Delicate Edible Birds (15 page)

 

A BRIEF RESPITE:
a cruise ship needing repairs docks at the marina, and there descends into the town a pair of celebrated lovebirds weeks into their honeymoon. They are known to everyone who knows anything about the theater. Our magazines are months behind; only recently have we gotten hints about this romance. The actress is golden as a songbird with a sharp little face; the actor is a small man with a barrel chest. When we hear they are in the port, we leave the pool in a hurry, still smelling of the oil we spread on our skin, and try not to run to the bazaar, where they are buying armfuls of textiles and tin sculptures.

When we arrive, however, so does a car for a luncheon arranged with the dictator's wife. We can hardly see the actors before they are whisked away. Morose, we buy drinks at a bar that we believe has only ever known men, and sit at the tables abandoned by the chess players when they saw us coming. We move the pawns about, dreaming of what we would do with this country if we were the dictator's wife, flicking the bishops and kings with our fingers.

In an hour, the car hums down the hill again. When the actors climb, laughing, from the car, after them climbs the dictator's wife like their single dark shadow. She is smiling, we see: she follows them to the gangplank and they give her elaborate kisses on the cheek when they part.

The boat's lines are thrown, the boat edges away from the dock. And when it is heading firmly toward sea again, we watch the small form of the dictator's wife as she stares after it. When she turns, we lose the sharpness of our envy. Always pale, she is deathly white, and though she was plump when she came to the country, her clothes hang on her loosely now.

We wonder if what the servant girls say is true: that she sleeps very little any longer, that she spends her nights staring out the window, horror on her face. That the last time the dictator was home she ducked away when he tried to embrace her.

 

THE RAINY SEASON COMES
and goes; our beautiful young lovers are gone in the war and we must content ourselves with books turned stale with humidity, phonographs playing the same fatigued songs. At our tea parties there fall long swaths of silence, which in earlier times we'd break by laughing, saying
an angel is passing over our roof,
though we do not bother now. Our servant girls bring reports of starvation in dark parts of the city, but when we go down in an investigatory cluster to see what we can do, the smell is so terrible we do not go again. We see writing on the buildings that appears to be angry, and there are people who stare at us with frowns on their faces. Our children seem pallid and whiny, mere specters of children. Our husbands are gone for longer stints and will not tell us where they have been when they return.

We pay the servant girls for their rumors, and the ru
mors trickle in more thickly. The guerrillas, they say, are peeling the dictator's forces back, pushing them toward the city, decimating the ranks of those beautiful young men. Because we can do nothing about it we pretend not to know.

And we hear, now, worse rumors about the dictator, what cruelties his armies are unloosing. Suspected insurgents punched in the stomachs while their heads are held in buckets of water; almost drowned this way, they cough up any confessions that are suggested to them. A special battery hooked to the nipples, a special torture. Phalanxes of hooded insurgents marched somewhere, never seen again. Villages in the way burned, survivors gutted. We hear that there is an ex-butcher on the dictator's special team called the Flayer, and we must stop ourselves from imagining what he does.

One day, before our husbands rise to the breakfast table, we flip open the newspapers and see the photograph on the front page. The dictator is frowning in his tall boots, and there is a pole suspended between two lieutenants beside him. Strung like beads on the pole, threaded through the tongue, are the decapitated heads of men. Each died grimacing.

We are modern women; some of us bob our hair and wear trousers at home; we are not the fainting types our mothers were. Still, after this, even we walk around the house feeling weak, feeling as if our legs are made of air.

 

OUR HUSBANDS COME
home early from work one evening and tell us, grimly, that the barbarians are at the gates. The
dictator has been useless, they say. When we press, they say that there are other forces at work; we should not worry our heads about it.

We wait. The pool is a blue stone inlaid in the ground, untouched. The monkeys get into the kitchens, leave floury imprints on the pianos, and we let them. The city itself seems to draw its tentacles in. Things are so quiet we can hear the distant sounds, the low dull explosions and the cracks of the guns. Some of our servants go home at night and do not return in the morning. We have difficulty finding coffee, then bread.

