Flight Behavior

  After breakfast Preston stood on tiptoe and nearly pressed his glasses against the kitchen window to count the monarch pairs circling above the back pasture, committing themselves to family life above the placid pregnant flock. His thrill was electric. They were waking up. She tried to tap into that current but failed, standing beside her son at the window, waiting stupidly. She got out the roasting pan for the lamb shoulder roast Hester had sent home with them yesterday. She would slow-cook it all afternoon and they'd have leftovers for a week. On a different day she would have felt the joy of that too, the relief of plenty. She opened the curtains in the living room, stunned by her wooden spirit, gaining no purchase on the bright sky. She felt sealed inside her airtight house, a feeling so entirely familiar, wondering how long before they breathed up all the oxygen. With mechanical hands she vacuumed the kids' bedroom, then the living room. Cordie climbed onto the sofa and stood looking over its back, out at the road, having inferred that on this day windows held the key.

  After a time she pointed. "Mama look. Lady."

  The lady wore a short winter coat over a long skirt and strode slowly along the roadside, bearing her magnificent large head. Dellarobia shut off the vacuum and went to kneel next to Cordie on the sofa. It was moving toward them. Or she was, certainly a she, lean and graceful like a slow-motion shot of a fashion model striding down the runway of this landscape. Maybe from one of those project shows where people fashioned fantastical outfits out of silk handkerchiefs and dandelion fluff. The oversize head was an illusion, stout locks of hair emerging from a blue headscarf elaborately wound and tucked. A gift-wrapped head. The blue print skirt with its manifold tiny pleats rippled like curtains in front of a window fan. In the gravel margin between road and weedy ditch she came along at a dreamy pace, her head tilted back on the long recurved stem of her neck, with time stopped around her, it seemed. No cars passed, the cattle did not look up. Her skin was the brown color of winter pasture, her face a mysterious clause between the commas of long gold earrings: a completely impossible person to see out the window. Dellarobia and both the kids watched wide-eyed as she turned up their driveway and proceeded without hesitation alongside the house toward their back field. They all charged to the bedroom where Cub still slept, crowding close together to peer through the blinds. The camper was there. While Dellarobia was vacuuming, it had materialized. The lady moved unhurriedly toward the vehicle. The lady went to the metal door and disappeared inside.

  In minutes, they both stood at the kitchen door. She was nearly as tall as Ovid, cut from the same sinuous cloth, one shade darker, but her accent was not like his. Her voice was a deep, honeyed song overlaid with precision, consonants so clear the touch of tongue to teeth was audible. Her name, of course, Dellarobia knew.

  Juliet. Emerson. "I know, right?" Juliet said with a musical laugh. "Ovid and Juliet, Emerson Byron. People say we sound like an AP English exam."

  Whatever that test might entail, it was not the source of Dellarobia's dismay. Ovid suddenly was talkative. He had gone to meet her plane yesterday in Knoxville, but everything went wrong. Dellarobia was at a loss to follow the train of mishaps. An equipment failure, a missed connection, he'd ended up driving all the way to Atlanta to meet her, and driving back after dark. They'd stopped somewhere in north Georgia to spend the night in a Walmart parking lot. Preston and Cordie stood close to their mother and stared at this new Ovid with his arm around the lady.

  "Juliet is not crazy about long drives in the camper," Ovid said.

  "It's okay, I just took a little walk to stretch my legs," she said, obviously not unhappy and surely, Dellarobia thought, long-legged enough. She had a way of slowly lowering her eyes when she spoke that was not coy but generous, as if she hoped to send attention elsewhere. An unlikely expectation, looking as she did. Even her closed eyes were beautiful and enormous, like bronze tulip bulbs. The headscarf was printed with peacock feathers and twined in some inscrutable way with her vigorous hair.

  "Have you seen our part of the country before?" Dellarobia thought to ask.

  "No. I grew up in the South, but flat south. Mississippi. Ovid didn't tell me it was so beautiful here."

  "Well," Dellarobia said. "Welcome."

