Fresh Eggs (11 page)

Rhea struggles into her father's arms again. “They just grow, Daddy. I don't want them to.”

Her father drops to his knees. His right hand holds her by the belt buckle. His left hand, fingers shaking, strokes the patch of feathers between the flat cups of her new bra. “They're growing there?”

“I can't help it, Daddy.”

Rhea sees the worry in her father's eyes. Waits for him to hug her and kiss her forehead. Tell her everything will be all right. Instead she feels him rip a feather from her chest. Feels the electric-shock of it. The lingering toothache-pain of it.

Donna is screeching. “See? See?”

Now Rhea sees panic in her father's eyes. She feels his fingers dig into her feathers. Feels the fire as he rips them out. She does not look down at her chest, but straight into his eyes. He rips. He rips. His fingers claw at the hollow of her neck, at the thin tender skin beneath her collar bones. His fingers invade the cups of her bra, finding each tiny feather in the soft swollen skin.

When at last he finishes and slumps back, she can see the bloody feathers in his palms. “They just grow,” she says.

Sometime in the early morning Rhea gets out of bed and gets the Nestlé's Quik can from the shelf. She goes down to the kitchen, stepping on the least-squeaky parts of the steps. She gets the flashlight from the drawer by the sink and sits on the edge of the porch for a while, scratching Biscuit's ears, crying into his shaggy mane. Then she follows the flashlight's amber beam across the wet grass until she sees her feathers. They're scattered in little lumps, like Blackbutt's and Nancy's after that coyote chewed them up. She puts them in the can.

For years she's been plucking the little feathers and hiding them in that can. But they just grow back, each time, it seems, a little bigger and a little stiffen And each time it hurts a little more, too. Not just on her skin, but deep in her heart.

Now her father knows. Now her father has ripped them from her chest. Why did he do that to her? How could he do that to her? Would he tear out her hair? Her fingernails or toenails? Her teeth? Her eyes? Why her feathers? Because a girl is not supposed to have feathers. That's why he did that. But she does have feathers—the same as she has hair and teeth and eyes and fingernails and toenails.

The school year ends. The first Saturday of June arrives. Rhea waits for her father to say, “Come on, pumpkin seed, let's go to the cemetery for our strawberries with Mom.”

But this year he doesn't say it.

They have been going to the cemetery for strawberries on the first Saturday in June since Rhea was six. The wild strawberry plants have spread completely around the gravestone and sent out runners to some of the other Cassowary graves. Last year the three of them had at least twenty-five berries apiece to eat.

When the first week of June turns into the third week of June, Rhea knows she'll have to take matters into her own hands. All morning she practices marching up to her father and asking, “Daddy, why aren't we going to the cemetery for strawberries this year?” But when he comes in for lunch she can't make herself do it. She is too afraid of him. She has been afraid of him since that day he plucked her feathers. Since that day they've said hardly anything to each other. Their eyes have rolled away from each other. Their feet have kept each other in separate rooms of the house.

After her father goes back out to the layer houses, Rhea rounds up Biscuit and walks down the fields toward the creek, and in the high grass by the rock pile she kneels by the wild strawberries that grow there. The berries are overripe, brownish and mushy, but she picks a handful and nibbles them anyway. “Hi, Momma,” she says as Biscuit sniffs the rocks for garter snakes. “It doesn't look like we're coming to the cemetery this year. So I hope this will do.”

Thirteen

The bulldozers are already rumbling when Rhea Cassowary wakes up. She goes to her window and looks across the valley. The maples are red and the oaks are yellow. It's October.

There are several bulldozers on the old Van Varken farm, pushing over the hog barns, rearranging the hills to accommodate the one hundred and seven big homes the Gumboro Brothers plan to build. There's also a bulldozer on the Cassowary farm, leveling ground for layer houses F and G.

Rhea gets ready for school. She can hear Donna and her father downstairs, walking nervously from room to room, whispering. She goes down. The bus will be there in ten minutes. Just enough time for her to have a bowl of cereal over the sink.

Her father surprises her. He's wearing a pair of his Sunday slacks and a new shirt. “We're keeping you home from school today,” he says.

