Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

Lucky Chow Fun

EVERY VILLAGE HAS ITS RHYTHM, AND EVERY year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out and the families of Phillies Phanatics ceded the town to retired couples with binoculars, there to watch the hills run riot with color.

Come winter, Templeton hunkered into itself. We natives were so grateful for this quiet — when we could hear the sleigh bells at the Farmers’ Museum all the way to the Susquehanna — that we almost didn’t mind the shops closing up. In winter we believed in our own virtue, lauded ourselves for being the kind of people to renounce the comforts of city life for a tight community and spectacular beauty. We packed on our winter fat and waited for spring, for the lake to melt, for the cherry blossoms, for the town to burst into its all-American charm, and the rapid crescendo of tourists.

This was our rhythm, at least, until the Lucky Chow Fun girls. That year, the snow didn’t melt until mid-May, and the Templeton High School Boys’ Swim Team won the State Championships. That year, we natives stopped looking one another in the eye.

I WAS SEVENTEEN that spring and filled with longing, which I tried to sate with the books of myth and folklore that I was devouring by the dozens. I couldn’t read enough of the stories, tiny doors that opened only to reveal a place I hadn’t known I’d known; stories so old they felt ingrained in my genes. I loved Medea, Isolde, Allerleirauh. I imagined myself as a beautiful Cassandra, wandering vast and lonely halls, spilling prophesies that everyone laughed at, only to watch them come tragically true in the end. This feeling of mutedness, of injustice, was particularly strong in me, though I had no particular prophesies to tell, no clear-sighted warnings. On the nights I stuffed myself with myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chickens.

All March, I skidded home from school as fast as I could in my ratty Honda Civic to look for my college acceptance letters in the mailbox; all of my friends had gotten in early, but because I was being recruited for swimming, I had to wait for the regular acceptances. All March, there was nothing. By the time my little sister, Petra — Pot — trudged the mile home over the snowdrifts, I would be sitting at the kitchen table, having eaten an entire box of cereal plus a bowl of ice cream, feeling sick.

“Oh, God, Lollie,” she’d say, dumping her backpack. “Nothing?”

“Nope,” I’d say. “Nothing.”

And she’d sigh and sit across from me. Her days were also hard, as she was too weird for the other fourth graders, too plump, too spastic. She never once had a sleepover or even a best friend. But instead of complaining, Pot would try to cheer me up by mimicking the new birdsongs she’d learned that day. “Drop-it, drop-it, cover-it-up, cover-it-up, pull-it-up, pull-it-up,” she’d sing, then say, “Brown Thrasher,” her dumpling face suddenly luminous. That year, Pot was on a strange ornithological kick, as if her entire pudgy being were stuffed with feathers. She fell asleep to tapes of tweets and whistles and had a growing collection of taxidermied birds scattered around her bedroom. I had no idea where she had gotten them, but was too moony with my own troubles to ask. I avoided her room as much as possible, because she had one particular gyrfalcon perched on her dresser that seemed malicious, if not downright evil, ready to scratch at your jugular if you were to saunter innocently by.

Those melancholy afternoons, Pot would chirp away until my mother came home from her own bad day at the high school in Van Hornesville, where she taught biology. No — my mother never came in, she blew in like the dust devil of a woman she was, stomping the snow off her boots, sending great clouds of snow from her shoulders. “Oh, God, Lollie, nothing?” she would say, releasing her springy gray hair from her cap.

“Nothing,” Pot would trill, then leap up to rejoin her stiff little aviary upstairs.

My mother would look at the wreckage of my snack, frown, and hug me. “Elizabeth,” she’d say, and I could hear the vibration of her words in her chest, feel the press of each individual bone of her rib cage. “Don’t you worry. It will all work out in the end. You’re no Podunk idiot like the kids I teach—”

“Spare me,” I’d interrupt, and give her a kiss on the chin. Then I’d stand, late for swim practice, and leave my nervous little mother to peep out the window at me as I pulled away. That spring she was dating The Garbageman, and when I came home I may have seen her before going to bed, or I may not have seen her until morning, singing during her preparations for school.

THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF VERSIONS of the Cinderella story throughout the world: Serbian Pepelyouga, Norwegian Kari Trestakk, Chinese Yeh-hsien, German Aschenputtel, French Cendrillon. What most of the stories have in common is both a good, absent mother and an evil, present one. Fairy tales are not like real life in all its beautiful ambiguity. There are no semigood semiabsent mothers. Or, for that matter, semipresent very good ones.

THAT WINTER, IT WAS ONLY IN THE POOL, feeling the thrust and slide of my body through the water, that I felt good. Only then could I escape the niggling terror of what would happen to my mother and sister when I left them, their sad dinners, my sister talking only of birds, my mother talking only of the crap day she had at school, neither heard by the other, neither listening.

I was the captain and the only girl on the Varsity boys’ swim team that year, though not much of a leader. During the long bus rides, I only giggled nervously at the boys’ boasts about boning chicks I knew they never touched. I wasn’t chosen as a captain because I was a leader, but rather because of my teammates’ small-town gallantry and my minor celebrity as an oddity in the papers. I was the fastest butterflier around and could beat everyone, boy or girl, in the region, save for one lightning-swift boy from Glens Falls. The papers all the way to Albany couldn’t stop chortling over this fact. They ran photos of me every week, careful to take only my fairly pretty face and leave my — let’s face it — overweight body on the cutting room floor. I was very heavy. “Rubenesque,” my mother called it, but the boys were clearly no aesthetes because they never looked directly at me, not even when I was on the block, waiting for the start. I was no pushover, though. If a boy made fun of the way I bulged in my bathing suit, calling me Moby Dickless, for instance, that boy would find himself stunned on the pool bottom, having been swum over by my own impersonation of a great white whale.

One Friday night in March, after an exceptionally hard relay practice, Tim Summerton leaned over the gutter when I came trundling in from the last race. He was no looker, all wonky-eyed and stippled with pimples, but he had a heart so kind he never went without a date to any school dance. He spat a stream of warm water into my face; I ducked and spat back at him, laughing. Then he grinned.

