Little Bird of Heaven Read online

  “The County Line. He took you there?”

  My mother’s eyes shone like copper coins. For she had me now, she would not readily surrender me.

  “Why didn’t you call me, Krista? If you were in a place with a phone? You must have known I’d be waiting for you.”

  “I did call, Mom. I tried….”

  “No. I was here, I’ve been home since four-fifteen. I would have heard the phone ringing.”

  “Mom, when I called the line was busy. Two or three times I tried, the line was busy….”

  This was true: I’d tried to call my mother from the County Line. But I’d only tried twice. Both times the busy signal had rung. Then I’d given up, and I’d forgotten.

  Now my mother was saying, conceding: maybe she had been on the phone, for just a few minutes. Maybe yes she’d missed my call. “I called Nancy’s number”—Nancy was a classmate of mine who lived in Sparta, at whose house I sometimes stayed overnight—“to see if you were there, or if Nancy knew where you might be. She didn’t.”

  “Mom, for Christ’s sake! Why’d you call Nancy.”

  “Krista, don’t use profanity in my presence. That’s crude, and that’s vulgar. Your father might say ‘For Christ’s sake’—and a lot worse—but I don’t want to hear such words in my daughter’s mouth.”

  Fuck, Mom. Such words are all I have.

  My heart beat in resentment that in my mother’s eyes I was still a child when I was certain I had not been a child in a long time.

  “How badly was he drinking? Was it bad?”

  “No.”

  “And he was driving. Was he—drunk?”

  I turned away. I hated this. I would not inform on my father any more than, to my father, I would have informed on my mother.

  We’d blundered out of the warm-lit kitchen of shiny maple wood cupboard doors on brass hinges and a countertop of pumpkin-colored Formica, into a shadowy, always musty-smelling alcove by the stairs to the second floor. As in an aggressive dance my mother seemed to be pushing close to me. Breathing into my face with a smell of something sour, frantic.

  Lucille didn’t drink: but Lucille had her prescription medication with the unpronounceable name: “Diaphra”—something.

  “Where are you going so quickly, Krista? Why are you in such a hurry to get away from me?”

  “Mom, I’m not. I have to use the bathroom. My clothes are wet, I want to change my clothes.”

  “He made you run through the rain? He didn’t even bring you up to the house?”

  “There’s an ‘injunction’ against him, Mom. He’d be arrested, coming onto this property.”

  “He should be arrested, violating the custody agreement. Picking you up at school—I assume that’s what he did—without my permission or knowledge. He should be arrested for drunk driving.”

  I was trying to smile, to placate her. Trying to ease past her without touching her for I feared that her touch would be scalding.

  It was so frequently a surprise to me, a sick-thrilling sort of shock, that my mother was not so tall as she’d once been. For by magic I had grown taller, and more reckless. My hard little breasts were the size of a baby’s fists but the nipples were growing fuller, a deep berry-color, and sensitive; I now wore these breasts tenderly cupped in a white cotton “bra” size 32A. I wore white cotton panties with double-thick crotches. Every four weeks or so I “menstruated”—a phenomenon that filled me with a commingled rage and pride, and anxiety that others—like my mother—would know what my body was doing, what red-earthen-colored seepage it was emitting through a tight little hole between my legs.

  My mother was speaking to me, sharply. I wasn’t able to concentrate. As I stood on one of the lower steps of the stairs, my mother stepped up to stand beside me. This was so weird! This was not right. At school, you’d be nudged away, standing so close; even a best friend.

  In my confusion it seemed almost that my mother had slapped me, or—someone had slapped me. Or—had someone kissed me hard at the edge of my mouth? A man’s whiskery-scratchy kiss that had stung.

  What I wanted was: to get away from this woman, to contemplate that kiss. To draw strength from that kiss. To observe my heated face in a mirror, seeing if that kiss had left a mark.

  Love ya, Puss! You know that eh?

  Your old man has let you down, you and your brother, but your old man will make it up, sweetie. You know that eh?

