Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And he's about to hang up when a man answers, his voice gravelly and intimate, as if lifting from a pillow, and again Jinx asks for Graice, says he's a classmate of hers, and the man says, OK, kid hang on, and there's a wait, a considerable wait, during which time Jinx hears muffled voices and music, radio noises; then the phone is taken up again with a thud and again the man's voice is close in Jinx's ear, slurred as if the speaker is mildly drunk. Looks like the girl isn't here right now. and the mother can't come to the phone.

  Jinx hangs up. Never tries another time.

  Ten minutes into the final quarter of the game against Troy, the Hammond team with a slim, chancy lead, Jinx Fairchild's basket ball career ends.

  One minute he's leaping straight up into the air. then he's falling, falling.

  Amid the deafening cheers and screams: Jinx. Jinx. Jinx.

  Since the start of the game the Troy guard has been hot breathing in his face. Stepping on his toes. Using elbows, shoulders. He's a white boy with a Polish sounding name, Baranczak, six feet three inches tall, eyes glaring as new minted marbles, a fair flushed skin, blond hair trimmed in a brutal crew cut; Baranczak is a strong defensive player, not quite so fast on his feet as Jinx Fairchild, but fast.

  and tricky, and mean. In the first quarter when Jinx spins to throw a hook shot Baranczak is there to surprise him. fouls him with an elbow in the ribs that nearly knocks him to the floor.

  That look of fanatic hatred! Muttering over the referee's whis the, Slow down, you black prick, this ain't Harlem.

  Not once, though, does Jinx Fairchild look Baranczak in the face.

  Plays his game so deadpan cool it's like the fucker isn't even there.

  That drives them wild.

  Never lock eyes with your man, only observe him at mid chest. Seeing is he there, and where. and where's his momentum going to take him.

  As, at the foul line, feeling the grain of the ball against his fingertips, Jinx Fairchild takes care never to glance to the right or the left, at the crowd. He'll furrow his forehead up like an old man's but his expression is still deadpan; can't nobody in this place guess is he praying God don't let me miss, please God don't A thousand times he has positioned himself here, at the foul line. Never knowing why.

  Asshole boys' game, but if you're in it, asshole, got to play it out.

  Jinx Fairchild snaps the ball from him. sees it arc, strike the rim wrong, and ricochet back out.

  So he misses. And the crowd responds as the crowd always does: groans of disappointment, screams of jubilation.

  It's an off night for Hammond; maybe they've been anticipating this game for too long. Their team rhythm is off, their rapport is off, it's one of those nights, even championship teams have those nights, who can say why? Jinx Fairchild the star forward is playing harder than he usually plays, isn't able to pass the ball cause his teammates are so closely guarded, and his own guard, Baranczak, is always in his face. if the big bullish flush faced kid is intimidated by guarding Jinx Fairchild it comes out not in nervousness but in aggression and rude words.

  Smart ass nigger who won't acknowledge he's there. he exists.

  For Jinx Fairchild, though, as the minutes pass, the game is becoming re mote, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Hammond is behind by eight points, then by twelve he doesn't glance at the scoreboard or the clock. but he knows.

  God don't let me fail. Please God don't let mefuck up.

  He's breathing through his mouth, he's running on leaden legs.

  There's a raw scraped hurt to his throat and he's been swallowing phlegm. and these painkiller pills Sissy Weaver slipped him out of her momma's supply doctor's prescription pills, from the welfare clinic make the throbbing in his head weird and muffled like a piston wrapped in yards of gauze.

  Caught a bad cold up there on the bridge, just what Jinx Fairchild deserves.

  The referee's whistle. the shouts of the other players.

  the maniac cries of the crowd. Hank Breuer, poor bastard, leaping up from the bench as if he's going to have a heart attack: all have become re mote and unreal.

  Still, Jinx Fairchild's beautifully conditioned body keeps him in the game. Long legs, quick hands and feet, sharp foxy eyes. Like Joe Louis out on his feet in the first match with Schmeling, but still going through the motions of fighting. That zombie look, that glisten to the eyes. Same principle as the praying mantis Sugar Baby cruelly decapitated in the garden when they were little boys and the thing kept on crawling around and twitching. for minutes.

  Don't thatfucker know he spose to be dead? Sugar Baby protested.

  Troy scores, Hammond scores. In the second half of the game Troy begins to lose its momentum. And Jinx is fouled another time by Baranczak. that broad cheeked sweaty face flush in his but the black boy won't see. and the pain of the fall shoots through his vertebrae but goes re mote too, and muffled, as if wrapped in yards and yards of gauze.

  One more foul, Baranczak is warned, and he's out of the game.

  Jinx Fairchild gets to his feet stiff in dignity. Eyes not quite in focus but he takes the ball, positions himself at the foul line, prepares to shoot. There's a whispery quiet to the gym. strange quality to the overhead lights as if suddenly they've become brighter, almost blinding. The hardwood floors glare with wax, and the smell of it underlies the galaxy of other smells.