“Hey,” he said. “The divers and I are going to the Lucky Chow Fun. Want to come?”

I looked at the little clump of divers snapping one another with towels. Those three boys were the exhibitionists of the team, with, truly, a little more to look at in their picklesuits than the swimmers had. I would know: I could see underwater remarkably well. “Oooh, Fun, Fun,” the divers were saying in a vaguely ethnic impression. “We have fun fun at Fun Fun.” They were not the smartest boys, our divers, but I suppose anybody who tries to shave his neck with the end of a diving board must be a little lacking in brainpower.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“Great. Meet you there,” he said, tapping my swim-capped head with a pull buoy. I was overwhelmed with the desire to grab his hand, clutch it to me, cover it in kisses, laugh like a madwoman. Instead I smiled then went back under the water, holding my breath until I could hold it no longer, then sent it up in a great silvery jellyfish-bubble of air. When I came up, Tim had gone.

That night, I showered with special care, washed the chlorine off my body, lotioned, powdered. And when I walked out into the cold night, all the gym’s lights went out behind me and the last employee locked the door behind my back. I left my hat off to let my hair freeze into the thin little snakes I liked to crunch in my fingers, and thought of moo goo gai pan.

It was a Friday night, but there was a basketball game at the high school, so the town was very still as I drove though it. Only the Ambassador’s mansion gave a sign of life, every window burning gold. The Ambassador was our local hero, a former ambassador to France and Guyana, and once-upon-a-time my father’s great friend, and I always felt a wash of fondness for him when I passed his fine fieldstone mansion on the river. He was an erect, gray man of eighty years old with thin, bluish fingers and canny eyes. He had, they said, a huge collection of rare goods from all over the world: a room entirely devoted to masks, one for crystal bowls, one for vases, even one for his miniature schnauzer, with paintings done by great artists of the snarly little beast. Nobody knew for sure, though, because when we were invited, we saw only the ground floor. In any case, my family hadn’t been invited since we lost my father.

Now, on Main Street, only a few shopwindows had left their lights on, casting an oily shine on the baseball bats in the souvenir shops, making the artificial flowers in the General Store glow. The Red Dragoon Saloon was open and there were three Harleys in the sludge on Pioneer Street, but still I was able to park right in front of Lucky Chow Fun, behind Tim Summerton’s Volvo.

The restaurant was newish, maybe two years old, and the town’s first tentative step toward ethnic food, unless one counted Gino’s Pizzeria and the Mennonite bakery on Main Street. It was a cheap linoleum joint, with an ugly, hand-drawn sign flapping in the wind off the lake, lit from above by a red light. It served a lot of sticky Americanized Chinese food, like General Tso’s chicken and fried rice, and I loved it all, the fat and salt, the scandalous feeling of eating fast food in a hamlet that banned all fast-food places, the miniature mythmaking of the fortune cookies.

That night, when I stepped out of the car and around to the sidewalk, I almost knocked into a small, shivering figure in an overlarge tee-shirt, sweeping the new powder of snow from the walk. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and stepped away, not really looking at the girl I had nearly trampled, gathering only a vague impression of crooked teeth and a jagged haircut. She was just one of the girls who worked at the Lucky Chow Fun, one of the wives or daughters of the owners. Nobody in Templeton cared to figure out who the girls were, just as nobody figured out who the two men who ran the place were, calling them only Chen One and Chen Two, or Chen Glasses and Chen Fat. Only later did we realize that no part of their names remotely resembled Chen, nor did the girls resemble the men in any way, either.

I feel the necessity of explaining our hard-heartedness, but I cannot. Templeton has always had a callousness about outsiders, having seen so many come through town, wreak destruction on our lake, trash the ancient baseball stadium, Cartwright Field, litter our streets, and move off. This wariness extended even to those who lived with us; anyone who wasn’t related to everyone else was suspect. Newcomers were people who had lived in town for only fifteen years. The one black family who lived in Templeton during my childhood promptly pulled up roots and moved away after a year, and, to my knowledge, there were only three Jewish children in school. The only Asians were preternaturally cheery and popular, adopted kids of the wealthiest of the doctors’ families in town. This was a town that clung ferociously to the shameful high school mascot of the Redskins, though if we were any skins, we should have been the Whiteskins. I was born and raised in this attitude. That night, without a second thought, I stepped around the girl and into the fatty brightness of the restaurant, past old Chen Glasses, snoozing over his Chinese newspaper at the door.

The restaurant was nearly empty, the long kitchen in the back sending out a fine oily sizzle, girls like ghosts in white uniforms chopping things, frying things, talking quietly to one another. The back-lit photos above the register struck me so powerfully with their water chestnuts and lovingly fried bits of meat that I didn’t at first see the divers, who were pretending to be walruses, chopsticks in their mouths like tusks. When they saw me, they took the chopsticks out so fast that it was clear who they were imitating. I was not unused to this. In fourth grade, the Garrett twins had named their science project, a miniature zeppelin, The Lollie. That night, I did what I always did, stifled the pang, pretended to smile.

“Very funny, boys,” I said. “Have you ordered?”

“Yeah,” said Brad Huxley. He was in my grade and blessed with a set of eyelashes that made every girl in school envious. He gave me a dimpled smile and said, “We each ordered our own. These two freaks don’t like sharing,” nodding at the others. It was his sorrow in life that he was not endowed with hand-eye coordination; otherwise he would have been on the basketball court that evening with the cool kids. He overcompensated in the diving pool, and in a few weeks, at States, would come so close to the board on his reverse back pike that he flayed a strip of skin from his neck to mid-back and got a perfect score for that dive.

I was standing at the front, deciding what to order from solemn and scornful old Chen Fat, with his filthy apron, when Tim Summerton came from the back where the bathrooms were. His face was drawn and pale, and he looked half-excited, half-horrified. He didn’t seem to see me, as he walked past me without a glance. He sat down at the table with the others and began to hiss at them something I couldn’t quite make out.

