Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
August 2003
B
y midmorning she’d crossed into Herkimer County on the old state highway heading south and east along the Black Snake River. Traffic was drawn to the interstate several miles to the south, that ran parallel with Route 41, leaving the highway relatively deserted.
In the aftermath of the previous night’s storm the air was glaring-bright. The sky a fierce cobalt blue that pained the eyes.
And the river! Rampaging, spilling its banks, a churn of mad white froth and part-submerged storm debris like projectiles.
Sunshine like broken-mirror glass on the river, winking of a thousand eyes.
“Good-bye, darling! Love you.”
And: “Drive carefully, promise? Give me a call when you get home.”
These words Konrad had uttered in a tone of jovial ebullience masking what concern, what care, what melancholy, what paternal anxiety M.R. could not know.
She’d laughed. She’d wiped at her eyes.
“Daddy, of course. Love
you.
”
She would not abandon her father another time, she vowed.
For Konrad and Andre would like each other, very much—she was certain.
What a great guy
each would say of the other. Almost, M.R. could hear the men’s uplifted voices.
Meredith darling! What a great guy . . .
. . . wonderful to meet him.
It had taken M.R. and Konrad scarcely twenty minutes to pack her car. For M.R. had brought very few things with her and had accumulated little during her stay in Carthage.
With a fussy sort of tenderness Konrad had hung M.R.’s clothes on wire hangers on the little hooks in the rear, which clothes M.R. would likely have flung down onto the seat. He’d found a canvas tote bag of Agatha’s—
CELEBRATE NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK!
—to fill with books M.R. was taking with her from the house, mostly from Agatha’s shelves.
It seemed wrong, a flaw of character if not a tragic presentiment, that a woman of M.R.’s age had accumulated so little that was essential to her.
“Life small enough to fit into a thimble! Well.”
She’d spoken aloud. Breathlessly she laughed, the remark seemed to her not only astute but witty.
In her mood of excited apprehension M.R. took care to drive at just the speed limit. Though traffic on Route 41 was sparse from time to time vehicles rushed past her—trucks, pickups, local cars. She would connect with the interstate eleven miles ahead and on I–81 she would drive most of the way home almost directly south, a drive of about seven hours.
Next morning, her new life would begin.
Her new life, that would be a transformation of her former life.
For now she was stronger. Now she was prepared,
readied.
In the near distance were steep wooded hills. The Adirondack forest, that stretched to the horizon. As a girl M.R. had felt her heartbeat quicken at the sight of the mountains—dense-wooded slopes, the higher peaks shrouded in mist; massed evergreens with scattered veins of premature red, red-orange, bright dying deciduous leaves like red stars in a distant constellation. For the end of summer was abrupt in this region.
On one of Konrad’s battered old road maps—(that Agatha had tried to re-fold, without success)—M.R. had located Canton, New York: surprised to see how small the town was, not a town but a village, and so far inland, nowhere near Lake Ontario as she’d imagined it was, or the spectacular St. Lawrence River; the nearest city was Ogdensburg, the size of Carthage.
St. Lawrence County extended to the Canadian border. One hundred miles north of Carthage.
Amid the distraction and upset of packing that morning she’d searched for the scrap of paper containing Hans Schneider’s phone number but hadn’t found it.
Thinking
If he wants to call Neukirchen, in Carthage, he will.
Thinking
It is out of my control. It is not my choice to make.
She had not heard from Andre Litovik since his astonishing call of the other day. She wondered if he had actually moved out of the house on Tremont Street in which he’d lived for so long—how difficult it would be, for one who’d routinely traveled in extragalactic space, to make so literal, so
physical
a move! The Litoviks lived in an old dark-lavender Victorian house with lilac shutters and trim, in need of repainting and repair yet still, to the stunned eye of the young Meredith bicycling past, more than once risking being seen by her (secret) lover, a mesmerizing sight that left her shaken. Here was a
family house,
a
home
—with bay windows, steep-pitched roofs, ornate gables, and a front porch partly hidden by wisteria. Meredith, who’d rented a small single-bedroom apartment for what seemed to her an excessively high rent, could only guess what such a property would cost in stylish Cambridge near Harvard University. Yet Andre dared to speak of this spectacular period house in such vague and negligent terms, you might be led to think the man scarcely lived anywhere solid, or even visible; you might be led to think that the house was the province of the wife entirely.
