Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates
school library I looked up estranged. There was an exotic sound to this word, that contained the more familiar strange inside it like something blunt and commonplace—a pebble, say—inside a colored Easter egg.
Separated, divided, hostile, alienated, indifferent, severed, sunder: estranged.
“Is Daddy ‘estranged’ from us?”—with the cruel simulated naivete of the very young I dared to ask my mother this question one evening when Daddy had been gone from the house for a week; I saw the wincing hurt in my mother’s face; how I escaped being slapped across the mouth, I don’t know.
How exciting our lives had become, so quickly! Breathless and unpredictable and yet the excitement left behind a sick sensation like that you felt on a roller coaster when you were a young child: you’d thought you had wanted this, you had clamored and begged for this, but maybe you had not wanted it, not this. You’d wanted to be frightened, and you’d wanted to be thrilled; you’d wanted something to rush through you like an electric current; you’d wanted to scream in an ecstasy of panic but maybe—maybe you had not really wanted this.
And maybe by the time you realized, it was too late.
“Krista? Come here, I have something to tell you.”
Already my mother had spoken with Ben, when he’d come home from school. I’d heard his sharp raised voice and then he slammed out of the house and Mom called after him just once, a sharp little cry like a shot bird,
“Benjamin!”
From a window I saw Ben running stooped over, in the slanted sunshine of late afternoon, without his jacket. My stricken brother stomping through foot-high snow to the old barn, a short distance behind the twocar garage my father had built adjoining our house; the barn was used for storage and as a second garage for my father’s succession of vehicles. I saw Ben’s breath turn to vapor as he ran. I thought that I might not have recognized Ben running in that way, like something wounded, looking younger than his age, smaller.
From the upstairs hallway, I saw this. I’d hurried upstairs as soon as I came home from school, I’d brought my after-school snack with me—a bowl of cereal, with milk and raisins—so that I could begin my homework while I ate. The cereal was bite-sized shredded wheat; it had to be eaten quickly or it would become soggy, sodden like mush, and the milk would become discolored, and what should have been delicious would become faintly nauseating, an effort to eat.
I was beginning to realize that all that I loved to eat—my special childhood treats like Honeystone’s ice-cream cones—could very easily turn nauseating, disgusting.
Since my father had moved out of the house I’d become susceptible to wild bouts of hunger. Especially in the afternoons, after the strain of school. I would devour a bowl of cereal like a starving animal. A childish elation came over me as if nothing else mattered except this: eating.
By which I meant solitary eating. Not at mealtimes. Not with my mother and Ben. With Daddy missing from his place at the end of the table, I’d come to hate mealtimes. I would eat standing in front of the opened refrigerator, I would eat sitting on the lower steps of the stairs, I would eat in my room or even in the bathroom, my mouth flooding with saliva. As quickly now at the little desk in my room—a desk Daddy had built for me from smooth whorled oak wood, left over from a construction site—I tried to spoon the shredded wheat into my mouth, before my mother called me as I knew she would.
First Ben, then Krista. There had to be some logic in our mother’s cruelty.
Half-choking I swallowed chunks of shredded wheat, milk. Thinking I don’t know yet. What Ben knows, I don’t know.
“Krista? Come here, I have something to tell you.”
My mother stood at the foot of the stairs calling to me. Her voice was sharp as a knife-blade, I could see it glittering, I wanted to run away, to hide! But I was not a small child any longer, I was eleven years old.
I could not have said if I was mature for my age, or immature. I may have looked younger than eleven but I felt older. I was the girl on the school bus who when the other, older girls shivered and shuddered whispering of That awful thing that was done to Zoe Kruller worse than being strangled sat very still and silent and seemed not to hear.
When I came downstairs, my mother had returned to the dining room where she’d been seated at the drop-leaf cherrywood table which was a “family heirloom” always covered by a tablecloth. The dining room was a room rarely used, and then mostly on holidays. For privacy Mom had brought the kitchen phone into this room, on an extension. These were days before portable phones and cell phones and you were bound to a socket outlet and an extension cord. It was startling to see on the dining room table so many manila folders: financial statements, insurance policies, receipts and income tax forms, scattered official-looking letters, papers.
“Mom? What’s all these things?”
“Sit down, Krista. Never mind these things.”
“But—”
“Wipe your mouth, Krista, for heaven’s sake! It looks like you’ve been lapping milk. I said, sit down.”
I hated the dining room chairs, that were so special. Hard cushions and wicker backs that weren’t comfortable, nothing like the worn vinyl kitchen chairs. Our family meals were always in the kitchen and the dining room was used only for special occasions, occasions of forced festivity arranged by my mother and her family to celebrate birthdays, holidays. There was an inflexible schedule by which Christmas eve, Christmas day, Thanksgiving, and Easter were rotated among my mother and her relatives.
Daddy had used to tease Mom about the tablecloth: What’s the point of cherrywood if no one can see it?—and Mom had said what if someone left a glass ring, a stain or a burn on the table, this was a risk she couldn’t take.
Since Daddy had gone to live with his brother Earl, Mom had become busy as we’d never seen her before. Always she was bustling about the house, up and down stairs; always she was on the phone. Bauer relatives came to see her every day, in the dining room with doors slid shut. There were several women friends who smiled grimly at me and looked as if they’d like to hug me against their droopy bosoms except I ducked away.
A hawk-faced man in a suit and necktie Mom introduced to Ben and me as “my accountant.” Another man in a suit and tie—“Mr. Nagel, my lawyer.”
Lawyer. I didn’t want to think what this might mean.
Estranged. Separated. Divorced…
“Krista? I want you to listen carefully—”
With an awkward sort of tenderness my mother took hold of my chill squirmy hands. She was speaking in a quiet voice which was unsettling to me, a wrong-sounding voice, a forced voice, a voice in which something pleading quivered, though less than an hour ago I’d heard her on the phone speaking sharply, punctuating her words with bursts of what sounded like laughter. I wanted to shut my ears against her, thinking with childish stubbornness Daddy will come back and change all this. Anything that is being done, Daddy will change back to what it should be. Both Ben and I had noticed that our mother’s eyes had a weird glassy sheen for lately she’d been taking prescription medications to help her sleep and to settle her nerves. Not wanting to see Mom’s eyes I stared at our hands, locked so strangely together. As if we were in some dangerous place, on a rocky height for instance, it was our instinct to clutch at each other, in fear. And yet the fear I felt was for my mother. For those glassy red-rimmed eyes and for the smeared-lipstick mouth that might tell me something very ugly I would not wish to hear.
Here was a surprising thing: my mother had removed her rings.
The “white gold” engagement ring with the single square-cut small diamond, and the matching wedding band she said she didn’t think she could force off her finger any longer, she’d gained so much weight. These were gone, I had never seen my mother’s fingers without rings before.
Something was trying to make me remember