Patricia Gaffney

by Mad Dash

  The box on the table is an incubator. The kiddie pool is a duckling house. Straw and wood chips line the rubber bottom, and a gooseneck lamp—how appropriate—shines down on a huddle of babies, tiny handfuls of fluff with perfect beaks and perfect little webbed feet. “Oh” is all I can say. I sink to my knees beside the pool, holding my hands together so I won’t reach out and grab anything.

  “God, they’re…”

  “Yeah,” Owen agrees.

  The cuteness is overwhelming; I’ve gone gooey inside. I’m sorry there’s no mother, though. I was imagining a big fat mama hen sitting in a pretty nest on a bunch of eggs, which would conveniently hatch, one by one, as soon as I got here.

  “Can I touch them?”

  “Well…”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  “It’s better if you don’t handle them too much right now, or they’ll imprint on you. Makes for problems later on.”

  “I can imagine.” But still. “How many are there? One, two, three…four.”

  “Four there in the brooder, two more eggs up here, and a wet guy I haven’t moved yet. One egg I had to throw out, the duckling was deformed, but that’s pretty good, two bad eggs out of eight.”

  “Two?” I get up to see what’s inside the incubator, a plastic box with a transparent lid. “Oh my God. Look at him.” A dark, stringy-looking bit of wet down on extremely unsteady legs, cheeping piteously while he stumbles and lurches and flings himself around the small enclosure. “Won’t he hurt himself?”

  Owen frowns. “Well, now, he just might.” There’s a small roll of corrugated cardboard on the table, only about three inches high and the same in diameter. Owen opens the incubator lid, drops the little tube of cardboard on top of the duckling, and quickly closes the lid. “That’ll settle him down.” It does; he can only crash into the sides of the tube now, and it also keeps him upright. “This one’s a lot further along since I last looked, but this one…”

  “Which, where?” He points, and I finally see the main attraction, the reason I came, the big show—an actual duckling actually hatching. No wonder I didn’t notice, though, it looks like…a lot of wet tea leaves in the bottom of a pearly white cup. With a beak! “Oh my God, oh my God!” And tiny beady eyes that look—I must be imagining this—exhausted. “Can’t we help him out? Oh, and this one.” There’s another egg, still intact—no, now I see a hole, the smallest chip in the top, darkness inside.

  “That one’s probably not gonna make it. Hate to keep opening this, drops the temperature—” Owen lifts the lid again, carefully snatches the unhatched egg and brings it out. “Can you hear?” He holds it between our ears—I stop breathing to listen.

  A faint scratching, just once. A weak peep.

  My heart’s in my throat. I stare at Owen. “Can’t you…”

  “No.” He puts the egg back in the incubator, bending down to read the number on a thermometer inside.

  “Why?”

  “You can’t help them. This is a test, right here. That duckling got through the embryo into the air sac, now it’s got to get out of the shell, and it’s probably not going to.”

  “What if you crack it open for him?”

  “Something’s probably wrong with it. My ducks are production bred, meat and laying. I can’t afford to help out the weak ones.” He smiles. “I know how you feel.”

  “But, Owen, he’s in there.”

  “Look at this guy, though. I didn’t think he’d make it, and look.”

  But I keep hearing that soft scratching sound, exactly like a baby’s fingernail. That one little cheep.

  The duck in the teacup-shell doesn’t seem to have moved. “How long does it take?” I ask. Owen’s arm touches mine, that’s how close we’re standing. I feel the heat of his body. The soft hairs on his arm brushing the soft hairs on mine.

  “Three or four days.”

  I pull back. “Three or four days?”

  “From the internal pip, yeah, the first breaking of the membrane. Ducks take a real long time.”

  And no cesarian sections allowed. Maybe my duck will still hatch, though. Owen thought this one wouldn’t, and now all of a sudden he’s lifting his head and using one stumpy wing like an arm to try to get some leverage on the egg edge, try to sit up. That lasts for an exciting, hard-to-watch minute or two before he sinks back down, palpitating from the exertion.

  “I can’t stand it,” I say, and turn back to the wading pool to look at the babies.

  Their makeshift nest is called a brooder, Owen informs me, and the eggs were laid by the brooder hen—“the broody,” he calls it, smiling back when I laugh.