  Yes it was so, Daddy “drank.” But what man did not drink? No man of my acquaintance in Sparta, no man among my father’s relatives, did not drink except one or two who’d been forbidden alcohol since alcohol would now kill them.

  Tell your mother I love her. That will never change.

  “—I have now, you and your brother. Don’t roll your eyes at me, Krista, it’s so. You are my family—you are precious to me. He doesn’t love you, he’s just using you to get back at me. ‘Vengeance is mine, saieth the Lord’—this was some old joke of your father’s, he and his brothers would laugh about. The Diehls are all good haters. They’re good enemies. They aren’t trustworthy husbands, fathers, friends—but they’re very good enemies.” My mother paused, having made this familiar declaration: many times I’d heard it, from both my mother and from her (female) relatives. “He picked you up at school, yes? It’s dangerous to drive with a drinker, Krista. You know he’s been arrested for DUI—I wish they’d revoked his license forever. He has hurt others terribly, he will hurt you. He has hurt you, but you pretend not. Can’t you understand, Krista, the man is an adulterer. It wasn’t just me he betrayed, he betrayed all of us. And you know—he hurt that woman. He is a—”

  I pushed free of her, with a little cry. I would not let her utter that terrible word murderer.

  As I dared to push past my mother she lost control and slapped me: twice, hard, on the side of my head. It was rare that Lucille behaved like this—rare in recent years—for she wasn’t “Mrs. Edward Diehl” any longer but had reverted to “Lucille Bauer” which was her prim girlhood name, a name of which she appeared to be proud; and Lucille Bauer, like all the Bauers, disapproved of displays of weakness in herself, as in others.

  Yet her coppery eyes were fierce, she was trying to hug me in an iron grip, pin my arms against my sides. You hear of out-of-control children, autistic children, being “hugged” in such vises, for their own good. The sensation was terrible to me, terrifying. I could not bear it. I could not bear my mother’s sour breath. A smell of her intimate flesh, her powdery-talcum-plump body, the feeling of her large soft breasts nudging against me, her surprisingly strong fingers…. “Let me go! I hate you.” Terrified I ran up the stairs, stumbling and near-falling; and then I did fall, and scraped my knee, pushed myself up again immediately like a panicked animal, running from a predator. It is said that a panicked animal’s strength increases double-or triple-fold and so panic-strength coursed through me, an adrenaline kick to the heart.

  To be touched—claimed—by my mother in one of her moods of possession! I knew that I was expected to be passive, meek and childlike in her embrace, this had once been peace between us, this had once been love, Mommy’s little Krissie who has been naughty but now forgiven and safe in Mommy’s arms protected from Daddy’s loud voice and heavy footsteps and Daddy’s unpredictable ways, all that is unknowable and unpredictable in maleness, but I was resisting her now, I would not ever be meek and childlike in this woman’s arms, never again.

  It was wounding to us both, lacerating. I would feel that my heart had been torn. Yet I was resolute, unyielding. I would not call back to her, not the most careless words of apology. Stumbling into my darkened room I slammed the door. Behind me on the stairs was the furious aggrieved voice:

  “You disgust me, Krista! You’re deceitful, you will turn out like him—betraying those who love you.”

  For there is nothing worse than betrayal, is there? Not even murder.

  3

  HE WOULD SAY I am innocent you know that don’t you?

  And I woul
d say Yes Daddy.

  But it was never enough of course. The fervent belief, the unquestioning love of a child for her father—this may be precious to the father but it can’t ever be enough for him.

  To claim—to claim repeatedly—that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.

  Unless you are publicly vindicated of whatever it is you have been strongly suspected of doing, it can’t be enough.

  …you know that darling don’t you? You and your brother? You and your brother and your mother have got to know that don’t you?

  Yes Daddy.

  4

  “HEY SORRY BABE, fuckin’ sorry sweetheart you got in my face.”

  And they laughed, that I’d been knocked onto my skinny ass on the basketball court and tears sprang from my widened eyes like cartoon-eyes, not for the first time this afternoon.

  And my nose leaking blood from a mean girl’s swift elbow before the referee could blow her ear-shattering whistle.

