The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  This morning, she broke off the stem of a prairie onion and chewed on it like the cowboys chewed on stalks of straw in her childhood adventure books. She loved the taste of onions; the bitter and the sweet on her tongue always brought her back to a vision of her father before the Accident, sitting at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings, sketching out strategies to shorten his game. In front of him would be a stack of scoring cards, which he used the way Milly and Twiss used flash cards in school. But instead of memorizing the multiplication tables or the meaning of the word “onomatopoeia,” he memorized the steps to achieve a perfect hole in one. Most people believed holes in one were perfect by their very nature.

  Their father believed differently.

  On the days he wasn’t giving lessons to the wealthy members of the golf course, members who came from Chicago and Minneapolis, who’d done well in the stock market or the steel industry and needed to learn how to play golf to make their money seem older than it was, Twiss’s father would bring her along while he played the back nine. Though she wasn’t strong enough to be his official caddy, he’d let her carry his old putter and whack at whatever mushrooms had popped up on the green. Rollie, the groundskeeper, would give her a nickel for slowing their proliferation (except for the morels, which Twiss was supposed to save for Rollie’s wife so she could make soup out of them). After she and her father had finished playing the course, Twiss would use the nickel to buy a cream soda from the clubhouse.

  Milly would stay at home because someone had to stay with their mother, who didn’t like to hear about golf, think about it, or dream about it. She said golf gave her heartburn.

  While Twiss and her father drove to the course on Sunday afternoons her mother would listen to A Day in the Life of …, a radio program that was supposed to illuminate what it would be like to drive a train across Colorado or to sing on Broadway in New York City. She’d sit down at the kitchen table a whole hour before the program started. Every fifteen minutes, when the wooden bird sprang forth from the cuckoo clock, she’d jump a little.

  “How would you like to climb Kilimanjaro?” she might say to Milly, if Milly happened to pass through the kitchen while the program was on. “I don’t think I’d like to wade through all that snow, but it might be worth it to see the view from the top.”

  “I’d rather look up than down,” Milly might say back, which would commit her to listening to the rest of the program.

  Milly never said whether she liked A Day in the Life of …, but the way Twiss figured, she still had to sit down and not play golf for an entire hour, an eternal afternoon.

  Countless ticks. Endless tocks.

  Twiss didn’t remember most of those Sundays with any real individual clarity, but she remembered one of them—when she was nine years old—photographically well.

  4

  hat Sunday, Twiss was too sick to play golf, and her mother compelled her to listen to the program with her while Milly accompanied her father to the course. Once or twice a year Twiss caught a cold. To account for her sneezing, she’d pretend she had allergies. Ragweed, she might say. Hay fever, when she couldn’t think of anything better.

  On this particular Sunday afternoon, she said just a little sick? when she meant … she couldn’t think of what she meant. Her head felt like a ball of dough.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” her mother said, when Twiss dressed in her golf clothes and went to the front door to wait for her father. “I wouldn’t hear the end of it at our next Society meeting. They already think I didn’t donate enough fabric at Christmas.”

  “But I meant the yellow stuff,” Twiss said.

  “Pollen,” her mother said. “If you’d said mold, I might have let you go.”

  Twiss appealed to her father when he came down the stairs in his golf shoes, which her mother was always trying to get him to put on outside since the metal spikes on their soles left polka-dot imprints on the wood floors.

  “Looks like your mother may be right about this one,” her father said.

  “Milly thinks I look fine,” Twiss said.

  “What do I think?” Milly said.

  “It’s only one day,” her mother said. “That’s what I think.”

  Her father took the putter from her hand and replaced it with a cherry cough drop. “You can be a champion next week. Give your sister a turn.”

  After he and Milly drove off, Twiss tried to slip out of the kitchen and up to her room. When her mother asked her where she thought she was going, Twiss coughed a little.

  “I should really be in bed.”

  Her mother motioned to a chair. “You should really sit down.”

  Before A Day in the Life of … began, she fixed a cup of tea for Twiss and one for herself. Into Twiss’s cup, she drizzled honey. Into her own, she drizzled milk. Then she pulled out her secret stash of sugar cubes from the back of the cupboard, which Twiss had ransacked on more than one occasion because she liked to see how long the cubes would take to dissolve on her tongue.

  “Looks like I have to find another hiding place,” her mother said, amused rather than angry. She dropped a cube into her cup. She said that was the way the English took their tea. Twiss wondered what people who spoke other languages did with their tea.

  Her mother looked at the cuckoo clock, and then turned up the radio. “This one’s about a man who lives with polar bears.”

  “With?” Twiss said, perking up.

  “In the vicinity of,” her mother said, and Twiss slumped back down in her chair.

  The program announcer introduced the day’s story by saying there were three kinds of people in the world: the kind that respected animals, the kind that got killed by them, and the kind named Hux. “No one ever dies on this program,” her mother said. “Although there was a near death once.” She took her tea bag out of her cup and placed it on the tiny plate beneath it.

  “That’s better than nothing,” Twiss said, taking hers out too.

