A Widow's Story Read online

  A Widow’s Story

  A MEMOIR

  Joyce Carol Oates

  In memory of my husband

  Raymond Smith

  Oh God—you are going to be so unhappy.

  —Gail Godwin

  I am very sorry to learn that Ray died a couple of weeks ago. When someone I loved died I found it helpful to remind myself that this person was not less real because she wasn’t real now, just as people in New Zealand aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.

  —Derek Parfit

  When my mother died I adopted the Gestalt technique of saying to myself, whenever there was a surge of grief, “I choose to have a mother who is dead.”

  —T. D., a former colleague at the University of Windsor

  One breath at a time, Joyce. One breath at a time.

  —Gloria Vanderbilt

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part I: The Vigil

  Chapter 1 - The Message

  Chapter 2 - Car Wreck

  Chapter 3 - The First Wrong Things

  Chapter 4 - “Pneumonia”

  Chapter 5 - Telemetry

  Chapter 6 - E-mail Record

  Chapter 7 - E. coli

  Chapter 8 - Hospital Vigil(s)

  Chapter 9 - Jasmine

  Chapter 10 - Vigil

  Chapter 11 - E-mail Record

  Chapter 12 - Memory Pools

  Chapter 13 - “I’m Not Crying for Any Reason”

  Chapter 14 - The Call

  Part II: Free Fall

  Chapter 15 - “The Golden Vanity”

  Chapter 16 - Yellow Pages

  Chapter 17 - The Arrow

  Chapter 18 - E-mail Record

  Chapter 19 - Last Words

  Chapter 20 - “You’ve Said Good-bye”

  Chapter 21 - Double Plot

  Chapter 22 - Cat Pee

  Chapter 23 - Probate

  Chapter 24 - “Sympathy Gift Basket”

  Chapter 25 - The Betrayal

  Chapter 26 - The Artisans

  Chapter 27 - E-mail Record

  Part III: The Basilisk

  Chapter 28 - “Beady Dead Eyes Like Gems”

  Chapter 29 - The Lost Husband

  Chapter 30 - “How Are You?”

  Chapter 31 - “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”

  Chapter 32 - The Nest

  Chapter 33 - Ghost Rooms

  Chapter 34 - E-mail Record

  Chapter 35 - Fury!

  Chapter 36 - Oasis

  Chapter 37 - Bruised Knees

  Chapter 38 - A Dream of Such Happiness!

  Chapter 39 - “We Want to See You Soon”

  Chapter 40 - Moving Away

  Chapter 41 - “Won’t Be Seeing You for a While”

  Chapter 42 - “Can’t Find You Where Are You”

  Chapter 43 - “I Am Sorry to Inform You”

  Part IV: Purgatory, Hell

  Chapter 44 - “Neither Joyce Nor I Can Come to the Phone Right Now”

  Chapter 45 - The Military Order of the Purple Heart

  Chapter 46 - In Motion!

  Chapter 47 - In Motion!—“Still Alive”

  Chapter 48 - In Motion! —“Mouth of the Rat”

  Chapter 49 - In Motion!— “The Wonder Woman of American Literature”

  Chapter 50 - In Motion!— “You Can’t Sit There”

  Chapter 51 - “Never Forget”

  Chapter 52 - The Widow’s Secret

  Chapter 53 - Congratulations! I

  Chapter 54 - Congratulations! II

  Chapter 55 - E-mail Record

  Chapter 56 - The Cache

  Chapter 57 - Morbidity Studies

  Chapter 58 - The Intruder

  Part V: “You Looked So Happy”

  Chapter 59 - Too Soon!

  Chapter 60 - “Leaving Las Vegas”

  Chapter 61 - “The Unlived . . .”

  Chapter 62 - Cruel Crude Stupid “Well-Intentioned”

  Chapter 63 - “If . . .”

  Chapter 64 - “Never, Ever That Again”

  Chapter 65 - The “Real World”

  Chapter 66 - Little Love Story

  Chapter 67 - Tulips

  Chapter 68 - Please Forgive!

  Chapter 69 - “Happy, and Excited”

  Chapter 70 - Blood in the Water!

  Chapter 71 - Walking Wounded

  Chapter 72 - Dead Woman Walking

  Chapter 73 - Taboo

  Chapter 74 - “Ashamed to Be ‘White’ ”

  Chapter 75 - It Made No Difference

  Chapter 76 - Sinkholes

  Chapter 77 - The Garden

  Chapter 78 - The Pilgrimage

  Chapter 79 - “You Looked So Happy”

  Chapter 80 - Black Mass I

  Chapter 81 - Black Mass II

  Chapter 82 - “Good Girl!”

  Chapter 83 - The Resolution

  Chapter 84 - “Did Ray Like Swing?”

