Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  He shot her a look. He was so used to her wise-assing by now that it barely broke his stride. But when we got to work it was great fun, and even Doug relaxed and let us play.

  Once we were finished, I had the afternoon off, and instead of hanging out with the others or learning my lines as I was supposed to be doing, I decided to make dinner for Sarah. I was in the middle of cutting onions for spaghetti sauce when I heard her pull in to the driveway. I could see the top of her head as she stepped out of the truck, but I couldn’t tell much from the way she was moving. She looked tired, maybe a little hesitant.

  “How did it go?” I called to her from the top steps.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her back to me, yanking her bag out of the truck. “Okay, I think? Maybe. I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out.”

  I ducked back inside the kitchen, rinsed my hands off in the sink, and kicked the open oven door closed with my foot. It was hot, and I was sweaty from the stove. Sarah came into the apartment and stood in the doorway, her bag dangling from her hand, looking at the table, which I had set, and at the flowers in the middle, black-eyed Susans, purple butterfly bush, two sturdy blue hydrangea stems, and some pink salt spray roses, which I had gathered on my walk home.

  “I made a peach pie,” I said, pleased, unable to sit on the news.

  She just stood there, no color in her face. She bit her lip.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. She looked suddenly, astonishingly, like she was about to dissolve in tears.

  “I didn’t think this would happen,” she said, very low, looking down at the floor, sounding almost stricken. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “What wasn’t supposed to happen? Sarah?”

  She gestured weakly, taking in me and the room.

  “What are you talking about?” I said again, confused, and when she didn’t respond, “You know everything that’s going to happen, do you?” to tease her, to lift the cloud.

  Her face rearranged and began to return to itself. She looked up.

  “I used to,” she said. “You were a surprise.”

  And then, recovered, “And peach pie. I would not have predicted peach pie.”

  Another time: at a party in early August at the beachside home of Marilyn, the introductory woman with the dandelion fluff hair from the first day of the workshop. All the actors were stumbling around, playing Frisbee, drinking beer, grilling hamburgers, and shucking corn. Marilyn was drinking too much, wearing a giant brown and purple caftan. Bill McNeil was skulking around the kitchen, faithful Nicky the bean counter by his side and a cluster of other students hanging on him worshipfully. But Sarah was nowhere. I looked for the better part of an hour until I finally found her outside, all alone looking at the water. I slid my arms around her ribs and pressed my nose into her cheek, that safe harbor. But she didn’t turn. She didn’t turn in toward me as usual. Her cigarette-flavored mouth was cold.

  “You’ve been smoking?” I said. She scowled, shoved her hands in her pockets, and almost turned her back on me, not speaking.

  “Sarah?”

  No response.

  Nothing too serious. A momentary lurch, a lost heartbeat.

  But it got rapidly stranger, and worse.

  One night toward the end of the first week of August we were coming out of a restaurant in Provincetown, gaily, laughing. A face floated up in front of us, a pale face hovering like a balloon at the end of a long stick thin body. I thought for a moment that it was a mask only it wasn’t Halloween, or a carnival, or a parade. A cadaverous face, gaunt, barely human, marked.

  “What was wrong with him?” I asked Sarah as soon as we were out of earshot.

  “KS,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Kaposi’s sarcoma,” she said repressively, as if that was the end of it, and I was chastened, couldn’t ask again. I looked back over my shoulder at the man’s long narrow back, and saw a shorter, bald man walked beside him holding his hand, as though he were keeping the sick man’s scary balloon head from floating away into the night sky.

  Sarah was silent in the dark all the way to the truck. When we got inside, she reached over and turned on the radio. Patsy Cline was singing, but I didn’t want to leave the conversation behind the way I usually did when she set up a roadblock. My voice sounded weak to me, though, and I had to ask my question twice before she even heard that I was speaking, so I switched off the radio and her head snapped sharply toward me.

  “I said, that man who was sick, why does it upset you so much?”

  “Why doesn’t it upset you more? You think it can’t happen to you? You think it doesn’t happen to anyone like you?” She sounded clipped, bitter.

