The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “What can I carry?” he said, and was handed Henry’s cage and told to take it to the car, as if he’d merely been on vacation and had returned restored and a little bit brown.

  The only person absent from the morning’s bustle of events was Twiss, whom everyone assumed was out finding the ingredient that would make people want to buy her wellness tonic if the promise of happiness wasn’t enough of a pull to give up a nickel. Twiss must have come to bed late the night before because neither Milly nor Bett had woken up, and she must have gotten up early because they didn’t see her in the morning, either. She’d made her bed, which was unusual, but sometimes Twiss forgot that she was supposed to be rebelling.

  “Your sister’s determination is truly remarkable,” Dr. Greene said to Milly. “I’m thinking of giving her my medicine bag. I’m too old to practice anymore. My hands shake too much. Besides, I think she has what it takes to be a doctor.”

  “A woman doctor?” Mrs. Collier said.

  Dr. Greene put his hand on her shoulder and smiled at Mrs. Collier in a knowing way. “It’s no different than a male knitter.”

  “Where is the infamous child anyway?” Mrs. Collier said.

  “She’s fourteen,” Milly said.

  “Anyone younger than I am is a child to me, dear,” Mrs. Collier said.

  Milly would have been more concerned about Twiss’s whereabouts if her father were still out in the barn, but the problem of Twiss’s forged note seemed to have resolved itself during the month of August without any intervention necessary on either of their parts. Besides, Milly was so busy thinking about the best way, given that Mrs. Bettle and Henry were squeezing in with them, to transport her cake from the house to the fair without damaging it that she didn’t question either where Twiss was or how the problem had been resolved.

  Even in their family, once every great while things just seemed to work out.

  “This is the best-looking cake I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Stewart said to Milly. “That’s the luckiest young man in the world you’ve got there. I hope he knows that.”

  “It’s for Father Rice,” Milly said.

  “After you, Asa was my best student,” Mr. Stewart said.

  “What are you two talking about?” Mrs. Bettle said, walking over. She was wearing a red polka-dot dress and a matching hat, which, along with the circles of strawberry-colored rouge on her cheeks and the frilly lace bows fixed to the tips of her shoes, made her look a little like a cupcake. “As you know, I don’t like secrets. Now fess up.”

  Please don’t tell her, Milly thought. She’ll tell Henry, and Henry will tell everyone at the fair.

  Mr. Stewart smiled. “We’re talking about the compounds in sugar. It’s a water-soluble crystalline carbohydrate. There are three classifications: monosaccharides, disaccharides, and trisaccharides. What do you think about the saccharide family?”

  “The only ride I care about is the one Henry and I are getting into town this morning,” Mrs. Bettle said. “Parrots don’t like jostling.”

  “What can I do to help?” Mr. Stewart said.

  “You could escort me to the car,” Mrs. Bettle said. “It would be just like me to trip over a pair of muck boots and ruin Henry’s big day. He’s been practicing for weeks, haven’t you, my little sugar beet? Poor thing. See his eyes? I’ve seen dead people who look more alive.”

  He’s a parrot, Twiss would have said, if she were there.

  “Cucumbers work for that,” Milly said because she wasn’t.

  “Henry hates cucumbers,” Mrs. Bettle said. “But I’d take a slice or two. If Henry doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep either. We’ve suffered a bout of insomnia recently. I do all right, but Henry says the most appalling things after a night of no sleep.”

  Milly cut the ends off a cucumber and handed them to Mrs. Bettle, who tucked them into her purse. “I hope you’re planning to drive, Margaret,” she said on her way out the front door. “We’re going over the bridge, after all.”

  In the living room, Bett was fixing her hair in the mirror beside the bookshelf. She’d already put one of Milly’s butterfly combs in and was wrestling with the other one in hopes of mashing down a cowlick that made a patch of her hair stand up like a weed.

  “I’ll never get used to this,” she said out loud, but to herself.

  “To what?” Milly said.

  “Everything it takes to be marryable on this side of the Mississippi.”

