Delicate Edible Birds (9 page)

 

SHE WOULD NO LONGER PLAY
on the playground for fear of dirtying her dresses and her father spanking her for it. He had begun to spank her for anything: for talking at dinner,
for quarreling with her brother, for hiding the booze when he staggered home at night, calling out to his wife to get her ass down here and help him upstairs, goddammit. Her mother would stand at the top of the stairs, her arms folded over the new baby girl, who looked like a monkey with a bad overbite. She would sigh and finger her sausage curls and send her eldest daughter down, and the girl would sit on her father's lap as he drank the whiskey that, under threat of the belt, she had miraculously found in the pie safe for him. Her back would vibrate under the great warm thumps of his heart, and he would kiss the back of her rag-bound head, kiss without stopping, kiss long after she fell asleep on his lap.

The one day that she wore an old brown dress to school in order to go out for recess, the boys pushed her against the chain-link fence, tied her there with her own jump rope, and lifted her skirt, chanting, I see London, I see France, I see Dummy's undiepants, and the girls shrieked with laughter, and she stood there, furious, kicking at the boys as they gyrated around her. When they set her free, she decked the biggest of them with a swift fist until he cried into the dirt, then she ran off into the classroom. She refused to take recess for the rest of the year, stopped talking in class or singing in choir, shook her head when the teacher asked her to read from the
Little Bear
book, although she read very well.

Because she wouldn't speak, the teacher brought her parents in for a conference in the shiny green classroom. Her father's face was knotted when they went out, but they all went for ice cream, and the girl was sucking a mouthful of
strawberry delight when her mother leaned forward, with her smell of lily of the valley and cigarettes. Oh, honey, she said, patting the baby calm, tugging at the brother's tether so that he wouldn't wander. Oh, my little princess, you're going to stay back a year. The teacher says you're behind. Your teacher says you're a little slow, honey. It's okay, some people just take a little longer than others. You understand? You have to stay back.

And the terrible shame in the girl, the way the blood rushed before her eyes, turning her sight dark. The strawberry ice cream souring in her mouth. She did not want it, gave it to her little brother, who smeared it over his sailor suit, and let a passing dog gobble it up.

Then the father said to the mother, as if the girl weren't there, Don't worry, honey, she'll always have her looks, at least. Squeezing the mother's knee, winking at her.

When the mother frowned her carmine lips, the girl said, No, I am not slow. But even though there was a scream inside her, a feeling as if her stomach had had holes punched into it and she was pouring out, she said it so softly that nobody else heard.

 

ONE DAY WHEN SHE WAS TEN,
the father came home early and sat at the table, head in his hands, drinking straight from the whiskey bottle, which he never did, not even when he staggered home late at night. The mother banished the children to watch the cowboy program on the television set while
the parents' voices rose in the kitchen. I don't care…the girl heard, What are we going to do…the girl heard, Jesus Christ, why didn't you get your tubes tied…she heard. There was shouting and the girl turned up the television, but it wasn't loud enough to drown it all out. When the front door crashed, the mother came into the den. Go to bed, she ordered the brother, grabbing the girl's hand so that she would stay. Take the baby with.

We got to brush our teeth? said the brother, and the mother sighed. No. Just put your sister in bed, and the little ones went away, and the mother turned to her daughter, and, wordless, put her kerchiefed head in her lap, burying her face on her skinny legs. As the girl stroked her mother's fine hair, she tried to keep down the thing that was rising in her stomach, and the mother kept saying, Oh God, can you believe? Lost his job. Now! Of all times. Stupid drunk, she said. Oh my God. The mother's cigarette trembled in her lips until it ashed itself all over her daughter's legs, but the girl did not move them under the tiny burn.

This was how the littlest baby of the four was born a little clammy and a little dull: every few weeks her father wobbled home late at night and the girl awoke and listened to his curses below, and at school her cheeks were flushed with all that she held in. Her little brother wet his bed, her little sister ate from her diapers, her mother swelled up, pale and bloated, and the neighbor ladies asked curtly for their casserole dishes back. The girl was not surprised when the mother sat everyone down and unveiled the sleeping face of the new child.
She had heard it on the playground. She knew it as a truth: Mongoloids come, she understood, from a lack of love in the family.

