Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  IT WAS LATE WHEN I CAME HOME because we sat around after we ate, as if waiting for something to happen. At last, Tim stood and said, “I’ll escort you out, Lollie?” and I had the brief and thrilling fear that he was going to ask me to the Winter Dance. But Tim only opened my car door for me, then pulled off, his old Volvo spitting up smoke. I drove home over the black ice and into the driveway of our cottage on Eagle Street.

  My mother’s car was gone, and only one light was on in the kitchen when I came in. Pot was sitting in the half-shadow, looking at me with a tragic face.

  “Potty?” I said. “What’s wrong, honey?” Her little face broke down until, at last, her eyes filled, huge and liquid, with tears.

  “I wanted your food to be warm,” she said, “so I put up the heat. But then you didn’t come home, and it burned a little, and so I put it down. And then I got scared because you still weren’t home, and so I put the heat up again, and now it’s all ruined.” She poked the foil off the plate, and her lip began to tremble.

  “Oh, I’m so, so sorry. We went out for Chinese,” I said, looking at the charred remains of the chicken and couscous my mother had saved for me. I hugged my little sister until she began to laugh at herself. Then I said, “Petra Pot, where’s Mom?”

  She frowned and said, sourly, “The Garbageman’s.” We called our mother’s new boyfriend The Garbageman, though he was actually a Ph.D. in garbage science and owned a lucrative monopoly on trash removal in the five counties surrounding ours. He certainly didn’t look like a garbageman, either, being fastidious to the point of compulsion, with his hair combed over a small bald spot on his head, his wrists doused in spicy cologne, and the beautiful shirts he had tailored for him in Manhattan. Though Pot hated him, I was ambivalently happy for my mother’s sudden passion: since we lost my father, she hadn’t seen anyone, and this, I privately assumed, had made her as nervous and trembly as she had been in recent years.

  When I say we lost my father, I don’t mean he died: I mean that we lost him when we were on a sabbatical in England, in the bowels of Harrods department store. This was back when Pot was five and suffering acutely from both dyslexia and ADHD. Her inability to connect language in her head, combined with her short attention span, frequently made her so frustrated she didn’t actually speak, but, rather, screamed. “Petra the Pepperpot,” we called her, affectionately, which was shortened to “Pepperpot,” then “P-pot,” then “Pot” or “Potty.” The day we lost my father was an exceptionally trying one, as, all morning, Pot had screamed and screamed and screamed. My dad, having coveted the Barbour oil jackets he’d seen around him all summer long, had taken us to Harrods to try to find one for himself. But for at least fifteen minutes, he was subjected to the snooty superciliousness of the clerk when he tried to describe the jacket.

  “Bah-bah,” my father kept saying, as that’s what he heard when he asked the Brits what kind of jacket they were wearing. “It’s brown and oily. A Bah-Bah jacket.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk returned indolently. “I’ve never heard of a Bah-Bah.”

  Thus, my father was furious already when my little sister fell into an especially loud apoplectic fit, pounding her heels into the ground. At last, my father turned on us. His face was purple, his eyes bulged under his glasses, and this mild-mannered radiologist seemed about ready to throttle someone to death. “Wait here,” he hissed, and stalked off.

  We waited. We waited for hours. My mother rubbed her thin arms, frightened and angry, and I was sent to the vast deli in the basement for sandwiches. Cheddar and chutney, watercress and ham. We waited, and we had no way to contact him, and so, when the store was about to close, we caught a cab back to our rented flat. We found his things gone. He was in a hotel, he said later when he telephoned. He had arranged our tickets home. My mother shut the sliding doors in the tiny kitchen, and Pot and I tried to watch a bad costume drama on the telly, and when our mother came out, we knew without asking that it was all over. Nowadays, my father lives in an Oxford town house with a woman named Rita, who is about to have their first child. “Lurvely Rita, Meeta-Maid” is what my mother so scornfully calls her, though Rita is a neurologist, and dry, in the British manner, to the point of unloveliness.

