Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates
to slap his hand, send the coins flying. With a nervous little laugh I ducked beneath the bristly-haired man’s elbow as I ducked beneath the older girls’ upraised elbows on the basketball court, and before he knew it I’d escaped him into the women’s restroom. Laughing to show that I wasn’t frightened, I knew he meant me no harm. “Now go away! I don’t need anything from you.”
There came a bark of laughter and the rap of knuckles on the door.
It wasn’t a restroom door you could lock. I would have to run to hide inside one of the toilet stalls, to lock a door.
If I did, he’d have me trapped.
Still it was just a joke, playful-drunk joking that would not escalate into anything serious as through the ill-fitting door the bristling man with the bloodshot eyes called me honey, baby-girl and went on to speak of something more complicated, something I could not follow and so I cupped my hands to my mouth to say: “I’m not alone here! My father is here! My father is in the barroom! My father is Eddy Diehl, he’s in the barroom, you’d better leave me alone or—”
Desperately I counted to ten, counted to twenty, now thinking Why here, will something happen here, will my father hurt someone here recalling how when we’d first entered the barroom from the parking lot my father had led me inside with his arm around my shoulders, fluffing my ponytail with his fingers, proudly he was showing me off, God-damned proud of his pretty blond daughter who was nothing like the wife who’d cast him aside, nothing like Lucille Bauer who had come to know Eddy Diehl too well. Entering the smoky barroom where much of the light was a luridneon rippling cast from beer and liquor advertisements and from the squat color TV above the bar, entering this clamorous place immediately we’d attracted attention, we’d attracted glances, and more than glances. The bartender, doughy-faced guy with Elvis sideburns, swiping at the sticky bar top with a rag, calling out, “Jesus! Is that—Ed Diehl?” It wasn’t clear immediately if the greeting was a friendly one—a warily friendly one, perhaps—but the men shook hands, they were of a height, and of a certain stature, and in their early forties; near enough in kind to be brothers.
At the bar, as Daddy and the bartender spoke together, other men paused in their conversations to observe, and to listen: and these too were wary, friendly-wary, as if recognizing my father but uncertain how to address him.
Daddy said happily, excitedly: “This is my daughter Krista, my little girl Krista, she’s older than she looks, she plays basketball at the high school, say H’lo to my buddies, Krista.”
Buddies! This was pathetic, I thought.
This was not like Daddy, I thought.
Still like a three-year-old on display I smiled and said H’lo. My face beat with a pleasurable sort of pain and I saw that Daddy was pleased with me, I had not let him down.
Now it seemed that Brent had departed. Cautiously I pushed open the restroom door—he’d gone. Quickly I went then to the pay phone and faced the wall making myself as unobtrusive as possible. Men were trailing in and out of the men’s room a few feet away, and I did not want them to take note of me. Dropped in one of Daddy’s quarters and prayed for Mom to answer when I dialed the number but in immediate rebuke there came a busy signal.
“Mom, pick up! Please, Mom. It’s me.”
Though I had no idea what I would say to my mother if she answered the phone. That I’d been complicit with my father, who’d violated the court order forbidding him to approach me? forbidding him even to speak with me? That I had violated my mother’s trust by going with her enemy, willingly? By wanting to be with him, and not wanting—at least at this moment—to be with her? By loving him—at least at this moment—more than I loved her?
Or maybe none of this was so. Maybe it was a desperate story that I was telling myself, at fifteen. I loved my father not because he was a good father or a good man—how could I have judged him, that he was a “good” man or otherwise—but because he was my father, he was my only father.
And maybe he’d been showing me off, a little—and why was that so terrible? Why couldn’t that be forgiven?
Daddy hadn’t truly expected Mom to take him up on his invitation, to come out to the County Line for dinner—had he? He’d spoken wistfully, an edge of hurt in his voice. He’d winked at me, he’d been joking.
Your daddy’s a tease, sweetie. Don’t think that I pay your damn ol’ daddy much mind.
I was becoming excited, nervous hearing the busy signal at the other end of the line. Hung up the phone and waited for the coin to drop into the return slot and another time I tried my mother’s number, and this time a stranger, a man, answered the phone—“Yeh? Who’s this?”—and it turned out that I had misdialed, I’d dialed a wrong number. And all this while the door to the men’s room was being pushed open, allowed to swing closed. I tried not to inhale odors of spilled beer, spilled urine. And a powerful stench of disinfectant beneath. How men are their bodies, there is no escaping men’s bodies came to me as a dismal epiphany. I was hiding from men who whistled at me in passing, called me Honey-babe in passing, fluffed my ponytail with rude playful fingers; I was hiding from them pressing my forehead against the smudged black-plastic surface of the pay phone. Another time I dialed my mother’s number—that is, our home number—and another time the busy signal came like jeering.
Of course, my mother was likely to be on the phone. Relatives were always calling her. She spoke with her mother and her sisters several times a day. She spoke with “new friends” at her church and with the minister and the minister’s wife. She spoke with individuals at the county family court and she may have spoken with a lawyer. Yet it seemed to me that my mother was being deliberately irresponsible, indifferent to me, keeping the phone in use at a time when I might have tried to call her.
I don’t need you! I hate you. Daddy has come to take me with him away from you.
Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.
I snatched up the coin from the return slot and went back to the booth where Daddy was waiting for me, drinking. By this time most of the barroom was filled. I had to make my way through a maze of tables. I had to make my way through the crowd at the bar, which was a horseshoe-shaped bar, long, curving, fraught with obstacles. I saw just one woman at the bar—the laughing young women had left, together—and she was a woman in her late thirties with springy curly flyaway hair in the style worn by Zoe Kruller which was a style from the popular TV show of an earlier era, Charlie’s Angels; it was a young glamorous style but the woman at the bar was not young and glamorous but thick-jowled, with lipstick so dark it appeared black. As I approached she glanced up at me with sudden stricken attention. And others at the bar glanced up at me. Self-consciously I smiled, it was my instinct to smile, as perhaps an animal will cringe, bare its teeth in a simulacrum of a smile, to forestall harm. I pulled at my pony tail to straighten it. Loose damp tendrils of hair were stuck to my forehead. There was a way of walking I envied in some of the older girls at the high school, a kind of self-exhibiting, heads lifted high and eyes bemused Don’t interfere with me! but this way of walking was beyond me, I lacked the sexual assurance. And there was a man stepping out to block my way. He was no one known to me—was he? He had a straggly goatee, his mouth a wide wet scar. “You’re his daughter? Diehl? Why’d he come here? Why’d he bring you here? What’s he doing here? The fucker.”
I was stunned. Too surprised to react other than to stammer foolishly—“I’m s-sorry…”
This man, this angry goatee-man whom I’d never seen before, dared to take hold of my arm. Asking again in a righteous drunken voice why had my father come here? Why’d he come back to Sparta where he sure as hell wasn’t wanted? And I tried to say, stammering and apologetic, that my father was “visiting.”
“Visiting who?”
I said I didn’t know.
Wanting to throw off the