Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  I understood in those moments all those surreal ancient stories: water flowing upward from earth to sky, rains of blood, plagues of frogs. Abominations or miracles seemed likely in those hours. In the Canticle of the Sun, Saint Francis of Assisi praises God for water: Praised be Thou, O Lord, for sister water, he says, who is very useful, humble, precious and chaste. But I would stand there, my head bowed to the rain, eyes closed, braced between each thunk of each fat drop of rain on my skull, each a blow, hard to predict, a punishment.

  AFTER FOUR DAYS, no sleep, little food, no showering, no improvement in your condition, I began to see things that didn’t exist. Rats scuttling across the floor, gray curtains flapping at the edges of my vision. Infants with your face, beard and all. Many of your friends had returned to their lives, coming to the hospital periodically with grave faces and comforting things in their hands. I paid no attention to them. I was concentrating, as if listening for music very, very far away, which if I heard it, would make everything all right.

  On the evening of the fourth day, my father helped my mother sneak me into the attendings’ locker room, where there were showers. I let my mother bathe me, as if I were a little girl, and put lotions on me, and dress me. Her face was pinched and gray; she looked old, I noticed with surprise. I could have done all of this myself, but I was concentrating too hard on the impossibly distant music.

  You appeared before me in the murk and cold of my mind, your dark body. Over and over again my hands grasped your arm and I began to pull you upward, airward, skyward, again.

  When I was clean it was time to visit. I went in and began to tell stories. I had grown used to this changeling in the bed where my husband should have been, and told him stories he had told me. But I embroidered them, perverted them, willing him to wake up and correct me. The first time he killed a deer, a twelve-point buck. The first time he ever had sex with a girl (Jinny Palmer, on the Fairy Springs docks, in broad daylight). That crazy night in his freshman year in college when those boys did everything they could to get arrested, short of murder or rape, and were never caught.

  Did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm? The flicker across the face? The swallow? Did I imagine you would open your eyes and wheeze out, That’s not the way it went, not at all? Did I hope you’d be angry when you opened your eyes and say, You have the story all wrong, Celie, you have it all wrong?

  I did. I do.

  On the fifth night there was a commotion, running, loud beeping noises. My father was summoned from my side in the waiting room, where he and my mother were spelling each other, and he was gone for quite some time. It was very late and your family was at home, trying to sleep.

  When my father came back, his face was red. Oh, honey, he said. I’m so sorry.

  Just say it, I said, my voice rough with thirst.

  He said, A mistake. Too much drainage. The vesicles collapsed. He’s gone. I’m so sorry.

  Dead? I said, very calmly.

  Oh, said my father, stricken. Oh, honey. Not entirely. But in a way, yes.

  WHEN YOUR FATHER heard he roared. He stomped down the corridor, shouting, We’re suing, we’re suing the goddamned pants off this goddamned hospital, until my brother, home from Boston, slipped a tranquilizer in his iced tea and put him out for a few hours.

  When your mother heard, she pulled herself up and nodded, and went out for a walk that lasted four hours. When it grew dark we sent teams out to look for her and one of your friends found her sitting on one of the boulders at the lake, shuddering in the dusky drizzle, and staring at the swollen water. She was soaked when she came back, and came over to me, lifting her hands like cold wet lumps of paper to my cheeks. She opened her mouth and everyone hushed to hear what she was about to say. But she just breathed and blinked and closed her little mouth again.

  GRIEF IS becoming a stranger to oneself. It is always a surprise to see how old, how womanly, one actually is. The crow’s-feet by the eyes, the lines by the mouth, how, translucent, a woman’s temples bare their tender blue veins to the world. That gold band hanging loose, so much flesh lost over the past few days. Down the empty corridor, ringing with voices and distant sounds of the hospital, steel and mop and rubber shoe. Into the vague green room, thick with shadows that waver like seaweed in the corners.

