The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  When one hada stepped into the light, another faded into a bough’s shadow. It looked random, an unplanned dance, charged with a romance that made the audience forget these people were relatives.

  Lace could sense the choreography under their movements. The show had the same patterned feel as the mermaids’ dance. The trick was making it look like no two nights were ever the same, so each performance brimmed with fleeting magic.

  Sometimes a Corbeau woman opened her hand, releasing a shower of wildflowers, and girls who watched from the ground held up their palms to catch the cream petals. Lace could never spot the women filling their hands. They must have hidden the flowers, one hada gathering a handful when the audience was watching another.

  Tourists stared up, their necks taut with the worry of watching tightrope walkers. Locals didn’t gasp, used to these shows year after year, but they still watched, smiled. Children lifted their hands and pointed whenever they spotted another fairy in the trees. After the show, the women offered children fairy stones, cheap glass pebbles full of glitter, and their small faces flooded with wonder.

  Watching sowed a strange jealousy in Lace. It burrowed into her as she fell asleep on the floor of the yellow trailer. Her exile and her wounds kept her from the shutter click of families taking pictures for vacation scrapbooks. They kept her from daughters in bright dresses reaching out to touch her tail fin, wondering if it was real.

  Did the women on those branches know how lucky they were to be beautiful? Lace had never been their kind of beautiful, but she’d faked it. The less stunning of the Corbeau women faked it too, now with Lace’s help.

  She woke up scratching at herself, dreaming of rain. Her nails left thread-thin trails of blood, like razor cuts. Waking broke her out of the feeling that the rain was eating through her.

  In the morning, Lace found another of Cluck’s feathers. It had settled into the folds of the blanket Clémentine had lent her.

  Lace clutched its stem. She turned it, and red streaks showed among the black.

  She thought of burning it. Instead, she tucked it into the lining of her suitcase. If she kept the ones she found, collected them, owned a little of this boy, it might give her power over him.

  Her back ached as she got dressed, not from the mattress on the trailer floor, but from turning over, trying to find a way to sleep that didn’t hurt her raw skin.

  She listened outside the blue and white trailer. Cluck was already throwing things around, fixing costumes. She moved to look through the cracked door. He hunched over a table, trousers on but shirtless, his hair wet. She turned away as soon as she saw his back.

  As long as she could help it, she wouldn’t enter the house when he was there. She wouldn’t let him trap her inside like a firefly in a jar. It was dangerous enough being in those walls with any Corbeau.

  She let herself in the back door of the house, toothbrush and makeup bag in hand. Clémentine stood at the stove in bare feet, frying an egg. Lace passed behind her.

  A woman sat in the heavy-curtained dining room, her posture straight as the lines of her shoulders. She looked around forty, age softly puckering the skin at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was pulled back into a neat bun that looked better fit for a catalog than a schoolroom, but her plain linen dress had the clean, bland shape Lace would expect on a mayor’s wife.

  She wrote in a heavy leather book, but did not bend over the page. She kept up straight, as though her dress was embroidered to the chair back.

  “You are our new makeup girl,” the woman said, not looking up.

  Lace thought of putting down her toothbrush to show respect. She didn’t know who the woman was, but if she kept the books, Lace shouldn’t cross her.

  Lace just nodded.

  The woman finished writing, and raised her eyes to Lace. She didn’t hide her study of the wine-colored burn on Lace’s cheek, or her uneven eyebrows; adhesive had left them in patches.

  The woman’s face, her inspection, asked the question without her having to speak it. You look like this and we should trust you to make us beautiful?

  Lace pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth. If she got angry, this woman might hear the sound of her uncles’ zampoñas under her breath, betraying how little she belonged beneath a canopy of glass chimes.

  “Makeup doesn’t cure ugly,” Lace said. She took her things toward the downstairs bathroom.

  “There are no ugly women,” the woman said. “Only lazy ones.”

