Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  This is a game, Jaime knows, but only Jason understands the rules. She believes the goal is to see how far he can go before Jaime squeals. For a month or so he has been catching her, squeezing her hips, letting his hand brush her ass in passing. A few nights ago, he caught her in the corridor on her way to the bathroom and pressed his body against hers hard and when his voice hissed in her ears for hours afterward, she didn’t know if she felt pleasure or alarm. She dices, she does not look at Bettina or Jason. She waits to know what she wants.

  LILY WATCHES HER grandmother from under the silken fringe of the table. The old woman is crumpled into a wheelchair against the window; behind her the winter sun sets over the city. She has a cigarette in one hand, a martini in the other; once in a while she puts down the martini to gasp into her oxygen mask. She never, Lily notices, puts down the cigarette.

  She’s like an old witch in your mom’s stories, says Sammy in Lily’s ear. Sammy is spiteful and bad, and Lily often has to discipline her because no one else can.

  Shut up, Sammy, she says. The grandmother turns her head and sees Lily.

  Come out of there, child, she snaps. Who’s that you’re talking to?

  Lily worms out slowly, her hands floured with dust. Just Sammy, she says. Nobody. She can see herself now reflected in the glass beyond her grandmother’s head: pale and plump, her hair stringy, her red-framed glasses enormous on her face. At least she’s not like Sammy, who’s fat and moist and googly-eyed, like a frog.

  The grandmother sighs, rattling, and says, You with your everlasting imaginary friend. And seeing Lily’s hand digging at her nostril, more sharply: Don’t pick your nose.

  Maria moves out in the hallway, humming. She went all the way to the West Side to pick Lily up at school that afternoon. The girl had been sitting in the principal’s office for hours. Lily’s chest had grown tighter and tighter until at last her bladder exploded and she wet herself. Lily often does. She has severe anxiety issues, Dr. Kramer says. Her mother calls her Our Lily of the Furrowed Brow, and at school, the kids are mean and call her Lily-Wet-Butt. But today Maria only smiled at Lily with her potato-plain face, and helped wash the girl off. Maria is like that. She puts out two plates when it’s snacktime and always asks about Sammy’s health. Even Sammy likes Maria and Sammy likes nobody.

  She’s real, says Lily to her grandmother now. Sammy’s real. She considers for a minute and says, But she’s ugly and dumb so you probably don’t want to see her anyways.

  Stop clutching yourself, says the grandmother sharply. Do you have to urinate?

  No, lies Lily, and then, feeling the old tightness in her chest, she stretches the neck of her shirt above her nose and down three times. All her shirts are floppy at the neck because of it. Dr. Kramer says she should do whatever helps. Sammy unfurls her long tongue into the grandmother’s martini, and Lily frowns: she’s going to have to punish Sammy for that later.

  A dense wave passes over her, and Lily is suddenly tired. All she wants is home. To finish her homework, to see her dad, who scoops her up when he comes home and reads or talks to her until she sleeps. Routine. She feels a sharp stab of sorrow in her gut. When am I going home? she asks.

  The grandmother says, I don’t know.

  Lily blinks, makes a little squeak. Where are my parents? she says. She feels the pressure descending on her, fast. It’s bad, and Sammy draws near to watch, breathing her moist breath in Lily’s face.

  We’re still trying to figure that one out, the grandmother says.

  But seeing the way Lily’s face changes, seeing her slow collapse, she hurriedly croaks out, Maria, Maria, Maria as loudly as she can until, at last, Maria comes running.

  KEY WEST, HYMN OF JOY: from the dark shadows of the room the girl emerges, a pale fish rising from the deep. Howie watches from the bed, heart throbbing in his throat, his own body struck to water. Hers is slim, smooth, a length of muslin, a sheet of music. Knees in-turned, gap in her teeth, the green moth tattoo on her buttock, turned away just now so he can only imagine it. Knowing it is there gives him such a pang, the last trace of her origins, the sad rundown farmhouse smelling of cat piss and mushrooms that he has imagined in full, though she has said nothing at all about where she is from. There is a part of him who longs for just this dirt in her. She is unlike anybody he’s ever known.