  She looked out the window to make sure her father was gone before she crossed her legs the way her mother had crossed hers. She didn’t altogether hate acting ladylike, but she could only act for so long before her instincts took over. In school plays, she was cast as a tree or a lamppost, whatever could appear or disappear without wrecking the show.

  “It’s called gunpowder,” her mother said.

  Twiss picked her cup up again. She liked the idea of being able to drink what you could load into a gun. “I should have been a boy,” she said, puckering her lips at the bitter taste of the tea and letting her legs fly out in opposite directions.

  Her mother uncrossed her legs and then crossed them again. “Being a girl takes practice. You have to learn how to do things boys never have to do.”

  “Like what?” Twiss said.

  “Like painting your fingernails,” her mother said. “Or holding your tongue.”

  The two of them stopped talking in order to listen to Hux talk about life in the Arctic Circle. Since the sun didn’t rise or set at the normal hours there, Hux said it wasn’t important when he woke up or went to sleep. Sometimes, he’d start his day with a cup of coffee at midnight. Other times, it would be four or five in the morning with a bowl of beef stew. Every day (or night) began with warming up his tundra buggy, which he’d drive over ice and snow and narrow crevasses to survey land for the Canadian government, which was hoping to uncover a bounty of natural resources, namely gold and uranium, to tap into.

  Giddy up, old girl, Hux would say to the buggy before expeditions.

  Queenie, he’d named it.

  “What does it look like?” the announcer said.

  “Picture a tractor,” Hux said. “Then picture your best friend.”

  Twiss pictured the John Deere and then Milly.

  Her mother looked around the kitchen as if a tractor might materialize from one of the cupboards or a best friend from the pantry.

  “You’d be amazed how quickly you grow to love whatever you’re capable of moving,” Hux said. He lived in
a government shack on the edge of the polar bears’ habitat. He cooked on a kerosene stove and slept on a mattress made of straw (there must not be pine needles in the Arctic, Twiss thought). When the wind rattled the tin roof of his shack and he felt the most alone, he’d drive around with Queenie hoping to come across the polar bears.

  One night, when the northern lights were swirling across the horizon like pink cotton, and he hadn’t spoken to another person in three months, Hux found what he was looking for in a tundra meadow situated between a moonlit crevasse and snow dune. That night, he got out of his tundra buggy and walked over to the bears, who neither accepted nor rejected him, which Hux said was all anyone could really hope for in human company.

  Together, he and the bears watched the northern lights.

  “I believe that’s called happiness,” Hux said. “I only wish it had lasted longer.”

  “Amen,” Twiss’s mother said when the music swelled and the program ended, but she didn’t say it in her usual religious way.

  “I don’t get it,” Twiss said. “Why didn’t they eat him?”

  Her mother laughed. “Maybe you should have been a boy after all.”

  She put her hand on the back of Twiss’s neck. When Twiss didn’t pull away or lurch forward, her mother drew her into her arms the way she used to do when Twiss scraped her knee or fell down on the driveway. “You should stay home more. We had fun, didn’t we?”

  Which reminded Twiss of what she’d missed by being sick. By now, Milly and her father would have finished playing the back nine. They’d be walking back to the clubhouse. If her father had played especially well, he’d linger at each hole, retracing his steps so that he could repeat them the next time. Twiss wondered if Rollie had given Milly a nickel for a cream soda, even though she didn’t know about the mushrooms and probably wouldn’t have whacked at one if she did. Twiss imagined her father bursting through the front door with the same gleaming expression he usually reserved for her.

  Who’s the real champion? Twiss could almost hear him ask.

  Me! Me! Me! She could almost hear Milly answer.

  “Can I go lie down now?” Twiss said, slinking out of her mother’s embrace.

  She ran to the bottom of the staircase before her mother had a chance to respond. Before she climbed the first stair, she looked back at her mother, whose arms were wrapped around an empty space. I did have fun, she almost said, but that would have been the girl thing to do. She darted up the stairs instead, thumping each step extra hard with her heels and yelping like the cowboys in her books did.

  The next Sunday was her mother’s birthday, and to celebrate, Milly and Twiss hung a paper banner over the doorway in the kitchen that said CONGRATULATIONS! YOU’RE 32 IN ’42! When their mother saw it, she frowned, but not as much as when she opened their father’s gift.

  Although their mother didn’t golf, that year Twiss’s father bought her a No. 1 Persimmon driver. The head was made from finely grained American persimmon wood, the hardest of its kind and, in her father’s opinion, the most beautiful. The wood matched the jar of honey sitting on the counter, which her father dipped his fingers into even though he was supposed to use a spoon. Every time Twiss went golfing with her father, he’d tell her to wait outside the pro shop for him. When he came out, he’d wobble like a drunk.

  “I thought you might want to start playing,” her father said after Twiss’s mother tore the brown wrapping paper off the driver.

  “I don’t want to know how much this cost,” her mother said, placing the driver back on his lap. “What I know is, none of us will be happy until you try it out.

  “Go,” she said, neither kindly nor unkindly. “And take Trouble with you.”

  Twiss’s father looked at Twiss and then at the dark patch of sky beyond the windows. “I’ll bet a nickel the thunderclouds don’t even thunder, Maisie.”

