Birdsong from the Radio

“Long ago,” Leonora told her children, and the telling was long ago, too, “I was just ordinary.” Of course they didn’t believe her. She was taller than other mothers, with a mouthful of nibbling, nuzzling teeth, and an affectionate chin she used as a lever. Her hair was roan, her eyes taurine.

Later the children would look at the handful of photographs of their mother from the time, all blurred and ill lit, as though even the camera were uncertain who she was, and they would try to remember the gobbling slide of her bite along their necks, her mouth loose and toothy on a shoulder. The threat of more. She was voracious. They could not stop laughing. No! No!

Again!

Children long to be eaten. Everyone knows that.

“Don’t you want to devour that child?” Leonora asked. “Oh, look at that bottom. I am, I’m going to bite it. I’m going to eat that child whole.”

(To speak of love as cannibalism! She would have thought it bizarre herself, before her marriage, but here were the children, Rosa, Marco, Dolly, plump loaves of bread, delicious.)

Those were the days just before busses replaced the trolley lines. The children could hear from their bedroom windows the screech of the streetcars up the hill. Their father ran his family’s radio manufacturers, and there were radios in every room of the house, pocket and tabletop, historic cathedrals. His name was Alan. “Poor Alan,” Leonora called him, and they both understood why: he was in thrall to his wife. He was a very bus of a man, practical and mobile, and he left the children to Leonora, who had a talent for love, as he had a talent for business.

Winters she took the children tobogganing. Summers they piloted paddleboats across the city pond. She never dressed for the weather. No

gloves, no sun hats, no shorts, no scarves. She was always blowing on her fingers or fanning her shirt against her torso. Sunburn, windburn, soaking wet with rain. The children, too. Other mothers sent them home with hand-me-down mittens and umbrellas.

Not surprising, said those mothers later: she never took care of her children.

Rosa, Marco, Dolly: Leonora took them to see the trolleys the last day they ran. She wore a green suede coat, the same color as the trolleys, in solidarity. The coat closed with black loops, which Leonora assured her children were called frogs.

“It’s raining,” said Leonora. “The frogs will be happy.”

“Those aren’t frogs,” said Marco. He was five, the age of taxonomy.

“They are,” said Leonora. “I promise. And my shoes are alligator.”

“Why are we watching the streetcars?” asked Marco.

“There’s no beauty in busses,” Leonora said. “A bus can go anywhere it likes. A trolley is beautiful.”

“Oh yes,” said Rosa, who was seven, “I can see.”

Leonora was as doleful as if the streetcars had been hunted into extinction. They were lovely captives who could not get away, and they left only their tracks behind.

Her coat fastened with frogs; her shoes were alligator. Perhaps she was already turning into an animal.

The children grew bigger, and bony. Leonora grew worse about love: she demanded it. She kissed too hard. She grabbed the children by the arms to pull them close. “You seized me,” said Dolly, age six. “Why did you seize me so?”

“I was looking for a place to nibble,” said Leonora. Dolly was a skinny girl.

Leonora bit. She really did now. Moments later, contrite, writhing, she would say, “The problem is I love you so. I do. Can I be near you? Do you mind?”

Later, when the neighbors discussed what had happened, exactly, to Leonora, they couldn’t decide. The story of her family was long and sad—a great-grandfather had lived three decades in an asylum; an aunt had killed herself—and the story had not reached its conclusion: here was Leonora’s

chapter. She missed her children, who were growing up. She had been, from a distance, a bonny mother, thin, patient, and now she thickened, and coarsened, and you could hear her shriek from all the windows of the house.

She had gone mad, or was going.

The doctors prescribed her pills, which she refused to take.

She still tried to eat her children, but they were afraid of her. So she had to sneak. The weight of her as she sat on the edge of their beds in the middle of the night was raptorial: ominous yet indistinct. At any moment, the children thought, she might spread her arms and pull them from the sheets through the ceiling and into the sky, the better to harm them elsewhere. The children took to sleeping in the same bed. Rosa, Marco, Dolly. Too old to sleep together, but they had to. They chose a different bed every night, and lay quietly, as they heard her go from pillow to pillow, the unfurling flump of the sheets like the wings they thought they could see on her back.

