Joyce Oates: A Widow’s Story: A Memoir

In this way as in that parable of Franz Kafka in which the most profound and devastating truth of the individual’s life is revealed to him by a passer-by in the street, as if accidentally, casually, so the Widow-to-Be, like the Widow, is made to realize that her situation however unhappy, despairing or fraught with anxiety, doesn’t give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others, especially strangers who know nothing of her—“Left rear tire over the white line in the street.”

Chapter 2 Car Wreck

We were in a car wreck. My husband died but I survived.

This is not (factually) true. But in all other ways, it is true.

January 2007. A little more than a year before my husband was stricken with a severe case of pneumonia, and brought by his anxious wife to the ER of the Princeton Medical Center in blissful ignorance of the fact—the terrible and irrefutable fact—that the reverse journey would never occur bearing him back home—we were in a serious car accident, the first of our married life.

It would seem ironic in retrospect, that this accident in which Ray might easily have been killed, but was not killed, occurred hardly more than a mile from the Princeton Medical Center at the intersection of Elm Road and Rosedale Road; this was an intersection we drove through invariably on our way to Princeton, and on our way home; it is an intersection I must drive through as in a dream of nightmare repetition in which my very grief is rebuked You might have died here! You have no right to grieve, your life is a gift.

The accident occurred on a weeknight as we entered the intersection: out of nowhere—on the driver’s side—there came a hellish glare of headlights, a screeching of brakes and a tremendous crash as the front of our car was demolished, windshields shattered and air bags detonated.

In the immediate aftermath of the crash we were too confused to gauge how extraordinarily lucky we’d been—in the days, weeks, months to follow we would try to fathom this elusive fact—that the other vehicle had struck only the front of our car, the engine, hood, front wheels; a few inches back and Ray would have been killed or seriously injured, crushed in the wreck. It was beyond our capacity to grasp how close we’d come to a horrific accident—if for instance the other vehicle had sped into the intersection even a half-second later . . .

Inside the wreck of our car there was a gritty smoldering odor. Our air bags had exploded with remarkable rigor. If you have never been in a vehicle in which air bags have exploded you will have a difficult time imagining how violent, how forceful, how bellicose air bags are.

Vaguely you might expect something cushiony, even balloon-like—no.

You might expect something that will not injure you in the service of protecting you from injury—no. In the instant of the air bag explosion Ray’s face, shoulders, chest and arms had been battered as if he’d been the hapless sparring partner of a heavyweight boxer; his hands gripping the steering wheel were splattered with acid, leaving coin-sized burn marks that would sting for weeks. Beside him I was too rattled to comprehend how powerfully I’d been hit by the air bag—I’d thought that this was the dashboard buckling in, all but crushing me in the passenger’s seat so that I could barely breathe. (For the next two months my bruised chest, ribs, and arms would be so painful that I could barely move without wincing and dared not laugh heedlessly.) But in our wrecked car in the euphoria of cortical adrenaline we had little awareness of having been so battered and bruised as we managed to force our car doors open and step out onto the pavement. A wave of relief swept over us—We are alive! We are unharmed!

Princeton police officers arrived at the accident scene. An ambulance arrived bearing emergency medical workers. I recalled that one of my Princeton undergraduate students, a young woman, was a volunteer for the Princeton Emergency Medical Unit and I hoped very much that this young woman would not be among the medical workers at the scene. I hoped very much that this episode would not be reported excitedly back and circulated among my students Guess who was in a car crash last night—Prof. Oates!

Strongly it was recommended that “Raymond Smith” and “Joyce Smith” be taken by ambulance to the ER to be examined—especially it was important to be X-rayed—but we declined, saying that we were all right, we were certain we were all right. Yet in the faux-euphoric aftermath of the crash in which there was no pain nor hardly an awareness of the very concept of pain we insisted that we were fine and wanted to go home.

Standing in the cold, shivering and shaky and our car pulverized as if a playful giant had twisted it in his hands and let it drop—there was nothing we wanted so badly as to go home.

We were asked if we were “refusing” medical treatment and we protested we weren’t refusing medical treatment—we just didn’t think that we needed it.

Refused then, the officer noted, filling out his report.

Two police officers drove us home in their cruiser. They were kindly, courteous. Near midnight we entered our darkened house. It seemed that we’d been gone for far longer than just an evening and that we’d been on a long journey. Our nerves were jangled like broken electric wires in the street. I’d begun to shiver, convulsively. I was dry-eyed but exhausted and depleted as if I’d been weeping. I saw that Ray was all right—as he insisted—we were both all right. It was true that we’d come close to catastrophe—but it hadn’t happened. Somehow, that fact was difficult to comprehend, like trying to fit a large and unwieldy thought into a small area of the brain.

I began to feel the first twinges of pain in my chest. When I lifted my arm. When I laughed, or coughed.

Ray discovered reddened splotches on his hands—“I’ve been burnt? How the hell have I been burnt?” He ran cold water onto his hands. He took Bufferin, for pain.

I took Bufferin, for pain. I had no wish to go to bed anticipating a miserable insomniac night, but by 2 A.M. we’d gone to bed and were sleeping, to a degree. Glaring headlights, screeching brakes, that moment of astonishing impact. . . . The sharp chemical smell, the air bags striking like crazed aliens in a science-fiction horror film . . .

“I’ll go to get us a new car. Tomorrow.”

Calmly Ray spoke in the dark. There was comfort in his words that suggested routine, custom.

Comfort in that Ray would supervise the aftermath of the wreck.

Raymond—“wise protector.”

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year. Born on March 12, 1930. I was born on June 16, 1938.

How long ago, these births! And how long we’d been married, since January 23, 1961! At the time of the car wreck we would celebrate our forty-seventh wedding anniversary in a few weeks. You would not think, reading this, if you are younger than we were, that to us these dates were unreal, or surreal; we’d felt, through our long marriage, as if we’d only just met a few years before, as if we were “new” to each other, still “becoming acquainted” with each other; often we were “shy” with each other; there were many things we did not wish to tell each other, or to “share” with each other, in the way of individuals who are only just becoming intimately acquainted and don’t want to risk offending, or surprising.

Most of my novels and short stories were never read by my husband. He did read my non-fiction essays and my reviews for such publications as the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker—Ray was an excellent editor, sharp-eyed and informed, as countless writers published in Ontario Review have said—but he did not read most of my fiction and in this sense it might be argued that Ray didn’t know me entirely—or even, to a significant degree, partially.