The Hungry Ghosts

Seven Allusive Comedies

by Joyce Carol Oates

Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974

200 pages

Excerpt

From "Angst"

Though she was by no means old-fashioned, and really very "liberated" from her background and its narrow rules of conduct, still Bernadine had never exactly had a lover; somehow it had not happened. It had nearly happened with Herman, several times. But finally it had not happened. Once, in her early thirties, she had isolated the problem, tracing it to her characteristic meticulousness, her need to pre-arrange, pre-imagine, pre-structure everything. It seemed to her only civilized that one must proceed through a series of drafts, before plunging into reality. And so she had never managed to lose her virginity, though she had known Herman for eighteen years and, in a strange way, they were perhaps married . . . mutual acquaintances often seemed to assume they were married, though not living together for some reason. It was all very awkward, yet it made a kind of sense.

It was love of a physical type that seemed to her mysterious: not ugly or vulgar or even untidy, but simply impossible. At times she seriously doubted whether anyone really did such things. . . . Perhaps it was all pretense? Or a literary convention?

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