Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  Patty Trout manhandled everyone, thumped people between the shoulders, put them into strange positions, shook their arms to loosen them, nudged the backs of their knees, confronted and coaxed them, asked all kinds of questions, out loud and murmured, and startlingly, occasionally yelled students’ text, by way of example. It was terrifying and electrifying all at once.

  When I stood up, finally, to face her, she looked at me for a minute and then began stroking my jaw down gently with her crooked index finger.

  “Let that go,” she said, and again, “let that go.” I grimaced.

  I stumbled through the text once. Then she moved in on me.

  Was this a face/To be oppos’d against the warring winds/To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder? I said, and she pressed in for the kill.

  “Who left you in the wilderness?” Patty Trout asked.

  I didn’t answer the question. It didn’t make any sense to me.

  “Who have you left in the wilderness?” Patty Trout prodded.

  “No one,” I said, resisting, forging on.

  “Who have you left?” she asked, placing a hand on the back of my neck.

  “Why are you asking me this?” I said, stiffening. I didn’t mean to sound huffy, but I did. I was digging my heels in.

  Patty Trout smiled at me, faintly. “It’s sometimes a fine line between leaving and being left,” she said. “And it’s affected you. Just say the lines in response when I ask you something.”

  I started to speak again.

  “Stop.” She said. “Repeat the line.” She moved her hand onto my belly, firmly but kindly, and placed the other on my shoulder. She said, “Breathe into my hand.” I did. Up close she smelled like all the spices you need for pumpkin pie, which was deceptively reassuring.

  “Look at them,” she said, indicating the rest of the students. “Take them in. Talk to them.”

  That seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. I looked at the lot of them with deep animosity.

  This time she actually leaned in so close that she touched the side of her forehead to the side of mine, lightly, and as she did she asked me, with both quiet determination and compassion, “Nina, who have you abandoned?”

  I made a fast rude face at her without meaning to, and just as immediately remembered being eight years old waiting in the jeep in the parking lot of the P&C in White River Junction. (This was the supermarket called the Price Chopper. Although why then the “and” in between the P and C? I chewed on this kind of thing—misplaced conjunctions—like someone the English teacher gods had reached down and touched in utero. You will strengthen our numbers.) Sometime earlier, my grandfather had shambled off like an upright bear into the supermarket. I could tell time but had no clock. I started counting cars in the lot and then black or blue cars that drove by and finally the seconds between blue and black cars, one Mississippi two Mississippi. Once I reached a hundred before a green Subaru wrecked my streak. He didn’t come out. It started to get dark and the lights from the store glowed invitingly like a spaceship. Every time I thought he’ll come out if I count to 100 or 500, I’d count, but he wouldn’t materialize and I’d just start all over again. I watched people come out hugging large paper bags, a quarreling teenage couple with matching gelled and spiky hairdos and a middle-aged woman with no waist. I was worried by the dark and felt pinned down by it like I couldn’t leave the jeep now that it was dark, but also like I might wind up sitting there all night. Who would know? Who would know to come out to me and how would I know if they could be trusted?

  Inside the jeep was the smell of the sun-warmed plastic window flaps, a smell being released now into the cool cover of night, a smell like rubber sheets on a baby’s bed, intimate, vaguely disgusting. Also, more happily, the rich familiar smells of machine oil and hay dust, bits of which were embedded in the seats. I picked at them with my fingernail until I got a hay splinter.

  I don’t know why I didn’t go into the store with him to do the grocery shopping. I usually did because there was always a treat in it for me—a stale gumball from the big pink machine, or better still, SweeTarts, which I liked to pretend were pills for some devastating illness I had. I doled the candy out, self-medicating, seriously and sorrowfully all the way on the drive up the hill, staving off my final collapse and privately practicing my last words, guilt-inducing but bighearted pardons for all the wrongs done to me. I had a number of popular scenarios, but my favorite involved my being propped up on pillows with my inexplicable gently wasting Beth March kind of disease, while the weeping, distraught face of my father hovered at my bedside, begging for reconciliation, and suffering much more than I was. I will never forgive myself, he would say.

  Eventually, the assistant manager brought my grandfather out to the jeep. I saw his face surface in the plastic window sheet like a mammoth fish coming suddenly into view at the Boston aquarium, a big white blur. He said, “That’s my daughter,” with assurance, and the assistant manager (Scott Something on his tag) looked at me for confirmation, helplessly. A skinny, leggy kid, Scott, with enraged acne. He had no idea what to do. I was confused, but I nodded because I couldn’t see what else to do either and I was glad not to be alone anymore. My grandfather climbed into the driver’s seat, a little shaky on his hind legs. He looked mad and turned inward, unlike himself. It should have been reassuring to have him back, but it wasn’t quite. He didn’t seem to know where he was. His wool barn jacket at least was familiar, comfortingly steeped in wood smoke. We sat for several minutes before he reached to turn the key.

