Delicate Edible Birds (21 page)

Tonight, on the couch beside Bettina, Jaime feels safe. She lets herself think of the boy from the park a lifetime ago, the flowers frilly as Victorian children. Jaime had cut through the park on her way home from school and the boy had followed her, throwing horse chestnuts, his clothes ripped, his head shaved save for the spiky band down its middle. Stop it, she cried, but he didn't until she ran away. At home, her
mother, on the ottoman with her skirt hiked up over her knees, giving herself a pedicure: she saw Jaime's face and cried, Jamina, Jamina, what's wrong? her voice full of alarm as she followed Jaime through the house, her feet pigeon-toed as she walked to keep the polish from smearing on the rugs. Jaime wanted to push her away, to think angrily of the boy alone in private. Over supper, the endless questions, even though Jaime was still a good girl then. Top of her class, quiet, going to college. Horse-plain, the way good girls are. But even when she was amenable, her parents didn't trust her to make her own decisions. Oppressive, their worry, their expectation.

The next day the boy was in the park again. He offered her a box of chocolates, stolen, she found out later, from a drugstore. She ate three right there, not caring if they were kosher. An immense thrill.

A few days later, he took her home. He didn't live in the rat-infested hovel she'd expected, but a large apartment on the Upper East Side. Played her records imported from Britain: Punk, he'd called them, and leaped around the room to the noise. It sounded like some blistered creature's death howls, but he loved it. He showed her a photo, the tight leather pants he wanted. He pulled a joint from his sock drawer (socks in neat buds, arranged by color by the maid), and she felt the world slow and become delicious. She didn't even know his name when he pushed her down on the bed. He hiked up her skirt, and on his clean blue sheets shoved his way into her.

She knew him for one month; during it he dyed her hair, attacked her tee-shirts with scissors, played his music until she began to like it. In school, people gaped at her. She crept out at night and stayed in a club until morning. Pills, coke, acid. And then, just as she was beginning to not mind the moment when he climbed on top of her, her parents carted her off to Sharon Springs, and at the end of the summer they dumped her with Bettina.

No religion, no school, no good Jamina. It had been a relief, in its way. At first she thought she missed the boy. Now she can't remember his face.

She'd wanted for a long time to tell Bettina about the boy, but if she was right to suspect that Bettina read her journal, the woman already knows. The commercials come on and Bettina moves off to make another aluminum pan of popcorn. Jaime follows her into the kitchen, where it smells of the coffee cake for tomorrow's breakfast, cooling on the stove. She wants to confess, to come clean, but she can't tell on Jason, and though she'd like to, she can't make herself talk of the boy in the park. Instead she tells about the woman upstairs, what she'd found that morning when she was cleaning.

In her purse? Jaime says. When she was in the shower? I found a man's button-up shirt. And it was all bloody. Like
totally
bloody.

Bettina stops shaking the popcorn over the burner. Her face has paled. A bloody shirt? she says, glancing at the ceiling.

That's what I found, says Jaime. You think she murdered someone or something?

Bettina turns off the stove and sits at the table. I think, she says. Doesn't matter what I think. She leans forward and Jaime is swimming in those violet, black-fringed eyes. Jaime, promise me, she says, don't tell anyone else.

Jaime flushes, resentful. Duh, she says, then Hepburn's bell-like voice chimes from the other room, and Jaime returns to the movie, feeling as if she'd just escaped something.

In the morning, when Jason comes inside, smelling of whiskey, Jaime is arranging the cake on the guest's tray. Bettina is by the stove. Jason grins at them, settles heavily into a chair. His back is straight. He runs his hand tiredly through his grizzled hair.

Drinking, Jason? says Bettina calmly. Already or still?

Jason sighs. You don't know, he says, his tongue slightly thick. You don't know about what's happening around here.

Bettina goes still. What don't we know? she says in her softest voice.

Be quiet for a minute, I'll tell you, says Jason. So we're at the Springs last night playing pool, he says, the boys and me, when in comes Arnie.

Arnie snowplow or Arnie cop? says Bettina.

