Delicate Edible Birds Page 8

  A natural, said the baton teacher, clasping her hands to her breast, rolling her eyes cloudward. A natural, smirked the boys on the football team as she marched at the head of the marching band in her knee-high boots, in her spangly little leotard, in her hat like an upended loaf of bread. She was the head majorette in her sophomore year of high school, hers the sole white costume amid the others’ discontented blues. The other twirlers dropped, one by one, nastily, all humdrum twirlers compared to her, until, at last, she stood alone. Before the thousands of awestruck fans, she tossed her solo batons until they spun above the bleachers on the football field. The fans lost the thin bands in the dusky sky and gasped when they fell into the girl’s hands, streaking stars.

  THE GIRL SPENT HER EVENINGS plucking her eyebrows, hair by hair, until they were as thin and arced as scythes. She swabbed the roots of her hair with cotton soaked in peroxide until she was blond as the day she was born, reduced with cottage cheese until her arms were twigs, smeared petroleum jelly over her lips and hands to keep them supple. She hemmed her skirts to mid-thigh, then hemmed still more. She wore her sweaters tight until her brother, embarrassed by his horn-dog friends, asked if she didn’t think her sweater kittens were going to freeze, exposed as they were. She looked at him coolly and changed into an even tighter sweater, so tight one could trace the label on her brassiere.

  And she said Yes to the boys who called for her, despite her daddy, who snarled and barked at them, and Yes to the football players who jogged after her before practice to ask her to the movies, and Yes to parking in the makeout lane, and Yes to their hands under her skirts, and Yes when they pushed their jeans down their thin hips because by then she forgot what it meant to say No. She caught her father in her room one evening holding her underwear up to the window, panty by panty, examining. She caught him staring at her above the goulash and she had to look away, in confusion, a dank feeling in her stomach. When Stepgranddaddy Joe Helmuth came for Easter supper, he settled his bitches in the corner with a bone, and Fritz the old collie wobbled over and sniffed them with panting eagerness. After Joe Helmuth said the prayer and the rest of them dove into their food, he looked long and hard at the girl, her makeup, her hair, the neat halves of each portion left on her plate in service of her diet. Then he said to her mother with a mouthful of lamb, Better watch my little wifey like a goddamn hawk, else she’s going to turn into her mother, my dear. He pointed at the girl with the tines of his fork, and the father dropped his napkin and pushed up from the table and went to pace the lawn, kicking at the dropped chokecherries.

  The girl then looked at her mother with the purple sleepless bruises around her eyes, at her smallest brother, who drooled in bubbles and seemed only to have attention for the way the cigarette smoke shattered against the overhead lamp. And there was something icy in her gut then, something hard, and she stopped saying Yes. She stopped saying much. She smiled, coquettish, and posed for the photographs for the school paper, for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, and she twirled, but no longer went out with the boys.

  Instead, she spent her nights and weekends at beauty pageants. Why not? she’d decided one Saturday night, restless and imagining the boys with their boy smells. Why not? She already had the sparkly leotards. By Monday she had stitched together an evening gown. By summer, she had won enough for a coughing blue Hornet and went chugging around the state, preparing for Miss America. She dreamed of the big payout, the scholarship to the college of her choice, vague classes with lab coats and fat books and professors with leather patches on their coats, four years, a real college, not two at a stupid technical school. But when she brought home the sashes and the crowns, the bouquets of red roses, she didn’t tell a soul where she’d gotten them, not even her mother, who had smoked herself foul-smelling and unpretty. In a box under her bed the girl buried Miss Hummelstown, Pennsylvania Milk Princess, Miss Lancaster County, Central Pennsylvania Cheese Duchess, and even Hershey Queen. All that long hot summer, the smell of chocolate rose from the factory, a memory made sensual, all that she’d won.

  Her mother watched her come into the house, this fine, thin girl. She pulled her sudsy hands from the sink and she walked toward her, holding them out to the girl as if to clutch her, to hold her, even briefly, before she had to let her go. But the daughter backed away from the soapy arms with a look of disgust, and fled the kitchen to the room she shared with her incurious, moody sister, to recount her tiaras and to straighten her sashes in order.

  AND SO IT WAS UNTIL THE DAY in her junior fall when the girl was outside with her fire batons on a day her father was burning leaves. She was spinning them skyward, where they blazed bright against the glum fall sky. Her monkey-faced sister was raking leaves, sulking in an old red sweater of their brother’s, and everywhere the glorious smell of singed leaves, smoke as thick as wool.

  The girl sent the fire baton into the air with her left hand as she did an Around the World with her right. When the baton fell, it fell a little askew, and she missed catching it with her palm; it fell on the ratty fringe of the old jeans she was wearing, they flamed up, and she stared at the bright blaze, blank, for a couple of seconds before she began to scream, Help me, help me, help!, clapping at the flame. The father dropped his wheelbarrow and ran, but for the younger daughter, for the red sweater—he tackled the younger daughter, and smacked out the flames of her red sweater before he realized they weren’t flames at all. By the time he reached his eldest daughter and put out the fire, holding her as the sister ran for the telephone, there were black scorch marks on the flesh of the girl’s shins and calves, and she had gone limp and unconscious.

