Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  “Now Lear has thrown you out, yes? He has broken your heart. He has forced you to leave your home with nothing, in total disgrace. You loved him, and he shamed you, he disowned you. And now here you are, you have come back to your father only to find him in this terrible state, at death’s door. He is about to die, he may already be dead. He looks like death. Your father, whom you loved and who said such terrible things to you, such wounding, terrible, terrible things. The last time he saw you, he broke your heart, and now you are facing him again, in this terrible state. For what is very likely to be the last time. And you must be asking yourself, of course you must have to ask yourself, How many times can one person break your heart?” (He groaned a little to himself at this point, his eyes closed in a kind of reverie, then his eyelids flew open, he turned on me, and asked again, sternly:)

  “How many times can one person break your heart?” (I stared at him blankly.)

  “Okay. OOOOkay. I want you to breathe into your spine, yes, soft belly yes and let your knees go a little—not so much!—okay here is what we are after. As if you had droopy knickers. Droopy knickers! Underpants. Droopy drawers!” (I drooped.)

  Bertie let out a squawk as though I had leapt full force on his foot.

  “No, my love, no.” Taking a hunk of my hair, he lifted it directly to the ceiling. I froze.

  “We want a plumb line from the top of your head to the floor and another out from your shoulders. Good. Now just give the knees a little bend. Yes. So you are ready for action. So you can jump in any direction. There you are. That’s my girl.”

  I tried to hold my stance obediently. I wished he would let go of my hair. He smelled, not unpleasantly, like sweaty doughnuts, a warm ripe oily smell.

  “Now I want you to skip while saying the first line. After each skip, turn.”

  I began to skip away from the class.

  Bertie roared after me, “Feel the heartbeat! I/am/bic. Iambic pentameter! Bbboom, bbboom. You need to feel the rhythm of the language in your heart; your heart needs to feel it. Break the lines down, my dear, into the sound of your heart beating. Shakespeare is the sound of your heart beating. Skip! Turn! Skip! Turn! Skip! Lines! Lines!”

  I skipped, reciting, feeling enormously stupid, my arms swinging idiotically, stomping, a comic circus ape with no grace. It was ridiculously difficult. Soon everyone had to do it, which was worlds better. Before long, we were all cantering to the trochees, beat beat beat, turn. The rest of the morning we spent galloping the length of the basement chanting lines. This I could do. On one turn, as I bounded across the room I passed Sarah, airborne at the same moment, and we splashed wide open in a grin together.

  Over coffee I learned that she had started in the acting program at Tisch at NYU the year before last, but then had taken the past year off. She did not say why. Her family was from the Midwest. She had never left the country. She hadn’t seen the ocean until she was seventeen. While she told me these things, she either studied the rim of her paper cup closely or looked at me ardently, there was no in between. I stared off into middle spaces, at the roof of Uncle Nick’s Café to the left of her head, or at the edge of her ear. Her face was shaped like a heart and I heard myself say so. She said she had never liked that and I heard myself say that she should, after which we both ducked our heads.

  CHAPTER 6

  I wasn’t new to girls, strictly speaking. I wasn’t new to the idea or the emotion. To begin with, I fell deeply in love with Genevieve James when we were seven. She had a totally mesmerizing Australian accent, and white blonde hair the color of unsalted butter that fell straight as rain, right as rain, past her shoulders. I would have followed her anywhere, to Australia even, if I’d had an independent income and been over four feet tall.

  Her arrival coincided with second grade, and the romance slid over into a love affair with school. We raced to clean the chalkboard and to take the erasers out back and clap them on the brick walls to get rid of the dust. We were assigned farm duty in the spring along with permanently congested Eric Costello, which meant the three of us were released from fourth period every other Wednesday and carried a bucket of grain over to the lone bleating sheep staked out in back of the school building. We would sprint ahead of poor Eric, leaving him snorting in our wake. We read aloud to one another lying on the grass on our stomachs in her backyard or in the cemetery in town. We were working our way through the Great American Poets. I liked Walt Whitman. She liked Emily Dickinson, and any poem about death.

