Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
A Widow's Story (26 page)
Why is everything so—
bright?
Even through my eyelids—
blinding-bright?
Now in the aftermath of my heroic night of sleeplessness—when I’d imagined that I was triumphing over my (presumed) addiction to Lorazepam—this day is so endless, so wracked with headache, dazzling-bright yet splotched with curious lesions like tears in cheap stage scenery—I am thinking
If only! If only I could sleep! I would lie down here
,
on this floor and I would shut my eyes and sleep for just a few minutes! If only—
in this place where I have never before shopped, Shop-Rite on Route 1, dazedly pushing a balky grocery cart along endless aisles in glaring fluorescent light; my heart is pounding strangely and there is a high ringing in my ears for I’d been able to sleep no more than an hour the previous night sweaty and shivering in the rumpled nest rising several times to stumble through the house to turn down the thermostat . . . It’s unbearable to remain awake, yet what alternative?—when I try to sleep my mind races flashing like knives; my brain is a runaway wheel containing nothing, there is no content to my thoughts apart from the obsessive worry
drug-addiction
,
insomnia
—
drug-addiction
,
insomnia
; with true insomniac compulsiveness I’d actually risen from bed one night to look up, in Homer, the encounter of Odysseus and his men with the sea-monsters between whom they must sail:
Scylla lurks inside [a cavern at Erebus]—the yelping horror,
yelping, no louder than any suckling pup
but she’s a grisly monster, . . .
She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down
and six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,
each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,
packed tight—armed to the hilt with black death!
. . . .
beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down.
Three times a day she vomits it up, three times she gulps it down,
that terror! Don’t be there when the whirlpool swallows down—
not even the earthquake god could save you from disaster.
. . . .
Now wailing in fear, we rowed on up those straits,
Scylla to starboard, dreaded Charybdis off to port. . .
(Homer, The Odyssey, Book 12, translated by Robert Fagles)
Where the life-struggle is stark, primitive, elemental—the terror is of being devoured alive.
Where the life-struggle is more “civilized”—the terror is of being driven mad.
If only! But I won’t.
This evening, dinner at a friend’s house.
This elegant house in Princeton from which my friend E. must soon depart—for her domestic/marital life, too, has collapsed.
House
,
home
,
household
—these are mysterious words, fraught with meaning. They signal conditions we take for granted until one day when, irrevocably, we can no longer take them for granted.
E. has been one of my intense e-mail correspondents since Ray’s death. Late at night—very early in the morning—E. and I exchange our most intimate, inspired, lyric-surreal messages.
Though E. doesn’t think of herself in my terms—she doesn’t consider herself quite so stricken as a widow—yet I feel a kinship between us. Both of us have lost our closest companions, both of us find ourselves suddenly alone.
Living alone, in houses we’d each shared with another person, for many years.
You could say, each of us has been in a car wreck. Our injuries are not visible, exactly.
Who is to say—which is worse? To lose a husband to death, or to lose a husband because he has chosen to leave, for another woman?
This evening at dinner there are just four people: four women: of whom three have been divorced—(each, more than once)—and one “widowed.”
Much of the dinner conversation turns upon E.’s situation—the imminence of her expulsion from her beautiful house—her financial crisis—the ways in which her companion seems to have betrayed her trust.
Where there is betrayal, there can be anger, rage. I am thinking with envy how much healthier, how much more
exhilarating
, such emotions would be, than the heavyheartedness of grief like a sodden overcoat the widow must wear.
One of the—several-times-divorced—women tells us that her most recent husband cheated her of thousands of dollars, but that her lawyer advised her not to sue him: “It wouldn’t be worth it.”
It’s shocking that this man—known to the community as a distinguished research scientist—seems to have been dishonest, duplicitous. From the way in which M. speaks of him, you would be led to believe that she despises him. Yet she’d left a previous husband for this man amid a flurry of Princeton scandal, some years before.
Each had left an unsuspecting spouse. Each had deeply wounded the left-behind spouse.
And E.’s tales of her traitorous companion of seventeen years! Robustly told, and funny.
Wine helps. If one drinks.
Amid this bawdy Wife-of-Bath talk how lonely I feel, how—inexperienced, naive. . . . It’s a fact that Ray was the first man in my life, the last man, the only man . . . Despite my reputation as a writer my personal life has been as measured and decorous as Laura Ashley wallpaper.
