The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “You have circles under your eyes,” his wife said.

  “I’m a little tired, I guess,” Jester said. “What about you?”

  “I feel better than I have in a long, long time,” his wife said, smiling. “No more cramping today. No more pain.”

  “Good,” Jester said. “That’s good.”

  What had changed? That morning when he’d left for work, his wife had made his breakfast, but she hadn’t kissed him good-bye or wished him well—she hadn’t wished him well in a long time, although he supposed he didn’t deserve to be wished well or kissed good-bye. Jester was selfish—he knew that; only a selfish man came home with a compass.

  But he loved her. Sometimes he’d be walking down the street and be struck down by this love so cruelly that he’d have to stop to steady his breathing, his legs. (True, that didn’t happen as often as when they were first married, but it still happened. Not everyone could say that, could they?) After he’d steadied himself, he’d think Go home, Jester, go home, but his legs would rarely carry him there. The distance between what he wanted and what he needed was too great; often he’d forget where he was standing. He’d bought the compass so that even if he forgot where he was standing, he’d always know how to get home.

  “That’s good,” Jester said a third time.

  The house was quiet, peaceful. His wife was round again. She took her little loaf of bread out of the oven and set it on the plate in front of him.

  “This is the last time I’m going to give you my heart, Jester.”

  That night, after his wife had put the one child to bed and quieted the other one, who, unlike the first child, was overly rambunctious in its soupy habitat, by rubbing her belly, Jester took a walk. He walked and walked and kept on walking until he reached the river.

  Go home, Jester. Go home.

  Jester stood at the edge of the river a long time before he unwrapped his handkerchief and dropped the loaf of bread into the dark water. The moment it disappeared beneath the surface, he regretted he’d let it go.

  Bett said that after searching all day, Milly and Twiss’s father and the other volunteers finally found Jester on a sandbar in the middle of the river late that afternoon, weakened but alive, with a handful of soggy breadcrumbs in his hand.

  “So that’s what he was doing the day you were born,” Bett said. She pinned her hair up so that sleep wouldn’t tangle what Milly had worked so hard to untangle.

  Was it true? Was it false?

  Was it better to pretend not to know for sure what you surely knew?

  Bett set down Milly’s brush. She tilted her head the way she did whenever she was genuinely concerned about something or someone. “I thought you’d be thrilled, Twiss. Your father saved that man’s life. In Deadwater, nobody ever saves each other.”

  Why did Twiss’s father tell Bett that story, and why had Bett been taken in by it? Twiss was about to go to the closet to look for the bronze compass, which her father had given her as a birthday present when she was eight years old and no money was left to get her a real gift.

  Jester—that was what her father always wished he’d been named; it was the name of the most heroic hero in his old adventure books, which now belonged to Twiss.

  “You’re supposed to be gloriously happy right now,” Bett said to Twiss.

  Happy? Twiss thought, and slumped back down on her bed.

  “Maybe she is,” Milly said. “Only she can’t say so for nineteen more hours.”

  Bett eyed the sheet on the buck’s head, and Milly’s pillow on the floor.

  “You can’t fool me. I know you’ve been talking.”

  16

  illy hated herself a little for opening her mother’s jewelry box. Why couldn’t she let the past stay where it had landed? Why all of this meddling today?

  A woman had singled her out for not being a mother—that was all.

  By now, the woman wouldn’t even remember what she’d said to Milly or what Milly had said in front of her daughter. She’d have dropped her children off at the school, gone to the grocery store, and vacuumed her toxic carpeting. “You must have a lot of time on your hands if you’re still thinking about that,” she’d have said.

  Yes, Milly thought. I do.

  “Old people are hopeless clingers-on,” the woman would have continued. “They can tell you what happened during the Depression—The dust storms they had to endure! The mealy potatoes! The loaves of bread on credit!—but they can’t tell you what Fruit Roll-Ups are.”