Huxley sat back with a little smirk on his face. “Duh,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “Everybody knows.” The other two divers looked pale, though, and smiles broke out over their faces.

I was about to ask what they were talking about, but Chen Fat said, “Hem hem,” and I turned toward him. His pen was poised over a pad and his eyelids were drawn down over his eyes. I couldn’t quite tell if he was looking at me or not.

“General Tso’s, please,” I said. “And a Coke.”

He grunted and rang up the bill on the old register, and I forked over my hard-won babysitting money, two dollars an hour for the Bauer hellions. When I sat down, the boys were already digging into their food, and the girl who had served them was backing away, looking down, holding the round tray before her like a shield. This one was pretty, delicate, with pointed little ears and chapped lips, but the boys didn’t seem to notice her at all. Tim Summerton was just pushing around his mu shu pork, looking sick.

“You okay?” I said to Tim. He looked up at me, then looked away.

“He’s just a pussy,” said Huxley, a grain of rice on his lips. “He’s all nervous about Regionals tomorrow. Doesn’t want to do the five-hundred free.”

“Really?” I said. “But, Tim, you’re the best we’ve got.”

“Eh,” said Tim, shrugging. “Well, I’m not too nervous about it.” Then he blinked and, clearly making an effort to change the subject, said, as my plate of crispy delicious chicken was placed before me, “So, who are you taking to the Winter Dance?” None of the boys really wanted to talk about this, it was clear, but spat out names: Gretchen, Melissa, maybe Gina, maybe Steph. Tim looked at me. “Who you going with, Lollie?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe just my friends.” Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren’t sure if we even liked one another anymore.

Huxley gave me his charming smile and said, “Because you’re, like, a dyke, right? You like chicks? It’s okay, you can tell us.” He laughed, and the other divers laughed with him.

“No,” I said, putting my chopsticks down, feeling my face grow hot. “What the hell? No, I’m not a whatever, I mean, I like guys, Jesus.” My excitement, the invitation to eat with them, soured a little in my gut. I looked hard at the curls of chicken on my plate.

“Relax, Lollie,” said Tim, grinning at me, his wonky eye traveling over the window, where the world was lit pink by the light over the sign. “He’s just teasing you. Brad’s a dick.”

And, charmingly, Huxley winked at me and showed me his mouthful of half-chewed food. “I know you’re no dyke,” he said. “But you could tell us if you were.”

“Yeah,” one of the other divers said. “That’s totally hot.” And when we all looked at him a little funny, he blushed and said, “Well. Maybe not you, Lollie. But lesbians in general.” He gathered high fives all around, hooting, until something in me burst and I gave him a little high five on his cheek, and he sat down again, abashed.

IN THE CHINESE MYTH, the goddess Nugua created the first humans from yellow earth, carefully crafting them with her own hands. Though they pleased her, these handcrafted humans took too much time, and so to speed the process along, she dipped a rope into darker mud and swung it around her head. In this way, she populated the earth with the darker mudspatters, who became the lowly commoners, while the handcrafted were the wealthy and higher-caste nobles.

Nugua, they say, has a woman’s upper body but a dragon’s tail. She invented the whistle, the art of irrigation, the institution of marriage. How terrible that this dragon-goddess is also the one who grants children to mothers; that this impatient snob of a goddess is the intermediary between men and women.

IT WAS LATE WHEN I CAME HOME because we sat around after we ate, as if waiting for something to happen. At last, Tim stood and said, “I’ll escort you out, Lollie?” and I had the brief and thrilling fear that he was going to ask me to the Winter Dance. But Tim only opened my car door for me, then pulled off, his old Volvo spitting up smoke. I drove home over the black ice and into the driveway of our cottage on Eagle Street.

My mother’s car was gone, and only one light was on in the kitchen when I came in. Pot was sitting in the half-shadow, looking at me with a tragic face.

“Potty?” I said. “What’s wrong, honey?” Her little face broke down until, at last, her eyes filled, huge and liquid, with tears.

“I wanted your food to be warm,” she said, “so I put up the heat. But then you didn’t come home, and it burned a little, and so I put it down. And then I got scared because you still weren’t home, and so I put the heat up again, and now it’s all ruined.” She poked the foil off the plate, and her lip began to tremble.

“Oh, I’m so, so sorry. We went out for Chinese,” I said, looking at the charred remains of the chicken and couscous my mother had saved for me. I hugged my little sister until she began to laugh at herself. Then I said, “Petra Pot, where’s Mom?”

She frowned and said, sourly, “The Garbageman’s.” We called our mother’s new boyfriend The Garbageman, though he was actually a Ph.D. in garbage science and owned a lucrative monopoly on trash removal in the five counties surrounding ours. He certainly didn’t look like a garbageman, either, being fastidious to the point of compulsion, with his hair combed over a small bald spot on his head, his wrists doused in spicy cologne, and the beautiful shirts he had tailored for him in Manhattan. Though Pot hated him, I was ambivalently happy for my mother’s sudden passion: since we lost my father, she hadn’t seen anyone, and this, I privately assumed, had made her as nervous and trembly as she had been in recent years.

When I say we lost my father, I don’t mean he died: I mean that we lost him when we were on a sabbatical in England, in the bowels of Harrods department store. This was back when Pot was five and suffering acutely from both dyslexia and ADHD. Her inability to connect language in her head, combined with her short attention span, frequently made her so frustrated she didn’t actually speak, but, rather, screamed. “Petra the Pepperpot,” we called her, affectionately, which was shortened to “Pepperpot,” then “P-pot,” then “Pot” or “Potty.” The day we lost my father was an exceptionally trying one, as, all morning, Pot had screamed and screamed and screamed. My dad, having coveted the Barbour oil jackets he’d seen around him all summer long, had taken us to Harrods to try to find one for himself. But for at least fifteen minutes, he was subjected to the snooty superciliousness of the clerk when he tried to describe the jacket.

“Bah-bah,” my father kept saying, as that’s what he heard when he asked the Brits what kind of jacket they were wearing. “It’s brown and oily. A Bah-Bah jacket.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the clerk returned indolently. “I’ve never heard of a Bah-Bah.”

