Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  I will bash you over the head with a tall, heavy, ornate, flowered Chinese vase, something from an Edith Wharton drawing room.

  I will thwack you in the middle of the back, or behind the knees with a piece of lumber, hard, knock you sprawling, skinning your hands and legs.

  I will trip you every so often, maybe once or twice a day, or shove you sideways, to keep you off balance, to make you fall hard, surprised, on your tailbone.

  I will kick you when you are down.

  I will jump on your head wearing motorcycle boots when you are down.

  I will drop-kick you out of the stadium.

  I will splinter your spine.

  I will split you from stem to stern, cut you open like an apple with an axe.

  I will reach into your chest, take out your wriggling heart, and wring it like a wet cloth.

  I will take out your gut, tie it up in a bundle, and let it bob out to sea.

  I will bite your neck open.

  I will bite your head off.

  I will show you the same care you have shown me.

  Even if the pain doesn’t come from me, it will come. (Grief comes to us all, Mary Margaret.) I’ll be waiting, I’ll be watching, and I won’t be sorry, because whatever I say in the future, know this: I will never forgive you. Forgiveness is horseshit, forgiveness is hogwash, forgiveness is strictly for the birds.

  I mean this.

  I know it’s not the thing to say you have regrets. It’s customary to say two people are to blame for the end of any two-person situation. This is crap. One person can wreck another, one person can be shipwrecked, while the other person sails away. I think it happens that way all the time and to say it takes two is a total lie. Most of the time it takes one, the one dancing in clogs on the innards of the other. And there’s no way that clog dancer can say, oh hey, sorry, I didn’t know those were your innards I was dancing on, sorry. Sorry about your innards. That bastard clog dancer is to blame, I mean please, let’s not kid ourselves.

  So I might wish this weren’t true—and I do, oh I do, I do in every single cell of my being—but right now all I have are regrets, a whole cross-country carload of them, and I don’t care who knows it.

  “I want to bite her heart out,” I blurt, or something to that effect. My voice sounds kind of like I’ve retched up a hairball onto the carpet. Titch doesn’t even blink.

  “Mmmmmm,” she says. She is trying to wedge a pen cap onto her pinky finger and doesn’t look up from her book. I don’t even know if she heard me. I can’t see what she’s reading, but she is completely lost in it. I wish I were too. I would give anything to be at sea in someone else’s story right now.

  When I arrived to live at my grandparents’ I couldn’t read yet, but I started almost immediately after that. In that house that’s what everyone did. From early, my grandmother used to read me giant juicy classics like Vanity Fair (you’re going to be disappointed in Becky Sharp, she said with resignation, and I was), Pride and Prejudice (you’re going to be disappointed in Charlotte Lucas, she said, and I was), and Lorna Doone (you’re going to be disappointed in Gwenny Fairfax, she said, and I was). I don’t know why she wanted to hurry up and acquaint me with all the disappointment before there’d even been time to think how lovely for Elizabeth to have someone clever like Charlotte to talk to, or how fabulously wicked Becky Sharp is, such a relief after the wet Amelia, or how loyal and fierce Gwenny is to milky Lorna.

  It wasn’t just the tough women, the bold ones biting the dust or letting you down that she warned me about either, it was the sad bits of the story coming up. When Lorna’s cousin Charley, young and handsome and stupid, is about to be crushed under the ruthless heel of Carver Doone, my grandmother took off her reading glasses with her left hand and pinched the bridge of her nose with her left thumb and index finger, a sure sign of distressing things to come. Oh dear, she might say, clearing her throat, and then gear up and forge ahead while I was lying in wait in my bed, weighted down by quilts and foreboding. I’ve never seen her cry; I’ve never heard her raise her voice. When she heard my grandfather’s body had been found, all she said was, “Well. We’ll need a sheet.” But she always seemed to be visibly moved by the plights of these characters, creaky with unease to encounter their sad fates again.

