The Pickled Egg

Chapter 1A Fine Start to a Good Day

The Pickled Egg woke up, as she always did, at half past six. Not because she set an alarm. She hadn’t set an alarm in forty years, and she wasn’t about to start now. Her body simply knew when it was time, tapping her gently on the shoulder from the inside, the way it always had, the way it always would, until one day it didn’t. But she wasn’t going to think about that this morning. Or any morning, really. What a waste of a perfectly good sunrise.

She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, the way the doctor had told her to ever since what he called “the episode” and what she called “the time I stood up too fast and saw something quite interesting.” She smoothed the quilt (a wedding gift, forty-nine years old now and still beautiful) and listened to the house settle around her. This was her favorite sound. The house breathing. Saying good morning in its own quiet way.

“Good morning,” she said back.

The house didn’t answer, but she felt certain it appreciated the acknowledgment.

She put on her slippers and wrapped herself in the blue robe that had belonged to Husband. It was enormous on her, which she found wonderful, like being hugged while walking. She shuffled to the kitchen to make her tea.

This was the ceremony she liked best. The kettle filled with fresh water, never yesterday’s, always fresh; she was firm about this. The blue teapot with the little chip on the spout, which she’d had since 1987 and which was not going anywhere. The tea in its canister, a particular brand she ordered from a shop in Vermont and which arrived every month like a polite, fragrant friend. She measured the leaves carefully. She hummed while she waited for the kettle. When it whistled, she poured, and then she picked up the teacup (her nicest one, the one with the tiny violets on it) and turned toward the kitchen table.

And then the cup was on the floor.

She wasn’t entirely sure what had happened. Her fingers had simply decided, independently and without consulting her, that holding the cup was no longer their concern. There had been a slip. A small terrible moment. And then the sound: a bright, decisive crack, the kind that means something is not getting up again.

She stood very still and looked at it. The pieces. The small brown puddle spreading across the linoleum. The handle, separated from the body of the cup, lying two feet away as though it had somewhere to be.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled.

“Well,” she said, to no one in particular, “it was clearly time I swept and mopped.”

She said this with some satisfaction, because it was true. She had been meaning to sweep and mop for three days now, and something had always come up. But here, clearly, was the universe providing what she had not managed to provide for herself: a reason and an occasion. She appreciated efficiency.

She cleaned up the broken cup with great care and tenderness, wrapping the pieces in newspaper the way you would wrap something that deserved a proper goodbye. The little violets faced upward until she folded the paper over them. She thought she might plant some violets in the garden this spring.

Then she swept. Then she mopped. The kitchen floor, which had been quietly becoming a concern, gleamed back at her afterward, pleased with itself, as linoleum always is after a good mopping.

She made another cup of tea (the mug this time, the large yellow one that said WORLD’S OKAYEST PERSON, a gift from someone whose sense of humor she had always appreciated) and she carried it carefully with both hands to the kitchen table.

She sat down. She took a sip. She looked out the window.

And there, on the branch of the old oak tree at the edge of the yard, the tree that leaned slightly to the left as though listening for something, was the little red bird.

She had seen him before. Or her. She had been unable to determine this, and had decided it didn’t matter; the bird’s business was the bird’s own. She had first noticed him in late spring, sitting in exactly this spot, and she had thought then what she thought now: what an extraordinarily red bird. Red in the specific, committed way that some birds are red, as though they made a decision early in life and saw no reason to revisit it.

The bird turned its head and looked directly at her.

“Good morning,” she said.

The bird opened its beak and sang. Three short notes and then one long, looping one that dipped down and came back up, like a question that answered itself.

She felt her whole body loosen with pleasure.

She knew, of course, in the way that a woman of seventy knows things, that the bird had not come specifically to sing for her. She understood how birds worked. They sang for territory, for mates, for the complicated social reasons that birds had and that she suspected were not entirely unlike the complicated social reasons of people at a church potluck. She knew all of this perfectly well.

But she also knew what it felt like when something was meant for you.

And this was what it felt like.

“Thank you,” she told the bird.

The bird sang again, three short and one long, and she nodded as though she understood, which she did, in the way that matters.

She sat with her tea for a long time. The light in the kitchen moved slowly from gray to yellow, the way good light does when it isn’t in any particular hurry. Outside, a car went by. Somewhere down the street a dog barked twice and then thought better of it. The oak tree moved in a breeze she couldn’t feel from here, and the bird moved with it, perfectly balanced, holding his spot on the branch with the casual confidence of something that had never worried about falling.

Eventually she stood up, washed the mug, and went to get dressed.

It was going to be a good day. She could tell.

She was, she had discovered over seventy years of practice, almost always right about this.