  “I know what Fruit Roll-Ups are,” Milly would have said back, although she didn’t know why they were sold as healthy snacks for children when they were heaped full of preservatives that were engineered in laboratories hundreds of miles from the nearest fruit tree.

  Before the processed-food craze, a health-food craze had hit Spring Green when they were in the last years of middle age. One of Milly’s doctors at that time had recommended eating bricks of gray tofu instead of red meat and mashed yeast instead of mashed potatoes. Another had recommended a colonic cleansing, which Milly had submitted to because she’d thought the doctor would merely send her home with a bottle of pills, maybe some hemp.

  “What did you think ‘cleansing’ meant?” Twiss had asked her on their way home from the doctor’s office. She kept biting her lip, so that she wouldn’t laugh.

  “You’d think they’d have warned me.”

  “Miss Milly Prim, I’m afraid you’re about to be probed now!”

  “They didn’t cover me with a sheet,” Milly said. “I could tell what they were thinking.”

  “You’re crazy?” Twiss said.

  “You don’t count anymore,” Milly said.

  Twiss steered the car to the side of the road. When a dark blue truck approached on the opposite side of the road, she got out of the car. She walked around to the front.

  Milly knocked on the windshield. “What are you doing?”

  “Testing a theory!” Twiss called back.

  When the truck was a hundred yards off, Twiss turned to face Milly. She smiled as she unbuckled her belt and dropped her trousers, followed by her underpants.

  “Have you gone mad?” Milly said.

  The driver of the truck honked several times in a row, waving emphatically as he passed them. “That-a-girl!” he said, continuing down the road.

  When the truck disappeared, Twiss pulled up her underpants and her trousers, buckled her belt, and got back into the car.

  “You’re right,” she said to Milly. “You’re never too old to be embarrassed.”

  “I think that was the Sprye boy driving that truck,” Milly said, smiling.

  “No,” Twiss said. “It was Asa’s boy’s boy.”

  “Oh?” Milly said, trying not to frown.

  “He looks just like her.”

  “Does he?” Milly said as if she hadn’t noticed the resemblance. She glanced at the side mirror, at the writing engraved in the glass.

  Objects are closer than they appear.

  Curtis. When he was in high school, he appeared in the sports section of the Gazette every Saturday during the fall. Curtis had won a scholarship to the university because he could throw a football farther than any other boy in Wisconsin. But it was his sister’s career that Milly had really been interested in and had secretly followed.

  Every Saturday, heat or cold, rain or shine, Milly would see Avery running up their road, her long blond ponytail swishing in time with her legs, just as the sun was making gemstones out of the fields and the hills and the bales of hay scattered across the landscape. Twiss would still be snoring away upstairs. Years of sleep remedies had failed to subdue her; she still slept like a wild animal and woke like one, too.

  On warm mornings, Milly would take her cup of tea out to the porch to watch Avery run by. Though she’d never been a runner herself—she didn’t like the sensation of breathlessness, or the hard thunk of her heart—she’d loved to watch Twiss run. And Avery was an even better runner than Twiss had been,
and certainly more graceful. She’d run first on the Spring Green high school team and then on the university team and now was training to run the marathon in the Olympic trials.

  In an interview, when a reporter from the Gazette asked her why she ran, Avery said, “Why does anybody do anything?” which had made Milly like Avery even more.

  Each Saturday morning, after she passed the driveway, Avery would pick up speed in order to crest the upcoming hills. Sometimes she ran with a yellow music player and matching headphones, but most of the time, she ran without them.

  “Something comes in and something goes out,” Avery had added in the interview, as if she’d been playing at being coy but couldn’t really play when it came to running. “I’d keep running forever if my legs would let me.”

  “Tell me about the routes you run in Spring Green,” the reporter had said.

  “My favorite is my Saturday route,” Avery said. “There’s this little purple meadow I pass on my way up into the hills. When I was little, my grandpa used to say it was enchanted. He said if you walked through it, you’d never be the same person again.”

