The Summer of the Swans

by Betsy Byars

  “There are the swans.”

  The six swans seemed motionless on the water, their necks all arched at the same angle, so that it seemed there was only one swan mirrored five times.

  “There are the swans,” she said again. She felt she would like to stand there pointing out the swans to Charlie for the rest of the summer. She watched as they drifted slowly across the water.

  “Hey, Sara!”

  She looked across the lake and saw Wanda and Frank, who had come by the road. “Sara, listen, tell Aunt Willie that Frank and I are going over to his sister’s to see her new baby.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll be home at eleven.”

  She watched as Wanda and Frank got back on the motor scooter. At the roar of the scooter, the startled swans changed direction and moved toward Sara. She and Charlie walked closer to the lake.

  “The swans are coming over here, Charlie. They see you, I believe.”

  They watched in silence for a moment as the sound of the scooter faded. Then Sara sat down on the grass, crossed her legs yoga style, and picked out a stick which was wedged inside one of the orange tennis shoes.

  “Sit down, Charlie. Don’t just stand there.”

  Awkwardly, with his legs angled out in front of him, he sat on the grass. Sara pulled off a piece of a roll and tossed it to the swans. “Now they’ll come over here,” she said. “They love bread.”

  She paused, put a piece of roll into her own mouth, and sat chewing for a moment.

  “I saw the swans when they flew here, did you know that, Charlie? I was out on our porch last Friday and I looked up, and they were coming over the house and they looked so funny, like frying pans with their necks stretched out.” She handed him a roll. “Here. Give the swans something to eat. Look, watch me. Like that.”

  She watched him, then said, “No, Charlie, small pieces, because swans get things caught in their throats easily. No, that’s too little. That’s just a crumb. Like that.”

  She watched while he threw the bread into the pond, then said, “You know where the swans live most of the time? At the university, which is a big school, and right in the middle of this university is a lake and that’s where the swans live. Only sometimes, for no reason, the swans decide to fly away, and off they go to another pond or another lake. This one isn’t half as pretty as the lake at the university, but here they are.”

  She handed Charlie another roll. “Anyway, that’s what Wanda thinks, because the swans at the university are gone.”

  Charlie turned, motioned that he wanted another roll for the swans, and she gave him the last one. He threw it into the water in four large pieces and put out his hand for another.

  “No more. That’s all.” She showed him her empty hands.

  One of the swans dived under the water and rose to shake its feathers. Then it moved across the water. Slowly the other swans followed, dipping their long necks far into the water to catch any remaining pieces of bread.

  Sara leaned forward and put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders. His body felt soft, as if the muscles had never been used. “The swans are exactly alike,” she said. “Exactly. No one can tell them apart. ”

  She began to rub Charlie’s back slowly, carefully. Then she stopped abruptly and clapped him on the shoulders. “Well, let’s go home.”

  He sat without moving, still looking at the swans on the other side of the lake.

  “Come on, Charlie.” She knew he had heard her, yet he still did not move. “Come on.” She got to her feet and stood looking down at him. She held out her hand to help him up, but he did not even glance at her. He continued to watch the swans.

  “Come on, Charlie. Mary may come up later and help me dye my shoes.” She looked at him, then snatched a leaf from the limb overhead and threw it at the water. She waited, stuck her hands in her back pockets, and said tiredly, “Come on, Charlie.”

  He began to shake his head slowly back and forth without looking at her.

  “Mary’s coming up to help me dye my shoes and if you don’t come on we won’t have time to do them and I’ll end up wearing these same awful Donald Duck shoes all year. Come on.”

  He continued to shake his head back and forth.

  “This is why I never want to bring you anywhere, because you won’t go home when I’m ready.”

  With his fingers he began to hold the long grass on either side of him as if this would help him if she tried to pull him to his feet.

  “You are really irritating, you know that?” He did not look at her and she sighed and said, “All right, if I stay five more minutes, will you go?” She bent down and showed him on his watch. “That’s to right there. When the big hand gets there, we go home, all right?”

  He nodded.

  “Promise?”

  He nodded again.

  “All right.” There was a tree that hung over the water and she went and leaned against it. “All right, Charlie, four more minutes now,” she called.

  Already he had started shaking his head again, all the while watching the swans gliding across the dark water.

  Squinting up at the sky, Sara began to kick her foot back and forth in the deep grass. “In just a month, Charlie, the summer will be over,” she said without looking at him, “and I will be so glad.”

  Up until this year, it seemed, her life had flowed along with rhythmic evenness. The first fourteen years of her life all seemed the same. She had loved her sister without envy, her aunt without finding her coarse, her brother without pity. Now all that was changed. She was filled with a discontent, an anger about herself, her life, her family, that made her think she would never be content again.

  She turned and looked at the swans. The sudden , unexpected tears in her eyes blurred the images of the swans into white circles, and she blinked. Then she said aloud, “Three minutes, Charlie.”

