Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  Kleet perched disconsolate on a sprig of fern, not even interested in the seeds ripening in the gillyflower heads nearby. Nothing was going as he had hoped. His tree, his adored Deity, had not vouchsafed him a mate. Instead he was seeing her buffeted by trouble as if by stormy gales. Kleet did not understand the hu-hu-hu cry she was crying now as she leaned against the other one, the tall dark one, but he felt that it was not good. It made him feel very alone.

  In the world on the other side of the hard air he had not felt so alone. Twee had been more with him there. But he had grown aware of many puzzlements, so many other trees like this tall dark one who was alive and twiggy and perchable yet not his tree, not Twee as his tree was Twee, not one whom he cared to skreek. When the other trees preened their plumage in front of the hard air, only similar trees looked back. But when Twee faced the hard air, a parakeet like Kleet yet not like Kleet, a blue parakeet, looked back. This made sense to him, for Bird is the spirit of Tree, Bird has been the spirit of Tree back to the Great Time, the beginning time of the One Tree—but, puzzlement, had those other trees no spirits?

  Why was Twee so unhappy?

  Did she want to preen her plumage like the other trees?

  She was standing up now, away from the other one. Kleet chirped and felt his own fluttering heart make his wings beat; he whirred up from his perch and flew to her. He perched upon her warmlimb the way she seemed to like and nibbled at her foliage. For a moment she turned to him and stroked his feathers—but only for a moment. Then she seemed to forget him again. Hu-hu-hu she cried from deep in her trunk. Her crown turned away.

  THIRTEEN

  Racquel watched the parakeet perched on Sassy’s shoulder nibbling her hair and the edge of her ear. She barely seemed to notice. He could see that she was still fighting tears and trying to clear a stuffy nose, but he figured she could talk now. Really, what better time to talk about the crap of life than when you’re already crying? It’s not like you’re going to lose it at that point when you’ve already lost it, so things are not going to get any worse.

  Racquel sighed, selected a comfy-looking patch of moss to plop himself on, and said, “Sassy, sit down and tell me about it.”

  “Aboud whad?” Obediently she sat. Too tamely. Racquel liked her recent fury better than the despair she was showing right now.

  “About how you came to forget, um, you know. Your real self.”

  “Frederig.”

  “Frederick is not your real self,” Racquel said, trying once again mawkishly to joke; God, he wished he’d stop that.

  “I thoughd he was.”

  “Huh?”

  Sassy explained, nasals gradually clearing out of her speech as she talked. Apparently she felt that she should have taken a cue from the fact that she had seen Frederick’s face instead of her own when she looked in the oval pool. She told Racquel about that and a great deal more. He listened and nodded and said things at appropriate intervals. All the time he felt himself tightening like a bowstring inside. Sassy was in worse shape than he had thought.

  “So it wasn’t just that he didn’t like you to try on hats,” he tried to sum up finally. “It was also that you took a stance. He had this idea of what a wife was like, and so did you—”

  “And I chucked away anything that didn’t fit the role.” Sassy sounded dead calm now, but also dead tired, and she was looking at bits of leaf and stick on the ground, not at him. The parakeet stood motionless on her shoulder.

  Racquel said, “God, Sassy, you are giving me the absolute chilly willies of marriage.”

  She almost smiled. “Good. Hold that thought.”

  “Holding.”

  “What an idiot I was.”

  “Hey!” Racquel reached over and grabbed her under her little pointed chin; surprised, she focused on him. “Stop that,” he told her. “Don’t go putting my friend down.”

  Startled, she actually grinned.

  “You did what you thought you had to do,” Racquel added, releasing her. “You gave the marriage everything you had. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So screw him. He did wrong, not you. And you’re not married anymore,” Racquel added. “You’re free now. You can do whatever you want.”

  She shrugged and looked at the ground again. There were periwinkle flowers growing amid the moss, and little mushrooms like pearls the color of peachskin, and snail shells as fancy as those Easter eggs they make in Ukraine, but Sassy did not seem to be seeing any of that. The parakeet chirped as if he were whispering in her ear, but she seemed not to hear. She was looking at dead sticks.

