Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
In fact, I am not able to write fiction any longer, except haltingly. Like a drunken woman staggering, colliding with walls, stunned . . . For weeks I labored on a single short story, that was finally completed last week. Of the many ideas for stories that assail my brain when the Cymbalta-haze lifts there is not one that I feel I can execute; I am too exhausted, I have so little concentration. . . . No more could I plan a new novel than I could trek across the Sahara or Antarctica. My principal means of communication in these early posthumous weeks is
e-mail.
I will take out of a drawer a novel I’d finished before Ray died. To save myself, as a drowning person might seize a rope, a lifeline, to haul herself up—to haul herself
up
,
up
—I will rewrite this novel entirely: each syllable. I will change the title. I will change the tone, the “voice.” In this novel I will mourn my lost husband, as I’d believed I had mourned my lost father, when I’d originally written the novel. In this way, I will try to defeat the basilisk jeering at me—I will “endure.”
Returning home after dark and approaching our house I see that the road has become a sort of tunnel, lined with vehicles parked on both sides—is there a party in the neighborhood?—why does this seem so ominous, threatening? My heart begins to beat quickly as I am forced to drive—slowly—through the narrow space between the parked vehicles—SUVs and minivans in mostly dark colors, like military vehicles; I am fearful of scraping against the side of one of the vehicles; it seems to take a very long time—minutes—for me to pass through the tunnel—I’ve begun to sweat inside my clothes—and there, finally, is our house: no lights on, a desolate place, abandoned.
I alone am alone
,
on this street. I am the lone person who is alone.
Because I haven’t left any outdoor light on, or any lights inside the house to illuminate the walk to the courtyard, I have to grope my way inside.
The only person who must grope her way into her house. Who could be so ridiculous!
It isn’t even the basilisk who jeers at me, but myself.
Weeks ago I might return home at such an hour, and there would be things left for me in the courtyard—a casserole still warm from a friend’s oven, a tote bag of fruit drinks. Now it’s the end of April and all that awaits me are UPS and FedEx deliveries. The dogwood tree is in bloom, a ghost tree in the shadows. By daylight I can’t bear to see it.
Soon, the Korean dogwood at the front of the house, in front of my study, will begin to bloom. This tree, too, was one of Ray’s favorites.
It is never an easy thing to return home to an empty house. Always when I step inside I am expecting—half-expecting—to see that damage has been done in my absence. Cushions thrown onto the floor, chairs overturned, lamps broken . . . My friend Lois has said to me
I worry about you
,
Joyce. In that house alone. It’s so . . . accessible.
In Detroit, in our first year in the house on Woodstock Drive, we’d returned one night to discover that the house had been
broken-into.
Heedlessly and naively we’d walked into the house. Neither of us seemed to grasp that something was wrong. Seeing our two kitchen chairs out of place, kitchen drawers yanked open—the sliding door to the patio part-opened—we stared in silence as if confronted with a riddle too massive to be squeezed into our brains.
Then, we hurried upstairs. In our bedroom staring at bureau drawers overturned on the floor, clothing and pillows tossed about—
Has someone been here? What is this?
It is strange how slow to comprehend the situation we were, how literally slow-thinking, as if in slow motion, or underwater—it’s said that this response is common when there has been a home burglary, the violation is so intimate it somehow can’t be immediately registered.
And in my study, a small room at the rear of the house, in which there were few items of furniture—a card table on which I wrote, a chair, two or three small unfinished bookcases—for a long moment I stared before comprehending that my typewriter was missing. . . .
My typewriter! In this era before even electric typewriters, I had a manual typewriter, to which I was attached as a shackled slave might be said to be “attached” to shackles that had grown to fit the very contours of his limbs. It might be said, reasonably—
Joyce loves her typewriter! Joyce is utterly dependent upon that typewriter.
Though I’ve always written by hand, always I’ve typed my work in its finished-draft form. Now burglars had taken away my typewriter, for what purpose we couldn’t imagine—it wasn’t new, it was far from an expensive model, surely it couldn’t be sold? Pawned?