  They wanted a recommendation for where they could dine out that night. "My wife has found me out," Ovid said. "My trash bin is filled with pork-and-bean tins, and from this she deduces I have gone completely feral."

  "Not fe-ral," Juliet said, lightly imitating his accent. "Just reverting to bachelorhood in the wilds, as always."

  The accused stood with his arm around his wife's waist as if he did not mean to let go. They looked like two willow trees, struck by lightning and fused. Dellarobia told them dining out in Feathertown occurred at the Dairy Prince, and confessed that anything else was beyond her sphere. She did the only thing ordinary kindness allowed, not to mention the Scriptures, gesturing at the large joint of meat in the roasting pan on her counter: more than enough to entertain strangers. For thereby some have entertained angels unawares, though angels, she knew, traveled with baggage.

  Ovid and Juliet had met in Mexico City at a conference on monarchs. He was there as a representative of science, and she of art. She was not an artist herself, she was quick to explain in her demurring way, the smooth angular wrist flicking away attention, its bangles riveting the eye. A folklorist, she said, a word Dellarobia somehow linked with those painted wooden bracelets. They resembled toys you'd find in an attic, relics from the pre-plastic era. Juliet studied art made by other people who did not think they were artists, first in Mississippi and then Africa and eventually Mexico for her doctoral research. She'd made a study of decorative objects made by people who lived near the monarch roosts, down through the ages.

  "You'd be amazed what the monarchs represent for them," Juliet said. "Even now. Some people believe they're the souls of dead children."

  Dellarobia felt astonished by connections unforeseen. "One of Preston's little friends told me that. Her family used to live there."

  Dellarobia's brain felt like a pot boiling over on the stove. There was way too much going on in there. Four adults and two kids at her kitchen table left no room for anything else, so she carved the roast on the counter and filled the plates, arranging the potatoes and carrots on each, spooning the gravy and delivering them fast so it wouldn't all go cold. In other times Cub would have announced, "My wife used to be a hasher," not in a teasing way but with the reverence of an ox in the presence of flight. His wife could handle three plates at once. The wide and bottomless emptiness she would feel, being admired for such a thing as that. But tonight Cub hardly spoke. She could see in his eyes that he had gained some drift of her expansive unhappiness. Although from her labored attempts to explain things yesterday, he'd probably picked up only one narrow band of the spectrum: that he disappointed her. He'd spent the day building lambing jugs, expressing himself with a hammer in an empty barn.

  Juliet had walked through the back door this evening in slim jeans and tall shoes and a dazzling loose tunic, orange and yellow and black, and a yellow headscarf wrapped differently from the earlier one, allowing a greater overspilling of her hair. Dellarobia's eye kept going back to the innumerable glossy braids the same way she admired a gorgeous jacket lining, for the work involved. Ovid and Juliet handed her something in a twisted, candle-like paper bag they called a Riesling, which turned out to be wine. They apologized that it didn't really go with lamb, Dellarobia apologized for not really having a way to open it, and Ovid went to fetch a corkscrew from his home in the yard. Cub did not partake of the Riesling, though Dellarobia did, just a little. Their best glasses were heavy blue plastic. Preston asked for a taste and, denied that, wanted to smell it. He took a long, hearty whiff and howled, "Pew!"

  "You probably think we're cave people," Dellarobia said, though she did not feel as if she were in a cave. That she'd stepped off a cliff was more like it, yesterday in the cab of Cub's truck, and was falling still. Every known feeling belon
ged to someone else, some previous occupant. This house was what it was, Ovid had seen it, and honestly there was no knowing what might please or offend Juliet. Apparently she collected paintings made by old men on discarded saw blades, which sounded like something Hester might buy at a yard sale. Juliet had six or seven years on Dellarobia, plus an education and fashion sense and many things Dellarobia suspected she was not equipped to detect. Juliet's face, alone, deserved its own audience. Her mouth was broad and expressive, somehow muscular, in the way her lips curled outward when she spoke. She smiled with her chin forward like someone singing in a choir. Cub had come late to the table with his hair still wet from the shower and his mind unprepared to be blown by the likes of Juliet. He scrutinized her with an attention span that was probably inappropriate, and definitely atypical. Tonight he did not channel-surf. He stayed with the Juliet channel.