  God don't let me miss Jinx Fairchild is thinking, swallowing down hot coin sized clots of phlegm, God what you going to do about it?

  The tall lanky forward for the Hammond team, number 3

  BAm soaeclsh e, pEepAsg cA.

  the right nor the left nor even at the first row of Hammond VIPs where his own mother Minnie Fairchild sits with the family in a paroxysm of anticipation and dread, her big knuckled hands folded tight as prayer in her lap.

  But he doesn't look, her Verlyn.

  Naw: that boy way beyond her.

  And this time, snapping the ball out from him, Jinx Fairchild sees it fall smoothly through the rim: that ellipsis you know is a circle.

  And his second shot goes in too.

  So Hammond slips into the lead. Four points. six points eight. Who can say why a team re gains its rapport, why another team loses its edge? Shortly into the final quarter there's a dazzling pick play and Jinx Fairchild has the ball running the baseline to the farther court.

  leaps three feet into the air and the ball glides outward from his fingers, graceful as an ascending musical note. then, coming down, and he comes down awkwardly, and hard, his ankle turns. and the crack! of the snapping bone sounds through the entire gym.

  Graice Courtney brings the florist's delivery upstairs to her mother in the kitchen: one dozen blood red roses and a handwritten note for MISS PERSIA DAICHES.

  Persia opens the envelope with an expression of anticipation and worry, re ads the note,are re ads it, hands it over to Graice.

  Commemorating the first official day of our divorce.

  SINCERELY I pray for your huppiness in this harvest we have yet to re ap.

  Your former husband DUKE Graice's laughter is brief, scratchy, and mirthless.

  She says, Why has he put quotation marks around his name?

  Is he only a name?

  She takes the tall blue vase from the cupboard, her favorite vase, fills it partway with water, arranges the roses carefully inside, with as much clinical detachment as a florist's assistant. Covertly, though, she's watching Persia as she stands so very still. so stricken and silent.

  If she cries, Graice thinks calmly, I won't be able to bear it.

  If she cries, Graice thinks, I'll slap her face.

  She says, lightly, I wouldn't think he could afford roses, or would want to. The less we see of him, the more mysterious he's becoming.

  I'd swear, that note isn't Duke. I don't know who it is but it isn't Duke.

  Persia is standing on the linoleum floor in her stocking feet, in a lacy black slip, hair haphazardly set in rollers. She has been ironin
g her black satin hostess's dress for the Golden Slipper Lounge and there's a warm, familiar, comforting scent of ironing in the air, an odor both of damp and of the faintest scorch. On the radio, in voices like Kleenex dissolving in water, the Everly Brothers are singing All I Have to Do Is Dream.

  Graice holds the heavy vase at arm's length. Yes, the roses are beautiful, fresh cut roses always are.

  She persists. Don't you agree, Mother? That note doesn't sound like Duke.

  But Persia is crying. Soundlessly.

  Leaning against the wobbly ironing board as if for support, her damp face exposed, her chest flushed and mottled, breasts prominent.

  Through the coarse lace of her slip her black brassiere shines with a fierce metallic glitter; since childhood, Graice has shied away from looking at her mother's breasts, as if, so visible, so blatant, they constitute a reproach of a kind to her. Graice's own body is tall, lean, tight muscled, with small hard breasts, a hard flat belly, hard hips, thighs. nerves coiled as if to spring. She sees with despairing satisfaction that the flesh of Persia's upper arms is going flaccid and that her shoulder length coppery blond hair dyed, though Persia's euphemism is rinsed has a harsh synthetic sheen, like a mannequin's.

  My beautiful mother. No longer beautiful.

  And dangling foolishly upside down from the ironing board is the black satin dress, that demeaning costume, short tight skirt, scoop neck, The Golden Slipper in yellow stitches on one breast and the cartoon figure of a small yellow slipper on the other. Worn with smoky spangled stockings and three inch heels, the dress is provocative as a burlesque costume.

  Graice cries, exasperated, hurt, childish, For God's sake, Mother, you wanted the divorce! You wanted it! And it was necessary! Why are you such a hypocrite?

  Persia's weeping is so unnaturally silent, her lovely mouth so contorted, Graice is almost frightened.

  Isn't there the mimicry of madness in the face of grief?

  And Persia, loose as a drunk, is leaning against the ironing board oblivious of the fact that the burning hot iron is set precariously on end. It wouldn't be the first time in this household that the iron has toppled over, crashing to the linoleum floor. Graice has overturned it, and so has Persia.

  Persia is saying, through her sobs,. never love any man the way I loved your father.

  Graice says, in a rage, Shit.

  It's as if a radiant flame has illuminated Graice, this rage. She slams out of the kitchen. Runs down the narrow corridor into her bedroom, this cramped stuffy room she has already outgrown.

  Cheap fleshy pink chenille bedspread, limp dotted swiss curtains, a mirror into which she doesn't dare look, somber wallpapered walls photographs, in frames, hung in profusion on the walls. not photographs of the Courtneys but photographs of strangers long dead, or stark landscapes or seascapes, given to her by her uncle. In the wildness of her dissatisfaction with herself Graice can stare at these photographs, all of them in black and white, taking solace in them as profound and irreducible answers to questions she has never voiced.