Material things don’t engage me. Sorry!
The sort of cavalier remark, M.R. thought, made by those who never have to think of
material things
.
For a moment, M.R. felt sympathy for the woman of that house. But only for a moment.
Even more beguiling, there’d been a garden beside the house, hidden behind a six-foot fieldstone wall covered in tattered ivy; through a part-opened gate, you could glimpse inside—Meredith had seen a beautiful autumnal ruin of a garden.
M.R. had never stepped inside the house on Tremont Street. Never stepped inside the garden. . . .
She was thinking of Agatha’s garden. How moved she’d been to enter it, in the aftermath of the previous night’s storm—beaten-down as if with mallets and shovels and yet still vivid with flowers, clumps of crimson phlox, black-eyed Susans, and frayed roses. And sunflower stalks broken like snapped spines, big round affable sunflower-faces hanging crooked. Several of the older trees had been devastated and their splintered wood whitely raw as marrow and when M.R. had suggested to Konrad that she stay another day, another day or two, she would help him with the storm cleanup, Konrad had laughed saying
Certainly not!
Saying
It’s time for you to leave.
Take care! Love you.
She hadn’t told Konrad about Andre’s call because she hadn’t wanted to talk to him further about Andre. Already she’d revealed too much to her father, she’d pained Konrad allowing him a glimpse of his daughter’s sexual vulnerability, naïveté.
How love had entered her veins, a virulent fever. How she’d never built up an immunity.
She wondered if Andre’s wife had really asked him to leave—“kicked him out.” She wondered how either Andre or the wife could break off their relationship of decades.
The wife, the son. The damaged son.
Obviously, Andre’s deepest feelings lay with his family. These were not, likely, happy feelings any longer—but they lay deep.
For hadn’t he said, once, in one of his curious ruminative moods, in which irony contended with a raw sort of sincerity, that though love can “wear out” over time, a marriage of decades is like tangled tree-roots: the trees may appear separate and distinct above-ground, but are entwined below-ground. His implication had been—(so M.R. had thought)—that his relationship with her was superficial, shallow, set beside his relationship with his wife.
They had virtually no roots grown together, no shared past.
Their pasts did not overlap. M.R. really knew very little of her (secret) lover’s life, as he knew virtually nothing of hers.
M.R. was frightened suddenly: Andre Litovik would never be her husband. What an idea!
M.R. was frightened suddenly: the prospect of living with Andre Litovik!
The intimacy between them had never been put to a serious test. For always there was the knowledge that their time together was limited, bracketed by their very different lives.
Always the knowledge that each life was totally exclusive of the other—a place of refuge to which the other had no access.
Andre loved “Meredith”—as the young woman not his wife, and not the mother of his (damaged) son. He loved her—(M.R. wanted to concede this, out of fear that it was true)—as a way of revenge on the other woman.
But this was too crude, too reductive. Andre was capable of the most extravagant emotions, it wasn’t possible for M.R. to fully comprehend him. Hadn’t he said to her
Better if I come to you. In some way we can reasonably work out, for now.
“I will believe that. I will have faith.”
A
t a crossroads M.R. saw bullet-ridden road signs:
ALEXANDRIA BAY, WATERTOWN, CASTORLAND.
Canton was not so far from Watertown. To the west of Watertown was Lake Ontario, the massive inland sea.
And here was a sign for smaller towns:
HERKIMER JUNCTION, SLABTOWN, SPRAGG, STAR LAKE.
STAR LAKE 9 MILES
.
Star Lake! Only nine miles away . . .
Gradually Route 41 had veered away from the Black Snake River. But if M.R. turned onto the Star Lake road, soon again she would be driving beside the river.
