Interior Design (22 page)

I kept up fine with my six cards, and across from me a lady scanned over twenty. Everywhere heads were bent, and I suspected that some rent payments might be riding on tonight's jackpots. Pretty soon a woman near the front shouted out “Bingo!” A checker strolled by—looked like he might double as a bouncer—and called out the woman's numbers.

“That's a good one,” Harriet announced.

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.