  Chapter Eight

  Sara was lying in bed with the lights out when Wanda came into the bedroom that night. Sara was wearing an old pair of her father’s pajamas with the sleeves cut out and the legs rolled up. She watched as Wanda moved quietly across the room and then stumbled over the dressing-table stool. Hobbling on one foot, Wanda opened the closet door and turned on the light.

  “You can put on the big light if you want. I’m awake,” Sara said.

  “Now you tell me.”

  “Did you have a good time, Wanda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get to see the baby?”

  “He was so cute. He looked exactly like Frank. You wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “No, he was darling, really he was, with little red curls all over his head.” She undressed quickly, turned off the closet light, and then got into bed beside Sara. She smoothed her pillow and looked up at the ceiling. “Frank is so nice, don’t you think?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Don’t you like him?” She rose up on one elbow

  and looked down at Sara in the big striped pajamas.

  “I said he was all right.”

  “Well, what don’t you like?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like him.”

  “I know, but I can tell. What don’t you like?”

  “For one thing, he never pays any attention to Charlie. When he came up the walk tonight he didn’t even speak to him.”

  “He probably didn’t see him in the tent. Anyway, he likes Charlie—he told me so. What else?”

  “Oh, nothing, it’s just that he’s always so affected, the way he calls you Little One and gives you those real meaningful movie-star looks.”

  “I love it when he calls me Little One. Just wait till someone calls you Little One.”

  “I’d like to know who could call me Little One except the Jolly Green Giant.”

  “Oh, Sara.”

  “Well, I’m bigger than everyone I know.”

  “You’ll find someone.”

  “Yes, maybe if I’m lucky I’ll meet somebody from
some weird foreign country where men value tall skinny girls with big feet and crooked noses. Every time I see a movie, though, even if it takes place in the weirdest, foreignest country in the world, like where women dance in gauze bloomers and tin bras, the women are still little and beautiful.” Then she said, “Anyway, I hate boys. They’re all just one big nothing.”

  “Sara, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, I mean it. What’s really wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel awful.”

  “Physically awful?”

  “Now don’t start being the nurse.”

  “Well, I want to know.”

  “No, not physically awful, just plain awful. I feel like I want to start screaming and kicking and I want to jump up and tear down the curtains and rip up the sheets and hammer holes in the walls. I want to yank my clothes out of the closet and burn them and—”

  “Well, why don’t you try it if it would make you feel better?”

  “Because it wouldn’t.” She lifted the top sheet and watched as it billowed in the air and then lowered on her body. She could feel the cloth as it settled on the bare part of her legs. “I just feel like nothing.”

  “Oh, everybody does at times, Sara.”

  “Not like me. I’m not anything. I’m not cute, and I’m not pretty, and I’m not a good dancer, and I’m not smart, and I’m not popular. I’m not anything.”

  “You’re a good dishwasher.”

  “Shut up, Wanda. I don’t think that’s funny.”

  “Welllll—”

  “You act like you want to talk to me and then you start being funny. You do that to me all the time.”

  “I’m through being funny, so go on.”

  “Well, if you could see some of the girls in my school you’d know what I mean. They look like models. Their clothes are so tuff and they’re invited to every party, every dance, by about ten boys and when they walk down the hall everybody turns and looks at them.”

  “Oh, those girls. They hit the peak of their whole lives in junior high school. They look like grown women in eighth grade with the big teased hair and the eye liner and by the time they’re in high school they have a used look.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t have to worry about getting a used look.”

  “I think it is really sad to hit the peak of your whole life in junior high school.”

  “Girls, quit that arguing,” Aunt Willie called from her room. “I can hear you all the way in here.”

  “We’re not arguing,” Wanda called back. “We are having a peaceful little discussion.”

  “I know an argument when I hear one, believe me. That’s one thing I’ve heard plenty of and I’m hearing one right now. Be quiet and go to sleep.”

  “All right.”

  They lay in silence. Sara said, “The peak of my whole life so far was in third grade when I got to be milk monitor.”

  Wanda laughed. ‘Just give yourself a little time.” She reached over, turned on the radio, and waited till it warmed up. ”Frank’s going to dedicate a song to me on the Diamond Jim show,“ she said. ”Will the radio bother you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it bothers me,” Aunt Willie called from her room. “Maybe you two can sleep with the radio blaring and people arguing, but I can’t.”

  “I have just barely got the radio turned on, Aunt Willie. I have to put my head practically on the table to even hear it.” She broke off abruptly. “What was that dedication, did you hear?”

  “It was to all the girls on the second floor of Arnold Hall.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean what I say now,” Aunt Willie called. “You two get to sleep. Wanda, you’ve got to be up early to get to your job at the hospital on time, even if Sara can spend the whole day in bed.”

  “I’d like to know how I can spend the whole day in bed when she gets me up at eight o’clock,” Sara grumbled.

  “Aunt Willie, I just want to hear my dedication and then I’ll go to sleep.”

  Silence.

  Sara turned over on her side with the sheet wrapped tightly around her body and closed her eyes. She was not sleepy now. She could hear the music from the radio, and the sound from the next room of Charlie turning over in his bed, trying to get settled, then turning over again. She pulled the pillow over her head, but she could not block out the noises. Oddly, it was the restless sounds from Charlie’s room which seemed loudest.

