Zoe
She tried to be the first to speak. It wasn't that she wanted to be nice, put them at ease; it was her way of warning them not to be, of setting the tone she did best: bemused, even ironic, but formal. She never wanted any of them thinking she was someone to cultivate. Whenever those voices, low and strained, interrupted her life downstairs, whether they came late at night from the front hall or mornings from the kitchen, she'd slip into the one-piece camouflage suit she used as a bathrobe, wrap the belt twice around her slim waist, and ascend to meet her mother's latest. She liked to catch him with breakfast in his mouth, or romance on his mind, and then before he could compose himself, announce, "I am Zoe, her daughter," offering a little bow and a graceful hand, limp as japonica.
It usually left him stammering, fumblingthis blend of childlike respect and self-possession. If he'd already begun to imagine her mother recharging his life with pleasure and purpose, Zoe's winsome presence could make such visions more intense, then tip them into unsettling. Though he'd never gone in for kids before, he found himself thinking at first how agreeable it would be to have a delicate creature like her around, slender, long-legged, with pale freckles across her nose and auburn hair. These days she has it bobbed at the ears, curling up shorter in back above a softly fringed nape. But if he thought for a moment how much the child must know, her poise could seem ominousall the things he didn't know, hungered to find out, might not want to hear.
"So what's it like, living with her?" one of them asked Zoe once, as if he expected soon to be sharing the experience. He reminded Zoe of a large rabbita confusion of timidity and helpless lust.
"There's never a dull moment," Zoe answered, sweet but nonchalant. "I meet a lot of interesting men." That was stretching things. Most have been rabbits.
Often they felt called upon to tell Zoe, "Your mom's a great lady." Did they think Zoe was responsible for raising her mother and not the other way around? Or that she had a choice of mothers? Or that she couldn't guess what they really meant, that her mother was something else in bed, that they'd never done it to a Sibelius symphony before?
Since the age of five, when her parents split up, Zoe Cameron and her mother, Phyllis Rush, have lived beyond the D.C. Beltway in the Colonies of Virginia, clusters of townhouses subtly tucked into one hundred acres of rolling woods, whose inhabitants have readily paid a little more to get aesthetic design and proximity to nature. Set into the ridge of a hill, with high ceilings and an expanse of glass to the south, Zoe's mother's unit welcomes light, draws it in to challenge her workheavy terra-cotta, here and there a dull giant bronzeset off by white walls. Each piece has been given a woman's name, yet they are only parts of women, global buttocks and thighs, pairs of breasts larger than the heads mounted upon themLeda, Electra, Helen, truncated. They are one reason Zoe has stopped bringing home friends, who tend to stare in stunned silence or whisper words like gross and perverted. Zoe has learned contempt for kids her own age, who cannot understand true art. Yet she hates her mother's women: fat, naked blobs. The bald definition of nipple or vulva makes her sick.
There are more of them on exhibit in the local gallery her mother manages in the Commons. The public tends not to buy them, but Phyllis does enter them in shows and they have won awards, including a purchase prize at the Corcoran. After that a man from The Washington Post came out to photograph Phyllis at home in her skylit studio. Zoe declined to be in any of his shots. He took her mother to dinner in Great Falls. When Zoe came up the next morning to leave for school, he was in the kitchen alone, making raisin toast. He offered her a slice, trying to act as if he owned the place, but she drank her sixteen ounces of water as if he weren't there. It was easier than ever to resist that sweet yeasty aroma, tainted as it was by his male pride.
BUT this Lucasnothing has been easy about him. If only she could go back and start over again with the moment she arrived home in the early afternoon to find his body sticking out from under the sink. Thinking her mother had finally called someone to fix the dishwasher, Zoe set her wide-brimmed hat down on the table and looked on absently as the body twisted and grunted with its efforts. Her hunger had been stubborn that day, conjuring extravagant food fantasies that almost sabotaged a test in precalculus. But she had conquered temptation, and now what she wanted was plenty of water and maybe a carrot to get through until dinner.
"Lemme out of here," came a roar, all of a sudden, followed by bumping sounds and great god's, and the upper part of the man extricated itself from the cabinet. His knuckles were smudged with black, his once-starched shirt was sharply wrinkled, and he rubbed the top of his head ruefully, but when he saw Zoe, his expression flexed in a smile. "Well, look at you," he said. "Aren't you just dressed to kill!"