Thus, my father was furious already when my little sister fell into an especially loud apoplectic fit, pounding her heels into the ground. At last, my father turned on us. His face was purple, his eyes bulged under his glasses, and this mild-mannered radiologist seemed about ready to throttle someone to death. “Wait here,” he hissed, and stalked off.

We waited. We waited for hours. My mother rubbed her thin arms, frightened and angry, and I was sent to the vast deli in the basement for sandwiches. Cheddar and chutney, watercress and ham. We waited, and we had no way to contact him, and so, when the store was about to close, we caught a cab back to our rented flat. We found his things gone. He was in a hotel, he said later when he telephoned. He had arranged our tickets home. My mother shut the sliding doors in the tiny kitchen, and Pot and I tried to watch a bad costume drama on the telly, and when our mother came out, we knew without asking that it was all over. Nowadays, my father lives in an Oxford town house with a woman named Rita, who is about to have their first child. “Lurvely Rita, Meeta-Maid” is what my mother so scornfully calls her, though Rita is a neurologist, and dry, in the British manner, to the point of unloveliness.

But the evening of the Lucky Chow Fun, my father wasn’t the villain. My mother was, because who leaves a troubled ten-year-old alone in a big old house in the middle of winter? There were still a few tourists in town, and anyone could have walked through our ever-unlocked front door. I was filled with a terrible fury, tempted to call her at The Garbageman’s place with a sudden faux emergency, let her streak home naked through the snow. And then, after some reflection, I realized I was the villain: my mother had thought I’d be home by the time she went out, Pot had said.

Stricken with guilt, I allowed Pot to take me upstairs to her own creepy ornithological museum. In the dark, the birds’ glass eyes glittered in light from the streetlamps, giving me the odd impression of being scrutinized. I shivered. But Pot turned on the light and led me from bird to bird, solemnly pronouncing each one’s name, and giving a respectful little bow as she moved on. At long last, she stopped before a new addition to her collection, a dun-colored bird with mischievous eyes.

Pot stroked its head, and said, “This is an Eastern Towhee. It goes: hot dog, pickle, ickle, ickle.”

“Neat,” I said, feeling the gaze of the gyrfalcon on the tenderest parts of my neck.

“Hurry, worry, blurry, flurry,” Pot said. “Scarlet Tanager.”

“Cool,” I said. “I like it. Scarlet Tanager. Hey, you want to watch a movie?”

“Quick-give-me-a-rain-check,” giggled Pot. “White-eyed Vireo.”

“Pots, listen up. Do you want to watch Dirty Dancing? I’ll make popcorn.”

“If I sees you, I will seize you, and I’ll squeeze you till you squirt,” my baby sister said, grinning so hugely she almost split her chubby little cheeks.

I blinked, held my breath. “Uh,” I said. “Where’d you get that one, Pot?”

“That’s the call of a Warbling Vireo,” she said with great satisfaction. “Let’s watch The Princess Bride.”

My mother was up before we were in the morning, flipping omelets and singing a Led Zeppelin song. “Kashmir,” I think. She beamed at me in the doorway, and when I went to her and bent to kiss her on the head, she still stank of The Garbageman’s cologne.

“Ugh,” I said. “You may want to shower before Pot gets up.”

She looked at me, frowning. “I did,” she said, pulling a strand of her springy peppered hair across her nose. “Twice.”

I took a seat at the table. “That’s the power of The Garbageman’s scent, I guess,” I said. “Indelible. He sprays you like a wildcat, and you belong to him.”

“Elizabeth,” my mother said, sprinkling cut chives atop the egg. “Can you just try to be happy for me?”

“I am,” I said, but looked down at my hands. I wasn’t sure what I was happy for, as I had never been on a date, let alone done anything remotely sexual, and it wasn’t entirely because I was fat. The hard truth was that nobody really dated at Templeton High. Couples were together, or broken up, without really having dated. There was nowhere to go; the nearest theater, in Oneonta, was thirty minutes away. And though I suspected there was some sexual activity happening, I was mystified as to how it was instigated.

My mother took my hand in a rapid little movement, kissed it, and went to the stairs to shout up for Pot. My sister was always a furious sleeper, everything about her clenched in slumber — face, limbs, fists — and she never awoke until someone shook her. But that morning, she came downstairs whistling, her hair in a sloppy ponytail, dressed all in white, a pair of binoculars slung around her neck. We both stared at her.

“I am going bird-watching on the nature trail,” she announced, taking a plate. “I’m wearing white to blend in with the snow. Yummy omelets, Mom.”

“Oh. Okay, Honey-Pot. Sounds good,” said my mother, sitting down with her own coffee and plate. She had decided when my father left to be a hands-off parent, and went from hovering nervously over everything I did to allowing my little sister the most astounding latitude.

“Wait. You’re going alone, Pot?” I said. I glared at my mother, this terrible person who would let a ten-year-old wander in the woods alone. What would she do when I was in college, just let my little sister roam the streets at night? Let her have drunken parties in the backyard, let her squat in the abandoned Sugar Shack on Estli Avenue, let her be a crack whore?

“Yup,” Pot said. “All alone.”

“Mom,” I said, “she can’t go alone. Anyone can be out there.”

“Honey, Lollie, it’s Templeton. For God’s sakes, nothing happens here. And the nature trail is maybe five acres. At that.”

“Five acres that could be filled with rapists, Mom.”

“I think Pot will be fine,” said my mother. She and Pot exchanged wry glances. And then she looked at the clock on the microwave, saying, “Don’t you have to be at the gym in fifteen minutes?”

I stifled my protest, warned Pot to take the Mace my mom carried as protection against dogs on her country runs, and struggled into my anorak. Then I stuffed a piece of toast down my gullet and roared off in my deathtrap Honda. When I passed the Ambassador’s mansion, I saw him coming up the walk, back from the Purple Pickle Coffee Shop, steaming cup in hand, miniature schnauzer on a lead in the other, and they both — man and beast — were dressed all in white, with matching white pompommed berets. Curious, I thought, but that was all: I was already focusing, concentrating on the undulations of my body through the water, envisioning the hundred butterfly, watching myself touching all the boys out by an entire body length.

