Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  (Okay, that’s not true. I knew Jason perfectly well because he was in school with me. He was a star soccer and lacrosse player. He was tall and nice looking, with dark floppy hair and bright blue eyes. Once a few years ago I had been at one of his games and wound up talking to him on the bleachers afterwards while we were waiting for rides home. He had admitted, almost shyly, that he had always wanted to act but that he didn’t have the time to try out for school plays. He told me this while we shared an unpleasant, mealy granola bar he dug out of the depths of his backpack and the last of the water from his water bottle. He had a lovely crooked smile. After things started with his father, though, I ignored his existence as much as possible. I had trouble looking at him, so I didn’t.)

  The MP was in some kind of complicated custody or ongoing divorce battle over Jason with his ex-wife, whom he occasionally referred to bitterly as the missus, but never by name. I knew who she was, of course, because she was the elementary school nurse. She had a pinched-looking mouth and a lot of gingery hair. She’d weighed me, measured me, tested me for scoliosis, and looked through my scalp for lice when Tammy Milliken had been sent home, crying, for infecting everyone. On one occasion, rather sternly, she demonstrated to my class how to brush our teeth and tongues, using a pinky beige plastic model of a jaw and a dry toothbrush. Brush the upstairs and the downstairs and then brush the carpet, she’d said. Don’t forget the carpet. That annoyed me. (The carpet? What, were we morons? Why were they forever bribing us with lollipops and condescending to us? Why couldn’t we call a tongue a tongue?). I could still conjure up her pink tongue sticking out after she said carpet, if I wanted to, which I didn’t. It creeped me out.

  But once when Titch had one of her panic attacks, I’d sat with her in the orange nursing cubicle while she breathed into a brown paper lunch bag and the nurse, the missus, had silently sat on her other side. She gave us ginger ale in plastic tumblers with red bendy straws before we went back to class. Her name was Lee. None of the sons looked anything like her except maybe Jason a little bit, in the blueness of his eyes.

  The MP claimed that she was stalking him, that she had hired a private detective to follow him. That made me jumpy whether it was true or not. I had to hunker down on the floor of his car, out of sight, wedged down with the dog hair and big flakes of dried mud from the treads of his boots. And one time with my forehead jammed up to the glove compartment was one time too many.

  Also, he started seeing a woman, a teacher, in fact a teacher I liked who had introduced me to Willa Cather two years earlier. Vanessa Hiller. She was the only teacher we’d had who wanted to be called Mz. Ms. Hiller. That was a first. She wrote her first name up on the board on the first day of class too, which was kind of unusual. Most teachers have no first names. Ms. Vanessa Hiller, with her bumpy nose, was all young-teacher skinny enthusiasm in her knee-length wool skirt. She had knobby knees, clunky sensible shoes, overeager teeth, and a really hopeful smile.

  She once wrote Excellent! 100%! across the top of an exam paper of mine when I had failed entirely to answer the last two questions. This bothered me some, but not enough to point it out to her. She’d already made up her mind, the way teachers do, that I was an excellent student. This didn’t have a lot to do with how smart I was—teachers just seem to decide one way or another about you, A student, B student, and then not give it a lot of thought again. I guess it’s easier for them that way. Ms. Hiller decided I was Excellent! 100%! because I gave her a lot of support in the room, you know, when other students would rather die than respond, when they actually look like they are dying right there on the spot, like the book under discussion is sending them into a drooling coma. Maybe it is. But I loved Willa Cather. (I did want to know though, why My Antonia? Why not Death Comes for the Archbishop, Ms. Hiller, so much better, so much more fun?) Those were not the most pressing questions I wanted to ask. Higher on the list were, What are you doing with this man? Do you know he wants a daughter? And, Can you tell me if I should tell you?

  I didn’t. I didn’t tell her. I felt a little bad about that, but I thought it was her lookout really. Even after everything that happened later.

  Already a month or so into secretive meetings with the MP I had started feeling let down by what he wrote and said, which began to seem trite and repetitive. I fought this feeling at first—wasn’t he an English teacher? He taught poetry, surely he could produce some. But the more besotted he seemed to become, the less interesting and legible the writing. Usually there were lengthy descriptions of nature—he liked hiking more than anything—(Did you see the sunset tonight? Pink mare’s tails scudding across the sky above the mountains. I was at the top of the Kancamagus heading home. I can’t think when I’ve seen a prettier one. Then the moon—full or almost full, sitting like a gigantic spotlight in the sky, making the night seem almost like day. I walked around the green when I returned home just absorbing the beams and thinking of you) and then repeated declarations of how beautiful I was (No one, nothing, is more beautiful than you).

