Free A Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

husband—is not possible for me to consider.
    The tile floor seems to be shifting beneath my feet. Hurriedly I’d dressed and left the house, I am not even sure what shoes these are—my vision is blurred—could be, I am wearing two left shoes—or have switched right and left shoes—recall that, in the history of civilization, the designation right and left shoe is relatively recent, not so very long ago individuals counted themselves fortunate to wear just shoes —this is the sort of random, pointless and yet intriguing information Ray would tell me, or read out to me from a magazine— Did you know this? Not so very long ago . . .
    The impulse comes over me, to rush into the other room, to tell whoever it is, or was—a woman—a stranger to me, as to Ray—about shoes , the history of right and left —except I understand that this is not the time; and that Ray, in any case, for whose benefit I might have mentioned it, will not hear.
    This past week I’ve become astonishingly clumsy, inept—forgetful—to pack Ray’s bathroom things I should have brought in a bag of some kind, but I didn’t—awkwardly I am holding them in my hands, my arms—one of the objects slips and falls—the aerosol-can shaving cream, that clatters loudly on the floor—as I stoop to retrieve it blood rushes into my head, there is a tearing sensation in my chest— Shaving cream! In this terrible place!
    It would be a time to cry, now. Ray’s shaving cream in his widow’s sweaty hand.
    Vanity of shaving cream, mouthwash, powder-soft scentless deodorant for men.
    Vanity of our lives. Vanity of our love for each other, and our marriage.
    Vanity of believing that somehow we own our lives.
    Lines from a Scottish ballad—“The Golden Vanity”—rush into my head. For my brain is unnervingly porous, I have no defense against such invasions—
There once was a ship
And she sailed upon the sea.
And the name of our ship was
The Golden Vanity.
    There is something faintly taunting, even mocking about these words. I am transfixed listening to them as if under a spell. The words are familiar to me though I have not heard them—I have not thought of them—in a very long time.
There once was a ship
And she sailed upon the sea. . . .
    Long ago—as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 1961—it was my task—it was my pleasurable task—to write a paper on the English and Scottish traditional ballads for a medieval seminar taught by marvelous Helen White, one of only two female professors of English in that largely Harvard-educated, highly conservative department; subsequently, for years of our married life, Ray and I listened to records of ballads, in particular those sung by Richard Dyer-Bennet. It is this singer’s voice that I hear now. Never had it occurred to me—until now—clutching a can of aerosol shaving cream in my hand—that this plainspoken, plaintive Scots ballad has been the very poetry of our lives.
There once was a ship
And she sailed upon the sea. . . .
    (Now that “The Golden Vanity” has invaded my thoughts I will not be able to expel it from my mind for days, or weeks; I am helpless to expel such invasions of songs, sometimes a random stanza of poetry, by any conscious effort.)
    Again I think—that is, the thought comes to me—that vague fantasy in which masochism masks fear, horror, terror—how frequently in the past I had consoled myself that, should something happen to Ray , I would not want to outlive him. I could not bear to outlive him! I would take a fatal dose of sleeping pills, or . . .
    How common is this fantasy, I wonder. How many women console themselves with the thought that, should their husbands die, they too might die—somehow?
    It’s a consolation to wives not-yet-widows. It’s a way of stating I love him so much. I am one who loves so very much.
    When he’d been just middle-aged, and not yet an aging, ailing man himself, my father would say in that way of