And not expecting such a remark from a repairman, Zoe, who was known to become transfixed by her own image wherever she found it reflected, who that day was wearing one of her favorite suitsbroadly padded shoulders over a short slim skirt, a blue that turned her eyes bluecould not bring herself to disagree, nor think of anything to say back. She did try her ironic geisha bow, but in the same instant noticed the roaches hurrying over the sill of the sink cabinet and out across the kitchen floor in a dark stream.
Before she knew it she had emitted a soft scream, more out of embarrassment than fear. She had certainly seen roaches in the kitchen before, those nights when she gave in to temptation and felt her way up the stairs in the dark, thinking it was almost like sleepwalking, she was almost not responsible for what she was about to do, forage for food, cookies, bagels, leftover pasta, cinnamon raisin toast drenched in butter. When she turned on the light, there they always were, collected on some vertical surface in clusters of imperceptible activity, and she caught her breath in disgust, but went on to get what she had come for.
"They must have a nest under there," the man said, a little out of breath. He was somehow hopping and stooping at the same time, slapping at the creatures with one of his moccasins. "How about giving me a hand here?"
Zoe looked down helplessly at her clothes, her inch-high patent heels.
"How about insecticide, a spray or something?"
"If we have any, it's in there." She pointed to the cabinet from which they kept coming. The floor around him was awash with brown spots. Some had been hit and were finished moving. "Close the door," Zoe cried. When she realized the sense of her suggestion, she repeated it more calmly.
He smacked the door shut, and the stream was cut off. "Good thinking," he said.
She pursed her lips to hide her pleasure. Producing a fly swatter from the closet in the front hall, she commenced ceremoniously to slap at the remaining roaches from the comfortable distance its handle allowed. "Mother," she called.
"She went to the store," the man said, rubbing his bare foot along his pants leg then replacing his shoe. "I thought I'd keep myself busy until she got back."
That was when Zoe realized he wasn't a plumber and that she had been inexplicably foolish. Her mother, who scorned home maintenance, who refused to spend any time on fixing things, when she could be making something newwhy would her mother suddenly hire a plumber? "I am Zoe, her daughter," she said, with a final stroke of the swatter, but it was too late.
"I assumed as much," the man said. "From the side you're a dead ringer." He introduced himself: Lucas Washburn. He had light almost frizzy hair and eyebrows, no cheekbones to speak of, and his nose must have been broken once and never set straight. His skin was fissured from past acne, and his eyes were a flat, changeless gray. He was not handsome, Zoe decided, but there was something about him. His hair was cropped short, his skin evenly tanned, his khaki pants creased. Cleanin spite of his disarray, he seemed oddly, utterly clean.
"I assumed you were the plumber." Zoe pulled the broom out from beside the refrigerator and began with dignity to sweep roach hulls into a pile.
"I can see why. I hear you're down to one bathtub."
Zoe stiffened at the forced intimacy, the hint of sympathy. She normally did not interfere in her mother's affairs, patiently allowing what Phyllis would call nature to take its course. But this man, with his long cheekless face, who had poked around under their sink, discovered their roacheshe was not at all her mother's type, and the sooner he was history, the better. She said, "Well, it happens to be my bathtub downstairs, which gets pretty inconvenient. One of my mom's quote friends end quote pulled the soap holder off the wall in her tub and half the tiles came with it, and the guest tub has a leak that drips into the front hall. Actually, the whole house is a total wreck." She finished, and made herself laugh, but in the silence that was his reply, she heard her words echo like a blurted confession, false notes, as if something were playing in the background in a different key. Blasé wasn't working.
"If I had my tools," Lucas said, "we could get this sink to drain, and I could take a look at those tubs. Next time I'll bring my tools."
That is a lot to assume, next time, Zoe thought, and to her surprise, that was what she said.
Lucas nodded solemnly then turned his back on her and began washing his hands. Should she explain that her mother had very liberal views, such as, if men and women were allowed to live naturally, without the inhibitions imposed by society, they would choose to spend their nights in each other's beds all the time, different other's beds as the impulse moved them, mornings parting, more often that not, forever? And that was all right with her, Zoe, for it was much worse when a man of her mother's showed up a second time, all twitchy and trembly, and suggested doing something that included her, and her mother, seduced by some transient vision of family, agreed. "I appreciate the warning," Lucas said, drying his long hands finger by finger. Then he added, "But maybe I've got something in common with those guys in there"he jerked his head toward the roach settlement"I'm pretty hard to get rid of."