“Come back to bed,” said Poor Alan from the hallway in a terrified voice. “Come listen to the radio and fall asleep.” The top of his head was bald. The children could see the bathroom light pool in a little dent in his scalp, just below his summit.

The children had radios in their rooms. He snapped one on, to the classical station, to calm them down. “You never need be lonely with a radio!” he always said, but they knew that wasn’t so. A radio station was another way grown-ups could talk to you without ever having to listen.

It was Rosa who told Poor Alan that they had to go. She was fifteen. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “You can come if you want to. But Marco and Dolly and I are going.” Then, seeing his face, “We’d like you to come.”

“She needs help,” he said.

“She won’t get it.”

He nodded. “How will we manage?”

“We’re not managing now,” said Rosa. “In a year I’ll get my license. I’ll drive the little kids to school.” The little kids! She was only two years older than Marco, who was three years older than Dolly.

“What will happen to your mother?” said Poor Alan, wringing his hands.

“Whatever it is, it’s already happening,” said Rosa. “I can’t watch anymore.”

“She’s a wonderful mother. You must remember that.”

“I don’t,” said Rosa.

He wasn’t a bad man. He could be mistaken for thinking it was a war, an ancient one, and that she would fight against the rest of them as long as she was near. In the autumn he took Rosa and Marco and Dolly to a new house, and Leonora was left behind. He arranged for her disability checks.

He did not take her off the bank account.

“If you get help, we’ll come back,” he told her.

Poor Alan hired a nanny, Madeline, a jug-eared, freckled beauty. A good girl, as her father later described her to news cameras. She picked the children up at the end of every school day and brought them to the house.

Rosa worshipped her; Dolly and Marco merely loved her. This went on for five months until the day after Madeline’s twenty-first birthday, when she woke up in the middle of the day still drunk from the first legal cocktails of her life, start of February, drove to the school, got the children into the car, and found the car was too hot, and as she tried to wrench her wool coat off one shoulder, and as she felt the last of the black Russians muscle through her veins, and as she hit a patch of black ice, she understood there would be an accident. She could see the children hurt in the back seat. The windshield gone lacey. Herself, opening the door, and running away, away, away. When the car stops, I’m going to leg it, and that was the last thought Madeline or any of them ever had.

No children, thought Leonora. She had intended to get herself upright and go looking for them. She should have eaten them when she could.

For a while she tried to distract herself with the radios. Each wore Poor Alan’s family name like a crest on the pellicle of the speaker. She went from room to room and turned them on, but then she thought she could hear

—behind the sonorous daylong monologue of the news station, or the awful brightness of Vivaldi on the classical station, or jokes cracked by a disc jockey named after an ancient king—the voices of her children. She tried to tune them in. You had to use the volume and the tuning knob in mincing little oscillations. Then, there it was: the tootling rhythm of Dolly’s conversation. Rosa humming at the back of her throat as though ready to defiantly swallow the sound should someone walk into the room. Marco sighing before he explained something. She wondered whether they each had a station, Dolly, Marco, Rosa. Maybe they had different radios, even.

No: they would be cuddled up together in one frequency, the way they liked.

But she could never tune them in clearly, and slowly the noise behind the newscast turned feral, howling, chirping, shrieking: a forest empty of children. Then she knew they were gone. The radios wouldn’t twist off tight enough. The voices of strangers leaked through, no matter how hard she turned the knob. She unplugged the radios, knocked the batteries from the backs. She could still hear that burble, someone muttering or the sound of an engine a block away.

She lay in bed. At her ear hummed the old clock radio, with the numbered decagons that showed their corners as they turned to indicate that a minute had ended, or an hour, the hum a little louder then. She felt her torso, where her children would have been, had she managed to eat them.

Not everyone who stops being human turns animal, but Leonora did.

