Lauren Groff: Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

And though it wasn’t funny, though we all had the flashing red and blue images lodged firmly in us somewhere just under our hearts, we — all of us — laughed.

I SLEPT LATE ON SUNDAY, into the afternoon. I never sleep late, and I know what this means: the worst cowards are the ones who refuse to look at what they fear. When I went downstairs, my mother and sister were still in their pajamas. Though Pot was almost my tiny mother’s size, and twice her width, she was cradled on my mother’s lap, sucking her thumb, her other hand up in her infant gesture to stroke my mother’s ear. They were watching television, the sound off. I stood in the door, looking at the screen until I realized that the snowy roads I was seeing on the television were roads I knew as intimately as my own limbs, that the averted faces of the men on the screen were men who knew me well, who followed my swimming in the paper, who thought nothing of giving me a kiss when they saw me. Hurrying down the snowy streets now, shame on their faces, shame in the set of their shoulders.

Then came the faces of the Chens — stoic, inexpressive — and the scared faces of the Chinese girls, ducking into Mr. Livingston’s limousine. He was my ninth-grade history teacher, and his limo was the only car in town large enough to hold all the girls and their lawyers at once. That car drove legends of baseball all summer from museum to hotel to airport. It drove brides and homecoming queens for the rest of the year. Now it was driving the Lucky Chow Fun girls wherever they were going. Somewhere, I hoped, far away.

I went to the television and turned it off. I stood for a minute, letting the swell die down in my gut, then sat beside my mother and said, “What happened?”

And my mother, who always made a point of being frank about sexual matters, describing biological functions in great detail so that her daughters would never be squeamish or falsely prudish, my mother turned scarlet. “Sit down,” she said, and I did. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She bit her lips.

Pot said, pulling her thumb from her mouth, “The Lucky Chow Fun’s a whorehouse.”

“Pot,” said my mother, then sighed. She looked at me, her thin mouth twisting, patting my thigh. “She’s right,” she said.

“What?” I said. “Wait, what?”

“Last night,” my mother said, slowly, as if trying to order the fragmented truths, “one of the girls at the Lucky died. She was locked in her room with her sister — seems they were being punished — and there was some kind of accidental gas leak. One of them died, and the other one almost did, too. And one of the other girls who knew a little English called the police and tried to leave a tip before the Chens found out. But there are not too many poor speakers of English in this town. The police figured it out. They arrested the Chens.”

“Oh, God,” I said. I thought of the little huddle of the Lucky Chow Fun girls the night before, flushed red and blue in the flashing lights, how quiet they were, how I never saw their eyes. I never looked. “Mom,” I said. “Who were those girls?”

My mother brushed Pot’s hair out of her eyes and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to hesitate, then she said, “They were bought in China and brought over here, it seems. They were poor. They worked in sweatshops. The Chens gave money to their parents, promised a better life. Apparently.”

“Slaves,” I said.

“On TV, they said that, yes,” said Pot, stumbling over her words. “And some of them, they said on TV that some of them, they’re younger than you, Lollie.”

We sat there, in silence, thinking about this. My mother at one point stood and made us some cocoa, but for once, my tongue tasted like ash and I wanted to take absolutely nothing in. I was sick, could never again be hungry, I thought. At last, thinking of Chen Fat glaring at me over his notepad, the sticky smell of the food, Brad Huxley, the delicate girl with the chapped lips, I said, shuddering, “Do they know who visited? Do they have names?”

“Well,” said my mother, who paused for a very long time, “that’s almost the worst. The Chens wrote down the names of the men who visited the Lucky Chow Fun.” It was hard to hear her, even in the preternatural stillness of the town on this day, even in our snow-muffled house. “They had a ledger. They made sure to write in English. The reporters said that they were going to blackmail the men who visited. Apparently, it’s not just tourists. Apparently, a lot of men from the town went, too.” She looked at us. “You should know. Some of the men you know, some you love, some of them may have gone.”

And there was something so uncertain in my mother’s face, something so fearful it struck a note in me. I looked at the clock over the mantel: it was already four o’clock, and my mother hadn’t left the house yet. Unusual: she was the only person I ever knew who could never sit still. Especially now, when she was dating The Garbageman, for whom she often cooked most meals and who, by this time on Sunday, had usually called our house to chat for hours, as if they were silly teenagers in love.

“Oh,” I said. I looked at her face under her mop of curls, the weary circles around her eyes. “The Garbageman call today?”

My mother flushed again and stood to carry the mugs back to the kitchen. “Not yet,” she tossed over her shoulder, as if it meant nothing to her at all.

I looked at Pot, who was frowning solemnly on her perch on the living room couch. She looked beyond me at a bird that landed on the tree outside, and cried, “A Song Sparrow! Hip, hip, hip hurrah boys, spring is here! That’s what they say,” she said, beaming. “The Song Sparrows. They say, Hip, hip, hip hurrah boys, spring is here! ” She was tapping her feet in her excitement, blinking so rapidly and nervously that she reminded me of my mother.

“Pot,” I said. “Have you taken your medication today?”

“Whoops,” she said, grinning.

“Pot,” I said. “How long has it been since you took your medication?”

She shrugged. “A week? Maybe a week. I stopped. I don’t believe anymore in medicating children,” she said.

I shuddered because I heard in her words the distinct voice of an adult, someone who never saw Pot as she had been in her awful years. A teacher, perhaps, or some judgmental village crone. I went to the kitchen, slamming the door behind me. “Mom,” I said. “Pot’s not taking her medication. And by the way, don’t you think she’s too young to understand all this Lucky Chow Fun crap? She’s only ten. She’s just a baby. I don’t think she can handle it.”

My mother stopped washing the mug she was holding and let the hot water run. The steam circled up around her, catching in her frizzy gray hair, spangling it when she turned around. “Lollie,” she said. “I’ll make sure she takes the Ritalin from now on. But nobody in town is going to be able to escape what happened. Not even the kids. It’s better that we tell her the truth before someone else tells her something much worse.”

“What’s worse?” I said. “And I don’t think people are made to take truths straight-on, Mom. It’s too hard. You need something to soften them. A metaphor or a story or something. You know.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t.” She turned off the water with a smack of her hand. “Why don’t you teach me, since you seem to know everything.”

“Well,” I said, but at the moment when we most need these things, they don’t always come to us. I couldn’t remember a word. I opened my mouth and it hung open there, useless. I closed it. I shrugged.

My mother nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said, and turned away.

YEARS LATER, I WOULD HAVE HAD the presence of mind to offer the tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” from the Brothers Grimm, to offer up an allegorical explanation. I would have told my mother how a wizard dressed as a beggar would magically lure little girls into his basket. He’d cart them to his mansion, give them an egg and key, and tell them not to go into the room that the key opened. Then he’d leave, and the little girls would explore the magnificent house, finally falling prey to curiosity and opening the door of the forbidden chamber.