Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  BLYTHE AND I TOOK SHOPPING trips with the children, long walks, and soon we began to spend mornings in our separate houses on speakerphone to read a poem aloud (me), and to talk about additions to pieces (her). She’d been to the galleries downtown where she’d seen performance art for the first time, and she wanted badly to create her own. Blythe’s new subjects were fanged, bloodthirsty: insanity, suicide, adultery, incest, masturbation, wanting to kill her own children. She wrote things so internal they still had the slick and beat of an organ when they came from her.

  “Listen, Harriet,” she’d say. “I know what I want to do so well. I want to mix my words with movement, you see? Visuals. Public, not static. In the moment. I want to crack open the words so people can step in. I want to give them to you, not just present them on a paper. I want whole rooms full of naked women smeared with blood, you know?” Her voice was hushed, and we held the moment until a child shrieked somewhere. The silence broke, and Blythe laughed at herself, at her solemnity, at my speechlessness.

  Blythe was making up what she was doing as she went along. She began to work with food, smearing the dark red jelly her mother made on her face as she chanted; making an igloo of the housewife’s best friend, frozen peas, and saying a long prayer-poem; shoving a grape into her mouth with each new line of a dialogue about her sons so that she almost choked herself at the end. She showed me her food log, hardbound sketchbooks in which she had noted every morsel that passed her lips from age fifteen to twenty-one, which stopped abruptly when she tried to kill herself for the first time (aspirin, in her parents’ pool house, she said, with a low laugh). She watched me as I read parts of it, growing nauseated at the annotations beside the biggest binges: Nasty, nasty, hog beside three cheeses-teaks and a case of Coke; Filthy bitch beside entire red velvet cake.

  “I want to use these,” she said. “I’ll record these entries and play them over a loudspeaker and eat an entire picnic of food in front of people until someone throws up.”

  “Jesus,” I said, which sometimes seemed like the only thing I could say.

  I admired how Blythe used her body, the shock of her, but there was too much Milton and Frost in me for my own stabs at such dramatics to be anything but undignified. While Blythe created new pieces at a fevered pitch throughout the summer and fall, I wrote of gardening and politics, of sense and memory, of things safely domestic. I saved the secret thrill of transgression for Blythe’s work, proud to help her birth her strange little creatures, because it was midwifery. I was the one to contact the galleries, to drive Blythe to the theaters, to call the press, to organize. I was the woman behind the camera for the videos of her performances, Blythe’s very first audience. All the while I scribbled poem after poem in the ragged notebooks I salvaged at the end of my daughters’ school year, and only dared to show Blythe the best.

  SOON THOUGH, BLYTHE BEGAN to sleep very little and ate nothing, sipping only what she called her “magic potion,” a Bloody Mary with extra vodka. I could see the ridges of her back through a cardigan. And in November, fourteen months after we’d met, there came another midnight call. Blythe was sobbing this time: “I’ve finished the best, I’ve finished Darkling. I’ve made a sculpture of alphabet pasta, I am going to eat it. I’m going to eat my words. I need you to organize it.”

  I had just nursed the babies through the chicken pox and was exhausted. I closed my eyes to the bluelit bedroom and leaned against my pillow. “That’s wonderful, B. I’ll do my best,” I said as Sam cursed into the mattress.

  Blythe gave a half-wailed, “Oh,” and put the phone down. I waited again at the front door, shivering with chill, but this time there was no squeal of tires or Blythe spinning merrily across the lawn. This time, there was a heavy silence all night and into the next few days, then a call from Pritch a week later, on Blythe’s birthday. The girls were out gathering armfuls of leaves from the lawn. I pressed my hand to the glass, as if to protect them, when he asked me to watch the boys for a week. Blythe had had another break, he’d said, and under his words, I understood that something terrible had happened. My core felt frozen, and I began to shiver.

  “It was so strange, Harriet,” he said. “She was wearing this disgusting lace dress that she’d had since she was nine. It’s this horrible thing she couldn’t even zip up. As if that was part of a formula. Vodka, pills, dress. So strange. Such a goddamn cliché.”

