Migratory Animals (33 page)

As she brushed her teeth and washed her face, Alyce tried to ignore the stacks of boxes everywhere, symbols of impending departure; the fellowship at the ranch was coming to a close next month. It hurt to leave. It felt good to hurt.

The late winter and early spring had been lively: White-tailed does showing up with their wobbly fawns, just as night lifted, to eat the corn Alyce left at the edges of the dewy yard. Wild turkeys mating and on the move, the hens crouching low to scour and peck the ground for worms and seeds, all the while seeming to ignore
the gobbling blue-headed males attempting to get their attention by prancing in front of them, displaying enormous fans of feathers, regalia that sprang forth from their bodies like jazz-hands, like the images of turkeys children make at school by tracing their fingers. Alyce had also had her first and only encounter with a diamondback rattlesnake when, walking back up the gravel path from the swimming hole, she'd been startled by the hiss and rattle of a slithery dee coiled in the road. Her heart beat faster in her chest:
I live. I live. I live.

The yucca were in bloom, white flowers pluming up into soft cotton clouds, and the prickly pear were opening their paper-thin purple and yellow flowers, probably fruiting soon, although it was unlikely Alyce would get to see one of the sweet juicy bulbs before the raccoons and possums picked them off. In the last week, she'd seen a pair of painted buntings outside her casement window and at least one rose-breasted grosbeak, covered in geometric swaths of red, white, and black. According to the bird book on the shelf, grosbeaks shouldn't have been in the Hill Country yet, but there was no mistaking it. The ranch seemed to attract vagrant birds, those aberrant individuals that, for reasons of strange weather or a reversed compass or simple curiosity, ended up out of the migratory range of their more normal counterparts.

Alyce waited for her husband on the porch in the dark, like a teenager, dying for a cigarette though she hadn't smoked in years. She felt a strange shift in her belly—butterflies—and remembered the fairy-tale rhyme her mother used to chant, whispering it aloud:

Spindle, my spindle,

haste, haste thee away,

and here to my house

bring the wooer, I pray.

For a moment Alyce imagined herself a poor woman in a cottage in the woods, tossing her spindle into the thicket like a fisherman flings his line.

But she didn't believe in spells. She and Harry couldn't go back, though she could pretend for a few hours. Feeling things she knew were ultimately pointless, that changed nothing, and yet were also nice in their way. For just a moment to believe entropy was reversible.

Harry drove up to the house slowly, headlights off. He stepped out of the car wearing blue pajamas and flip-flops and a puffy jacket. His face looked white in the moonlight; two little pockets of shadows rested in his dimples when he smiled. She looked at him, flesh and blood, and felt the aftertaste of desire on her tongue.

As he walked up the steps of the porch, she unbuttoned her shirt. It was chilly, the March air hitting her nipples like a shock. She took a sharp breath in. Then, Harry covered her chest and stomach with his, enveloping her as she walked them backward through the door. Like a film moving in reverse, they glided through the living room, past her studio, past the kitchen, past the boys' room where they stopped and lightly clicked the door shut, the greenish glow of a night-light escaping beneath the crack.

As they reached the master bedroom, goose bumps broke out on Alyce's shoulders and arms, and she remembered what she said after they made up from their first big fight when they were only twenty-one years old: “I discovered I fancy you again.” She felt the pricks of hair along the back of Harry's head and neck. The same body. The same touch. The same movements as they found their rhythm. It could have been any of the hundreds of times they'd made love. It was all those times. There was the cadence of the clock on the wall, its bright silver hands moving forward with controlled relish. The blanket sliding off the mattress. The creak of the floor.

And afterward, as they lay on the bed, spent, Alyce could see in Harry's face what he was too afraid to say:
I believed my love would always be enough.

Alyce stared at him and thought:
Love was never enough.
Not by itself. She felt the presence of the tapestry in the other room as if it were a living being. Listening. Waiting for her.

