It was late May, housecleaning season, when Roger fell in love with a woman at the dump. He never saw her. He just liked the way she threw things away. Sometimes she left clothes draped gracefully across a corner of the Dumpster—a nicely laundered shirt, its long sleeves tucked up away from a rusty patch, or a pair of blue jeans folded across slightly worn knees. Sometimes she put things off to the side, arranged in orderly rows in the grassy ditch at the edge of the woods—a white plastic fan, a ceramic container of wooden spoons, a clip-on bedside light, and a whole hummingbird cake wrapped in several layers of plastic wrap and aluminum foil, set up on a stump. She left notes on some items.
“This fan works, but it makes a clicking sound and will not oscillate.”
“I can't eat this whole hummingbird cake.” And Roger's favorite, taped to a Hamilton Beach fourteen-speed blender: “Works good.”
He admired the style of the notes, the generous margins, the almost childish legibility, the careful use of punctuation, and the casual and almost intimate “good” instead of the grammatical but pretentious “well.” He was intrigued by the skewed logic in some of the notes, where her mind seemed to go skittering away from reason and fact, in a direction he could almost follow, but not quite:
“If you are tall, maybe this light won't shine in your eyes.”
“I'm intrigued,” he said to Hilma and Meade, who both seemed horrified. “How many people do you know who can spell Oscillate’?” he asked. “I admire good spellers.”
“O-s-c-i-double 1-a-t-e,” snapped Meade.
“But, Roger,” said Hilma sensibly, “she could be a racist or a thief. She could be cruel to animals. You can't draw conclusions about a person based on nothing more than a fourteen-speed blender and a white plastic fan.”
“No,” said Roger, “of course not.” But still he made a point of stopping by the Dumpster every time he went to Attapulgus to do his thrips counts, just checking. She threw away a radio/tape player: “Squawking in left speaker will stop if you tap the volume knob.” She threw away two plastic chairs.
The absence of things can give a kind of shape to a space, and using his collection of negatives, Roger imagined the inside of her house, silent, light, and spare, without a cheap white fan clicking but not oscillating, without the high scream of an electric blender on Whip, without the ridiculous excess of a hummingbird cake. He imagined her in the house, padding silently from room to room on big bare feet, looking for things to throw away.
Delia had come to south Georgia to make a yearlong study of her special birds—coots, gallinules, and rails—in the spring-fed rivers and swamps and the salt marshes at the coast. But instead of beginning that serious work, she had found herself falling under the spell of a small flock of chickens at a nearby hatchery.
“America's oldest breed of chickens, ma'am, now endangered,” the poultryman had told her, looking sorrowfully at the big black and white birds scratching in the dust. “A hundred years ago every family had three or four Dominickers in the backyard, and now you can count the registered flocks on one hand.” Before she had even settled into her small apartment, Delia had begun a large watercolor painting of a brace of Dominiques and thrown away most of her household goods.
In the early sketching phase she threw out the fan because the clicking disrupted her concentration. But there was something so satisfying about setting that cheap white fan down in the grass by the Dumpster and driving away from it that a few days later, when the work became more difficult, she threw out several electrical appliances. And when she began the feathers, a week of dizzying black and white, requiring such a light touch, delicate but not tentative, she threw out all of her kitchen utensils and most of her furniture. She ate cold food from the grocery store out of its plastic wrap, standing over the kitchen sink, and in the evenings, with her head aching slightly from eyestrain, she walked downtown to the Pastime Restaurant and ordered a vegetable plate.
If the work had gone well that day, she would linger over her greasy beans and new potatoes and then sit peacefully for a while, smiling to herself and enjoying the dense white of the old china plates at the Pastime, the shallow dishes of pickles on each table, and the waitresses, who seemed so different from her, big and loud and friendly.
On other days, she would grip her knife and fork in her fists and stab her food around, and then she would shove the whole thing away and make little sketches of difficult bits of the painting on the back of the place mat. When she got home she would pace around and around her apartment ferociously, and pile up stuff by the door to throw away.
It was on one of these bad nights that she first noticed the picture of Roger and the two peanut plants. She was looking at it when Betty handed her her change and said, “You have a nice day now.” But it was nine o'clock at night, she was stuck on the scaly yellow legs of the Dominique rooster, and when she got home she threw away a telephone and a small space heater. It was not a nice day.
“She's strange,” said Betty. “She's got a gone look in her eyes.”
Then Fern, who was clearing off tables, called out, “Look at this! Chicken feet!” Some were flat on the ground, toeing inward slightly; some were taking a step, walking or running; some were flung up, toes outspread, with threatening spurs. Fern and Betty sat down at the booth surrounded by dirty dishes and examined the place mat, turning it around and around to see the chicken feet.
