Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  “Okay, ladies,” Luke said, fake harrumphing, “this is a serious mission we’re on. This is no time to fool around.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” I asked, not getting up.

  “Anything that appeals. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

  Sarah had spotted a set of blue glasses and nudged me off her lap.

  “Look at those,” she said. “They’re gorgeous.”

  “You have glasses,” Eddy said.

  “Not as nice as these.”

  “That’s the thing about you, Sarah,” he said. “You’re never satisfied with what you have, you always want something else.”

  At that moment, Luke dived into a box and emerged with a triumphant cry holding something yellow I couldn’t identify right away.

  “What is that?”

  “What is that? That,” he said lovingly, “is a marigold-colored espresso machine. Oh, now this is a find.”

  “Does it work?”

  “It will,” he said, turning it upside down and investigating its nether regions. “It will work for me. Once we’ve had a chat.”

  I laughed and Eddy laughed when I did. He began digging through a pile of records. For a moment, all three of them were quiet, absorbed in their discoveries, and I stood there, unable to stop smiling, not needing or wanting anything but that company, that dusty sunny moment in time.

  When we got home from visiting the Swap Shop, I was struck with a cheerful urge to see Titch, and I ran over to visit her at work.

  It’s true that we weren’t speaking much or at all at this point. We hadn’t really crossed paths since our run-in at the movies. I didn’t care. But that day Sarah had work to do for the program at the apartment, and it seemed suddenly like the perfect time to go find Titch, so I went down the road and crossed over West Main Street to Briar Lane. Then, just when I walked into the sandwich shop, I saw a tall redheaded woman gather her bags and exit out the back. Sarah’s ex-girlfriend. Bess.

  “What’s the matter with her,” I asked Titch, rolling my eyes, trying to make a joke of it. Titch was working behind the counter, wearing a green apron and a cap with the store’s logo, looking hot and grumpy. When I said this, she shot me a look of infuriated disbelief.

  “I just thought I’d say hi,” I said, and when she didn’t answer me, “I can wait.”

  I went over near the register while she assembled a sandwich.

  “I said no mayo,” said the bearded man with a threadbare backpack at the counter. Titch dropped the bread in the trash can with disdain and started over in a concentrated fury.

  “Do you have spelt or some non-wheat bread?” a pinched-looking woman inquired. Her nostrils appeared to be glued together. She was wearing flip-flops and had a beach towel draped around her leathery neck.

  “All the breads are on the board,” Titch said with elaborate politeness, spearing pickles.

  “Come on, I mean she didn’t have to leave,” I said to Titch, when she had rung up Scruffy Backpack Man. “What’s her problem?”

  “I see the bread,” Pinched Woman said, “but all the breads have wheat, they’re all wheat breads. I don’t do gluten.”

  Wordlessly, Titch took change from Scruffy Backpack Man and stared hard at the woman.

  “I guess I could have the special salad,” the woman said weakly.

  Titch began shoveling greens in a bowl.

  “Your mom called again last night,” she said, finally, not looking at me. “Also the MP has left four messages.”

  Out of the window, I could see Bess. She had come around to the front of the store, and was squatting down beside a spindly old bike, fishing for something in her bag, her skirt dragging a little bit in the dust.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say to him, Nina, but it doesn’t seem like he knows the two of you are done. Why is he calling? I thought you said it was over.”

  “We are, it is,” I said, frowning. Now Bess was knotting the end of her skirt in front of her. She swung her leg over the bike and balanced precariously.

  “Yeah? Did you forget to tell him, is that it? You just don’t talk to anyone anymore?”

  “Just don’t answer the phone,” I said, annoyed. “What do you care? It’s not your problem.”

  “Actually, it is, because I live there and, news flash, I know him too.”

  “Fine.” I said. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  “Don’t make me take care of your crap. That’s all. Also, I’m not going to cover for you when your mom calls,” Titch said, still under her breath to me, head down, snatching at the red onions violently with her plastic tongs.

  “Nobody asked you,” I said.

  “No radishes,” the woman customer wailed, but softly, like a child who’s been put down for a nap and still wants you to know it’s under protest. When she had paid and sat down at the table by the window, I turned back to Titch, who was now resolutely wiping surfaces with a cloth. I flicked the glass of the display counter with my fingernail, hard, exasperated.

  Bess was still visible. She was stopped at the corner of Holbrook, resting on one foot, adjusting the strap of her grey messenger bag across her chest.

  “She’s your sister’s friend,” I said, “I don’t even know her.”

  “What are you talking about?” Titch said. “Everyone knows about them. Didn’t she ever tell you—didn’t Sarah ever talk to you about it? You met Bess, didn’t you? I mean what did you think was going on? Why would you think it wouldn’t matter to her?”

  “Well what does it matter to me?” I asked hotly. “They broke up before I even got here. So what if Sarah never talks about it. Obviously, it’s not important enough to mention. And what do you care? Why are you taking her side?”

  “I’m not taking her side. This isn’t junior high. There aren’t sides. I’m saying they were together for almost two years. You don’t think that counts for something?”

  “Well, obviously. But it’s over.”

