The Snow Geese Page 8
‘What happened?’
‘Well, let me tell you. Sunday came around and the four professionals showed up, four lady tennis players in little white skirts and brand-new sneakers. All the sisters were sitting in the bleachers – there were three or four tiers next to the tennis court – all trussed up in stockings, garter belts, gabardine petticoats, wimples, scapulars, you name it. The pros started playing. They played a couple of sets. Mother Superior stood up by the net and made a speech, thanking the ladies for their exhibition. Then, I couldn’t believe it, she said that Sister Jean-Marie was especially appreciative. Especially appreciative! One of the tennis pros said, ‘Why doesn’t she come and hit some tennis balls?’ and another pro said, ‘Sure, let her come and hit some tennis balls,’ and of course this is in front of everybody, so Mother Superior doesn’t really have a choice, she has to let me go and play with the professionals.
‘I climb down off the bleachers and walk out on to the court, and remember I’m dressed in a habit and the pros are in these precious little tennis dresses, right up their butts, excuse me. One of them hands me her racquet and says she’ll sit out so I can play. But I’m shaking. I’m on the forehand side. I’m receiving serve. I haven’t even had a warm-up. I’m trying to stay low and concentrate on the server, who’s bouncing the ball, preparing to serve. I could tell she wasn’t going to go soft on me just because I was a nun, and sure enough the next thing I knew she sent down a firecracker, and I was so pent-up because I’d been so shamed that I hit it back with fury in it, I returned her serve as hard as I could, and the ball whizzed past the net person, straight down the line. It was a clear winner, no question. I’d watched the toss and seen just where she threw it. It came perfectly to my forehand and I made perfect contact, just as though the racquet were an extension of my body, and all the sisters in the bleachers jumped up and down and cheered. They whooped and hollered, and grabbed their scapulars, and shook them, and waved them in the air, their holy scapulars!’
It was getting late; people were sleeping. Reflections of red and yellow lights were sliding across the glass to my left, beyond Jean, then appearing unmediated on the near side, and other reflections were sliding across the glass between me and the lights, as if the Greyhound were revolving, or moving at the centre of revolving carousels of lights: streetlights and headlights, the red lights on rear fenders and radio masts, the winking red winglights of planes, hazes rising off the thick-sown lights of conurbations, the brightness of car lots (buffed hoods gleaming under Klieg lights), the neon fantasias of funfairs and casinos. The driver switched off the lights inside the bus, and stars were suddenly visible, constellations in the east: Hercules, Boötes, Virgo.
In the 1950s, the German ornithologist Franz Sauer suggested that birds might refer to the stars in order to determine their migratory direction. In the late 1960s, Stephen Emlen studied indigo buntings, a species that breeds throughout the eastern half of the United States and winters in the Bahamas, southern Mexico, and Central America south to Panama. Caged indigo buntings display intense nocturnal Zugunruhe in April and May, and again in September and October, the two periods during which their counterparts are migrating in the wild. When this restlessness began, Emlen placed his buntings in special circular cages: funnels of blotting paper mounted on ink pads and covered with clear plastic sheets. Birds in these cages could only see the sky overhead; all ground objects were blocked from view.
‘A bunting in migratory condition,’ Emlen wrote, ‘stands in one place or turns slowly in a circle, its bill tilted upward and its wings partly spread and quivering rapidly. At frequent intervals the bird hops on to the sloping paper funnel, only to slide back and continue its pointing and quivering. Each hop from the ink pad leaves a black print on the paper. The accumulation of inked footprints provides a simple record of the bird’s activity: they can later be counted and analyzed statistically.’
The buntings kept diaries: footprints lettered their seasonal restlessness.
Emlen put the cages outside on clear, moonless nights. In September and October, the buntings tended to hop south. In April and May, they tended to hop north. The cage walls screened the horizon from view: the birds could only see the sky. On cloudy, overcast nights, their orientation deteriorated significantly. Emlen hypothesized that buntings were able to determine their migratory directions from visual cues in the night sky.
Emlen then took his buntings into a planetarium. In September and October, using a Spitz Model B projector, he shone the normal autumn stars onto the dome. The buntings, appropriately, left footprints in the southern sectors of their cages. In April and May, Emlen projected the stars of a normal spring sky. The buntings hopped north and north-east. But when Emlen switched off the projector and filled the dome with diffuse light, the buntings behaved just as they had done on cloudy nights outside: they were unable to determine their migratory direction. And when Emlen shifted Polaris to the east or west, the buntings changed their orientation to match the new ‘north’ or ‘south’, depending on the season.
To understand the significance of Polaris, the North Star, you first have to imagine that all the stars are fixed to a celestial sphere centred on the Earth. You have to imagine the axis on which the Earth is spinning. And then you have to follow the line of this axis from the North Pole up to the celestial sphere. The line intersects with the sphere at the north celestial pole, which happens to be very close to Polaris, a bright star located just off the tip of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. Due to the rotation of the Earth, the celestial sphere appears to rotate clockwise around Polaris.
