Lauren Groff: Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

EVERY VILLAGE HAS ITS RHYTHM, AND EVERY year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out and the families of Phillies Phanatics ceded the town to retired couples with binoculars, there to watch the hills run riot with color.

Come winter, Templeton hunkered into itself. We natives were so grateful for this quiet — when we could hear the sleigh bells at the Farmers’ Museum all the way to the Susquehanna — that we almost didn’t mind the shops closing up. In winter we believed in our own virtue, lauded ourselves for being the kind of people to renounce the comforts of city life for a tight community and spectacular beauty. We packed on our winter fat and waited for spring, for the lake to melt, for the cherry blossoms, for the town to burst into its all-American charm, and the rapid crescendo of tourists.

This was our rhythm, at least, until the Lucky Chow Fun girls. That year, the snow didn’t melt until mid-May, and the Templeton High School Boys’ Swim Team won the State Championships. That year, we natives stopped looking one another in the eye.

I WAS SEVENTEEN that spring and filled with longing, which I tried to sate with the books of myth and folklore that I was devouring by the dozens. I couldn’t read enough of the stories, tiny doors that opened only to reveal a place I hadn’t known I’d known; stories so old they felt ingrained in my genes. I loved Medea, Isolde, Allerleirauh. I imagined myself as a beautiful Cassandra, wandering vast and lonely halls, spilling prophesies that everyone laughed at, only to watch them come tragically true in the end. This feeling of mutedness, of injustice, was particularly strong in me, though I had no particular prophesies to tell, no clear-sighted warnings. On the nights I stuffed myself with myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chickens.

All March, I skidded home from school as fast as I could in my ratty Honda Civic to look for my college acceptance letters in the mailbox; all of my friends had gotten in early, but because I was being recruited for swimming, I had to wait for the regular acceptances. All March, there was nothing. By the time my little sister, Petra — Pot — trudged the mile home over the snowdrifts, I would be sitting at the kitchen table, having eaten an entire box of cereal plus a bowl of ice cream, feeling sick.

“Oh, God, Lollie,” she’d say, dumping her backpack. “Nothing?”

“Nope,” I’d say. “Nothing.”

And she’d sigh and sit across from me. Her days were also hard, as she was too weird for the other fourth graders, too plump, too spastic. She never once had a sleepover or even a best friend. But instead of complaining, Pot would try to cheer me up by mimicking the new birdsongs she’d learned that day. “Drop-it, drop-it, cover-it-up, cover-it-up, pull-it-up, pull-it-up,” she’d sing, then say, “Brown Thrasher,” her dumpling face suddenly luminous. That year, Pot was on a strange ornithological kick, as if her entire pudgy being were stuffed with feathers. She fell asleep to tapes of tweets and whistles and had a growing collection of taxidermied birds scattered around her bedroom. I had no idea where she had gotten them, but was too moony with my own troubles to ask. I avoided her room as much as possible, because she had one particular gyrfalcon perched on her dresser that seemed malicious, if not downright evil, ready to scratch at your jugular if you were to saunter innocently by.

Those melancholy afternoons, Pot would chirp away until my mother came home from her own bad day at the high school in Van Hornesville, where she taught biology. No — my mother never came in, she blew in like the dust devil of a woman she was, stomping the snow off her boots, sending great clouds of snow from her shoulders. “Oh, God, Lollie, nothing?” she would say, releasing her springy gray hair from her cap.

“Nothing,” Pot would trill, then leap up to rejoin her stiff little aviary upstairs.

My mother would look at the wreckage of my snack, frown, and hug me. “Elizabeth,” she’d say, and I could hear the vibration of her words in her chest, feel the press of each individual bone of her rib cage. “Don’t you worry. It will all work out in the end. You’re no Podunk idiot like the kids I teach—”

“Spare me,” I’d interrupt, and give her a kiss on the chin. Then I’d stand, late for swim practice, and leave my nervous little mother to peep out the window at me as I pulled away. That spring she was dating The Garbageman, and when I came home I may have seen her before going to bed, or I may not have seen her until morning, singing during her preparations for school.

THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF VERSIONS of the Cinderella story throughout the world: Serbian Pepelyouga, Norwegian Kari Trestakk, Chinese Yeh-hsien, German Aschenputtel, French Cendrillon. What most of the stories have in common is both a good, absent mother and an evil, present one. Fairy tales are not like real life in all its beautiful ambiguity. There are no semigood semiabsent mothers. Or, for that matter, semipresent very good ones.

THAT WINTER, IT WAS ONLY IN THE POOL, feeling the thrust and slide of my body through the water, that I felt good. Only then could I escape the niggling terror of what would happen to my mother and sister when I left them, their sad dinners, my sister talking only of birds, my mother talking only of the crap day she had at school, neither heard by the other, neither listening.

I was the captain and the only girl on the Varsity boys’ swim team that year, though not much of a leader. During the long bus rides, I only giggled nervously at the boys’ boasts about boning chicks I knew they never touched. I wasn’t chosen as a captain because I was a leader, but rather because of my teammates’ small-town gallantry and my minor celebrity as an oddity in the papers. I was the fastest butterflier around and could beat everyone, boy or girl, in the region, save for one lightning-swift boy from Glens Falls. The papers all the way to Albany couldn’t stop chortling over this fact. They ran photos of me every week, careful to take only my fairly pretty face and leave my — let’s face it — overweight body on the cutting room floor. I was very heavy. “Rubenesque,” my mother called it, but the boys were clearly no aesthetes because they never looked directly at me, not even when I was on the block, waiting for the start. I was no pushover, though. If a boy made fun of the way I bulged in my bathing suit, calling me Moby Dickless, for instance, that boy would find himself stunned on the pool bottom, having been swum over by my own impersonation of a great white whale.

One Friday night in March, after an exceptionally hard relay practice, Tim Summerton leaned over the gutter when I came trundling in from the last race. He was no looker, all wonky-eyed and stippled with pimples, but he had a heart so kind he never went without a date to any school dance. He spat a stream of warm water into my face; I ducked and spat back at him, laughing. Then he grinned.

“Hey,” he said. “The divers and I are going to the Lucky Chow Fun. Want to come?”

I looked at the little clump of divers snapping one another with towels. Those three boys were the exhibitionists of the team, with, truly, a little more to look at in their picklesuits than the swimmers had. I would know: I could see underwater remarkably well. “Oooh, Fun, Fun,” the divers were saying in a vaguely ethnic impression. “We have fun fun at Fun Fun.” They were not the smartest boys, our divers, but I suppose anybody who tries to shave his neck with the end of a diving board must be a little lacking in brainpower.