  When the girl awakened, she was in the burn unit, tubes in her arms, her legs bandaged and elevated and feeling as if they were packed with clay. Her idiot brother was kneeling on a chair beside her, nobody else in the room. He rubbed her cheek with his finger and cooed.

  Oh, little guy, she would have groaned if she could only get her mouth to work. Oh, little guy, what happened? She only remembered the flames when she saw, on the stand, monuments of flowers, from the principal, from the football team, from the boys who knew every inch of her skin rather well, from her calculus and biology teachers, from her stepgranddaddy, from her baton teacher’s good-looking husband. All, she realized, from men. She picked up a novel her mother had dropped there, and she read to escape the thought.

  By the time the flowers wilted and dropped their petals one by one, the girl had devoured a tower of books. She was a religious convert for books, parched and feverish. While she spun her batons she had forgotten that terrible ache; the books made her forget for longer. She gave up the idea of Miss America with nary a pang; nobody wants a singed beauty queen. And when she began walking again with her skinny, tender legs, and zipped up the long boots she would forevermore have to wear with her skirts, and she realized her grades were not good enough to slide into school on them alone, she began twirling again. Only halfheartedly. Only to stay in the light. She was good at it. It would take her where she would need to go: to college, that distant horizon.

  In the summer, she was selected to be the head majorette for Big 33, the state high school football championships, and as such, she choreographed the routines of forty-five of the state’s best twirlers. On the big day, she did a perfect routine with three fire batons. On television, in front of everyone, Joe Paterno watched her and gave a little smile and said, Hell, if I had any say over the Penn State band, that young lady would be my number one draft pick.

  Flushed with her success, knowing this was the pinnacle of her half-abandoned life as a majorette, she drove home in her coughing Hornet, her father by her side, her mother crammed in the back. And perhaps it was what Paterno had said, but her father looked at his firstborn, and his eyes filled, and he couldn’t say a word, only turning away from her, to look out into Pennsylvania flying by. The girl felt the heat of his gaze, and then the relief as he looked away.

  Though that autumn her history and English teachers had a great b
lowup in the faculty lounge about who, exactly, should take credit for the girl’s turnaround, neither was responsible: after the fire, after Paterno, the girl read at night until the books made her fall asleep. That was how she earned herself a full scholarship to Lafayette College, near Allentown. For their first coed class, the admissions committee wanted a diverse group of girls. She fluttered her eyelashes. She aced her interview.

  THE SERENITY, THE BEAUTY, the aged brick of the campus stirred in her something close to exploding, something sweet and good. She smiled, she got along well with her roommates, both city girls, both rich. She borrowed their White Shoulders, their miniskirts, their brandy; their bracelets chuckled on her wrists. And though the football games were quieter than her high school ones—the team was awful, the fans more interested in smoking pot and watching the clouds above explode into psychedelic shapes—every weekend, she put on her flabby handed-down uniform and twirled mightily and gained a few fans.

  Hey, Darlin’, war protesters outside the union would shout at her as she crossed the quad, Hey, Majorette. Come twirl over here to protest the war.

  And when she’d give them a shy smile at halftime as she marched out for the routine, one boy with gleaming reddish hair and a sweet face under his glasses would trot before the bleachers and woo the sky, singing, One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war! And the crowd would raise their fists and say, Five, six, seven, eight, twirl them sticks to set them straight!

  And the girl, under the spinning batons in the air, would laugh. She’d give a little antiwar shuffle to the beat of the chant. And then she would think of her glowering father if he were to see her, and become scandalized at her own daring, and flush and run off.

  She didn’t know that the redheaded boy was in her biology class until the day she saw him as she was coming down the steps of the lecture hall to hand in a test. Her skirt was the miniest she had, her boots white platforms, and he dropped a pencil to peer up the stretch of her legs. He grinned at her, and, despite herself, she grinned down at him, and this is how they met. He was in premed, he said, because his draft number was ridiculously low, and if he didn’t get into graduate school he’d be in some Asian jungle somewhere, torching babies.

  What do you think? he said, naked, gleaming with sweat on his frat-house bed, looking at her anxiously. If I don’t get into med school, would you go to Canada with me? For weeks her greatest anxiety had been how to hide her seared calves under his sheets, but now she forgot her own body entirely. And she looked at him, began to blink, and as she blinked, there was a tremendous shifting as if something began to strain closed inside her. He frowned. What’s the matter? he said. And she said, Nobody ever asked me what I thought before. And he said, That’s silly, you must have been asked what you thought at some point, and she said, No, and he said, Well, you have to have opinions, everyone has opinions, and she said, I don’t. I don’t know. I don’t know how to make opinions. And he pried her hands from her face and kissed her on the nose, and instead of saying, as she thought he was going to say, Well, I’ll have all the opinions you need, little missy, he said, Well, you can have all the opinions you want around me. Go ahead and practice.

