilings, floors. The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will survive it, reverting again to house when home has departed.
    In my life subsequent to Millersport I have not found the visual equivalent of these abandoned farmhouses of western New York in the north country of Erie County in the region of the Tonawanda Creek and the Erie Canal. You are led to think most immediately of Edward Hopper: those unsettling stylized visions of a lost America, houses never rendered as “homes,” and human beings, if you look closely, never depicted as anything other than mannequins. There is Charles Burchfield who rendered the landscapes of western New York and his native Ohio as visionary and luminous and excluded the human figure entirely. The shimmering pastel New England barns, fields, trees and skies of Wolf Kahn are images evoked by memory on the edge of dissolution. But the “real”—that which assaults the eye before the brain begins its work of selection, rearrangement, censure—is never on the edge of dissolution, still less appropriation. The “real” is raw, unexpected, unpredictable; sometimes luminous but more often not. Above all, the “real” is gratuitous. For to be a “realist” (in life as in art) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. No design, no intention, no aesthetic, moral, or teleological imprimatur. The equivalent of Darwin’s vision of a blind, purposeless, and ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ultimate “products”—only temporary strategies against extinction.
    How memory is a matter of bright, fleeting surfaces imperfectly preserved in the perishable brain.
    Where a house has been abandoned, too wrecked, rotted, or despairing to be sold, very likely seized by the county in default of taxes and the property held in escrow, there is a sad history. There have been devastated lives. Lives to be spoken of cautiously. How they went wrong. When did it begin. Why did she marry him, stay with him . Why, when he’d so hurt her. Why, when he’d warned her. Those people. Runs in the family. Shame.
    For the abandoned house contains the future of any house. The tree pushing like a tumor through the rotted porch in sinewy coils, hornets’ nests beneath sagging eaves, a stained and rain-soaked mattress on a floor of what was once a bedroom, a place of intimacy and trust; windows smashed, skeletal animal remains and human excrement dried in coils on what had once been a parlor floor. On a wall in what had once been the kitchen, a calendar of years ago with blocks of days exactingly crossed out in pencil, discolored by rain.
    I SEEM TO HAVE suggested that the abandoned houses were all distant from our house and that we did not know the families who were unfortunate enough to have lived in them. In fact, the fire-gutted house, the Judds’ house, was less than a mile from ours and so by the logic of rural communities, the Judds were—almost—“next-door neighbors” and Helen Judd was my “next-door friend.”
    The Judds lived on the Tonawanda Road