The Wild Birds Page 5

  “I bet your mom tried to own that victory.”

  “Oh, absolutely. But I refuse to give her credit for that one. Things would have worked out as they were meant to without her ‘meddling.’” From her place below the window, Lily could just see her mother’s long fingers perform dramatic air quotes.

  “No kidding,” Darla said, the sound of her chair screeching on the concrete floor as she rose to embrace her friend. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”

  Lily slumped under the window as it started to rain again, her back picking up little splinters from the cedar shingles as she slid down to the ground. She could care less about a few splinters. This was the first she’d heard of her mother’s in-utero attempt to off her, but somehow she was not completely surprised. She could hear quiet sniffles from her mom and Darla as they embraced inside. And here you are the one crying? she thought as she listened to the sobs. Because everything is about you, isn’t it? The rain from the roof dripped off on her in a line on her shoulders, her skin like ice. She decided she didn’t want to hear any more and slunk away from the window to curl up into a ball at the back corner of the building, out of earshot. She held tight to her legs as she rocked and looked out over the misty field.

  The harrier was back, rising in the distance. Lily wanted badly to cry, to feel something. But her whole body felt numb. The harrier dropped, missed, dropped, and missed again. Shit, she thought. I’m not even supposed to be here. I guess every damn one of us hunts blind. The closest her body could get to crying was a strange itching behind her eyeballs. She rubbed at her dry eyes with her flannel as the harrier landed in the distance under a tree. The great bird adjusted her soggy wings and something dark and acrid settled in Lily’s center. She felt pure rage, digging her already black fingernails into the dirt. Well, at least I feel something, she thought. But as far as feelings go, it was not the welcome kind.

  Lily went up to her room, put on a CD of the band Veruca Salt as loud as she could, and stayed there. Every lyric seemed to mock her newfound sense of shame. Can’t fight the seether—I try to ram her into the ground. After a while, she moved to The Breeders, but they spoke the same kind of truth. Spitting in the wishing well for sure. An hour or so later, she heard Darla drive away and the sound of the kitchen door squeal as her mother came inside. The album ended and in the abrupt absence of the bass line she heard the clank of dishes being stacked and rinsed in the sink drift up. She knew this probably meant her mother would be on an upcycle. She could almost smell the remorse wafting up on the air. There would be folded sheets and limited drinking in the house for at least a few days, possibly a week or even two. Her mother would make breakfast and send her to school with a complete and balanced lunch. They would go through all this again—pretending they were a normal, functional family.

  But there was no point in holding her breath during this phase. It would fall all apart like petals from the tulip. It’s the flower that ends before it’s done beginning, she’d heard someone say. Day by day the petals would fall and there they would be again two naked stems of women. A ruined pile. After overhearing Alice’s confession about trying to abort her, something had shifted in the way Lily perceived her mother. There was a new chasm between them that was too wide to leap over. No reconciliatory hugs or gifts bought out of guilt could close the gap. Lily found herself on her own, the tie that binds a young girl to her mother severed. She still loved her, but from a distance.

  Feeling a bit freed by the recent untethering, Lily decided that while her mother was consumed with her brief redemption, she would have to take action of her own. She put in another CD—Nirvana’s In Utero. She scoffed. In utero, she thought. What if she had succeeded? As Kurt Cobain’s thoughts on nothingness and pain seemed more acute than they ever had before, she told herself, Fuck it. She decided to seduce Max by the light of the upcoming lunar eclipse. There would have to be a picnic and booze involved. If it was how she’d come into the world, she thought, she might as well own the forces that had shaped her and harness them for her own. She knew she was not watertight. The cold from outside had seeped deep into her bones and she could almost feel something dark and moldy growing there. Her new independence felt intoxicating. The idea that she could have been killed before she ever lived made her want to live faster, harder, before someone took it all away.

