Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It's a frosty iridescent day in November 1959.

  Graice Courtney and a friend are walking on Main Street holding hands.

  When Graice isn't in her mother's company and isn't in the apartment on Buena Vista Avenue they've moved again: shabbier neighborhood, tackier apartment, but at least no freight trains every night , she is capable of going for hours without thinking of Persia. her heart lifts.

  She's seventeen years old. A senior at Hammond Central High School.

  She'll graduate fourth in her class of one hundred fifty three, she'll win a full tuition scholarship to Syracuse University, she's so poised, so coolly mature, adult men sometimes approach her on the street, in stores, in the public library where she works evenings not realizing until they see the alarm in her eyes that she isn't the age she appears. Whatever that age is.

  But this afternoon Graice is in the company of a boy who imagines he loves her, a boy avid to one day marry her, and she's feeling hopeful, if not happy precisely Persia is a sick woman, Persia will not go to a doctor , and half listening to his conversation. and she sees to her astonishment a truck rattling by, ORLEANS CO. MAINTENANCE on its side, several black men in the open rear in thick jackets, wool caps, amid shovels, sandbags, road re pair equipment, and one of the black men, the tallest, Jinx Fairchildmy God, isn't it?

  Graice doesn't call his name, only waves after him. Tries to catch his elusive eye.

  Of course, he doesn't see her.

  Of course, the truck just barrels along Main Street, carrying its human cargo away.

  The several times Graice Courtney has sighted Jinx Fairchild in the past year and a half, by chance on one or another busy Lower town street, he hasn't seen her. Turns casually away.

  Now Graice's friend asks who she's waving at and Graice says quickly, No one you'd know. anyway, it wasn't him.

  As if she'd betrayJinx Fairchild in his current diminished state to someone who knows who he is. or was.

  blowy January night, temperature around 15 degrees Fahrenheit, so deep a chill it enters the marrow of her bones. Forever.

  She's weeping with the insult: sent home dazed and feeble limbed in a taxi, prepaid.

  Like a match that's extinguished. you go out.

  Her public collapse, the first of her life, is not an event Persia witnesses, nor is it an event, strictly speaking, she experiences. It occurs without her volition, participation, or awareness.

  You go out.

  Striking her forehead above the right eye on the porcelain rim of the sink. In the women's lavatory, Covino's Bar & Grill, where she's working the 6 P. M. to 2 A. M. shift.

  She falls. Her legs melt away. She's just a body, brainless, falling.

  The first time Persia has ever blacked out in public.

  Amid the smells, the frank undisguised stinks of the lavatory.

  Sprawled on the floor, that filthy floor. Dripping blood. Dazed and moaning and bewildered like a cow stunned by a sledgehammer blow It takes them minutes, long minutes, to re vive her.

  I don't want no ambulance, what the fuck it's gonna look like, fucking ambulance at the door. people come to have a good time on Friday night, these customers are all my friends, and some stupid cunt it's her own damn fault drinks too much and passes out!

  I told her! I warned her! Get her out of here!

  Sent home in a taxi like any passed out drunk.

  Prepaid: don't bother coming back.

  And it isn't her fault! Under such stress. Run off her feet. That wop manager. All the girls drink if they can. Singling her out. And the others staring at her. breasts, belly that's swollen and sore, buttocks starting to sag. Whispering filthy things to her she can't quite hear. Whispering their filthy slanders about her behind her back.

  The alternative is taking money from men. Persia re fuses to do that.

  She has her pride. God knows it's all she has.

  The taxi driver's ringing the bell for 16 D. Prolonged ringing like a summons to disaster.

  It's 11:20 P. M. , Graice Courtney has long been home from her library job, hasn't yet gone to bed. Don't let it be trouble, she prays.

  Graice Courtney's prayers are lightweight aluminum; she imagines them skittering, skimming, flying across the surface of a body of water, knows they won't be heeded so she fashions them cheap and disposable.

  She runs, though. Downstairs. Three flights of drafty un heated stairs. Buena Vista Arms, 3551 Buena Vista Avenue kitty corner from the Hammond Farmers' Market, there's that advantage at least.

  Graice cries, Oh, Momma! seeing Persia slumped against the wall, face like putty, eyes blurred, a swelling the size of a hen's egg on her forehead. she's being held up by the taxi driver, who's a kindly taciturn oldish man not so embarrassed by his task as one might expect, and he helps Graice maneuver her mother upstairs to the apartment and inside the door murmurs courteously, Thank you, no, miss, when Graice offers him payment, a tip at least, Graice Court they biting her lips to keep from crying and fumbling, faltering, like a small child not knowing what she'll do. what it is her daughterly task to do.

  Next day Graice stays home from school in the morning, brings Persia the only food Persia claims she can stomach, heated milk with pieces of white bread soaked in it, Lipton's tea so weak it's practically colorless, a bowl of sugar cubes if she craves something sweet.

  And her pack of Chesterfields.

  She's sitting up in bed; she looks a little better. But still her face is battered and scraped, the ugly bruise above her eye lurid as a growth. Without makeup her skin is oddly shiny as if it has been scrubbed with steel wool.

