Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

might have murdered—“strangled in her bed”—a Sparta woman who’d been his “mistress”—yes, “mistress” was the very term, boldly printed in local papers and pronounced on local radio and TV—you would naturally think that Edward Diehl should be forbidden to approach his children; if you believed that Edward Diehl was an innocent man, in fact a “good and loving” father to those children, you naturally felt otherwise.
    A family splits apart just once, all that you learn will be for the first time.
    “…but if you want to hold your own with tough girls like that, sweetie, you need to be more aggressive. You aren’t actually the shortest girl I saw on the court but you’re the least ‘developed’—I mean that muscularly —and you need to be meaner, and to take more chances. A good athlete isn’t thinking of herself but the team. If you’re cautious thinking you might be hurt—’cause you can always be hurt, for sure, in any sport—you’ll be a deficit not an asset to your teammates.”
    Deficit. Asset. In my father’s voice was an echo of a long-ago high school coach.
    I was hurt, Daddy was criticizing me! Daddy was not praising me as I’d expected he would.
    “I was watching those girls. Three or four of them are pretty impressive for their age. The one with the black hair shaved up the sides like a guy, must be a Seneca Indian?—yes?—the way she was ducking, using her elbows, twisting in midair tossing the basket—she’s dynamite. You can tell she’s been playing with guys, out there on the rez. And that big busty gal, with the peroxide streaks, the way she got the ball from you, justwhipped it out of your hands. And that six-foot girl who almost trampled you, straight black hair and face like a hatchet—”
    “Dolores Stillwater.”
    “She’s Indian, right? From the rez?”
    Why are we talking about these girls! Why aren’t we talking about me!
    “If you want athletes like that to take you seriously, Krissie, you’ll have to work a little harder. Not just shooting baskets—from a stationary position, that isn’t hard. But on the run, playing defensively, holding your own, showing them you’re willing to hurt them—foul them —if those little bitches get in your way. An athlete has to make a decision, early on—Coach told us, in junior high—‘Either it’s you, or it’s them.’ Either you spare yourself the risk, and they take the risk—or you take it, and run right over them. A player who gets fouled all the time isn’t worth crap. If you don’t want to take the risk, Puss, maybe you shouldn’t be playing any sport at all.”
    I was remembering: how like our father this was. Ben’s father, and mine. You thought you might be praised for something—anyway, not found lacking—but somehow, as Daddy pondered the subject, turning it this way and that in his thoughts as we’d see him turn a defective work tool in his fingers—it wasn’t praise that was deserved after all but a harsh but honest critique.
    In his work, Daddy was something of a perfectionist: his shrewd professional eye picked up mistakes invisible to other eyes. So Daddy once tore out tile in our kitchen floor he’d laid laboriously himself, cursing and red-faced he ripped out wallpaper over which he’d toiled for hours in summer heat, he repainted walls because the shade of paint he’d chosen “wasn’t right” and it was “driving him crazy” he’d built a redwood deck at the rear of our house to which he was always adding features, or subtracting features; on our property, work was “never done”—there was “always something to fix up” but it was dangerous to offer to help Daddy, for Daddy’s standards were high, and Daddy was inclined to be impatient snatching away from my brother’s fumbling fingers a hammer, a screwdriver, an electric sander—when, years ago, poor Ben was eager to be Daddy’s apprentice carpenter around the house.
    Fucking up was what Eddy Diehl hated.