Night. Sleep. Death. the Stars. by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Visions at Dutchtown

It is not a dream exactly, this conviction that her eyelids have been ripped from her eyes. So that she is awake continuously. Visions flood her brain.

“MA’AM? Anything I can help you with?”

Yes, probably. Soon.

No. Not ever again.

Shocked to see the face of someone she’d known, in that other lifetime. Saturday afternoons at the Dutchtown Farmers’ Market across the county line in rural Herkimer County, a forty-minute drive from the house on Old Farm Road.

The woman, a farmer’s wife, had grown gaunt and wizen-faced where once (as Jessalyn recalled) she’d been solid-bodied, flushed with health. She’d never hesitated to lift heavy packages to load into Jessalyn’s car trunk, not stooping to lift the packages but bending her knees in a practiced motion, gripping with the crooks of both arms, unerring. She’d been very friendly, and may have seemed to the (older) McClaren children just slightly simple-minded, being so very friendly, and always asking their names, which she would never recall; always calling Jessalyn “ma’am” though she was older than Jessalyn by as many as twenty years.

Today, the farmer’s wife wouldn’t have been recognizable to Jessalyn if Jessalyn had met the woman elsewhere. Nor was Jessalyn, white-haired and alone, diminished in widowhood as a plant after the first frost of the season, recognizable to the farmer’s wife.

And where was the farmer?—an older man even at that time, now certainly long retired, vanished.

Shawcross—that had been the name. Jessalyn knew better than to ask where Mr. Shawcross was.

“I’ll take this. And this. Oh, this is beautiful—thank you . . .”

Lush, wet-bright-green romaine lettuce, red-leaf lettuce, spinach with veined and sand-flecked leaves, crinkled dark-green kale . . .

She was feeling giddy, selecting these greens. As she’d have felt if she were going to prepare a lavish meal that evening.

For if you have bought such beautiful fresh produce presumably you are planning to prepare it for others to eat, and if you are not planning to prepare it for others to eat, why have you bought it? Jessalyn supposed that she could drive by Beverly’s house, and give the greens to Beverly; but this was risky, for her daughter would certainly insist that Jessalyn stay for dinner with the family, and Jessalyn preferred to be alone.

(In fact, there was nowhere Jessalyn felt more alone than at the Benders’ where she was obliged to impersonate “Granma Jess” and where Beverly and Steve spoke cuttingly to each other as the children bickered at the dinner table until such time as they were released, to run upstairs to their rooms and beloved electronic gadgets.)

“Oh, you’re lucky! Or very brave. No one in my family will eat kale. Especially not my husband.”

At these airy playful words Jessalyn glanced around, and saw a woman smiling at her, a woman not unlike herself, casually dressed, yet tastefully dressed, a woman with glittering rings, blond-rinsed hair, manicured nails. The woman had spoken in such a way that Jessalyn might acknowledge her remark, or ignore it altogether, without being rude.

“My husband hates kale.

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