  “Okay,” (slapping the dish towel down on the counter, turning her back, noisily pushing dishes under the tap, refusing to look at me), “whatever you say.”

  I looked at the back of her sunburned neck murderously and then slammed the screen door on the way out as hard as I could, making Pinched Woman cough up a cherry tomato.

  The reason Titch and I became friends was because she marched up to me on the playground at the beginning of fourth grade and asked if I wanted to be friends—which, who does that? I was talking to Molly Hartman and I just looked at Titch like she was crazy. I can still see her coming over and standing for a minute with her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her blue CB jacket. She was chewing on the inside of her cheek. When Molly and I paused to look at her, she said, “Nina? Do you want to be friends?” She said it firmly, too, without any kind of hesitation. I think I said yeah, sure, in an unconvincing disbelieving way, in a way that was meant to be totally discouraging. It startled me that she said my name like that, that she seemed to have so completely and decisively chosen me. She nodded once, crisply, and turned away and I probably even rolled my eyes when her back was turned. I said yes because she looked kind of intense and she scared me a little, with her directness, her determined chin, and the way she stood there, all pointy and hopeful like a newly sharpened pencil. Back then, white girls in Vermont and New Hampshire—and there weren’t many other kinds where we lived—all wore turtlenecks with patterns on them, like tiny red hearts or blue whales, under big, baggy sweaters that often went down to the mid-thigh, very preppy ugly and all about hiding breasts and butts, whether you had them or not. That day she had tiny green alligators sticking up on the neck of her turtleneck. She was skinny and angular, flat front and back, with a long neck and thick, slightly frizzy shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair held back with two green and white beribboned barrettes on each side of her he
ad. (It was also the time of beribboned barrettes, colored ribbons braided through plain silver, gold, or brown metal barrettes and left to dangle at the ends. Listen, we didn’t know. We were just in it, and when we were together in it we were happy too.)

  But the truth is I found it impossible to talk to Titch about Sarah. Sarah and I were in our own world and I didn’t want anyone crashing about in it asking questions, making me feel common when we were so clearly not like anyone or anything else. The arrogance of it, the staggering, joy-filled superiority. More than anything I didn’t want Titch’s slyness, her sharpness—all things I loved about her—needling my happiness. She had no place in it.

  Also Titch was right that the sight of Bess troubled me. Mostly I skated right over her existence. If you grow up in a small town, having routine blind spots for people is second nature. But I would still see her out of the corner of my eye with some regularity, going to work at the restaurant, or at the liquor store, or once at Hatch’s buying cherries, or coasting down the street on her shabby, ancient bike, her red hair flying out behind her in a show-offy way. The blotch of her red hair was like an irritating floater in my eye, skimming around the edges.

  Her old bike tapped at my chest though. It was like a bike you might come across in the recesses of a dusty secondhand store or upstairs in a barn, it was a bike with a history, a cracked seat, a bell.

  Sarah had startlingly little to say about Bess. This was the sum total of what I had learned: Bess was an excellent baker and made great fruit pies. She taught yoga. She knew about wine. She was thirty-two, impossibly old. She spent a lot of time in her studio, making sculptures. She was saving up for a new lathe. The dust from the studio had bothered Sarah. They didn’t have much in common. Once they had taken a vacation to North Carolina and Sarah had been horribly sick, vomiting all night, and Bess had not held Sarah’s hair back for her while she was throwing up. It was like a small pile of mismatched laundry, this information, unusable but impossible to throw out.

  CHAPTER 23

  I had sent my mother and grandmother four or five chatty, uninformative letters and an arty postcard, as well as calling a handful of times, but now that Titch had given me the heads up that I was missing my mother’s calls, I preemptively phoned home that same day. I said that with my schedule it was best to call on Sunday afternoons, and after that I hustled over to Truro for my mother’s weekly call. I wasn’t happy about making the trek, but it was better than drawing attention to the fact that I didn’t live there. If Titch was around and got to the phone first she would make an elaborate show of calling my name and delivering the phone to me, which I tried to ignore.

  In these conversations, I mainly listened to my mother and didn’t speak. She had a lot to say and didn’t ask much. She seemed really distracted. She told me a little bit about what was happening on the farm, about how much hay the neighbors had brought in from our field, about how much we still needed, but mostly she was fretting about my grandmother. She said my grandmother wasn’t talking to her much at all, although I pointed out that she hadn’t said much of anything for a couple of years. It didn’t seem alarming because it was such a gradual creeping kind of silence. Also she was very communicative, for a silent person.

  “It’s as though she’s given up,” my mother said, one Sunday. “I mean some days it feels like she’s not even really here anymore. Like this is not my mother anymore, but more like a remnant of my mother.”

  All I could think about was how when my grandmother read to me when I was a child, I used to hold up my thumb and index finger to my eye to make her manageably tiny, blurring the light of the lamp with her head. I could hear her clearing her throat, I could hear the knitting needles, that soft clicking and rubbing together, the pages turning.

  “I don’t know what to feed her,” my mother went on. “She’s not eating very much. I keep thinking about whether I should get some help, except you know that she’s not going to tolerate strangers in the house. Also I can’t get her to wash without a fight. But it’s more like civil disobedience than a struggle. She goes sort of limp.”