The axis of celestial rotation is always aligned with geographical north. Buntings, Emlen found, were determining direction by reference to the rotation of star patterns. The constellations move across the sky with an angular velocity of fifteen degrees an hour, but their shape remains constant, and each maintains a distinct relationship to the North Star. When Emlen made his fake firmament revolve around Betelgeuse, a bright star in the constellation Orion, the buntings flew as if Betelgeuse, not Polaris, were the North Star. By systematically removing and reinserting portions of his planetarium sky, Emlen found that his buntings relied especially on constellations close to Polaris, such as Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, Cepheus and Cassiopeia.
‘These are the Flint Hills,’ Jean said. ‘In daylight this is beautiful open country, very green.’
She paused.
‘The Flint Hills of Kansas,’ she said, as if quoting the title of a plangent popular song. Another pause. I gazed out of the window at all the passing lights. The curling brunette wig lay unclaimed on the dashboard.
‘We had a laundry in the convent,’ Jean continued. ‘A professional laundry. It was one of the ways we made money. We used to laugh because we knew we were washing Mother Superior’s pantyhose or the chaplain of the University’s boxer shorts. We were like naughty schoolgirls. We loved to giggle. We washed underthings, delicates, petticoats, scapulars, wimples, veils, habits, bedclothes, you name it, pressing and starching, finding a partner to fold the sheets with. We used rollers to squeeze out the water, and big industrial presses. We were supposed to keep silence. You just heard the machines going. I started to love laundry, the smell of clean clothes and the way they feel.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Do you? I love laundry. I love to do my husband’s laundry. I love to wash clothes for friends of mine. I think of myself as a radical feminist, but I love doing people’s laundry. For me, the best way I can show affection, or the warmth I feel towards someone, is to launder their clothes. Delicates I like to wash by hand with soap flakes. I’ve got a wicker basket for things waiting to be ironed. Don’t you love the smell of fresh laundry? Sometimes when I tell my so-called feminist friends that I love to wash my husband’s clothes, I hear them tut-tut as if I’ve committed a crime, but I don’t think it’s a crime that I like doing laundry.
‘I don’t have a drier. I hang things on a line in the garden. We visited Veni
ce a few years ago. We walked down lots of these alleyways with beautiful old houses on either side and washing-lines strung between the houses. There was all this fresh laundry hanging over our heads – shirts, sheets, dresses, brassières, colours, and whites with the sun in them. All those bright colours. The shirts were waving like flags. When I walked under those clotheslines I felt like a bride walking under arches of fresh flowers.
‘I had a friend who passed away last year. She’d been sick for four years. I went to see her pretty much every day and did all her laundry. I made sure she had clean clothes and clean bedlinen. I thought that if she had clean bedlinen that would make quite a difference to how she was feeling. There was one particular nightgown she liked to wear. It was very thin cotton with lace around the neck and on the shoulder straps. I washed that nightgown by hand over and over again, and she was wearing it when she died. I felt very close to her then, because we were such friends, and also because she was wearing the nightgown which I’d washed. I don’t like to hear anyone say I’m wrong to love doing laundry.’
Jean reached down for the tote bag that lay between her feet. She lifted it to her lap, rummaged briefly, and pulled out a postcard.
‘I like to collect things that have to do with laundry. I brought this along to show my sister. Maybe you can guess what it is.’
I looked at the postcard: a surreal, near-photographic painting of a washing-machine, not a commonplace household washing-machine but something like a large earthenware bowl, painted grey, with a chunky lid on top, and a round window in which a jumble of clothes was visible: it seemed antique and futuristic at the same time.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘It’s Mickey Mouse’s laundry room,’ Jean said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes! It’s from the Disney Museum.’
Yes, I could see one of Mickey’s yellow mitts pressing against the window. Containers of laundry-related products were ranged along a shelf: a box of Freeze Detergent (For Really Cold Water), and bottles of Toonox Bleach, Toony Fabric Hardener and Toonite Liquid (For Fine Washing). A small barrel of clothes pegs hung from a rail. Each smooth peg had been carved from wood and resembled an elegant chess piece.
‘Up on my kitchen wall I like to stick photos of my friends’ laundry rooms. I have a needlepoint picture of women doing laundry. It’s from a painting by Clementine Hunter. She came from a slave family on the Melrose Plantation in Louisiana. There are three women doing laundry, wearing dresses, orange, lemon yellow, the hottest pink you can imagine, and a big black kettle with a fire underneath it – one woman stirring the cauldron and the other two leaning over baskets, about to hang clothes on the line. I’ve got a collection of clothes pegs and laundry pins – old wooden pegs without springs, like these here’ – she pointed to Mickey Mouse’s clothes pegs – ‘and all sorts of sprung plastic pins, every colour you can think of, transparent, opaque, milky, glittery. I don’t need to tell you I’m proud as a peach of my laundry collection!’
