Juno's Swans Read online

  Then she said, “Well. Tricky Nicky.”

  We didn’t say much else over our eggs and we didn’t eat off each other’s plates as much as usual. Sarah read the Arts and Leisure section from front to back. I snuck looks at their table. They didn’t appear to be speaking much.

  “Do you think he’s sleeping with her?” I asked as soon as we were out the door.

  “Looks that way,” Sarah said, unperturbed, head down, rooting around in her slouchy patchwork velvet bag.

  “It’s just that she’s kind of a dumb bunny,” I said.

  “Well, I doubt he’s in it for the conversation.”

  “Okay, but she’s an idiot if she thinks that’s going to lead to anything. It’s not like he’s going to cast her in something because he’s sleeping with her.”

  “You don’t know that,” Sarah said, then conceded, “okay, probably not.”

  “Anyway,” she added a minute later, “everyone’s in a relationship for a reason, everyone’s getting something from someone else.” She sounded dark and irritable.

  We were walking by the drugstore on Main Street where a grizzled old man in the window gazed out unseeingly over his newspaper. He looked filmed over somehow, or maybe it was just that the window was dirty.

  “Really? What are you getting with me?” I said jauntily, turning away from his vacant look.

  “A soul mate,” she said breezily.

  And just like that she could switch from an incomprehensible, aloof, moody person filled with judgment and misgiving to someone who made me weak in the knees. There was no pausing, she just shot around the game board and landed on love.

  What would I be impatient for, if not for this?

  CHAPTER 21

  Did you know about Nicky and Bill McNeil?” I asked Shisha the following Monday, on a break, at the picnic table outside the church. The two of them were standing in the distance, smoking together. Nicky had one hand jammed in the back pocket of her jeans, and she was turned away from the rest of us, pretending indifference.

  “Oh yeah. It’s hard to miss. She’s practically wearing his letter jacket.”

  The thought of Bill McNeil owning a letter jacket seemed so hilariously heretical that it made me snort like I was in grade school and slosh juice in Shisha’s general direction.

  “Take it easy there, sport,” she grinned, moving my bottle to a safer distance.

  “What are we talking about?” Ann asked, scootching cautiously closer to us on the bench.

  “Bill McNeil, and Nicky wearing his letter jacket.”

  “What?” Ann was completely scandalized, her eyebrows flying up and out like bat wings. “NO. Really? He’s old enough to be her father.”

  She looked over at them, anxiously, and then back at us, her head waggling from side to side as though she could not control it.

  “That’s a real draw for some people,” Shisha said.

  “Maybe it’s about power, getting access to it, or you know, feeling powerful,” I said vaguely, screwing the lid on my bottle.

  “Oh yeah? Power? Whose?”

  “Both parties,” I said, picking at the label on the bottle, affecting unconcern, and then to escape the conversation, “what do you think he lettered in?”

  “Bill? Pussy.”

  Ann’s face came completely undone and she let out a horrified yelp. I wanted to be unflappable, but I blushed instantly, unstoppably. Shisha laughed her big honking laugh. Ann snatched up her blue and white canvas bag and headed back inside, while Nicky exhaled smoke and shot a squinty look in our direction.

  “You scared her,” I said, looking after Ann’s agitated back, feigning composure. “That’s not kind.”

  Shisha shrugged. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Are you and Sarah going public or is this undercover shit going to last all summer?”

  “We’re not undercover,” I said defensively. “Anyone who’s paying attention would know now.”

  “Sure,” she said affably. “Because people pay such close attention.”

  “They do here,” I said. “Could anyone be more in anyone else’s business than this crowd?”

  “Okay. I was just asking.”

  “I think she feels awkward,” I said, after a pause. “I mean because she’s the group leader. Like it might make the group dynamic strange. And she’s a very private person.”

  Shisha looked at me like she was trying to decide whether to let this pass, and then she smirked and stood as Nicky came up alongside us.

