Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

The grandmother says, I don’t know.

Lily blinks, makes a little squeak. Where are my parents? she says. She feels the pressure descending on her, fast. It’s bad, and Sammy draws near to watch, breathing her moist breath in Lily’s face.

We’re still trying to figure that one out, the grandmother says.

But seeing the way Lily’s face changes, seeing her slow collapse, she hurriedly croaks out, Maria, Maria, Maria as loudly as she can until, at last, Maria comes running.

KEY WEST, HYMN OF JOY: from the dark shadows of the room the girl emerges, a pale fish rising from the deep. Howie watches from the bed, heart throbbing in his throat, his own body struck to water. Hers is slim, smooth, a length of muslin, a sheet of music. Knees in-turned, gap in her teeth, the green moth tattoo on her buttock, turned away just now so he can only imagine it. Knowing it is there gives him such a pang, the last trace of her origins, the sad rundown farmhouse smelling of cat piss and mushrooms that he has imagined in full, though she has said nothing at all about where she is from. There is a part of him who longs for just this dirt in her. She is unlike anybody he’s ever known.

Her white body moves, and moves him. She’s just past adolescence, just a girl, young enough to be his daughter. Briefly there flashes in his mind his daughter’s face, such a fierce, lost thing, tiny. He has to focus on the lovely girl before him to regain his desire.

Outside, the lime-flavored sunlight tries to peer at them through the plantation shutters: in the sky, the birds rill the world alive. Above, the sun beats down on the island and urges the sea to singing.

Now that sweet face nearing, now those bitten lips, now the eye clear and blue as mint, that tender hollow in her collar. The girl, so young, smiles down at him. Howie reaches for her. At last, he forgets himself.

THE WOMAN IS IN the shower when the punk girl arrives in the morning. As she comes back into the cold room, bringing a cloud of steam with her, she finds the girl furiously pulling up the bedspread, her eyes red-rimmed. The woman cannot help herself: she touches the girl’s face and feels the soft childish skin, her warmth. There is something familiar about the loose mouth, the way it leaps and stretches wormlike with the girl’s emotions. Vulnerable is the word: and she doesn’t realize she’s said it aloud until the girl turns and flees, the laundry bunched in her arms.

The tray has no gifts on it this morning, which disturbs the woman most of all.

By the window later, as the sun sizzles out in the wet treetops, she falls asleep. When she wakes, there is the last fog of a story in her head — she’d seen it somewhere, or heard it. Television, book, movie, she doesn’t know where it came from. There was a woman, tall and beautiful: this she knows, though she couldn’t see the woman clearly. A letter plucked from a heap of mail, without return address or signature, a photograph falling from it, a menace of flesh. And, somehow connected, a night, a pond rimmed by dark trees, headlights spinning the fog, a car sunk to its bumper in the water.

She considers this for a minute, but there is danger there, and she pushes it safely away.

Now, as she awaits the knock on the door, the hot early supper on the tray, a voice in her mind rises up, sly and dark, an old woman’s voice. It says: Tabitha. It says: Sudden Pond.

The woman shivers: the radiator clucks out its warmth. Although she presses her hands against it, although she paces, counting her steps so she won’t think, she can’t get warm.

IT IS LATE. Bettina is in the kitchen popping popcorn over the stove; Jason is out, somewhere; Jaime’s hair is still wet from her second shower of the day and she is waiting for Roman Holiday on television. There is something tragic about Hepburn even when she’s happy. As if the princess knows that the one measly day in which she gets to eat gelato and smash a guitar over a secret policeman’s head and swoon into Peck’s arms will never be enough to compensate for her lonely life as a royal.

This makes Jaime think of the woman upstairs at her window. She pictures what she found when she was cleaning that morning and pushes her out of her mind again.

Bettina comes in with the popcorn as the credits roll. She settles into the couch beside Jaime, puts her arm around the girl’s shoulders. She smells of lemon balm and the camphor cow-udder medicine she rubs on her hands to keep them soft. Like this, leaning against Bettina’s bulk, feeling a wash of love come over her, Jaime wants to confess everything. How, this morning, in the shower, she looked up to see Jason’s head tucked behind the curtain and watching her, a grin on his handsome face. She’d clasped her arms over her breasts, her crotch. He didn’t touch her. He went whistling away. Despite herself, she grew warm. She sat on the floor until the water turned cold, not knowing what she’d wanted from him, whether just to leave her alone, or to intensify this game, teach her the rules. Jason was not an unkind man (she’d seen him put out kibble for the feral cats; he’d been the one to hold her when her parents abandoned her in Sharon Springs and she’d wept with fury). She was sure he would obey whatever she asked of him. Ex-soldier, married to Bettina, he was used to obeying. Jaime studied a handful of her hair. After two weeks the dye had lost its hold, the magenta turning into strawberry blond. Considering her hair brought her back to herself, made her stand, turn off the water.

Tonight, on the couch beside Bettina, Jaime feels safe. She lets herself think of the boy from the park a lifetime ago, the flowers frilly as Victorian children. Jaime had cut through the park on her way home from school and the boy had followed her, throwing horse chestnuts, his clothes ripped, his head shaved save for the spiky band down its middle. Stop it, she cried, but he didn’t until she ran away. At home, her mother, on the ottoman with her skirt hiked up over her knees, giving herself a pedicure: she saw Jaime’s face and cried, Jamina, Jamina, what’s wrong? her voice full of alarm as she followed Jaime through the house, her feet pigeon-toed as she walked to keep the polish from smearing on the rugs. Jaime wanted to push her away, to think angrily of the boy alone in private. Over supper, the endless questions, even though Jaime was still a good girl then. Top of her class, quiet, going to college. Horse-plain, the way good girls are. But even when she was amenable, her parents didn’t trust her to make her own decisions. Oppressive, their worry, their expectation.

The next day the boy was in the park again. He offered her a box of chocolates, stolen, she found out later, from a drugstore. She ate three right there, not caring if they were kosher. An immense thrill.

A few days later, he took her home. He didn’t live in the rat-infested hovel she’d expected, but a large apartment on the Upper East Side. Played her records imported from Britain: Punk, he’d called them, and leaped around the room to the noise. It sounded like some blistered creature’s death howls, but he loved it. He showed her a photo, the tight leather pants he wanted. He pulled a joint from his sock drawer (socks in neat buds, arranged by color by the maid), and she felt the world slow and become delicious. She didn’t even know his name when he pushed her down on the bed. He hiked up her skirt, and on his clean blue sheets shoved his way into her.

She knew him for one month; during it he dyed her hair, attacked her tee-shirts with scissors, played his music until she began to like it. In school, people gaped at her. She crept out at night and stayed in a club until morning. Pills, coke, acid. And then, just as she was beginning to not mind the moment when he climbed on top of her, her parents carted her off to Sharon Springs, and at the end of the summer they dumped her with Bettina.