Cygnet

by Season Butler

  Mrs. Tyburn pulls out an archive box full of film reels, all labeled with strips out of one of those stupid label-making machines, and hands me one marked July 1975—Our New Yacht, Nantucket. I thread the leader of the reel into position and guide it through to the take-up reel of her old 8 mm projector, tug down the screen, and pull the blackout curtain.

  The first frames are black with dots and blotches. They’re always my favorite part, even though they only last a few seconds. Then the scene opens to what looks like a perfect day. The fact that it’s in black and white makes it seem even more pristine. The shot pans down from a tasteful scattering of clouds to the masts and sails in a marina. The kids dart into the frame, running but not racing each other. Mr. and Mrs. Tyburn stroll into frame a few beats later. Mrs. Tyburn is a knockout, totally cute in a floral shorts set, full makeup, and a sun hat that blows a little in the wind, forcing her to pose with her hand behind her head. Her breasts barely make an impression. I’m taking notes.

  The yacht is smaller than I thought it would be, but I guess my only frame of reference for yachts is rap videos. This one is red and white (the red seems red; it’s weird how even in black and white you can kind of tell).

  It’s called Jenny. The name was Mr. Tyburn’s idea. Apparently, his mother, Jean, was nicknamed Jenny. That man’s got a nose that grows. That’s what my mother would have said about Mr. Tyburn.

  As the family boards the yacht, the attic lights come on. “You get the drift,” says Mrs. Tyburn. “We went out on the boat a few times that summer. The name will have to change, and a few minor adjustments will be necessary elsewhere. You do understand?”

  “What do you want the boat to be called?”

  She does a weird harrumph and shrugs really big like she’s trying to be flippant when I know she supremely does care what the boat is called.

  “I mean, naming your yacht after your mother. Is that the done thing, I wonder?” And she actually looks at me, for, like, boat-naming etiquette rules. “Naming your yacht after your sweetheart is far more de rigueur. Only, I never did have a nickname, and Maude simply won’t do. But you’ll think something up, with that magic you do.”

  She gestures toward my face, nearly touching her fingers to the underside of my chin, and pulls a long pink smile across her powder-white face.

  One night after I’d been working on Mrs. Tyburn’s archive for a couple of weeks she called me downstairs. There was a fire burning in the fireplace, and a box of letters beside her. “I’m popping out to see Rose about ordering some things. Would you take care of these? I might be some time; lock up when you’re through, will you?” The letters were from someone called Jenny, all addressed to Mr. Tyburn. I only read one or two, enough to be sure they were definitely not from his mother.

  So now the first thing I’ve got to do is come up with the nickname she supposedly got from her husband. I decide not to think too hard about it. I Google “yuppie nickname dictionary” and make a list: Topsy, Sooze, Peaches, Mimi, Mitzi, Miffi, Bitsy, Buffy, Bunny. Bunny is a classic, but maybe a bit too stripper these days. Buffy has too many goth connotations, but would Mrs. Tyburn know that? Mimi could work. There’s not so much of a leap between Maude and Mimi, but Mimi’s also the name of a lady she plays bridge with, and because Mimi always wins Mrs. T is sure she cheats. “Strictly entre nous.” And then it comes to me, and I know just what to do.

  I rewind the film and set up the digital camera on a tripod just below the lens, run a cable from the camera into the computer, and start up Premiere. I set the pixel ratio to 4:3, recording at twenty-four frames per second. The trick to getting the digital copy to look right is to record the image at the same speed it’s transmitted. Then I need darkness. I turn off the monitor and cover the standby light with electrical tape, snap the blackout curtains down against the wall so that absolutely no light gets in, wipe the lens super carefully with a special slippery black cloth, flick the light off, and start the film. For the first few seconds it’s as dark as it was just before the world started. Just a buzzing noise of something about to happen.

