Cygnet

by Season Butler

  But I know there’s no use dwelling on it. I’ve agreed to it, to go through every frame of her life and adjust it to her satisfaction. And maybe then I’ll have my own life. Maybe I’ll be able to take six months and trek through the Andes, climb pyramids, sit in an arroyo in the desert and sing with the coyotes.

  “What an interesting skirt. Is it new?”

  I spill some hot water onto the counter as Mrs. Tyburn enters. She tuts at my clumsiness through dust-pink lips. Her hair is pinned into the sort of intricate knot that you only see in old pictures. She’s finally managed to find a color of pale blond that recedes easily into her white roots without jarring the eye. She’s tiny, as if age takes a little piece off her body as the minutes go by. She doesn’t have the droopy bottom and boobs some women get in menopause. She’s just compacted, like she’s shrinking to death.

  Somehow, though, I always feel smaller when I’m with her, like her kind of aging is contagious. It makes me uneasy.

  “Yes, it’s new. I mean, new to me at least. Do you like it?”

  Her expression doesn’t change. “Red.”

  Charcoal slacks, black boat-neck top, pearls. I shrink and feel that I have to really reach to take down the cups and saucers. She takes a pair of reading glasses out of the drawer that holds the notepads, pens, and the ten-year-old phone book. The pearls of the chain on her glasses match her necklace exactly. I take my notebook out of my bag and turn to the most recent page.

  “So, where were we?” she asks.

  “Sophia’s diary, June eighteenth, 1977.”

  “Oh, yes. Read back the last paragraph.”

  “‘Today is Jenny’s birthday. She’s my best friend at camp because she’s pretty and kind and she let me have the top bunk. I said we could swap every two days so that we could both have the top bunk.’”

  “Put an exclamation point there. No, two exclamation points. She was fond of overpunctuating as a child.”

  “‘We both got care packages from home today, but the one from my mom was the biggest out of anyone in my cabin. I think the other girls were jealous, so I put the raisins and peanuts out on the card table for everyone to share. I have to remember to wrap them up again before lights out so we don’t get ants. Mommy also sent me the new Nancy Drew mystery—I’m already finished with the first chapter. When I’m done I’ll see if Martha will trade it for one of her Famous Five books from England.’”

  “Excellent work, my girl. Sounds exactly like her at her best. I always said that she really thrived when she was able to mobilize her resilience and the resourcefulness she inherited from her father and me.” She leans in closer to check the handwriting in my draft against the original. On that day in 1977, little Sophia actually confessed to stealing all of her bunkmate’s chocolate. She’d snuck in during craft time, and even though she had plenty of chocolate from her mother’s care packages she’d torn through the other girl’s stash and buried the wrappers in the woods. When the theft was discovered, she denied it, confessing only to her antacid-pink diary with Secrets in cursive across the cover and a supremely pathetic lock. At least I’ve already finished rewriting her letters, a poor kid begging her mother to let her come home.

  Mrs. Tyburn thinks “Sophia’s” handwriting should be smaller and more rounded when I transcribe the alternative story into the replica diary. Piece of cake.

  “Very nearly perfect,” she says. “Leave the rest with me and I’ll be up soon with my corrections. Finish up the diary and after that make a start at slimming her down in the pictures. The group photos might be a bit tricky because that silly Instamatic camera she had was dreadful, but I know you’ll work your usual magic. And if you have time, perhaps you’ll make a start at fixing that boat.” She means the pictures of the boat.

  With this she curls her fingers—which are somehow both skeletal and amazingly soft—around my chin, beaming pride at me. The truth is that I’m her favorite child because I’ve fallen for her only trick like neither of her real children ever would. I need her money, I rely on it, so during billable hours I’ll do and say just about anything she wants. I’m hers like no one else has ever been.

  The phone rings sharp through the halls of the house, threatening to shatter the glass cabinet fronts and all the fancy tchotchkes behind them, but she’s still got her talons clamped to my jaw and doesn’t let me go until she purrs, “That must be Ted running early with the prints. Keep your seat—I’ll speak to him.”

  Her breast brushes my shoulder when she reaches for the phone. I think about teddy bears—the soft ones that little kids take to bed and the hard ones that grown-up women collect. Mrs. Tyburn has the second kind.