  See the strange woman look around, make sure all are assembled. On the other faces, there is more than fury and sadness. Also a fatigue, a relief. The darkened room. The quiet machines. The sheet pulled over the body that is only flesh, over the bruised face. The turning away.

  I SEE YOU NOW just leaving rooms I am in. The hem of your khakis flashing beyond the door frame. The wind in the room still shifting. The smell of you, musk and clove and even the stink of your fatigue when you’ve come in from a long day outdoors, hunting or snowmobiling or cross-country skiing; all this, a moment before I turn around.

  Is that you? I call, but there’s no answer. Just this house still empty of furniture. I turn to my books but can’t read. Maybe the telephone rings then and breaks the jangling quiet, or a crow flies past the window with a songbird in its beak; carrion comfort. I hold on to the tiniest of visions for as long as I can, savoring them like the aftertaste of a long-gone cup of tea.

  OUR DIVER FRIEND, the one from the wreck and the falling dive buddy, changed his song. He chose an odd moment for it, at the wake, avoiding my eye over the cold cuts (funeral meats, I thought; terrible expression). He grabbed my elbow hard, whispering urgently. I let him. There was a comfort in his wine-tart breath in my ear, and I watched the window as he whispered to me. Outside, it still rained and rained.

  He told the story again from the beginning: the scaly wreck, the chasm, the strange fishes. He broke off where he had before, where you and I had once thought he’d paused to build tension. Watching his buddy fall and be slowly swallowed by the dark chasm, teetering between his own life and the chance of saving another’s. Now, under the strange slow hush of Bach and conversation, the diver blinked and blinked and shifted the glass in his hand.

  Instead of telling me about his decision, though, the quick flipping down into the dark maw, the laughter, catching his buddy, he said, Listen. I have to say it. I didn’t go after him.

  What? I said. I heard him through the gray felt I’d thickened around myself since the phone call, the hospital.

  I watched him go, he said.

  What? I said, again.

  By the time I saw him, he said, he was too far gone. I had to let him go.

  I pulled away, my fists clenched. But your crazy laughter, I said.

  He looked at me, the very whites of his eyes wine-stained.

  But the love, I said.

  That was all true, he said. Only after I couldn’t see him anymore. When I was just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone.

  I stared at the diver, his purple face. He was trying to tell me something, but it was too raw. A story can also be cruel. And when I remember this scene, I remember it static, my hand in mid-slap, hovering near his left ear. On his face a curious look, almost voluptuous, his cheek tilted up as if to accept the blow, eyes closed and lips nearly bent in a smile.

  IN JULY, THE SUN at last came out, dried the mud, sopped the wet from the air. The bodies of water abated, and the greens were so green they filled all of us with wonder. So many different shades lived in the world that summer. For some moments, in some especially strong lights, I felt the generosity of such green as a salve, drawing the sick grief from me.

  But even in those deepest greens, hiking in the hills (the maples, the ferns, the pines, the scuttling toads), I caught a memory. When my heart at last righted itself, it beat, but furiously.

  Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, it said into the lovely day.

  Long ago, before I found you a second time, when I must have been in college, I was home, driving on East Lake Road. It was a cold day but the lake hadn’t yet melted and large pieces of mist flaked off the lake in pastry layers. I was listening to pub
lic radio. On one of the shows, a narrator, his voice soft but emotionless, was telling a story about Niagara Falls. There was a sound effect of roaring water—harsh, impersonal—behind his words, a strange contrast to his hush.

  In one very poor town near the Falls, he said, there lived an old couple. She was dying of an old-age disease, and her husband was taking care of her. I pictured an orange afghan, a half-drunk cup of tea, a room with olive paint so peeled it was as if the walls were shrugging out of their skins. I pictured a bent old man in suspenders, hovering over a tiny woman, all bones.