The women turn their attention upon me. I’ve been so quiet. I can’t tell them
I am so yearning to go home
,
to crawl into my nest. Even if I can’t sleep. I am so unhappy
,
here . . .
Though really, I am happy here. I am “having a very good time” here. The women are wonderful company, E. has made a splendid dinner, there is something heartening about our being together—as if the glittering dining room table—candlelight reflected in the fine wood, slender glass vases of white flowers—were a kind of life raft, and we four in the life raft, on a choppy sea.
M. asks if I am sleeping and I tell her that I’m not sleeping very well but that I’ve stopped taking a prescription drug to which I’d become addicted—just the previous night, I managed not to give in and take this drug; if I’d expected M., a professional woman with a medical degree of some kind, to be impressed with this remark, I am taken aback by the bluntness with which M. speaks, ostensibly to me, but for the benefit of the others: “You could be ‘addicted’ to that drug for the rest of your life and it wouldn’t be nearly so serious as going without sleep. If you don’t sleep your immune system will be weakened, you’ll be susceptible to illnesses and infections and your life expectancy will be shortened. If you don’t sleep, you die.”
How like a curse this sounds to me, I sit stunned at the dining table, staring. How helpless I feel, like one about to slip from the life raft out of sheer weakness, exhaustion.
If you don’t sleep
,
you die.
M. speaks with authority. M. tells us that “morbidity studies have shown . . .”
Morbidity studies!
The words strike a chill in me. I’d been so determined to break my addiction to Lorazepam—as if this were equivalent to breaking an addiction to anxiety, depression, insomnia—the condition of
widowhood
itself . . .
Driving home, I feel mounting anxiety, yet a kind of childish relief—
I tried to break the addiction. I tried!
There is someone in the house! There is an intruder in the house! Carelessly she had not locked all the doors—again. And now
,
Death has entered through the rear door overlooking the terrace. Frightened and paralyzed she lies in her bed. Footsteps
,
in the hallway. Silently the door
,
kept ajar
,
is pushed open. A figure in the dark—a darkness ten times dark—for she has turned off the bedside light
,
evidently—and she has fallen asleep—has she?—in a state of anxious exhaustion—in a state of drug withdrawal—“derealization”—unable to move as the intruder approaches her. For Death is always
he.
Death is always mute and efficient and the most efficient way is to press a pillow over her face
,
her nose and mouth. No air! No oxygen! She struggles
,
panicked. This is not the Death she had fantasized. This is not the Death she had wished for. She will put up a struggle for she is an animal fighting for her life—the physical life
,
raw animal-life
,
that knows nothing of the luxury of loss
,
grief
,
melancholia. The struggling woman in her sweaty churned bed is unexpectedly strong but Death is stronger.
Though you loved Ray, very much, and could not imagine living without him, you will begin to discover that you are doing things that Ray would not have much been interested in doing, and you are meeting people you would not have met when Ray was alive, and all this will change your life for the better, though you might not think so now.
—Eleanor Bergstein
This is shocking to me—that the unremitting cold of the season of Ray’s death—New Jersey sky like a pot carelessly scoured, twilight easing up out of the drab earth by late afternoon—is yielding by slow degrees to
spring.
The widow doesn’t want
change.
The widow wants the world—time—to have
ended.
As the widow’s life—she is certain—has
ended.
A perverse sort of comfort, solace—that the winter has hung on so long, well into late March, early April.
Standing in the doorway staring into the courtyard. How long I’ve been standing here, I have no idea. What fascinates me—what fills me with dread—are the small green tender shoots pushing through the snow-crust of the earth: tulips.
Too soon! This is too soon.
Ray’s tulips. Last fall he’d dug up this entire bed, and he’d planted dozens of tulip bulbs. On his knees in the soft dark earth utterly absorbed, contented,
happy.
A gardener is one for whom the prospect of the future is not threatening but
happy.
He’d shown me the packages of tulip bulbs, from Holland. Bright red, yellow-striped, purple-striped, white with pale orange strips like lace. He’d bought these tulips at his favorite nursery/garden center which is Kale’s Nursery about two miles from our house.
Want to come with me?—I’m going to Kale’s after lunch.
Usually, I’d said no.
No thank you
,
I have work to do.
Now I am sick at heart, remembering. What stupidity—madness—had blinded me, that I’d imagined there was
work to do
more important than accompanying my husband to Kale’s.
