Bett twirled around as if for the first time in her life. “Mr. Peterson thought I needed a new one. He didn’t believe me when I told him I’d never worn something new.”
“What about the old one?” their mother said.
“He bought me a pair of shoes, too.” Bett went out to the porch and came back with another brown paper package and a rectangular box. “I don’t even know how to walk in them.”
“They look like sapphires,” their mother said.
“Crystals actually,” Bett said. “They’re from London.”
“Those are—,” Twiss began.
“Magnificent,” Milly said. “I didn’t see them in the shop.”
“They were in the bridal shop,” Bett said.
“What about the old one?” their mother said again, about the dress she’d lent Bett.
“The shopkeeper wouldn’t let me bring it home,” Bett said.
“Wouldn’t let you?” their mother said.
Bett opened the package she’d placed on the chair and handed their mother a light green day dress with an even lighter green floret at the back.
“She sent me home with this instead.”
“For me?” their mother said, draping the dress over one of the kitchen chairs and then walking around that chair, admiring the fine fabric with her fingers, and smiling girlishly—she said she hadn’t been in such close proximity to a dress of this quality since she was sixteen—until one of her nails, which the washboard had made jagged, pulled a tiny green thread loose.
“Mr. Peterson thought you’d like it more than your other one,” Bett said.
Their mother took a step back from the dress.
“It’s from Europe,” Bett said.
“No matter how much I’d like it to be otherwise, and believe me I would,” their mother said, “when I look out the window, I see cornfields, not the Eiffel Tower and cappuccino.”
“What’s cappuccino?” Bett said.
“It’s a nice gesture,” their mother said. “I just don’t think it would fit me.”
“Hello! Dresses are boring!” Twiss said. “What’s wrong with your lungs?”
“See for yourself,” Bett said, and handed Twiss an oversized envelope.
Twiss ripped the X-ray films out of the envelope and held them up to the light, although she had no idea what she was looking at. “I don’t see anything,” she said.
“That means I just have asthma,” Bett said.
“Do you still have to eat meat?” Milly said.
“Not if I don’t want to,” Bett said.
“Do you have to stay in bed?” Twiss said.
“Only if I feel like it,” Bett said.
Their mother put her plate beside the sink. She hadn’t eaten a single bite of the supper she’d spent the afternoon preparing. Her napkin was still folded neatly on the table.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” she said to Bett. Even though it was only six o’clock, she yawned and slipped quietly upstairs.
After their mother closed her bedroom door, Bett said, “Why wouldn’t your mother take the dress? It was the right size. And even if it wasn’t, we could have altered it to fit her.”
“Would your mother take the dress?” Milly said.
“What does my mother have to do with it?” Bett said.
“They’re sisters,” Milly said.
“Tell me everything about the doctor’s office!” Twiss said. “What kind of instruments did he use? Did he take a sample of your lungs? With a scalpel?”
“This is the twentieth century,” Bett said. “Not the Dark Ages.”
“What did you and Mr. Peterson talk about?” Milly said.
“You, actually,” Bett said. “He wanted to know what you were like.”
“What did you say?” Milly said.
“I told him you were the meanest person I’d ever met. I also told him you made sacrifices to pagan gods with pigs’ hearts, but that you were just biding your time with them until you got a human one. Everyone knows how powerful they are in comparison.”
“You didn’t,” Milly said.
“You’re right,” Bett said. “I told him you were nicer than the word ‘nice.’ ”
“What did Mr. Peterson say?” Milly said.
“He said, ‘That’s nice.’ ”
Before Bett regaled Twiss with details about the doctor’s office—no, there wasn’t a giant jar of pus on the counter, but there was a book with sketches of different kinds of skin and bone diseases—she told Milly that Asa had come to town, too.
What are you trying to do? Milly thought.
“I was in the bridal shop,” Bett said, “standing on the fitting pedestal entranced by the sparkle of the shoes in the mirrors. I guess Asa didn’t recognize me in the new dress and the new hair and all. He came in with grass stuck all over him and looked at me like he was about to really look at me—like I was someone worth stopping to admire—but then it was like he remembered something suddenly because he opened the shop door and left.”
“That’s all?” Milly said, happy and sad at the same time.
“He had a little purple flower sticking out of his front pocket,” Bett said. “I’m guessing someone came over to mow the property today and someone else brought out more than a plate of cookies and lemonade this time.”
Milly stared at Twiss. Hold your tongue. Which Twiss did.
After that, Milly went upstairs to look in on her mother.
“I’m so jealous you got X-rays!” Milly heard Twiss say as she opened her mother’s bedroom door. “I would kill for X-rays, especially when people claim I don’t have a heart.”
Me too, Milly thought concerning the jealousy part, but for much different reasons.
Although she had pined over the blue silk dress that now belonged to Bett, that wasn’t what she was really jealous of. Or the shoes, although they were stunning. Wanting the dress and the shoes was a controllable desire; though it was difficult, she’d walked away from the dress when she saw the price tag dangling from the material like a lock. Her desire for Mr. Peterson’s affection was different; that he so obviously preferred Bett hurt her terribly.