  Charlie was not a good sleeper. When he was three, he had had two illnesses, one following the other, terrible high-fevered illnesses, which had almost taken his life and had damaged his brain. Afterward, he had lain silent and still in his bed, and it had been strange to Sara to see the pale baby that had replaced the hot, flushed, tormented one. The once-bright eyes were slow to follow what was before them, and the hands never reached out, even when Sara held her brother’s favorite stuffed dog, Buh-Buh, above him. He rarely cried, never laughed. Now it was as if Charlie wanted to make up for those listless years in bed by never sleeping again.

  Sara heard his foot thump against the wall. It was a thing that could continue for hours, a faint sound that no one seemed to hear but Sara, who slept against the wall. With a sigh she put the pillow back beneath her head and looked up at the ceiling.

  “That was my dedication. Did you hear it?” Wanda whispered. “To Little One from Frank.”

  “Vomit.”

  “Well, I think it was sweet.”

  The thumping against the wall stopped, then began again. It was a sound that Sara had become used to, but tonight it seemed unusually loud. She found herself thinking how this had been Charlie’s first movement after his long illness, a restless kicking out of one foot, a weak movement then that could hardly be noticed beneath the covers, but now, tonight, one that seemed to make the whole house tremble.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t hear that,” she said to Wanda. “I don’t see how you can all persist in saying that you don’t hear Charlie kicking the wall.”

  Silence.

  “Wanda, are you asleep?”

  Silence.

  “Honestly, I don’t see how people can just fall asleep any time they want to. Wanda, are you really asleep?”

  She waited, then drew the sheet close about her neck and turned to the wall.

  Chapter Nine

  In his room Charlie lay in bed still kicking his foot against the wall. He was not asleep but was staring up at the ceiling where the shadows were moving. He never went to sleep easily, but tonight he had been concerned because a button was missing from his pajamas, and sleep was impossible. He had shown the place where the button was missing to Aunt Willie when he was ready for bed, but she had patted his shoulder and said, “I’ll fix it tomorrow,” and gone back to watching a game show on television.

  “Look at that,” Aunt Willie was saying to herself. “They’re never going to guess the name. How can famous celebrities be so stupid?” She had leaned forward and shouted at the panelists, “It’s Clark Gable!” Then, “Have they never heard of a person who works in a store? A person who works in a store is a clerk—Clerk Gable—the name is Clerk Gable!”

  Charlie had touched her on the shoulder and tried again to show her the pajamas.

  “I’ll fix it tomorrow, Charlie.” She had waved him away with one hand.

  He had gone back into the kitchen, where Sara was dyeing her tennis shoes in the sink.

  “Don’t show it to me,” she said. “I can’t look at anything right now. And Mary, quit laughing at my tennis shoes.”

  “I can’t help it. They’re so gross.”

  Sara lifted them out of the sink with two spoons. “I know they’re gross, only you should have told me that orange tennis shoes could not be dyed baby blue. Look at that. That is the worst color you have ever seen in your life. Admit it.”

  “I admit it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to admit it so quickly. They ought to put on the dye wrapper that orange cannot
be dyed baby blue. A warning.”

  “They do.”

  “Well, they ought to put it in big letters. Look at those shoes. There must be a terrible name for that color.”

  “There is,” Mary said. “Puce.”

  “What?”

  “Puce.”

  “Mary Weicek, you made that up.”

  “I did not. It really is a color.”

  “I have never heard a word that describes anything better. Puce. These just look like puce shoes, don’t they?” She set them on newspapers. “They’re—Charlie, get out of the way, please, or I’m going to get dye all over you.”

  He stepped back, still holding his pajama jacket out in front of him. There were times when he could not get anyone’s attention no matter what he did. He took Sara’s arm and she shrugged free.

  “Charlie, there’s not a button on anything I own, either, so go on to bed.”

  Slowly, filled with dissatisfaction, he had gone to his room and got into bed. There he had begun to pull worriedly at the empty buttonhole until the cloth had started to tear, and then he had continued to pull until the whole front of his pajama top was torn and hung open. He was now holding the jacket partly closed with his hands and looking up at the ceiling.

  It was one o’clock and Charlie had been lying there for three hours.

  He heard a noise outside, and for the first time he forgot about his pajamas. He stopped kicking his foot against the wall, sat up, and looked out the window. There was something white in the bushes; he could see it moving.

  He released his pajamas and held onto the window sill tightly, because he thought that he had just seen one of the swans outside his window, gliding slowly through the leaves. The memory of their soft smoothness in the water came to him and warmed him.

  He got out of bed and stood by the other window. He heard a cat miaowing and saw the Hutchinsons’ white cat from next door, but he paid no attention to it. The swans were fixed with such certainty in his mind that he could not even imagine that what he had seen was only the cat.

  Still looking for the swans, he pressed his face against the screen. The beauty of them, the whiteness, the softness, the silent splendor had impressed him greatly, and he felt a longing to be once again by the lake, sitting in the deep grass, throwing bread to the waiting swans.