A NECESSARY RITE

One day during the summer, a box arrived containing what resembled a miniature flying saucer. My father removed it from its packaging and held it up for me to look at. “It’s an incubator,” he told me triumphantly. “We’re going to see how eggs hatch into birds.” When he said the word birds, the r made an open-throated windy sound, as if it had taken flight, refusing to be tame. His movements were lively and crisp as he unfolded the instruction sheet and spread it on the table. “It’ll be an experiment.” At experiment, he rolled over the r like something solid, an object to be held up to the light and examined.

“Of course, we won’t keep them,” he’d explained that afternoon, driving back from the farm supply and feed store where we’d purchased quail eggs. “Once they’re old enough to survive on their own, we’ll set them free.” Indeed, in the encyclopedia entry he sent me to reference, the bobwhite quail did resemble the dun-colored finches that nested in our trees and hopped along scouring the lawn for worms—the ones that scattered like buckshot whenever any of us set foot in the yard.

It was the kind of proposition I was used to. When my brother Michael had brought home ducklings one Easter, we’d kept them until they grew to be full-sized and dirty white. We’d even set up a kiddie pool filled with fresh water for them to bathe and preen in, though they seemed to require more grooming than that. They stank. They soiled the patio. Every five or six days, Mom would give them a good shower with the garden hose. Eventually, our dog learned to help her round them up. By the following Easter, we’d surrendered them to the duck pond by the public library, where we hoped they’d take to life in the suburban wild. The next animal endeavor had been a warren of Dutch rabbits, the offspring of two “brothers” I’d been given for Christmas when I was eight. (I wonder now if the store assured everyone that the rabbits they sold in pairs were brothers.) My father built a hutch with a private sleeping den and a pen I could easily reach into. Each time a new litter was born, my father would sequester the mother and the baby bunnies. “Otherwise,” he’d told me matter-of-factly, “the male might eat the young.” Our attempts at animal rearing always eventually gave way to disillusionment. When the rabbits stopped feeling like pets, we passed them on to a family for whom they seemed to offer a more worthwhile promise. Still, my father was always game for one more experiment, one more run-in with the contradictions—science vs. mystery, order vs. chaos—that never ceased to captivate him.

The incubator sat on a shelf in my room. There was a clear Christmas tree bulb that fit into the device to provide the requisite heat. The instruction booklet said I was also to rotate the eggs three times a day, just like the mother quail would have done. Beyond that, my father assured me, nature would do the rest.

It was summer vacation, a time of few distractions. There were books I was supposed to be reading before the start of fifth grade, but even that took only a small portion of each day to complete. I was invited to a birthday party for a friend from school, a girl named Amber, who all year had captivated me with the stories of Giselle, Coppélla, and Swan Lake. Together, Amber and I would scour the school library for all the books and records having to do with ballet. Her mother was an ex-ballerina and taught at a local dance studio where Amber and all her sisters took classes. Amber loved to dream of herself laced into the costumes and transformed into a queen or sylph. I’d taken ballet classes, too, as a little girl. I’d even been praised for my ability, but I’d decided rather abruptly to quit after my teacher one afternoon chided me, “Ballerinas don’t eat peanut butter sandwiches!” After a lapse of five years, I found myself newly eager to get to the place all the ballet books promised to take me: to a world of glamour and magical transformations but also of drama, strife, and loss. Ballet: that rarefied form with its religion of beauty and grace. The slender, strong bodies, almost always white. A world so remote, so inaccessible, that I felt inconspicuous hiding my thoughts there, projecting my own nascent desire for emphatic feelings upon it. Is this what any little girl is doing when she first learns to swoon over fairy princesses? Is it an instinct she is responding to, an involuntary urge to be swept up in the torrent of romantic feeling, when a little girl prays that the prince in the story will be the right kind of prince and will drop down to one knee and ask for the maiden’s hand? I’d pore over a photograph—the dancer beautiful, bereft, her very body pushed beyond the limits of the bearable—and feel perfectly undetectable in rehearsing my fantasy of what my own future might feel like: One day I will house a tremendous heartache. One day I will reel with a singular ecstasy. No one was the wiser. No one, myself included, knew that the ballet bodies were merely targets upon which to project appetites I didn’t yet know that I housed: for passion or love, perhaps even for physical desire, which the starved, sinewy bodies must have told me looked like hunger itself.

