Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  “How could you be so stupid?” “You were involved with this man?” “You know the police have called?” and, “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I can’t come there right now to get you,” she said eventually, in a pinched, determined, strangely self-righteous voice, “Because I have my hands full here. So you need to pull yourself together and we’ll talk about this when you come home.”

  “I’m not coming home,” I said. It was the first thing I’d said.

  She started to laugh. She sounded genuinely, if crazily, amused.

  “Listen,” she said finally. “Listen, I don’t know who this girl is, or what you think you are doing with her, but it’s going to stop. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but you have school starting next month and you are coming home.”

  I couldn’t speak. My throat was swollen shut. There was a dangerous pressure in my stomach, a vomiting pressure. I thought I might say things, I could feel them surging upward, I might say things we were careful not to say and I would not be able to take them back.

  I did. I did say some of them.

  “What about you?”

  “What?” Her voice was soft and dangerous.

  “You knew something was going on. You didn’t even try to find out what it was. You knew I was lying to you when you came home, you said so to my face, but you didn’t do anything. You’re my mother. Aren’t you supposed to do something?”

  “You think the mess you’ve made here is my fault? Is that really what you want to say to me right now? You’re old enough to be responsible for your own actions and you know it. What is going on with you? What in God’s name is this about?”

  “It’s about my life. And I’m not coming home. I’m staying here.”

  “Where? On Cape Cod? Doing what exactly? Where are you going to live? What are you going to live on? Who do you think is paying for what you’re doing right now?”

  “I can get a job, I have a job.”

  “You don’t have a job. That’s not a job. You think this girl, whoever she is, you think she is going to support you? You’re going to college, Nina. You have plans”—for a moment she sounded completely bewildered, unmoored, almost, distressingly, compassionate—“you’ve always had plans. Something’s wrong, something’s happened to you. None of this makes any sense.”

  “Well, obviously something’s happened to me but you don’t care about that. I don’t think you’ve ever cared about that. You’ve never paid any attention to what’s happening in my life.”

  That turned her right back around, although now her anger was shot through even more violently with incredulity and sarcasm, like this was all some kind of colossally bad joke.

  “Oh, you want attention? Is this really how you would go about getting my attention? Well, good work, because you have it. And not just mine. Everyone’s paying attention. The police are paying attention. The neighbors are paying attention. The whole town is paying attention. You must be very pleased.”

  She exhaled through her nose hard. My heartbeat was deafening.

  “I haven’t said anything to your grandmother,” she said after a moment. “Not that she necessarily understands what I’m saying to her anyway, I mean who knows I can’t tell. But. I haven’t said anything. She doesn’t need to know any of this. She would be so disappointed in you. She would be crushed. I don’t even think she would believe anything I told her about what you’ve been up to.”

  I couldn’t speak. My mind was full of my grandmother’s hands, the bumps and ridges, the hardened raised topographical map of veins, the way her palms were partly permanently cupped, more like paws than hands.

  “You need to come home now,” my mother said again, and this time her voice was tired.

  “Are you even going to be there?” I asked, finally, nastily.

  “Where else would I be?” she snapped. And then, weary, “Yes. I’m here for the foreseeable future.”

  When she hung up, I sat for a while. I realized I was gripping the phone fiercely on my lap. My fingers were so clenched they had begun to tremble. The shocked pulsing in my ears subsided. In its place was a gathering rage. I had to stab at the receiver and missed dialing the numbers a few times when my index finger buckled.

  “How does she know that? Titch? How does she know?”

  There was a very long pause, which told me what I needed to know, what I already knew.

  “You told my mother. You told my mother?”

  “No, I told Amy and she told her mom. I guess Amy’s mom called your mother.”

  “You told Amy Klein about the MP? Everyone will know.”

  She was silent. She knew it was true.

  I was assailed by the smell of the harsh cleaning solvents in the claustrophobic carpet in the high school, the sensation of the institutional grey-flecked fibers flying upward toward my face as though I were falling. I saw the walls tilting in, the turning heads, the whispering.

  “Titch,” I said, hissing through my teeth. “How could you do that? How could you do that to me? And you told my mother about Sarah? What the hell is wrong with you? How could you tell her about Sarah? Why would you do that to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “I wasn’t thinking. Or I was mad. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t trust her,” she said then suddenly, vehemently. “I don’t know what’s happened to you since Sarah came, I don’t know who you are.”

  “Don’t talk to me, don’t talk to me ever again,” I said violently and hung up. Then I burst into ragged noisy sobs. My cheeks were purple and swollen with effort and my scalp was burning hot. There was snot all over.

  I had to go right to rehearsal, I was already late, and I wanted to catch Sarah, but everyone had gathered and the first scene of the second act was under way. Of course Sarah could tell something was wrong as soon as I walked into the room; she raised her eyebrows at me but I just shook my head. I sat looking around at everyone in the room, everyone going through their motions, everyone I had spent so much time with, thinking, None of these people know me. None of these people know anything about my life. It was not disturbing, only insistent and starkly true.

  On break from the dress rehearsal, at the intermission, I huddled with Sarah in the stairwell of the art gallery, which smelled like rotting seaweed and bleach.

