Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Chapter 84
“Did Ray Like Swing?”
Jeanne has written me:
Today I’m listening to La Bohème in its entirety for the first time since my father died. On my way home from errands I stopped by the cemetery and opened all the doors of my car and played “Musetta’s Waltz” for Ray. I had the mezzo-soprano from the Cathedral in Cleveland sing it at my father’s funeral. Then when all the gray people filed out of the church, I played my dad’s c.d. of the Glenn Miller Band playing Sing Sing Sing I & II, featuring Gene Krupa on drums.
Did Ray like swing?
XXOO
Jeanne
“This is hard. But I’ll be with you.”
My friend Susan has offered to drive me to the Department of Motor Vehicles on Route 1 in Lawrenceville to fulfill the last of the lengthy drumroll of death-duties—transferring the title of our 2007 white Honda to the “executrix” of Raymond Smith’s estate.
At least, I think this must be the last of the death-duties. I am so very tired of these death-duties, my soul shrivels like a desiccated leaf tossed into the fire at the mere prospect of—“executrix”—“Joyce Smith”—“death certificate”. . .
Shingles-lesions throb with especial virulence at such times. Itching rises to an aria of jeering in parts of the body difficult to reach and in any case not allowable, when the widow is observed by others.
Think of the lesions as exposed nerves. Mangled quivering exposed nerves. Something of the furious and maimed widow-soul pushing through the skin like shale through earth. And all secret, in a terrible silence.
Riding with Susan in her car, stopping by Quaker Bridge Mall for a half hour in JCPenney and Macy’s, being in the company of a friend at this hour of the day—early afternoon—is an adventure for me; since I never shop any longer except for groceries, and then as infrequently as I can manage; since drifting through a store, a mall, in any public place where people are likely to be with relatives, is just too painful for me and in any case there is nothing that I want to buy.
Shopping alone forces me to think of not-shopping-alone—as I’d done for years as a girl, with my mother Carolina, for whom department-store-shopping was an adventure also, since she hadn’t much money to spend and was obliged to choose purchases very carefully, after comparing prices in stores; and, for even more years, with Ray, whose object in entering any store was to exit the store as quickly as possible with or without having made the purchases for which the store was entered.
In some stores in the Princeton area, if I don’t steel myself and look quickly away I am likely to see us—
ghost-Ray and ghost-Joyce
—ascending on an escalator, pushing a cart into the utterly depressing fluorescent-lit warehouse interior of Wal-Mart.
But shopping in Susan’s company is easy, and fun. And Susan and I are temperamentally akin: browsing JCPenney/Macy’s for nightwear bargains.
Susan has taken me to Hopewell on that Saturday in summer when the entire town turns into a flea market/rummage sale. Fortunately, Ray had no interest in such creative-bargain-hunting and so I have no painful ghost-memories of shopping in Hopewell with him.
How busy the Department of Motor Vehicles is, on this weekday afternoon! Dispiriting to see so many people—all the seats are taken—as in probate court in Trenton, weeks ago.
In this waiting room there are no
memory pools
. This is a place of utter expediency, soulless and grim.
In a steady stream new arrivals fill out forms for the clerks at the counter and take their places in the long lines. As the lines move slowly forward they become “sitting lines” in several rows of vinyl chairs.
Clutching my death-duty documents, I take my place in one of the lines. Thinking
Who are all these people? I had not thought that death had undone so many . . .
Badly I would like to hide somewhere, in a restroom stall, and claw at my hot-itching shingles-lesions with my fingernails. I am willing to draw blood if that will assuage the itching but of course it would only exacerbate the condition, that is fueled by stress.
Suffer! Ray was worth it.
But I am not so sure. Not that Ray isn’t worth suffering for—but the value of suffering itself. Physical pain, emotional and psychological pain—is there any purpose to it? The faces of many individuals in this waiting room—dark faces, Hispanic and Asian faces predominant among them—are drawn with stress of one sort or another; if not grief for the loss of someone beloved, then another sort of loss, and another sort of grief. Though I am writing this memoir to see what can be made of the phenomenon of “grief” in the most exactingly minute of ways, I am no longer convinced that there is any inherent value in grief; or, if there is, if wisdom springs from the experience of terrible loss, it’s a wisdom one might do without.