  She said chooks for chickens and was not afraid of anything, not snakes or heights or even ski tow lifts, not the J-bar that grabbed you under the butt at Oak Hill and not the chairlift that swung up so terrifyingly high at Suicide Six. She played the cello seriously, her buttery cape of hair fanning out on both sides of the strings. I cried for two weeks very nearly when her father’s sabbatical ended and she moved back to Sydney. We wrote letters for almost five years, in round and even script.

  Later a senior girl in high school named Lindsey used to wrap me up in the heavy, dark, dusty red velvet curtain of the auditorium stage and kiss me, her cheek softer than pussy willow buds, her mouth tasting unfailingly like the delicious medicinal artificial sweetness of Dr. Pepper.

  In the high school winter show, she played Ado Annie in Oklahoma, which is an unfair advantage. If you don’t crush out on Ado Annie, something’s wrong with that show. What does she sing? I’m just a girl who cain’t say no, I’m in a turrible fix. Okay, then, you see what I mean. I mean that was me. I was the one in a fix. I couldn’t say no. Happily I was in the chorus, so I got to flock around her picnic basket. I thought she was the bee’s knees, as my grandmother might say, the cat’s pajamas.

  In our vocal warm-ups before rehearsals, I could see her sleek coppery head in the soprano section, ten people over from my sticky clump of freshman altos. One day she helped me with my hair before a dress rehearsal, twisting it up into what she called a chignon. When she was done, she paused, regarding me in the mirror. Taking the bobby pins out of her mouth, she said, “You have beautiful eyelashes.” This made my insides collapse and I started sneezing violently, from happiness and all the hairspray.

  She had a boyfriend named Mike, who played lacrosse. He had scary big knobs for shoulders like football pads only not, actual flesh and bone. Sometimes I would pass the senior lounge with my heart thudding, just racketing around in my chest like a rogue squash ball, waiting to see if she would be there. If she was, she’d be stretched out all summery on one of the beanbag chairs, fingers dripping like she was punting on a river and trailing her hand over the side of the boat, just tracing the water. She’d be laughing at the boys who lunked and wrestled, looking like overfed oxen bumping into one another. If she saw me in the hall she would lift her palm and smile in passing. Once she casually tucked my hair back behind my ear right in the hall outside Organic Chem with Mr. Hutchens, while I stood transfixed. I didn’t love her, I didn’t know her, but I knew she wanted to touch me and that was tremendous, that was stupefying information. I would never have followed up on this in any way, demanding or questioning or doing anything. All I did was to pocket every gesture, every moment, carrying them home to pore over as soon as I was alone.

  I watched her graduate in a flurry of black robes before she went to the University of Vermont. She didn’t introduce me to her parents, but when she was walking away with her friends after the ceremony, she turned back toward me for a minute, her hair tumbling down on her shoulders, the crumpled gown in one hand, the magical curve of her waist turning in her jeans, and she blew me a kiss. It was like being thrown a long silken rope of happiness and I caught the end of it gratefully.

  Of course alongside the girls, by the time I was thirteen I was almost always in a couple with some boy or other. But boyfriend is not a word I’ve ever used much. It thrilled me exactly once in my life: in third grade when I was on the B4 bus going to school and Bruce Brickle mocked Sam Nic
holson for sitting next to me, which Sam always did. Bruce lurched over the back of our seat with his enormous lumpy head looming over us and said, with all the sophistication of a mean oversized moron, you’re her boyfriend. He smelled like cough syrup and dirty damp scalp. There was some spit bubbling on his braces and suspended in a tiny triangle at the corner of his mouth. It made me think of Charlotte’s Web. I thought, Well, that’s torn it (my grandmother said that sometimes, Well, that’s torn it). I pictured Sam and myself, so amicable and united today, torn in two like dismembered paper dolls, rent apart forever. We would never again be able to keep company on or off the bus, because what boy could withstand that kind of taunt? But before I finished mourning our end, Sam said, calmly, Well I am a boy and I am her friend, so yes okay I am her boyfriend. I looked at him with love for years because of that, no kidding. I doubt he’d remember. He got into fights later with his stepfather, wound up in juvenile court, and got shipped off somewhere. But he was loyal and he had a good heart. I would look at him with love today if I saw him.