  Her white body moves, and moves him. She’s just past adolescence, just a girl, young enough to be his daughter. Briefly there flashes in his mind his daughter’s face, such a fierce, lost thing, tiny. He has to focus on the lovely girl before him to regain his desire.

  Outside, the lime-flavored sunlight tries to peer at them through the plantation shutters: in the sky, the birds rill the world alive. Above, the sun beats down on the island and urges the sea to singing.

  Now that sweet face nearing, now those bitten lips, now the eye clear and blue as mint, that tender hollow in her collar. The girl, so young, smiles down at him. Howie reaches for her. At last, he forgets himself.

  THE WOMAN IS IN the shower when the punk girl arrives in the morning. As she comes back into the cold room, bringing a cloud of steam with her, she finds the girl furiously pulling up the bedspread, her eyes red-rimmed. The woman cannot help herself: she touches the girl’s face and feels the soft childish skin, her warmth. There is something familiar about the loose mouth, the way it leaps and stretches wormlike with the girl’s emotions. Vulnerable is the word: and she doesn’t realize she’s said it aloud until the girl turns and flees, the laundry bunched in her arms.

  The tray has no gifts on it this morning, which disturbs the woman most of all.

  By the window later, as the sun sizzles out in the wet treetops, she falls asleep. When she wakes, there is the last fog of a story in her head—she’d seen it somewhere, or heard it. Television, book, movie, she doesn’t know where it came from. There was a woman, tall and beautiful: this she knows, though she couldn’t see the woman clearly. A letter plucked from a heap of mail, without return address or signature, a photograph falling from it, a menace of flesh. And, somehow connected, a night, a pond rimmed by dark trees, headlights spinning the fog, a car sunk to its bumper in the water.

  She considers this for a minute, but there is danger there, and she pushes it safely away.

  Now, as she awaits the knock on the door, the hot early supper on the tray, a voice in her mind rises up, sly and dark, an old woman’s voice. It says: Tabitha. It says: Sudden Pond.

  The woman shivers: the radiator clucks out its warmth. Although she presses her hands against it, although she paces, counting her steps so she won’t think, she can’t get warm.

  IT IS LATE. Bettina is in the kitchen popping popcorn over the stove; Jason is out, somewhere; Jaime’s hair is still wet from her second shower of the day and she is waiting for Roman Holiday on television. There is something tragic about Hepburn even when she’s happy. As if the princess knows that the one measly day in which she gets to eat gelato and smash a guitar over a secret policeman’s head and swoon into Peck’s arms will never be enough to compensate for her lonely life as a royal.

  This makes Jaime think of the woman upstairs at her window. She pictures what she found when she was cleaning that morning and pushes her out of her mind again.

  Bettina comes in with the popcorn as the credits roll. She settles into the couch beside Jaime, puts her arm around the girl’s shoulders. She smells of lemon balm and the camphor cow-udder medicine she rubs on her hands to keep them soft. Like this, leaning against Bettina’s bulk, feeling a wash of love come over her, Jaime wants to confess everything. How, this morning, in the shower, she looked up to see Jason’s head tucked behind the curtain and watching her, a grin on his handsome face. She’d clasped her arms over her breasts, her crotch. He didn’t touch her. He went whistling away. Despite herself, she grew warm. She sat on the floor until the water turned cold, not knowing what she’d wanted from him, whether just to leave her alone, or to intensify this game, teach her the rules. Jason was not an unkind
man (she’d seen him put out kibble for the feral cats; he’d been the one to hold her when her parents abandoned her in Sharon Springs and she’d wept with fury). She was sure he would obey whatever she asked of him. Ex-soldier, married to Bettina, he was used to obeying. Jaime studied a handful of her hair. After two weeks the dye had lost its hold, the magenta turning into strawberry blond. Considering her hair brought her back to herself, made her stand, turn off the water.

  Tonight, on the couch beside Bettina, Jaime feels safe. She lets herself think of the boy from the park a lifetime ago, the flowers frilly as Victorian children. Jaime had cut through the park on her way home from school and the boy had followed her, throwing horse chestnuts, his clothes ripped, his head shaved save for the spiky band down its middle. Stop it, she cried, but he didn’t until she ran away. At home, her mother, on the ottoman with her skirt hiked up over her knees, giving herself a pedicure: she saw Jaime’s face and cried, Jamina, Jamina, what’s wrong? her voice full of alarm as she followed Jaime through the house, her feet pigeon-toed as she walked to keep the polish from smearing on the rugs. Jaime wanted to push her away, to think angrily of the boy alone in private. Over supper, the endless questions, even though Jaime was still a good girl then. Top of her class, quiet, going to college. Horse-plain, the way good girls are. But even when she was amenable, her parents didn’t trust her to make her own decisions. Oppressive, their worry, their expectation.

