The Goose Lady was not her real name. She was born Emily Forster. When she married, she became Emily Davis. Later, neighborhood adults called the widow woman The Goose Lady because of the plastic goose that she dressed up and placed on her lawn. Their children said something different.
“Doody Doo Davis!” the girls screamed, kicking the goose that was garbed in smartly clad seasonal attire: a bright yellow slicker and matching hat for springtime rains, a brown jacket to complement the falling leaves or a reindeer sweater and antler hat for Christmas. Bolder girls paraded around with the antlers on their heads and made quacking duck calls that didn’t sound at all like a goose. “Doody Doo Davis,” chanted the boys, tossing the goose about like a football until boredom seized them. Then they hurled the poor plastic lawn ornament into a bush. Its black beak formed a bridge that ants and worms climbed over until Mrs. Davis located her featherless friend.
“Do not worry,” she told the silent creature, “I’ll watch out for you. They can bully me all they want but not you.” Scowling, the widow brushed dirt off her companion and set the bird in its special place on the lawn where it would soak up sunshine. The goose wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the child. Her child. Rosie. As for the neighborhood kids, Mrs. Davis remembered her own childhood antics.
A very long time ago, the young Emily Forster had tempted fate and danced around a sign that another old widow woman had placed on her lawn. Joyously, Emily sang out its green painted words: Don’t step on the grass. The world could change, but youthful fear of the old remained the same. When kids saw an old woman with her wrinkled face and misshapen spoon-like hands, they could not stretch themselves out into their own futures or see that the person who they called “Doody Doo” had once been a running child, too.
Mrs. Davis petted her special friend on its bald head and walked slowly back to her living room rocking chair. She thought about how change had entered into her life.
One rainy day when Emily was approaching the end of her teen years, she sat in church with her parents. The three held their arms at their sides. Their shoes stuck to the church’s shiny linoleum floor. For no good reason, Emily lifted her heels. Her umbrella leaked water underneath them. As she placed her heels down again, they made squishing sounds. “Must be the rain,” she mused. On the pulpit, the minister left off preaching about hell and damnation and described the man who built an ark sturdy enough to hold all earthly animals. Emily imagined Noah rushing to finish his seaworthy home.
“Male and female,” the minister said. “They came into the ark two by two.” His hushed voice grew light and airy as if it had wings that rose above all that water. Darkness had spread across the aisles that were drenched in despair and hope.
Soon to turn twenty, Emily Forster wanted her girlhood back. Better yet, she desperately wished to hold someone’s hands, but her parents sat tall and stiff as two steel stakes to the left of her. On the other side, emptiness pushed against Emily’s arms with the unexpected fury of a tidal wave that made her feel unbalanced.
Two by two, the animals entered big and small, from land and sea: elephants, giraffes, monkeys, whales, and dolphins, who were supposed to be as smart as people. She would have liked to have been part of a dolphin pod. How did different communities get along inside the ark? She was so busy sorting out animals that she didn’t notice a young man taking up a position inside the emptiness. Only when the minister talked about the dove did she turn her head. There he was.
“I’m Alvin Davis,” he quietly said. “People call me Al.”
“Emily,” she answered, although he hadn’t asked. “I don’t have a nickname. Nobody gave me one.” Her heels attempted to hold onto the swirling water.
Al smiled a broad rainbow smile. He carried sunlight around in his outstretched arms as easily as one carries groceries. The minister’s words brushed against Emily like the feathers of a great winged being. She instantly fell in love with the stranger and he with her.
Shortly after their marriage, Emily confessed to Al about his arms and the colors that she saw in his smile. Her mind slid to whales and porpoises moving over and under each other, encircling even without arms. Inside Al’s embrace, the young woman felt larger than herself. The two formed a new and unique being.
“If you like,” Al whispered, “I can call you Em. Em and Al. They fit together.”
“Em,” she repeated. “I like that. Al and Em.”
When the child came along, their child, a new name was unearthed: Mommy. Em and Mommy made Mrs. Davis see how skin and soul were seamlessly sewn and held together. Love moved like a silent underground stream from her body to her spirit so that Em thirsted for nothing more than what she held in her arms. Emily Davis stretched herself out to include her husband and Rosie’s father inside the sacred space.
New days piled on top of old ones like so many land and sea babies riding on their mothers’ backs: opossums, chimpanzees, and giant anteaters; loons and swans and pudgy polar bears.
