Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  Only during the day was there peace, a gentleness, when the mother would fill the bath with tepid water and for hours the two of them would be still, suspended, there. All afternoon, the baby’s little rear bumped against her mother’s belly, the tiny shoulders tethered to the dry land of her mother’s chest, and in the buzz of the baby’s grapefruit skull was the sweet release of familiarity. Together, they would float and breathe and stare at the hieroglyphs the smoke made on the ceiling until it was time for the meatloaf, the gelatin salad, until it was time for the mother to spritz herself with lily-of-the-valley perfume and crack open the beers.

  Some nights, the parents, still so very young, put the baby in her stroller and propped her up with cushions. There, the baby watched the two planets in her universe swing each other around the dance floor of the kitchen, pink and sweaty, giggling, smoking, drinking. She laughed as the parents turned the radio up and up some more until it was very loud, and only began to scream when it hurt her cockleshell ears. She laughed until the father tossed his wife into the air too high and she hit her head on the ceiling; she laughed until the mother stumbled, drunk, and the father pushed her away, disgusted.

  The baby grew, and learned soon enough that, though they looked sweetly chewy, her toes were not for eating, that when a father puts his little finger in one’s mouth, gumming was fine, but practicing new teeth was not. She learned when one flailed one’s sausagey arms against the linoleum, one could scoot forward. Such fun! With a snaky movement of the belly, then a lifting movement of the knees, she could perambulate along nicely. She could grasp the little fuzzies that spun around under the couch, she could take the hard bits of corn from under the stove and suck happily upon them as her mother looked at the same page of a movie magazine, staring like this, for hours.

  THE BABY WAS SICKLY, whooping with coughs, quaking with colic. Even so, it took her no time at all to ignore her sickness and grin with nearsighted delight at any balloonish face that loomed above her stroller. Invariably, the faces said, What a beautiful baby!

  And the young mother would sigh and say, Oh, well, she’s pretty now, but her hair’s darkening already. She’d say this, stroking the velvet head, but in the nighttime, she would stuff envelopes with pictures of the girl and send them off to baby food companies. At last, she won a spot on a can of formula for her lovely girl, which the family kept on the mantel-piece for decades until some rodent gnawed the label where her face had been.

  Only Joe Helmuth, who’d had the foresight to have a framed picture made from the label, had any proof of her starring role on the formula canisters. Darling girl, you’re a dandy little thing, he’d say to her, mouthing a cigar under his peppery moustache. He’d puff and regard her from his height, his boxer dogs snuffling under her skirt. Darling girl, you’re my formula baby, and he’d pull a silver dollar from her ear. As she squealed with pleasure, he’d say, I’m going to marry you, you know. Only have to wait me some sixteen years or so. And he’d give her a dashing grin until she fell over on her love-weak legs.

  But soon, another creature began to grow in the mother, sucking all energy right out of her, and so the girl learned to totter then run when the mother was taking her afternoon naps. There was a terrible emptiness inside her then, a sickness that her mother used to soothe by her presence alone. Now, she sang to herself, but the songs didn’t sound right; she licked the cranberry-glass goblets in the china cabinet to see if they tasted red, but they didn’t. And so, rattling alone in the dim house, the girl learned to take off her dress, to slide button through hole, ribbon-end through the bunny-ears of the bow, because the frills and the starch of her dresses were harsh on her skin and she liked the sweep of air much better. And when the mother was weak in bed, and the father snipped violently at the hedges outside, she learned how to take off her little patent leather shoes and her lacy socks and her big-girl diapers with the pink-nubbed pins. She took off her dress, but left the red hairbow in her rag curls. And then she stood in the bay window that gave out onto the busy, sunny streets, the postman coming up the walk, the boys playing dodgeball with a flabby ball, the mothers pushing their babies in their strollers, the little girl stood there and pressed her belly against the cold glass like a sunbleached sand-dollar. She pressed her hands against the glass until they turned into suction cups holding her there. She stood in the window, nude and happy.

