Delicate Edible Birds (12 page)

Then, the phone call in the middle of the night when, in the bolt-upright moment just before the phone rang, I knew it was Blythe, and that there was something wrong.

“Hello,” I said, but she was already talking, her voice vibrant in the dark.

“Harriet, Harriet, I've done it,” she said. “You have to see.” And before I could respond, I heard her drop the phone, her footsteps running from the room.

“Sam,” I whispered, putting the phone back in the cradle. “I think there's something wrong with Blythe.”

“She's crazy, dammit,” he muttered.

I had almost fallen back asleep when I heard the squeal of tires around a corner, and I ran downstairs in my pajamas. Through the screen I saw Blythe's car ram the curb and narrowly miss the crabapple in our minuscule yard. The car ground to a stop and, its headlights still on, Blythe burst from the driver's seat and hurried up the walk. Her hair was wild and her nightdress eerie in the stream of brightness and shadow. I cringed, expecting the lights to come on in the neighbors' houses, but this was a place used to teenagers' heavy metal past midnight, where neighbors inserted themselves into marital spats through the open windows of houses. Blythe's behavior didn't warrant a dog barking. She leaped the steps and thrust a paper in my hand. “Read it,” she said and gave a little crow. Then she grasped the poem back out of my hand and said, “No. I have to read it. It's the performance that counts.”

Blythe stepped down onto the lawn and tilted the paper into the headlights' beam. She let the paper drop so it floated down, and raised her arms so her sleeves were filled with light. And then she declaimed her poem at high voice. The
neighbor's beagle bayed along with her: she swept her arms up and out of the light, then back in, out, in. She was conducting the midges, the wind along the rooftops, the Schuylkill glimmering at the foot of the hill, I thought. Later I would read the poem itself and think,
Eh,
but in her mouth that night the words were full of needles and music.

I watched Blythe, so gorgeous and fluttering in her iridescent nightgown, a winged thing, and said, “God.” I had never been religious, and even if I had been, my God would have been much more ancient and angry than Blythe's prim Episcopalian one, but still, I sensed the hand of something vast in this swift transformation.

When Blythe clasped me about the neck at the end, I thought I heard her say something strange over the wind and the idling engine:
Oh, Mother
. Later I dismissed what I heard and climbed back into bed to fall asleep, happy for my friend.

 

BLYTHE AND I TOOK SHOPPING
trips with the children, long walks, and soon we began to spend mornings in our separate houses on speakerphone to read a poem aloud (me), and to talk about additions to pieces (her). She'd been to the galleries downtown where she'd seen performance art for the first time, and she wanted badly to create her own. Blythe's new subjects were fanged, bloodthirsty: insanity, suicide, adultery, incest, masturbation, wanting to kill her own children. She wrote things so internal they still had the slick and beat of an organ when they came from her.

“Listen, Harriet,” she'd say. “I know what I want to do so well. I want to mix my words with movement, you see?
Visuals
. Public, not static. In the moment. I want to crack open the words so people can step in. I want to
give
them to you, not just present them on a paper. I want whole rooms full of naked women smeared with blood, you know?” Her voice was hushed, and we held the moment until a child shrieked somewhere. The silence broke, and Blythe laughed at herself, at her solemnity, at my speechlessness.

Blythe was making up what she was doing as she went along. She began to work with food, smearing the dark red jelly her mother made on her face as she chanted; making an igloo of the housewife's best friend, frozen peas, and saying a long prayer-poem; shoving a grape into her mouth with each new line of a dialogue about her sons so that she almost choked herself at the end. She showed me her food log, hardbound sketchbooks in which she had noted every morsel that passed her lips from age fifteen to twenty-one, which stopped abruptly when she tried to kill herself for the first time (aspirin, in her parents' pool house, she said, with a low laugh). She watched me as I read parts of it, growing nauseated at the annotations beside the biggest binges:
Nasty, nasty, hog
beside
three cheeses-teaks and a case of Coke
;
Filthy bitch
beside
entire red velvet cake.

“I want to use these,” she said. “I'll record these entries and play them over a loudspeaker and eat an entire
picnic
of food in front of people until someone throws up.”

“Jesus,” I said, which sometimes seemed like the only thing I could say.

