Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  We paid for our Diet Coke, and left.

  “Was Bess your girlfriend?” I said, trying not to leave the conversation behind in the store, trying casually, nonchalantly, to pick up the threads. I had met Bess once at the house she and Ruby shared on the first weekend we’d arrived on the Cape, but I couldn’t picture anything about her in this moment except that she was tall and had red hair. The mention of her name seemed to make Sarah grow stiller. I felt like I was approaching a distrustful animal.

  “Yeah. We broke up in the spring and it’s been a little sticky since then. I don’t know. You know she’s an artist?” Sarah asked. She was frowning, looking down, fiddling with the handle on her bag.

  I shook my head.

  “When we broke up, she made a whole set of children’s furniture, tiny tables and chairs, and she painted the word LEARN on them in bright primary colors and then stacked them up in a heap.” Sarah said this seriously enough, but her mouth twitched and I couldn’t help it. I laughed. She grinned back at me then, only slightly ruefully.

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said, boldly, feeling giddily superior, daring.

  “It is, isn’t it?” she said, and laughed suddenly, happily.

  I didn’t want to let on how heady I found this conversation.

  “Come on I’ll buy you a soft ice-cream cone,” she said, catching my hand.

  “But it’s going to rain,” I said, thrilled, hanging on like a child. The sky had gone a deep greenish color and there was an ominous rumbling. Flinty New Yorkers were walking at their regular speeds, not acknowledging the sky, while a few—tourists, Sarah said, laughing—were looking around worriedly and ducking under awnings, searching their oversized bags for umbrellas.

  “You don’t mind a little water, do you?”

  I told her how, when I was little, my grandmother used to hand me a bar of soap and send me outside naked in the rain to wash.

  “And what was that like?”

  “Oh so cold,” I said, “I mean you wouldn’t believe how cold. And I don’t know how clean I got because I used to slide on the grass. But I loved it.”

  Sarah looked at me then with such tenderness, her face very close to mine, that my heart jumped. But all she did was tug my hand and pull me across the street to the Mister Softee van.

  “Come on,” she said.

  Just as I had eaten the top of my ice cream, the first big fat raindrop splashed down. I saw it hit Sarah on the forehead and watched her turn her face upward, blissful, as the rain started pelting down harder and harder.

  “My ice cream!” I yelled in protest, covering it, gobbling it as the rain sluiced down my cone and the whole thing fell apart in my hands. She stood and laughed at me, rain pouring down her front, and seized with happiness, I threw the remainder of my cone at her. It caught the bottom edge of her shirt and she just laughed harder, holding the shirttail up in the rain to wash it out. We were drenched in minutes, looking out at one another from behind our scraggly and dripping hair. A giant crack of thunder opened up around us and she turned in circles, jumping in puddles. She was yelling something at me and I couldn’t hear her over the noise.

  Eventually, we squelched home to the apartment, which she shared with a friendly guy named Dan, a plump waiter waiting for his acting break. Inside, she stripped down easily while I stood frozen for a moment looking anywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  She held out a long-sleeve T-shirt to me. It was a soft washed cotton in purplish-blue. It smelled of fabric softener and Sarah.

  “It’s your color,” she said with authority and I took it, mute, damp, shivering, blessed.

  Walking to the restaurant I told Sarah about the last time I had been in New York, which had been on a college visit the previous spring with Titch and Amy Klein. Amy’s parents had driven us to the city and we all stayed with Amy’s aunt, who had a large apartment in the Apthorp building on the Upper West Side. The place seemed very romantic and nineteenth-century, the way I wanted New York to be.

  But then after the Columbia University tour ended, before Amy’s parents met up with us, Titch and I had gone off to a grubby café just down the street from St. John the Divine. We were feeling very worldly with our herbal tea and our unfamiliar pastries—hamentashen, the girl behind the counter said, her voice thick and foreign and bored—two girls, out and about, loose in the big city. Then a man came in to the café, took out a gun, and threatened the girl behind the counter, who didn’t speak much English. He was yelling. She was hysterical. I don’t remember feeling anything but wonder when the gun swung around the room, dipping toward us, jerking away. Somebody to my left was crying quietly. A man behind me said, Oh Lord Jesus, Oh Lord Jesus, Oh Lord Jesus and groaned. Someone else said, Shut up, viciously, like a wet slap.