It is now early June, and I am no longer taking Cymbalta. My method of halving the dosage each day seems to have worked for I haven’t had any unusual or alarming symptoms nor do I seem to be more—or less—“depressed” than I’d been at the start.
Still, I must “self-medicate” if I want to sleep for even a few hours. To endure to the point at which I might naturally “fall asleep” after hours, hours, and hours of anxious wakefulness is just not possible and now with the shingles-lesions provoked by stress, I am afraid to take such chances.
I haven’t told anyone about the shingles. I have passed through the contagion stage and would have thought that, after several weeks, the welts, blisters, and watery pus would have abated, as well as the worst of the burning pain, but that isn’t so.
But how tired I am, of being
sick.
When people inquire how I am, always I say I’m feeling very good—“Much better.”
And my friends say: “Joyce! You are looking much better.”
And my friends say, to the point at which, if Ray could overhear, he would laugh with me, for this remark has become so frequent: “Joyce! You’re looking so much
better-rested.
”
(A backhanded compliment to the widow since it suggests how ravaged, how wretched, how really terrible-looking the widow has been, previously.)
When friends greet me with hugs, it’s all that I can do to keep from screaming and recoiling with pain, when the shingles-lesions are forcibly touched. Tears running down my cheeks even as I am smiling, smiling to assure my friends
Yes truly
,
I am feeling much better.
Yes truly
,
I am alive. For a while
,
there was some doubt!
Often my eyes well miserably with tears. Often and surreptitiously I wipe my eyes with my fingertips. Especially here at the Motor Vehicles Department in the grim task of acquiring “title” to the car I have been driving for years as if I were not in fact entitled to the car purchased out of the joint checking account I’d had with my husband. When the widow is interrogated on the subject of her widowhood the widow is likely to feel embittered, resentful. The widow is likely to feel very depressed. Fortunately Susan has gone elsewhere and isn’t a witness to my near-breakdown when an unfriendly female clerk gives me a difficult time, for some reason—
Does she think that I am pretending my husband is dead? Does she think that I have printed up this death certificate as a ruse
,
to acquire his car?
Rudely I am made to wait as my documents are checked and double-checked.
Death certificate: “certified.”
Certificate of Title.
Executor Short Certificate.
Driver’s license. Car registration. Insurance card. Identification papers.
Widows, survivors. I wonder how many there are of us here. Single women, older women—more women than men in the waiting room. In this inhospitable place I am trying to recall Ray. Seeing him suddenly outside my study window in the courtyard waving to me—“Come outside and see the new car.”
And I’d gone outside, and saw the white Honda in the driveway—“But it’s just like the old car.”
“Of course.”
Except now I am thinking—if only Ray had thought to purchase the car in both our names, not in just his own. Now I would not be here in the Department of Motor Vehicles pressing a claim for the very car I’ve been driving since January 2007 when Ray brought it home.
Months later, in the fall, when I am stopped on Pretty Brook Road for “crossing the white line”—the narrow country road is very twisty, there are numerous blind turns—and the police officer asks to see my auto registration, the document which I hand to him will be invalid, because incomplete. In my desperation I will search the glove compartment again, futilely—the police officer will issue me a ticket for driving without registration— it’s then that I will remember the frowning clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles who’d removed part of the auto registration document—a card-sized piece of paper—and must have kept it instead of returning it to me with the other documents.
I will wonder—is this the clerk’s petty revenge? But revenge for what?
I will wonder—was it just a mistake? The clerk had torn out the registration card and simply forgot to return it and there was nothing intentional on her part, no covert meanness that will result in my having to appear in the Titusville traffic court early one Monday morning in October, to forestall having to pay a fine of three hundred dollars . . . ?
The “Executor Short Certificate” is one of the documents I have grown to hate. This document states that “Joyce Smith” is the
executrix
of the estate of “Raymond J. Smith, Jr.”—to glance at it is to know, in an instant, that “Joyce Smith” is the widow/survivor and that “Raymond J. Smith, Jr.” is gone.