  But a boy saw her and began to scream with laughter, holding the red rubber ball against his chest, pointing. The other boys began hooting. The mothers covered their smiles with their red-nailed hands, made little shooing motions, and the postman, talking to the father, turned and guffawed. In her pleasure, all the people in the glass laughing, the little girl laughed, too, sending out bell-like peals of joy. She was excited, fizzed to the bone, and clutched her crotch because she had to pee, which only made the boys laugh harder.

  Then her father looked up from the hedges, grew pink, and stormed inside, still holding the clippers, so that, for a moment before he grabbed her roughly by her fat forearm, she thought he was going to snip her in the way he snipped the hedges, and she was afraid. She opened her little mouth in a round O and narrowed her eyes and sirened with alarm.

  When the father spanked her, she screamed so loudly he thought he was doing her great harm. After he put the diaper and the dress back on and shoved the shoes roughly on her betrayed little feet, he held her so tightly she panted, kissing her until the mother came down from the nap, bleary-faced and asking groggily what had happened.

  WHEN THE GIRL WAS BIG ENOUGH to open doors and steal into rooms where she shouldn’t be, she peered through the bars of the crib at her small brother, who looked like the baby rabbits that Fritz, the collie, found and ate in the yard. He smelled of celery, of urine, of baby sweat. He looked at her with his pink and quivering face, opened his mouth in a rictus of joy.

  You, she accused, are ugly. He reached out his tiny hand and clutched at her nose, sliding his earthworm fingers into her nostrils, grinning his bare-gummed grin. She put a thumb into his mouth and he clamped down on it, and his tongue was hot and squirmy. Some small warmth hatched in her, and for a moment, she forgot the sick feeling that she had felt since her mother was fat with him, since he came home. She sighed. It’s okay, she said, taking his fingers out of her nose. You can be ugly. You’re a boy. He let out a cackle, as if agreeing, then the sick feeling returned to her.

  Girl things were beautiful. Beauty was in girl things. Pretty, she breathed as her mother lifted the charlotte pan from the quivering dessert. Beautiful, she said to her face in the puddle when she took the red berries from the chokecherry and smeared the juice across her lips. Lovely were the dance lessons, the little pink leotards and tutus that made her look like a carnation. There was a lot of jumping and leaping and twirling, and the girls told secrets and pulled their leotards from the necks to show their nipples and sat in the middle of the lesson to cry for no reason. The girl scorned such behavior; she did not sit and cry, and for that reason, for the performance, she was the one chosen to be the purple butterfly when everyone else was pink. Her mother spent all night on the clacketing sewing machine creating her wings, vast and fluttery, with wire supports. When she wore them she was a butterfly, and at night she would crawl from her sleeping body and go spinning out the window over the rooftops of her neighborhood, flapping about with her spangled wings, looking down upon the daddies like her own, weaving home on the sidewalks and singing slurredly, the mothers like her own in the kitchen, in curlers, in housedresses, flipping through magazines, cigarettes in their downturned mouths. Above their unsuspecting heads, the girl spun unseen in the dark sky, so beautiful, so very beautiful.

  She loved the wings so much she wore them on her first day of school. But the wings were crushed when she went out to play on the monkey bars and one boy twisted them savagely. Stupid, he said, You’re not no stupid butterfly, you’re just a girl. She said, I am so, you monster, I am so a butterfly, and she threw her shoe at him and ran away,
one-shoed. When her mother came to get her, fat again with yet another baby, she clung to her mother’s knees and choked until she vomited. The prettiest thing in the world, her wings, now dead, now gone, now crushed. Pure sorrow.

  For consolation, her mother let the girl wear her Hershey Queen tiara and the girl fell asleep with it glittering on her head that night. Her baby brother patted her foot with his dumpling hand, the warmth of his flesh against her foot extraordinary, sweet.

