The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “I made you supper,” Milly said when she reached the front door of the barn. She knocked twice before her father appeared at the entrance.

  “Let me just wash up,” he said, wiping grease from his hands onto his good trousers.

  Usually, Milly left his plate on the tree stump next to the barn door and went back to the house. Today, she waited for him to rinse his hands and face at the water pump beside the barn because she knew what was coming. Even though she knew asking the favor of Asa had been the right thing to do, she didn’t want to see the look on Bett’s face when what she’d asked for finally arrived. She thought about her lips grazing Asa’s ear and touched them with the tip of her tongue. She was surprised to find that they tasted like salt.

  When her father returned, the collar of his shirt was soaked through but his hands and his face were still black. He glanced at the container of turpentine just inside the door, but picked up the plate of food instead.

  “This looks delicious,” he said.

  Milly sat on the maple stump while her father worked at his piece of pie. The sun was beginning to set, stretching pink fingers of light across the sky. The air was hot and wet and unlikely to cool much overnight; they were beginning to reach the point in the summer where heat stopped leaving the walls at night. Theirs was one of the few houses that didn’t have a screened sleeping porch attached to the second floor. At least once every summer, Milly and Twiss would haul their blankets onto the regular porch, bed down, and be back in the house a minute later. Like the wolf spiders in Deadwater, by the end of June the mosquitoes in Spring Green were also as big and furry as birds. By August, their bites did as much damage to the flesh as the bites of beavers to logs. The people who used lemon oil to repel them had welts up and down their arms and legs. The people who used camphor did a little bit better.

  Milly walked over to the pump and filled the tin cup hanging from it with water. “You won’t hurt my feelings if you say the truth,” she said, handing the cup to her father.

  “The truth?” her father said in his old tone of voice. He scraped the last bit of kidney bean pie onto his fork and drew it to his mouth. When he finished, he laid his silverware across the plate horizontally and picked up the cup of water, which he drank from until it was empty.

  “I’m miserable,” he said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his favorite golf shirt.

  10

  hen Twiss saw the goldfinch peeking out of her pocket, she remembered what she was doing in the meadow, but didn’t feel the kind of relief that one might expect from knowing where you are and where you’re going. Reorienting herself to the present moment, the ordinariness of it, felt to her a little like being robbed. According to her chore list, she was supposed to feed the chickens. Milly had already retrieved the eggs. She’d mentioned something about egg salad, if she could round up a jar of pickles in the cellar.

  “A change might do us good,” she’d said, which had made Twiss laugh.

  “Nothing like old pickles to oust us from routine.”

  Twiss fed the chickens, each of whom she called Raoul because she couldn’t tell them apart, and swept up the droppings on the floor. Under the feed trough, she spotted a golf ball and slipped it into her pocket. Twiss had broken the main window so many times that neither she nor Milly saw the use in repairing it anymore. Twiss had covered it with plastic and secured the corners with electrical tape. The lattice of wood was the only element still in place, bisecting the frame like a crossword puzzle—another game Twiss had never possessed the patience for.

  She’d flip through the newspaper until she got to the answers, which were positioned upside down on the last page to deter the person prone to cheating.

  Hinge: A five-letter word for a movable joint used to fasten two things together.

  “I’d like to know who makes these things up,” she’d said to Milly that morning.

  Milly said the key to the answers, more than the clues, was the arrangement of the squares. “You have to think like the puzzle maker to know how everything fits together.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with a person whose thoughts fit into neat little squares.”

  Milly took the crossword puzzle from Twiss. “A five-letter word for a musical instrument typically found in churches? Organ.”

  “I’d have gotten it if you’d have said Beetle,” Twiss said.

  “How can you still call her that?” Milly said.

  “How can she still be alive? She’s got to be on her ninth life by now. Tenth, if you count the time she fell in the tub.”

  “Poor Henry,” Milly said.

  “Yes, poor Henry,” Twiss said. “He had to see her naked. Who wants to see an old body?”

  “You’ve seen me naked, too,” Milly said.

  Which was true. When Milly got her hip replaced with a titanium one, the nurse had made her wear a cotton gown without ties. The hospital in Madison was supposed to be better than the one in Sauk, although neither of them was convinced.

  “Go home,” Milly had said after her surgery, which didn’t go as smoothly as planned. Her heart rate had dipped down so low that the doctors warmed up a defibrillator and shocked her twice to keep her going. When Milly’s heart had stabilized, she was transferred to a room that overlooked a playground. Children came and went all day, jumping on the bright yellow slide and hanging from the swings, laughing in the delicious way only children are capable of.

  “They’ll shock me if my heart gets out of line again,” Milly said.

  Twiss was sitting on the edge of Milly’s bed, giving her the first of many pedicures in the weeks to come. She’d never painted her own nails, and her lack of skill was reflected in the uneven globs of pale pink polish that adorned each of Milly’s toenails.

  “Really,” Milly said. “Stop fussing. I’ll be fine. Go home.”

  Twiss blew on Milly’s toenails one by one. “I am home.”

