Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Only during the day was there peace, a gentleness, when the mother would fill the bath with tepid water and for hours the two of them would be still, suspended, there. All afternoon, the baby’s little rear bumped against her mother’s belly, the tiny shoulders tethered to the dry land of her mother’s chest, and in the buzz of the baby’s grapefruit skull was the sweet release of familiarity. Together, they would float and breathe and stare at the hieroglyphs the smoke made on the ceiling until it was time for the meatloaf, the gelatin salad, until it was time for the mother to spritz herself with lily-of-the-valley perfume and crack open the beers.

Some nights, the parents, still so very young, put the baby in her stroller and propped her up with cushions. There, the baby watched the two planets in her universe swing each other around the dance floor of the kitchen, pink and sweaty, giggling, smoking, drinking. She laughed as the parents turned the radio up and up some more until it was very loud, and only began to scream when it hurt her cockleshell ears. She laughed until the father tossed his wife into the air too high and she hit her head on the ceiling; she laughed until the mother stumbled, drunk, and the father pushed her away, disgusted.

The baby grew, and learned soon enough that, though they looked sweetly chewy, her toes were not for eating, that when a father puts his little finger in one’s mouth, gumming was fine, but practicing new teeth was not. She learned when one flailed one’s sausagey arms against the linoleum, one could scoot forward. Such fun! With a snaky movement of the belly, then a lifting movement of the knees, she could perambulate along nicely. She could grasp the little fuzzies that spun around under the couch, she could take the hard bits of corn from under the stove and suck happily upon them as her mother looked at the same page of a movie magazine, staring like this, for hours.

THE BABY WAS SICKLY, whooping with coughs, quaking with colic. Even so, it took her no time at all to ignore her sickness and grin with nearsighted delight at any balloonish face that loomed above her stroller. Invariably, the faces said, What a beautiful baby!

And the young mother would sigh and say, Oh, well, she’s pretty now, but her hair’s darkening already. She’d say this, stroking the velvet head, but in the nighttime, she would stuff envelopes with pictures of the girl and send them off to baby food companies. At last, she won a spot on a can of formula for her lovely girl, which the family kept on the mantel-piece for decades until some rodent gnawed the label where her face had been.

Only Joe Helmuth, who’d had the foresight to have a framed picture made from the label, had any proof of her starring role on the formula canisters. Darling girl, you’re a dandy little thing, he’d say to her, mouthing a cigar under his peppery moustache. He’d puff and regard her from his height, his boxer dogs snuffling under her skirt. Darling girl, you’re my formula baby, and he’d pull a silver dollar from her ear. As she squealed with pleasure, he’d say, I’m going to marry you, you know. Only have to wait me some sixteen years or so. And he’d give her a dashing grin until she fell over on her love-weak legs.

But soon, another creature began to grow in the mother, sucking all energy right out of her, and so the girl learned to totter then run when the mother was taking her afternoon naps. There was a terrible emptiness inside her then, a sickness that her mother used to soothe by her presence alone. Now, she sang to herself, but the songs didn’t sound right; she licked the cranberry-glass goblets in the china cabinet to see if they tasted red, but they didn’t. And so, rattling alone in the dim house, the girl learned to take off her dress, to slide button through hole, ribbon-end through the bunny-ears of the bow, because the frills and the starch of her dresses were harsh on her skin and she liked the sweep of air much better. And when the mother was weak in bed, and the father snipped violently at the hedges outside, she learned how to take off her little patent leather shoes and her lacy socks and her big-girl diapers with the pink-nubbed pins. She took off her dress, but left the red hairbow in her rag curls. And then she stood in the bay window that gave out onto the busy, sunny streets, the postman coming up the walk, the boys playing dodgeball with a flabby ball, the mothers pushing their babies in their strollers, the little girl stood there and pressed her belly against the cold glass like a sunbleached sand-dollar. She pressed her hands against the glass until they turned into suction cups holding her there. She stood in the window, nude and happy.

But a boy saw her and began to scream with laughter, holding the red rubber ball against his chest, pointing. The other boys began hooting. The mothers covered their smiles with their red-nailed hands, made little shooing motions, and the postman, talking to the father, turned and guffawed. In her pleasure, all the people in the glass laughing, the little girl laughed, too, sending out bell-like peals of joy. She was excited, fizzed to the bone, and clutched her crotch because she had to pee, which only made the boys laugh harder.

Then her father looked up from the hedges, grew pink, and stormed inside, still holding the clippers, so that, for a moment before he grabbed her roughly by her fat forearm, she thought he was going to snip her in the way he snipped the hedges, and she was afraid. She opened her little mouth in a round O and narrowed her eyes and sirened with alarm.

When the father spanked her, she screamed so loudly he thought he was doing her great harm. After he put the diaper and the dress back on and shoved the shoes roughly on her betrayed little feet, he held her so tightly she panted, kissing her until the mother came down from the nap, bleary-faced and asking groggily what had happened.

WHEN THE GIRL WAS BIG ENOUGH to open doors and steal into rooms where she shouldn’t be, she peered through the bars of the crib at her small brother, who looked like the baby rabbits that Fritz, the collie, found and ate in the yard. He smelled of celery, of urine, of baby sweat. He looked at her with his pink and quivering face, opened his mouth in a rictus of joy.

You, she accused, are ugly. He reached out his tiny hand and clutched at her nose, sliding his earthworm fingers into her nostrils, grinning his bare-gummed grin. She put a thumb into his mouth and he clamped down on it, and his tongue was hot and squirmy. Some small warmth hatched in her, and for a moment, she forgot the sick feeling that she had felt since her mother was fat with him, since he came home. She sighed. It’s okay, she said, taking his fingers out of her nose. You can be ugly. You’re a boy. He let out a cackle, as if agreeing, then the sick feeling returned to her.

Girl things were beautiful. Beauty was in girl things. Pretty, she breathed as her mother lifted the charlotte pan from the quivering dessert. Beautiful, she said to her face in the puddle when she took the red berries from the chokecherry and smeared the juice across her lips. Lovely were the dance lessons, the little pink leotards and tutus that made her look like a carnation. There was a lot of jumping and leaping and twirling, and the girls told secrets and pulled their leotards from the necks to show their nipples and sat in the middle of the lesson to cry for no reason. The girl scorned such behavior; she did not sit and cry, and for that reason, for the performance, she was the one chosen to be the purple butterfly when everyone else was pink. Her mother spent all night on the clacketing sewing machine creating her wings, vast and fluttery, with wire supports. When she wore them she was a butterfly, and at night she would crawl from her sleeping body and go spinning out the window over the rooftops of her neighborhood, flapping about with her spangled wings, looking down upon the daddies like her own, weaving home on the sidewalks and singing slurredly, the mothers like her own in the kitchen, in curlers, in housedresses, flipping through magazines, cigarettes in their downturned mouths. Above their unsuspecting heads, the girl spun unseen in the dark sky, so beautiful, so very beautiful.