The State We're In: Maine Stories (2 page)

“So what did you write about?” Angie said, her eyes downcast. “I can’t even believe this is what we have to talk to each other about. I guess we could just shut up and not say anything.”

“I thought T. G. was coming down tonight,” Jocelyn said.

“Tell her,” Angie said to Zelda.

“What? Like you can’t? He’s in the ER getting his stomach pumped. He texted me. He put down a bottle of Ambien, or something, and barfed it all up on Stoli. The dog was licking his face when his father walked in.”

“No way,” Jocelyn said.

“Your
boooooooy
friend,” Zelda said. “Or at least, one of the few guys in the class who isn’t a sociopath, or something. That kid that cuts himself? Way gross! All that blood getting flicked around under the desk. We could get AIDS.”

“The ER,” Jocelyn echoed. “Wow.”

“He’ll text when he’s out.” Zelda shrugged.

“Should we visit him, or something?” Angie said suddenly.

“They don’t let friends visit each other in the ER,” Jocelyn said.

“Well, I would,” Zelda said. “It would be good for morale.”

“That’s the Army or something,” Angie said. “Mo-raaaale,” she drawled.

The stars were out over the water. Jocelyn thought the slight heavy feeling in her stomach might be because she was about to get her period. Her mother had had a hysterectomy. It was one of the reasons she’d sent Jocelyn to her aunt and uncle’s. She felt so weak and sick. And Bettina had made such a pitch for the “accelerated” summer program. What did that mean? Like you never put on the brake? If she could, she’d pull up a hand brake. Just WHAM! and even with the seat belt she’d be nose to nose with the windshield, the car would stop so suddenly.

“I wrote about Lupine,” she said. “I couldn’t get the Magical Realism part about them, though. I’m also so retarded, I got the wrong word, but my uncle knew what flowers I meant. I think I’m going to figure out a way the whole field can lift up and become the sky, or something.”

“It gets Raptured?” Zelda said.

“And it would turn out that we’re really walking in the sky and then there’s this flash of Earth, and then the planet revolves, or something. I mean, she’d go with anything, if the grammar was correct.”

Zelda laughed. Jocelyn noticed that she’d painted her toes pale green.

“When I was little, my parents had a sleeping porch. We’d all three of us be out there in July and most of August. Then my father closed it in,” Angie said.

“My mother’s worried about losing our house. She says she’s getting a reverse mortgage, but Uncle Raleigh says she is not. He’s trying to find a job. He quit the other one because he had to stand up all day, but now he wishes he hadn’t.”

“What age are those people?” Angie asked.

“He’s like ten years older than my mother. He’s sixty.”

“Sixty. I can’t even imagine my parents at sixty. They had me when they were twenty, so they’re thirty-six. Sixty!” Angie said. “I guess people live longer now.”

“That’s Cassiopeia,” Zelda said, twining her scarf around her throat, then tugging it down. “Why wouldn’t the Big Dipper be out?”

“It’s too depressed. It’s at home, writing an essay: ‘My Life as the Big Dipper,’ ” Jocelyn said. “I’ve got to fix the end of my essay. I said I’d be back in an hour. That gives me how much time before I have to go?”

Zelda checked her cell phone. “Twenty-five minutes, more or less,” she said. “I didn’t notice exactly when you came.”

Jocelyn thought she might just drive past the hospital. She could go in and ask if he was okay, even if they wouldn’t tell her anything. When her own mother was hospitalized, they wouldn’t tell her anything. They’d only tell Bettina. And Raleigh, too, though he was never at the hospital because he had an anxiety thing if he walked into one. He had to carry smelling salts in sealed packets, like substitute sugar. She and Raleigh had gone to matinees—he was pretty great about that; he’d watch anything—and they’d eaten wherever she wanted, so she’d ordered a lot of really fresh, tasty stuff at Chipotle, and then they’d bought takeout for BLT, which always leaked out of the container, though neither Raleigh nor she could ever figure out how that happened every time.

“My parents were married on the beach in Nantucket,” Angie said. “There was a string quartet, with my cousin playing cello and worried all the time about sand blowing into it, apparently. I was inside Mom. I was attending as a fetus.”

“I never want to get married,” Zelda said. “Quote me on that if I say I’m engaged.”

“I will,” Angie said. “I think we should both skip the whole marriage thing and hope we turn into lesbians.”

“Ugh,” Zelda said.

“Maybe I’ll give Uncle Raleigh a break and head back early,” Jocelyn said. “He’s really been supernice to me, especially considering how oppressed he is.”