  By the time boyfriend was a desirable title, in the terms dictated from on high school high, I usually had one except for one strange four-month stretch in freshman year when they all seemed temporarily to dry up and evaporate.

  The bigger difficulty was that I was bored out of my gourd. Usually I had trouble sticking to one boy and instead roved, trolled, overlapped with more than one. This got me in some hot water occasionally. But listen, I just wanted more information. I wanted the sex version of the Big Book of How Things Work in the children’s section at the library, less on how steamships stay afloat or how electric currents run and more on the movements and vagaries of lips and hearts, skin and bones.

  Mostly I wound up kissing boys who asked or seemed interested because it was worth the practice or I was indifferent, intrigued, wanted to educate myself. Usually this was a pretty unexciting pursuit but sometimes it had unexpected results. The first time I helped a guy masturbate, for example (it was Lewis Aronson if you want to know)—which is to say I held onto his dick while he showed me what to do—I worried the whole time that I would choke it somehow especially since it kept swallowing itself up in skin, which was incredibly disconcerting. Lewis’s dick didn’t smell like much to me surprisingly, inoffensive, unremarkable, kind of like butter that’s been in the fridge too long and smells like the inside of the fridge. But, as I said, inoffensive. The whole experience seemed unexceptional. Afterwards though, I had to sit down with my grandmother for dinner and I was really disturbed because the entire time my hand appeared to be glowing neon blue, like in those undercover TV specials when they use infrared detection or whatever to show you the traces of sperm left on the hotel sheets that only look clean. This had nothing to do with sperm (I tried to stay completely clear of that, even though it was a little like avoiding a blind man’s sneeze). It had to do with me, but also with my grandmother.

  In short flashes that suppertime—as I reached for the salt with my hand, or heard the familiar sound of my grandmother’s voice, the scraping of her chair as she pushed it back from the table—I saw a fissure opening between us. It wasn’t that my grandmother would disapprove of what I had done so much as she would not even recognize it and so could not necessarily recognize me.

  I did not want the space between us magnified. Even as much as I wanted to know about how everything worked, there was also plenty that I didn’t want to be forced to contemplate. Like for example, I did not want AIDS brought to my attention so damn much. Like it wasn’t enough to be all the time horrified about pregnancy and what a total nightmare that would be.

  The first time I heard the word AIDS was almost two years ago. I was sitting in the kitchen at the counter on a stool looking at the bird feeder in the sunshine and spooning up Cheerios while weighty National Public Radio voices were talking somberly about the gay cancer. The interviewer was explaining that some scientists, some experts, some people in the know—although not the president, apparently, or anyone in his administration—but a handful of other people thought it was possible that we could all get the gay cancer now, any one of us, from blood and kissing and sperm—bodily fluids, the first time I heard that said over and over, like an incantation, bodily fluids, bodily fluids, bodily fluids.

  Before long we were hearing about this development in school too. There was even a special assembly for juniors and seniors, where, in the quiet, dark hush of the auditorium, the school nurse spoke to students gravely about safe sex. Some parents complained about this later, saying that this was overreaching, that we were being told things we didn’t need to know. But for most of us the bigger problem was that it was hard not to feel disgusted at yet another outrageous claim clearly designed to freak us out, this one smarter, more strategic because it was so sweeping and vague. We don’t know exactly what this is or how this happens or if you can protect against it (except by locking yourself in a hermetic plastic box predictably). No matter what the alleged scientific discovery or medical advancement, the lesson always seemed to wind up being: you will die if you touch someone. Of course this wisdom came from the same people who had only recently realized apparently that you won’t go blind if you masturbate. Mr. Hannigan, who had terrible dandruff and naturally picked the short straw to preside over eighth-grade sex ed, actually made Lisa Sullivan read the masturbation passage aloud from the book. It gave you a lot of faith in the experts. We’ve been moronically wrong before about sex, but hey, we can tell you definitively that those bodily fluids are a death trap.

