Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  Watershed

  A DIVER WE KNEW ONCE TOLD US A STORY. We were at a wedding, and all night he had watched us with a curious look on his face. At last, he loomed up from the corner of the tent, already talking, drunk, breathing his winey breath into our faces. You clutched my knee under the table to keep from laughing. The diver didn’t notice, just kept on talking.

  When he was young, he said, he dove to a wreck beside a deep, dark chasm. It was cold down there and in his lights the wreck seemed strange, scabbed with rust, the fish pale and shiny as they darted before him. His dive buddy was a man he had been paired with, barely an acquaintance. That far down, a diver should be wary of nitrogen narcosis, with its hallucinations, its emotional swoops, its blackouts. At one point, our friend turned to make sure everything was fine with his dive buddy, and saw him falling quietly, spread-eagled, into the abyss.

  Our friend had two choices. He could watch the man disappear into the dark, knowing he had fainted and would never awaken before he died. Or, he could set off after him, risking a blackout himself, certain death for both of them. That deep, he gave himself a five percent chance of catching his buddy while he was cogent enough to bring them both to safety. He paused here in his story, looking at the dancers on the floor swaying to “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” We thought he was trying to build suspense. We cried, Well, what did you do?

  The diver blinked and returned to us. Oh. Well, I just dove, he said.

  The water was heavy, and just before his hands touched the other fellow’s arms, our friend began to laugh. It came from nowhere, the laughter, and though he was daring death, he couldn’t help it. He laughed so hard he almost spat out his regulator so he could laugh even harder. But he didn’t. He grabbed his buddy, inflating his buoyancy vest a little. It was only when they rose out of the chasm and into the lighter, greener waters above the wreck that he stopped laughing. He watched the other man awaken behind his mask, open his eyes, confused. As they floated at twenty feet below the surface, decompressing the nitrogen from their blood, they clutched each other. They watched the waves wrinkle and break like silk against the boat’s prow, the elegant blue of the sky beyond.

  I held that guy, said the diver over the empty wine bottles, I held him so hard. On land he’d never have been a close friend. But waiting to emerge into the air, he said, I have never in my life felt a purer love for a human being. I have never loved anybody as much as I did that stupid man at that very moment.

  Without another word, our friend stood and moved off. We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.

  YOU’LL REMEMBER THIS SPRING, how, after the snow melted, the lake rose and didn’t stop rising. March was soggy with rain, April drenched. In the hills, the beaver dams broke and spread diseased water into the rain-slapped lake until it was the color of a bruise. The river couldn’t drain it fast enough, and roared thick and brown over the bridges, carrying the bloated bodies of unwary cows and deer down the current toward Harrisburg.

  By June, our basement walls wept between the stones. Water seeped to ankle level, then to mid-calf. In the corner, the cardboard boxes weakened then broke apart, and when they did they spilled still-wrapped wedding gifts into the murk.

  IT IS STRANGE to find myself living again in our chintzy hometown after fifteen years away. It was a tiny thing, really, that brought me back to stay: a high school friend of ours was getting married last autumn, and I was almost late for the wedding. I slid into the pew with four seconds to spare and was still so flustered throughout the benediction that I began to tear the program into tiny pieces. I may have ended up shredding a hymnal or the offertory sleeves, or even my own hem, had a man’s hand not reached over into my lap and gently took hold of both of mine, and held them still until the end of the service.

  I stared at those strange hands until it was all over. I could do nothing else, and they were large, callused, with swirls of dark hair below the first and second knuckles, neat nails and pretty moons in the nail beds. Very strong, very warm. But I didn’t dare peek at their owner until the bride, beaming, swooshed back down the aisle in a cloud of lily scent and Pachelbel and lace. Then I glanced at you and had to quickly look away. You were almost too handsome, though I know now that’s not how you strike most people. What, to others, was a too-big jaw and too-ruddy cheeks, a prominent forehead, the blue shadow of a beard under freshly shaven skin (I could smell the cream you’d used), was, to me, breathtaking.

