A Widow's Story Read online

  How Ray would have smiled at this—or laughed outright: “The Wonder Woman of American Literature.”

  What the widow has lost—it would seem a trifling loss, to others—is the possibility of being teased.

  Of all categories of being, The Widow is the least likely to be teased, laughed-at.

  It’s the eve of Ray’s birthday, March 11. Tomorrow he would have been seventy-eight years old.

  Janette confides in me, she doesn’t know how she would manage the loss of her husband—retired academic, Sanskrit scholar, comparative historian and philosopher of world religions who’d been a professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; she thinks she might “curl into a fetal ball and pull the covers over my head for a couple of months.”

  I am thinking Yes! What an appealing image.

  Janette is driving me in her car to an event. Janette is confiding in me in the way that women confide in each other who have not much time together—crucial things must be said, and quickly. She tells me about a close friend of hers who’d lost her husband unexpectedly and has become depressed and agoraphobic.

  Agoraphobia! I am thinking This is something I could try, next.

  The prospect of staying at home, hiding at home—instead of this frantic travel . . . Traveling in the wake of my husband’s death has been the outward face of my madness as my madness has been the inward face of my grief. Yet travel is perceived as “professional”—it is respected, as hiding at home would not be respected.

  Agoraphobia—fear of open spaces. Claustrophobia—fear of closed-in spaces.

  How hellish it would be, if the two were conjoined! For there would be some creaturely comfort in agoraphobia, at least. As a wounded or dying animal crawls away to be alone so the stricken person craves aloneness, whether to die of it, or to be healed.

  Agoraphobia is more frequently a female affliction than it is a male affliction—three to four times more frequently, in fact. This can’t be because men are less neurotic and phobia-prone than women but because men have traditionally had little choice about leaving their homes—“earning a living”—while women, wives and mothers, have traditionally been “house-bound.”

  In some fundamentalist cultures, women are virtually house-prisoners: prisoners of their/our sex. This is the extreme of which the “housewife” of contemporary American culture is a more liberal, seemingly more liberated example. To be a recluse in our culture is perceived as a choice of a (perverse) kind; to be morbidly “house-bound” requires at least one enabler, very likely a family member. Someone willing to provide an income, shop for groceries, mediate between the agoraphobic and the outside world.

  I think of Shirley Jackson—brilliant writer, chilling and funny and “feminist” in an era—the 1950s—before “feminism” began to be established as a new and revolutionary way for women to think of themselves, who ended her life as an acute agoraphobic, unable even to leave the squalid bedroom of her house in North Bennington, Vermont.

  Not that Shirley Jackson had “lost” her husband in any literal sense—except that, repeatedly, Stanley Edgar Hyman was openly unfaithful to her, often with his worshipful Bennington undergraduates.

  The most hideous of deaths—morbid obesity, amphetamine addiction, alcoholism. Months Shirley Jackson had hidden away in her squalid bedroom—with Hyman’s complicity?—certainly he was indifferent to her by this time—before she was found dead, her heart stopped, at the age of forty-nine.

  And there was Emily Dickinson, whose withdrawal from the world seems to have been in inverse proportion to the efflorescence of her revolutionary poetry. Secluded—protected?—within the walls of the Dickinson family house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was both housebound and “free”—in the interstices of housework and nursing for dying relatives—to create her poetry.

  I hide myself within my flower,

  That, fading from your vase,

  You, unsuspecting, feel for me

  Almost a loneliness.

  (903)

  Dickinson remarked to her niece Mattie that all she needed to do was retire to her bedroom, turn the key and—“There’s freedom!” Her gradual withdrawal from the world was perceived by relatives as “only a happening”—not the consequence of any real deficiency or abnormality in her personality.

  So strange that I should feel a kinship with Emily Dickinson when, to all neutral observers, I would appear to be so utterly different!

  Yet: as the “perfect man of action is the suicide”—in William Carlos Williams’s words—so the individual most frantically “in motion” may be resisting the lure of agoraphobia.

  When we arrive at Janette’s beautiful house overlooking a lake, when I am shown through the sun-filled rooms, and shake her husband’s hand—I am stricken to the heart thinking how all this beauty, these carefully chosen pieces of furniture, these colorful carpets, artwork, books—all that makes this house a home—will be horrible to Janette, a mockery, as the things in my house have become a mockery, if she should lose Cliff.

  Am I insane, to think such thoughts? At such a time?

  To the widow, all wives are widows-to-be. Ours is the basilisk stare you will want to avoid.

  Tonight in my room in the Inn at USC—in the high, canopied bed that reminds me of an old-fashioned sleigh—phrases of Emily Dickinson careen through my mind. I don’t know if I am awake or asleep; or partially awake, and partially asleep; that porous state of the soul when poetry is the most natural speech, and the poet speaks for the soul in extremis:

  The Brain, within its Groove

  Runs evenly—and true—

  But let a Splinter swerve—

  ’Twere easier for You—

  To put a Current back—

  When Floods have slit the Hills—

  And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—

  And trodden out the Mills—

  (556)

  Next morning on the way to the Columbia airport—Cliff is driving, Janette is in the passenger’s seat and I am in the backseat of Cliff’s car—I hear myself remark that at least I don’t have to worry any longer about flying, as I’d always done when Ray was waiting for me back home. “I would think, what if the plane crashes? And I won’t ever see Ray again. But now I don’t worry about planes crashing. I don’t worry at all.”

