Delicate Edible Birds (4 page)

Our shell-shocked mayor appeared on television. He was the town know-it-all, a bearded hobbit of a man who gave bombastic walking tours to the tourists and wore shorts all year because of a skin condition. He had to pause to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief, choking up throughout his speech. At the end, he said, “Templeton will survive, as we have survived many other disasters in our illustrious history. Be brave, Templeton, and we will see each other through.” But there was no applause at the end, as there were no Templetonians in the audience, composed as it was of disaster-gawkers and newscasters.

Our Ambassador appeared on CNN and
20/20
to defend our town. “We are not perfect,” he said in his quivery old man's voice. “But we are a good town, full of good people.” His cloudy eyes filled with fervor. It was very affecting.

We stayed inside. We went to the grocery store, if we needed to, to school, and a few of us went to the gym. Our team practiced in virtual silence, the only sound the water
sucking in the gutters, the splash of our muscled limbs. In school, the teachers came to classes with red-rimmed eyes, traces of internal anguish happening in the homes of people we never imagined had private lives. The drama kids pretended to weep at lunch on a recurrent basis. There was a hush over the town, as if each of us were muted, swaddled in invisible quilts, so separate from one another as to not be able to touch, if we wanted to. Girls began walking in groups everywhere, as if for protection. The Templeton men did not dare to look at the Templeton women, furious as we were, righteous. And in this separation, in our own sorrow, we forgot about the girls, the Lucky Chow Fun girls, and when, after some time, we thought of them, they were the enemies. They were the ones who had brought this shame to our town.

 

TWO TERRIBLE WEEKS PASSED.
My mother stopped talking about The Garbageman,
tout court
. He stopped calling. She stopped visiting him with plates of food. She grew drawn and pale, and spent a lot of time in her flannel nightgown, watching
Casablanca.
She picked a new fight with the principal and came home spitting. The Winter Dance was canceled: I spent that evening dating a pizza and an apple crumble, watching Fred and Ginger glide across the floor, pure grace. Pot acquired two new taxidermied birds, one finch, one scarlet macaw, its head cocked intelligently, even in death.

One day, I came home, skirting Main Street and its hordes of news cameras. I went to the mailbox and found six envelopes from colleges all over the country, all addressed to me.

I went inside. I sat at the table with a cup of tea, the six letters splayed before me. One by one, I opened them. And what would have been a personal tragedy before the Lucky Chow Fun was now a slight relief. Of the six colleges, all of which had recruited me for swimming, though I had indifferent grades and mediocre SATs, I had only gotten into one.

Rather: I had gotten into one. One, glorious, one.

I tossed out the bad five, and waited for Pot. My tea cooled and I made more, and it cooled again. I peered out the curtains for my little sister, but she didn't come. I made cookies, chocolate chip, her favorite. I had half an hour before swim practice and she still wasn't home when my mother came in, with her energetic stompings and mutterings. “My God, Lollie,” she said, “you'll never guess what that ass-muncher of a princip—”

“Mom?” I interrupted. “Do you know where Potty is?”

“Isn't she here?” she said, massaging her neck, peeping in from the mudroom. “She was supposed to come straight home from school to go to the grocery store with me.”

“Nope,” I said. “And it's getting dark.”

She came into the kitchen then, scowling. “Do you have any idea where she could be?” she said. We looked at each other, and her hand floated up to her hair.

I stood, nervous. “Oh, God,” I said.

“Calm down,” she said, though she was flustered herself. “Think, Lollie. Does she have any friends?”

“Pot?” I said. I looked at her. “You're kidding, right?”

“Oh, God,” she said.

“Let's think, let's think,” I said. I paced to the window, then back. “Mom. Let's think. Where does Potsy get her birds? The stuffed ones. Do you know?”

My mother looked at me, then slowly lifted her hands to her cheeks. “You know,” she said, “I never actually wondered. I guess I assumed your dad was sending them. Or she was buying them with her allowance. Or something. I never wondered.”

“You haven't given us allowance in six months,” I said. “So where are they from?”