  Hello, Celie, you said, grinning.

  Hello, I whispered.

  You cocked your head. You don’t remember me, do you?

  No, I said. No.

  Well, you said, and stood when everyone else did, and took my arm. Your date gave a dismayed squeal (I remember her only as a brown silk frill, some kind of gold shoe that was kicked at me after she grew drunk at the reception), but we ignored her. We walked out of the warm church and under a hail of rice that wasn’t meant for us; we went over the hard-frosted grass and through the first door we could find, the rectory, empty. You plucked a piece of rice out of my hair, and leaned me up against a stained-glass window depicting John the Baptist, baptizing. A cloud slid back outside and in the brief burst of sun, your cheek was dyed red and yellow and blue. I hid my hands behind my back to keep them from shaking.

  Think hard, you said. You do know me.

  Nope, I said. Nothing. We maybe went to high school together?

  You gave a little grin and clicked the bridge of your four top teeth out of your mouth so that I was staring through a great gap at your pink tongue.

  I was startled and drew away against the cool glass. And then I laughed, with wonder. My God, I said, it’s you. You sure have grown up, I said.

  Boy, have you, you said. And like that, four front teeth in your hand, you kissed me.

  YOU WERE A FRIEND so old I had forgotten about you. The little boy down the street, but a year younger than I, and my brother’s buddy. So, invisible. Still, there are family pictures you snuck into, and I was there when my brother judo-kicked you in the mouth by accident and you lost those front teeth. You were there the day of my eighth-grade cotillion, and said nothing when I came down the stairs in my royal blue satin and sparkles, just ran off to do what seventh-grade boys do behind locked doors.

  I loved books like people; I liked real people less. You were wild and left clumps of mud from your soccer cleats everywhere. I sometimes tried to speak all day in perfect rhyme. I will take some flakes to break my fast, I’d say in my poetically gauzy nightgown, For that alone is a fine repast, and my siblings would groan and my father snort into his coffee, and the little neighbor boy who was always hanging around would give me a bright, shy smile.

  You didn’t laugh much, but when you did it was a goosey honk you never quite lost.

  My parents weren’t from this village, had four graduate degrees between them, and expected their children would do the same. My siblings—a doctor, a lawyer, an architect—left and only returned to visit. Before I came back I was a professional storyteller, a glamorous title that means a life of public libraries and wailing children and minimum wage.

  Your family has been rooted in our village for six generations and though not poor, were not well-off, either. Your father is the town’s florist and a hard, mean man; he’d replace the twelfth rose of a bouquet with baby’s breath to cut costs. Your mother, a housewife who clipped coupons. You came home after two years of college to buy a snowmobile store, which turned into an ATV store in the summer.

  All that time, you said, you never forgot me. There were many dates, many girlfriends—a ridiculous number—but they were never serious. Because, you said, there I was, riding along with you all that time. A leech, a lamprey, a fluke.

  I went off into the world and if I ever thought of you, it was as a small child, hair sticking up everywhere, a snot-bubble in your nose, that peculiar wedge-shaped face. A brown
little boy in too-short jeans. I remembered an androgynous shirt you wore then, a cheery blue with a rainbow on the front. At one end of the rainbow, a beaming sun. On the other a white cloud spilling rain down your spindly, wriggling, little-boy rib cage.

  EVERY MARCH OF MY CHILDHOOD, my father would uncover the pool to reveal the greasy green water, still frigid with winter. There’d be frogs kicking toward the gutters, masses of insects, dead leaves. One year, when my mother was away for the evening and I was about seven, he gave us a dare.