  What an unsatisfactory little word! Now that she was old, Twiss understood why people her age stopped speaking and started sitting on porches. Language failed to describe the simplest of phenomena; a fine sunset, for example, was more than fine. There were no words, or Twiss couldn’t find them anymore, for the way the colors made her feel. She’d say to Milly, “It’s an especially pretty one tonight,” when she meant that it reminded her of other sunsets, and years, and people who had nothing to do with sunsets: pinks and reds and blues.

  “It is,” Milly would say. Or she might add a word like “lovely” or “otherworldly” and then Twiss would know that Milly, too, was thinking about something else entirely as they passed a glass of iced tea back and forth and gazed at the changing colors of the sky.

  11

  hen Twiss was a girl, language was language as a sunset was a sunset. There was no need or time to give either much thought once a word came across her lips or the sky emptied of color for the night. Words were vehicles that got her where she wanted to go. She didn’t pick them for their nuances. She picked them for their shock value.

  “Father Stone’s a pigheaded bigot!” she’d said to Mrs. Bettle, Bett, and her mother the night Milly made kidney beans and, for the first time in her life, made everyone suffer. “If anyone should ferme sa bouche, it’s him!”

  “C’est vrai!” her mother said that evening on the porch, on one of the rare occasions she and Twiss were getting along.

  That night, Mr. Peterson and his doctor arrived in a shiny black car, which seemed like the kind of car a king would drive. In the early evening light, the fender shone more brightly than the silver serving platter her mother polished every week, though she never used it.

  Bett had gone upstairs complaining of a stomachache, but it was Bett whom Mr. Peterson and the doctor wanted to see. The doctor fingered the stethoscope around his neck. Mr. Peterson fingered a tiny ring that would no more fit his fingers than it would a woman’s.

  “I can’t abide a child being sick,” Mr. Peterson said. “Where’s the little girl?”

>   “She’s eighteen,” Twiss said to him.

  “You must be younger than that,” Mr. Peterson said, smiling lightly.

  “Twiss is fourteen,” her mother said.

  “That’s an unusual name,” Mr. Peterson said.

  “A nurse named me,” Twiss said, smirking.

  Her mother showed him and the doctor up to the bedroom Bett was sharing with her and Milly for the summer. Her mother kept picking up stray items as they went along—Twiss’s Sunday dress, which Twiss had thrown on the stairs the moment they got back from church, her Sunday shoes, and the blue ribbon she’d been forced to wear in her hair. Mrs. Bettle, who was still tipsy from the brandy, attempted to level the crooked pictures on the wall and knocked over a glass paperweight that crashed to the floor, but didn’t break.

  If Twiss had been the one to drop the paperweight, she would have had to stay in her room until she’d pieced it back together or come up with the money to buy a new one, but her mother ignored Mrs. Bettle. She explained to Mr. Peterson and the doctor that Bett had come down from the North and was staying with them for the summer, which led to her admitting that they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit, but she knew Bett needed one.

  “My sister Gertrude didn’t send her down with any money,” she said. “Her husband’s out of work right now. They live in the bush.”

  “No, they live in Deadwater,” Twiss said.

  “Deadwater is the bush,” her mother said.

  “I lost a child once because I was poor,” Mr. Peterson said. “I won’t lose another.”

  He smelled like bay rum, which Twiss’s father used to wear when he still worked at the golf course. The scent was the only link Twiss could detect between the two men, other than their link of boss and employee. Mr. Peterson was taller than her father, and broader in the shoulders, but it wasn’t just his body that took up the majority of the hallway; it was his unwavering resolve, as well as his finely tailored suit, which Twiss wasn’t positive stemmed from having so much money, but suspected was the case.

  Twiss’s mother knocked on the bedroom door, a courtesy she didn’t usually grant any of them. When Bett told her to come in, she swung the door open wide enough so that Mr. Peterson and the doctor could fit through at the same time.

  Though Twiss was standing behind Mrs. Bettle, who was standing behind her mother, she was still able to see Bett curled up on the cot, coughing into one of the handkerchiefs her mother had given her. Bett was wearing the nightgown Milly had lent her when hers disintegrated in the wash bucket the day before. Whatever color Bett’s face lacked, the tiny purple lilacs, which trailed from the bodice of Milly’s nightgown down to the hem, made up for. In the dim light of the bedroom, Twiss couldn’t see the red half-moons beneath Bett’s eyes or the puffiness in Bett’s face, the wonderful sprawling veins she’d seen at the supper table. In this light, her cousin looked syrupy sweet. Pretty even, which disappointed Twiss since beauty wasn’t the beauty of her cousin; ever since Bett had stuck her hands into the sandpile and the ground bees had swarmed all around her, Twiss had had trouble describing what was, although she knew one thing for certain: anyone else would have been stung.

  Mr. Peterson went to Bett’s side. Once Bett granted him permission he stroked her forehead. “I’ve brought my personal doctor,” he said to her. “He wields his stethoscope like a magic wand. May he have a look at you, my dear?”

  “It’s my stomach,” Bett said, casting her covers aside and uncurling herself. “It feels too full or too empty, I don’t know which.”

  “We’ll fix that,” Mr. Peterson said.