“Is she stealing them?” said my mother. “Maybe from the Biological Field Station?”

“Pot?” I thought of this, wondering if Pot could have the gall to waltz into some place, open up the display cabinets, hide the birds under her shirt, and waltz on home. “I don't think so. It's not like her,” I said, at last.

“Well,” said my mother, her voice breaking. “Who'd have a collection like that?”

And my mother and I looked at one another. There was a long, shivery beat, a car driving by outside, its headlights washing over my mother's face, then beyond. And then we both ran out coatless into the snow, we ran into the blue twilight as hard as we could up the block, forgetting about our cars in our hurry, we ran past the grand old hospital, over the
Susquehanna, we ran fleet and breathless to the Ambassador's house, and then we burst inside.

The house was extraordinarily hot, the chandelier in the hallway tinkling, and the ugly miniature schnauzer barking and nipping at us. Our shoes slid on the marble floor as we sped into the living room. Bookcases, Persian rugs, leather armchairs—no Pot. We flew through the door, into the library—no Pot. We ran though the hall and stopped short in the dining room.

There, my little sister was dressed in a feather boa and rhinestone starlet glasses, in her undershirt, crouching on an expensive cherrywood chair and looking at a book of birds that was at least as big as she was. She looked up at us, unsurprised, when we came in.

“Hey,” she said. “Mom, Lollie, come here, look at this. This is a first edition Audubon. The Ambassador said I could have it when I'm eighteen.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” my mother said, snapping from her surprise and charging over to her. She ripped the glasses from Pot's face and pushed her arms into her little cardigan. Pot looked up at her, her face open and wondering.

That's when the Ambassador appeared in the doorway and said, “Oh, dear. I told Miss Petra here she should have been home hours ago. But you know her and birds,” and he gave a tinkly little laugh.

“You,” I said, charging at him. “What in the fuck are you doing with my sister? Why is she in her undershirt?”

“Pot,” my mother was saying at the same time. “Has he touched you? Has he hurt you? Has he done anything to you?”

The Ambassador blinked, his milky eyes canny. “Oh, my,” he said mildly. “Oh, I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding. Pot told me you knew she visited with me.”

“We did
not
,” I said. “Are you hurting her?”

Pot gave a little bark of surprise. “Oh, God,” she said. “No. Jeez, you guys. I mean, like. I don't think he even. You know. Girls,” she trailed off.

We looked at her.

She sighed. “No girls. He doesn't like them,” she said.

My mother and I looked at the Ambassador, who flushed, ducked his head. “Well,” he said. “Well, Petra. Oh, my. But yes, you are right. And no, I have never touched Petra. She comes here after school, and I give her one object of her choice every week. I have no heirs, you know,” he said. “I have so many beautiful things. Petra is an original. She is a pleasure to talk to. She will one day be something great, I warrant.”

“He lets me wear a boa,” said Pot. “He lets me be a movie star. He knew Grace Kelly. And it's always hot in here so I have to take off my sweater. It's always one hundred degrees exactly. I
die
if I don't take off my sweater.”

“Yes. I'm afraid I am anemic,” the Ambassador said delicately. “I cannot bear cold.” He looked at our shoes, dripping slush on his fine floors. He said, “Could I make some tea for you before you three ladies return home?”

My mother and I stared at the Ambassador for a very long moment. And then, in shame, we gathered ourselves up. We apologized, we clutched our little Pot tightly to us. And he, ever the statesman, pretended we hadn't offended him. “These times,” he sighed, escorting us to the door, where the wind had blown a great heap of powder onto the priceless rug. “In these dark days, there is so much distrust in this town. I understand absolutely. You never know quite what to think about people you believe you trust.” Then he shivered, and Pot reached up and squeezed his hand. In the glance between the two there was such adoration that, on the long walk through the dark, I stole small looks at Pot to try to see what exactly he had seen in her, the budding wonder there. The one she would become, to our great wonder.

