Joyce Carol Oates - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart

by Because It Is Bitter

  Over the years so many people... especially, Iris gathers, male admirers... have asked Persia about her exotic name, she has perfected a little story to explain. Each time Iris hears the story she feels an absurd thrill of apprehension, as if fearing the story will go wrong; each time Iris hears the story it is precisely the same.

  "My parents had some perfectly normal, ordinary name picked out for me," Persia says, her vanity unconscious as a child's, "like Margaret, or Betty, or Barbara.... Then in the hospital my mother was glancing through a magazine and she saw pictures of this beautiful country-in Africa, I guess-but not, you know black Africa. The people there are white. Or, at any rate, light-skinned.

  There were mountains in these pictures, and a sea like an emerald, and some strange kind of temple-a 'mosque'-and my mother said she knew she had to call me 'Persia." No one could talk her out of it, though they tried. 'Persia' she wanted, and 'Persia it is.

  Gazing at her watery-seeming reflection in Persia's dressing table mirror, when Persia isn't home, Iris wets her lips with the pink tip of her tongue.

  'Persia' she wanted, and 'Persia' it is."

  Someday, she will have her own story to tell.

  After the move to Holland Street, to the mustard-colored brickand-stucco building from whose tarpaper roof Iris Courtney can see the Cassadaga River drifting in a long slow curve from east to west, motionless at this distance as a strip of wallpaper, the earth begins to shift on its axis.

  Always at such times you wait for balance to be restored, for things to "right" themselves. Until the act of waiting itself becomes the "rightness."

  Duke has a new job as a "manufacturer's representative," and this new job requires traveling by car... and odd hours. There are midnight telephone calls; there is Persia's voice raised sleepily, then angrily.

  For sometimes Duke Courtney is, Iris gathers, not out of town at all but involved in marathon poker or euchre games right here in Hammond; sometimes, flushed with winning, he cannot resist calling home. Or, stricken with losing, drunk-sick, repentant, he is calling for "my bride" to come fetch him in a taxi.

  In their Java Street house, in the attractively wallpapered living room with several windows, the sofa the Courtneys chose on one of their extravagant shopping trips-featuring four outsized pillows and two giant seat cushions, made of impractical crushed velvet in lavender and green splotches-looked dramatic as an item of furniture in a Hollywood musical; in this new cramped, lowceilinged place, jammed against the end wall and taking up nearly every inch, it looks monstrous and sad.

  Mornings, Iris steels herself to seeing it made up hastily as a bed.

  If it is Persia who has slept there, Persia is likely to be up; if Duke, Duke will still be sleeping... sleeping and sleeping. A "hero's hangover," he calls such fugues. He sleeps in boxer shorts and thin grayish T-shirt, snoring in erratic gasps and surges, like drowning; disheveled silver-glinting hair on a makeshift pillow is ris will see of his head. He lies hunched beneath a blanket, in weather, as if he were cold, face turned toward the wall.

  Persia and Iris prepare for the day, for going out, careful not to disturb him. Duke can be mean in the morning before the memory of his guilt washes over him, bringing color to his cheeks.

  Iris whispers, "Momma, what's wrong?" Persia lights a cigarette and says, "Who wants to know?" Regarding her daughter with brown bemused eyes as if she has never seen her before.

  Who wants to know?

  The sort of puzzle, a heart riddle, a twelve-year-old can almost grasp.

  When Iris trails home from school-she has friends, she goes to friends' houses, hangs out sometimes on the street-Duke will be gone. Persia won't be home, and Duke will be gone. But the glamour sofa will still have the look of an emergency bed, big pillows heaped on the floor, blanket lying where it fell.

  And that smell, that unmistakable smell, of a body in sleep: alcoholic headachy rancid sleep.

  Now Persia is a waitress, now she gets decent tips; returning late from her job, seeing that Duke is still out, she sometimes turns around and hurries back out herself, high heels clattering an alarm on the stairs.