Donna is wearing a dress. “We're taking you to see Dr. Hauberk,” she says.

Rhea knows who Dr. Hauberk is: Donna's dermatologist. “I don't have pimples,” she says. “I have feathers.”

They wait for Rhea to eat her cereal, then go out to the car. They crackle down the driveway. Turn left toward Tuttwyler and the highway that meanders east to Akron.

Her father hasn't mentioned the feather incident since it occurred. He hasn't said much to her at all. He has barely looked at her. Now he won't shut up. “I know what I did was wrong, pumpkin seed. I didn't mean to hurt you. You know that, don't you? I just wigged out. I was scared.”

“So was I,” Rhea says from the back seat.

“Dr. Hauberk is really good,” Donna says. She's sniffling, as she always does in the car. She's allergic to the fabric on the seats. The drive takes a long hour.

Dr. Hauberk's nurse takes Rhea into an examining room. Gives her a gown to put on. “You can leave your panties on,” the nurse says, “but everything else has to go.”

Dr. Hauberk comes in twenty minutes later. Rhea is relieved. Dr. Hauberk is a woman. She's got freckles and long hair the same orange-brown as Biscuit's. She is very nervous for a doctor. “I have to confess, I've never had a patient with feathers. I don't think anyone else has either.” She smiles bravely. “But we'll see what we can do. Okay?”

Dr. Hauberk removes Rhea's gown. She studies the feathers on her chest: they're growing over her collar bones and her nipples now, right down her ribs to her belly button. She studies the feathers on Rhea's back: they extend from her shoulder blades to her tailbone dimples. She slowly pulls Rhea's panties down and studies the feathers covering her vulva and her thighs. She lets Rhea pull up her panties and put the gown back on. “They started growing when?” she asks.

“I think I was five.”

“About the time your mother died?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You miss your mother?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I miss my mother.”

“Is she dead, too?”

“She lives in Arizona. But my dad's dead. I miss him like you miss your mother.” Dr. Hauberk frowns. “Your father has a lot of chickens.”

“Pretty soon he's going to have a million.”

“That's a lot of chickens.”

Dr. Hauberk takes a syringe from the pocket of her white coat. “I'm not sure what I can do for you, Rhea. I'm pretty good at rashes—like the one's your stepmother gets—but this feather thing is a new one on me. But I'm going to take a blood sample, just to make sure everything else is okay.” She spreads the feathers just below Rhea's elbow. The needle slides in. “First try—how about that?” The blood leaks into the syringe. “Have you started having your periods yet?”

“Since July.”

The doctor scrunches her nose. “Fun, aren't they?”

“They're okay.”

The syringe is full. Dr. Hauberk pulls it out and wedges an alcohol-soaked cotton ball between her ruffled feathers. “I know you're getting more and more feathers all the time, but are they getting bigger, too?”

“They're a lot bigger.”

“Your father told me he lost his head and pulled a lot of them out.”

“Uh-huh.”

“About a month ago?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He hasn't done it since?”

“No.”

“It probably wasn't such a good idea for him to do that, was it?”

“No.”

“What about you, Rhea, do you pull them out?”

“I used to.”

“But not any more?”

“It hurts too much now.”

They do not drive home as Rhea expects. They drive to another office building in another part of Akron. “We're going to have Donna's allergist look at you,” her father says.

The news doesn't make Rhea very happy. “Does Dr. Hauberk know that?”

“She suggested it,” Donna says. “You'll like Dr. Paillard.”

Donna Cassowary has been seeing Drs. Hauberk and Paillard since marrying Calvin. As his wife she qualifies for coverage under his health insurance policy, a godsend after a lifetime of suffering.

Though neither doctor has cured her of her allergies, they have made life infinitely more tolerable for her.

Donna, it seems, suffers not only from the usual allergies—pollen, animals, dairy products, mold, and the feces of dust mites—but also from the modern world. She suffers, Drs. Hauberk and Paillard concur, from MCS, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. So many things can start her coughing or sneezing. So many things plug her nose shut or make it drain like a faucet. So many things give her headaches, make her dizzy, listless, and nauseous. So many things give her bladder infections. So many things give her rashes, make her eyes swell and itch. Synthetic clothing and carpeting can do it. Food preservatives can do it. Detergents and deodorizers can do it. Cigarette smoke. Cosmetics. Paint. Perfumes. Paper. Central heating. Air conditioning. Easter egg dye.

