Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  Listen, obviously it’s not the same thing what I’m feeling now and what those McAuliffe kids were feeling. Obviously. But something has exploded. And anyone who really looks at me can see my chest is cracked open, my heart is visibly, senselessly banging away. Anyone who is looking at me can see that all I am is a collection of exposed organs, walking around.

  It’s dreadful being porous, the way everything and everyone gets in. There should be a plastic wrap for this grief and rage, or a way to lock me in my own phone booth so I can be left to stew alone.

  (I’m in love with her.

  You can’t be. You’re for me.)

  This is not my only experience with heartbreak. I’ve had my heart broken. Not like this, but still. Broken. My heart broke when I was nine. My grandfather, who I loved more than anything—more even than my rabbit Milo, who was assertive, clean, and grouchy like most intelligent animals—my grandfather froze to death. My grandfather froze to death and I was not there to save him because I was away on a rare trip with my mother. (You get no say in these matters when you’re a child. Your bag gets packed and you’re told to get in the car this minute or else. Besides which, I liked traveling with my mother, she laughed more when we were away.) By the time we were back home, it was too late.

  What I remember, what can’t be true because I wasn’t there, is my grandmother sitting in an armchair, wearing her blue velvet Christmas skirt that goes all the way down to the ankles. She has a grey cat on her lap, Potlatch, the cat of seven cats ago. (Cats don’t last long on my grandparents’ farm, coyotes get them or fisher cats, or we say only they wandered too far into the woods, like they are in their very own feline fairy tales.) Potlatch is shedding great clumps of grey and white hair, handfuls floating onto my grandmother’s skirt and downward onto the carpet. My grandfather is freezing to death about a half a mile away from where we are. He has wandered too far into the woods. We don’t know this but we can hear the police dogs, the sounds of men shouting. Snow the color of blue opal banks up above the window ledge.

  (That bit is true. That winter the snow piled so high that I could climb out the upstairs window, and, taking care not to dislodge the slate tiles on the roof, slide right off into the snowdrift below.)

  Inside, my grandmother is stroking the cat, slowly meditatively stroking and stroking. There are clouds of his hair everywhere. The cat’s tail has a broken bone in its end and the tip twitches. I’m watching the tail twitch and I’m watching her. She doesn’t have her teeth in. There’s a hole in her face, a dark, irrevocable hole. I want to dive into it because it’s inscrutable the way she is, it’s like black water under ice, it’s like something you have to flail against, something you have to ravage, something you have to destroy in order to get to the bottom of it.

  Five days after we had returned from our trip, my mother took a walk. She found her father’s orange hunting hat, a fluorescent bright, bright orange. It was supposed to make him visible so no one would accidentally shoot him with a hunting rifle. So he could walk through the world unharmed. She found the hat on a path. She walked a little farther. She found a pile of his clothes. He had folded them. There was a little fresh snowfall on them. All I could see when she described this to me was cat hair drifting like milkweed fluff on his clothes. He was naked. He was naked and he was blue like my grandmother’s skirt all the way to the ankles so you can’t see her legs. He was blue through his whiteness from his toes to his ears, the way that skim milk is blue.

  I saw his death certificate. It said “exposure.” Under “consequences of or due to” someone left-handed wrote in black ink “lost in woods” and then under “notes,” right-handed blue ink added “senile dementia.” I was there when one of the policemen explained to my mother that in the end stages of severe hypothermia people often do something called terminal burrowing, when they try to dig themselves into a hiding place, a cave, a hole, a space under the bed, trying to make a small corner to crawl into, to hide in and die, as animals do. He said that people who are freezing to death also often undress—he called it “paradoxical undressing”—because when the muscles are exhausted from shivering to keep a person warm, they finally relax and the person who is freezing to death feels a sudden surge of blood and heat, especially in the extremities, a feeling of being so overheated that he or she will often tear off any clothing. My mother didn’t say anything when the policeman told her this; she was stroking the sleeve of her father’s worn brown corduroy jacket, which was draped over her arm. I wanted to say, but he folded his clothes, he folded them. He kissed my grandmother goodbye, he walked into the woods, he undressed, he folded his clothes, he laid them in a pile, and he stretched out on the snow on his back and looked up at the sky. He didn’t burrow down into the snow or rip off his clothing. It wasn’t paradoxical. It was intentional. I know it was.

  Here’s the thing: if I’d been home it never would have happened because even though they brought in police dogs they couldn’t find him and I would have been able to sniff him out. He had a very particular smell, a little sour, a little watery, like he never managed quite to wash the sleep dank off himself, but at the same time his whiskers could be as warm and delectable as brown sugar in oatmeal.

