My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

III

       The Scar

       The Burrow

       Valentine

       Keeping Myself Alive

       Off the Books

       Rat, Waiting

       Sorrowful Virgin

       Damned Little Dog

       Tongue

       Uncanny

       First Aid

       “Maxed-Out”

       The Misunderstanding

       The Return

       In My Mother’s Garden

       Forgiveness

       The Guilty Sister

       Howard Street

       Home

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Novels by Joyce Carol Oates

       About the Publisher

I

       The Rat

       Go away. Go to hell—rat!

       You don’t get another chance to rat on anybody.

      It’s true, you will not be given another chance.

      There is just the one chance, the first.

       The Omen: November 2, 1991

      THIS, I WOULD REMEMBER: SMELLY DARK WATER IN THE RIVER near shore, the color of rotted eggplant, we’d seen on the way to school that morning and stopped to stare at.

      On the Lock Street Bridge. Crossing on the pedestrian walkway. And there, directly below, the thunderous river (a deep cobalt-blue on clear days, metallic-gray on cloudy days) seemed to have changed color near shore and was purplish-dark, smelling of something like motor oil, roiling and surging as if it was alive like snakes, giant writhing snakes, you didn’t want to look but could not look away.

      My sister Katie nudged me crinkling her nose against the smell. “C’mon, Vi’let! Let’s get out of here.”

      I was leaning over the railing, staring down. Trying to see—were those actually snakes? Twenty-, thirty-foot-long snakes? Their scales were a winking deep-purple sheen. The sight was so terrifying, I’d begun to shiver convulsively. The odor was making me nauseated, and dizzy.

      As far as we could see upstream the oily-purple water came in surges near shore while elsewhere the river was the color of stone, choppy and thunderous—the Niagara River rushing to the Falls seven miles to the north.

      We ran from the walkway. Didn’t look back to see if the giant snakes were pursuing us.

      I was twelve years old. This was the morning of the last day of my childhood.

      (NOT OUR IMAGINATIONS. THE OILY PURPLE WATER LIKE SNAKES in the river had been real.

      Alarmed citizens in South Niagara had noticed the phenomenon and reported it. There’d been many calls to local authorities and to 911.

      On the front page of that evening’s South Niagara Union Journal it was curtly explained that the excessive discharge of sludge in the river that morning had been the result of routine maintenance of the Niagara County Water Board’s wastewater sedimentation basins and no cause for concern.

      What did this mean? What was sludge?

      When our father read the boxed item in the Journal he laughed.

      “‘Routine.’ ‘Sedimentation’—‘no cause for alarm.’ Sons of bitches are poisoning us, that’s what it means.”)

       Disowned

      ONCE I’D BEEN DADDY’S FAVORITE OF HIS SEVEN KIDS. BEFORE something terrible happened between us, I am trying still to make right.

      This was in November 1991. I was twelve years, seven months old at the time.

      Sent me into exile. Thirteen years! To an adult that is not a long time—probably; but to an adolescent, a lifetime.

       Who’s Daddy’s favorite little girl?

       Violet Rue. Little Violet Rue!

      When I was a little girl Daddy would kiss my pug nose, and make me squeal. And Daddy would lift me in his strong arms, and pretend to toss me into the air so I was frightened but did not let on for Daddy did not like scaredy-cat little girls.

      There was an intensity to this, the lifting-in-the-arms, the impassioned speech. A delicious fiery smell, Daddy’s breath, fierce and unmistakable and I had no idea why, that he’d been drinking (whiskey) but knowing this ferocity to be the very breath of the father, the breath of the male.

       How’s my little girl? Not afraid of your daddy are you?

       Better not, Daddy loves his little Violet Rue like crazy!

      ONCE, BEFORE I WAS BORN, MY OLDEST SISTER, MIRIAM, HAD BEEN Daddy’s favorite little girl. Later, my sister Katie had been Daddy’s favorite little girl.

      But now, the favorite was Violet Rue. And would remain Violet Rue.

      Because the youngest,