“Valentine” (1996)

This Joyce Carol Oates story appears simple (and fanciful) but it is working on many levels. It’s a memoir piece told first-person by a grown woman, Erin, recalling an incident (fantasy) when she was 15 years old during a snowstorm on a Valentine’s Day. There’s a lot of specificity—1959, Buffalo, New York. She is living with an aunt on her mother’s side. The rest of her family, seven of them, have “dispersed” and no longer live together. It’s a whopper of a snowstorm, with drifts up the side of the house to the attic and her room. In the middle of the storm, in the middle of the night, a car pulls up outside her house. It’s her algebra teacher, Mr. Lacey! Just that morning she had slipped him an anonymous valentine. He’s the teacher she has a crush on, a young man still in his 20s. He stairsteps up the snowdrift by the side of the house and collects her to take her ice skating. She’s never been very good at it, but she improves in his kind company. He speaks strangely, the words italicized. Erin? Make haste, he says at her window. He drives a Volkswagen. While skating they encounter some jeering bully boy types who pelt him with snowballs and make him bleed. After skating they stop for coffee at “the Bison City Diner adjacent to the Greyhound bus station.” She follows his lead and takes her coffee black, but she hasn’t learned yet to like coffee. She feels too awkward with him to order food. The narrator, the memoirist, plays it straight all the way as if this were a story that really happened. Of course it can’t be, but it lives exactly between a daydream and a night-dream. It’s another story that captures the sense of dreaming well, but the action is all the fantasy of an adolescent with a crush on a teacher. I like the way Oates uses a legendary Buffalo snowstorm, with snowdrifts you can climb. Mr. Lacey is perfectly chaste and aboveboard with Erin, but the fact he comes for her in the middle of the night speaks to a reckless romantic side of him, at least in Erin’s view. This story goes well afield of reality, but it has gritty edges and undertones. Mostly I take it as the fantasy of an adolescent girl who is ready to let loose and let it fly—and I believe every bit of that.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts
Story not available online.