  But the evening of the Lucky Chow Fun, my father wasn’t the villain. My mother was, because who leaves a troubled ten-year-old alone in a big old house in the middle of winter? There were still a few tourists in town, and anyone could have walked through our ever-unlocked front door. I was filled with a terrible fury, tempted to call her at The Garbageman’s place with a sudden faux emergency, let her streak home naked through the snow. And then, after some reflection, I realized I was the villain: my mother had thought I’d be home by the time she went out, Pot had said.

  Stricken with guilt, I allowed Pot to take me upstairs to her own creepy ornithological museum. In the dark, the birds’ glass eyes glittered in light from the streetlamps, giving me the odd impression of being scrutinized. I shivered. But Pot turned on the light and led me from bird to bird, solemnly pronouncing each one’s name, and giving a respectful little bow as she moved on. At long last, she stopped before a new addition to her collection, a dun-colored bird with mischievous eyes.

  Pot stroked its head, and said, “This is an Eastern Towhee. It goes: hot dog, pickle, ickle, ickle.”

  “Neat,” I said, feeling the gaze of the gyrfalcon on the tenderest parts of my neck.

  “Hurry, worry, blurry, flurry,” Pot said. “Scarlet Tanager.”

  “Cool,” I said. “I like it. Scarlet Tanager. Hey, you want to watch a movie?”

  “Quick-give-me-a-rain-check,” giggled Pot. “White-eyed Vireo.”

  “Pots, listen up. Do you want to watch Dirty Dancing? I’ll make popcorn.”

  “If I sees you, I will seize you, and I’ll squeeze you till you squirt,” my baby sister said, grinning so hugely she almost split her chubby little cheeks.

  I blinked, held my breath. “Uh,” I said. “Where’d you get that one, Pot?”

  “That’s the call of a Warbling Vireo,” she said with great satisfaction. “Let’s watch The Princess Bride.”

  My mother was up before we were in the morning, flipping omelets and singing a Led Zeppelin song. “Kashmir,” I think. She beamed at me in the doorway, and when I went to her and bent to kiss her on the head, she still stank of The Garbageman’s cologne.

  “Ugh,” I said. “You may want to shower before Pot gets up.”

  She looked at me, frowning. “I did,” she said, pulling a strand of her springy peppered hair across her nose. “Twice.”

  I took a seat at the table. “That’s the power of The Garbageman’s scent, I guess,” I said. “Indelible. He sprays you like a wildcat, and you belong to him.”

  “Elizabeth,” my mother said, sprinkling cut chives atop the egg. “Can you just try to be happy for me?”

  “I am,” I said, but looked down at my hands. I wasn’t sure what I was happy for, as I had never been on a date, let alone done anything remotely sexual, and it wasn’t entirely because I was fat. The hard truth was that nobody really dated at Templeton High. Couples were together, or broken up, without really having dated. There was nowhere to go; the nearest theater, in Oneonta, was thirty minutes away. And though I suspected there was some sexual activity happening, I was mystified as to how it was instigated.

  My mother took my hand in a rapid little movement, kissed it, and went to the stairs to shout up for Pot. My sister was always a furious sleeper, everything about her clenched in slumber—face, limbs, fists—and she never awoke until someone shook her. But that morning, she came downstairs whistling, her hair in a sloppy ponytail, dressed all in white, a pair of binoculars slung around her neck. We both stared at her.

  “I am going bird-watching on the nature trail,” she announced, taking a plate. “I’m wearing white to blend in with the snow. Yummy omelets, Mom.”

  “Oh. Okay, Honey-Pot. Sounds good,” said my mother, sitting down with her ow
n coffee and plate. She had decided when my father left to be a hands-off parent, and went from hovering nervously over everything I did to allowing my little sister the most astounding latitude.

  “Wait. You’re going alone, Pot?” I said. I glared at my mother, this terrible person who would let a ten-year-old wander in the woods alone. What would she do when I was in college, just let my little sister roam the streets at night? Let her have drunken parties in the backyard, let her squat in the abandoned Sugar Shack on Estli Avenue, let her be a crack whore?

  “Yup,” Pot said. “All alone.”

  “Mom,” I said, “she can’t go alone. Anyone can be out there.”