  I was silent. I did think that, pretty much. Despite the various warnings we’d had at school, or the murmurings I had heard on the radio, the only people I knew for sure who had been affected by AIDS were gay men and drug users and maybe some unfortunate people who got contaminated blood from transfusions. And even that much had been hard for me to believe; the whole thing just seemed so implausible and foreign and unreal.

  “People are dying,” Sarah said, and she sounded really angry. I looked out the window. It was a warm night and the air was sticky with salt. I could hear a man calling drunkenly, mournfully, to someone else, over the noisy sounds of the bar behind him.

  “Okay, but why are you angry with me?”

  “I’m not angry with you,” she said, sounding angrier still. “I’d like to go home now though, is that okay?”

  I bit my lip. She started the truck and we drove to Wellfleet in silence. When we got there though, she took out the key and held it for a minute, twisting the chain in her hands. I waited, unsure of what, if anything, was coming.

  “Eddy’s sick,” she said, after a long pause. “He tested positive.”

  “He is? I mean, he did?” I was really shocked. Eddy with his lanky frame and his cigarettes, his clowning around, his unexpected friendliness, his efficient way of moving about at work, what I’d heard—from whom I couldn’t remember—about his many girlfriends; I couldn’t put it all together. I thought about how he had said of Sarah, a lot of trouble. Why did he say that? I looked over at his apartment, which was dark. I had only been in there once and we almost never saw him there, only sometimes pulling on a jacket over his bony shoulders, his long arms, his hands jerking out of the cuffs, as he hurried down the steps from his side to work or wherever he was going. He was almost always in a hurry, unless he was smoking, in which case his whole world seemed to come to a short, meditative halt until the cigarette was done.

  Sarah was looking out of the window in the direction of the bay, where the water was slightly darker than the night sky.

  “How did he get it?” I asked tentatively.

  “Who knows?” she said, only marginally less impatiently. “And who cares? He’s twenty-nine and he’s going to die.” But when she turned to look at me, her face was pale, wiped clean of anger. “He slept with the wrong person, I guess.”

  I was confused, and silent. I wanted to say, But isn’t Eddy straight? How do you know he has AIDS? Did he tell you? Why did he tell you? How long have you known? How long has he known? Do the other guys know? Does he know who made him sick? Do they know? And how come he doesn’t look sick? Is he definitely going to die? And, underneath this, the unaskable, the unthinkably selfish, what does this have to do with you and me? The questions were still coming along one after another in my mind as Sarah was getting out of the truck and walking away, they were still coming one right after the other as her intractable back marched up the stairs without me.

  When I saw Eddy next, which was at work, I tried to behave normally, although I couldn’t help watching him out of the corner of my eye. “Hey, kid,” he said, with warmth when I arrived and was standing by
the door, struggling to pull my apron over my ponytail. “Hey,” I answered, and he stopped to knot the apron tie behind my back for me. He didn’t seem any different from the way he always had. He didn’t look marked. But then nobody does, until they do.

  I had an odd, sinking sensation under my ribs about all of these people I thought I was coming to know, these people who had started to feel like family. I thought, I don’t know them at all. I was an interloper, a stranger, a tourist. Who were they? Instead of being closer to everyone, I could suddenly, jarringly, be farther away. Even—although I didn’t think this, I couldn’t think this, I refused to think this—farther away from Sarah, maybe especially from Sarah. From one minute to the next, with a new disconcerting regularity, Sarah could all of sudden be standing behind a plate of glass, unreachable, unknowable.

  CHAPTER 25

  Around this time Sarah told me her mother was coming to town to see her. We were finishing up dinner in Luke’s kitchen when she told me. I asked her if her father was coming too. She said something noncommittal about his work and about his needing to stay home in Indiana with the family dog, an ancient ailing Siberian Husky. When she was saying this, Luke was drying dishes at the sink with his back to us. He didn’t look over, but it was as if he had. Several bars of jaunty jazz music played into the silence that descended on the three of us. Sarah sighed.

