Delicate Edible Birds (3 page)

 

IN THE GRIMMS
'
STORY
“Hansel and Gretel,” it isn't the witch in the gingerbread house who is the wickedest character, as the poor wandering siblings easily defeated her with their small cunning. Rather, the parents of the children were the ones who, in a time of famine, not once, but twice, concocted the plan to take their children into the dark forest and leave them there to starve. The first time, the children dropped stones and found their way back. The second time, the forest gobbled up their trail. The witch did what witches do. The parents were the unnatural ones. This speaks to a
deep and ingrained fear: that parents could, in their self-interest, lose sight of their duties to their children. They could sell them to the dark and dank wilderness, send them to the forest, let them starve there. And each time, those two little children, hungry for home, came struggling so bravely back.

 

BUT NOTHING HAPPENED TO POT THAT DAY,
and we won Regionals, as nobody could dent our team that year. It was late when we returned, and I was reading
Bulfinch's Mythologies
for the nth time, under the red exit light in the back of the bus. I was marveling over the tiny passage on Danae:
Daughter of King Acrisius of Argos who did not want her to marry and kept her imprisoned because he had been told that his daughter's son would kill him. Jupiter came to her in the disguise of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus. She and her child were set adrift in a chest and saved by a fisherman on the island of Seriphos.
There was something so haunting in the story, drama packed so tightly into the words that images burst in my head: a white-limbed girl in a dark room, a chink in the roof, the shower of gold pouring over her dazzled body; then the black chest, the baby squirming on her stomach, the terrifying rasp of the scales of sea-monsters against the wood. A story of light and dark. Purely beautiful, it seemed to me, then.

I was daydreaming so happily as we trundled over Main Street that I didn't at first notice what was happening until
one of the freshman boys gave a shout. The bus driver slowed down to rubberneck as we went around the flagpole on Pioneer Street, and I saw it all: all eight of the town's squad cars up the hill to our left, all flashing red and blue in syncopated bolts, glaring on the ice and snow, and the ambulance with the stretcher being swallowed up inside it, the running police, the drawn guns, the Chens, both Fat and Glasses, up against the Lucky Chow Fun's vinyl siding, arms and legs spread. A huddled ring of the Lucky Chow Fun girls on the steps. I could pick out the girl with the jagged haircut, her arm around a plump girl with hair to her waist.

“Ohhhhh. Shit,” breathed Brad Huxley in the seat before mine. And then the bus passed the scene, and we rolled down Main Street toward the one stoplight in town. From there, the hamlet looked innocent and pristine, a flurry of wind-blown snow turning the streetlights into snow globes, icing the trees. Over the hills, the March moon was pinned, stoic and yellow, reflected in pieces on the half-glassy lake.

We were already halfway up Chestnut Street, silently looking out the windows, when someone said, “One too many cases of food poisoning?”

And though it wasn't funny, though we all had the flashing red and blue images lodged firmly in us somewhere just under our hearts, we—all of us—laughed.

 

I SLEPT LATE ON SUNDAY,
into the afternoon. I never sleep late, and I know what this means: the worst cowards are the
ones who refuse to look at what they fear. When I went downstairs, my mother and sister were still in their pajamas. Though Pot was almost my tiny mother's size, and twice her width, she was cradled on my mother's lap, sucking her thumb, her other hand up in her infant gesture to stroke my mother's ear. They were watching television, the sound off. I stood in the door, looking at the screen until I realized that the snowy roads I was seeing on the television were roads I knew as intimately as my own limbs, that the averted faces of the men on the screen were men who knew me well, who followed my swimming in the paper, who thought nothing of giving me a kiss when they saw me. Hurrying down the snowy streets now, shame on their faces, shame in the set of their shoulders.

Then came the faces of the Chens—stoic, inexpressive—and the scared faces of the Chinese girls, ducking into Mr. Livingston's limousine. He was my ninth-grade history teacher, and his limo was the only car in town large enough to hold all the girls and their lawyers at once. That car drove legends of baseball all summer from museum to hotel to airport. It drove brides and homecoming queens for the rest of the year. Now it was driving the Lucky Chow Fun girls wherever they were going. Somewhere, I hoped, far away.