  It’s so funny how we’ve begun to acknowledge our differences. A stride forward from the time when, out of politeness, we pretended we didn’t have any. It’s a measure of intimacy, I think, how frank you are with another person about how foreign he can seem. “The broody”—how old-timey, how Farmer Brownish. When I happened to mention my book club not long ago, Owen kept repeating “Book club? Book club?” as if he’d never heard the term, and it turned out he hadn’t. “You read a book in a club?” It just wouldn’t compute until I compared it to Bible study, then the lightbulb went on. Now he teases me; he’ll pick up the newspaper on my kitchen table and say, “Did you read this with your club? What’d they think of the funnies?”

  “How long do they have to stay in this here brooder?” I ask him, sitting on the floor by the ducks and crossing my legs. I’ve got on shorts; straw sticks to my thighs and I pick it off in a prissy, city-girl way. Owen hunkers down beside me, forearms on his knees. I bet he can’t even cross his legs—they’re too muscle-bound.

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “How do they learn to swim?” Motherless, fatherless, not even allowed to imprint on Owen. They’re like aliens set down on a new planet with no instructions.

  “They can swim right now. They love it, the second they stick their foot in. You oughta see a duck’s first time, that’s comical.” He sees the question I’m about to ask. “But I keep ’em out of water till they’re a lot older, and they don’t miss it. Can’t miss what you don’t know.”

  “That’s mean.”

  “No, it’s not. A young duck can drown if you don’t watch it every second, which I don’t have time to do.”

  “A duck can drown?”

  “Sure. They’re like wads of cotton. Put ’em in water, they soak it up and sink. So you have to keep them warm and dry. Dry.”

  “I doubt if Mother Nature keeps them warm and dry. What if you supervised them?”

  He sighs. It’s fun to exasperate him. “If I had nothing else to do but play with ducks—like their mother—I’d fill a paint roller pan with warm water. That’s got a low slope, a ramp, see, so they could get out when they wanted a rest. And I’d watch ’em splash around in that all day.”

  “But you can’t because you’re a busy man.”

  “I’m a busy man.”

  White smile lines fan out from the corners of his light-brown eyes. A slant of sun through the dusty window makes his blond beard hairs glitter. I told Mo I’d never be unfaithful, and she said, “What does desire have to do with principles? Passion isn’t in the head, it’s in the blood.” I was a wild girl twenty years ago—is that all gone? No, it is not.

  But it’s not just lust. Owen intrigues me. Under his deliberate, easygoing manner there’s always a tension, something unsettled about him. He keeps his mouth closed, the jutting lips clamped shut, jaws flexed. Even when he smiles, his lips look defensive. Truthfully, I’m not sure what I want to do more, mother him or kiss him.

  Beep.

  It’s not a duck; it’s the pager he wears on his belt. “Damn,” he says, checking the readout. “I’ve got to return this call.”

  “Go. I’m fine, I’ll just sit here.”

  “Sure? Might take a few minutes.”

  “No, go. You’re a busy man.”

  Luckily I have ducks to distract me when he leaves. It’s so tempting to touch th
em. Two could easily sit in the palm of my hand. I would be a bad duck raiser, they’d make me their mama in the first five minutes of their lives. I want to touch one’s little bill, find out if it’s soft or hard; I love the two tiny nostrils at the top, on either side of the most delicate bend. Their eyes must see two completely different worlds, they’re so wide-set.

  I must have some ducks.

  I get up to check on the hatchlings, but nothing’s changed. The heat in here is starting to get to me. I step outside for some air.

  The grown-up ducks waddle away from me or jump in the creek, burbling along between its low, grassy banks. Butterflies, buttercups, smell of fresh earth. Through the willow-tree leaves, I can see a mountain in the distance, another one hazy behind it, and a third hardly at all. The muted colors go from jade to amethyst as your eye sweeps the range, and then there’s the blue, blue sky.

  Farm life. It has its ups and downs, I imagine, like any other life, but the satisfactions must go very deep. Tending the land, growing something from nothing, working the soil with your hands. The simplicity. I must tell Owen that my mother’s grandparents were farmers. In Lithuania. They grew beets and potatoes.

