Delicate Edible Birds (16 page)

There are only a few moments in every life where the world becomes entirely real: that night, the lake, the fog, your face so startlingly near, crystallized in me.

You took my foot and rubbed it. So, you said. Do they have snowmobiles in Boston? Because I'm going where you are.

Oh, that would be a mistake, I said, too quickly. I'd had a thought of my tiny apartment, the marmalade cat I'd taken to help a friend, a nasty squalling beast I hated. I imagined you, hulking and strange, inserting yourself into my solitary life there.

A cloud settled over your face and your hands fell from my foot. In your scowl, I recognized the little neighbor boy,
and it felt the way it did when I began to tell that first real story in the banana suit, a good weight, deep within.

You don't understand, I said. I touched your cheek. I'm staying here, I said.

 

I WAS THIRTY-TWO
then, thirty-three now. I'm a feminist if they'll still have me, though from the way my friends reacted when I told them that I was staying in my little hometown it seems doubtful I'll be welcomed back into the fold.

A friend from Boston, a tenured professor in anthropology, said, Good God, Celie. “Stand By Your Man” is only a song—you're not supposed to take it
literally
.

A friend from my years in Philadelphia said, But what are you going to do in Podunkville? (I don't know.) How many people live there? (Twelve hundred.) Do they even have a movie theater? (No.) Aren't you going to die of boredom? (Possibly.)

A friend from my years in Wisconsin said, suspiciously, I thought you always said you didn't believe in marriage. Catering to the hegemony, yadda yadda. Wait a second; you can't be Celie. Who
are
you?

But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who'd picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was humane to everyone but me.

When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell.

And, after that: Hallelujah.

 

I AWOKE IN YOUR APARTMENT
over the pizzeria to the sound of eggs cracking on a metal bowl. I called my mother so she wouldn't worry, and whispered where I was. She let out a whoop and, delighted, said, Nice job, honey! That's one good-looking boy.

You came back in then, holding an omelet, coffee, toast. When I bit into the omelet later, my teeth would grind against eggshells and the coffee would be harsh and overbrewed. But at that moment, it looked perfect.

I said, Let's fly to Las Vegas and get hitched.

You deposited the tray on the bed and folded your arms, frowning. No, you said.

Oh, I said. I flushed and looked away, now doubting everything: the night before, the brilliant morning, the man standing before me in the too-small robe.

Oh, no, you said, sitting down. I'm going to build you a house, then we'll get married. I already have the land ready to go.

You said, without any irony, Every bird needs her nest.

I felt dizzy, spun back to a time when this may have been an appropriate thing for a man to say; I wanted to protest, or at least to scoff a little. But something in me felt like a bubble popping, the fear I'd carried around under my sternum, the
ugly balloon that expanded a breath with every passing year, the one in the shape of the word
spinster
.

So I said, Oh. Well, then, yes. A nest sounds nice.

It was my fault that I didn't say what I should have: that I wasn't the bird type, or maybe the nest type. To watch out, to think this over carefully, because it wouldn't be easy.

 

EVEN IN THAT FIRST
hot flush I knew you were human, flawed. You had false front teeth, an annoying laugh, a streak of stupidity that made you once lose a pinky toe to frostbite and another time vote for Ross Perot. You became belligerent when soused, held half-baked convictions about politics, made messes (of clothes, of facts, of women), adored cooking but cooked inedibly, and from the beginning loved too-proud, too-angry, too-mean me. And that, in the tally of flaws, was one that even your friends tried to talk you out of.

She's a tough cookie, they warned. She's used to things we don't have here.

You nodded gravely, then gave your crooked smile. I'm pretty tough, too, you said. I think I can tackle tough like Celie's any day.

 

WE SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK
in bed. The whole world was indulgent, and we could hear the smiles in people's voices when we called to abandon our responsibilities; the snowmobile store could be run by the boys there, my family was fine
gathered in the house together without me. Stripped of almost everything, eating crackers and single-serve pudding with our fingers in the sheets, all we had left were our stories.

Mine were elaborate, and when I retold them I always changed them. Yours were simple and neat and didn't change at all.

This is one of mine: I was out on a sailboat in Lake Tahoe with an old boyfriend. The wind died down, and as we were waiting for it to start up again, he told me that a famous diver, the one on all the documentaries, was hired to film the bottom of the lake. Nobody had ever done this before; it was too deep. The diver went down and came back up sooner than the people on the boat expected. When he hauled himself over the gunwale, he was pale and shaking and wouldn't speak a word, but when they were at last on shore, he swore them to secrecy, then told them what he'd seen: all the victims of mob hits from the casinos, their feet in buckets of concrete, perfectly preserved by the cold down there. Dozens of them, in a tight space, no more than fifty feet by fifty. Some faces still frightened, frozen in quiet screams. Fat men in business suits, skinny men who looked like jockeys, one woman in a spangled dress, her hair shifting in the current. And this is what scared the diver the most: their hands were floating at breast-level, beseeching.

I told this story to scare you, I think, but instead you laughed. Urban legend, you said, resting your heavy head on my chest.

I believe it, I protested. When the wind rose and the boat
was flying again over Lake Tahoe and the water was splashing everywhere, I screamed every time a drop hit me.

That's your problem, you said. You have way too vivid an imagination. Now, let me tell you a real story.

Oh, goody, I said, a little smug: I was the one, after all, who once made an entire kindergarten class cry fat tears of sorrow for my own little mermaid.

