Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

before, she was sure. And yet—how familiar it was to her.

      It was not a distinguished or even an unusual bridge but an old-style truss bridge of the 1930s, with a single span: wrought-iron girders marked with elaborate encrustations of rust like ancient and unreadable hieroglyphics. Already M.R. knew, without needing to see, that the bridge was bare planking and would rattle beneath crossing vehicles; all of the bridge would vibrate finely, like a great tuning fork.

      Like the bridges of M.R.’s memory, this bridge had been built high above the stream below, which was a small river, or a creek, that flooded its banks after rainstorms. To cross the bridge you had to ascend a steep paved ramp. Both the bridge and the ramp were narrower by several inches than the two-lane state highway that led to the bridge and so in its approach to the bridge the road conspicuously narrowed and the shoulder was sharply attenuated. All this happened without warning—you had to know the bridge, not to blunder onto it when a large vehicle like a van or a truck was crossing.

      There was no shoulder here upon which to park safely, at least not a vehicle the size of the Lincoln Town Car, but canny Carlos had discovered an unpaved service lane at the foot of the bridge ramp, that led to the bank of the stream. The lane was rutted, muddy. In a swath of underbrush the limousine came to a jolting stop only a few yards from rushing water.

      Some subtle way in which the driver both obeyed his impulsive employer, and resisted her, made M.R.’s heart quicken in opposition to him. Clearly Carlos understood that this was an imprudent stop to have made, within an hour of their destination; the very alacrity with which he’d driven the shiny black limousine off the road and into underbrush was a rebuke to her, who had issued a command to him.

      “Carlos, thank you. I won’t be a—a minute …”

      Won’t be a minute. Like stretch my legs this phrase sounded in her ears forced and alien to her, as if another spoke through her mouth, and M.R. was the ventriloquist’s dummy.

      Quickly before Carlos could climb out of the car to open the door for her, M.R. opened the door for herself. She couldn’t seem to accustom herself to being treated with such deference and formality!—it wasn’t M.R.’s nature.

      M.R., whom excessive attention and even moderate flattery embarrassed terribly; as if, by instinct, she understood the mockery that underscores formality.

      “I’ll be right back! I promise.”

      She spoke cheerily, gaily. M.R. couldn’t bear for any employee—any member of her staff—to feel uncomfortable in her presence.

      As, teaching, when she’d approach a seminar room hearing the voices and laughter of the students inside, she’d hesitate to intrude—to evoke an abrupt and too-respectful silence.

      Her power over others was that they liked her. Such liking could only be volitional, free choice.

      She was walking along the embankment thinking these thoughts. By degrees the rushing water drowned out her thoughts—hypnotic, just slightly edgy. There is always a gravitational pull toward water: to rushing water. One is drawn forward, one is drawn in.

      Now. Here. Come. It is time….

      She smiled hearing voices in the water. The illusion of voices in the water.

      But here was an impediment: the bank was tangled with briars, vines. An agonized twisting of something resembling guts. It wasn’t a good idea for M.R. to be walking in her charcoal-gray woolen trousers and her pinching-new Italian shoes.

      Yet if you looked closely, with a child’s eye, you could discern a faint trail amid the underbrush. Children, fishermen. Obviously, people made their way along the stream, sometimes.

      A nameless stream—creek, or river. Seemingly shallow, yet wide. A sprawl of boulders, flat shale-like rock. Froth of the hue and seeming substance of the most nouveau of haute cuisine—foam-food, pureed and juiced, all substance leached from it, terrible food! Tasteless and unsatisfying and yet M.R. had been several times obliged to admire it, dining at the Manhattan homes of one or another of the University’s wealthy trustees, who kept in their employ full-time chefs.

      The creek, or river, was much smaller than the Black Snake River that flowed south and west out of the southern Adirondacks, traversing Beechum County at a diagonal—the river of M.R.’s childhood. Yet—here was the identical river-smell. If M.R. shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, she was there.

      Here was an odor of something brackish and just slightly sour—rancid/rotted—decaying leaves—rich damp dark earth that sank beneath her heels as she made her way along the bank, shading her eyes against the watery glitter like tinfoil.

      Mingled with the river-smell was an odor of something burning, like rubber. Smoldering tires, garbage. A wet-feather smell. But faint enough that it wasn’t unpleasant.

      All that M.R. could see—on the farther bank of the stream—was a wall of dark-brick buildings with only a few windows on each floor; and beyond the windows, nothing visible. High on the sides of the buildings were advertisements—product names and pictures of—faces? human figures?—eroded by time and now indecipherable, lost to all meaning.

      “‘Mohawk Meats and Poultry.’”

      The words came to her. The memory was random, and fleeting.

      “‘Boudreau Women’s Gloves and Hosiery.’”

      But that had been Carthage, long ago. These ghost-signs, M.R. could not read at all.

      Carlos was surely correct, they weren’t far from the small city of Ithaca—which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University where M.R. had been an undergraduate twenty years before and had graduated summa cum laude, in another lifetime. Yet she had no idea of the name of this small town or where exactly they were except south and west of Ithaca in the glacier-ravaged countryside of Tompkins County.

      It was a bright chilly October day. It was a day splotched with sumac like bursts of flame.

      The not-very-prosperous small town of faded-brick storefronts and cracked sidewalks reminded M.R. of the small city in which she’d grown up in Beechum County in the foothills of the southern Adirondacks. Vaguely she was thinking I should have planned to visit them. It has been so long.

      Her father lived there still—in Carthage.

      She had not told Konrad Neukirchen that she would be spending three nights within a hundred miles of Carthage since virtually every minute of the conference would be filled with appointments, engagements, panels, talks—and yet more people would request time with M.R., once the conference began. She had not wanted to disappoint her father, who’d always been so proud of her.

      Her father, and also her mother of course. Both the Neukirchens: Konrad and Agatha.

      How painful it was to M.R., to disappoint others! Her elders, who’d invested so much in her. Their love for her was a heavy cloak upon her shoulders, like one of those lead-shield cloaks laid upon you in the dentist’s office to shield you from X-rays—you were grateful for the cloak but more grateful when it was removed.

      Far rather would M.R. be disappointed by others, than to be the agent of disappointment herself. For M.R. could forgive—readily; she was very good at forgiveness.

      She was very good at forgetting, also. To forget is the very principle of forgiveness.

      Perhaps it was a Quaker principle, or ought to have been, which she’d inherited from her parents: forget, forgive.

      Boldly now she walked on the bank of the nameless river amid broken things. An observer on the bridge some distance away would have been surprised to see her: a well-dressed woman, alone, in this place so impractical for walking, amid a slovenly sort of quasi-wilderness. M.R. was a tall woman whom an erect backbone and held-high head made taller—a woman of youthful middle-age with an appealingly girlish face—fleshy, flush-cheeked. Her eyes were both shy and quick-darting, assessing. In fact the eyes were a falcon’s eyes, in a girl’s face.

      How strange she felt in this