  I said, “I’m not going home, I can’t go home, I’m staying here with you.”

  Also (although I did not say this): I don’t know where else to go. I don’t know what else to do. And: I cannot be out of your company.

  Sarah just stroked my hair methodically and didn’t say anything until I stopped crying.

  “It will work itself out,” she said. “It will.”

  “We’ve got to go back in,” she said, finally, not unkindly. She kissed the top of my head and stood up. “I’ve got to go back in at least. I can tell them you’re not well, if you want,” she offered, gazing down at me. But I followed her. Where else was I going to go?

  “You’re not very cheerful today, Masha,” Shisha said when she walked up to me inside the gallery the following morning.

  “Yeah,” I said, unable to hold up my end by saying my lines in return.

  “Wrong play,” she said, grinning, “If it is a play. What’s going on? Moscow got you down? Some trouble in paradise?”

  “I can’t talk about it.” She sized me up.

  “I really can’t.”

  “Okay, come on. Quick trip to the pier.”

  We left the other students behind, everyone mingling and swapping notes from the rehearsal the night before, and slipped outside. She put her arm through mine, and listened.

  I was jumpy and spent at the same time. By the time we had gotten home the night before, Sarah had gone instantly to sleep on her back in the bed, without even brushing her teeth, one arm flung up and over her face. B
ut I couldn’t sleep. I had sat on the wooden stairs that led down to the driveway and waited in the inky black for what seemed like hours, until I was stiff and cold. I don’t know what I was waiting for, but I couldn’t quiet my head.

  “I did not see that coming,” Shisha said. “Dark horse.”

  “But you can see that I can’t go back home, right? Everyone knows everything now.”

  We sat in meditative silence for a moment. A seagull shrieked.

  Then, “You’re like a lesbian Lolita,” she said and snorted her deep contagious snorting giggle. A weight took wing and flew off my chest. I got my airway back. I howled, she snorted and wheezed. We scared the hell out of the birds.

  “I do know something about standing out,” she added a while later. “Hello. Black girl from Oklahoma.”

  She said, “You’re going to stay here then? For the rest of the summer?”

  “Or longer,” I said, bracing myself for her response. But she just smiled at me. “I hope you’re happy,” she said. “You’re a funny one.” She looked out across the water for a minute. “If you’ve got people who love you, you should go to them. They’re going to get over it. But,” she added, “if you wind up going to New York, with that one or without her, you should look me up.”

  I looked at her, wiping my nose on the back of my hand.

  “Yeah, I’m moving there.”

  “Is Judith going too?”

  But Shisha just smiled again in her lopsided, unrevealing way and shrugged, her large hands palm up to the sky. She stood up and brushed her bottom off.

  “You be good now, you hear?” she said, so I said, Okay. I said thanks.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” she said and snorted again.

  CHAPTER 31

  The final show of Three Sisters that Friday night did not feel like the culmination of the summer’s work. It came and went very fast. That evening was like being trapped inside a kaleidoscope, the lights and whirling colors and dizzying speed of everything. The show itself was an awkward patchwork of scenes, with a handful of gorgeous moments and a lot of ragged ends. It hardly mattered anymore, whether the work we did was good or bad or indifferent, it had been suffused and surpassed by everything else going on for everyone—the emotions of the end of the summer and the pull between being present and preparing to leave, all these people dispersing to their other lives. For me the total uncertainty, the brand-spanking newness of whatever was coming now, right now, made me feel like I was holding very still at the center of a storm.

  Some people’s families came to watch the final performance, and like at graduations, their presence heightened the oddness, the distance between what we thought we knew of each other and other, maybe realer possibilities. There was too much beer, too much food, too much praise. Most people spent a lot of time hugging tearfully, even businesslike little Ann. Bill McNeil of course did not tear up, but even he made an appearance at the cast party after the performance of Three Sisters. Everyone stayed up until dawn that night and then packed, hungover. Sarah had to miss the party because she was heading into New York for the television pilot workshop that began the next day. But I was glad in a funny way to be just with everyone else, to go down to the beach before dawn with all of Group 6 and some others, to put our feet in the water, and make all kinds of promises about staying in touch that probably no one would keep.

  It was a relief too when everyone finally drove or bussed away and quiet descended. The Thursday before I had cleaned out bags of trash from the Davidsons’, and Luke had finally coaxed Chester back inside, where he sat dejectedly, watching the birds busy at the feeders and watching me leave. I took my stuff and moved into the apartment in Wellfleet for almost one whole perfect month.

  Sarah was going back and forth to New York a lot, between the pilot workshop and various auditions, and sorting out her status at Tisch, where she thought she might return for school, maybe even in the spring semester. She seemed apprehensive about work, although I told her time and again I was sure it was going to be fine. I was so happy in the apartment, waiting for her, walking on the beach, visiting with the guys. Luke had a habit of walking out of his small house, standing in the yard between his house and the apartments, and shouting up some piece of information he thought we all might want to know, like a town crier—Interview with Al Pacino on NPR! Putting on spaghetti for dinner, come and get it in ten minutes!—and then walking back into his house and letting the screen door whine and slam behind him. I cooked and read and picked up hours at work, which was easy to do because the season on the Cape extended fully through Columbus Day. Eddy was happy to have me and he said there would be other opportunities through the winter if I wanted them.