  We certainly read other books that were much less fraught, much stranger, peculiar dusty books that I was sure could only exist in my grandparents’ house, not in the library with its officious warm date-stamp smells. One of those books was called something like Tales of a Brownie and it concerned a small puck-like figure, a kind of grumpy Scottish fairy who always needed to be appeased. He was a troublemaker, a demon really, the Brownie. I had him in my mind as part of a crew that included the Wild Wooders, the ferrets and stoats in The Wind in the Willows, and Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream. (My grandmother set me to recitation on rainy days so I could jump in anytime with What? Jealous Oberon? Fairies skip hence, I have foresworn his bed and company, or Over hill, over dale . . . ) The Brownie liked any number of unusual acknowledgments but the only one I remember was a bowl of milk set out, which troubled me because I didn’t see how you could prevent the cat from getting it and consequently enrage the Brownie. It was very easy to enrage the Brownie and difficult to placate him. This was because he liked playing tricks and harassing anyone who’d slighted him. I remember he would pinch people, painfully in unlikely places at irregular intervals, just pinch pinch the day away. And his victims, who had often utterly unwittingly irked him, would be in constant but erratic pain, getting increasingly jumpy about when they would be pinched again, like rats in some torture experiment with electric zaps. The Brownie would chortle at all this misery. The Brownie would hold his spirit sides and split himself laughing. It was pretty sinister actually and I don’t know why we read it. I always liked the big bold love stories best.

  I’m in love with her. I’m in love with her. I’m in love with her.

  And just like that without warning, I’m knee-deep in a river of sadness. My boots are full and squelching, my feet are sodden. Just like that. I can’t make this stop.

  The grief is huge, stinging, saturating. Hearing the mental loop of Sarah’s voice is a lot like vomiting. I can feel her words churning up again, unstoppable, wrenching.

  I’minlovewithherI’minlovewithherI’minlovewithher.

  If I thought it would help, I’d sic a Brownie on her, one who hasn’t been out of the forest in a long time, one with a great deal of bad humor to dole out in hard twisting bruising pinches, side stitches, in her heart, her intestine, her intercostals. Did you feel that? Did it hurt? Good. Breathe because it won’t happen again for a day or a minute, who knows which, but it will happen again and again and again when you don’t expect it until the bruising is permanent—the purple mementos, the lesions on your heart, your organs—those are gifts from me.

  But this isn’t helping. Not even anger is helping. (I’m in love with her.)

  You can’t be. Because how can that be true?

  If anything I know is true, how can what she says also be true?

  CHAPTER 4

  Titch,” I say, my voice dipping and sliding alarmingly up and down a crazy, uncontrolled, gulping scale.

  “Titch, it happened right? I mean, I’m not crazy, right?”

  She looks up at me, blankly, but not meanly. Perplexed.

  “Well, a lot’s happened,” she says, slowly.

  “I mean she loved me? And I was happy?”

  She flinches slightly. “Yeah. You seemed happy.”

  “Really?” I am pleading, begging, unable to stop myself. I can’t breathe for the sadness.

  Titch’s chin has dropped to her chest and her hands are clasped in front of her as though she is praying. I can’t see her face.

  Finally, in a low voice, not looking at me, she says, “When it started you were happier than I’ve ever seen anyo
ne.”

  It’s true. I was.

  When it started we were at a party in Wellfleet on Cape Cod in June. Ruby, Titch’s stepsister, had a party at the beginning of the season and we were invited. It was at Ruby’s that everything began, right on our first weekend in town. Ruby was living in a tiny house on Whit’s Lane in the center of Wellfleet. She shared the house with an older red-haired woman named Bess, who we had met briefly the day we stopped by when we arrived on the Cape. Ruby and Bess were both waitresses at Aesop’s, a restaurant in town. The weather was cold and I was uncomfortable because I hadn’t packed the right things and I didn’t know anyone. I retreated into the bedroom with all the coats almost immediately after arriving, just to buy some time away, on the pretense of looking for something in my jacket. Not that I needed a pretense. Not that anyone was paying any attention to me.

  The bedroom had a reproachful smell I couldn’t place, a smell of sad, stale sex with an acrid vein like something had gotten caught in the toaster that shouldn’t have—wool maybe, or hair. The smell rapidly made me uneasy and I stopped looking at the charcoal drawings tacked to the wall and rejoined the party.

