224
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Always this hot flashing of shame between them, the shame of her
husband's near-failure, the clumsiness of his love - .
"You didn't hurt me," she said.
II.
They had said good-bye six months before. He drove her from
Nantucket, where they had met, to Albany, New York, where she
visited her sister. The hours of intimacy in the car had sealed some–
thing between them, a vow of silence and impersonality: she recalled
the movement of the highways, the passing of other cars, the natural
rhythms of the day hypnotizing her toward sleep while he drove. She
trusted him, she could sleep in his presence. Yet she could not really
fall asleep in spite of her exhaustion, and she kept jerking awake,
frightened, to discover that nothing had changed - still the stranger
who was driving her to Albany, still the highway, the sky, the antiseptic
odor of the rented car, the sense of a rhythm behind the rhythm of the
air that might unleash itself at any second. Everywhere on this high–
way, at this moment, there were men and women driving together,
bonded together - what did that mean, to be together? What did it
mean to enter into a bond with another person?
No, she did not really trust
him;
she did not
reall~
trust men. He
would glance at her with his small cautious smile and she felt a declara–
tion of shame between them.
Shame.
In her head she rehearsed conversations. She said bitterly, "You'll
be relieved when we get to Albany. Relieved to get rid of me." They
had spent so many days talking, confessing too much, driven to a pitch
of childish excitement, laughing together on the beach, breaking into
that pose of laughter that seems to eradicate the soul, so many days of
this that the silence of the trip was like the silence of a hospital- all
these surface noises, these rattles and hums, but an interior silence, a
befuddlement. She said to him in her imagination, "One of us should
die." Then she leaned over to touch him. She caressed the back of
his neck. She said, aloud, "Would you like me to drive for a while?"
They stopped at a "picnic area" where other cars were stopped
- couples, families - and walked together, smiling at their good luck.
He put his arm around her shouders and she sensed how they were
in
a posture together, a man and a woman forming a posture, a figure,
that someone might sketch and show to them. She said slowly, "I don't
want to go back...."
Silence. She looked up at him. His face was heavy with her words,
