Nest (2 page)

“Hey, Chirp,” Rachel says, slowing down her shaking shoulders, “let’s do it for Mom. Can you?”

“Can
you
?” I answer.

“Of course, we cancan!” we shout at the exact same time. We stop twisting. The cancan isn’t exactly the coolest dance to be doing in 1972, but Mom loves it. I slither my wet arm around my sister’s wet waist. She slides her arm, warm, around me. Now we’re kicking our legs high, flinging streaks of cool water into the steamy air. Little streams land on Rachel’s tanned, blackberry-scratched legs.
Good, strong girl-legs
, Mom calls them. When we’re sure Mom’s watching, we do our special reverse formation, taking tiny steps backward, legs straight, chins up, just like she taught us. My bikini bottom’s slipping down in all our kicky wetness. I yank it up, hoping Mom doesn’t notice. I don’t want to wreck our show. I don’t want Mom to feel disappointed. I want to be a success like
Mom was when she used to dance in contests in New York for the grand prize. Most of all, I want Mom to keep on laughing,
heeee heeee hee hee hee
, like some kind of bird I’m trying to identify by its happy sound.

We’re gearing up for our finale. I’m crouched down low in the sandy dirt by the side of the road, facing Rachel, who’s still in the middle of the road. My job is to splash through the puddles and spring into my sister’s arms.
One, two, three
and I’m running fast on my girl-legs. Does Mom see how strong they are?
Light as air, soft as a feather, light as air, soft as a feather
. I fly up toward Rachel’s arms just as there’s the biggest flash and then the loudest crash. The scrub oaks glow with light.
“Whoaaa!”
Rach yells, and hits the deck, scared. Without her arms to catch me, I land, hard, on top of her. My arm scrapes the road, and I wonder if there’s blood. With my ear on Rachel’s chest, I can hear her heart beating.

“Okay?” I ask, but I know she’s fine. We’re tough as nails, is what Mom tells us. What I really want to know is if Mom’s all right. Did the thunder and lightning scare her? Is her laughing squeezed down so deep that I’ll have to wait a long time again to hear it? I lift my head off Rachel and make myself look through the rain at our front porch. Dad’s hovering over Mom. She’s peeking around him like she’s trying to check on us, but he moves his body in the way. I bet he’s talking to her in his psychiatrist voice, explaining what’s what. He puts his arm around her
shoulder and steers her inside like she just might get lost, even though she’s lived in this house since before I was born.

“Don’t worry. We’re okay!” I shout after them, but the screen door has already bumped closed.

Time to get up. If Joey and his brothers look out their window and see me lying on top of my sister, they’ll call us lezzies and try to dunk us the next time we go swimming in Heron Pond. They might try to dunk us anyway, because we’re Jews and they’re not, but I don’t want to give them more ammunition.

“Let’s go,” Rachel says, just as I’m rolling off her and pulling her to her feet. I check my arm. No blood, just trickles of water.

“Let’s go see if Mom liked our dance,” I say, flinging my wet hair out of my eyes.

“She and Dad are probably talking,” Rachel says. “We should give them privacy.”

“But I want to find out if she liked our cancan.”

“Dad told us at lunch that they’re worried about Mom’s leg. It’s been more than a week now that it’s been hurting her. Just leave them alone.” Rachel’s heading for the stairs.

“That’s not what he said.” He said they were
terribly preoccupied
, which I’m pretty sure is psychiatrist secret code for
Don’t you dare bother us
, but I hate admitting that maybe Rachel’s right and I shouldn’t go check on Mom.

“What
did
he say, then?” Rachel asks from halfway up the stairs.

“I’m singin’ in the rain!”
I belt out, ignoring her. She sits in Mom’s watching chair on the porch while I take big, swaying steps down the middle of our road, like I’m Gene Kelly in the movie and there’s nothing that’s worrying me, nothing at all, since there’s nothing in the world but a sky crammed with dark clouds and these fat, beautiful drops of rain.

