The Bird Sisters (22 page)

“Purple Prairie?” Milly said.

“It sounds better than Purple Meadow,” Twiss said.

“How much is it?” Milly said.

“A nickel,” Twiss said. “Remember, that’s Twiss’s wonderfully stupendous—”

“You can stop saying that,” Milly said. “I’ll buy some of your tonic. So will everyone else if you badger them.”

“I bet Dr. Greene will help me make it,” Twiss said. “He still has a whole cabinet of cure-alls. I’m pretty sure he already gave one to Mrs. Collier. Mold-Be-Gone.”

Milly tossed her pillow at Twiss. “You have the eyes of a crazy person.”

“What would your home economics teacher say about your behavior?” Twiss said.

“Pillow throwing shows too much independence on the part of a young woman!”

“You sound like
me
,” Twiss said.

“You sound like Bett,” Milly said.

“That’s only because Bett sounds like me.”

“Then you must be easy to sound like.”

After that, the two of them lost their laughter.

Milly stood up on her bed and draped her sheet over the buck’s head on the wall the way people did after the first snow, when they closed off entire sections of their houses to conserve heat, and money, for the winter.

“I don’t like how this thing looks at me,” she said. “Sometimes I swear it winks.”

“Sometimes I think it does too,” Twiss said.

When they heard the screen door open and close, the two of them stopped speaking. This time, they didn’t toss pillows at each other or pretend to be asleep. Milly opened her gardening book again and Twiss reread Father Rice’s letter.

As if Father Rice were a fish and her letter a lure.

When Bett came in, she took off her robe and placed her slippers at the side of her bed. “Neither of you told me how funny your dad was. I thought he’d be the bitter type. The life-isn’t-a-bowl-of-cherries kind of man after that stunt in the kitchen the other day. But he wasn’t. He invited me right in and set out a milk pail for me to sit on. He was charming.”

My milk pail?
Twiss thought.
Charming?

“He told me a story,” Bett said to Twiss. “About the day you were born. He wasn’t playing golf like your mother thinks.”

Twiss covered her ears.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Bett said, gently pulling Twiss’s hands away from her ears. “Your father was at the river, helping a group of other volunteers look for a man who was thought to have drowned.”

The man, Jester Johnson, had disappeared the night before—willfully, Bett said, because he’d spent an entire month’s earnings on a bronze compass and was shamed by his lack of willpower to walk past the shopwindow where it was displayed and continue on to the general store like he was supposed to. Jester had promised to bring home a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread for supper and had brought home the compass instead.

When Jester showed her the compass, his wife didn’t look mad like she usually did, nor did she place her hands on her hips. As if she’d known the outcome of his trip to town before it came out, she’d gone ahead and scraped together enough flour for a miniature loaf of bread, which she’d baked into the shape of a heart.

“Sit,” she said to Jester. “Put your feet up.”

Jester pulled off his boots and sat in the chair at the head of the table.

“Tell me about your day,” his wife said.

Jester was waiting for his wife to ask about the milk and the bread—she always asked about the milk and the bread. “It was all right,” he said.

“You have circles under your eyes,” his wife said.

“I’m a little tired, I guess,” Jester said. “What about you?”

“I feel better than I have in a long, long time,” his wife said, smiling. “No more cramping today. No more pain.”

“Good,” Jester said. “That’s good.”

What had changed? That morning when he’d left for work, his wife had made his breakfast, but she hadn’t kissed him good-bye or wished him well—she hadn’t wished him well in a long time, although he supposed he didn’t deserve to be wished well or kissed good-bye. Jester was selfish—he knew that; only a selfish man came home with a compass.

But he loved her. Sometimes he’d be walking down the street and be struck down by this love so cruelly that he’d have to stop to steady his breathing, his legs. (True, that didn’t happen as often as when they were first married, but it still happened. Not everyone could say that, could they?) After he’d steadied himself, he’d think
Go home, Jester, go home
, but his legs would rarely carry him there. The distance between what he wanted and what he needed was too great; often he’d forget where he was standing. He’d bought the compass so that even if he forgot where he was standing, he’d always know how to get home.

“That’s good,” Jester said a third time.

The house was quiet, peaceful. His wife was round again. She took her little loaf of bread out of the oven and set it on the plate in front of him.

“This is the last time I’m going to give you my heart, Jester.”

That night, after his wife had put the one child to bed and quieted the other one, who, unlike the first child, was overly rambunctious in its soupy habitat, by rubbing her belly, Jester took a walk. He walked and walked and kept on walking until he reached the river.

Go home, Jester. Go home
.

Jester stood at the edge of the river a long time before he unwrapped his handkerchief and dropped the loaf of bread into the dark water. The moment it disappeared beneath the surface, he regretted he’d let it go.

Bett said that after searching all day, Milly and Twiss’s father and the other volunteers finally found Jester on a sandbar in the middle of the river late that afternoon, weakened but alive, with a handful of soggy breadcrumbs in his hand.