“Maybe you can marry us before you go. People do it with just some certificate they get over the Internet, anyway.” Angie grabbed Zelda’s hand. Zelda pulled her hand back. “Say, ‘I marry you, I hereby marry you. You are now married,’ ” she said.

“What is that country where you can say, ‘I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you’ and it’s true?” Jocelyn said.

“You made that up,” Angie said.

“No, really. It’s true.”

“Because NPR said it, or something?” Zelda said, taking Angie’s hand. “Oh, darling, NPR says we’re divorced!” she said.

Jocelyn laughed and toed a little wet sand toward them. It was their ritual: they’d send some wet sand in the other’s direction, sand like instantly appearing wrinkles, or like a pug dog’s scruff. Angie’s mother had two pugs. They snorted all night and kept everyone awake. Angie could do a very funny imitation of everyone: her distraught mother, talking to the dogs; her father, throwing them out in the middle of the night; the pugs, snorting.

“Okay, well, you ace it with your story about flowers in the sky, your ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ story,” Zelda said. She hated for people to go. She always said something to keep them. She toed another bit of wet sand in Jocelyn’s direction. It looked like shit. That was what it looked like, wet and more brown than gray.

*  *  *

She drove through the parking lot of the hospital, but didn’t go in. She turned on the radio and heard that rain and thunder were predicted later, and also the next day. Maybe it would rain out her uncle’s golf game.

She almost forgot the pizza, it was such a stupid thing to do—eating another dinner at almost ten o’clock at night. She made a U-turn and pulled into the parking lot, but she wasn’t the only person who’d forgotten. The owner’s son was sponging off tables, saying that nobody’d phoned in an order. She wondered if she should just ask for a small plain pizza and get points with her aunt, but she decided no—her aunt could really do without a pizza. She bought a ginger ale in a bottle that exploded all over her when she unscrewed the cap. “Shit!” she said, which brought the owner to the counter. His son shrugged, acknowledging what had happened, but making no comment. “So what’s this? Did you shake the bottle?” Mister Rogers said. It wasn’t his real name, it was his nickname, behind his back, because he always said “Beautiful day” to adults, and T. G. had pointed out that Mister Rogers said, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” Or, at least, the guy who imitated him on the old
Saturday Night Live
did.

She shook her head. A question like that didn’t even deserve a response. The guys did that, sometimes. Would she do it? A girl?

Then came the very loud sound of shattering glass. She ducked, thinking a car was coming in right through the front windows. Mister Rogers and his son ducked, too, and the sponge flew across the room. Mister Rogers quickly got out of his crouch and ran toward the door.

There stood Ms. Nementhal. In a halter top and blue Bermuda shorts, Ms. Nementhal was wincing, her arms clasping her shoulders, her mouth agape. Someone had thrown bottles out of a car window, lots of them, it turned out. Could it have been on purpose? Who littered that way anymore? One had made a huge crack in one of the front windows. “Oh, Jesus,” the owner’s son moaned. “Are you okay?” he said to Ms. Nementhal.

“What was that?” she said, hysterically. “WHAT WAS THAT?”

“Trash. Every year it’s worse trash,” Mister Rogers said. “You’re all right, ma’am? Is that a little cut on your leg?”

“Shit, shit, shit,” the owner’s son said, tapping his cell phone. “That was probably that pond scum, Winston Bales.” He turned away. Behind Ms. Nementhal were several broken bottles, their necks scattered in one direction, glass strewn across the parking lot. There was a cut on her leg. She was bent over, examining it, her long hair obscuring any expression, and she hadn’t responded to the question. She hadn’t said one thing, though everybody knew she could monologue for hours. The owner must not know who she was. How would he? Some kid from Yale with her first summer job (as the newspaper report would later inform everyone), a volunteer in a program for troubled teens. They were not troubled! They weren’t! Jocelyn had not had the program advertised to her that way. What, exactly, was she troubled about?

One thing would be having to finish her essay, trying to write in a way that was credible about Earth being reversed with the sky; flowers sparkling instead of stars, the stars all fallen around everyone’s feet. A
detritus
(was that too big a word?) of stars. What would she be going for, though? Was that just another C-plus idea, or would something like that be Magical Realism?

THE FLEDGLING

S
he was hurrying out of the house, late for an appointment, purse slung over one shoulder, canvas shopping bag in her hand. A squawk came from the oak tree. Somewhere nearby a car backfired, but the squawking bird wasn’t silenced. It flew down one branch and sat at the tip of another, weighing it down, continuing to make the sound, less a squawk than a piercing cry.

