Little Bird of Heaven
Joyce Carol Oates

For Charlie Gross

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

Part Two

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

45

Part Three

1

2

Praise

Also by Joyce Carol Oates

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

1

THE YEARNING IN MY HEART! This was a long time ago.

“Can’t go inside with you, Krista. But I promise: I won’t drive away until you’re safe indoors.”

That November evening at dusk we were driving along the river—the Black River, in southern Herkimer County, New York—west and slightly south of the city of Sparta, in this long-ago time swathed in mist and smelling of a slightly metallic damp: the river, the rain.

There are those of us—daughters—forever daughters, at any age—for whom the smells—likely to be twin, twined—of tobacco smoke and alcohol are not unpleasant but highly attractive, seductive.

Driving along the river, bringing me home. This man who was my father Edward Diehl—who’d been “Eddy Diehl” and a name of some notoriety in Sparta, in those years—“Eddy Diehl” who would be my father until the night his body was to be riddled with eighteen bullets fired within ten seconds by an improvised firing squad of local law enforcement officers.

Daddy’s hoarse voice, always slightly teasing. And you love being teased if you’re a daughter, you know it is a sign of love.

“Just say we got held up, Puss. No need to elaborate.”

I laughed. Anything Daddy said, I was likely to laugh and say Sure.

Always you had to respond quickly to a remark of Daddy’s, even if it wasn’t a question. If you failed to respond Daddy would look sharply at you, not frowning but not smiling either. A nudge in the ribs—Eh? Right?

Of course Daddy was bringing me home just a little late, carelessly late. So that there was no mistaking that I’d been brought home and hadn’t taken the school bus.

Careless, that was Eddy Diehl’s way. It was never Eddy Diehl’s intention.

Daddy was bringing me home on that November evening not long before his death-by-firing-squad to a house from which he’d been banished by my mother and the circumstances of his banishment had been humiliating to him. This was a two-storey white clapboard house of no special distinction but it was precious to my father, or had been: a house Daddy had partly built, with his hands; a house whose roofing and painting he’d overseen; a house like others on the river road, paint beginning to peel on its northern, exposed side, shutters and trim in need of repair; a house from which several years before Edward Diehl had been banished by an injunction issued by the Herkimer County Criminal Court, Family Services Division. (Neither my brother nor I had seen this document though we knew that it existed, hidden away somewhere in our mother’s legal files.)

Our mother kept such documents from us out of a fear—it was an unreasonable fear, but typical of her—that one of us, presumably me, might take the injunction and tear it into pieces.

I wasn’t that kind of daughter. I think that I wasn’t. Clinging to a man’s careless promise Won’t drive away until you’re safely indoors, Puss.

From what dangers might I be safe, by this action of my father’s, Daddy did not say.

I was very moved, Daddy called me Puss. This was my little-girl name I had not heard in some time. Though I was no longer a little girl, Daddy must know.

Having sighted him once, seeing me. Two years ago when I’d been in eighth grade. Thirteen years old and shorter by an inch or two than I was at fifteen, not an adolescent girl exactly though no longer what you’d call a little girl, yes but clearly a child, young for her age. And crossing a street downtown, several blocks from school, with two other eighth-grade girls. And squealing, and giggling, and running, as a tow truck bore menacingly upon us, the (male, young) driver teasing us by driving fast and (recklessly) close to cause a small tidal wave of gutter water to splash onto our bare legs, and once on the sidewalk, safe but laughing, breathless, in the aftermath of a frisson of terror by chance I saw a man about to climb into a car parked at the curb, and how intently this man was staring at us, at our wetted legs and clothes, seeing this man—with thick rust-colored hair, in profile—fleetingly, for I didn’t pause in running, none of us did—I thought Is that Daddy? That man?

Later, I would think no. Not Daddy. The car he’d been climbing into hadn’t looked familiar—I’d thought.

Of course, I hadn’t looked back. Stared-at in the street by an adult man, at age thirteen you don’t look back.

That day, two years before, there’d been rain. So frequently in Sparta there was rain. From Lake Ontario to the north and west—from the Great Lakes, beyond—(which I knew only from maps, and loved to contemplate: these lakes like exquisite cloud-formations linked one to the other and so beautifully named Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, Superior where our father had promised Ben and me he’d take us sometime, on a “yacht trip”)—always a sky out of which rain-clouds, massive gray-black thunderheads, might emerge as if by malevolent magic.

Of that landscape, and of that parentage.

And so it was raining that evening. And on the narrow blacktop Huron Pike Road visibility was poor. Walls of pale mist like amnesia drifting in front of Daddy’s car, the car’s yellow-tinged headlights that had seemed so powerful were swallowed up in mist. In such driving conditions it’s possible to forget where you are and where you are headed and for what purpose for the infrequent houses were obscured in mist and mailboxes loomed out of the dark like sudden raised arms. “Daddy? Here—” I said for abruptly there was our mailbox at the end of the graveled driveway emerging out of the mist before my father seemed to have expected it.

Daddy grunted to signal Yes. I know where the hell you live.

Now would Daddy turn into the driveway?—that long puddled lane leading back into darkness?—leading back as in a tunnel to our house that, in the encroaching dark, barely visible from the road, glowed a ghostly white? There was only a faint light in the living room windows, the upstairs was darkened. It might have been the case that no one was home except I knew that my mother would be at the rear of the house, in the kitchen where she spent much of her time. If Ben was home, very likely he’d be upstairs in his room also at the rear of the house.

Before he’d moved out—before the court injunction banished him—my father had repaired the steep shingled roof of our house, that had been leaking into the attic; he’d done some electrical rewiring, in the basement; he’d bolstered up the back steps leading into the house. By trade he’d been a carpenter, and a good one; he was a work foreman now, for a Sparta construction company.

Everywhere inside the house, upstairs and down, was evidence of Daddy’s carpentry work, his attentiveness to the house. You would be led to presume, Edward Diehl’s devotion to his family.

Daddy didn’t turn into the driveway but braked to a stop on the road.

Almost I could hear him mutter to himself God damn I will not.

For if he had, he would approach too closely the place of his shame. The place of his expulsion. The place of his hurt and of his rage that was at times a murderous rage, and it was too risky for him who had been banished from these premises by an order of the county court, whose breath smelled frankly of whiskey and whose face was flushed with a deep hot furious fire.

Would you think it strange that to me, who had lived all her life on the Huron Pike Road, the daughter of a man not unlike other men who lived on the Huron Pike Road in those years, the smell of whiskey on my father’s breath was not disturbing but a kind of comfort? (So long as my mother didn’t know. But my mother needn’t know.) A risky comfort, but a comfort nonetheless for it was familiar, it was Daddy.

And the stubbled jaws suddenly ticklish-scratchy against my face as Daddy leaned over to kiss the edge of my mouth, wetly. Daddy’s movements were impulsive and clumsy as those of a man who has long lived by instinct yet has come at last to distrust instinct as he has come to distrust his own capacity for judgment, his sense of himself. Even as Daddy kissed me, roughly, a little too hard, a kiss he intended I would not soon forget, Daddy was pushing me away for a hot rush of blood had come between us.

“G’night, Puss.”

Not good-bye he was saying but good night. This was crucial to me.

It had not seemed to be raining hard but as soon as I climbed out of Daddy’s car and began to run to the house, a chill pelting rain started. A mad flurry of wet leaves rushed at me. Awkwardly I ran with my head lowered, I was breathless and wanting to laugh, so awkward, my backpack gripped in one hand slapping against my legs, almost tripping me. I hated to think that my father might be watching me. Halfway up the lane I turned to see—as somehow I knew I would see—the red taillights of my father’s car fading into the mist.

“Daddy! G’night—”

YOU WOULD THINK But he’d promised her! He’d wait until she was safely inside the house.

You would think that I was disappointed, hurt. And that I was not even surprised, to be disappointed and hurt. But you would be mistaken for I have never been a daughter to judge my father who’d been so harshly, cruelly and wrongly judged by others; and I would not wish to recall so trivial, so petty an injury, a misunderstanding, a moment’s carelessness on the part of a man with so much else to occupy his mind, a man drawn ever more rapidly and inexorably into the orbit of his death and his oblivion beyond the length of the graveled driveway glistening with puddles on that rainy night in November 1987 when I was fifteen years old and eager for my true life to begin.

2

REPROACH LIKE AN ARROW leaping from the bow, aimed at my heart. Reproach in a voice of the lightest chiding, almost you’d mistake—if this were a TV comedy, if you were an unseasoned viewer—for playfulness, mischief.

“You were with him, Krista. Weren’t you.”

My mother did not emphasize him. In the light-chiding TV-Mom voice “him” was flat as concrete.

Nor was her query a question. It was a statement: an accusation.

“You could have called, at least. If you weren’t going to take the bus. If you’d given a thought to anyone except yourself—and him. You’d have known that—”

That I was worried. Or if not worried, offended.

A mother’s pride is easily hurt, don’t mistake a mother’s love as unconditional.

Breathless from my dash through the rain and indignant, straggly-haired I kicked off my boots, fumbling to spike my jacket on a hook by the door half-hoping it would tear. A spiffy purple faux-silk jacket with cream-colored trim I’d quite liked when it was new not so very long ago but now had come to think looked cheap and too hopeful. I was avoiding confronting my mother for I did not want to have to respond to the accusing look in her eyes, a commingling of relief—for truly she’d been worried about me, not having known where I might be—and mounting anger. In the square-cut window above the kitchen counter, that my father had constructed, as he’d rebuilt much of the kitchen, our reflections appeared close together by a trick of perspective; yet you could not have identified either of us, even which was mother, which daughter. In a voice of deceptive calm my mother said, “Krista, at least look at me. Were you—you were, weren’t you?—with him?”

And now it was him. Now, unmistakably.

A strap of my backpack had become tangled in my feet. I kicked it aside, my face was smarting. Near-inaudibly I murmured Yes for I could not lie to my mother who so knew my mutinous heart, and, when she asked what I’d said, guiltily I repeated, defiantly: “Yes. I was with—Daddy.”

Daddy was a little-girl word. Ben had not uttered Daddy in years.

“And where were you, with ‘Daddy’?”

“Just driving. Nowhere.”

“‘Nowhere.’”

“Along the river. Nowhere special.”

But yes it was special. Because it was just Daddy and me.

Betrayal is the hurtful thing. Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

My mother’s name was Lucille. No one called her “Lucy.” An acute consciousness of her authority—now, the vulnerability of her authority—seemed to grip her, to bedevil her, at such times, increasingly as I grew older; to the most casual of exchanges she brought a mysterious demand that seemed never to be fully satisfied. Since Lucille’s husband—now her former husband—who was my father—had left us for the final time, or—this had never been clear to me, or to Ben—had been made to leave us, this demand had grown ever more insatiable.

“‘Nowhere’ would have to include a stop for drinks, yes? You must be forgetting that part.”

“Well—” I’d disentangled the strap from my feet, I had no reason not to look at my mother standing close beside me. “That country place on route thirty-one, by the Rapids bridge…”

“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-talcumy-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 would 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 such 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 muchtalked-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.

(Was this so? Neither Ben nor I had any idea. Photographs of our young parents showed two strikingly attractive individuals: a very pretty round-faced girl with a cheerleader-smile, glamorous teased hair and a sizable bust straining against silk “designer” blouses; a tall broad-shouldered rust-red-haired young man with a jaw like a mallet, wary eyes and a sly half-smile very like the signature smile of the young Elvis Presley. Neither Ben nor I would have wished to acknowledge what seemed obvious if you studied these photos, especially a wedding photo in which the groom’s husky arm is slung about the bride’s shoulders all but crushing her against him, the groom’s large male hand cupped about the bride’s bare upper arm beneath a white lace stole, and the thumb of that hand unobtrusively pressing against, very likely rubbing against, the sweet fatty talcumed flesh of the bride’s right breast. Sex! Our parents! That was it.)

Over those eighteen years, Lucille had gained weight. And then, during the eighteen months preceding her divorce, Lucille had lost weight. Her moon-shaped face that had been such a pretty girl’s face well into her thirties became ravaged, cruelly lined; she’d lost weight too quickly for her skin to shrink, there were loose pockets and pouches of skin everywhere on her body she took pains to keep hidden. But Lucille had the sort of features that took well to make-up, still she could exude an aura of smalltown glamour. She never left the house without dressing presentably: “primping.” She never left the house without fresh-applied lipstick. Not long after the divorce—in September 1984, on the very Tuesday public schools began classes—Lucille had her hair cut and restyled and “lightened” and overnight those single steely hairs like nails had vanished, to her adolescent daughter’s immense relief.

Naively Ben said: “Mom looks different today, you notice?”

“Maybe she was smiling.”

“Ha-ha,” Ben said, in a way meant to convey heavy sarcasm. In all things having to do with my mother Ben flared up quickly, he hated our father for how our father had hurt our mother, thus had to love our mother blindly, without judgment and without nuance. If I persisted in criticizing Lucille, Ben had been known to punch me.

Not that Lucille smiled, much. Not at home.

Away from home, yes Lucille smiled. Returning to church—the First Presbyterian Church of Sparta, a grim triangle-shaped limestone structure that made my heart clutch like a fist, in adolescent resistance each time I was dragged into it—and to her “old, best friends” she’d “all but lost” while married to Eddy Diehl who “hadn’t any patience with nice people.”

Boring people, Mom meant. Nice boring kind-Christian women whose boring husbands hadn’t left them, not yet. Or anyway so far as anyone knew. Yet.

“Krista, Hilda Smith’s daughter Pearl—you must know her, she’s in your class at school?—belongs to Sparta Christian Youth Alliance—they have the most wonderful summer campground at Lake George, Hilda was telling me. I told her I’d speak to you…”

O.K., Mom. You’ve spoken to me.

“We need to put this behind us, Krista. This ugliness. Like an earthquake, or a flood, you’re in shock but then, you know, you galvanize. You come alive. The idea of the Gospels is—‘Good news is possible.’”

Lucille spoke with a hard gritty optimism like one grinding away with her teeth at something lodged in her mouth—some careless takingin of a substance not quite edible, grindable. But she would grind it down, she would swallow it. If you weren’t careful she would make you swallow it, too.

The Herkimer County order of restraint against Edward Diehl had originally been issued in April 1984 and since that time reissued at least once. By this order Edward Diehl was forbidden to approach his (ex)-wife Lucille and his children Benjamin and Krista in any public or private place; he was forbidden to come closer than one hundred feet of any of them; he was forbidden to “trespass” on the Huron Pike Road property that he himself had purchased with a thirty-year mortgage, twelve years before. Of course he dared not approach the house, nor even make telephone calls to the house, which he’d partly remodeled and in which he’d executed so much carpentry over a period of years. (In an extravagant and reckless gesture my father had simply deeded the property over to my mother—“The least he could do,” my mother said bitterly.)

In the months following the divorce, so far as we knew, Daddy lived in Sparta with friends, or relatives; Daddy may even have been taken in by a woman friend; for there were many who knew Eddy Diehl well, who’d gone to high school with him, and been drinking-friends of his, scarcely known to Lucille or to us. These people—mostly men but not exclusively men—were convinced that Eddy Diehl hadn’t done what it was claimed by others that he had done, committed an act of murder: “homicide.” They would not cease to believe in Eddy Diehl’s innocence even after he’d been taken into Sparta police custody, even when it was leaked to the media that he’d “failed” a polygraph test; even when his picture began to appear in local papers and on local TV news in the company of the other “prime suspect” in the case, the father of a classmate of a Sparta man uncannily resembling Eddy Diehl in age, height, physical type.

SUSPECTS IN KRULLER HOMICIDE QUESTIONED BY POLICE

THOUGH MY MOTHER HAD had our telephone number changed, and removed from the directory, yet my father managed to acquire the number as if by magic, and called us. Sometimes when one of us answered he didn’t speak: you listened and heard only a crackling sort of silence, like flames about to erupt. Timidly I said, “Daddy? Is that—you?” but Daddy would not answer, nor would Daddy hang up the phone; at such times I did not know what to do, for I loved my father very much, and was frightened of him; I had been made to be frightened of him; among the Bauers it was whispered that he was a brute, a murderer. And there were many in Sparta who believed yes, my father was a brute, a murderer. If Ben answered his voice went shrill, he was furious, half-sobbing: “We don’t want you to call us, Dad,” but Ben’s voice weakened when he uttered Dad, though he’d steeled himself not to say Dad, yet Dad had come out. Once when I picked up the phone expecting to hear my friend Nancy’s voice instead the voice was a man’s, low and gravelly: “Krista? Just this, honey: I love you.” On trembling legs I stood in the kitchen dazed and blinking as the voice continued, “Is your mother nearby? Is she listening?” and I could not manage to answer, my throat had closed tight, “Don’t hang up yet, honey. Just want you to know I love—” but the look in my face was a signal to my mother, with an angry little cry Mom took the receiver from me and slammed it down without a word.

