Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  “I know I should have come,” I started to say. I wanted to say something about letting her down, about her mom, about how I knew I had abandoned her, about how I knew she had been all alone and afraid this past month and I had left her there, about how Sarah had abandoned me, about the whole summer and everything that had come before, but there was a giant jagged glittery rock in my throat. I was choked and stripped and so sad I thought I might topple over. If she be traitor, why so am I.

  “Okay,” I said finally, helplessly, instead. I couldn’t swallow. One of the dogs, done with dinner, stuck its muzzle around her thigh and looked out at me with passing interest.

  “She’s at the hospital,” Titch said at last, not giving an inch.

  “But she’s okay? I mean she’s going to be okay?”

  “For now,” she said and turned away, and then over her shoulder she added, “Come around to the basement.”

  When I didn’t move, she said, “I’ll meet you down there,” and closed the door.

  I went around the side of the house and let myself in the sliding doors to the basement. It smelled moldy and familiar. I could hear the pounding of some music on the rock station in the room above us. I heard Titch yell something and a lower voice responding. In a couple of minutes she came thudding down the carpeted stairs.

  “It’s just Randy,” she said when she came into the room, dismissing her stepfather. We looked at each other again and finally she said, “Does anyone know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “Right now.”

  “Are you going back to school?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to New York?” (This, carefully, not looking at me.)

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you going to stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She made a face, pulling the corner of her lip up, and then rubbed her nose with her right index knuckle violently, making the cartilage squeak. It was a familiar gesture. I watched her.

  “I was doing some homework,” she said, finally. I waited. She grimaced up at the ceiling, in the direction of the water stains over my head. “I guess you can hang out here for right now. If you want.”

  “You’re a complicated animal,” I said, so relieved suddenly that I thought I might throw up right there on the shag carpet with its damp curling edges.

  “Yes,” Titch said, flatly, unforgiving, “but I’m worth it.”

  How many times can one person break your heart?

  Sarah would send me a note eventually, from New York, where she was living with Marg Hawthorne. In the note she said that she would be in love with me forever.

  All my life, I will not know what that could possibly mean.

  You are either hand in hand, or you are not.

  She was on my side. Whatever I’m for. And then she wasn’t. I’m for you.

  That’s betrayal, however you slice it, whatever else you can say.

  That Sarah doesn’t want or need me or care, that she didn’t choose me, is like having a long thin sword in my chest. Like a good two feet of flat skinny blade sticking out of my chest, so that movement—just walking or standing up even—makes that protruding blade twang and reverberate through my heart and all the way through my guts. Eventually I’m sure I’ll adjust to it, I’ll move around with the unconscious knowledge that I’m carrying a thin sword in my chest. But now, I can be going along and forget that I am stuck with this blade and then I turn and thwack it will hit something hard and boing boing there are shudders on shudders on heartache, all my muscles shocked, jumping, jangled.

  “I’ve been thinking about how hard it was for you when your dad left,” my mother said to me when I called and told her I was planning to leave the Cape. She didn’t directly address the question of where I was going, or say anything about Sarah—in fact I don’t think she ever said Sarah’s name—but she was speaking to me more easily now.

  “It was so sad for you when he left. You missed your dad,” she said, “of course you did. You have probably been feeling that loss all this time, carrying it around with you.”

  Without thinking I said, “No, you were sad because he left, you were sad about him, but I mean I didn’t really miss him. How could I miss him? I didn’t even really know him. But I missed you then. I was sad about you.”

  She was quiet.

  “I think Mother is a little better,” she said, finally. “She’s been out walking with me in the woods, and she’s keeping close watch on the birds. You were right about the Jello. She eats custard too, which is even better because of the eggs. I’m not very good at making it, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She seems to want a lot of sweet things, which is funny, because she never liked sugar before. But why shouldn’t she have it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s not like she has her own teeth to worry about anymore.”

  “You have given my parents a lot of joy,” my mother said, ignoring this. She spoke more firmly now, her voice back underneath her. “I think you have given them a focus and an outlet and tremendous joy. I didn’t have that relationship with them. We had a harder time. So without you, you know, they would never have had that. You anchored my father, even when he was drifting away. He loved you so much, I think he stayed himself and I even think he stayed here as long as he could for you. And I think it must have been such a relief for him that you did not expect him to be anyone other than who he was—you did not want him to be anyone other than who he was—even at the end. You have been a great gift to them.”

  I had hot tears pooling in my eye sockets. I sniffed loudly, before I could stop myself.

