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Every month or so, a new one would show up in the lingerie department, having flown in by accident through the huge sliding glass doors in Housewares. Celine liked to keep an eye on them, willing them toward the exits with her attention. Usually, they found their way out. At least, that’s what Celine told herself when she stopped seeing a particular bird silhouetted by the skylights.

The first time Celine spotted a bird flying beneath the skylights in Lingerie, she called maintenance, alarmed. But when they arrived, they stared at her with their hands stuffed into their blue coveralls. “What do you want us to do about it?” they asked. Celine had to admit she wasn’t sure, but afterward, she thought they must have had ladders. Otherwise, why would all the skylights be so clean?

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“They clean them on the outside,” her boyfriend Carl told her as he unhooked her bra that night, cupping her breasts in his hands. “From up top.” While he moved on top of her, Celine closed her eyes and thought of the bird, how it had darted from one window to the next, pink chest all puffed up in agitation, the soft thud of its wings against the glass.

Celine had been with Lingerie almost a full year, having transferred from Misses. The pay was the same, but to Celine, Lingerie was a promotion. She liked the whispery silk of the negligees and the smooth, round curves of the pre-shaped bra cups. The clear plastic hangers were like the shoulders of tiny, transparent women, their collarbones rigid as a dancer’s plié. Here, women were less likely to ask her how they looked in a particular garment, which meant Celine rarely had to lie. As she slipped the filmy fabrics onto their hangers, she sometimes whispered the brand names to herself: Donatella, Adore Moi, Flora, Jezebel. They sounded like poetry.

One Friday in June, just before the end of Celine’s shift, a bird Celine had been keeping an eye on—a robin—shat on an end cap of some pantyhose eggs. The bird had been flying frantically around the store all afternoon, startling shoppers, but no one except Celine noticed the damaged pantyhose eggs. With a wet cloth, she cleaned most of the white mess off the three splattered eggs, but each egg had a cut-out in the center, designed so the customer could feel the sheer fabric. On two of the eggs, the bird shit was embedded in the fabric. The sight of the soiled pantyhose made Celine feel panicky, almost sick to her stomach.

At the end of her shift, Celine stuffed the plastic ovals into the dumpster and inventoried them as stolen, hoping Bobbi wouldn’t notice. Bobbi, Celine’s manager, was a deeply unfriendly woman who tricked you with her perky name and flashy smile. Bobbi was thin—so thin that Celine imagined it was Bobbi’s bones pressing up against her skin that made her appear so unnaturally white. Bobbi had no boobs to speak of.

Bobbi might have more sales experience, but when it came to lingerie, Celine was clearly the expert, with all her curves. Women trusted her, and men liked asking her which slip or pair of panties a woman would prefer. It was how she’d met Carl, who’d been shopping for his then-girlfriend. “Which is your favorite?” he’d asked, and Celine had pointed to a red negligee with lace over the nipples. It wasn’t her favorite, actually, but it was the more expensive one, and she knew Carl would buy it. But then he asked a salesgirl from the beauty department to give it to her—Celine!—in the same tissue paper she’d just wrapped it in. He’d written his phone number on the receipt, and Celine still remembered how much—$59.98. 

She never called him. He was a lot older than her, for one thing, and had at least three days of stubble on his face when he bought the negligee. He was tall, which Celine liked, but rangy, too—a man who looked like he needed taking care of. But Carl showed up again and again, asking after her, bringing gifts. Finally, she gave in. The first time they had sex, he asked her to wear the red negligee, which gave her armpits an itchy rash. 

The day after the ruined pantyhose, Celine kept her eye out for the robin. It appeared around lunchtime, walking along a support beam, the previous day’s frantic energy gone. She’s given up, Celine thought. The thought distracted her. She failed to greet customers when they stepped into Lingerie, forgot about people in dressing rooms. She kept looking skyward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the bird in flight, but always it was sitting in that same spot, looking smaller than it had before, the bright flare of its chest now a pale pink. 

