The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Twiss lagged behind because she didn’t want to be responsible for turning her father into a mule. Whenever he stopped to square his shoulders for a shot, she sucked in her lips to keep herself from speaking. Once, she’d asked him a question about bull snakes in the middle of a swing. Even though the ball went where it was supposed to go, he scolded her. “I don’t like snakes,” he’d said. “And I don’t appreciate thinking one’s near my golf ball either.”

  So Twiss stayed quiet even when, halfway between the seventeenth and eighteenth holes, the sky turned from grumpy to enraged and the fire station sirens began to sound. People would be closing their storm shutters and starting for their cellars. Most people kept emergency supplies in their cellars in case they were stuck beneath the ground overnight. Among Twiss’s family’s supplies were an oil lamp and a book of fairy tales, which her mother would read from when the cellar doors began to rattle. Once upon a time, she’d begin.

  Twiss’s father looked at the sky, but didn’t seem dismayed. He studied the treetops and the sand blowing over the lips of the bunkers in the distance. A line of pink lightning flashed overhead. The wind howled.

  “Run to the stream,” he told Twiss, but he said it in the same steady way he explained the theory of wind and the physics of golf.

  When she got there, she was supposed to crouch down low and put her hands over her head like they did in school when they were practicing for tornadoes. During the drills, kids would stick wads of gum to the bottom of the lockers in the hallway.

  “Wait for me there,” Twiss’s father said, which Twiss took to mean I’ll be right behind you since Twiss was such a fast runner.

  Another flash of lightning. Another howl of wind.

  “Run!” her father said, though it was he who started running, and not toward the stream. He took Persy, but left the rest of the clubs in the bag at Twiss’s feet.

  “It’s the shot of a lifetime!” he yelled. “The shot of a lifetime!”

  Twiss stayed where she was. The rain came before the lightning and the thunder, soaking her until her clothes stuck to her like a second skin. The wind sent the dandelion behind her ear flying toward the stream, but Twiss was too alarmed to follow it.

  “Clark?” she said, after her father disappeared down the fairway.

  Lightning! Thunder!

  Whirrrrrrrr, whir. Whirrrrrrrr, whir.

  “Mom!” she screamed.

  Right then, Twiss knew she should have loved her mother more for being right about the weather, but that would have meant loving her father less for being wrong about it. So with each snarl of thunder and each flash of lightning, each realization that her father wasn’t coming back for her, she stuck to the safety of hating her mother, even though her mother would never leave her alone in the middle of a storm. Because her mother would never leave her alone.

  “Milly,” Twiss finally cried, since she didn’t have to make a choice about loving or hating her. There wasn’t a person in the world as worthy of love as her sister.

  Though she’d never said so, Twiss knew Milly played halfhearted games of golf on her behalf. “Graceless,” she’d overheard her father say to her mother one night about Milly’s swing, which was perfectly graceful when she and Twiss were alone. “A mule could have played a more elegant round of golf than our elder daughter.”

  “So she had a bad day,” her mother had said to him. “Even you’ve had a few of those.”

  “I’d jump off a bridge if I ever played like that.”

  In the end, when Twiss couldn’t will herself to move or will her father to come back to her, it was Rollie who scooped her up as if she were a feather and ran with her all the way back to the maintenance shed, where they waited out the storm, which whirled things around plenty but never produced a tornado. Even after the sky cleared and the sun came out and a rainbow arched over the river, she wouldn’t let go of Rollie.

  “You’re safe, Button,” he kept saying. “You’re safe now.”

  But Twiss didn’t feel safe. None of her tricks had kept her from crying or brought her father back to her. As far as he knew, she was still crouching on the bank of the stream next to her baby dragon, whose gift couldn’t protect her. Twiss realized just how much she’d counted on the history books being right; nowhere in the pages she’d read did Clark ever leave Lewis behind. The and always linked them together.

  After her father returned, wild-eyed and windblown, Twiss ran to him, but not as quickly as she could have. It was as if he had inadvertently told her something essential about himself, a secret she would have to keep forever: You can’t count on me.

  5

  illy put down The Curious Book of Birds in order to pick herself up. She glanced at the bariatric walker—an affront to both her decorative tastes and her relatively small size—which was sitting in the corner of the room collecting old linens and scraps of fabric. She used to mend clothing for half the town of Spring Green when she could still sew without making a mistake. Despite her recent inabilities, she was working on a layette for a woman who lived by the river. The woman, a girl, didn’t have a mother to sew one for her.

  Not that people in Spring Green sewed much anymore; when they needed something, they went to the department stores in Madison. Milly had only been to a department store once, after her doctor recommended knee braces to treat her hip pain.

  “But it’s my hip that hurts,” she’d said.

  “Treating just the hip’s like baking a cake without flour. You wouldn’t do that, would you?” the doctor said.

  Well, yes, she thought. I would.

  But she and Twiss drove to the department store anyway and paid an astronomical price for what amounted to Ace bandages. And the walker, which could accommodate persons up to one thousand pounds. The salesman claimed that purchasing a bariatric was like getting two walkers for the price of one; plus, he’d said when they’d looked doubtful, it was the only walker left in stock. While they were there they also bought an electric mixer, which ended up in the attic because the sound of it made the chickens (and Milly) anxious.