So that the phone could not ring again, Mom removed the receiver from the hook.

“How dare he! He’s been warned! I should call the police…”

We could not sit down to our dinner! We were too excited to eat.

My mother insisted, we must eat. We must not be upset by him, he must not have such power over us. Numbly we sat at the table, we passed platters of the food that my mother and I had prepared together, we tried not to see where my father stood brooding and smoking in a corner of the kitchen.

My mouth was too dry, I could not chew or swallow. “Maybe he just wants to…” Numbly I spoke, my words were barely audible.

In her cool calm voice my mother said, “No, Krista. It’s over.”

And there were the times, how many times we had no idea, when my father drove past the house; when my father cruised slowly past the house, pausing at the end of the driveway; when my father dared to park at the side of the road, in a stand of straggly trees, not visible from the house. Word sometimes came back to us, from relatives. One of my mother’s cousins called. Virtually all of the Diehls supported Edward, their Eddy; the Bauers were less sure. (There was a split among the Bauers, in fact. Those who believed that Lucille’s husband might have been unfaithful to her, but not that he’d killed that woman: not Eddy! And those who believed yes, Eddy Diehl was capable of murder, if he’d been drunk enough. And angry, and jealous enough.) I knew that my father was close by because, some nights, I could feel his presence. I could hear his voice Krista? Krissie? Where’s my Puss? I’m coming to get my little Krissie-puss. There was a sensation inside my head like fire about to erupt, crystal glass about to be shattered. Almost unbearable excitement like the terrible thrill of a vehicle made to speed too fast for the road, the spinning basketball aimed at your unprotected face: that instant before the ball hits, and your nose spurts blood.

When I was thirteen, that Christmas when there’d been so much snowfall we were snowed in, and Herkimer County snowplows and tow trucks were on the Huron Pike Road through the night, that Christmas morning there was a vehicle parked at the end of the drive—just barely visible from my bedroom window—a pickup truck, it seemed to be—I saw a male figure climb out, and I saw this figure shoveling the end of our driveway where the snowplows had heaped up ridges of icy snow—at first I thought it must be someone from the county, though this wasn’t part of the usual snowplowing service—then I realized it had to be my father, coming to shovel out the end of the driveway as he’d always done after a heavy snowfall, when he’d lived with us.

And where was my father living then? Not in Sparta, I think—he must have made the drive early Christmas morning, in treacherous weather conditions, for this purpose.

Neither my mother nor Ben ever knew, I never told them. That the end of the driveway wasn’t blocked as usual must have made no distinct impression on my mother, when she drove her car out.

Another time, a more careless/desperate time he’d parked at the end of the driveway, very likely he’d been drinking and so forgot to switch off his headlights and Ben happened to notice from an upstairs window and shouted to my mother: “It’s him, Mom! Damn bastard, I hate him!”

In a panic my mother called the number the Herkimer County sheriff had given her for such emergencies and within minutes a squad car careened along Huron Pike Road with a flashing red light like on TV—unresisting, Eddy Diehl was arrested, taken away in handcuffs and in the morning his car was towed away.

Why Lucille declined to press charges, she would not explain.

“It’s over.”

He was gone, then. Except: one afternoon months later again he was sighted driving slowly past the small shopping center where my mother had begun part-time work at the Second Time ‘Round Shop—a “consignment” shop to which women brought no-longer-wanted clothing to be resold; he was sighted in the parking lot at the rear, just sitting in the car, smoking, possibly drinking; it would turn out, he’d told one of his Diehl cousins that he was wanting “just to see her, from a distance”—“not even to try to talk”—but Lucille didn’t appear, and after an hour or so he drove away.

It was Daddy’s statement made frequently to relatives, meant to be conveyed to Lucille: “She knows that I love her and the kids. That isn’t going to change. However she feels about me, I can accept it.”

SPARTA RESIDENT DIEHL, 42, RELEASED FROM POLICE CUSTODY “NO CHARGES AT THIS TIME”

Because my mother prowled in my room in my absence—I knew! I’d set devious Mom-traps in my sock-and-undies drawer and in my clothes closet—I kept my cache of clippings about my father in a school notebook, carried back and forth in my backpack. This clipping, from the Sparta Journal for April 29, 1983, commemorated the final time Edward Diehl’s photograph would appear prominently on the front page of that paper.

For that reason, and for the reason that it so clearly stated that Edward Diehl had been released from police custody, for lack of evidence linking him to the murder of Zoe Kruller, this clipping was precious to me.

Not that I failed to note—no one could fail to note, who was even skimming the article—the begrudging No Charges at This Time.

The conspicuous omission of Suspect Cleared.

Edward Diehl had been in police custody more than once, more than twice, possibly more than three times. He’d been identified—numberless times!—as one of the prime suspects; yet he’d never been arrested. (Another man, the murdered woman’s husband, had been arrested—but later released.) It was a season of misery and public humiliation for all of the Diehls, the Bauers, and their friends; for Ben and me, having to go to school where everyone seemed to know more about our father—our father and a woman named Zoe Kruller, who’d been “murdered”—“strangled in her bed”—than we did. For months the police investigation continued, very like a net being dragged in one direction and then in another, a nightmare net trapping all in its path, as virtually anyone who knew my father was “interviewed,” often more than once. After a year, two years, several years this case was still open; by November 1987, no one had been definitively arrested, and the name Zoe Kruller had vanished from the newspaper; Edward Diehl was no longer a prime suspect, evidently—yet no public announcement had ever been made by Sparta police or by the county prosecutor that Edward Diehl’s name had been cleared.

My mother never spoke of the case any longer. Like a woman who has endured a ravaging cancer, and managed to survive, she would not speak of what had almost killed her, and became white-faced with fury if anyone tried to bring it up. Lucille, d’you mind my asking how is—

Yes. I do mind. Please.

At the time, I had not been told much about what my mother and her family chose to call the trouble. I was believed to be an overly sensitive, excitable girl and so, more than my brother Ben, I was to be spared. But I knew that my father, who was no longer living with us, was a suspect in a local murder case, that he’d had to hire a lawyer, and in time he’d had to fire that lawyer and hire another lawyer; and, inevitably, he’d come to owe both lawyers thousands of dollars more than he could have hoped to pay them; for he was obliged to continue to support his family, which meant my mother, my brother, and me; and he’d lost his job at Sparta Construction, Inc. where he’d worked since the age of twenty, first as a carpenter’s assistant, then as a carpenter, then he’d been promoted to foreman/manager by his employer who was also his friend or had been his friend until he’d been taken into police custody.

All these facts, I knew. Though no one had told me openly.

The trouble was as good a way as any of pointing to what had happened. The trouble that has come into our lives my mother would say, as Daddy would say The trouble that has come into my life.

Like lightning from the sky. A catastrophe from out there.

When he’d been released from police custody for the second and final time—in late April 1983—my father was told that he was free to leave Sparta, and so he moved to Watertown, sixty miles to the north on the St. Lawrence River, where he got a job as a roofer; then he moved to Buffalo, two hundred miles to the west, where he worked construction. There was a time he lived in the Keene Valley in the Adirondacks, working for a logging company. And later, we heard he had a job with Beechum County, which was adjacent to Herkimer—snow removal, highway construction. In our lives my father appeared, and disappeared; and again appeared, and disappeared. He sent birthday cards to Ben and me—though never quite in time for our birthdays. He sent Christmas cards to LUCILLE, BENJAMIN & KRISTA DIEHL, R.D. # 3, HURON PIKE RD., SPARTA N.Y. signed in a large childlike scrawl LOVE, DADDY. Sometimes just LOVE DADDY. (These cards I scavenged from the trash where my mother had thrown them, to hide away in my secret Daddy-notebook.)

There came months of silence. No one spoke of Eddy Diehl, no one seemed to know where he was. But one evening the phone would ring and if our mother answered it we’d hear a sharp intake of breath and then Mom’s steely response: “No. It’s over. It’s finished. No more.”

If Ben answered, quickly he’d hang up the phone. White-faced and quivering Ben slammed out of the room—“That sick, sorry bastard. Why doesn’t he let us alone.”

If I answered—if Mom wasn’t there to hear me, and to snatch away the receiver—Daddy and I might talk, a little. Awkwardly, eagerly. My voice was tremulous and low-pitched and my heart beat hard hard hard like the wings of that little bird of heaven in the song Zoe Kruller once sang.

6

“KRISTA. CLIMB IN.”

Outside, at the rear exit of the school, Daddy’s car was waiting.

A vehicle unknown to me, I was sure I’d never seen before. A shiny expanse of dark-coppery metallic finish, gleaming chrome fixtures, new-looking, you might say flashy-looking, with whitewall tires and hubcaps like roulette wheels: one of Eddy Diehl’s specialty-autos.

These were purchases of secondhand cars of some distinction which Daddy would rebuild or “customize”—drive for a while, and resell, presumably at a profit. They were older-vintage cars—Caddies, Lincolns, Olds—or newer-vintage Thunderbirds, Corvettes, Stingrays, Mustangs, Barracudas; they were mysteriously acquired through a friend of a friend needing money suddenly, or bankruptcy sales, police auctions. Through my childhood these specialty-autos were both thrilling and fraught with peril for the purchases upset my mother even as they were wonderful surprises for my brother and me. Typical of Daddy to simply arrive home with a new car, without warning or explanation. There in the doorway stood Daddy rattling car keys, with his foxy-Daddy grin: “Look out in the driveway. Who wants a ride?”

We did! Ben and me! We adored our unpredictable Daddy!

It was like that now, this abruptness. My father showing up at school, in the gym. And now here. The demand that if you loved him you leapt unquestioning into the happiness that Eddy Diehl was offering you—otherwise the foxy-smile would cease abruptly, a hard cruel light would come into the narrowed eyes.

Without thinking—not a glimmer of caution—Do I want this? Where will he take me? What will happen to me?—nor recalling that my mother expected me home as usual within forty minutes, in this season in which dusk came early, before 5 P.M.—I climbed into the passenger’s seat of this impressive vehicle my father was driving and dropped my backpack onto the floor.

“Jesus, Puss! It’s been a hell of a long time.”

My father grabbed me: rough bear-hug, wet-scratchy kiss, unshaven jaws, fumey smell of his breath.

“Sweet li’l Puss”—“Krissie-baby.” Names no one had called me in a very long time.

As no one had hugged, kissed me like this in a very long time.

Daddy must have been forty-five—forty-six?—now. A large tall man—six foot four, 220 pounds—mostly solid meaty-muscle though beginning to slacken at the waist. He’d been a high school athlete (football, baseball) and in his early twenties he’d been a Private First Class in the U.S. Army (Vietnam) and he walked now with a slight limp in his right leg (shrapnel, wartime). He had declined to tell Ben and me about his Vietnam experiences, or adventures—we were certain that he’d had some—though we had never located any Vietnam snapshots, souvenirs, even Daddy’s medals (Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Medal) or letters from friends—he’d had to have had friends in his platoon, Eddy Diehl was such a gregarious man—but always he’d shrug us off evasively muttering It’s over, kids. Don’t go there.

Our mother didn’t encourage us to “provoke” Daddy. He was hurt, he was in the hospital for eight weeks. His mother told me, they thought he might not live.

And another time our mother told us, in a lowered voice He has never talked about it with me and it’s best that way.

In scorn I’d thought: What kind of selfish wife doesn’t even want to know about her husband in the war?

How easily, Daddy could have crushed me in his embrace. I would not realize until afterward—I mean years afterward—that Daddy may have been frightened of me, of the fact of me so suddenly with him, in his car; his laughter was loud, delighted. Possibly it was the laughter of disbelief, wonder, a pang of conscience—My daughter? My daughter I am forbidden to see? She has come to me, this is—her?

“That’s my good girl. My good—brave—girl.”

Tenderly my father’s large hands framed my face. My father’s large calloused hands. Once I had seen my father seize my mother’s face in his hands like this—not in love but in fury, exasperation—to make my mother listen, to make my mother see—and the long-ago memory came to me now, with a stab of panic. And yet, how unresisting I was: like a child whose anxiety has at last been quelled, all fear banished even fear of Daddy. Such luxury to be so gripped, so kissed and so loved. I knew that my father would never hurt me. Tears stung my eyes, ran down my face that throbbed with hurt from having been struck by a carelessly thrown basketball within the past hour. I could not have recalled when my mother had last kissed or even hugged me—could not have recalled when I’d last wished to be kissed or hugged by her. Such displays of emotion would have embarrassed us both. We’d have steeled ourselves to hear my brother say—this was one of Ben’s too-frequent household remarks delivered in a droll dry voice of disgust—Cut the crap for Christ’s sake. This ain’t TV.

This was not TV, I thought. This was improvised, unknown. This had not happened before. Or, if it had happened, it had not happened to me.

School buses were idling nearby, sending up sprays of exhaust. My classmates were running through the rain and there was much commotion in the parking lot as the buses were loading, preparing to leave. Headlights would have illuminated my father’s and my excited faces which Eddy Diehl would not have wished.

Is that—Eddy Diehl? The one who—

Is he with his daughter? What’s-her-name—

Quickly Daddy put his car in gear, drove out of the parking lot.

In the rain we drove for some confused yet exhilarant minutes. Not knowing where he was taking us—Edgehill Street, East End Avenue, Union Avenue—lower Main Street, a turn and steeply downhill to Depot—these streets of Sparta so familiar, in truth they lacked names to me—they were but directions, impulses—taking us away from my school where we might be recognized but lacking a destination since there was no longer a common destination in our lives.

With something of his old pride in such showy purchases my father was telling me about the car he was driving, a 1976 Caddie he’d acquired just in time for this visit. The finish was “Red Canyon” and the interior was “cream-colored leather, genuine.” This “beaut” of a car naturally came with power steering, whitewall tires, V-eight engine, air-conditioning, radio and tape deck, more mileage for the gallon than any other U.S. “luxury car.”

It was so, Daddy conceded, the Caddie’s chassis had had to be rebuilt after a rear-ending but the engine was in “damned good shape—you can hear it.”

I listened, I could hear it. Eagerly I nodded Yes yes! I can hear it.

Stammering with schoolgirl emotion I told my father that this was the most beautiful car of his, ever. The most fantastic car I’d ever ridden in.

“Well. Pretty close, Puss.”

Maybe what I said was true. Daddy’s specialty-autos had all been spectacular. But each spectacular vehicle—Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, Lincoln Versailles, Chevy Corvair, vintage Thunderbird and vintage Studebaker—had a way of displacing its predecessor as the most vivid and seductive dreams are displaced by their predecessors, and begin at once to fade.

There was a pause, I knew that my father would have liked to ask what kind of car Lucille was driving now. By implication Your life with your mother is pitiable. Like the love you get from your mother. But then I thought that Eddy Diehl would probably know exactly what sort of car Lucille was driving—which of the not-new but serviceable cars sold to her by relatives, or given to her outright.

Yes, my father would surely have known what my mother was driving at this time. Before seeking me out at school Daddy would have sighted and observed my mother at the Second Time ‘Round Shop—he’d have parked up the street, or in the parking lot at the rear. It was known that Eddy Diehl kept “close tabs” on his former wife Lucille by way of those several Diehl cousins with whom he remained close, conspiratorial; most of the Diehls continued to “believe in” Eddy, and detested Eddy’s former wife for not having “stood by him” when he’d needed her so badly.

And so it seemed to me suddenly, my father probably knew more about my mother’s private life than Ben and I knew, who would not have had the thought that our middle-aged, fretting and deeply unhappy mother could have a private life!