  I remember noticing that the edge of Titch’s mug—that heavy indestructible white crockery so many restaurants use—had a lipstick smear on it. She was breathing hard. She grabbed my hand under the table, crushing the bones of my fingers together. It was over so fast—there was a plainclothes cop in the room, it turned out—that we barely had time to register what had happened. We didn’t tell Amy or her parents because her father panicked easily and we thought he might not let us finish the trip. I think he would have been thrilled to have an excuse to get out of New York. All the way on the drive down from New Hampshire, he talked about the crack epidemic, the homeless epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, which, to hear him tell it, began in the West Village of New York City, not in San Francisco or Africa at all.

  I asked Titch and Amy the first night we were there, when we were getting ready for bed in the guest room, if they thought there were always so many epidemics, or if it was true that there were really more epidemics now than ever before. If we were living in the time of epidemics. They didn’t know. Also Amy wasn’t really interested in that kind of conversation. She wanted to know whether she’d be able to take classes at Columbia if she went to Barnard. Whether there’d be boys.

  Anyway, the danger was over so Titch and I didn’t say anything. We didn’t talk about it until we were home and alone together again and even then, not much.

  But for the rest of the time we were in New York and even after we went home—for about two weeks altogether—I discovered that whatever comfortable protective shield I must have usually had up in front of me was down. I was a magnet for deranged and desperate people, for sick animals, for beggars, for anyone raw and unprotected. Outside of NYU Admissions, a homeless woman hit me over the head with her large shopping bag, which felt like it was filled with rocks. A man with only one working eye followed me down 8th Street, yelling about getting rid of the demons. Another younger man put his head on my shoulder, crying, on the subway train. It wasn’t just New York, either. The first day back home, in the parking lot outside of the mall in West Lebanon, a rabid raccoon staggered toward me across the pavement out of nowhere. I mean this raccoon got me in his sights and tracked me down. It was completely unnerving. But I must have been approachable. After the holdup I must have dropped some guard I didn’t even know I had.

  Sarah didn’t say anything when I told her about this. I had meant it to be kind of a funny story, a worldly story, but she just glanced over at me from time to time, seriously, intently, while I was talking. Then she paused on the street, reached out, took hold of my necklace, and slid the clasp, which had migrated around to the front of my neck, around to the back. I felt her fingertips lightly on the nape of my neck. “I’m so glad you were okay,” she said.

  At dinner, we were quiet. I was playing with the red candle on the restaurant table, tilting it one way and then another, watching the wax pool up and re-form, picking at it with my fingernail, concentrating, self-conscious. She took the candle from me and poured hot candle wax into her mouth. It made me wince and she laughed, delighted, and peeled a red wax rose from her tongue. If she had pulled a rabbit from benea
th the table it would not have surprised me. She was magical. She had tricks up her sleeve.

  When we left the sanctuary of the restaurant, I was aware again of the strangeness of the city, its looming darkness pressing in, an unexpected piercing scent of wisteria. By the time we were walking up the flights of stairs to her apartment, I could hear my breathing, feel the pulsing in my neck. The entryway smelled like old cat urine.

  I was a little light-headed. For the first time, nervousness pricked my chest. I focused on Sarah, moving purposefully ahead of me, in her jeans with a green tank top and Blund­stones on her feet. She was all bare brown arms and humid neck, her hair pinned up at the back of her head somehow, straggling bits sticking to her skin.

  Her roommate Dan was already asleep. His small mop-like dog came to visit us, toenails clicking across the linoleum, and then sighed and collapsed, legs shooting straight out to the four corners of the room so he looked like a miniature bear rug, belly to cool floor. The air was gluey from the city smells. The shapes of furniture in the dark living room seemed ghostly now, blockish, unknown.

