A Widow's Story

by Joyce Carol Oates

  My Pennington doctor suggests that I begin to take 60 milligrams of Cymbalta a day, up from 30 milligrams. Since the lower dose “doesn’t seem to be helping.”

  In the Pennington drugstore, like a manic character in a Dostoyevsky novel bent upon self-destruction, I swallow a 60 milligram Cymbalta tablet as soon as the pharmacist hands me the vial. Driving home, I imagine cotton batting clotting my brain, my arteries. It is true—my vision is blurred. And it is true, my heart often leaps and cringes in “palpitations”—but I am no longer obsessively thinking of Ray in the hospital bed, or Ray in the funeral home when I failed to see him one final time. The medication is a scrim through which objects are viewed but so dimly, you have no clear idea what they are. You have no clear idea why they should mean anything to you, or to anyone.

  Chapter 74

  “Ashamed to Be ‘White’ ”

  This was a long time ago, in Detroit, Michigan. In a residential neighborhood one block west of Woodward Avenue and one block south of Eight Mile Road where we’d bought a house—our first house!—on Woodstock Drive.

  We’d moved north from Beaumont, Texas, as soon as the academic year 1961–1962 ended. In fact, we’d been so eager to leave that desolate East Texas landscape that Ray mailed in his final grades en route to Detroit where we had teaching jobs for the following year; we’d managed to pack everything we owned into the boot-shaped black Volkswagen that rattled at sixty miles an hour and had no heat except in gusts of hot air that entered from the motor.

  In Detroit, we lived for a year in an apartment building on Manderson Road, near Palmer Park; then, we bought a four-bedroom, two-storey Colonial on Woodstock Drive in an area known as Green Acres. The price of our house in May 1963 was $17,900.

  Ray’s yearly salary as an instructor at Wayne State University was $5,000. My yearly salary as an instructor at the University of Detroit was $4,900. The gentlemanly man who’d hired me—his name, renowned in the area at that time, was Clyde Craine—confided in me that he and the chairman at Wayne State had conferred, to make sure that Ray’s salary was just a little higher than mine.

  On Woodstock Drive in the spring of 1963 our house shone with newness. White aluminum siding, orange-red brick, dark blue shutters—the house was ravishingly beautiful to us, we could not stare at it enough. Repeatedly we drove past our house before we moved in, admiring it, planning how we would furnish it. Of course, we didn’t own the house, technically speaking—the mortgage company owned it.

  I remember being hurt and upset when, at the bank, my modest salary at the University of Detroit was discounted. Only Ray’s salary counted. I was a married woman, the bank officer told me, with an expression somewhere between disdain and pity. Likely I would quit work in another few years and have a baby.

  “But we’re not planning to have a baby.”

  “I’m sorry. That is our rule.”

  Together, our two salaries were respectable. But only Ray’s salary would be computed for the thirty-year mortgage.

  Thirty years! The expression on Ray’s face, as he signed these documents!

  “This will take us to 1993. In theory.”

  Quickly we discovered that Detroit was nearly as segregated racially as Beaumont had been. The area in which we lived was totally white. The Detroit News and Free Press were filled with reports of incidents one assumed to be “racial”—if you decoded them correctly. But the city would not explode in racial violence until July 1967.

  Before we moved into our new house, before we even had a key to the house, we drove over in the evenings to work on the lawn—at this point, just hard-packed bare earth and weeds. We brought over bushels of topsoil, flats of ground cover, small trees. Earnestly we planted grass seed. The backyard was deep, bounded by an alley; beyond the alley was another row of smaller houses, and Eight Mile Road which was a major thoroughfare. One day when Ray was working in the backyard and I was raking in the front, a neighbor child approached me to ask—“Are you eighteen? My mother says you don’t look old enough to be married.”