  The next day the boy was in the park again. He offered her a box of chocolates, stolen, she found out later, from a drugstore. She ate three right there, not caring if they were kosher. An immense thrill.

  A few days later, he took her home. He didn’t live in the rat-infested hovel she’d expected, but a large apartment on the Upper East Side. Played her records imported from Britain: Punk, he’d called them, and leaped around the room to the noise. It sounded like some blistered creature’s death howls, but he loved it. He showed her a photo, the tight leather pants he wanted. He pulled a joint from his sock drawer (socks in neat buds, arranged by color by the maid), and she felt the world slow and become delicious. She didn’t even know his name when he pushed her down on the bed. He hiked up her skirt, and on his clean blue sheets shoved his way into her.

  She knew him for one month; during it he dyed her hair, attacked her tee-shirts with scissors, played his music until she began to like it. In school, people gaped at her. She crept out at night and stayed in a club until morning. Pills, coke, acid. And then, just as she was beginning to not mind the moment when he climbed on top of her, her parents carted her off to Sharon Springs, and at the end of the summer they dumped her with Bettina.

  No religion, no school, no good Jamina. It had been a relief, in its way. At first she thought she missed the boy. Now she can’t remember his face.

  She’d wanted for a long time to tell Bettina about the boy, but if she was right to suspect that Bettina read her journal, the woman already knows. The commercials come on and Bettina moves off to make another aluminum pan of popcorn. Jaime follows her into the kitchen, where it smells of the coffee cake for tomorrow’s breakfast, cooling on the stove. She wants to confess, to come clean, but she can’t tell on Jason, and though she’d like to, she can’t make herself talk of the boy in the park. Instead she tells about the woman upstairs, what she’d found that morning when she was cleaning.

  In her purse? Jaime says. When she was in the shower? I found a man’s button-up shirt. And it was all bloody. Like totally bloody.

  Bettina stops shaking the popcorn over the burner. Her face has paled. A bloody shirt? she says, glancing at the ceiling.

  That’s what I found, says Jaime. You think she murdered someone or something?

  Bettina turns off the stove and sits at the table. I think, she says. Doesn’t matter what I think. She leans forward and Jaime is swimming in those violet, black-fringed eyes. Jaime, promise me, she says, don’t tell anyone else.

  Jaime flushes, resentful. Duh, she says, then Hepburn’s bell-like voice chimes from the other room, and Jaime returns to the movie, feeling as if she’d just escaped something.

  In the morning, when Jason comes inside, smelling of whiskey, Jaime is arranging the cake on the guest’s tray. Bettina is by the stove. Jason grins at them, settles heavily into a chair. His back is straight. He runs his hand tiredly through his grizzled hair.

  Drinking, Jason? says Bettina calmly. Already or still?

  Jason sighs. You don’t know, he says, his tongue slightly thick. You don’t know about what’s happening around here.

  Bettina goes still. What don’t we know? she says in her softest voice.

  Be quiet for a minute, I’ll tell you, says Jason. So we’re at the Springs last night playing pool, he says, the boys and me, when in comes Arnie.

  Arnie snowplow or Arnie cop? says Bettina.

  Arnie cop, says Jason. Anyways, Arnie says, Looks like we got us a missing person down in Roseboom, going to drag the pond, make sure nobody’s in it. He said to wait till morning, but we got carried away, got into our trucks, went up there to see what we could do. And get this, there’s this car halfway in the water, this Mercedes all filled with water. So Pete shines his light in, sees the seats, and they’re all covered with dark splotches. And he rubs his hand on it, and then says, Fuck!—here, Jason looks at Jaime and says, Pardon the French, then continues—Pete drops the flashlight and jumps back. It’s blood. A lot of blood. And so we wait out in the truck and luckily someone brought whiskey and just when it gets dawn we drag the lake. But not good enough, I guess, cause we didn’t find a body or anything.