The dictator's wife comes to sit with us on the overgrown lawn, the bougainvillea threatening to swallow the tennis court. She has been to the cathedral, she tells us, but the doors were closed. She found a side entrance to the priests' house and found the priests at the kitchen table, eating toast, still in their pajamas. They would not look her in the eye. They would not give confession, she says. They silently refused.

She says this, her body still, this woman who jitters when calm. Never beautiful, she has become ugly with fatigue, her skin lined. Her daughter hides behind her chair, and we notice the girl's mouth is the dictator's own. One by one, she plucks out gray hairs from her mother's head, and though her mother winces with each pluck, she allows it. We have little to offer the dictator's wife now, except our silence and more tea.

I have dreams,
the dictator's wife starts to say. When she
raises her face, her pupils have swallowed her irises. We are reminded again of a medium in mid-séance, of the plain, quiet widow she had once been in a Saint Louis parlor, limning a canvas with her paint and visions.
I know everything he has done,
she says.

In the middle of the night, a knock on the door, and we who have packed everything get into the cars and glide down the hill. The younger children are sleeping against our shoulders, and there is the smell of smoke in the air. Our husbands are grim and do not speak. We do not say good-bye to our remaining servants, or to the booze we cannot take home to our dry country. We do not say good-bye to the compound, our lovely houses, the pool in which we have spent so many of our years. The darkness swallows it all. The marina is protected by a line of our own officers with guns on their shoulders. If the natives know we are leaving, we do not see them in the night, and it would not matter, we cannot take them. In the distance there are terrible sounds.

When we are on the boat, we breathe again. Not one of us asks our husbands to fetch the dictator's wife, who is alone in the pink palace on the hill, her daughter sleeping beside her. We have made our own choices in this life; the dictator was hers. There is something that unfurls in us when we think this, and we dare not examine what it is.

Still, as the boat unhitches from the dock and quietly moves into the harbor, we see the palace dwindle into a dark lump on the hill and imagine her there, in the gilded chamber, the dark carved bed swinging with velvet drapes. We
imagine her at the window, watching the fires roil from the edges of the city. The sky is touched with a terrible glow and our ship is a dark spot fading against the greater darkness.

Then, in the moment between the thump of one heartbeat and its sweet sliding after, we at last see what is before her eyes. We see great flights of angels in flapping robes descending upon the city, their faces terrible with bloodlust and fury; we see the furious melee, the young boys falling, the old people huddled in their apartments, the dictator wild on a screaming horse and the boar-hunting knife in his hand. In this moment we know his strength is only her own last strength, which he pulls from her, for that is what this marriage was; the dictator coming into the gallery in Washington, feeling small under the power of those paintings, turning to the little dark woman standing patiently beside him in her widow's weeds, knowing in that moment the terrific power in her, everything he could use of hers. We watch through her now as she sees the ragged bandits crash in one great wave, then two great waves against the palace, find entry. She closes her eyes and leans her forehead against the window. Like that she is emptied, at last.

We will not tell one another what we knew just then; we are not sure we will ever admit it to ourselves. As we see the city dwindle into a small speck of light, we lean against our husbands, who are not strong and do not fight, but at least have gotten us away. They, wanting to comfort, put their arms around us. And they are comforted for all their own errors, in their turn.

A DIVER WE KNEW ONCE TOLD US A STORY.
We were at a wedding, and all night he had watched us with a curious look on his face. At last, he loomed up from the corner of the tent, already talking, drunk, breathing his winey breath into our faces. You clutched my knee under the table to keep from laughing. The diver didn't notice, just kept on talking.

When he was young, he said, he dove to a wreck beside a deep, dark chasm. It was cold down there and in his lights the wreck seemed strange, scabbed with rust, the fish pale and shiny as they darted before him. His dive buddy was a man he had been paired with, barely an acquaintance. That far down, a diver should be wary of nitrogen narcosis, with its hallucinations, its emotional swoops, its blackouts. At one point, our friend turned to make sure everything was fine with his dive buddy, and saw him falling quietly, spread-eagled, into the abyss.

