What It’s Like to Be Us

Early this morning the blackbirds fell from the sky, hammering onto rooftops and parked cars, pavement and windshields. It happened in what our parents call the wee hours, the thumping on the rooftops that shook us from sleep. Today we girls sit glossy-lipped at our desks at school while men in gloves buzz around outside, shoveling bird carcasses from the lawn, and we pick the polish from our nails, passing notes and pretending to be bored while at the same time trying urgently to outdo each other in grades, in answers, in looks from boys.

Except for the birds, it is an ordinary day.

Though no one can explain why they fell, in some ways the birds—for us—seem like a great equalizer. Because every day, for us, brings a small event that in some way upsets the world the way the birds do for everyone else today: a strange look from a boy, maybe, or the stranger, more critical looks we give each other.

We love each other. We go way back. Our priests and pastors tell us to be kind and our parents tell us to be grateful. They make casual commandments that we struggle to follow and, when we fail disastrously, denounce as unfair. No one knows what it is like to be us.

Our teacher tells us to be proud. We are really going to go somewhere someday, she says. But where? When? And where are we now?

Outside the classroom window, a steady drip from the gutter, diamond drops of water refracting light. It snowed a little last night, unseasonably, and the papers say maybe this is why the birds fell, mistaking snowy parking lots for bodies of water, avenues for rivers, and attempting to dive headfirst into them. Because they navigate by starlight and, at night, might mistake for stars the artificial lights of a town like ours. There are other possibilities, too, the papers say: disorientation from fireworks at a venue outside of town, or the inscrutable hand of God.

The birds, their bodies on the sidewalks that we picked our way around this morning on our walk to school, make everything suspect. When our teacher tells us that one number multiplied by another equals another, we are unsure whether to believe her. We watch those dainty crystals of water drip outside the window, redirect the sunlight. We pass notes, pick the color from our nails.

Our teacher, Ms. Kendall, is beautiful and as flawless as an actress on a magazine cover, though she wears a turtleneck that reaches up high and sits snug just beneath her chin, a sweater that smells of wool, a smell we inhale when she walks by, a smell like being tucked beneath a warm blanket on a frost-lined morning. While men wander outside our classroom window retrieving feathered bodies from the grass, we look at them, then look at her; we see them watching her through the window with blackbirds in their gloved hands and wonder if it’s true, what the boys say—that she’s a stripper after school gets out, that friends of their brothers’ fathers and fathers of their cousins’ friends have seen her, her knee crooked around a silver pole in a dark room.

“They’ve seen her,” the boys say. “Everybody knows about Ms. Kendall.” We sense the untruth of the rumor, and its cruelty. We see that Ms. Kendall looks at home in her pinstripe slacks, sheathed in her wool turtleneck. And yet, too, we understand intimately the ways in which people change: rapidly, without warning, the way these blackbirds with the iridescent oily sheen on their wings, with their wiry claws, fell from the sky in the still-dark hours of morning. We have been sinking our own claws into each other’s flesh for years. We love each other ferociously and we hate each other ferociously as well. We swing between these two positions pendulously. We are best friends. And we are all alone.

Mary Louise

This morning, Mary Louise’s mother used the pool skimmer to scoop dead birds from the...