My favorite bird in August is the red-throated loon, and my favorite time to see the loons is now, when the rest of the family is still sleeping. I need to move fast so that I’m up and at ’em before Dad wakes up. He has an early patient four days a week, so the odds are good that this is one of those days. I wouldn’t want to be him and listen to people talk about their problems when the day is just beginning and nod
uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh
, like I understand everything about everything.

I slept in my green bikini, so all I need to do is pull on my jean cutoffs. I’ve got my knapsack prepacked with my birthday binoculars, notebook, pen, and pennywhistle, and I grab it off the hook on the back of my door. I slide down the banister so I can avoid the stairs’ squeaks. Breakfast is important for
clear thinking, but I don’t need to think clearly when I’m looking for loons, so I skip it. Anyway, there’s a blackberry patch with ripe berries on the way to the salt marsh. I leave a note that says, “Back before long. Love, Chirp,” in case anyone notices that I’m gone.

The air’s already thick and warm, even though the sun’s still just a spritz of light in the pitch pines and scrub oaks and not a hot, round ball bouncing on the top of my head, like it will be soon. On the path behind our house, bunny tracks in damp sand, wet spiderwebs, mourning doves, chickadees, a couple of crabby starlings, and the
thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop
of my blue flip-flops. No delivery trucks yet racing down Route 6. In class last year, Mrs. McHenry taught us that Harriet the Spy is good at what she does because she’s observant and that careful observation is a skill all of us should develop while we’re young, so I’m working on it.

If I take the biggest steps I can from the beech tree, I’ll be at the fork in the path in thirty-eight steps, unless my legs grew a lot since last Thursday. This time I’ll try to hop the whole way, no counting. Anyone seeing my tracks will think I have just one leg, like Timmy Mahoney, who was just honorably discharged from Vietnam and hangs out in the town square smoking cigarettes with his pant leg neatly folded up and safety-pinned. But if they observe the ground closely, like they’re supposed to, they’ll wonder why
there’s no sign of crutches. It’ll be a mystery, solved only by a team of searchers with magnifying glasses and sniffer dogs. And at the end of the investigation? Just me, an almost-sixth-grade girl who hopped on one foot on her way to look for red-throated loons.

Red-throated loons can’t walk on land, because their feet are too far back on their bodies, but they can use their feet to kind of shove themselves along on their bellies. Underwater, it’s a whole different story: they’re fast and graceful and do all kinds of cool stuff, like dive super deep down to catch fish and flap their wings when they really want to put the pedal to the metal. When Dad first met Mom, she was scared of the water, since she grew up in the Bronx, where there aren’t any ponds or lakes. I guess there might be swimming pools, but her parents were too poor and busy to teach her how to swim, since they were immigrants from the old country, and even put her in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum for two years when she was really little because they didn’t think they could afford to keep her. Dad, on the other hand, was a very patient teacher, and now Mom can swim okay, even when it hurts to walk. We found that out yesterday morning when we all went to Heron Pond to try our experiment.

The pond wasn’t crowded, because all of the summer people were scared off by the storm clouds. In general, summer people only like blue-sky days for
swimming, and they leave the not-blue-sky days to locals like us and the Morells and go play miniature golf and eat soft ice cream at Windee’s Dairy Breeze.

“Now, don’t push yourself, Hannah,” Dad said, but Mom was already walking toward the water with her long, slow dancer steps and her dark, twisty dancer bun.

“Here I go,” she said, dipping in before Dad could catch her and finish his lecture. She swam underwater all the way to the rope at the other side of the shallow area and then started doing laps.

“Bravo!” Dad yelled from shore.

“Bravo!” Rachel and I yelled, but Dad shushed us and said that Mom preferred not to draw attention to herself.

“But, Dad,” I said, “you’re the one who—” But he wasn’t listening, because he was already sprinting toward Mom, just in case her leg decided to give her more of that new nasty business.

Rachel had her fake smile on, which means she’s upset but won’t admit it.

