The Bird Sisters (10 page)

While other people called her Goldilocks, Milly hardly noticed that her hair was more beautiful than anyone else’s. Every morning she twirled it into a bun and pinned it the way their mother had taught her. What she never saw was the way it trailed down her back like yellow silk just after she’d brushed it out. Each morning Twiss would wake up to that view, which was like waking up to a bright sun—all the possibilities that came with fine weather. And that was just her hair.

“Beauty gives you choices,” their father said to Milly. “Ugliness doesn’t.”

He glanced at the clothesline, where Bett was unpinning linens and dropping them into the wicker basket beside her feet.

“What about me?” Twiss said.

“Your hands belong around a golf club,” their father said.

“What about my hands?” Milly said.

Their father drew them to him. “You both deserve more than this.”

“I’m glad I don’t have to get married,” Twiss said. “The boys in my class have bat breath. One of them has warts all over his fingers. He wipes them on the girls he likes.”

Their father laughed. “That sounds about right,” he said, and went back into the barn to continue working on whatever he was working on. Though he no longer lived in the house, he still seemed to know what went on inside of it, as if he’d been looking through a window or listening on the other side of a door. He knew, for instance, that Twiss had chopped off the hair on the left side of her head one night when she was bored and that Milly had evened it out for her, creating a look their father called charming and a little boyish.

“Bye, Dad!” the girls said and went back to their chores, glancing over their shoulders whenever the grass around them stirred or a bird chirped or a frog hopped into the pond, although they never witnessed what they felt: their father watching over them.

In the afternoons, when they’d checked the last item off their lists, they were free to roam around as they pleased. Bett was free, too. On hot days, the three of them would walk down to the river to swim. Bett didn’t have a bathing suit, so their mother lent Bett her black one, which Bett was too thin to fill out. Whenever it got wet, it bloused in the places it was supposed to be tight. Black did nothing for her pale coloring either, according to Twiss’s mother, who said that against the material Bett’s skin looked like ice.

Twiss liked that she could see the inner workings of Bett’s circulatory system, the complicated patterns of blue webbing that kept her cousin alive. If you didn’t know her, you’d think a puff of wind might knock her over, but when you did, you knew Bett was as capable as anyone else. She just didn’t look good in a bathing suit. That was the beauty of her.

Twiss wore one of her father’s undershirts over her bathing suit because she wouldn’t normally walk around the house in just her underwear and didn’t see why she should do so in a public space. She didn’t like the idea of anyone seeing the little black hairs that had begun to sprout like wires beneath her underarms or the ones that marched up from her knees to her inner thighs to the other place she didn’t like the idea of anybody seeing either.

Milly’s was the only body that didn’t merit hiding. Her bathing suit dipped in all the right places and hugged all the other ones. The suit was made of iridescent green crepe and matched the luminous color of her eyes.

Before the three of them worked up the courage to jump into the water from the wooden boat launch, they’d stand around in their suits. In June, although the air had already reached temperatures Twiss called
swimtastic!
, the water was still cold. The shock of it against their skin was something they could never prepare for, but always recovered from.

While they dawdled on the dock, warming their feet on the wood planks and hopping around to avoid the carpenter ants, men driving over the County C bridge slowed down to admire Milly. They tipped their hats in her direction.

“That’s disgusting!” Twiss said one day. She put herself between Milly and the men on the bridge. “They’re married. That one has three daughters.”

“You can’t blame them,” Bett said.

“He’s old enough to be our father,” Twiss said.

“But he’s not,” Bett said, and jumped into the water.

Out of the three of them, Milly was the most graceful swimmer. Twiss always felt a little like she was drowning. She’d thrash and kick to stay above the surface, swallow a mouthful of water, and dip below the waterline despite her best efforts. Bett’s swimming style fell somewhere in between theirs. She unsettled the water plenty, but moved through it in a quick, measured way. She said that’s how people had to swim in Deadwater.

“There’s a lake spirit,” she said.

“What kind?” Twiss said.

“One that eats canoes,” Bett said.

The three of them would swim out to Milly and Twiss’s old sandbar, which still looked like an exclamation point or a question mark depending on the speed of the current, but no longer elicited corresponding modes of conversation from them. There were new, more interesting games to play.

Bett had introduced them to Truth or Consequences.

“Go outside, circle the house twice, and come back up,” she’d said to Twiss for her first consequence on their first night all together. “Without clothes on.”

“Naked?” Milly had said.

“It’s more risky,” Bett said.

Even though Twiss could have easily told a truth, she pretended she couldn’t, although she didn’t know why since she didn’t get any particular thrill from tossing her robe on the porch and running a lap around the house without her clothes on, other than the thrill of impressing Bett and forcing her to think up other consequences for her.

