Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

THE GIRL IS UP in the hotel room and Howie is swimming his laps in the pool, feeling the joy in his new muscles, how after these few days his skin has softened into tan. He dips below the water and comes up blowing in the bright Key West light. Salt on the air, terns screaming: he dips again to the blue water and its kind murmur. There, he imagines the girl inside the dim room, television washing her body with flickering greens. Her show is on, and she has never missed an episode. He’d tried to watch with her the day before, but got confused: it was about a woman who was seen in two places at once; impossible, and Donna’s explanation only confused him. There’s Texas in her voice, though she’s never been. His own Eliza Doolittle has learned a great deal from those oil-slick wives, their great powder puffs of hair, their avidity, their boldness, even the slow caramel drawl of their words. From the show she knows words that just a few months ago were foreign to her: yacht, Sauternes, carat .

Howie swims and his heart swims, too, rhythmic, longing.

Before the girl, he was gray. New York City snowfall gray, exhaust-dogdirt-gray. Gray as his office with its pleather couches, black-and-white photos on the walls, even home’s small comforts gray, all glass and steel. His wife is modern and loves all things modern, as well.

But one day he saw the girl on his couch in the waiting room, a peony in a sea of ash. When he walked into the exam room, he pretended to be taking notes, only looking up when the door closed to see that she’d forgotten the modesty gown. She sat there, slow-smiling, naked, cupping her breasts like nesting birds in her hands. Pretty girl, barely out of her teens, gaudy squares of zirconium in her ears.

I thought, she’d said, smiling at him, that I felt a lump.

No lump: also no further exam. He didn’t want to see anything belonging to the girl in a clinical light. He drove home dazed and saw coronas of sunlight on the cold glass of skyscrapers. His classical music station bored him and he flipped until he heard Neil Diamond warbling “America”: he listened, astounded. It was big and celebratory and bold, this song, like his heart put to music. This song was the zeitgeist, this new decade hungry and striving, where anyone could strike it rich and everyone was doing so.

There was a party at home when he arrived: he’d stood limply in the door, striving to place all those people in the house.

Then he shook himself, mingled, fetched drinks. Became again the good man his guests knew, the one without adultery thumping in his chest. Howie, tee-ball coach, kind father of a problem child, head of the Neighborhood Association, gentle gynecologist. His wife shimmered and dazzled, bon mots spinning from her mouth, and he laughed with the guests, Tabitha’s perfect audience. He squeezed her hand in passing, subject as always to her acerbic charm. His persona felt odd on him, as if he were wearing a mask from a Greek play, features fixed, mouth a loudspeaker.

In the midst of it all, he went to the bedroom, rolled up his cuffs, dialed the number the girl had written on his wrist: Donna, she’d written, and he knew by the way she’d smiled when she said it, tasting the word with such pleasure, that it was a name she’d given herself. Even here, in Key West, he still doesn’t know her true one.

Before she answered, he remembered those two small breasts in her hands and almost hung up. But she answered and what had to happen, happened.

Now, three months later, as March sludges on cold and gray in the city, he is dipping into sun, into water, into sun again. He comes to the end, clutches the concrete lip, and raises his face to the warmth. On the balcony, there is a butterfly flutter, magenta and gold, the girl in the fancy kimono he’d bought her. She’s laughing down at a gardener who gapes upward, his hose flaccidly gushing. Then she looks out and sees Howie in the pool, his thin hair slicked back, watching her. His breath leaves him under her transformation: from a mere girl she turns into a whole-body beckon.

THE DAY BEGINS: the woman rises from the bed, climbs into her chair. But even in the sulfurous draft she can’t concentrate a whit. The exact matte of the road mud holds no draw for her. She is restless, restless.

Her fingers fly off her lap and scrabble about. Her thigh-wound has made her skin taut and pulsing. It burns and leaks a clear fluid through her denim skirt. Worse, that voice has begun to speak in sentences and has not left her head. It is a stern old woman’s voice that barks out names in staccato: Donna, she says, Tabitha, Miriam Dubonnet-Quince. Howard.

Now the old woman says, Sudden Pond, with a crow’s caw of a laugh. The woman feels ill. She tries to ignore the old woman (she knows somehow the old woman’s fat, shrewd, a brusque old bat). She tries to think of other things. The water beneath the town, beneficial, beginning to melt: the veins in the ground, thick with ice, the sulfur, salt, magnesium water pressing up urgently against the ice. But there is something in this she doesn’t like either. It reminds her of something very unpleasant.

The woman curls into her chair, presses her hands against her ears. She doesn’t hear the door when it opens.

But rising to her, the scent of breakfast, lifesaving coffee, and she looks around for the girl. She finds tears of gratitude, of love, in her eyes. She loves the girl for something the girl reminds her of. She doesn’t want to examine exactly what it is.

But instead of the girl, it’s the large woman, the dark one with the British accent (the old woman in her spits out, Surrey , distastefully — how would she know?). The British woman is the wife of the gardener, he who chips ice from the walks — they own the hotel; she cooks the meals. The man is a Labrador retriever, earnest and stupid and simple. The woman is more difficult, secretive, and far too young to be the punk’s mother.

She wills the British woman to finish her cleaning and leave, but the woman isn’t cleaning at all. She’s watching her, lovely porcelain face on a swollen body. Laura Ashley cabbage roses, poofy sleeves, ridiculous. Stillness of a cat.

Where’s the punk? says the woman, nervous. I like her, she says.

Sorry, says the large woman. Jaime isn’t well today. She leans forward and does a curious thing. She takes the woman’s hands in her own and presses them.

For a long while, for the time it takes for the dawn to dip the highest chimneytop in gold, she holds her guest’s hands. They stare at each other. Then the British woman says, The day you came. Do you remember it?

Despite herself, the woman does now. She sees a three-quarter moon, raw; headlights; her whole skin chafed and wet. She shudders and pushes it out of her head.

I walked down the hill to the village, she says. It was dark. My shoes were wet. Your windows were the only ones lit and I knocked.

And before? says the British woman.

Before, says the woman. The road at the top of the hollow and the truck driver. He stopped for gas. The truck smelled unpleasant, and she got out and began to walk. She doesn’t say this. She shakes her head and says, No.

All right, says the British woman. She cocks her lovely head. Listen. I don’t know what happened. The less I know the better. But this afternoon, my husband and I are going to Richfield Springs for groceries and we can take you. There’s a coach, at three, to Boston.

Something in her voice when she says: Boston’s a large, large town. Easy to begin anew.

The woman is not sure what the other is trying to tell her. Oh, she says. No, thank you. I like this very much, and she gestures at the town, her window, the stark little room.

The British woman looks at her, then sighs and stands. Very well, she says, and turns to make the bed. When she leaves, she leaves the television on to some show. A black-haired woman with a pistol stands over a woman who looks just like her, bleeding on the ground. The music dramatic and bright. Under it, the old lady in her head speaks up. Well, now, she says grimly. I sure don’t believe that fat Brit is all she seems to be.