Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

level would rise, must rise, since the car was totally submerged,
she'd heard of accident victims surviving in submerged cars for as many as five
hours and then rescued and she would be rescued if she was patient if she did
not panic but by degrees the filthy black water would rise to fill her mouth,
her throat, her lungs though she could not see it nor could she hear it
trickling, seeping, draining beyond the blow to her head, the roaring in her
ears, spasms of coughing and choking that seized her, black muck to be spat up.
    Except
had he not promised her?—he had.
    Except
had he not held her, kissed her ?— he had.
    Penetrated
her dry, alarmed mouth with his enormous tongue?—he had.
    No
pain! no pain! she swore she
felt no pain, she would give in to no pain, they'd praised her so brave ' Lizabeth , brave little girl when her eye had been bandaged
and that was her truest self, he would see, as soon as he helped her free she
would save herself, she was a strong swimmer. I'm here.

 

    Twice weekly, T uesdays and T hursdays even in summer, Kelly Kelleher made the arduous
drive in her secondhand Mazda from her condominium up behind Beacon Hill,
Boston, out to Roxbury, where in an ill-ventilated community services center
she taught, or made the spirited effort of teaching, black adult illiterates to
read primer texts. Her classes began at 7 p.m . and ended, sometimes trailed
ambiguously off, at 8:30 p.m . Asked what
progress she and her several students were making Kelly would say, with a
smile, "Some!"
    Kelly was a volunteer of only a few
months in the National Literacy Foundation of
America program and she felt both enthusiasm and zeal for what she did . .. yet a priggish
self-righteousness too, a Caucasian condescension mingled with a very real and
visceral fear of physical threat, harm, not within the community services center
itself but in the streets surrounding, in desolate Roxbury and along the
debris-strewn expressway, in the vulnerability of her white skin.
    This
ambivalence so qualified her experience in Roxbury that she had yet to tell her
parents about it by midsummer, and rarely mentioned it to her friends.
    Nor
did she mention it to The Senator during their several conversations that day
at Buffy's... not knowing why, exactly... perhaps hoping to seem, not the
zealous volunteer type with whom The Senator like
any successful politician was contemptuously familiar, but another type altogether.
     
    What's a volunteer, especially a lady
volunteer?
    Someone who knows she can't sell it.
     
    As the black water drained into the
space that contained her snug as any womb.
     
    Except:
Buffy had been sweet giving her the little-sister's room as they called it, the
south-
    east-corner
room of the five-bedroom Cape Cod on Derry Road, how many times had Kelly
Kelleher been a guest there, a room with a chaste white-organdy brass bed and
spare Shaker-inspired furniture and braided rugs and that floral wallpaper
predominantly the hue of strawberries so like Grandma Ross's favorite room in
the big old house in Greenwich, and with trembling fingers Kelly had washed her
warm face, took time to rinse her sun-dazed eyes, brushed her hair in swift
brisk excited strokes smiling at herself in the bathroom mirror thinking, It's wild, it can't happen.
    But,
yes. Kelly Kelleher was the one.
     
    At
first The Senator was speaking generally, to everyone. Tall and broad-shouldered
and vehement and ruddy with pleasure at being where he was, this place,
beautiful Grayling Island of which he'd known virtually nothing, he'd visited
Maine infrequently since they summered on the Cape mainly, his family place on
the Cape, bent upon ignoring how the Cape had changed over the years, so
developed, overpopulated... "Some facts of life, things closest around
you, you sometimes don't want to see."
    But
The Senator's tone was expansive, gregarious. This was a happy occasion, an
attractive, younger crowd, he had the air of a man determined to enjoy