  I’d meant to sound upbeat, cheery. I’d meant to make Janette and Cliff laugh. But the awkward silence in the car indicates that I’ve said an inappropriate thing and made my hosts uncomfortable and suddenly I am desperate to be home.

  Chapter 50

  In Motion!— “You Can’t Sit There”

  Sanibel Island, Florida. March 20, 2008.

  Windy/sunny Sanibel Island on the Gulf Coast to which I have come as a guest of the Sanibel Island Public Library—surely the most spectacular of small-town American libraries! As soon as I check into my hotel room—a suite—in fact, a small apartment with a compact kitchen and a balcony—windows looking out onto a dazzling vista of beach/ocean/ sky—I put on a jacket, a hat, running shoes—jogging in the wake of the chilly spray as epiphanies fly at me as if I have traveled hundreds of miles for these revelations—Ray was not unhappy, Ray did not experience his death as you are experiencing it, he did not experience the loss you are experiencing, he knew nothing of what was to come and so he did not suffer—Ray was happy in his lifetime—Ray loved his work, his domestic life—Ray loved his garden—he did not suffer the loss of meaning that his survivor feels; he was defined by that meaning, which you provided for him; not for one moment of his life with you was he not-loved, and he knew this; for Ray, his death was no tragedy but a completion.

  This is so! This logic so overwhelms me, I’ve begun to shiver, almost convulsively shivering with excitement, I think it must be excitement—for I am convinced, this reasoning is so: Ray was not unhappy, only you are unhappy. Think of Ray, and not of yourself for once . . .

  The widow is one to whom such epiphanies come frequently. The widow is one to whom
such nuggets of insight, profound revelations, “truths” rush with disconcerting intensity. When you see the widow staring into space, as if she’s listening to something no one else can hear, you can be sure that the widow is receiving these revelations in the way that a sleeping person receives dreams, or a schizophrenic receives hallucinations.

  In the days immediately following Ray’s death, I felt like inert matter bombarded by radioactive waves—every minute an acute, profound realization—heart-stopping revelations!—except, almost at once they evaporated, vanished.

  So this is what life is! Life is—bounded by death!

  People die! People die, and disappear! We will all die!

  We will all suffer, and we will all . . .

  It’s unfortunate, you might say it’s unfair, that the most heart-rending revelations are utterly banal, commonplace. So the widow must confront the fact that, though she is shaken to the roots of her being, and the clarity of grief washes over her at irregular, frequent, unpredictable intervals, all that she can know about the experience is a familiar set of words.

  . . . all suffer, and we will all die. And . . .

  Except now, returning to the hotel, the sky now darkened, riddled with goiterous storm clouds of the hue of tarnished pots, and the surf the color of lead, and all conviction has ebbed, and all spurious joy, and the thoughts that now assail me are sneering, deflating—You! You are so ridiculous! Trying to cheer yourself up when the only significant fact of your life is, you are alone. You are a widow, and you are alone. You are not prepared to be alone for you had thought you would be loved, you would be protected and cared for, forever. But now you are a widow, you have lost all that. Your heart is not broken but shriveled. You are ridiculous flying everywhere giving “talks”—“readings”—because you are terrified of staying home. You are terrified of reading Ray’s novel because you are terrified of discovering something in it that will upset you. Too cowardly to stay home, to try to work, to write—terrified that you can’t. You are a failure, you are an unloved woman no longer young, you are worthless, you are trash. And you are ridiculous . . .

  ***

  “ . . . this evening our guest . . . ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ . . . she has created some of the ‘most enduring fiction of our time’ . . . born in upstate New York, currently residing in Princeton, New Jersey . . . recipient of National Book Award, Prix Femina . . . author of way too many titles to list . . .”

  The very nice librarian who introduces me is not mocking me, I know. Intellectually, I know this. Yet the lavish claims made for “JCO,” the lists of prizes and awards, quotations from reviews, such critics as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Elaine Showalter, have an air of the preposterous; halfway, I expect individuals in the audience to begin laughing, shaking their heads in derision—You! Do you think for a moment we believe all these preposterous things about you?

  Yet, the audience is very courteous, even enthusiastic. The audience is gratifyingly large. What will I say to them? Read to them? How dismayed these residents of Sanibel Island would be if I were to tell them what my epiphanies on the beach have revealed to me; if I were to say Yes it’s true that I used to be a writer—a writer with a very mixed reputation—“controversial” is the kindest term. But now—I am not a writer now. I am not anything now. Legally I am a “widow”—that is the box I must check. But beyond that—I am not sure that I exist.

  As I address the Sanibel residents in a flawless imitation of my writer-self (I want to think!) I find that I am glancing about the room as if seeking—what? Who? In public places I seem to be searching for someone who is missing—I wonder if for the rest of my life I will be searching for someone who isn’t there . . .