Al built a beautiful backyard playhouse for his daughter, Rosie, to make dreams in when she grew old enough. He had considered painting it, but the bare wood made him think of Noah’s ark and the way that pairs multiplied and filled the new land. Em made an old-fashioned pink and blue hook rug that she placed under a highchair like the one in their home except smaller. A tiny table held miniature cups, plates, spoons, and forks so that Rosie could crook her pinkie inside a handle and imagine herself at a tea party. On the window Emily placed curtains that she had sewn. Blue like the sky and Rosie’s eyes.
In the early spring of the child’s fifth year, Em took Rosie to visit the geese. Because the river current ran fast and constant, there was always an open spot between ice patches for wintering birds. It had been so cold that year. Emily and Rosie had stayed inside near the fire that Al built up. Now mother and daughter wanted to feel the wind on their faces and hear the outside world. Rosie tore stale bread into small bits that Emily placed in a brown paper bag. The sun was a distant bright thing in the cloudless sky.
“I thought it was warmer,” murmured Emily.
“I’m not cold,” said the child through chattering teeth. She giggled while the geese, honking loudly, circled around them.
“Don’t you dare eat up my good little goose girl!” Em held her daughter’s mitten tightly while they threw out crumbs and forgot the cold until that night when Rosie started coughing. The distraught mother peered into her child’s eyes that were sharp as knives. The mother’s heart felt torn into a thousand tiny pieces. She made a million promises.
I’ll stop up my ears when you beg to see the geese. I’ll keep you warm inside the house and paint that highchair blue just as I intended. Her promises were like breadcrumbs tossed into the sea. The doctor’s words were useless: Don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t the weather. Your child’s heart was bad. Al wrapped his outstretched arms around his beautiful wife. She felt nothing but cold.
Weeks later, Emily placed the child’s highchair near the fireplace where it would always be warm. Cold became her companion even as the sun shone. One night she hid the playhouse key in the bottom drawer of her jewelry box where it couldn’t be seen. Mr. Davis wrapped his tools up in a bag and never touched them again. When he spoke to his wife, Al called her Emily. She rarely used his first name. The word “Mommy” disappeared from their lives. Days resembled letters that were never mailed, and nothing much happened until two summers later when Rosie would have been seven.
Emily couldn’t quite explain it. She’d be sitting with Al at the small kitchen table, eating her usual breakfast of buttered toast and jelly when she’d sense a restlessness in her legs. Laying her hand on her chest, she felt its fierce beat. To still the violence inside of her, Mrs. Davis embarked on long walks with her husband when he came home from work. “Exercise is good for you,” she stated breathlessly. Then she laughed hard, too hard. Or she broke down sobbing.
“Maybe,” said Al one night after they had walked so much that his feet looked like enormous over-baked potatoes, “maybe we should have another child. Do you think so? Do you want another child?”
His words sounded like the first burst of rainfall after the clouds released their weight. There was no color on his face. His eyes were as dark as steeped tea that had set too long.
“Al,” she said, drawing out the one syllable so that it sounded like two, “it’s all right just the way it is. Really it is.”
But it wasn’t all right. They were husband and wife, separate souls, two arks lost at sea.
One evening, after having walked with his wife for miles on end, Al collected wood, lit the fire, and sat down near the white highchair that Em had planned to paint blue. He painfully stooped over and took off his shoes and his socks. The baby toe on his left foot had bled during the enforced march. It stained his new white socks. For the first time since he was a young boy, he cried. “I can’t do this anymore,” he croaked in between sobbing sounds. “My feet are a mess.”
Em touched her husband’s wet cheek. She sopped up the tears with the palm of her hand. She remembered the church, her parents, the way the minister spoke, the questions she asked about the ark animals, Al sitting so close, taking up space. He had found her. Pulled both of them out of a solitary place. Together, they had made a child.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I never knew—”
He placed his thumb on her lips.
The couple walked slowly to the back porch. Against the red setting sun, the miniature house seemed shabby. Al turned over Em’s hand and traced the line that some fortune teller had once said was a lifeline. “She was beautiful, wasn’t she?” he said.
Emily nodded. It was all she could do.
“I think,” he continued, “I think the playhouse needs painting. Blue.”
“I don’t know,” she murmured.
“Blue is a good color. Sky blue.”
“I don’t know,” she repeated. The child’s blue eyes hurt her heart. The seams between body and soul split apart against the beating muscle tissue.
The following morning, after Al left for work, Emily found the miniature key, opened the playhouse door that squeaked in response, pulled back the musty curtains, and unlatched a window. Wind rushed in to greet her. She tasted dust.
