ignored Ben. Smoking in the darkened living room with just the TV screen glimmering and glowing like something phosphorescent at the bottom of the sea, a simulacrum of life that was not life. The acrid smell of her cigarette smoke wafted upstairs to my bedroom, I dreamt that the house was on fire, my legs were tangled in bedclothes and I could not escape.
Sometimes sensing my mother’s mounting desperation—unless it was my own—I would sit at the top of the stairs. In pajamas, barefoot and shivering. It was midnight: so late. And then it was 1 A.M., 2:35 A.M., alarmingly late. I was waiting with Mommy, in secret.
To see Mommy in the living room, on the sofa with her back to me, I had to slide down two or three stair steps. I had to be very quiet, hugging my knees. For if Mommy knew that I was there she would have been very angry. Can’t I have any privacy in this God-damned house for God’s sake! Go away and leave me alone you God-damned kids, having babies was the end of me, lost my figure, lost my looks, God damn you go away, just leave me alone.
This was not our daytime mother, I understood. This was Mommy-at-night in the darkened living room and with the TV set turned to mute. And sometimes I would fall asleep on the stairs, and one of them—it might be Mommy, it might be Daddy—would discover me, and not be angry with me, but half-carry me back to my bed and tuck me into my bed and so it was part of my dream, and a happy part of my dream, or maybe it had not happened, at all.
Krissie you naughty girl! Shut your eyes tight and sleep.
“YOUR FATHER WILL be staying with your uncle Earl for a while. No—don’t ask me about it, he will tell you himself.”
No longer Daddy but your father. This subtle change. This abrupt change. Our mother speaking to us of your father as she might have been speaking of your teacher, your bus driver.
This was three days after the news of Zoe Kruller was first released. Three days after the banner headlines in the Sparta Journal which my mother had snatched from my fingers.
Three days, during which time Daddy had not been home very much, or had been home and gone away again, and had returned late at night when Ben and I were in bed and supposedly asleep.
“Tell us—what?”
We’d just returned from school. Ben let his backpack fall onto the floor. Since the news of Zoe Kruller had entered our lives Ben had been behaving strangely, loud-laughing, crude as the older boys on the school bus who tormented younger children.
Ben’s face flushed with anger. “Bullshit.”
Ben pushed past our mother, ran upstairs thudding his heels on the stairs and slammed the door to his room. Looking as if she’d been struck in the face our mother stared after him but didn’t call his name—didn’t scold him—so I knew that something was very wrong.
“Mom? What is…”
“I said. He will tell you, Krista. Your father. Soon.”
I was stunned. I could not comprehend why Ben was so angry, and what it meant that your father was staying with a relative. I seemed to know that this must have something to do with Zoe Kruller but could not imagine what.
The phone began ringing. We were in the kitchen and something, too, was wrong with the kitchen: there were dishes in the sink, soaking. There was a discolored sponge on the counter that looked as if it had been used to mop up coffee. There was an ashtray filled with butts, and the air stank of cigarette smoke and butts. And this was a wrong smell, for this house. And my mother’s face looked shiny and swollen and her mouth was greasy with fresh smears of Revlon lipstick as if she’d been expecting company or possibly company had come and departed and that was why there were dishes in the sink and cigarette butts smoldering in the ashtray and an air of frantic unease that felt like a churning in the guts. I was young enough then to react as a child would react—trying to push into my mother’s arms. But my mother was distracted, upset; she had no time for a needy daughter; the ringing phone seemed to stymie her as if she couldn’t recognize its sound. When I moved to pick up the receiver my mother gave a little slap at me: “No, Krista. Not for you. I’ll take it, you go away.”
SO ABRUPTLY MY FATHER was staying with my uncle Earl Diehl who lived in East Sparta. But Daddy’s things remained at home, most of Daddy’s clothes and Daddy’s tools in his basement workshop and Daddy’s 1975 Willys Jeep he’d been thinking about selling, in the garage.
Each time the phone rang naturally the thought was This is Daddy!
But Daddy didn’t call until the next evening when we were just sitting down—late—to a meal already delayed and interrupted by phone calls. In a guarded voice my mother answered and waved for Ben and me to leave the kitchen, which we did, hovering nervously in the living room, and after a few minutes my mother called Ben back—“Your father wants to speak with you, Ben! Hurry up”—and Ben took the receiver from her hand shyly and reluctantly; his face flushed red, all he could murmur was O.K., Dad, yeah I guess so in a voice close to tears. Then it was my turn, I was dry-mouthed and anxious and like Ben stricken with shyness for how strange it was, how wrong-seeming, to be speaking with Daddy on the phone! I don’t think that either Ben or I had ever spoken on the phone before with our father; I was unprepared for my father’s voice so close in my ear—“Is that Puss? That’s my li’l Puss? Is it? My sweet Puss—is it?” I was unable to say anything more than Yes Daddy! Yes Daddy for something seemed to be wrong, there was something wrong with Daddy I could not have identified He’s drunk. Couldn’t get up the courage to call his family except drunk. Unexpectedly I began to cry, I was confused and frightened and out of nowhere began to cry, and Daddy said sharply, “Damn, don’t cry. Krista, don’t you cry. No fucking crying, what the fuck’s your mother been telling you, put your mother on the phone, Krista—”
What happened after that, I don’t remember. My mother must have taken the receiver from me, the rest of the evening is a blank.
Hadn’t heard my father’s voice very clearly over the phone and so it came to be a time when I couldn’t hear anyone’s voice very clearly. At school I had difficulty hearing Mrs. Bender. A roaring in my ears like distant thunder. Or in the distance, the roar of one of Daddy’s cars on the Huron Pike Road coming home. On the blackboard—in fact, at our school it was a green board—where chalk-words and numerals melted into one another. My eyes swam in tears. My nose ran. Hunched over my desk desperately wiping my nose with my fingers, shiny wet mucus on my fingers I had to let dry in the air, I’d used up the wad of Kleenex my mother had given me. “Krista? Are you crying? You can tell me, dear.”
Mrs. Bender stooped to peer at me. Mrs. Bender provided me with fresh tissues. Mrs. Bender asked if I would like to step outside into the hall to speak with her—if I had something to say, I might want to say in private—but I shook my head no. My mother had cautioned me Don’t say anything about Daddy. Never say anything about our lives at home. Never anything to be repeated Krista do you understand?
Faint and reproachful in my ears were my father’s admonitory words Don’t cry! Krista, don’t you cry! No fucking crying.
I was shivering so hard, my teeth were chattering. Like a stark-wet-eyed little doll set to shaking. Somehow it had happened that a daughter of Lucille Diehl—Lucille, who took such pride in her household and in her children!—had been allowed to leave the house on a freezing February morning in just a cotton pullover and slacks beneath a winter jacket, my fine limp pale-blond hair badly snarled at the nape of my neck and my skin hot.
Tenderly Mrs. Bender pressed the back of her cool hand against my forehead.
“Oh, dear! You’re running a fever.”
Shivering turned to giggling. Running a fever—how could this be? In the school infirmary the nurse took my temperature with a thermometer