  Chapter 85 - “Title”

  Chapter 86 - “Your Husband Is Still Alive”

  Epilogue

  Three Small Sightings in August

  The Widow’s Handbook

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  The Vigil

  “My husband died, my life collapsed.”

  Chapter 1

  The Message

  February 15, 2008. Returning to our car that has been haphazardly parked—by me—on a narrow side street near the Princeton Medical Center—I see, thrust beneath a windshield wiper, what appears to be a sheet of stiff paper. At once my heart clenches in dismay, guilty apprehension—a ticket? A parking ticket? At such a time? Earlier that afternoon I’d parked here on my way—hurried, harried—a jangle of admonitions running through my head like shrieking cicadas—if you’d happened to see me you might have thought pityingly That woman is in a desperate hurry—as if that will do any good—to visit my husband in the Telemetry Unit of the medical center where he’d been admitted several days previously for pneumonia; now I need to return home for a few hours preparatory to returning to the medical center in the early evening—anxious, dry-mouthed and head-aching yet in an aroused state that might be called hopeful—for since his admission into the medical center Ray has been steadily improving, he has looked and felt better, and his oxygen intake, measured by numerals that fluctuate with literally each breath—90, 87, 91, 85, 89, 92—is steadily gaining, arrangements are being made for his discharge into a rehab clinic close by the medical center—(hopeful is our solace in the face of mortality); and now, in the late afternoon of another of these interminable and exhausting hospital-days—can it be that our car has been ticketed?—in my distraction I’d parked illegally?—the time limit for parking on this street is only two hours, I’ve been in the medical center for longer than two hours, and see with embarrassment that our 2007 Honda Accord—eerily glaring-white in February dusk like some strange phosphorescent creature in the depths of the sea—is inexpertly, still more inelegantly parked, at a slant to the curb, left rear tire over the white line in the street by several inches, front bumper nearly touching the SUV in the space ahead. But now—if this is a parking ticket—at once the thought comes to me I won’t tell Ray, I will pay the fine in secret.

  Except the sheet of paper isn’t a ticket from the Princeton Police Department after all but a piece of ordinary paper—opened and smoothed out by my shaky hand it’s revealed as a private message in aggressively large block-printed letters which with stunned staring eyes I read several times like one faltering on the brink of an abyss—

  LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH

&
nbsp; In this way as in that parable of Franz Kafka in which the most profound and devastating truth of the individual’s life is revealed to him by a passer-by in the street, as if accidentally, casually, so the Widow-to-Be, like the Widow, is made to realize that her situation however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn’t give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others, especially strangers who know nothing of her—“Left rear tire over the white line in the street.”

  Chapter 2

  Car Wreck

  We were in a car wreck. My husband died but I survived.

  This is not (factually) true. But in all other ways, it is true.

  January 2007. A little more than a year before my husband was stricken with a severe case of pneumonia, and brought by his anxious wife to the ER of the Princeton Medical Center in blissful ignorance of the fact—the terrible and irrefutable fact—that the reverse journey would never occur bearing him back home—we were in a serious car accident, the first of our married life.

  It would seem ironic in retrospect, that this accident in which Ray might easily have been killed, but was not killed, occurred hardly more than a mile from the Princeton Medical Center at the intersection of Elm Road and Rosedale Road; this was an intersection we drove through invariably on our way to Princeton, and on our way home; it is an intersection I must drive through as in a dream of nightmare repetition in which my very grief is rebuked You might have died here! You have no right to grieve, your life is a gift.

  The accident occurred on a weeknight as we entered the intersection: out of nowhere—on the driver’s side—there came a hellish glare of headlights, a screeching of brakes and a tremendous crash as the front of our car was demolished, windshields shattered and air bags detonated.

  In the immediate aftermath of the crash we were too confused to gauge how extraordinarily lucky we’d been—in the days, weeks, months to follow we would try to fathom this elusive fact—that the other vehicle had struck only the front of our car, the engine, hood, front wheels; a few inches back and Ray would have been killed or seriously injured, crushed in the wreck. It was beyond our capacity to grasp how close we’d come to a horrific accident—if for instance the other vehicle had sped into the intersection even a half-second later . . .

  Inside the wreck of our car there was a gritty smoldering odor. Our air bags had exploded with remarkable rigor. If you have never been in a vehicle in which air bags have exploded you will have a difficult time imagining how violent, how forceful, how bellicose air bags are.

  Vaguely you might expect something cushiony, even balloon-like—no.