IN THE GRIMMS’ STORY “Hansel and Gretel,” it isn’t the witch in the gingerbread house who is the wickedest character, as the poor wandering siblings easily defeated her with their small cunning. Rather, the parents of the children were the ones who, in a time of famine, not once, but twice, concocted the plan to take their children into the dark forest and leave them there to starve. The first time, the children dropped stones and found their way back. The second time, the forest gobbled up their trail. The witch did what witches do. The parents were the unnatural ones. This speaks to a deep and ingrained fear: that parents could, in their self-interest, lose sight of their duties to their children. They could sell them to the dark and dank wilderness, send them to the forest, let them starve there. And each time, those two little children, hungry for home, came struggling so bravely back.

BUT NOTHING HAPPENED TO POT THAT DAY, and we won Regionals, as nobody could dent our team that year. It was late when we returned, and I was reading Bulfinch’s Mythologies for the nth time, under the red exit light in the back of the bus. I was marveling over the tiny passage on Danae: Daughter of King Acrisius of Argos who did not want her to marry and kept her imprisoned because he had been told that his daughter’s son would kill him. Jupiter came to her in the disguise of a shower of gold, and she became the mother of Perseus. She and her child were set adrift in a chest and saved by a fisherman on the island of Seriphos. There was something so haunting in the story, drama packed so tightly into the words that images burst in my head: a white-limbed girl in a dark room, a chink in the roof, the shower of gold pouring over her dazzled body; then the black chest, the baby squirming on her stomach, the terrifying rasp of the scales of sea-monsters against the wood. A story of light and dark. Purely beautiful, it seemed to me, then.

I was daydreaming so happily as we trundled over Main Street that I didn’t at first notice what was happening until one of the freshman boys gave a shout. The bus driver slowed down to rubberneck as we went around the flagpole on Pioneer Street, and I saw it all: all eight of the town’s squad cars up the hill to our left, all flashing red and blue in syncopated bolts, glaring on the ice and snow, and the ambulance with the stretcher being swallowed up inside it, the running police, the drawn guns, the Chens, both Fat and Glasses, up against the Lucky Chow Fun’s vinyl siding, arms and legs spread. A huddled ring of the Lucky Chow Fun girls on the steps. I could pick out the girl with the jagged haircut, her arm around a plump girl with hair to her waist.

“Ohhhhh. Shit,” breathed Brad Huxley in the seat before mine. And then the bus passed the scene, and we rolled down Main Street toward the one stoplight in town. From there, the hamlet looked innocent and pristine, a flurry of wind-blown snow turning the streetlights into snow globes, icing the trees. Over the hills, the March moon was pinned, stoic and yellow, reflected in pieces on the half-glassy lake.

We were already halfway up Chestnut Street, silently looking out the windows, when someone said, “One too many cases of food poisoning?”

And though it wasn’t funny, though we all had the flashing red and blue images lodged firmly in us somewhere just under our hearts, we — all of us — laughed.

I SLEPT LATE ON SUNDAY, into the afternoon. I never sleep late, and I know what this means: the worst cowards are the ones who refuse to look at what they fear. When I went downstairs, my mother and sister were still in their pajamas. Though Pot was almost my tiny mother’s size, and twice her width, she was cradled on my mother’s lap, sucking her thumb, her other hand up in her infant gesture to stroke my mother’s ear. They were watching television, the sound off. I stood in the door, looking at the screen until I realized that the snowy roads I was seeing on the television were roads I knew as intimately as my own limbs, that the averted faces of the men on the screen were men who knew me well, who followed my swimming in the paper, who thought nothing of giving me a kiss when they saw me. Hurrying down the snowy streets now, shame on their faces, shame in the set of their shoulders.

Then came the faces of the Chens — stoic, inexpressive — and the scared faces of the Chinese girls, ducking into Mr. Livingston’s limousine. He was my ninth-grade history teacher, and his limo was the only car in town large enough to hold all the girls and their lawyers at once. That car drove legends of baseball all summer from museum to hotel to airport. It drove brides and homecoming queens for the rest of the year. Now it was driving the Lucky Chow Fun girls wherever they were going. Somewhere, I hoped, far away.

I went to the television and turned it off. I stood for a minute, letting the swell die down in my gut, then sat beside my mother and said, “What happened?”

And my mother, who always made a point of being frank about sexual matters, describing biological functions in great detail so that her daughters would never be squeamish or falsely prudish, my mother turned scarlet. “Sit down,” she said, and I did. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She bit her lips.

Pot said, pulling her thumb from her mouth, “The Lucky Chow Fun’s a whorehouse.”

“Pot,” said my mother, then sighed. She looked at me, her thin mouth twisting, patting my thigh. “She’s right,” she said.

“What?” I said. “Wait, what?”

“Last night,” my mother said, slowly, as if trying to order the fragmented truths, “one of the girls at the Lucky died. She was locked in her room with her sister — seems they were being punished — and there was some kind of accidental gas leak. One of them died, and the other one almost did, too. And one of the other girls who knew a little English called the police and tried to leave a tip before the Chens found out. But there are not too many poor speakers of English in this town. The police figured it out. They arrested the Chens.”

“Oh, God,” I said. I thought of the little huddle of the Lucky Chow Fun girls the night before, flushed red and blue in the flashing lights, how quiet they were, how I never saw their eyes. I never looked. “Mom,” I said. “Who were those girls?”

My mother brushed Pot’s hair out of her eyes and kissed her on the forehead. She seemed to hesitate, then she said, “They were bought in China and brought over here, it seems. They were poor. They worked in sweatshops. The Chens gave money to their parents, promised a better life. Apparently.”

“Slaves,” I said.

“On TV, they said that, yes,” said Pot, stumbling over her words. “And some of them, they said on TV that some of them, they’re younger than you, Lollie.”