  “I have talked to your teachers,” she went on. “You know you only have a semester’s worth of credits left and they say you can finish them in the spring if you want to. Or even next year. Although I think you might just want to get back in there and get it over with. Everything that’s happened this year will be old news before you know it, it will all die down. It’s the nature of a small town like this one; there’s always someone else to gossip about. And, Nina, once you are done with school, you are done. I know it feels like a circle of hell, but once you are out, you are out, and you never have to go back. You should graduate this year, get on out into the world. You’ve worked hard for this, and you need to go to college sooner or later. Go sooner. You don’t want to throw it away. And listen, I can tell you, I can promise you, that some endings really are only for the best.”

  For an instant she sounded almost a little forlorn. Something in her voice made me remember that she had been in the same high school, that she had also lost my father and her father, and that there must be other endings too about which I knew nothing.

  We were silent for a while, but it was a good kind of silence.

  “I would have killed that teacher if he hadn’t done it himself,” she said finally, thoughtfully. And it made me laugh out loud, without my meaning to at all.

  “Or at least kicked his ass,” I said.

  “Or at least kicked his ass,” she agreed.

  In the end, I tell Titch everything I can in the basement. She listens.

  When I finally come to a stop, she is quiet for a minute. Then she says, “Don’t take this the wrong way. Because I’m not saying you should be grateful, exactly. Except, you know, maybe you should? A little bit? Or at least. Nina. Not many people know what it’s like to have something like that.”

  “But I don’t,” I say despairingly. “I don’t have it. She says she’s in love with someone else.”

  “Well. Yes,” Titch says. “Yes, she says that now.”

  “Do you still have stuff of Sarah’s?” she asks then. “You should make a funeral pyre.”

  I have the headshot of Sarah in my bag and I hand that over to her. There are other bits and pieces in the car,
letters, cards, scribbled notes, sweaters, T-shirts, jeans, books, a wrap, pictures, photos of the two of us running about like idiots on the beach, mixtapes covered in her beloved curvy handwriting, her jaunty y’s, gifts from small to large, decorative thimbles to a mossy green suede bag, everything freighted. First comes love, then detritus. I am not ready to rake it all up, to look at the crazy sad pile of it. Maybe in another eight months, or a year, I’ll be ready to gather everything up in a large garbage bag, noose the neck with a yellow plastic tie, and throw it out. Or burn it, if that’s not too dramatic. But not yet. I can’t do it yet.

  Titch studies the headshot critically for a minute, her head tilted at an angle. I lean in, unable not to look at the picture. There is the black-and-white sweetness of Sarah’s mouth, curved, pursed, sloping, the heart-shaped cheek, the stark pale eyes. There is my predictable lurching pain.

  Titch, frowning at the photograph, says, “Something’s missing.”

  I look at her, confused.

  “Strength of character maybe,” she adds, and looks up, grinning at me so quickly that I almost miss it. “Or maybe integrity,” she says musingly. “Something small like that.”

  She hands the headshot back, this time with her blessed, twitchy smile.

  Something unknots in my chest. Kindness is what does it, kindness is to blame. I rub my face hard, covering my eyes, but when I take my hands down there is snot and wet all over them. I am shuddering, my chest seizing and heaving in great bumpy waves. I try to mop up with the tail of my shirt, the backs of my hands, and my sleeves.

  Titch is visibly wincing. She hates emotional displays, even the threat of them. She grabs a dusty box of Kleenex from the top of the VCR, throws it at me, eyes averted, and goes back to her book.

  “I’m serious about burning that,” she says, without looking up. Her hair falls over her face.

  Earlier after I’d said I didn’t know if I wanted to go back to school, or home or New York, Titch had asked, “Well, where do you want to be then?” not exactly testy, but brisk, in the manner of old that suggested from time to time how very much I got on her nerves. It was her tone of no nonsense, as my grandmother would say, approvingly.

  Well, where do you want to be?

  I think about that now.

  It reminds me of the time at summer camp four years and ten lifetimes ago when the counselors asked us to imagine where we would want to be during nuclear war. You know, if the president slipped up and hit the wrong button, which everyone I knew seemed to think was fairly likely. Grown-ups I knew gave betting odds on that, and they weren’t good odds. It seemed like a kind of morbid party game. Someone might say, He won’t do it, he has children himself, but then if you looked at Ron Jr. and Patty, that wasn’t encouraging, that wasn’t going to make you think oh right they would be enough somehow to stop the all-out devastation of the world as we knew it. Who wanted the future of humanity to hang on that sad pair? Someone else might say in a grimly jovial way, So what do you think? Is this the year? Like the president was going to hit a homer and he was batting for the other team. The apocalyptic team. The death team. The planet incinerator team. All the would he or wouldn’t he conversation was mind-bogglingly depressing, paralyzing.