  “He’s not a bad guy, but he can’t do this,” she said then, unexpectedly (gesturing almost inadvertently to herself, a repeated small stirring movement with her right hand in front of her chest). “He doesn’t believe in it. It would be much worse if I were his son, but as it is, it’s. Bad enough. Not his thing. He’s not a bad guy,” she said again, her voice trailing off, “he just doesn’t know what to say or do with me really. So, you know, he doesn’t. Do anything.”

  Luke turned around then, wiping his hands on the dishtowel. “Coffee?”

  I knew very little about Sarah’s parents beyond the most basic information, but the timing of Sarah’s mother’s coming filled me with relief and focus. I thought it meant that Sarah and I would be reunited on the same team, we would be co-conspirators together again. Having her mother visit would be a distraction from whatever dark corners we had accidentally stumbled into. I would almost certainly learn more about Sarah—about the place she was from and about her people—more than I could ever learn only from her account. Better yet, I would be connected to her family; her mother at least would know who I was and connect me to Sarah. And Sarah would see anew what an asset I could be. Because I’m terrific with parents. Fathers love me. Mothers love me. Other people’s families love me. All week before her mom arrived, I was looking forward to it.

  But from the moment Lenore, Sarah’s mom, took my hand limply, reluctantly, I knew how wrong I was. She was a wiry querulous person with an anxious, kind, deeply weathered face. I couldn’t see Sarah in her, except possibly in the refined bones of her jawline and the high forehead. She had trouble looking at me directly, although she did seem shy with almost everyone except the waitress, with whom she was chatty and warm. She looked constantly apprehensive, even panicky, as though she was prepared to be shocked by the customs in this strange place, or as though she was afraid all the time about what might spring out at her around the next corner.

  We had dinner at the Waltzing Lobster in Truro with Luke, to whom Lenore seemed to cling. He took good care of her, pulling out her chair and exuding his avuncular charm. I was grateful to him, but unable to stop being worried and unhappy that I couldn’t win her over. No matter what I said, she behaved as though I were speaking a foreign language, joking in a foreign language, and she was struggling to keep up, to get the punch line. She was never rude. But although she answered my overtures and queries, she did so with circumspection, remoteness, refusal. She did not ask me anything. She did not want to know anything.

  It had never occurred to me that I could be an undesirable girlfriend, that anyone’s parent would not only be disappointed by me, but would wish fervently that I did not exist. But suddenly it seemed as though I was a problem. I was a liability. Even more dumbfounding it seemed as though I might be the problem, as far as Lenore was concerned. This idea was so unfamiliar and so unfair that it could not register; for well over half the night I simply could not find any place inside me for the idea to take up residence. But by dessert, it was a fact that had wedged itself in my chest, like a sharp stone, a flinty arrowhead I had swallowed.

  Unbidden, my own mother sat with me during this meal and I thought of how she would have behaved if she had been there, if she knew about Sarah, which of course she did not. But I had to conclude that she would have done better than this. She hadn’t much cared for Titch when I became friends with her, but she had changed her mind, eventually. I liked to think that she had finally trusted that there was something there that she couldn’t see, something that made me happy. I was surprised that my mother surfaced here, surprised that I recruited her to be in my corner. But she materialized in this moment because I knew absolutely, knew grudgingly and with an unwanted upwelling of gratitude, that while my mother might have been wary and judgmental, she would have talked to Sarah. She would have made the effort.

  It would have been hard if Lenore had just disliked me, but what happened was much worse. Sarah had been a little discouraging about the visit, but she had not warned me in any way about how her mother would regard me. As a result, not only did I feel like I had plunged into another reality with Sarah’s mother, but I also felt like Sarah had dropped me there, whether unwittingly or not I couldn’t tell. Sarah was quiet at dinner, attentive to her mother and once in a while checking in with me, but she made no effort to draw a connection, to open any kind of avenue between us, to relay any kind of warmth. She already knew what I was learning: that this was a lost cause.

