Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates
and people cried, especially women. Women were adept at crying, as men were humbled and stymied by crying. Women were cleansed by crying, as men were smudged and stained by crying. But the person who’d died was usually elderly, or had died after a long illness, or both; or had died in a car crash on the highway, or a boating accident on the river or one of the numerous lakes surrounding Sparta. These were sad deaths but not frightening deaths. Because you knew, if you were a child, that nothing like those deaths would ever happen to you.
Except now, people were frightened. Adults were frightened. There is such a profound difference between dying and being killed.
At Honeystone’s Dairy it wasn’t so much fun any longer. Without Zoe Kruller leaning on her elbows on the counter, smiling.
The ice cream was still delicious, greedily we devoured it.
The smell of the fresh-brewed coffee was pungent, disagreeable. To my sensitive nostrils, disagreeable. Since my ice-cream cone infested with nasty weevils Daddy hadn’t taken Ben and me back to the dairy all summer, I had to wonder if there was some connection.
At Honeystone’s I hadn’t much wanted to overhear my mother speaking with old grumpy-grandma Mrs. Honeystone. The two shaking their heads in disapproval, bonded in that moment by a swell of indignation like dirty water swishing about their ankles. And leaving her family, too! How could she.
The mysteries you live with, as a child. Never solved, never resolved. Utterly trivial, petty. Like a tiny pebble in your shoe, that causes you to walk crookedly.
ZOE KRULLER. Zoe Kruller. Zoe Kruller.
Now in late February and early March of 1983 the white clapboard house on the Huron Pike Road quivered with this name, unspoken. In the household upstairs and down and in my father’s workshop in the basement in which he spent much of the truncated time he now spent at home there was the taut tense silence that follows a lightning-flash when you wait for the thunder to roar in.
Across Lake Ontario, great armadas of winter-storm clouds. Blown eastward and south out of Canada, the air too bitter-cold for snow. The silence-before-the-storm where you wait not knowing what you are waiting for.
In their bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall—the door shut tight, only a meager band of light beneath—our parents spoke together in their low urgent alarmed voices. For hours.
We sank into sleep, Ben and me, to the sound of those voices. We were wakened from sleep, to the sound of those voices. I think this was how it was. I am trying not to mis-remember, and most of all I am trying not to invent.
Zoe Kruller. How could you! How many times! Oh why.
Those hours, middle-of-the-night. Those vibrations in the air as when the old furnace clicked on, heaving itself into life like an enlarged and failing heart.
Or maybe: my parents’ bedroom door opening, and my father’s footsteps in the hall, on the stairs to the first floor. So I was wakened dry-mouthed and frightened.
“Daddy? Where are you going?”
Calling down the stairs to him, and he’d tell me to get back to bed, back to sleep. And if I followed him to the stairs, and halfway down the stairs he’d speak more sharply to me: “Go back to sleep, Krista. This is not for you.”
EARLIER THAT WINTER, WHAT we hadn’t wanted to remember. What would be blurred and smudged in our memories—Ben’s, and mine—like a blackboard across which a fist has been dragged, carelessly.
Later we would realize that these were the days before.
Days, nights before Zoe Kruller’s death.
After Thanksgiving, through the long siege of Christmas and through snow-dazzled January those days we had no idea were before.
Those days when Daddy seemed to be away much of the time. He’d been hours late for Thanksgiving dinner—“dinner” was at 4:00 P.M.—at my aunt Sharon’s house and he had not shown up at all for a birthday dinner at another relative’s house. Weekdays he’d call home to say he’d be late for supper or maybe he wouldn’t be having supper with us at all. And those nights when he didn’t call home. And when he didn’t come home.
And 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