  Racquel decided to try again. Very gently. Keeping his voice down, not to be obnoxious. Whimsy. Attempt whimsy. After extensive mental preparation, he blurted, “So, you never did tell me, what kind of bird would you be?”

  Sassy did not look up. She mumbled, “Oh, who cares?”

  “I care! Sassy, tell me about yourself. The real self. Not this wife person.”

  “What’s there to tell?”

  “I don’t know. Anything.” He knew what her natural hair color was now: a shimmer of tawny auburn. It had looked stunning over the winged Sassy’s green gown. “Did you wear your hair in pigtails?”

  “Yes.”

  “With ribbons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bright red ribbons?”

  “No, I liked subtle colors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Lavender. Dusty pink. My mom tried to make me wear white, with white-ruffled socks. I hated them.” A hint of a smile now, Racquel saw.

  “You didn’t like ruffles?”

  “I didn’t like white. Actually, I had lace-ruffle lavender barrettes that I loved.”

  “Barrettes. That’s adorable. Did your mom curl your pigtails?”

  “Yeah. Banana curls.”

  Racquel let himself grin. “I bet you were cute. Freckles?”

  “Right across the nose. I liked my freckles. I—”

  Sassy stopped talking. Her mouth fell open. She looked as if she had been stepped on by something invisible but large.

  “Sassy?”

  “Oh,” she gasped. “Oh, for God’s sake.” The strongest language he had ever heard her use.

  “For God’s sake, what?”

  “Oh!” She leaped to her feet, startling the parakeet off her shoulder, hanging on to her head with both hands as if it might explode. “Oh, I don’t believe it!”

  “What?” Racquel struggled onto his sore feet, beginning to be alarmed, wondering whether something physical might have flown into her brain all of a sudden. With a person that sensitive to bird poop, it might happen.

  But it wasn’t that. “I don’t believe it!” she yelled up at the forest canopy as she clutched her own squirrel-colored hair with both hands. “I’m still being a wife!”

  “Waaal, smack my fanny and call me Suzie,” Racquel drawled in owl-eyed down-home wonder. Luckily, Sassy seemed not to hear him.

  “Hanging on!” she yelled. “Hanging on with my stupid gray hair and my stupid sacky pants! Still playing the same old sad song—”

  “Waal, paint me green and call me Gumby.”

  “Paint me stupid! I wouldn’t want him back if he came back, so what the—the—whatever am I trying to prove?”

  “Waaal, dip mah balls in cream and throw me to the kittens,” Racquel intoned. “I’ll be licked.”

  “I can’t believe I’m still acting like a—a—”

  “Fricking-fracking,” Racquel suggested.

  “A ding-damn dopey mopey wife!”

  “What the hell do you think I’ve been trying to tell you?”

  “Good grief!” She looked at him for the first time since the beginning of this outburst. “I’m stuck in a rut, Racquel.”

  “No duh.”

  “No wonder I—she—”

  Silence. Sassy stood gazing upward. Racquel lifted his head also to scan the green-lacework jigsaw puzzle overhead limned with cer
ulean blue. He saw that, and flits of gold like a dusting of glitter—maybe warblers, maybe butterflies—and dusky sunbeams filtering down into gray-green shadow. Nothing else. But he knew what Sassy was thinking. Or rather, of whom.

  “No wonder,” he agreed.

  “I been looking at myself through foggy glasses.”

  “Yeppers.”

  Finally noticing his tone, she gave him a hard look. “Don’t make fun of me,” she said. “Twenty-seven years is a long time.”

  Oops. Yes, it was. Almost longer than he’d been alive. Abashed, he said nothing.

  “Waaal paint me green,” Sassy murmured.

  Racquel smiled; okay, she wasn’t really mad. He’d just shut up now for a while. Somehow the two of them had started walking again in no particular direction, not admitting at this point to looking for anything, just wandering through the wonderland under the trees with Kleet flying circles around them.

  “You seem to be a lot more adaptable than I am,” Sassy said after a while.