It was time to leave the house. The top of her back grew humped with ursine fat, and she shambled like that, too, bearlike through the aisles of the grocery store at the end of the street. She shouldered the upright fridges full of beer; she sniffed the air of the checkout lanes. Panda-eyed and eagle-toed and lion-tailed, with a long braid down her back that snapped as though with muscles and vertebrae. Her insides, too. Animals of the dark and deep.

Her kidneys dozing moles; her lungs, folded bats. The organs that had authored her children: jellyfish, jellyfish, eel, eel, manatee.

I am dead. I am operated by animals.

Her wandering took her to the bakery, where every Saturday morning of their early childhood, she’d taken her children, to let Poor Alan sleep in. In the angled case she saw the loaves of challah. She saw something familiar in the shape.

“Can I help you?” said the teenager behind the counter. His T-shirt had a picture of the galaxy on it, captioned YOU ARE HERE.

She tapped the glass in front of the challah. “Please,” she said, and he pulled a loaf out, and she said, “I don’t need a bag.”

He had already started angling the loaf into the bag’s brown mouth.

Who didn’t need a bag for bread?

“I don’t need a bag,” she repeated. She counted out the money and set it down. “Just the paper.”

He handed it self-consciously across the counter. When it was in her hands she adjusted the paper around it, admired the sheen of the egg wash,

its placid countenance. Then she carried it to a table in the window and spread out the wax paper and set the loaf upon it.

Marco. She saw his sleeping baby self in the shape of the bread. Knees and arms akimbo, head turned, as always, to the left. The girls had cast different shadows. She put her hand on the loaf to check for oven warmth.

Not on the surface. Maybe at the heart. Later she wouldn’t care what people thought of her, she’d cradle the loaf in her arms before eating, but now she patted the bread, and then, with careful fingers, pulled it apart. That sense of invading a privacy that is then offered up to you. Yeast, warmth, sweetness: a child. Her mouth was full with it, and then her head, and throat, and stomach. She felt the feral parts of her grow sleepy and peaceable.

Thereafter, every morning she went to the bakery and bought a challah and pretended it was one of her children. She knew she could never say this aloud. Rosa slept with her bottom in the air. Dolly, alone of the children, needed to be swaddled. Marco, akimbo. She carried the day’s loaf in her arms to the table. She patted it. Then she ate it. Not like an animal. Knob by knob, slowly: one loaf could last her four hours, washed down with water from the waxy paper cups the bakery gave away for free.

That was her nourishment. She lived on bread and good manners and felt sick with her children.

The new mothers of the neighborhood wished the bakery would throw the bulky unkempt woman out. As they wished they felt guilty, because they were trying to teach their children tolerance. But then they looked at the angled case. The center bay was filled with glittering sugared shortbread cookies, decorated according to the season. Hearts, shamrocks, eggs, flags, leaves, pumpkins, turkeys, candy canes, hearts again. Evidence: bakeries were for children, and children were frightened of Leonora. (A trick of the radio again. The children were only tuned to their mothers’ fear.) Sometimes a mother and child would walk by her table, and Leonora could see the rictus of judgment on the mother’s face.

“Say hello, Pearl,” the mother would tell her child, and Pearl, dutifully, would say hello, and Leonora would wave. She knew that the mother was thinking, Thank God she doesn’t know what I’m thinking.

Those children neither pained nor interested her. They weren’t her lost ones. But every now and then a Pearl or a Sammy would smile at her, and even giggle, and she would, she would want a nibble, a kiss, in the old way.

A raspberry blown on a neck, a kiss with a bite at its heart: nibble, nibble,

yum. They weren’t hers, but they were sweet. But if you were the mother of dead children, that was over. You weren’t allowed.

On those days she ordered a second loaf of bread, which she dragged home and tore apart.

Five years passed like nothing. She was recognized in the neighborhood as the monument she was, constructed to memorialize a tragedy but with the plaque long since dropped off. She was Leonora. Her name had survived, because the bakery workers remembered it, but that was all. Nobody imagined that she was a mother. She was (anyone who saw her presumed) a person who had always been exactly thus, poisoned, padded, eyes sunk into her face. She existed only at the table, eating bread in her finicking way.