  Dellarobia sat down with the last plate and gestured for everyone to dig in. They both made appreciative groans, genuinely pleased, she could tell. It was hard to fake that kind of enthusiasm for a meal. She remembered his offhand remark about his wife's cooking that she'd taken for disloyalty, and now saw that Juliet probably would have agreed and laughed about it, had she been there. Juliet had bigger fish to fry. Suddenly Dellarobia thought of the knitters.

  "You know what? There are people up here on the mountain doing what you're talking about. Making representations of the butterflies."

  Juliet kindly spared her the embarrassment of going too far with this. She knew all about the knitters already, had followed their blog and communicated with them directly. She wanted to photograph their work and do interviews, but had had to wait until her break in classes to fly out for this visit.

  "Juliet's teaching load is oppressive," Ovid said. "She is the departmental mule."

  "Associate professor," Juliet said, with an unmulish smile. "Not a luminary like this one."

  "She has a sabbatical coming up," Ovid said.

  "I do," she agreed. "Our first whole winter together in seven years of marriage."

  "I'm not sure how she will tolerate me," Ovid said, and Juliet smiled again with her amazing glossy mouth. Plainly, she would tolerate him.

  Juliet knew things about monarchs her husband did not. Dellarobia asked about the name King Billies, and she knew it. From colonial times, she said. Protestant settlers noticed this butterfly wore the royal colors of their prince, William of Orange, who got around eventually to being the king of England. The name monarch came from the same old king.

  "You never told me that," Ovid said to his wife.

  Juliet's eyes blinked in their slow-motion way. "You never asked."

  "You see my strategy, Dellarobia. I keep myself surrounded with smart women."

  Ovid wore a loose, bright shirt similar to Juliet's with the same embroidered front placket instead of buttons. Dellarobia would not have dreamed he owned a shirt like that. Like the day he'd worn a tie for the kindergartners; here was a whole different Ovid she knew nothing about. He too had a father who'd died young, Alcidus Byron. Juliet never got to meet him but was great friends with Ovid's mother, Raquida, a forceful woman who supervised all postal affairs on the island of St. Thomas. Ovid's most comforting pastime as a boy had been to float in the sea and watch the sea turtles grazing in the sea-grass beds. Juliet was the one who described this. He'd taken her snorkeling many times, beginning with their honeymoon. "You can't be anything but happy when you watch them. Their little turtle mouths are always smiling." She demonstrated, moving her head slowly from side to side as if she were chewing sea grass instead of potatoes.

  "When I look at your sheep, I am often thinking of turtles," Ovid confessed. "I will miss those sheep. Especially the naughty brown fellows that stay up on the hill."

  Dellarobia was floored. She didn't think Ovid paid one bit of attention to the sheep. "This is Reggie we're eating, by the way. One of the naughty brown ones. Maybe that's not an introduction for polite company."

  "To Reggie," Juliet said, raising her plastic glass. Preston clinked with his cup and made Cordie lift her juice box. They were all hungry, and for several minutes everyone ate quietly, even Cordelia, giving Dellarobia the unaccustomed pleasure of hearing the clicks of forks against plates and tasting the melting texture of the slow-cooked roast. All the pasture and sunny days that had been Reggie.

  "We get to name the lambs this year," Preston said. "Because we're the ones getting them born."

  "What will you name them?" Juliet asked.

  "Mama says one will be Tina Ultner."

  "Oops," Dellarobia said. "Maybe don't mention that at school, Preston."

  Ovid seemed appreciative. "You think she will be safe for consumption?"

  "We'll probably just shear her," Dellarobia said.

  "That post is brilliant, by the way," Juliet said. "Did you make the video?"

  Dellarobia was surprised. "My friend Dovey. You heard about that?"

  "Are you kidding? I saw it before he called me. A friend of ours in Canada forwarded the link. My Ovid is a star." She reached her arm around his shoulders and hugged him like a little boy. He grinned like a boy. "Honestly? I think it's the best presentation he's given in years. I've probably told him that fifty times since Thursday."

