Lauren Groff: Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“Great. Meet you there,” he said, tapping my swim-capped head with a pull buoy. I was overwhelmed with the desire to grab his hand, clutch it to me, cover it in kisses, laugh like a madwoman. Instead I smiled then went back under the water, holding my breath until I could hold it no longer, then sent it up in a great silvery jellyfish-bubble of air. When I came up, Tim had gone.

That night, I showered with special care, washed the chlorine off my body, lotioned, powdered. And when I walked out into the cold night, all the gym’s lights went out behind me and the last employee locked the door behind my back. I left my hat off to let my hair freeze into the thin little snakes I liked to crunch in my fingers, and thought of moo goo gai pan.

It was a Friday night, but there was a basketball game at the high school, so the town was very still as I drove though it. Only the Ambassador’s mansion gave a sign of life, every window burning gold. The Ambassador was our local hero, a former ambassador to France and Guyana, and once-upon-a-time my father’s great friend, and I always felt a wash of fondness for him when I passed his fine fieldstone mansion on the river. He was an erect, gray man of eighty years old with thin, bluish fingers and canny eyes. He had, they said, a huge collection of rare goods from all over the world: a room entirely devoted to masks, one for crystal bowls, one for vases, even one for his miniature schnauzer, with paintings done by great artists of the snarly little beast. Nobody knew for sure, though, because when we were invited, we saw only the ground floor. In any case, my family hadn’t been invited since we lost my father.

Now, on Main Street, only a few shopwindows had left their lights on, casting an oily shine on the baseball bats in the souvenir shops, making the artificial flowers in the General Store glow. The Red Dragoon Saloon was open and there were three Harleys in the sludge on Pioneer Street, but still I was able to park right in front of Lucky Chow Fun, behind Tim Summerton’s Volvo.

The restaurant was newish, maybe two years old, and the town’s first tentative step toward ethnic food, unless one counted Gino’s Pizzeria and the Mennonite bakery on Main Street. It was a cheap linoleum joint, with an ugly, hand-drawn sign flapping in the wind off the lake, lit from above by a red light. It served a lot of sticky Americanized Chinese food, like General Tso’s chicken and fried rice, and I loved it all, the fat and salt, the scandalous feeling of eating fast food in a hamlet that banned all fast-food places, the miniature mythmaking of the fortune cookies.

That night, when I stepped out of the car and around to the sidewalk, I almost knocked into a small, shivering figure in an overlarge tee-shirt, sweeping the new powder of snow from the walk. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and stepped away, not really looking at the girl I had nearly trampled, gathering only a vague impression of crooked teeth and a jagged haircut. She was just one of the girls who worked at the Lucky Chow Fun, one of the wives or daughters of the owners. Nobody in Templeton cared to figure out who the girls were, just as nobody figured out who the two men who ran the place were, calling them only Chen One and Chen Two, or Chen Glasses and Chen Fat. Only later did we realize that no part of their names remotely resembled Chen, nor did the girls resemble the men in any way, either.

I feel the necessity of explaining our hard-heartedness, but I cannot. Templeton has always had a callousness about outsiders, having seen so many come through town, wreak destruction on our lake, trash the ancient baseball stadium, Cartwright Field, litter our streets, and move off. This wariness extended even to those who lived with us; anyone who wasn’t related to everyone else was suspect. Newcomers were people who had lived in town for only fifteen years. The one black family who lived in Templeton during my childhood promptly pulled up roots and moved away after a year, and, to my knowledge, there were only three Jewish children in school. The only Asians were preternaturally cheery and popular, adopted kids of the wealthiest of the doctors’ families in town. This was a town that clung ferociously to the shameful high school mascot of the Redskins, though if we were any skins, we should have been the Whiteskins. I was born and raised in this attitude. That night, without a second thought, I stepped around the girl and into the fatty brightness of the restaurant, past old Chen Glasses, snoozing over his Chinese newspaper at the door.

The restaurant was nearly empty, the long kitchen in the back sending out a fine oily sizzle, girls like ghosts in white uniforms chopping things, frying things, talking quietly to one another. The back-lit photos above the register struck me so powerfully with their water chestnuts and lovingly fried bits of meat that I didn’t at first see the divers, who were pretending to be walruses, chopsticks in their mouths like tusks. When they saw me, they took the chopsticks out so fast that it was clear who they were imitating. I was not unused to this. In fourth grade, the Garrett twins had named their science project, a miniature zeppelin, The Lollie . That night, I did what I always did, stifled the pang, pretended to smile.

“Very funny, boys,” I said. “Have you ordered?”

“Yeah,” said Brad Huxley. He was in my grade and blessed with a set of eyelashes that made every girl in school envious. He gave me a dimpled smile and said, “We each ordered our own. These two freaks don’t like sharing,” nodding at the others. It was his sorrow in life that he was not endowed with hand-eye coordination; otherwise he would have been on the basketball court that evening with the cool kids. He overcompensated in the diving pool, and in a few weeks, at States, would come so close to the board on his reverse back pike that he flayed a strip of skin from his neck to mid-back and got a perfect score for that dive.

I was standing at the front, deciding what to order from solemn and scornful old Chen Fat, with his filthy apron, when Tim Summerton came from the back where the bathrooms were. His face was drawn and pale, and he looked half-excited, half-horrified. He didn’t seem to see me, as he walked past me without a glance. He sat down at the table with the others and began to hiss at them something I couldn’t quite make out.

Huxley sat back with a little smirk on his face. “Duh,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “Everybody knows.” The other two divers looked pale, though, and smiles broke out over their faces.

I was about to ask what they were talking about, but Chen Fat said, “Hem hem,” and I turned toward him. His pen was poised over a pad and his eyelids were drawn down over his eyes. I couldn’t quite tell if he was looking at me or not.

“General Tso’s, please,” I said. “And a Coke.”

He grunted and rang up the bill on the old register, and I forked over my hard-won babysitting money, two dollars an hour for the Bauer hellions. When I sat down, the boys were already digging into their food, and the girl who had served them was backing away, looking down, holding the round tray before her like a shield. This one was pretty, delicate, with pointed little ears and chapped lips, but the boys didn’t seem to notice her at all. Tim Summerton was just pushing around his mu shu pork, looking sick.

“You okay?” I said to Tim. He looked up at me, then looked away.

“He’s just a pussy,” said Huxley, a grain of rice on his lips. “He’s all nervous about Regionals tomorrow. Doesn’t want to do the five-hundred free.”

“Really?” I said. “But, Tim, you’re the best we’ve got.”

“Eh,” said Tim, shrugging. “Well, I’m not too nervous about it.” Then he blinked and, clearly making an effort to change the subject, said, as my plate of crispy delicious chicken was placed before me, “So, who are you taking to the Winter Dance?” None of the boys really wanted to talk about this, it was clear, but spat out names: Gretchen, Melissa, maybe Gina, maybe Steph. Tim looked at me. “Who you going with, Lollie?”