Celine snapped out of her reverie when Bobbi emerged from the employee break room with a smile like a shard of glass. She had seen this smile before, when a previous employee, Sally, had been fired for changing the prices on bras so she could sell them to friends who came in pretending to be regular customers. “Celine,” Bobbi said, making the name sound like a nasty word, “we need to discuss the inventory.” 

Celine swallowed. She could hear her mother’s voice whispering in the back of her skull, reminding her whose fault it was that she was nothing but a department store salesclerk. “Do you want to work a dirt job your entire life?” Celine’s mother had asked when she’d failed yet another semester of community college. “Cleaning other people’s plates? Picking up their laundry?” Celine, who always liked folding laundry—the smooth lines, the smell of soap—had wondered what was so wrong with those people’s lives, the ones who did the work her mother didn’t want her doing. The answer, Celine had now worked long enough to know, was having to work for people like Bobbi. “How do you know those pantyhose were stolen?” Bobbi asked. 

“The ones I marked in the inventory?” Celine answered, stupidly, trying not to look upwards as she said it, at the bird on her mournful perch. But she knew she was caught. When Celine explained that she’d had to throw them away, Bobbi wanted to know why. Biting her lip to keep from crying, Celine told her. She hadn’t wanted Bobbi to blame the bird, which she realized as soon as she said it out loud was idiotic. If she’d marked them as damaged and set them out on the discard table, they probably wouldn’t even be having this conversation. 

Bobbi, like the maintenance crew nearly a year ago, stared at her. Unlike the maintenance crew, she was still smiling, the store’s fluorescent lights reflecting off the white sheen of her teeth. “What did you think I would do to the bird?” she asked. “Shoot it?” Bobbi’s laugh sounded like a ream of fabric being ripped in two. Shame rose up in Celine’s cheeks like a rash. 

The shame still hadn’t faded when she got home, and Carl asked if she was feeling ill. “A little,” she said, and lay down in her darkened bedroom, which used to smell like rose oil but now smelled like Carl, his Old Spice deodorant, and underneath that, the spoiled smell of his sweat. 

Two weekend shifts, the ones Celine had worked hard for, were pulled from her schedule. Bobbi gave no reason except a “change in department priorities,” but Celine knew it was because of the bird and the pantyhose. She wondered which part had bothered Bobbi more—her childlike insistence on protecting the bird from some imagined fate, or her failure to put up a fight in the face of Bobbi’s ridicule. Women like Bobbi wanted you to be weak but hated you for it at the same time. Whatever Bobbi’s reasons, Celine did not argue. 

Explaining herself to Bobbi was as unthinkable as explaining herself to her own mother, which she had tried to do only once, in sixth grade, when she finally revealed that her uncle had been feeling her up at every family gathering since she was old enough to walk. “Well,” Celine’s mother had said. “You shouldn’t be sitting in his lap.”

That was the first time Celine had felt her skin and bones evaporating, all of her becoming as sheer as the gauze curtains her mother draped over the windows in their formal dining room. She was immaterial, insubstantial as air. Even now, when someone looked right at her she felt startled, like they’d pulled back a curtain she’d been hiding behind. 

During weekday shifts, Celine did her best to stay busy, organizing end caps, rehanging bras and nighties, and reminding herself when she saw Bobbi that there was still rent to pay. Otherwise, she’d end up moving in with Carl. She’d put him off for months now, but her bank account was thinning out, and she was beginning to doubt that diligently wiping down the dressing room mirrors with Windex would prevent the inevitable. 

When Bobbi wasn’t looking, Celine watched the bird. She’d begun darting around the store again, this way and that, disappearing and then reappearing. By the end of the second day, Celine understood the robin was building a nest. Panicked at the thought of a pregnant mother unable to find food or water, Celine hid Dixie cups half-full of water on top of display racks. She took an uneaten crust of bread from her lunchbox and slid it into her pocket before she went back onto the sales floor after lunch. When the lights were out and the gates pulled down, Celine kneaded the crust into crumbs in her pocket, then spread them out on top of the jewelry counter on her way out the door. 