  But things didn’t smell good there either. From the living room, yeasty smells of cumin, cilantro, and warm beer mingled, alongside the aggressive, revolting fragrance of a vanilla-scented candle. A man with a doleful jowly hound head was crouching down beside the chair of a woman I thought was named Brigitte. Everyone was clasping beers. I couldn’t see Titch anywhere. Distantly but insistently, maybe from the kitchen radio, Madonna was suggesting that we take a holiday and some time to celebrate. I noticed that a serious Middle Eastern doctoral student I’d met that morning in the coffee shop was eyeing me speculatively from across the room. Feeling a little desperate and trying not to breathe through my nose, I made a break for the door.

  There on the ledge, waiting calmly, was a dog, not big, not small, a well-proportioned brown and gold dog who looked like she had some beagle in her. I don’t usually like dogs, but she seemed like an excellent diversion so I squatted beside her and she immediately offered up her belly for stroking, then sighed heavily and curled up in an impossibly small ball, her spine like butter.

  “She’s pretty worn out,” someone said above me.

  I struggled to get up and there was a girl looking at me. She had clear green eyes like glass on the beach, with a brown spot on the left one. She looked into me, frankly, amused. I was riveted. The dog lifted her head too, her muzzle a vertical line to the girl above. Together we gazed at the girl.

  “I wore her out on the beach.”

  “Is she yours?” I said, stupid, dazzled.

  She smiled, not a smile, brisk, dismissive, and I saw I was in the way, blocking the door. I lunged to the left, nearly falling over the dog, and the girl, carrying a six-pack of beer I saw now, walked past me into the party, her hair swinging. I spent the next two hours creeping around the edges of the room trying crabwise to get close to where she was, but kind of like the way something slips away from you in a dream, she kept receding to the horizon. Everyone seemed to know her.

  Eventually Titch wanted to leave, grumpily, and I wheedled out of going. I said I would find a way home and she glared at me hard with total disgust, like she had really had it with me, and then she turned on her heel. The girl with the honey-colored hair was directly across the room with her back to me, looking out the window. I managed to sidle over, wobbly. She looked thoughtfully down at the handkerchief garden while I hovered for an alarming minute, all my neck hairs upright, prepared to bolt. Just then she lifted her head and had me in her sights.

  “You’re friends with Ruby’s sister?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said and sank like a stone. Then, inspired: “We’re here for the summer.”

  She smiled a little. “You’re Nina.”

  Yes. Yes I am. Suddenly: I am. Because she knows my name: I am.

  She didn’t say anything else. I scrounged frantically, finally coming up with, “Do you live out here?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “For the moment.”

  She had a small beauty mark on her left jawbone. The pulse in her neck was beating. She’d gone back to looking out the window. The silence seemed companionable and I stood very still, willing it never to end, for us to stay there forever with the weak sunlight reaching our knuckles and splashing our feet.

  Ruby crashed into it, holding a large metal spoon and a potholder shaped like a lobster claw.

  “Where’s Titch,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “Buggered off? Do you want dinner?” She asked my companion, not me. “The water’s just boiling.”

  “No,” she said, “I’ve got to get going.”

  “Just as well,” said Ruby ruefully, as though there was more to be said on that score. But the girl just gazed through her, ignoring the opening, if it was one, and Ruby swung around, rallying the crowd towards the kitchen, her spoon held aloft in a Viking charge. The conversations followed after her.

  “Do you need a ride?” the girl said to me, businesslike, and I said yes like I was the short person picked first for the volleyball team, then, mortified, downshifted to say that would be great so formally it sounded like my voice had cracked right there on the spot. Blissfully, she didn’t seem to notice. She scooped up a grey windbreaker in one hand and headed to the door.

  “Come on, Biscuit,” she said and the dog bounced straight up like a ball.

  She had a beautiful bright blue truck, the kind with rounded hubcaps and a hood curved like the tender benign snout of some loveable water mammal. Biscuit sat between us and I put my hand on her taut side feeling her sleep warmth and her full body breath. She kept her forelegs in perfect alignment with the edge of the seat. I was grateful to have something to touch.