  I should have gone after him, my grandmother said. She was uncharacteristically short with me afterwards. I never found out what happened in the store. It was some unnamable shame, like whatever strange spell had him in its grip when he came back to the jeep, like the wave that sometimes rose up in front of his eyes. Why didn’t you go in with him? she said, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know what was wrong with him or even for sure that something might be. Nobody told me. I didn’t know he needed me. Why didn’t anyone tell me that he needed me? Why didn’t I know? I would never have left him alone, not for an instant. But I thought I was the one who had been left behind. Then he went into the woods, opposed the warring winds, and froze to death.

  In class I was crying, but hadn’t noticed.

  “Say it again,” Patty said insistently, gripping my arm.

  Was this a face/To be oppos’d against the warring winds/To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?

  “And.”

  Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire.

  “Against what?”

  Against. My. Fire.

  “And.”

  Alack, alack. Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once had not concluded all.

  But they had. They had concluded all. Alack. A lack. A lack.

  “From the beginning,” Patty Trout said, and I did, with a drive from some internal place. She said, “Nice work,” and released me.

  I was exhausted, depleted, sodden. I tottered over to Group 6 and slid down the wall to sit with my people. Shisha leaned over to me, pressing the length of her upper body against mine, and said, quietly, “That was the shit,” and I smiled at her. The coolness of the skin on her arm made me realize how flushed I was. Geoffrey was smiling his slow beatific smile at me and even Emily stopped her constant jiggling long enough to stretch out her foot and nudge my thigh gently in appreciation. I looked around for Sarah and saw her looking straight at me from across the room, a troubled inscrutable hard-edged look; I had no idea what it meant. There might have been tears in her eyes, or there might not. I could not tell.

  During our lunch break that day, Bill McNeil passed our table and rapped me lightly on the head with his knuckles. “That was passable work today,” he said, and then the glimmer of a smile—like the shadow of a beautiful exotic butterfly—fluttered lightly over hi
s face. He said, “What are we eating here?” and sat down between Chris and Nicky, immediately appropriating and rifling through Chris’s bag of potato chips. Even his benevolent presence put something of a damper on the conversation, although we all felt the unconscious honor. Nicky dug in her bag and produced a cigarette for him, which he promptly took without thanks. “I’ll see you lot later,” he said, and headed over to where Patty Trout was stretched out on her back on the grass on her yoga mat, a big floppy hat pulled down over her face, apparently passed out.

  That night there was a party at a house that a group of eight students were sharing, including Chris and Doug. It was a recently built soulless grey rental house, out on Chequesset Neck. When I went upstairs to find a bathroom, the first open door revealed a bedroom that looked like the inside of a suitcase had exploded. There were clothes everywhere. The bathroom was cold—someone had left the window open—and it smelled like old bong water. Someone had scrawled a smiley face in coral lipstick on the corner of the mirror. I saw my own face in the mirror, surprisingly round and pink and buoyant.

  Downstairs someone had cleared the main living room and pushed back the sofa and chairs so that people could dance. Someone had hooked up speakers and the music—the good, the bad, and the ugly—was all equally loud.

  When she saw me come downstairs, Emily ran over and pulled me onto the dance floor, spinning me around clumsily, bobbing and weaving and laughing. Only yesterday, this would have felt oppressively like an unnecessary, grabby, heavy-footed cheer, something to escape. But now I was equally effervescent, glad to join her and grateful that she did not know how I had misjudged her, or if she did, that she forgave me. The bounty, the beneficence. We were in the middle of a clump of red-faced people jumping up and down, and Katrina and the Waves were singing Ohh-ohh. I’m walking on sunshine, ohh-ohh, which is exactly the kind of music I find irresistible and Sarah condemns out of hand. I don’t know how anyone can object to that kind of contagious peppy ridiculousness. I was happy to give in to it, to give in to Emily, and to all the beaming, sweaty people bumping into me.

  Toward the end of the song, I caught sight of Sarah hovering near the edge of the room, not dancing. We had gone there separately—she had to go to a meeting with the other section leaders at the end of the day and I had gone out with the rest of the group for pizza—and she looked alone there somehow, disconnected, contained. I headed over to her and gestured with my head to the dance floor. I didn’t know if she’d join me, but it seemed harmless enough to ask. At least two thirds of the people were mingling on the floor. Then I threw open my arms, but she just looked at me steadily and took a sip of her drink. I dropped my arms, foolishly, but I couldn’t release my good mood, the fizzing in my chest and head from the day’s praise and beer and dancing.

  Feeling bold, I came up right next to her, closer than I would usually in any group and leaned in close to speak to her.

  “Is my kiss on your list?” I asked, repeating the song lyrics that were playing now, speaking into her ear.

  She pulled back from me, looking at me very seriously, and I thought for a minute that she was going to shut me down or ask me how much I had had to drink, but then she leaned over and said into my ear, her face expressionless, “I can’t believe you did that. I can’t believe you Hall and Oatesed us.”

  “You’re such a snob!” I yelled over the music, happily.

  “About Hall and Oates?” she said. “Are you kidding me? Absolutely.”