Milly thought of how Asa had held her up in the meadow and wished he was in the room with her now, doing exactly the same thing. She touched her leg on the place that Asa had touched it, but there was no magic in the pads of her fingers, just as there was no magic left in her lips. That she would have to wait until it rained again to feel what she’d felt that afternoon in the meadow was unthinkable. That was the difference between yesterday and today, perhaps the only difference between then and now. Yesterday, she had hope. Today, she had relief. She didn’t know what she would have tomorrow.
“Mom?” she said, a few steps into the darkened bedroom.
“I’m just tired,” her mother said from beneath the covers.
The room smelled of dust, of light that had been abruptly cast out by the drawing of the shades. “I’m tired too,” Milly said.
Her mother made a space for Milly in her bed. That night, the two of them slept side by side in their clothes without supper in their bellies or pillows beneath their heads (her mother had given her pillows to Bett). When her mother finally fell asleep, her breathing became less labored than it was when she was awake. According to Twiss, everyone dreamed whether or not they wanted to. What her mother was dreaming about Milly didn’t know; she’d drawn her knees to her chest like a baby. Beyond the windows, Milly heard the sound of nails being driven into wood. Her father, no doubt. Trying to find a way to live without golf.
Before Milly fell asleep, and dreamed whatever she was meant to dream, she unfolded a thin cotton blanket and covered her mother with it. Even at the height of the summer, the room had a draft. Milly kissed her mother’s neck—I wouldn’t have taken that dress either—and rolled over so that as she drifted off to sleep she’d be facing the windows and, though the shades were drawn, the little purple meadow, which would never again be to her what by its nature
it was: grass and dirt and weeds.
18
hen the water ran clear, Twiss stopped pumping and drank a mug of it down. As she bent to put the mug back in its place on the rusty handle, the goldfinch fell out of the front pocket of her work shirt onto the wooden platform, which their father had built around the pump when they were young so their shoes wouldn’t get muddy every time they were thirsty. The boards were as slick and black as the stones at the bottom of Mill Creek, although this summer, because no rain had fallen, the boards dried too quickly to grow mold.
Twiss picked up the goldfinch. Like Milly, she didn’t know if she could muster the energy to find the trowel and go back to the gladiola bed, where she’d have to get on her hands and knees and dig down into the earth far enough that the squirrels and field mice wouldn’t pull the goldfinch back up and make a postmortem meal out of her hard work; she didn’t know if she could muster the energy for another disfigurement, another little death.
Twiss had read stories about native people who stuck their dead up in the trees, suspending their souls like ornaments so that whatever god they believed in could pluck them up into the heavens and the afterlife, if there was such a thing.
For most old women in Wisconsin, only two choices were available: to believe in God so as to thwart the fear of the inevitable—God will lift me up so that I will still be me, just me in a different place, an airy place with fine tablecloths and even finer silver settings—or to believe in God so as to thwart the inevitable itself—God, spare me another year, another month, another day, another hour, another minute, another second. Twiss had created a third choice: to believe in the inevitability of fear on the eve of one’s death. Good old-fashioned debilitating fear; that’s why she’d made Milly agree to wheel her onto the porch when death knocked on their bedroom door.
Give me lightning! she thought. Give me thunder! Give me the storm of my life!
Should the air be still and the sky be blue like it was today when the reaper came for her, she’d simply refuse to die. If you could live through a walloping tornado, shouldn’t you also be able to live through a sedate, if blistering, summer afternoon? If the weather (and the reaper) wouldn’t accommodate her, there was always the river, which would gladly swallow an old woman. Of course, there was the getting her to the river if for some reason she couldn’t get there herself, but she had Milly for that. Twiss would just have to make sure she died first.
That was where Twiss’s real fear came in, the kind that arrived in the late hours of the night disguised first as something else—a lamp shade, a shadow, a creaking floorboard—and burrowed in between what she wanted and what she could get. Instead of whispering, like every other decent, well-bred fear, this one yelled in her ear while she slept.
Fat chance of dying outside, Twiss! We have the pope to accommodate! Do you know what kind of God power it takes to organize a procession of that size? Through the streets of Vatican City. Those great cobbled messes! So you see, there is not much God power left for someone as unlovable as you.
All will leave you …
“Did you hear that?” Twiss would say to Milly after the voice had trailed off.
“What?” Milly would say groggily from her bed.
“The Scornful God voice.”
“You were dreaming.”
“Maybe I’m going crazy.”
“You’ve always been crazy. Go back to sleep.”
“You have to promise me something.”
“I promise to wheel you onto the porch.”
“Because I can’t die inside this house,” Twiss would say. “I can’t die like them.”
“Then I won’t let you,” Milly would say.
Twiss would think of her mother and her father. She’d think of the town fair and of Father Rice—of all the ways her Purple Prairie Tonic succeeded and all the ways it failed.
“The bathtub was full of weeds,” she’d say to Milly, thinking of the green stains, which had faded but were still visible around the rim of the tub. “What was I thinking?”
“You were just being you,” Milly would say and roll back onto her side.