Voices ricocheted off the walls of the small gallery space. Alyce skimmed her hand along the bar and plopped a lime into her seltzer water so it looked like she was drinking a gin and tonic. Her new therapist encouraged a multipronged approach. Medication but also exercise and vegetables and cutting back on the drinking. Alyce's response, turning her cheek to the cool leather of the therapist's Mission-style recliner, had been to shrug and say, “Sure.” Why the hell not.

Alyce looked evenly at the wheeling groups of people chatting and spearing cubes of smoked Gouda and thought:
At least it was a good turnout.
Most of the attendees were friends and weavers, otherwise known as “people without enough money” to buy the biggest tapestry she'd ever made, eight by six feet (the width limited to the width of her loom).

The event was a closing reception for her fellowship at the ranch, and it seemed none of the local newspapers or magazines had decided to cover or review it. Not a single art critic in the house. Her masterpiece, her personal apex, greeted not with applause, not with jeers, but with a distracted silence.

She watched as Flannery, Steven, and Lou huddled in one corner, Flan's hands behind her back, fingers brushing the wall. They were drinking and probably talking politics, guessed Alyce, from the way their faces telegraphed mutual disgust and frustration.

When Lou and Steven had arrived at the gallery, late and flustered from trying to park downtown on a weekend, Lou had looked up at
the tapestry saying, “I thought you said you were weaving images of us? You changed your mind?” Alyce had smiled and shrugged. Lou didn't see what Alyce saw, but that was all right. The tapestry wasn't really for her.

An older friend who used to weave but didn't anymore came up to Alyce with a plastic bag full of beautiful, vintage silk scarves she said she no longer had use for. The material looked too old and weak for the beaters of Alyce's loom, but she accepted them graciously.

Brandon and Santiago lorded over the spinach dip, the scientist gesticulating and trying to explain something to the architect, who leaned back, his gaze both skeptical and amused. Some of Harry's friends from his private high school in Houston meandered about, nodding at Alyce and looking vaguely uncomfortable, a common response to impending divorce. A few feet away, Alyce and Harry's old Realtor stood in front of the tapestry. He looked serious, leaning back with his large arms crossed.

Next to her tapestry was a pasted white cardboard label with the piece's title in italics:
Migratory Animals
. The other walls of the space were lined with black-and-white photographs of her at the loom in the ranch studio—the fellowship had sent two photography majors from the university to take them. She thought the images turned out shadowy and formal, like old daguerreotypes taken on the frontier of stern women with beak noses and stiff black dresses.
Don't smile
, the young photographer with spiky hair had told her—
it will look better if you don't smile.

Alyce moved toward the middle of the room, looking up at the flock looking back at her. A robin, a black-capped chickadee, a golden warbler, a finch, a tufted titmouse, a purple martin, a mockingbird, and a kingfisher. All flying, for a moment, the moment captured here, in the same direction, feeling the same swift current, powered fliers and gliders both. The mosaic flock flew in inky blackness
across a strip of stars, a silver river going in the opposite direction, the two configurations poised in an X. The birds were crossing the silver river, over it, beyond it somewhere. It didn't matter where. Robin had not yet killed Bear, not yet tossed the scene in blood from his arrow. It was a story frozen en media res.

With juicy yarns and sharp colors, Alyce had used her brocade technique to make the birds themselves emerge sculpturally from the background, which was more subtly constructed with thin, slippery silks, each bird framed by a ribbony strip where the weft itself showed through, creating a halo effect. The birds seemed to be flying in a closer plane to the viewers than the rest of the scene, and it was not just a trick of perspective but of the concrete elements of yarn and weave.

Alyce had been conditioned never to touch art hung on walls, but with tapestry it was more difficult not to obey the impulse to reach, to press one's body and face directly into the cloth, absorbing it tactilely through osmosis. And this one was hers and so she could. Who would stop her? The fabric was so soft she thought about ripping it down and flinging it around her shoulders and walking out.

From up close, the birds no longer looked like a flock but were abstracted into geometric shapes, a series of curves and sharp points. The hand-dyed silks and wools were shaded with so many colors that it was impossible to tell exactly where one thread started and another stopped.