  And she looked at him, at the laughing redheaded boy who squinted at her presbyopically, she saw the lick of salt from the dried sweat on his forehead and said, I think you are the kindest man I know. And he said, Well, that’s a good one. You’re about the only woman in the world to ever have that opinion, and they laughed together, and he stopped laughing and he looked at her very seriously, brushing the bleached hair from her face. He opened his mouth. And when all the other men she’d known would have said, Baby, you’re so beautiful, he didn’t. Instead, he said, Beautiful, you are smart. Believe it.

  Then she burrowed into him, tried to fit her whole head into the hollows of his torso. Oh, she wanted to weep, but not from sorrow, from confusion. She felt as if all her life she’d been carrying this black sack filled with cobras, and the redheaded boy had swept it from her hands and given her a different one, filled with something soft, and said, Listen, this, too, is yours, and you can have it, and didn’t you know there are millions of different things to carry in the world, darling? And she thought of her father, of Joe Helmuth and all the other hard, dark men in her childhood, and had to blink to see the redheaded boy with his big nose and his sleepy, mole-like eyes as the same genre of human as them. Later, she let the sheets fall off her legs, let the boy exclaim and hold her calves in his hands, and she explained the burns, told the story for the first time of her own small revolution. As she watched him sleep that night, she thought a very definite Yes.

  THIS IS HOW A LIFE FALLS INTO PLACE. A graduation, a wedding with her pale, redheaded groom sneaking into her room before the ceremony for a prewedding snuggle, the reception with Joe Helmuth in a fine blue tuxedo, spinning her around the dance floor, his white moustache twitching with pride as she smiled up at him in her lace dress. A hot day outside, the chocolate factory perfuming the wedding, like a blessing bestowed by her hometown. Her parents looked small and nervous at their table, her father becoming so drunk he wept openly, smacking his forehead with his palm, smacking, smacking, until her mother stubbed out her cigarette, and took his hands in her own jaundiced ones, and held them to her lips and kissed them until he leaned his forehead against hers. They sat there, calm, eyebrow to eyebrow. Her monkey-faced sister, who turned out to be quite pretty in an overbitten Betty Boop way, swept her retarded brother around the floor, both laughing like fools, and the bride’s younger brother pressed her to him for one brief moment after the dance, unable to speak, his eyes full of tears. He smelled the same as ever: celery, sweat.

  Then she was the breadwinner, putting her husband through medical school, drawing blood samples from small Amish boys who never so much as whimpered at the needle. Her father, resenting this—It’s not natural, he said, it’s not right; a man should provide for his wife—began to only grunt in her husband’s presence, always seeming to have a tool in his hand. Joe Helmuth tried hard to provoke her husband to bickering and when her redheaded husband only laughed, refused to bicker, he at last relented, giving them a basset puppy that grew up fat and gentle. With the residency came the years of joyous scrimping, years of making baskets for gifts and canning her own vegetables, and hovering over her first child, a beloved son, whose birth was the best day of her life, at least until the birth of her daughter, an even brighter day that seemed to engulf her, drown her in its fearsome miracles.

  When she unwrapped her daughter for the first time, she touched the tender folds of the baby’s body, the warm little tires of her neck and lips and eyelids and kneepits. And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms. If her daughter cried at night, she stood and slipped into her room and kissed her to sleep. She nursed her and felt herself grow softer, her hard edges sanded off, as the satiated mouth grew slack.

  And she watched this daughter grow, grasp at words as if they were bright things, shove everything the world offered into her mouth, as if to taste it all. She watched those little legs in their corduroy pants pump like pistons down the lawn after her older brother, she watched her build forts of sticks and stones and tree stumps, make soft beds for herself of thick moss. The delicate things her daughter crafted with her hands she held in her own and wondered over, as she wondered over the fierceness of the girl’s bright force as she shouted and pulled at a stranger’s mean dog that had attacked their family’s golden retriever, at how, so young, the power of her fury drove the mean dog off. The years of dancing to suburban hip-hop in the kitchen as they did dishes, of bent flowers ripped from the ground in a pitcher for Mother’s Day, of the hurling of words more painful than any thwack of her own daddy’s belt, her daughter screaming words at her, spiny with
superiority: You’re so fucking superficial; It’s the nineties; Make Dad make his own sandwich, for God’s sake. And then the swallowed sorries and bittersweet repentance: Mom, you know I love you. Her daughter grew tall and muscled, fierce and laughing, so terrible that the girl scared her mother, her brother, her small and suspicious grandparents. Joe Helmuth laughed and laughed at her. My girlfriend, he said with admiration, Such a spicy jalapeño. Her mother watched her, awed, this mountain of a girl; she saw how the hunger in her was different from her own, greedy, not empty.

  Should a life be lived with such intensity? the mother asked her husband as he read a magazine before bed. Should life be lived with the intensity our daughter lives it? He put the magazine down, smiled, the skin behind his glasses crinkling. He was bald now, plump. What do you think? he said. She did not answer him at first, spent a few minutes looking through the dark panes and into the city where they lived, far from Hershey, far from her childhood. She thought of her mother’s cigarette smoke as it spun a blue web on the ceiling. Yes, I think it should, she said, and then put out the light and folded herself under the covers, rested herself against him. Her old body against his old body, unbeautiful in aging. But together, they were still beautiful, somehow.