  I said soothing things, but mostly to keep myself from panicking, from throwing the phone across the room. He seemed calm, but when we’d already said good-bye, he said, “I forgot.” Now his voice seemed just on the edge of breaking. “Some big gallery downtown wants Blythe to come and do her newest piece. Darkling, I think she’s calling it.” Then, hesitant, “I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen anything she does. I won’t understand it, I’m not artistic, but I think I need to. Do I, Harriet? Should I look at the videos you made? Or should I read the work? Would that help?”

  A long, cold moment passed before I could react. In one performance, Blythe had made a net of Pritch’s ties, and, catching herself in it, entangling herself, gave a monologue in which she used the lines “and wives are made / for fucking.” In another, she’d smeared red jelly across her face as she delivered a poem about one of her abortions. I had to turn away from my girls, whose hands were full of leaves burning red and orange, in the thinning afternoon. “Oh, Pritchard,” I said. “No, I really don’t think you should.”

  All afternoon, watching the four children playing a board game, I couldn’t shake Pritch’s quaver out of my ears. I had been a bad friend. I had been too busy with my own life; I hadn’t taken care of Blythe. I could have stopped her free fall, if only I had been paying more attention. I knelt and buried my head in Bear’s mop of hair, ferociously breathing in his musky boy smell. Never, never would I make that mistake again, I promised. I would stop the despair the next time it came around and the next and the next, however long it took.

  THAT WINTER AND SPRING I LEARNED the dark strain of recovery. Blythe at the hospital; home, but not allowed to be alone with the children; crying, gray and languid; then suddenly, as if infused with someone else’s blood, in a gallery, creating Darkling for a solemn audience. It was a long and painful piece: Blythe singing the same poem to herself as she ate the woman-shaped sculpture of alphabet noodles, until her voice cracked and her lips bled and she sank to a squat. She had insisted on performing it until Pritch and I had both caved in. When we did, she dimpled, kissed us both on the cheek, and we were charmed, despite ourselves.

  Her slow recovery was sped by a front-page write-up of Darkling in the Arts section of the Inquirer. The reporter, a recent women’s college graduate, said her whole world shifted when she saw it. “Through Cantor’s work,” she rhapsodized, “we see the plight of the housewife in contemporary America, pulled between the competing obligations to her family and a career of her own, the sad legacy of women’s liberation in this new decade of ours. It is a terrific sight, and one this reporter won’t forget for a very long time.”

  After that, Blythe still spoke in a little-girl voice at times, still clutched me too hard around the waist. But for long stretches, weeks at a time, she donned a personality she’d concocted for the reporters who came to interview her: brash, chain-smoking, hinnying like a horse, raw with sex. I liked this new Blythe. I was afraid of her. She appeared so hard, though all the while, if I was in the room, Blythe held my hand and stroked it.

  I adored her, even during those dark hours when she’d turn herself off, slip vegetative into her sadness. I saw her vision, and it shook me. What talent I had was quiet and web-like, a connecting of seemingly scattered elements, while Blythe imprinted herself upon the world with a grandiosity that awed me. She had a vast generosity, a daring charm. She brought armfuls of Gerbera daisies into my house because, she said, they were beautiful and I was beautiful in the same way, ruddy and angular and strong; she mixed me drinks until we were drunk by the pool in the early afternoon; she slipped off her hee
ls with the gold buckles and handed them to me because I loved them. She laughed when her boys turned to me with a wound, and allowed me the pleasure of comforting them. Those boys, with their translucent little faces, their wariness, the way they sidled up to me shyly whenever I was around, broke my heart.

  One day, in late summer, in the ladies’ room at the zoo on an excursion with Blythe and the boys, Susan looked up at me with a grave frown as I tried to wrestle her pants up her legs. “Mom,” she said, “which kid do you love most: me or Mackenzie or Blythe?” And though I felt terribly guilty later, at that moment I only stared at my littlest and broke into a surprised roar, and didn’t end up answering my daughter at all.

