Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  In the end, it was volleyball that was her daughter’s steady passion, the sport for leaping Amazons. The mother sat in the honeyed high school gymnasiums, the college gyms, and watched the stony look come over her daughter’s face with every stuff, dig, kill. In the stands, the mother touched her ravaged calves. She was still so lovely in her increasing years, her hair dark now and straight, her lips glossed, eyebrows grown out to a normal thickness. When the ball shot toward her girl, the mother leaned forward and waited.

  She saw her daughter’s thigh muscles bunch as she readied herself for the jump; she saw one beautiful summer night at her parents’ years ago. Her children had been tiny then, running around with glass jars to collect the fireflies, her retarded brother was singing a song under his breath. Tang of daiquiri in her mouth; lick of cigarette smoke curling into the night; scent of the middle-aged chokecherry pricking her eyes. She ran inside and dug in the basement for her fire batons and came out onto the lawn, setting her mother’s lighter to the ancient ends, flinging them one, two, three, four, into the air so they spun into the starred sky, one after another, outglowing the stars. She saw herself reflected in the faces of her family, twirling, the children spellbound; she saw how they looked at her with surprise.

  In the warm glow of the gym she closed her eyes to imprint her daughter upon her eyelids, stilled her in midmotion. As the game went on, she held her daughter leaping. A wonder, this girl, who knew already how to catch herself.

  Blythe

  THE YEARS BEFORE BLYTHE WERE A KIND OF beautiful limbo, sticky with juice boxes, scented with leaf mold at Wissahickon Park where I walked the babies, book-ended by the hordes of Catholic schoolchildren in their uniforms who flitted down the hill in the mornings, drawn by the ponderous bells, and dispersed in the afternoons like handfuls of moths. Sue and Mackenzie would press their faces to the window and watch the children pass with toddlers’ fixed awe, and I would watch my girls and think with a fierceness I still sometimes feel, Not yet. When I’d remember the law firm where I was supposed to return to work, panic like a cold finger would press my heart, and I’d think the same thing: Not yet, not yet, not yet.

  My husband tells me I romanticize those years, that in reality I was lonely and wept a lot and complained about betraying my principles by being a lowly housewife. He claims I called the girls little vampires, sucking the life out of me with their constant need. His version would explain the electric jingle of my nerves the day before that first poetry class, why all afternoon I caught the girls watching me carefully, as if they were afraid I’d suddenly explode. The class that evening seemed at once the most difficult thing I’d ever attempted and the most immensely silly. It was, of course, Sam’s idea. I had been absently filling scraps of paper with the words that bubbled up in my brain as I cleaned the house, and Sam had found them, and enrolled me in the class for my birthday.

  “Harriet Buxbaum,” he scolded after I’d refused his gift. “You have talent. And you seem so tired. Your very soul seems tired.” True, I was deeply tired, but I believe I would have skipped the class entirely had Sam not come home that night with a weary pale face and a briefcase of papers he still had to wade through before sleeping. I kissed him, smelled the law firm on his skin, and was chased out of the house more by a desire to never return to that life of codicils and affidavits than by anything else.

  On the drive from Manayunk to the University of Pennsylvania that night, the streets seemed made of wet tar, and inside the building the corridors smelled of mushrooms and raincoats. I was in such a flutter of panic I could barely clutch my pencil or look at the other students in the circle about me. All I wanted was the warm effacement of home.

  When the room had filled, the teacher, a slight man with a quivery Vandyke, began rustling his papers and hemming to begin. Before he could, though, the door opened again. A subtle shifting in the chemistry of the room; like everyone else I found myself looking toward the doorway. There, smiling, stood a fashion model. Surely a mistake. I waited for someone to tell her that the life-drawing class was down the hall, but the woman stepped inside. She was tall, her dark hair shot with copper and studded with tiny white flowers.

  This was Blythe Cantor, extremely thin back then and making one of her brilliant entrances. She looked nothing like anyone I had ever known; my familiars were floury types, wholesome and good. My friends, my family, potato knishes all.

  “Poetry?” Blythe said in a husky voice.

  “Yes,” said the instructor, pulling at his bowtie. “Please, sit.”