 

IT TOOK A LOT OF TIME.
Templeton could not heal quickly. There was still much scandal, many divorces, many people leaving town to start over. The dentist I had been to all my life. The school custodian, the principal, the football coach. My postman, the town librarian, my best friend's brother, the owner of the boatyard, the manager of the Purple Pickle, the CFO of the baseball museum—all divorced or shamed. Brad Huxley sent to military school. The Garbageman moved to Manhattan, though his trucks still rumble by every Thursday morning. And there were many more.

But the newscasters trickled away when a professional football player killed his wife and charged the country with
a new angst. The tourists returned as if nothing had happened, and there were motorboats again on the lake, my tearful graduation, the death-by-chocolate binge the night before I drove off to school. The Chens were shipped back to China, and probably set free, and the girls were taken to San Francisco, where most of them decided to make a new life. To heal. I read of their trial in the
Freeman
's
Journal,
from the safety of my dorm room my freshman year. In the end, time smoothed it all away.

But for those of us who return periodically, there is always a little frisson of darkness that falls over us when we see the candy shop where the Lucky Chow Fun once had been.

 

ONLY NOW, MANY YEARS LATER,
can I imagine what the real tragedy had been. It was not the near-death of my town, though that was where all my sympathy was at the time. I mourned the community that almost buckled under the scandal, for the men in the town, for our women. How we were split. As was my training, I forgot about the poor Lucky Chow Fun girls. Only now, years later, do I dream of them.

 

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE SEVEN GIRLS.
They were girls like any other girls, no cleverer, no more or less wealthy than others in their town. They were pretty as young girls are always pretty, blooming, rose-cheeked, lily-skinned. The factory they worked in was gray, the machines they
worked on were gray, the nighttime streets they walked back to their crowded apartments, all gray. But they dreamed in colors, in blues and greens and golds.

One dark night, the girls' parents closed the doors. Conferred. When they came out, the girls were told: we are sending you to America. There should have been joy in this, but the parents' smiles were also taut with fear.

How much? the girls asked, trembling.

Enough, the parents responded, meaning: Enough money, enough of your questions.

And the seven girls were taken to the docks. They crawled into boxes and were sealed inside with water and candy and pills. There, with the bones of their knees pressed to the bones of their ribs, hearing the roar of the tanker, they saw nothing in the darkness but more darkness.

They arrived, weak and trembling. They were unpacked. They were taken to the house where they were trained to be quiet, absent, to press themselves to the mattresses and not say a word. In that house, they slowly became ghosts.

The seven ghosts were put then into a van, driven to a cold town on a lake, where nobody knew who they were, nobody cared if they were living or dead, where they cooked silently, cleaned silently, lay on the mattresses, and did not say a word. Men went into their rooms, men left their rooms, other men came in.

One ghost stopped eating and she died. In the middle of the night, the ghosts were forced to row her to the middle of the black lake. They tied her limbs to grease buckets filled
with stones and they dropped her in. She sank under the water and seemed to blink up at them as she went. They rowed back. Wordless, as always.

Then there were six ghosts. The two that were sisters were punished, locked in a room. The air was bad, and one died, the other almost did. And one of the remaining ghosts found the dead girl and her half-dead sister. She touched the blue cheeks of the dead girl, and she felt only cold. Something old rose in her, some small courage. She stole one moment with the phone, spoke words, clumsy, ugly, perhaps, but those words breathed life back into the girls, brought liberty in the form of flashing red and blue lights.

 

IN THE END, AFTER THE LONG TRIAL,
the men who'd imprisoned them were imprisoned themselves. The girls went to San Francisco, where they chose to stay, where, slowly, they went out into the streets. They saw the green of the water, the gold of the sky, and they learned what it meant to be girls again. I imagine them there, together, walking in some garden, their hair gleaming under the sun. I imagine them happy.

And it is a happy ending, perhaps, in the way that myths and fairy tales have happy endings; only if one forgets the bloody, dark middles, the fifty dismembered girls in the vat, the parents who sent their children into the woods with only a crust of bread. I like to think it's a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.