  After dinner, Sarah drove me home. Her mother was staying with her in Wellfleet. My stomach was uneasy because my distress was curdling the cream sauce from dinner. I thought maybe Sarah would attempt to reassure me and tell me it hadn’t gone as poorly as I thought. I thought maybe she would be able to explain some of what had gone wrong. I thought maybe I should say something comforting to her. Neither one of us spoke, or even so much as acknowledged that anything had gone wrong, which felt a little disastrous.

  I thought with her mother in town that Sarah wouldn’t want to come in, that she would have to go right home. But we were kissing in the car and she slid out of the truck and followed me up the stairs. She had hold of the waist of my jeans, her fingertips slipped in and holding lightly where my jeans gaped at the small of my back. We moved totally silently, wholly in sync, like seasoned and yoked pack animals. We went right past Titch’s room with her light still showing under the door. We didn’t turn my light on. She closed the door softly behind us. Before I had finished pushing piles of clean laundry off the bed onto the floor, she had her shirt over her head. When I turned around, she was already standing stripped down and focused at the end of the bed. She meant business. She was on task.

  But before she left, she rested her cheek in the pocket of my hip bone and sighed. I could see a silvery strip of moonlight running down her bare back. Her spine looked like a necklace of beads laid out in a line. Her hair was spilled across my stomach, rising and falling lightly when I breathed. After a long minute she rolled over on her back. I reached over her for the cotton blanket to cover us and she gripped my hip bone in her hand fiercely for a moment. We sat up, clung together, wound around each other like seaweed. After a moment she gracefully and silently rose. I watched her dress. We did not speak. Fully clothed, she paused by the side of the bed and traced the side of my face and my mouth with her thumb. Then she slipped out the door and down the stairs, holding her shoes in one hand. I had my arms wrapped around my knees in the midst of the rumpled bed, listening to the motor start up as she backed out of the driveway with the lights off. The sound seemed acutely, unaccountably sad.


  The next morning, I was nursing a cup of coffee in the kitchen, holding it in both hands up to my cheek when Titch came in and stood at the end of the counter. She regarded me for a moment, weight on one hip, so still and silent that I began to feel awkward. I wondered whether she had heard us the night before. I couldn’t tell if she looked accusatory or what, because I had to hide my face in my mug.

  “This came for you,” she said finally, crossing behind me to the fridge and dropping an envelope in front of me. It was yet another letter from the MP, always the same handwriting, slanted to the right, legible but ugly, careful cursive, every round “a” with its tail. When I had opened the first envelope pulverized dried flowers coated the paper and my hands in a fine dust, making me sneeze. I looked at the latest squat little cream-colored envelope on the counter. I did not need to burn it; I did not even have the energy to throw it out. I carried it into the bedroom, and shoved it in the drawer by my bed, unopened, with the others. I could feel Titch’s eyes on my back as I left the room.

  I didn’t see Sarah the rest of that Saturday, while her mother was in town. I was in the house in Truro and I didn’t have to go to work. Titch didn’t have to work either, as far as I knew, but after puttering about for an hour in the glassed-in patio, which she had turned into a kind of painting studio, she took the car and went out without speaking to me. I heard the car reversing in the driveway from my bedroom. It was a damp, grey day and my joints hurt. I curled up on the sofa with the cats, who were all over me, Jack springing on my feet and biting, Chester lying heavily by my side. I read Three Sisters and tried not to wait for the phone to ring.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sarah did call, but not until the next day. At first she sounded like herself again on the phone. I was as relieved that her mother was gone as I had previously been that she was coming. I was prepared to forget all about it, if that was possible. Sarah had to go up island to Hyannis to find a list of props and costume pieces for the final show. I said I was happy to go along, but by the time we left, it was late and Sarah was stressed and absorbed by the task. She couldn’t be teased out of this mood, even though in a better moment she would have granted me at least a smile. When I couldn’t get more than a half-hearted response from her, I gave up and just listened to Stevie Wonder, who was singing in his unfailingly upbeat and sweet way.