Arnie cop, says Jason. Anyways, Arnie says, Looks like we got us a missing person down in Roseboom, going to drag the pond, make sure nobody's in it. He said to wait till
morning, but we got carried away, got into our trucks, went up there to see what we could do. And get this, there's this car halfway in the water, this Mercedes all filled with water. So Pete shines his light in, sees the seats, and they're all covered with dark splotches. And he rubs his hand on it, and then says, Fuck!—here, Jason looks at Jaime and says, Pardon the French, then continues—Pete drops the flashlight and jumps back. It's blood. A lot of blood. And so we wait out in the truck and luckily someone brought whiskey and just when it gets dawn we drag the lake. But not good enough, I guess, cause we didn't find a body or anything.

He looks at the women, pauses for drama. Pretty clear, he says, slowly, somebody was murdered there.

Murdered? says Jaime, and looks at Bettina with alarm, but Bettina is calmly placing a poached egg on the tray for the woman upstairs.

Huh, she says. Any idea whose car it is?

Muckamucks from the city. Some kind of doctor and his wife. They think there was a hitchhiker or something, killed them both. Is there any coffee?

Bettina pours the coffee into Jason's mug and looks at Jaime. Take the food up, Jamie, before it gets cold, she says.

Jaime weighs the woman upstairs and her bloody shirt against Jason, so bleary, his great paws around his mug, ears cold-reddened, making him seem almost childlike. At least she understands the danger that is Jason's, a little.

Bettina? she says, helpless. I can't.

Bettina's mouth knots into a silken bow. She says, All right. Go on and do the dishes, then. She heaves the tray upstairs.

 

IT HAS BEEN THREE DAYS:
Lily hasn't been to school. She's sure this is illegal, but Sammy said that if Lily told, her grandmother was probably too rich to go to jail and Maria would have to go instead. At night, Lily dreamed of Maria in jail and woke up in a puddle. She'll never tell, not even if she was out for the rest of the year, not even if she was out for
ten
years and couldn't go to college and get a good education and would never be a veterinarian, and would end up poor like Maria.

She feels the wildness rise in her again, tries to push it back. When she was just three, she would have such terrible attacks that she scratched her own cheeks until they bled. She remembers her parents talking, her mother's slow drawl, her father's clipped voice—Is it our fault? he said. Did we do this to her? God, I'll never forgive myself if that's the case; and Lily's mother gave a small, tough laugh and said, For heaven's sake, listen to yourself. Of course we did. We're both neurotic as hell. In a softer voice her mother, who was never soft, said: Lil will grow out of it.

This is what Lily tells herself when she fears she will never be normal, when she feels the anxiety lurking in the corners of the room: I'll grow out of it. And when she says it, to herself, she says it in her mother's broken-glass voice.

Lily is on the couch between Maria and Sammy. Maria is watching her show and Sammy is itching for mischief. She's been naughty all morning, spilling the milk, knocking over the grandmother's oxygen tank, eating all the cookies from the jar. But Lily won't let Sammy be bad right now: she has to keep Sammy in check. It's exhausting.

On the screen a very beautiful woman with huge shoulders is walking across a wood-paneled office, a grin on her red lips. What's going on? says Lily.

Maria says, without turning her eyes from the television, Oh, it is incredible! This woman is not this woman, but her evil twin. Everyone thinks she is she, but, no, she has her sister tied up in a basement. She is trying to steal her sister's fortune and man. Maria pats Lily's face, her hand smelling of the fennel she'd turned into soup for lunch.

Lily's father knows stories about evil twins: he spends hours at night telling Lily stories, mostly fairy tales. Her grandmother has explained to Lily that her parents are lost. Now, as the show jitters on, she imagines her father out in the forest, barefoot in the snow, only frozen berries to feed him. Somewhere in a sleigh in the cold, her mother sits all dressed in white, her beautiful face icy, enchanted by bad magic into a snow queen.

With that, the great wave looms above Lily, threatening, keeping her from breathing.

Sammy has turned her froggy face toward Lily, is poking her in the side with a sticky finger. Together, the wave and the poke are enough to make Lily wail.

Into Lily's hair, Maria says, Oh, hush-hush. When Lily won't hush, Maria says, So you want to be a veterinarian? To doctor the animals?