  “Poor baby. Poor li’l white-gal. Man, I am sor-ry!”

  After-school basketball at Sparta High. To play with these girls you had to be tall, strong, tough, quick on your feet. Or reckless.

  There were other girls I could have played with, if I’d wanted to. Girls my own age, my own size and not so athletic as I was so I’d have been the star player in their midst as I’d been in eighth and ninth grades at the junior high. But I wanted to play with these girls: Billie, Swansea, Kiki, Dolores. They were older, and bigger. They were sixteen, seventeen years old. Dolores may have been eighteen. She and Kiki lived on the Seneca Indian reservation a few miles north of Sparta—they had sleek black straight hair that lashed and swung about their shoulders heads like scimitars, their black eyes shone with malice and merriment. Driving out into the countryside north of the city—the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains—you were made to see the wreckage of long-ago glaciers in their slow violence causing the rocky landscape to contort like something forced through a meat grinder. You were made to see how, being given such untillable and near-uninhabitable land by the U.S. government in treaties they had no choice but to sign generations ago, the descendants of the original Six Tribes of upstate New York might wish to exact some sort of revenge upon their Caucasian benefactors whenever the opportunity arose.

  My classmates thought that I was crazy to play with these older girls. I was the youngest, in tenth grade, slender-boned and wily as a snake weaving and darting unpredictably and my silky-blond ponytail flying behind me as if to provoke; more than once as I’d leapt to shoot a basket, I’d felt a sharp little tug on my ponytail to throw me off-stride. I weighed no more than one hundred six pounds and if I was hit—and often, you can be sure, I was hit—by one of the larger girls, I fell to the polished hardwood floor so stunned sometimes I couldn’t get up for several seconds.

  “Krista sweetie—you O.K.? C’mon girl, get up.”

  Mostly they liked me. Things they said to me—crude, funny, obscene—they said to one another. They were fluent in profanities meant to be endearments—“Out of my face, bitch”—“Fuckin’ white bitch”—“Fuckin’ cunt.” (Most of us were in fact “white”—but there were gradations of “white.” As there were gradations of what was never given a name—“social class”—“background.” At Sparta High there were students, among them Dolores and Kiki, and several other girl-athletes, who had relatives, neighbors, friends, and boyfriends in or recently paroled from juvenile detention facilities and prisons; their obscenity-laced speech was prison-speech, a kind of roughshod poetry.) In their midst I was “Krissie” who didn’t have to be taken seriously, like a team mascot. If I sometimes surprised them by sinking a basket unexpectedly, appropriating a wayward ball, running in my liquid-snaky way beneath their elbows and darting to the front of the court before anyone could stop me, still I was no competition for even the second-best players, I lacked the true athlete’s aggressiveness, the willingness to be mean. When play on the court got rough—as it was sure to do at least once per game—I shrank away, never held on to the ball if I was in danger of being hurt. And if you’d been knocked down and fouled you might then be caressed, if a 150-pound girl collided with you like a dump truck colliding with a baby carriage, knocked you skidding on your skinny little ass on the floor, this same girl might stoop over you to help you to your feet: with a sly slit of a smile she might rub her knuckles against your scalp, or give your ponytail a tug, or pinch the nape of your neck murmuring, ‘Fuckin’ sorry, baby. You got in my way.”

  Not so bad, then. Even a blood-dripping nose.

  Limping to the foul line as girls lined up to watch: shooting fouls was what Krissie Diehl became damned good at, having had plenty of opportunities.

  “’Way to go, Krissie! C’mon girl.”

  “You go, girl! Show us you’ li’l thang.”

  Late-afternoon Thursday, my father appeared at basketball practice. No warning, never any warning for that wasn’t Eddy Diehl’s way.

  Lucille would accuse me of making plans with “your father” behind her back but how could I have possibly planned to meet him, my father had made no attempt to contact me in months and I had no way of contacting him except through the Diehls who weren’t very nice to me (as Lucille’s daughter and a co-conspirator they believed); I wasn’t even sure where he was living now—Buffalo? Batavia? Not a day, not an hour passed that I didn’t think of my father and when I wasn’t consciously thinking of him he was a dull throb of an ache in my throat and yet I could not have said with certainty where he might be.