  Blythe glided across the room to fold her long self into a chair beside me. I felt resentful at the scent wafting from her, cigarette smoke and perfume like some overblown peony about to shiver apart. When I looked at the frumpy people about me, I knew this woman had no right to be in the room. We were serious poets. She could be only a dilettante. A WASPy poetaster. She seemed raw in the way silk can be raw, and still shimmery, elegant.

  That’s when I felt my ambitions begin to solidify, if only to defend them against fakers like this woman.

  So I fumed until the teacher began to speak, and Blythe leaned over to me, green eyes brilliant with tears. She whispered, “Lord. Lord. I am so very frightened. You’ll be my friend, won’t you?” It was only when I smelled bourbon on her breath and watched one of her flowers unpin itself and fall down her collar that my heart fell for her with a decided plunk, the sound of a stone dropping into water. I squeezed her hand. Blythe wouldn’t let go, not throughout the entire hour, though I had to take unruly notes with my left hand, or even afterward in the beer-stinking undergraduate bar where we’d fled after class was over.

  I had planned on going home directly after class—I knew Sam was waiting for me—but that night seemed to ring with a new kind of freedom, and so I followed her. The bar was so dark that at first all I could see of Blythe was a series of sparkles: eyes, necklace, glossy lips. We perched on our stools, and, over the first round of stingers—her choice—we found out that our children were the same age. She lived in Merion, a place that evoked Tudor-style manors and tennis courts and Katharine Hepburn; we were renting at the ridge of a steep hill between Manayunk and Roxborough, where old men would sit on their porches in their wife-beaters and drink homebrewed beer from mason jars. From her clothes it was clear that Blythe had few money worries, while Sam and I lived a series of small economies, our law school debts enormous, my salary gone when Mackenzie was born.

  That night we talked and talked. Even then, Blythe had the ability to look at you as if you were the most stunning person in the world, and I, who had spent years as a ghost, basked in this new sun. We discovered that I had been in law school with a cousin of hers; she remembered visiting my parents’ candy store when she was a little girl; I had an uncle who once worked in her father’s investment company. With every particle of ourselves that we brought up we found a connection, a subtle link. I know now that if one digs enough one can find such confluences with practically anybody, but that night, under the spell of her magnetism, those connections seemed miraculous.

  “Do you know what this means?” said Blythe. “Harriet, we’re destined to be best friends.” She clasped my hand and kissed it. Then she frowned. “I should tell you something before we fall madly in love, of course, which we will. It’s just that I’m probably crazy.”

  “Me too,” I said, tipsy and laughing. “The girls drive me nuts all day long.”

  “No,” said Blythe. “I mean I’ve been in the hospital. I’ve tried to kill myself three times. In July, I left my littlest son in the car and tried again. Bridge. I came home from the hospital a week ago. I’m only in this class because my shrink said poetry is good for me.” She rolled her glass in her hands and gave me a strained smile. “Now that you know, you don’t have to be friends with me. I’ll understand.”

  But my whole good self had cracked open that night like a walnut; I felt fresh. Blythe was so little like me—plain, quiet—that she seemed like hope embodied. Besides
, other than a maniacal professor in college who began hooting like an owl during an anthropology class and had to be escorted from the room, I’d never known anyone who was actually clinically insane. I thought of Sam, my gentle parents, my sensible activist friends. “Oh, Blythe,” I said. “I don’t think there’s been enough madness in my life.”

  Blythe raised one eyebrow. “Careful what you wish for,” she said. Then she grinned and kissed me on the temple and raised her glass so that the liquid swung in the light. She said, “To us.” She downed her drink, wiped her mouth with a delicate pinky finger, and signaled for more with a coy little wink at the bartender.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER ON THE LAST moderate afternoon of the year, my girls and I were paddling around the Cantors’ pool like ducks. It was a chilly day and fog lifted breathlike from the heated water, but Blythe lay on her chaise longue in a bikini that showed off her smooth waist and lovely small breasts. It seemed vaguely obscene to see how eagerly her nipples pushed against the fabric. I tried not to look.