  Sometimes he was sad. I cheered him up. We went for soft ice cream together, which would have been strictly verboten by my mother, or more accurately not recognized as being edible at all (it would be like saying we went to eat Astroturf together). But my grandfather and I would drive down Route 14 in the tan Hornet to a small place with one window that never ever looked open and always was even in the winter I think. We would go up to the hatch—he’d lift me up—and I’d ring the round bell, which I loved. It was like the bell that sat on Mrs. Harrison’s desk that she rang when spelling speed tests were over. It made my heart race a little bit just to see a bell like that. This one looked rusty but when I hit it with the flat of my hand it would ping out clear and very slowly someone would emerge from the cross-hatched darkness and take our order, an old man in an apron in the off seasons and snippy teenage girls in the summer, all equally sullen. Then we’d sit and lick the cones, the vanishing empty sweetness, on the hood of the Hornet facing the White River, watching the light wink on the water or the ice or the muck of built-up leaves and old tires. It was a lovely leisurely silent glinting bubble we were bound up in. I don’t remember speaking at all. Afterwards he would carefully clean his whiskers of the chocolate jimmies we always ordered. These reminded me of the dotting of mouse turds in the corners of my bedroom in their house. Even though he didn’t say anything, I knew from the reflective, hard front of his belly, I knew from his thoughtfulness, from the silence, from the careful way he folded his handkerchief and returned it to his pocket, that we would never mention these outings. I never have until now, either.

  Anyway he died, but that wasn’t what broke my heart. I mean it’s not as if sad crap hadn’t happened before this. My father had up and left, for one. But since his leaving led to my living with my grandparents, it always seemed to me that I came out ahead on that one. What finally broke my heart was at my grandfather’s funeral when I realized that he knew I would have found him and that was why he’d waited until we were out of town. Because I could have prevented his death and he did not want me to. Even in his wandering state, his not-all-there state, he still knew me better than anyone else and well enough to know that I would have done anything to keep him with me.

  I remember the words of the minister sliding back and forth over my head in a mindless seesaw. I was looking down into the grave and I felt my own chest yawn open so there was a gap and I made a kind of groan like trees make when the wind has pushed them too far or maybe something inside the trunk is giving way or rearranging. Someone, it must have been my mother, I don’t remember, swept me up and away, although I was too big to be carried. My legs were all tangled up in the moving legs below, banging and bumping shins and feet and kneecaps. Over the moving shoulder—my cheeks
slipping and jolting—I could see the grave receding. Then my shoes were being pulled off and a blanket tucked over me. I turned my face to the wall and slept and slept, trying to shut it out.

  No one believes your heart can break so young, but why not? Why not worse? Just because your bottom is closer to the floor doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to fall. When my grandfather died, my grandmother started winding down very, very slowly, speaking less and less, like a balloon almost imperceptibly deflating. But I was promptly and completely floored by his loss. He was a big man and I counted on that bigness, it filled a space, it created ballast, it secured me. A lot of grown-ups seem to think that littler bodies have littler emotions, even sometimes that little means dumb when it’s the god’s honest truth that’s their own stupidity shining through like the hangover daylight, every bit as harsh and blundering. Your body can capsize with grief whatever its size.

  Now it happens with no warning, the ebb and swell, the grip and slither of grief. Mostly all I’m doing here, all I’m doing these days, is waiting grimly for the next wave. What I need is a certain kind of leverage, a foothold, to drag myself out of this stupid sad abyss. It’s just like that too—a wet bog, a sandpit, something from the Brontës’ world with craggy rocks all around—and I keep trying to pull myself up and out. It’s sad in here. It’s gloppy and messy and sad. Rage is about the only thing that helps. It’s like a handhold or a skeletal structure, a backbone. Without it, I would be nothing but a pulsing blob, a pulp of sadness.

  (I’m in love with her. You can’t be.)

  I want her to suffer in small pointed ways and in biblical plagues.

  (I’m in love with her.) Don’t think it won’t happen.

  (You. Can’t. Be.) Don’t think I can’t make it happen.

  For starters, I used to be a biter. I was biter right off in nursery school. I was living in London with my mother then, in Islington, by a park where all the tulips were planted aggressively according to color, vivid reds together, then yellows, then reds again. Sometimes when my mother carried me by the flower border, the bobbing of the colors over her shoulder would make me nauseated. That was the year my father left us. I believed for a long time that he was coming back, but I was pretty unhappy about it just the same. I bit in school because I was angry most of the time and it was extremely effective. I bit children who crossed me and they left me alone. Before long all I had to do was bare my teeth and other children would back away from me. Children are fast learners. I was no exception. That year, after I drew blood from the stringy forearm of the school matron for the second time, I was finally sent home to live with my grandparents on their sheep farm in Vermont. I still remember the sweetness of sleeping on that transatlantic flight, my head in my mother’s lap, the muffled airplane drone in my ears, that stuffy sickly recycled airplane air coating the inside of my nose. I remember seeing my grandparents in the distance waiting to meet us at the gate at Boston’s Logan Airport, and I ran toward them as fast as I could run, as fast as I had ever run, until I was enveloped in my grandfather’s deliciously pipe-smoked rumpled coat, lightheaded with relief.

  I never bit anyone in school again. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not capable of inflicting pain. It doesn’t mean I can’t bite, or damage, devastate, or destroy.

