The Falls Read Free Page A

blew her nose into it.
    Though she’d obeyed of course. Never would Ariah have defied Mrs. Littrell in such matters of feminine protocol.
    Later, on the morning of the ceremony, being dressed by Mrs.
    Littrell and the seamstress, she’d prayed silently Dear God, don’t let my stockings be baggy at the ankles. Nowhere it can show.
    And, as the ceremony began: Dear God, don’t let me perspire. I know I’m starting, I can feel it. Don’t let half-moons show at my underarms. In this beautiful dress. I beg you, God!
    These eager girlish prayers, so far as Ariah knew, had been answered.
    She was feeling stronger by degrees. She forced herself to whisper,
    “Gilbert?” As one might sleepily whisper to a spouse, waking in the morning. “Gilbert, w-where are you?”
    No answer.
    Gazing through half-shut eyes she saw: no one in the bed beside her.
    A crooked pillow. Wrinkled linen pillowcase. A bedsheet turned partly back, as if with care. But no one.
    Ariah forced her eyes open. Oh!
    A German ceramic clock on a mantel across the room and shiny The Falls X 13
    gilt numerals that meant, for several arduous seconds, nothing to Ariah’s squinting eyes. Then the clock’s face showed 7:10. The fog outside the hotel windows was fading, it appeared to be morning and not dusk.
    Ariah hadn’t lost the day, then.
    Hadn’t lost her husband. Not so quickly!
    For probably if Gilbert wasn’t in the bathroom, Gilbert was elsewhere in the hotel. Gilbert had let it be known he was an early riser.
    Ariah guessed he was downstairs in the lobby with its Victorian dark paneling, leather settees and gleaming marble floor; or possibly he was having coffee on the wide, regal veranda overlooking Prospect Park and, a short distance beyond, the Niagara River and Falls.
    Frowning as he skimmed the Niagara Gazette, the Buffalo Courier-Express. Or, his monogrammed silver pen in hand, a birthday gift from Ariah herself, he might be making notations as he leafed through tourist brochures, maps and pamphlets with such titles as THE
    GREAT FALLS AT NIAGARA: ONE OF THE SEVEN WON-
    DERS OF THE WORLD.
    Waiting for me to join him. Waiting for me to slip my hand into his.
    Ariah could envision her young husband. He was quite attractive in his stern way. Those winking eyeglasses, and nostrils unnaturally wide and deep in his long nose. Ariah would smile gaily at him, greet him with a light kiss on the cheek. As if they’d been behaving like this, so casually, in such intimacy, for a long time. But Gilbert would dispel the mood by standing quickly, awkwardly, jarring the little rat-tan table and spilling coffee, for he’d been trained never to remain seated in the presence of a woman. “Ariah! Good morning, dear.”
    “I’m sorry to be so late. I hope . . .”
    “Waiter? Another coffee, please.”
    In charming white wicker rocking chairs, side by side. The honeymoon couple. Among how many hundreds of honeymoon couples in June, at The Falls. The uniformed Negro waiter appears, smiling . . .
    Ariah winced, climbing down from the bed. It was a Victorian four-poster with brass fixtures and a crocheted canopy like mosquito netting; the mattress was unnaturally high from the floor. Like a creature with a back broken in several places, she moved cautiously.
    14 W Joyce Carol Oates
    Tugging at a strap of her silk nightgown where it had fallen, or had been yanked, over her shoulder. (And how sore, how discolored her shoulder was . . . A plum-colored bruise had formed in the night.) Her lashes had come unstuck, though barely. There were dried bits of mucus in her eyes like sand. And that ugly acid taste in her mouth.
    “Oh. My God.”
    Shaking her head to clear it, which was a mistake. Shattered glass!
    Mirror-shards shifting, sliding, glittering in her brain.
    As, the previous week, she’d clumsily dropped a mother-of-pearl hand mirror on the carpeted floor of her parents’ bedroom, perversely the mirror bounced from the carpet and onto a hardwood floor and