  Lace stopped, laughing softly. Abuela threw the same quote at her and her cousins, when she pointed out that Lace was getting a little fat, or that Martha’s modest dresses made her look dowdy, or the flare of acne reddening Emilia’s cheek.

  Lace turned around. “Helena Rubinstein.”

  The woman nodded once. A little light from between curtains crossed her face. “Très bien.” She motioned to a chair. “Come.”

  Lace sat down, the chair legs creaking as she shifted her weight. How did the woman’s chair stay so quiet?

  The table looked like an estate sale leftover. Once it must have been dark-polished wood, shining like still water. But it had been nicked and dulled so many years, it looked no grander than a wine cork. No wonder the owners left it to be rented out with the house.

  “Je m’appelle Nicole,” the woman said.

  “Lace.”

  So this was Nicole Corbeau, Abuela’s rival.

  Nicole reached for Lace’s makeup bag. “Puis-je?” she asked.

  Lace nodded. She had nothing to hide in there. Her tail was in her suitcase, locked, and her skirt and blouse covered her scales.

  “Are you one of the performers?” Lace asked.

  Nicole laughed a curt laugh, neat as her chignon. “I was.” Her fingers searched the pouch’s contents. “Now I keep the books. Dax is my son. So is le cygnon.”

  “Who?” Lace asked.

  “It’s a nickname. His cousins call him Cluck.”

  “Dax and Cluck are brothers?”

  The woman laughed again.

  Lace bit the knuckle of her forefinger. She hadn’t meant to sound so surprised. They had similar voices, but didn’t look much alike. Though Cluck wasn’t small, his brother’s shadow would have swallowed him whole.

  “La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants,” the woman said.

  Lace didn’t ask what that meant. If the woman wanted her to know, she’d have said it in English.

  Nicole set out Lace’s foundation, concealer, and powder. “This is what you use?”

  “It’s what I used to use.”

  “And now?”

  Lace had tried. The covering up only drew attention, made the burn look like a deep patch of scar tissue. The reddening on her arms would fade. The dead skin would peel back and fall away. But her shoulder had pressed her sleeve hard against her face that night, quickening the reaction. Even once the burn on her cheek healed, it would leave a bad scar, hard to hide.

  “It makes it look worse,” she said.

  Nicole opened the powder compact, turning it so the mirror caught Lace’s reflection. “Show me what you are doing.”

  This was all vinegar, having to be polite to a woman who stared at her marred face. But Lace did it, spread on a good layer of foundation and concealer, finished with powder. Not for Abuela, but for her father and Tía Lora.

  Lace set the powder brush down. She lifted her chin to show the woman her face, her right cheek rough and mottled.

  “Je comprends,” the woman said. “Now wash your face.”

  “Excuse me?” Lace asked.

  “I will show you how to fix it.”

  “I know how to do makeup.”

  “No,” Nicole said. “You know how to do show makeup. It won’t help you with your own. And if you cannot do your own face, how will they trust your hands?”

  None of them seemed to mind the night before. They’d all sat down one at a time and let her put on their bases and colors.

  “Your work is good for the shows,
” Nicole said. “But for you, for daylight, it is too heavy. Wash your face.”

  It was easier to do it than argue. Lace scrubbed off the makeup at the downstairs sink, gritting her teeth against the soap.

  She came back with her face heat-reddened, and sat down, her thin scarf tied to her arm to hide the feather burn.

  Nicole sponged a little foundation over her face, then concealer. She brushed the lightest layer of powder over Lace’s cheeks and forehead, then a little more base, then powder again. “Better to use a light hand many times than a heavy hand once.”

  Lace clenched her back teeth to keep from wincing, her skin still raw enough that bristles and foam pads stung.

  Nicole swirled blush onto her cheeks, swept on eye shadow with a few flicks of a brush, handed her a lipstick. Lace dabbed it onto her mouth and rubbed her lips together.

  Nicole set the compact mirror into Lace’s hands. “Regarde.”

  Lace opened her eyes. The coral on her cheeks and lips stood out. Her eyelashes looked pure black against the cream shadow.