Dr. Hauberk and Dr. Paillard consult regularly about Donna's allergies, to make sure the pills and ointments they prescribe don't interact negatively. Dr. Hauberk thinks Donna's biggest problem is her own imagination. “Physiological problems can have psychological origins,” she tells Dr. Paillard. “I think that deep down Donna may not think she deserves her good looks.”

Dr. Paillard doesn't reject the dermatologist's suspicions out of hand—he's read enough psychology to know that the division between body and mind is foggy to say the least—but he suspects Donna is genetically predisposed to her sensitivities. “You could lay her on the couch and make her talk all day about her terrible childhood, and she'd still be allergic to the imitation leather,” he once told Dr. Hauberk.

“What do you say we take a little blood?” Dr. Paillard says to Rhea.

“That other doctor already took my blood,” Rhea says.

“Well, I need some, too.” He sits on a stool with wheels and scoots toward her, syringe in one hand, cotton ball of alcohol in the other.

Rhea holds her arm still while the doctor takes her blood. She liked the woman doctor better. This doctor is old and bald and a man. He tugs on her feathers as if they're made out of plastic.

“Do they make you sneeze?” Dr. Paillard asks.

Rhea shakes her head no.

“They itch?”

“Sometimes.”

“What about the feathers on your father's chickens? They make you sneeze or itch?”

Rhea shakes her head no.

“You get the girl's blood back yet?” Dr. Paillard asks Dr. Hauberk on the phone a few days later.

“Yeah. Everything's normal.”

“My sample, too.”

“Find anything in your literature?” asks the dermatologist.

The allergist chuckles. “Like breaking out in feathers from eating too many kumquats? No history of that. As far as I can tell, feathers are symptomatic of only two conditions—either you're a bird or an Indian chief.”

Now the dermatologist chuckles. “I didn't find anything either.”

“What about electrolysis?”

“I thought about it—for three seconds. If you remember your college biology, feathers in birds are not homologous with hair in mammals. They're entirely different structures, more like the scales on a fish. There's no way I'm going to start zapping that girl with electricity. That's what got Dr. Frankenstein in trouble, if you remember.”

“So a depilatory wouldn't do the trick either?”

“Not unless you soaked her for a month.”

Dr. Paillard hears Dr. Hauberk tapping her teeth with her fingernails. “So what are you thinking?” he asks.

“I'm thinking I'm way over my head with this one,” the dermatologist says. “I'm thinking that this little girl is in real trouble.”

The allergist knows what she's getting at. “And you're thinking you and I will be in real trouble, too, if we try to treat her?”

“To tell you the truth, Dr. Paillard, I'd be afraid to send in an insurance form on this one.”

One morning in November Rhea wakes up with a feather on her neck. She refuses to pluck it. Donna refuses to pluck it. Calvin wants to pluck it, but each time he reaches for his daughter's neck, his hand starts shaking and his guilt prevents it.

So Rhea stays home from school and Donna goes shopping for turtlenecks. By Christmas Rhea's neck is covered with feathers, by Valentine's Day her arms and legs, too. Drs. Hauberk and Paillard won't see her again, nor will fifteen other specialists who've taken Rhea's blood, read their literature, and considered their careers. They know how to treat dermatitis, psoriasis, dysplastic nevi, and dermatofibromas. They can treat the cancerous melanomas of sun worshippers, remove warts and moles and cherry spots. They can treat allergies, acne, and athlete's feet. Birthmarks. Baldness. They can treat dandruff, hives, and poison ivy. They can treat so many conditions. But none of them has ever seen anyone with feathers.

In January, Calvin spots a tiny feather growing on Rhea's chin and makes an appointment with her teacher and the school principal. “Rhea is developing a skin condition,” he tells them, watching the snow fall on the empty playground equipment outside the office window.