We sat there, in silence, thinking about this. My mother at one point stood and made us some cocoa, but for once, my tongue tasted like ash and I wanted to take absolutely nothing in. I was sick, could never again be hungry, I thought. At last, thinking of Chen Fat glaring at me over his notepad, the sticky smell of the food, Brad Huxley, the delicate girl with the chapped lips, I said, shuddering, “Do they know who visited? Do they have names?”

“Well,” said my mother, who paused for a very long time, “that’s almost the worst. The Chens wrote down the names of the men who visited the Lucky Chow Fun.” It was hard to hear her, even in the preternatural stillness of the town on this day, even in our snow-muffled house. “They had a ledger. They made sure to write in English. The reporters said that they were going to blackmail the men who visited. Apparently, it’s not just tourists. Apparently, a lot of men from the town went, too.” She looked at us. “You should know. Some of the men you know, some you love, some of them may have gone.”

And there was something so uncertain in my mother’s face, something so fearful it struck a note in me. I looked at the clock over the mantel: it was already four o’clock, and my mother hadn’t left the house yet. Unusual: she was the only person I ever knew who could never sit still. Especially now, when she was dating The Garbageman, for whom she often cooked most meals and who, by this time on Sunday, had usually called our house to chat for hours, as if they were silly teenagers in love.

“Oh,” I said. I looked at her face under her mop of curls, the weary circles around her eyes. “The Garbageman call today?”

My mother flushed again and stood to carry the mugs back to the kitchen. “Not yet,” she tossed over her shoulder, as if it meant nothing to her at all.

I looked at Pot, who was frowning solemnly on her perch on the living room couch. She looked beyond me at a bird that landed on the tree outside, and cried, “A Song Sparrow! Hip, hip, hip hurrah boys, spring is here! That’s what they say,” she said, beaming. “The Song Sparrows. They say, Hip, hip, hip hurrah boys, spring is here!” She was tapping her feet in her excitement, blinking so rapidly and nervously that she reminded me of my mother.

“Pot,” I said. “Have you taken your medication today?”

“Whoops,” she said, grinning.

“Pot,” I said. “How long has it been since you took your medication?”

She shrugged. “A week? Maybe a week. I stopped. I don’t believe anymore in medicating children,” she said.

I shuddered because I heard in her words the distinct voice of an adult, someone who never saw Pot as she had been in her awful years. A teacher, perhaps, or some judgmental village crone. I went to the kitchen, slamming the door behind me. “Mom,” I said. “Pot’s not taking her medication. And by the way, don’t you think she’s too young to understand all this Lucky Chow Fun crap? She’s only ten. She’s just a baby. I don’t think she can handle it.”

My mother stopped washing the mug she was holding and let the hot water run. The steam circled up around her, catching in her frizzy gray hair, spangling it when she turned around. “Lollie,” she said. “I’ll make sure she takes the Ritalin from now on. But nobody in town is going to be able to escape what happened. Not even the kids. It’s better that we tell her the truth before someone else tells her something much worse.”

“What’s worse?” I said. “And I don’t think people are made to take truths straight-on, Mom. It’s too hard. You need something to soften them. A metaphor or a story or something. You know.”

“No,” she said, “I don’t.” She turned off the water with a smack of her hand. “Why don’t you teach me, since you seem to know everything.”

“Well,” I said, but at the moment when we most need these things, they don’t always come to us. I couldn’t remember a word. I opened my mouth and it hung open there, useless. I closed it. I shrugged.

My mother nodded. “That’s what I thought,” she said, and turned away.

YEARS LATER, I WOULD HAVE HAD the presence of mind to offer the tale “Fitcher’s Bird,” from the Brothers Grimm, to offer up an allegorical explanation. I would have told my mother how a wizard dressed as a beggar would magically lure little girls into his basket. He’d cart them to his mansion, give them an egg and key, and tell them not to go into the room that the key opened. Then he’d leave, and the little girls would explore the magnificent house, finally falling prey to curiosity and opening the door of the forbidden chamber.

There, they’d find a huge basin filled with the bloody, dismembered remains of other girls. They’d be so surprised, they’d drop the egg in the vat, and wouldn’t be able to wipe the stain away. When the wizard would come home to find the stained egg, he would dismember the girls and toss their remains into the vat.

Eventually, he did this to the two eldest girls from one family, and came back for the third daughter. This girl, though, was uncommonly clever. She hid the egg in a safe place and brazenly went into the room, only to find her dismembered sisters in the bloody vat. But instead of panicking, she pulled their severed limbs out and pieced them back together again, and when the parts were reassembled, the girls miraculously came back to life.

The clever girl hid her sisters in a room to await the wizard, and when he returned and saw she hadn’t bloodied the egg, he decided to marry her. She agreed, but said first that she would send him home with a basketful of gold for her parents. She hid her two sisters in the basket, which he carted home, now a servant of his clever bride. In his absence, the little girl dressed a human skull in flowers and jewels and put it in the attic window. Then she rolled herself in honey and feathers to transform herself into a strange feathered creature, and ran out into the bright day.

On her way home, she encountered the wizard, who thought she was a wonderful bird and said, “Oh, Fitcher’s feathered bird, where from, where from?”

To which she responded, “From feathered Fitze Fitcher’s house I’ve come.”

“And the young bride there, how does she fare?” he asked, imagining his marriage night, and the soft young body of his wife.

And she, smiling softly under her down and honey, said, “She’s swept the house all the way through, and from the attic window, she’s staring down at you.”

When the wizard arrived home to find the skull in the window, he waved at it, thinking it was his bride. When he went inside, the brothers and father of the little stolen girls locked the door, set a fire, and burned the terrible murderer up.

IN THE GRIMMS’ STORY, of course, the community at last cleansed itself by fire, and in the aftermath came out righteous and whole. This did not happen to Templeton.

We were under siege. The media trucks were parked all along Main Street. Our town, though small, was famous for the baseball museum and for its beauty, an all-American village. Right-wing pundits on television and in the mega-corporation-owned newspapers held up our town as a symbol for the internal moral rot of America, a symbol of the trickle-down immorality stemming from our Democrat president, who went around screwing everything that moved. People from Cherry Valley and Herkimer roared into town, pretending that they were natives, and the whole country saw us as drawling mulleted hicks in whole-body Carhartt, and hated us more. The handsome newscasters shivered in their fur-lined parkas, sat at our diner, and tried to eavesdrop, but were really only eavesdropping on other newscasters.