THAT night her mother and Lucas fixed strip steaks, steamed artichokes, wild rice. As she often did, Phyllis set up small folding tables on the balcony off the living room in view of the sunset, but Lucas moved the hibachi to the backyard below to comply with the county fire code. ("What fire code?" Phyllis asked. She had never heard of any fire code.) Zoe went downstairs to change into a faded denim jumpsuit, espadrilles. She rolled a fuchsia bandana into a headband and tied her curls down, Indian-style. She freshened the strip of pale blue shadow on her lower lids. All the while aware that Lucas was right beyond the glass door, the drapes that don't quite meet, calling arguments up to her mother in favor of well-done. Phyllis stuck to rare. Her face blank and impersonal, Zoe made a last appraisal in the full-length mirror. She pushed a fist into her sucked-in abdomen. I hate my stomach, she thought. You couldn't trust mirrors; they could be designed to make people look thinner; all the ones in stores tricked you that way.
Lucas sawed off huge blocks of meat and swallowed them almost whole. Her mother plucked her artichoke, petal by petal, dragged each one through her lips slowly, her subtly silvered eyelids drooping with the pleasure. She had a strong jaw, and a wide mouth with large teethbut she knew how to recontour her face with light and shade, to make her eyes seem bigger, mysterious. Yes, Zoe had her nose, rising fine and straight from the brow, nostrils flared back, so that if you happened to have a cold or be cold, their moisture was open to view. Zoe had learned to carry her head tilted slightly forward, to make it hard for anyone to see into her nose.
To Lucas's credit he seemed not to be noticing Phyllis's sensual performance. He was expressing his suspicion that her clogged dishwasher and drain stemmed from a failure to scrape dirty dishes thoroughly; a small chicken bone in the trap, for example, was all it took to start an obstruction.
Phyllis threw her head back and laughed. "You sound like my mother," she said.
Lucas wasn't fazed. "You're talking to someone who's trained to eliminate human error." Lucas flew for United; Phyllis had picked him out of the happy-hour crowd in the lounge at Dulles Airport after dropping off a friend.
Phyllis stroked his closest arm. "That's mother all over again."
"Another word for it is accident."
"It's only a dishwasher," Phyllis said, sullenly, and the fatalist in Zoe settled back with the vaguest sense of loss to watch this man ruin things with her mother long before he could get the bathtubs fixed.
In a steady, almost uninflected voice, he was talking improvements. He could see a brick patio in their backyard, and redwood planters and a hexagonal redwood picnic table. Zoe saw clumsy strategy, tinged with pathos. He frankly admitted he was tired of living on the tenth floor of a condo in River Towers. Between his job and the apartments he unpacked in, he never had his feet on the ground. "It's about time I got my feet on the ground," he said.
"You could sprinkle dirt in your socks," Phyllis said.
She was being strangely tolerant; maybe he had touched off an attack of what she called her passion for reality, when practical dailiness, what everyone else did, became the exotic object of curiosity and desire. Lucas was neither suave nor witty. If you sanded his face, he might be handsome. Zoe guessed he had what her mother would call a good body, though she, Zoe, had trouble looking at a male body long enough to form a complete picture of one. She tended to focus on them piece by piece, and they stayed like that in her mind, a jumble of parts. Her mother often said it was an insult to women the way men let themselves go after a certain age, after they had good incomes. Phyllis herself kept her weight down by smoking and thought women should band together and hold men to the same physical standards everyone held women to.
"Why me?" Phyllis asked Lucas, and seemed genuinely to wonder. "For how many years you've been tied to no place particular and been perfectly happy? Why pick on my place? Maybe I like it this way."
"Look at that," Lucas said, pointing above them at a strip of white streaks and blotches on the cedar stain. "Look at the mess those birds have made of your siding. Starlings. They must have a roost in the eaves. I'd have to take care of that before I'd put in a patio right under their flight lines!"
Phyllis pulled forward a lock of her thick dark hair. "I don't begrudge them that. It's nature." She gave a quick yank then let the breeze lift an offending gray strand from her fingers.
"Like roaches under the sink."
