Little Bird of Heaven (7 page)

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-red-brown hair in a silky swirl that made him look like a girl, startled fair-brown 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 double-scoop 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.

T
HAT 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.