"Angry and Buzzing"

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a short story with a title that borrows from a musical: “Getting to Know All About You”.

In this story, we follow the fates of four family members as they move from Schenectady to Utica to Rome (New York State). The narrator, a teenage girl named Judith, lives with her older brother Wesley and their two parents, Darrell and Trix. The adults who used to be dancers had to give up their dreams of show biz fame. The themes here are blasted ambitions, social decay, but also love and sexuality. Mentioned in the story are singer Nina Simone, dancers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, actresses Doris Day, Dorothy Collins and Grace Kelly. Apart from its title, the text contains no song references.

Trix, whose real name is Trish, refuses to be called “mom” or “mommy”. We learn that her stage name used to be Roxanne, which, according to the narrator, seemed “to best suit her.” Right from the start, this ubiquity creates much unease. The daughter's confusion is evident as she muses over the old snapshots of her parents, dating back from their dancing days. To talk about the woman in the picture, she uses her mother’s household nickname and by her stage name, which is placed in parentheses and followed by a question mark. So the title resonates ironically at first.

As she introduces her parents, the narrator says that her mother had “a beautiful throaty alto voice”, which “resembled Nina Simone’s.” On rare occasions, husband and wife have the opportunity to work together, as organist and singer. Most of the semi-regular jobs that the parents get have nothing to do with dance or music. For most of the story, Trix is a cocktail waitress. Darrell tries his hand at a variety of small jobs.

The only moment readers hear Trix sing is a stolen moment. As the family affairs are taking a turn for the worst, the narrator and her brother eavesdrop a late-night drunken discussion between Trix and Darrell. Trix’s new place of work is the seediest so far in the story; she has also become notoriously unfaithful. Darrell is getting into more and more troubles with the law: He is becoming violent and unpredictable. Late that night, as the parents are trying to make sense of their relationship, its nature and evolution over time, Trix breaks into song. She sings the eponymous number from the musical The King and I. The pair starts to dance. Unbeknownst to them, their children are watching. The narrator knows it is wrong but admits that the scene is magnetic.

By the end of the story, the only sound to escape Trix’s mouth is a strange humming. This sound has nothing to do with the one Judith, our narrator, emitted earlier in the story, when she was alone in the apartment in Utica. Well-fed, listening to the radio, she was “humming to herself” in a solitary happiness. Now that things have unravelled, Trix craves another kind of solitude. She avoids visual contact with her children who have come to visit her and begins to hum: “No melody I could recognize, just sound, angry and buzzing.” The Broadway number has come to a close: Trix, we are told, is satisfied to find herself in a place where no one knows her.

Oates, Joyce Carol, “Getting To Know All About You”, (pp 241-261) Heat and Other Stories, Plume, Penguin, 1991