Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ Ben and I persisted Where’s Daddy? though seeing in our mother’s hurt and furious eyes Don’t ask! Shut up and go away but of course we asked, we could not stop ourselves from asking. No one so pitiless as children sensing something wrong, smelling blood and eager for someone to blame.

      Where Daddy was: at work. Or, meeting with a customer. Or, at the construction site.

      I worried that Daddy wouldn’t have any supper, Daddy would be hungry. Where would Daddy eat?

      Ben said not to worry, there’s plenty of taverns between here and wherever Daddy might be. And Daddy knew them all.

      Our mother said: “Your father is taking on more work. ‘Managerial’ work. Paul Cassano”—(our father’s employer at Sparta Construction)—“is semi-retired, you know he’d had a minor heart attack last winter. So your father has more responsibilities.”

      Still I set Daddy’s place at the table. Dark green “woven” plastic place mats, paper napkins neatly folded and fork, knife, spoon positioned properly.

      And I helped Mom prepare dinner. When I’d been a little girl, this was such a special time! Being entrusted with stirring macaroni as it boiled in a pot on the stove, cleaning carrots and potatoes at the sink, regulating the Mixmaster at its various magical speeds—not too fast, so that mashed potatoes or frosting splattered out of the bowl; setting the oven, usually at 375° F, for casseroles and cakes. What I liked was, at such times, nudging against my mother’s warm fleshy thighs, as if accidentally in our small kitchen. My mother had a crisp biscuity smell unlike the harsher perfume-smell of some of the mothers of my classmates, who lived in Sparta and in whose homes I sometimes stayed overnight, as my mother dressed more casually than these mothers did—in Kmart stretch slacks, pullover shirts and sweaters, wool socks (in cold weather), sneakers. For just at home my mother never wore makeup but before Daddy returned from work, late afternoons on weekdays, she took care to put on lipstick—the same shade of Revlon pink-frosted-plum she’d been wearing since high school—and to fluff out her flattened hair, pinch at her sallow cheeks.

      It was a time when my mother boasted of my father, to anyone who came into our house: “These maple wood cupboards, this counter and floor—all this Eddy did by himself. Isn’t it beautiful?”

      And: “Eddy put in the deck by himself. That built-in grill—Eddy did that. Saved us thousands of dollars he says. Isn’t it beautiful?”

      No longer did my mother speak of my father in this way, when the trouble began. Rarely did my mother speak of my father at all except in blunt flat statements of fact Your father won’t be back tonight, don’t set a place for him.

      During the lengthy, confused and unsettling Christmas season—how endless it seemed, being “recessed” from the safe, secure routines of school—the serious arguments began. These were eruptions of words not strictly confined to my parents’ bedroom and therefore particularly alarming to Ben and me as the sight of, for instance, our parents’ unclothed bodies would have been to us. Or, these were voices rising through furnace vents and into my room, from the kitchen; sometimes, late at night, from the living room where, a single lamp burning, TV turned low, my mother would be awaiting my father on the sofa, alone, like a sick woman curled up beneath an afghan.

      Those nights when Mom insisted upon my going to bed by 9:30 P.M. and Ben by 10:30 P.M. but did not come upstairs to bed herself. Instead she was waiting for headlights to turn into our lane, from the river road. She was smoking—though Lucille Diehl did not smoke—and she might have been drinking—though Lucille Diehl certainly did not drink. She seemed to be watching television but no channel engaged her interest for long not even the Classic Movie Channel, and the sound was muted. Several times Ben came downstairs barefoot in his T-shirt and boxer shorts—Ben emulated Daddy, in nightwear—to say how “weird” she was getting, for God’s sake why didn’t she go to bed!

      Mom ignored Ben. Smoking in the darkened living room with just the TV screen glimmering and glowing like something phosphorescent at the bottom of the sea, a simulacrum of life that was not life. The acrid smell of her cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to my bedroom, I dreamt that the house was on fire, my legs were tangled in bedclothes and I could not escape.

      Sometimes sensing my mother’s mounting desperation—unless it was my own—I would sit at the top of the stairs. In pajamas, barefoot and shivering. It was midnight: so late. And then it was 1 A.M., 2:35 A.M., alarmingly late. I was waiting with Mommy, in secret.

      To see Mommy in the living room, on the sofa with her back to me, I had to slide down two or three stair steps. I had to be very quiet, hugging my knees. For if Mommy knew that I was there she would have been very angry. Can’t I have any privacy in this God-damned house for God’s sake! Go away and leave me alone you God-damned kids, having babies was the end of me, lost my figure, lost my looks, God damn you go away, just leave me alone.

      This was not our daytime mother, I understood. This was Mommy-at-night in the darkened living room and with the TV set turned to mute. And sometimes I would fall asleep on the stairs, and one of them—it might be Mommy, it might be Daddy—would discover me, and not be angry with me, but half-carry me back to my bed and tuck me into my bed and so it was part of my dream, and a happy part of my dream, or maybe it had not happened, at all.

       Krissie you naughty girl! Shut your eyes tight and sleep.

       10

      “YOUR FATHER WILL be staying with your uncle Earl for a while. No—don’t ask me about it, he will tell you himself.”

      No longer Daddy but your father. This subtle change. This abrupt change. Our mother speaking to us of your father as she might have been speaking of your teacher, your bus driver.

      This was three days after the news of Zoe Kruller was first released. Three days after the banner headlines in the Sparta Journal which my mother had snatched from my fingers.

      Three days, during which time Daddy had not been home very much, or had been home and gone away again, and had returned late at night when Ben and I were in bed and supposedly asleep.

      “Tell us—what?”

      We’d just returned from school. Ben let his backpack fall onto the floor. Since the news of Zoe Kruller had entered our lives Ben had been behaving strangely, loud-laughing, crude as the older boys on the school bus who tormented younger children.

      Ben’s face flushed with anger. “Bullshit.”

      Ben pushed past our mother, ran upstairs thudding his heels on the stairs and slammed the door to his room. Looking as if she’d been struck in the face our mother stared after him but didn’t call his name—didn’t scold him—so I knew that something was very wrong.

      “Mom? What is…”

      “I said. He will tell you, Krista. Your father. Soon.”

      I was stunned. I could not comprehend why Ben was so angry, and what it meant that your father was staying with a relative. I seemed to know that this must have something to do with Zoe Kruller but could not imagine what.

      The phone began ringing. We were in the kitchen and something, too, was wrong with the kitchen: there were dishes in the sink, soaking. СКАЧАТЬ