The Culling

“Your children don’t need you,” my second husband announced.

He poured his second, maybe third vodka tonic.  He didn’t even look at me as he eased his six-foot-something frame through the sliding glass doors onto our deck. His words grazed by me as he sat down in the folding chair placing his drink on the small table between us, next to his worn copy of Machiavelli’s, The Prince.

He knew it was my favorite time of day, just before dusk. A letter from my ex-husband’s attorney lay open on my lap. My eyes moved from the fine print to look out at the pond. The fountain had just been switched on, promising spring. Several male geese commanded the pond’s perimeter, guarding ground nests while the females looked for food. I noticed my breathing had quelled.

I tried to hoist his words out over the deck railing, but “your children don’t need you” wouldn’t escape into the waning daylight. There was anticipation—or was it excitement?—in his voice that clove his words to my skin, an envelope for his invitation. He expected a response. I could tell by the way he moved his drink in a circular motion, the lime slice almost spilling out. Still, what could I say?

We were distracted then by a fluttering. Wings flapping. A cacophony of honks and squawks. The geese were in a tizzy. I thought it may have been my thoughts finally spattering out, but he looked outward toward the pond, not at me, so I knew it was the geese.

Two men—maintenance crew members—moved stealthily around the water’s edge. Each man snuck a gloved hand into pockets of earth covered in leaves and feathers. They wrenched one egg from each nest, tossed them in a bucket. The ganders chased them, snipping at their calves. My eyes squinted. I was witnessing a criminal act.  

My second husband laughed. He said, “Good. There are too many geese in the complex.” He made some mumblings about “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection.” He quoted Machiavelli, “It is better to be feared than loved.” I didn’t understand the context. Didn’t everyone want to be loved? What did all of this have to do with the geese?

He turned from the pond back toward me. His eyes fell on the letter on my lap. Words like custody and school district and child support rose off the page. He stood up then. Took a sip and looked down. My eyes rose to meet his. He felt the need to continue with his truisms, “They don’t need you. They have their father. Give him full custody.”

I think he was about to add, “Surely, you agree?” when the female geese returned. They stomped wildly over toward their mates. They realized at once what had happened. Did I? If they could speak, I knew they would be asking: How could you let this happen? They needed someone to blame. A familiar feeling cut in: was I to blame again? His words scissored around my insides: Your children don’t need you.

I thought of Nora's strawberry hair glued to her ruby face, nursing for the last time the morning we moved from Connecticut to New York. I thought of Quinn, watching us. He pulled up the corner of his Little Tykes shirt and placed my breast pump on top of his little nipple. When I laughed, Nora turned her head to smile at her brother, her tiny hand resting confidently on my breast. She knew I would still be there when she turned back toward me, lips wide.

At least the geese were vocal in their protest. I let his words scab over my mouth. Fear crusted over latent anger. I thought maybe I didn’t deserve Quinn and Nora. They were so perfect. I was so flawed. Maybe I couldn’t take care of them. Maybe their father was a better parent.

At the pond, mayhem was slowly turning to resignation, too. Mother geese staggered around crestfallen. Their futile screams cut into the evening air. They nudged aside leaves and overturned clumps of sod with their black beaks, searching. Eventually, they settled on their nests tending their phantom eggs.

I thought of the time I let the electricity bill go unpaid for too long. It slithered down to the bottom of a growing pile. The paste on the papier-mâché life I was trying to put together wouldn’t hold. The lights went out. Before he was my second husband, he helped me scrape up enough money to turn them back on when my children returned from their father’s. How easily I let him became my prince. I was easy to conquer and easy to rule. Machiavelli’s dream. Quinn and Nora were so generous with their unsuspecting hugs when they flew through the door. Did they notice I could barely light up their room anymore?

He got up to mix another drink. I knew he would make one for me. While he was gone, I wept. How could I not? I watched the momma geese settle into their gaping wounds. This was no offering to their god, though maybe they wanted to believe so. Their anger seemed to settle into their downy backs, diluting into a fierce sorrow. To be of such strong stock, I thought, yet to be so powerless. Their goslings stolen in an orchestrated attack. Not manslaughter but first-degree murder! I wondered if the gloved men would be plagued by what they had done. Would I? I supposed they were acting on instinct, on orders passed down from a long-ago superior they could no longer name.

“They have their father,” my second husband continued. I was thrust back onto the deck by the surety of his voice. One eye stayed on the geese though. “He makes more money than you. He can take better care of them.”

He seemed nonplussed still about the geese. He handed me my glass. I felt a shift. I noticed there was no lime in mine. I wished it were kerosene instead of vodka. I had a strange urge to spill my drink all over his book. Over him. To light a match. But then, vodka was flammable, wasn’t it?

I thought of happier times. It wasn’t all unpaid bills. There were lazy Sundays when the kids and I would empty the jug of change we’d been saving onto the bed. We would separate the coins, arranging quarters, nickels, dimes, even pennies, into dollars. Somehow, we always had enough to make a pilgrimage to Saratoga for lunch and a trip to the bead store. Rows of tiny wooden boxes filled with medallions and stones waited for us. Most were tinged with gold. Every time we went, the blue of Quinn and Nora’s eyes became starlight. I felt like the moon.

I took too big of a gulp of my drink. What else was there to do? The strong liquid staggered down my throat. Echoes of geese crying inhabited me. It was all too much. Survival of the fittest? It seemed all the laws of nature had been violated tonight. I saw those men skulking around the pond earlier. Could I have stopped them? Weren’t they the same men who fixed my thermostat last month? Hadn’t they brought warmth once? It was easier to be a victim than a witness I realized. Still, I could do something, I thought.

“Your children don’t need you,” my second husband insisted. Again. And again. I thought then of the true-crime shows I liked to watch. The detectives could always identify a crime of passion by the staggering number of knife wounds. One wouldn’t do. Even if the first blow was fatal, the offender kept going.

He leaned toward me for a kiss. I thought: maybe they don’t need me, but I need them. I also thought just then if I were a goose, I would have bit him hard. My mother had grown up on a farm, been bit. She spoke of the inconsolable pain. But I suppose I just let him kiss me. I might have run to the maintenance shed. I knew it wasn’t too late. The eggs may still have been whole. I could have sat on them myself. I was nothing if not warm, if not a mother.

“I need you,” he confessed. “...more than they do.”

And that was it. The geese quieted. I wondered how long they would stay on their nests. How long until they finally succumbed to their reality, the theft? Their very nature, the order of things, irreparably disrupted. My eyes shut.

Behind my eyelids, I watched myself unravel with rage. I watched my throat swell and spew. I was not easy to rule just then. I envisioned my second husband packing up his belongings in two army-green duffle bags. Even in anger, he folded his clothes, was methodical, pragmatic. There wasn’t much to pack. We hadn’t been married a year. Soon, behind my eyelids, he marched out the front door. His need became nothing more than heavy footfalls on the stairs. As his need descended, mine rose.

When I opened my eyes, he was still there next to me on the deck. He seemed oddly satisfied. He was too drunk to realize that I had become Medici, had already banished him in exile. There was no more fear, no more love. Had there ever been? Natural selection. I stayed on the deck too long that night. I was evolving. I didn’t want the geese to wake up and think that no one cared, that no one remembered. If they were brave enough to come back next spring, I promised myself, I would protect their nests, too.

-Tina Goodyear

Tina Goodyear is a writer and teacher living near the shore in New Jersey. Currently, she is in the midst of revising her first memoir draft, FROM THE NECK DOWN.