Emily found a doll in the corner that her own mother had given her. She had meant to give it to Rosie although the child would have laughed at such an old thing that had buttons for eyes and legs that didn’t bend. Dusting herself off, she locked the house back up and went downtown where she bought several cans of sky-blue paint, sticks for stirring, rollers, and small brushes for areas that couldn’t be reached with a roller.
All day long the woman worked. Blue encircled her. It splattered on her winter jacket and sweaty face. Em’s heart fluttered in rhythm with her paint strokes. When Al came home, she kept on working. “I’ll be finished soon,” she yelled up to him. “Start without me.” The sky turned red. It matched her sun-burnt cheeks. Al brought her a cup of tea. The heat of it made her frozen fingers turn strangely green.
“You have to come in,” said Al. “It’s enough for today.”
“I’m almost finished.”
“You said that two hours ago. It’s dark already.” Covered in paint, his wife looked like a mermaid who had forgotten the feel of water. Al turned on the porch light. Husband and wife toiled together. When they were done, the two put the lids on the paint cans, collected the sticks, brushes, and rollers, and stood back. Under the light of the full moon, the tiny house shone.
“There was a full moon when she was born,” whispered Al. He saw that evening as if it were yesterday—yesterday and a million years ago. Looking away from his wife, Al busily scraped off paint from his fingernails. Al’s bruised fingers searched for Em’s blue splotchy ones.
Together they watched the house and the moon in the cold night of early spring.
And days scattered themselves like low flying leaves across lawns and streets. In the warm evenings of summer, Em and Al took short walks up one side of the block and down the other. Then they loaded their supper onto paper plates and ate out on the porch where they could look down on the playhouse. Though neither spoke of the child they had or a child they might have if only they were brave enough, they felt new to each other. Every so often, Al smiled. It vanished before there was ever a chance of its fading away. Like a memory of a rainbow, thought Emily. She didn’t tell her husband about the fluttering inside of her nor mention her need to see the geese.
Mornings, when she no longer heard Al’s footsteps and her home closed in on her, Emily lifted the key out of her jewelry box, walked down the back stairs, and stepped inside the miniature house. She sat across from the doll and told her about small things: the changing weather, the bulbs she was planting, a new dish she had made for the man who had become new to her again. “It’s funny how a stranger can enter your life,” Em confessed to the doll.
After wiping dust off the doll’s face and straightening her tiny, rumpled dress, Emily got to work. She swept dirt from the rug that she had made and washed the windows so that sunlight streamed through them. All along, she sang about girls who had lambs that followed them to school or young women who wore bangles and beads and rode snow white horses. “Men are a mystery,” she confided to the doll. Her fluttering heart grew wings. Blood rushed up through her legs, chest, arms, and hands until everything inside her was light and airy.
I must see the lake and the geese. I must go there.
Her husband needed her at home. She could not leave him.
Days disappeared like drain water even while the pair clasped their hands together. They became an old couple held up by the bonds of memory. In their mouths life tasted like dark chocolate: rich and bitter. And while Emily Davis loved her husband, she felt the pull of change. Somewhere inside herself, the singular woman had begun drawing patterns of long-ago flights. Every fall, without looking, she knew when the geese left their breeding grounds. When they flew over her house in V-shaped formation, she craned her neck and peered up at their long, sleek necks, their folded legs, and elliptical wings. Every spring she sensed them preparing for migration, bearing the pull and tug of air currents, and the satisfaction of settling on that nearby lake. She heard the patter of goslings trailing after their mothers. Going down to the blue playhouse wasn’t necessary anymore. The sight and sound of the geese swelled inside of her.
On an overcast morning, Emily woke to find, overnight, Al had quietly left the world behind. Just like him to go without a fuss, she thought. She might have lost sight of it after Rosie’s death, but Al was always her rainbow. Now she was no longer Mommy. No longer Al Davis’s wife. She had a new name that sounded like weeping water: the widow woman.
Nights, in bed, Emily wrapped her thin aging arms against her chest. Days she held onto routine. She had her breakfast of buttered toast and tea. She sat opposite her husband’s empty chair, his dish and cup, his silverware snugly wrapped in a napkin. She’d never put away Al’s place setting. Emily knew widows who ate in chairs while they stared vacantly at the TV. Sometimes nothing was on. Perhaps the pictures went off inside their minds, too.
While standing in the grocery store one day, she surprised herself. She didn’t grab the usual raspberry jelly. That had been Al’s favorite. She picked up an expensive jar of cherry preserves. Plump fruit leaned heavily against the glass.