Amber had visited my house just once before, at the end of the school year. She’d been dropped off by her mother and two of her sisters and retrieved by her stepfather, a man in an air force uniform who had struck up a conversation about the service with my dad. This was my first time visiting her, and the otherworldliness of ballet had so inflected my perception of Amber that I was shocked to find her home so perfectly normal. It sat on a street similar to my own, where every house was the mirror image of one of its neighbors. The rooms were plain and tidy, even a little shabby. I don’t know if it was the ordinariness of Amber’s life that caused me to feel a slight sinking sensation or if it was the fact that our entire fourth-grade class had been invited indiscriminately to the party. I felt dejected. The whole group of us sat outside around a swimming pool into which had been tossed several colored rings, but none of us swam. We ate hot dogs and potato chips. We sang “Happy Birthday” over a big snowy sheet cake, and though I had wanted it to be more elaborate and to taste more exquisite than every other birthday cake bought in the grocery store bakery section, it had clearly been picked up that morning from Raley’s or Albertsons and personalized with a hasty thread of pink piping. After the gifts were open, Amber announced that her father was being transferred overseas to Japan. This was the last time she’d see any of us.

We didn’t live on the air base, and I didn’t have many friends with fathers in the service. My brothers and sisters sometimes still complained about the ways our father’s serial assignments in the military had marred their childhoods, forcing them to surrender friendships at the drop of a hat and put down roots over and over again, knowing they’d just be yanked up later. I’d never before been able to empathize with their frustration, but Amber’s announcement put me in touch with a feeling of deep betrayal. Finally, I could understand how such constant upheaval must have felt to my siblings. Amber appeared at once disappointed by the news but also mostly inured to it; perhaps she was already severing ties to all of us in her mind, preparing herself for the act of assimilation she’d be forced to attempt. I said a disbelieving goodbye and left the party feeling heartsick. The pastime we’d shared, for me at least, had been an urgent one, and I was left unsure as to whether our fantasies were being taken from me or whether I was to become their sole possessor.

The summer ticked past. After the entire third week with the incubator had come and gone with no baby chicks, I allowed myself to accept that something was wrong.

On a Saturday, after my father had been home a whole night and had had the chance to wake up at his leisure and eat one of Mom’s breakfasts that he liked, I delivered the news to him with a leaden guilt. He frowned, following me upstairs. There was no visible evidence that the chicks inside were dead, but as we gazed at the eggs, it seemed oddly clear that we were in the presence of nothing alive. The plastic Chick-U-Bator glared at us, flimsy as a toy. My father offered a few conciliatory words. His rural upbringing had taught him that such losses were not unusual. He understood that life, while meaningful, was also fragile. But I felt like a failure.

On the day, a few weeks later, that an even larger box arrived in the mail, I watched the eager energy return to my father’s every movement. He set it down on the floor and fished out his pocket-knife. Lifting the contraption from the box, he assured me, “This is foolproof!” The very word seemed to chasten and sting. I had been a fool, hadn’t I? I’d been lax in my responsibility, mooning about, bored or distracted, and as a result, the chicks had died. They would never get the chance to stand on their feet and scour the grass for seeds; they’d never scatter into the distance out of instinctive distrust at my approach.

The new incubator was easily five times larger than the first, and it had its own heater and automatic egg turner. Inside, there were compartments for more than a dozen eggs, which we drove once more out to the feed store to collect, and then placed one by one into their cradles. We parked it near the upstairs linen closet, where it wouldn’t see a lot of commotion. All in all, it seemed a far more elaborate setup than nature itself—all lockstep order, an authoritative array of knobs and displays—but it seemed wiser, too; I wouldn’t have to do anything but wait the requisite number of weeks for the chicks to peck their way out. The enterprise was no longer a matter of faith but of science.

The job that kept my father away from home all week involved a thing called the Hubble Space Telescope. I didn’t know much about it or what he and the other engineers did each day, but every now and then, he’d explain to one of us, or one of our guests, that they were contributing to a device that would look farther into space than ever before, a machine that would tell us how the universe itself was born. An unbounded hope, like that of a child, broke into his voice at the word born, and it sometimes caught me up, but only briefly. I was conflicted. For if the universe had been born at God’s hand, and if no one had ever seen God—didn’t the Bible say that none can or will or should seek to?—wasn’t a project like the Hubble doomed? I didn’t think about the astounding discoveries the horde of scientists and engineers might bring into relief in examining the vast span between the present moment and the dawn of everything, only that it would surely be hard to get to the very bottom of something God had seen fit to enshroud in mystery. Still, it was a job my father performed with the utmost scrutiny and, from what I could tell, an unflagging faith.