I admired how Blythe used her body, the shock of her, but there was too much Milton and Frost in me for my own stabs at such dramatics to be anything but undignified. While Blythe created new pieces at a fevered pitch throughout the summer and fall, I wrote of gardening and politics, of sense and memory, of things safely domestic. I saved the secret thrill of transgression for Blythe's work, proud to help her birth her strange little creatures, because it
was
midwifery. I was the one to contact the galleries, to drive Blythe to the theaters, to call the press, to organize. I was the woman behind the camera for the videos of her performances, Blythe's very first audience. All the while I scribbled poem after poem in the ragged notebooks I salvaged at the end of my daughters' school year, and only dared to show Blythe the best.

 

SOON THOUGH, BLYTHE BEGAN
to sleep very little and ate nothing, sipping only what she called her “magic potion,” a Bloody Mary with extra vodka. I could see the ridges of her back through a cardigan. And in November, fourteen months after we'd met, there came another midnight call. Blythe was sobbing this time: “I've finished the best, I've finished
Darkling
. I've made a sculpture of alphabet pasta, I am going to eat it. I'm going to eat my words. I need you to organize it.”

I had just nursed the babies through the chicken pox and was exhausted. I closed my eyes to the bluelit bedroom and leaned against my pillow. “That's wonderful, B. I'll do my best,” I said as Sam cursed into the mattress.

Blythe gave a half-wailed, “Oh,” and put the phone down. I waited again at the front door, shivering with chill, but this time there was no squeal of tires or Blythe spinning merrily across the lawn. This time, there was a heavy silence all night and into the next few days, then a call from Pritch a week later, on Blythe's birthday. The girls were out gathering armfuls of leaves from the lawn. I pressed my hand to the glass, as if to protect them, when he asked me to watch the boys for a week. Blythe had had another break, he'd said, and under his words, I understood that something terrible had happened. My core felt frozen, and I began to shiver.

“It was so strange, Harriet,” he said. “She was wearing this disgusting lace dress that she'd had since she was nine. It's this horrible thing she couldn't even zip up. As if that was part of a formula. Vodka, pills, dress. So strange. Such a goddamn cliché.”

I said soothing things, but mostly to keep myself from panicking, from throwing the phone across the room. He seemed calm, but when we'd already said good-bye, he said, “I forgot.” Now his voice seemed just on the edge of breaking. “Some big gallery downtown wants Blythe to come and do her newest piece.
Darkling
, I think she's calling it.” Then, hesitant, “I've never seen it. I've never seen anything she does. I won't understand it, I'm not artistic, but I think I need to. Do I, Harriet? Should I look at the videos you made? Or should I read the work? Would that help?”

A long, cold moment passed before I could react. In one performance, Blythe had made a net of Pritch's ties, and,
catching herself in it, entangling herself, gave a monologue in which she used the lines “and wives are made / for fucking.” In another, she'd smeared red jelly across her face as she delivered a poem about one of her abortions. I had to turn away from my girls, whose hands were full of leaves burning red and orange, in the thinning afternoon. “Oh, Pritchard,” I said. “No, I really don't think you should.”

All afternoon, watching the four children playing a board game, I couldn't shake Pritch's quaver out of my ears. I had been a bad friend. I had been too busy with my own life; I hadn't taken care of Blythe. I could have stopped her free fall, if only I had been paying more attention. I knelt and buried my head in Bear's mop of hair, ferociously breathing in his musky boy smell. Never, never would I make that mistake again, I promised. I would stop the despair the next time it came around and the next and the next, however long it took.

 

THAT WINTER AND SPRING I LEARNED
the dark strain of recovery. Blythe at the hospital; home, but not allowed to be alone with the children; crying, gray and languid; then suddenly, as if infused with someone else's blood, in a gallery, creating
Darkling
for a solemn audience. It was a long and painful piece: Blythe singing the same poem to herself as she ate the woman-shaped sculpture of alphabet noodles, until her voice cracked and her lips bled and she sank to a squat. She had insisted on performing it until Pritch and I had both
caved in. When we did, she dimpled, kissed us both on the cheek, and we were charmed, despite ourselves.