  Iris calls after her, "Mom? Mommy?" and Persia's voice lifts out of the dark, "I won't be long, lion!" Persia knows where to find her husband... some nights. There is the Cassadaga House, there is Rick Butterfield's, there is the Four Leaf Clover Club, there is Vincenzo's.... Some nights, though, she doesn't come home until two or three in the morning, escorted to her very door, without him.

  In bed but rarely asleep at such times, Iris waits to hear a stumbling on the stairs, voices. Who are the men who bring her mother home?

  she wonders. And does her father know?

  She's very frightened but believes her interest to be merely clinical.

  * * * Gently pulls her Girl Scout uniform off its wire hanger, eases it out of the stuffed beaverboard wardrobe at the foot of her bed, pads barefoot into the other bedroom where there is a floor-length mirror as well as the heart-shaped mirror over Persia's dressing table.

  Stands holding the dress against the front of her body, gazing at her reflection, admiring the color of the fabric, its texture and substantiability, the several fine-stitched badges she has earned, Iris embroidered in shiny greenish-gold thread above her left breast.

  She'd wanted more than life itself to belong to the Girl Scouts, to the troupe at school; to be a part of that circle of girls, the most popular girls; to wear this dress, this beautiful dress, as casually as the others She'd pleaded with Persia: Please; oh, please, please, I will never ask for anything else again.

  Now she stares, her eyes damp with emotion. Holding the dress, the long perfect sleeves, against her body, her arm folded over it like a lover.

  Persia stares at Duke Courtney, who is unshaven, tieless, a soiled look to his best white shirt, a cheapness to the gold flash of cuff links.

  He's home at the wrong hour of the day.

  A gusty whitely glowing November day. She'll remember.

  He has just informed her that they are in debt. He has borrowed money not only from the loan company that financed their 1953 four-door Mercury sedan but from a second loan company.

  has borrowed money from his brother Leslie... and from friends of whom, in several instances, Persia has never before heard. Duke has been forced to confess since, today, embarrassingly, before noon, he is obliged to drive their car, the very car he requires for his job as a salesman, to the loan company headquarters uptown. Such words as "repossession," "default," "in lieu of," resound like drunken song lyrics in her head.

  My God. Duke has even borrowed money from Madelyn.

  "But the poor woman works in that terrible beauty salon.

  she doesn't have any money!"

  "Maddy wanted to go in with me on a bet at the Downs," Duke says evasively, running a hand through his hair. "It wasn't exactly a loan.

  Only seventy-five dollars."

  He smiles one of his reflex smiles. His nostrils are wider and darker than Persia recalls. In his fair, thin-skinned, handsome face, the narrow-bridged nose is becoming swollen and venous.

  "Strictly speaking, we both lost. The bet." He smiles again.

  "But I repaid the loan."

  "You repaid it? You did?"

  "I said I did."

  "How much do you owe? I mean... in all." Persia is frightened but tries to keep her voice level. Though their daughter is at school she has a perilous sense that there is a third party in the flat with them, listening.

  "Why does it matter, Persia, how much? A sum."

  They are standing in the kitchen, a formal space between them. Persia in her pink quilted bathrobe, a surprise gift, and a luxury gift too, from Duke, on a Valentine's Day long past. Going grimy at the cuffs, frayed at the hem. Persia is barefoot and almost naked beneath the robe. Begins to feel the linoleum-tiled floor tilt under her feet.

  .

  . like the teakwood deck of that gleaming white yacht Erin Maid.

  Since confiscated, a
mong other items, by the Hammond City Council.

  Duke is trying to joke. "We owe, darling. Not just me. You've spent most of it yourself, in fact-groceries, clothes. Things Iris 'simply has to have."" "But how much?"

  "Not all that much."

  "Duke, honey, please"-Persia's voice begins to falter-"how much?"