  Milly took the comb out of Bett’s hands and placed it in her cousin’s hair. “Don’t let Mrs. Collier hear you. She thinks everyone younger than her is a child.”

  “She should stick to thinking about jam,” Bett said.

  After Milly had adjusted the comb, she stepped back to have a look at the overall effect of her placement and to see if the two butterflies and their wings lined up. After negotiating the axles and the gearshift, her sense of symmetry had improved.

  “I think Dr. Greene loves her,” she said.

  Bett looked toward the kitchen, where Milly’s mother and father were standing. Milly’s father had a pencil in his left hand and her mother had her back pressed against the molding. From the living room, it looked like they were either about to kiss or about to measure each other’s heights. Both of them were smiling.

  “You’re the worst kind of optimist,” Bett said, as if something about the view caused her sadness. She took the butterfly clips out of her hair and gave them back to Milly. “You always believe in love.”

  When Twiss didn’t pile into Dr. Greene’s car or their own with everyone else, it was decided that their little motorcade would have to leave her behind. Mrs. Collier honked the horn several times in a row; ever since she’d learned how to drive, she didn’t like standing still for too long. She and Dr. Greene were talking about taking a trip out west, where Mrs. Collier would have miles of open road to roar the engine across. Dr. Greene thought that seeing the cutout of the Grand Canyon might be inspiring to his new interest in female handiwork. Mr. Stewart had expressed interest in such a trip—for the geology.

  Milly’s mother offered the driver’s seat to Milly’s father, but he said he’d been looking forward to riding, if that was all right with her.

  Looking forward? Milly thought.

  “You rest,” her mother said. “I’ll drive.”

  Although Milly was enjoying her parents’ seemingly genuine affection for each other, a smidge of Twiss’s pessimism seeped in. What did you do with my real parents? The ones who hate each other? The ones who write “No, I will not!” The people in the front seat seemed like imposters, only they were of an unusual sort: They were impossibly friendly, impossibly nice. Could Twiss’s note, her scrawling “perfect little pink seashell toenails,” really have been that transformative? This morning, Milly had walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and saw her mother sitting on the edge of the bathtub, trimming her toenails and sanding down her calluses with a pumice stone.

  “We can’t leave Twiss behind,” she said.

  “We can’t wait for her either,” Mrs. Bettle said. She was sitting beside Milly in the place where Twiss usually sat. Since Mrs. Bettle was larger than Twiss, Milly was forced to ride with her cake on her lap and Bett was forced to squeeze in next to Henry in the very back. Bett was afraid that Henry would defecate on her new crystal shoes and so placed them beneath a pile of wrinkled golf shirts and a pair of golf trousers.

  “It’s timeliness that’s next to godliness,” Mrs. Bettle said. “Not that your sister is known for her cleanliness, either. Her fingernails are filthy.”

  “That’s because she worked so hard digging up things for her tonic,” Milly said.

  “This is no doubt another one of her schemes,” Milly’s mother said. “To hold us up long enough for all of us to miss the fair.”

  “That does sound like our Button,” Milly’s father said.

  “That’s what Rollie calls her,” Milly said.

  “It’s decided then,” her mother said.

  On th
eir way out of the driveway and down the country road, Milly scanned the meadow and the pond, the woods and the water pump beside the barn. She knew that Twiss was all right in the physical sense—her sister always managed to get herself out of whatever trouble she’d managed to get herself into—but that something else was wrong. Twiss would never have abandoned her tonic and the town fair otherwise; she’d already predicted how many of the jars she would sell and what portion of a train ticket that would buy for Father Rice, and for the first time in her life, she had learned how to navigate fractions—The lowest common denominator of five-sixths, one-fourth, she’d said, is twelve!—as if in her head a light had gone off.

  As suddenly as Twiss had mastered basic math and her parents had returned to communicating the way that normal parents did, Milly’s cake and the cuff links she’d been dreaming about buying suddenly didn’t seem as important as they had all along. What would anything really be without Twiss to pitch a tent in her backyard? Or in a spare bedroom with a view of the stars? The worst kind of trouble for Twiss to get into was the kind she couldn’t easily get out of: the mental kind.