She spoke to the people behind the counter. That was all. Some of them were patient, and some of them weren’t.

Then one day a man came into the bakery, caught her eye, and smiled.

Poor Alan, she thought reflexively, but then she remembered Poor Alan was dead, though he’d remembered her in his will and set up a trust to take care of her. This man wore a green wool hat like a bucket. The hat looked expensive, imported. He pulled it from his head and revealed a mop of white hair. No, he never was Poor Alan, who’d lost his hair long before it faded. But she did know the man. He sat down across from her. The tabletop was Formica, the green of trolleys.

“Mike Wooster,” he said.

“Hello, Mike Wooster,” said Leonora. She could smell her own vile breath. She slept in a bed and washed herself, but she did not always remember to brush her teeth. Why would she? She scarcely used them.

He bounced the hat around on his fists. Then he set it in front of him.

She had a sense he wanted to drop it over the remains of the day’s bread: Dolly this time. He said, “I’m Madeline’s father.”

She heard the present tense of the sentence.

Everything about him was rich and lulled. “I heard you came here,” he said. “That bread good?”

She tore off a brown curve. A cheek, a clenched hand. She sniffed at it before she pushed it in her mouth.

He cleared his throat. “We’re having a memorial service. And my wife and I and our kids—well, we thought of you.” He picked the hat back up, brushed some flakes of challah from the brim. “I’ve thought of you.” He

said that to the hat, then got hold of himself. “Every single day I’ve thought of you. You know,” he said, “they turned my daughter into a monster, too.”

The alcohol, the coat, the ice. Everyone said that if one of those things hadn’t been true, they never would have crashed. “Too?” she said.

The animals of her body were roaring back to life. They—whoever they were—had not turned Leonora into a monster. They had erased her.

Newspapers, television, the terrible gabbling radio, which spoke only of the children’s father, the left-behind man, the single parent. That poor man, looking after his children. To lose all of them at once.

Poor Alan had held a funeral, had invited her. Though he’d asked her to come to the front, she’d sat alone at the back of the church—a church!

Since when!— drunk and unmoored. Nobody spoke to her. She was a mother who’d let her children go, a creature so awful nobody believed in her. She’d had to turn herself into a monster in order to be seen.

“Madeline never got a chance,” said Mike Wooster. “To redeem herself.

But you could. You could be redeemed.”

She laughed, or part of her did, a living thing sheltered in a cave inside of her. “Redeemed,” she said. “Like a Skee-Ball ticket.”

“Like a soul. Your soul can be redeemed.”

“Too late,” she said. “Soul’s gone.”

“Where?” he said.

“Where do you think?” she said.

At that he took her hand. “This only feels like hell,” he said. “I know. I do know.”

She shook her head to refuse his sympathy: she could smell the distant desiccation of it. No. Why had he come here? She could not be redeemed, a coupon, a ticket. He had a dead child, too. She could feel it twitching through his fingers, the sorrow, the guilt, like schools of tiny flicking fish who swim through bone instead of ocean. He was not entirely human anymore, either. Indeed, she could hear the barking dog of his heart, wanting an answer. Her heart snarled back, but tentatively.

If she accepted his sympathy, then she would have to feel sorry for him.

She would have to transcend. Some people could. They could forgive and rise above their agony.

She could feel the turning of her organs in their burrows, and she felt an old emotion, one from before. Gratitude. She was thankful to remember that

she was a monster. Many monsters. Not a chimera but a vivarium. Her heart snarled, and snarled, and snarled. She tried to listen to it.

“The thing,” Leonora told Mike Wooster, and she pulled her hand from his, “is that you can’t unbraid a challah.”

“No?” he said. “Well, I’d guess not.”

“Would you like some?” she asked.

He looked at the rubble of the day’s loaf. “Oh no. No, that’s yours.”

“Let me get you one. Please.”

“I don’t need—”

Leonora said, rising, “It will be a pleasure to watch you eat.”