19
ou are a wonderful young woman! Father Rice assured Twiss in his letter back to her the summer Bett came down from Deadwater. Twiss had waited for his fourth letter with the same impatience Bett had waited for the first one from her mother, Aunt Gertrude. In her letter, Twiss had written to Father Rice about the goings-on in Spring Green and had asked him about the goings-on in Illinois, as well as asking a series of questions about the state of her soul. Not going to church regularly after the Mrs. Bettle/organ/“Don’t any of you care that you’re going to hell?” debacle had made her less certain of her convictions, her nonbelief in belief. She’d written, among other things,
Dear Father Rice,
I’m afraid I might be going to Hell, after all. A life of adventure, I think, may cost too much.
What do you think?
Sincerely, Twiss
P.S. Have you ever known anyone named Carlos Vidales of Rosarie?
P.P.S. How is Beardsley?
Dear Twiss,
I can assure you that God looks gently on you—you are not, as your fears have it, going to Hell for your girlish (boyish?) misdeeds. Although it’s extremely unpriestly of me, I should tell you I don’t believe in hell; I suppose it shouldn’t be capitalized then, should it? I believe that people have goodness in them and badness, too, and that in our lifetimes we usually display and witness both.
I apologize if my first letter had an ill effect on you; perhaps my cautioning planted seeds of fear? What I really want to say is this: You have always been so full of questions and passion and bravery, you simply can’t expect your life to turn out like everyone else’s in Spring Green. Even my life has taken a different course, and I didn’t have nearly as much zest for the world as you do.
I’d like to tell you a story I haven’t told anyone—take from it what you will.
When I was a boy, my mother said my favorite thing to play with was a plain gray stone. She said she took it from the garden one day and gave it to me, so that I might stop pulling on the hem of her dress and urging her to pick me up. She was busy, as country women often are. I remember taking that stone into my hands as if it were an extension of my mother and so would somehow keep me safe.
I grew up with that stone. I honored it. I even etched my initials into its hard skin. For years, I carried it in my pocket—to and from my father’s untimely funeral, my brother’s, and finally my poor mother’s. Over time, the weight of the stone wore my shirt pockets thin. I remember the first time I felt for the stone and found it was not there: I was wandering along the country road by Lilly chapel. When my fingers met with fabric, I knew I’d lost the stone, but also that I’d lost something less explicable, too. Although I’d known it intellectually for quite a while, I understood then—I felt it then for the first time in that empty pocket—that there was no one left in the world who loved me.
It was a feeling I never quite recovered from. I walked inside Lilly chapel to sit down and I never really got up again; that is, until now. Fear kept me indoors for most of my life. The possibility of love is what finally brought me out. For myself? Another? I’m not certain, even now.
I found my stone the morning I decided to leave the church and Spring Green, you see, when I was cutting the weeds back by the road. I don’t know what it meant or means, but I have enjoyed the not knowing even if it has translated to some loss—heavy at times, I admit—along the way.
From your very own, Father Rice
P.S. Yes, I knew a man named Carlos, once. Why do you ask?
P.P.S. Thank you for asking after Beardsley. You would like him. Beardsley’s been out west—before his mother became ill and he came back to Illinois to care for her (and before the accident at the mill). He rode horses in the Great Wild West Rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He’s also been to the Continental Divide!
After Twiss finished reading Father Ri
ce’s letter at the mailbox, she walked back down the driveway with the rest of the mail tucked under her arm and Father Rice’s letter tucked into the pocket of her coveralls. Although his stone story seemed sad to her upon the first reading and maybe a little miraculous, too, for now Twiss focused on the fact that he’d told it to her and no one else rather than on its meaning. She also focused on the You are not going to hell part. And the You are a wonderful young woman! part. It was nice to be called wonderful by an adult instead of awful, terrible, deficient, sadistic, selfish, greedy—yikes! that list was getting long. Twiss’s favorite of the unfavorites was contrary (just for the sake of it!).
She kicked at the gravel in front of her, smiling at the reddish dust that clung to her shoes and coveralls, at the anthills between her feet and the slivery spiderwebs in the switchgrass on either side of the driveway. She’d been so distracted with Bett in the house and her father in the barn and Father Rice in one-third of a room in Illinois that she’d missed the slow accumulation of summer this year; she hadn’t noticed the leafy stalks of rhubarb or the toothy cotton plants that had sprouted up in the alfalfa fields on the other side of the road. Or the bright orange tiger lilies, which grew everywhere in the country despite their being unwild.
The beginning of August was Twiss’s favorite part of the summer; the world seemed the most alive and full to her then—the most everything. Even the earth smelled earthier somehow. Twiss loved the days just before the world started to turn inward again, to shrivel and brown. In the past, she’d take long walks around the property, memorizing the overgrown look of the land and the garden, the grass and the trees, the black upturns of field soil, so that in winter she’d have the promise of summer inside of her, the melting, the growth.
Twiss flipped through the stack of mail beneath her arm. When she noticed the brown letter addressed to her cousin, she gave up memorizing the look of twisting vines. The envelope, which Bett had waited for all summer, was worn badly at the top as if it had been opened and closed many times before the final sealing; it said Deadwater without saying it at all.
The Bird Sisters Page 16