  Whoever can stay in the water longest gets five bucks, he said, laughing, figuring thirty seconds would be enough. We stripped down and climbed in, careful to keep our heads dry. My little brother got out immediately; cold wasn’t his thing. My older brother and sister lasted two minutes, then came out muttering retarded this, retarded that. In the end, the only ones left were you and me, and though I was a princess I was fierce. I would die before I’d be beaten by a younger boy, a boy whose nipples were turning purple, whose whole skinny body was shuddering.

  I hope I would have gotten out had I known what five dollars meant to you then. To me, it was another book from the bookstore that I’d half-understand; to you, it was a birthday present for your little sister.

  Twenty minutes in, my father was no longer amused and had begun to have visions of the emergency room, explaining to the mothers and his doctor colleagues why, exactly, two kids left in his care were hypothermic. He said, Enough, blinking quickly behind his thick glasses. We were both blue and quaking. But I was laughing because you went up the ladder first, and I thought that made me the winner. My father held the fiver in his hands and seemed for a second about to be Solomon, to rip the bill in two.

  It’s okay, you said, still shaking under the warm towel. Celie can have it.

  It’s yours, said my father, handing the bill to you. You earned it.

  I began to squawk and my father said, Hush, hush, you’ll have one too, as soon as your mother gets back and I can get it from her purse. Then he gathered us both up under his arms and carried us in and dumped us unceremoniously in the shower. Don’t tell your mothers I let you do that, okay? he said, looking abashed.

  Okay, we said, but when my father left, I stared angrily at you as you lost your blue and began turning pink under the warm water. I won, I said.

  We both won, you said. You’ll get your money when your mom is home.

  It’s my dad’s, I said. His money and my pool, and I should get it first.

  You shrugged and soaped yourself, singing a little song.

  I climbed out and dried off, and, seeing the wet wad of a bill on the sink, took it.

  At dinner, you said nothing about the missing money. Even when you started sneezing you said nothing; even when my father dug into my mother’s purse to give me a five (the other bill wadded wetly in my underwear, imprinting my skin), you said nothing. When I took the money from my father’s hand and ran away from the table and to my room and locked my door, you didn’t come knocking, and the next time I saw you, after the fever that had kept you from school for a week subsided, you still said nothing.

  Years later, I asked if you remembered this.

  Of course, you said. It was one of the great traumas of my childhood.

  You should’ve punched me, I said. I was such a jerk.

  You were you, Celie, you said. I couldn’t have been mad. Even then, you were beyond my anger.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, my life began with Once upon a time. I didn’t have a passion when I graduated from college, and I floated from profession to profession: bartender, newsletter editor, grant writer, finally a temp. I liked the anonymity of temphood, the office supplies, the interchangeability of one cubicle with the next, but was an atrocious typist and had no math skills at all. When I was kept on for a long time, it was because the workers had gotten to like me, despite my lack of ability.

  One morning my temp coordinator called me about a job: a literacy fair in Cambridge sponsored by a fruit company. The afternoon storyteller had gotten sick in the hundred-degree heat and I was to fill in. I’d have to wear a banana suit all week, she said. I laughed and said, No way. She laughed and said, Forty bucks an hour; I laughed and said, Call me Banana.

  The first two days were hell, the suit soggy with the morning storyteller’s sweat before I even put it on, the children whinging, my stories duds. But on the third day, magic happened: I began spinning a story and the children stopped fidgeting, their parents leaned forward in their seats, and I was able to forget the sweat streaming down the inside of the suit. The story carried me until the cool evening wind rose and the heat scaled back and the children went home, one by one, small pools of sweat where they had sat, entranced, for hours. When I took off the banana suit that evening, soaked and weak with elation, I had found what I was meant to do.

  Storytelling is simple: selecting a few strands from many and weaving them into cloth. My life was retranslated, made neater. The tale of the neighbor boy and the pool became an epic of redemption: in retelling you became older, charismatic, quick, a bully; you became the robber of my shivery winnings, and I was the wounded little stoic.

