Lorrie Moore - 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

“Is your father here?” he heard Marian ask the children. “Where is he, in the bathroom? Ralph?”

“Mama, mama!” Dorothea exclaimed. “Daddy has a big, big bandage on his face!”

“Ralph,” she turned the knob. “Ralph, let me in, please, darling. Ralph? Please let me in, darling, I want to see you. Ralph? Please?”

“Go away, Marian. Just let me alone a while, all right?”

“Please, Ralph, open the door for a minute, darling. I just want to see you, Ralph. Ralph? The children said you were hurt. What’s wrong, darling?… Ralph?”

“Will you please be quiet, please?”

She waited at the door for a minute, turned the knob again, and then he could hear her moving around the kitchen, getting the children breakfast, trying to answer their questions.

He looked at himself in the mirror, then pulled off the bandage and tried gently with warm water and a cloth to wipe off some of the red stain. In a minute or two he gave it up. He turned away from the mirror and sat down heavily on the edge of the bathtub, began to unlace his shoes. No cowardly Aegisthus waiting for him here, no Clytemnestra. He sat there with a shoe in his hand and looked at the white, streamlined clipper ships making their way across the pale blue of the plastic shower curtain. He unbuttoned his shirt, leaned over the bathtub with a sigh, and dropped in the plug. He opened the hot water handle, and the steam rose.

As he stood naked a minute on the smooth tile before getting into the water, he gathered in his fingers the slack flesh over his ribs, looked at himself again in the clouded mirror. He started when Marian called his name.

“Ralph. The children are in their room playing… I called Von Williams and said you wouldn’t be in today, and I’m going to stay home.” She waited and then said, “I have a nice breakfast on the stove for you, darling, when you’re through with your bath… Ralph?”

“It’s all right, Marian. I’m not hungry.”

“Ralph… Come out, darling.”

He stayed in the bathroom until he heard her upstairs over the bathroom in the children’s room. She was telling them: settle down and get dressed; didn’t they want to play with Warren and Jeannie?

He went through the house and into the bedroom where he shut the door. He looked at the bed before he crawled in. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. How should a man act? It had assumed immense importance in his mind, was far more crucial and requiring of an answer than the other thing, the event two years ago… He remembered he’d just gotten up off the couch in the living room where he’d been working, and come into the kitchen and sat down… The light ornament in the ceiling began to sway. He snapped open his eyes and turned onto his side as Marian came into the room.

She took off her robe and sat down on the edge of the bed. She put her hand under the covers and began gently stroking the lower part of his back. “Ralph,” she murmured.

He tensed at her cold fingers, and then, gradually, he relaxed. He imagined he was floating on his back in the heavy, milky water of Juniper Lake, where he’d spent one summer years ago, and someone was calling to him, Come in, Ralph, Come in. But he kept on floating and didn’t answer, and the soft rising waves laved his body.

He woke again as her hand moved over his hip. Then it traced his groin before flattening itself against his stomach. She was in bed now, pressing the length of her body against his and moving gently back and forth with him. He waited a minute, and then he turned to her and their eyes met.

Her eyes were filled and seemed to contain layer upon layer of shimmering color and reflection, thicker and more opaque farther in, and almost transparent at the lustrous surface. Then, as he gazed even deeper, he glimpsed in first one pupil and then the other, the cameo-like, perfect reflection of his own strange and familiar face. He continued to stare, marveling at the changes he dimly felt taking place inside him.

JOYCE CAROL OATES was born in Lockport, New York, in 1938 and was raised on her parents’ farm. She was fourteen when her grandmother gave her her first typewriter. Oates went on a scholarship to Syracuse University, where she majored in English.

After Oates stumbled upon the fact that one of her stories had been cited in the honor roll of The Best American Short Stories , she assembled the fourteen stories in her first book, By the North Gate . It was the first of almost seventy books. In addition to short stories and novels, she regularly publishes poems, plays, literary criticism, and essays. Of her prolific nature, she once said, “A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino’s, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.” Among her numerous awards are the National Book Award, the Rea Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and five lifetime achievement awards.

Oates was once asked, “What is the function of violence in your work?” She replied, “Given the number of pages I have written, and the ‘violent’ incidents dispersed throughout them, I rather doubt that I am a violent writer in any meaningful sense of the word… Real life is much more chaotic.”

Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978.

★

HELEN THOUGHT: “Am I in love again, some new kind of love? Is that why I’m here?”

She was sitting in the waiting room of the Yellow Bus Lines station; she knew the big old room with its dirty tile floor and its solitary telephone booth in the corner and its candy machine and cigarette machine and popcorn machine by heart. Everything was familiar, though she had been gone for four months, even the old woman with the dyed red hair who sold tickets and had been selling them there, behind that counter, for as long as Helen could remember. Years ago, before Helen’s marriage, she and her girl friends would be driven in to town by someone’s father and after they tired of walking around town they would stroll over to the bus station to watch the buses unload. They were anxious to see who was getting off, but few of the passengers who got off stayed in Oriskany — they were just passing through, stopping for a rest and a drink, and their faces seemed to say that they didn’t think much of the town. Nor did they seem to think much of the girls from the country who stood around in their colorful dresses and smiled shyly at strangers, not knowing any better: they were taught to be kind to people, to smile first, you never knew who it might be. So now Helen was back in Oriskany, but this time she had come in on a bus herself. Had ridden alone, all the way from the city of Derby, all alone, and was waiting for her father to pick her up so she could go back to her old life without any more fuss.

It was hot. Flies crawled languidly around; a woman with a small sickly-faced baby had to keep waving them away. The old woman selling tickets looked at Helen as if her eyes were drawn irresistibly that way, as if she knew every nasty rumor and wanted to let Helen know that she knew. Helen’s forehead broke out in perspiration and she stood, abruptly, wanting to dislodge that old woman’s stare. She went over to the candy machine but did not look at the candy bars; she looked at herself in the mirror. Her own reflection always made her feel better. Whatever went on inside her head — and right now she felt nervous about something — had nothing to do with the way she looked, her smooth gentle skin and the faint freckles on her forehead and nose and the cool, innocent green of her eyes; she was just a girl from the country and anyone in town would know that, even if they didn’t know her personally, one of those easy, friendly girls who hummed to themselves and seemed always to be glancing up as if expecting something pleasant. Her light brown hair curled back lazily toward her ears, cut short now because it was the style; in high school she had worn it long. She watched her eyes in the mirror. No alarm there really. She would be back home in an hour or so. Not her husband’s home, of course, but her parents’ home. And her face in the mirror was the face she had always seen — twenty-two she was now, and to her that seemed very old, but she looked no different from the way she had looked on her wedding day five years ago.