  Rex is barking again, a monotonous repetition of the same boring, bored pitch. Following the sound, I come upon a small, upright platform made of plywood, the bottom half stained red. It has two red canvas conelike things nailed to it upside down. What could they be? I go closer to find out.

  Halfway there I freeze in midstep, front foot poised just off the ground. I must look pretty silly. That’s not red canvas. It’s bloodstained canvas. I know why the cones are upside down. Owen sticks the ducks in headfirst. The feet probably protrude from the top when they’re snugly in there, their wings immobile. Do they quack? Unlikely; they’d be too terrified. They don’t know what’s coming, but I bet they can smell the blood. He chops their heads off, I suppose, and lets them bleed into the ground. What does he use, an ax, a hatchet? He’d make sure it was razor sharp—he’d want it to be quick.

  What I hate most is that there are two cones, for efficiency. So one duck always dies and one always knows it’s about to.

  I’m conscious of my hypocrisy as I shrink away from this killing place, a knot of revulsion cramping my stomach. “What did you think,” I mutter, “what did you expect?” Meat and laying, that’s what Owen said, but I only thought of eggs. The sunny side of farm life, baby animals, milking contented cows. Owen’s cattle, down in the lower forty or wherever they are—they’re beef cattle. I eat steak. I eat duck.

  I watch my feet—my sandals and pink toenails look idiotic to me now on the trampled grass—and take the path back to the house.

  Owen’s talking on the telephone in the kitchen. Old-fashioned kitchen, everything almond yellow, lots of rooster-themed bric-a-brac, pineapple stenciling around the low ceiling. It’s as if his mother stepped out a few minutes ago to set the table in the dining room.

  Owen holds up one finger, not to shush me but to say he’ll be finished soon. It’s a business call, something about kilocalories and the optimum ratio of phosphorus to calcium in gluten meal. He circles the finger in the air, which I take to mean “Make yourself at home, look around, go anywhere.” Good: I want to explore.

  The house smells old, like a vacuum-cleaner bag that needs changing. In the living room, the floorboards creak at every step under worn sculpted carpet, two shades of green to match the flocked wallpaper. Heavy curtains with elaborate swag valances hang over mottled sheers at the front windows. The television’s new, though. It’s huge, one of those projection screens that take up half a wall. The couch across from it is plaid, well-worn, with cushions stacked at one end. I picture Owen sprawled sideways, flicking through hundreds of channels beaming in via the satellite dish on the roof. The local paper and the TV Guide clutter the coffee table, and plastic wrappers by a dish of hard candy, a can of Pepsi with a glass of melted ice on a coaster. A coaster. That gets me.

  An old pump organ sits near the unused front door, its dusty top covered with photographs. In their formal wedding picture, Owen and Danielle look equally nervous and uncomfortable. I recognize her from pictures I’ve seen at Cottie’s, but she looks younger in the wedding shot, vulnerable and childlike. Scared to death, actually. Not a good start for a marriage, but then hindsight is everything.

  Except for one picture of Owen with the Benders—he in his army uniform, practically bald, Cottie and Shevlin vigorous-looking in their fifties—all the photos are of Danielle, either by herself or with little Matthew. Here she’s in Owen’s kitchen, lazy-eyed, saluting the photographer with a can of beer; here with Matthew on the back of a horse, his thin arms clutching her waist from behind. Here a formal pose in front of an enormous yellow forsythia, high as it is wide, in her Easter Sunday navy suit and white pumps. She wears her dark hair shoulder-length but short on top, a style I’ve always disliked. She’s pretty. I think of her as a blonde, so there’s always an instant of surprise when I see a picture and remember, no, she’s brunette.

  I never gave Owen the deer-in-headlights photo he took of me that day in my kitchen. It turned out about the way I expected. If I had given it to him, I know one thing: It wouldn’t be among these pictures on top of the pump organ. This is a shrine to Danielle.