  Dellarobia's surprise gained a new dimension.

  "He's so reticent. He hides his light under a bushel." Juliet playfully cuffed him under the chin. "The climate science community will probably give him a medal now."

  "The purple heart," Ovid said.

  "You're still in one piece," said his wife. They toasted to Tina Ultner.

  Dellarobia wondered what Ovid had told her about his first evening at this table. All that lame-brained prattle, her monarch-fact parade, the testicle balloon above the table. The emergency-room fever of that evening's embarrassment seemed fairly tame now, given the litany of embarrassing delusions that were still to come, regarding Ovid and herself. Her vision of Juliet as an interloper now struck Dellarobia as bizarre. It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been. As opposed to the fool she was probably being now. People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.

  The climate subject left them a little subdued. Ovid confessed they didn't know where they would spend their sabbatical winter, with the monarch system disintegrating under the pressures of fires and floods. His life was now at the whim of a livid ecosystem. Dellarobia watched as Cub meticulously cleaned his plate, avoiding eye contact, not out of step with the present company but staring through it. If he'd said one word this whole evening she could not remember it. She thought it unlikely that he had any real issue with Ovid and Juliet, Cub was not one to put a lot of energy into tact; he was just brooding, as he had been all day. It was so public and implicating, his sulk, like a forehead bruise on one of the kids that customarily made her blurt explanations to casual strangers at the grocery. Yet here she sat, detached, as if this gigantic miserable husband were not her fault. Just being the fools we are right now, she thought: a condition that inevitably changed, often for the worse. In one transcendent moment buoyed by about two ounces of Riesling she saw the pointlessness of clinging to that life raft, that hooray-we-are-saved conviction of having already come through the stupid parts, to arrive at the current enlightenment. The hard part is letting go, she could see that. There is no life raft; you're just freaking swimming all the time.

  Ovid was explaining something to Juliet that he called the theory of the territorial divide. With some confusion Dellarobia understood this was her theory, he was attributing it to her, though the terms he used were unfamiliar: climate-change denial functioned like folk art for some people, he said, a way of defining survival in their own terms. But it's not indigenous, Juliet argued. It's like a cargo cult. Introduced from the outside, corporate motives via conservative media. But now it's become fully identified with the icons of local culture, so it's no longer up for discussion.

  "The key thing is
," Juliet said, resting her elbow on the table, that beautiful wrist bending under the weight of its wooden rings, "once you're talking identity, you can't just lecture that out of people. The condescension of outsiders won't diminish it. That just galvanizes it."

  Dellarobia felt abruptly conscious of her husband and her linoleum. "Christ on the cross," she said without enthusiasm. "The rebel flag on mudflaps, science illiteracy. That would be us."

  "I am troubled by this theory, Dellarobia," Ovid said, "but I can't say you are wrong. I've read a lot of scholarly articles on the topic, but you make more sense."

  "Well, yeah," Juliet said, "that's kind of the point, that outsiders won't get it." She looked at Dellarobia, moving her head slightly from side to side in some secret girl signal, as if they were in league. Dellarobia felt herself resisting the invitation. Juliet went to yard sales for entertainment. She'd seen the coral reefs. Which according to Ovid were bleaching out and dying fast, all over the world. Preston would never get to see one. Dellarobia felt like taking a tire iron to something, ideally not now, ideally not herself. She got up to clear the plates.

  Cordie had been good through most of supper, if lifting her shirt and playing with her navel counted as being good. And squeezing boiled potatoes in her fists, watching white potato mush squirt out between her fingers. "Good" was a euphemism for quiet. But the internal weather of Cordelia always turned quickly, and now suddenly she was fussy, ready for a bath and bed. Cub lifted her by the armpits and retreated, barely nodding good night. Preston meanwhile was getting cranked up. His science buzz, Dellarobia called this. He remembered to ask Dr. Byron about the Perfect Females, the question he'd been nursing for weeks and weeks. Ovid explained they were females that had their full complement of parts.