  The first day of senior year came and went. It was odd that morning, disorienting, thinking about what was happening there and about all those people, but I felt overwhelming relief about not being there too. And it did feel like another life, not mine, not for now. I had called my mother and left her the phone number at Sarah’s so she could reach me if she needed to, but I hadn’t talked to her and she didn’t call. She wrote a short letter instead, with bits of news about the farm. She wrote that she expected me to come home when I was ready. The likelihood of this seemed remote, but I wasn’t angry anymore. Now that I was really here—really living with Sarah—I felt safely over some hurdle.

  Biscuit stayed mostly with Luke at his place, but when I wanted to play with her, I would whistle and she would come bounding out for a walk. She was excellent company. Except the last weekend in September when Sarah took Biscuit with her. She said Dan, her New York roommate, wanted to visit with her.

  I was sitting in the kitchen when Sarah called.

  That morning when I woke up, I thought, Thank goodness I’ll see Sarah tonight. Thank goodness she is coming home tonight. I spent the whole day in happy preparation, cleaning up and shopping. I made vegetable soup and baked two loaves of whole wheat bread from the Tassajara bread book, licking the brown sugar and yeast and the sticky clumps of dough off my fingers. I was really happy in my last minutes of not knowing. It’s painful to think about how happy I was, but there it is.

  I thought dumb, happy, lazy, domestic thoughts.

  I thought, We need a proper breadboard.

  I thought, Maybe I will scrub the bathtub. But it doesn’t really need it yet.

  I thought, I should get myself a pair of red union suit pajamas like Sarah’s, which I was wearing. Then I thought, I don’t need to, because I can always wear hers.

  When Sarah called, I was sitting at the table reading an old New Yorker, wearing her pajamas, and eating fresh bread with plenty of butter, one foot folded up under my bottom on the chair. Before I could say anything, she spoke, in a tone I had never heard, a measured, tender, regretful, terrible tone.

  “Listen,” she said, and all the books fell off the shelves. All the birds fell out of the sky.

  “Listen,” she said again while I sat transfixed with everything hurtling violently down around me. There was a powerful smell of sulfur, making it hard to breathe. My heart shrank to the size of a pin. Everything was electrified, dangerous, like before a huge thunderstorm. I thought to myself confusedly, Whatever you do, don’t touch the wire.

  “The thing is,” she said. “The thing is I’m going to move back to New York.”

  She exhaled a hard breath. “I’m moving in with Marg.”

  “Marg?” I said. “Who’s Marg?”

  I think that’s what I said. I might have said, “Marg who?” There was a deafening pounding in my head like hail hitting the roof of a car.

  “Marg Hawthorne,” she said softly.

  “Marg Hawthorne?” I repeated. I couldn’t remember who this was for a moment.

  Then I remembered her in class. I heard her voice say meaningfully, Raise the stakes. Raise the stakes. I strung together what I knew on a very short string. Marg Hawthorne was a
middle-aged casting director who lived in New York. Marg Hawthorne had the pouchy, soft cheeks of someone’s mother. Marg Hawthorne had suggested Sarah audition for the pilot workshop in New York. Nicky had said, It’s a big deal if she likes you, she’s very well connected.

  Marg Hawthorne had been kind to me. She had been kind to me. This last stung up and down, like nettles, and I broke out in a rash.

  “What are you talking about?” I said to Sarah.

  “I’m telling you what’s happening because it’s important that you know,” she said gently.

  Her gentleness cracked me wide open with molten rage and fear.

  “I’m in love with her,” she said.

  “You can’t be,” I said, shaking, furious, certain, and desperate all at once, a disemboweled madman under torrential heavens, “you’re for me.”

  I thought that was the final word on the subject. I didn’t know there was any other response to you’re for me except yes, I am. I thought those were the magic words that woke her from whatever strange spell she was under. They had been magic words, but now they were drained suddenly, completely, and forever of all their power. And so were we. It’s hard when you don’t know something’s irrevocable until it is.

  After that conversation, we didn’t speak again. So it was the final word on the subject, but not in any way I could have imagined.

  When we got off the phone that night in September, I didn’t move until late the following day. I was running a fever. All night I thought she would have to appear, she would be coming in the door at any minute, now, right now. Or now. I calculated the driving time slowly, excruciatingly, repeatedly. The time to walk to the parked truck, the drive, eyes glazed, strained, determined, out of the city, the bad radio stations, the cold coffee, the relentless street lights boring into her skull, the need to get to me, my need pulling her out of New York, through Rhode Island, around the roundabouts, over the bridge, the lights flashing yellow all night long, Route 6, the first salt air coming in through the windows, the one-lane traffic, passing by Orleans, turning left at PJ’s, in the long cool whispering night, the car whistling over the gravel pulling onto the oyster shells in the driveway, the door closing, her feet coming up the steps, running up the steps, she would come running up the steps, she was running up the steps, I could hear it: she was coming. All night long I was still sure.