I lifted myself up in my seat and looked back down the bus at people sleeping, the Greyhound a gallery in which diverse attitudes of repose were on display: heads tilted back, mouths agape, necks limp, cheeks on shoulders, couples slumped together, all lit up when the Americruiser cruised through concentrations of streetlights at the intersections, and all eyes closed but for those of the two white-bearded Amish elders, who looked straight back at me with the inscrutable, wild gaze of prophets. Tail-lights moved in the traffic flow like red-hot coals in lava streams, and sometimes the line of Interstate 35 appeared ahead of us, a light-course bending eastwards, not perceptibly founded on solid ground, but airborne, like the tube of bats that had curved away from Congress Avenue. I imagined this rope of lights as something useful to migrating birds, a guideline, and thought of flocks flying above us, town and city lights arranged beneath them in fixed constellations: zodiacs above and below.
The mechanisms of avian orientation are not fully understood. In species that migrate in flocks, including ducks and geese, experienced birds may guide juveniles from breeding grounds to winter grounds and back again. Birds are known to inherit an endogenous programme for migratory activity; to navigate using solar, magnetic and stellar compasses; and to pilot by familiar landmarks. It has also been suggested that they find their way by reference to winds, smells, infrasounds and minute changes in gravity and barometric pressure. ‘Birds,’ Emlen wrote, ‘have access to many sources of directional information, and natural selection has favored the development of abilities to make use of them all.’
We came to Kansas City and waited in the terminal for our connection. The Greyhound for Minneapolis got under way after midnight, helmed by a younger driver, a man in his mid-thirties, spick and span the way a house can be, with a neat, trim moustache and a smooth, shining bald pate like a cap of polished wax, his uniform exemplary in crease and aspect, his announcements crisp and honed – he appeared just-minted, like a new coin. Jean and I sat together, two rows back on the right-hand side. The terminals received travellers and discharged them in fresh combinations: we recognized some of those who had boarded the coach with us, and noted the absence of others, like the Amish elders, who had boarded coaches assigned to other reaches of the network, bound for other destinations. Across the aisle sat a grey-haired man, jowled like a bull seal in a green suit, his tie loosened and top button undone, and before the Greyhound reversed away from the terminal gate he addressed himself to Jean and me, saying, ‘I’m just waiting for the wheels to get turning. As long as the wheels are turning, I’m getting closer to home.’
Soon he was asleep. Jean slept. She had removed her glasses; there was a moist pink groove on the bridge of her nose. She slept with her head straight, tilted back on the headrest, mouth open, hands resting on the black tote bag across her lap. I slept, woke, and slept again as we continued north up Interstate 35, continuing north with the snow geese across Missouri and Iowa into Minnesota, between the Great Plains and the Great Lakes, sleeping when the coach hit cruising speed and the wheel-drone settled to an even pitch, lights spinning past in regular cadence, and waking whenever such constancy was interrupted, opening my eyes to find Jean asleep next to me, shoulder to shoulder, dreaming of tennis and fresh, fragrant laundry.
Laundry. We had a laundry room, with a drying rig of dowels raised by ropes and pulleys, so that you hoisted the wet sheets and towels like sails, and if you needed to walk from one side of the room to the other you’d have to part the drying clothes with outstretched hands as if they were lianas and fronds, or else give in to the clamminess of damp shirts and trouser legs as they dragged across your scalp and cheeks. There was an old wringer with crank-turned rollers, and an oversized paint-stained sink beneath a shelf that was crowded with bottles of Brasso, bleach, turpentine, household ammonia and limescale remover, and also with paintbrushes, scrubbing brushes, yellow Johnson’s wax polish and beeswax polish and a rusting pink Flit fly-gun with a trademark white-trousered soldier marching on its canister. This white-trousered soldier could himself be seen toting a pink Flit fly-gun, and once, when I was very young, I studied the soldier’s fly-gun to see if I could find on its tiny canister an even tinier soldier toting a fly-gun, imagining an infinite, shrinking series of quantum soldiers toting fly guns. And opposite the washing-machine, on its own square concrete plinth, rested the old blue oil-fired boiler, the house’s heart, with a complex system of padded arterial white pipes leading from it to the ceiling. The small room in which I’d slept as a child (and in which I slept when illness returned me to the condition of a child, dependent on my parents, unable to cope with the challenges of the world outside my immediate home range) was directly above the boiler, and each morning, soon after the rooks began cawing, I’d hear it shudder to life as the timer decreed – the walls shaking, the table-flap rattling on its secret latch, a sound in the floorspaces as if big, clumsy bubbles were galumphing up the white pipes, carrying heat to the house’s extremities.
It was not hard, sitting on the Greyhound that night in March, following the snow geese, with Jean asleep beside me and the mesmerizing, hallucinatory flare and slide of lights all around us, to return home, to go back to the laundry room, or to the short white passage that led from it to the back door of the house, where the bars of three bolts slid with known weight and easiness into sockets on the jamb. The door opened on to the small paved terrace, the feeder with its red-husked peanuts, and if you looked to the left you’d see chestnuts, sycamores and limes, you’d hear the bassoon caws of rooks in the tree crowns, the sound of the Sor Brook dropping off the waterfall, and if you looked to the right you’d see shrubs and climbing roses along a wall, a copper beech, farmland receding in a gentle upward grade to the west, the fixed pattern of fields named Lower Quarters, Danvers Meadow, Morby’s Close, Allowance Ground.