Authors: Joyce Carol Oates

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Three Small Sightings in August

August 11
,
2008.
Last night the garden was suffused with light—a strange sort of sourceless sunshine that seemed to come from all directions. I could not see clearly but the garden seemed both my garden—ours—Ray’s and mine—and a larger, less cultivated setting. And Ray was—somewhere?—Ray was close by—Ray was turned to me, though I could not see his face clearly—and I felt such relief, saying
You’re all right
,
then. You’re here.

August 19
,
2008.
So strange!—mysterious!—yet utterly ordinary: how sometime after 11
P.M.
in bed while reading, I began to feel sleepy; a sensation of sinking, dissolving, as into warm lapping water; a sensation I had not felt since driving Ray to the hospital, that had become unfamiliar to me and but dimly recalled as the chronically ill but dimly recall the days of their health; a sensation of such wonder, such sweetness, such comfort, for I had not (yet) taken anything to help me sleep; for I would take a single non-prescription reputedly non-habit-forming pill to help me sleep, at about midnight; and again, if/when I woke, a second pill at perhaps 4
A.M.
, for this was my usual night, for this was my usual strategy of enduring the night, lying in a carefully calibrated position amid the bedclothes, to minimize the hot-itching-pain of the shingles-lesions which had begun to abate, and even to fade, yet continued to exert a curious autonomous life—a “crawling” sort of sensation—as if the ugly lizard-thing had burrowed into my skin—leaving fissures, scars and discolorations like leering birthmarks; yet the sensation of
sleepiness
overcame all else, the phenomenon of
sleepiness
rose like dusk lifting from the earth; and I did not have time really to comprehend what was happening, the strangeness of what was happening; scarcely time to close the book I was reading, or trying to read, for I’d been rereading the same passage for some minutes, and place the book on the bedside table, and fumble to turn out the light, and fall asleep. And following this night, for most nights afterward I slept without medication; I slept for as long as seven or eight hours, which seemed to me a miracle; I did not speak of this to anyone, for fear that the miracle would depart, as abruptly as it had come to me. I thought
Am I abandoning Ray?
—
what is happening to me . . .

August 30
,
2008.
Waking this morning, or part-waking—a sense of yearning, anxiety—that there must be some mistake, or misundertanding—I wasn’t married any longer. And it seemed to me that I could remarry Ray—I would do this, and a vast wave of relief came over me.

And then, waking more fully, I remembered—why I was not married to Ray any longer, and why I could not hope to remarry him.

I was stricken with loss, very depressed. As if this were all new to me—that I’d lost Ray. As if until now I hadn’t exactly known, how I’d lost Ray. And now, I was being made to see the situation from another perspective, like one who is traveling about a disaster site, viewing the disaster from different perspectives. Now that my insomnia had lifted and after all these weeks I was still alive and often happy, in the presence of friends at least—now that the final issue of
Ontario Review
was printed, published and has made its way into the world as Ray would have wished—cautiously I’d been thinking
Maybe I am all right now
,
it’s all right. Maybe I can do this
.

But the dream has told me
No. It is not all right.

And later that morning at the rear of the driveway: seeing one of the trash cans fallen onto its side, and the contents spilled out rudely onto the driveway—raccoons, it must have been, scavenging for food scraps, or the possibility of food scraps; for, the previous night, my friend Ebet and I had hosted a dinner at my house, a small dinner for the Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt whose wife was out of town, and to this dinner had come a disjointed gathering of guests, individuals whose spouses were away at the end of August, or had abandoned them, or both; there were only six people, including me; and one of these guests was a stranger to me, a neuroscientist at Princeton University invited by Ebet; and I could not have guessed how, another time so purely by chance, as years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, it was purely chance that Ray had come to sit beside me, my life would be altered—
You must not forget it is a gift freely given you could not deserve.

Kneeling in the driveway picking up things scattered about by the marauding raccoons—wadded napkins, paper towels, bits of tin foil, packages, yogurt containers, a crumpled aluminum pan in which Ebet had brought homemade pizza—and there, amid the litter, a gleam of something silvery—an earring!—which I’d believed that I had lost; this earring must have been set on the kitchen counter, and gathered with the trash, and thrown out, the previous night; both earrings I’d removed, to lay on the kitchen counter, after the guests had departed; unwittingly then I’d swept the earrings into the trash; and now, kneeling in the driveway I see the second earring a few feet away . . . These were favorite earrings of mine though of no great consequence or worth, nor had Ray given me these earrings, but I wore them often. And I thought
This is my life now. Absurd
,
but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life
,
and the love of my life
,
I might still find small treasured things amid the spilled and pilfered trash.

The Widow’s Handbook

Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think
I kept myself alive.

Ray Smith and Joyce Carol Oates at a garden wedding.
EVA HAGGDAHL

Acknowledgments

Excerpts from this memoir have appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
and in
Conjunctions.

Also by Joyce Carol Oates

The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature (1972)

New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974)

Contraries (1981)

The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews (1983)

On Boxing (1987)

(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)

George Bellows: American Artist (1995)

Where I’ve Been and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose (1999)

The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (2003)

Uncensored: Views and (Re)views (2005)

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973–1982 (2007)

In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews (2010)

A WIDOW’S STORY.
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“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” from
Selected Poems
by John Crowe Ransom, copyright 1924 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and renewed 1952 by John Crowe Ransom. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.