  Outside I can hear the grunting roars of walruses that sometimes hang out on the beach up here on the north side of Swan. I’m so anal about anything getting into the room that it makes me jump a little, like the noise is going to break the darkness and ruin the copying process. It takes a second for me to realize the difference between sound and light. My mother liked to hike up here and watch the walruses after Lolly brought us all over, before they ditched me here. We went for a walk together pretty much every day. My mother asked if walruses would eventually evolve out of their blobby shape into something more elegant. I told her that’s not how evolution works, which just made us both feel like assholes. She was just making conversation. I didn’t need to be mean about it.

  We’d been living outside Boston, my parents and me. It was a little communal organic farm in Vermont before that, but my folks got us kicked out. I didn’t have to ask why. Work was patchy in Boston and my parents were home a lot, which was the best incentive for me to go to school every day. It wasn’t that bad. The other kids let me keep to myself, and I even started to get interested in a couple of subjects, mostly English and French. Eventually a herd of my parents’ new friends started coming around, playing guitars and watching TV, smoking tina late into the night, making it impossible for me to sleep. I started missing so much school that I couldn’t keep up with the other kids and it was too embarrassing to go. The school sent letters but we all just ignored them until finally Child Services turned up. A teacher had tipped them off when I stopped going to school. As they snooped around the apartment, I kept trying to will the cockroaches to crawl back under the speckled beige countertops, but they were bolder than ever, like they were trying to get us in trouble. There was a little orange syringe cap on the floor but I don’t think they saw it before I kicked it under the couch. We answered their questions on our best behavior. My mother spoke to them sweetly about all my problems, insomnia, trouble concentrating, social anxiety, looking over at me now and then, like she was simply telling them things we talked openly about all the time, some funny, homegrown mystery that had nothing to do with her. My dad rubbed her back or squeezed her shoulder or patted her knee, all sensitive and supportive.

  The narcs didn’t buy it. The second time they came, they took me with them. My folks were too fucked up to say anything; they stayed in the living room while I packed my stuff. Sometimes I wonder if they noticed at all.

  It didn’t matter at first. Actually it was a relief; who wants to live in a tiny apartment in the shittiest part of a shitty town with two overgrown teenage junkies? It was actually peaceful, in a way, even with the chaos of the group home, the kids who were just using it as a fucked-up sorority house before they were old enough to be sent to big-girl prison for their thefts and arson and assaults. I knew how to be quiet, and for the most part they left me alone. One of the social workers didn’t, but I figured him out quickly enough. He had these stubby hands like lumps of putty with crusty red scabs where he chewed his fingers. I started pretending that I liked it and he lost interest. I went to school on most days and visited my parents for a bit in the afternoon, even though I wasn’t technically allowed to go over there. I cleaned up a little, gave them money when I had any. We tried not to make a big deal about it.

  In the group home, there was always someone watching you, monitoring, compiling reports, keeping track of your “progress” in a file. There was a camera above every door and one in the common room. If you were in the bathroom too long, pretty soon someone would knock. There was always someone looking at you, but this weirdly constant gaze would always look away long enough to let bad things happen from time to time. I started to notice cameras in town, outside shopping centers and in parking lots, and I felt, not really paranoid, just annoyed, I guess. I had a sense of being looked at all the time, someone watching and waiting for you to do something wrong. Looking at you instead of looking out for you.
/>   Our family court date rolled around, and I was surprised to see that Lolly was there waiting for us. She was early; my parents were forty minutes late. We hugged, and she held me like I’d survived some kind of natural disaster. After the moment passed, though, we had nothing to say to each other. I hadn’t really grown since she’d last seen me two years earlier, and she knew it was pointless to ask me about school, so the two go-to subjects for adult-child conversation were DOA. Waiting on the hard bench outside the courtroom, I broke the ice. I took out the book I was reading and told her about it. She’d read it when it came out in the seventies, and asked if I’d gotten to her favorite part, where the narrator freaks out her parents by dismembering the blond baby doll they got her for Christmas. I said I had, and that I loved that part, too. I wanted her to tell me what the funny names of the three prostitutes meant (“China” and “Poland” I could probably have figured out on my own, but “the Maginot Line” confounded my best theories). But she said she didn’t know; she just reads for pleasure. I knew I was missing something in that statement—I mean, why else do people read novels?—but I didn’t push it, and she seemed happy to sit quietly after that.