  Duke sighs; rummages through a drawer for a pencil and a note pad; scribbles down the figure to show Persia as if the numeral is too shameful, or too intimate, to be disclosed orally. Persia whispers, "Oh, God." She yanks out a chair, sits blindly at the kitchen table, her hair, having endured elaborate pin curls through the night, now suddenly limp, straggling in her face. She hasn't put on any makeup yet this morning, so her skin is ivory pale, glazed.

  Without lipstick her lips look unnatural.

  'And all this went for cards? At the racetrack?"

  'And in a business investment. I tried to explain." Duke fetches a bottle of Jack Daniel's from the cupboard, pours each of them a drink in a whiskey glass. His manner is edgy but controlled.

  'Also, honey, as I said, household expenses. Life isn't cheap these days."

  "But your job "Never mind about my job."

  "Your commissions. Didn't you tell me "Persia, the money went. Money goes.

  He pauses, smiling at her. He is standing, Persia is sitting.

  His is the advantage of the natural actor who inhabits, not only his own body, with consummate ease, but the larger, invisible, indefinable body of the space about him. Watching Duke Courtney, though they have been married nearly fourteen years, have been joined together in lovemaking more times than Persia could wish to calculate, she feels her hair stir at the nape of her neck as if it were being caressed.

  Duke says, "Hey. Love. My love. You know we love each other." He touches her as if shyly. Touches her breasts, loose inside the quilted robe. "That's the main thing, Persia."

  "Is it?"

  "Isn't it?"

  "The main thing?"

  Duke picks up his glass and drinks, nudges Persia to join him.

  It is a lover's gesture: wordless, yet edged with reproach. More urgent than Persia wants to acknowledge.

  But Persia doesn't drink. Not just yet. She is thinking-or, rather, the thought is forcing itself upon her-that the figure Duke scribbled on the notepaper is probably a lie.

  Her eyes veer wildly, she makes an abrupt rising movement, for an instant Duke thinks she is going to hit him... but instead she embraces him, arms tight and crushing around his waist, warm face pressed against his chest. Her smell is that of something being crushed in a moist fist.

  Early summer. But hot. Heat like a quivering wall you could press your hand against.

  Upright as a sinewy black-glittery snake, Sugar Baby Fairchild jumps cannonball fashion from the topmost girder of the Peach Tree Bridge, screaming, "Bombs away."' And here's his fifteen-year-old brother, Jinx Fairchild, running off the girder as easily as another boy might run on a flat surface, thrashing his long legs, screaming, "Look out below!," a comical squarish grimace opening up the lower part of his face.

  Cavorting and preening, performing flawless dives when they wish, for the benefit of the admiring white girls.

  They all know that Peach Tree Creek, emptying into the Cassadaga River by way of the trashy ravine edge of the railroad yard, meandering through the scrubbiest of the back lots of Lowertown, is a dirty creek picking up sludge from factories in its passing and bottles, tin cans, old tires, bones, yes, and raw garbage and used condoms and sewage from drains-not a decent creek for swimming but it's close by, and fast-running in its approach to the river so the scum doesn't accumulate, and deep, as deep as twelve feet beneath the bridge, and dark, deliciously dark, a cool glossy serpentine feel to the current, reflections under the bridge dancing and darting like shreds of dream pulled out into daylight.

  Unlike the open river where the shoreline is rocks and broken concrete, or the public pool at Cassadaga Park where, under the watchful eyes of white supervisors and the white lifeguard, playful black boys like the Fairchild brothers aren't made to feel welcome.

  Here, they can do any damned crazy stunt they want to do.

  The white girls Iris Courtney and Nancy Dorsey shouldn't be swimming in Peach Tree Creek... probably. They are not the only girls swimming here this afternoon but they seem to be the only white girls, and they know they're noticed.

  But who's to know or care? Who would inform their families?