  The burn on her cheek was still there, still visible. Just fainter, a little discoloration under a veil of sand. In the right light, if Lace wore her hair down, it might go unnoticed. In the dusk and globe lights, she could pass for almost pretty.

  “How’d you do that?” Lace asked.

  “A light hand, and patience,” Nicole said. “You teach people what to see.”

  Ne réveillez pas le chat qui dort.

  Don’t wake the cat who sleeps.

  Cluck watched his mother standing at the kitchen counter, picking lavender from a dish of herbes de Provence. Every time she bought a jar, she never noticed the violet buds until she got home, when she cursed in French as though it were her first language.

  Years ago Cluck used to do this. His mother and Dax figured out that telling six-year-old Cluck to pick out all those tiny buds would keep him out of the way for a couple of hours. “Look, we have found a way for you to be useful to this family,” she’d say.

  Cluck leaned on the door frame, thinking of how different Lace looked now that his mother had gotten ahold of her. Still pretty, but painted. Her skin looked made of powder and blush.

  “Did you have to do that to her?” he asked.

  She flicked the lavender into another bowl. If Clémentine didn’t ask for it, she’d throw it out. “Do what to who?”

  “Lace,” he said. “All that makeup. She looks like a pageant contestant.”

  “You hired a girl to do makeup, and you don’t like that she wears it?”

  His mother couldn’t act like she didn’t have a hand in this. He’d seen that same look on half the girls in this family.

  “I know your work,” he said.

  “And she thanked me.” She shook the dish. “Now she looks us in the eye. This is a good thing in the girl we trust with our faces.”

  He’d liked seeing Lace the way she was the night before, without anything covering her face, her lipstick almost the same deep red as the patch on her cheek. Nothing between that wound and the air it needed to heal.

  If she had to scrub off all that makeup every night, her burn would take twice as long to scar over.

  “Three days ago, she was in a hospital,” he said. “She doesn’t need someone telling her to cover up something that just happened to her.”

  “Girls need what they need to feel pretty,” his mother said.

  “She’s pretty without it,” he said.

  His mother lifted her eyes from the counter, catching him in her peripheral vision.

  He crossed his arms. This way his mother had of looking down at him even though he was taller than she was made him want to take up as little space as possible.

  “Careful,” she said.

  There were only a handful of people with the show who weren’t Corbeaus by blood or marriage. And everyone, not just Cluck, had to follow one simple rule: don’t touch them.

  But there were more rules for Cluck. Cluck was everything bad about his father, and Dax was everything good, chaff and wheat like the verse in Matthew. When Dax asked about their father, aunts burst with stories about how handsome and tall he was, how when he played the euphonium it sounded like the breath of un séraphin. When Cluck asked, they looked at him as if he’d been the one to make their father leave. They reminded him that the man had left so completely after Cluck was born that they did not even know for sure what county he was in now. Inyo, they guessed? Monterey maybe?

  Cluck, the bad son, was only allowed to talk to girls Dax and his mother chose for him. Girls they met at churches they would never bring Cluck to. Girls they thought would grow into women who might make him something less dangerous than he was.

  Lace was not one of them. And now Lace worked for the show. He couldn’t have found a girl more off-limits to him in Saint Mary’s Convent.

  “Cygnon,” his mother said as he was leaving.

  The nickname stopped Cluck in the door frame. Until Eugenie came up with “Cluck,” for the way the fingers on his left hand looked like a rooster’s claw, Dax got all the cousins to call him le cygnon, for having no more contour feathers than a young swan, gray and ugly.

  Dax and his mother still called Cluck cygnon sometimes, Dax’s way of pointing out that all the other Corbeaus had feathers that were stiff and neat, narrow on the leading edge and wider along the inner vane. And they were the true black of forest crows, not red-streaked like Cluck’s. Cluck’s hadn’t changed as much from when he was small, when his first feathers grew in fluffy and short. They weren’t natal fluff anymore, but they’d only developed into semiplumes, a cross between a cygnet’s fuzz and a flight feather.

