Lauren Groff: Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

“Neat,” I said, feeling the gaze of the gyrfalcon on the tenderest parts of my neck.

“ Hurry, worry, blurry, flurry ,” Pot said. “Scarlet Tanager.”

“Cool,” I said. “I like it. Scarlet Tanager. Hey, you want to watch a movie?”

“Quick-give-me-a-rain-check,” giggled Pot. “White-eyed Vireo.”

“Pots, listen up. Do you want to watch Dirty Dancing ? I’ll make popcorn.”

“If I sees you, I will seize you, and I’ll squeeze you till you squirt,” my baby sister said, grinning so hugely she almost split her chubby little cheeks.

I blinked, held my breath. “Uh,” I said. “Where’d you get that one, Pot?”

“That’s the call of a Warbling Vireo,” she said with great satisfaction. “Let’s watch The Princess Bride .”

My mother was up before we were in the morning, flipping omelets and singing a Led Zeppelin song. “Kashmir,” I think. She beamed at me in the doorway, and when I went to her and bent to kiss her on the head, she still stank of The Garbageman’s cologne.

“Ugh,” I said. “You may want to shower before Pot gets up.”

She looked at me, frowning. “I did,” she said, pulling a strand of her springy peppered hair across her nose. “Twice.”

I took a seat at the table. “That’s the power of The Garbageman’s scent, I guess,” I said. “Indelible. He sprays you like a wildcat, and you belong to him.”

“Elizabeth,” my mother said, sprinkling cut chives atop the egg. “Can you just try to be happy for me?”

“I am,” I said, but looked down at my hands. I wasn’t sure what I was happy for, as I had never been on a date, let alone done anything remotely sexual, and it wasn’t entirely because I was fat. The hard truth was that nobody really dated at Templeton High. Couples were together, or broken up, without really having dated. There was nowhere to go; the nearest theater, in Oneonta, was thirty minutes away. And though I suspected there was some sexual activity happening, I was mystified as to how it was instigated.

My mother took my hand in a rapid little movement, kissed it, and went to the stairs to shout up for Pot. My sister was always a furious sleeper, everything about her clenched in slumber — face, limbs, fists — and she never awoke until someone shook her. But that morning, she came downstairs whistling, her hair in a sloppy ponytail, dressed all in white, a pair of binoculars slung around her neck. We both stared at her.

“I am going bird-watching on the nature trail,” she announced, taking a plate. “I’m wearing white to blend in with the snow. Yummy omelets, Mom.”

“Oh. Okay, Honey-Pot. Sounds good,” said my mother, sitting down with her own coffee and plate. She had decided when my father left to be a hands-off parent, and went from hovering nervously over everything I did to allowing my little sister the most astounding latitude.

“Wait. You’re going alone, Pot?” I said. I glared at my mother, this terrible person who would let a ten-year-old wander in the woods alone. What would she do when I was in college, just let my little sister roam the streets at night? Let her have drunken parties in the backyard, let her squat in the abandoned Sugar Shack on Estli Avenue, let her be a crack whore?

“Yup,” Pot said. “All alone.”

“Mom,” I said, “she can’t go alone. Anyone can be out there.”

“Honey, Lollie, it’s Templeton. For God’s sakes, nothing happens here. And the nature trail is maybe five acres. At that.”

“Five acres that could be filled with rapists, Mom.”

“I think Pot will be fine,” said my mother. She and Pot exchanged wry glances. And then she looked at the clock on the microwave, saying, “Don’t you have to be at the gym in fifteen minutes?”

I stifled my protest, warned Pot to take the Mace my mom carried as protection against dogs on her country runs, and struggled into my anorak. Then I stuffed a piece of toast down my gullet and roared off in my deathtrap Honda. When I passed the Ambassador’s mansion, I saw him coming up the walk, back from the Purple Pickle Coffee Shop, steaming cup in hand, miniature schnauzer on a lead in the other, and they both — man and beast — were dressed all in white, with matching white pompommed berets. Curious, I thought, but that was all: I was already focusing, concentrating on the undulations of my body through the water, envisioning the hundred butterfly, watching myself touching all the boys out by an entire body length.

IN THE GRIMMS’ STORY “Hansel and Gretel,” it isn’t the witch in the gingerbread house who is the wickedest character, as the poor wandering siblings easily defeated her with their small cunning. Rather, the parents of the children were the ones who, in a time of famine, not once, but twice, concocted the plan to take their children into the dark forest and leave them there to starve. The first time, the children dropped stones and found their way back. The second time, the forest gobbled up their trail. The witch did what witches do. The parents were the unnatural ones. This speaks to a deep and ingrained fear: that parents could, in their self-interest, lose sight of their duties to their children. They could sell them to the dark and dank wilderness, send them to the forest, let them starve there. And each time, those two little children, hungry for home, came struggling so bravely back.

BUT NOTHING HAPPENED TO POT THAT DAY, and we won Regionals, as nobody could dent our team that year. It was late when we returned, and I was reading Bulfinch’s Mythologies for the nth time, under the red exit light in the back of the bus. I was marveling over the tiny passage on Danae: Daughter of King Acrisius of Argos who did not want her to marry and kept her imprisoned because he had been told that his daughter’s son would kill him. Jupiter came to her in the disguise of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus. She and her child were set adrift in a chest and saved by a fisherman on the island of Seriphos. There was something so haunting in the story, drama packed so tightly into the words that images burst in my head: a white-limbed girl in a dark room, a chink in the roof, the shower of gold pouring over her dazzled body; then the black chest, the baby squirming on her stomach, the terrifying rasp of the scales of sea-monsters against the wood. A story of light and dark. Purely beautiful, it seemed to me, then.

I was daydreaming so happily as we trundled over Main Street that I didn’t at first notice what was happening until one of the freshman boys gave a shout. The bus driver slowed down to rubberneck as we went around the flagpole on Pioneer Street, and I saw it all: all eight of the town’s squad cars up the hill to our left, all flashing red and blue in syncopated bolts, glaring on the ice and snow, and the ambulance with the stretcher being swallowed up inside it, the running police, the drawn guns, the Chens, both Fat and Glasses, up against the Lucky Chow Fun’s vinyl siding, arms and legs spread. A huddled ring of the Lucky Chow Fun girls on the steps. I could pick out the girl with the jagged haircut, her arm around a plump girl with hair to her waist.

“Ohhhhh. Shit,” breathed Brad Huxley in the seat before mine. And then the bus passed the scene, and we rolled down Main Street toward the one stoplight in town. From there, the hamlet looked innocent and pristine, a flurry of wind-blown snow turning the streetlights into snow globes, icing the trees. Over the hills, the March moon was pinned, stoic and yellow, reflected in pieces on the half-glassy lake.

We were already halfway up Chestnut Street, silently looking out the windows, when someone said, “One too many cases of food poisoning?”