  “I do?”

  “Sure. You’re a guy but you’re a woman too.”

  “Most people don’t call that adaptable,” Racquel said. “Most people call it perverted.”

  “Well, phooey on them. You’re awesome. One day you’re in retail and the next day you’re an outlaw in the biggest Sherwood Forest there ever was and it doesn’t seem to faze you.”

  “I—I guess I’ve been through a lot of changes already.” Rejection, though he didn’t say so. His family. One develops certain tools.

  Sassy asked, “Do you like the Robin Hood thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “You like being a guy?”

  He took his time answering. Had to think about it. Finally he said, “Here, yeah. I do like it.” Made sense. In this world behind the mirror he was his own reflection—no, he was behind his reflection; he was his own secrets. “You asked once what’s my real name,” he said. “It’s Devon. Devon Shelton.”

  “I know.”

  That startled him about as much as anything that had happened. “What?”

  “I know. Cop told me.” She hadn’t smirked. She hadn’t even blinked. She just looked at him and she must have seen emotion in his face because she added, “It doesn’t matter, Racquel.”

  God. He wanted to hug her. But something, some shyness, kept him from doing it. They walked on.

  “Do the outlaws call you Devon?” Sassy asked.

  He shook his head. They called him Moor. “It would be okay here,” he said, noticing that his voice came out a bit husky. “But back home—nah.”

  “Huh,” Sassy said.

  “Once I get back, I won’t be able to wait to get into a really bitchin’ dress.”

  “With a feather boa, probably.”

  “You bet. And a cockfeather bustle, and a ruff, and …” He let the thoughts trail away, because her nodding acceptance was squeezing his heart. “Sassy,” he asked on impulse, “you still have some of those lipsticks on you?”

  “Sure. Got ’em right here in my pocket.”

  “Pretty me up a little bit, could you? And braid my hair for me?”

  “Hey. Sure.”

  She sat down, and Kleet perched to gaze down on both of them, and Racquel sat with his head resting between her cocked knees, cherishing the gentle touch of her hands working around his head.

  Never in her life, Sassy mused, had she simply laid down on the ground under a tree to take an afternoon nap. And this was exactly what she and Racquel were doing. For some reason Racquel seemed very tired. He lay beside her sound asleep, his arms flung out as if he had been dropped from a height. She had dozed for a while but now she lay with her eyes open, gazing up into layers of leaflace and shadowlight, seeing the forest of lost dreams from a new angle. And in soft focus, like somebody had smeared Vaseline on the camera lens, since she had entrusted her glasses to a tree limb nearby. But she felt no urge to reach for them. Control didn’t matter so much anymore. She lay listening to layers of silence and sound, birdcalls and midday peace and something else chirring and humming—tree frogs? Cicadas? Didn’t matter. No urge to reach for an encyclopedia, either; it was sufficient just to be where she was. At peace. With Racquel close by. With sweet little Kleet perched close by. With—

  At first a shining speck like a daytime star, then larger, spiraling lazily down, down, down like a maple wing, a white pinion floated toward her.

  Sassy gasped and sat up.

  The pearly shining feather halted in front of her face and hovered there.

  “Racquel,” Sassy murmured. The hum of peace in the forest was such that she could not seem to speak aloud.

  Racquel did not awaken. The feather, however, darted at her face as if to shush her, shaking itself like an admonishing fingertip.

  “Just me?” Sassy whispered.

  The feather withdrew, nodded in the air, wheeled and pointed.

  Sassy swallowed hard, taking a deep breath. “Okay,” she breathed, getting up, a bit shaky. She put on her glasses and looked at Racquel sprawled there sleeping in his jerkin and hose and lipstick and Heidi braids, memorizing him in case she didn’t see him again. In that moment she knew that there was only one thing in the world more important to her than Racquel, and this was it. She sensed in her bones, to the feathery marrow of her hollow bones, that this was it. “Coming,” she whispered, and she followed the glimmering pinion.

