Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff Read Free Book Online Page A

water. Rosalind sits in the corner by the potted palm, takes out her knitting, and falls asleep.
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    IN THE BEGINNING, THEY DON’T SPEAK. He asks her to kick as he holds her in the water. She tries, making one tiny splash, then another. Around the shallow end they go, three, four times. Rosalind’s gentle snores echo in the room. At last, Aliette slides one thin arm around L.’s neck. “Stop,” she says, panting with pain.
    He brings her to the steps and sets her there. He stands before her in the waist-deep water, trying not to look at her.
    â€œWhat is wrong with Rosalind?” he says. “Why is she sleeping?”
    â€œNothing is wrong,” says Aliette. “Poor thing has been up all night.”
    â€œI trust that she was not caring for you? I assumed you were healthy,” L. says.
    Aliette hesitates and looks down. “She was caring for me, yes—and others,” she says. Her face is tight and forbidding. But she then looks at him with one cocked eyebrow and whispers, “L., I must admit that I like your other suit better.”
    He is wearing a new indigo bathing costume with suspenders, and he looks down at himself, then at her, puzzled. His new suit cost him a week’s wages. “Why is that?” he asks.
    She glances at the sleeping nurse, then touches him where a muscle bulges over one hip. “I liked the hole here,” shesays. Then her hand is under the water where it looms, suddenly immense. She touches his thigh. “And here,” she says. Her fingertip lingers, then falls away.
    When he has steadied himself to look at her face, she is smiling innocently. She does not, however, look like a little girl anymore.
    â€œThey were only small holes,” he says. “I am surprised you noticed.”
    â€œI notice everything,” she says. But her face grows a little frightened; her eyes slide toward Rosalind, and she gives a great roar as if he’d told a stunner of a joke. This awakens the nurse, who resumes her knitting, blinking and looking sternly at the pair. “Let’s swim,” cries Aliette, and claps both of her hands on the water like a child.
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    DURING THE LATE LESSON THAT NIGHT, as Rosalind again succumbs to the heat and damp of the room, Aliette watches with amusement as L. tries to hide his chipped tooth from her by turning his face. He has waxed his moustache mightily, and the musky fragrance of the wax fills her head and makes it swim. She laughs, her face in the water. He thinks she is only blowing bubbles.
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    BY THE END OF THE FIRST WEEK, Aliette has gained ten pounds. When she is not swimming, she is forcing herself to eat cheese and bread with butter, even when she is not hungry. She loosens her corset, then throws it away. At night, though exhausted from swimming, she climbs out of bed and tries to stand. She succeeds for one minute one night, and five minutes the next. She has a tremendous tolerance for pain. At the end of the week, she can stand for thirty minutes and take two steps before falling. When she does fall, it is into bed, and she sleeps immediately, L.’s poetry beating around in her brain like so many trapped sparrows.
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    ALL THAT WEEK, L. PACES. On the cloudy Friday, he kicks the notebooks full of weightless little words, and they skitter across his floor. He decides that he must quit, tell that Wall Street Huber that he has another obligation and can no longer teach Aliette to swim. Blast her pathetic little legs to hell, he thinks. L. stands at his window and looks down into the dark street, where urchins pick through boxes of rotting vegetables discarded from the greengrocer’s downstairs. A leaf of cabbage blows free in the wind and attaches itself to the brick wall opposite L.’s window, where it flutters like a small green pennant.
    â€œPorca madonna,” he says. Then, as if correcting himself, he says, in English, “Pig Madonna.” It doesn’t sound