  “My lungs are bad, too,” Bett said. “They won’t let me do anything I want to do.”

  Which was news to Twiss. So far, Bett’s lungs had allowed her to go swimming and stick her hands into a giant beehive and drag Milly from the river as if she were as light as a dime.

  The doctor came forth and placed his stethoscope over the lilacs at the back of Bett’s nightgown. After that, he motioned to everyone except Mr. Peterson to exit the room.

  “In the interest of privacy,” he said, which no one in their house had ever benefited from. He opened his medical kit and laid out several instruments that Twiss didn’t recognize on the night table beside the cot. One of them looked like a shoehorn.

  Mr. Peterson and the doctor stayed an hour with Bett before the door opened and they emerged from the bedroom. Twiss’s mother had made Twiss and Mrs. Bettle go downstairs with her, so that they didn’t seem like they were trying to listen in.

  “Why won’t you let me put a glass to the door?” Twiss said.

  “Because fourteen’s too old for that,” her mother said. “What I’m wondering is how Mr. Peterson knew Bett was sick. Could people be talking about it?” She glanced at the chair that Milly usually sat in, as if its emptiness had answered her question before she’d finished asking it. “That boy better marry her if we’re to endure this.”

  Mrs. Bettle yawned.

  “Go tell your father to take Mrs. Bettle home,” Twiss’s mother said.

  “But I’ll miss everything,” Twiss said.

  “Then you better hurry,” her mother said.

  When Twiss heard the bedroom door open, she ran to the barn as fast as she could. Milly and her father were sitting on two tree stumps outside of it.

  “That was smart what you did today in the meadow,” her father said to Milly, which made Milly blush and then blush all over again.

  “I did it for her,” Milly said. “Not for myself.”

  “Everything we do is for ourselves,” their father said. “That doesn’t take away the goodness of the act, though. I’m sure Asa didn’t mind the attention at all.”

  “Mom wants you to take Mrs. Bettle home!” Twiss said, because she was sick of hearing about Asa. “Mr. Peterson’s here with his doctor. They’re listening to Bett’s lungs.”

  “We saw Mr. Peterson drive up,” Milly said.

  “Then why didn’t you come?” Twiss said.

  Before Milly could answer, their father stood up. “I’ll drive Mrs. Bettle home on one condition,” he said to Twiss. “That you come with me.”

  “What about Milly?” Twiss said.

  “She needs her rest.”

  “I’m the one who’s had to listen to the Beetle all night!” Twiss said.

  “Then twenty more minutes won’t hurt you,” her father said.

  Even though their parents no longer spoke to each other, they had a similar way of speaking when they wanted Twiss to do something she didn’t want to do. She didn’t know if all parents spoke this way or if, despite their current (and forever?) dislike for each other, her mother and father’s linguistic habits had rubbed off on each other.

  “You sound like her,” Twiss said.

  “That’s because I didn’t say what you wanted to hear,” her father said, brushing pie crumbs from his pants. “We’ll be home before you could sprint to the front door.”

  But they weren’t.

  After they dropped Mrs. Bettle off, her father drove into town. When Twiss asked where they were going, he said, “I want to see something.”

  Twiss hadn’t been back to the golf course since just after the Accident, when her father had played his first round of golf back like an amateur. After that dismal round, he didn’t invite her along again and she didn’t ask to go with him. Twiss had felt a kind of embarrassment for him that she couldn’t explain then, but understood now as they entered the course by way of the maintenance road when they used to drive through the front gates like everyone else.

  People had always looked up to her father when he was playing golf—they asked him for advice about the game and looked him in the eye when they shook his hand; at those times, it didn’t matter that the members had more money than he would ever have, because he knew how do something that they didn’t know how to do. Twiss had always held her head as high as her father’s. That’s my dad! she’d think, when people stopped their own games to admire his.
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  That day on the course, after he’d missed several easy shots that even Twiss could have made (well, at least Milly could have made them), she averted her eyes.

  “I don’t understand,” he kept saying.

  Twiss didn’t understand either. Even though he squared up for the shots the way he always had, the ball didn’t go where it usually went. By the seventeenth hole, he’d lost his swing and his temper. When his ball landed between two of the moguls, he threw his club so high in the air that Twiss thought it might never come down.

  “Golf was the only thing I was good at,” he said, when the club, his beloved Persy, finally landed in the stream and sank to the bottom.

  Twiss understood then that it was his singular vision that had made him such a skilled golfer, the way he lived and breathed in terms of it. She also understood that without it, he would be regular, which neither Twiss nor her father was ready to accept.

  “Maybe Rollie changed the moguls while you were in the hospital,” she said.

  “Of course!” her father said.

  He grew cheerful. “Changes are supposed to be cleared through me. No one else has the authority. I’m still the only one who’s ever played a perfect game around here.”

  Of course Rollie hadn’t changed anything—they both knew that—but the idea that he might have instilled in them a kind of hope that what had been lost could be recovered.

  When her father turned off the headlights and began to motor over the course illegally, whatever hope Twiss had been maintaining dissolved once again. She slumped down low in her seat. “We could get in trouble,” she said to her father.