  All Milly really knew was that something was askew, like the weather vane pointing north when it should have been pointing south, and that Mrs. Bettle took up too much room. When they went over the first of the bumps on the bridge over the Wisconsin River, Milly wasn’t holding on to the cake as tightly as she’d planned and it tipped this way and that, its oversized tractor wheels and perfectly aligned axles mashing against the side door of the car.

  “My cake!” she said, when what she meant was Where are you?

  Milly didn’t survey the damage her cake had incurred until they arrived at the fair because at that point in the day so little could be done to mend it. The judging had been scheduled as the first event of the fair in order to prevent the late morning and afternoon sun from liquefying the cakes into slicks of buttercream and slides of chocolate. Milly had brought along a sculpting spatula, but had left everything else behind.

  “It’s not so bad,” Mrs. Bettle said.

  Milly placed the cake on the hood of the car and everyone gathered around it, assuring her that the dented folds of black frosting on the wheels were hardly noticeable and wouldn’t affect her chances of winning the prize.

  In a strange kind of unison, they said, “The hubcaps are still intact.”

  “Nobody cares about hubcaps,” Milly said, staring at the John Deere lettering and beneath it the PROPERTY OF THE SPRING GREEN GOLF COURSE lettering, which she’d designed to look like a stamp but which had been badly mauled. “It looks like it’s been in an accident.”

  “What do you think, Joe?” her mother said.

  “Accidents aren’t always what they seem,” her father said.

  Twiss would have told her the full truth—It looks like it ran sideways into a cow!

  Bett held her index finger just above the top of the cake, as if she were going to take a swipe of the black frosting, but ended up putting her hand on Milly’s shoulder instead.

  “It’s more genuine now,” she said.

  “Yes,” someone said. “They’re flawed by their nature.”

  “I’ve never seen one without a scratch.”

  “If you don’t count the red Farmall.”

  “I don’t.”

  “We won’t!”

  The judges weren’t as interested in genuine replicas of farm equipment as everyone thought they’d be. Sitting on the panel were three of the top members of the Sewing Society, who were wearing their yellow hats, which were only remarkable because of the impression of exclusivity that they gave off, something like a No Trespassing sign fixed to a barbed-wire fence. Between tipping their hats to dab at their foreheads with matching yellow handkerchiefs, the three women waved away blackflies, which had been flying over from the livestock ring.

  The prize went to a woman who’d made a crumble-top brown sugar apple pie that looked more like a pile of horse manure than a delectable dessert. When the judges handed her the oversized check, the woman displayed it long enough for the man from the Gazette to take a photograph and then handed it right back.

  “For the Society,” she said, looking at Milly’s mother. “Not every one of us here’s a thief. Some of us think about the greater good of the town.”

  “What’s she talking about?” Milly’s father said.

  Her mother took his hand. “Just something you missed while you were in the barn.”

  A pie isn’t the same thing as a cake, Milly thought. What have you done with my mother?

  Although she didn’t win the cash prize, the panel decided Milly shouldn’t walk away without winning something, so she won the prize for the most unique cake. One of the judges walked over to the livestock arena and came back with an ancient, downtrodden-looking goat with a long white beard and white, foamy cataracts in both of his eyes.

  “Here,” she said and handed Milly the lead rope. “We were going to sell him to the slaughterhouse, but, congratulations, he’s yours now.”

  Normally, Milly’s mother would have stepped in, but today her mother just smiled girlishly. She said, “I don’t know how we’ll ever get him into the car,” when she usually would have said something like, “That’s all the snubbing you’re capable of?”

  “What am I supposed to do with him?” Milly said.

  “Whatever you want,” the panel reiterated. “He’s yours now.”

  Milly never expected those three words—He’s yours now—to be the words she’d remember all of her life.