  “Where did he hear that story?” the reporter asked.

  “I guess he used to know the people who lived in that house,” Avery said.

  “The bird sisters?” the reporter said.

  “All I know is, when I pass that meadow, suddenly I can run faster,” Avery said.

  “Are you superstitious?”

  “I visualize the meadow during all of my races, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Have you ever walked through it?”

  “I believe in it too much,” Avery said.

  “Can you be more specific?” the reporter asked.

  “No,” Avery said.

  17

  he meadow did possess a kind of magic, at least on the day Milly and Asa had walked through it together, both nervous, shy and young, and grateful for the owl-shaped cookies Milly had baked that morning (inspired by the barn owl that had sung in the oak tree and in her dreams all night), which provided an entrée into what she’d come to think of as the conversation of her life, a conversation unremarkable in every way but one: She’d had it with Asa.

  Mr. Peterson had taken Bett to the doctor’s office to get her lungs X-rayed; Twiss was off in the woods, searching for ingredients to put into her happiness tonic; her mother was canning the vegetables she’d harvested from the garden that morning so they would be able to have milk-braised wax beans in the winter. Her father was in the barn.

  For once, Milly was left alone enough with Asa for her feelings to materialize into something more tangible than salt on her lips.

  “The owls are my favorite,” Asa said, as they walked the perimeter of the meadow. Asa had just parked the tractor in the middle of it when Milly came out with the plate of cookies and a glass of iced tea garnished with a mint leaf she’d plucked from the garden when her mother wasn’t looking. The mint was supposed to be for a special jelly her mother planned on making for the following Christmas supper. By then, she said, they might be able to afford the roast of lamb it traditionally went with. By then, everything sad and black might be buried under a thick layer of fresh white snow. Her mother was hoping for an early blizzard that would go down in the history books. Forty feet of snow in September! Some say a miracle! (Others can’t find the front doors to their houses. Still others can’t find their houses at all.)

  “I like that they have pecans for beaks,” Asa said about Milly’s cookies. To get the pecans, Milly had had to barter with the clerk at the general store. A small batch of her sugar cookies—his favorite—for a small bag of pecans, which seemed fair enough.

  “The only thing I ever made was mud pie,” Asa said.

  “Mud pie’s delicious,” Milly said, more cheerfully than she meant. “But it’s basically just chocolate pudding,” she added to compensate.

  “I mean with real mud,” Asa said. He covered his mouth the moment he began to trip over his words. In school, Asa had worked with a woman every day on his speech. Now that he had graduated, he simply worked. “M’s are hard for me. If you can’t understand—”

  Milly thought of what Bett or Twiss would have said—m-m-mean m-m-mud m-m-mouth—and drew Asa’s hand away from his face and into her own. “I understand you perfectly.”

  They walked that way, hand in hand, until Twiss darted out of the woods, jumped up and down yelling “hoo-hoo” on a bed of pine needles for a straight minute, and darted back into the woods again. Even though Twiss had disappeared, they could hear her laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” Milly said. She was suddenly conscious of how sweaty her hand was. Girls weren’t supposed to sweat, let alone sweat on a boy they liked. “My sister has to be the center of attention or she’ll die.”

  “Jumping out of the woods is like a survival mechanism then,” Asa said.

  “Now she’ll live another five minutes,” Milly said, smiling at him.

  The two of them continued circling the meadow, and the mower, but didn’t leave it for the pond or the woods or even the spotted monarch butterfly that flitted back and forth between the two. Above them was a patch of blue, blue sky. Below them a series of snake holes, which Milly stepped carefully around since the snakes they belonged to had already laid the first of the season’s leathery-shelled eggs and the snakes were as long as she was. She didn’t want Asa to know that she shared her father’s fear of them, or that once, when Twiss put a garter snake in her bed, she’d sprained her ankle trying to get away from it.

