A Widow's Story
Page 40
August 30, 2008. Waking this morning, or part-waking—a sense of yearning, anxiety—that there must be some mistake, or misundertanding—I wasn’t married any longer. And it seemed to me that I could remarry Ray—I would do this, and a vast wave of relief came over me.
And then, waking more fully, I remembered—why I was not married to Ray any longer, and why I could not hope to remarry him.
I was stricken with loss, very depressed. As if this were all new to me—that I’d lost Ray. As if until now I hadn’t exactly known, how I’d lost Ray. And now, I was being made to see the situation from another perspective, like one who is traveling about a disaster site, viewing the disaster from different perspectives. Now that my insomnia had lifted and after all these weeks I was still alive and often happy, in the presence of friends at least—now that the final issue of Ontario Review was printed, published and has made its way into the world as Ray would have wished—cautiously I’d been thinking Maybe I am all right now, it’s all right. Maybe I can do this.
But the dream has told me No. It is not all right.
And later that morning at the rear of the driveway: seeing one of the trash cans fallen onto its side, and the contents spilled out rudely onto the driveway—raccoons, it must have been, scavenging for food scraps, or the possibility of food scraps; for, the previous night, my friend Ebet and I had hosted a dinner at my house, a small dinner for the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt whose wife was out of town, and to this dinner had come a disjointed gathering of guests, individuals whose spouses were away at the end of August, or had abandoned them, or both; there were only six people, including me; and one of these guests was a stranger to me, a neuroscientist at Princeton University invited by Ebet; and I could not have guessed how, another time so purely by chance, as years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, it was purely chance that Ray had come to sit beside me, my life would be altered—You must not forget it is a gift freely given you could not deserve.
Kneeling in the driveway picking up things scattered about by the marauding raccoons—wadded napkins, paper towels, bits of tin foil, packages, yogurt containers, a crumpled aluminum pan in which Ebet had brought homemade pizza—and there, amid the litter, a gleam of something silvery—an earring!—which I’d believed that I had lost; this earring must have been set on the kitchen counter, and gathered with the trash, and thrown out, the previous night; both earrings I’d removed, to lay on the kitchen counter, after the guests had departed; unwittingly then I’d swept the earrings into the trash; and now, kneeling in the driveway I see the second earring a few feet away . . . These were favorite earrings of mine though of no great consequence or worth, nor had Ray given me these earrings, but I wore them often. And I thought This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, and the love of my life, I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash.
The Widow’s Handbook
Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Ray Smith and Joyce Carol Oates at a garden wedding.
EVA HAGGDAHL
Acknowledgments
Excerpts from this memoir have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and in Conjunctions.
Also by Joyce Carol Oates
The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)
New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)
Contraries (1981)
The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983)
On Boxing (1987)
(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)
George Bellows: American Artist (1995)
Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)
The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003)
Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005)
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973–1982 (2007)
In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews (2010)
Copyright
A WIDOW’S STORY. Copyright © 2011 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” from Selected Poems by John Crowe Ransom, copyright 1924 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and renewed 1952 by John Crowe Ransom. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
FIRST EDITION
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ISBN: 978-0-06-201553-2
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