  I wasn’t accustomed to this kind of conversation with my mother. She sounded tired and forlorn, with only a small familiar undercurrent of crankiness. Also my heart clutched a little when she talked about my grandmother this way. Was it true? Was she slipping?

  “Maybe she doesn’t need to wash,” I offered. But my mother wasn’t listening.

  She sighed. “I think she misses him. I didn’t know it was this bad. I’m so afraid that she’s going to lose her mind too. Oh, you know, not the way he did. Jesus, I hope not like that. But still.”

  When she said this, I was sorting Sarah’s laundry in the bedroom in Truro and I had two sudden, vivid memories one right after the other:

  First: on a hot green summer day four years after my grandfather’s death, my mother and I are at the Lippitt Morgan Horse Show in Tunbridge, Vermont. In the show ring, holding a fidgety brown filly and her slightly sway-backed dam, is an old man, a stranger with a ridiculous hat, a floppy green sun hat secured under his chin with white elastic that cuts into the wattles on his neck. His face looks out with a clouded stubbornness, a veiled fury, not sour but deep, upsetting. A familiar look. A look of dementia, a demented look. My mother’s face contracts and she grabs my arm, hard.

  Immediately this memory jumped, like a slide projector clicking back, to the sight of the back of my grandfather’s hand. The skin, loose and brown-spotted like crackled roast chicken skin. The dog has bitten him right after dinner, and blood is running freely out of the gash in his hand onto his pants. He can’t see it. My grandmother approaches with white gauze bandages, but he waves her away with his bleeding hand, shaking his head no, his twice-broken twice-healed wrist trembling. He can’t feel the bite. He continues to shake his head, agitated, lost, while she wraps the wound, accidentally smearing his blood on her cheek with the back of her hand.

  He watches her, shaking his head, defeated but apprehensive. He is like a sheep in the flatbed of a moving truck: no thought beyond the moment, the disoriented struggle to stand, but still a vague, larger sense of loss of control. A sheep will lean against you heavily for support if the truck turns a corner, always breathing distrustful milky breath, eyes wet, unknowing. The docility of my grandfather’s heavy hard stomach is hard to bear. He would walk into the woods that very week and he would never come back.

  On the day of the dog bite he nibbled at the bandage surreptitiously, shredding the gauze like a sneaky teething child, while my grandmother gazed out the window at the unoccupied bird feeder.

  And then, unexpectedly, he put his head down on the table and she cleared her throat, laying a hand on the back of his neck. Her stomach gurgled. I put my cheek down too on the cool wood surface and looked over at my grandfather at eye level, like we were looking at one another in the crack underneath a door. His eye knew me, for an instant in that narrow sliver of space, and I knew it back. Was this a face to be oppos’d against the warring winds?

  “She likes Jello,” I said to my mother, fully expecting to be reminded of the disgustingness of Jello, its nasty unacceptable ingredients.

  “Jello,” she repeated. “Jello.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Things started to go wrong. In the final stretch of the workshop, something was shifting underground. Sarah’s dark moods seemed a little darker, a little more frequent, although she could still be nuzzled out of them most of the time. It made me vigilant and a little uneasy. I knew she worried about money, she worried about working, but the dense grey mushroom cloud that settled over her from time to time didn’t seem connected to anything specific. It made her burrow deep in the covers and struggle to come out. I went in after her. I thought it was my job. I understood it to be my job.

  There was almost never a trigger that I could see or predict though. Also the off moments were tiny at first, causing me only pinpricks of bewilderment, a
sensation like when you are coming down stairs and think you’ve reached the bottom step only to discover abruptly that there’s six inches of empty air still to go before your foot hits solid ground. A momentary lurch, a lost heartbeat.

  We had received our assignments for the final collective show of Three Sisters, which we were supposed to muscle together into a coherent production in the remaining two and a half weeks. I was acting in most of Act 1 and then directing two more scenes in Acts 2 and 3. It was hard to hold all the pieces in my head, so I didn’t try. Instead I focused only on what I was doing when I walked into my assigned rehearsal room each day. Sarah, along with the other assistants, was responsible for the big picture, for paying attention to the lines of continuity throughout, as well as for scheduling, stage managing, organizing props and costumes, and corralling the actors, as much as that was possible.

  The day we started rehearsals, Sarah was away. She’d driven into New York very early that morning to audition for a television pilot workshop. I didn’t wake up when she left, but I was up early and at rehearsal before anyone else, looking forward to it. I was pleased because I was playing Masha—my favorite, the middle sister—alongside Shisha as the oldest sister, Olga, in the opening of the play. Another girl, Jeanette, a little blonde elfin presence, more like a wafer than a person, was playing the youngest sister, Irina. Doug was directing us, and he showed up with a sheaf of notes, bristling with self-importance. He looked like in his mind he was wearing a monocle. We sat around with our chairs in a circle while he lectured us.

  “This opening moment is when we establish the relationship between the sisters, so it’s terribly important that we get it right.”

  “Is it?” asked Shisha. “Is it terribly important?”