Lily, crying hard, nods, and Maria stands and carries Lily through the French doors onto the veranda. It is freezing out there, the stripped trees in the park below bowing, the street noises billowing up to meet them. Maria puts her finger on her lips, and Lily tries hard to press her sobs into her chest. Maria carries her over to an enormous empty planter, where in the summer there sits a topiary in the shape of a swan.

They look down, and Lily gasps. There, blue with cold, peep three chicks, songbirds, opening their cocktail-straw throats to Lily, pleading for warmth and worm mash. They strain toward Lily, shivering with effort.

The world around Lily halts. In this moment, there is no Maria holding her, no grandmother smelling of sickness, no parents lost in the woods, no Sammy. Lily has stepped out of herself. It feels good. There is a rift inside her and on the far side of the rift, there are only the chicks, creatures so much weaker than even Lily that the girl feels herself filled with a kind of light, calm and blue; a light full of forgetting.

 

THE GIRL IS UP
in the hotel room and Howie is swimming his laps in the pool, feeling the joy in his new muscles, how after these few days his skin has softened into tan. He dips below the water and comes up blowing in the bright Key West light. Salt on the air, terns screaming: he dips again to
the blue water and its kind murmur. There, he imagines the girl inside the dim room, television washing her body with flickering greens. Her show is on, and she has never missed an episode. He'd tried to watch with her the day before, but got confused: it was about a woman who was seen in two places at once; impossible, and Donna's explanation only confused him. There's Texas in her voice, though she's never been. His own Eliza Doolittle has learned a great deal from those oil-slick wives, their great powder puffs of hair, their avidity, their boldness, even the slow caramel drawl of their words. From the show she knows words that just a few months ago were foreign to her:
yacht, Sauternes, carat
.

Howie swims and his heart swims, too, rhythmic, longing.

Before the girl, he was gray. New York City snowfall gray, exhaust-dogdirt-gray. Gray as his office with its pleather couches, black-and-white photos on the walls, even home's small comforts gray, all glass and steel. His wife is modern and loves all things modern, as well.

But one day he saw the girl on his couch in the waiting room, a peony in a sea of ash. When he walked into the exam room, he pretended to be taking notes, only looking up when the door closed to see that she'd forgotten the modesty gown. She sat there, slow-smiling, naked, cupping her breasts like nesting birds in her hands. Pretty girl, barely out of her teens, gaudy squares of zirconium in her ears.

I thought, she'd said, smiling at him, that I felt a lump.

No lump: also no further exam. He didn't want to see anything belonging to the girl in a clinical light. He drove home dazed and saw coronas of sunlight on the cold glass of skyscrapers. His classical music station bored him and he flipped until he heard Neil Diamond warbling “America”: he listened, astounded. It was big and celebratory and bold, this song, like his heart put to music. This song was the zeitgeist, this new decade hungry and striving, where anyone could strike it rich and everyone was doing so.

There was a party at home when he arrived: he'd stood limply in the door, striving to place all those people in the house.

Then he shook himself, mingled, fetched drinks. Became again the good man his guests knew, the one without adultery thumping in his chest. Howie, tee-ball coach, kind father of a problem child, head of the Neighborhood Association, gentle gynecologist. His wife shimmered and dazzled, bon mots spinning from her mouth, and he laughed with the guests, Tabitha's perfect audience. He squeezed her hand in passing, subject as always to her acerbic charm. His persona felt odd on him, as if he were wearing a mask from a Greek play, features fixed, mouth a loudspeaker.

In the midst of it all, he went to the bedroom, rolled up his cuffs, dialed the number the girl had written on his wrist:
Donna,
she'd written, and he knew by the way she'd smiled when she said it, tasting the word with such pleasure, that it was a name she'd given herself. Even here, in Key West, he still doesn't know her true one.

Before she answered, he remembered those two small breasts in her hands and almost hung up. But she answered and what had to happen, happened.

Now, three months later, as March sludges on cold and gray in the city, he is dipping into sun, into water, into sun again. He comes to the end, clutches the concrete lip, and raises his face to the warmth. On the balcony, there is a butterfly flutter, magenta and gold, the girl in the fancy kimono he'd bought her. She's laughing down at a gardener who gapes upward, his hose flaccidly gushing. Then she looks out and sees Howie in the pool, his thin hair slicked back, watching her. His breath leaves him under her transformation: from a mere girl she turns into a whole-body beckon.