Issue #81 A Pair of Peacocks

Meeting House is back with a new look. We hope you like it as much as we do.

This week, we're excited to feature a new story by Stacy Spencer Thompson. Stacy is a copy editor and writer currently pursuing her MFA in fiction through the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program.  She lives in Somerville, MA, with her husband and three cats.

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A Pair of Peacocks

By Stacy Spencer Thompson of Somerville, MA

Mrs. George Herbert Winkler’s eyelids remained fixed at half mast as she watched the gardener’s boy polish her late husband’s 1957 Chevy Sports Coupe. “Just Bernice” had been referring to herself as such ever since a crack of lightning had struck Mr. Winkler dead before he could get his umbrella hoisted. That was that, Bernice had been telling people for the better part of a decade. She wondered what they expected: It rained three months a year in Shreveport, for heaven’s sake!

Bad luck and Bernice had become acquainted the summer a tornado rolled through Main Street and snatched her childhood home. Neighbors said they could see the little side-gabled bungalow encircled by a cloud of debris and dust as it spun into the distance. Bernice didn’t know if she quite believed that, but she did remember how the empty plot of land had looked from the back window of her family’s station wagon: like a missing tooth.

Why, that was just the beginning! During her teen years, spinal polio had shattered Bernice’s dream of showing in the Keeneland Pony Club’s annual dressage competition. How could she be expected to compete with an atrophied right leg? Then, in college, Bernice had positioned her heated rollers too close to the scalp and awakened to entire patches of hair missing the next morning. After Mr. Winkler’s sudden and inexplicable passing, it was all Bernice could do to remain in her parlor and watch the world turn on its head from the other side of her Bay window.

Presently, Bernice was studying a pair of peacocks from the safety of her paisley wingback chair. They had wandered into her front lawn moments earlier, and the gardener’s boy, whose circles to the car’s shiny exterior had been slow to begin with, now held the soapy rag in place as he observed the spectacle. Without warning, the male peacock sprouted a tail of iridescent, blue-green feathers and the female, as terrified by the individual, goldenrod eyes as Bernice, darted from side to side trying to evade the net that had been cast. She’s trapped! Bernice thought with a start.

Bernice scooted forward on her seat cushion hollowed from years of use. By now, both male and female peacock were heading toward the well-trafficked road ahead, the male’s deliberate amble ushering the female to the edge of Bernice’s professionally manicured lawn. When the male peacock let out a squawk that, even through her double-paned windows, sounded to Bernice like a feral cat’s beastly meow, Bernice stood up and began smacking the window repeatedly with the palm of her hand. She wasn’t about to let some antiquated mating ritual wreak havoc on her already inauspicious existence.

“Young man!” she called to the gardener’s son, “Yoo-hoo, young man!” Bernice continued beating the glass as the male peacock sauntered into the street, oblivious, it seemed, to the cacophony of blaring horns. The female, still trapped, Bernice imagined, behind the ostentatious display of elongated tail feathers, was nowhere to be seen.

The boy cupped a hand to his forehead as if saluting and squinted into the sunlight reflecting off the window.

“Yes, you over there!” Bernice bellowed from inside. “Do something!”

“Missus Winkler?” the boy said as he watched Bernice throw open her front door and march toward him, the ends of her long skirt gathered in her left hand. In all the time he had worked at the Winkler estate, he had never seen her outside of her home. Not once.

“Just Bernice, son,” she said and brushed past him. By the time she made it to her immaculately trimmed rosebushes, the truck was already rumbling past, the dual thumps merely an afterthought. Bernice sank to her knees and squeezed her eyes shut tight, the image of purple, blue, and green plumage flattened against the asphalt too much to bear. Enough was enough.