  CHAPTER 3

  Do you remember Billy Willenka?” I ask Titch abruptly.

  “Yeah, you clocked him,” she says, not hesitating, totally straight-faced. She is speaking through her teeth, vigorously chewing a hangnail. She doesn’t look up from her book. She is deeply intent.

  “You cleaned his clock. You kicked his ass.”

  Cleaned his clock. Not true.

  But true: in the seventh grade on the playground I hit Billy Willenka in the face as hard as I could and I broke his glasses. I mean I sent them spinning off his head in two pieces. We watched them arc up and out in horror. He looked so taken aback and terrified that I burst into tears. Blood leapt out of his nose. Mrs. Hanratty immediately seized Billy by the arm to drag him off to the principal’s office because it was only possible that he had injured me, despite the bright red evidence to the contrary. Neither of us protested initially, from shock maybe or because in the larger scheme of things that was an accurate verdict. He, Billy, would do harm to the likes of me. Not that he had, not that he did much more than leer and harass, push too hard in touch tag, cheat on math tests, trip hapless students in the hall. Usually his targets were girls, especially if they had tender beginners’ breasts. But he also went after those boys who could be counted on to cry, like Matthew Williamson, or boys who would let fly a useless flapping fist, flailing horribly at the slightest provocation, those poor boys who made you want to duck your head in shame so as not to be a witness to their lunchroom degradation.

  Billy was only ever a low-level bully. His mother was Bunny Willenka, the gray mean-eyed secretary in the principal’s office who spoke so forcefully that it seemed like her teeth would come shooting out of her head. Everyone was afraid of her, probably even Billy. In the moment when I hit him he had just said something about being able to see blood on the back of my pants—which was impossible at the time—but in saying it, he conjured the single worst moment imaginable in school, something that had actually happened to Heather Linney-Proctor the year before. In French class when Heather stood up to walk to the board, there was a bright blooming scarlet rose across the seat of her white jeans. Shelly Adams jumped up behind Heather, grabbed her elbow, and walked out of the room with her. Chubby, smiley, previously completely unremarkable Shelly Adams who was forever pushing her thick glasses up her nose. She planted herself behind Heather like she was putting her body in front of a bullet. She was deaf to the frenzied cries of Monsieur Hoover—Où allez-vous? Reviens immediatement s’il te plaît!—even when he stood in the doorway, calling down the hall after them. No one could conjugate a verb for the rest of third period and Heather, although tiny, blonde, generically appealing, and a superb field hockey goalie, never really recovered.

  The year after that, her father, who was a gynecologist, was accused of sexual harassment and the whole family moved away to San Diego. I remember Titch’s musing with a certain authority about the likelihood of being accused of sexual harassment when your job was examining women with their feet up in stirrups. The word stirrups in this context made me deeply uneasy and I didn’t pursue it, although under other circumstances I might have challenged her. At the time, what happened to Heather and what her father did for a living possessed a sort of awful logical continuity, like the unfortunate messy blot of female sex was stamped on the whole family, like a paint line was slapped across their front door to indicate contamination from a plague.

  When Billy invoked Heather Linney-Proctor’s mythic nightmare moment, I wheeled around and hit him hard, square, closed fist in the face, with a glorious flowering of rage and power in my chest. My mother happened to be in town at this time so she was called into school and when I recounted what I had done she did not say, We don’t hit. She did not say, What’s gotten into you, you’ve always been such a nice girl. (That was the principal, who clearly did not know me well.) She said, Nina has every right to defend herself and verbal harassment is an attack on her well-being. And: If this boy thinks twice about harassing someone else, you can thank her. To me in the car she said, Don’t do that again. Also: We’re not telling your grandmother. But nothing she said later could change the fact that I have never loved her more than I did in that principal’s office.

  I didn’t tell my mother that when I hit Billy I was flooded with the pleasure of the violence, the massive satisfaction of connecting knuckle to bone. It was like a dam burst in my chest. It was like the top of my head flew off. It scared the hell out of me.

  I thought, I could kill, and it wasn’t hypothetical. The certainty made hay of all the times I’d wept for dead things, my rabbit Milo whose cage sat out too long in the sun, or the moths that Danny Stern’s ol
der brother had pinioned with thumbtacks to the windowsill in Health. That person who had wept big fat baby tears was a fraudulent shell now. I felt myself step out of her, wearing the tighter, shinier skin of a killer, a person who caused pain and enjoyed the sensation. I had no idea it would be so thoroughly satisfying. It was the kick, the high as he collapsed in front of me that astonished and exhilarated me the most. It was unspeakable and magnificent and appalling all at once.

  So you know what I would relish doing to Sarah now, given the chance? (I’m in love with her, she says). Okay. Given that moment again, I wouldn’t say piteously You can’t be, or, like a chump, like a fool, like prize freaking idiot, You’re for me.

  No. I’d say, Just so you know, this is what I will do to you if I ever get the chance: