Bound.(Lowest Ebb)(Joyce Carol Oates)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 22-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

A "lowest ebb" implies something singular and finite, but for many of us, born in the Depression and raised by parents distrustful of fortune, an "ebb" might easily have lasted for years. When I was growing up, my parents, my younger brother, and I lived with my mother's Hungarian parents on a small farm in upstate New York, which failed by slow, excruciating degrees in the nineteen-forties and fifties.

Always the fear prevailed that we would lose the farm. I think my city-born father must have hated it, hated the ceaseless labor of it, and yet nothing was more terrible to contemplate than losing property; it was all that stood between you and oblivion. To...

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