Read Online High Crime Area by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online

Agnes’s last name was considered dangerous.
    â€œIf I knew you would read what I write, I would write more—I would write with hope .”
    Yet still Agnes hesitated.
    â€œI—I’m sorry, Joseph. I guess—that isn’t such a good idea.”
    Mattia smiled quickly. If he was deeply disappointed in her, he spared her knowing.
    â€œWell, ma’am!—thank you. Like I say, I learned a lot . Anyway I feel, like—more hopeful now.”
    Agnes was deeply sorry. Deeply disappointed in herself. Such cowardice!
    This was a moment, too, when Agnes might have shaken hands with Mattia, in farewell. (She knew that her male instructors violated protocol on such occasions, shaking hands with inmate-students; she’d seen them.) But Agnes was too cautious, and Agnes was aware of guards standing at the doorway, watching her as well as the inmate-students on this last day of class.
    â€œThank you , Joseph! And good luck.”
    Now, she would make amends.
    Several years had passed. If Mattia still lived in Trenton, it would not be such a violation of prison protocol to contact him—would it?
    He’d “paid his debt to society”—as it was said. He was a fellow citizen now. She, his former instructor, did not feel superior to him—in her debilitated state, she felt superior to no one—but she did think that, if he still wanted her advice about writing, or any sort of contact with her as a university professor, she might be able to help him.
    What had Mattia said, so poignantly—she had given him hope .
    And from him, perhaps she would acquire hope .
    She was getting high more frequently. Alone in the cavernous house.
    It was good for her, she thought. Saved her life!—for she’d had no appetite since her husband’s death, in fact since his hospitalization when food—the “eating” of “food”—came to seem nauseating to her as well as bizarre.
    Placing “food” in a mouth, “eating”—it had become mechanical to her, a learned act and not a natural instinct. (She’d lost so much weight, her clothing hung over her as on a scarecrow. But why should she care? There was no one to see .)
    But now, since she’d begun smoking, her appetite had returned—a ferocious appetite, as of a young child, requiring nourishment in order to grow. She devoured yogurt by the quart container, mixed with blueberries and raspberries (her husband’s favorite fruits), and sometimes in the semi-darkened bedroom listening to rain pelting the roof close above her head she devoured containers of crackers—“gourmet” crackers—dipped into hummus and smeared with soft, stale cheese. It was far too much trouble for her to “prepare” any meal—she could not bear the ritual of such preparation, in the empty kitchen.
    Yet it was a good thing, she was eating now. At least, sporadically and hungrily. Smiling to think I will not starve to death, at least!
    A few months after she’d begun, smoking “pot” was becoming as ritualized to her as having a glass of wine had been for her husband, before every meal. She had sometimes joined him, but usually not—wine made her sleepy, and in the night it gave her a headache, or left her feeling, in the morning, mildly depressed. She knew that alcohol was a depressant to the nervous system and that she must avoid it, like the pills on the marble ledge.
    Getting high was a different sensation. Staying high was the challenge.
    Mattia might be a source of marijuana, too. She hadn’t thought of this initially but—yes: probably.
    (He’d been incarcerated for killing a drug dealer. It wasn’t implausible to assume that he might have dealt in drugs himself.)
    (Or, he might have cut himself out from his old life entirely. He might be living now somewhere else.)
    (She wasn’t sure which she hoped for—only that she wanted very much to see