Read Online Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page B

was wrong.
    Do you for. Not Do for you. This was so funny!
    Even Ben, who disliked being teased, especially by people he didn’t know well, laughed when Zoe Kruller leaned on her elbows to peer down at him over the counter asking what could she Do him for and calling him Daddy’s big boy.
    Well, if Mommy had brought us, Zoe would call Ben Mommy’s big boy. But it wasn’t so thrilling somehow, then: Zoe wouldn’t pay much attention to us, then.
    Our mother knew Zoe Kruller when she’d had a different last name. When she’d been a high school girl, the younger sister of a classmate of Lucille Bauer’s at Sparta High.
    In a small city like Sparta, everyone knows everyone else. It’s a matter of age, generation. Everyone knows everyone’s family background, to a degree. There are commingled histories, intense friendships and intense feuds that, having gone underground decades before, continue to smolder and pollute the air.
    You can smell the pollution, but you can’t see it. You could not ever guess its history.
    Tangled roots, beneath the surface of the earth. How astonishing to discover these roots, so hidden. How my mother began working obsessively outdoors that spring, digging in the clayey soil beside the driveway determined to plant what she called snow-on-the-mountains —a hardy fast-growing perennial—and the shovel struck a tangle of roots like something ugly knotted in the brain.
    When the trouble began in my parents’ lives—except Ben and I had not known that there was anything like the trouble, at the start—our mother became strange to us, spending time outdoors as she’d never done in the past, sweaty and her forearms ropey-veined in a way frightening to see, andthe set of her mouth grim like something zipped-up seen from the wrong side. And Mom would try to sink the shovel into the ground, using her weight as leverage, and the sole of her sneakered foot struck hard against the rim of the shovel and she cried out in pain Oh God! God-damn.
    Beneath, those tangled roots. Severed, their insides glared a terrible white like bone marrow.
    However our mother knew Zoe Kruller who was so glamorous at Honeystone’s, our father knew Zoe Kruller some other way.
    Say I was on comfortable speaking terms with my brother Ben—from whom I am not estranged, exactly—and I called him impulsively and asked Do you remember us going to Honeystone’s? When Daddy took us? How different was that, from when Mom took us?
    And say Ben didn’t hang up the phone. But in a mood of not-bitter reminiscence he would speak sincerely to me, thoughtfully. He would say:
    Sure, you could tell. For sure.
    At the time?
    No. Not at the time.
    But later?
    Right. Later.
    That quickness in Daddy. Playing the car radio loud, humming loudly with it. Driving just a little too fast on Huron Pike Road and the careful way he parked in Honeystone’s graveled lot, very likely it was one of Eddy Diehl’s showy cars he was driving, that very morning washing, waxing, polishing in our driveway and here in Honeystone’s graveled parking lot Eddy Diehl was positioning the car in such a way that, if anyone inside cared to glance out—Honeystone’s front window was horizontal, long, plate-glass spanning nearly the width of the building—she would see the stately 1973 Lincoln Continental with two-tone beige-and-black finish, or maybe it was the cream-colored 1977 Oldsmobile Deluxe with its glittering chrome grille—possibly the cherry-red vintage Thunderbird like the sleekest of rockets yearning to be launched—and she would stop dead in her tracks, and stare. And smile.
    Eddy Diehl’s specialty-autos were to make observers smile.
    Certain observers, that is. Others, the intention was to intimidate, provoke envy.
    Jesus! Who owns that?
    Seeing this vehicle in the lot, guessing the driver was probably Eddy Diehl, quickly she would turn away to check her reflection in the mirror at her back, or in the mirror of the little plastic compact she kept