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A Widow's Story

HarperCollins

Chapter One

The Message

February 15, 2008. Returning to our car that has been haphazardly
parked—by me—on a narrow side street near the Princeton Medical
Center—I see, thrust beneath a windshield wiper, what appears to be
a sheet of stiff paper. At once my heart clenches in dismay, guilty ap-
prehension—a ticket? A parking ticket? At such a time? Earlier that
afternoon I'd parked here on my way—hurried, harried—a jangle of
admonitions running through my head like shrieking cicadas—if you'd
happened to see me you might have thought pityingly That woman is in
a desperate hurry—as if that will do any good—to visit my husband in the
Telemetry Unit of the medical center where he'd been admitted several
days previously for pneumonia; now I need to return home for a few
hours preparatory to returning to the medical center in the early eve-
ning—anxious, dry-mouthed and head-aching yet in an aroused state
that might be called hopeful—for since his admission into the medical
center Ray has been steadily improving, he has looked and felt better,
and his oxygen intake, measured by numerals that fluctuate with liter-
ally each breath—90, 87, 91, 85, 89, 92—is steadily gaining, arrangements
are being made for his discharge into a rehab clinic close by the medical
center—(hopeful is our solace in the face of mortality); and now, in the
late afternoon of another of these interminable and exhausting hospital-
days—can it be that our car has been ticketed?—in my distraction I'd
parked illegally?—the time limit for parking on this street is only two
hours, I've been in the medical center for longer than two hours, and
see with embarrassment that our 2007 Honda Accord—eerily glaring-
white in February dusk like some strange phosphorescent creature in the
depths of the sea—is inexpertly, still more inelegantly parked, at a slant
to the curb, left rear tire over the white line in the street by several inches,
front bumper nearly touching the SUV in the space ahead. But now—if
this is a parking ticket—at once the thought comes to me I won't tell Ray,
I will pay the fine in secret.

Except the sheet of paper isn't a ticket from the Princeton Police De-
partment after all but a piece of ordinary paper—opened and smoothed
out by my shaky hand it's revealed as a private message in aggressively
large block-printed letters which with stunned staring eyes I read several
times like one faltering on the brink of an abyss—learn to park stuppid bitch.

In this way as in that parable of Franz Kafka in which the most profound
and devastating truth of the individual's life is revealed to him by a passer-by
in the street, as if accidentally, casually, so the Widow-to-Be, like the Widow,
is made to realize that her situation however unhappy, despairing or fraught
with anxiety, doesn't give her the right to overstep the boundaries of others,
especially strangers who know nothing of her—"Left rear tire over the white
line in the street."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Widow's Story by Joyce Carol Oates Copyright © 2011 by Joyce Carol Oates. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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