  Bett started laughing a deep guttural laugh, a man’s laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said, when people turned their attention away from Milly and the goat to her. “I can’t help it. It’s just so obviously wrong. Milly won a goat. A goat.”

  “And a fine goat he is,” Dr. Greene said.

  “A real blue ribbon winner,” Mrs. Collier echoed.

  “What do people want with a giant check, anyway?” Mr. Stewart said.

  “When they can have parrots and goats,” Mrs. Bettle said.

  “He’s not so bad,” Milly’s father said, clucking his tongue.

  “A farm can always use a goat,” her mother said.

  “You’ve all got a lot of nerve!” Milly said, raising her voice for the first time in her life. She yanked the lead rope harder than she intended to, which made both the goat and the thick white hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. “I had plans for that money,” she said and started off in the opposite direction of the crowd. “Plans!”

  Without any further yanking, the goat trotted along beside Milly as if she’d been his owner all along. She and the goat didn’t stop walking until they got to the edge of the fairground, where the waist-high weeds met up with the ones that had been mowed down to her ankles and she saw Twiss, who was dragging a case of tonic through the field on a creaky metal dolly. When Twiss waved, Milly let go of the lead rope, but the goat didn’t leave her side.

  “Top of the morning!” Twiss said, as if she’d merely overslept and missed nothing more than breakfast. She was wearing a dress a handful of sizes too large for her with sunbursts of yellow lace embroidered from the hem to the neckline. Her cheeks were as pink as calamine.

  “What’s with the goat?” she said.

  “What’s with the dress?” Milly said. Where were you?

  “Isn’t it amazing?” Twiss said. “It’s like happiness can be sewn.”

  She parked the dolly of tonic beside the goat. Where she’d come from and where she’d been, Milly didn’t know. All Milly knew was that when Twiss opened her arms to give her a hug, her anger—visions of someone besides Asa wearing the tractor cuff links, or worse, someone besides her giving them to Asa—came bubbling up.

  “You ruined everything!” she said to Twiss. “I would’ve been paying more attention if you hadn’t run off like you always do when you want attention!”

  Before she knew what she was doing, Milly had pushed her sister down to the ground, an action t
hat, along with her parents’ imposters’ posturing, brought to mind a game called Opposites Day, which she and Twiss used to play.

  The only person who seemed exactly like herself today was Bett—on the ride into town, Henry had avoided the used golf shirts and, instead, had defecated on the sleeve of her dress, and in retaliation, when Mrs. Bettle wasn’t looking, she’d plucked out one of his bright green feathers.

  “What did you do that for?” Twiss said, brushing the dirt off her knees, which she’d skinned in the process of falling down. Tiny trickles of blood flowed down her legs.

  “Everything,” Milly said, taking up the lead rope again.

  The fair went on with Milly and the goat lingering at the sidelines, watching the gravel parking lot so that she would be the first to see when Mr. Peterson and Asa arrived. Although the cake was ruined and she hadn’t won first prize, she was ready to tell Asa the whole of her feelings for him, to collapse in his arms.

  “Take me away from here,” she imagined saying to him. Never mind that people only talked with that kind of false earnestness in the movies. Never mind.

  “Where would you like to go?” she imagined him saying back.

  “Nowhere. Anywhere.”

  “How about the boat launch?”

  “That sounds nice,” Milly would say.

  It would be the great romantic moment of her life; they wouldn’t need cakes or cuff links or a pair of crystal shoes. At the boat launch, he’d park the car and run around to her side to open the door so that he could help her down. The two would walk to the end of the boat launch, with the sandstone cliffs looming above them and the water flowing below them.

  “Glaciers came through here,” Asa might say.

  “I know,” Milly might say back. “About twenty thousand years ago.”

  “Right, and the sandstone’s even older than that.”

  “Five hundred million years or so,” Milly would say and smile. She’d just happen to have Mr. Stewart’s fossil in her pocket, which she’d pull out to illustrate what the words five hundred million years couldn’t illustrate. “Did you know that fish can drown?”