  THOSE FIRST FOUR YEARS I had only seen Blythe’s mother once, though Blythe and I were more like sisters than friends. I doubt Blythe had ever truly told her about our friendship. The old crone was fearsome. I discovered this only by accident; one day I’d hurried through a department store with my hands full of bargain goods—Mackenzie needed shoes, money was tight—and I saw Blythe at the café with an older woman. They were dressed in suits identical save for their different shades of blue. The older woman was Blythe with a thinner face, gray hair, a wicked bauble on her finger, and she was avoiding her daughter’s hungry stare by addressing her remarks to the embossed tin of the ceiling.

  I approached, eager to introduce myself, but stopped when I heard the mother’s voice. It was clipped and cold. “Shameful, really,” she was saying. “I must speak out: your sisters fear you, you know, and Pritch is useless. Why would you wallow like a pig in your episodes? Why? I tried to come to one of your performances, you know, and couldn’t stay for more than a minute. So dark and ugly. Why must you insist on making yourself so ugly, rubbing things all over you, saying those horrible things? Blythe, darling, we all wish you wouldn’t, you know. They’re no one’s business. Your boys will never get away from them. You will end up making them just like you, and I, well…It’s simply unfair,” she said.

  Her webbed eyes fell from their focus and she saw me standing behind Blythe, staring at her. I was holding Mackenzie’s hand so tightly the poor child was squirming. Blythe’s mother pursed her lips and narrowed her dark eyes, which were so like my Blythe’s, but hard where her daughter’s were liquid. I suddenly felt so dirty and ugly and vulgar with my cut-price shoes that I turned and fled, despite Mackenzie’s whining, despite my own curiosity. And from then on I couldn’t help grimacing whenever Blythe spoke of her mother, because she always did so in a voice redolent with love.

  BY THE TIME MY GIRLS were in school I had stopped writing poetry. Blythe was already making great waves with her pieces, and in the maelstrom of her success I began to lose my love for my own poems. I make no excuses for myself: had I been a real poet, her fame wouldn’t have affected me at all. I would have kept on writing my quiet things, sending them out, collecting the rejections and rejoicing in the few acceptances. But under Blythe’s reflected light my poems seemed so paltry and meek. I kept my love for poetry in general and for the more serious fiction I was reading in gulps, and it was this love that made me return to school for a Ph.D. in English. I would still be thinking deeply of writing and art, would still be doing what my poetry had been doing, trying to connect distant pieces of the world and draw them closer.

  I could never tell Blythe why I had stopped writing: she needed the fiction that I was there solely for her. “Without you, Harriet,” she’d cry in her exuberance after a performance, “I’d be nothing, nothing.” We both knew it was true; only I knew it was bittersweet, and that before making my decision, I spent long nights at the kitchen table, my eyes sandpapered with sadness.

  The day I was accepted at UPenn, Sam said, “You, Harriet, are going to be the most overeducated mommy in the world,” and I couldn’t tell you then why that statement seemed to suck the air right out of me.

  Her new celebrity made Blythe grow first indiscreet, then downright flippant, about her lovers. She even invited her most recent beau to a February party she threw to celebrate her new artist’s grant. He was a florid Montana painter, tall and moustached, so full of himself that he didn’t seem to notice the inappropriateness of his presence or the poisonous way Blythe grinned at Pritch all night. As at all of the Cantors’ parties, there was too much whiskey, too little food, too loud house music. Their parties had such an air of permissiveness that inevitably some actor would paw his pretty-boy date in the corner or some matronly woman would disapear conspicuously into the bathroom with a man decades younger than she was.

  I should have put a stop to Blythe’s display, I knew. But I was drunk, loving the silver bangles that chittered on my wrists when I danced, celebrating my own minor victory: I’d just had my first book review accepted for publication. So I thought, Yummy, looking at the cowboy-painter, instead of I’d better go stop this nonsense, which was more like me.

  Just before dawn the second-to-last couple staggered out with the Montana painter to give him a ride home. Sam and I were left to pick up the empty glasses and clean the ashtrays and turn off the music. In the new silence, Pritch’s and Blythe’s whispers boiled up into shouts in the kitchen. Sam seized my arm, pulling me to the door, but I shook free to listen.

  “Had to bring him here, in front of our goddamn friends. In our goddamn house with our goddamn children sleeping upstairs,” Pritch said.