Zoe held her breath as her mother lit a cigarette. Was he joking or criticizing? Either way he had no right; either way her mother would finally put him in his place. Then why was she stretching, smiling languidly at his rudeness? "Everyone has them," she said, blowing a plume of smoke. "They're a fact of life."
"You don't have to give in totally," Lucas persisted.
"It isn't in me to go around poisoning things."
Her mother's reasonableness was a puzzle to Zoe. Why him? she kept asking herself, until the answer came to her, all at once, made her a little queasy. It was obviously something to do with sex that gave Lucas this power, this license. Wasn't her mother always declaring that everything came down to that? It must be something sexual he did to her mother or for her, which she, Zoe, for all her determined precocity, had not yet figured out. Then she felt very emptyempty as though she had failed an exam; empty because she didn't want to think of Lucas that way. In the back of her mind, she had been hoping he was different, and she didn't even know she was hoping until he turned out to be the samejust another male, who in the irresistible flux of life must soon disappear. Well, she couldn't care less.
THAT night Zoe ate. Once dead silence told her Lucas and her mother had settled down, she stole upstairs in the dark, removed from the freezer a half gallon of vanilla ice cream and went back down to her room. She sat on the bed, and gazing at the photos of lithe models she had cut from her magazines, began to spoon ice cream into her mouth. Each mouthful hit her empty stomach like a cold stone. It made her feel a little crazy, she couldn't think straight anymore. She swung between defiance, when she agreed with herself that this was perfect pleasure, no matter how high the price, this cool, bland sweetness, this private solitudedefianceand despair. "Eat up," she heard her mother encouraging, as she had all evening though never showing concern when Zoe didn't. "She eats like the proverbial bird," her mother told Lucas. And then Lucas had said, "Do you know how much a bird eats? One of those starlings, for example? They eat something like four times their body weight in one day."
Ah Lucas, the way he looked at Zoe then, as if he knew, that sometimes she forgot she must be thinner. She forgot the terrible burden of stomach and hateful thighs, which kept you from ever being wonderful, and she ate, and having forgotten, she ate more, to forget she forgot. One hand around the damp, softening box of ice cream, in the other the spoon, hands like bird claws, eating like a bird. Her stomach danced madly as if filled with birds. Her whole body felt in motion. She strutted across her own mind, plump-chested, preening; she opened her wings and took off, soared and swooped above the balcony where Lucas, the flier, watched captivated. And then the ice cream was gone, and all that motion froze, like someone caught in the act. She looked down at her denim thighs spreading against the bed; she could barely get both hands around one. Her stomach was monstrous, almost pregnant. She was losing her shape. She would turn into one of those gross female blobs of her mother's. The thought alone was all it took to convulse her, as eyes dosed above the toilet, she imagined all the birds escaping from the cage of her ribs.
Afterward she would not allow herself to sleep. Awake burned more calories, burned flesh from bones. She held one hand to the hollow of her throat and felt her heart beating fast and hot as a bird's.
THIS afternoon Zoe found her mother nestled in the wine velvet cushions of the sofa, her legs drawn up under a long Indian cotton skirt, smoking with one hand, sipping green tea with the other. From the dull puffiness of her mother's eyes, Zoe could tell she had been crying. It is all right to cry, Phyllis has always said. It is a natural response of the body. Holding it back is harmful. Zoe hates it when her mother cries, hates to see the pain, the rivulets of mascara, the surrender.
"The bus was a little late today," Zoe said, hitching the knees of her linen pants and perching on the chair opposite.
Her mother pulled herself upright, bare soles on the floor, began carefully to shift the position of everything around herthe huge pillows, ashtray, teapot, the extra cup, which she filled and handed to Zoe. "You're not happy," she told her daughter.
"I'm not?" Zoe asked, with careful laugh.
"Oh Zoe, you don't have to pretend. But why, when two people love each other, can't at least one of them be happy? You'd think they could pool their resources and work on one of them. Tell me something you want, Zoe, OK?"
"Kids my age just aren't very happy." Her mother was in one of her moods. "We grow out of it. It's no big deal."
"But what would make you happy? We could manage it."
"You must have had a bad day," Zoe said.
Phyllis took a long pull on her cigarette. "For six hours I have tried to work." She didn't exhale but let the smoke seep out as she talked. "I felt like any minute my hands were going to do something no one has ever done before, but they never did. Nothing. I might as well have been kneading bread. At least I'd have something to show for my time."