  “Time to go in?” she asked, cheerfully.

  But then. We were still doing scenes of Shakespeare usually once a week in the afternoon with Bertie. We would take the text all apart and dissect the language and put it back together like technicians. The table work was tiring, but then we’d get up on our feet and play and it was great fun. One hot, lazy afternoon, Bertie asked Sarah to play Rosalind in Act I, scene 3 of As You Like It and then looking around the room, he landed on me and said, Nina, you take Celia. Doug, Duke Frederick.

  We hadn’t done any scene work yet together all summer, and I felt my eyes start to go helter-skelter when I got up and walked toward her. I felt unsteady and exposed. I had done this scene before, three years ago in another lifetime with Titch, but this was different and new.

  The scene was the one in which Celia’s tyrannical father, Duke Frederick, banishes his niece Rosalind from court on penalty of death, and Celia (me) comes passionately to her defense.

  I was too young that time to value her;

  But now I know her: if she be traitor,

  Why so am I; we still have slept together

  Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together

  And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno’s swans,

  Still we went coupled and inseparable.

  I heard my voice wobbling a little and I tried to slow down and breathe. Then when I looked directly into Sarah’s open face, I felt a great swell of courage, and she met my shaky eyes head on and they steadied and the lines were simply true:

  Pronounce that sentence then on me, my liege:

  I cannot live out of her company.

  When we paused, Doug was standing stock-still looking at us. I realized Sarah and I were holding hands, and I felt a change in the room, a change in the breathing, maybe just my own, or maybe more than my own.

  “I think that’s a good place to stop,” said Bertie, with his giant goofy smile. “Very nice.”

  We didn’t say anything to one another in class. But I waited for her that day after classes were over, on the stretch of grass outside the church, and no one questioned it, no one asked me what I was doing, or why I didn’t join them as I usually did. Ann offered me the sections of the New York Times that she had finished before she went off with the others for dinner and I thanked her and took them, although I didn’t read anything. I lay on my stomach and watched people walking toward Commercial Street in the warm light of the end of the day. When Sarah finally came out, she waved goodbye to her fellow assistants and came loping toward me seamlessly, smiling, like we did this every day.

  “I thought you’d still be here,” she said. “I was hoping you would be.”

  She told me on the way home that the next day’s visiting instructor was going to lead a singing class and I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue at nothing in particular. I am deathly afraid of singing in public. It makes me panicky.

  She laughed. “It won’t be so bad,” she said. “You just focus your mind on the person you are singing to—imagine you are singing to a child if you want, or anyone you know and care about, imagine you are putting someone to sleep if you want—and don’t forget to breathe.”

  The only time I sing is with my grandmother, who sings and hums all the time, whether she is washing dishes or feeding the cat or pulling
up burdocks at the sides of the road. She sings Elizabethan rounds and popular songs, nursery rhymes and made-up songs. My grandfather sang as well. Walking home with Sarah that day I was thinking of something catchy like “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” and how their singing it could make me feel as lightly suspended as swinging in a hammock on a summer day. I was used to piping alongside my grandmother, but it was easy because my voice could chime underneath and be enveloped by hers. I never want to sing by myself in front of other people.

  It turned out that I was not alone in my fear of singing and in the end Sarah had to stand up to sing first. Part of her job as group assistant was always to go first if nobody else was leaping into the breach. She sang that sad song “10,000 Miles,” and when she got to the end she sang it directly to me. I couldn’t believe it was happening, in front of everyone, so openly, not in the course of a scene or in any kind of veiled way. She had a lovely singing voice, clear and sweet. I had never heard it before. The bit of the song that I remember was, Oh come ye back my own true love/And stay a while with me/If I had a friend all on this earth/You’ve been that friend to me. I know it wasn’t your usual love song or anything—she could have picked something much more obvious. But it was so beautiful when she sang it that I was struggling not to cry. When she was done she walked over, sat down right next to me, like it was the most natural thing in the world, and took my hand between hers. I didn’t know where to look, so I looked at the floorboards and wept a little and tried to pull it together. I didn’t want to cry, really I didn’t, but I couldn’t seem to help it. (Of course, there’s more to that song. Farewell, my own true love. I’m going away. And: Don’t you see that lonesome dove, sitting on the ivy tree/She’s weeping for her own true love, as I shall weep for mine. For example.)