  That day, Blythe’s sons hovered around their mother, small satellites. Tom carefully conveyed ice cubes from the kitchen in silver tongs, to deliver them one by one to his mother’s glass of vodka like an officiant. Bear, the baby, was playing with his blow-up floaty at Blythe’s feet, from time to time patting them as if reassuring himself that she truly was there. Both boys wore a calm film over their faces like plastic wrap. Sometimes when the film slipped I saw fear beneath, and I had to look toward my own babies: Mackenzie, three, strawberried by the sun, pudgy little Susan, a joy.

  I spun Mackenzie in the water and when I looked up, Blythe was blowing twin strands of smoke from her nostrils and frowning at us. “I could never have girls,” she said. “I don’t know how my mother did it. Three girls. Hell on Earth.”

  “That’s awful,” I said. “My girls are sweet. They’re going to be my best friends someday.” Mackenzie squeezed my neck furiously and breathed her wet breath into my ear.

  Blythe smiled, said, “I’m sure. But girls are just so needy. I had to sleep in my mother’s bed until I was almost sixteen. Plus, all the world wants to get into their panties, and you have to protect them, even from their own fathers and uncles and grandfathers. Boys can practically raise themselves. At least with them the Oedipus complex thing is simple. Screw Mommy, kill Daddy. Easy enough.” She laughed.

  The four children all paused and looked at Blythe, but she lowered her glasses and winked at them and stretched like a great sleek cat. They returned to their play. Only I could have taken this seriously, and I wasn’t about to ask her to stop talking like this: nobody I knew was ever so reckless, and it filled me with a kind of ecstatic terror. When I looked toward the kitchen, I saw Pritch, Blythe’s husband, moving behind the window, wearing an apron and making dinner. He was a stocky man with the face of a Boston terrier, condensed features and bulging eyes, and I always expected his tongue to loll pinkly out of his mouth on a hot day. I feared him a little, for no reason I could figure out, and knew if he heard his wife saying such things before the children he would grow angry in his quiet, flushing way. I said, “Blythe. Maybe now’s not the time.”

  “Oh, Harriet,” said Blythe. “We’ve both lived through all that feminist crap, probably even joined some of those clubs.” I blanched: I’d been the president of the Feminist Alliance in college. She said, “You were a lawyer, I did advertising. And here we are, housewives. No matter what we choose to do from now on, that’s what we are. We won’t be taken as seriously as the boys. We’ll be inferior, even if we could write rings around them. Which we can.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “I believe the cream rises to the top.” I really did, back then.

  Blythe carefully put out her cigarette. “Not in America, darling,” she said at last. “Here, the scream rises to the top. Home of the squeaky wheel, land of the knave,” and she laughed, pleased with her rhyme.

  I went underwater to think. When I came up, I pushed my springy hair from my eyes. “Fine,” I said at last. “Then scream.”

  Blythe gave a funny smile. “I intend to,” she said. She stood and walked to the diving board. Bouncing a little, she raised her arms and grinned, and then, despite all of my expectations to the contrary, she gave a rather clumsy dive, shaping herself like a candy cane and dropping deep with a splash.

  I NEVER FELT COMPETITIVE WITH BLYTHE. I was skinny and small and plain, far poorer, far less charming. I’d never been to Europe; I’d never eaten escargot. My mother was from a small village in Latvia, my father only finished three months of college. Blythe’s family could recite all their ancestors since the Mayflower. I was not in the least the magnet for strangers’ eyes that Blythe was, with her stunning looks, her tight clothes.

  Yet, for a long time, Blythe was a horrendous poet, writing song lyrics and thinking they were lovely. I had to tutor her, and I held tight to the small comfort of this superiority. In our class, I was the teacher’s pet, the one who could give moderate critique, the one whose poems he held up to the rest of the class as examples of anaphora, ellipsis, tone. And I would allow myself one tiny lick of judgment, like a child with a secret lollipop, when Blythe would sit across from me in the bar and breathe out the stories about her lovers; the undergraduate’s sweaty garret, the poetry teacher’s lust for clamps and rubber tubing, the way her shrink’s head resident (Blythe’s shrink refused to have sex with her) delighted in the cold examination table on his buttocks. I would never do any of these things myself, but did have a voyeur’s delight in hearing about Blythe’s doing them. In those days she seemed the distillation of life, and I felt some of my own returning, breath by breath, in her presence.