  “What do you want me to do? I can’t touch you, Pritchard. You make me sick,” said Blythe. There was a horrible sound of hand against flesh, a fall, a shattering of glass. Sam and I ran to the kitchen. Blythe was sitting in a pile of broken tumblers, bleeding from her hands and clutching her left cheek.

  Before we could rouse ourselves, Pritch bent down and scooped her up as if she were light as a doll. Blythe buried her face in her husband’s chest and threw her arms around his neck, murmuring, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” Pritch gave me a stern look, then turned away, carrying Blythe upstairs. Sam cleaned up the blood, the glass, as I stood there, burning. We let ourselves out into the dove-gray dawn in silence, clutching each other’s hands with all the force we could muster.

  Yet, when we were safe in bed that morning, I resisted sleep. All night there had been a strange lightness in me, and as I listened to Sam’s breath, I imagined vivid impossibilities. A dark bathroom, the heartbeat of a party downstairs, tile cold against my hands and knees. One silky moustache tickling my ear.

  I NEVER GREW USED TO BLYTHE’S CRUMBLINGS, or how they could come along so suddenly. One happened before my eyes when we were thirty-eight, and Blythe had been manic for quite some time. She’d put a great deal of weight on her bones and though the lithium had given her odd twitchings, weird darts of her tongue, it made her skin glow and her sore chapped lips swell and ripen, a postcoital look.

  Throaty, glittering, these were the years she was performing naked, glorying in her thick body, in her shame. She sat in a bathtub made of ice as she said, And the sweet wet slide of my son into water / a dive / how he beats like a pulse before bursting / into air. Severe, incantatory, she made an electric chair of willow rods as she repeated, Give us the brank / give us the switch / we are all witches / we terrible ones.

  Blythe was still the darling of New York, of London, but I saw that she had begun to repeat herself, that her vision had narrowed, that she was growing only more extreme, not more subtle. I tried to tell her, but even small criticisms were treason to Blythe. She would shout so much that I learned to stay quiet and watch. I thought she would do what she wanted to no matter what I said; that I would be a better friend by being purely supportive.

  The night of her collapse she was in an elegant gray silk suit, flushed and victorious from a performance that held the critics in thrall: these were her AIDS years, and she had black male models and white female models walking in a tight room, brushing up carnally against one another. Blythe was in the center, touching everyone who passed by like an enormous, ravenous spider. Afterward we had returned home to her Merion house, and she
thrust open the French doors so the sunset threaded her bob with veins of bronze. In that moment, she had transformed into a figure of bliss. She turned to speak to me, to hold my face in her hands and kiss me on the forehead in her excess of joy, when the phone rang and she went to it, all a green-eyed dazzle.

  Her face fell and she said “No” in a very low murmur. She grew pale, seemed to shrink, and her eyes darkened until they were black. The moment after Blythe hung up the phone and just before she looked at me and spoke of her mother’s sudden death, I couldn’t find my friend in her transformation into a dull and bloodless woman.

  That was her most decided collapse yet. She grew querulous, fought more. She grew plumper, then outright fat, though her new flesh was creamy and somehow beautiful, making her even grander. Pritch stayed away from the house for as long as possible, as did the boys. Tom and Bear turned my rec room into a foot-smelling sanctuary for themselves, and they slept there, on a bunk bed I’d bought them, more nights than not. Once, despairing at her weight while Pritch was on a business trip, Blythe trashed all the food in her house, and the boys had no meals for a whole day until Tom called me, crying. She even turned on me when she seemed strong enough to do something bad and I stole her pills. She would throw glasses and lamps, whatever was at hand, until I fled.

  It felt inevitable that I would come upon Blythe lying on the hideous dress on the sofa, senseless, so I was calm when I called the ambulance. Blythe had shouted at me when she awoke to the hospital’s buzz and bleachy sheen, “How dare you, Harriet? How dare you? You’re not my friend,” and she refused to talk to me for the three weeks she was in the hospital. Then one day she called to chat as if nothing had happened.

  Those years I awoke at night many times in a panic of sweat, having dreamed of falling. Such constant urgency began to feel routine, Peter and the Wolf on repeat. I began to ignore the histrionics, and a few times refused to come to the phone when I sensed Blythe was on the other line and only mildly insane.