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

by Because It Is Bitter

  perfect.

  It is perfect, Leslie said, his eyeglasses winking with plea sure. I sleep better here. I work more efficiently. More customers come in.

  I'll never be wealthy but at least I'm not in debt.. I don't want to sound superstitious or mystical, but it truly does seem that Persia had everything to do with it. Her influence, just at that crucial moment!

  God knows, living as I was, I might have wound up lonely and mad, or even dead, instead of, as I feel now, supremely alive. He was smiling, not at Graice but toward a corner of the room, no doubt a corner of the room in which Persia's and Graice's photo graphs were hanging on the wall. Though his hair was graying to the point nearly of iridescence, and thinner than Graice re called, he looked scarcely older than he had a decade ago. Graice perceived that her uncle, with his angular boyish face, his eager expression, his sweet smile, was one of those persons middle aged in youth and, in middle age, youthful; for an enchanted number of years, while their contemporaries age relentlessly they seem hardly to age at all.

  When Persia died, that part of him died too, Graice thought. So he's untouched now, in his soul. He can't be further harmed.

  During her three day visit Graice learned that the photography course at the YMCA wasn't the only new thing in her uncle's life: he was also doing occasional freelance work for the Hammond Chronicle as their arts feature man; he was shortly to begin a new photography project on the postwar industrial landscape of western New York State; he had acquired a small circle of friends who shared cultural interests; and there was even the possibility of an exhibit of his work being held next winter in the George Eastman House in Rochester. But of course I don't re ally expect anything to come of it, Leslie said, embarrassed. I am, after all, the quintessential amateur.

  But that's wonderful, Uncle Leslie! Graice said. She did not know, however, if she was excited or, rather, stunned by the possibility that the man so long dismissed as an eccentric by everyone who knew him, an affable lifelong failure, might yet be revealed as exceptional after all. This, not even Persia could have anticipated The second surprise of the visit was even more unexpected.

  Leslie told her that, in early April, a former high school classmate of Graice's, a young black man, now a Private First Class in the United States Army, came to the studio to have his photograph taken, and that he'd left a wallet sized print for her.

  For a long moment Graice could not speak.

  For me? she asked faintly.

  And then, quickly, Was his name Jinx? Jinx Fairchild?

  Fairchild, yes, Leslie said, rummaging through a drawer, but I seem to re member another name. Leslie searched through a much worn accordion file, frowning, saying, He wanted, he said, to give his mother a formal picture of himself as a birthday present;

  he was being shipped to Vietnam.. a soft spoken young man, very polite. a little guarded, I suppose. Were you good friends? I don't re member your ever having mentioned.. but of course I wouldn't know. Ah, here it is! Why did I file it under i? For Graice, I suppose.

  Graice stared at the envelope for a moment before opening it. Her heart was pounding painfully and the tips of her fingers had gone icy.

  Graice C. , he'd written on the envelope in a large looping hand; she was thinking she'd never seen Jinx Fairchild's handwriting and here, and now, with so strange an intimacy, her own name, Graice C. , in that hand.

  Graice opened the envelope, drew out the wallet sized print, stared, stared for a long moment in absolute silence, while her uncle chattered casually: When he came back to pick up the prints he asked if I was re lated to you, said he was a friend of yours from high school, he was much more relaxed and friendly now that the photo graphing was over so we got to talking, he said he'd heard you were in college at Syracuse, asked after you, and I told him all your good news, I didn't want to sound boastful, but. your high grades, and graduating summa cum laude, and your engagement to a young art historian. and he seemed interested though he didn't ask anything more; before he left he said, Will you give her one of these next time you see her, mister Courtney?

  and left that print.

  struck me as an unusually intelligent young man and I thought what a pity it is, a damned pity, his being a soldier in this war no one seems to be able to make sense of. He paused, watching Graice.

  You're not upset, Graice, are you? Did you know him well?

  The young black man in the photograph, formally, even a bit stiffly posed, in his dress uniform, hands clasped against his knees, hat smartly set on his head, was certainly Jinx Fairchild: the shock of seeing him after so long, of seeming empowered to look, in an instant, into his eyes, ran through Graice and left her weak.

  weakened. Her eyes began to sting with tears she wiped impatiently away.

  Jinx Fairchild sat ramrod straight, gazing calmly, perhaps ironically into the camera, his jaws forcibly set, his eyes large, fully open, the whites distinctly white. Though the photograph was for his mother he was not smiling. The sides of his head had been shaved warrior style with brutal efficiency, his skin looked very dark, his lips pursed, swollen but it was his posture, on the basketball court so much a matter of fluidity, sloping shoulders, elastic spine, sly head cocked to one side, that seemed most unnatural: unlike Jinx Fairchild.

  Graice thought, All that's missing is his rifle.

  On the re verse of the print Jinx had written in that large looping lazy seeming hand, Honey Think I'll pass ?