  Why are we here? What are we to one another?

  What is this l'fe. £ its dimensions, its circumstances?

  Duke Courtney has never been invited to the Jewett Street apartment, though he has telephoned many times. Because of Duke's persistence, Persia has had to get an unlisted number. And came, once, in the time of Virgil Starling, pushing his way inside the door, so coldly furious it had not seemed at first that he was drunkin a sharkskin suit, white shirt, bow tie, his eyes yellow glaringinsisting he had a right to be here, had a right to spend the night. and when Persia tried to push him away he'd swung wildly and struck her on the side of the head, knocking her back against the kitchen table. and when Graice screamed he'd turned to her, seemed for a moment to be about to strike hey I'm Graice, Daddy! she'd said.

  Don't hit me.

  And Duke Courtney hadn't. He'd gone away without touching her at all.

  Tonight Graice too is preparing to go out: she'll babysit for a woman friend of Persia's in the neighborhood, for which she'll be paid $5.

  Graice Courtney's adolescence is a kaleidoscope of small jobs, after school, Saturdays, summers, savings of$5, $10, $20 she puts in the First Bank of Hammond, Persia's own bank uptown on Main Street' one of the sacred possessions of her life is the grainy dark blue account book in which tellers, over the years, have re corded the steady accumulation of her fortune: $460 by the time of her sixteenth birthday. The saving of money is an end in itself, a satisfaction in itself; the thought of spending it leaves Graice faint with dread.

  For what material possession, what exchange of the abstraction of money for the concrete fact of experience, might justify such a transaction?

  Money might constitute freedom, though, someday. Freedom from Hammond, from the memory of Little Red Garlock, from that woman sobbing in the kitchen as if her heart, broken so many times, has the capacity to break again!

  Hypocrite, thinks Graice, listening.

  You wanted the divorce. you must want this life that's ours.

  She makes a few rough swipes with the hairbrush at her dense, springy hair, regards herself distrustfully in the mirror: her eyes shadowed from insomnia but oddly bright, teary bright, though she isn't the one who's crying.

  She's eager to get out of the apartment before Persia leaves.

  Eager to get to missis Cupple's house up the street, neutral territory.

  Taking with her an armload of books, as usual. this is the summer Graice Courtney is reading the novels of Jane Austen, poetry by Keats, Shelley, Robert Frost, nature books, photography books, anthologies of poetry, short fiction, and drama selected at random from the shelves of the Hammond Public Library: an adolescent reading, fevered and directionless, its common principle the attraction of not here and not now.

  In the kitchen, Persia is still crying.

  Still standing flat footed in her stocking feet, in her lacy black slip. one strap slipped from a shoulder.

  Persia has resumed ironing, though her face is wet with tears and her mascara, so methodically applied within the hour, has begun to streak.

  Rivulets in the pancake makeup mask like ths colored rain.

  On the ironing board, in plain view, there's a glass of some thing clear: gin.

  Graice says angrily, Oh, Mother, why? You said you wouldn't.

  Graice says, You have to drink at that damned place you work, you said, so you were going to cut down at home. you said.

  The dozen blood red roses are on the counter beside the sink where Graice left them.

  It's a sixteen year old's breathy helpless spite: You said. You said.

  Liar.

  Graice Courtney stands in the kitchen doorway of the apartment upstairs at 927 Jewett Street, Hammond, New York, late in the afternoon of a featureless midsummer day in 1958. Her heart is pounding as if she.

  she. has been insulted. Her hair is fierce and burnished about her head; righteousness shines in her young face; she might be a form of an angel of wrath, a creature in an old painting, one of those medieval or early Renaissance paintings she contemplates in art books at the public library. feeling, for all their beauty, no human warmth, but a cold inquisitiveness, an analytical curiosity, wondering at the myriad forms human desire has taken.

  But Persia, slatternly looking in her black slip, jiggly pink plastic rollers on her head, re fuses to be drawn into one of their exhausting quarrels. She's too smart! She's a woman of thirty six obliged to conserve every ounce of her energy for the long night ahead; her duties as cocktail hostess at the Golden Slipper Lounge a seminotorious roadhouse three miles north of Hammond, on Route 63 begin at 6 P. M.

  and end at 2 A. M at least, 2 A. M. is the Lounge's official closing time. No, Persia won't exchange words with her bratty daughter; Persia takes a large therapeutic swallow of her drink, steadying the glass with both hands. Her pretty rings glitter, on both hands.

  Graice wipes roughly at her eyes. Maybe Daddy is right the things he says about you.<
br />
  The telephone begins to ring.

  On the radio, there's a loud happy advertisement for auto mobile sales, new and used, a local Hammond dealer: former friend in fact of Persia and Duke Courtney.

  Persia takes up the iron again, with more dispatch. She's oddly dignified despite the clownish streaked mascara. Saying, Your father is right, maybe, about everything. That's what's so terrible