Our friend had two choices. He could watch the man disappear into the dark, knowing he had fainted and would never awaken before he died. Or, he could set off after him, risking a blackout himself, certain death for both of them. That deep, he gave himself a five percent chance of catching his buddy while he was cogent enough to bring them both to safety. He paused here in his story, looking at the dancers on the floor swaying to “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” We thought he was trying to build suspense. We cried, Well, what did you do?

The diver blinked and returned to us. Oh. Well, I just dove, he said.

The water was heavy, and just before his hands touched the other fellow's arms, our friend began to laugh. It came from nowhere, the laughter, and though he was daring death, he couldn't help it. He laughed so hard he almost spat out his regulator so he could laugh even harder. But he didn't. He grabbed his buddy, inflating his buoyancy vest a little. It was only when they rose out of the chasm and into the lighter, greener waters above the wreck that he stopped laughing. He watched the other man awaken behind his mask, open his eyes, confused. As they floated at twenty feet below the surface, decompressing the nitrogen from their blood, they clutched each other. They watched the waves wrinkle and break like silk against the boat's prow, the elegant blue of the sky beyond.

I held that guy, said the diver over the empty wine bottles, I held him so hard. On land he'd never have been a close friend. But waiting to emerge into the air, he said, I have never in my life felt a purer love for a human being. I have
never loved anybody as much as I did that stupid man at that very moment.

Without another word, our friend stood and moved off. We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.

 

YOU'LL REMEMBER THIS SPRING
, how, after the snow melted, the lake rose and didn't stop rising. March was soggy with rain, April drenched. In the hills, the beaver dams broke and spread diseased water into the rain-slapped lake until it was the color of a bruise. The river couldn't drain it fast enough, and roared thick and brown over the bridges, carrying the bloated bodies of unwary cows and deer down the current toward Harrisburg.

By June, our basement walls wept between the stones. Water seeped to ankle level, then to mid-calf. In the corner, the cardboard boxes weakened then broke apart, and when they did they spilled still-wrapped wedding gifts into the murk.

 

IT IS STRANGE
to find myself living again in our chintzy hometown after fifteen years away. It was a tiny thing, really, that brought me back to stay: a high school friend of ours was getting married last autumn, and I was almost late for the wedding. I slid into the pew with four seconds to spare and was still so flustered throughout the benediction that I began
to tear the program into tiny pieces. I may have ended up shredding a hymnal or the offertory sleeves, or even my own hem, had a man's hand not reached over into my lap and gently took hold of both of mine, and held them still until the end of the service.

I stared at those strange hands until it was all over. I could do nothing else, and they were large, callused, with swirls of dark hair below the first and second knuckles, neat nails and pretty moons in the nail beds. Very strong, very warm. But I didn't dare peek at their owner until the bride, beaming, swooshed back down the aisle in a cloud of lily scent and Pachelbel and lace. Then I glanced at you and had to quickly look away. You were almost too handsome, though I know now that's not how you strike most people. What, to others, was a too-big jaw and too-ruddy cheeks, a prominent forehead, the blue shadow of a beard under freshly shaven skin (I could smell the cream you'd used), was, to me, breathtaking.

Hello, Celie, you said, grinning.

Hello, I whispered.

You cocked your head. You don't remember me, do you?

No, I said. No.

Well, you said, and stood when everyone else did, and took my arm. Your date gave a dismayed squeal (I remember her only as a brown silk frill, some kind of gold shoe that was kicked at me after she grew drunk at the reception), but we ignored her. We walked out of the warm church and under a hail of rice that wasn't meant for us; we went over the hard-frosted grass and through the first door we could find, the rectory,
empty. You plucked a piece of rice out of my hair, and leaned me up against a stained-glass window depicting John the Baptist, baptizing. A cloud slid back outside and in the brief burst of sun, your cheek was dyed red and yellow and blue. I hid my hands behind my back to keep them from shaking.

