“I never saw her give you the belt.”
“That’s because I’ve never given her a reason,” Milly said.
The two of them lingered on the bank of the creek, watching the water bugs balance on the surface and the first of the season’s dragonflies hover over it, before they walked the rest of the way home to prepare for their mother’s birthday. She’d asked them to treat the day like any other, but they knew she’d be disappointed if she came home from the luncheon and didn’t find a card on the kitchen table and a freshly iced cake on the counter.
“Your mother’s people put gold in their soup,” their father would say to explain the difference between what she said she wanted and what she expected.
“At least we don’t water ours down like your people,” their mother would say back. She and her sister, who lived in Minnesota, had given up their inheritances and married for love. “And look where that got us,” she’d say. “On either side of the Mississippi without so much as a paddle!”
“There should be another word for love,” Twiss said to Milly while Milly measured out flour at the counter. Twiss had already changed out of her dress and back into her coveralls.
“Like what?” Milly said.
“For him it should be ‘golf.’ What’s the opposite of golf?”
“I don’t think it has an opposite,” Milly said.
“Anything French, I guess,” Twiss said.
Since they were little their mother had taught them French alongside their English lessons. When Twiss thought their mother wasn’t listening, she’d put a clothespin on her nose.
“Merde, merde, merde!” she’d say. “I’m Frauwnch as Frauwnch can be!”
Their mother, who was always listening, would pour a handful of soap flakes into Twiss’s mouth and make her say je suis désolée until the flakes dissolved.
“What would your word be?” Twiss said.
Something to do with baking. Whenever Milly could scrape together enough flour, sugar, and butter, she’d bake a dessert. Often, her parents would stop what they were doing and wander into the kitchen, where Twiss would already be sitting with a napkin tucked into the collar of her shirt. Something about sugar made their family sweeter.
“ ‘Sugar,’ ” Milly said to Twiss, measuring out two cups’ worth.
She mixed the batter and poured it into a cake pan. After she put the pan in the oven, she gave Twiss the bowl to lick and took the spoon for herself. While the cake cooked they sat on the porch steps. Twiss stuck her whole head in the bowl and was attracting everything from brown-bellied beetles to cicadas. Even the grasshoppers lunged at her.
“ ‘Wisconsin,’ ” Twiss said. “That’s my word.”
“The word or the state?” Milly said.
“Both,” Twiss said.
Twiss knew every dip and rise on their land, every anthill and every snake hole. She knew what kind of grass grew where. You could blindfold her and she’d be able to tell you what kind of bark belonged to what kind of tree. Pines were her favorite; she liked how they looked so different from the other trees in the woods, yet relied on the same underground springs to stay alive. Instead of a cotton-filled pillow like the rest of the family slept on, Twiss slept on a pillow stuffed with pine needles. She envied the birds that lived in the actual trees.
Twiss mashed her toes into the flower bed beside the porch. When her feet turned black, she stuck one of them in Milly’s face. “Look, I have river fungus!”
“The river doesn’t have fungus,” Milly said.
“Why do you think the water’s brown?”
“Sediment,” Milly said.
Twiss stopped mashing her toes in the earth when Rollie, the groundskeeper of the golf course, started up the driveway on the red Farmall, the tractor he used to mow the course.
“Father!” Rollie yelled, when he got close enough for them to hear. “Accident!”
Bad news provoked responses in Twiss more quickly than in Milly, who stayed on the porch, knowing she should run after Twiss but standing still instead, the way she did when storm clouds gathered on the horizon. The thing about clouds was that you never knew what would come out of them. You could end up in the cellar for rain or in the house for a tornado.
“Run!” Twiss said, and Milly let herself go.
But not entirely. Before she followed Twiss to the tractor, she took the cake out of the oven and turned the oven off. As she ran out of the house, across the porch, and down the driveway, her white apron flapped like a flag in the wind.