  I laughed at this. Not only was I over eighteen, I was twenty-four. My first book had been accepted for publication—though its publication had been postponed until fall 1963. I was an instructor at the Jesuit-run University of Detroit where, in the English department, there were but two women—an elderly nun with the impressive title Sister Bonaventure, and me; and my very nice, handsome husband Ray was an instructor at Wayne State—the area’s most prominent “institution of higher learning” with a mandate from the state of Michigan to bring education to culturally deprived—i.e., mostly black—students. With his Ph.D. from Wisconsin, Ray was considered a highly respectable academic, with the likelihood of promotion at Wayne, or elsewhere; with my master’s degree, and a gathering number of publications, I was what might be called “promising.” We were so young, happy and optimistic!—all the world lay before us.

  Several months after we moved into the house on Woodstock Drive, neighbors began to complain to us—mostly to Ray, who worked outdoors in the back, laying bricks for a small improvised patio: there was a rumor that “Negroes” were moving in across the street. Residents on both sides of us spoke of the homeowner across the street who’d “betrayed” his neighbors—he’d listed his house with a real estate agent who sold to “Negroes” in an effort to “block-bust.”

  In our naiveté Ray and I had had no idea of the racial melodrama smoldering in Green Acres, into which we’d moved with such anticipation. We knew little of the notorious history of racial violence in Detroit—a bloody riot on Belle Isle, a city parkland, in 1943, in which thirty-four people were killed, and many injured; the new threat of “block-busting” in white residential neighborhoods through the city—unscrupulous real estate agents arranging for black families to settle in houses in “white” neighborhoods, at low prices, talking anxious homeowners into selling their homes, and so inspiring panic—seemingly overnight, entire blocks of long-settled residential neighborhoods on the west side began to be festooned with FOR SALE signs. Here was a demonic parody of racial integration that would eventually drive the city’s white-majority population into the suburbs—Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Southfield, Grosse Pointe and St. Claire Shores—and reduce entire neighborhoods to rows of abandoned houses and rubble-strewn vacant lots as in the aftermath of war—though no one could have predicted such a cataclysm, at the time.

  In Green Acres in 1963, where the houses were generally newer, better kept and some distance from the inner city, there was no real panic—yet.

  In Beaumont, the races had lived so far apart, there wasn’t—yet—any discernible tension. In Detroit, in an economy that was booming for some and stagnant for others, tension was evident. Though we never watched television—in fact, we didn’t own a set—we were aware of a kind of latent hysteria in the air, and often it was suggested to me—as a “white woman”—that I should be very careful walking alone in any semi-deserted place, or even in my parking lot at the edge of the University of Detroit campus.

  Much was made in the local media of a lone woman—a “white woman”—whose car had broken down on the John Lodge Expressway, at night, and who had been harassed, chased, raped and beaten by marauding “black youths.”

  It may have been at this time, or a year or two later, that much was made of the fact—if it was a fact—that there were more handguns in the Detroit area than there were residents and that, in law enforcement circles, Detroit, Michigan, was known as Murder City, USA.

  In Green Acres, a FOR SALE sign erected across the street in front of a two-storey brick house was knocked down, or removed; soon after, the FOR SALE sign reappeared, and was knocked down, or removed. Each day we drove along Woodstock Drive we were made uneasily aware of the status of the FOR SALE sign. “Who’s doing that?” one of us might ask, and the other would say, “Who do you think? Our neighbors.”

  Behind the houses facing us on Woodstock Drive was a city cemetery.

  It was believed by certain of ou
r neighbors that “Negroes” are particularly frightened of living near a cemetery and so, stealthily one night, they’d gone to cut down vines and shrubs at the rear of the property that had hidden the cemetery from view. When Ray was told this by the man who lived next-door to us Ray failed to respond as the man might have anticipated and their exchange ended abruptly.

  I wasn’t there, and so I didn’t hear. I have no idea what Ray actually said or what was said to Ray in return. But I know that the exchange was unpleasant, and that Ray was upset and disgusted by our neighbors’ behavior.

  “It makes you ashamed to be ‘white.’ ”

  Milwaukee, too, where Ray was born and had lived until he’d gone away to college, had its segregated white suburbs. But Milwaukee was never so racially fraught as Detroit and had comparable history of racial violence.

