Middle Age by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

later, Adam was dead. Marina was herself the personal executor of his estate. With a pang of dread she supposed the gift was still hers?
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    How death enters your life . Following Adam’s death, and that stranger’s body in the morgue, things began to loosen and unravel. Marina was a passenger in a careening vehicle that at high speed begins to shudder. Your instinct is, hide your eyes.
    But in fact she was a responsible woman. The owner of the last independent bookstore in the village, widely admired as a still-youngish woman of independent means. Adam Berendt’s friend, and the “personal executor”
    of Adam’s estate.
    Marina would make arrangements for Adam’s body to be cremated, by way of a funeral home in Nyack. She must try to notify his relatives. (But who were Adam’s relatives?) Somehow, his car would have to be driven Middle Age: A Romance
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    back to Salthill. And there was the emergency matter of Adam’s dog: what had happened to Apollo? When Marina returned to Salthill in the evening of July Fourth, groggy and exhausted from her ordeal at the medical center, she drove directly to Adam’s house on the river thinking, I alone am responsible for that dog . But at Adam’s house, where was Apollo?
    When Adam was away for brief periods he usually left the dog outside, on a long leash, but Marina couldn’t find Apollo in his usual place, had he slipped his leash, knowing somehow that his master was in distress, and run away? The silver-tipped husky was nowhere on Adam’s property, Marina called and called for him until her throat was hoarse, tramping through the tall grass, through a wooded area, at last along the River Road wild-eyed and disheveled, crying, “Apollo? Apollo! ” How furious she was, at both the dog and his dead master! Her drawn white face was illuminated in oncoming headlights that flared up, blinded her, and mercifully disappeared. Salthill was such a small community, Marina dreaded one of these drivers recognizing her, but no one did, nor did any residents of the River Road at whose houses she stopped to report having seen the lost dog. No one had heard “unusual barking.” Marina thought Apollo knows that Adam has died . Marina reported the missing dog to the Salthill Animal Watch, and went home, staggering with exhaustion.
    Envy Apollo! Adam once said. Of all of us, Apollo alone doesn’t know he must die .
    A   of Adam’s death, Marina had been living for seven years, contentedly enough, in the magical Village of Salthill-on-Hudson, where everyone was middle-aged.
    She’d noticed immediately: Salthill residents who appeared to her young—“youthful”—in some cases strikingly attractive, in their late twenties or early thirties—were in fact middle-aged. Well into their forties, fifties, sometimes sixties. Salthill residents who looked frankly “middle-aged” were elderly. The only really young couples who could afford to live in Salthill were sons and daughters of the rich, and these had about them a vigorous, health-minded, resolutely “upbeat” American-middle-aged aura.
    Adolescents and even children in Salthill, staggering beneath the weight of their parents’ ambitions for them like overburdened camels, were middle-aged in spirit. The most commendable thing you might say of such offspring was that they were wonderfully mature for their ages even as the most
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    commendable thing you might say about the elderly, if you could identify them, was that they were wonderfully young for their ages . No matter the demographics of Salthill and its environs, the median age had to be fifty.
    It was possible, Adam Berendt refuted these observations. He was believed to be in his early fifties, and he looked exactly that age. But of course, he was middle-aged—“The very essence of that state of the soul.”
    Marina Troy, who on her last, startling birthday was thirty-eight, could console herself