Winter clings to the porch, a sheen of ice across wet boards, a hard white crust on the railings. From a recliner in her living room, Gloria watches birds flutter around a feeder hanging from the porch gutter. Seed hulls scatter dark across the sinking snow, punctuation marks without words. There is no urgency to this weather, just its slow dripping from one moment into the next. There is no urgency left in Gloria, just the slow settle of her body into her chair in the mornings, into the bedsheets when night falls.
Inside the house, the priest comes, the church ladies. It is a small town, and her neighbors watch the mailbox, salt the walk while checking for footprints. No one wants to find her days after the fact. They’re not that kind of neighborhood, that kind of congregation, to lose track of someone in her final days. But this kindness feels macabre to Gloria, as if they’re trying to arrive as close as possible to the event, to be there when it happens. When she was a girl her mother told her that a window should be raised in anticipation, to let the soul escape. Her mother died, decades ago, in an eighth-floor hospital room whose windows did not open. She tells the church ladies this, about raising the sash.
“Oh, let’s not talk about sad things,” they say.
Not one of them will open a window for her, Gloria thinks.
They bring soups and casseroles and lasagna, microwavable single portions. They sit on the couch and watch her eat while they chatter: errands, recipes, children, work. Gloria wonders what stories she is supposed to be offering them in return. She gives away objects instead: a set of coasters, a glass bell, a porcelain parakeet. She props beside her chair the framed poem the principal gave her when she retired from the high school. It is the poem she was asked to read every commencement for forty-five years—two roads diverging in a wood, one path slightly grassier than the other. She has always hated this poem.
She holds on to the family pictures of siblings gone, husband gone, children gone in a different way, voices on the phone, the grandchildren bigger at every holiday than it had occurred to her to imagine them. She keeps her Audubon prints, her Minnesota bird guide, the pair of binoculars on a side table in the bay window. Most of the birds that come to the feeder are ordinary. There is a colony of sparrows in the juniper bush in the yard. Chickadees, finches, wrens. Sometimes a blue jay or cardinal. A bluebird. The bluebird of happiness. She doesn’t know where the phrase comes from, but there it is, in her head.
“A bluebird?” the church ladies ask.
“It m-must have just flown away,” Gloria stammers. But having erased the bluebird, what has she done to the happiness?
Her husband used to call her “chickadee,” sang chick-a-dee-dee-dee as he poured the morning coffee. There were moments so sweet she felt like she needed to wash her own mouth out. They’d been married five years when, drunk at a dinner party, he threw his arms around her and squeezed. “Plain but lovely. My plump little birdie.” He dropped his weight back in his seat, made himself small and round and twitched his head as if looking for seed. It was a good impression. It was meant to be an impression of her. She laughed so the party guests could do the same, gave them permission by tucking her hands under her arms and flapping little wings. The laughter egged her husband on, and he bent his head to her plate, plucked a green bean up with his lips extended in a beak. The worm dangled until he flung his head back, and it disappeared down his throat.
He said that night that she was round in the ways that counted, not the ones that didn’t, but what she heard in her head after the light was off, after he put a hand on her belly and she rolled away, was Plain but lovely. Plainbutlovely. Plain and plump. Fat little chickadee.
She might have asked him, Boreal or black-capped? Carolina or blackpoll? Be specific with your words.
“Boreal?” The church ladies flutter.
She commanded specificity from her students, more times than she can count, more weeks, more semesters, more years. Students felt they could talk to her; she was young, and then when she wasn’t anymore, she still had carrot-orange hair and earrings in the shape of little books. She was ages and ages hence, and way had led on to way, and that alone seemed like a promise of wisdom. Students sneaked to her classroom during lunch period or stood in her doorway with their arms wrapped around themselves like blankets. To the neediest ones she’d give her phone number, scrawled on torn-out grade-book pages. They still send her invitations years later—weddings, college graduations, baby showers—so she knows that at least some of her words must have been the right ones, though it’s impossible to know which. Every choice is a forking, she told them, every phrase, and no one can stand still in that ugly yellow wood forever.
The church ladies leave. The priest comes the next day, or is it the day after? The conversation lags, too little news to report, and when he trails off midsentence, staring out the window, she feels his exhaustion. How endless, the secrets of others. How endless, the reassurance they need. She sees his distaste at the porch, where the harsh winter has brought the birds in flocks. They gorge at the feeder and then shit copiously over the peeling rail.
“You must keep your strength up,” the priest says, and then he is handing her a cup of soup. She sniffs and recognizes the cream of mushroom the church ladies brought. She does not recall him rising, going to the kitchen. Sometimes she does not recall eating. She is thin now, but still plain. Her swollen knuckles are beads on a string. Kebabs on a skewer, she thinks, and laughs.
“What?” the priest says, because her hand is in front of her face, and the soup rattles dangerously on her lap.
She asks him if he’d like some soup, holding out the bowl, but he shakes his head. What she would have given in another decade to be thin. God gives us all different gifts, her mother used to tell her. Chick-a-dee-dee-dee.
A great horned owl came to the porch once, night bird in broad daylight, sitting on the railing, big as a football. She held still, watched until her muscles ached, and then tapped on the window glass to say hello. It rotated its head toward her. Its stare was baleful, but only because of the shape and set of its yellow eyes. Owls always looked solemn, the way panting dogs always seemed to be smiling. More photographs to be dealt with—the parade of departed Labradors in the upstairs hallway, the same dumb unburdened expression on all their faces. Really, she thinks, we have no idea what they’re feeling. We never know what anyone is feeling.
“There’s no owl there, Gloria.”
She nods her head. Yes, there is no owl. There was a day with an owl, and today is a day with no owl, and two roads once diverged in a yellow wood, birds watching from the branches.
“I have something for you,” she tells the priest and tries to give him the framed poem.
“You don’t need to do that, Gloria,” he says, because people are always using her name now, as comfort or perhaps reminder.
The passing had worn them really about the same, and there she was in this house with a baby in her arms. She had said she would have no babies. She had said she would be an actress. A radio actress. She was never a complete dreamer.
And when the leaves were trodden black underfoot, she took her daughter shopping and said of a sleeveless pink dress with a narrow red sash, “It’s really not the most flattering, is it?” And then the blousy white frock that swallowed her daughter up, a tiny blond head atop a gull’s wing. She regrets that dress. She regrets that it made her feel better to see her daughter a frump. Two plump drab sparrows, she is telling this with a sigh, ages and ages hence.
“Take the poem,” she says. “Please.” She thinks he will. Unlike the church ladies, he won’t pretend that she is not dying.
The priest slips away from her and the house is dark and she remembers to reach behind her and turn on the light. The curtains are still open, so there she is, her reflection in the dark window, another bird beyond the glass. She does not recognize this specimen, hunched and flightless. This traveler. Fly, she thinks, fly.
She rises for bed and stumbles into the framed poem. He has not taken it like she thought he would, or did she only imagine offering it to him? She is a long time going up the stairs. They are grassy and want for wear. Her bedroom is too warm. She opens a window to let in some cool air. A traveler, she thinks, I wish I had traveled. A migratory tern, a swallow, a swift. I wish I had asked to read a different poem. I could have called him a grackle. I wish I had bought her the pink dress she liked. That has been all the difference, and no difference, and oh that hopeless wood.