Her slow recovery was sped by a front-page write-up of
Darkling
in the Arts section of the
Inquirer
. The reporter, a recent women's college graduate, said her whole world shifted when she saw it. “Through Cantor's work,” she rhapsodized, “we see the plight of the housewife in contemporary America, pulled between the competing obligations to her family and a career of her own, the sad legacy of women's liberation in this new decade of ours. It is a terrific sight, and one this reporter won't forget for a very long time.”

After that, Blythe still spoke in a little-girl voice at times, still clutched me too hard around the waist. But for long stretches, weeks at a time, she donned a personality she'd concocted for the reporters who came to interview her: brash, chain-smoking, hinnying like a horse, raw with sex. I liked this new Blythe. I was afraid of her. She appeared so hard, though all the while, if I was in the room, Blythe held my hand and stroked it.

I adored her, even during those dark hours when she'd turn herself off, slip vegetative into her sadness. I saw her vision, and it shook me. What talent I had was quiet and web-like, a connecting of seemingly scattered elements, while Blythe imprinted herself upon the world with a grandiosity that awed me. She had a vast generosity, a daring charm. She brought armfuls of Gerbera daisies into my house because, she said, they were beautiful and I was beautiful in the same way, ruddy and angular and strong; she mixed me drinks
until we were drunk by the pool in the early afternoon; she slipped off her heels with the gold buckles and handed them to me because I loved them. She laughed when her boys turned to me with a wound, and allowed me the pleasure of comforting them. Those boys, with their translucent little faces, their wariness, the way they sidled up to me shyly whenever I was around, broke my heart.

One day, in late summer, in the ladies' room at the zoo on an excursion with Blythe and the boys, Susan looked up at me with a grave frown as I tried to wrestle her pants up her legs. “Mom,” she said, “which kid do you love most: me or Mackenzie or Blythe?” And though I felt terribly guilty later, at that moment I only stared at my littlest and broke into a surprised roar, and didn't end up answering my daughter at all.

 

THOSE FIRST FOUR YEARS
I had only seen Blythe's mother once, though Blythe and I were more like sisters than friends. I doubt Blythe had ever truly told her about our friendship. The old crone was fearsome. I discovered this only by accident; one day I'd hurried through a department store with my hands full of bargain goods—Mackenzie needed shoes, money was tight—and I saw Blythe at the café with an older woman. They were dressed in suits identical save for their different shades of blue. The older woman was Blythe with a thinner face, gray hair, a wicked bauble on her finger, and she was avoiding her daughter's hungry stare by addressing her remarks to the embossed tin of the ceiling.

I approached, eager to introduce myself, but stopped when I heard the mother's voice. It was clipped and cold. “Shameful, really,” she was saying. “I must speak out: your sisters fear you, you know, and Pritch is useless. Why would you wallow like a pig in your
episodes
? Why? I tried to come to one of your performances, you know, and couldn't stay for more than a minute. So dark and ugly. Why must you insist on making yourself so ugly, rubbing things all over you, saying those horrible things? Blythe, darling, we all wish you wouldn't, you know. They're no one's business. Your boys will never get away from them. You will end up making them just like you, and I, well…It's simply unfair,” she said.

Her webbed eyes fell from their focus and she saw me standing behind Blythe, staring at her. I was holding Mackenzie's hand so tightly the poor child was squirming. Blythe's mother pursed her lips and narrowed her dark eyes, which were so like my Blythe's, but hard where her daughter's were liquid. I suddenly felt so dirty and ugly and vulgar with my cut-price shoes that I turned and fled, despite Mackenzie's whining, despite my own curiosity. And from then on I couldn't help grimacing whenever Blythe spoke of her mother, because she always did so in a voice redolent with love.

 

BY THE TIME MY GIRLS
were in school I had stopped writing poetry. Blythe was already making great waves with her
pieces, and in the maelstrom of her success I began to lose my love for my own poems. I make no excuses for myself: had I been a real poet, her fame wouldn't have affected me at all. I would have kept on writing my quiet things, sending them out, collecting the rejections and rejoicing in the few acceptances. But under Blythe's reflected light my poems seemed so paltry and meek. I kept my love for poetry in general and for the more serious fiction I was reading in gulps, and it was this love that made me return to school for a Ph.D. in English. I would still be thinking deeply of writing and art, would still be doing what my poetry had been doing, trying to connect distant pieces of the world and draw them closer.