  Asa pointed to Twiss, who was hanging from the branch of a pine tree. “Has it been five minutes already? Your sister’s persistent.”

  “Even when she’s not doing something,” Milly said, “she’s doing something.”

  “I don’t have a sister,” Asa said. “I mean I used to, but she died when I was four. My mother did too. Before we came to Wisconsin.”

  “Do you remember them?” Milly said, thinking of the story Bett had told her.

  “Sometimes I think I do,” Asa said, scratching his cheek as if he didn’t know what else to do with his free hand. “But then I realize they’re my father’s memories, not mine. It’s sort of like losing something you never knew you had, but always knew you wanted. All I know is my sister used to call me Afa because she couldn’t pronounce s’s. She’d stick her tongue out at me if I wouldn’t pick her up. Her hair was red as an apple—like your cousin’s.”

  “What about your mother?” Milly said.

  Asa glanced at the tractor. The field birds were pecking at the owl cookies Milly had left on the seat. They were bathing in the glass of iced tea. “It’s hard just having a father.”

  Milly meant to reach for Asa’s hand, but she pressed her lips against his lips instead. She didn’t close her eyes like the actresses did in the movies, nor did she tilt her head or lift her foot off the ground romantically, flirtatiously. This was a practical kiss, a kiss meant to accomplish what she didn’t know how to say meaningfully: I’m so sorry.

  The two of them stood that way, still as the grass around them—for a second? a minute? an hour? forever—before Twiss leaped down from the branch of the tree she had climbed and a snake leaped up from the hole it had burrowed into and both of them hissed and hissed.

  Milly jumped onto Asa’s back, and Asa did his best to hold her there.

  “It’s just a rat snake,” he said, shooing it away with one hand and holding Milly’s bare leg—her dress had twisted and shimmied up her thigh during her jump—with the other.

  “They don’t bite,” he said. “Even if they do, they’re not poisonous.”

  “How can you tell?” Milly said, aware of his hand on her leg, which felt practical yet impractical at the same time. If he let go, she would fall.

  If he let go … Don’t let go.

  “His tail,” Asa said. “Look how pointy it is.”

  Once the snake had gone back into its hole, Milly stopped clutching Asa’s back and let her feet touch the g
round again. She could hear Twiss cackling from her place at the edge of the woods. Milly was glad that Bett was gone; there was a chance that Twiss wouldn’t tell her about the kiss and the snake, depending on how generous she was feeling that evening and what the doctor had discovered or not discovered about Bett’s lungs.

  “Your heart thumped me,” Asa said, after they’d started walking again.

  Milly untwisted her dress and smoothed her hair. Her leg was back to being just her leg again—functional. “Your heart thumped me, too,” she said.

  Bett took much longer to come home than anyone expected, so that when Mr. Peterson finally dropped her off in front of the porch, and kissed both of her cheeks like French people did, they were certain she’d walk through the screen door bearing bad news.

  “Iron lung!” Twiss kept saying.

  “That’s for people who can’t breathe on their own,” Milly said.

  “Iron lung!” Twiss said again anyway.

  Their mother had just finished setting supper on the table and the three of them had bowed their heads to say grace, when Bett walked through the front door on her tiptoes, a brown paper package tucked under her arm. She was wearing different clothes than she’d left the house in. Her hair was different, too.

  “Mr. Peterson took me to the salon,” Bett said, and set her package on the chair she usually ate her meat in. “I had my first real haircut today. My first manicure, too.” She waved her fingers in the air. “The woman said French girls paint their fingernails this way.”

  “Why are you walking on your toes?” Twiss said.

  “I’m practicing,” Bett said.

  “For what?” Twiss said.

  “They’re pretty,” their mother said about her fingernails.

  “I could show you how to do it,” Bett said.

  “That dress—,” Milly said.

  “Is it silk?” their mother said.

  Milly had seen the dress on display in one of the shopwindows in town. She’d also seen the price tag and had forced herself to keep walking.