  “I’ll bet a nickel they do, Joe,” her mother said.

  On their way out the door, Twiss took another swipe of coconut frosting from the cake Milly had baked for the occasion. Milly had decorated the top of it with four-leaf clovers, which she’d crawled through an entire field on her hands and knees to find that morning.

  “Is my luck that bad?” their mother had said when the cake was presented to her.

  On the drive to the golf course, Twiss rolled down her window to look at the cat’s-paws on the river. She called the bigger ones tiger’s-paws. The biggest ones were mastodon’s-paws because mastodons were extinct and she liked to bring things back to life.

  “One mastodon,” she counted. “Two mastodons. Three. Four.”

  “One hole in one,” her father said. “Two holes in one. Three. Four.”

  “I’m counting mastodons,” Twiss said.

  “Right,” her father said. “And I’m counting holes in one.”

  He continued counting until he got to eighteen holes in one and they were over the bridge. Twiss could see the golf course in the distance, hemmed in by a row of pine trees and a stream that fed into the river. On humid days, while her father played the eighteenth hole, Twiss would walk to the stream. She liked to pretend she was Lewis, fording rivers and mapping new parts of the country. Her father was Clark.

  “Clark!” she’d call when she found a native’s spear (an interesting stick) or a new species (a one-legged frog). She kept track of her findings in a notebook at home. So far, she’d mapped four new rivers, five new species, and eighteen new weapons. Her favorite was the baby dragon that spit up fire instead of milk.

  “Clark’s crossing a mountain range!” her father would call back, which meant his ball had landed between the grassy moguls near the eighteenth hole. “He’ll be there soon!”

  On this day, there would be no Lewis and Clark because her father would be too busy with the new driver to play along. Plus, it wasn’t hot enough to get wet. She’d have to amuse herself with the mushrooms, which she liked whacking at, but not as much as she liked when her father would surprise her. If it were really hot and he’d played a particularly good round of golf, he’d sneak down to the stream and jump into the water in all of his clothes.

  “Here comes a grizzly bear!” he’d say, and growl his way over to her.

  Her father was the one who’d taught her how to swim, though “taught” wasn’t exactly the right word for what he’d done. Twiss would be so surprised by the growling that she’d close her eyes and start shoveling at the water with her arms and legs. When she opened her eyes again, she’d be on the opposite side of the stream. Part of the fun of the grizzly bear game was that she never knew when her father would play it. Whenever Twiss waited for her father to pop out of the tall river grass, he never would. And whenever she’d become invested in one of her discoveries, he’d trample her with his fearsome growling, his unpredictable love.

  Twiss turned toward her father in the car. She was thinking about What If, the game she and Milly liked to play when they were bored. What if the sky was below us instead of above us? one of them would ask the other. What if you had a tail the length of your hair? A honeycomb instead of a knee? They would ask until one of them was stumped by a question.

  “What would you do if you couldn’t play golf?” Twiss asked her father, who didn’t know about the game or the way to win it.

  “Why wouldn’t I be able to play golf?” he said.

  “What if there was a flood?” Twiss said.

  “I’d wait until the grass dried out.”

  “But what if it didn’t?” Twiss said.

  “I’d learn how to play in water.”

  “But what if you couldn’t?”

  “Then I’d forget how to swim.”

  They arrived at the course before Twiss could ask the question she really wanted to ask. Her father picked up the driver and the rest of his clubs. He was halfway to the clubhouse before he noticed that Twiss was still sitting in the car.

  “Aren’t you coming?” he said, grinning his special grin. He’d had his front teeth capped because
that’s what the most important members of the course did when theirs were uneven. Her mother was always telling him to chew his food twice as much as everyone else to justify the expense, which they were still paying for and would be for a long, long time.

  For Twiss, all it took was a flash of those perfectly aligned teeth, and she was running after him, tripping on her shoelaces. They checked in at the clubhouse and came out with a scoring card and a freshly sharpened half-pencil.

  Rollie was in the middle of pulling a dandelion out of the ground. “We just pulled everyone else off the course. Weather’s coming.”

  “We’re not everyone else,” Twiss’s father said.

  “You keep watch for lightning, Button,” Rollie said, tucking the dandelion behind Twiss’s ear. “You’re too young to walk around with a streak of gray hair and a mixed-up mind.”

  Twiss wasn’t afraid of storms, but she’d never been caught in a severe one either. There was a man who had, though, who lived in the woods by the river. People said if you saw him running in one direction, it was best not to run in the other. So as they walked along, Twiss kept watch for the lightning man while the clouds began to lump together like angry faces.

  “Grumpy’s getting grumpier,” Twiss said, while her father teed off.

  “Why are you grumpy?” her father said.

  “I’m not,” Twiss said, watching the treetops sway. “The sky is.”

  “That’s just wind.”

  After her father putted the ball into the first hole, he started for the next one. Twiss followed him closely but not so closely as to test his concentration, even though he said the difference between a good player and a great player was how well the player could tune out his surroundings. Comparing the two, her father said, was like comparing a mule and a stallion; both could plow a field, but only one of them did so with grace.