Think hard, you said. You
do
know me.

Nope, I said. Nothing. We maybe went to high school together?

You gave a little grin and clicked the bridge of your four top teeth out of your mouth so that I was staring through a great gap at your pink tongue.

I was startled and drew away against the cool glass. And then I laughed, with wonder. My God, I said, it's
you
. You sure have grown up, I said.

Boy, have you, you said. And like that, four front teeth in your hand, you kissed me.

 

YOU WERE A FRIEND
so old I had forgotten about you. The little boy down the street, but a year younger than I, and my brother's buddy. So, invisible. Still, there are family pictures you snuck into, and I was there when my brother judo-kicked you in the mouth by accident and you lost those front teeth. You were there the day of my eighth-grade cotillion, and said nothing when I came down the stairs in my royal blue satin and sparkles, just ran off to do what seventh-grade boys do behind locked doors.

I loved books like people; I liked real people less. You
were wild and left clumps of mud from your soccer cleats everywhere. I sometimes tried to speak all day in perfect rhyme.
I will take some flakes to break my fast,
I'd say in my poetically gauzy nightgown,
For that alone is a fine repast,
and my siblings would groan and my father snort into his coffee, and the little neighbor boy who was always hanging around would give me a bright, shy smile.

You didn't laugh much, but when you did it was a goosey honk you never quite lost.

My parents weren't from this village, had four graduate degrees between them, and expected their children would do the same. My siblings—a doctor, a lawyer, an architect—left and only returned to visit. Before I came back I was a professional storyteller, a glamorous title that means a life of public libraries and wailing children and minimum wage.

Your family has been rooted in our village for six generations and though not poor, were not well-off, either. Your father is the town's florist and a hard, mean man; he'd replace the twelfth rose of a bouquet with baby's breath to cut costs. Your mother, a housewife who clipped coupons. You came home after two years of college to buy a snowmobile store, which turned into an ATV store in the summer.

All that time, you said, you never forgot me. There were many dates, many girlfriends—a ridiculous number—but they were never serious. Because, you said, there I was, riding along with you all that time. A leech, a lamprey, a fluke.

I went off into the world and if I ever thought of you, it was as a small child, hair sticking up everywhere, a snot-bubble in
your nose, that peculiar wedge-shaped face. A brown little boy in too-short jeans. I remembered an androgynous shirt you wore then, a cheery blue with a rainbow on the front. At one end of the rainbow, a beaming sun. On the other a white cloud spilling rain down your spindly, wriggling, little-boy rib cage.

 

EVERY MARCH OF MY CHILDHOOD,
my father would uncover the pool to reveal the greasy green water, still frigid with winter. There'd be frogs kicking toward the gutters, masses of insects, dead leaves. One year, when my mother was away for the evening and I was about seven, he gave us a dare.

Whoever can stay in the water longest gets five bucks, he said, laughing, figuring thirty seconds would be enough. We stripped down and climbed in, careful to keep our heads dry. My little brother got out immediately; cold wasn't his thing. My older brother and sister lasted two minutes, then came out muttering
retarded this, retarded that
. In the end, the only ones left were you and me, and though I was a princess I was fierce. I would die before I'd be beaten by a younger boy, a boy whose nipples were turning purple, whose whole skinny body was shuddering.

I hope I would have gotten out had I known what five dollars meant to you then. To me, it was another book from the bookstore that I'd half-understand; to you, it was a birthday present for your little sister.

Twenty minutes in, my father was no longer amused and
had begun to have visions of the emergency room, explaining to the mothers and his doctor colleagues why, exactly, two kids left in his care were hypothermic. He said, Enough, blinking quickly behind his thick glasses. We were both blue and quaking. But I was laughing because you went up the ladder first, and I thought that made me the winner. My father held the fiver in his hands and seemed for a second about to be Solomon, to rip the bill in two.

