The Bird Sisters (8 page)

Milly and Twiss couldn’t find anything heartening about their father sleeping in the barn or him handing them notes scrawled on leftover scoring paper from the golf course when he had something to say to their mother.
You must be very happy, Margaret
, he’d written on the last piece of scoring paper.
You finally got exactly what you wanted
.

Like always, her father was talking about golf, with one significant difference: after he drove the car off the bridge over the Wisconsin River, and had recovered from his slight injuries, his swing had altered imperceptibly to everyone including him, though the outcome was clear; overnight, he’d become a player who duffed the same shots he used to sneer at for their elementariness. Overnight, he’d become average.

“We might have to face the facts,” their mother said one evening when the pantry was empty but should have been full. Despite the sorry state of his swing, once again their father had spent most of his paycheck (which wasn’t big to begin with since being a golf pro was more about prestige than money) buying rounds of drinks and cigars for members at the clubhouse.
You don’t understand
, he’d said, when their mother handed him a stack of bills, the mortgage slip on top.
It’s the only way to really be one of them
.

That afternoon, their mother had asked Milly and Twiss to go out to the pond to catch frogs, which she cooked for supper alongside a mountain of pink beans.

“Facts?” their father said, snapping off a frog’s leg. “The fact is people pay big money to eat these.
French
people, Margaret.”

Their mother pushed the beans around with her fork. Milly excused herself from the table. Even Twiss wouldn’t touch one of the boiled frogs. She said it was immoral to eat something that hopped into her coveralls so willingly.

“It tastes like chicken,” their father said. “Nobody gives a thought to eating those.”

Mr. Peterson had given their father three weeks to get his swing back; he couldn’t give him more than that because summer was upon them. Instead of readying the pro shop, Mr. Peterson let her father play the course every day. When her father’s swing didn’t return, Mr. Peterson opened the course up to him after hours.

“I can’t add two and two when people are watching me,” he said.

When his swing still didn’t return, Mr. Peterson sent his personal doctor to their house, but after a lengthy examination, the doctor concluded nothing was wrong with their father.

“Then why can’t I play golf like I used to?” their father said.

“Why do
you
think you can’t play golf like you used to?” the doctor said.

Their father yanked the doctor’s stethoscope. “You’re the expert. You tell me.”

When their father’s swing (and the doctor) didn’t come back, Mr. Peterson sat their father down to let him go. But he didn’t let him go completely. He offered their father a job in the dairy division of his farm. He said, “Watching you golf was like watching the stars, Joe.”

And though her father’s accepting the job was an awful thing to be even slightly happy about, Milly couldn’t help herself. Asa, Mr. Peterson’s son, worked in the dairy too.

“What I wanted?”
Milly’s mother had said when she opened their father’s note. She’d laughed the kind of hysterical laughter that Milly and Twiss had only seen unhappy people, namely their mother and father, achieve.

Since the Accident, the girls had been trying their hands at matchmaking.

“Mom wants you to have supper with us tonight,” they’d say to their father, who’d look at them as if they’d said
Mom wants you to go to the moon
. “She’s making steaks and potatoes.”

To their mother, they’d say, “Dad wants you to visit him in the barn,” which would produce the same disbelieving look.

One day, though, they convinced her they were telling the truth.

When their mother took off her apron and went out to the barn, Milly and Twiss smiled. They imagined their parents letting go of whatever invisible things they were holding on to so they could hold on to each other. But when their mother came back, her hair wasn’t tousled the way they thought it would be and her lips weren’t pink. She looked at Milly and Twiss very seriously before she put her apron on and went back to rolling out dough.

“Don’t do that again,” was all she said.

Milly and Twiss were hopeful their cousin Bettie would prevail where they’d failed. When relatives had come in the past, their mother and father would sleep in the same bedroom again without sneaking around in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning. A week would pass and they’d believe their parents had fallen in love again only to be jolted back into the fact of separate bedrooms when the relatives went home. Genuine or not, Milly and Twiss preferred the scent of cold cream mixing with aftershave in the bathroom.

What they didn’t understand then was that love, or even the play at love, wasn’t the same thing as forgiveness, which was what neither of their parents could offer. Their father couldn’t forgive their mother for her background because it—the sprawling fairy-tale house in Butterfield, the glittering evening parties, the ladies in silk dresses and white gloves, the back patting, the cigars, and the golf, a game only gentlemen could afford to play then—was what he’d coveted his whole secondhand life. The only reason he’d been allowed on a golf course in the first place was to caddy, and the only reason he’d ever been allowed to swing a club was because a member had suspected his talent and had sponsored him. For her part, their mother couldn’t forgive their father for wanting a lifestyle more than he wanted her.

Because Twiss didn’t understand that then, the morning Cousin Bettie was due to arrive care of the postman, who ferried people from town to the country for extra pocket money, she ran back and forth between the house and the barn as if the distance had already narrowed.

“Race me!” she kept saying to Milly, who finally gave in and ran after her. The day was warm enough to go barefoot, but the mud puddles between the house and the barn were still cold enough to make them lose feeling in their toes.