  “Honey, Lollie, it’s Templeton. For God’s sakes, nothing happens here. And the nature trail is maybe five acres. At that.”

  “Five acres that could be filled with rapists, Mom.”

  “I think Pot will be fine,” said my mother. She and Pot exchanged wry glances. And then she looked at the clock on the microwave, saying, “Don’t you have to be at the gym in fifteen minutes?”

  I stifled my protest, warned Pot to take the Mace my mom carried as protection against dogs on her country runs, and struggled into my anorak. Then I stuffed a piece of toast down my gullet and roared off in my deathtrap Honda. When I passed the Ambassador’s mansion, I saw him coming up the walk, back from the Purple Pickle Coffee Shop, steaming cup in hand, miniature schnauzer on a lead in the other, and they both—man and beast—were dressed all in white, with matching white pompommed berets. Curious, I thought, but that was all: I was already focusing, concentrating on the undulations of my body through the water, envisioning the hundred butterfly, watching myself touching all the boys out by an entire body length.

  IN THE GRIMMS’ STORY “Hansel and Gretel,” it isn’t the witch in the gingerbread house who is the wickedest character, as the poor wandering siblings easily defeated her with their small cunning. Rather, the parents of the children were the ones who, in a time of famine, not once, but twice, concocted the plan to take their children into the dark forest and leave them there to starve. The first time, the children dropped stones and found their way back. The second time, the forest gobbled up their trail. The witch did what witches do. The parents were the unnatural ones. This speaks to a deep and ingrained fear: that parents could, in their self-interest, lose sight of their duties to their children. They could sell them to the dark and dank wilderness, send them to the forest, let them starve there. And each time, those two little children, hungry for home, came struggling so bravely back.

  BUT NOTHING HAPPENED TO POT THAT DAY, and we won Regionals, as nobody could dent our team that year. It was late when we returned, and I was reading Bulfinch’s Mythologies for the nth time, under the red exit light in the back of the bus. I was marveling over the tiny passage on Danae: Daughter of King Acrisius of Argos who did not want her to marry and kept her imprisoned because he had been told that his daughter’s son would kill him. Jupiter came to her in the disguise of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus. She and her child were set adrift in a chest and saved by a fisherman on the island of Seriphos. There was something so haunting in the story, drama packed so tightly into the words that images burst in my head: a white-limbed girl in a dark room, a chink in the roof, the shower of gold pouring over her dazzled body; then the black chest, the baby squirming on her stomach, the terrifying rasp of the scales of sea-monsters against the wood. A story of light and dark. Purely beautiful, it seemed to me, then.

  I was daydreaming so happily as we trundled over Main Street that I didn’t at first notice what was happening until one of the freshman boys gave a shout. The bus driver slowed down to rubberneck as we went around the flagpole on Pioneer Street, and I saw it all: all eight of the town’s squad cars up the hill to our left, all flashing red and blue in syncopated bolts, glaring on the ice and snow, and the ambulance with the stretcher being swallowed up inside it, the running police, the drawn guns, the Chens, both Fat and Glasses, up against the Lucky Chow Fun’s vinyl siding, arms and legs spread. A huddled ring of the Lucky Chow Fun girls on the steps. I could pick out the girl with the jagged haircut, her arm around a plump girl with hair to her waist.

  “Ohhhhh. Shit,” breathed Brad Huxley in the seat before mine. And then the bus passed the scene, and we rolled down Main Street toward the one stoplight in town. From there, the hamlet looked innocent and pristine, a flurry of wind-blown snow turning the streetlights into snow globes, icing the trees. Over the hills, the March moon was pinned, stoic and yellow, reflected in pieces on the half-glassy lake.

  We were already halfway up Chestnut Street, silently looking out the windows, when someone said, “One too many cases of food poisoning?”

  And though it wasn’t funny, though we all had the flashing red and blue images lodged firmly in us somewhere just under our hearts, we—all of us—laughed.