  Graice says, gentle, hopeful, not that accusatory voice she under stands now has been a tactical error these many months, Now you know you'll have to stop drinking, Momma, now you know that, don't you?

  expecting a shrug or a sarcastic re joinder or at least resistance.

  but Persia astonishes her by immediately agreeing.

  Yes, honey, you're right. She's repentant guilty, rubbing the swelling on her forehead: Guess I'd better She tries to smile, squinting up at Graice. Her eyes are webbed in broken capillaries and appear thick, rubbery, like hard boiled eggs.

  Persia speaks with such sobriety, such chastened sincerity, it's clear she speaks the truth.

  ndyou lied. You lied. You always lied.

  Insurance? Blue Cross Blue Shield?

  No.

  Cash, then, or check? If it's check, dear, the hospital re quires two kinds of I. D.

  Cash.

  The blond cashier at ACCOUNTS, Hammond General Hospital, has a blue jay's perky bobbing manner, a crest of stiff permed hair that lifts almost vertically from her forehead. She's kindly, though, perhaps seeing that Graice Courtney's fingers have gone virtually blue at the tips, the nails a ghoulish purplish blue with cold, fear, low blood pressure. Graice fumbles a little, re moving bills from her wallet, crinkly fresh minted bills of which she's perversely proud that they are hers. even to give away.

  Drawn out of her savings account at the First Bank of Hammond that very morning.

  The tests itemized, are: blood, thyroid, chest X rays, barium X rays, urinalysis, two or three others. Payable in advance. Each item includes a penciled in figure but Graice has been too rattled to add up the column of figures in her head, it's as if she childishly prefers being surprised. stunned. by the sum the cashier announces as if it were nothing extraordinary: $ 149. 76.

  Is that tax included, or?

  Oh, no, dear. The cashier laughs. There's never any tax here at the hospital.

  Graice laughs too, though her teeth are chattering. Well, that's good!

  She passes bills one by one through the window to the cashier, watches them being taken from her as if they were mere pieces of paper. No emotion. No emotion that shows. The Hammond Public Library pays her $ 1 an hour, 78 cents after taxes and deductions, she works fifteen hours a week for less than $ 12, but of this melancholy fact she isn't going to allow herself to think.

  Momma, its th
e least I can do.

  The night before, sipping wine to steady her nerves, smoking her endless cigarettes, Persia said, Damn it, Graice, it should be me paying for you, this is the wrong way around, I feel like such a.

  failure as a mother, and Graice said, embarrassed, Oh, Momma, don't be silly, you've done enough for me, and Persia said almost crossly, Why is it silly to worry about costing my own daughter money? I know how hard you work.

  Graice said stiffly, Momma, it's the least I can do.

  Thinking, And why do you lie? Why, always, do you lie?

  Not only has Persia been lying about her drinking these past several weeks, since the blackout in Covino's; she has been lying about her lying. In her journal Graice writes, And what f she can't distinguish any longer between truth and lies, what does that mean about truth and lies ?

  The floor tilting beneath one's feet. No directions fixed.

  It has become a game of a kind. In the cupboard, as if on display, are a half dozen bottles. the usual. But they're un touched. Persia's re al bottles are hidden in the clothes hamper.

  in the grease encrusted oven. in Persia's carelessly made bed where the bedspread's raised, nubby material can be made to appear accidentally bunched. She has even hidden precious bottles of Gordon's gin wrapped in newspapers on the outside stairway where anyone might find them. an act, Graice guesses, of flamboyant desperation.

  She can stop fshe wants to. She must be made to want to.

  What matters at the moment is that Persia has at last consented to see a doctor, has acknowledged that, yes, she is sick; in fact it was at Aunt Madelyn's urging, and whatever Persia told doctor McDermott, or failed to tell him, about her drinking and eating and sleeping habits, the frequency of her vomiting spells, her fugues of dizziness and disorientation and forgetfulness and weeping, whatever admixture of truth and lies, lies and truth, the crucial matter at the moment is that she's here at Hammond General Hospital to take a battery of routine tests. striding off alone and almost cheerful into the interior of the labyrinthine old building while Graice Courtney, shivering in her coat, sits in the fluorescent humming reception area adjacent to the outpatients' clinic and waits.

  Another day of missed classes, another legitimate excuse: mother, medical.

  The other day one of Graice Courtney's teachers asked her if it was anything serious, her mother's medical situation, and Graice said, No not at all, it's under control.

  And it's true, isn't it, once the results of the tests are in, once the facts are known, the nightmare will begin to lift. won t it?

  Surely?

  She sits, coat unbuttoned, fingertips pressed against her eyes.

  Without knowing it Graice has begun her siege of waiting. a premonitory mourning. And she's exhausted already!

  Hearing a dim fading voice, I'd cut the child's throat and then my own, to spare her.

  Graice's attention is drawn by voices and movement in the outpatients' clinic. a young mother is wearily scolding her two small boys, who are fighting together, her West Virginian voice raised in pro test.

  Y'all stop that, damn you, ain't I told you, do I got to beg you?