“—a little surprised, Krista but it’s a good surprise, how you’ve grown. I mean—tall. You’re going to be a tall girl. And pretty. You’re going to be damn pretty. Not that you aren’t pretty now, Puss—but—”

Daddy spoke distractedly as he drove the showy Cadillac through the rain, now beneath a railroad overpass where skeins of water lifted like wings behind us and I feared something might happen to the high-caliber engine, and we’d be stuck in a foot of water, “—and playing basketball with those girls—big tough Indian-looking girls—frankly, Puss, your Daddy was—” In a kind of genial-Daddy wonderment his voice trailed off. This was the sort of praise you might direct toward a child about whom you are thinking very different thoughts.

When my father wasn’t speaking in his loud blustery in-control Daddy voice, I’d come to hear another sort of voice: one that bore a wounded sweetness. Sometimes I woke from tumultuous dreams hearing this voice, recalling no coherent words but shivering with yearning. Observing my father now I saw that—of course, this should not have been suprising—he looked older. His face had thickened at the jawline, his skin was weathered and creased with a look like hard-baked bread. The thick rust-red hair threaded with mica-gray was in fact thinning at the back of his head where he was spared having to see it as he was spared having to see, and kept hidden from the world, the mass of swirling scar tissue, of the color of lard, that disfigured much of his right leg and knee.

Never did Eddy Diehl wear shorts, on the hottest days of summer. Never had he gone swimming with us, at Wolf’s Head Lake.

Though I’d glimpsed the injured leg, from time to time. I’d had to wonder if my mother saw it often, in my parents’ bedroom; if my mother was suffused with love for Daddy, for having suffered in wartime combat, or whether she felt a subtle revulsion for the disfigured flesh.

If she felt a subtle revulsion for my father’s maleness. His sexuality.

Daddy was saying now, how he’d been missing me. How he’d missed his “beautiful daughter”—how “God-damned depressed and in despair” he’d been missing his daughter he loved “more than anything on this earth.”

Steering the car through deep puddles of rainwater with one hand and with the other groping for my hand, capturing both my hands, clasping both hands together in his single hand, hard.

I tried not to wince. I loved such sudden pain!

I said, shyly, “Daddy, I missed you, too. I don’t know why Mom—”

“No ‘Mom,’ Krista. Not right now.”

Despite his unshaven jaws and slightly disheveled hair threaded with gray, my father was looking handsome, I thought. Even with his battered face, discolored pouches of skin beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t been sleeping well, or had been rubbing his fists into his eyes, and his forehead creased in thought or worry, Eddy Diehl was a handsome man. The suede coat he wore seemed to be padded with a woolly down like a large upright tongue—what comfort such a burly coat could give, if you were squeezed against it. And dark-graying hairs sprouting up from Daddy’s chest visible at his throat, what comfort in pressing my face against that throat, hiding my face there.

We’d ascended from the rain-pelted dark of Depot Street, the warehouse district, the scrubby waterfront of the Black River, now turning onto the Highlands Bridge that was a beautiful suspension bridge above the river with a wire-net surface that hummed beneath our car tires. A wild happiness was loosed inside the 1976 Caddie Seville with the cream-colored leather interior, Canyon Red finish and whitewall tires—“Fasten your seat belt! Taking off!” Daddy was laughing, of sheer delight, or defiance; I heard myself laugh, excited and uneasy.

Where was Daddy taking me? Across the suspension bridge, into a now lightly falling rain, mist rising from the invisible river below and a blurred vision of lights along the river, the dim stretch of derelict riverfront brick mills and factories shut down for as long as I could remember—Link Ladies Luxury Hosiery, Reynolds Bros. Paper Goods, Johnston Tomato Cannery.

These familiar Sparta landmarks I’d been seeing all my life long before the trouble had destroyed my family.

“—damned proud, Krista. Seeing my li’l girl mixing it up with those big hulking girls.”

Big hulking girls seemed to mean something other than its words. Big hulking girls contained something sexy, sniggering.

I asked Daddy how he’d known where I was? That I’d stayed after school, and was in the gym? Daddy tapped the side of his nose saying, “Your old man has you on his radar, Krista. Better believe it.”

Was he drunk, I wondered. Growly-teasing voice, his words just perceptibly slurred.

And yet: there is no happiness like being fifteen years old and being driven by your (forbidden) father to a destination you can’t—yet—guess. Your handsome (forbidden) father so clearly exulting in your presence as in his possession of you as a thief might gloat over having made away with the most precious of valuables, and no one in pursuit.

I was thinking how no one else loved me like this. No one else would wish to possess me.

Years ago before my father had moved from Sparta, in that interregnum of confusion and nightmare when Edward Diehl was being “taken into police custody”—“released from police custody”—banished from our household but living with relatives locally, it would happen that, as if by accident, Daddy would turn up at places where Ben and I were: boarding the school bus after school, at the mall while our mother was shopping for groceries, riding our bicycles along the Huron Pike Road. I was thrilled to see Daddy waving at us but Ben stiffened and turned away.

Muttering under his breath Like some damn ghost haunting us. Wish he would die!

It was a nasty side of Ben, I’ve never forgiven him, the eager way he reported back to our mother: “Daddy was following us! Daddy waved at us!” My mother was terrified—or wished to declare that she was terrified—that my father might “kidnap” us, such incidents left her semihysterical with indecision. Should she call the police, should she call my father’s family, should she try to ignore Eddy Diehl’s “harassment” or—what should would a responsible mother do?

No one knew. Many opinions were offered but no one knew. If you believed that Edward Diehl might have murdered—“strangled in her bed”—a Sparta woman who’d been his “mistress”—yes, “mistress” was the very term, boldly printed in local papers and pronounced on local radio and TV—you would naturally think that Edward Diehl should be forbidden to approach his children; if you believed that Edward Diehl was an innocent man, in fact a “good and loving” father to those children, you naturally felt otherwise.

A family splits apart just once, all that you learn will be for the first time.

“…but if you want to hold your own with tough girls like that, sweetie, you need to be more aggressive. You aren’t actually the shortest girl I saw on the court but you’re the least ‘developed’—I mean that muscularly—and you need to be meaner, and to take more chances. A good athlete isn’t thinking of herself but the team. If you’re cautious thinking you might be hurt—‘cause you can always be hurt, for sure, in any sport—you’ll be a deficit not an asset to your teammates.”

Deficit. Asset. In my father’s voice was an echo of a long-ago high school coach.

I was hurt, Daddy was criticizing me! Daddy was not praising me as I’d expected he would.

“I was watching those girls. Three or four of them are pretty impressive for their age. The one with the black hair shaved up the sides like a guy, must be a Seneca Indian?—yes?—the way she was ducking, using her elbows, twisting in midair tossing the basket—she’s dynamite. You can tell she’s been playing with guys, out there on the rez. And that big busty gal, with the peroxide streaks, the way she got the ball from you, just whipped it out of your hands. And that six-foot girl who almost trampled you, straight black hair and face like a hatchet—”

“Dolores Stillwater.”

“She’s Indian, right? From the rez?”

Why are we talking about these girls! Why aren’t we talking about me!

“If you want athletes like that to take you seriously, Krissie, you’ll have to work a little harder. Not just shooting baskets—from a stationary position, that isn’t hard. But on the run, playing defensively, holding your own, showing them you’re willing to hurt them—foul them—if those little bitches get in your way. An athlete has to make a decision, early on—Coach told us, in junior high—‘Either it’s you, or it’s them.’ Either you spare yourself the risk, and they take the risk—or you take it, and run right over them. A player who gets fouled all the time isn’t worth crap. If you don’t want to take the risk, Puss, maybe you shouldn’t be playing any sport at all.”

I was remembering: how like our father this was. Ben’s father, and mine. You thought you might be praised for something—anyway, not found lacking—but somehow, as Daddy pondered the subject, turning it this way and that in his thoughts as we’d see him turn a defective work tool in his fingers—it wasn’t praise that was deserved after all but a harsh but honest critique.

In his work, Daddy was something of a perfectionist: his shrewd professional eye picked up mistakes invisible to other eyes. So Daddy once tore out tile in our kitchen floor he’d laid laboriously himself, cursing and red-faced he ripped out wallpaper over which he’d toiled for hours in summer heat, he repainted walls because the shade of paint he’d chosen “wasn’t right” and it was “driving him crazy”; he’d built a redwood deck at the rear of our house to which he was always adding features, or subtracting features; on our property, work was “never done”—there was “always something to fix up”; but it was dangerous to offer to help Daddy, for Daddy’s standards were high, and Daddy was inclined to be impatient snatching away from my brother’s fumbling fingers a hammer, a screwdriver, an electric sander—when, years ago, poor Ben was eager to be Daddy’s apprentice carpenter around the house.

Fucking up was what Eddy Diehl hated. Fucking up—his own mistakes, or others’ mistakes—drove him crazy.

If you’d known my parents socially—not intimately—you’d have assumed that my mother might be difficult to please, and Eddy Diehl with his feckless smile and easy demeanor the one to let things go as they would, but in fact my father was the one whom any kind of fuckup enraged for it was a sign of a man losing control of his surroundings. In the confrontation of a fuckup anywhere in our vicinity my mother Lucille became alarmed and frightened, anxious how my father would react.

Not until the time of the court order banishing Eddy Diehl from our property and our lives would I learn the extent to which my mother was terrified of my father’s quick, hot, “blind” temper.

Maybe I should give up basketball?—sulkily I asked my father.

My heart that had been swollen with elation, pride, wanting-to-impress Daddy was now shriveled as a prune.

Steering the Caddie Seville onto an exit ramp, frowning and squinting through the rain-splotched windshield, my father seemed not to have heard me at first; then he said, more tenderly, “I didn’t say that, Krissie. Hell no. You’re learning. You’re promising. Sports is all about who you’re contending with, see? Like life, maybe. You’re only as good as your opponents let you be. They’re only as good as you let them be.”

This was so. Uncontestably, this was so. Now I had an idea of what my father might be feeling, his opponents thwarting him, blocking him, trampling on his life. And I had a sharper memory of how when we’d all lived together in the house on Huron Pike Road the very air reverberated with the swelling and shrinking, the waning and waxing of my father’s mood.

“Baby, no. You don’t ever give up.”

Daddy wasn’t staying with relatives or friends here in Sparta but, surprising to me, in the Days Inn on route 31. Maybe there was a reason for this, he’d explained. He was going to be “in the vicinity” until the following Monday—“seeing people”—“doing some business”—“tying up loose ends.” I hoped that this didn’t include trying to see my mother or any of her family. None of the Bauers wanted to see Eddy Diehl, ever again.

Your father is not welcome with us.

Your father is dead to us.

Some of my father’s business in Sparta had to do with “litigation”—he’d been trying for years, with one lawyer or another, to sue local law enforcement officers and the Herkimer County prosecutor’s office on grounds of harassment, character assassination, criminal slander and misuse of authority. So far as anyone knew, nothing had come of my father’s lawsuits except legal fees.

I dreaded to hear that he might be seeing yet another lawyer. Or that he might be planning on speaking again with the police, the prosecutors, the local newspapers and media. Demanding that his name be cleared.

Whatever my father’s specific business in Sparta, I knew better than to ask about it. For though Daddy seemed always to be speaking openly and frankly and in a tone of belligerent optimism you could not speak like this to him, in turn. I’d come to recognize a certain mode of adult speech that, seeming intimate, is a way of precluding intimacy. I am telling you all that you need to know! What I don’t tell you, you will not be told.

We’d exited the eerily humming suspension bridge from downtown Sparta to East Sparta, a no-man’s-land of small factories, gas stations, vacated warehouses, acres of asphalt parking lots creased and cracked and overgrown with gigantic thistles. In litter-strewn fields, in trash-choked gutters you saw lifeless bodies—you saw what appeared to be bodies—trussed and wrapped in twine, humanoid, part-decomposed. You saw, and looked again: only just garbage bags, more trash. East Sparta had lost most of its industries, now East Sparta was filling up with debris.

I asked my father where was he living now?—and my father said, “Me? Living now?” meant to be a joke and so I laughed nervously.

Maybe he wanted me to guess? I guessed Buffalo, Batavia, Port Oriskany, Strykersville…He said, “I’m between habitats, right now. Left some things in storage in Buffalo. Mostly I’m in motion, y’know?—in this car that’s my newest purchase/investment. Like it?”

Though I was listening intently to my father yet I seemed not to know what he was asking me. This car? Do I like—this car?

I had already told my father yes, I liked this car. This was a beautiful car. But he wasn’t living in his car, was he? Was he living in his car?

The backseat was piled with things. Boxes, files, folders. A pair of men’s shoes, what appeared to be clothing: outer garments. Suitcase. Suitcases. Duffel bag. More boxes.

Dead to us. Doesn’t he know it?

Damn dumb ghost wish to hell he’d die.

“Anywhere I am, Krista. In my—y’know—soul. Like in my thoughts, except deeper. That’s what a soul is. In my soul I’m here, in Sparta. Lots of times in my sleep in our house, on the Huron Road. That’s where I wake up, until—I’m awake and I see hey no—nooooo!—that isn’t where I am, after all.”

To this, I had no idea how to reply. I was thinking how I loved my Daddy, and how strange it was that a girl has a Daddy, and a girl loves a Daddy, a girl does not judge a Daddy. I was thinking how I hated my brother Ben, who was free of having to love Daddy.

Ben didn’t love me, either. I was sure.

“It’s my birthplace here,” Daddy said. “My birthright. Nights when I can’t sleep I just shut my eyes, I’m here. I’m home.”

“I wish…”

“Yes? What d’you wish, Puss?”

“…you could come live with us again, Daddy. That’s what I wish.” Daddy laughed, kindly. Or maybe Daddy’s laugh was resigned, wounded.

“…wish you could come back tonight…It isn’t the same without you, Daddy. Anywhere in the house. Anywhere…” I was wiping at my eyes, that ached as if I’d been staring into a blinding light. Maybe one of the guards on the opposing team had thumbed my eye, out of pure meanness.

Pissy little white girl get out of my face! “I miss you, Daddy. So does Ben. He doesn’t say so, but he does.”

This was a lie. Why I said it, impulsively, I don’t know: to make Daddy happy, maybe. A little happier.

“Well, honey. Thank you. I miss you, too. Real bad.” There was a pause, Daddy pondered. “And your brother.”

I said yes, I’d tell him. I’d tell Ben.

It had been one of the shocks of my father’s life, how his son had turned against him. His son, against him.

And maybe he’d loved Ben better than he’d loved me. Or he’d wanted to. Having a son was the card you led with, in Daddy’s circle of men friends.

“…she’s getting along, O.K.? Is she?”

She. We were talking about my mother, were we? All along, since I’d scrambled to climb into the Caddie Seville, the subject had been my mother.

“…to that church? The new one? How’s that turning out?”

I told him it was turning out all right. My mother had joined a new church, my mother had “new friends” or claimed to have. I had not yet met these “new friends” but one of them was named Eve Hurtle or Huddle, the brassy-haired dump truck-shaped woman who owned Second Time ‘Round.

I was uneasy thinking that my father might ask if my mother was “seeing” anyone—any man—and I prepared what I might say. Daddy I don’t know! I don’t think so. Hoping he wouldn’t ask, this would be demeaning to him.

But Daddy didn’t ask. Not that. If Eddy Diehl felt sexual jealousy, sexual rage, he had too much manly pride to ask. Though I could sense how badly he wanted to ask.

“…doesn’t pass on much information about me, I guess? To you and Ben?”

Information? I wasn’t sure what Daddy meant.

“It’s like I’m dead, yes? ‘Dead to me’—that’s what she says?”

It’s over. Finished. That’s what she says.

Carefully I told Daddy I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe he was right, she didn’t pass on much information to Ben and me but then she didn’t confide in us on “personal” things. I didn’t think that she confided in anyone, there was too much shame involved.

Naked female strangled in her bed. Eddy Diehl’s tramp mistress.

On the highway ahead of us was a school bus, carrot-colored, Herkimer Co. School District, red lights flashing as it braked to a stop to let several passengers out. Almost too late, Daddy braked the Caddie. He’d been distracted, cursing and gripping the steering wheel.

“Fuck! God damn school buses.”

Both Daddy and I were wearing seat belts. Daddy was sharp-eyed about seat belts. Daddy had had a friend, an old high school friend, who’d been killed in some awful way like impaled on a steering wheel or his head half sheared off from his shoulders by broken glass, Daddy had always warned Ben and me about belting in.

“She cashes my checks, though. I hope she tells you that.”

Cashes his checks? Was this so? All I knew, or was made to know by my mother and the Bauers, was that my father was derelict in his duty. Neglects his family. Behind on alimony/child support.