  While we finish our tea Mrs. Tyburn gives me a few more notes. As she talks, new things occur to her, dozens of details to make her daughter’s childhood happier, so many that I have to ask her to slow down.

  “I suppose they don’t teach young women shorthand anymore. This must be difficult for you.”

  Last of all, for the time being at least, I have to deal with Sophia’s clothes. Mrs. Tyburn wants her daughter to wear “brighter colors” (which means more pink), and finds it odd that she wore corduroys when it was obviously too hot. (I tug my sweaty bra line and see her point.) Is there anything I can do about this? Of course, I tell her. That’s what I always say. Nothing she asks is impossible. I clear up and take my notes to the impromptu edit suite she has set up for me in her attic. I like to pretend I’m that character from A Little Princess, working away with a beacon of optimism keeping me going: the storybook knowledge that my daddy will return from whatever war that was, shake off his amnesia, and come for me.

  This room is different from the rest of the house, where everything looks one-of-a-kind and carefully made. The attic makes me feel rejected, like she doesn’t really want me in her house. But there’s nowhere else to put me. Story of my life. In here the furniture is new and cheap. The L-shaped desk and the adjustable office chair are from Ikea and could sit in any room, anywhere. The plastic-wood drawers have plastic-metal handles. There’s no inkwell carved into dark wood or little decorative things with tiny clockworks that jingle and bing for no reason.

  I shouldn’t complain, though—I didn’t expect her to go out antiquing for me when she hired me to digitize her family archive, and she topped up her old equipment with everything I said I’d need for the job. I have a great computer with two big screens for editing, all the most up-to-date software, a brand-new scanner, and a photo-quality printer as well as an inkjet one for ordinary documents. And then there’s the old photo equipment, the ancient slide carousel, the two-reel projector, the eight-track player, two typewriters. (I jot a note on a Post-it that one is almost out of ribbon.) Even the Betamax video player in orange-and-beige faded plastic and the clunky black audiocassette player have a certain charm. I pull up my chair and press the on buttons, listen to the fizzle and crack of the machines waking up. I log in and check my email; yeah, I didn’t expect anything to have come through from my folks since I left the house. It doesn’t matter.

  Mrs. Tyburn thinks I’m some kind of genius. I feed myself with her mistake. It’s a good thing I have the place to myself up here. I spend most of my time googling error messages and watching online tutorials and asking questions on forums about how to do this or that in Photoshop, winging it, hitting undo a hundred times until I manage. I’m not bad at most things now, but when I started I didn’t have a fucking clue.

  * * *

  Mrs. Tyburn and I met on a First Friday just after I arrived last January. First Fridays are when they let visitors onto Swan. Some of the Wrinklies want it to be less often than that, the hard-line separatists, like Nick. I wish they could just be patient. I didn’t ask to exist, and I certainly didn’t ask to exist here. It’s just shit luck. My mom had my full astrological chart read once. The guy kept talking about hard lessons and learning experiences and I could tell he was really saying, “Sorry, kiddo; your life is going to be shit.” My mother was always getti
ng me stuff I didn’t need for my birthday, stupid trinkets or experiences she thought would be, like, groovy, when I really could have used the cash.

  That particular Friday, when I met Mrs. Tyburn, was clear and not too cold, so there were lots of families out playing games or eating and chatting on blankets in the grass. My parents didn’t come, of course; I’d asked Lolly to invite them and she’d agreed, but later she said the two numbers they’d left—a cell and a landline—had both been disconnected. So I was walking by on my way to visit the Duchess and to get something for lunch from Rose’s shop, and Mrs. Tyburn was out with little clusters of people, directing a middle-aged couple and their pimply teenage son to pose with the sea in the background. It was a good picture—puffy clouds on a bright blue sky and a breeze wrapping the woman’s green dress around her shins. The woman’s beige coat and tan scarf were so neat and crisp they could have been made of origami.

  “No, stay just like that,” Mrs. Tyburn urged them. “Don’t move, I’ll get it.”

  “Oh, Mother, please,” said the woman.

  Then the man said, “Let me have a look.”

  “No, no, stay right where you are. It’s perfect, just like that. I’ll get the . . . I’ll get this . . . this . . . damned thing . . .”