“Mom, what are you doing?” she heard her son Jake ask from behind her.

Alyce backed up, removing her face from the cloth.

The boys were characteristically disheveled but well dressed in matching navy jackets with fake brass buttons. Looking at her sons as they tugged self-consciously on their clothes, she thought maybe it was time to stop dressing them alike. “Well? Do you like it?”

“It's nice.” Jake smiled shyly.

“We like it,” added Ian, a step behind him, slurping on a sucker, “but birds aren't our favorite animal anymore.”

Alyce leaned down to kiss them each on the forehead. Maybe the tapestry only absorbed the energies that had been put into it, neither transmitting nor refracting any of Alyce's intentions. Her own sons were oblivious. All the painstaking hours and lost stories poured into it just for them.

“Look at this, Mom,” Ian commanded, showing her the chewy chocolate he'd found in the center of his lollipop, as though no one had ever discovered it before.

“Watch me, Mom. Are you watching?” asked Jake, his arms stretched wide, pinwheeling through the air, almost knocking over an older couple dressed in black. “I'm one of your birds.”

Kids were always asking you to watch them, thought Alyce, to look at whatever they'd done or found. This confirmed to Alyce what she'd been lately discovering: her real job as a parent was her presence: her ability to watch, to look, to stand witness at the passage of Jake's and Ian's lives. Not for them to watch or look or stand witness to her tapestry and what it said about the passage of her own life. Maybe nobody saw what Alyce saw in the tapestry because it wasn't real. It was her own self-serving narrative. Her own subjective story used to justify her actions.

“Come on, kiddos. Daddy's bedtime,” said Harry, squeezing Alyce's shoulder. He told them to say good night to their mother, and they did so reluctantly, instinctively reaching for Harry's hands. He congratulated her again on
Migratory Animals
, which in a kindhearted overstatement he called stunning. They were still at that place, the one before the legal wrangling begins in earnest and before the small cracks of bitterness start to spread, where they couldn't get used to not supporting each other.

As he turned to leave, Harry looked over his shoulder and said, “Do you remember the metal birds you hung from my ceiling?”

Alyce smiled but shook her head no—metal birds?—fingering the glossy jet beads tied in a knot at her breastplate, the ones her mother had brought the last time she visited Austin, which must have been over two years ago now.

“I was thinking about them the other day,” continued Harry. “Those birds, the way they moved when you turned on the ceiling fan. They were stunning, too, you know.”

And then Harry was gone. And Alyce was alone again, with what was left of the flock.

At that moment, Alyce could almost admit what would really happen: She would move into a duplex in Duvalier Place—a neighborhood more romantic-sounding than romantic. She would be a renter again, like when she was just out of college, someone else in charge of mowing the lawn and painting the walls and calling the plumber. Her life would become less cluttered. The boys would stay with her on weekends. She would watch the light change in the kitchen from morning to evening, autumn to spring, and she would notice it because she would be alone. She would go on living.

It was a step in her most important recovery. She was a mother, which was sometimes harder than eating and exercising and drinking less. One day at a time and all that. As her therapist had acknowledged, maybe Alyce wasn't one of those women who was better off with children than she was without them. But the only way to ever know something like that for sure was to live two lives. And Alyce barely had time and energy for this one.

Migratory Animals
might have been the last real piece of art Alyce would ever make. Not because it was really so different in style or staidness than the William Morris
Woodpeckers in an Orange Tree
that had been her original plan. But just because it was hers. It was all of theirs. It was finished.

From now on Alyce would only weave brightly colored table runners, blankets, and scarves with pattern names like “rose path” and “bird's eye” and sell them at festivals and boutiques around the state. She would make her own living, if not a particularly good one. She would become more efficient, warping two to four articles of clothing onto the loom at once. She wouldn't have to pay attention in the same way she did for tapestry, and could fall into a rhythm, one arm throwing the boat shuttle as the other worked the beater, her bare feet tapping back and forth on the treadles.