  We grew close, then closer. L’amour fou, Sam called it, with a wry look on his soft face; folie à deux. One night in bed after a dinner party where the tiniest derogation had sent Blythe into a frenzy of sorrow (Blythe’s a princess, someone had said, and her whole face had crumpled), my husband assessed my friend with affectionate exasperation. “Like a Chihuahua,” he said. “Precious, trembling, breakable. She’s skinless, that girl.”

  But I clicked my tongue and pulled my pillow from under his head. “You have it all wrong,” I said. “She’s something wild and sensitive and overbred. Like some Arabian stallion or something.”

  “She can’t be a stallion, she’s a girl. You mean a mare,” said Sam, laughing.

  But I was thinking of the way Blythe seized life with two greedy hands and gobbled, the bell-like laugh, the conviction in her voice when she spoke of her former sadnesses. I said quietly, “That’s where you’re wrong,” and wouldn’t respond even when Sam put a hand on my waist in apology.

  Our class ended, the long winter passed, and in the spring Blythe and I both signed up for advanced poetry. Something subtle had been shifting in my friend for a few months: she had begun to come over during my children’s naps when I tried to clean the house, and sat at the table, twittering gaily about small things until Mackenzie and Susan woke and called to me from their rooms. One cold day she brought over a frosty fistful of crocuses, and while she talked her eyes followed me whenever I moved. I wondered about Blythe’s boys, if she’d left them alone, but knew that she had the money for a nanny. Not even Blythe, I hoped, would leave them alone, I thought, and hated myself for doubting her.

  Then, the phone call in the middle of the night when, in the bolt-upright moment just before the phone rang, I knew it was Blythe, and that there was something wrong.

  “Hello,” I said, but she was already talking, her voice vibrant in the dark.

  “Harriet, Harriet, I’ve done it,” she said. “You have to see.” And before I could respond, I heard her drop the phone, her footsteps running from the room.

  “Sam,” I whispered, putting the phone back in the cradle. “I think there’s something wrong with Blythe.”

  “She’s crazy, dammit,” he muttered.

  I had almost fallen back asleep when I heard the squeal of tires around a corner, and I ran down
stairs in my pajamas. Through the screen I saw Blythe’s car ram the curb and narrowly miss the crabapple in our minuscule yard. The car ground to a stop and, its headlights still on, Blythe burst from the driver’s seat and hurried up the walk. Her hair was wild and her nightdress eerie in the stream of brightness and shadow. I cringed, expecting the lights to come on in the neighbors’ houses, but this was a place used to teenagers’ heavy metal past midnight, where neighbors inserted themselves into marital spats through the open windows of houses. Blythe’s behavior didn’t warrant a dog barking. She leaped the steps and thrust a paper in my hand. “Read it,” she said and gave a little crow. Then she grasped the poem back out of my hand and said, “No. I have to read it. It’s the performance that counts.”

  Blythe stepped down onto the lawn and tilted the paper into the headlights’ beam. She let the paper drop so it floated down, and raised her arms so her sleeves were filled with light. And then she declaimed her poem at high voice. The neighbor’s beagle bayed along with her: she swept her arms up and out of the light, then back in, out, in. She was conducting the midges, the wind along the rooftops, the Schuylkill glimmering at the foot of the hill, I thought. Later I would read the poem itself and think, Eh, but in her mouth that night the words were full of needles and music.

  I watched Blythe, so gorgeous and fluttering in her iridescent nightgown, a winged thing, and said, “God.” I had never been religious, and even if I had been, my God would have been much more ancient and angry than Blythe’s prim Episcopalian one, but still, I sensed the hand of something vast in this swift transformation.

  When Blythe clasped me about the neck at the end, I thought I heard her say something strange over the wind and the idling engine: Oh, Mother. Later I dismissed what I heard and climbed back into bed to fall asleep, happy for my friend.