  “It’s not such a bad song,” I said loudly, overemphatically. “It’s catchy.”

  She looked at me, shook her head in mild disgust, and looked away again.

  “It’s not like I’m confessing to owning REO Speedwagon, or Journey, or Phil Collins,” I shouted, on a noisy and happy roll.

  Sarah grinned at me then, broadly, briefly. Looking away from me, out across the room, she leaned over and spoke directly into my ear again, her breath warm.

  “Oh, go ahead, honey,” she said. “Embrace the cheese. I’m not stopping you. I might have to shame you, but I’m not going to stop you.”

  The teasing tone, the word honey, the word shame, her breath in my ear and down my neck made my shoulder blades fly together sharply and my whole body stand at attention. She knew she was doing this, but her face stayed removed, faintly amused. She lifted the bottle in her right hand easily to take a sip of a beer. I wanted to grab her by the wrist and crush all the bones in her hand.

  At that moment the music changed and Sarah put her bottle down on the windowsill, still without looking at me, and began to move toward the center of the room.

  “Oh, now you’re dancing?” I called after her. “Now you are?”

  “Prince is the real deal,” she said, over her shoulder. “It’s not even worth discussing.”

  “I wasn’t trying to discuss,” I shouted. “I was trying to dance!”

  “Emphasis on trying,” cracked Geoffrey, who slid suddenly into view on my right.

  “Oh shut up,” I said, relieved and entertained. “I can kick your ass in the minuet and you know it.”

  “Too bad there’s not much call for that,” he said, dancing away again.

  “If I had a list of the best things in life, you would be on it,” I called to Sarah, loudly, recklessly, over and above the other people in the room. She was turned away from me, dancing, and she threw me a glance, but whether it was warning or warm, I couldn’t entirely tell.

  CHAPTER 20

  The next day we were headed out to breakfast, which was what we usually did on Saturdays before I went to work at noon. Sarah liked to eat mostly in Province­town despite the drive, which meant an early rise before the road was too clogged with beachgoers funneling back and forth. We almost never ran into anyone from the program there, and when I was getting dressed that morning I wondered for the first time if that was part of the reason we went so far. Sarah came out of the shower after me and was hunting through a pile of clean T-shirts lying over the back of the chair in the bedroom. I dove toward her and we fell backward on the bed.

  “There’s no time for this,” she said sternly, and then she burst out laughing at the mock consternation on my face.

  “Oh, goodness. Come here, greedy girl,” she said, and scooped me toward her. I rested my head on her chest for a moment, luxuriating. I could hear her deafening heartbeat in my ear and feel her still damp skin on my cheek. She smelled citrusy from the shower soap, and underneath that like her own naked slightly astringent self. She was the most gorgeous tawny color all over, even her breasts, which were a revelation. I had never had much truck with my own, which I found inconvenient most of the time, heavy to carry around and hard to dress, intent on straining my shirtfronts and popping open buttons. Their only virtue had been their appeal to boys, and that was at best a mixed, unsatisfactory advantage. I never could understand what boys were responding to; in fact the interest boys had in breasts always seemed to me like a clear marker of how inane most of them were. They were so easily contented with seeing or touching a breast, but they never seemed to know what on earth to do with one, once it was revealed. It’s not that I was any help with this; I hadn’t had any idea what to do with breasts either. What was the point? What was being craved? What possible purpose was being served here? But I had to reconsider this position when I met Sarah because I was entranced by her breasts, which were in every way different from my own. She did not need to wear a bra, although she almost always did, but whereas my breasts are like heavy soft cushions, mild-mannered flotation devices in the water that require constant corralling and support on land, hers stood up of their own accord like gravity had nothing to do with them. Her breasts were all at once so pretty and so single-minded, so businesslike and so pleasing. Like all of her body, they were straightforward, beloved, desired, merged to me and mine. They did not lie.

  That Saturday we eventually made it to Café Heaven in Provincetow
n. We were waiting for our food, when a woman at the table next to ours decided to move toward the window, saying to her friend in tow, “There’s more light up here and I like to go toward the light.”

  “Does that seem like a good idea?” I asked Sarah, sotto voce, and she laughed, her bursting pealing laugh, bumping her coffee mug and spilling a little on the newspaper, just as our food appeared.

  “Can I have your French fries?” I asked immediately, reaching over toward them.

  “Don’t be so impatient,” she said. “You’re so impatient.” But she shoveled a pile onto my plate.

  “Look what you give me,” I said happily.

  “Not as the world gives do I give to you,” she said, scooping sugar into her coffee and clanking the spoon twice, emphatically, on the edge of her mug.

  “That is so true,” I said, reaching for her ketchup.

  Right then the café door opened and Bill McNeil came in. I started to wave and then I saw that immediately behind him, smug and twitchy at the same time, was Group 6’s very own Nicky Pickler, wearing a purple windbreaker. She waved at us, and I waved back brightly. Bill looked around grumpily and sat in the far corner by the window, his antennae up, not acknowledging us at all.

  Sarah looked at me and said quietly, “Your mouth’s open.”