Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Only when it is stanched with great handfuls of toilet paper can the woman sit again at the window, look out into the town, listen to the roar of the wind corkscrewing down into the hollow. Only then can she recapture all that stillness, all that peace.

I BELIEVE, BETTINA SAYS as she cuts the gizzard from the turkey, that she’s a ghost. A sad old ghost, yearning to go home.

Jason cracks pecans and winks at Jaime behind Bettina’s back; he seems to believe that Jaime and he are in some confederacy against his wife. Jason is handsome in a military, washed-out way, with features that blur into one another and buzzed, rust-colored hair. His fingers are long and delicate and can craft woodwork that seems a marvel of sensitivity, but he tells the raunchiest jokes Jaime has ever heard. He keeps her off balance.

Bettina turns toward them, her violet eyes, overstuffed lips, a beauty mark in a sickle shape across her cheek. She reminds Jaime of an iced cake, all fondant and sugar pansies. She is plump and British, too refined for this dark place, the falling-apart hotel in its sulfur-stinking valley. Jaime, she says, what do you think about our guest?

Bettina has only begun asking Jaime her opinions, though Jaime has been with them for almost nine months. Jaime’s family had come to Sharon Springs every year since her own grandparents were children, her Orthodox Jewish kin climbing the hill from the springs, their dark clothes damp. Bettina and Jason aren’t Jewish, but are fixing up the village’s grandest hotel, and Jaime’s mother loves them for it. One morning last summer, over blueberry pie, Jaime’s mother had confided to Bettina that her sweet girl had turned sullen, strange. Dressed in rags, wore makeup, refused her religion. Only the day before she came home in a police cruiser; she’d tried to buy cocaine from a boy at the Stewart’s up the hill.

We don’t know what we did, Jaime’s mother had wept in Bettina’s kitchen, her wig sliding slowly over one ear. How could a good girl become bad so fast? How could our little Jamina become so different? It is our fault, her father’s and mine. We gave her too much, now she wants none of it. The eighties! Jaime’s mother said savagely. Nowadays people think they can do whatever they want.

Bettina patted her lips and said, Why don’t you leave her with us for the winter? What trouble will she get into in Sharon Springs? Give her a few months with us in this old barn in the wintertime, nothing to do. She’ll run back to you.

That was that: at the end of the summer Jaime’s parents drove off, and Jaime stood staring at their exhaust. All fall and winter Jaime has been at this closed-up hotel. School had been her choice — she was sixteen — and she’d said, No thanks, thinking of the cloddish boys and passive-aggressive farm girls she’d find there. Without school her days stretched long. She learned to cook, to love the town in winter, empty of people. She’d go for long hikes in the mountains, wander in the huge, abandoned hotels, finding the postcards in odd corners, the cellulose dolls left by forgotten children.

The night the woman showed up, Bettina and Jason and Jaime had been in the parlor watching the show they all liked with the wily Texas rich folk: the main character, a raven-haired beauty, had begun to act strangely, an evil new glint in her eye. Then came a knock on the hotel’s dark window, and there was the woman, bedraggled in the rain, like a zombie from a horror film. She’d insisted on a room though the hotel was officially closed until May. She signed her name in an indecipherable scrawl, something like Danielle or Diane or Donna, then closed her door and has not emerged since.

Jaime wants to tell Bettina and Jason about this morning, when she’d plucked one of the woman’s hands from its graceful scrabble in the air, and felt her flesh, and knew she was real. But she only says, blushing, I just think she’s a really sad person. She told me she plays music.

Bettina massages butter and herbs under the turkey’s skin, her imagination afire. She speaks of a cellist she once knew who had been in a coma, who had dreamed of her soul wandering, desperate to find its body again. Jaime has stopped listening. Jason is watching her, his face impassive. He puts down the nutcracker. Jaime flushes. Bettina natters, back turned. A quiet lunge, and Jason pins Jaime’s hand on the cutting board, slides his own up her holey tee-shirt, cups her breast, squeezes it.

It is over: Jason is back to cracking nuts, and there is only the ghost-warmth of his hand on her chest. Bettina is still singing her little tale, tucking the turkey fat over the herbed flesh as if it were a coverlet. Jaime picks up a celery stalk and dices it.

This is a game, Jaime knows, but only Jason understands the rules. She believes the goal is to see how far he can go before Jaime squeals. For a month or so he has been catching her, squeezing her hips, letting his hand brush her ass in passing. A few nights ago, he caught her in the corridor on her way to the bathroom and pressed his body against hers hard and when his voice hissed in her ears for hours afterward, she didn’t know if she felt pleasure or alarm. She dices, she does not look at Bettina or Jason. She waits to know what she wants.

LILY WATCHES HER grandmother from under the silken fringe of the table. The old woman is crumpled into a wheelchair against the window; behind her the winter sun sets over the city. She has a cigarette in one hand, a martini in the other; once in a while she puts down the martini to gasp into her oxygen mask. She never, Lily notices, puts down the cigarette.

She’s like an old witch in your mom’s stories, says Sammy in Lily’s ear. Sammy is spiteful and bad, and Lily often has to discipline her because no one else can.

Shut up, Sammy, she says. The grandmother turns her head and sees Lily.

Come out of there, child, she snaps. Who’s that you’re talking to?

Lily worms out slowly, her hands floured with dust. Just Sammy, she says. Nobody. She can see herself now reflected in the glass beyond her grandmother’s head: pale and plump, her hair stringy, her red-framed glasses enormous on her face. At least she’s not like Sammy, who’s fat and moist and googly-eyed, like a frog.

The grandmother sighs, rattling, and says, You with your everlasting imaginary friend. And seeing Lily’s hand digging at her nostril, more sharply: Don’t pick your nose.

Maria moves out in the hallway, humming. She went all the way to the West Side to pick Lily up at school that afternoon. The girl had been sitting in the principal’s office for hours. Lily’s chest had grown tighter and tighter until at last her bladder exploded and she wet herself. Lily often does. She has severe anxiety issues, Dr. Kramer says. Her mother calls her Our Lily of the Furrowed Brow, and at school, the kids are mean and call her Lily-Wet-Butt. But today Maria only smiled at Lily with her potato-plain face, and helped wash the girl off. Maria is like that. She puts out two plates when it’s snacktime and always asks about Sammy’s health. Even Sammy likes Maria and Sammy likes nobody.

She’s real, says Lily to her grandmother now. Sammy’s real. She considers for a minute and says, But she’s ugly and dumb so you probably don’t want to see her anyways.

Stop clutching yourself, says the grandmother sharply. Do you have to urinate?

No, lies Lily, and then, feeling the old tightness in her chest, she stretches the neck of her shirt above her nose and down three times. All her shirts are floppy at the neck because of it. Dr. Kramer says she should do whatever helps. Sammy unfurls her long tongue into the grandmother’s martini, and Lily frowns: she’s going to have to punish Sammy for that later.

A dense wave passes over her, and Lily is suddenly tired. All she wants is home. To finish her homework, to see her dad, who scoops her up when he comes home and reads or talks to her until she sleeps. Routine. She feels a sharp stab of sorrow in her gut. When am I going home? she asks.