  Strawberries and Beer

  Burning Woods, Oregon, 1977

  As summer took hold of the Siuslaw, the populace freed their mildewed souls in prostration to the sun. Layers came off and people flopped their soft, over-wintered bodies onto towels by the river. It was the time of year when people became amnesiacs about the preceding nine months of rain, gushing to one another, “Why would we live anywhere else?” For the kids, summer break from school meant bike rides, swimming in clear crisp lakes, and picnicking relatively mosquito free. The brief reprieve from the eternal drizzle allowed for hikes and the harvesting of sweet, sun-shined fruits, as the grass crinkled like paper at the ankles and people explored their territory anew. But stark sunshine creates stark shadow, and in the darkest shade of peaceful moments can lurk the most vicious of things.

  Alice and Sal, or “Sally” as she was known only on her birth certificate and to Alice’s parents, laid their pasty bodies out on their towels under the sun on a slim, gray strip of beach lining the local swimming hole. Sal wore board shorts and a running bra that kept her almost nonexistent breasts firmly in place. Alice, always up for a little attention, wore a crochet bikini she’d made herself, the loose weave revealing flashes of pink nipple and hinting at the mound of soft blonde fur as she flipped onto her back and arched up toward the sun. Boys watched them from above where everyone parked their cars on the gravel shoulder, watching them flip back and forth like skewers in the hot sun. The guys whistled, but the two girls didn’t deign to acknowledge them. They only had eyes for one another.

  Sal clocked the way Alice arched her back and watched as a trickle of sweat formed between her breasts. She wondered what it would taste like were she to test her tongue against Alice’s soft, glowing skin. When Alice lifted her sunglasses and found Sal looking at her in that particular way, her heart raced and she made sure to arch a little higher, to let her legs fall apart and sway back and forth, catching the sun on her long, smooth slopes. Both girls wondered the same thing but felt different kinds of guilt about their attraction to one another. Sal’s guilt was rooted in the feeling that growing up on a commune, with hippies, had sculpted her into some kind of perversion of nature. She wondered if the feelings she had for Alice had gurgled up from the wellspring of free love she had been forced to drink from and whether that well was better off capped and boarded up forever. Alice, on the other hand, had been assured by her Catholic upbringing that with no uncertain doubt the feelings for Sal she let roll through her body and shiver her skin to attention were the work of the devil himself. To act on her feelings would be the most sinful transgression of her fifteen years, and one she feared might bring fire and brimstone to her doorstep.

  “How can you be cold?” Sal asked, putting her hand on Alice’s goose-bumped forearm. “I’m sweating like a pig.”

  “Not cold. Just got the shivers, I guess.” Alice flipped her glasses back down to hide the obvious tenderness in her eyes and rolled over onto her stomach again.

  A lifted truck started up on the road above and a male voice shouted something unintelligible as the giant tires peeled out from the gravel. Gravel tumbled down the hill, sifting into the enormous ferns, and a fine mist of gray dust lifted up over the girls and settled flat on the air, shading them with a veil of uncertainty.

  Later in the week, Alice walked alone along the highway toward Sal’s house on the commune. All summer, Alice had been waiting for yet dreading Sal’s going-away party. A year ahead in school, Sal was leaving town to study biology at Northern Arizona University, and Alice would miss her terribly when she went away. Under the impending d
eadline imposed by Sal’s plane ticket and packed bags, Alice finally decided she needed to tell her something she’d never mustered the courage to tell anyone in her sixteen years. She had to admit she was in love with her. The act would take courage from somewhere deep within the pale well Alice called a self. The risk and potential outcome of such a confession horrified her into a state of nausea and sweaty-palmed nervousness. As she walked the two miles from her parents’ orchard to the commune driveway, she wiped her hands on her blue cotton dress and nervously plucked hairs from her eyebrows, the pricks of pain keeping her steadied.

  Sal greeted her with a double-armed wave as Alice walked the last hundred feet up the driveway toward the main house, past jaunty signs painted with flowers and spirals that said, “BREATHE” or “The LIGHT is Within YOU” stuck in the ground as a sort of empirical greeting for any and all venturing onto the communally owned land. Sal grew bigger and more real with each graveled step Alice took toward her, until she loomed large as an oak or an oncoming train. As the two embraced, Alice was not sure the light was within her, or that she was capable of breathing, but she did her damnedest to fake that she was breezing through the day like a samara on the wind.