It's okay, you said, still shaking under the warm towel. Celie can have it.

It's yours, said my father, handing the bill to you. You earned it.

I began to squawk and my father said, Hush, hush, you'll have one too, as soon as your mother gets back and I can get it from her purse. Then he gathered us both up under his arms and carried us in and dumped us unceremoniously in the shower. Don't tell your mothers I let you do that, okay? he said, looking abashed.

Okay, we said, but when my father left, I stared angrily at you as you lost your blue and began turning pink under the warm water.
I
won, I said.

We both won, you said. You'll get your money when your mom is home.

It's my dad's, I said. His money and my pool, and I should get it first.

You shrugged and soaped yourself, singing a little song.

I climbed out and dried off, and, seeing the wet wad of a bill on the sink, took it.

At dinner, you said nothing about the missing money. Even when you started sneezing you said nothing; even when my father dug into my mother's purse to give me a five (the other bill wadded wetly in my underwear, imprinting my skin), you said nothing. When I took the money from my father's hand and ran away from the table and to my room and locked my door, you didn't come knocking, and the next time I saw you, after the fever that had kept you from school for a week subsided, you still said nothing.

Years later, I asked if you remembered this.

Of course, you said. It was one of the great traumas of my childhood.

You should've punched me, I said. I was such a jerk.

You were you, Celie, you said. I couldn't have been mad. Even then, you were beyond my anger.

 

ONCE UPON A TIME,
my life began with
Once upon a time
. I didn't have a passion when I graduated from college, and I floated from profession to profession: bartender, newsletter editor, grant writer, finally a temp. I liked the anonymity of temphood, the office supplies, the interchangeability of one cubicle with the next, but was an atrocious typist and had no math skills at all. When I was kept on for a long time, it was because the workers had gotten to like me, despite my lack of ability.

One morning my temp coordinator called me about a job: a literacy fair in Cambridge sponsored by a fruit company. The afternoon storyteller had gotten sick in the hun
dred-degree heat and I was to fill in. I'd have to wear a banana suit all week, she said. I laughed and said, No way. She laughed and said, Forty bucks an hour; I laughed and said, Call me Banana.

The first two days were hell, the suit soggy with the morning storyteller's sweat before I even put it on, the children whinging, my stories duds. But on the third day, magic happened: I began spinning a story and the children stopped fidgeting, their parents leaned forward in their seats, and I was able to forget the sweat streaming down the inside of the suit. The story carried me until the cool evening wind rose and the heat scaled back and the children went home, one by one, small pools of sweat where they had sat, entranced, for hours. When I took off the banana suit that evening, soaked and weak with elation, I had found what I was meant to do.

Storytelling is simple: selecting a few strands from many and weaving them into cloth. My life was retranslated, made neater. The tale of the neighbor boy and the pool became an epic of redemption: in retelling you became older, charismatic, quick, a bully;
you
became the robber of
my
shivery winnings, and I was the wounded little stoic.

 

AT THE WEDDING RECEPTION
the day I rediscovered you, years after we had left childhood, I don't think I ever found my table or had a bite to eat. We were at a teahouse in a private garden right on the lake, and the stalks of summer's
plants were brown and frostbitten. In the dusky fog, every dead plant seemed imbued with meaning, which I thought I could decipher if I only concentrated hard enough. We walked in the clammy dark garden, listening to the music and voices from the teahouse, sometimes talking, sometimes not. When dancing started, we came into the bright house and danced, too, my cheek only as high as your shoulder. Your date kicked her shoe at me, and was escorted away by the brother of the groom; the bride chortled and threw her pretty arms around us, squeezing us, telling us she
loved us, loved us, loved us
. At the end of the night, after the garter, the bouquet, the slow slipping away of the guests, we were the last ones in the teahouse, urged by the tired father of the bride to turn out the lights when we left. We laughed in the wreck of the feast, and sat down on a bench.