 

ON SATURDAYS THAT BAD WINTER
when she was twelve, the girl pushed the three littlest in the swings at the park when her mother was in the church basement, waiting for a boxful of dented cans and dandruffy cake mixes. At home, there were endless projects, her mother bent over the sewing machine crafting trousers out of curtains, remaking some little Anabaptist's dress into something the girl wouldn't hate, perhaps even a skirt the other girls would finger with envy, wondering what boutique it was from.

She was picturing exactly this one day as she watched her brother and sister whip one another with willow branches in one of those sordid little parks beside the more generous churches. The spade-shaped duck pond was filled with cigarette butts and little plastic jellyfish she was too young to know were condoms. The girl was pulling her cold fingers through her curls to keep them from knotting, shivering in the sharp March wind. That was the year she didn't have a winter coat, pretending that three old cardigans and a scarf and some mittens spelled warmth.

She turned her head and he appeared, the young man with thinning hair and irisless eyes and round red cheeks like a doll's. Those cheeks were why she didn't scream when he
stood close, closer, why she sat on her bench, frozen, looking up. She didn't move when he opened his trousers and out popped his little worm and he brushed it, hot and silky, against her neck. And then he gave a breathy giggle as her brother shouted at a duck at the far end of the park, and the man pushed the worm back in the pants hole and hurried away over the desolate grass. She watched him go, holding her breath, clutching the bench so hard she felt as if she broke her hands. At home, in the pink bathroom, she scrubbed at her neck with the guest soaps in the shapes of curled nautili, scrubbed until she scrubbed that spot bloody and, eventually, scabrous. That night, sleepless, reimagining the hot brush on her neck, that gulf the girl carried around inside of herself widened with a terrible dull roar. When her daddy came home, silent and sober, the dangerous fire in his eyes snuffed when she shied away from his kiss. He looked at his eldest daughter, her pinched averted face, her bad shoes. I suppose I deserve that, he said, softly.

 

A DAY CAME WHEN THE GIRL RAN HOME,
eyes kindling with excitement. There was a teacher in school who would teach the girls to be twirlers, with fire batons and everything! The mother frowned, put down her cigarette, and stood, arms akimbo, pushing the new baby in his rocker with her foot. Sparked by the girl's excitement, the brother raced out of the room with a Mohican ululation, the little sister did a
shimmy to the music on the radio. The mother had to look away when she took a deep drag and, letting it out through her nose like a dragon, told her daughter, No, my pretty one, you know we don't have the money for baton lessons.

The girl struggled with the bitterness that stirred in her. Trained as she was by now, she didn't open her mouth. She bowed her head. Set the table.

It was the face the girl made, sharp as a needle, that the father saw when he looked up through the steam of his sauerkraut and pork supper. And the next day, old Joe Helmuth came into the kitchen with one hand behind his back, his favorite bitch clicking along behind him. He leaned over to whisper in his stepdaughter's ear. Her puffy, once-pretty face lifted, broke into wonderment. She clutched his hand and put her cheek on it, wordless.

Then old Joe Helmuth looked at his stepgranddaughter as she pinned the hem on a dress across the table and asked her what she thought he had behind his back. She guessed a silver dollar, but the hand came out waving a baton in saucy imitation of a twirl. Give your old granddaddy a little kiss, he said, and she did, a big one, and didn't mind his scratchy moustache or the way his lips lingered a half-second too long on her own.

Now the father worked at the kennel all day, mucking the dog shit from the concrete floor, no matter that he had two years of college, no matter that he had once been a government employee. And with the father at work so long, the mother was able to finish her chores before supper, and the
girl had time to practice. Lordy, did she practice. She took that hollow ringing in her and twirled it away, twirled in the basement in the foulest weather, when her hands stuck to the metal in the cold and she could not practice on the lawn. In her bed at night, her fingers flicked imaginary batons in the air. She sent batons spinning up like whirligigs into the night sky, batons flipping around her body like ions to her atom, batons spinning about her like glittering wings. She twirled through her legs and over her body as if her batons were her very own limbs. The mother paused to watch her daughter practice out the kitchen window and plum forgot to bread the chicken. The father took her in the early mornings to the far-off competitions, drinking coffee from a thermos as she snoozed against the car door, and praying a little to his forgotten God before she marched onto the field.