I went to the television and turned it off. I stood for a minute, letting the swell die down in my gut, then sat beside my mother and said, “What happened?”

And my mother, who always made a point of being frank about sexual matters, describing biological functions in great
detail so that her daughters would never be squeamish or falsely prudish, my mother turned scarlet. “Sit down,” she said, and I did. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She bit her lips.

Pot said, pulling her thumb from her mouth, “The Lucky Chow Fun's a whorehouse.”

“Pot,” said my mother, then sighed. She looked at me, her thin mouth twisting, patting my thigh. “She's right,” she said.

“What?” I said. “Wait, what?”

“Last night,” my mother said, slowly, as if trying to order the fragmented truths, “one of the girls at the Lucky died. She was locked in her room with her sister—seems they were being punished—and there was some kind of accidental gas leak. One of them died, and the other one almost did, too. And one of the other girls who knew a little English called the police and tried to leave a tip before the Chens found out. But there are not too many poor speakers of English in this town. The police figured it out. They arrested the Chens.”

“Oh, God,” I said. I thought of the little huddle of the Lucky Chow Fun girls the night before, flushed red and blue in the flashing lights, how quiet they were, how I never saw their eyes. I never looked. “Mom,” I said. “Who were those girls?”

My mother brushed Pot's hair out of her eyes and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to hesitate, then she said, “They were bought in China and brought over here, it seems. They were poor. They worked in sweatshops. The Chens gave money to their parents, promised a better life. Apparently.”

“Slaves,” I said.

“On TV, they said that, yes,” said Pot, stumbling over her words. “And some of them, they said on TV that some of them, they're younger than you, Lollie.”

We sat there, in silence, thinking about this. My mother at one point stood and made us some cocoa, but for once, my tongue tasted like ash and I wanted to take absolutely nothing in. I was sick, could never again be hungry, I thought. At last, thinking of Chen Fat glaring at me over his notepad, the sticky smell of the food, Brad Huxley, the delicate girl with the chapped lips, I said, shuddering, “Do they know who visited? Do they have names?”

“Well,” said my mother, who paused for a very long time, “that's almost the worst. The Chens wrote down the names of the men who visited the Lucky Chow Fun.” It was hard to hear her, even in the preternatural stillness of the town on this day, even in our snow-muffled house. “They had a ledger. They made sure to write in English. The reporters said that they were going to blackmail the men who visited. Apparently, it's not just tourists. Apparently, a lot of men from the town went, too.” She looked at us. “You should know. Some of the men you know, some you love, some of them may have gone.”

And there was something so uncertain in my mother's face, something so fearful it struck a note in me. I looked at the clock over the mantel: it was already four o'clock, and my mother hadn't left the house yet. Unusual: she was the only person I ever knew who could never sit still. Especially now,
when she was dating The Garbageman, for whom she often cooked most meals and who, by this time on Sunday, had usually called our house to chat for hours, as if they were silly teenagers in love.

“Oh,” I said. I looked at her face under her mop of curls, the weary circles around her eyes. “The Garbageman call today?”

My mother flushed again and stood to carry the mugs back to the kitchen. “Not yet,” she tossed over her shoulder, as if it meant nothing to her at all.

I looked at Pot, who was frowning solemnly on her perch on the living room couch. She looked beyond me at a bird that landed on the tree outside, and cried, “A Song Sparrow!
Hip, hip, hip hurrah boys, spring is here!
That's what they say,” she said, beaming. “The Song Sparrows. They say,
Hip, hip, hip hurrah boys, spring is here!
” She was tapping her feet in her excitement, blinking so rapidly and nervously that she reminded me of my mother.

“Pot,” I said. “Have you taken your medication today?”

“Whoops,” she said, grinning.

“Pot,” I said. “How long has it been since you took your medication?”

She shrugged. “A week? Maybe a week. I stopped. I don't believe anymore in medicating children,” she said.