  The Fairchild brothers haul themselves up out of the water, streaming water like seals. The sun strikes sparks on their dark skin: Sugar Baby first, then Jinx. Sugar Baby is always first. Slapping their thighs, dancing on the balls of their feet. Whoops of elation, yodels and yells. Someone in the water below calls up to them and Sugar Baby, pretending outrage, cups his hands to his mouth and yells back, "You the peckerhead! You gonna split you head like guts."' The Fairchild brothers are not twins but it's easy to mistake one for the other unless, like now they are standing together, with a look of boys contemplating themselves in the mirror and liking what they see. Sugar Baby is seventeen, taller than Jinx by an inch or two, must be six feet tall in his bare feet, ten pounds heavier, and very mature... very mature in his tight-fitting trunks like black elastic molded to his genitals and buttocks. His hair is springy and matted, his grin all curvy teeth. Girls stare at him and forget to look away blushing.

  Sugar Baby cups his hands to his mouth again and calls over to the white girls, whom he knows from the neighborhood, "Gimme the high sign, honeys! You gonna gimme the high sign?

  Hnnnnnn?"

  The girls have no idea what he's talking about; his Negro dialect is laid on so heavy, so rich, they can barely decipher a word.

  Nancy Dorsey ducks her head as if fearful of looking up too directly at Sugar Baby, locking eyes with his. It has happened more than once between them... it has happened frequently. She murmurs a warning to Iris Courtney to ignore the Fairchilds, both leaning on the bridge railing overhead. The water casts a shivering reflection upward onto her face, giving it a dissolving look.

  Iris Courtney laughs, the notion is so fanciful. Ignore them?

  Iris, swimming in four feet of water, in and out of the sheltering shadow of the bridge, looks up and sees Sugar Baby and Jinx looking down. Two smiles, all white curvy teeth.

  Sugar Baby teases, impudent, hooded-eyed. "Don't gonna gimme no high sign, hnnnnn? Don't know no high sign, hnnnnn?"

  It's a relief when the brothers resume their diving and swimming, clambering up the sides of the rusted girders.

  In the shadow of the bridge Nancy Dorsey cuts her eyes at Iris and presses a fist against the tight-swelling bosom of her swimsuit.

  "Oh, God, my heart's beating like crazy.

  Iris doesn't say a word.

  Peach Tree Creek at this spot is a lovely cavernous region, sounds echoing from the cobwebbed underside of the bridge, the farther creek bank tangled and clotted with vegetation. There's a brackish smell, though, the girls don't want to get in their hair; they're swimming with their heads lifted out of the water, a little stiffly, self-consciously. Iris Courtney's hair is in a bunchy ponytail, Nancy's loose to her shoulders. The girls have little in common really except that both their mothers are working and they have no sisters or brothers (at least at home: Nancy does have an older brother somewhere) and their fathers are not living with them.

  on a regular basis.

  Balanced atop a high girder, lanky arms outstretched and hands flopping loose at the wrist as if broken, Sugar Baby goes into his Little Richard act: high-pitched jabbering screech-"'I'utti Frutti, Tutti Frutti 'I'utti Frutti"-as calmly he steps into empty air to fall like a dead weight into the creek.

  Jinx, not missing a beat, executes a perfect somersault dive, hardly raising a splash.

  Nancy Dorsey whispers shivering in Iris's ear some words Iris acknowledges with a sharp startled laugh.

  The white girls stretch out languidly in the sun, on a flat bleached rock like t
he palm of an uplifted hand. A familiar old rock; they've lain here before.

  It's a humming sort of day... time dragging backward. No purpose to going home.

  There are some Negro girls swimming with the Fairchilds, some other Negro boys who glance their way from time to time, two or three white boys, small children splashing near shore... no purpose to going home. Iris says suddenly to Nancy, "My mother told my father he's mean-hearted, the other night: chunk of ice where his heart should be.

  Now I'm worried I might be the same."

  Nancy says vaguely, her eyes on the bridge, "I wouldn't worry.

  Shit."

  Iris Courtney is wearing a single-piece jersey swimsuit the color of dried blood; Nancy Dorsey is wearing a two-piece suit with a tight ribbed bodice, bright green parrots splashing in a maze of gold.