"Let's go to the mall," Zoe suggested. She and her mother have always had a good time shopping for Zoe's clothes. When Zoe was small, her mother said, it was like having a doll. Now Zoe has her own ideas, and Phyllis, rather than objecting, seems able to guess almost infallibly what they aresophisticated angular lines, in pastels or white and black, plenty of defining blackPhyllis combs the racks, and brings a steady supply of possibilities into the fitting room for Zoe to try. Phyllis has always shopped for herself alone and piecemeal, at craft fairs, antique markets, Episcopal church rummage sales in Leesburg, Fairfax. She's owned her favorite jacket for over twenty yearsbrown leather with a sunrise appliqued in faded patches and strips on the back.
"I'm going back to pots," Phyllis said dramatically. "Tomorrow I'm hooking up the wheel."
"Let's go to the mall." Zoe bounced twice in the chair to demonstrate eagerness. "I need summer things. That would make me happy."
Her mother paused, searched Zoe's face. "Lucas gets in at five," she said finally. "I think he'll be coming right over."
"Lucas?" Why the flare of panic? Zoe had not seen him since the afternoon of the roaches, assumed that like one of her mother's moods, he had passed.
"That's what he said last week before he left. He had back-to-back European runs. He said he'd be carrying his tools in the trunk of his car." Her mother's voice quavered, as if she were afraid of something too.
"What did you say?"
Her mother went into a prolonged shrug. "I said all right."
"Well, you must like him then," Zoe said dismissively, deciding it was all right with her, at least one of them would be happy.
"I don't know. I don't understand him. I don't know what he's after." She laughed nervously.
"Mother," Zoe said, stressing each syllable. This was no time for either one of them to act innocent.
"Do you know what he said to me? He said, Why do you women assume that's all you've got to offer?" Phyllis shook her hair violently. "We shouldn't be talking like this."
"We always talk like this."
"I know, but."
"Don't be weird, OK? You've got to tell me what's going on." That has been, after all, Zoe's main fareknowing. "I can handle things."
"I was asking him to spend the night."
"So?" Zoe had handled that countless times. Then all at once question and answer came together in her mind. "He didn't spend the night?" A rush of feeling, worse than any amount of fear, washed away her strength. She fell back into the chair, crushing her linen blazer.
"He said number one, it wasn't safe anymore and I should know better, and number two, that didn't matter because he'd promised himself the next time he met a woman he liked he would wait to sleep with her for six months." Her mother spoke haltingly, as though, his reasoning mortified her.
"He said he liked you, anyway."
"He said he'd been through enough relationships that began with great sex. He can't afford another."
Zoe pulled herself up straight again. "Did you tell him what you think, about tapping into the flow of nature, and creating the sensuous present?"
"I can't remember," her mother said faintly, then all at once roared angrily through her teeth. "Forget him," she said, bounding up, jabbing each foot into a thong. "Let's go. He's too damned controlled. Forget him."
"I don't mind staying here and waiting to see if he shows up." Zoe's voice was playing tricks on her, first whispering and then suddenly wanting to shout. "It would be nice to have the plumbing work."
LUCAS arrived around seven, looking as if he'd never thought for a moment that he wouldn't. He was wearing fresh khakis and a white knit shirt, with the last of four neck buttons open. He had stopped somewhere to rent a giant ladder, which he had tied onto the ski-rack of his semi-restored Karmann Ghia. If there was awkwardness in the rather formal greetings he received from mother and daughter in the front hall, he didn't seem to notice; he was more interested in introducing the two of them to his plumber's pliers, assorted wrenches, a drain snake, a staple gun, and a roll of six-inch-wide screening. He was ready to work.
"You must be hungry," Phyllis said. "I've got pastrami, Swiss cheese. A wonderful melon. Aren't you too tired for this? I mean, what time is it for you? It must be after midnight. You ought to sleep. I can make up the couch," she added quickly.
He wasn't ready to sleep. He'd spent all that time in the air dreaming of feet-on-the-ground work, making mental lists of things to do. He had promised to return the ladder the next morning, and the sun was already dropping into the trees in back. "First things first," he said, unlashing the ladder from his car. He took one end, Phyllis and Zoe the other, and he led them back into the house, down the front hall, miraculously through the living room, without bumping a life-size bronze of staunchly planted legs and hipsthe Arch of Triumph, he had dubbed it last week. Out on the balcony, he passed his end over the rail and took over theirs.