  I want you to hear this song, she said. Okay. We were sitting kitty-corner in chairs at the kitchen table with a tape player and glasses of water. She pressed play. She leaned in toward me and brushed her cheek against mine so lightly it was more like warm air than skin. She dipped in again and we rested there for a moment barely cheek to cheek, barely breathing. This is what they mean, I thought confusedly, about cheek to cheek. The softness the warmth the nearness was dizzying. We did not kiss. We put our heads together and touched noses and cheeks instead, as inquiring and velvety as horses who visit by lowering their satiny muzzles together. In the background, Nina Simone sang “Lilac Wine,” crooning gently. (I lost myself on a cool damp night/Gave myself in that misty light/Was hypnotized by a strange delight/Under a lilac tree.) We breathed on one another. (I made wine from the lilac tree/Put my heart in its recipe/It makes me see what I want to see/And be what I want to be.) I tried to hang onto the words of the song to steady the happy jumble of my mind, the huge pounding in my chest. (Lilac wine, I feel unsteady. Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love.) I tried to listen to what Nina was singing as a way to hold on, but I wasn’t capable of holding on. I was already beyond, over the edge of delight. The words slipped away from me in the wash of joy, of breath, of the revelatory softness and the mild lush sweet scent of her skin. It was the smell of happiness. My whole body rolled over in warmth, like a dog in deep grass in the summertime sun.

  When Sarah did speak, it didn’t make any sense to me at first. She said, Hello beach plum. Then she said, Oh, Nina. Her eyes were unfocused. Her voice did not sound like anything I had ever heard before.

  CHAPTER 13

  One of the first things I noticed this summer about living in a new place is how I map that place, how I carve it up and use it. On the Cape, I learned the routes to places that I went regularly for practical reasons—the produce store in Orleans for example, the cheap gas in Eastham—as well as the way to a few places I had adopted as my own—Bound Brook Beach, the quietest pond tucked away in Truro—and once I’d hit a certain number of each kind of place—places I needed and places I liked—I trucked back and forth to those spots, digging my trail, rarely getting off course. I did this on foot and by car. There were whole unexplored areas of the Cape, probably hundreds of overgrown scrubby sandy roads that I never even considered going down. That way I had a gradual feeling of mastery over my own tiny map. For a landscape, a place, to be familiar, I need the doing and the doing of it, the same step by step across it, a repeated physical habit to learn the terrain.

  But with Sarah what was known, what was familiar between the two of us, was immediate. I’m not talking about feeling smug because we’d both really read our Edith Wharton like those insufferable couples everyone knows. I’m not talking about shared interests or those seemingly amazing discoveries when you’re first crushed out on someone and you learn that they hate Elmo too or when you admit that you both grew up listening to Dolly Parton and you adore her. Those moments might make you feel destined to be with the other person, but really they only serve as confirmation of your own ego and tastes (every right-thinking Sesame-Street-watching self-respecting person hates that wannabe-Muppet and of course you loved Dolly and you were right to do so). I’m not talking about this kind of mutual self-congratulatory pleasure.

  What happened was that we were skin of the same skin.

  I had felt something similar to this sensation once, long ago when I was little, with a slender boy, slippery and loose-limbed, double-jointed and lithe like a circus performer. He could have curled himself into a small box such as might hold a bakery layer cake or a tall hat, and he was graceful in a way that very few boys are. His name was Nico. He said that when he grew up he wanted to be a circle. He said this as though it were about the same thing as wanting to be an astronaut or a fireman. It made perfect sense to me. He made sense to me, in his being. We met and regarded one another for less than ten minutes before we pounced and leaped and rolled. It was the summer after I had moved home to Vermont to live with my grandparents. We were both six years old, our birthdays only one day apart.

