Then we were on to a second round of straight bingo, and after that a variation, where the numbers had to form a diamond shape. The next game was the Letter X Special for a double jackpot, and when Harriet started calling out numbers again—“B—10 … B—one-zero”—the place started to buzz a little. “She’s finally warming up,” the stringy-haired woman beside me murmured.
I listened more closely to Harriet’s voice and caught a little flutter I’d never heard before. She probably knew everyone here and how badly they needed to win, and I guessed she was happy that everyone listened to her, that they couldn’t wait to hear what number she’d announce next.
She didn’t disappoint, she kept calling out numbers with just the right pause: my wife always had a way with quiet, and the sound of her voice—“I—16 … I—one-six”—was a gentle rocking. So this was what I’d missed all these years.
I sat back in my chair and looked up at her. Just by the way her head tilted slightly I could see, even from far away, that her face was filled with a funny kind of waiting, and then she was into her Out-of-the-Body quiet. But she was still calling out numbers—“O—63 … O—six-three”—and I heard something else in her voice, a kind of music more complicated than all of her quiets: those numbers had words in them, whole sentences, long speeches. Harriet was talking to herself, and all of us in that big room were only eavesdropping while she said, This could be the one, your big chance, here it comes and it’s better than money, it’s good luck, maybe even a new life, and I’ll say the number you’re waiting for, see?—I won’t keep it, I’ll give it to you, it’s yours, not mine.
Like everyone else in the room, I wanted that luck. But it wasn’t in a winning number—let somebody else shout Bingo—it was in Harriet’s voice. I wanted her to keep calling out those numbers forever so I could listen as she floated out of herself. And I wasn’t crazy, everybody around me seemed to catch the same thing I did—I swear some people were even swaying slightly. Swaying a little myself, I actually tapped my fingers on the table in time to the rhythms of her voice, and I just knew I could tap them all evening and listen to Harriet, I could come back week after week for more: I could be a regular.
About the Author
Philip Graham is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the story collections The Art of the Knock and Interior Design; a novel, How to Read an Unwritten Language; and The Moon, Come to Earth, an expanded version of his series of McSweeney’s dispatches from Lisbon. He is the co-author (with his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb) of two memoirs of Africa, Parallel Worlds (winner of the Victor Turner Prize), and Braided Worlds. His work has been reprinted in Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, and Portugal.
Graham’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, North American Review, Fiction, Los Angeles Review and elsewhere, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Poets & Writers Magazine, and the Washington Post. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, two Illinois Arts Council awards, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction, Graham teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. A founding editor of the literary/arts journal Ninth Letter, he has served as the fiction and nonfiction editor, and as an editor-at-large for the journal’s website. His posts on the craft of writing can be found at www.philipgraham.net
Roy Kesey is the author of the story collections All Over and Any Deadly Thing, the novella Nothing in the World, and the novel Pacazo (winner of the 2012 Paula Anderson Book Award). His stories have been included in the Best American Short Stories and New Sudden Fiction anthologies and numerous literary journals.
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