  After classes were finished that day, Bill McNeil asked everyone to gather in the big room of the art gallery in order to discuss what we should do with the final weeks of the workshop. Sarah was sitting near Bill, with her back against a wall. She had her red notebook open and was taking occasional notes on the conversation. I weaved in between all the students, who were strewn across the room, sitting, lying down, inconveniently lumped together, until I got to her, and then I squeezed in beside her. She smiled at me. A heated debate was going on around us about whether to attempt a full-length show—probably a Three Sisters cobbled together in a way that would enlist everyone in some capacity—or to present scenes, or not to do any final performances at all. The logistics were making my head swim. Bored, I reached for Sarah’s pen and scribbled, 3 Sisters are you for it or agin it in her notebook. Sarah looked down, paused, closed her eyes for a long moment, opened them, and penned quickly, Whatever I’m for, I’m for you. She bent her head and her hair fell forward so I couldn’t see her face, and she wrote underneath that, Whatever’s for us, for us. Then: I will hold you always no matter where no matter when no matter what. You’re my person. She underlined again, Whatever I’m for, I’m for you. She paused, looked away. My hands were thick and stupid, my heart flopping. You’re my person. She lifted the pen again and wrote. I think this is passion I think this is true.

  Do you? she wrote. I started to look over at her, but then, unexpectedly, she touched my hand, tracing lightly between my fingers. Her hand jumped a little. Without looking at me, she underlined what she’d just written again, in a single, shaky dark line, Do you?

  Yes. I do. Of course I do. You know I did. You know I do.

  (This is how the broken heart squeals: between tenses. The sticky clutch, the grinding gears, the sound of a ten-car pile-up.)

  This might seem like nothing, the whim of two girls too young to drink legally, but the worst of it is that this connection doesn’t come often, sometimes doesn’t come at all. And once had, it colors everything. If you don’t know what I am talking about, I don’t know whether to say, I hope you never do, or to say, Whatever you do, never settle for anything less.

  You know how there were those things you didn’t know about until you did? Like what a semicolon is used for or what it would feel like to be really kissed. When I turned ten some grown-up said to me, “You’ve entered the double digits,” gloomily or cheerfully I can’t remember, but it didn’t matter because the suggestion seemed so alarming—a life sentence, since you were likely never getting out of the double digits. Suddenly a corner had been turned and I didn’t even know I was turning it. Around that time I started keeping a mental list of things you didn’t know about until you knew, like the arrival of the ATM to our town because once that happened no one ever said, Did you get to the bank? on Fridays anymore because it didn’t matter if you did. Then there was the matter of high school terminology when I was little. I knew you were a senior in the last year but I didn’t know which year was sophomore year and by the time I was ten it seemed like I had passed the moment when it would be okay to ask.

  I tried to glean meaning from context, which is what my grandparents always told me to do, Listen to the word in the sentence. I looked things up a lot in the encyclopedia and learned to be extremely serious about words and about never, ever writing in books, or breaking their spines, or dog-earing their pages. Words were sacrosanct. But my mother was fond of teasing. Once when I was eight, while spending the summer plowing through P.G. Wodehouse, I asked my mother what aspic was and she said serenely, “What does it sound like?” Which left me a little worried. Or once she made me believe that a family friend’s last name was Wasserperson (it was Wasserman), which entertained her and infuriated me. My grandparents did not do this. I don’t like being tricked, but more than that I think being in the state of unknowing, the state of unknowing and asking, deserves honesty and respect. It’s not precisely the same as innocence or ignorance even, it’s another state of being, which can be hard to say goodbye to mostly because you never know when you are going to shapeshift into a new state of being until you do. It’s dizzying to think about really, the constant rollover.

