Joyce Oates: A Widow’s Story: A Memoir

A Widow’s Story

A MEMOIR

Joyce Carol Oates

In memory of my husband

Raymond Smith

Oh God—you are going to be so unhappy.

—Gail Godwin

I am very sorry to learn that Ray died a couple of weeks ago. When someone I loved died I found it helpful to remind myself that this person was not less real because she wasn’t real now, just as people in New Zealand aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.

—Derek Parfit

When my mother died I adopted the Gestalt technique of saying to myself, whenever there was a surge of grief, “I choose to have a mother who is dead.”

—T. D., a former colleague at the University of Windsor

One breath at a time, Joyce. One breath at a time.

—Gloria Vanderbilt

Contents

Cover

Title Page A Widow’s Story A MEMOIR Joyce Carol Oates

Epigraph Oh God—you are going to be so unhappy. —Gail Godwin I am very sorry to learn that Ray died a couple of weeks ago. When someone I loved died I found it helpful to remind myself that this person was not less real because she wasn’t real now, just as people in New Zealand aren’t less real because they aren’t real here. —Derek Parfit When my mother died I adopted the Gestalt technique of saying to myself, whenever there was a surge of grief, “I choose to have a mother who is dead.” —T. D., a former colleague at the University of Windsor One breath at a time, Joyce. One breath at a time. —Gloria Vanderbilt

Part I: The Vigil

Chapter 1 - The Message

Chapter 2 - Car Wreck

Chapter 3 - The First Wrong Things

Chapter 4 - “Pneumonia”

Chapter 5 - Telemetry

Chapter 6 - E-mail Record

Chapter 7 - E. coli

Chapter 8 - Hospital Vigil(s)

Chapter 9 - Jasmine

Chapter 10 - Vigil

Chapter 11 - E-mail Record

Chapter 12 - Memory Pools

Chapter 13 - “I’m Not Crying for Any Reason”

Chapter 14 - The Call

Part II: Free Fall

Chapter 15 - “The Golden Vanity”

Chapter 16 - Yellow Pages

Chapter 17 - The Arrow

Chapter 18 - E-mail Record

Chapter 19 - Last Words

Chapter 20 - “You’ve Said Good-bye”

Chapter 21 - Double Plot

Chapter 22 - Cat Pee

Chapter 23 - Probate

Chapter 24 - “Sympathy Gift Basket”

Chapter 25 - The Betrayal

Chapter 26 - The Artisans

Chapter 27 - E-mail Record

Part III: The Basilisk

Chapter 28 - “Beady Dead Eyes Like Gems”

Chapter 29 - The Lost Husband

Chapter 30 - “How Are You?”

Chapter 31 - “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”

Chapter 32 - The Nest

Chapter 33 - Ghost Rooms

Chapter 34 - E-mail Record

Chapter 35 - Fury!

Chapter 36 - Oasis

Chapter 37 - Bruised Knees

Chapter 38 - A Dream of Such Happiness!

Chapter 39 - “We Want to See You Soon”

Chapter 40 - Moving Away

Chapter 41 - “Won’t Be Seeing You for a While”

Chapter 42 - “Can’t Find You Where Are You”

Chapter 43 - “I Am Sorry to Inform You”

Part IV: Purgatory, Hell

Chapter 44 - “Neither Joyce Nor I Can Come to the Phone Right Now”

Chapter 45 - The Military Order of the Purple Heart

Chapter 46 - In Motion!

Chapter 47 - In Motion!—“Still Alive”

Chapter 48 - In Motion! —“Mouth of the Rat”

Chapter 49 - In Motion!— “The Wonder Woman of American Literature”

Chapter 50 - In Motion!— “You Can’t Sit There”

Chapter 51 - “Never Forget”

Chapter 52 - The Widow’s Secret

Chapter 53 - Congratulations! I

Chapter 54 - Congratulations! II

Chapter 55 - E-mail Record

Chapter 56 - The Cache

Chapter 57 - Morbidity Studies

Chapter 58 - The Intruder

Part V: “You Looked So Happy”

Chapter 59 - Too Soon!

Chapter 60 - “Leaving Las Vegas”

Chapter 61 - “The Unlived . . .”

Chapter 62 - Cruel Crude Stupid “Well-Intentioned”

Chapter 63 - “If . . .”

Chapter 64 - “Never, Ever That Again”

Chapter 65 - The “Real World”

Chapter 66 - Little Love Story

Chapter 67 - Tulips

Chapter 68 - Please Forgive!

Chapter 69 - “Happy, and Excited”

Chapter 70 - Blood in the Water!

Chapter 71 - Walking Wounded

Chapter 72 - Dead Woman Walking

Chapter 73 - Taboo

Chapter 74 - “Ashamed to Be ‘White’ ”

Chapter 75 - It Made No Difference

Chapter 76 - Sinkholes

Chapter 77 - The Garden

Chapter 78 - The Pilgrimage

Chapter 79 - “You Looked So Happy”

Chapter 80 - Black Mass I

Chapter 81 - Black Mass II

Chapter 82 - “Good Girl!”

Chapter 83 - The Resolution

Chapter 84 - “Did Ray Like Swing?”

Chapter 85 - “Title”

Chapter 86 - “Your Husband Is Still Alive”

Epilogue

Three Small Sightings in August

The Widow’s Handbook

Acknowledgments

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part I The Vigil

“My husband died, my life collapsed.”

Chapter 1 The Message

February 15, 2008. Returning to our car that has been haphazardly parked—by me—on a narrow side street near the Princeton Medical Center—I see, thrust beneath a windshield wiper, what appears to be a sheet of stiff paper. At once my heart clenches in dismay, guilty apprehension—a ticket? A parking ticket? At such a time? Earlier that afternoon I’d parked here on my way—hurried, harried—a jangle of admonitions running through my head like shrieking cicadas—if you’d happened to see me you might have thought pityingly That woman is in a desperate hurry—as if that will do any good—to visit my husband in the Telemetry Unit of the medical center where he’d been admitted several days previously for pneumonia; now I need to return home for a few hours preparatory to returning to the medical center in the early evening—anxious, dry-mouthed and head-aching yet in an aroused state that might be called hopeful—for since his admission into the medical center Ray has been steadily improving, he has looked and felt better, and his oxygen intake, measured by numerals that fluctuate with literally each breath—90, 87, 91, 85, 89, 92—is steadily gaining, arrangements are being made for his discharge into a rehab clinic close by the medical center—(hopeful is our solace in the face of mortality); and now, in the late afternoon of another of these interminable and exhausting hospital-days—can it be that our car has been ticketed?—in my distraction I’d parked illegally?—the time limit for parking on this street is only two hours, I’ve been in the medical center for longer than two hours, and see with embarrassment that our 2007 Honda Accord—eerily glaring-white in February dusk like some strange phosphorescent creature in the depths of the sea—is inexpertly, still more inelegantly parked, at a slant to the curb, left rear tire over the white line in the street by several inches, front bumper nearly touching the SUV in the space ahead. But now—if this is a parking ticket—at once the thought comes to me I won’t tell Ray, I will pay the fine in secret.

Except the sheet of paper isn’t a ticket from the Princeton Police Department after all but a piece of ordinary paper—opened and smoothed out by my shaky hand it’s revealed as a private message in aggressively large block-printed letters which with stunned staring eyes I read several times like one faltering on the brink of an abyss—

LEARN TO PARK STUPPID BITCH