Yesterday I read Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates.  It is a re-telling of the awful night in July 1969 when Ted Kennedy drove a car into a pond on Chappaquiddick Island: he escaped the sinking car but his passenger, 28-year old Mary Jo Kopechne was left in the car and died. Kennedy left the scene and did not call authorities until after Kopechne’s body was discovered the following day.  In Oates’ fictionalized version, much remains the same but slight changes have been made: the Senator is certainly Kennedy, but the young girl is now a woman named Kelly (who graduated from Brown and wrote her senior thesis on the Senator), the car is driven into a swamp on an island of Maine, not Martha’s Vineyard and the date is July 4th in the late 1980s instead of July 18, 1969.

The “chance meeting” between Kelly and the Senator at a party earlier that day is retold in chapters that are interspersed with chapters detailing horrifically but without excess the evening’s accident and its aftermath:  “the black water flooded over the crumpled hoof of the car, washed over the cracked windshield, over the roof, a sudden profound darkening as if the swamp had lurched up to claim them.”  We are there with Kelly, waiting; either for rescue or for the water to overtake her and bring her death.  The moments in the water, and the drive leading up to its plunge into the water, come to us in pieces of lucidity and of dreaming.  Kelly’s life comes back in snippets of a failed love affair, scholastic achievement, youthful optimism, and scared, frozen thoughts of death coming in with the black water.

This novel has many levels and reached me in so many ways.  It is an exploration of fate and destiny, a chilling dissection of “what if”. Horoscope forecasts are intermingled with Kelly’s own decisions to go the Maine party or not.  “[H]ow it had been chance, this Fourth of July on Graylings Island“: Kelly is marveling at how chance brought her to the Senator but it is much more momentous, the decisions she made that brought her to Maine, to the Senator’s notice, and within his embrace. It is not an affair she is about to embark upon; it is the last journey of her young, and troubled, life.

On another level, Oates brings us to the horrid and vivid place of a young person recognizing that death is imminent. Death at a young age, whether from illness or accident or violence, is incomprehensible, an act against nature and against the promises made to us from childhood: we will live a long life, with time to fulfill our dreams and ambitions and pass something on.  Kelly, in those moments before she dies, does not accept the death.  She hangs onto the mantra of her upbringing: she’s a good girl, she’s an American girl, she loves her life.  And she will not lose it.  She thinks back to those times when she’s questioned that mantra, when she faltered, considered suicide, starved herself.  But she came through all that and now she is in charge. Only we know she is not in charge, not at all. The car has her pinned, the black water is rising, the senator has kicked  against her to get himself out of the car, and he will not come back.

As powerful as the imagery of impending death is in the novel, and how heartbreaking those final moments are when she still believes the Senator will come back for her and then when she sees herself as a little girl again, the most poignant and galvanizing element of this novel for me was Oates’ unabashed revelations about the American dream as sold to girls, the loneliness of youth, and the abuse of youthful exuberance and trust by older men.  It is an ugly story, and a common one.  Girls — especially good-looking ones who are hard workers and sincere — are fed the dream of having it all, of being respected for their brain but also their perfect bodies, of being wanted and desired — but they are expendable and replaceable, and used again and again, by men in power eager to get laid. The Senator has noticed Kelly and found her attractive: “she was the one, the one he’d chosen.”  From that moment, her fate was sealed.  Raised to be obedient, she will obey now.  The Senator uses his power, his prestige and his celebrity, to take her as he wishes. She never had  choice.  Fed magazine cover stories like “Dream your wishes.  [Follow] your desires for once,” she marches forward, but is it willingly?  It cannot be, when she has never felt desire herself, only a man’s desire for her.  It is her duty to respond to the man’s desire, and she will do it. The Senator has groped her, kissed her, and she can’t back out:  “I’ve made you want me, now I can’t refuse you.“  She also wants more: “if I don’t do as he asks there won’t be any later“.  She won’t give up this chance to be with her hero: “You’re an American girl, you love your life….you believe you have chosen it.”

She continues the mantra to herself that she is chosen and thus she cannot die. But the black water rises and we know she is going to die.  We hope she will not but we know the story already, it is part of American political lore, a tragic episode of deceit, fear, and abuse.

Kelly, as evoked so clearly by Oates, is vulnerable and the Senator sees that vulnerability, smells it on her and takes her for his own use. She cannot see what is happening because it is beyond her orbit of behavior: she’s been following the rules all her life and expects others to, also.  Even her late-teens rejection of her parents’ Republican mores was part and parcel with the in-step progression of her life, the necessary rebellion that did nothing more than place her on the other side of the line from her father, but left her behaving in the same way as her parents, judging herself by her father’s same measurements of success, and by her mother’s rules on men.

Her life was never hers: she relinquished it in her struggle to be good, to work hard, to perform. And her relinquishment led to the fateful decision to leave that Independence Day party (the irony!) and go off on with that drunken animal of a man, to speed off into the night, racing to catch a ferry to mainland and his motel room.  What a waste, what a terrible waste.  Given more time, she might have grown into the woman who could claim her own life, her own way, and truly love it.  Not just fake it.