  In preparation for the party, Alice and Sal helped hang strings of lights outside, dragging feet upon feet of extension cords from the big house in order to hang a chandelier from the largest oak tree above the enormous reclaimed wood tables. The commune may only have been two miles from Alice’s parents’ house, but culturally it was light-years away. People wore corduroy and suede fringe, jewelry that jangled, bangs or long hair parted in the middle. There was no Sunday dress code except dirtied knees on coveralls from helping the garden. Worship involved not the Lord and Savior and His Son but the Sun in the Sky or a many-armed blue female elephant. They discussed commune business in a “forum” and danced regularly to exotic stringed instrumental music, winding their arms through the air like they were braiding the invisible. Sometimes they did a dance where they all held hands and wound the entire group from a loose and limbering spiral into a tight knot, their bodies crushed up against one another in a spiraled lump. Alice wasn’t really sure of the point of the exercise, but always played along because she loved the people who lived there, the way they laughed from their diaphragms and not their throats and hugged strangers for far longer than she had ever seen her own parents touch anyone. But most of all, she loved that these were the people who had helped create her Sal.

  Sal’s chin-length, curly brown hair and dark skin seemed to suck the sun to it. Her almond eyes betrayed a strong mix of cultures in her blood. There was a particular reticence among commune children to pinpoint who exactly begat them, as often these facts were as fluid as a storyteller’s tales, shifting and moving like sand under the wind’s guile. Alice knew Sal’s father well, as he was a prominent figure on the commune, but whenever Alice asked her about her absentee mother, Sal said with a smirk, “I am a daughter of the earth, remember?” And that summer, it seemed to Alice that the dusty earth of the southwestern deserts were all Sal wanted to talk about. Alice began to be jealous of the dust itself. It seemed to her that a place with things called Gila monsters, little pink-and-black dragons that once they bit you were almost impossible to unlatch from your leg, was more science fiction than a region of her own country. Sal talked about shrikes and thrashers, Mojave greens and kangaroo rats. She described the life cycle of saguaros and the skeletons of cholla. She spoke in reverent tones of a collection of plants and animals that more resembled a Dr. Seuss landscape than anything Alice had ever known stalking the coast range Sitka of the low-lying Cascade range or the oak savannah of the Willamette Valley. As they hung the last of the white lights, weaving the wires around the trunk of the oak, Alice promised she would come visit first chance she got, as long as Sal kept her safe from monsters. Sal laughed, the deep kind she liked to call the “hippie guffaw,” and put her arm around Alice’s much taller, bony shoulders. Sal’s head rested there. She promised she would do her damnedest.

  That evening at the party, the girls started a huge fire in the pit and mingled with the other guests. They were given beers with a wink by the eldest member of the commune and told to “be responsible.” Busses, Westfalias, and Volkswagen vans in candy colors rolled up the driveway and parked on the grass pell-mell, the loud doors releasing vaporous clouds that smelled like some kitchen experiment burning on the stove.

  “A party here is really just an excuse for people to smoke way too much grass and participate in the doctrine of free love,” Sal whispered to Alice.

  “I didn’t know regular love cost anything,” Alice said.

  “They say all love comes at a cost.”

  “Now that’s not very bohemian thinking.”

  With the bonfire lit, the strawberries from the garden picked and still warm from the sunshine, the girls sat down with the rest of the party and Sal handed Alice another beer concealed in a red plastic cup, letting her hand linger a little while on Alice’s as she transferred the beverage.

  “Try it with the fresh strawberries. It’s amaaazing,” Sal said.

