A Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

philosophical—metaphysical—paradoxes. You do not see a self without a body to contain it, yet you do not see a body without a self to activate it.
    When my mother died at the age of eighty-six she had lost a good deal of her memory—her “mind.” Yet she had not lost her self, not quite.
    She’d become severely forgetful, you might say a dimmer and less animated version of herself, as a monotype fades with repeated strikings, its subtleties lost. Yet Mom was never entirely lost. In a garden at her assisted living facility in Clarence, New York, we were sitting with her—my brother Fred and me—and Fred asked her if she remembered me—and Mom said, “I could never forget Joyce!”—and in that instant, this was so.
    I loved my mother very much. Friends who knew us both have said how much of my mother resides in me—mannerisms, voice inflections, a way of smiling, laughing. I know that my father resides in me also. (Daddy died two years before Mom. Her mild delusion was that Daddy was living in a farther wing of the facility: “Over there,” Mom would say, pointing at a specific building. “Fred is over there.”)
    Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.
    Now, I feel differently. Now, I have no option.
    Returning home!
    What happiness—what relief—returning home!
    As if I’ve been gone for days not hours.
    As if I’ve traveled many miles not just a few.
    Behind a ten-foot fence so faded you would not identify it as redwood—behind a part-acre of deciduous and evergreen trees—our house hovers ghost-white in the darkness—no lights within—but I thought I’d left at least one light on, that morning—I am so very very tired, I am so eager to get inside this place of refuge, I feel faint with yearning, I could weep with relief, exhaustion.
    This nightmare vigil! The smell of the hospital clings to me—that distinctive smell as of something faintly rotted, sweetly rotted beneath the masking odor of disinfectant—as soon as you push through the slow-revolving front door and into the foyer you smell it—the smell of hospital-elevators, hospital-restrooms, hospital-corridors—the smell of Ray’s room—(what a quaint sort of usage, Ray’s room —until it is vacated and Ray’s bed filled by another)—this smell is in my hair, on my skin, my clothing. I am eager to get inside the house and tear off my contaminated clothing—I am eager to take a shower—to scrub my face, my hands—my hair that feels snarled, clotted— But no first : phone —I must check phone calls on Ray’s phone, and on my own— No first : cats —I must feed the cats, let them outdoors—skittish and distrustful they prefer to be let outside than to eat in their corner of the kitchen— No first : mail —but I am too tired to run outside to the mailbox, the very thought whirls in my brain shrinking to the size of a dot, and vanishes— No first : lights —for the house is so very dark—a cave—a sepulcher—like a crazed woman who has thrown off her manacles I run through the rooms of the house switching on lights—living room lights! dining room lights! hall lights! bedroom lights! Ray’s study lights!—I turn on the radio in the kitchen—I turn on the television in our bedroom— can’t bear this silence—you would think possibly I am rehearsing Ray’s homecoming—the entire house lighted as if a party were taking place within— No first : clean with manic energy I will vacuum the rooms of the house, lingering over the carpets, of all household tasks it is vacuuming I most enjoy for its brainless thumping and the immediate gratification it yields—there is something especially gratifying about late-night vacuuming—vacuuming into the early hours of the morning which one could not do, surely, if one’s