“Now if she can draw that good, why in the world does she want to draw chicken feet?” said Fern. “Seems like she'd want to be drawing a vase of flowers or a man on a horse.”
“She's strange, I told you,” said Betty.
“You have a nice day now,” Delia whispered the next morning as she sat on her little stool at the hatchery, watching the four Dominiques scratch and peck and strut and wallow in the dust.
“You have a nice day now,” she whispered to herself all afternoon as she sat at her drawing table, staring at her brushes with her hands in her lap.
“You're the one drew them good chicken feet last night,” said Fern, shoving the salt and pepper and sugar jar to one side and wiping down the table with a rag. “I don't know what else you can draw, but you can sure draw some chicken feet, honey. Me and Betty both said that, we said, ‘She might be a little strange, but she knows she can draw chicken feet.’ Now what you want to eat tonight?” And she bunched the rag up in a discreet little wad on the corner of the table and stood there, clutching her pad against her bosom and making little scribbling movements above it with the nub of a pencil. But Delia just sat, seeing her troubled, secret life with the chickens laid open in the bright light of the Pastime Restaurant by this boisterous, big-faced woman smelling slightly of Clorox.
“Now what you want to eat tonight, honey, your regular?” asked Fern in a louder voice, and she snatched up the rag and went away, leaving Delia staring at the red glowing letters spelling e-m-i-t-s-a-P against the black window.
“You some kind of a chicken artist?” asked Betty at the cash register, but it alarmed Delia to be called any kind of artist at all with the painting going so badly, and fumbling in her pocketbook for the correct change, she said, “Well, no, not now, I guess, although—really, no.” When she looked up with her two pennies and a quarter, there it was, that nice day with the magnificent white clouds and the line of trees at the back of the field and the bald-headed man with the kind face holding those plants so carefully.
“You have a nice day, honey,” said Betty.
For the rest of the week everything she tried to paint came out dense and muddy. It was ridiculous to think that she could make out of black paint, water, and white paper those shimmering barred feathers, where the black and the white seemed to switch places with every blink of the eye, and one night at the cash register when Betty asked, “So how are my chickens coming?” Delia took a deep breath and held it, and then covered her face with both hands. Fern put down her stack of dishes and thumped her on the back hard, several times.
“Why, I know chickens ain't easy, honey, they ain't got no shape to them.” She peeled several napkins off the to-go stack and poked them in between Delia's clenched fingers. “I know what,” she said, and she closed her eyes and sucked on her lip thought fully. “You go home and sit down and paint you a little house. Put a flower garden out front, paint you a little man out there in it with a hoe. If you want to put a bird in it, put a bird in it,” and she clapped Delia on the back to comfort her. “Just don't paint no chickens in there.”
Then Betty came bustling out of the back with a big white frozen lump wrapped up in plastic. “Here,” she said, “you take this home, it's a hummingbird cake.”
They were such kind gifts, the little man with the hoe and the frozen cake, and Delia wanted to smile and say something grateful, but the black and white that kept flashing in her head made her woozy and she didn't trust herself to speak. She stood there at the cash register, staring at the picture of the peanut field, her eyes aching from the black and white and her arms aching from the frozen cake, while Betty and Fern glanced back and forth furtively.
“Honey,” Betty said at last, “that's nothing but Roger in the spring Agrisearch with his spotted wilt work.”
“Thank you so much,” said Delia, “for everything. It's so kind of you, I shouldn't really, I can't…” And before Betty could say “Have a nice day,” she had left her $4.95 on the counter and was gone. The cake must have weighed ten pounds.
“Little studies,” she called them. A stick and a leaf, a single pinecone, a striped gourd, an acorn beside its cap, nothing bigger than five by seven. “They'll do me good,” she told herself with forced cheerfulness.
and she slid the unfinished chicken painting into the middle of a stack of new paper and taped it up. Every morning she sat at her table under the light, painting tiny single things on cheap paper, and every afternoon she gathered them up, looked them over, and threw them away.
Sometimes people are uneasy when they meet strangers at Dumpsters beside country roads, miles from a town—the dark woods in the background, the sinister-looking shiny black bags, frightening glittery things in the sand, the closest building a deserted church on a hill around the bend—so Roger stood back to give her a comfortable distance and waited while she squatted in the mud, lining her little paintings up against the flange at the base of the Dumpster.
When she finally stood up and turned around, she looked so sad and troubled that Roger had to stop himself from stepping forward to comfort her. She just stood there for a long time, staring at him, and then all of a sudden she smiled and laughed out loud and said, “Have a nice day!”