  SHE WOULD NO LONGER PLAY on the playground for fear of dirtying her dresses and her father spanking her for it. He had begun to spank her for anything: for talking at dinner, for quarreling with her brother, for hiding the booze when he staggered home at night, calling out to his wife to get her ass down here and help him upstairs, goddammit. Her mother would stand at the top of the stairs, her arms folded over the new baby girl, who looked like a monkey with a bad overbite. She would sigh and finger her sausage curls and send her eldest daughter down, and the girl would sit on her father’s lap as he drank the whiskey that, under threat of the belt, she had miraculously found in the pie safe for him. Her back would vibrate under the great warm thumps of his heart, and he would kiss the back of her rag-bound head, kiss without stopping, kiss long after she fell asleep on his lap.

  The one day that she wore an old brown dress to school in order to go out for recess, the boys pushed her against the chain-link fence, tied her there with her own jump rope, and lifted her skirt, chanting, I see London, I see France, I see Dummy’s undiepants, and the girls shrieked with laughter, and she stood there, furious, kicking at the boys as they gyrated around her. When they set her free, she decked the biggest of them with a swift fist until he cried into the dirt, then she ran off into the classroom. She refused to take recess for the rest of the year, stopped talking in class or singing in choir, shook her head when the teacher asked her to read from the Little Bear book, although she read very well.

  Because she wouldn’t speak, the teacher brought her parents in for a conference in the shiny green classroom. Her father’s face was knotted when they went out, but they all went for ice cream, and the girl was sucking a mouthful of strawberry delight when her mother leaned forward, with her smell of lily of the valley and cigarettes. Oh, honey, she said, patting the baby calm, tugging at the brother’s tether so that he wouldn’t wander. Oh, my little princess, you’re going to stay back a year. The teacher says you’re behind. Your teacher says you’re a little slow, honey. It’s okay, some people just take a little longer than others. You understand? You have to stay back.

  And the terrible shame in the girl, the way the blood rushed before her eyes, turning her sight dark. The strawberry ice cream souring in her mouth. She did not want it, gave it to her little brother, who smeared it over his sailor suit, and let a passing dog gobble it up.

  Then the father said to the mother, as if the girl weren’t there, Don’t worry, honey, she’ll always have her looks, at least. Squeezing the mother’s knee, winking at her.

  When the mother frowned her carmine lips, the girl said, No, I am not slow. But even though there was a scream inside her, a feeling as if her stomach had had holes punched into it and she was pouring out, she said it so softly that nobody else heard.

  ONE DAY WHEN SHE WAS TEN, the father came home early and sat at the table, head in his hands, drinking straight from the whiskey bottle, which he never did, not even when he staggered home late at night. The mother banished the children to watch the cowboy program on the television set while the parents’ voices rose in the kitchen. I don’t care…the girl heard, What are we going to do…the girl heard, Jesus Christ, why didn’t you get your tubes tied…she heard. There was shouting and the girl turned up the television, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown it all out. When the front door crashed, the mother came into the den. Go to bed, she ordered the brother, grabbing the girl’s hand so that she would stay. Take the baby with.

  We got to brush our teeth? said the brother, and the mother sighed. No. Just put your sister in bed, and the little ones went away, and the mother turned to her daughter, and, wordless, put her kerchiefed head in her lap, burying her face on her skinny legs. As the girl stroked her mother’s fine hair, she tried to keep down the thing that was rising in her stomach, and the mother kept saying, Oh God, can you believe? Lost his job. Now! Of all times. Stupid drunk, she said. Oh my God. The mother’s cigarette trembled in her lips until it ashed itself all over her daughter’s legs, but the girl did not move them under the tiny burn.

  This was how the littlest baby of the four was born a little clammy and a little dull: every few weeks her father wobbled home late at night and the girl awoke and listened to his curses below, and at school her cheeks were flushed with all that she held in. Her little brother wet his bed, her little sister ate from her diapers, her mother swelled up, pale and bloated, and the neighbor ladies asked curtly for their casserole dishes back. The girl was not surprised when the mother sat everyone down and unveiled the sleeping face of the new child. She had heard it on the playground. She knew it as a truth: Mongoloids come, she understood, from a lack of love in the family.

  ON SATURDAYS THAT BAD WINTER when she was twelve, the girl pushed the three littlest in the swings at the park when her mother was in the church basement, waiting for a boxful of dented cans and dandruffy cake mixes. At home, there were endless projects, her mother bent over the sewing machine crafting trousers out of curtains, remaking some little Anabaptist’s dress into something the girl wouldn’t hate, perhaps even a skirt the other girls would finger with envy, wondering what boutique it was from.