How wrong, how unnatural this is. Anyone who knew Ray would know that he would not have gone away and left me.
He would not have gone away and left me to this
infinite whirl
, alone.
Another document I hate is the “certified”—i.e., stamped with the New Jersey State seal—death certificate of Raymond J. Smith, Jr.
Such words as
cause of death
:
cardiopulmonary arrest—pneumonia
.
Time of death
:
2/18/08 12
:
50 a.m.
After almost four months, I am able to read these words without feeling
I want to die. I should die
. Almost, I am able to read these words as if they were ordinary words and not terrible words that chart so casually and perfunctorily the end of my life as I’d known it.
When I am alone in the house in which Ray and I lived for so many years, I fantasize of families—the happiness of families, which seems always so much greater than any happiness of which I might be capable myself; but when I am in public places, seeing individuals with relatives, I don’t feel at all that I would like to trade places with them . . . even in fantasy. The melancholy fact is: these individuals linked by blood will not remain linked for very long. Many are older, elderly—they will not be living much longer. Seeing a woman of about my age with a much older woman, no doubt her mother, I am led to think
But you won’t have her much longer. I have lost my mother
,
six years ago. I never thought that I would laugh or even smile again but of course . . . Of course I have.
Susan, who used her time at the Department of Motor Vehicles to have her car inspected outside, returns and is surprised that I haven’t yet received the title to my car; I am still waiting in line, though at the very front of the line now. “What! How can these people be so
slow
?”
Susan is one of my wonderful women-writer-friends, with a wonderful husband, and though I am sure that Susan understands how her energy, her confidence, her good humor and her zest for work are inextricably bound up with her husband and her marriage, I think that she can’t quite realize the degree to which this is so. And it is good for Susan, and for my other non-widow-women friends, that they can’t know.
Maybe they will never know. This is possible.
“We’re not in any hurry,” Susan says, squeezing my hand. “We can wait.”
Chapter 86
“Your Husband Is Still Alive”
Your life together was purely chance. You must not forget
,
it was a gift freely given you could not have deserved.
On a Sunday evening, in a gathering of graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in a room of the fabled old Student Union overlooking Lake Mendota, he came to sit beside me.
Only fleetingly I had a sense of this tall slender dark-haired young man, at first. I did not want to stare at him. I was talking with others, others were talking with me, it was a social situation, we were all smiling.
We may have been lonely people, in our residence rooms.
We may have been very lonely people, some of us new to Madison and knowing virtually no one.
Yet we were here, we’d come to meet one another, and so he’d crossed the room to sit beside me, before even I had had a clear glimpse of his face I’d begun to think
But this is something—someone—special. . . . Maybe.
Pointedly he’d pulled out a chair from the table, and brought it to me. And he was sitting beside me. He introduced himself—“Ray Smith.” I told him my name. He told me something of himself—he was a Ph.D. student in English, completing his dissertation on Jonathan Swift, he had a fellowship and wasn’t teaching this semester; when he asked about me I told him that I was an M.A. student in English, I had a Knapp Fellowship and was not teaching, either. He asked me what I was studying and I told him—I told him that I was having difficulty with Old English—he laughed and said, “But I can help you with the ‘great vowel shift’ ”—and he asked me if I would like to have dinner with him that evening which was the evening of October 23, 1960, and I said yes—yes I would—and so it happened that night, and the following night, and the following night—dinner together in Madison—and one of these evenings, an impromptu dinner in Ray’s little rented room on Henry Street—and we were engaged on November 23 and we were married—in Madison, in the sacristy of the Catholic chapel there—on January 23, 1961; and for forty-seven years and twenty-five days we would be together nearly every day and every night until the morning of February 11, 2008, when I drove my husband to the emergency room of the Princeton Medical Center; and we would speak together every day of those forty-seven years and twenty-five days until the early morning of February 18, 2008, when the call came for me, rousing me from sleep and summoning me to the hospital quickly! quickly!—“Mrs. Smith! Your husband is still alive.”