You put your hand on my mouth to make me hush. Now, I saw you once in your Wisconsin phase, you said, when you came back to town for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass at the old Presbyterian church, lit up with the candles we were holding. You were with your family in front, and me and my family were in back, my cousin and me passing our traditional flask of bourbon under the hymnal. I look around, bored, and I see you there. Wearing this jacket with fur around the collar, holding the candle under your chin. One more inch and you burst into flame. So thin I could almost see through you. Then everything ends, we do the singing thing, blow out the candles, I was about to go talk to your parents and your brother, say hi to you, when you just walk by and I'm struck to stone. You looked sad, like you needed someone to just come along and make you happy. I took a good look at myself and knew I didn't have what it took. So I let you walk away.

Oh, I said. That's awful. Five years down the drain.

No, but, listen, you said, though I already was listening. Listen, if had I gone to say hello then, we wouldn't be here now. Now we're right, the timing's right, but before we weren't
and it wasn't. We were lucky, you said, turning your head and kissing my lowest rib, gently. Timing is everything.

In the window an icicle caught the sun and burst into a thousand shards of light on the walls. I watched it burn there, dripping. I said, Your story was better than mine.

 

AT THE END
of that week, we emerged into the cold world blinking like newborns. In our absence, the village had been swaddled with thick snow. There was the first skim of ice stretched taut across the lake, a canvas waiting for the brush. When we crossed the crashing river, I couldn't help myself, and said,
Where a gluegold-brown marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down
.

You looked at me. That's so damn pretty, you said, and, for such a tough country boy, there were tears in your eyes. That's the prettiest thing I ever heard, you said in such a voice that I couldn't ever tell you the words weren't mine.

 

WE WENT TO BOTH
Thanksgiving dinners, the early one at your mother's, with her frozen corn and box stuffing, the later one at my house, with homegrown Brussels sprouts and orange-nutmeg cranberry sauce. I preferred your mother's. Over dessert, we settled on late May for the wedding.

Immediately, the fights began.

In December, I scratched off the bumper sticker on
your truck that endorsed the worst president in American history.

In January, when we started building the house, though you tried to stick to my eco-structure mandate, I freaked out when I saw the workmen lowering a standard septic tank into the ground.

In February, I decided I wouldn't take your name, even though your mother sobbed over the dishes about it and your father stomped around saying that your name was as good a name as any name in the dadblasted town, and they'd been here longer than some snooty people he could name and where do I get off saying his name wasn't good enough, he would like to know that, he would like to dadblasted know that.

In March, we almost came to blows over something you said that I wasn't supposed to hear, a joke at the bar involving terrorists and nuclear bombs. I, who had just come into the busy place, and had been about to put my hands over your eyes and plant a kiss on the back of your neck, stalked out of the bar, your friends looking away.

In April, in the height of wedding planning, we fought once a day.

Still, there was no other valve for everything building up inside us, and we always made up beautifully. You were kind. You had a certain delicacy that, when either of us was at the point of broaching a real darkness, allowed you to suddenly capitulate. Your face would pale and you'd nod once and say, Okay. You're right. I would stare at you, disbelieving, the horrid thing I was just about to say still crawling on my tongue.

Stupid me. Those months, I thought your capitulation was weakness. I now know it was everyday kindness.

 

IT WASN'T EASY
to come back to a little town when I was used to cities. Our hometown is tiny and obscure, an upstate village with a cheap-looking Main Street, cracked sidewalks, public buildings of brown brick and particleboard, weathered plastic wreaths on the neighbors' doors. Townspeople gave me befuddled looks when I said I was staying: Really? they said. I saw my stock sink in their faces. The produce manager in the grocery store snorted at me when I suggested he start up an organic section, and when I looked at the sorry state of the conventional pears he had, I understood what he meant. I couldn't find enough space in town to walk, and when I went into the hills where the dogs are never locked up and unused to pedestrians, I was attacked by a furiously droopy basset hound. I was impatient with the Saturday night choices: the movies thirty minutes away, or television, or a bar, or a board game. I felt like a teenager again, stifled and bored, without even the possibility of babysitting and snooping around in other people's business. I attempted to have a storytelling hour at the library, but the time ticked by and not one child came, and the librarian muttered with a sideways glance that I shouldn't be surprised: there was a high school basketball game that afternoon, after all.

Yet, as winter dribbled into spring, I found myself paying more attention to the tiniest things: a crocus furling out of the
ground, the way the two old women who sat in the diner from opening to closing greeted each other with only a wet sniff every day. Because I had nothing to do, I finally began to understand the rhythm of the village, its subtleties that I had been too impatient to recognize when I was young.

Are you happy here? my mother said once in April, pouring coffee into my cup. I don't mean with him, she said, nodding toward the living room, where you and my father were shouting at some sports team thousands of miles away. But here?

I considered this, the bones of my hands warming against the mug. I said, slowly, I can feel the beginnings of happiness sort of seeping into me.

My mother nodded and looked out the window, though she couldn't see anything through the downpour. She sighed and said, Oh, that damn rain.

 

IT HAD BEEN RAINING
constantly since late February, and of course it rained at our wedding. In the receiving line, nearly everyone whispered into my ear,
Rain on a bride means good luck,
and kissed my cheek and went on to the buffet.

I didn't care. I beamed. I'd had the flu for a week, but had taken nuclear doses of medicine and all night felt like I was floating. I danced and ate and drank, and when we came home to our new-smelling house, with the floors still unfinished and the walls still unpainted, you tossed aside the umbrella (we found it the next day halfway up a blue spruce),
swooped me up into your arms, kicked open the door, and carried me over the threshold, to where it smelled of sawdust and plaster; you kicked the door shut behind us and carried me up the stairs and the rain on the roof was thrumming, and opened the door to the bedroom, the one room in the house you'd finished and furnished with castoffs from my parents' house. Candles were aflame, and your florist father hadn't held back, filling the room with ferns and lilac, lovely garlands across the walls, huge vases overflowing with greenery.