  I don’t know if she’d make him happy, but if she were here she’d wake this house up. This wouldn’t be a shabby, lonely, one-man room anymore. Owen wouldn’t fall asleep on the couch and wake up in the middle of the night with his clothes on, mouth sour, some kickboxing tournament playing on the giant TV screen. I think of her as a blonde, and I thought of him as a strong, sure man with endless resources and a soft-spoken, rock-solid self-confidence. But I believe he’s as sad and alone as any of us.

  “Stay for supper?”

  He’s so big and solid, yet he moves so quietly. He stands in the doorway with his fingertips in his pockets, watching me. I feel like a snoop, an unmasker. But it’s myself I’ve unmasked. I make my living with my eyes, and I’ve been looking at a complicated man through only one or two facets of a prism that has more sides than I can count.

  Why do we feel so frightened when other people’s marriages fail? That’s what Mo asked me. “Can’t we learn? Don’t we see?”

  I know why. Because we want it so badly. We’re not blind, we see people screwing up right and left, we know the odds are miserable. We want it anyway. If you were stranded in the desert you’d still want water, even knowing there isn’t any. We want love, a lover, because otherwise it’s too lonely. To care for someone else, to toss your lot in with theirs, to make their burdens yours, to try to make someone else happy, to have that be part of your job—it keeps your heart from darkening.

  “Thank you, Owen. I don’t think I will.”

  twenty-one

  Once, when Chloe was four or five years old, I let her come into my darkroom while I was working. This was strictly forbidden, a taboo we had reached a grumpy understanding on after innumerable serious conversations and corrections. I don’t remember why I relaxed the rule on that day—a Saturday, Andrew’s day to mind her while Mommy did a million other chores that had backed up during the week and sometimes, rarely but sometimes, got to play in her darkroom. Maybe it was the sweetness of Chloe’s knock on the bathroom door, the poignancy of her entreaty, the fact that I was in the process of printing pictures of her recent birthday party and she knew it—whatever the reason, I broke the law and let her come in.

  “Don’t touch anything, honey. In fact, don’t move. Put your hands in your pockets and just stand still.”

  “Stinky,” she pronounced the room, wrinkling her nose. She loved the red light. “But I can’t see,” she complained when I got back to work at the enlarger. Good; I wanted it to be boring, so her lust to see what went on behind the tantalizing closed door would go away and leave us both in peace. But then, I also wanted her to understand the process as much as she, my ceaselessly curious child, wanted to understand it. I put my left arm arou
nd her waist and picked her up.

  “Look. See how the light shines through the negative onto this paper and makes a…?”

  “A…”

  “A positive.” It was a photo of Chloe blowing candles out on her cake. Needless to say, she was spellbound. I managed to time an exposure one-handed before I set her down. “Now, watch.” The best part, gently swishing an eight-by-ten sheet of blank paper in a tray of developer and watching an image form. Absolute magic. It’s what it’s all about.

  Chloe took it in studiously, matter-of-factly. It wasn’t magic to her. She was a child; everything was magic. All phenomena were at once amazing and just what you’d expect.

  I had a system: developer on the toilet seat, stop bath on the toilet top, water in the sink, fixer in a tray on the edge of the bathtub. Very ergonomic; all I had to do was pivot. I was washing my miracle print in the sink when I heard a whoosh, followed by a shrill wail. Chloe had pulled the tray off the tub edge and drenched herself in fixer from the chest down.

  Andrew’s footsteps pounding up the stairs. Me calling, “Wait a sec!” Andrew flinging the door open. I couldn’t help it, I was still in darkroom mode, it was a reflex—I yelled, “My papers!” I’d left the box open; Andrew had ruined them. They were expensive.

  We had a terrific fight, Chloe screaming through most of it. “The fumes!” he kept saying. “She could’ve been burned!” No, she couldn’t have, but he blamed me so unkindly, so eloquently, and he was completely right—that was the ghastly part. I’d broken the rule out of foolishness and thoughtlessness and vanity, putting our child at risk. We bathed Chloe in the shower together, by which time Andrew’s anger had gone silent. (Much more terrible.) I could not bring myself to admit guilt yet, but I had no defense, none, so I went on the attack. He was never here, how dare he go all Father of the Year on me, I did everything, I took care of Chloe and kept the house and held down a job while all he did was stoke his ego by being charming nine hours a week to a bunch of undergraduates. We didn’t speak for days.