  Lolly had prepared this stack of research and evidence organized in a neat new folder, bound with elastic and labeled with different-colored tabs and Post-its. Everything she needed, and not a page more. She’d copied transcripts of cases from the past ten years that had any similarity to ours, highlighted passages, composed transitions so one followed another until they formed an airtight case for family intervention instead of making me a super-temporary ward of the state, since I wouldn’t be a minor for too much longer. The judge didn’t even seem bored while she was talking, and actually sat up straight when she told him how much the county would save if they gave her custody instead of keeping me locked up in the prison for kids with bad taste in parents. Everyone’s a winner.

  We left for Swan that same week, and she let my parents come with us, even though she was pushing her luck bringing two more youngsters to Swan along with me. I’ll never forget that. Help you get settled in, she said. No one talked much in the cab to the ferry in Portsmouth. At the water my legs felt like Popsicles, crunching and threatening to crumble as I forced myself on board. Orange plastic seats with their silly bowl shape making me shift and slide as the boat rocked, too fucking cruel and stupid; I just needed so badly to feel steady. So I held my mother while we crossed. I held her bones. My dad mostly stood out on deck and smoked. Menthols, always menthols.

  The weird thing was, there was this big stack of mattresses on the deck. I figured out later that they were for the hotel on Star. The Star Island hippie kids kept trying to climb on top of the stack, and they laughed at each other as each one clawed their way up and rolled off as soon as the boat went over a swell or turned sharply. None of them managed to stay on. And I wanted to try. It was dumb, of course, but I wanted to play too, and I felt like I could have done better, like I could have stayed up there. But I wasn’t them—I wasn’t one of the Star Island kids. I wasn’t anybody. I just held my mom and watched my dad smoke and swallowed the feeling that those kids had fucking everything just because none of them looked like their life was ending. I wonder what Lolly did. I can’t see her at all now, as hard as I try.

  My parents stayed longer than I’d expected, almost two weeks. I could see Lolly losing patience with them, coming home every day and finding them still there, eating her food and doing nothing much with their time. I don’t remember them saying goodbye to me either. They must have, though. Right? I remember telling Lolly that I didn’t want to go with them to the dock, where Ted was waiting to row them over to Appledore. I walked up to the top of the hill, where the path meets the road, and watched them walk north with this raw ache behind my eyes and nose and in my chest, like when you realize you’re coming down with the flu. Mom stuck her hand out and waved. She wore the brave smile of someone being shipped out in the draft.

  * * *

  The last frames of the film are just patterns on black, the background flashing fast like a distress call in Morse code, followed by the tap tap tap of the end of the reel knocking against the projector with every revolution. I paid attention to most of it. The four of them on their red-and-white boat, having a picnic, Sophia playing with jacks, Mr. T and six-year-old Ben fishing off the side, Mrs. T sunbathing in a floral-patterned bikini top that I’m going to have to fuck around with in Illustrator for ages.

  I flip the lights, switch off the projector and camera, roll the mouse, and get started.

  I do the stupid boobs first. I’m pretty good at this now—it’s really a matter of playing with circles and half spheres. It’s the pattern and the shading, and getting them to move fluidly from frame to frame, that’s the challenge. She turns around for thirteen seconds. I clip this part out and play with it in a second file. Thirteen seconds, three hundred and twelve frames. Three hundred and twelve frames that I’m pretty much ruining. I mean, what a cutie. I almost feel bad doing it until I realize that a) she’s paying me to do it, b) no one else is going to pay me to do anything, c) it’s not like I’m actually giving anyone fake boobs, just making the fake boobs she already has a bit more real by letting her pretend that the swollen bulbs she hauls around all day in Bloomingdale’s ivory bras were always that way, and that some failure of gravity keeps them floating just south of her chin (they’re higher than mine, and I’m a teenager, for Christ’s sake), and d) no one is ever going to watch these films anyway.