“Stop dragging your sister around!” their mother called to Twiss from the front porch.

Twiss stuck her tongue out and ran toward the barn.

“I saw that!” their mother said. “Come back here and apologize!”

Milly ran after Twiss. When she reached the barn, she collapsed against the side of it, panting like the strays that came to the back door for scraps of food.

“How do you have the energy to love her and hate her so much?” she said to Twiss.

“I never said I loved her.”

“Then why’d you want her to come out here?”

“For
him
,” Twiss said.

Milly looked at her mother, who’d dragged the wash bucket onto the porch and was scrubbing her father’s work clothes against the washboard, working at the milk stains with a bar of homemade lye soap. “You should be nicer to her,” she said to Twiss.

“She should be nicer to me,” Twiss said, and ran around the meadow again, stopping now and then to look at the end of the driveway.

Cousin Bettie was coming all the way from Deadwater, a fishing outpost in northern Minnesota. To make ends meet, her father had two jobs: during the week he was a fisherman and on the weekends a taxidermist. For Christmas, he’d sent them a buck’s head, which their mother had put in the attic. That morning, she dragged it down the stairs and hung it on the wall in Milly and Twiss’s room to make their cousin feel more at home.

To get to Spring Green, Cousin Bettie had to cross a bog, a prairie, and the Mississippi River. She was traveling alone because her family couldn’t afford to go with her and their family couldn’t afford to come and get her. In her letter, she said she’d be the one standing at the end of the driveway at eleven o’clock wearing black rubber hip boots.

“What is a bog exactly?” Twiss asked Milly between races.

“A swamp,” Milly said.

“Then why don’t they call it that?”

While Milly thought about the answer, Twiss took off running toward the barn.

“You tricked me!” Milly said, starting after her.

“You’re easy to trick!” Twiss called back.

By the time the mail truck dropped their cousin at the end of the driveway with a paper bag for a suitcase and an armful of mail, Milly and Twiss were in the middle of a new contest down by the pond; whoever caught the least number of frogs had to wash
and
dry the dishes that evening. They’d decided to catch as many frogs as they could so they wouldn’t end up on their supper plates again, although they were supposed to be clearing algae from the water so the fish didn’t get sick again. Last summer, they couldn’t swim without running into a floater.

Their mother walked out to the end of the driveway to meet Cousin Bettie, who was wearing hip boots like she’d promised. She was taller than they thought she’d be; she had to stoop to hug their mother, who wasn’t short. The boots, which came up to the middle of her thighs, came up to their mother’s waist. When Cousin Bettie took them off, they grazed the tops of the stinkweeds at the side of the driveway.

After a while, their mother and cousin let go of each other. Their mother carried the paper bag and Cousin Bettie carried her boots. The two of them walked toward the pond.

“She probably has Amazon blood in her!” Twiss said.

“She can probably hear you,” Milly said.

When Cousin Bettie and their mother passed the pile of sand, which was supposed to have become a beach but had sat all spring collecting ground bees instead, Milly stopped pretending to look for frogs, but Twiss kept going, croaking and hopping after them.

“Put those frogs back this minute!” their mother said to Twiss, when she and Cousin Bettie were within shouting distance. “You’re supposed to be raking muck off that water.”

When they got closer and she saw the mud stains on Twiss’s coveralls, their mother added, “Stop making work for me!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Twiss said, saluting.

“This is your cousin Bettie,” their mother said. “She’s got weak lungs, so don’t run her around. If I even
think
you’re up to something,” she said, raising her eyebrows to Twiss, “I’ll make you breathe out of a straw for a week and see how you like it.”

“I have asthma,” Cousin Bettie said.

“And I have a line of linens to take in, not to mention the tractor and the wheelbarrow. If it were up to your father, he’d let everything rust.”

“The wheelbarrow’s already rusty,” Twiss said.

“Still,” their mother said. “He ought to come out of that barn and help me.”

“I’ll help you, Aunt Margaret.”

“I won’t have you dragging a wheelbarrow around. We can’t afford a trip to the general store, let alone the hospital. But I appreciate the offer. You won’t hear that from this one,” she said, motioning to Twiss. “You just tell me if she starts bothering you.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine, Aunt Margaret,” their cousin said.

“Just say the word,” their mother said, and yanked a frog out of Twiss’s pocket before handing Cousin Bettie the paper bag and heading into the house, leaving the three girls alone.

Milly and Twiss stared at their cousin, who was as thin and pale as the white asparagus growing in the vegetable garden. As unappealing, too. Except for the shock of red under her eyes and on top of her head, Cousin Bettie looked like the specimens Mr. Stewart preserved in formaldehyde at school. Dearly departed, or not so dearly.

“You look dead,” Twiss said.

“Tired,”
Milly corrected.

“I am,” Cousin Bettie said.

“Which?” Twiss said.

Cousin Bettie yawned. “Both, I guess.”

Rarely did Milly and Twiss meet someone who could handle Twiss in full force without bursting into tears. The last girl they’d invited out to the farm walked all the way back to town after Twiss sprayed her with a hose and called her a water buffalo.