  The narrator continued, saying that one morning, after the woman had had a very bad night, the couple’s son stopped by on the way to a night shift. He found an empty house, no parents, everything tidy. He grew alarmed and drove to all of their places: the diner, the theater, the library, the hospital. They weren’t anywhere. He didn’t know where else to drive, and at last, to pull himself together, he drove to the Falls. It was almost dawn now; there was a pink cast at the edge of the sky. When the son climbed from the car and went to the fence at the edge of the Falls, he found two pairs of shoes polished to a brilliant shine. The tiny black shoes of his mother, the cordovans of his father, pointing, eloquently, toward the water.

  The old man had taken his wife in his arms, hot, sick; he had stood there in the dark predawn with her in his arms. He looked into her old face. Then he jumped.

  I had to pull my car over because of this story, because of those lonely four shoes at the annealing edge of the Falls, right where the water hesitates and seems to catch its breath before shattering downward. And, later, during that long winter when you made me come home, I thought vaguely of this story, again and again. Not because I wanted to die, of course. But because I thought I had found exactly that, someone to take me to old age, someone who could take me beyond, if it were necessary and right to do so.

  There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.

  Sir Fleeting

  THE WINTER IS INESCAPABLE HERE. HALF OF my walls are glass, opening to a Central Park vista of naked trees with branches like grasping fingers, and down in the courtyard, even those floozies, the cherry trees, have turned spinsterish in the cold. In my modern apartment their bare limbs are doubled upon the shining walls, the stainless-steel kitchen, the mirrors. What doesn’t reflect trees reflects my face, which is not always a welcome variation. Last week, for instance, after my granddaughter visited, full of plans for her wedding and honeymoon in Argentina, I showed her a picture from my own trip so many years ago and upset her; after she left I stood for a long time palpating my cheeks, watching the woman etched in the steel elevator doors do the same.

  I don’t know why I said what I did. I suppose I was piqued when she held the old photo by its edges, and said, “Oh God, Nana, you were so beautiful.”

  I took the picture from her. That eighteen-year-old idiot, squinting in the Argentine sun? A pretty face, yes, a girl with a clever hand at dressing well with no money. But fat. A Wisconsin farm girl raised on apples and whole milk, a body carved out of a slick ton of butter like those statues at the state fair.

  “Darling,” I said, “I was a ball of lard.” My granddaughter, bless her heart—she’s nothing close to the pudge I was—actually hissed at me. “No,” she said loudly. “You were beautiful,” and she stood to go, and I couldn’t press the check into her hand before she left.

  Afterward, I watched that lady reflected in the elevator door and I didn’t like her much. Whatever it was I’d had in that picture had seeped away over the years, a rubber tire with a long, slow leak. In the days that followed, I tried to push that image in the elevator door out of my head and go about my life—the yoga, the hairdresser, the charity luncheons. The photo stayed where it was, facedown on the glass table, for days, until it woke me up in the middle of the night and insisted that I look at it again.

  I walked through my dark apartment and flipped the photo over to see it in the moonlight. There she was again, that bride, beside her new husband, leaning on the hotel’s Corinthian columns. Buenos Aires, 1956. I could feel the warm sun on my face, my first husband’s hand in my own. It was spring in Argentina, and the city was full of flowers, great washes of buds bursting open, red hibiscus on our balcony, roses and bougainvillea in the parks. The day of the photo, a fluke of wind from some distant jungle had carried a gigantic cloud of iridescent blue butterflies into the city, and we had run outside to see them. The city seemed to pulsate under the beat of those many wings. In the black-and-white picture the butterflies are blurry streaks behind us, though one creature has settled on my husband’s breast pocket like a boutonniere. He is scowling in the sun and I am grinning, not at the butterflies or even my new groom, but, rather, at the man holding the camera.

