The Gravity of Birds. Tracy Guzeman
until he’d navigated the short flight of flagstone steps and the screen door banged shut behind him before she moved, choosing a soft mound of earth pillowed with needles. She scratched at a mosquito bite and opened the book of poetry to read it again. Mrs. Phelan, the librarian, had set it aside for her when it first came in.
‘Mary Oliver. No Voyage and Other Poems. My sister sent it to me from London, Alice. I thought you might like to be the first to read it.’ Mrs. Phelan fanned the pages recklessly, winking at Alice as though they were conspirators. ‘It still has that new book smell.’
Alice had saved the book for the lake, not wanting to read any of the poems until she was in exactly the right surroundings. On the dock that morning, she’d grabbed a towel, still faintly damp and smelling of algae, and stretched out on her stomach, resting on her elbows as she thumbed through the book. The glare of sunlight off the crisp pages gave her a headache, but she stayed where she was, letting the heat paint her skin a tender pink. She kept reading, holding her breath after each stanza, focusing on the language, on the precise meaning of the words, regretting that she could only imagine what had been meant, as opposed to knowing with any certainty. Now the page with the poem ‘No Voyage’ was wrinkled, pocked from specks of sand, its corner imprinted with the damp mark of Alice’s thumb. I lie like land used up … There were secrets in the lines she couldn’t puzzle out.
If she asked, Thomas would decipher the poem for her, without resorting to the coddling speech adults so often used, choosing vague words and pretending confusion. The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted—Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre—stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary—her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart.
‘Good grief,’ he’d said, shuddering. ‘I’m in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price.’
She suspected their conversations only provided him with reasons to procrastinate, but she made him laugh with her descriptions of the people in town: Tamara Philson, who wore her long strand of pearls everywhere, even to the beach, after reading of a burglary in the neighboring town; the Sidbey twins, whose parents dressed them in matching clothes, down to the barrettes in their hair and the laces in their sneakers, the only distinguishable difference between the two being a purple dot Mr. Sidbey had penned onto the earlobe of one. You, Alice, Thomas said, are my most reliable antidote to boredom.
She peered through the birch trunks toward the back of the house. If she waited too long before knocking, he might start working, and then she risked interrupting him. His manner would be brisk, his sentences clipped. He was like a feral animal that way, like the cats at home she tried to entice from behind the woodpile and capture. She would never have gone over without an invitation—one had been extended, after all, in general terms—but even so, she had found it best to approach him cautiously.
Come over and visit, he’d said to her family that first day, introducing himself on the dock the properties shared, appearing from the woods to retrieve the frenzied dog that circled his feet. But introductions weren’t necessary—at least not on his part. They knew exactly who he was.
***
‘That artist’ was the way her father referred to him, the same way he might say ‘that ditch digger’ or ‘that ax murderer.’ She’d staked out a listening post at the top of the stairs at home long before they’d ever driven to the lake, eavesdropping on her parents’ conversation.
‘Myrna says he’s gifted,’ her mother had said.
‘Well, I imagine she would know, what with her expertise in the field of … what is it he does?’ Her father’s voice had the exasperated tone he often used when confronted with Myrna Reston’s expertise in a myriad of subjects.
‘You know perfectly well what he does. He’s a painter. She says he’s received a scholarship to the Royal Academy.’
Her father snorted, unimpressed. ‘A painter. So people pay him to drink their booze and make eyes at their daughters and sit in a chair sucking on the end of a paintbrush. Nice work if you can get it.’ Alice pictured her father rolling his eyes.
‘There’s no need for sarcasm, Niels.’
‘I’m not being sarcastic. I just don’t want anyone in my family fawning over some artist. We’ve already had more than we can handle with …’ There was a pause, the whispers became inaudible, and Alice knew they were discussing Natalie. Her father’s voice boomed again and startled her on the step where she perched. ‘Why now, after all these summers of the house being deserted? Better it should stay that way—’
Her mother interrupted. ‘Whether or not they use the house is no business of ours. You’re only annoyed because if he’s there, you won’t be able to keep one of the boats tied up to the Baybers’ side of the dock. You can hardly blame the young man for that.’
Her father exhaled loudly—his sigh of defeat. ‘I can certainly try.’
The four of them had arrived on a Saturday evening three weeks ago: Alice, her parents, and her older sister, Natalie, all of them sweaty and road-weary, wrinkled and wretched from the long drive. When she woke the next morning the first things she saw were their suitcases lying open-jawed on the bedroom floor, spilling things yet to be unpacked. The swimsuit she grabbed from the clothesline and tugged onto her body after breakfast pulled like rubber against her skin, still damp from their ritual swim at dusk the night before. In spite of her father’s wild laughter as he splashed Alice and her mother, and her mother’s dramatic squeals in response, Natalie had refused to join in, and remained on the shore in the fading light, just watching them; her arms crossed and her face fixed with a cold violence, an expression she’d mastered since returning from her time away. Alice couldn’t account for Natalie’s sudden and intense dislike of the three of them. Why are you being such a pill? she’d whispered in the backseat of the car on the drive up, deliberately choosing a word Natalie often directed at her, then elbowing her sister when she refused to reply. You’re going to make them unhappy. You’re going to ruin everything.
When Alice was younger, her father had fashioned a rough mask from evergreen needles and lake grass glued to a rotten shell of pine bark, shed like a skin. He secured it to the end of their canoe with heavy yellow cord, telling Alice their ancient Dutch relatives believed water fairies lived in the figureheads of ships, protecting the vessels and their sailors from all manner of ills—storms, narrow and treacherous passageways, fevers, and bad luck. Kaboutermannekes he called them. If the ship ran aground, or even worse, if it sank, the Kaboutermannekes would guide the seafarers’ souls to the Land of the Dead. Without a water fairy to guide him, a sailor’s soul would be lost at sea forever. Natalie, locked in place on the rocky shore, did not look like she would protect any of them from anything.
Alice lounged on the dock that first morning, listening to her parents talk about all the things they might do with the day. They never moved from their chairs, only shifted from one hip to the other, their skin smeared white with contrails of suntan lotion, their eyes invisible behind dark glasses, their fingers intertwined until they traded sections of newspaper or reached for their Bloody Marys. When the dog suddenly appeared on the dock, a low growl deep in its throat, Alice’s mother drew her feet up onto the chair, alarmed. They heard a voice coming from the deep part of the woods, calling sharply, ‘Neela. Neela, come here right now.’
‘She’s really harmless, just suffers from ‘small dog complex’ is all’ was what he said. She was tempted to say in return, ‘You’re not what I expected,’ but held her tongue.
She stopped at the back door to Thomas’s cabin, the books tight in her hand, and