  Milly put The Curious Book of Birds back in its place on the shelf. She finished dusting the bookshelves and the hutch, twirling the duster around corners and spines until she saw a slight reflection of herself in the varnished wood. She didn’t quite know when what had happened to her body had happened to her body. The sagging skin beneath her knees told one story. The liver spots on her hands told another. Though she’d never been the type of woman to fawn over her reflection, she wished she’d have taken a moment to appreciate her youth while she was still youthful. The one hip had already gone out, and the other was beginning to creak. One day, it would snap altogether and she’d have a body full of titanium, but nothing to propel her forward. And her chin! The pull of gravity had turned what was once one into two. The chins worked against each other like cresting waves.

  Crash, they went.

  You’re old, they said.

  So be it, Milly thought.

  She pulled the drapes shut to keep out the heat and then drew a line through the task on her chore list. She looked over the way she spelled out each step like her mother used to because Twiss would feign ignorance that what was washed also needed to be dried.

  MILLY’S CHORE LIST

  Dust bookshelves and hutch

  Dust and close drapes

  Change bed linens

  Wash bed linens

  Dry bed linens

  More dusting?

  Supper?

  The list struck her as both amusing and a little sad, and Milly wasn’t eager to obey it this morning. She was drawn once again to the bird book as if it were a live thing, a wing beat of breath on an otherwise breathless day, which deserved her care—pleaded for it—more than some dusty old linens, worn-out threads. This time, Milly read about the different kinds of nests birds built, how some were well wrought and some carelessly fastened to branches. The smartest birds built their nests high up in the trees. Some birds, namely t
he wood pigeon, the clumsiest architect of all, began building their nests but never finished them.

  6

  hat was the way the tree house went in the weeks leading up to Cousin Bettie’s visit. By the end of May and the beginning of the trumpet vines and wisteria, the honeysuckle and hummingbirds, Milly and Twiss had collected enough scrap lumber to build the foundation. They’d checked out a book from the library that taught them about basic woodworking, but Twiss didn’t want to wait until they could afford to buy the materials they needed. She said they’d be dead before that happened. What was one more floor that leaned?

  Together, they dragged the planks to the backyard. Twiss found two hammers in the attic. She didn’t bother to wipe away the toadstool on the handles or the rust on the heads. She named her hammer Rust-O-Lonia and went to work. Milly called hers Hammer. After she washed the toadstool off him (It’s poisonous, she told Twiss, but Twiss said, Not if you don’t eat it), she tapped at the nails as if she were asking them for permission.

  “Pretend the nail’s something you don’t like,” Twiss instructed.

  “You don’t like snakes,” she added when Milly didn’t say anything.

  “But I don’t want to hammer them,” Milly said.

  “Cousin Bettie better be less of a humanitarian,” Twiss said.

  “Do you even know what that means?”

  “It means we need a third person to finish the tree house.”

  Since they’d found out she was coming, Milly and Twiss had been making predictions about their cousin. They’d met her only once, and “met” wasn’t the quite right word since Milly was two and Twiss was still a baby. Cousin Bettie was four then. According to their mother, they got along beautifully. Twiss was hoping for another her. Milly didn’t know what to hope for, but figured their cousin would probably be wearing a bracelet with little charms in the shapes of horseshoes and tennis rackets like the other girls in Spring Green.

  “Or worse,” Twiss said. “A dress.”

  “I wear dresses,” Milly said.

  “But you don’t act like you do.”

  At night, they’d talk until the shadow of their mother’s feet appeared under the door, which meant Not another word. Their mother let their whispering go on longer than usual because she was eager to have another pair of hands around the house for the summer; a pair, she told Twiss, that wasn’t as lazy as hers.

  Mine? Twiss said, pretending to be outraged.

  Their mother planned on repairing the damage living on a farm had done to her. She said that wives deserved a little mindless time and mothers deserved much, much more. Her sister, Gertrude, was sending their cousin with the understanding that if the three of them got on well together, Milly and Twiss would go up north next summer to help out. If was their mother’s way of saying when. Each morning, she crossed a day off the calendar with a black X.

  The day before Cousin Bettie arrived, Twiss flipped ahead three hundred sixty-five days to a Wednesday in early June, the day their mother decided they would depart for Aunt Gertrude’s house in Deadwater, a day that would have been unremarkable if it weren’t for the smiling sun their mother had drawn in the square with a yellow crayon.

  Milly’s father didn’t notice the bath salts or the calendar.

  After the Accident, which had taken on the weight of a proper noun somewhere between his coming home from the hospital and the appearance of the June bugs, he spent his time in the barn when he wasn’t working. He’d even started sleeping up in the hayloft because he said their mother’s snoring woke him, though a thick plaster wall separated their bedrooms and she didn’t snore. Their parents had always kept separate bedrooms, but they hadn’t always slept separately. When Milly and Twiss were little, their father had used his bedroom to store golf equipment, but would sleep in their mother’s room. One day, though, for no reason the girls understood, a mattress appeared on the floor in their father’s room and he started sleeping on it, now and then at first, then more and more regularly. Milly and Twiss would still occasionally catch him sneaking out of their mother’s bedroom in the morning, which would hearten them. Other times, they’d find him asleep on his bed in all of his clothes, and their mother’s eyes would be puffy, which would still hearten them because their parents were trying to work out whatever ugly thing had come between them.