“Good choice, Em,” she said. She looked around to make sure no one had heard an old woman talking to herself. She needed to say the intimate monosyllabic word. It made her feel as if Al was with her. He didn’t mind this new purchase. Not at all.
That night, instead of a normal supper, the famished woman had toast that was buttered more lightly than usual and tea that was stronger. Emily spooned the preserves on her toast. She spoke in a secretive voice as she sucked on tart cherry sweetness. “Al,” she said, “I’ve been dreaming about geese. Me and the geese. And our child. Her, too.” She swallowed hard and nearly choked on a particularly plump piece of fruit. Her mouth was heavy with feathers and cherries and bits of toasted bread. Emily lifted her heavy arms up and down. She stamped on her feet. “It’s only circulation,” she said to the empty plate. “I must get out more.”
One March day, Emily wrapped a woolen scarf around her neck. She pulled a woolly hat over her ears and found a pair of old gloves and boots. Tentatively, she opened the front door. Under the shining sun, the last of the white stuff had melted away. The wind pulled her down the street past the last remains of a snowman with stick arms and a carrot nose, down the long hill where neighborhood women walked their dogs to the junkyard where the old sway-backed horse stood. He was nibbling strands of dried grass that had grown between rusted tractors and dilapidated trailers.
“You’re still alive,” Mrs. Davis shouted. Every winter the horse disappeared. Every spring he reappeared.
Wind whooshed through all her protected places. “Al’s gone. And Rosie. You know about Rosie.” She had to talk to someone. “I’m getting a goose.” She stood so close to the horse that she could see the whiskers around his muzzle. Caked mud blanketed the poor bony beast. He moved his head up and down. It was a hopeful sign. Then the aged animal stumbled over to another area. He pawed the still frozen ground and found a second patch of dried grass.
Undeterred, Mrs. Davis stopped at an antique shop. In the window was a large plastic goose dressed in a yellow raincoat and matching hat. Feathers fluttered under Emily’s skin. At home, Emily placed her goose on the miniature highchair next to the fireplace where it would always be warm.
Spring made its usual brief appearance. Summer settled in. Evenings, after she cleared away her supper, Emily sat across from the bird and fanned herself vigorously. She talked to the goose about what it would wear the next day. The mute creature had a closetful of clothes that Mrs. Davis had found at flea markets, garage sales, and estate auctions. A Pilgrim outfit for Thanksgiving. A reindeer sweater with a matching antler hat. A yellow slicker and hat. That was her favorite. A swimsuit and beach umbrella to shield the goose from the blazing sun. Every once in a while, the woman wondered about the people who had dressed their own plastic geese, but no one could feel the way she did. Her goose listened to her. They were a lot alike: Em and her friend. All they needed was to stay warm and wait for change.
And Mrs. Davis’s neighborhood kept changing. The old people moved to places where the sun shone all the time. Their children escaped to large cities where jobs were easier to find. New neighbors moved in, neighbors with kids who called Mrs. Davis a nasty name.
Doody Doo Davis! They screamed and screamed.
When they began hiding the goose behind bushes and under the pine trees, the old woman brought it in at night. “Kids are so disrespectful these days,” she said to her close friend. She washed and dried the creature whose feathers always lay flat. She set it near the fire. The old widow woman was satisfied. For a while longer.
But thousands of tiny feathers seemed to spill out of the places where soul and skin had once been tightly sewn together. She could not still the sound of the geese. Her head hurt from their incessant honking.
On a particularly cold morning, Emily did not eat her usual breakfast or clear the one plate that she ate from. She left the goose dressed in its flannel night-shirt. Darkness hung over the house.
Emily moved to her seat near the fireplace. She wanted to stop the flight. Stop beating her wings. Land somewhere. Anywhere. Make a new home. She wanted to find Al and to tell him . . . tell him . . . Her heart sounded in her ears. She dragged herself upstairs, changed her clothes, found her key near the very back of her jewelry box, and stuffed it in her pocket.
“Al,” she said as she lay on top of the bed, “what’s my name?”
“Em,” said the wind.
“And what else?”
“Mommy,” said the goose.
She murmured those two names over and over. Under her eyelids, she saw the lake. She did not hate it anymore. She didn’t fear it, either. She moved toward it. There was land all around. She had studied the map. The patterns. Wings fluttered inside her and around her. A flock of geese honked in her head. She lifted her arms that were light and strong.