Our shell-shocked mayor appeared on television. He was the town know-it-all, a bearded hobbit of a man who gave bombastic walking tours to the tourists and wore shorts all year because of a skin condition. He had to pause to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief, choking up throughout his speech. At the end, he said, “Templeton will survive, as we have survived many other disasters in our illustrious history. Be brave, Templeton, and we will see each other through.” But there was no applause at the end, as there were no Templetonians in the audience, composed as it was of disaster-gawkers and newscasters.

Our Ambassador appeared on CNN and 20/20 to defend our town. “We are not perfect,” he said in his quivery old man’s voice. “But we are a good town, full of good people.” His cloudy eyes filled with fervor. It was very affecting.

We stayed inside. We went to the grocery store, if we needed to, to school, and a few of us went to the gym. Our team practiced in virtual silence, the only sound the water sucking in the gutters, the splash of our muscled limbs. In school, the teachers came to classes with red-rimmed eyes, traces of internal anguish happening in the homes of people we never imagined had private lives. The drama kids pretended to weep at lunch on a recurrent basis. There was a hush over the town, as if each of us were muted, swaddled in invisible quilts, so separate from one another as to not be able to touch, if we wanted to. Girls began walking in groups everywhere, as if for protection. The Templeton men did not dare to look at the Templeton women, furious as we were, righteous. And in this separation, in our own sorrow, we forgot about the girls, the Lucky Chow Fun girls, and when, after some time, we thought of them, they were the enemies. They were the ones who had brought this shame to our town.

TWO TERRIBLE WEEKS PASSED. My mother stopped talking about The Garbageman, tout court. He stopped calling. She stopped visiting him with plates of food. She grew drawn and pale, and spent a lot of time in her flannel nightgown, watching Casablanca. She picked a new fight with the principal and came home spitting. The Winter Dance was canceled: I spent that evening dating a pizza and an apple crumble, watching Fred and Ginger glide across the floor, pure grace. Pot acquired two new taxidermied birds, one finch, one scarlet macaw, its head cocked intelligently, even in death.

One day, I came home, skirting Main Street and its hordes of news cameras. I went to the mailbox and found six envelopes from colleges all over the country, all addressed to me.

I went inside. I sat at the table with a cup of tea, the six letters splayed before me. One by one, I opened them. And what would have been a personal tragedy before the Lucky Chow Fun was now a slight relief. Of the six colleges, all of which had recruited me for swimming, though I had indifferent grades and mediocre SATs, I had only gotten into one.

Rather: I had gotten into one. One, glorious, one.

I tossed out the bad five, and waited for Pot. My tea cooled and I made more, and it cooled again. I peered out the curtains for my little sister, but she didn’t come. I made cookies, chocolate chip, her favorite. I had half an hour before swim practice and she still wasn’t home when my mother came in, with her energetic stompings and mutterings. “My God, Lollie,” she said, “you’ll never guess what that ass-muncher of a princip—”

“Mom?” I interrupted. “Do you know where Potty is?”

“Isn’t she here?” she said, massaging her neck, peeping in from the mudroom. “She was supposed to come straight home from school to go to the grocery store with me.”

“Nope,” I said. “And it’s getting dark.”

She came into the kitchen then, scowling. “Do you have any idea where she could be?” she said. We looked at each other, and her hand floated up to her hair.

I stood, nervous. “Oh, God,” I said.

“Calm down,” she said, though she was flustered herself. “Think, Lollie. Does she have any friends?”

“Pot?” I said. I looked at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Oh, God,” she said.

“Let’s think, let’s think,” I said. I paced to the window, then back. “Mom. Let’s think. Where does Potsy get her birds? The stuffed ones. Do you know?”

My mother looked at me, then slowly lifted her hands to her cheeks. “You know,” she said, “I never actually wondered. I guess I assumed your dad was sending them. Or she was buying them with her allowance. Or something. I never wondered.”

“You haven’t given us allowance in six months,” I said. “So where are they from?”

“Is she stealing them?” said my mother. “Maybe from the Biological Field Station?”

“Pot?” I thought of this, wondering if Pot could have the gall to waltz into some place, open up the display cabinets, hide the birds under her shirt, and waltz on home. “I don’t think so. It’s not like her,” I said, at last.

“Well,” said my mother, her voice breaking. “Who’d have a collection like that?”

And my mother and I looked at one another. There was a long, shivery beat, a car driving by outside, its headlights washing over my mother’s face, then beyond. And then we both ran out coatless into the snow, we ran into the blue twilight as hard as we could up the block, forgetting about our cars in our hurry, we ran past the grand old hospital, over the Susquehanna, we ran fleet and breathless to the Ambassador’s house, and then we burst inside.

The house was extraordinarily hot, the chandelier in the hallway tinkling, and the ugly miniature schnauzer barking and nipping at us. Our shoes slid on the marble floor as we sped into the living room. Bookcases, Persian rugs, leather armchairs — no Pot. We flew through the door, into the library — no Pot. We ran though the hall and stopped short in the dining room.

There, my little sister was dressed in a feather boa and rhinestone starlet glasses, in her undershirt, crouching on an expensive cherrywood chair and looking at a book of birds that was at least as big as she was. She looked up at us, unsurprised, when we came in.

“Hey,” she said. “Mom, Lollie, come here, look at this. This is a first edition Audubon. The Ambassador said I could have it when I’m eighteen.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” my mother said, snapping from her surprise and charging over to her. She ripped the glasses from Pot’s face and pushed her arms into her little cardigan. Pot looked up at her, her face open and wondering.

That’s when the Ambassador appeared in the doorway and said, “Oh, dear. I told Miss Petra here she should have been home hours ago. But you know her and birds,” and he gave a tinkly little laugh.