If I could have fashioned a model of my own imagination, perhaps it would have resembled the telescope my father was working on: heavy, made of steel and glass, and run through with lenses and wires whose work I could only half decipher, pointing off into a distance that had no shape. Perhaps there would sit, at the outer edges of that distance, something I was afraid to bring into focus, some knowledge or presence, the power or verity of which might cause the rest of me to cower. It felt like that sometimes, like there were limits to what I would let myself understand, limits to the whole to which I’d give myself access. I was ten years old, living with a vague knowledge that pain was part of my birthright, part of what was meant by a word like Home. It was not the kind of beautified self-inflicted angst that can transform a girl into a swan or a doll or an ice princess in the ballet. Not even the kind of grief that, in art, can bring back the dead. No, what I felt, what I feared and discerned, even from my rather far remove, was the very particular pain that was tied up in blood, in race, in laws and war. The pain we hate most because we know it has been borne by the people we love. The slurs and slights I knew were part and parcel of my parents’ and grandparents’ and all my aunts’ and uncles’ lives in the South. The laws that had sought to make people like them—like us, like me—subordinate. It was a pain that could be triggered at the slightest hint that the residue of those laws still lingered, even unconsciously, in the minds and imaginations and the deepest assumptions of all the people I knew who didn’t have access to a pain like that of their own. Who do you think you are? Don’t you wish you were white?

Almost three weeks from when we brought them home, the first few eggs began to shake and rattle as the oldest or most intrepid chicks pecked through their shells. It caught me off guard; my fear of failing a second time had convinced me they’d turn out to be duds, like the first batch, but that afternoon, the incubator was teeming with life. The tiny birds were a wet mottled brown, dark as burnt toast in some places, sandy in others. Their markings resembled those of a tabby cat. They worked their way out of the eggs with a particular insistence, struggling, pausing, then resuming work until each egg had been scored with what looked like a lid. Then they stretched their small downy bodies and wriggled out. My father was right. It was remarkable to watch. I remembered my excitement, years before, at the yellow chicks and the baby calf at Mr. Gustafsson’s ranch, but never before had I witnessed another thing being born. They were mine, in a way, but I knew they weren’t, and I knew it was a little cruel that the birth of all these chicks should be attended solely by someone whose interest in them was at most fleeting and who could offer them little in the way of love or warmth or even safety, if those are indeed things that a chick is born seeking.

After all the other birds had hatched, I noticed there was one who had gotten most-way out of the shell but had fallen short of shaking the thing free. He struck me as stuck, exhausted, in need of help. I had succeeded at keeping all the others alive, or at staying out of the way of their surviving, and thought only that if this one last chick came through, I’d have a perfect record. If every last chick could hatch, perhaps the other eggs’ not hatching could be blamed on something other than me. I didn’t think of that last step—the chick shaking off the shell and stepping finally out of it—as a necessary rite of passage; it was merely something to be gotten past, the final obstacle to my own relief at having hatched every last egg. My father would be pleased, and I’d feel redeemed. So I reached in to lift the cap of shell from the chick’s head. I would not be an alien observer but rather a mother, a protector. I’d carry the chick over the threshold and into life.

The shell stuck at first, as if what was left of the yolk had already started to harden. I was able to detach it with just a slight tug, but when I did, the chick slumped. Immediately, I felt a nervous unease. I wanted to watch what the chick did next, but I couldn’t bear to. So I did what I should have done in the first place, which was nothing. I stood up and walked down the stairs. Hurried, actually, wanting to get away from the feeling of what I’d done. I tried to busy myself beside my mother in the kitchen, but waves of guilt kept me from relaxing. I’d just committed a crime, and I couldn’t help wondering if anyone had seen me or if there was telltale blood on my hands.

That evening, I saw that the last chick had finally risen to its feet. The incubator was a flurry of activity, with the little birds hopping around and peeping at one another, but the bird I’d helped was hunched over, contorted, and the others ignored him. My father was home. When I showed him what had happened, he lifted the chick from the incubator and cupped him in his hands. There was something merciful but inevitable to the set of his shoulders as he carried the small thing away.