“So that’s what he was doing the day you were born,” Bett said. She pinned her hair up so that sleep wouldn’t tangle what Milly had worked so hard to untangle.

Was it true? Was it false?

Was it better to pretend not to know for sure what you surely knew?

Bett set down Milly’s brush. She tilted her head the way she did whenever she was genuinely concerned about something or someone. “I thought you’d be thrilled, Twiss. Your father saved that man’s life. In Deadwater, nobody ever saves each other.”

Why did Twiss’s father tell Bett that story, and why had Bett been taken in by it? Twiss was about to go to the closet to look for the bronze compass, which her father had given her as a birthday present when she was eight years old and no money was left to get her a real gift.

Jester—that was what her father always wished he’d been named; it was the name of the most heroic hero in his old adventure books, which now belonged to Twiss.

“You’re supposed to be gloriously happy right now,” Bett said to Twiss.

Happy?
Twiss thought, and slumped back down on her bed.

“Maybe she is,” Milly said. “Only she can’t say so for nineteen more hours.”

Bett eyed the sheet on the buck’s head, and Milly’s pillow on the floor.

“You can’t fool me. I know you’ve been talking.”

illy hated herself a little for opening her mother’s jewelry box. Why couldn’t she let the past stay where it had landed? Why all of this meddling today?

A woman had singled her out for not being a mother—that was all.

By now, the woman wouldn’t even remember what she’d said to Milly or what Milly had said in front of her daughter. She’d have dropped her children off at the school, gone to the grocery store, and vacuumed her toxic carpeting. “You must have a lot of time on your hands if you’re still thinking about that,” she’d have said.

Yes
, Milly thought.
I do
.

“Old people are hopeless clingers-on,” the woman would have continued. “They can tell you what happened during the Depression—The dust storms they had to endure! The mealy potatoes! The loaves of bread on credit!—but they can’t tell you what Fruit Roll-Ups are.”

“I know what Fruit Roll-Ups are,” Milly would have said back, although she didn’t know why they were sold as healthy snacks for children when they were heaped full of preservatives that were engineered in laboratories hundreds of miles from the nearest fruit tree.

Before the processed-food craze, a health-food craze had hit Spring Green when they were in the last years of middle age. One of Milly’s doctors at that time had recommended eating bricks of gray tofu instead of red meat and mashed yeast instead of mashed potatoes. Another had recommended a colonic cleansing, which Milly had submitted to because she’d thought the doctor would merely send her home with a bottle of pills, maybe some hemp.

“What did you think ‘cleansing’ meant?” Twiss had asked her on their way home from the doctor’s office. She kept biting her lip, so that she wouldn’t laugh.

“You’d think they’d have warned me.”

“They didn’t cover me with a sheet,” Milly said. “I could tell what they were thinking.”

“You’re crazy?” Twiss said.

“You don’t count anymore,” Milly said.

Twiss steered the car to the side of the road. When a dark blue truck approached on the opposite side of the road, she got out of the car. She walked around to the front.

Milly knocked on the windshield. “What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory!” Twiss called back.

When the truck was a hundred yards off, Twiss turned to face Milly. She smiled as she unbuckled her belt and dropped her trousers, followed by her underpants.

“Have you gone mad?” Milly said.

The driver of the truck honked several times in a row, waving emphatically as he passed them. “That-a-girl!” he said, continuing down the road.

When the truck disappeared, Twiss pulled up her underpants and her trousers, buckled her belt, and got back into the car.

“You’re right,” she said to Milly. “You’re never too old to be embarrassed.”

“I think that was the Sprye boy driving that truck,” Milly said, smiling.

“No,” Twiss said. “It was Asa’s boy’s boy.”

“Oh?” Milly said, trying not to frown.

“He looks just like her.”

“Does he?” Milly said as if she hadn’t noticed the resemblance. She glanced at the side mirror, at the writing engraved in the glass.

Objects are closer than they appear
.

Curtis
. When he was in high school, he appeared in the sports section of the
Gazette
every Saturday during the fall. Curtis had won a scholarship to the university because he could throw a football farther than any other boy in Wisconsin. But it was his sister’s career that Milly had really been interested in and had secretly followed.

Every Saturday, heat or cold, rain or shine, Milly would see Avery running up their road, her long blond ponytail swishing in time with her legs, just as the sun was making gemstones out of the fields and the hills and the bales of hay scattered across the landscape. Twiss would still be snoring away upstairs. Years of sleep remedies had failed to subdue her; she still slept like a wild animal and woke like one, too.

On warm mornings, Milly would take her cup of tea out to the porch to watch Avery run by. Though she’d never been a runner herself—she didn’t like the sensation of breathlessness, or the hard thunk of her heart—she’d loved to watch Twiss run. And Avery was an even better runner than Twiss had been, and certainly more graceful. She’d run first on the Spring Green high school team and then on the university team and now was training to run the marathon in the Olympic trials.

In an interview, when a reporter from the
Gazette
asked her why she ran, Avery said, “Why does anybody do anything?” which had made Milly like Avery even more.