“Go up to the attic,” Bett said to Twiss for her second consequence. “Spend an entire minute alone in the dark and say ‘Bloody Mary’ three times.”

At night, the attic felt strange and unfamiliar even though the boxes up there contained familiar keepsakes from the past that had been deemed useless but not useless enough to throw away. Among the boxes was the wooden rocking horse she and Milly had played with as girls and the model airplane Twiss had abandoned building when she learned it would never fly. There was also her mother’s serving platter from Hungary and her father’s first complete set of golf clubs, which he’d worked three jobs to buy when he was fourteen.

He said he’d never worked so hard for anything except the institution of marriage, which had made Twiss’s mother laugh heartily but not unkindly. “You’ve got quite the memory, dear husband. Dementia, I think that’s called.”

“You win, dear wife,” her father had said, also laughing. “Someone gave me the clubs.”

Standing up in the attic felt like standing in a graveyard. Twiss wasn’t frightened, exactly, but she didn’t feel like invoking the spirit of Bloody Mary and waiting for a chopped-off head or the body to which it belonged to pop out of one of the boxes either.

“Next time it’s truth,” Bett said when Twiss finally crept back down the stairs. “Consequences are obviously too easy for you.”

For Milly, both options were difficult. She wasn’t the type to prance around the yard without her underwear, nor was she the type to say the full truth of what was on her mind. Not that she was a liar; her explanations simply stopped where most people’s began. And Bett wasn’t all that fair to her. She’d ask questions designed to expose whatever secrets Milly kept.

“How old were you when you got your monthly?” she asked one night, which even Twiss didn’t know the answer to.

The two of them didn’t talk about what had happened to their bodies. One day, it was okay for them to walk from the bathroom to their bedroom in their towels and the next day it wasn’t, just as one day they didn’t wear brassieres and the next day they did. Twiss had never gotten used to the lumps beneath her shirts, the tops of which looked like root beer gumdrops. She hated root beer and knew Milly didn’t like it either. When Twiss looked in the mirror, she saw two people: the person she used to be and the fleshy imposter who had taken her over.
Go away
, she’d say, pinching the soda-colored parts of her skin.
Leave me alone!

“Well?” Bett said to Milly. “How old were you?”

Milly hid her face in her pillow. “Fourteen,” she said, and started to sniffle.

“Miss Milly Prim,” Bett said.

“I got mine last year,” Twiss said. “When did you get yours?”

“When I was nine,” Bett said. “I had to tell my dad.”

“Where was your mom?” Twiss asked.

“On a time-out,” Bett said.

“Like when you’re little?” Milly said.

“No,” Bett said. “Like when you’re unhappy.”

When Milly and Twiss didn’t say anything, Bett said, “Right then, my dad stopped kissing me good night. He said I wasn’t his little girl anymore.”

“We have an outhouse,” she added. “You can imagine the difficulties. Not to mention the wolf spiders that live in there. They’re as big as birds. They have
fur
, for God’s sake.”

“Fur?” Milly said, letting go of her pillow a little bit.

“Hair, if you want to be technical about it,” Bett said.

So far, Deadwater was the most exciting place Twiss had ever heard about. She couldn’t wait to go up there the next summer and marked off the days on her mother’s calendar before her mother had a chance to; instead of an X, she drew a canoe in the square allotted to each passing day. “Do you have a canoe?” she asked Bett.

“We live in the middle of a chain of lakes. How else would we get anywhere?”

Bett added a stick figure to Twiss’s drawing.

“I was born in a canoe,” she said. “I’ll probably die in one too.”

“That’s bad luck,” Twiss said.

“No,” Bett said. “That’s Deadwater.”

Twiss didn’t know how much of what Bett said about Deadwater was true, but she chose to believe her cousin’s stories the same way she chose to believe that the family who drowned in a boating accident last year was actually living at the bottom of the Wisconsin River.

Last June, the family was on a day trip when a storm came up on the river. The whitecaps swamped their johnboat and overturned it. The two children, girls in elementary school, were sitting on their orange life preservers instead of wearing them; either they weren’t very smart or they didn’t go out on the river very often. The parents didn’t see the necessity of having life preservers for themselves and swam as well as you’d expect people to swim fully clothed. The father was wearing steel-toed boots. The mother was wearing heeled oxfords. The children were barefoot and stayed afloat the longest.

When Twiss imagined the family at the bottom of the river, she didn’t see willowy spirits swaying like river grass; she saw a rosy-cheeked family sitting at a kitchen table made out of driftwood, discussing the day’s plans.

“What shall we do today, dearest?” the mother would say to the father.

“Let’s ask the children what they’d like to do,” the father would say.