On her first Saturday off, Carl wanted to go for a drive. The road into the foothills was long and windy and made her nauseous. Carl talked as he shifted into the turns, his voice growing louder when he turned to look at her. Celine could only take in a fraction of what he was saying. Steak dinner. Superior spatial awareness. Hairpin turn. Solar eclipse. She turned the phrases over in her mind, murmured listening sounds. Conversations with Carl never required much from her. She wondered if the bird had found the food and water she’d left out, and tried to remember the name of the fairy tale where two children were led away by an evil witch, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs back to the safety of their home. 

They pulled over at a lookout, and Carl led her to the edge of a small meadow where people were gathered. “The eclipse,” Carl reminded her. “It’s just a partial eclipse, but it will be fully visible from this spot.” He used two different-sized rocks to demonstrate how an eclipse worked, and Celine thought how fragile the rocks looked in his big hands, like eggs. 

Then, they stood and waited, Carl pointing out hawks hanging in the sky, seemingly motionless. Celine followed the shadow of a hawk as it came alive, turning from the shape of a bird into a sleek, dark arrow that disappeared into the woods at the edge of the clearing. Carl pulled two pairs of paper sunglasses from his back pocket, like the kind they give you for a 3D movie. When Celine put hers on, the world around her darkened. More people arrived. Soon, everyone was looking up, whispering to each other in awed voices. 

Celine squinted at the crescent of the sun from behind her eclipse glasses and tried to feel something. Instead, she imagined the robin seeing the eclipse through the mall skylight. Could birds see that far? Did a bird even have to see an eclipse? Or did it just know an eclipse was happening, the same way it knew to build a nest or find shelter? But if that was the truth, then why couldn’t the robin find her way out of the department store? 

When Celine looked away from the sun and removed her glasses, she saw that Carl was kneeling beside her, holding something in his palm. A little red velvet box, like the ones from the jewelry counter. “Oh,” she said. Carl was looking up at her, his eyes obscured by the silver mirrors of the glasses, his lips pressed together in a crooked kind of smile. Oh no, Celine thought. But by then, it was too late. People were looking. Someone was taking a picture. When she said yes, there was a ricochet of applause. Only when they got back into the car and Carl mentioned their dinner reservations did Celine understand what had happened. She was engaged to Carl.

Making love to Carl that night, Celine felt more detached than usual. Usually, Celine could see herself from above the mattress when she closed her eyes, Carl’s broad back and hips pressed between her legs. His arms like a tent pitched over her face, her head turned to the side, just one blue-eyeshadowed eyelid visible. But this time, there was no floating. Her eyes were open. She could feel her back pressing into the mattress and her palms pressing against Carl. 

“Stop,” she said. It took a moment, but he paused, lifted from his forearms to his palms to look her in the face. “I’m too tired,” she said, which felt like the most true thing she had ever said to him. As he rolled off of her and she rolled to her side, pulling the comforter across her back, she felt a shifting deep down inside herself, like parts of the earth moving against each other, the landscape shifting. The tremor, starting at the base of her spine and moving up to her skull, kept her awake all night. 

On Celine’s next shift, she spent much of her day watching the robin’s nest. The bird never once left its perch. A dedicated mother already, Celine thought. All morning, she pulled the engagement ring off her finger and then put it on again, turning it over between her fingers when she’d taken it off. When she put it back on, she twisted it halfway around her finger and closed her fist, feeling the sharp edges of the stone push against the flesh of her palm. 

Near the end of her shift, a teenage girl walked into the lingerie department with her mother. The girl had her arms crossed over her chest, but Celine could see that the girl had no breasts to speak of. Like her mother, she was flat as a board up top. When she approached the pair, the mother waved her away. She was just grabbing a pack of panties, she said, one for her, one for her daughter. 

As the mother paid, the girl stood behind her, half-hidden in an aisle of silk nighties. Celine watched her run her fingers over the slick fabric and then stuff her hand back into her pocket as if she’d touched something hot. The mother said something to the girl as they walked away, and the girl’s face opened up in laughter. Celine envied the girl her homeliness, her practical panties, the way she and her mother disappeared into the mall’s entrance, their thin backs like two parallel lines that would someday merge into one. 