  As if she could feel me watching, Mrs. Tyburn turned and called me over. Obviously, she knew who I was, but in my first few weeks I’d managed to avoid her. “You young people know how to get these things working, don’t you? For the money I paid for it, it could at least do me the service of taking a simple snapshot, don’t you think?”

  She had it set to video. Plus the lens cap was on.

  Once she’d taken four or five shots of the family, they walked off, the woman huffing and mumbling to her husband. Mrs. Tyburn ignored them while I showed her how to see the photos she’d just taken and how to delete the ones she didn’t like. She complained that she couldn’t see the boy’s face well enough in one shot and I said that she could use a computer program to change the contrast and get rid of some of the shadow.

  “My, youth today. Such technical expertise.” I wanted to walk away but I could tell she had something more to say, and I had to wait while she worked out exactly what. “You know, I have a veritable library of images that could use a touch-up like this, and my son-in-law says that all of my pictures really should go onto compact discs. My dear, your particular brand of savvy could be just what this old woman needs. I think five dollars an hour would be suitable. Yes.”

  I started to accept before I realized it wasn’t actually a question.

  * * *

  An updated version of InDesign shoves its new features onto my screen with a pop-up sporting an image of a bird whose acid-trip tail brags about their clever design chops (so, if I take the virtual tour, I’ll be able to design a similarly magnificent creature!). It’s the kind of window you feel like you have to deal with because the option to skip this step is tiny and faint, a dweeby kid cowering in a corner of the window. So I bite and click through the whole intro-tour of the updated interface until Mrs. Tyburn comes in with her revisions to Sophia’s diary, much of it just squiggles and symbols and shorthand, and goes out again to a more charming part of the house. Mostly I understand what the symbols mean from context. But there’s one I have to look up. Stet, verb—let it stand. In a proof a revision that should be ignored, like crossing out a crossing out. Let it remain. Stet, stet. I like it. It hits hard enough to hurt a little but not too bad. It makes an impact.

  I look at more of the search hits and find out that there’s a book called Stet by some lady who used to be a book editor, and I consider ordering it, but that’ll take a month and I’ll be gone by then for sure. I wonder if it means the same thing to her that it means to me, if it’s one of those really sad words for her too. Of course she edited books and I edit some old lady’s fucked-up life. Still, I imagine reading it and emailing her to tell her what I think. Maybe she’d write me back. I have really stupid ideas sometimes.

  Stet. The more I repeat it in my head, the more desperate it makes me feel. I can’t stop saying it, though. Let it remain. Like a prayer, short and kind of pathetic, because it doesn’t matter what you say or do; whatever’s going to happen is going to happen no matter what. There’s no magic. That’s what made me feel so shitty about it, this stet. Mrs. Tyburn can get me to fix her life and change her family and make it look like everybody loves her because she has the money to pay me to do it. But I can’t do it for myself, my family, my life. I’ll say stet when things feel really awful, if only to be cruel to myself. Stet, I say, I ask, I beg. Only, I’ll never be able to instruct like she does. I’ll never be able to make anything stay.

  An hour or so later, the doorbell rings. Even though I’m all the way at the top of the house, it’s up to me to answer it. Only respectful, I guess. It’s Ted with the pictures. He has this rickshaw-style bike he uses to deliver stuff to the Swans. He was a graphic designer before he retired, which is handy when I’m really stuck with something, though I try not to bother him too much. Mrs. Tyburn actually asked him first to do my job, but he said it sounded way more complicated than anything he was into now. I think he also realized that the job was going to be creepy as hell and didn’t want to be part of it.

  “Hey, kid,” he huffs as he lifts one of the larger pictures out of the trailer behind his bike. “Seven framed portraits, for Her Majesty’s approval. Nice job on the color and shade around the faces. Your work is really coming along.” Ted’s the only one who can really see what I do.

  “Thanks. And thanks for bringing them over. Do you want to come in for a cup of coffee or anything? I could show you how I’ve set up the projections to transfer the home movies to digital.”

  A drop of sweat slides down from his wispy white hairline and soaks into his eyebrow. “I’ll take a rain check.” And he takes the envelope from Mrs. Tyburn that I hand him. “Hey, don’t work too hard up there.” He mounts his stocky frame on his bike and rides away the long way where the path is smoother and the slope longer and less steep.