  You might expect something that will not injure you in the service of protecting you from injury—no. In the instant of the air bag explosion Ray’s face, shoulders, chest and arms had been battered as if he’d been the hapless sparring partner of a heavyweight boxer; his hands gripping the steering wheel were splattered with acid, leaving coin-sized burn marks that would sting for weeks. Beside him I was too rattled to comprehend how powerfully I’d been hit by the air bag—I’d thought that this was the dashboard buckling in, all but crushing me in the passenger’s seat so that I could barely breathe. (For the next two months my bruised chest, ribs, and arms would be so painful that I could barely move without wincing and dared not laugh heedlessly.) But in our wrecked car in the euphoria of cortical adrenaline we had little awareness of having been so battered and bruised as we managed to force our car doors open and step out onto the pavement. A wave of relief swept over us—We are alive! We are unharmed!

  Princeton police officers arrived at the accident scene. An ambulance arrived bearing emergency medical workers. I recalled that one of my Princeton undergraduate students, a young woman, was a volunteer for the Princeton Emergency Medical Unit and I hoped very much that this young woman would not be among the medical workers at the scene. I hoped very much that this episode would not be reported excitedly back and circulated among my students Guess who was in a car crash last night—Prof. Oates!

  Strongly it was recommended that “Raymond Smith” and “Joyce Smith” be taken by ambulance to the ER to be examined—especially it was important to be X-rayed—but we declined, saying that we were all right, we were certain we were all right. Yet in the faux-euphoric aftermath of the crash in which there was no pain nor hardly an awareness of the very concept of pain we insisted that we were fine and wanted to go home.

  Standing in the cold, shivering and shaky and our car pulverized as if a playful giant had twisted it in his hands and let it drop—there was nothing we wanted so badly as to go home.

  We were asked if we were “refusing” medical treatment and we protested we weren’t refusing medical treatment—we just didn’t think that we needed it.

  Refused then, the officer noted, filling out his report.

  Two police officers drove us home in their cruiser. They were kindly, courteous. Near midnight we entered our darkened house. It seemed that we’d been gone for far longer than just an evening and that we’d been on a long journey. Our nerves were jangled like broken electric wires in the street. I’d begun to shiver, convulsively. I was dry-eyed but exhausted and depleted as if I’d been weeping. I saw that Ray was all right—as he insisted—we were both all right. It was true that we’d come close to catastrophe—but it hadn’t happened. Somehow, that fact was difficult to comprehend, like trying to fit a large and unwieldy thought into a small area of the brain.

  I began to feel the first twinges of pain in my chest. When I lifted my arm. When I laughed, or coughed.

  Ray discovered reddened splotches on his hands—“I’ve been burnt? How the hell have I been burnt?” He ran cold water onto his hands. He took Bufferin, for pain.

  I took Bufferin, for pain. I had no wish to go to bed anticipating a miserable insomniac night, but by 2 A.M. we’d gone to bed and were sleeping, to a degree. Glaring headlights, screeching brakes, that moment of astonishing impact. . . . The sharp chemical smell, the air bags striking like crazed aliens in a science-fiction horror film . . .

  “I’ll go to get us a new car. Tomorrow.”

  Calmly Ray spoke in the dark. There was comfort in his words that suggested routine, custom.

  Comfort in that Ray would supervise the aftermath of the wreck.

  Raymond—“wise protector.”

  He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year. Born on March 12, 1930. I was born on June 16, 1938.

  How long ago, these births! And how long we’d been married, since January 23, 1961! At the time of the car wreck we would celebrate our forty-seventh wedding anniversary in a few weeks. You would not think, reading this, if you are younger than we were, that to us these dates were unreal, or surreal; we’d felt, through our long marriage, as if we’d only just met a few years before, as if we were “new” to each other, still “becoming acquainted” with each other; often we were “shy” with each other; there were many things we did not wish to tell each other, or to “share” with each other, in the way of individuals who are only just becoming intimately acquainted and don’t want to risk offending, or surprising.

  Most of my novels and short stories were never read by my husband. He did read my non-fiction essays and my reviews for such publications as the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker—Ray was an excellent editor, sharp-eyed and informed, as countless writers published in Ontario Review have said—but he did not read most of my fiction and in this sense it might be argued that Ray didn’t know me entirely—or even, to a significant degree, partially.

  Why was this?—there are numerous reasons.

  I regret it, I think. Maybe I do.

  For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness.

  But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

  Thinking then, that night of the car wreck, and subsequent nights and days as phantom pains stabbed in my chest and ribs, and I despaired that the ugly yellowish purple bruises would ever fade, that, if Ray
died, I would be utterly bereft; far better for me to die with him, than to survive alone. At such times I did not think of myself as a writer primarily, or even as a writer, but as a wife.

  A wife who dreaded any thought of becoming a widow.

  In the morning our lives would be returned to us but subtly altered, strange to us as others’ lives that bore only a superficial resemblance to our own but were not our own. It would have been a time to say Look—we might have been killed last night! I love you, I’m so grateful that I am married to you . . . but the words didn’t quite come.