Lauren Groff: Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe just my friends.” Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren’t sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Huxley gave me his charming smile and said, “Because you’re, like, a dyke, right? You like chicks? It’s okay, you can tell us.” He laughed, and the other divers laughed with him.

“No,” I said, putting my chopsticks down, feeling my face grow hot. “What the hell? No, I’m not a whatever, I mean, I like guys, Jesus.” My excitement, the invitation to eat with them, soured a little in my gut. I looked hard at the curls of chicken on my plate.

“Relax, Lollie,” said Tim, grinning at me, his wonky eye traveling over the window, where the world was lit pink by the light over the sign. “He’s just teasing you. Brad’s a dick.”

And, charmingly, Huxley winked at me and showed me his mouthful of half-chewed food. “I know you’re no dyke,” he said. “But you could tell us if you were.”

“Yeah,” one of the other divers said. “That’s totally hot.” And when we all looked at him a little funny, he blushed and said, “Well. Maybe not you, Lollie. But lesbians in general.” He gathered high fives all around, hooting, until something in me burst and I gave him a little high five on his cheek, and he sat down again, abashed.

IN THE CHINESE MYTH, the goddess Nugua created the first humans from yellow earth, carefully crafting them with her own hands. Though they pleased her, these handcrafted humans took too much time, and so to speed the process along, she dipped a rope into darker mud and swung it around her head. In this way, she populated the earth with the darker mudspatters, who became the lowly commoners, while the handcrafted were the wealthy and higher-caste nobles.

Nugua, they say, has a woman’s upper body but a dragon’s tail. She invented the whistle, the art of irrigation, the institution of marriage. How terrible that this dragon-goddess is also the one who grants children to mothers; that this impatient snob of a goddess is the intermediary between men and women.

IT WAS LATE WHEN I CAME HOME because we sat around after we ate, as if waiting for something to happen. At last, Tim stood and said, “I’ll escort you out, Lollie?” and I had the brief and thrilling fear that he was going to ask me to the Winter Dance. But Tim only opened my car door for me, then pulled off, his old Volvo spitting up smoke. I drove home over the black ice and into the driveway of our cottage on Eagle Street.

My mother’s car was gone, and only one light was on in the kitchen when I came in. Pot was sitting in the half-shadow, looking at me with a tragic face.

“Potty?” I said. “What’s wrong, honey?” Her little face broke down until, at last, her eyes filled, huge and liquid, with tears.

“I wanted your food to be warm,” she said, “so I put up the heat. But then you didn’t come home, and it burned a little, and so I put it down. And then I got scared because you still weren’t home, and so I put the heat up again, and now it’s all ruined.” She poked the foil off the plate, and her lip began to tremble.

“Oh, I’m so, so sorry. We went out for Chinese,” I said, looking at the charred remains of the chicken and couscous my mother had saved for me. I hugged my little sister until she began to laugh at herself. Then I said, “Petra Pot, where’s Mom?”

She frowned and said, sourly, “The Garbageman’s.” We called our mother’s new boyfriend The Garbageman, though he was actually a Ph.D. in garbage science and owned a lucrative monopoly on trash removal in the five counties surrounding ours. He certainly didn’t look like a garbageman, either, being fastidious to the point of compulsion, with his hair combed over a small bald spot on his head, his wrists doused in spicy cologne, and the beautiful shirts he had tailored for him in Manhattan. Though Pot hated him, I was ambivalently happy for my mother’s sudden passion: since we lost my father, she hadn’t seen anyone, and this, I privately assumed, had made her as nervous and trembly as she had been in recent years.

When I say we lost my father, I don’t mean he died: I mean that we lost him when we were on a sabbatical in England, in the bowels of Harrods department store. This was back when Pot was five and suffering acutely from both dyslexia and ADHD. Her inability to connect language in her head, combined with her short attention span, frequently made her so frustrated she didn’t actually speak, but, rather, screamed. “Petra the Pepperpot,” we called her, affectionately, which was shortened to “Pepperpot,” then “P-pot,” then “Pot” or “Potty.” The day we lost my father was an exceptionally trying one, as, all morning, Pot had screamed and screamed and screamed. My dad, having coveted the Barbour oil jackets he’d seen around him all summer long, had taken us to Harrods to try to find one for himself. But for at least fifteen minutes, he was subjected to the snooty superciliousness of the clerk when he tried to describe the jacket.

“Bah-bah,” my father kept saying, as that’s what he heard when he asked the Brits what kind of jacket they were wearing. “It’s brown and oily. A Bah-Bah jacket.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk returned indolently. “I’ve never heard of a Bah-Bah.”

Thus, my father was furious already when my little sister fell into an especially loud apoplectic fit, pounding her heels into the ground. At last, my father turned on us. His face was purple, his eyes bulged under his glasses, and this mild-mannered radiologist seemed about ready to throttle someone to death. “Wait here,” he hissed, and stalked off.

We waited. We waited for hours. My mother rubbed her thin arms, frightened and angry, and I was sent to the vast deli in the basement for sandwiches. Cheddar and chutney, watercress and ham. We waited, and we had no way to contact him, and so, when the store was about to close, we caught a cab back to our rented flat. We found his things gone. He was in a hotel, he said later when he telephoned. He had arranged our tickets home. My mother shut the sliding doors in the tiny kitchen, and Pot and I tried to watch a bad costume drama on the telly, and when our mother came out, we knew without asking that it was all over. Nowadays, my father lives in an Oxford town house with a woman named Rita, who is about to have their first child. “Lurvely Rita, Meeta-Maid” is what my mother so scornfully calls her, though Rita is a neurologist, and dry, in the British manner, to the point of unloveliness.

But the evening of the Lucky Chow Fun, my father wasn’t the villain. My mother was, because who leaves a troubled ten-year-old alone in a big old house in the middle of winter? There were still a few tourists in town, and anyone could have walked through our ever-unlocked front door. I was filled with a terrible fury, tempted to call her at The Garbageman’s place with a sudden faux emergency, let her streak home naked through the snow. And then, after some reflection, I realized I was the villain: my mother had thought I’d be home by the time she went out, Pot had said.

Stricken with guilt, I allowed Pot to take me upstairs to her own creepy ornithological museum. In the dark, the birds’ glass eyes glittered in light from the streetlamps, giving me the odd impression of being scrutinized. I shivered. But Pot turned on the light and led me from bird to bird, solemnly pronouncing each one’s name, and giving a respectful little bow as she moved on. At long last, she stopped before a new addition to her collection, a dun-colored bird with mischievous eyes.

Pot stroked its head, and said, “This is an Eastern Towhee. It goes: hot dog, pickle, ickle, ickle .”