  Wake in the night, perspiring and anxious: that throb-ache.

  My brother Ben said contemptuously it was like an infection, he had it, too. “Some damn fever. As long as we live here in Sparta and people know our name, we’re sick with it: Eddy Diehl’s kids.”

  AFTER BASKETBALL, unless I was staying overnight in town with a classmate, I took the 4:30 P.M. bus home, which was called the “late bus.” (The “regular” bus left at 3:30 P.M.) Our house on the Huron Pike Road was about three miles from Sparta High and I would have been home just after 5 P.M. except: I never got on the bus.

  Just inside the gym doors he was standing. Rare to see adults in the gym at such times. As the game ended I limped off the court wiping my sweaty face on my T-shirt and I heard a male voice—startling, in that context—a thrilling growly undertone: “Krista.”

  At once I looked up. Looked around. A man not twenty feet away, in a fawn-colored suede jacket, dark trousers, cap pulled low over his forehead. Was he signaling to me?

  Now I heard him, more clearly: “Krista. Outside.”

  I felt weak. I could not reply. Staring after my father as he pushed through the doors to the corridor beyond, and was gone.

  Other girls had seen him, heard him. Of course. They’d sighted him—a man—Krista Diehl’s father?—before I had.

  We shuffled into the locker room together. Girls who’d been laughing loudly had quieted. Girls who felt a certain tenderness for me, or, at least, some measure of tolerance, glanced at me with expressions of curiosity, concern.

  Diehl? The one who…?

  That woman who was killed, he’s the one who…? Why’s he out of prison so soon?

  Someone—I think it was our gym teacher—was watching me. Asking me some question but I pretended not to hear. Through the excited buzzing in my ears there was little I might have heard, that I wished to hear.

  Wanting to laugh in all their faces. For what did any of them know about my father Eddy Diehl, and me? Thinking He has come for me, you can see how special I am after all.

  5

  “IT’S OVER.”

  Or, “It’s finished.”

  These were my mother’s words. There was dignity in my mother’s posture—erect, not visibly tremulous, head held high and eyes unflinching—as there was dignity in the brevity of su
ch a reply: her response to questions put to her about her (ex)-husband Eddy Diehl. For it was not to be avoided, Lucille Bauer was asked about Eddy Diehl, this now much-talked-of and “controversial” individual to whom she’d been married for eighteen years, which was most of her adult life; and when Lucille wasn’t asked in actual blunt rude pushy words she was asked by implication, indirection.

  Oh Lucille! How is it with—? And so she’d taken to replying in this brief cool but perfectly polite way, with a knife-cut of a smile that suggested hurt, or the mockery thereof.

  Want to see me cry? Want to see my broken heart? You won’t.

  In the 1980s, in Sparta, New York, the expectations of a young woman of Lucille’s class—working-class/middle-class/“respectable”/“good”—were not essentially different from the expectations of Lucille’s mother in the late 1950s and early 1960s: you yearned to be engaged young, married young, start to have your babies young. You yearned to attract the love of an attractive man, possibly even a sexy man, certainly a man who made a good living, a man who was faithful.

  In the late 1960s, elsewhere in the country, or, at least, in the tabloid America fantasized, packaged and sold by the commercial media, there had been a sexual revolution: a hippie take-over. But not in Sparta, and not in Herkimer County. Not in upstate New York in this glacier-raddled region in the southern foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. Here, despite a rising divorce rate, more “single-parent” homes (i.e., Negro mothers on welfare, much talked-of, disapproved-of ), and other unmistakable incursions of the 1960s fallout, the America of the 1950s yet prevailed, beneath a showy veneer like the faux yellow pine hardwood floors my father’s construction company sold, since prospective homeowners didn’t want to pay for the real thing.

  Not publicly but to her family, repeatedly and dazedly my mother would say—not quite within my hearing, but I managed to hear—that she’d never known Eddy: she’d lived with a man for all those years, she’d had two children with him and she’d never known his heart.