The Falls Read Online Free PDF

actions. Though observed to be surprisingly passionate while thundering her way through the stormy movements of Beethoven’s great piano sonatas, or singing certain Schubert lieder, Ariah was a stiff, shy girl in most gatherings. She blushed easily, she shrank from being touched. Her pebbly-green eyes glinted with intelligence and not warmth. If she’d had occasional boyfriends they’d been boys like herself. Boys like Gilbert Erskine who were young-old and inclined to be round-shouldered in their teens. Of course Ariah was routinely examined by the Littrells’ family doctor, but the elderly physician could be relied upon not to use gynecologic instruments in any extreme manner, and always desisted when Ariah whimpered in pain and discomfort, or kicked at him in panic. Out of feminine delicacy and embarrassment Mrs. Littrell skirted the marital subject, and of course Reverend Littrell would rather have died than speak to his tense, virginal daughter of “intimate” matters. He left this awkward task to his wife, and thought no more of it.
    The hot bath was making Ariah light-headed. Or such thoughts were making her light-headed. She saw that her left breast floated in the water, partly ochre-colored as if in shadow. He’d squeezed, 24 W Joyce Carol Oates
    pinched. She supposed there were bruises on her lower belly and thighs. Between her chafed legs there was less sensation, as if that part of her body had gone to sleep.
    That bat-cry of his! His flushed shiny boy’s face contorted like Boris Karloff ’s face in Frankenstein .
    He had not said I love you, Ariah. He had not lied.
    Nor had she whispered I love you Gilbert as she’d rehearsed, lying in his arms. For she knew the words would offend him, at such a time.
    Lying in the bath, as the water lost its steamy heat and began to scum over with soap, Ariah began silently to cry. Tears stung her eyes, that were already sore, and ran down her cheeks into the bathwater. She’d imagined how, while she was bathing, she would hear the outer door open and close, and Gilbert’s uplifted voice—“Ariah?
    Good morning!” But she hadn’t heard any door open and close. She hadn’t heard Gilbert’s uplifted voice.
    She was thinking how, long before she’d met Gilbert Erskine, while still in high school she’d locked herself in the bathroom at home and “examined” herself after a bath with a small mirror. Oh, she’d nearly fainted! It was bad as giving blood. She’d seen, between her slender thighs, inside the damp, curly swath of pubic hair, a curious little raised tissue like a tongue, or one of those slithery organs you take care to remove from a chicken before roasting it; and, as she stared in appalled fascination, a small, pinched hole at the base of this tissue, smaller than her belly button. How on earth could a man’s
    “thing” be fitted into such a tiny space? Worse yet, how could a baby emerge through such a tiny space?
    The revelation had left Ariah weak with terror, dread, revulsion for hours afterward. Maybe she hadn’t recovered, yet.
    4
    T h e r e i t wa s. The note. So conspicuous. Like a shout. Propped up by the vanity mirror. Ariah would never comprehend how, or why, she hadn’t noticed it earlier.
    On rose-colored hotel stationery, in a hastily scrawled handwrit-The Falls X 25
    ing Ariah could not have easily identified as Gilbert’s, were these words:
    Ariah sorry—I cant—
    I tried to love you
    I am going where my pride must take me
    I know—you cant forgive
    God will not forgive
    By this I free us both of our vows
    On the carpet below was a monogrammed silver pen. It must have been tossed carelessly down, and rolled onto the floor.
    For a very long time (five minutes? ten?) Ariah stood frozen, the note in her trembling hand. Her mind was struck blank. At last she began to cry, hoarse ugly sobs wracking her body.
    As if, after all, she’d loved him?
    The Fossil-Seeker
    R un, run! Run for your life.
    At last it was dawn. All night