After Rollie explained their father was in the hospital, but was going to be all right, Milly and Twiss slumped onto the wells of the front wheels while Rollie drove the Farmall down Lilly Road, up County C, and around Back Bend, a stretch of land beside the river where families poorer than them lived in shacks made out of cardboard. People said Back Benders ate worms the way regular people ate spaghetti.
A little girl with long black hair and pretty white skin waved to Milly, and Milly waved back. Without thinking, she unclasped the oval locket she was wearing and tossed it in the girl’s direction. The girl ran after the flash of silver and caught the locket before it fell to the ground. The girl made it all the way to her front door before Milly realized that food would have been the more useful thing to have thrown.
Milly also realized she’d given away something that could be replaced and something that couldn’t. The locket contained a photograph of Milly’s mother and father before they were married, a week after they’d been introduced on the golf course in Butterfield, the town where both of them had grown up. The day they met, Milly’s father carried her mother’s golf clubs the length of the course before he had the courage to ask her out. He carried them the length of it back before her mother had the courage to say yes.
Her mother had just turned sixteen, her father seventeen.
In the photograph, they were on their first date: a Friday night at the county fair. Midway through the evening, an old man convinced them to stop and have their photograph taken. “What’s a nickel in the face of love?” he said.
The old man positioned them in front of a paper moon, a sky filled with cardboard stars. He didn’t tell them to smile because it wasn’t the style at the time; hard-faced expressions were. Milly’s mother and father had just eaten watermelon slices at the stand across the way, and one of the seeds was stuck to her father’s collar. Her mother leaned forward to pluck it off. Either because he was quite skilled or quite unskilled, the old man snapped the photograph after her mother had retrieved it, when they were looking at each other, laughing as if a watermelon seed were the funniest thing in the world.
Milly wondered what her story would be.
There was a boy at school named Asa, whom she’d brushed shoulders with in the hallway between math and art before the quarter ended and summer recess began. Instead of embarrassment, Milly had felt a surge of inexplicable panic when, at first, he’d continued along without noticing. Plenty of boys had written notes to her or stuck their gum to her locker or pretended to drop pencils in an attempt to look up the skirts of her dresses, but Asa was different from all of them. He was quiet and shy, like her. Tall. Thin. He knew how to rope a calf and he also knew the square root of four hundred eighty-four.
“I bumped you,” Milly said, and Asa turned.
“I don’t mind,” he said, smiling crookedly for the briefest moment before his cheeks grew pink and his wheat-colored bangs fell across his eyes and he looked down at the floor.
“I don’t mind either,” Milly said, smiling and looking down too.
She didn’t know what their encounter meant, if anything, but the feeling of it—like swinging higher and higher, up, up, and up—stayed with her that day, the next, and the next, which was how Milly’s mother had described meeting Milly’s father.
Rollie drove the tractor over the river and the County C bridge. He drove past the ice-cream stand and the underground house with grass for a roof, the Clydesdale farm, cornfields, and t
he petting zoo. When they arrived at the hospital, Twiss uprooted everyone in her path until she found their father. The nurses chased after her with bottles of peroxide and rolls of gauze. They thought the dirt on her feet was dried blood, but they couldn’t make sense of the cake batter plastered to her face and hair. “Vomit?” they called after her as if that was her name.
Milly found her mother in the waiting room and the two followed the trail of footprints until they found Twiss curled up next to their father in a windowless room. He was stroking her sticky hair, telling her the story of how he came to reside in a hospital bed.
“I’d just helped Alyce Sweeney shave off two strokes on the moguls between the seventeenth and eighteenth,” he said to Twiss with the kind of wide smile you wouldn’t expect from someone who’d gone off a bridge. “Just so you have a sense of the mood I was in.”
“I thought she was away at that fancy women’s college,” their mother said.
“Bryn Mawr,” their father said. “She’s just gotten back from a semester in France. When her ball landed in the woods and we had to go searching for it, she said, ‘C’est la vie.’ ”
“Oh,” their mother said, a little sadly.