“Of course, it’s the least I can do. I don’t begrudge her. I mean, you are my family. What kind of crap ‘salary’ would she get from selling secondhand clothes? Least I can do, ruining that woman’s life…”

Daddy’s voice trailed off, embarrassed. And angry. Clumsily he was lighting up a cigarette, sucking in a deep deep breath like the sweetest purest oxygen he’d been missing.

You could not tell if Daddy’s embarrassment provoked his anger or whether the anger was always there, smoldering like burnt rubber in the rain, and embarrassment screened it fleetingly as a scrim of clouds screens a fierce glaring sun.

“…I never said I wasn’t responsible, for that. Not…not the other, Krissie, but…that. Your mother, and you and Ben…ruining your lives. Jesus! If I had to do it over again…”

This was new, I thought. I was uneasy, hearing such words from my father. Ruining your lives. Ruining that woman’s life. For a moment I hadn’t known which woman my father was speaking of, my mother or—the other woman.

My father had never once spoken of Zoe Kruller to me, or to Ben. I was sure he had not spoken of her to Ben. In his claims of innocence and his protestations that he’d had nothing to do with that woman’s death he had never given a name to Zoe Kruller. And he would not now, I knew.

“…grateful to be alive. And free. That’s the miracle, Krissie—I am not in Attica, serving a life sentence. They say you go crazy in a few months in Attica, the inmates are crazy especially the older ones, the white ones, the guards are crazy—who else’d be a C.O. at Attica? You can’t make it alone, I’d have had to join up with the Aryan Nation—there’s some bikers in Attica, guys I knew from the army, already they’d sent word to me—if I got sent to Attica, I’d be O.K. Imagine, Krissie, my ‘future’ was being prepared for, this was what I had to look forward to, as some kind of good news.” My father laughed, harshly. His laughter turned into a fit of coughing, in disgust he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray that opened out of the dashboard beside his knee. “What I am trying to determine, Krissie, is: maybe there is a God, but does God give a shit for justice on earth? For any of us, on earth? I was reading some science discovery, that God is a ‘principle’—some kind of ‘equation’—so there is a God, but what kind of a God is that? A man has got to forge his own justice. As a man has got to forgive his own soul. This justice can’t spring forth too fast, it has to bide its time. So when it’s least expected. Most of humankind, they don’t give any more of a shit than ‘God.’ I guess you can’t blame them, there’s hurricanes, floods, every kind of terrible thing erupting out of the earth, every time you see a paper or turn on TV—how’d you keep up with it? I was a kid, I had to go to Sunday school for a while, till I was eleven when I wouldn’t go any more, I remember how we were told about Jesus performing his miracles, how impressed everyone was, it was ‘miracles’ that impressed them not Jesus as a preacher, anyway—my point is—you are made to think that Jesus could raise the dead, Jesus could save his people, but in actual fact, how could Jesus ‘save’ the teeming multitudes that populate the world now? There’s millions—maybe billions—of people alive, and they are all in peril. As for the God-damned ‘authorities’—the ‘leaders’—they don’t give a damn. It’s all about power. It’s about raking in cash, hiding it in Switzerland. Some banks where they don’t reveal your identity. You don’t pay taxes. The ‘authorities’—they’d sell their own grandmother’s soul, to put an innocent man in prison, or on death row—bottom line is, they want to ‘close the case.’ God-damned hypocrite fuckers…”

I was confused, frightened. It had seemed at first—hadn’t it?—that my father was speaking of something painful with which he’d come to terms, something for which he acknowledged responsibility; he’d sounded remorseful at the outset of his speech but then abruptly the tone shifted, he’d become angry, indignant. His jaw jutted like a fist. His eyes stared straight ahead. Despite warm air from the Caddie’s heater I felt a sensation of chill wash over me.

Can’t trust a drinker. Krista promise me never never get in any vehicle with a drinker you will regret it.

Hadn’t my mother warned me, many times! For surely her mother had warned her, too; and she had not listened.

It seemed that we were headed into the country on route 31, a two-lane state highway north of Sparta. The strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations and motels where the Days Inn was located was behind us. I thought that, if Daddy had intended to kidnap me, he would not be driving in this direction—would he? In a more genial Daddy-voice he was saying now that for my sixteenth birthday just maybe he’d give me a car—“How’s about a convertible coupe? Just right for sweet sixteen.”

Was Daddy joking? A car, for me? I wondered if Daddy even knew when my birthday was.

From a cloverleaf ramp I could look into the fleeting rears of houses: sheds, animal pens, clotheslines drooping in the rain. A dispirited-looking trailer “village,” a smoldering trash dump that smelled of burning rubber.

We were headed east on route 31, we seemed to have a destination. I had to wonder if Daddy was planning to meet up with someone, there was such urgency in his driving. Those places that Zoe Kruller had frequented were miles behind us: Tip Top Club, Chet’s Keyboard Lounge, Houlihan’s, the Grotto, Swank’s Go-Go, bars at the new Marriott and the Sheraton-Hilton. There was the HiLo Lounge at the Holiday Inn. There was Little Las Vegas at the traffic circle. These were neon-glamorous places by night and by day mostly deserted. In the raw light of day you were made aware of the crude unlit signs sporting semi-nude female figures like cartoon drawings and of overflowing Dumpsters, parking lots littered like acne. After Eddy Diehl had been taken into police custody it would be revealed that he had not been the only “family man” who moved in such circles, as his friends and companions were made to inform upon him and upon one another. No one was arrested for any crime. Yet lives were ruined.

I’d been too young then to know. I was still too young at fifteen to have a grasp of what it might be, that I didn’t yet know.

Here in the country, in a township of Herkimer County known as the Rapids, we were in hilly farmland where by day we’d be seeing herds of Guernsey cows grazing placid and near-motionless in pastures on either side of the road. There were odd-shaped hills called drumlins, exposed shale and limestone like bone broken through skin. Eddy Diehl had relatives who lived in the Rapids but we were not going to visit them, I knew.

“Wish I could see where we were, Daddy. Where we’re going.”

My voice was little-girl wistful, I took care not to sound whiny or reproachful. I guessed we were headed for the County Line Tavern which was one of Eddy Diehl’s places. I wished it was another time and Daddy was taking me for a sight-seeing drive along the Black River and into the countryside in his showy new car as he’d done when Ben and I were young children and sometimes our mother would come with us. This car! I can’t get over this car! What on earth are you going to do with this car! Oh Eddy. Oh my God.

On Sunday drives Daddy would take us out to Uncle Sean’s farm.

Uncle Sean was an uncle of my mother’s, an old man with stark white fluffy hair and skin roughened as the skin of a pineapple. Ben and I were allowed to stroke the velvety noses of horses in their stalls, in the company of our cousin Ty who kept a close watch over us—“Careful! Walk on this side”—and we were allowed to brush the horses’ sides with a wire brush, warm rippling shivery sides, always you are astonished at the size of a horse, the height of a horse, the ceaseless switching of the coarse mane and the coarse stinging tail, the fresh manure underfoot, horseflies hovering in the air, repulsive. Yet I had wanted a horse of my own. I loved to press my face against the horses’ warm sides. My favorite was a mare named Molly-O, one of my uncle’s smaller horses, pebble-gray, with liquidy dark eyes that knew me, I was certain.

I wondered what it meant: here was a horse, but I was a girl.

I wondered if it was just an accident, how we are born: horse, girl.

The way after my father was lost to us in defiance of my mother I would bicycle into Sparta and past the row house where Zoe Kruller was said to have been strangled in her bed and the thought came to me unbidden, illogical If I’d lived here. Anyone who lived here. Death was meant to come here.

You want to blame them, those who’ve been killed. Any woman naked and strangled in her bed you certainly want to blame.

“…shouldn’t have shut me out like that. Your ‘Uncle Sean.’”

“Uncle Sean” was uttered in a tone of contempt, hurt. Daddy seemed to have been following my thoughts.

“All of your mother’s people, that I’d thought liked me. I mean, some of them. The men. Your ‘Uncle Sean’—”

“He isn’t my uncle, Daddy. He’s Mom’s uncle.”

“He’s your great-uncle. That’s what he is.”

I wanted to protest, that wasn’t my fault!

I wanted to protest, Uncle Sean was just an old, ignorant man. Why should Daddy care what he thinks…

“…should know that I won’t give up. A guilty man, he’d give up, he’d move away. By now he’d be vanished from Sparta. But I’m not a guilty man—anyway not guilty of that—and I mean to alter the judgment of bastards like ‘Uncle Sean’ that had no faith in me. You tell your mother, Krista: I am not going to slink away like a kicked dog, I am still fighting this. It’s been—how long—going on five years—a guilty man would’ve given up by now, but not Eddy Diehl.”

Moved by sudden emotion, Daddy reached out another time to grope for my arm, my hand. His fingers were strong, closing around my wrist. I felt a pang of alarm, a moment’s unthinking panic. Always you are astonished. Their size, their height. Their strength. That they could hurt you so easily without meaning to.

7

“WELL, SAY! Thought it was you.”

At Honeystone’s Dairy the person you hoped would wait on you was Zoe Kruller.

Not heavyset Audrey with the sulky dark-purple mouth like a wound, not the steely-eyed grandma Mrs. Honeystone the owner’s wife, or in the height of summer temporary hired-help, high school girls who took little interest in the names of most customers or in recalling that a finicky child might prefer one type of ice-cream cone (lighter, less crunchy) over another (darker, grainier and chewier), and want her chocolate scoop on the bottom and her strawberry on top so that, melting, the strawberry would seep into the chocolate and not the other way around which seemed to the finicky mildly repugnant, unnatural; and on sundaes no nuts, and no maraschino cherries. But Zoe Kruller knew, Zoe Kruller always remembered.

As Zoe remembered names: “Krissie, is it? H’lo there Krissie!”

Zoe was glamorous, not merely pretty. Your eye moved onto Zoe with startled interest as your eye might be drawn to a billboard face posed above the highway, you would never imagine might have the slightest consciousness of you.

If you were a child, that is. A girl-child intensely aware of adult women: their faces, their bodies.

Zoe was an adult woman, a wife and a mother. Yet you would not have guessed that Zoe was much older than the high school girls who worked behind the counter at Honeystone’s. Her face was a girl’s face, just this side of beauty: her eager smile revealed a band of pink gum and her long hungry-looking teeth overlapped just perceptibly in front. Her skin was pale, warmly freckled. Her hair was “strawberry blond”—crimped, flyaway, shoulder-length. Her eyebrows had been carefully plucked and filled in with eyebrow pencil, her pale lashes were inky with mascara. Her nose was a little too long, with a waxy tip, and wide nostrils. Her chin was a little too narrow. Yet her eyes were beautiful, exotic: shades of amber like sherry at the bottom of a glass, or a certain kind of children’s marble, amber-glazed, changing its colors as you turned it in your fingers.

Zoe was a small woman, her figure was what’s called petite. She could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds nor was she more than five feet two. Yet she exuded an air of sexy funny-girl swagger that made her appear taller, like one accustomed to the spotlight. Behind the counter at Honeystone’s Zoe had a way of rising up on her toes when she locked eyes with a customer, smiling that glistening bared-gum smile and a light seemed truly to come into her face.

“Well, say! Thought it was you.”

Most remarkable was Zoe’s throaty purring voice. It was a voice so low and shivery it didn’t seem as if it was issuing from Zoe Kruller’s wide-lipped crimson mouth but from a radio. Here was a distinctive voice amid a clamor of voices of no distinction, that made you stop and stare at Zoe even more than her lit-up face might have warranted. Here is someone special you were made to think.

That red-embroidered ZOE on a tiny pocket above Zoe’s left breast.

‘“Zooh-ey.’ Not ‘Zoo-ey.’ Please!”

In Chautauqua Park on summer nights local musicians and singers performed at the bandstand and Zoe Kruller belonged to the most popular group, that called itself Black River Breakdown. Zoe was the only woman among several men—guitarist, banjo player, fiddler and piano-player.

Except for the Elvis-looking guitarist, a kid in his early twenties with dyed-black hair and cowboy boots with a prominent heel, they were all in their thirties, ardent, excitable, yearning for applause. Their music ranged from country-and-western classics (“Little Maggie,” “Down from Dover,” “I’ll Walk the Line”) to bluegrass (“Little Bird of Heaven,” “Her Little Footprints in the Snow”) and disco (“I Will Survive,” “Saturday Night Fever”).

Especially on stage at the bandstand, sexy-seductive in a spangled dress that left most of her thighs exposed and her strawberry-blond hair frizzed and crimped in a wild halo around her head so it looked like an electric bolt had shot through her, Zoe Kruller did not resemble any other wife/mother in Sparta.

Yet she was Mrs. Kruller, the mother of a boy in Ben’s class at school. This boy was named Aaron and he looked older than Ben by a year or more and had a stiff glaring face nothing like Zoe’s.

“Zoe married young”—this was said of Mrs. Kruller, by our mother and our mother’s friends.

“Zoe married ‘way too young’”—this was said with satisfaction.

And, sometimes: “Zoe married ‘way too young and the wrong man.’”

None of this meant anything to Ben and me. Being taken for a drive out to Honeystone’s which was an actual dairy farm on the outskirts of Sparta, locally famous for its homemade ice cream and desserts, was a Sunday reward for having been good through the week, or one of Daddy’s capricious treats. Anybody interested in a ride? Honeystone’s?

Say I returned to Sparta. Say I looked up my few remaining “friends”—classmates from school—and asked what they remembered most vividly from our childhood, each would say—“Honeystone’s!” Clutching at one another’s hands, eyes misting with tears of sentiment, the sweetest sort of tears, recalling Honeystone’s Dairy as you’d recall a lost paradise.

Recalling even the drive to Honeystone’s, fraught with the happiest sort of anticipation.

Out East Huron Pike Road, past the water treatment tower. Past the railroad yard. Across the Black River Bridge and beyond East Sparta Memorial Park and a short mile or so to the Sparta town limits and there was the sparkling-white stucco building set back from the road in a neatly tended graveled parking lot bounded, in summer, by bright red geraniums in clay pots, and in the autumn by chrysanthemums of all hues; there was the smiling-cow sign thirty feet high, on a pole illuminated at night like a stage set—HONEYSTONE’S DAIRY. Inside Honeystone’s the air was immediately distinctive: milky-cool, marble-cool, like the foyer of the Midland Sparta Bank, except here there was an odor of bakery, so sweet your mouth watered like a baby’s. On the floor of Honeystone’s was what appeared to be actual marble, black-and-white checked, worn but still elegant; there were ornately designed white wrought-iron tables and chairs and there were vinyl booths that resembled leather, sleek and black. Descending from the ceiling were a half-dozen slow-moving fans with blades like the propellers of small planes, both languorous and vaguely threatening. If you were to dream of Honeystone’s interior, the slow-moving fans would take on an ominous note.

A dream of Honeystone’s might be edgy as well because you would not clearly see who’d brought you. For invariably in these dreams you are a young child in the company of an adult and you are essentially helpless.

“What can I do you for, sweetie?”

This was Zoe’s snappy way of greeting. Glamorous Zoe Kruller leaning forward onto the high counter, on her elbows, on her toes, smiling that crimson long-lipped hungry smile, baring her gums. Her eyes so exotic in black mascara, silvery-blue eye shadow and eyeliner, you gaped not knowing how to respond.

And there were other fascinating things about Aaron Kruller’s mother: the way she wore the sleeves of her white Honeystone’s smock pushed up past her elbows so that her slender arms were exposed, covered in dark little moles and freckles like tiny ants! Oh there was something ticklish—shivery—about Zoe Kruller! This giggly throaty-voiced woman about the size of a thirteen-year-old girl who made you want to sink your teeth into ice cream, bite down hard so your teeth ached, and your jaws, and you shuddered at the cold.

Honeystone’s help had to wear white smocks over white cord trousers and both smock and trousers had to be kept spotless. Honeystone’s help had to wear hairnets which made them—except for Zoe Kruller—look silly, dowdy. But on Zoe, her thick strawberry-blond hair just barely contained by the gossamer net, the effect was strangely alluring.