  We talked about the dog, how her name was going to be Basquiat until she turned out to be a bitch and how she’d come from the Animal Rescue in Brewster. She told me—Sarah told me, in the truck she finally said her name was Sarah, her name is Sarah, her name will always be Sarah—a little bit about what we were driving past. She never asked where to go, she seemed to know. She was an excellent driver. I made her laugh twice, which made me heady with power.

  Two weeks later I slid my hand into hers one night at a crowded party when I was leaving and wanted her attention before I left, just to say goodbye I’m sure I told myself—although you know it’s just as likely that I thought I would die if I went one more minute without touching her—but what I thought was I’ll just get her attention to say goodnight. What I do know is that when I slid my hand into hers, the words slid and hand, mine and hers were blown open, just stretched to breaking like the skin of a balloon, as if I didn’t know or had to relearn what sliding was, the ease the smoothness the grace the arms outstretched glee and terror of a foolhardy child hurtling down the chute at the playground. She held my hand. People around us were talking, but they were only so many silent movie mouths with oversized puppet heads. The world was between our palms, so discreetly and politely pressed, so heated and limitless, curious and fervent. The world contracted to that electric violet place. If we had opened our hands right then the light streaming out would have dazzled you blind. I didn’t look at her; I couldn’t look at her. I just held that pulsing jewel and marveled, brilliantly distracted. (You know this to be true, deserter, betrayer, coward, liar, holocaust denier. You know who you are.)

  I don’t know how this works, putting this together, because although I can pluck these details out, then they promptly smear and what I’m left with is a muddle of feeling sprinkled with the occasional crystallized moment, a shockingly defined image. Like walking down the beach with the enormity, the never-ending haze of moving water and floating sky on the one hand and then on the other, precise bits of whelk shell and that floppy green bean seaweed that unfurls its distinct fat fingers. So here too: once, after she’d laughed and turned thoughtful, her point
y upper tooth third from center overlapped her lower lip like a cat’s fang when they forget, as cats sometimes do, to tuck their canines in—this tooth jumps out even now from the general wash of truck sounds and conversation, the soft Cape colors in spring, brown, gold, and the breathtaking bleached blue. I can see that tooth, sharp as a needle, and the individual golden flat hairs on her forearm, set against a blur of happiness, a sun-filled golden draft like a warm bowl of clear broth. All at the same time, these pinpricks of clear wonder in a big terrible richness. I felt light as a bubble, giddy as a Ferris wheel, safe as houses.

  If my grandmother were reading this story, she would take her reading glasses off at this moment, pinch the bridge of her nose, and clear her throat. You are going to be disappointed in her.

  PART 2

  THE GIRL

  CHAPTER 5

  That’s one version of meeting Sarah. But this is also true: I didn’t worry about her at all because it seemed ordained. Also because I thought it wasn’t serious, couldn’t be serious, didn’t know what it would mean to be serious. She kind of snuck in and latched on like those puzzling skin tags that show up on your arms or belly or actually anywhere. Even if you’re vigilant and you’ve been told repeatedly about the family history of skin cancer, you don’t pay attention to a skin tag, or at least not if you’re me. And then of course I had other things on my plate.

  It was Titch’s idea that we go to Cape Cod this summer. It was because of her that we got there, although we had some assistance from Ruby, who has been going to the Cape in the summer since before her father, Randy, married Lois. Now at twenty, she has a waitressing job she returns to in Wellfleet every summer and a circle of college friends who go back to work there too. Ruby is tall, curvy, and pretty, with lots of shiny wavy brown hair, but she has a bad-tempered expression on her face all the time, a mean mouth that I find completely off-putting. Sometimes she’s been friendly to Titch and to me—if nothing else was occupying her attention she would let us borrow her toenail polish, for example, or back before we had our licenses sometimes she could be persuaded to give us a ride into town—but she is unreliable at best. She barely acknowledged Titch in high school, when they overlapped there for a year. She’s always acted like having a stepsister cramps her social style.