Read Online After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Ads: Link
clock at my bedside I see that it is 4:28 A.M . when the dream jolts me awake like a kick in the belly. I’m tangled in bedsheets, my heart is pounding worse than when Crow was laughing at me. It’s two nights later, maybe three. This dream is like a hawk’s talons sinking into me. My fingers clutching raw at a railing, a bridge railing that has been broken and twisted, I’m desperate to keep from being sucked through the broken place and into empty space. Oh oh oh, help us, I’m sobbing, I’m a little girl sobbing, below us the river is rushing black and brackish-smelling, it has sucked away the person I was with, the person behind the wheel of the car, the person I was trying to save whose face I could not see, my throat is raw with screaming, Mom! Mom!
Soon afterward, someone knocks on the door of my room. My aunt asking if I have called her, and I say no.
12
In Yarrow Lake much of my life becomes secret.
Like an iceberg, which they say is nine tenths hidden below the surface of the water. What you see is such a small part of it, you don’t have a clue what it actually is.
How was school today, Jenna? is code for Are you adjusting? Are you going to be “normal”? and it pisses me off how my aunt and my uncle are always asking. Even my little cousins Becky and Mikey. Their parents have instructed them, Be nice to Jenna! so they try, and I love them for trying so transparently only just I’m not in a mood to play big sister to them. Sorry.
A secret life is the sweetest life. Also the safest.
Weekends are family time. (Even if sometimes on a rainy Sunday afternoon Uncle Dwight, the workaholic, slips back to his office at McCarty, Weissman & Associates, Architects, for a few hours before supper.) The McCartys are children-oriented, like almost everyone in Yarrow Lake, as in Tarrytown, so this means the family being together, in good weather on Yarrow Lake, where friends have a sailboat, or bicycling on the Sable Creek trail, or watching Becky play soccer at her school, or going to see Shrek 2 at the Lakeland Mall and having an early meal afterward at Leaning Tower of Pizza. Family time is a kind of sacred time, so it baffles and hurts the McCartys when Jenna explains politely that she would rather stay home, she has schoolwork, or wants to walk/hike/run by herself, or…whatever it is Jenna does in her room with the door shut for hours.
Doesn’t Jenna like us, Mommy?
Of course Jenna likes us! What a thing to say!
If she likes us, she’d be happy, wouldn’t she? She always seems kind of sad.
But that doesn’t mean Jenna doesn’t like us, Becky. It just means that Jenna is sad.
Here is a secret.
How when the McCartys leave to go sailing on Yarrow Lake, I immediately go into my aunt and uncle’s bathroom to see what drugs they have in their medicine cabinet. So disappointing! Mostly just boring over-the-counter drugs like Bufferin, Advil, Tylenol anybody can buy, plus medication for “hypertension” (Uncle Dwight) and “dyspeptic stomach” (Aunt Caroline). I was hoping, with my aunt sometimes kind of nervous and edgy, that she was into tranquilizers like Valium (which Mom took for a while after Dad left us), but I guess not.
Except I don’t give up the search. Their bathroom is kind of old-fashioned, with a long cabinet counter and drawers filled with stuff, including old prescription drugs, vials with just a few pills remaining, and one of these turns out to be OxyContin, prescribed for Dwight McCarty, one tablet every three to four hours for pain relief , and there are four big pills remaining! I’m so excited, I almost drop them.
Figure my uncle will never miss these pills, the prescription was for zero refills in March 1999.
13
“Hey, babe, you bald?”
Trudging upstairs to math class, which is my worst class of the day, I’m jostled by some obnoxious guys grabbing at my grimy sailor cap, yanking it from my head in a burst of hyena laughter and tossing it into the air, and I’m
Soon afterward, someone knocks on the door of my room. My aunt asking if I have called her, and I say no.
12
In Yarrow Lake much of my life becomes secret.
Like an iceberg, which they say is nine tenths hidden below the surface of the water. What you see is such a small part of it, you don’t have a clue what it actually is.
How was school today, Jenna? is code for Are you adjusting? Are you going to be “normal”? and it pisses me off how my aunt and my uncle are always asking. Even my little cousins Becky and Mikey. Their parents have instructed them, Be nice to Jenna! so they try, and I love them for trying so transparently only just I’m not in a mood to play big sister to them. Sorry.
A secret life is the sweetest life. Also the safest.
Weekends are family time. (Even if sometimes on a rainy Sunday afternoon Uncle Dwight, the workaholic, slips back to his office at McCarty, Weissman & Associates, Architects, for a few hours before supper.) The McCartys are children-oriented, like almost everyone in Yarrow Lake, as in Tarrytown, so this means the family being together, in good weather on Yarrow Lake, where friends have a sailboat, or bicycling on the Sable Creek trail, or watching Becky play soccer at her school, or going to see Shrek 2 at the Lakeland Mall and having an early meal afterward at Leaning Tower of Pizza. Family time is a kind of sacred time, so it baffles and hurts the McCartys when Jenna explains politely that she would rather stay home, she has schoolwork, or wants to walk/hike/run by herself, or…whatever it is Jenna does in her room with the door shut for hours.
Doesn’t Jenna like us, Mommy?
Of course Jenna likes us! What a thing to say!
If she likes us, she’d be happy, wouldn’t she? She always seems kind of sad.
But that doesn’t mean Jenna doesn’t like us, Becky. It just means that Jenna is sad.
Here is a secret.
How when the McCartys leave to go sailing on Yarrow Lake, I immediately go into my aunt and uncle’s bathroom to see what drugs they have in their medicine cabinet. So disappointing! Mostly just boring over-the-counter drugs like Bufferin, Advil, Tylenol anybody can buy, plus medication for “hypertension” (Uncle Dwight) and “dyspeptic stomach” (Aunt Caroline). I was hoping, with my aunt sometimes kind of nervous and edgy, that she was into tranquilizers like Valium (which Mom took for a while after Dad left us), but I guess not.
Except I don’t give up the search. Their bathroom is kind of old-fashioned, with a long cabinet counter and drawers filled with stuff, including old prescription drugs, vials with just a few pills remaining, and one of these turns out to be OxyContin, prescribed for Dwight McCarty, one tablet every three to four hours for pain relief , and there are four big pills remaining! I’m so excited, I almost drop them.
Figure my uncle will never miss these pills, the prescription was for zero refills in March 1999.
13
“Hey, babe, you bald?”
Trudging upstairs to math class, which is my worst class of the day, I’m jostled by some obnoxious guys grabbing at my grimy sailor cap, yanking it from my head in a burst of hyena laughter and tossing it into the air, and I’m
Similar Books