  For example: I used to babysit for this little boy I adored, named Matthew. He had just turned six years old, and we’d been practicing his letters for a while and then suddenly one afternoon he’d begun to read. Very soon after that we were in the car on the way to his swim lesson, and he burst into tears because, he said, no one had ever told him that once he could read, he would never be able not to read again. He had understood reading to be a consensual, voluntary process, which would mean that he could read whenever he chose, but he didn’t have to read if he didn’t want to. But now and forever when he saw a stop sign, he would have to read Stop. He would have to read Yield and Construction Ahead and Two for One at Wendy’s! and Are You On the Right Road? And that was just the beginning. He had no idea the full scope of what he was going to have to read or the full extent to which he was going to be a prisoner to literacy. But he had an inkling. And he felt furious and betrayed. Which I completely understand.

  Sometimes you can be crafty with change, outmaneuver it a little. Like when I finally got glasses in ninth grade. I was walking on Hovey Lane and I looked up into a circus tent of maple tree leaves with my new glasses on and I was amazed because the leaves had edges. I had needed glasses for at least six years but wasn’t having any of it. Instead I had gotten so I could distinguish the walks and general outlines of people from way far away down the hall in school, and I was an excellent note taker because I could never see the board. But all that time, I had had no real idea that leaves over my head, the leaves I walked under almost every day, spring, summer, and fall, had edges. The definition was extraordinary, heartbreaking. Then I took off my glasses and saw the familiar comforting blur of gold and green, the dappled light, the big, peaceful movement. I love having bad eyesight because I can see either with soft focus—shut the world out, push it to the gently fuzzy periphery, and see only what’s right in front of me—or I can see with cold sharp brisk vision, the way most other people do. But I get to choose.

  It wasn’t like that with touch and S
arah, she opened me up and revealed me and there was no choice and no going back. Whatever I’m for, I’m for you.

  In fairy tales when the princess signs away her firstborn and then whinges about it later, I always thought, listen you dumb cluck you don’t mess with the spirit world you don’t mess with the fairies or the gods, if you sign on the dotted line or your word’s as good as a signature then you better believe you will pay the price and that oath is irrevocable. But when the time came, I signed, I promised, I was all in and I didn’t even know it had happened. It’s hard when you don’t know something’s irrevocable until it is.

  PART 3

  THE END OF THE FAMILIAR,

  THE BEGINNING OF THE END

  CHAPTER 22

  The first Sunday morning in August, I went along with Sarah and Eddy and Luke to the Swap Shop, the community exchange on Cole’s Neck Road, which was also the Transfer Station and Recycling Center, or the dump. They were on a mission to find whatever the summer people had started to leave behind. I’d only ever been there to leave garbage before, never stopped in to the Swap Shop to look around. It turned out to be full to the brim with dishes, glassware, pots, pans, games, puzzles, toys, lamps, speakers, sporting goods, LPs, umbrellas, chairs, and books.

  “It’s funny to go trash picking like this,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a far cry from dumpster diving,” said Luke robustly. “There’s great stuff here. It’s remarkable what people will throw away or leave behind.”

  “Look at this!” said Sarah. She was balancing on a pile of old cushions and she had hold of the arm of a blue and green upholstered armchair from a recently deposited collection. “I could get this back to New York in the truck easily. It’s beautiful. Nina, come and help me.”

  “Why do you want that?” Eddy asked. “You have furniture.”

  “Why not? And anyway it’s beautiful. It’s only got one chip on its foot. It’s completely sturdy.” She kicked the pillows away, dragged the chair a little way away from its pile, and sat on it. When I walked over, she grabbed me around the waist and pulled me in as well.