  There is something familiar about the woman's pale, plump, sallow skinned face, the set of her features, the foxy eyes. she's in her early twenties but has the worn look of a much older woman, hair so sadly thin that patches of scalp show through, swollen ankles and she's pregnant, hugely. She's wearing an army surplus jacket, unbuttoned, and a shapeless black skirt, and thick cotton support stockings, and men's boots; she watches with an air of spiteful helplessness as one of her little boys crawls prankishly beneath a row of connected chairs, annoying patients who are sitting in them, while the other boy, whose face is covered in sores, runs beside him trying to kick him, screaming with laughter. The child might be mildly retarded. perhaps both boys are retarded. it's amazing that he doesn't seem to see the clublike white cast on the foot of a man seated in one of the chairs but trips over it, falls, goes sprawling. The mother calls out plaintively, Y'all stop that!

  Danny! Bud. Come back here!

  Graice Courtney hurries over to pick up the wailing boy, brings him back to his mother, who seems startled at such kindness and flushes with embarrassment and pleasure. Oh, thank you, that's real nice of you, seizing the little boy by his shoulder and giving him a violent shake. Ain't you terrible You and him. Y'know I'm gonna tell your daddy about all this, tonight! Graice says, Aren't you Edith Garlock?

  and the woman smiles at once, showing damp babyish teeth, That's right, used to be, now I'm Edith Bonner.

  still Garlock, I guess.

  So they chat together for several minutes.

  So Graice Courtney, who could never have premeditated such a meeting, who would have laughed in horror at the very possibility, finds herself talking companionably or almost companionably with a woman re lated to Little Red Garlock: a cousin of his, as it turns out. Graice tells Edith that she and her family used to live on Holland Street, near Gowanda. she went to school with several

  Garlock children. and her mother was friendly with Vesta Garlock, sort of.

  Edith gives a little cry of pleasure. Did she! You tell your momma my Aunt Vesta's all improved now. she went back home to West Virginia that she never wanted to leave. poor woman was just so unhappy up here. And I don't blame her none, the nasty weather we got to put up with, and casting a covert glance at the nurse receptionist close by the kinds of people you run into that don't give a damn if you live or die once they get the word on you you ain't rich. They see you're on the county, they look at you like you re shit, make you wait long as they damn please. My little Bud here Bud, you sit still that's got these nasty sores on his face, and near a constant flu, they're telling me he's allergic, handed me a list of, I swear, one hundred things the child can't come near let alone eat. Like dust, like animal fur, like whole grain, like milk! I mean, milk! You ever heard of anything so crazy? When I come home with that list, last time, my husband just about.

  Graice Courtney's eyes mist over in sympathy.

  I can imagine, she says.

  Edith Garlock glances up at her, amused. Maybe you can and maybe you can't. Not at all sarcastic.

  Graice draws a deep breath. Little Red, he was in school with me it was such aa shock about him. I guess the police never found who killed him, did they? There was all this talk about motorcyclists, but Edith astonishes Graice by laughing derisively.

  Huh! That!

  To quiet her little boy, who has stopped crying and is now fretting and squirming beside her, Edith re aches into a deep, zipped open side pocket of the army jacket and draws out an orange which, as she talks to Graice, she peels with quick, precise little pluckings of her fingernails, as if she were defeathering a small bird and enjoying the process. Listen, lion, it was never any secret to some folks, what happened. Who did it.

  It. wasn't?

  Naw.

  _________________ ____ ________ 1

  Edith gestures for Graice to step closer, she has something to tell her she doesn't want overheard. as if, in this noisy place, with a baby wailing two chairs down and the hospital PA. system blaring announcements, anyone could overhear. The sweet tart aroma of orange and orange rind lifts to Graice's nostrils mixed with the grimmer odors of damp wool, oily hair, the white flaking salve on the boy's face.

  Not quite boastfully, but with an air of pride, Edith says, We knew.

  The men, anyway. A quarrel like that is bad blood between folks dating back to home. West Virginia, I mean. It gets settled. It gets put right. Don't matter what the fool police think they know or don't know. She pauses, handing over sections of the orange to her boy and dumping the peelings into an ashtray, not noticing that some of the peelings have fallen onto the floor.

  Graice is struck by the simplicity and logic of these re marks. She feels, in a way, subtly rebuked. as one whose comprehension of the universe has been mistaken and is now exposed. So that's how it is!

  The family settled it.r />
  Edith smiles mysteriously. The men, they did. Like they always do.

  By 3:30 P. M. , Persia is back.

  Graice quickly lays down her book and stands. She looks at her mother searchingly.

  I guess it went a little faster than you expected ?

  Graice, it went slowly enough. Don't ask.

  Persia's bronze red lipstick is gnawed partly off and there's a glisten of sweat at her hairline; she looks both tired and euphoric with re lief. Her hair has been fastened at the nape of her neck with a clip, she's wearing nondescript wool slacks and a shaggy mohair sweater. an old sweater she'd fished out of a drawer, wears frequently now because it hides her embarrassing little potbelly as well as the protruding bones of her shoulders and wrists. Still, there's an air of glamour about her. Her dyed hair, her heavy cosmetic mask, her brittle public manner. she draws attention from strangers; it never fails.