A natural, said the baton teacher, clasping her hands to her breast, rolling her eyes cloudward. A natural, smirked the boys on the football team as she marched at the head of the marching band in her knee-high boots, in her spangly little leotard, in her hat like an upended loaf of bread. She was the head majorette in her sophomore year of high school, hers the sole white costume amid the others' discontented blues. The other twirlers dropped, one by one, nastily, all humdrum twirlers compared to her, until, at last, she stood alone. Before the thousands of awestruck fans, she tossed her solo batons until they spun above the bleachers on the football field. The fans lost the thin bands in the dusky sky and gasped when they fell into the girl's hands, streaking stars.

 

THE GIRL SPENT HER EVENINGS
plucking her eyebrows, hair by hair, until they were as thin and arced as scythes. She swabbed the roots of her hair with cotton soaked in peroxide until she was blond as the day she was born, reduced with cottage cheese until her arms were twigs, smeared petroleum jelly over her lips and hands to keep them supple. She hemmed her skirts to mid-thigh, then hemmed still more. She wore her sweaters tight until her brother, embarrassed by his horn-dog friends, asked if she didn't think her sweater kittens were going to freeze, exposed as they were. She looked at him coolly and changed into an even tighter sweater, so tight one could trace the label on her brassiere.

And she said Yes to the boys who called for her, despite her daddy, who snarled and barked at them, and Yes to the football players who jogged after her before practice to ask her to the movies, and Yes to parking in the makeout lane, and Yes to their hands under her skirts, and Yes when they pushed their jeans down their thin hips because by then she forgot what it meant to say No. She caught her father in her room one evening holding her underwear up to the window, panty by panty, examining. She caught him staring at her above the goulash and she had to look away, in confusion, a dank feeling in her stomach. When Stepgranddaddy Joe Helmuth came for Easter supper, he settled his bitches in the corner with a bone, and Fritz the old collie wobbled over and sniffed them with panting eagerness. After Joe Helmuth said
the prayer and the rest of them dove into their food, he looked long and hard at the girl, her makeup, her hair, the neat halves of each portion left on her plate in service of her diet. Then he said to her mother with a mouthful of lamb, Better watch my little wifey like a goddamn hawk, else she's going to turn into her mother, my dear. He pointed at the girl with the tines of his fork, and the father dropped his napkin and pushed up from the table and went to pace the lawn, kicking at the dropped chokecherries.

The girl then looked at her mother with the purple sleepless bruises around her eyes, at her smallest brother, who drooled in bubbles and seemed only to have attention for the way the cigarette smoke shattered against the overhead lamp. And there was something icy in her gut then, something hard, and she stopped saying Yes. She stopped saying much. She smiled, coquettish, and posed for the photographs for the school paper, for the Harrisburg
Patriot-News,
and she twirled, but no longer went out with the boys.

Instead, she spent her nights and weekends at beauty pageants. Why not? she'd decided one Saturday night, restless and imagining the boys with their boy smells. Why not? She already had the sparkly leotards. By Monday she had stitched together an evening gown. By summer, she had won enough for a coughing blue Hornet and went chugging around the state, preparing for Miss America. She dreamed of the big payout, the scholarship to the college of her choice, vague classes with lab coats and fat books and professors with leather patches on their coats, four years, a real college,
not two at a stupid technical school. But when she brought home the sashes and the crowns, the bouquets of red roses, she didn't tell a soul where she'd gotten them, not even her mother, who had smoked herself foul-smelling and unpretty. In a box under her bed the girl buried Miss Hummelstown, Pennsylvania Milk Princess, Miss Lancaster County, Central Pennsylvania Cheese Duchess, and even Hershey Queen. All that long hot summer, the smell of chocolate rose from the factory, a memory made sensual, all that she'd won.