  I feel as if I’m missing something visible—an arm, a leg. Or that part of my face has been smudged and distorted as in a nightmare painting by Francis Bacon. Like the cruelest and most succinct of prognoses in a Chinese fortune cookie the thought comes to me—Not one person in this room would want to trade places with you: widow.

  As I speak, my attention is drawn to older, white-haired men in the audience—men of perhaps Ray’s age—though Ray didn’t have white hair but dark hair laced with silver-gray; in this upscale Florida retirement community there are numerous older, elderly individuals with canes and walkers, in wheelchairs . . . A bizarre fantasy comes over me: I will meet a man, an older man, a man in a wheelchair, and it will be granted to me to be given a second chance, with this man—I had not had the opportunity to bring my husband home from the rehabilitation center—I hadn’t “nursed” him for even a day.

  But how absurd this is, even in fantasy—no older man in urgent need of a nurse/female companion could have made his way to the Sanibel library unassisted! And indeed, when I look more closely, each elderly/ infirm man is accompanied by a companion.

  What could be more ridiculous—casting an envious eye on strangers in wheelchairs! No one can believe what compulsive fantasist the widow is, even the widow herself.

  Yes! It has been decided that you will be allowed to have your husband back but in a diminished state. In exchange for his being alive you will have to care for a convalescent, an invalid, a very sick man; a man who has lost his vision, or his hearing; a man on a respirator; a man who must be fed through a tube; you may be called upon to provide blood, bone marrow, a kidney . . .

  Later, at the motel, I stand in the darkened living room and stare out at the dark ocean—a stretch of beach, pale sand—vapor-clouds and a glimpse of moon—the conviction comes over me suddenly Ray can’t see this, Ray can’t breathe . . . As I’ve been thinking, in restaurants, staring at menus, forced to choose something to eat This is wrong. This is cruel, selfish. If Ray can’t eat . . .

  Only a few hours earlier I was running along this beach in dazzling sunshine without seeming to have acknowledged Ray can’t see this sunshine, the ocean, any of this.

  Tightly I draw the blinds! So tightly, the cord cuts into my fingers. If in the morning sunshine floods against the window, I will be spared seeing it.

  I draw the blinds shut tight. In the morning if sunshine floods against the window, I will not see.

  “Excuse me—you can’t sit here.”

  A row of seats, a broken seat, nowhere to sit in the crowded Charlotte, North Carolina, airport and so I have laid my coat over the seat, set down my bag—awaiting a delayed connecting flight to Philadelphia—staring into space, thinking. So eager to return home and yet—fearful of returning home. Again and again, again I see Ray in the hospital bed; I see myself timidly approaching him; I hear my pleading voice Honey? Honey—? This is the instant before I knew, when it was not possible that I did not know; before, I had suspected, I had dreaded the worst, as, at the time of the car crash, I had braced myself for the worst, but now, in this instant, I would know. This is the pivotal moment of my life: before this moment there is the possibility of being relieved, happy; after, I am damned, accursed.

  Startled by a harsh male voice—“He’s sitting there.”

  “He? Who?”

  “My son.”

  Though the seat is unoccupied as well as broken there is, in fact, a very young child sitting/crawling on the dirty floor in front of it, oblivious of me and of his father’s anger at me. Quickly I snatch up my things and apologize to the irate man—“I’m so sorry—I didn’t see your son there. I didn’t see that anyone was ‘sitting’ in this seat.”

  Though the child’s father is strangely upset with me, as if I had not only taken his son’s seat but violated the special sanctity of his family, my stammering apologies and the tears welling in my eyes seem to placate him for he ceases glaring at me and mumbles, “It’s O.K.”

  Quickly I back away. There is a mother, too—and another young child—a family—inadvertently I have intruded upon a family! Keenly I am aware of my isolated and despised state—family-less, husband-less—continuing to apologize even as my face dissolves, my fragile self-control evaporates, before I can turn and hurry away I am crying abjectly, as
a child might cry, blindly pushing through a crowd jostling for position to board a plane.

  Through the congested airport, stumbling. There is nowhere to hide—strangers glance at me in passing, at my tear-stained face—if one should recognize the “Wonder Woman of American Literature”—how embarrassing!—how shameful!

  I think I am breaking apart. I am unraveling. Cracking up. I must get home. I must never leave home again.

  Chapter 51

  “Never Forget”

  The hard part of travel is the return. Where formerly the return was the very best part of travel.

  “Honey? Hello—”

  In the hospital he’d said, in regard to one or another fussy procedure They make too much of things, here.

  In fact, he’d been mistaken. In the end “they” had not made enough of things that had mattered crucially.

  “Honey. Hello. . . .”

  Silly forlorn voice. Even the cats aren’t deceived.

  Walking through the rooms of the house and in each room there is a likeness of Ray—that is, of the watercolor portrait of Ray which an artist-friend painted after his death, as if it were the cover of the final issue of Ontario Review.

  The original, which is framed, is kept in the kitchen. Photocopies are placed elsewhere including on the door of Ray’s study and on my desk.