  There’s something bothering me as I bring the pictures inside. I’m in an awkward position as I shift each picture inside while keeping the door from swinging closed with my foot. But that’s not it. It takes a second before I recognize the feeling. Anxiety is like a bad joke you’ve heard before. It comes up with this ridiculous energy, but it’s really the same boring shit as ever. I’m anxious about what will happen if Mrs. Tyburn doesn’t like the photos, or if I’ve offended her in some other way, or if she’s gotten tired of me. I’ve hardly managed to save anything yet, and if she fired me, that would be that. I still wouldn’t know where my parents were. I wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on or the phone connected. And eventually I’d have to find Ted—probably tinkering in his tool shed, or at the Psychedeli playing guitar with Johnny, or in the Relic, doing whatever they do in there—and ask him to row me over to Appledore. We’d head to the pier, me clutching my bag and avoiding the concerned, encouraging eyes of the Wrinklies. I’d sit in the sun in Celia Thaxter’s boring garden and watch the beads of sweat form on my folded arms and drip into the dirt, heave my bones onto the next boat back to the Bad Place, alone. I’d probably end up just like my folks, wherever they are. Except I’m alone and at least they have each other.

  “Bring them through, darling! Oh, it’s just like Christmas!”

  I take the pictures into the kitchen one at a time. Mrs. Tyburn reaches into her drawer and pulls out a little pair of scissors, the one she uses to open boxes, packages, and envelopes with that new kind of adhesive she hates. By the time I come through with the third one she’s staring at the first, unwrapped on the kitchen table. She pulls off her glasses and lets them bounce against her breasts.

  “You, my girl, are an absolute prodigy.” The portrait of her son—with creamy, boyish skin instead of an angry rash of teenage acne—looks up at me as if he doesn’t entirely agree.

  “My darling girl! How perfect, how m
arvelously perfect! Now, quickly with the others. I cannot wait.”

  In the picture of her high school graduating class, the tassel on her cap now has the same stripes as the kids who’d graduated with honors. She fills out her gown with polite, round B cups and she has two perfectly shaped eyebrows. In the shot of her in a bikini with her college girlfriends she has grown into a C. It’s a sunny day now, and the palm trees actually have banana leaves because she didn’t like the ones that were there on the day. Too brown, too fan-like; the banana shape is more to her taste. Her friend Michelle’s front teeth are the same length and that “dreadful portly child” in the background has vanished, along with the “flaccid excuse for a castle” he’d been building. Midway through her degree, fully developed into ample, high-set Ds, she and Herbert Tyburn pose in front of a dance-contest trophy. “Let’s make it second place. And change it to the Lindy Hop. Foxtrot sounds so stuffy these days, don’t you think?” And on through the years, births, milestones, candid moments. I’ve given her real breasts, grateful children, a husband whose eyes never wandered. In these seven pictures, that is. There are still boxes and boxes of A cups to enhance, frowns to invert, people to insert or delete, an upper lip to paste onto her husband every memorable day for fifty years. I double-check and she assures me she’s happy with the prints, so the next time she’s out I’ll gather up the originals and destroy them.

  * * *

  At a little past one, I decide to take my lunch break. This is one of those awkward moments when I feel like I’m taking forever to make a really boring decision. I could go to the Psychedeli (and return some tapes Johnny lent me), but I’m saving up for when my parents call and tell me to come and meet them wherever they’ve ended up. So I should make something, but there’s no food in the house. I’d have to buy something from Rose and take it back and fix it at home, which would take most of my break. I could just work through lunch but Mrs. Tyburn doesn’t pay me extra. I tried it once, when I gave her my hours for the week. But instead of paying me an extra fifteen dollars, she said that that’s not what we’d agreed to and anyway she wasn’t going to incentivize workaholism, which is a bad habit and I’m at just the age when you should guard against bad habits. She said it all in this really confident way, like she’d noticed me working through lunch all week and had prepared her speech in advance. I guess that’s how rich people get that way; they know how to avoid giving money away. She lifted her chin and kind of half raised her eyebrows, but didn’t look at me. Her eyes were pointed down like she was really talking to her ridiculous fake boobs.