  My disappointment with the MP was confusing, disheartening, and hard to admit. I wanted to go head-to-head and toe-to-toe with someone, I wanted to run up against something hard, something and someone who had their own strength. I wanted someone to meet me and stand up to me. In fact I had gotten to the point where it felt not even like a desire but actually like a kind of necessity to go up against someone like this. But if the MP initially felt like something different, that feeling changed with astonishing rapidity. In the first place, it wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d hoped it would be to start something. Also, much worse, very soon it started to seem like the entire affair had very little to do with me. It was the same thing that happened with everyone else, only worse because I’d hoped so for something new. I had a bad sinking feeling that this was all that romance was going to amount to: glazed, blind men, like sad Greek mythic figures, capsizing. Men latching on, like the proverbial monkey on the back, the albatross around the neck—not to me but to some idea of me that they held onto with a relentless grip. The disturbing new development was that they could be more than tiresome or burdensome or boring, they could be suffocating, they could drag me under with them. This made me panicky. I had always been able to outrun or abandon boys who weighed me down. It seemed like a good idea to be the one doing the leaving. But I wasn’t sure the MP would be so easily unloaded. I thought I was going to require some help extricating myself, and somehow I was going to have to get that help without telling anyone what was going on.

  CHAPTER 9

  I did have a sort of a plan, a private plan. I never thought I was a pawn in this game. My plan was to draw the MP in close so that my mother could crush him.

  Last April my mother decided it was time to move back home at least temporarily, or so my grandmother reported to me. My mother was worried about her mother (my grandmother said, dryly), worried that she was starting to slip. When my grandmother repeated this phrase to me she threw her hands in the air and did a startling little dance step in the kitchen, which made me laugh. I didn’t know what prompted my mother’s concern. I knew my grandmother had stopped reliably answering my mother’s letters—although this might have been both a passive form of punishment and the result of the shakiness in her arthritic wrists. Any number of things that might have suggested slippage to the outside world were normal to us. The odd hours, for example, or the infrequent baths. She didn’t go in for bathing much anymore. In warm weather she would still take a brisk dip in the pond where she transformed into a swimmer with a long reach and a graceful Australian crawl. I loved to watch this and I loved the way her bathing cap made her look a tiny bit like Katharine Hepburn. Sometimes she got her years mixed up on the phone, or she referred to me by the cat’s name, or vice versa, I don’t know. It wasn’t unusual and it didn’t worry me, but sometime in April my mother decided it was time to come home to Vermont, at least for a while, to deal with it.

  My mother is a United
Nations Refugee Resettlement expert which means she travels around the world wherever there are humanitarian crises or terrible conflicts, like Africa or the Balkans, and whenever there are people who need to be resettled, which as far as I can tell happens pretty much anywhere far away in the world all the time. She comes home about four or five times a year and stays for a week or two, occasionally as long as three, before she is off on another assignment. To my knowledge, my grandmother has only ever made three comments about my mother’s comings and goings. The first remark was, “Kay always did have trouble sitting still.” Since my grandmother would also say, You have ants in your pants, to me on occasion when I was younger, I was privately pleased by this evidence of a shared trait with my mother. The second and more baffling comment was, “Your mother always behaves as though she’s on the lam.” (It took me forever to crack this one. Of course as a small child I heard this as she’s on the lamb, which led me to two possible but equally mystifying conclusions: either my grandmother meant that although my mother was a vegetarian she was somehow behaving as though she had eaten lamb meat, so that she was regrettably on the lamb, the way someone else might be in the drink who oughtn’t to be; or, alternatively, the expression she’s on the lamb, somehow disturbingly linked in my head with the phrase high on the hog, made me envision my mother as a miniature person, a midget’s midget, a Tom Thumb, riding atop a lamb, although why she might be doing this, or rather behaving as though she was, I was hard-pressed to say.) The last thing my grandmother has said, more than once, is more oblique and doesn’t immediately appear to connect to my mother, but by now I know what my grandmother is talking about most of the time and when she says this, she is talking about my mother. She likes to say, “Running away never solved anything.” And we know what she is talking about when she says it.

  Whenever my mother leaves, there’s a day or two of emptiness, of a strange weightlessness, but then my grandmother and I return to our rituals and all is well with the world until my mother returns to throw us off our game again. I like my mother well enough when she’s around though. She used to want me to call her by her first name, which I did proudly when I was little, but lately I haven’t wanted to—I might introduce her as “my mom, Kay” to cover all bases if I had to—but between the two of us, I don’t call her anything. We don’t look anything like each other, but she’s very tough and she’s funny, not at all sentimental. She gets really animated about her work, which I think she loves. And she’s always been invested in treating me seriously, after a fashion. She’s the kind of person who crouches down to speak to children at their level and does so genuinely and earnestly, as though they are fully cognizant adults, at the same time that with me she expects to be the absolute expert on everything. This didn’t used to bother me, again because she’s not around enough to enforce much authority. This past April I wanted her to come home, but I was deeply anxious about it. I wanted her to know about the MP but I certainly didn’t want to be the one to tell her and I didn’t even want to be in the same room when she found out, or really in the same hemisphere. Still, I hoped she might take up arms on my behalf, which I found privately reassuring.