  I SLEPT LATE ON SUNDAY, into the afternoon. I never sleep late, and I know what this means: the worst cowards are the ones who refuse to look at what they fear. When I went downstairs, my mother and sister were still in their pajamas. Though Pot was almost my tiny mother’s size, and twice her width, she was cradled on my mother’s lap, sucking her thumb, her other hand up in her infant gesture to stroke my mother’s ear. They were watching television, the sound off. I stood in the door, looking at the screen until I realized that the snowy roads I was seeing on the television were roads I knew as intimately as my own limbs, that the averted faces of the men on the screen were men who knew me well, who followed my swimming in the paper, who thought nothing of giving me a kiss when they saw me. Hurrying down the snowy streets now, shame on their faces, shame in the set of their shoulders.

  Then came the faces of the Chens—stoic, inexpressive—and the scared faces of the Chinese girls, ducking into Mr. Livingston’s limousine. He was my ninth-grade history teacher, and his limo was the only car in town large enough to hold all the girls and their lawyers at once. That car drove legends of baseball all summer from museum to hotel to airport. It drove brides and homecoming queens for the rest of the year. Now it was driving the Lucky Chow Fun girls wherever they were going. Somewhere, I hoped, far away.

  I went to the television and turned it off. I stood for a minute, letting the swell die down in my gut, then sat beside my mother and said, “What happened?”

  And my mother, who always made a point of being frank about sexual matters, describing biological functions in great detail so that her daughters would never be squeamish or falsely prudish, my mother turned scarlet. “Sit down,” she said, and I did. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She bit her lips.

  Pot said, pulling her thumb from her mouth, “The Lucky Chow Fun’s a whorehouse.”

  “Pot,” said my mother, then sighed. She looked at me, her thin mouth twisting, patting my thigh. “She’s right,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “Wait, what?”

  “Last night,” my mother said, slowly, as if trying to order the fragmented truths, “one of the girls at the Lucky died. She was locked in her room with her sister—seems they were being punished—and there was some kind of accidental gas leak. One of them died, and the other one almost did, too. And one of the other girls who knew a little English called the police and tried to leave a tip before the Chens found out. But there are not too many poor speakers of English in this town. The police figured it out. They arrested the Chens.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. I thought of the little huddle of the Lucky Chow Fun girls the night before, flushed red and blue in the flashing lights, how quiet they were, how I never saw their eyes. I never looked. “Mom,” I said. “Who were those girls?”

  My mother brushed Pot’s hair out of her eyes and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to hesitate, then she said, “They were bought in China and brought over here, it seems. They were poor. They worked in sweatshops. The Chens gave money to their parents, promised a better life. Apparently.”

  “Slaves,” I said.<
br />
  “On TV, they said that, yes,” said Pot, stumbling over her words. “And some of them, they said on TV that some of them, they’re younger than you, Lollie.”

  We sat there, in silence, thinking about this. My mother at one point stood and made us some cocoa, but for once, my tongue tasted like ash and I wanted to take absolutely nothing in. I was sick, could never again be hungry, I thought. At last, thinking of Chen Fat glaring at me over his notepad, the sticky smell of the food, Brad Huxley, the delicate girl with the chapped lips, I said, shuddering, “Do they know who visited? Do they have names?”

  “Well,” said my mother, who paused for a very long time, “that’s almost the worst. The Chens wrote down the names of the men who visited the Lucky Chow Fun.” It was hard to hear her, even in the preternatural stillness of the town on this day, even in our snow-muffled house. “They had a ledger. They made sure to write in English. The reporters said that they were going to blackmail the men who visited. Apparently, it’s not just tourists. Apparently, a lot of men from the town went, too.” She looked at us. “You should know. Some of the men you know, some you love, some of them may have gone.”

  And there was something so uncertain in my mother’s face, something so fearful it struck a note in me. I looked at the clock over the mantel: it was already four o’clock, and my mother hadn’t left the house yet. Unusual: she was the only person I ever knew who could never sit still. Especially now, when she was dating The Garbageman, for whom she often cooked most meals and who, by this time on Sunday, had usually called our house to chat for hours, as if they were silly teenagers in love.

  “Oh,” I said. I looked at her face under her mop of curls, the weary circles around her eyes. “The Garbageman call today?”