  Nico’s father was working a job, digging out the pond at my grandparents’ home, and Nico came along to ride on the giant machinery. He could have been my twin. The first morning we stretched out lengthwise at the top of the long hill behind the house, arms stiff by our sides, and rolled down faster and faster in the meadow grass, which was blousy, spiky, smelling of sun with whirling pockets of damp ripe earth, crisp prickly sweetness. When we landed in a heap at the bottom my nose was tucked in the hollow of his collarbone, which smelled like the peepers sound, which is to say, like home. I licked his neck, which didn’t startle him at all. He rested his face in my hair. His heartbeat was too close to the skin in his skinny boy chest. It was a strange sensation to be near him because his oversized heartbeat made him seem at once fragile and all encompassing. It gave me the same amazed feeling as cupping my hands around a songbird, the way the heart pounds all through the body, that wide terrifying embrace. He was all heartbeat, all heart. In the one picture someone took of us, we are both in denim overalls, hand in hand, dirty and victorious, not girl or boy but shining eyes in grubby faces. He has a high, worryingly vulnerable forehead, enormous impish glee, a mop of dark hair, large dark eyes, and a beautiful mouth.

  For two months, we played together seriously, with abandon, every day but Sunday. He was my brother and my true love returned to me. We were our own litter of puppies. We were joyful and unashamed.

  This did not mean that we agreed on most things or much of anything. Once we found a dead cat in the road behind the barn, its eyeball lying apart in the dust like an iridescent blueberry, or that shiny dark reddish blue skin of a wild grape, pulpy and battered. I wanted to investigate it, but he cried and wouldn’t look at me. I thought we should move what remained, the matted fur, the flattened forelegs, off the road. He didn’t want to touch it or have anything to do with it so I hunted up sticks to pry up the body. He looked at me all streaked with tears and snot, like I was a traitor. He would not touch me on the walk home.

  When his dad was done with the job, he was gone from one day to the next and I never saw him again. But I believe I would know him anywhere, at any time. I believe that all my bones would rise up and clatter together like noisemakers to greet him, in jubilant recognition, just as they did the very first time I saw him.

  Sarah and I didn’t always see eye to eye either, but we too are from the same litter. When she curled over me in sleep, in love, from the first night on, we would find ourselves later in the most remarkable, unlikely positions without strain, with our earliest limberness, our baby bonelessness, allowing for an intertwining, a merging I never knew possible. The ease was astonishing, unknown to me. This was not sidling up for comfort—although it was comforting—this was not passionate gymnastics—although it
was passionate—this was being drawn, drawing to your own skin, inevitable, magnetic, necessary.

  It would be better not to remember this.

  But if I do, when I do, what I remember is waking up in the morning, that first morning and many, many others, deep in soft folds of bedding, naked as a jaybird, heavy with ease, limbs entangled, basted top to toe with happiness, just drenched in it, smeared with it. Her face on the pillow smiling her lazy smile at me, her hair mussed, her slow heavy-lidded familiar blink, smiling her smile, completely undefended, as assured and content as the cat that has drunk the cream. The first time I saw her unguarded smile, I was undone. I was done in. I was done for. Her whole face opened and unfurled when she looked at me, as uncomplicated and joyful as a sheet shaken out and billowing in the sunshine. The first time I saw that look on her face, I knew she loved me.

  She believed in good bedding, in a feather bed, a mattress piled high with a downy comforter, soft, soft sheets, a decadent pillowed place to burrow in and bed down. In it, we made our own rules. In it, we were a fort that could not be taken; we were sheltered from all the elements. In it, we belonged to each other and nothing in the world could touch us.

  After the weekend in New York, without any discussion, we were together for as much time as could be squeezed from the day, which seemed expansive, like an opening accordion, for us. Between classes, whenever possible we would lag behind walking from one location to another, backing each other into corners, crushing the morning glories on a dilapidated trellis, pressing up against the back of a building, curving into the cool musty stone stairway to the basement of the church, locking the door in the girls’ bathroom at the library. At the end of the day, I liked to wait for her on the landing outside her place in town and when she was finally done with the workshop and I heard her footsteps crunching on the driveway, I would bolt down to meet her and leap off the fourth step from the bottom, the way the lambs race up the manure pile and sail off the other side into the open air, knees bent, ears out, for no other reason than because they can.