  The digital copy looks pretty good. There are places where it jitters, which makes me uneasy. The edges of objects in the foreground seem almost overdrawn, like the outlines of a cartoon, while in the background the horizon is vague. But not bad, really. It’s called generation loss—you inevitably get some when you transfer analog to digital. All you can do is be careful with the aspect ratio and the recording speed. You never transmit in exactly the way you receive—the playback is always different. But that’s life. And with all my tampering, what’s a little generation loss?

  Doing Sophia stings a little. I have a stock photo of her I use as a guide, from the first time I fixed her to Mrs. Tyburn’s approval. Opening these frames in Illustrator, I change the brush size to one hundred and liquefy her little sepia legs, use the pucker tool until they’re sticks with some prepubescent hint of a shape. I zoom in and shrink each finger, her wrists, her arms. I bring in her waistline a few pixels at a time. I’m a child abuser, I’m a flesh-eating virus.

  I’m a cartoonist. This is a joke.

  It’s quarter past five. I’ve been editing for three hours and I’m sixty-four seconds into the film. My work is all seconds and pixels and millimeters. My work is the size of a lifetime. I wonder if life seemed so long before I started looking at it one frame at a time. I’ll be up here forever, fixing Mrs. Tyburn’s memory. I’ll stay up here forever until my parents come and climb the stairs, burst in and gather me up. Mrs. Tyburn will try to stop them. “She isn’t finished. I still have bad memories up there. You can’t have her until she’s finished.” But my mother will be awesome. “Back off, Madame Bovary!” she’ll shout, and then probably flick out a switchblade or something embarrassing like that. And we’ll go. We’ll live in one of those places you have to get to by train. I’ll go back to school and learn French in no time. Or German or whatever. And we won’t talk about anything in the past. We won’t be able to. We’ll live in a place where nothing has a memory, and I’ll have a chance to catch up with the world.

  I paste the frames I’ve been editing back into the parent file and play it at speed. There are a couple of hiccups. Pause, step back, tweak. I consider letting a couple of small errors slide but I never do. Someone will see this film after all. Just once. Mrs. Tyburn will watch all of these, one time, to replace her memory of the day with the spotless memory of a film of the day, and she’s paying me to make the memory perfect.

  Body-image garbage out of the way, it’s time to rename the boat. The part I was real
ly looking forward to. What I have in mind is like when Michelangelo painted one of his critics getting his tiny penis bitten off on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or like the guy who did the artwork for the home video cover of The Little Mermaid and made one of the spires of Triton’s castle in the shape of a huge cock. I go through frame after frame of footage putting the new name on the old boat—Lolly, my grandmother’s nickname, the only name I ever called her. Everyone else called her Violet. As a joke, it’s totally private, entirely my own. Kind of a prank, kind of an ode.

  The repetition is making my mind wander. Jenny’s dead, long live Lolly. Out with Jenny, in with Lolly. Jenny off, Lolly on. When the boat turns away and appears to the camera at a coy angle, the letters need to shift too, Lolly on a red carpet looking at the cameras over her shoulder as her fans swoon and scream at their TV screens. She was never Grandma to me, or Granny or Nanna—always Lolly. Maybe I tried to say Violet when I was little and couldn’t manage. I’ll have to ask my mother, when I see her next, when she comes for me.

  It’s been almost four months since Lolly died. What started as soreness sprinted ahead with a power that didn’t belong to human tissue. It was just an odd pain at first, a sore left breast. And then it turned red and sprouted streaking tendrils that reached out to her armpits, and her throat swelled up. But just as suddenly it went away and life went on. She worked in the garden, grinning and cooing at the furriness of bees in the lilacs or the discovery of an arrowhead in a turn of the soil. But it came back the next week. I was on the couch staring into a book one night when I heard her go, hmmm. The sound when just one question sounds like a million, a monster with too many identical heads. The next morning she went to the Oceanic for Gretchen to have a look. They said they needed to keep her there overnight for tests, whatever tests they could manage with the equipment they had on hand. And she died the next day, Sunday. Violet.