In other beds, near the driveway, snowdrops are already in bloom—almost invisible, unobtrusive. Such small delicate bell-like flowers, almost you might mistake them for dollops of snow, or overlook them entirely amid the late-winter accumulation of rotted leaves, storm debris.
And crocuses, which Ray had planted also: lavender, purple-striped, yellow, pale orange . . .
Too soon! This is all too soon.
These small early-spring flowers I would pick, just a few, to place in small vases on the dining room table, on the kitchen windowsill, sometimes on Ray’s desk.
Now, the thought of picking flowers, bringing them into the house, is repulsive to me, obscene.
Like preparing a meal in the kitchen. Sitting at the dining room table, eating.
So much is becoming
obscene
, because it has not
ended.
“It isn’t fair. Ray would want so badly to be . . .”
To be
here.
To be
alive.
I am thinking of how, that morning in February, I’d found Ray in the guest room, at the white Parsons table, wadded tissues scattered on the tabletop amid the sprawl of the
New York Times.
How I’d insisted upon taking him to the medical center. How I’d believed—we’d both believed—that this was an inconvenience, an annoyance—an interruption of our workday—but that Ray would be home within hours, or maybe by next morning.
By the road to the contagious hospital
—this line of William Carlos Williams reverberates in my head like a persistent rattle.
And I am thinking, helplessly I am thinking, how terrible it is, that, when I’d driven Ray into Princeton, it was the
contagious hospital
to which I was delivering him, like a good wife. Taking my husband away from the home in which he’d been so happy, and delivering him—where? He’d trusted me, he’d been weak, sick. He had not the strength to resist, or to question my decision.
And now, the tulips. These tulips from Holland, that will outlive him.
A kind of rage comes over me, almost I want to dig up the tulip bulbs, or cover the shoots with rotted leaves, dirt.
If the widow could
stop time.
If the widow could
reverse time.
My mouth is parched, my lips feel chafed. There is the familiar sour taste of morning—the insomniac’s
morning-after
—this groggy/headachey/zombie state that follows an interminable night interrupted by periods of “sleep”—not the powerful Lorazepam which I have ceased taking despite S.’s advice but other medications, spaced through the night: at 11
P.M.
maybe a Lunesta half-pill; at 4
A.M.
a second half-pill, or, at a friend’s recommendation, one or two tablets of Tylenol
P.M.
, or Benadryl—non-prescription drugs said to be
non-habit-forming.
How I dread being
addicted
!
—
an
addict
!
Though the rest of my life is in ruins, yet—I am determined not to be an
addict.
Though I have come to feel enormous sympathy for drug addicts of all kinds, as for alcoholics, the
walking wounded
who surround us—these are ourselves, self-medicated. Their spiritual malaise is such, only powerful medication can assuage it. Otherwise, there is suicide.
Where in my former life I’d seemed to believe, with a schoolgirl sort of moral certitude, that drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide—the general collapse of an individual—suggested some sort of spiritual dereliction, to be avoided by an act of will—now I believe the exact opposite.
What astonishes me is that there are so many who don’t succumb. So many people who have not killed themselves . . .
I am not sure if “suicide”—as an idea—was abhorrent to Ray, or whether Ray was indifferent to it. Not once do I recall Ray speaking of suicide as a philosophical issue, still less as a personal issue. Though I recall his having taught the poetry of Sylvia Plath, whose breathless incantatory lines are a summons to nullity, extinction:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
—“Lady Lazarus”
It is the “almost unnameable lust”—of which Anne Sexton speaks in her poetry, as well—this wish to
self-medicate
, to the point of
self-erasure.
As if there were a terrible mistake, a fundamental error—that one is alive and the act of suicide is a correction, a “righting” of what is “wrong.”
The widow feels in her heart, she should not be
still alive.
She is baffled, frightened—she feels that she is
wrong.
Standing in the doorway shivering staring into the courtyard at the tiny green tulip-shoots thinking these thoughts like one entranced. If Ray were alive I would not be here, I would not be thinking these thoughts; the fact that I am thinking these thoughts is profound, I must pursue these thoughts further. In the periphery of my vision the lizard-thing glimmers faintly—why should I need
that
?
Now it’s late morning, now a stirring of the air, a scent of—spring?—yet the widow is near-catatonic, mesmerized. If the phone rings I will not have the strength to answer it but the ringing will rouse me from this trance. Oh who will call me, who is the friend who will think—
Maybe I should call Joyce to say hello
,
poor Joyce!—she won’t answer the phone anyway.