Joyce Oates - My Life as a Rat

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © The Ontario Review, Inc. 2019

Cover photograph © Getty Images

Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here.

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

Source ISBN: 9780008339647

Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008339661

Version: 2019-05-04

To my friend Elaine Showalter,

and to my husband and first reader, Charlie Gross

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

I

The Rat

The Omen: November 2, 1991

Disowned

The Happy Childhood

Best Kisses!

Obituary

“Boys Will Be Boys”

To Die For

“Accident”

Louisville Slugger

The Little Sister

The Promise

The Siege

Because …

The Rescue

The Secret I

The Secret II

Final Confession

“Dear Christ What Did Violet Do Now”

The Revelation

The Bat

Safe House

Runaway

II

“Praying for Violet”

Exile

Sleepwalker

The Iceberg

Turnip Face

Sisters

“Mr. Sandman Bring Me a Dream”

“Dirty Girl”

The Stalker: 1997

“You Are Not Wanted”

Dirty Girl

“Violet, Goodbye!”

III

The Scar

The Burrow

Valentine

Keeping Myself Alive

Off the Books

Rat, Waiting

Sorrowful Virgin

Damned Little Dog

Tongue

Uncanny

First Aid

“Maxed-Out”

The Misunderstanding

The Return

In My Mother’s Garden

Forgiveness

The Guilty Sister

Howard Street

Home

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Novels by Joyce Carol Oates

About the Publisher

Go away. Go to hell—rat!

You don’t get another chance to rat on anybody.

It’s true, you will not be given another chance.

There is just the one chance, the first.

THIS, I WOULD REMEMBER: SMELLY DARK WATER IN THE RIVER near shore, the color of rotted eggplant, we’d seen on the way to school that morning and stopped to stare at.

On the Lock Street Bridge. Crossing on the pedestrian walkway. And there, directly below, the thunderous river (a deep cobalt-blue on clear days, metallic-gray on cloudy days) seemed to have changed color near shore and was purplish-dark, smelling of something like motor oil, roiling and surging as if it was alive like snakes, giant writhing snakes, you didn’t want to look but could not look away.

My sister Katie nudged me crinkling her nose against the smell. “C’mon, Vi’let! Let’s get out of here.”

I was leaning over the railing, staring down. Trying to see—were those actually snakes? Twenty-, thirty-foot-long snakes? Their scales were a winking deep-purple sheen. The sight was so terrifying, I’d begun to shiver convulsively. The odor was making me nauseated, and dizzy.

As far as we could see upstream the oily-purple water came in surges near shore while elsewhere the river was the color of stone, choppy and thunderous—the Niagara River rushing to the Falls seven miles to the north.

We ran from the walkway. Didn’t look back to see if the giant snakes were pursuing us.

I was twelve years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.

(NOT OUR IMAGINATIONS. THE OILY PURPLE WATER LIKE SNAKES in the river had been real.

Alarmed citizens in South Niagara had noticed the phenomenon and reported it. There’d been many calls to local authorities and to 911.

On the front page of that evening’s South Niagara Union Journal it was curtly explained that the excessive discharge of sludge in the river that morning had been the result of routine maintenance of the Niagara County Water Board’s wastewater sedimentation basins and no cause for concern.

What did this mean? What was sludge?

When our father read the boxed item in the Journal he laughed.

“‘Routine.’ ‘Sedimentation’—‘no cause for alarm.’ Sons of bitches are poisoning us, that’s what it means.”)

ONCE I’D BEEN DADDY’S FAVORITE OF HIS SEVEN KIDS. BEFORE something terrible happened between us, I am trying still to make right.

This was in November 1991. I was twelve years, seven months old at the time.

Sent me into exile. Thirteen years! To an adult that is not a long time—probably; but to an adolescent, a lifetime.

Who’s Daddy’s favorite little girl?

Violet Rue. Little Violet Rue!

When I was a little girl Daddy would kiss my pug nose, and make me squeal. And Daddy would lift me in his strong arms, and pretend to toss me into the air so I was frightened but did not let on for Daddy did not like scaredy-cat little girls.

There was an intensity to this, the lifting-in-the-arms, the impassioned speech. A delicious fiery smell, Daddy’s breath, fierce and unmistakable and I had no idea why, that he’d been drinking (whiskey) but knowing this ferocity to be the very breath of the father, the breath of the male.

How’s my little girl? Not afraid of your daddy are you?

Better not, Daddy loves his little Violet Rue like crazy!

ONCE, BEFORE I WAS BORN, MY OLDEST SISTER, MIRIAM, HAD BEEN Daddy’s favorite little girl. Later, my sister Katie had been Daddy’s favorite little girl.

But now, the favorite was Violet Rue. And would remain Violet Rue.

Because the youngest, the baby of the Kerrigan family.

Last-born. Most precious.

Daddy had named me himself— Violet Rue. A name he claimed to have heard in an Irish song that had haunted him as a boy.

It was said that Violet Rue had been an accidental pregnancy—a “late” pregnancy—but to the religious-minded nothing can be truly accidental.

All human beings have a special destiny. All souls are precious to God.

The family is a special destiny. The family into which you are born and from which there can be no escape.

Your mother was thrilled! A beautiful new girl-baby to take the place of the others who were growing up and growing away from her and especially the boys she hardly dared touch any longer, their downy cheeks, their prickly cheeks, the heat of their skin, fierce flushed faces she did not mean to surprise, opening a door without knocking, unthinking— Oh. Sorry. I didn’t think anyone was … Your big brothers who’d throw off Mom’s hand if even by chance she touched them.