  It was rare for Ray to speak of his home, or of his family. His father was a “devout” Roman Catholic who’d hoped that Ray might become a priest and had been disappointed when Ray had dropped out of a Jesuit seminary after graduating from the prestigious Jesuit-run Marquette High School in Milwaukee. His mother had been upset when Ray had ceased attending Sunday mass at the age of eighteen but, unlike his father, she had not tried to “reason” with him.

  As a wife must respect her husband’s family even when—as it sometimes happens—her husband does not entirely respect them, or appears to be somewhat estranged from them, so I did not ever speak of Ray’s family in any way other than warmly and positively; if I asked Ray about his father, for instance, some stiffening in his expression, a palpable resistance in his manner, allowed me to know that I was intruding into my husband’s privacy, and had better retreat.

  My sense was that Ray’s parents were politically conservative, like many Catholics; that, in the volatile matter of civil rights for Negroes, and in all matters involving radical or even reasonable social change in the United States in the early 1960s, they were adamant in opposition.

  When you think of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” you might imagine the provocative singer addressing white Americans like Ray’s parents—Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.

  No words strike more horror in the hearts of parents—especially, in the hearts of conservative Catholic parents.

  (And how Ray admired Bob Dylan in that early, thrilling and iconoclastic phase of Dylan’s career!)

  Soon then it happened, in Green Acres, that the house across the street from ours was sold, and, yes—to a black family.

  An altogether “respectable” black family, it seemed to us.

  For we, too, were hyper-aware of our new neighbors. We, too, watched from the front windows of our house as movers carried furniture and packing boxes into the house across the street.

  (For how could we not be aware, how could we not look? Though we had virtually no sense of anyone else living on Woodstock Drive and would probably not have recognized any of our neighbors out of context—yet we were distinctly aware of the new black family. Race makes of us hyper-vigilant in the most primitive and distressing of ways.)

  Anxiously we waited for something to happen—some act of petty vandalism, or meanness. If the black family suffered any sort of harassment, we did not know about it, and would not have been informed, in any case. One day Ray said, “Let’s go over and say hello.”

  And so we went across the street, rang the door, shook hands with our new neighbors and introduced ourselves: “Ray Smith”—“Joyce Smith.”

  I don’t recall a word that was exchanged but assume that we “welcomed” the new family into the neighborhood—nor do I remember the black couple except that they were slightly older than they’d appeared at a distance, and that the man was a doctor who’d gone to medical school at Wayne State. I remember the man and his wife looking at us quizzically—smiling—though they didn’t invite us to step inside, and had not many questions to ask of us.

  We never spoke to the black couple again, nor did they speak to us. Frequently we waved at one another in greeting, driving in our cars or working on our lawns. We smiled, we mimed cheery greetings— “Hello! How are you!” In such ways we might have imagined that we’d contributed to the amelioration of racism in Detroit.

  Four years later the city would erupt in racial violence. After years of “police brutality against blacks” a raid by the Detroit police on the United Community League for Civil Action on Sunday, July 23, 1967, would ignite a social cataclysm of arson, looting, rioting and even sniping; both whites and blacks were involved in the rioting, but black fury was predominant, and much publicized; the violence would continue for several days, making of Murder City, USA, a national monument to racial/social American chaos:

  Forty-four people would die, 5,000 were left homeless, 1,300 buildings would be destroyed, 2,700 businesses were looted, the smell of smoldering ruins would linger long in the very air, one might say permanently. On the first night of the rioting white homeowners like us would huddle in our houses with doors and windows locked, blinds drawn, listening to the terrifying sound of sirens, angry shouts and sporadic gunfire and waiting for martial law to be declared and the Michigan National Guard to occupy the city.

  Ashamed to be “white”—but what alternative?

  Chapter 75

  It Made No Difference

  “ . . . at my old high school in Los Angeles, four since June.”

  “ . . . at my high school in Boston, two since Christmas.”

  “ . . . an eleven-year-old boy, in New Brunswick.”