  AT THE WEDDING RECEPTION the day I rediscovered you, years after we had left childhood, I don’t think I ever found my table or had a bite to eat. We were at a teahouse in a private garden right on the lake, and the stalks of summer’s plants were brown and frostbitten. In the dusky fog, every dead plant seemed imbued with meaning, which I thought I could decipher if I only concentrated hard enough. We walked in the clammy dark garden, listening to the music and voices from the teahouse, sometimes talking, sometimes not. When dancing started, we came into the bright house and danced, too, my cheek only as high as your shoulder. Your date kicked her shoe at me, and was escorted away by the brother of the groom; the bride chortled and threw her pretty arms around us, squeezing us, telling us she loved us, loved us, loved us. At the end of the night, after the garter, the bouquet, the slow slipping away of the guests, we were the last ones in the teahouse, urged by the tired father of the bride to turn out the lights when we left. We laughed in the wreck of the feast, and sat down on a bench.

  There are only a few moments in every life where the world becomes entirely real: that night, the lake, the fog, your face so startlingly near, crystallized in me.

  You took my foot and rubbed it. So, you said. Do they have snowmobiles in Boston? Because I’m going where you are.

  Oh, that would be a mistake, I said, too quickly. I’d had a thought of my tiny apartment, the marmalade cat I’d taken to help a friend, a nasty squalling beast I hated. I imagined you, hulking and strange, inserting yourself into my solitary life there.

  A cloud settled over your face and your hands fell from my foot. In your scowl, I recognized the little neighbor boy, and it felt the way it did when I began to tell that first real story in the banana suit, a good weight, deep within.

  You don’t understand, I said. I touched your cheek. I’m staying here, I said.

  I WAS THIRTY-TWO then, thirty-three now. I’m a feminist if they’ll still have me, though from the way my friends reacted when I told them that I was staying in my little hometown it seems doubtful I’ll be welcomed back into the fold.

  A friend from Boston, a tenured professor in anthropology, said, Good God, Celie. “Stand By Your Man” is only a song—you’re not supposed to take it literally.

  A friend from my years in Philadelphia said, But what are you going to do in Podunkville? (I don’t know.) How many people live there? (Twelve hundred.) Do they even have a movie theater? (No.) Aren’t you going to die of boredom? (Possibly.)

  A friend from my years in Wisconsin said, suspiciously, I thought you always said you didn’t believe in marriage. Catering to the hegemony, yadda yadda. Wait a second; you can’t be Celie. Who are you?

  But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She w
as the one who’d picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was humane to everyone but me.

  When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell.

  And, after that: Hallelujah.

  I AWOKE IN YOUR APARTMENT over the pizzeria to the sound of eggs cracking on a metal bowl. I called my mother so she wouldn’t worry, and whispered where I was. She let out a whoop and, delighted, said, Nice job, honey! That’s one good-looking boy.

  You came back in then, holding an omelet, coffee, toast. When I bit into the omelet later, my teeth would grind against eggshells and the coffee would be harsh and overbrewed. But at that moment, it looked perfect.

  I said, Let’s fly to Las Vegas and get hitched.

  You deposited the tray on the bed and folded your arms, frowning. No, you said.

  Oh, I said. I flushed and looked away, now doubting everything: the night before, the brilliant morning, the man standing before me in the too-small robe.

  Oh, no, you said, sitting down. I’m going to build you a house, then we’ll get married. I already have the land ready to go.

  You said, without any irony, Every bird needs her nest.

  I felt dizzy, spun back to a time when this may have been an appropriate thing for a man to say; I wanted to protest, or at least to scoff a little. But something in me felt like a bubble popping, the fear I’d carried around under my sternum, the ugly balloon that expanded a breath with every passing year, the one in the shape of the word spinster.

  So I said, Oh. Well, then, yes. A nest sounds nice.

  It was my fault that I didn’t say what I should have: that I wasn’t the bird type, or maybe the nest type. To watch out, to think this over carefully, because it wouldn’t be easy.