Sourland by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

course—I’m forbidden by the Motor Vehicle Department of the State of New Jersey which will not grant me a driver’s license. How ridiculous this is, & unjust!—when any idiot with two legs & half a brain can get a license in New Jersey. And so I’m dependent upon accepting rides with co-workers or taking the shore bus.
    For the first several months of my employment at Barnegat I rode with one of the other librarians, who also lives on Shore Island, three miles to the north. Until one day it became abundantly clear that this woman was too curious about me. Too interested in me. So now I take the shore bus. Now I ride with predominately dark-skinned commuters—African-American, Hispanic—most of them nannies, cleaning women & day-laborers of various kinds. This is something of a scandal at the library—something of which my co-workers speak ruefully behind my back— Why won’t Jane let us help her? If only Jane would let us help her! To their faces I am not at all unfriendly; in fact I’m very friendly, when I wish. But the bus stop is less than a block from the library. The trip itself is less than three miles, from my (rented) apartment (duplex, ground-floor) on Shore Island to Barnegat; if you continue south from Barnegat it’s another three miles to Lake View, & so along the Jersey shore—densely populated in the summer, sparsely populated in the winter—forty-three miles to Atlantic City.
    Yes I’ve taken the bus to Atlantic City since moving to the Jersey shore.
    Yes I’ve gone alone.
    My family disapproves of course. My mother in particular who is anxious & angry about her cripple-daughter of course.
    Why on earth would you take public transportation when you could ride with a friend, she asks.
    Not a friend, I tell her. A co-worker.
    A co-worker, then! But why live alone on the Jersey shore when you could live in Highland Park, with us.
    (Highland Park is a very nice middle-class suburb of New Brunswick not far from the sprawling campus of Rutgers University where my father teaches engineering.)
    Because I do what I want to do. And not what you want me to do.
    My mother & I are not close. And so I would not tell her how fascinated I am by others’ fascination with me. How I love the eyes of strangers moving onto me startled, shocked—by chance, at first—then with deliberation—making of me an object of sympathy, or pity; an object of revulsion. Love making you feel guilty for having two normal legs, feet. For being abled, not disabled. Staring at my face fixing your eyes on my eyes to indicate how pointedly you are not looking away nor are you glancing down at my lower body to see what is missing in me that makes me irremediably different from you who are whole & blessed of God.
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    Now at the rear of the darkened library he’s waiting.
    In the parking lot, near Library Staff Parking Only —he’s waiting.
    Later he will say I tried to go away. But I couldn’t.
    He will say Do you know why, Jane? Why I couldn’t go away?
    By 6:20 P.M . the parking lot behind the library is empty except for a single vehicle, a station wagon, which must be his. In no hurry I have prepared to leave. For I know he’ll be there: already between us the bond is established, should I wish to acknowledge it.
    Like an actress preparing to step out onto a stage & uncertain of the script—uncertain what will be said to her. By this time the sky has darkened. The clouds are thickening. There is a wan melancholy beauty remaining in the sky in the heavy massed clouds like a watercolor wash of Winslow Homer, shading into night & oblivion. On the pavementare swaths of snow pockmarked with the grime of the long Jersey winter but at this hour, imperfections are scarcely visible. I am wearing a long military-looking dark wool coat swinging loose & unbuttoned—a chic, expensive designer coat purchased at an after-Christmas sale at the East