He dug the ladder firmly into the grass below, then produced a shoelace from his pocket and tied one end around the staple gun, the other around a belt loop. He slipped the roll of screen up his arm, swung a leg onto the ladder, and descended. When he reached the ground, he stamped his feet a few times as if to get used to it. "Come on down," he called back to them.
Zoe had never been on a ladder before, the whole thing made her think of burning buildings, great escapes. She scrambled over the edge, linen pants, Capezios and all, and breathing deep against the slight sway, carefully eased herself from rung to rung. She was afraid of losing it if she looked down, so turned her eyes on her mother's face, where she found the blank, patient expression of someone lying low.
"I think I'll use the stairs," her mother said, and disappeared. When Zoe alighted on firm ground, Lucas yanked the ladder over against the siding and extended ithalfway up the third story, barely within reach of the roof. "It's simple physics," he told Zoe, waving away her offer to steady the bottom. "It can't go anywhere." He had one foot on the first rung.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute." It was Phyllis, arms akimbo, at the open glass door.
Lucas froze, eyes front, hands in midair.
"What are you going to do?"
"I am going to staple this stuff over the vents in the soffit, to keep the birds from getting up under your eaves and building nests and shitting on your siding." It took great control for him to speak that slowly, clearly.
"And you have to do it right now? I mean, it must be two in the morning, your time."
Lucas looked at his watch and then back at Phyllis, stared at her as if he were having trouble translating her language. He didn't want to sleep, he didn't want to stop and wait for sleep to overtake him, he wanted to push himself until he droppedat least that was what Zoe recognized.
Phyllis clenched her jaw, swallowed visibly. "I don't know whether I'm being bullied or cared for."
"Give it a while," Lucas said, "and you ought to be able to tell the difference." Unblinking, he watched her, as she appeared to consider this. Then her shoulders fell forward.
"I'll be inside," she said.
Lucas was on the ladder, his feet over Zoe's head, when she realized that she must love him. She wasn't sure whymaybe because he didn't belong to Phyllis, maybe because there was something so definite about him, but it wasn't a boyfriend sort of love. He didn't have to return it; in fact she would rather he didn't. He just had to stay there, in her life, and let her watch him while he fixed things, and she would privately love him. The ladder flexed in toward the house.
"You sure this will hold you?" she called up to him. "What if the two pieces came apart?"
"I checked everything out," he called from the higher rungs. "But thanks for your concern."
She pursed her mouth. His head and shoulders had run out of ladder, he was stretching up, pressing the strip of screen against the eaves with the fingertips of one hand. With the other he tried to bring the staple gun into range, but he couldn't get it there: the shoelace was too short. He cursed and then tugged again, but only managed to hike his pants up on the right side where he'd tied it. The ladder shuddered, and Zoe clutched it for all she was worth.
Then Lucas climbed up one more rung. He wrapped his legs around the top rungs, twisted his right hip toward the house, and blindly felt the screen into place, firing the staple gun along its edges, clunk, clunk. He wavered precariously at each recoil. She gaped up at him in wonder, and not just his body at that odd foreshortening angle, but his whole heroic being seemed clear to her, shining. She was still afraid he would fall, but just as sure that there was a way to fall, a way to land so you didn't get hurt, and Lucas would know what it was.
In a few minutes he was down, and without pausing to comment or change the arrangement with the inadequate shoelace, had repositioned the ladder and mounted it again. He did this three times, four. And Zoe remained dutifully at its foot, face upturned, holding him in place with her eyes.
At first she thought her ears had begun to ring from craning her neck so long. She covered and uncovered themthe noise was outside, she had never heard it start, and now it had grown in volume to something shrill and unpleasant. Beyond the cluster of townhouses to the south, a long cloud of black birds hung in the pale violet sky. They were their own fixed path, funneling in from the invisible distance, spreading to rest in the saved trees at the base of the back slope. The shrieking came from the trees: when you looked closely among the leaves, it was as if each branch was thick with black fruit. Zoe had never seen anything like it.