Zoe’s pert question—“What can I do you for, sweetie?”—was like a riddle for there was something wrong with it, words were scrambled, you had to think—and blink—and think hard to figure out what 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, and the 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 in a pocket of her white cord smock for just such semi-emergency occasions; there was just time for her to dab some scented ivory powder on her nose, check her eye makeup, shape a pouting smile to see if the crimson lipstick was still fresh. And adjust her hair in the damned hairnet they made you wear in this damned prissy place.

“Well say, Eddy Diehl! Thought it was you.”

Zoe Kruller’s sexy-throaty voice that was like sandpaper rubbed against sandpaper to make you shiver. Zoe Kruller’s voice that was close and warm and teasing like a voice murmured in your ear as you lay in bed, head on your pillow and bedclothes clutched to your chin.

With what eagerness Daddy entered Honeystone’s—pushing the door open with such force that the little bell attached overhead tinkled loudly, ushering his young children—what were their names—Ben? Krissie?—into the milky-cool, marble-cool air of Honeystone’s Dairy which was so wonderful.

And there in that instant was Zoe Kruller catching sight of Eddy Diehl, and Eddy Diehl catching sight of Zoe Kruller. Almost, you could feel the rush of blood that ran through them, like an electric current.

“How’re you doing, Zoe-y. Looking good.”

In a casual voice my father called out a greeting. Sunday afternoons, Honeystone’s was likely to be busy.

Zoe Kruller was such a favorite at the dairy, as she was a favorite at Chautauqua Park on summer-music nights, there were customers who waited in line to be waited on by her: though heavyset Audrey and white-haired Mrs. Honeystone might both be available behind the counter, scowling.

Not wanting to meet Mrs. Honeystone’s eye—the white-haired older woman was Marv Honeystone’s wife, and Eddy knew Marv Honeystone from having worked for him—Eddy lingered before one of the refrigerated dessert cases, hands on his hips, brooding. As if he’d come to Honeystone’s with the intention of buying a strawberry whipped-cream pie, a chocolate mousse, a three-tiered birthday cake, a luscious glazed fruit tart or a platter of fudge, chocolate-chip cookies, macaroons. “O.K. Ben, Krissie—say what looks good to you. What’d you like best.”

Earnestly Ben and I debated: the strawberry whipped-cream pie, banana cream pie, cherry pie with strips of golden crust like a pinwheel instead of the usual boring solid upper crust…

An entire display case of birthday cakes!

This debate could occupy minutes. While Eddy Diehl glanced at Zoe Kruller in the mirror behind the display case, took in his own reflection with a critical frown and slicked back his tufted rust-red hair like a rooster’s comb with a quick movement of both his hands.

Eddy Diehl’s big carpenter’s hands. Eddy Diehl’s big thumbs. Eddy Diehl’s heavy-lidded eyes behind flat sea-green “aviator” sunglasses with the metallic rims. Eddy Diehl’s wordless appeal to the pert petite strawberry-blond woman with the glamorous made-up face like a Dolly Parton doll, white sleeves pushed back to bare her pale freckled forearms.

After some Sundays of this, Ben began to object: “You always ask us what we want, Dad, but you never buy anything. So why ask us?”

I didn’t want to hear this. I’d made my choices to tell Daddy: banana cream pie, caramel custard pie, triple-layer chocolate cake with HAPPY BIRTHDAY scrolled in pink frosting on the top. Once I’d watched Zoe Kruller squirting a coil of pink frosting like toothpaste over a duplicate of this very cake, completing the message HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBIN!

At the time, I’d thought how lucky Robin was.

Whoever Robin was: girl, boy.

Daddy said, just this side of annoyed: “Might be I’m making a mental note, Ben. Your Daddy has a mind like a steel trap. Filing facts, that will one day come in handy.”

Mental note? I was curious about this. Asked Daddy what was a mental note but Daddy was casting a sidelong look over at Zoe Kruller who was casting a sidelong smile at him past a customer’s frizz-permed head.

“Daddy? What’s a ‘mental note’—”

“You tell her, Zoe.” Affably Daddy raised his voice, to draw Zoe into the conversation. A few feet away Zoe was preparing sundaes for a family of fretting young children. “What’s a ‘mental note.’”

This presumed that Zoe had been listening to us from a distance of ten, twelve feet. That, since Eddy Diehl had first entered Honeystone’s, Zoe Kruller had been keenly aware of him and his two young children who took after the mother’s side of the family, it seemed—A gosh-darn pity since Eddy Diehl is the good-looking one and not chubby moon-faced Lucy Bauer.

Zoe tilted her head to indicate that she was thinking hard.

“‘Mental note’ is—a memory. You make a special memory inside your head, to remind yourself of something at a later date. ‘Mental note’ is for the future, to refer back to now.”

Zoe spoke in a low mysterious throaty murmur. I had no idea what she and my father were talking about but any succession of words Zoe Kruller spoke no matter how ordinary or banal were freighted with significance like words blazoned on a billboard or in a bright-lit TV commercial.

Eddy Diehl wore work caps, baseball caps. Always outdoors and often indoors. He’d removed his cap—grungy dark-blue with bronze letters SPARTA CONSTRUCTION, he’d worn for years—to swipe at his hair but he’d quickly replaced it tugging the rim low over his forehead. There was something shy about him, or anyway self-conscious: here was a man who knows he is looked-at by both women and men, and wants to be looked-at, yet on his own terms exclusively.

At work—at Sparta Construction, Inc.—Daddy wore white shirts: short-sleeved in summer, long-sleeved in winter. These shirts my mother ironed, for Daddy insisted upon white cotton shirts, not wash-and-wear. Daddy wore neatly pressed trousers on the job, sport coats or jackets in cold weather, never an overcoat. You would never see a carpenter—any man who works with his hands—wearing an overcoat on the job. Summers, away from work Daddy wore T-shirts and khaki pants likely to be rumpled and stained, running shoes on his size-twelve feet.

It never ceased to amaze me, Daddy was so big. Daddy loomed above me, a tall muscled man with broad shoulders, long arms and powerful wrists. In spite of his bad knee (as my mother called it, though not in Daddy’s presence) Daddy walked without wincing, or at least visibly wincing; never did he wish to allude to his bad knee, his injury; he flushed with indignation if anyone—usually female relatives of my mother’s—questioned him too pointedly about his health. (So too my father coolly disdained questions from relatives both male and female about how the construction business was going, smiling and shrugging Can’t complain. Holding our own. You?)

There was something loose and impulsive in my father’s movements, a quicksilver excitement hinting almost of threat except he was teasing, smiling—wasn’t he? Don’t come too close! Don’t mistake my seeming friendly for my being your friend.

On my father’s tanned arms thick hairs grew in bristling swirls and eddies, dark-rust-red shading to black, springy and intransigent as wires to the touch. As a little girl I’d been intimidated by Daddy’s muscled arms covered in hair and the hint of a dark wiry animal pelt covering his chest, parts of his back, beneath his white T-shirt, springing into view at his throat. Seeing the look in my face Daddy laughed: “Don’t worry, Puss. Turning into a mean hairy ape won’t happen to you.”

This was Daddy joking. I like to remember Daddy joking. It is important to remember that men like my father—so very American, small-city-coming-of-age-in-the-Vietnam War-era—were given to joking, teasing, what they called kidding around, there was nothing more wonderful than a man like Eddy Diehl in this mood, maybe he’s had a few beers, maybe he’s with his buddies, guys like himself who are the only people he can trust since he can’t trust any woman even his wife, not even his mother—If you have to ask why, forget it.

If you have to ask, go to hell.

Go fuck yourself, see? If you have to ask.

Nothing more wonderful than the smiles of these American daddies causing their hard faces to soften like boys’ faces and the edges of their wary eyes to crease and yet—nothing more frightening than when these daddies cease to smile.

Suddenly, and without warning.

As in Honeystone’s that day, when my father snapped at Ben: “Hey. Get the hell over here.”

What had Ben been doing? Poking at a platter of fresh-baked brownies covered in cellophane, displayed on one of the glass-topped cases.

Ben at the age of ten, a lanky sweet-faced boy with fair-coppery-redbrown hair in a silky swirl that made him look like a girl, startled fairbrown eyes, a rabbity unease. Daddy’s voice came much too harsh, furious for the occasion.

“God damn you what’re you doing. Keep your hands off what doesn’t belong to you.”

Daddy was getting pissed, as he’d say. Waiting for Zoe Kruller to pay attention to him. Waiting, and Eddy Diehl isn’t accustomed to waiting for women to pay attention to him.

I felt a shivery little frisson of satisfaction, that my older brother was being publicly scolded by our father. So funny—the way Ben jerked back from the display case as if he’d touched a snake. Yet it scared me, that Daddy might suddenly lapse into one of his moods, and little Krista would be scolded harshly, too.

But there came Zoe’s sweet-honeyed voice directed toward us at last.

“Eddy? That’s some swanky car out there.”

Daddy laughed, pleased. Daddy assented, yes that was his car, he’d acquired just a few days ago.

“Soon as you pulled into the lot, I knew it had to be you.”

Now words flew between our father and Zoe Kruller swift as Ping-Pong balls. Whatever these words meant—talk of Daddy’s newly acquired car, or Black River Breakdown’s next “gig” in a week or two—talk of respective spouses, families—on their surface these words were innocuous and banal like the smiles of adults as they gaze at you thinking their own faraway private thoughts.

Zoe was teasing but beneath you could see that Zoe was dead-serious.

Fixing Eddy Diehl with her crazed-amber eyes, calculating and ardent; stroking her bared forearm that was freckled and stippled with tiny moles.

I saw how Zoe Kruller’s fingernails flashed crimson. I saw how Daddy would see, and felt my blood quicken.

After what seemed like a long time—though it must have been no more than two or three minutes—Zoe turned her wide-eyed gaze upon Ben and me: “So—Ben? And—Krissie? Daddy’s little guy, and Daddy’s little gal—what can I do you for today?”

We laughed, this was so curious a way of speaking, like a riddle, like tickling. I wasn’t sure that I liked it, words scrambled in such a way. As a little child I’d been anxious about misspeaking, and provoking adult laughter. Saying words in the wrong sequence like wetting my panties, wetting the bed, spilling a glass of milk at supper, dropping a fork laden with mashed potatoes, what a child most dreads is the exasperated laughter of adults when you have done a wrong thing.

Now Zoe Kruller was mouthing funny words Do you for. What can I. Ben? Krissie?

I loved Zoe Kruller, I think. The way Zoe Kruller fixed her eyes on me, and called me by name.

Why was I so frightened of Zoe Kruller!

There was an interlude of teasing-Krissie—Daddy told Zoe that I wanted a coffee ice-cream cone—I protested no, I hated coffee ice cream—and Zoe laughed and said yes, she knew: what I wanted was a doublescoop cone, chocolate on the bottom and strawberry on top.

“Your daddy’s a tease, sweetie. Don’t think I pay your damn ol’ daddy much mind.”

Damn was one of those words adults could use. Depending on the tone and on who was saying it to whom it was soft-sounding as a caress, or it was harsh.

Anything that passed between Zoe Kruller and Eddy Diehl, in Honeystone’s Dairy, was soft-sounding as a caress, and not harsh.

Daddy never bought ice-cream cones or sundaes for himself. Not ever. Daddy hadn’t much taste for sweet things, preferred salty things like pretzels, peanuts, potato chips however stale, eating them by the mouthful as he drank beer, Sundays. And Daddy liked coffee, Daddy was “hooked” on black coffee, so pungent-smelling it made my nostrils shut up, tight. Especially Daddy liked coffee you could get at Honeystone’s which smelled like a different kind of coffee than at home.

Zoe made a show of pouring the steaming liquid into a tall Styrofoam cup. “There you go, Eddy. Hope it’s what you like.”

“Yes. It’s what I like.”

One day, Zoe Kruller would be vanished from Honeystone’s. One day soon and it would be a shock to me, a cruel surprise—my mother was the one to drive Ben and me to the dairy and eagerly we’d run inside looking for Zoe Kruller but there was just old Mrs. Honeystone and fat scowling Audrey and another girl who was a stranger to us and we asked Mrs. Honeystone where was Zoe? Where was Zoe? and Mrs. Honeystone said only that she’d quit, Mrs. Honeystone did not utter the name Zoe but only just she. You could see how Mrs. Honeystone would not smile and did not care to say anything further about Zoe Kruller nor would our mother inquire.

Where is she, she’s gone. Gave notice, and gone.

THAT DAY, that Sunday I am thinking of. When I was eight years old and going into third grade in the fall. And Daddy and Zoe Kruller talked together in their swift Ping-Pong banter as Zoe scooped out ice cream for Ben and me and poured coffee for Daddy, rang up the order and made change and Daddy said in a lowered voice taking the change from Zoe’s slender fingers with the startling crimson nails that Zoe should say hello to Del for him—someone named “Del”—and Zoe laughed and said, “Sure! When I see him.” Which was an answer that possibly took Daddy by surprise, he fumbled the change, dropped a quarter that rolled across the marble-tile floor and Ben swooped to snatch it up; and Zoe said, still with that laugh in her voice like nothing could hurt her, airy and light as any little bird fluttering overhead, “And you say hi to Lucy, will you?”

Outside in the parking lot, in muggy-hot air, oppressive after the milky cool of the dairy, as we approached Daddy’s car parked imprudently in the glaring sun, discovered that the tip of my ice-cream cone was caved in, broken—and then I discovered, horribly, that something was inside the tip of the cone: squirmy black weevils.

I screamed. I dropped the cone onto the ground.

Daddy heard, and came to investigate.

“What the hell, Krissie? What’s wrong?”

Two scoops of ice cream—strawberry, chocolate—on the hot gravel, melting. Looking so silly, there on the ground. Something that was meant to be a treat—something special, delicious—on the ground like garbage. I told Daddy that there were weevils inside the cone, I couldn’t eat it. I was gagging, close to vomiting. Daddy cursed under his breath poking at the cone with the tip of his shoe, as if he could see from his height the half-dozen black insects squirming inside the tip; his manner was skeptical, impatient; he didn’t seem very sympathetic, as if the defiled cone was my fault. Or maybe, a clumsy child, I’d simply dropped it, and was trying to pass on the blame to someone else.

“Well. You’re not getting another one, we’re late and we’re leaving.”

Not another cone? When this wasn’t my fault? I drew breath to protest, to cry, stricken with a child’s sense of injustice, and with the loss of something I’d so craved, but Daddy was heedless, Daddy had made up his mind he wasn’t going back inside the dairy, he wasn’t going to complain to Zoe Kruller or to anyone about his daughter’s ice-cream cone.

When I balked at leaving Daddy took my arm roughly, my thin bare arm, at the elbow, and gave me the kind of tug you don’t resist. “Fuck it Krista, I said come on.”

Ben, smirking, licking his ice-cream cone, showed little sympathy, too. In the front seat of the car beside Daddy where, being a boy, he insisted upon sitting. In the backseat riding home—the car was an Oldsmobile, I think—some kind of special “Deluxe” model—mauve interior—the leather seat hot from the sun, searing my bare legs—I was whimpering, crying under my breath stunned with the unfairness of what had just happened, if I’d run back inside the dairy of course Zoe Kruller would have given me another ice-cream cone, if Mommy and not Daddy had brought me that day, of course Mommy would have seen to it that I’d gotten another ice-cream cone, inside Honeystone’s the clerks would have been sympathetic, apologetic. But Daddy was driving away, and Daddy was flushed with anger. Daddy was cursing beneath his breath, you wouldn’t want to annoy him. If he’d thought of it, Daddy would have ordered Ben to share his ice-cream cone with me but Daddy wasn’t thinking about any ice-cream cone, or about his stricken daughter, his thoughts were elsewhere. I huddled in the backseat sniffing and panting thinking Not my fault. Not my fault. Why is Daddy mad at me! My eight-year-old heart was broken, it would not be for the first time.

A week or so later when we were taken to Honeystone’s by our mother, on our way home from visiting one of Mommy’s cousins outside East Sparta, Ben was eager for an ice-cream cone but I was not. Instead, I asked for a sundae, in small plastic bowl where you could see what you were eating. Though Zoe Kruller was at the counter, and remembered exactly the kind of ice-cream cone I’d always wanted, winked and called me “Krissie” in the sweetest way, and tried to get me to smile at her, I wouldn’t smile, I was sulky-sullen and not the sweet little Daddy’s girl and I would not lift my eyes to Zoe’s shining face, I would not.