“You never give lessons on Sundays,” Milly said.
“After Alyce and I finished playing, I was on my way home,” their father said.
He said he was so pleased with his teaching that when he saw the ice-cream stand he decided to stop off for sundaes. He picked butterscotch for their mother, strawberry for Milly and Twiss, and chocolate for himself. He never got the flavors right. Milly and Twiss liked butterscotch and their mother liked chocolate. Their father didn’t even like ice cream.
“What happened next?” Twiss said.
Their father said he was halfway across the County C bridge when he couldn’t help but look at the sundaes on the passenger seat, at the whipped cream and chopped nuts, the gleaming maraschino cherries. Before he realized what was happening, the car went plunging off the bridge and into the river. The last thing he saw before he hit the water and everything went black was the sundaes flying in formation out the window.
All he knew was that the current carried him a mile down the river, past the new docks and the old boat launch, all the way to the bait shop, before a fisherman pulled him out of the water. He bruised his hip and his shoulder, and sprained the pinky finger on his right hand, but was otherwise unharmed, or so all of them thought at the time.
“They would have melted before you got home,” their mother said.
“We could have drunk them like frappés,” Twiss said.
“When have you had a frappé?” their mother asked.
Twiss moved closer to their father. “At the course restaurant.”
Milly stood an equal distance from each parent. “They’re French, aren’t they?”
“Since when are you a diplomat?” their mother said to Milly.
“Diplomats do quite well, Margaret,” their father said. “If Milly keeps this up, you’ll have all the china in China.”
“And you’ll have all the debts in Wisconsin,” their mother said.
She opened her purse to look for loose change. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, when she’d spooned up the last few bites of Twiss’s oatmeal before church. She’d refused the ham sandwiches offered at the Sewing Society luncheon because she didn’t want to give the other members the satisfaction of watching her eat something she couldn’t afford.
“You must be starving,” she said to Milly.
When she emptied the contents of her purse onto the foot of the hospital bed, a comb, a case of powder, and a pincushion shaped like an apple came tumbling out. She picked up the pincushion by its green felt stem and turned it in her hands as if she were examining it for edibility. “You wouldn’t happen to have any money left over from those sundaes?” she said to their father, who held his hands up to show they were empty.
“It’s at the bottom of the river, Maisie.”
The result was never positive when their father addressed their mother by her nickname. Something old was buried beneath the familiarity that ended up making both of them sad. Their mother put her purse back together. She looked at their father the way she looked at the pantry when there was nothing in it.
“Of course it is, Joe.”
Even though they didn’t have money to buy anything, Milly walked down to the cafeteria with her mother. The kitchen had been closed an hour; the buffet was empty and the lights had been dimmed. In the far corner, a janitor was mopping the floor with a bucket of astringent, which smelled like the formaldehyde Mr. Stewart used to preserve sheep’s brains in the laboratory at school. Milly had earned an F on dissection day because she wouldn’t slice into the folds of gray matter with a scalpel. Mr. Stewart wrote in a letter to her parents to explain the poor mark on her report card:
Your elder daughter believes she can save what’s already dead. I admire her as much as I pity her; not so long ago, I felt precisely the same way.
Milly’s mother sat at one of the long wooden tables. She put her head down, even though the surface of the table was wet. Her hair had come out of the neatly pinned bun she usually kept it in, and the backside of her best dress, the light green one she’d picked out of the charity bin at the Catholic church two towns over to show the Sewing Society ladies she wasn’t a charity case, was stained with her monthly blood.
“I’ll never make it to France again, will I?” she said.
Milly thought about the partially baked cake sitting on the counter, the construction paper card she and Twiss had started but never finished:
Happy …
Milly untied her apron and wrapped it around her mother’s waist to cover the stain. She tucked a loose strand of hair back into her mother’s bun and secured it with one of the bobby pins from her own, letting her hand linger longer than was necessary.