  It led her a long shadowy way between towering trees jeweled with efts, butterflies, finches, fungi, orchids, ribbon snakes, passionflowers; past mossy boulders studded with fiddleheads and toadstools; under the green-gold lacework canopy through a twilight of lost dreams to the oval pool.

  Sassy knew where she was going when she saw the sunlight beyond the greenshadow and her feet stumbled. Her glasses fogged as her face heated and chilled as if with fever. No. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t brave that place again.

  But maybe she wouldn’t actually have to look into the pool. Right?

  Or maybe it wasn’t really the same place—

  It was. The feather led her into the shadowy dingle—she could not mistake that fullmoon circle like a green eye looking to the sky, the oval pool the winking pupil at its heart—Sassy had once looked into some animal’s eye with an oval pupil of that same fathomless blue; what was it? A cat, a lizard, a horse, a goat? She could not think. It seemed to matter tremendously yet it didn’t matter. She walked down the gentle slope and her feet faltered even on the smooth sward. She slowed, but trudged on down the hollow, right to the edge of the still water, to the verge rimmed in slate-green and gray-blue and rose-colored stone; around that verge calla lilies bloomed instead of narcissus. Sassy stopped a few feet short of the edge, blinking like a child in the presence of that mirroring surface.

  The guiding pinion shot upward and disappeared into sunlight, dismissing her. Good-bye.

  “No,” Sassy whispered. She took off her glasses, wiped them on her sweatshirt, put them on again and looked around, anywhere except at the pool. Treetops looming as if they would fall in on her. Tiny blossoms in the grass, white, lavender, powder-blue. Something big and white flying over—her heart jumped. But it was only an egret, neck bestowed in an elegant S-curve, legs trailing like two sticks of spaghetti.

  Nothing else.

  “Hello?” Sassy whispered.

  Only the distant chiming of tree frogs answered.

  “Hello? Please? Where are you?” More loudly.

  Nothing.

  “Oh, come on. Please? Pretty please with peaches and cream? Come talk with me?”

  Nope.

  “Say something?”

  Nope.

  Sassy walked the rim of the oval pool, then turned and walked around it the other way, as if that might help. She called again. She looked around some more.

  Nothing moving or shaking. Not even, seemingly, the sun in the distant sky.

  “Oh, darn—darn—damn it all!”

  She knew she had to do it. She knelt beside the po
ol. Please. Please let it not be Frederick this time. Please let me be able to handle it, whatever it was.

  She looked.

  The surface mirrored back to her only a blue budgie.

  Blue. Like the sky. Like her mood most of the time.

  “Huh!”

  She stood up again and looked around. Nothing.

  “Okay, you—”

  You what? Okay, Sassy knew what she was, though she couldn’t have explained it. But what was her name?

  You must name me.

  Sassy walked around the oval again, brushing her hand against calla lilies as she walked, tincturing her palm with saffron pollen. She reversed and walked back, brushing them with the other hand.

  She looked up and said, “I name you Shadow.”

  Nothing.

  “I name you Sassafras tree,” she went on, for a being as important as Shadow could have more than one name. Many names. “I name you Perdita, because you were lost, and I name you Eureka, because I found you. I name you Freebird. I name you Rebel. I name you Deeproot, I name you Wonderwing, I name you Smart—Smart Alec. I name you Wise Child. I name you Sassy. I name you me.”

  Nothing happened, exactly, but deep in the hollow of the sky Sassy felt something holding its breath. The air seemed to hum. She felt a silent thrumming vibrating the lacunae of her bones.

  She strolled around the pool again. Childlike, singsong, she chanted,

  I name you Shadow,

  I name you Tree,

  I name you Rebel,

  I name you Free,

  I name you Birdsing,

  I name you Wonderwing,

  I name you Sassy—

  What else? Sassafras? Smart alec? Wise child? Nah.

  I name you Sassy.

  I name you me.

  The echoes had not yet faded when, with wingbeats like distant thunder and singing pinions and flying hair and a glad cry and a thump as she landed on her bare feet on the grass, Shadow stood before her.

  “Uh!” Racquel yawned, stretched, sat up and looked over at Sassy.