  I went out the very weekend after that sex ed class and wound up making out furiously with Michael North, much to his surprise, in the front seat of his ancient green Mustang, out by Wilder Dam. I had more fondness for the car than the boy who, eager with cherry Chapstick, was too clean to be really thrilling. Boys in my experience—the tall and short actors, lacrosse players, musicians, runners, brains, artists, soccer stars—were almost all tiresomely tender, terribly eager to be attached, devoted, floppy, needy, clutching at me in fact, or, occasionally and divertingly, brutally dismissive. But none of them could get properly sweaty—or that’s all they could do, get properly sweaty running up and down the length of a jewel green athletic field—and I wanted some improper sweat. Bodily fluid, or, maybe better yet, a fluid body.

  My last brush with trying to be in a couple had been the three months I hung around with Peter Salvato. He was okay, but eventually he had to spend nearly two hours in the front seat of his parents’ Volvo before last Christmas break making a tortured effort to tell me that he loved me. He didn’t really know anything about me, but he’d made up his mind anyway. I hate that. He was sweating with earnestness and if I’d been at all compassionate I might have helped him out, but as it was I could only summon up wild irritation. It was amazing to me that he couldn’t see this irritation spray painted all over me, but it’s true that he was only looking at his lap or—in moments of colossal bravery—at the dashboard.

  We were parked up on Bragg Hill in Norwich, not far from his house. The tape playing in the car while Peter was rambling was Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. We went through it twice. The motor was running the whole time because it was at least twenty degrees below zero outside. My feet were cold in my boots, and I curled and uncurled my toes. I distracted myself by thinking about David Byrne in his big white suit. I wondered what I would look like in a big white suit. I wanted to roll down the window, crawl out of the car into the towering snowdrift by the side of the road, and just lie there, preferably in a big white suit. By the time Peter had shyly stammered out his feelings, I was far along into a vision of my funeral, the cortege, white horses, the flowers, the music, the weeping mourners, me in my big white suit stretched out in the casket.

  Somehow this exchange with Peter put me over some edge and sent me into a deep, cold rage. He was just another boy who seemed to require bottomless reserves of support and hand-holding and coaxing and care. I didn’t think I was up
to providing this kind of attention. Deep down I didn’t feel anything for any of these boys. (Not even deep down. Right underneath the surface.) And the problem was that I didn’t even want to be up to taking care of any of them. But if I wasn’t up to it, if I didn’t even want to be up to it, if I was filled with such casual loathing for them, what kind of person was I? Not a good one, clearly. I was angry all the time. It was so easy to get these boys and so hard to get rid of them that I desperately wanted a change, something I thought would be wild, something with teeth. I wanted to fast-forward through all these mind-numbing tender proceedings and get to something raw and real, a power surge in the heart, a jump start, a kick start, a running start—for god’s sake already, a start.

  Which doesn’t mean I meant to start anything.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was illegal. I was underage. For starters. One day in early January this year I was working on a scene for the Woodstock High School Shakespeare Festival competition with a wet sack named Alan. I was eyeballing this Alan, my Macbeth, from my place as a hopelessly miscast, pissed off Lady Macbeth. It was 5 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, junior year. Snow was falling dark and cold and fast outside the second-floor classroom windows. The heat made a hissing sound and the air in the room was layered warm around the knees and chilly at chest level where the cold floated right into the room. The windowpanes were icy to the touch. I could see the headlights of cars, dappled and wobbly, progressing through the slush on Lebanon Street in front of the school.

  I glared full on at Alan and he tottered a bit on his pins and broke the scene, saying, like the lame duck he was: “Look at her eyes, she’s scaring me.”

  I was slipping in scorn at this point and snorted audibly (read the script, you fucking crybaby). That’s when Roger Peters, director of the Shakespeare workshop and the most popular English teacher, maybe hands down the most popular teacher in high school, stepped forward with his bullet head and got in my sight line.