  Milly and Twiss couldn’t find anything heartening about their father sleeping in the barn or him handing them notes scrawled on leftover scoring paper from the golf course when he had something to say to their mother. You must be very happy, Margaret, he’d written on the last piece of scoring paper. You finally got exactly what you wanted.

  Like always, her father was talking about golf, with one significant difference: after he drove the car off the bridge over the Wisconsin River, and had recovered from his slight injuries, his swing had altered imperceptibly to everyone including him, though the outcome was clear; overnight, he’d become a player who duffed the same shots he used to sneer at for their elementariness. Overnight, he’d become average.

  “We might have to face the facts,” their mother said one evening when the pantry was empty but should have been full. Despite the sorry state of his swing, once again their father had spent most of his paycheck (which wasn’t big to begin with since being a golf pro was more about prestige than money) buying rounds of drinks and cigars for members at the clubhouse. You don’t understand, he’d said, when their mother handed him a stack of bills, the mortgage slip on top. It’s the only way to really be one of them.

  That afternoon, their mother had asked Milly and Twiss to go out to the pond to catch frogs, which she cooked for supper alongside a mountain of pink beans.

  “Facts?” their father said, snapping off a frog’s leg. “The fact is people pay big money to eat these. French people, Margaret.”

  Their mother pushed the beans around with her fork. Milly excused herself from the table. Even Twiss wouldn’t touch one of the boiled frogs. She said it was immoral to eat something that hopped into her coveralls so willingly.

  “It tastes like chicken,” their father said. “Nobody gives a thought to eating those.”

  Mr. Peterson had given their father three weeks to get his swing back; he couldn’t give him more than that because summer was upon them. Instead of readying the pro shop, Mr. Peterson let her father play the course every day. When her father’s swing didn’t return, Mr. Peterson opened the course up to him after hours.

  “I can’t add two and two when people are watching me,” he said.

  When his swing still didn’t return, Mr. Peterson sent his personal doctor to their house, but after a lengthy examination, the doctor concluded nothing was wrong with their father.

  “Then why can’t I play golf like I used to?” their father said.

  “Why do you think you can’t play golf like you used to?” the doctor said.

  Their father yanked the doctor’s stethoscope. “You’re the expert. You tell me.”

  When their father’s swing (and the doctor) didn’t come back, Mr. Peterson sat their father down to let him go. But he didn’t let him go completely. He offered their father a job in the dairy division of his farm. He said, “Watching you golf was like watching the stars, Joe.”

  And though her father’s accepting the job was an awful thing to be even slightly happy about, Milly couldn’t help herself. Asa, Mr. Peterson’s son, worked in the dairy too.

  “What I wanted?” Milly’s mother had said when she opened their father’s note. She’d laughed the kind of hysterical laughter that Milly and Twiss had only seen unhappy people, namely their mother and father, achieve.

  Since the Accident, the girls had been trying their hands at matchmaking.

  “Mom wants you to have supper with us tonight,” they’d say to their father, who’d look at them as if they’d said Mom wants you to go to the moon. “She’s making steaks and potatoes.”

  To their mother, they’d say, “Dad wants you to visit him in the barn,
” which would produce the same disbelieving look.

  One day, though, they convinced her they were telling the truth.

  When their mother took off her apron and went out to the barn, Milly and Twiss smiled. They imagined their parents letting go of whatever invisible things they were holding on to so they could hold on to each other. But when their mother came back, her hair wasn’t tousled the way they thought it would be and her lips weren’t pink. She looked at Milly and Twiss very seriously before she put her apron on and went back to rolling out dough.

  “Don’t do that again,” was all she said.

  Milly and Twiss were hopeful their cousin Bettie would prevail where they’d failed. When relatives had come in the past, their mother and father would sleep in the same bedroom again without sneaking around in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. A week would pass and they’d believe their parents had fallen in love again only to be jolted back into the fact of separate bedrooms when the relatives went home. Genuine or not, Milly and Twiss preferred the scent of cold cream mixing with aftershave in the bathroom.

  What they didn’t understand then was that love, or even the play at love, wasn’t the same thing as forgiveness, which was what neither of their parents could offer. Their father couldn’t forgive their mother for her background because it—the sprawling fairy-tale house in Butterfield, the glittering evening parties, the ladies in silk dresses and white gloves, the back patting, the cigars, and the golf, a game only gentlemen could afford to play then—was what he’d coveted his whole secondhand life. The only reason he’d been allowed on a golf course in the first place was to caddy, and the only reason he’d ever been allowed to swing a club was because a member had suspected his talent and had sponsored him. For her part, their mother couldn’t forgive their father for wanting a lifestyle more than he wanted her.