Drag

I would like to begin with three facts:

      1. I have pet chickens.

      2. I have a ten-year-old daughter.

      3. I have never smoked a cigarette.

Yesterday I had a biopsy taken of my cervix, and the procedure went fine except for the crampy feeling afterward, which I’d been warned about. I’m still waiting on the results.

Regardless of being just fine, I decided to take the rest of the day off, which is something I rarely do because, frankly, I have been an overachiever my entire life. Although I believe I know how to have fun (camping is fun), I have recently started to suspect that some people consider me a “drag.” I’ve begun to consider myself a drag, especially when I can’t take a measly half day off without my conscience bugging me.

As evidence of my puritanical past, I offer again that I have never smoked a cigarette, not even once, mainly because it hasn’t occurred to me that it might be fun. But for some reason the biopsy made me want to smoke a cigarette on the sly. Also I’d just had my fortieth birthday, and every forty-year-old should have smoked at least once, right? So I thought I might lounge around after the biopsy, take a bath, read a magazine, and smoke a cigarette, right in the middle of the day.

But the doctor had been running late, so I arrived home late, and then my daughter got off the bus with a friend, and I was conscripted into making caramel popcorn, my signature dish. So there was never any time for lounging around and smoking.

After driving the friend home at dusk, my daughter and I came upon three roosters just standing in the middle of the road. Not deer, not stray dogs, not skunks, but three roosters — huge, beautiful birds, the kind with shimmery, multihued feathers — just standing there in the middle of the road, which is in the middle of Colorado grasslands and brush. No houses, hen or otherwise, in view.

My daughter said, “They’re going to be eaten by a fox tonight, aren’t they?”

“Yes, they are,” I said.

“Why are they here?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve never seen roosters standing in the middle of the road.”

“Me either,” I said.

What came next was whining: we just had to save the roosters.

I had never had a biopsy. I had never seen roosters in the road. But I had, nearly every day of my adult life, been denied my wishes, so often that I was at peace about it — not in a pushover, spineless way, but just a recognition of the impermanence of every­thing, including plans. So I got out of the car and murmured, “Here, chick-a-chick-a-chick,” which would bring my own hens wobble-running to my side. At home we have nine chickens with names like Burt, Oh-Beatle-Beatle, Zeitgeist, Sy, Fred, Henrietta, and so on, who huddle together outside our front door and follow me around whenever I step out of the house. They are mainly treated as pets, even by our dog.

But these roosters just glared at me and backed off. I stepped forward, holding my aching abdomen, and they ran backward. I ransacked my car and found some crackers from a fast-food restaurant to throw to them. Though they appeared interested in the saltines, the birds weren’t coming forward.

“No can do,” I told my daughter as I climbed back in the car and began to drive on. “Part of the circle of life and all.”

Next she started sobbing, sobbing — ridiculous for a rural and sturdy kid like her. And then she did something she had never done before, which was threaten to jump out of the moving car — in order to, quote, “save those lovely, mean roosters!”

She even opened the door and leaned out.

Cursing under my breath, I pulled into the driveway of the nearest farmhouse, which had a pure white peacock and many ducks and geese in the yard. Since it was a hippie-looking house, this struck me as normal. The homeowner, however, was not a rooster lover. She confirmed my suspicion that the roosters had probably been “dumped.” We nodded in mature acknowledgment of the truth: roosters are mean, and we’d probably have dumped them ourselves.

While I was talking with the woman, my daughter secretly dug out my cellphone and called my husband, who immediately drove over.

“Where are the horses that are out?” he asked when he climbed out of the car. He’s used to helping chase neighbors’ escaped animals. Last week it was llamas.

“Roosters,” I clarified.

“I’m here for roosters?” He looked at my daughter and narrowed his eyes.

“Just for the record,” I told him, “I want to say that (a) I want to go home and take a bath and climb into bed, and (b) I’m all for letting the fox get them.”

But no. My husband and daughter chased the roosters back and forth across the evening-lit fields until the man I married, in a quick, savvy move, grabbed one rooster, turned it upside down, and held it to his chest so that it couldn’t spur him. “Hurrah!” my daughter yelled, and then she agreed that the fox could have the other two, since by now they were about a mile away. She’s a realist, after all.

Meanwhile I could feel blood between my legs — not much, but enough to gather in my underwear. It was one of those moments — yes, indeed, there are a few — when I wished I hadn’t had children, so that I could take an afternoon off and care for my body when it needed care. But I simultaneously felt the tired recognition that life without my daughter would feel empty to me. I’ve been practicing calm acceptance of late, and for once it actually came to me unbidden. It’s wonderful that my husband and daughter are cooing over a rooster while I am bleeding in my underwear, I thought.

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