"Oates, Joyce Carol - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

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.