I shuddered because I heard in her words the distinct voice of an adult, someone who never saw Pot as she had been in her awful years. A teacher, perhaps, or some judgmental village crone. I went to the kitchen, slamming the
door behind me. “Mom,” I said. “Pot's not taking her medication. And by the way, don't you think she's too young to understand all this Lucky Chow Fun crap? She's only ten. She's just a baby. I don't think she can handle it.”

My mother stopped washing the mug she was holding and let the hot water run. The steam circled up around her, catching in her frizzy gray hair, spangling it when she turned around. “Lollie,” she said. “I'll make sure she takes the Ritalin from now on. But nobody in town is going to be able to escape what happened. Not even the kids. It's better that we tell her the truth before someone else tells her something much worse.”

“What's worse?” I said. “And I don't think people are made to take truths straight-on, Mom. It's too hard. You need something to soften them. A metaphor or a story or something. You know.”

“No,” she said, “I don't.” She turned off the water with a smack of her hand. “Why don't you teach me, since you seem to know everything.”

“Well,” I said, but at the moment when we most need these things, they don't always come to us. I couldn't remember a word. I opened my mouth and it hung open there, useless. I closed it. I shrugged.

My mother nodded. “That's what I thought,” she said, and turned away.

 

YEARS LATER, I WOULD HAVE HAD
the presence of mind to offer the tale “Fitcher's Bird,” from the Brothers Grimm, to
offer up an allegorical explanation. I would have told my mother how a wizard dressed as a beggar would magically lure little girls into his basket. He'd cart them to his mansion, give them an egg and key, and tell them not to go into the room that the key opened. Then he'd leave, and the little girls would explore the magnificent house, finally falling prey to curiosity and opening the door of the forbidden chamber.

There, they'd find a huge basin filled with the bloody, dismembered remains of other girls. They'd be so surprised, they'd drop the egg in the vat, and wouldn't be able to wipe the stain away. When the wizard would come home to find the stained egg, he would dismember the girls and toss their remains into the vat.

Eventually, he did this to the two eldest girls from one family, and came back for the third daughter. This girl, though, was uncommonly clever. She hid the egg in a safe place and brazenly went into the room, only to find her dismembered sisters in the bloody vat. But instead of panicking, she pulled their severed limbs out and pieced them back together again, and when the parts were reassembled, the girls miraculously came back to life.

The clever girl hid her sisters in a room to await the wizard, and when he returned and saw she hadn't bloodied the egg, he decided to marry her. She agreed, but said first that she would send him home with a basketful of gold for her parents. She hid her two sisters in the basket, which he carted home, now a servant of his clever bride. In his absence, the little girl dressed a human skull in flowers and jewels and put
it in the attic window. Then she rolled herself in honey and feathers to transform herself into a strange feathered creature, and ran out into the bright day.

On her way home, she encountered the wizard, who thought she was a wonderful bird and said, “Oh, Fitcher's feathered bird, where from, where from?”

To which she responded, “From feathered Fitze Fitcher's house I've come.”

“And the young bride there, how does she fare?” he asked, imagining his marriage night, and the soft young body of his wife.

And she, smiling softly under her down and honey, said, “She's swept the house all the way through, and from the attic window, she's staring down at you.”

When the wizard arrived home to find the skull in the window, he waved at it, thinking it was his bride. When he went inside, the brothers and father of the little stolen girls locked the door, set a fire, and burned the terrible murderer up.

 

IN THE GRIMMS
'
STORY,
of course, the community at last cleansed itself by fire, and in the aftermath came out righteous and whole. This did not happen to Templeton.

We were under siege. The media trucks were parked all along Main Street. Our town, though small, was famous for the baseball museum and for its beauty, an all-American village. Right-wing pundits on television and in the mega-corporation-owned newspapers held up our town as a symbol
for the internal moral rot of America, a symbol of the trickle-down immorality stemming from our Democrat president, who went around screwing everything that moved. People from Cherry Valley and Herkimer roared into town, pretending that they were natives, and the whole country saw us as drawling mulleted hicks in whole-body Carhartt, and hated us more. The handsome newscasters shivered in their fur-lined parkas, sat at our diner, and tried to eavesdrop, but were really only eavesdropping on other newscasters.