Ray called the police. Ray spoke with the police officers when they arrived. By this time it was late—past 11
P.M.
The police officers looked through the house, asking us what was missing, and only vaguely, stumblingly, could we tell them—as if we’d been personally assaulted, we could not seem to think what was missing, apart from my typewriter and some silver-plated serving spoons and forks, that had been wedding presents; had we had money hidden anywhere, the police officers asked, and we said no, we had not; had we any firearms, the police officers asked, and we said no, we had not; were we insured, would we be filing an insurance claim, and we said yes, we supposed so.
The police officers addressed most of their remarks to Ray. Only perfunctorily did they appear to be taking notes. Clearly, in Murder City, USA, home burglaries like ours did not register heavily upon police consciousness. Their search of the house was quick and minimal. Before leaving they allowed Ray to know how dangerous it had been for us to go upstairs once we’d suspected that the house had been burglarized—“If they’d been upstairs, and there’s no other way out for them, you and your wife could’ve been hurt, Mr. Smith.”
Mr. Smith
was uttered just barely politely.
Man to man they were speaking.
Your wife
stood to the side. When they left, Ray was very quiet. And for days afterward, very quiet on the subject of the break-in.
By degrees I would realize
He was insulted by them. They spoke to him without respect. A man who’d behaved dangerously
,
stupidly—hadn’t protected his wife.
The glass house. How wise is this? No blinds, shutters—a single floor—“accessible.”
In a glass house, by day or by night, there are unexpected reflections—ghost-images—shadowy figures moving in the corner of the eye. Deer are reflected in the glass, and their reflections reflected in another glass, or—is it a human figure?—
Is it Ray?
—for so often, over the years, of course it has been Ray; and the heart floods with . . .
Some sort of adrenaline-equivalent of
hope.
Hope
in the face of
common sense.
To be insane is—this is a partial, improvised definition—to believe that something is what we wish to believe it is, in the face of knowing that it is not. To be not-insane is to acknowledge that one’s deepest and most profound wishes have nothing to do with what is.
I conclude that I am not insane. Not just yet.
Maybe it is dangerous, living here alone. But the dangers are not likely to be from break-ins, serial killers.
I am thinking of the anonymous male worker-figures of Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
marching like zombies into the netherworld which is their abode.
I am thinking of a museum Ray and I had visited—possibly, the Louvre—a sinkhole of exhaustion—though containing “beautiful” things—“rare” things—in a wing of antiquities—walking together silently for we’d been silenced by the figures of long-deceased kings—their faces reduced to a few primitive features—some of the sculpted forms were armless, legless—headless—ancient Egypt, was it?—humanoid figures from an extinct species yet condemned to “exist”—in the museum; in that gray, diffuse light all meaning had drained from these blind, vacant figures—all meaning had drained from what we were doing there—bearing witness to what absurd claim of human identity, value? authority?
Ray took my hand—“Let’s get out of here!”
Living alone it is very easy to become disembodied.
Thinking
I must stop taking these pills. I am being poisoned.
(In New Jersey, it’s said the air is polluted even in those parts of the state, like Princeton, in which the air is claimed to be not-polluted.)
(Sometimes, in any case, you can smell/taste the toxins—for instance a faint discoloration of the air not unlike the hue of dried cat urine on a death certificate issued by the State of New Jersey.)
Like his father—his father from whom he’d been emotionally estranged—Ray was once observed weeping. In his office, at his desk, and I’d come into the room utterly astonished, and concerned—asking what was wrong, what was wrong, oh what was wrong—for this was so utterly unlike my husband, as I’d known him; and Ray had turned away saying it was nothing, he’d been thinking about his father, that was all—nothing.
At this time his father had been dead perhaps a year or two.