  Alice was in a sort of ecstasy with the sweet, warm strawberries and bubbles dancing on her tongue. Emboldened by the alcohol, she gazed seductively into the fire, thinking of how to get Sal alone to reveal her feelings. She was lost in a scenario involving Sal, some tall grass, and moonlight by the frog pond, when she noticed a small, balding, blond man watching her from across the fire. He wore a tan suede jacket with fringe and beaded Native American moccasins, though clearly he himself was not. His thinning hair glowed almost white despite a fair amount of natural grease smoothing it back around his ears. Around his neck hung a bundle of necklaces including what appeared to be a shark or dinosaur tooth and a very tiny spoon. His eyes were wide, rimmed in pink, and a little crazed. Alice wondered how long he’d been staring at her like he wanted to eat her. She set down the bowl of strawberries and wiped her mouth, suddenly feeling self-conscious.

  Next thing Alice knew, as though he had moved with the shifting of the smoke from the fire, the man was sitting on the bench next to her sidling closer and closer.

  “You sure were enjoying those berries,” he said, leaning in.

  “Ah, yes,” Alice said politely, waving the bonfire smoke from her eyes. “They’re from the communal garden.”

  “Of Eden?” The man said, laughing far too loudly at his own proto-joke. Up close, Alice could see the broken capillaries in the whites of his eyes and could smell an unfamiliar acrid odor on his breath. She looked around the fire to see if anyone was watching them, if anyone knew this man. Sal had been called away to help with something in the barn, leaving Alice to contend with the man alone. He didn’t introduce himself, but instead just stared at the bowl of fruit in her lap.

  “Would you like one?” Alice said, again defaulting to a politeness her Christian upbringing had drilled into her, unsure what else to say or do.

  “Indeed,” the man said, plucking the largest one, letting his hand linger too long in the bowl sitting in her lap, then eating it with little grunts. Alice looked around for Sal to see if she’d returned, but she couldn’t locate her among the crowd. Alice wasn’t really sure what was going on, but she felt a flight instinct kick in.

  “Excuse me a moment,” she said, getting up.

  “Don’t go,” the man grabbed her arm. She pulled it out of his grasp, hard, almost knocking herself over.

  She walked away from the firelight and lit-up trees toward the big farmhouse, the beer feeling less ecstatic now in her body, more like the rocking of a ship in a storm back and forth in her veins. She stumbled through the dark and toward the porch light, twisting her ankle in a hole in the ground. She walked the rest of the way more slowly, the pain in her ankle growing warm and sharp.

  Inside the farmhouse, she walked slowly through the living room while touching all the exotic items on display. There were large Turkish
silver stars embossed with intricate patterns or with cutout patterns of flowers and vines. There was one extremely large sketch hanging over the fireplace of a man and woman lying down, entwined and naked. You couldn’t see their faces, but you could tell by the intimate and gentle way they held each other that they were in love. On the couches there were throws and pillows in bright hues and mismatched patterns, vases filled with dried flowers on the end tables, and tapestries on the wall from unknown countries. There was nary a cross with Jesus crucified as could be found in every room of her parents’ house. The closest this place came to a representation of Jesus was perhaps Kenneth, the longhaired bearded fellow who lived in the addition off the kitchen and made driftwood sculptures. She walked upstairs to the bathroom, the pain in her ankle biting with each step.

  She was sitting on the toilet spacing out, trying to regain her wits and stop the rocking, when a loud rap on the door startled her.

  “Occupied,” she said quietly.

  “Is that you, strawberry?” a male voice asked.

  “Who?” she said, pulling up her underwear and smoothing her dress down. She flushed the toilet and turned on the faucet, washing her hands for a long time. “There’s another bathroom downstairs,” she finally yelled. She paused for a long time, looking through the cabinet and inspecting the bottles and tubes one by one—face cream, hemorrhoid cream, Tylenol, nettle tincture, arnica. She sorted and resorted the many toothbrushes before finally unlocking the door. Her hand paused on the handle before she opened it, but she had to go out at some point, and it had been quiet outside in the hallway for some time. But when she opened the door, the moccasined man was right there, quietly waiting.