8

TWO YEARS, seven months later on a snow-glaring Sunday morning in February 1983 Zoe Kruller was found dead in a brownstone rental on West Ferry Street, downtown Sparta.

On the front page of the Sparta Journal it was reported that Zoe Kruller had suffered blunt force trauma to the head as well as manual strangulation and so it was a case of foul play, homicide.

It was revealed that the murdered woman had been separated from her husband, no longer living with her family. It was revealed that the murdered woman had been discovered in her bed, by—

“Krista. Give that to me.”

“No! I’m reading this.”

“I said—”

She snatched the pages from me. Such agitation in her face, I surrendered the pages to prevent their being torn.

Such agitation in her face, I turned away frightened. But I’d seen—

Discovered in her bed by her fourteen-year-old son Aaron Kruller who ran into the street to summon help.

At this time, I was eleven years old. No longer a small child to be protected from what my mother called “ugly”—“nasty”—“disgusting” things. No longer a small child to tolerate such protection and so somehow I knew—I came to know—that the glamorous freckled friendly woman who’d waited on us at Honeystone’s was this very woman who’d been found strangled in her bed by her own son; I came to know, with a thrill of horror, and of fascination, that at the time of her death Zoe Kruller had not been living with her family, as other wives and mothers lived with their families; at the time of her death Zoe Kruller had been separated from, estranged from her husband Delray Kruller and her son Aaron who was in my brother Ben’s class at the middle school: separated from, estranged from, broken off communication with. Such delicious facts I came to know, that caused a sensation of numbness to pump through me, as if I were wading into a dream; a dream that resembled the Novocain injected into my tender gums, when I went to the dentist; a dream that left me short of breath, dazed and strangely aroused, headachey; a dream of the most intense yearning, and the most intense revulsion. For to these facts were added, in what was invariably an altered tone of voice, like the shifting of a radio station on the verge of dissolving into static, the fact that Zoe Kruller was sharing quarters with another woman, at 349 West Ferry.

Sharing quarters with a woman! Not living with her husband and son but with a woman! And the woman’s name too seemed exotic: DeLucca.

West Ferry Street was miles away from Huron Pike Road. West Ferry Street was not a street familiar to me. I thought it might be near the railroad yard. Off Depot Street, a block or two before the bridge. At the edge of the warehouse district, the waterfront. That part of Sparta. There were taverns there, late-night diners and restaurants. There was XXX-Rated Adult Books & Videos. There were rubble-strewn vacant lots, and there was a raw-looking windswept stretch along the river advertising itself as Sparta Renaissance Park where “high-rise condominiums” were being built.

And somehow too I knew that men came to visit Zoe Kruller in that brownstone, male visitors.

These male visitors were to be interviewed by Sparta police.

Why these facts so agitated my mother, I had no idea. Why my mother slammed and locked the door against me, against both Ben and me, refusing to answer our frightened queries—Mom? Mommy? What’s wrong?—I had no idea.

It was a very cold February. There were joke-cartoons in the local paper about the Ice Age returning. Comical drawings of glaciers, mastodons and woolly mammoths with curving ice-encrusted tusks. I was in sixth grade at Harpwell Elementary and my brother Ben was in ninth grade at Sparta Middle School which was also Aaron Kruller’s school. When my mother asked Ben if he knew Aaron Kruller quickly Ben said no: “He’s a year behind me at school.”

Adding, with a look of disdain: “He’s part-Indian, Kruller. He doesn’t like people like us.”

“He’s your age, isn’t he, Ben? In the paper it says ‘fourteen.’”

Irritably Ben said, “What’s that got to do with it, Mom? I told you, he’s a year behind me. I don’t know him.”

“But he isn’t from the reservation, is he? He isn’t a full-blooded Indian, is he? ‘Delray Kruller’—he isn’t an Indian.”

“Jesus, Mom! What difference does it make? What are we talking about?” Ben was becoming frantic, furious. This doggedness in our mother—this persistence, in the most trivial details—had a way of upsetting Ben even more than it upset me.

Let it go, Mom. Please let it go would be my silent plea.

Still our mother persisted: “That poor boy. That’s who I feel sorry for, in all this. Just a child, to discover—her.” Even now, our mother could not bring herself to utter the name Zoe Kruller, only just her in a tone of disgust.

Ben turned away with a shrug. He hadn’t looked at me at all.

Of course, Ben knew Aaron Kruller. He’d known Aaron Kruller since grade school.

But it was like Ben, not to talk about things that upset him. The fact that Zoe Kruller had died, that someone we’d known had died, seemed to embarrass him. My brother was of an age when, if you couldn’t shrug and make a wisecrack about something, you turned away with a pained smirk.

To me he said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Kruller’s mom—that ‘Zoe’—know what she was? A slut.”

Slut? I felt the word sharp and cracking like a slap across my silly-girl face.

“A slut is a female that fucks. Aaron Kruller’s mom was a slut, and a junkie, too. That was why she left the dairy. That was why she left off singing. And Aaron didn’t go running out to ‘summon help’—they found him with her, where she was dead, and”—Ben’s voice lowered even further, creased and cracked with hilarity—“he’d shit his pants. That news you won’t find in the paper.”

In the paper—in the succession of newspapers that would come into my hands—some of them hidden from us by our mother, in a drawer of her cedar bureau, others shared with me by my girlfriends at school—I would see Zoe Kruller’s smiling face gazing up at me, on the verge of winking at me Krissie! What can I do you for today?

That riddle to which there was no answer.

As she’d turn to Daddy lifting her fevered glamour-face like a flower taunting you to pick it Mis-ter Diehl! And what can I do you for—today?

The most commonly printed photograph of Zoe Kruller—which in time would find its way into state-wide newspapers though never into national publications nor syndicated by the Associated Press, so far as I knew—was the one in which Zoe posed with fellow musicians from Black River Breakdown, in her spangled low-cut girl-singer attire, and with her hair crimped and springy and electric-looking cascading over one semi-bare shoulder. Another more casual photo showed a younger Zoe smiling at the camera at a sly angle as if she’d been teasing the photographer, with the exuberant ease of a high school cheerleader or prom queen. How many times these and other likenesses of Zoe Kruller, Sparta murder victim would be reprinted, how many times I would stare at them in wonderment that I had ever known her—that of course I knew her, still—never in my life would Krista Diehl not-know Zoe Kruller from Honeystone’s—and each time it seemed to me a wrongful thing, a nightmare-thing, a cruel taunting joke that in these photographs Zoe had been smiling with such trust, never imagining that, one day, her picture would be printed—reprinted—in newspapers—shown on local TV news—with the identification Zoe Kruller, Sparta Murder Victim.

Though I was young for eleven, young in the ways of the (adult, even the adolescent) world yet the admonition came to me She should not have been smiling like that.

The early headlines were enormous banner heads running the width of the Sparta Journal.

SPARTA WOMAN, 34, FOUND BEATEN, STRANGLED

Death of Local Bluegrass Singer Investigated by Police

Focus on “Men Friends”—“Visitors”

Later, headlines would diminish, and their tone would subtly alter in tone:

BLUEGRASS SINGER’S PRIVATE LIFE YIELDS “SURPRISES”

Sparta Detectives Continue Investigation Following “Leads”

In our household, no one spoke of Zoe Kruller. It was a time—I guess it wasn’t the first time—when Daddy was often working late, or had to stay away overnight “on business”—and Mommy was edgy and impatient with Ben and me if we asked about him—“He’s away. He’s working. How do I know where he is, ask him yourself!”

Which was so illogical, even Ben couldn’t think how to reply.

The phone, which had not often rung, rang often now. And Mom, who hadn’t often used the phone, was using it often now. At a distance from us, upstairs in the big bedroom into which we were not welcome except by invitation—when I helped my mother houseclean and vacuum, for instance—or in the kitchen with the door so oddly, unnaturally closed—the maple wood cedar door which Daddy had installed in the kitchen was never closed.

Except now, sometimes it was. When Ben and I returned from school on the school bus and tramped into the mudroom at the rear with our snow-wetted boots, there was the kitchen door closed over, and we could hear our mother speaking on the phone in her low urgent accusing panicky voice that was a warning to us, not to approach her But what—? What will—happen? What does this mean? Will there be an—arrest? How can there be an arrest, if—A lawyer? Why would he need a lawyer? Oh God a lawyer—we can’t afford a—

Ben was stony-faced, kicking off his boots and stomping away upstairs loud enough so that Mom might hear. Ben ignored my entreaties as he ignored my stricken look, my wounded thumb shoved to my mouth so that I could gnaw at the nail and cause the cuticle to bleed a little more.

What does he say, you know what he says! Well he won’t talk to me—maybe he’ll talk to you—But no lawyer, that’s—No that’s crazy—

This excited voice of my mother’s—this tone of reproach, bewilderment, humiliation, anger—suggested that she was speaking with her older brother, or with one of her sisters. I didn’t want to hear!—quickly I pressed my hands over my ears and stomped upstairs after my brother.

Well, say! Thought it was you.

What can I do you for, Krissie?

Tried to make myself cry staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and speaking in Zoe Kruller’s throaty-scratchy voice but I didn’t cry, not one tear.

9

DADDY, we could not ask.

Not Krista, not Ben. Not our mother.

Not about Mrs. Kruller-whose-picture-was-in-the-paper. Not about the homicide.

There were no words for me to speak of such a thing to my father. As at any age I could not have spoken frankly to him about the physical life, or about sex; I would never have dared ask my father how much money he made, how much our house had cost, if he was insured and how much was he insured for. I could not have asked him about God: Is there a God, and what has God to do with us? These were taboo subjects, though the word taboo did not exist in our vocabulary and if it ever came to be known in Sparta, by way of advertisements and popular culture, it would be the perfume Taboo.

In any case children did not ask about death. Children could watch death on TV, gunfire, explosions, planes shot wantonly from the sky to fall in a filigree of flame, but children could not ask about death. Only very young children who would quickly learn their mistake.

When Grandpa Diehl had died, and I was four years old and too little for school. When Daddy wasn’t at work he’d kept to himself in the basement of our house in his workshop where we would hear his power tools wailing through the floorboards and in the days, weeks following Grandpa’s funeral Daddy did not speak to us about Grandpa Diehl except evasively to say that Grandpa had “gone away.” By the look in Daddy’s face, my brother and I had known not to ask where Grandpa Diehl had gone.

Mom had warned us: don’t ask Daddy about Grandpa, Daddy is upset. On the phone Mom said Eddy’s taking it pretty hard. You know how he is, it’s all inside.

The words struck me: It’s all inside.

Taking it pretty hard. All inside.

At school, people were talking about Zoe Kruller, who was Aaron Kruller’s mother, or had been Aaron Kruller’s mother. Now Mrs. Kruller too had gone away.

How strange it seemed to us, who’d known Zoe Kruller from both Honeystone’s Dairy and from the Chautauqua Park music-nights, that a woman so friendly, so pretty and glamorous would be strangled in her bed, murdered. How wrong it seemed to us that you could be the girl-singer for Black River Breakdown and applauded and whistled at and made to sing encores, yet someone could still hate you enough to beat, strangle you in your bed.

Some worse things were done to Aaron’s mother than just killing her, know why?—‘cause she was a slut.

We were made to come home immediately from school. Our mothers would not allow us to stay for after-school activities nor did school authorities encourage such activities, in the months following Zoe Kruller’s death. Patrol cars swung by the schools, cruising through the parking lots like friendly sharks. Bus drivers counted heads before shutting the bus doors and leaving the school property, determining that we were all present and accounted for. The older boys objected, they weren’t damn girls.

Ben said: “Some things I heard, about Aaron’s mother, it was just her he was after, the ‘strangler.’ He wouldn’t be after any of us.”

I asked Ben who’d told him this. I asked Ben what else he’d heard at his school and Ben shrugged evasively and said just some things—“Not for you to know.”

In Sparta—unlike the rest of the world where people were dying and being killed in terrible ways all the time—it seemed rare that anyone died and yet more rare that anyone died in a way to cause such upset, dread, wonder. Of course the “natural” deaths were sad 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 T-shirt and boxer shorts—Ben emulated Daddy, in nightwear—to say how “weird” she was getting, for God’s sake why didn’t she go to bed!

Mom ignored Ben. Smoking in the darkened living room with just the TV screen glimmering and glowing like something phosphorescent at the bottom of the sea, a simulacrum of life that was not life. The acrid smell of her cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to my bedroom, I dreamt that the house was on fire, my legs were tangled in bedclothes and I could not escape.

Sometimes sensing my mother’s mounting desperation—unless it was my own—I would sit at the top of the stairs. In pajamas, barefoot and shivering. It was midnight: so late. And then it was 1 A.M., 2:35 A.M., alarmingly late. I was waiting with Mommy, in secret.

To see Mommy in the living room, on the sofa with her back to me, I had to slide down two or three stair steps. I had to be very quiet, hugging my knees. For if Mommy knew that I was there she would have been very angry. Can’t I have any privacy in this God-damned house for God’s sake! Go away and leave me alone you God-damned kids, having babies was the end of me, lost my figure, lost my looks, God damn you go away, just leave me alone.

This was not our daytime mother, I understood. This was Mommy-at-night in the darkened living room and with the TV set turned to mute. And sometimes I would fall asleep on the stairs, and one of them—it might be Mommy, it might be Daddy—would discover me, and not be angry with me, but half-carry me back to my bed and tuck me into my bed and so it was part of my dream, and a happy part of my dream, or maybe it had not happened, at all.

Krissie you naughty girl! Shut your eyes tight and sleep.

10

“YOUR FATHER WILL be staying with your uncle Earl for a while. No—don’t ask me about it, he will tell you himself.”

No longer Daddy but your father. This subtle change. This abrupt change. Our mother speaking to us of your father as she might have been speaking of your teacher, your bus driver.

This was three days after the news of Zoe Kruller was first released. Three days after the banner headlines in the Sparta Journal which my mother had snatched from my fingers.

Three days, during which time Daddy had not been home very much, or had been home and gone away again, and had returned late at night when Ben and I were in bed and supposedly asleep.

“Tell us—what?”

We’d just returned from school. Ben let his backpack fall onto the floor. Since the news of Zoe Kruller had entered our lives Ben had been behaving strangely, loud-laughing, crude as the older boys on the school bus who tormented younger children.

Ben’s face flushed with anger. “Bullshit.”

Ben pushed past our mother, ran upstairs thudding his heels on the stairs and slammed the door to his room. Looking as if she’d been struck in the face our mother stared after him but didn’t call his name—didn’t scold him—so I knew that something was very wrong.

“Mom? What is…”

“I said. He will tell you, Krista. Your father. Soon.”

I was stunned. I could not comprehend why Ben was so angry, and what it meant that your father was staying with a relative. I seemed to know that this must have something to do with Zoe Kruller but could not imagine what.

The phone began ringing. We were in the kitchen and something, too, was wrong with the kitchen: there were dishes in the sink, soaking. There was a discolored sponge on the counter that looked as if it had been used to mop up coffee. There was an ashtray filled with butts, and the air stank of cigarette smoke and butts. And this was a wrong smell, for this house. And my mother’s face looked shiny and swollen and her mouth was greasy with fresh smears of Revlon lipstick as if she’d been expecting company or possibly company had come and departed and that was why there were dishes in the sink and cigarette butts smoldering in the ashtray and an air of frantic unease that felt like a churning in the guts. I was young enough then to react as a child would react—trying to push into my mother’s arms. But my mother was distracted, upset; she had no time for a needy daughter; the ringing phone seemed to stymie her as if she couldn’t recognize its sound. When I moved to pick up the receiver my mother gave a little slap at me: “No, Krista. Not for you. I’ll take it, you go away.”

SO ABRUPTLY MY FATHER was staying with my uncle Earl Diehl who lived in East Sparta. But Daddy’s things remained at home, most of Daddy’s clothes and Daddy’s tools in his basement workshop and Daddy’s 1975 Willys Jeep he’d been thinking about selling, in the garage.

Each time the phone rang naturally the thought was This is Daddy!