“You,” I said, charging at him. “What in the fuck are you doing with my sister? Why is she in her undershirt?”

“Pot,” my mother was saying at the same time. “Has he touched you? Has he hurt you? Has he done anything to you?”

The Ambassador blinked, his milky eyes canny. “Oh, my,” he said mildly. “Oh, I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. Pot told me you knew she visited with me.”

“We did not,” I said. “Are you hurting her?”

Pot gave a little bark of surprise. “Oh, God,” she said. “No. Jeez, you guys. I mean, like. I don’t think he even. You know. Girls,” she trailed off.

We looked at her.

She sighed. “No girls. He doesn’t like them,” she said.

My mother and I looked at the Ambassador, who flushed, ducked his head. “Well,” he said. “Well, Petra. Oh, my. But yes, you are right. And no, I have never touched Petra. She comes here after school, and I give her one object of her choice every week. I have no heirs, you know,” he said. “I have so many beautiful things. Petra is an original. She is a pleasure to talk to. She will one day be something great, I warrant.”

“He lets me wear a boa,” said Pot. “He lets me be a movie star. He knew Grace Kelly. And it’s always hot in here so I have to take off my sweater. It’s always one hundred degrees exactly. I die if I don’t take off my sweater.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I am anemic,” the Ambassador said delicately. “I cannot bear cold.” He looked at our shoes, dripping slush on his fine floors. He said, “Could I make some tea for you before you three ladies return home?”

My mother and I stared at the Ambassador for a very long moment. And then, in shame, we gathered ourselves up. We apologized, we clutched our little Pot tightly to us. And he, ever the statesman, pretended we hadn’t offended him. “These times,” he sighed, escorting us to the door, where the wind had blown a great heap of powder onto the priceless rug. “In these dark days, there is so much distrust in this town. I understand absolutely. You never know quite what to think about people you believe you trust.” Then he shivered, and Pot reached up and squeezed his hand. In the glance between the two there was such adoration that, on the long walk through the dark, I stole small looks at Pot to try to see what exactly he had seen in her, the budding wonder there. The one she would become, to our great wonder.

IT TOOK A LOT OF TIME. Templeton could not heal quickly. There was still much scandal, many divorces, many people leaving town to start over. The dentist I had been to all my life. The school custodian, the principal, the football coach. My postman, the town librarian, my best friend’s brother, the owner of the boatyard, the manager of the Purple Pickle, the CFO of the baseball museum — all divorced or shamed. Brad Huxley sent to military school. The Garbageman moved to Manhattan, though his trucks still rumble by every Thursday morning. And there were many more.

But the newscasters trickled away when a professional football player killed his wife and charged the country with a new angst. The tourists returned as if nothing had happened, and there were motorboats again on the lake, my tearful graduation, the death-by-chocolate binge the night before I drove off to school. The Chens were shipped back to China, and probably set free, and the girls were taken to San Francisco, where most of them decided to make a new life. To heal. I read of their trial in the Freeman’s Journal, from the safety of my dorm room my freshman year. In the end, time smoothed it all away.

But for those of us who return periodically, there is always a little frisson of darkness that falls over us when we see the candy shop where the Lucky Chow Fun once had been.

ONLY NOW, MANY YEARS LATER, can I imagine what the real tragedy had been. It was not the near-death of my town, though that was where all my sympathy was at the time. I mourned the community that almost buckled under the scandal, for the men in the town, for our women. How we were split. As was my training, I forgot about the poor Lucky Chow Fun girls. Only now, years later, do I dream of them.

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE SEVEN GIRLS. They were girls like any other girls, no cleverer, no more or less wealthy than others in their town. They were pretty as young girls are always pretty, blooming, rose-cheeked, lily-skinned. The factory they worked in was gray, the machines they worked on were gray, the nighttime streets they walked back to their crowded apartments, all gray. But they dreamed in colors, in blues and greens and golds.

One dark night, the girls’ parents closed the doors. Conferred. When they came out, the girls were told: we are sending you to America. There should have been joy in this, but the parents’ smiles were also taut with fear.

How much? the girls asked, trembling.

Enough, the parents responded, meaning: Enough money, enough of your questions.

And the seven girls were taken to the docks. They crawled into boxes and were sealed inside with water and candy and pills. There, with the bones of their knees pressed to the bones of their ribs, hearing the roar of the tanker, they saw nothing in the darkness but more darkness.

They arrived, weak and trembling. They were unpacked. They were taken to the house where they were trained to be quiet, absent, to press themselves to the mattresses and not say a word. In that house, they slowly became ghosts.

The seven ghosts were put then into a van, driven to a cold town on a lake, where nobody knew who they were, nobody cared if they were living or dead, where they cooked silently, cleaned silently, lay on the mattresses, and did not say a word. Men went into their rooms, men left their rooms, other men came in.

One ghost stopped eating and she died. In the middle of the night, the ghosts were forced to row her to the middle of the black lake. They tied her limbs to grease buckets filled with stones and they dropped her in. She sank under the water and seemed to blink up at them as she went. They rowed back. Wordless, as always.

Then there were six ghosts. The two that were sisters were punished, locked in a room. The air was bad, and one died, the other almost did. And one of the remaining ghosts found the dead girl and her half-dead sister. She touched the blue cheeks of the dead girl, and she felt only cold. Something old rose in her, some small courage. She stole one moment with the phone, spoke words, clumsy, ugly, perhaps, but those words breathed life back into the girls, brought liberty in the form of flashing red and blue lights.

IN THE END, AFTER THE LONG TRIAL, the men who’d imprisoned them were imprisoned themselves. The girls went to San Francisco, where they chose to stay, where, slowly, they went out into the streets. They saw the green of the water, the gold of the sky, and they learned what it meant to be girls again. I imagine them there, together, walking in some garden, their hair gleaming under the sun. I imagine them happy.

And it is a happy ending, perhaps, in the way that myths and fairy tales have happy endings; only if one forgets the bloody, dark middles, the fifty dismembered girls in the vat, the parents who sent their children into the woods with only a crust of bread. I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.