“One day,” she told her mother, “you’ll sip Château Margaux on the Seine.”
3
efore Twiss took the goldfinch up to the barn, she put on her muck boots and walked the perimeter of their property: a half-mile loop that had seemed large when she was young and large again now that she was old. She followed the tractor ruts, weaving around anthills and snake holes, breathing the first real air of the day. Twiss had never been able to stand being in the house longer than eating or sleeping required. When the end came, she hoped she’d be struck by lightning or whirled up into a tornado. Dying inside was to her a misery that couldn’t be borne; she’d made Milly agree to wheel her onto the porch if she couldn’t manage it herself.
A windstorm had passed through the night before, breaking off oak branches and leaving impressions of the debris in the sandy soil. Still, no rain. Not a drop had fallen all summer, a cyclical happening according to the 2006 Farmers’ Almanac, a fact that eased everyone but the land, which had begun to bristle under the stress. The air contained all of the water the land needed to flourish, but wouldn’t let go of its claim either to the sky or earth; it hung between the two like a curtain. Twiss cupped at the air, half expecting to feel something solid in her hand. Though it was early, she could feel the heat coming. The Gazette had predicted temperatures in the triple digits—LOCAL WARMING! the front page said.
“Promise me you won’t play today,” Milly had said before the mother arrived with the goldfinch, which now sat in Twiss’s front pocket, yellow as a tape measure.
Although the goldfinch had done nothing but linger in the middle of the road for too long, and she knew he deserved a resting place as fine as that of any other bird they’d been unable to save, Twiss didn’t go after the trowel just yet. She’d heard what the mother had said to Milly—Only a person without children would say something like that—as if she’d known exactly how to sting Milly in a way that wouldn’t allow Milly to sting back. If it had been Twiss and having children had been important to her, she’d have slapped the woman’s face.
Shame on you, the outline of her hand would have
said.
“Play what?” Twiss had said to Milly.
“You know what,” Milly had said.
Twiss walked around the pond, pretending to look for golf balls in the reeds when she was really looking for Snapper, a forty-year-old turtle that lived in the pond. When she found him, she tapped on his shell with a willow stick. The last time, he almost lopped off her toes just like his mother had almost lopped them off when Twiss was a girl.
In his effort to attack her, Snapper tipped over and couldn’t right himself. Even with this disability, he snapped at her in a wild, entitled way. Though Twiss had the opportunity to win their ongoing war, she used the stick to hoist him back onto his limbs.
“You owe me a bucket of Dunlops,” she said to Snapper, whom she was certain could understand her but chose to ignore her. Twiss had always been jealous of the snapping turtles that lived in the pond. When their plans were thwarted, they made new ones. When the new ones were thwarted, they swallowed a few golf balls and went about the rest of their day as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “Stop eating up my game,” she said.
The game, which Twiss played on most days, took place in the barn and consisted of a bucket of balls and Persy, her father’s old No. 1 driver. She’d line up the balls at the threshold and aim for the pasture. Most of the time, she’d hit the roof of the henhouse or, worse, one of the windows. Twiss had always lacked the concentration—the stillness—to launch a ball with any real accuracy. She’d square her shoulders and position her feet, but the moment she went to swing the club, a gnat would land on her neck or a bee would buzz in her ear, and then the ball would lurch off in whatever direction it wasn’t supposed to go. Of the two of them, Milly was the better golfer, though neither of them took after their father, who’d held a club as though it were an extension of himself. Twiss often wondered what would have happened if he’d lived his life as gracefully as he’d played golf.
She walked the length of the pond, up to the woodlot and shed, and back down through the meadow, which was crowded with prairie onions and bluestems that rose to the tops of her muck boots. Every day of her life Twiss had walked through the meadow, and still the beauty of it caused her to linger longer than she intended.
The Bird Sisters Page 3