Ray did not speak of his family often, or easily. But he’d told me that more than once, he’d discovered his father weeping. Once, when Ray had been quite young, he’d discovered his father hunched over, his head on his arms. He’d been very frightened. It is frightening to see your father crying. Frightening to see your father so seemingly helpless, defeated. And another time when Ray was eighteen, and had ceased going to mass on Sunday, his father had cried, his father had appeared genuinely upset, anxious—
If you lose your faith I will be blamed. If you go to hell. It will be my fault if you go to hell. I will be blamed.
An adult man, crying! Frightened of hell! Telling me these things Ray laughed. His lips twisted in a bitter sort of smile.
But did your father really mean this? I asked. How strange to me, whose parents had never been devout or even very serious Catholics; whose family would no more have spoken of God, Jesus Christ, Mary, the Devil or heaven or hell than they’d have lapsed into a discussion of higher mathematics. Somehow it seems, in Millersport, New York—a rural crossroads community of a dozen houses—such “profound” issues sound just plain silly.
Ray said yes. His father had meant it.
I asked how could anyone seriously believe . . .
Irritably Ray said that his father had believed. His father was a devout Roman Catholic and he “believed”—what Catholics believe.
But—
Let’s drop the subject, Ray said. Please.
In a marriage, as in any intimate relationship, there are
sinkholes.
Or maybe
minefields.
You don’t blunder into them. You don’t make that mistake.
You don’t make that mistake more than once.
To Ray, there was a sinkhole: his family.
The sinkhole was immense, covering many acres: his family, the Church, hell.
This sinkhole nearly pulled him into it, to drown. Before I’d met him, Ray said.
Or so I’d gathered, as a young wife.
My impression was that Ray had pulled himself out of the sinkhole at considerable cost—emotionally, psychologically. I could not ask him, as I could not ask him about his father. One of those bullets that are lodged too close to the spinal column, or the brain, to be removed by surgery.
In writing this, I feel that I am betraying Ray. Yet in not writing it, I am not being altogether honest.
There is no purpose to a memoir, if it isn’t honest. As there is no purpose to a declaration of love, if it isn’t honest.
For years we’d lived with no reference to Ray’s past, for Ray’s past was ever more distant in time. But at the start of our marriage, this past had been close, in fact this past intruded upon the present, for Ray’s parents were both living at the time. (Ray’s mother would live well beyond ninety—when she’d died, she had been a widow for forty years.)
How does a young wife respond to her husband’s family? If her husband is on good, easy terms with them, there is no problem. If he isn’t, there is likely to be a problem.
I am not comfortable criticizing others. Though I am not what you’d call a credulous person, I don’t want to be, or even to seem, scornful, skeptical, dismissive of others’ beliefs.
Especially fervently held religious beliefs.
And so, with the issue of Ray’s family, I withheld any opinion. I did not press the issue of wonderment, that Ray’s father should actually have believed that he would be accountable—to God?—if his son left the Catholic Church.
As Ray said
Drop it.
Another time, when we’d first met, and were seeing each other every night in Madison, Wisconsin, in the head-on excitement of being what we’d have been far too shy to have designated
newly in love—
Ray had spoken hesitantly of his sister who’d been “institutionalized.”
This was a coincidence! For my sister Lynn, eighteen years younger than me, had been institutionalized, too.
So severely autistic, Lynn could not be kept at home beyond the age of eleven. She’d become violent, threatening my mother. This was a heartbreaking interlude in my parents’ lives, after I’d gone away to college; implicitly, I’d left the family, and Lynn was perhaps to have been my replacement.
Or perhaps my younger sister had been an accident. Accidentally conceived when my mother was in her early forties.
But Ray’s sister wasn’t autistic. Ray’s sister Carol, as he recalled her, had not been mentally defective, but she’d been—“excitable”—“difficult”—“disobedient.”
Of the four children in Ray’s family, Carol had been the rebellious one. Carol had resisted following orders from her parents, and Carol had “over-reacted” to the religious climate of the household.
What did this mean? I asked.
She hadn’t been a good girl—a good little Catholic girl. She hadn’t been devout. She’d been loud, argumentative.
And what—what happened to her? I asked.
She was institutionalized. When she was about eleven. Like your sister. But for different reasons.