  “ . . . three high school girls who were close friends, in Toronto.”

  “ . . . at Berkeley.”

  “ . . . at Cornell.”

  “ . . . at NYU.”

  In the wake of a painfully candid story about suicide by a young Korean-American woman in my advanced fiction workshop who has written about suicide before, the others are discussing suicide in a way to suggest that this is a taboo subject about which, in other circumstances, they would not be speaking; here, in the fiction workshop, the animation with which they speak suggests that this is a subject to which they have given much thought.

  “ . . . in Tokyo, it’s, like, an epidemic.”

  “ . . . in Delhi . . .”

  In their other university courses, impersonality is the norm. A scrupulously impersonal mode of speech is the only acceptable means of communication. Our creative writing courses here in the arts building at 185 Nassau provide counter-worlds in which the most upsetting truths can be uttered. Perversely, what is “fiction” is likely to be what is “most real”—in writing of fictitious individuals, the young writer is most likely writing about him-/herself.

  Of course, this is “fiction”—in a short story, the suicidal undergraduate who finally hangs himself in the shower of his residential college is not a Princeton student but a Yale student.

  Or, a Harvard student.

  (It hasn’t yet been the case that a student from a non–Ivy League university has hanged himself in any short story in one of my workshops. Even suicidal fantasies are buoyed aloft by a certain residual snobbery.)

  “ . . . you need to make the Yale campus, like, more believable.”

  “ . . . you need to make him seem like he isn’t at Princeton. Reading it, you just keep thinking he is.”

  How distressing this is, that my young writers—the oldest would be twenty or twenty-one, the youngest nineteen—are so obsessed with suicide; or, if not with suicide per se, with the severe depression that precedes suicide. Suicidal fantasies are presented in serio-comic form, sometimes crudely composed, as in a cartoon by R. Crumb. Often the stories are said to be based on an individual whom the writer knew, or knew of—“in prep school”—“my brother’s suite-mate, at Stanford”—and if the means of suicide is disputed or criticized in the workshop, the rejoinder is the protest: “But this really happened, like this.”

  Amid this animated discussion, there are those who sit quietly, listening. Like the Korean-
American girl who has written the most intimate and unsettling stories about suicidal fantasies, including unnervingly detailed passages about a high school girl intent upon “cutting” herself as a prelude to slashing her wrists.

  These very bright, very talented, very privileged Princeton undergraduates! It is tempting to think This is their secret subject. This is their bond.

  Of course I would not tell them that a friend of mine, a vice president at Rutgers in New Brunswick, remarked the other evening that suicide among college-age students has become a virtual “epidemic” in parts of the country.

  Of course I would not tell them about the basilisk.

  (For what if the basilisk is known to one of them? To several of them?)

  I would not tell them how Anne Sexton spoke of the wish to die as the almost unnameable lust.

  Nor would I tell them that I’ve known at least one suicide up close.

  At least one suicide, among the hundreds of students I have taught since Detroit in 1962.

  It had seemed almost like happenstance that Richard Wishnetsky wandered into my office at the University of Detroit one afternoon in the spring of 1965—“wandered” is the accurate term for Richard had seemed idly drifting about, though unusually well dressed for a student, with trimmed hair, a white cotton shirt, shining eyeglasses. His greeting was smiling, subtly belligerent: “You are—‘Joyce Smith’? I’ve been told that I should meet you.”

  At the University of Detroit, I would always be “Joyce Smith.” But it was known among some, and written of in the local papers, that I was also “Joyce Carol Oates,” a writer. When Richard Wishnetsky uttered the name “Joyce Smith” it was with a wink, or a twitch in his cheek to indicate But I know who you really are! My soul mate.

  Utterly confident, or confident-seeming, Richard Wishnetsky introduced himself to me, taking it for granted that I had time for him, or would make time for him, though clearly I was busy; without hesitation he extended his hand to grip mine, and shake it, as no previous student at the University of Detroit had ever done. He was twenty-three, and I was twenty-seven.