Reasoning
There will be another entrance to I–81, farther south.
Reasoning
No one is waiting for me today. Tonight.
Next morning, M.R. had a sequence of appointments in Salvager Hall starting at 8:30
A.M.
Next morning was the first of September and but thirteen days before the start of the fall semester at the University.
Later she would think
It was a decision. It was not impulse.
And so, turning onto Star Lake Road which was a narrow blacktop road bringing her through stretches of densely wooded countryside alternating with farmland, or the remains of farmland; long sweeping hills of surpassing beauty and strangeness as on a facing hill a quarter-mile away where the road ascended, a dark-swooping-winged shadow like a gigantic crow moved toward her—the shadow of a cloud.
M.R. ducked, as the shadow rushed toward her.
Nine miles to Star Lake. But the road was circuitous, tortuous. In the foothills of the Adirondacks, no route is direct.
Strewn by the roadside and frequently in the road were broken tree limbs, storm debris from the previous night. No one seemed to have driven on this road since the storm. A ditch fraught with muddy water had overflowed and puddles like leprous lesions had invaded the road.
Several times M.R. had to get out of her car to drag aside broken branches to make a space for her car to pass. Soon her hands were stinging from thistles, thorns. In the bright sunshine she felt both anxious and exhilarated, curious. There was a purpose in visiting Star Lake, she knew: the tar paper dwelling behind the Gulf station on the highway. Bare floorboards part-covered in loose patches of linoleum—“remnants”—and a Formica-topped kitchen table from Goodwill with mismatched vinyl chairs that could be made to skid across the floor, if the spike-haired man was provoked to kick. And the big deep stained bathtub in the closet-sized bathroom. And on all the walls of the little house “crosses”—“crucifixes”— “Jesus Our Savior”—which as a small child she’d seen without
seeing
—upon which her eyes moved without
knowing, identifying
—“crosses” and “crucifixes”—“Jesus Our Savior”— mysterious words that fluttered in her brain like nighttime moths drawn to lamplight. Yet the fact must have been that at the time, when she’d been Jedina—(so young! lacking all volition)—she had never heard such words as
crosses
—
crucifixes
—she was sure.
If her mother had identified these objects at all it would be to speak of them as
special signs of God.
Paradox
:
how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus cannot know that we have failed to see it.
That was the human predicament, was it?—the effort to remain human.
The blacktop road so twisted, so turned back on itself to accommodate the hilly landscape, M.R. lost her sense of how far she was from Star Lake knowing only that, practicably speaking, she could not turn back: the road was too narrow, the overflowing ditch too close to the road.
The effort to attain civilization. To resist delusion. Even as the very mud-muck beneath the floorboards of civilization is delusion.
Nervously M.R. smiled. It seemed to be so—M. R. Neukirchen had made an (academic) career out of such paradoxes.
She could not be lost of course—so long as she stayed on this poorly maintained road.
She calculated she was about four miles from Star Lake when she crossed a wood-plank bridge—(not over the Black Snake River, which had veered away from the road again)—but over a fast-running, swollen creek. And in her rearview mirror she saw—(she’d been seeing, without exactly registering the fact)—a vehicle approaching on the blacktop road.
A pickup truck, painted a bright royal blue. And with oversized tires, that lifted the truck-chassis to a daunting height.
M.R. slowed her car and moved as far to the right of the narrow road as she dared. Roadside grasses and underbrush scraped noisily against the fenders and underside of her car.
How like a child’s crude painting of an adult vehicle, tank-sized, bright blue, looming large above the road!
The pickup was moving at a speed greater than M.R.’s, jolting and lurching in potholes, crashing through debris in the roadway without slowing. M.R. felt a frisson of panic, the bright-blue vehicle would collide with her smaller vehicle, crash and crush and run over it like a tank.
M.R. was driving at a slow speed, to allow the pickup to pass. But the bright-blue vehicle had slowed also and did not pass her looming so large in her rearview mirror that she could see only a portion of it, a windshield blinding with sunshine, obscuring the driver within.