Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

herself.
    Still,
her hands were trembling. Her breath was quickened. In that heart-shaped
white-wicker-framed mirror over the bureau a girl's face floated rapt, glowing, hopeful .
    In
all truthfulness her mind did fly free like a maverick kite drunkenly climbing
the air above the sand dunes thinking he is after all separated from his wife, his marriage is after all over—he says; voters are no longer puritanical, punitive.
    To avoid the appearance of impropriety. The appearance of extramarital scandal.
    It's
a changed world from the one you knew, Mother. I wish you would accept that.
    I
wish you would let me alone!
    Carrying
a beer as she'd passed through the kitchen where Ray Annick was on the
telephone speaking in a low, angry voice, the words asshole, fuck,
fucking punctuating his customarily fastidious speech, Kelly was
startled for here was a man so unlike the genial smiling man romantically
attentive to Buffy St. John all that day, so unlike the man courteous and
sweetly attentive to Kelly Kelleher, and she saw that his eyes (which were
puffy, glazed—he'd been drinking all afternoon and the tennis games had humbled
him) followed her as she passed a few yards from him, as a cat's eyes follow
movement with an instinctive impersonal predatory interest; yet, as soon as she
passed beyond his immediate field of vision he ceased to see her, ceased to
register her existence.
    "Look,
I fucking told you—we'll take this up on Monday. For Christ's sake!"
     
    Kelly Kelleher teetering on one leg,
swiftly changing out of her white spandex swimsuit. Purchased at Lord & Taylor, midsummer sale, the
previous Saturday.
    Swiftly
changing into a summer knit shift, pale lemony stripes, cut up high on the
shoulders revealing her lovely smooth bare shoulders, that shoulder, that
tingling area of skin, he'd touched with his tongue.
    Had
that really happened, Kelly Kelleher wondered.
    Would
it happen again. Again.
    You love your life because it's yours.
    The wind in the tall broom-headed
rushes, those rushes that looked so like human figures. Blond, swaying. At the periphery of
vision.
    The
wind, the cold easterly wind off the
    Atlantic. Shivering rippling water like pale flame striking the beach,
pounding the beach. Buffy said that the highest dunes they were looking
at were seventy feet high, and how weird they were, the dunes where the pitch
pines can't keep them from migrating, roaming loose over the Island like actual
waves of the ocean with their own crests and troughs and it's been measured
that they move west to east at the rate of between ten and fifteen feet a year,
over Derry Road so it has to be cleaned off, right through the snow fences and
over the beach grass—"It's beautiful here but, you know," shivering,
wincing, "—it has nothing to do with human wishes."
    And
now it was short choppy waves she was hearing against the slanted roof of this
room—snug and safe beneath the covers, Grandma's crocheted quilt with the
pandas around the border.
    You love your life. You're ready.
    She
had not wanted to say yes. But she'd wanted to say yes.
    Yes
to the ferry, to Boothbay Harbor. The Boothbay Marriott, it was.
    Beyond
Boothbay, beyond the fifth of July ... ?
    Kelly
Kelleher would make the man love her. She knew how.
    Surprising herself with this thought, and its vehemence. You're ready.
    In the car, she'd turned the radio
dial, heard the reedy synthesized music all sound-tissue, no skeleton. How touching, The Senator a man of fifty-five felt such nostalgia for a youth
so long ago!
    Saying
yes though she'd seen how The Senator had been drinking. At first he'd been
prudent drinking white wine, Perrier water, low-calorie beer then he'd switched
to the stronger stuff, he and Ray Annick: the two older men at the party.
    Older men. Yes and they did think of themselves that way, you could tell.
    It
was the Fourth of July. A meaningless holiday now but one Americans all
celebrate, or almost all Americans celebrate. Rockets' red
glare,