“I think Mom would like us to cheer. Don’t you, Rach?” I asked, standing close enough to her that I could smell lemon shampoo and see the goose bumps on her arm. Rachel shook her head and wouldn’t look at me, like I’d done something wrong.

“Go, Mom, go,” I whispered, jumping with my legs bent up behind me like a cheerleader.

“Stop it, Chirp,” Rachel said. “You’re being a baby.
Dad knows what Mom wants better than you do.” Then she folded her arms and stared out at the water like she was having deep thoughts. I looked at her hard to get her to look back at me. What I observed was that her hair is wavy-curly, not corkscrew-curly like mine, and her eyes aren’t green with different colors sprinkled in. She’s got Mom’s eyes, nice dark brown ones like wet dirt.

“Fine,” I said when she still wouldn’t look at me, and I dove into the water just like Mom. I skimmed my belly along the sand until my lungs ached and I had to pop up. I figured it was about a minute, which is the average time that my red-throated loons stay under.

The truth is, I’ve only seen a few in my whole life. They’re not easy to find, like cormorants and herring gulls. The encyclopedia says that the red-throated loon population is declining, due to the fact that we’re messing up their habitat with oil spills and garbage. I’d like today to be my lucky day, but that might mean lying low and watching for hours, and my stomach’s already grumbling, since I forgot to load up at the blackberry bushes. Being hungry won’t kill me, but dehydration is a real possibility in the summer heat, which is why Dad says Rachel and I must always take responsibility to bring our own canteens, filled up, when we go on family nature walks, and he really shouldn’t have to remind us since Rachel is no longer a child but in adolescence and I’m not far behind.

No one’s here to remind me what I am and what I’m not, which is a good thing, like this spot under the pitch pine that has a perfect view of the water, and my birthday binocs, which turn the sun sparks on the water into big bursts of light, and the air that’s so salty and warm I open my mouth, again and again, and gulp it into me—not sweet like blackberries but almost as satisfying.

“Oh, oh,” Mom says, fluttering her hands like butterflies around my face, “you, my girl, are the loveliest creature on all of Cape Cod, the prettiest one on land or sea.” We’re sitting together at the kitchen table, and Mom’s pulled my curly hair into a twisty bun and tied her purple silk scarf around my neck. Dad would
not
approve of a hairbrush on the kitchen table, but Dad isn’t here. Just me and Mom. Just Mom and me. I turn up Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass.

Mom smiles at me. Her leg hurts a lot less today, and she thinks that maybe whatever ugly beast grabbed hold of it has let go. As Dad was walking out the door to go to his office this morning, I heard him say to Mom, “Promise me that you’ll lie low on your alone night with Chirp and read a book or just take a bath,” but now she’s reaching for me, swaying and bending like dune grass in the wind.

“C’mon, Snap Pea,” she says, twirling in front of
me. She turns the record player up even louder. I take her hand and she leads me to the middle of the kitchen. At first, she closes her eyes and just rocks back and forth in time to the beat. I rock, too, but my eyes are wide open. I could watch Mom all night, with her eyes closed tight and her quiet, pretty smile and her rocking. I like how the wavy hair by her ears ticks back and forth, like our metronome. Her neck is long and skinny, like the necks of the Modigliani ladies in the art book at school. She’s wearing her really short sleeveless dress that’s green like the bay leaves she drops into spaghetti sauce, and her arms and legs and even her feet look strong—not like a muscleman looks strong, but more like pictures I’ve seen of tigers running. A trumpet shouts and Mom’s eyes pop wide open. “C’mon, baby!” She’s dipping and diving like the craziest bird. I’m laughing so hard my ears feel hot. “Show me your stuff!” So I do my lowest limbo and my highest leap while Mom claps her hands. She grabs me around the waist, and we whirl together in a tight circle. Lavender, sweat, lemons. We spin until the song stops, but still we don’t let go. Mom’s heartbeat is all over my body. When she sniffs the top of my head, I feel a cool puff of air.