Just then, someone cried out in the children’s department. There was a scrambling of people over to the area, but by the time Celine arrived, everyone was quiet, standing in a circle around a display table of infant sweaters and matching beanies. In the center of the table, almost as if someone had placed it there, was the robin’s nest, upside down. On the floor beside Celine’s foot lay the tiniest baby bird, its downy feathers just coming in, completely still. 

The salesclerk on the department side was trying to draw the customers away from the table—a very pregnant woman and her mother, and also a man holding two different colors of baby booties, one in each hand. Celine stopped closer to the display table and reached for the nest. When she turned it over, the birds, now heaped on an infant sweater, opened their mouths and wings and began to make noise, as if she’d popped the lid on a jack-in-the-box. Their pink transparent beaks opened wider than seemed possible, given the size of their bodies. Their bodies trembled with the effort of their high-pitched chirping. Celine’s eyes filled with tears. 

Using a baby beanie as a glove, Celine scooped the birds back into the nest. There were four of them. Nothing to be done now about the still one on the floor. She marched back to the lingerie department with the bird’s nest held out in front of her like an offering. Bobbi was there, furiously counting money on the sales counter, already asking Celine, without even looking at her, if she thought it was just fine to walk away from a full register in the middle of her shift. When Celine said nothing, Bobbi looked up. 

“I’m taking these birds home,” Celine said. The words were out of her mouth before she’d had time to think them, but there they were. She was taking the birds home. When Celine was in grade school, the widow who lived in the house across the street had saved birds as a hobby, rehabilitating them in her living room. Bluebirds and robins and one time, a baby owl. The memory came to Celine fully formed, how she and a neighbor girl, Cindy, had watched the widow feed the birds from tiny droppers, had listened as the widow told them how eventually the birds would grow strong enough to fly on their own. It was a myth that a mother bird would abandon her chicks if they’d been touched by a human, the widow explained, so sometimes she even returned a baby bird to its nest. 

Bobbi walked over to Celine, so close she could smell the sharp scent of Bobbi’s perfume, something almost chemical. Bobbi peered down into the nest, and then into Celine’s face. “If you leave before your shift’s end, you shouldn’t bother coming back.” 

Celine could have said the words for her. They were that predictable. Everything in Celine’s life all of a sudden was that predictable. She knew what her mother would say when she told her she’d lost yet another job, what Carl would say when she returned the ring: ugly, cutting things. Things meant to make her feel small. But with the bird’s nest cradled in her palms, Celine didn’t feel small. She remembered a story she’d read in high school, about a girl who’d turned herself into a tree to finally get away from a lover who wouldn’t leave her alone. Celine was growing roots, sprouting blossoms, expanding. 

“I quit,” she said.

As she left the lingerie department, she could hear the robin in the rafters, calling out to her babies, maybe even calling out to Celine. But Celine couldn’t save her now. She could only save what was right here in front of her, these four baby birds with their mouths open wide, so blindly committed to living. She would drive straight to the pet supply store and buy one of those droppers. She’d feed them baby food mixed with water, one drop at a time, just the way the widow had done. 

And then the second part of the memory rushed back to Celine like a strong wind. From a shoebox on a table beneath the window, the widow had lifted a small, pale-breasted bird into Celine’s waiting hands. With the widow guiding her, they’d stepped out together onto the front porch, right to its edge, where the boughs of a blue oak tree arched down toward the house. She’d held her palms up, the bird’s wings beating like a heart in her hands. And then, Celine remembered with a jolt of joy, it had flown.

 

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KATHERINE VAN DIS is a fiction writer and yoga teacher living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her work has previously appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Juxtaprose. She is currently at work on a novel. Katherine lives on a woodsy little acre with her husband, two sons, their little dog Joni, and about a hundred houseplants. Find her on Instagram @katevandis and on Substack @midlifesentences.

Featured image by freestocks, courtesy of Unsplash.