When Lucas came down to move the ladder for the last time, she said, "They don't like what we're doing." It did seem their shrieking was directed at the two of them. "Maybe they think you've caught one of their friends up there behind the screen," Zoe said, to be amusing, but Lucas said it was just what starlings did, gather for the night in communal roosts. They had probably been there every night since early spring, carrying on, making a mess. She had just never noticed it.
"I guess I'd rather sleep up there under our roof where I could get comfortable than have to balance all night on a tree branch," said Zoe.
"Starlings are the roaches of the bird world," Lucas called down meaningfully as he climbed one last time. A few minutes later he was finished, sliding the ladder back to carrying size with loud clanks.
"Could you see whether they'd built a nest or something?" Zoe asked.
"Didn't look," Lucas said.
"Probably they hadn't yet." She gazed skeptically at the streaks and blotches on the siding.
"Hard to say. It is that time of year. You know," Lucas went on, "being a pilot, there's no love lost between myself and birds. I could tell you a story or two about the accidents they've caused, hitting propellers, getting sucked into jet engines, gumming up the works. A couple years ago out of JFK a bunch of gulls sailed right up into one of my engines two minutes after takeoff."
"That's so sad."
"I don't know about sad. The way a jet turbine works, it's got these finely balanced blades. A bird carcass gets in there and the engine chokes up." Zoe made a little gagging sound. "Look," Lucas said, "that engine was ruined. I had to fly out over the Atlantic and dump 100,000 pounds of fuel before that jumbo was light enough to land minus an engine. That's megabucks down the drain, not to mention the danger. When you look at it that way, it's them or us."
Zoe could tell that she was being tested. She wasn't supposed to waste sympathy on the gulls, act squeamish at their fate. That was all right. She could see that a jumbo jet was more important than a handful of birds. Lucas was realistic. How much he knew about certain things! Clear, definite knowledge. She searched her mind for something comparably definite to say, something to suggest she was in agreement with him on the issue of birds. But all that came to mind in that driving clamor of bird screams was a jumble of her mother's pronouncements, bitter and nebulous as a mouthful of smoke.
LUCAS has showered in Zoe's tub and crashed on the sofa, which Phyllis fixed up for him. There was nothing for mother and daughter to do then but retire early to their own rooms upstairs and downstairs, leaving him the middle. Was it because Lucas was watching that Zoe hugged her mother before they parted, something she never does willingly, unless for a camera? And why her mother's body seemed so sadly appealing to her arms, her mother's odd scorched smell, so suddenly sweet, Zoe doesn't know.
Zoe won't be able to eat tonight became she doesn't dare try to sneak by Lucas. That is all right. She would much rather know he is stationed there at the center of the house, a guardian of order. Stomach clenched around its treasured pain, she lies awake thinking about this manhis determination on the ladder, the way he thanked her for her concern. She goes over and over these moments in her mind, savoring them. She imagines that she has emptied herself in order to be filled more purely and perfectly by his image. When she doses her eyes, he is all she sees, poised at the foot of the ladder, then at different stages of his ascent. Give it a while, he keeps telling her, and she knows that he does what he does became he cares.
He has climbed far above her now, and the ladder keeps lengthening. He is climbing far beyond the roof of the house, so far she can hardly see him. Her stomach begins to ache with worry. Then the dreadful noise beginsshe knows even while it is dim and distant, it is dreadful. She tries to call a warning to Lucas, but he is too high to hear, and soon the noise is deafening, and the sky darkens with enemy starlings. Lucas is engulfed by a black cloud of them; Zoe screams as loud as she can, but nothing can be heard over that noise. Then as she looks up, something comes sliding down the ladder, something shapeless, shrunken lands at her feet. She wakes up in terror, the noise still in her ears.
She must calm herself. She is awake now. She is safe inside. There are no birds, they are are all asleep in the trees, balancing somehow on their branches without falling.
But that noise still shrieks in her ears, and she must make sure. She turns on the light and stumbles to the window, pulls the drape aside, tries to peer beyond the glass, through the reflection of her own room, her own body, all arms and legs, wrapped in a large men's T-shirt.
She is awake now, yet it seems the noise has filled her room, and she drags open the glass door to let it out. The night air flows in, chills her into alertness. The noise inside dissipates, met as it is by another sound from above, beyond the screen, softer, but as shrill and relentless, the sort of sound, like crickets, or running water, you could confuse with silence unless you'd been warned it was there.