But Daddy didn’t call until the next evening when we were just sitting down—late—to a meal already delayed and interrupted by phone calls. In a guarded voice my mother answered and waved for Ben and me to leave the kitchen, which we did, hovering nervously in the living room, and after a few minutes my mother called Ben back—“Your father wants to speak with you, Ben! Hurry up”—and Ben took the receiver from her hand shyly and reluctantly; his face flushed red, all he could murmur was O.K., Dad, yeah I guess so in a voice close to tears. Then it was my turn, I was dry-mouthed and anxious and like Ben stricken with shyness for how strange it was, how wrong-seeming, to be speaking with Daddy on the phone! I don’t think that either Ben or I had ever spoken on the phone before with our father; I was unprepared for my father’s voice so close in my ear—“Is that Puss? That’s my li’l Puss? Is it? My sweet Puss—is it?” I was unable to say anything more than Yes Daddy! Yes Daddy for something seemed to be wrong, there was something wrong with Daddy I could not have identified He’s drunk. Couldn’t get up the courage to call his family except drunk. Unexpectedly I began to cry, I was confused and frightened and out of nowhere began to cry, and Daddy said sharply, “Damn, don’t cry. Krista, don’t you cry. No fucking crying, what the fuck’s your mother been telling you, put your mother on the phone, Krista—”

What happened after that, I don’t remember. My mother must have taken the receiver from me, the rest of the evening is a blank.

Hadn’t heard my father’s voice very clearly over the phone and so it came to be a time when I couldn’t hear anyone’s voice very clearly. At school I had difficulty hearing Mrs. Bender. A roaring in my ears like distant thunder. Or in the distance, the roar of one of Daddy’s cars on the Huron Pike Road coming home. On the blackboard—in fact, at our school it was a green board—where chalk-words and numerals melted into one another. My eyes swam in tears. My nose ran. Hunched over my desk desperately wiping my nose with my fingers, shiny wet mucus on my fingers I had to let dry in the air, I’d used up the wad of Kleenex my mother had given me. “Krista? Are you crying? You can tell me, dear.”

Mrs. Bender stooped to peer at me. Mrs. Bender provided me with fresh tissues. Mrs. Bender asked if I would like to step outside into the hall to speak with her—if I had something to say, I might want to say in private—but I shook my head no. My mother had cautioned me Don’t say anything about Daddy. Never say anything about our lives at home. Never anything to be repeated Krista do you understand?

Faint and reproachful in my ears were my father’s admonitory words Don’t cry! Krista, don’t you cry! No fucking crying.

I was shivering so hard, my teeth were chattering. Like a stark-wet-eyed little doll set to shaking. Somehow it had happened that a daughter of Lucille Diehl—Lucille, who took such pride in her household and in her children!—had been allowed to leave the house on a freezing February morning in just a cotton pullover and slacks beneath a winter jacket, my fine limp pale-blond hair badly snarled at the nape of my neck and my skin hot.

Tenderly Mrs. Bender pressed the back of her cool hand against my forehead.

“Oh, dear! You’re running a fever.”

Shivering turned to giggling. Running a fever—how could this be? In the school infirmary the nurse took my temperature with a thermometer thrust beneath my tongue, making me gag. She examined the scummy interior of my mouth and my throat that throbbed with soreness. She and Mrs. Bender conferred in whispers This girl, you know who she is—Diehl?

It took much of an hour for the nurse to contact my mother on the phone to tell her please come immediately, take your child home she has a temperature of 102° F and seems to be coming down with the flu.

Coming down with the flu! This expression was used so frequently in Sparta in the winter, it had acquired something of the lilt and innocence of a popular song. Coming down with the flu explained this sick sad collapsing sensation so it wasn’t scary any longer but a hopeful sign, you were just like everyone else.

“BULLSHIT.”

This was what Ben said. Sometimes in disgust, sometimes laughingly. Sometimes in a mutter not meant to be overheard and sometimes rudely loud so that my mother and I had no choice but to hear.

When Mom wouldn’t let us see the newspaper, watch the six o’clock local news or any TV unless she was in the room with us clutching the remote control.

When Mom took telephone calls upstairs in the bedroom with the door shut against us. When Mom no longer summoned us to the phone, to speak with Daddy. In desperation I appealed to Ben to say why, why was this happening, and Ben had no answer except a shrug—“Bullshit. That’s all it is.”

I asked Ben what this had to do with Mrs. Kruller being killed and Ben only just repeated in maddening idiocy—“Bullshit. I told you.”

“What do you mean—‘bullshit’?”

“I told you, stupid. ‘Bullshit.’”

I followed Ben around. I pulled at Ben’s arm. Ben slapped at me, shoved me. I was white-faced in desperation, indignation. I repeated my question and finally Ben relented as if taking pity on me.

“What they’re saying in the news. That Dad is a ‘suspect.’”

“‘Suspect’—what’s that?”

“The police are ‘questioning’ Dad about Mrs. Kruller. He’s ‘in custody’—Eddy Diehl is a ‘suspect.’”

“But—why?”

Of course I knew what a suspect was. I knew what it meant when a suspect was in police custody. Yet I could not seem to comprehend what this had to do with our father, or with us. I was feeling anxious, vaguely nauseated. I could not comprehend why my brother suddenly hated me.

“Why? Because they’re assholes, that’s why. These men she was seeing, one of them did it, ‘strangled’ her—‘murdered’ her—and they’re trying to say that Daddy was one of these men, but everybody knows Aaron’s father is the killer, it’s God-damned fucking bullshit, taking Dad into custody.”

Ben’s face contorted as if he were about to cry and I was frightened that Ben would cry for if Ben cried and I was a witness, Ben would be furious with me, Ben would never forgive me and would hate me even worse than he hated me now. So I said, in a silly-girl voice, like a girl on a TV comedy whose mere presence evokes expectant titters of laughter in the invisible audience: “Oh, say—know what?—Mrs. Kruller was here, once.”

Ben stared at me. Ben’s eyes glittered dangerously with tears.

“Here? Where?”

“Here. In this house.”

“Bullshit she was! When?”

I tried to think. It must have been last year, last spring. At the start of warm weather. But we were still in school—it would have been May, early June. The memory returned to me like a TV scene that, at first, seems unfamiliar but gradually then reveals itself as familiar, comforting. The school bus from Harpwell Elementary had brought me home unexpectedly early—12:30 P.M. It was a half-day Wednesday for a teachers’ meeting had been called for that afternoon. Mom was away, Mom had not known about the meeting and the half-day Wednesday. Mom was away in Chautauqua Falls visiting a relative hospitalized for surgery.

The back door was unlocked, Mom had told me—Mom had told Ben and me—just to come inside if she wasn’t home by the time we got home, she was sure to be home by 5:00 P.M., she promised.

It was not unusual, to leave a house unlocked. On the Huron Pike Road in the countryside west of Sparta it was not unusual to leave a house unlocked all day, all night.

Nor was it unusual that a mother—a “devoted” mother, like Lucille Diehl—might leave her children unattended for an hour or two, in such circumstances.

And so I walked into the kitchen humming to myself, and there was Mom at the sink—no: not Mom—there was Zoe Kruller at the sink!—pretty Zoe Kruller from Honeystone’s Dairy except Zoe wasn’t wearing her white cord smock and trousers but silky purple slacks and a snug-fitting lavender sweater, no hairnet on her springy hair, Zoe was whistling as she rinsed coffee mugs at the sink and turning Zoe blinked at me with startled widened eyes and after the merest heartbeat of a pause Zoe said in a low throaty smooth voice like honey, “Why it’s—Krissie! Well, say—Krissie! Thought that was you! What brings you home at this time of day, Krissie?”

Zoe’s voice was pitched to be heard. Not just by little Krissie but by someone else, in an adjacent room perhaps. At the time I did not quite grasp this fact. At the time I was surprised—I was very surprised—but it was a pleasant surprise, wasn’t it?—to see Zoe Kruller in our kitchen, at our sink? Zoe was smiling so hard at me, her cheeks were all dimpled. Her smile was wide and lustrous baring her pink gums. Against her milky skin freckles and tiny moles quivered. In the other room I heard a man’s voice—a muffled voice—but of course it was Daddy’s voice—I knew it was Daddy of course, I’d seen Daddy’s Jeep in the driveway. I told Zoe that it was a half-day at school, I told Zoe about the teachers’ meeting, and how my mother had driven to Chautauqua Falls to visit a relative in the hospital, and how my mother would be home in a few hours. At the mention of my mother Zoe seemed to brighten even more, Zoe said, “That’s who I dropped by to see, Krissie—your mom. Just wanted to say hello to Lucy but Lucy isn’t home—I guess? Where’d you say she went, Chautauqua Falls?”

There came Daddy into the kitchen combing his hair—it was strange to see Daddy combing his hair, in the kitchen—Daddy’s bristly red-brown hair that looked newly wetted as if he’d just had a shower; Daddy was combing his hair back from his forehead in a single sweeping movement; Daddy was wearing one of his fresh-ironed short-sleeved white cotton shirts, and in the breast pocket was a plastic ballpoint pen, the kind given out at SPARTA CONSTRUCTION; and Daddy’s face looked ruddy and handsome and Daddy stared at me for a long moment as if he didn’t know who I was, then said, “Krissie. You’re home.”

Quickly Zoe intervened explaining that I had just a “half-day” at school since there was a teachers’ meeting. Zoe explained that she’d told me she had dropped by to see Lucy—Lucille—“But now I guess I’ll be going, since Lucille isn’t here right now.”

By this time Zoe had dried both coffee mugs and put them away in the maple wood cabinet in exactly the places where Mom kept them.

“You don’t have to tell your mother that I was here to visit her,” Zoe said. Zoe stooped to smile at me even harder, and to brush her lips against my forehead. Zoe smelled perfumy and musky and nothing at all like Honeystone’s Dairy. In the hollow of her neck there was a faint glisten of moisture, I’d have liked to touch with my tongue. Around her neck Zoe was wearing a small golden bird—a dove?—on a thin golden chain. “It can be a surprise, Krissie. I’ll come back tomorrow and surprise your mom so don’t spoil the surprise, Krissie, all right? We’ll keep it a secret between you and me, that I was here today.”

Yes, I said. I liked it that there might be a secret between Zoe Kruller and me; and that Daddy was part of it, too.

“Well, Puss!—your dad has to leave, too.” Awkwardly Daddy leaned over me and kissed me on the forehead, a wet embarrassed swipe of a kiss at my hairline. “See, I’m going out to a construction site—I just dropped back here to change my shirt. Well—O.K.! See you later, Krissie.”

If it seemed strange that Zoe Kruller and my father scarcely acknowledged each other—scarcely glanced at each other—somehow it didn’t register on me, at the time. Strange too that Zoe left the kitchen carrying her shoulder bag slung over her shoulder by a strap, with an airy growl “G’bye, you two”—and almost immediately afterward Daddy left the kitchen by the same door; within seconds there came the sound of the Willys Jeep pulling out of the driveway, and surely Zoe Kruller had to be riding with Daddy, in the passenger’s seat—but already by that time I was distracted peering into the refrigerator for a snack, leftover tapioca pudding from the previous evening’s dessert neatly covered in Saran Wrap.

Never did it occur to me to think at that time Mrs. Kruller was here with Daddy! Mrs. Kruller came to visit Daddy.

Still less would I have thought Daddy brought Mrs. Kruller here, to be alone with her. While Mommy was away.

“Mrs. Kruller was here,” I told Ben. “Last year. When the teachers had their meeting, and we were let out of school at noon.”

“We weren’t! That never happened.”

“You weren’t. It wasn’t your school.”

“Bullshit Mrs. Kruller was here. She wasn’t any friend of Mom’s.”

“She dropped by to see Mom, she said. She called Mom ‘Lucy.’ But Mom wasn’t home so she went away again.”

Ben said doubtfully, “Why’d she come here? Mom and Mrs. Kruller were not friends.”

There was something sad and flat in the way Ben spoke the words Mom and Mrs. Kruller were not friends.

“Daddy was here, too. At the same time.”

“He was not! You’re making this up.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Zoe Kruller wouldn’t have come here, Krista. That is such bullshit.”

“Will you stop saying that! She was, too. And Daddy was here, too.”

“Krista, he was not.”

“They went away in Daddy’s Jeep. I had a half-day at school and came home early and they were here.”

“Bullshit.”

“They did.”

Ben struck me in the shoulder, hard. “That never happened, you’re a God-damned liar. You tell anyone about that, I’ll break your scrawny neck.”

Ben pushed past me and out of the room. I felt a flame of pure hatred ripple over me for my brother who was so crude, and so cruel. Scrawny neck!—I would never forget these words.

Later, I would come to wonder; maybe Ben was right, and I was wrong. That might be better to think, than the other.

Had Zoe Kruller really been in our kitchen, rinsing coffee mugs at the sink? Had Zoe Kruller really been here, whistling? And Daddy had come into the kitchen combing his hair back from his face, his left arm bent and part-cradling his head, his right hand gripping the black plastic comb he carried in his rear pants pocket, and Daddy had been limping just slightly, you would have to know that Daddy had a bad knee to register this limp. Maybe I was remembering all of this wrongly?—the way I hadn’t been hearing Mrs. Bender at school, or hadn’t been able to see the smaller chalk markings on the blackboard at school.

Here was another possibility: Zoe Kruller had come to our house and Mommy had been waiting for her. Maybe it hadn’t been the half-day at my school but another day. Mommy had invited Zoe Kruller to the house because Lucille Diehl and Zoe Kruller were friends, and it wasn’t Daddy who was Zoe Kruller’s friend after all.

Which would mean: Daddy had not been here. Daddy had not driven Mrs. Kruller away in the black Willys Jeep.

Daddy hadn’t been here at all. Not at that time.

11

BUT I CAN LOVE YOU BEST, Daddy! I can forgive you.

That would be my secret, not even Daddy would know.

In the County Line Tavern, in our booth in a farther corner of the barroom Daddy tossed change onto the sticky tabletop—quarters, dimes, wild rolling pennies.

“Here’s change for the phone, Krista. Call your mother and let her know where you are. Let her know that you are safe”—Daddy twisted his mouth into a sneer of a smile—“and you’re having dinner with me and why doesn’t she come join us?—we’d like that.”

Would we like that? I wasn’t so sure.

Daddy winked at me as obediently I slid out of the booth. I laughed uncertain what Daddy’s wink meant.

As if my mother would want to meet us—in all places, the noisy County Line Tavern which was a country place on the highway five miles north of Sparta and about that far from my home, in another direction. Here the air was dense with men’s uplifted voices, laughter. Loud rock music, country-and-western, blaring from a jukebox. That smell that is so poignant to me—that smell that indicates my father, my father’s world—of beer, tobacco smoke, a just barely perceptible odor of male sweat, maybe male anxiety, anguish. There were a few women in the County Line—young women—some very young-looking girls who had to be at least twenty-one to be served alcohol, seated together in a festive knot at the bar—but predominantly the place was men: local working men, farmers, truckers who left the motors of their enormous rigs running in the parking lot—why, I never knew—wouldn’t they be burning up gasoline, needlessly?—causing the fresh chill air outside to burn blue with exhaust.

At this hour of early-evening, nearing 6:00 P.M., past dusk and dark as night, the County Line was very popular. Men in no hurry to get to their homes, or men like Eddy Diehl somehow lacking a home, invisibly disfigured and yet determined to be festive, hearty. In my Sparta High jacket which was made of a synthetic fabric that resembled silk, eye-catching deep-purple glancingly-glamorous silk, in my much-laundered jeans and with my luminous-blond ponytail flaring at the back of my head and halfway down my back, I caught the eye of men the way an upright flame drifting through murky shadow would catch the eye. In a gesture of vague paternal protectiveness my father had led me to a booth in the “family” section of the tavern when we’d first entered—he’d seated me with my back to the bar—but seemed heedless now, that to call my mother on the pay phone I would have to make my way through the bustle of the barroom, by myself.

In my flurry of excitement—the daughter-enchantment of being with the forbidden Daddy—it would not have occurred to me to think Why would Daddy bring me to such a place! Nor was I willing to think Is it to show me off—Eddy Diehl’s daughter, who still adores him?—has faith in him?

In the cramped corridor outside the restrooms a thick-bodied man with bristling hair stood at the pay phone cursing into the receiver—“Expect me to b’lieve that, fuck you.” It was a furious and yet intimate exchange, I had to wonder at the person—a woman, surely—at the other end: wife? Ex-wife? Girlfriend? Already at fifteen I seemed to know that there would not be, in my life, anything like this sort of blunt matter-of-fact intimacy; anything like such vulnerability.