  It was the same thing with The Day After, that awful television movie about nuclear war. We had to watch it as a homework assignment for school and discuss it in class. The television network gave out viewers’ guides that were supposed to prepare us for the graphic scenes of horror and destruction, radiation burns and the end of civilization. There were hotlines opened on the day the movie aired with the 800 number at the bottom of the screen so you could call in and talk to a counselor, who presumably would soothe your now frantic fears about nuclear winter. At the same time, censors reportedly forced ABC to cut a scene in which a child woke up screaming from a nightmare about nuclear holocaust. It was hard to square these things. Were we supposed to be afraid or reassured, or afraid and then reassured, or what?

  The word was that President Reagan wept when he saw the movie. All that ever stuck in my mind was the ad that ran repeatedly, showing the mushroom flash going off, poof, obliterating the word Apocalypse on the television screen, and then a horse who was galloping through a field away from the explosion suddenly became nothing but bones, a skeleton that instantly disintegrated into dust.

  Titch went around in the week before it was going to be shown on television solemnly repeating some version of the movie’s tagline, which was The End of the Familiar, the Beginning of the End. When something wasn’t going well in class she’d intone, It’s the End of the Familiar, the Beginning of the End. This should have been funny, but actually it bummed me out. I hated seeing that horse’s bones. I can still see them on the back of my eyelids, to this day. Why did the horse have to die?

  At summer camp, we were supposed to describe in great detail the most beautiful, restful place we could imagine being. A place that was safe, a place that was home. The idea was that then we could visualize ourselves there whenever we got anxious about nuclear war, or, I guess, in the event of the actual nuclear war. I can still hear the kind, encouraging tones of the woman counselor—I think her name was Mary—who had an overbite and a crazy long, dirty blonde hippie braid tied with limp green string. I can hear her say coaxingly, Where do you feel happy and loved? Where do you feel calm? Where do you feel you are truly at home? And for a while the more I tried to locate this place—Where the hell was it? Where did I feel happy and calm? Where did I feel loved and at home? Did such a place even exist?—the more freaked out I got, like why were they so sure that we needed to visualize this place? What did they know? What were the odds, anyway? And why wasn’t there anywhere that I felt this way?

  Eventually this is what I came up with:

  Once walking up to the barn early, early in the morning during lambing season, when it was bitterly cold and my nose ran, there were delicate crackling sheets of ice over the puddles in the road and I jumped on every one, shattering them. I was walking between the majestic bulk of my grandfather, his big steamy breath leading the way, and the elegant stem of my grandmother, and what I remember is that they both stopped and waited patiently while I crunched the ice. There was no talk of coming along now, only the happy satisfying crash and tinkle of those hundreds of fragile panes of glass. The winter light was grey and bleak on the road, with black looming trees, but the barn’s warm darkness was comforting. The patiently chewing sheep heads turned in our direction, stirring in the hay. The sound of the tins of grain being opened—a screeching of metal on metal, the hollow drum of reverberation—would start a different kind of rustle in the barn. One after another the sheep would call until everyone was joining in the full-throttled baaing breakfast chorus. Occasionally the sounds of deep stomach gurgles mixed in, or a loud wet satisfied sheep belch. My grandmother, moving gracefully and efficiently, broke the layered inches of ice in the water buckets, banging the stretched and distorted black rubber tubs against the fence or on the frozen ground. My grandfather handed me flakes of hay to parcel out in the snowy barnyard, and to stuff into the feeders. Weak sunlight came out to light the ground in patches. I let my forehead rest against the splintery slats of the hayrack, breathing in that prickly sweet smell mingled with all the good warm animal smells of wool, lanolin, grain, manure.

  That’s where I’d be.

  And on this day in the moldy basement, I think: right here, right here where I am with Titch. That too.

  I feel emptied out, subdued. I look over at Titch, slouched over her book. I stand up.

  “Where are we going?” she asks, folding down the page. And stretches her arms upward to join me.

  The End

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Tamsen Wolff is a professor in Princeton University’s English Department, where she specializes in modern and contemporary drama, voice, directing, and dramaturgy. She has published essays in numerous journals, and
is the author of Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. Juno’s Swans is her first novel.