  She was picturing exactly this one day as she watched her brother and sister whip one another with willow branches in one of those sordid little parks beside the more generous churches. The spade-shaped duck pond was filled with cigarette butts and little plastic jellyfish she was too young to know were condoms. The girl was pulling her cold fingers through her curls to keep them from knotting, shivering in the sharp March wind. That was the year she didn’t have a winter coat, pretending that three old cardigans and a scarf and some mittens spelled warmth.

  She turned her head and he appeared, the young man with thinning hair and irisless eyes and round red cheeks like a doll’s. Those cheeks were why she didn’t scream when he stood close, closer, why she sat on her bench, frozen, looking up. She didn’t move when he opened his trousers and out popped his little worm and he brushed it, hot and silky, against her neck. And then he gave a breathy giggle as her brother shouted at a duck at the far end of the park, and the man pushed the worm back in the pants hole and hurried away over the desolate grass. She watched him go, holding her breath, clutching the bench so hard she felt as if she broke her hands. At home, in the pink bathroom, she scrubbed at her neck with the guest soaps in the shapes of curled nautili, scrubbed until she scrubbed that spot bloody and, eventually, scabrous. That night, sleepless, reimagining the hot brush on her neck, that gulf the girl carried around inside of herself widened with a terrible dull roar. When her daddy came home, silent and sober, the dangerous fire in his eyes snuffed when she shied away from his kiss. He looked at his eldest daughter, her pinched averted face, her bad shoes. I suppose I deserve that, he said, softly.

  A DAY CAME WHEN THE GIRL RAN HOME, eyes kindling with excitement. There was a teacher in school who would teach the girls to be twirlers, with fire batons and everything! The mother frowned, put down her cigarette, and stood, arms akimbo, pushing the new baby in his rocker with her foot. Sparked by the girl’s excitement, the brother raced out of the room with a Mohican ululation, the little sister did a shimmy to the music on the radio. The mother had to look away when she took a deep drag and, letting it out through her nose like a dragon, told her daughter, No, my pretty one, you know we don’t have the money for baton lessons.

  The girl struggled with the bitterness that stirred in her. Trained as she was by now, she didn’t open her mouth. She bowed her head. Set the table.

  It was the face the
girl made, sharp as a needle, that the father saw when he looked up through the steam of his sauerkraut and pork supper. And the next day, old Joe Helmuth came into the kitchen with one hand behind his back, his favorite bitch clicking along behind him. He leaned over to whisper in his stepdaughter’s ear. Her puffy, once-pretty face lifted, broke into wonderment. She clutched his hand and put her cheek on it, wordless.

  Then old Joe Helmuth looked at his stepgranddaughter as she pinned the hem on a dress across the table and asked her what she thought he had behind his back. She guessed a silver dollar, but the hand came out waving a baton in saucy imitation of a twirl. Give your old granddaddy a little kiss, he said, and she did, a big one, and didn’t mind his scratchy moustache or the way his lips lingered a half-second too long on her own.

  Now the father worked at the kennel all day, mucking the dog shit from the concrete floor, no matter that he had two years of college, no matter that he had once been a government employee. And with the father at work so long, the mother was able to finish her chores before supper, and the girl had time to practice. Lordy, did she practice. She took that hollow ringing in her and twirled it away, twirled in the basement in the foulest weather, when her hands stuck to the metal in the cold and she could not practice on the lawn. In her bed at night, her fingers flicked imaginary batons in the air. She sent batons spinning up like whirligigs into the night sky, batons flipping around her body like ions to her atom, batons spinning about her like glittering wings. She twirled through her legs and over her body as if her batons were her very own limbs. The mother paused to watch her daughter practice out the kitchen window and plum forgot to bread the chicken. The father took her in the early mornings to the far-off competitions, drinking coffee from a thermos as she snoozed against the car door, and praying a little to his forgotten God before she marched onto the field.