  Graice re ad,are re ad these words; she was standing with both hands pressed against a glass topped counter, leaning forward, eyelids fluttering. it wasn't tears she beat back but a sensation of starkest horror, a certitude beyond grief. She was aware of her uncle's voice, his words, the movement of his mouth, aware too of Houdini the midnight black cat nudging and rubbing with persistent affection against her legs, purring loudly, yet she heard nothing, comprehended nothing, simply stood there in a place not known to her on a warm May afternoon leaning her weight on a glass topped counter, a weight heavy against the palms of her sweating hands.

  Leslie touched her shoulder, asked gently, Are you upset, Graice?

  Is he a close friend?

  Graice said, I loved him.

  And burst into uncontrollable tears.

  Memory is a transcendental function. But it attaches itself only to bodies.

  That long headache racked afternoon of walking through the lower streets of Hammond, to the foot of Pitt Street where, to Graice's surprise, a Sunoco gas station had been built on the vacant lot where Little Red Garlock died and she'd walked too past the old houses, Java Street where the duplex her parents had once rented looked so narrow, so cheaply improved in its beige aluminum siding, and the mustard yellow stucco apartment house at 372

  Holland as shabby and rain streaked as ever, where she made her way bold and undetected through the hallway to the rear entrance, let herself out into the weedy dizzily familiar yard to contemplate in harsh sunshine that outdoor stairway that had cast her room, her room there beyond the meager half window, into shade: the stairway unchanged these many years though surely it had been painted and its sagging steps re paired, and she'd thought angrily, Why are you here, what is this place to you? It isn't your home any longer.

  She's here, now. In the Savages' house.

  Slipping the photograph of Jinx Fairchild back into the envelope with Graice C. written on it, re placing the envelope neatly in her drawer.

  . and her journal, that place of secrets her husband will never share.

  . her journal in which she has written just now, Memory attaches itself to bodies. I must learn to forget.

  In fact Graice rarely writes in the old battered journal any longer, her journal that's nearly filled in any case, only a few dog eared pages remaining; then perhaps it's the merest glimmer of an urging, like a dream incompletely re called she'll throw it all away. I must learn to forget, I am learning to forget. I live in the present tense and have never been so happy.

  Alan Savage once kept a
diary too, he'd told her, since the age of nineteen, a diary primarily of living abroad, American Non American he'd rather pretentiously called it, but this diary he'd thrown away without so much asare reading when, last summer, he decided to come back home.

  Alan said, You have to grow up sometime.

  Graice was wakened early that morning, in this bed unfamiliar to her, in a body she knows is hers. White cunt. Bitch. We know you. It was the birds fluttering and thrashing in the English ivy outside the windowdamned plague of sparrows, doctor Savage called them and in the near distance raucous crows, quite a flock of crows, settling only briefly in the wooded area to the rear of the house, always at dawn, then moving on. What a noise! For all its rowdiness and jeering, a happy sort of noise!

  Graice perceives that life is a matter of waking in successive beds, each bed erasing the bed that precedes.

  This is the last, the absolutely final fitting, missis Savage says.

  'And then I have some telephone calls to make, and then we can leave for the church, I hope I have time to talk with you.

  She links her arm through Graice's, says in a whisper, Isn't missis Vitale cross with me! But it's worth it, I believe, to insist upon doing things right. And her work is re ally lovely, lovely Graice says, Oh, yes.

  worth every penny. Absolutely.

  Oh, yes.

  In the sun filled room with the organdy curtains missis Vitale has been using Graice Courtney glances shyly, or is it fearfully, at her mirrored re flection; since last year her hair has so rapidly grayed, glinting with silver like hoarfrost, it's as if her very life is speeding before her. But the chipped tooth is perfectly disguised, the bruised eyes have long since healed, the blood encrusted nostrils. I never saw yourfaces, I never heardyour names. Lift your arms, dear, missis Vitale murmurs, and just stand still. For this final fitting Graice has changed her underclothes another time: white strapless brassiere, long white taffeta slip with a lace overskirt, seamless nylon stockings. And she's wearing the shoes she will wear on Saturday, white satin pumps decorated with tiny pearl like beads.

  As Graice stands obediently still missis Vitale and missis Savage deftly lower the dress over her head.. the skirt, the torso. a good snug fit in the shoulders and arms, the exquisite pleated bodice now snug too as the dress is buttoned up, not tight but comfortably snug, a perfect fit for Graice's small high breasts. And the waist, and the hips, and the long skirt that must be arranged as if sculpted perfect. missis Savage arranges too the bridal veil, the subtly yellowed Brussels lace, how lovely, how angelic, the women murmur, and Graice is smiling, seeing only her bride's costume in the mirror, silken luminous white, dazzling white; her heart lifts with a kind of anxious pleasure. It's of both older women she asks her question: Do you think I'll look the part?

  The End