The heavyset man fumbled to hang up the receiver, turned and blundered into me, muttered Hey sor-ry! His breath stank like diesel fuel. In exaggerated surprise his bloodshot eyes blinked at me. “Debbie, is it? Debbie Hansen? You lookin for company, Deb-bie?”

I told him no. I wasn’t Debbie and I wasn’t looking for company.

“No? Not Debbie? Shit—you’re too young, what’re you—a kid? High school? You callin’ a boyfriend, honey? You don’t need to call no boyfriend if—like—you need a ride home? You need a ride home? My name’s Brent, I’m like your daddy’s age—you need any help, honey.”

Again I told him no. Told him I only just wanted to make a telephone call.

“You need some—change for the phone? I got a pocketful—see—”

He was teetering over me. I told him please leave me alone.

“—lots of change, see—help y’self—”

On his sweaty palm coins glinted. I had a sudden impulse 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 man’s hand. For my fear was, Daddy would see us. And something terrible would happen, and possibly to Daddy. I hoped that Daddy wasn’t seeing this confrontation.

“Your old man never did time, did he? For what he did to Delray Kruller’s wife? Y’know who that was—Zoe? How old are you? Why’d he bring a kid like you here? How’d he get away with what he did? Why’s he back here? ‘Visiting’—who? God-damned murderer motherfucker.”

I tried to protest. I was being jostled, pulled-at by someone else—the big doughy-faced bartender who had shaken my father’s hand. And there was another man, a friend of the goatee-man. Saying, “Shit, Mack, let the girl go. She’s got nothing to do with it. Come on.”

“Son of a bitch killed Delray’s wife, and never paid shit for it. Is that him over there, in the booth? That’s Diehl?”

I tried to protest, my father had not murdered anyone. My father had not been arrested, even. My father had not been indicted…

Spittle-mouthed Mack was pulled aside. There came someone shoving at the bartender, who grabbed him by the shirt collar as in a cartoon, shook and unsettled him and shoved him back. There were raised vehement voices. The bartender—his name was Deke—said “Chill out. C’mon chill out. Settle down”—as now the woman with the springy flyaway hair and a creased-monkey made-up face intervened: “Don’t listen to these assholes, honey! Your father has every right to drink any damn place he wants, this is the United States of America for Christ’s sake.” I was grateful to think that this woman was my friend, she wore a hot-pink satin designer blouse and tight-fitting jeans, she teetered on ridiculous high heels of a kind Zoe Kruller might have worn on the bandstand at Chautauqua Park. Her breath reeked of cheap whiskey, she was leaning into my face aggressively. “That Kruller woman what’s her name—God-damned Zoe—hot-shit ‘Zoe’—she was asking for it. Everybody knew what Zoe was. It hadn’t been one man it’d been another. ‘Get the bed you lay down in’—the bed you deserve, see?—who the fuck fault’s that?”

I escaped back to my father in the booth. It was amazing to me, Daddy had not been aware of the commotion at the bar.

In fact Daddy was sitting with his shoulders hunched, like a bear that has been wounded and is trying to summon back his strength. A few minutes alone without the pretty blond ponytail daughter, a man like Eddy Diehl can sink into a mood. A man like Eddy Diehl is a sucker for such a mood. Elbows on the scarred tabletop and his heavy jaw brooding on his fists, eyes half-shut as if he was very tired suddenly, so fucking tired. He had ordered another Coke for me and a shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of foaming dark ale for himself. Glancing up at me with the quick Daddy-smile, as I half-fell back into the booth.

I was dazed, but I was smiling. Another Daddy might have noted the daze beneath the smile but not this Daddy who finished off half his shot glass in a single swallow. “Listen to the song I’m playing for you—know what it is?”

I tried to listen. I thought this might be important. So much commotion in the barroom, more men at the bar staring in our direction, I couldn’t concentrate very well.

Delia’s gone, one more round!

Delia’s gone

A man’s deep baritone voice—a country-and-western drawl—was this Johnny Cash? I tried, but could scarcely hear.

Strange how my father lowered his head, as if it was urgent to hear the words of the song, as if the song conveyed some special meaning to him; as if Eddy Diehl had recently been in some place (but what place could that have been?) where he hadn’t been allowed to hear such music. Or hadn’t been allowed to sit like this drinking whiskey, drinking beer, smoking a cigarette, in a luxury of sensuousness, solitude; the peculiar solitude of the drinker-in-public.

Delia oh Delia

Where you been so long?

One more round, Delia’s gone,

One more round.

Still at the bar we were under scrutiny. I could not bring myself to look but in the corner of my eye I was aware of the angry goatee-man—and others—observing Daddy and me. (But why wasn’t Daddy aware? Was Daddy drunk, or was Daddy deliberately not seeing?) I felt an absurd leap of hope, that the drunk woman in the shiny hot-pink blouse would come to our defense; she would enlist others, in support of my father.

Of course I knew that the name Diehl carried certain associations now, in Sparta. In all of Herkimer County. Maybe in all of the Adirondacks. As Zoe Kruller would be known, and the bluegrass group Black River Breakdown. Cassettes and CDs of the band’s music were passed about locally; Daddy had several in the glove compartment of the Willys Jeep, which I’d often asked him to play, when I was riding with him in that vehicle.

“Mister? Here y’are.”

A waitress brought a platter of French fries to our table, and another bottle of ale. Daddy roused himself from his music-trance to offer some fries to me—“I ordered these for just now. This isn’t our dinner yet—we’ll go somewhere special for dinner—only right now, I’m so God-damned hungry.”

He began to eat with his fingers. He’d removed his baseball cap, his hair was disheveled, dark with feathery streaks of gray, alternately thick and sparse, receding at his temples which appeared flushed and lightly beaded with sweat. It made me uneasy, that Daddy was beginning to resemble his father—Grandpa Diehl who’d always been so old—whom Daddy and his brothers had called the old man with an exasperated sort of affection—the old bastard—can’t put anything over on the old bastard. A man begins to lose his hair, his skull takes on a different shape, he begins to assume a different identity. I felt such tenderness for Daddy, I wanted to stroke Daddy’s face, that was looking so battered and leathery as if windburnt; clearly he’d been working outside. In his early forties Eddy Diehl was no longer a man for whom a fresh-laundered white cotton shirt was appropriate work-attire.

No longer a husband/father of whom his wife said boastfully he was of the managerial class.

“Krista? Have some. C’mon eat with your old man.”

“No thanks, Daddy! I don’t like fries.”

“Must be hungry, Puss, the way you were running around on that basketball court. C’mon.”

I was hungry. I was very hungry. But could not bring myself to eat the thick greasy-salty fries, reheated in a microwave oven behind the bar, doused with ketchup, the kind of food my mother was quick to perceive was likely to be leftovers from other meals, scraped off other customers’ plates.

Daddy shoved the platter of fries in my direction. I thought Ben would eat these! and so I picked up one or two fries, to break into smaller pieces and pretend to eat.

I saw that my father’s knuckles were freshly scratched, bruised. And maybe scarred, beneath. I knew he’d done treework at one time recently—working with chainsaws—I knew that there were men at Sparta Construction who’d had terrible accidents with chainsaws—I wanted to take up my father’s big, scarred hand in mine—to tell him that I loved him, and I did not believe what some people said about him, I knew it could not be true.

Yet with his unshaven jaws and something heavy-lidded, sulky, about his eyes Daddy exuded a sharkish air; here was a man of pride, to whom you did not condescend; the voice on the jukebox, penetrating the smoky interior of the crowded County Line Tavern on a weekday evening, was the very voice of this man’s soul, and you did not condescend to such a soul. I felt a warning shiver of the kind a swimmer might feel as something not-quite-visible—dark, finned, silent—passes close beneath him, he can’t quite see.

The jukebox song was ending. There was a deep-baritone masculine robustness that seemed inappropriate to its subject:

So if your woman’s devilish

You can let her run,

Or you can bring her down and

Do her like Delia got done.

Delia’s gone, one more round!

Delia’s gone

Daddy was nodding with grave satisfaction, chewing French fries. Big lardy-greasy fries the size of his big fingers lavishly doused with ketchup. Whatever the Johnny Cash song meant to him, it had struck a powerful chord. He’d finished his shot of whiskey and signaled for another. Took a hearty swig from the bottle of ale. Fixed me with a squinting wink and a terse Daddy-smile to finally ask what he’d been putting off asking, since I’d returned to the booth. “Well, Krista: what did your mom say?”

Mom! I had not heard this word in my father’s mouth for a very long time. I saw that he’d been hopeful that my mother would be joining us, his eyes shone with a crazy hope.

12

MARCH 1983

THE TROUBLE corroding our lives like deep pockets of rust in the hulks of abandoned vehicles. The trouble sucking all the joy out of our lives. And the very awareness the trouble slow to be absorbed by us, who wished each day to think that this! this would surely be the day when the trouble is cleared up.

In retrospect it appears inevitable, and awful. At the time it seems just haphazard.

How Daddy was gone from our household and living with his brother in East Sparta and one day Ben said meanly, “If he’s gone thirteen days he’s gone. He won’t be coming back.”

Zoe Kruller was not a name to be uttered in our household. Yet Zoe Kruller was a name uttered everywhere in Sparta.

On the Sparta radio station local DJ’s were playing songs by Black River Breakdown. Zoe Kruller’s unmistakable voice—throaty, intimate, just-this-side-of-teasing—was suddenly everywhere. The most popular Zoe Kruller songs were “Footprints in the Snow”—the words of which had an eerie prescience, describing what appears to be the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman—

I traced her little footprints in the snow

I found her little footprints in the snow

Now she’s up in heaven she’s with the angel band

I know I’m going to meet her in that promised land

I found her little footprints in the snow

and “Little Bird of Heaven” which was my favorite, and I guess it was Daddy’s favorite too since it was the one Daddy played most often when he was driving one of his vehicles. Zoe Kruller’s voice was airy and playful in this song but melancholy too, you’d find yourself drawing in a breath and biting back a little cry, these words were so beautiful—

Well love they tell me is a fragile thing

It’s hard to fly on broken wings

I lost my ticket to the promised land

Little bird of heaven right here in my hand.

So toss it up or pass it round

Pay no mind to what you’re carryin’ round

Or keep it close, hold it while you can

There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand.

In Sparta it came to be thought that Zoe Kruller had left a message—“a nest of clues”—in this song. Especially by girls and women it was thought that Zoe had “named her murderer” in the song and if you listened closely, or wrote the lyrics down and took note of the first letters, or the last letters, of each line, you would know who the man was.

Fallen hearts and fallen leaves

Starlings light on the broken trees

I find we all need a place to land

There’s a little bird of heaven right here in your hand.

In Mom’s car we were driving and there came breathy and urgent in our ears amid gushing heat from the heater—for it was a vicious-windy March morning—the murdered woman’s voice Little bird of heaven right here in your hand—and with a cry my mother switched off the radio.

“Her! That terrible woman.”

Why is Zoe Kruller a terrible woman?

Is it because Zoe Kruller is a slut?

And does a terrible-slut woman deserve to die?

No one could understand why Black River Breakdown had never made a commercial record, never had a contract with a New York City or Los Angeles recording agency, or been invited to perform outside the Adirondack region. Now their girl-singer had been murdered, the dazed little band of musicians found themselves touched with a kind of lurid tabloid glamour like a spotlight beamed into their faces. The fiddler, who was the group’s oldest musician, at forty-six, had gone into hiding and refused to be interviewed by the media except to say he’d known Zoe Kruller “since she’d been the prettiest baby you could imagine”—while the young guitarist with his Elvis sideburns and shoulder-length hair turned up anywhere you’d look—on late-afternoon local TV, in the “entertainment features” pages of the Sparta Journal facing the comic strips, baring his soul saying he hadn’t slept a night since Zoe was murdered, he hoped to God the police would find whoever did this, and fast; he was composing a ballad in memory of Zoe he hoped he and the group could perform sometime soon…

This newspaper article, and others, I would keep in my notebook, in secret. Seeming to know This will be with me all my life. This will change my life.

No one had been murdered in Sparta, or in all of Herkimer County, for a long time: nine years. If you didn’t count—as the media did not—several killings at the Seneca Indian reservation designated manslaughter which had been settled without trials and publicity. And rarely had anyone in Herkimer County been murdered in such a way: in the victim’s residence, in her bed, to be discovered on a Sunday morning by her own son.

The previous murder, in Sparta, had been during a robbery at the Sunoco station on route 31; before that, a homeless man had been hammered to death by another homeless man, in a Sparta shelter. Both killers had been identified and arrested by police within a day or two.

How different this was—The murderer of Zoe Kruller remains at large.

And—Suspects but no arrests yet, Sparta detectives decline to comment.

We were frightened but we were thrilled, too. We were made to come home directly from school and our mothers drove us places where just recently we’d had to walk or, in warmer weather, to ride our bicycles. We could not know it—perhaps in a way we did know it, we sensed it—and this was part of the thrill—that this interlude would mark a turn in our lives as in the small-city life of Sparta, a sense that We will not be safe again, there is no one to protect us always.

Boys were allowed more freedom than girls, of course. This was always the case but now more than ever for whoever had killed Zoe Kruller had to be a man and this man would not wish to kill a boy or another man, only a woman or a girl. Even a child of eleven understood this logic.

Girls were warned always to be wary of strangers. Never be talked into climbing into a stranger’s car, never reply to a stranger, never make eye contact with a stranger, if a stranger approaches you, run!

Or: it might be someone you know. Not a stranger but an acquaintance. An adult man.

For whoever had killed Zoe Kruller, it was believed that he had known her and that she had let him into her residence willingly. One of Zoe Kruller’s male companions.

Or, Mrs. Kruller’s husband Delray.

Sometimes identified as her estranged husband Delray.

In a dictionary in our 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 it: a smile tugged at my lips.

A long-ago Daddy-game when I’d been a little girl. Daddy had hidden my hands inside his big-Daddy hands pretending they were lost, he couldn’t find them.

Where are Puss’s little paws? Who’s seen Puss’s paws? Anybody seen two lost paws?

“Why are you smiling, Krista? Is something funny?”

Quickly I told my mother no. Nothing was funny.

“I’m glad that someone thinks something is funny. Yes, that’s good to know.”

When my mother was angry she pretended to be hurt. If you didn’t apologize immediately, and repeat your apology several times, my mother would become angry.

I told her no nothing was funny. I wasn’t smiling. But I was sorry that I was smiling, if I was smiling.

My mother drew a deep breath. My mother squeezed my chill squirmy hands as if to keep me from running away.

“Well, Krista! You know that your father has been staying with your uncle Earl. And maybe you know that your father has been ‘cooperating’ with the Sparta police detectives who are investigating”—my mother’s brave voice began to falter, I couldn’t raise my eyes to her face—“the death of—that woman—the one who was hurt—Mrs. Kruller—you know who she is. Who she was. The one who was—killed.” My mother paused, and drew another deep breath. A vein pulsed in her throat like a frantic little blue worm. “They—the police—haven’t caught him yet—the one who hurt her—Mrs. Kruller—but they will. But, Krista, I wanted to tell you—and Ben—that your father has been—he has ‘cooperated’ with the police—he has told the police—first, he told me—that he had been a—a ‘close friend’ of that woman’s. And he had visited her where she was living…sometimes.” Now my mother was speaking in rapid little bursts and pauses, like one who is running, whose breath comes in pants; like one whose heartbeat has become erratic. She was squeezing my hands to make me wince. “He—your father—had told police at first that he hadn’t visited her—not for a long time—and that they weren’t friends—they had not been friends for a long time—a few years ago yes, but not recently—this is what he’d told the police—and he had told me—but that was wrong of him because it wasn’t true—and it was wrong of him because the police would find out—because he should have known the police would find out—the police are questioning everyone who knew that woman and her family and everyone who worked with her or lived by her or any of the Krullers—any of that family—they are questioning them all, and so it was a mistake for your father to lie to them. Your father lied to the police, Krista, and your father lied to me. He was afraid, he said. He wanted to protect his family, he said. But the mistake was he has made some people think—he has made the police think—that he might have had something to do with…”

My mother paused, breathing rapidly. The little blue vein fluttered in her throat. Something oily glistened at her hairline. She was wearing her shapeless black stretch-band jersey slacks, a shirt with a twisted collar and a cardigan sweater buttoned crookedly to her neck. Her hair looked matted on one side as if she’d been sleeping on that side of her head and had not checked her reflection in the mirror.