The flapping of wings stopped her. Was the bird dive-bombing her, or just having an awkward moment? It flew back into the tree and sat again on a lower branch. Then she heard the second sound, the little sound, the curious tinkle of wind chimes, though she did not have wind chimes, thinking them obnoxious. But it was unmistakably the sound of glass rattling. You could hardly hear it above what were now two, no three noisy birds; medium-size, common birds of ordinary color she should have known the name of, but if they weren’t cardinals or mourning doves, she didn’t know birds’ names. Well, she knew a grackle when she saw one. Recently, flying squirrels had gotten into the attic and multiplied like crazy, the animal control guy going up every day on the ladder to check the traps until seventeen of them were caught. The mother, then the only remaining baby, old enough to go to college and drink beer if it had been human, were the last to go. They were billed by the day.

Birds! What’s happening here? Might a storm be on the way?

Tinkle, tinkle. Then nothing. One more bird flying into the tree, two of the three already lifting off, one landing on the lawn and making the sound over and over, standing there in the grass. No more tinkling sound, no more pseudo-wind-chime susurration, but really: how dumb could she be? It was there, in the blue recycling bin, still filled with wine bottles, seltzer bottles, milk containers, a crushed Budweiser can she’d picked up out of the road (they were not the sort to drink Budweiser) the day before. Also in the recycling bin, where dirty water pooled in a corner, was a tiny fledgling, every now and then beating its wings futilely, voicing an almost silent burble. Right there in the dark water that was probably mostly rainwater, mixed with a bit of undrunk red wine, a splash of Coke that leaked out when the can was tossed. The little bird just looked like an animated piece of crap, its nondescript color that of sludge, some pollen dusting the tops of the bottles and cans, a small fallen branch across one corner like those old-fashioned picture darts her mother used to lick to stick her baby pictures in an album. There had been hundreds of them, but the photographic record fizzled out pretty much where it should have: with her, knobby-kneed, pigtailed, and ribboned, on the steps outside the building where she went to kindergarten.

You weren’t supposed to touch birds, because they wouldn’t be allowed back in the nest, right? If you got your human smell on them. Or was that an old wives’ tale? Were there still old wives who told tales, or did everyone know everything now, including how to remove red wine stains, how to make your tablecloth soft, how to keep salt from getting moist in the container? Oh, it was a world of rice now, very little ingested because quinoa was so popular, that and tabouli and spelt, though rice grains were still put in saltshakers. Rice was still thrown at weddings. Certain weddings.

Poor little dirty sad frightened bird! Poor distraught elders! They all feared the worst scenario: death by drowning; death by starvation; an ugly end with no one but them as witnesses, and they could do nothing except send up a storm of sound and hope either the gods, or the humans who acted like gods, would do the right thing, that one of them would be the savior. She was obviously that, staring nervously for only a few seconds before dropping everything, checking her impulse to plunge in her hand, running inside for the oven mitts, guaranteed to be safe for food cooked up to 450 degrees.

Into the house she ran, out of the house she ran, hands in mitts. But she didn’t want to crush it. It was so small. So sodden. The skin of its tiny head looked like the crow’s-feet fanning out from the corners of her eyes.

The birds were making a terrible sound, two on the ground as if facing off with her, yet much too far away. Two others sitting high up in the tree were making the loudest noise. She was capable of reaching in, even though the mitts made the use of her hands awkward, to say the least, and lifting out the little thing and putting it on the walkway, where she hoped all traces of Roundup were gone from the spraying done by the lawn service, to keep weeds from sprouting in the sand between bricks . . . maybe put it on the grass. Though it looked like it would need all the traction it could get. What was the scenario? She could retreat to the house or go to the car and turn on the AC and watch in her rearview mirror to see Mother Bird swoop down and—however she did it—enfold Baby Bird somehow, and lift it again to the nest, which she imagined she saw—either that or some dead leaves—midtree. Well, it was nature. It would work out. Of course it would. She kept focusing on the near future because the little bird was cupped in her oven mitts now. When suddenly she remembered something she had forgotten for . . . well, for most of her life. It was a poem that began “Good-bye, little fledgling, fly away.” Her grandmother, who’d been such a good baker, had placed in the center of her famous apple pies made with three kinds of apples a little black bird with an open beak, a pie bird, to release steam. A simplified version of a bird, a little objet, the clever baker’s secret to a perfect pie.