Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates

Breathe by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2021-06-10T00:00:00+00:00


“MA’AM?”—A WAITER HAS APPROACHED MICHAELA, hesitantly.

A young Mexican-American waiter, it seems. Evidently the café is open. Or has just opened. The waiter regards Michaela with a wary smile as if his experiences with White women tourists has not always been pleasant.

But Michaela doesn’t look like a tourist. She doesn’t even look White, she thinks. If you look closely her skin is smudged, sullied.

She isn’t sure how long she has been seated at the table. In her entranced state time moves unpredictably: with glacial-slowness, then in quick leaps and pleats, as if someone is leafing impatiently through the pages of a book. She has made her way through a portion of the manuscript but much of it will have to be examined a second time, and probably a third; she makes little progress, for she keeps finding more problems.

The morning he’d said quietly as one might report the temperature:

“I’m so much weaker than I was yesterday.”

Michaela turns the oversized man’s watch on her wrist hoping to see the time but the exact time eludes her.

“Ma’am? Is something wrong?”

I am not ma’am. Please.

But of course Michaela is ma’am. Michaela is a White woman, and Michaela is ma’am. The waiter is no more than twenty-five years old. Whoever she is, she hasn’t been twenty-five for a decade or more.

“Would you like to order something now, ma’am, or would you like to wait for your friend to return?”

“‘Friend’? What do you mean?”

The waiter glances about the terrace with a quizzical half-smile. As if there is someone in the vicinity of whom he has lost sight. A handsome boy with a narrow fox face. Sideburns, a small mustache. He might be as young as twenty—younger. Michaela wonders what the wary dark brown eyes see, seeing her.

“Was someone here with me?” Michaela is trying to remain lighthearted. Exude an air of caprice. As if she is just joking with him, not menacing him but simply joking with him, not altogether serious.

“Excuse me, did you say—you saw someone here with me?”

Hesitantly the waiter says yes. He is not so certain now.

“What did he look like?”

The waiter smiles uneasily. For possibly this is a joke. A White woman’s sense of humor? He explains that he hadn’t seen her companion very clearly.

“It was a man?”

A man, yes.

The waiter seems anxious to escape. No drink order seems to be forthcoming. He is torn between sympathy for the solitary White woman and a simple wish to escape her.

“Was he tall? With dark, graying hair? A little older than I am? Was he—did he seem—”

The waiter shakes his head quickly, don’t know, ma’am.

Michaela has more questions for the young man but he slips away from her. Disappears into the café. The afternoon sky has darkened, flashes of lightning illuminate the sky like livid veins. When she looks more closely, she sees that the café is darkened, there is a closed sign in the window.



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