226
JOYCE CAROL OATES
past. . . . What
if
someone, an ordinary husband and father, were
to
not~ce
them in this car, were to run over and accuse her friend of up.
setting her? She was much younger, she was girlish and frightened, she
was
not really here in this car saying these
things....
"I'm so ashamed of myself!" she said finally.
She returned to her husband and saw that another woman a
,
shadow-woman, had taken her place - noiseless and convincing, like a
dancer, performing certain difficult steps. Her husband folded her in
his arms and talked to her of his own loneliness, his worries about his
business,
his
health, his mother, kept tranquilized and mute in a nursing
home, and her spirit detached itself from her and drifted about the
rooms of the large house she lived in, with her husband, a shadow–
woman delicate and imprecise. There was no boundary to her, no edge.
Alone, she took hot
baths
and sat exhausted in the steaming water,
wondering at her perpetual exhaustion. All that winter she noticed the
limp, languid weight of her arms, her veins bulging slightly with the
pressure of her extreme weariness.
This
is fate,
she thought, to be here
and not there, to be one person and not another, a certain man's wife
and not the wife of another man. The long, slow pain of this certainty
rose in her, but it never became clear, it was baffling and imprecise. She
could not
be
serious about it: she kept congratulating herself on her
own
good luck, to have escaped so easily, to have freed herself. So much
love had gone into the first several years of her marriage that there
wasn't much left, now, for another man. . . . She was certain of that.
But the bath water made her dizzy, all that perpetual heat, and one day
in January she
drew
a razor blade lightly across the inside of her aIm,
near the elbow, to see what would happen.
Afterward she wrapped a small towel around it, to stop the bleed·
ing. The towel soaked through. She wrapped a bath towel around that
and walked through the empty rooms of her home, not very worried,
hardly aware of the stubborn seeping of blood. There was no boundary
to her in this house, no precise limit. She could flow out like her own
blood and come to no end.
Her husband telephoned her when he would
be
staying late at
the plant. He talked to her always about his plans, his problems,
his
business friends, his future. It was obvious that he had a future.
J.j
he spoke she nodded to encourage
him,
and her heartbeat quickened
with the memory of her own, personal shame, the shame of this man's
particular, private wife. One evening at dinner he leaned forward and
put his head in his arms, and fell asleep, like a child. She sat at the
table with
him
for a while, watching
him.
His hair had gone gray,
al·
