The Baby Swan

ALLEN PARK, MICHIGAN
Fall 1964

Long ago, from a time of creased and mildewed memories, this is the story I told myself.

I lay on my back on the narrow pad of the crib, a toddler, a pre-schooler, legs grown too long to fit any other way except propped up against the footboard where my toes could twirl the pastel wooden balls on the top, designed to amuse babies. Because my younger brother would be cranky if he got too tired, I was supposed to be napping as well; because I was the oldest, it was my responsibility to set the example in all things. If he needed to sleep, I needed to be tired, although I wasn’t. I could hear him, breathing loudly, sprawled out asleep in his room on his full-sized bed while I lay awake and cramped and forbidden to move or make a sound until he woke up on his own. All I could do was tell myself stories, silently, staring at the ceiling.

My left arm, held above me, fingers pursed together, hand pointed down, as if I was making a shadow picture on the wall of a swan, was in fact, a baby swan. The baby swan swam all day, content and curious, looking at everything, wondering about everything, happy to be beautiful in a beautiful world. Then my right arm, the mother swan would swim over.

Peck, peck, peck! The mother swan would peck the baby’s head, until the baby dropped its neck down into the water to hide. Peck, peck, peck, the mother would be there waiting when the baby’s head came up. Over and over until, exhausted, the baby would lie still, barely swimming, unable to get away while the fingers making up its beak would be separated and twisted by the beak of the mother swan. When the baby was tattered and bruised and utterly defeated, the mother would swim away. Over her shoulder, as she left, she would say “once there was an ugly duckling who became a swan, but you are not a swan, and now you are too ugly to even be a duckling.”

The baby could not move, could not even cry or make a sound because its beak was broken, although it kept swimming forlornly in a circle, knowing it could never be called a swan again, knowing it was unfit even for ducks. Sometime later, a father swan would come swimming by and see the baby twisted and torn, nearly sinking in the water. He would try to help, poking and prodding with his rough beak, trying to unsnarl the baby’s wrecked and tangled one. But it was permanently bent, it could never be put right again. Impatient with his lack of progress, he too would swim away saying “you look a little better now so maybe the ducks will take you after all, but I don’t know where they live.”

And the little swimming bird was left to paddle in circles on its own forever more.