  Once in a while, I like to say the name aloud: Ancel de Chair. That name alone seems to bring warmth to this wintry city. We overlapped for only a short time in Argentina when we first met, but a sort of static cling brought us together again and again throughout our lives. My husband and I had already been in Buenos Aires for two weeks by then, though I don’t believe we did much during those weeks save eat enormous, glistening steaks and run back upstairs to bed again where we had discovered, to our virginal disbelief, our own bodies. Before marriage we had fallen into an itchy sort of lust, and, good children, we had waited until we were married to scratch it. On our honeymoon, sex was still strange to me: the awkward fittings of parts to parts, my poor husband sobbing after his every achievement, me wide-eyed and wondering if there wasn’t something I might have missed in those few frenzied minutes. I’d found my most voluptuous tenderness in stroking my husband’s furry ears, and hoped there was more to learn in what I thought would be our eternity together.

  How sophisticated we’d thought ourselves then, we innocents. I’d had a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, a farm girl with six sisters, a talent for sewing, and a sharp brain for math, and had spent my freshman year lonely, refusing dates, taking the train home on weekends to help with the chores. When I met my first husband in a social theory course and heard how well the man could argue, I was like a match sparked alight. I used to long to lick his face in the middle of class.

  Poor man; I believe he is still alive somewhere like Scottsdale or Santa Fe, an old immigration lawyer turned fat and wheezy. But when I met him he was a child from a New York family that I, with my scant knowledge of wealth back then, thought inordinately rich. He had a cashmere coat and smoked pipe tobacco constantly, something my father was able to treat himself to only once a week, at most. My husband had blazing eyes, an attractive nervous energy, and a passion for justice that transmuted, over time, into a Communist zeal that eventually broke up our little union. When my first husband told me his family drank wine at meals, argued about books, and had a strongly Socialist bent, it took my breath away, daughter as I was of a farm wife with chicken blood on her hands and a stony Libertarian with one penny in his pocket that longed for a mate to jingle with.

  When my husband and I came to New York after we were married so that I could meet his family, his mother (tweedy, with the face of an Afghan hound) took one look and broke down sobbing on her husband’s shoulder. I suppose it was swell to embrace the masses in theory, but she never thought the masses would be quite so blond and blowsy in practice.

  Off we flew to Buenos Aires, my husband in a rage about how his parents had treated me. By the day the butterflies landed in the city, I had become slightly bored by his wiry body, and by our tall white room and its balcony. A sign on the door told me the same joke every day; the English tran
slation of a notice to the guests, in which the greeting, “Señor Pasajero”—Dear Guest—had been somehow torturously translated to “Sir Fleeting.” The first day my husband and I had laughed until we cried about it, called each other Sir and Dame Fleeting, but soon the joke had gotten old. Soon we avoided it as if it were a faux pas we ourselves had made, some stink in the room with an unknown provenance.

  So I was restless on the night we first saw Ancel de Chair, made more restless by our dinner company, another newlywed couple we’d been palling around with since we arrived. It was a lukewarm friendship, sparked by proximity and youth rather than true alignment; the man had the personality of a sheet of waxed paper, and the woman was a small, brown field mouse from some excellent English family who read the gossip magazines and relayed everything to us whether we cared to listen or not. We were chatting about Rio de Janeiro, where we were going after Buenos Aires, when the door opened and in walked a couple so striking that our conversation stopped. The woman was a blade, all bones and angles, black hair cut severely to her chin, French by the quiet words I overheard. He, on the other hand, was the distillation of the heroes in the books I loved, a smiling, dapper Mr. Rochester, Rodolphe Boulanger, Sir Percy Blakeney. He had a handsome face with a fine, thin nose, wide-set green eyes, hair as black and shining as a puma’s fur, which I’d later find was slicked back with some sweet-smelling oil. The enormous yellow diamond on his tiepin caught the candlelight and winked merrily at us.

  They sat at a table by the window, and our table’s conversation began again. My gossipy friend gave a chirrup and leaned toward me.

  “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” she whispered, her face animated as I’d never seen it. “Those people,” she said, “are Ancel de Chair and Lulu Fauré.”