  She may not be present much, but she’s been my only parent for the last twelve years. I didn’t know what my father would have done about the MP, if anything—I couldn’t even imagine the way I used to when I was littler—because I know almost nothing about him. I remember holding onto his thumb and trying to navigate a copper doorsill, and being lifted high into the air with the blur of his face and beard underneath me. I remember that he always sang on car trips even to the grocery store, union songs mostly, “Come All You Coal Miners”, “Bread and Roses”, “Which Side Are You On,” occasionally a rousing chorus of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” that kind of thing. Before he left he imparted three pieces of information to me that stuck, although it’s perfectly likely that I have mucked these up in my memory or confused them with something some indeterminate, unrelated person said. But if anyone asked me what my father taught me, I would say: one, that Henry Kissinger is responsible for a disproportionate number of the world’s woes (Reagan will be Kissinger’s puppet he said once, fiercely, while giving me a vigorous bath); two, that brushing my teeth with hot water will get them cleaner than brushing them with cold water; and three, that I should support the Sandinista revolution when I got old enough, or, at the very least, send my allowance to the cause. This last might have been a joke, but I thought of him a lot when the Contra war was gaining speed. He was long gone by then. But I kept track of the war and the Iran-Contra affair in the news for a while so he would know that I remembered what he said, that I was the kind of person who took these things seriously, and so I would be equipped to talk about them with him if he returned. When he left, he actually did go to Central America, to oversee something having to do with the Peace Corps, although my mother always snorted about this and said it wasn’t the real Peace Corps. I still don’t know what she meant by this.

  When I was ten, my mother told me that she had heard that he had remarried, had two children, and now lived in Wyoming. She said he had gotten religion. She said this as though he had contracted an unspeakably revolting and terminal disease. At summer camp that year, I pretended that he had died in a fiery plane crash. I would trot him out on occasion, my father who died, for effect. I didn’t know him enough to be affected even if he had died.

  But I can remember how my stomach bottomed out when my mother said two children. The turbulence of hope and rage in equal measure.

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Brothers or sisters?”

  Her shoulders sagged.

  “Three children,” I said then, quavering, all but stamping my foot. “He has three children.”

  “Oh, bug,” she said, helplessly. The baby name tipped me toward rage.

  “I don’t care.” And I shot out of the house to go lie in the soft dirt in the garden, crying, with the asparagus ferning out over my head. The cat found me and sat heavily, comfortingly, on my chest. He dug his claws into my jersey and kneaded and I let him.

  What my father’s leaving meant to me in the moment was that it sent my mother pretty much out to lunch. We were living in London at the time he left, and every day when I came home from primary school she would be sitting in the darkened bedroom, chain-smoking and watching the children’s television show The Wombles, which was about furry animated creatures who lived in burrows under Wimbledon Common and recycled trash. (Underground, over ground, wombling free, the Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we . . . making good use of the things that we find, the things that most everyday folk leave behind. Catchy. I could sing it to you in my sleep.)

  That’s when I took to biting people, which effectively drew my mother’s attention so I got to come home. I was supposed to live at my grandparents’ for a year or two, probably only until I started first grade and was in school full-time, but then my mother got her new traveling job, and no one mentioned changing anything, least of all me. I kept very quiet, because I was entirely happy where I was.

  But now that my mother was coming home, temporarily or not, I developed my private plan. The plan was that my mother would shoot the MP between the eyes with a 12-gauge shotgun, which she would be holding across her knees in the rocking chair on the front porch. (We did not have a rocking chair, front porch, or 12-gauge shotgun to the best of my knowledge.)

  It was not a perfect plan.

  What happened instead was this. My mother came home in late April. Two days after she got back, I said I was going out to meet with a study group, and instead I met the MP in Strafford. When I came home after midnight, she was sitting waiting at the dining room table with its slightly rickety pullout extensions. (You have to put the heavy pots in the center). The oval straw placemats were scrambled every which way, scratchy, unraveling. It was dark. My mother was sitting waiting in that lonely light when I
fell through the front door and caught myself mid-fall.

  My mother spread her empty hands palms down on the table and did not look at me. She waited until I had righted myself. I could see her outline but her face was in shadow. It was always dark in the house because we replaced most of the bulbs with energy-saving fluorescents that give off less light than a dying firefly. The light seemed eerily reminiscent of both a B-movie interrogation room and a schoolroom, like I was standing under a lone humming bulb, tasting chalk dust and stale disinfectant on the back of my tongue, about to be given a test covered in questions no one could answer, just reams of them. Right then, waiting for the questioning, my scalp was electrified with fear and anticipation. In the silence, I could hear my heart and my grandmother’s gentle sleeping emphysema wheeze from the downstairs bedroom.

  “When you are lying to the people you love,” my mother said then, quietly, without emphasis, “something is very wrong.”

  Then she cleared her throat, rose, and went upstairs.

  I wanted nothing more than to throw something heavy at the back of her head, a wrench, a paperweight, the chair I was gripping.

  Apparently without saying anything I’d lied—which was true, I was lying all the time like an addict about everything, cheerfully, or when not cheerfully, determinedly, bald-faced, as they say—but then again she didn’t seem to have any interest in the truth, or whatever was happening that I might be lying about, which was confounding. She just wanted me to know she was onto the lying. Since I lied strenuously in order to be uncovered and relieved of the weight of all those lies, it was incredibly upsetting not to be questioned under that flickering light, not to be found wanting so that I could stop wanting to be found out.