  He looks at the women, pauses for drama. Pretty clear, he says, slowly, somebody was murdered there.

  Murdered? says Jaime, and looks at Bettina with alarm, but Bettina is calmly placing a poached egg on the tray for the woman upstairs.

  Huh, she says. Any idea whose car it is?

  Muckamucks from the city. Some kind of doctor and his wife. They think there was a hitchhiker or something, killed them both. Is there any coffee?

  Bettina pours the coffee into Jason’s mug and looks at Jaime. Take the food up, Jamie, before it gets cold, she says.

  Jaime weighs the woman upstairs and her bloody shirt against Jason, so bleary, his great paws around his mug, ears cold-reddened, making him seem almost childlike. At least she understands the danger that is Jason’s, a little.

  Bettina? she says, helpless. I can’t.

  Bettina’s mouth knots into a silken bow. She says, All right. Go on and do the dishes, then. She heaves the tray upstairs.

  IT HAS BEEN THREE DAYS: Lily hasn’t been to school. She’s sure this is illegal, but Sammy said that if Lily told, her grandmother was probably too rich to go to jail and Maria would have to go instead. At night, Lily dreamed of Maria in jail and woke up in a puddle. She’ll never tell, not even if she was out for the rest of the year, not even if she was out for ten years and couldn’t go to college and get a good education and would never be a veterinarian, and would end up poor like Maria.

  She feels the wildness rise in her again, tries to push it back. When she was just three, she would have such terrible attacks that she scratched her own cheeks until they bled. She remembers her parents talking, her mother’s slow drawl, her father’s clipped voice—Is it our fault? he said. Did we do this to her? God, I’ll never forgive myself if that’s the case; and Lily’s mother gave a small, tough laugh and said, For heaven’s sake, listen to yourself. Of course we did. We’re both neurotic as hell. In a softer voice her mother, who was never soft, said: Lil will grow out of it.

  This is what Lily tells herself when she fears she will never be normal, when she feels the anxiety lurking in the corners of the room: I’ll grow out of it. And when she says it, to herself, she says it in her mother’s broken-glass voice.

  Lily is on the couch between Maria and Sammy. Maria is watching her show and Sammy is itching for mischief. She’s been naughty all morning, spilling the milk, knocking over the grandmother’s
oxygen tank, eating all the cookies from the jar. But Lily won’t let Sammy be bad right now: she has to keep Sammy in check. It’s exhausting.

  On the screen a very beautiful woman with huge shoulders is walking across a wood-paneled office, a grin on her red lips. What’s going on? says Lily.

  Maria says, without turning her eyes from the television, Oh, it is incredible! This woman is not this woman, but her evil twin. Everyone thinks she is she, but, no, she has her sister tied up in a basement. She is trying to steal her sister’s fortune and man. Maria pats Lily’s face, her hand smelling of the fennel she’d turned into soup for lunch.

  Lily’s father knows stories about evil twins: he spends hours at night telling Lily stories, mostly fairy tales. Her grandmother has explained to Lily that her parents are lost. Now, as the show jitters on, she imagines her father out in the forest, barefoot in the snow, only frozen berries to feed him. Somewhere in a sleigh in the cold, her mother sits all dressed in white, her beautiful face icy, enchanted by bad magic into a snow queen.

  With that, the great wave looms above Lily, threatening, keeping her from breathing.

  Sammy has turned her froggy face toward Lily, is poking her in the side with a sticky finger. Together, the wave and the poke are enough to make Lily wail.

  Into Lily’s hair, Maria says, Oh, hush-hush. When Lily won’t hush, Maria says, So you want to be a veterinarian? To doctor the animals?

  Lily, crying hard, nods, and Maria stands and carries Lily through the French doors onto the veranda. It is freezing out there, the stripped trees in the park below bowing, the street noises billowing up to meet them. Maria puts her finger on her lips, and Lily tries hard to press her sobs into her chest. Maria carries her over to an enormous empty planter, where in the summer there sits a topiary in the shape of a swan.

  They look down, and Lily gasps. There, blue with cold, peep three chicks, songbirds, opening their cocktail-straw throats to Lily, pleading for warmth and worm mash. They strain toward Lily, shivering with effort.