  Cluck turned around.

  His mother kept picking out lavender. “Your brother would like to talk to you.”

  Cluck slid his hands into his pockets, hiding his wrecked fingers in the lining.

  This wasn’t an order to go find his brother.

  Dax would find him.

  Cría cuervos y te sacarán los ojos.

  Raise crows and they will peck your eyes out.

  Lace held an eye shadow brush under the bathroom tap, flooding out the color she couldn’t get with rubbing alcohol the night before. Lilac-tinted water swirled down the drain.

  One of the Corbeau women pushed on the half-open door. Lace couldn’t remember her name. Only that the dress she wore for the show was yellow as a pear.

  “Excuse-moi.” She reached past Lace for a bottle of perfume all the Corbeau girls shared.

  Lace nodded to the woman’s reflection. At first she’d kept the door closed, but cleaning the brushes took so long that every few minutes a Corbeau woman knocked, wanting the mirror so she could fix her lipstick on her way out to the Blackberry Festival. After the second time, Lace gave up and just left the bathroom door open.

  She’d wondered what about those booths and fruit stands thrilled them so much until Eugenie sighed and said, “So many farmers’ sons,” as she combed her hair.

  The woman sprayed on a little perfume, and the room filled up with a warm, sweet smell like cardamom. All wrong for the weather, but if the Corbeau girls wanted to stand out among all the powdery flower perfumes, that was how to do it.

  The woman rubbed one wrist against the other, eyeing the brushes. “How’d you get stuck with that job?”

  “Someone has to.” Lace pressed water out of the rinsed bristles. “And I don’t mind.”

  “Better you than me.” The woman set the bottle back on the counter. “Next time use the sink upstairs,” she said on her way out. “Horrible little mirror. No one will bother you.”

  Forget it. Lace would rather do all this at two in the morning than go upstairs. Being in this house was bad enough.

  Lace laid out the brushes to dry, the chatter of a few Corbeau girls rounding the side of the house and then moving too far away to hear.

  A door slammed at the other end of the hall, and Lace jumped. So many Corbeaus had left the house in the last f
ew hours—off on errands or enjoying the free hours before tonight’s show—that she’d thought the whole downstairs was empty.

  Even from the bathroom doorway, Lace could hear the muffled yelling. She patted her hands dry on her skirt and took slow steps to the other end of the hall, trying to keep the old wood quiet.

  She stopped at the closed door, making out two voices she was just starting to learn, and the clipped sound of skin hitting skin.

  “Who is this girl?” one voice asked. Dax, the man who’d stood over Lace and the blond woman.

  “She’s from around here,” the second answered. Cluck.

  Dax chuckled. “She’s from around here. Well, that fixes everything, doesn’t it?” Then came the thud of a body hitting a dresser or a wall. “We don’t know enough about her. She could be a thief.”

  Lace pressed herself into the door, listening against the wood.

  “That’s what everyone thinks we are,” Cluck said, his voice strained with trying to get his air back. “So I take that as a recommendation.”

  “You don’t get to make that kind of decision on your own.”

  Guilt pinched at the back of Lace’s neck. It crackled down her body, spreading through her escamas.

  “Do you want me to fire her?” Cluck asked. “She’s good. You saw her work.”

  “Les mecs,” a voice behind Lace whispered, close enough to warm her shoulder.

  Lace startled, tripping on the hallway carpet.

  Nicole Corbeau passed by, shaking her head. “Il faut que jeunesse se passe, n’est-ce pas?” She rolled her eyes at Lace, ready for her to agree.

  The alcohol and sharp floral scent of Nicole Corbeau’s perfume slipped into Lace’s open mouth and needled her throat.

  This woman had given her back her face. She’d told Lace about dyeing Eugenie’s hair red, teaching the blonder Corbeaus to coat their feathers in cake flour, showing Violette and Margaux how to bleach their freckles with salt and lemon juice. And now she kept on her way down the hall, taking out her earrings, gliding by the room where one of her sons was beating the other?