Flight Behavior

Ovid was explaining something to Juliet that he called the theory of the territorial divide. With some confusion Dellarobia understood this was her theory, he was attributing it to her, though the terms he used were unfamiliar: climate-change denial functioned like folk art for some people, he said, a way of defining survival in their own terms. But it’s not indigenous, Juliet argued. It’s like a cargo cult. Introduced from the outside, corporate motives via conservative media. But now it’s become fully identified with the icons of local culture, so it’s no longer up for discussion.

“The key thing is,” Juliet said, resting her elbow on the table, that beautiful wrist bending under the weight of its wooden rings, “once you’re talking identity, you can’t just lecture that out of people. The condescension of outsiders won’t diminish it. That just galvanizes it.”

Dellarobia felt abruptly conscious of her husband and her linoleum. “Christ on the cross,” she said without enthusiasm. “The rebel flag on mudflaps, science illiteracy. That would be us.”

“I am troubled by this theory, Dellarobia,” Ovid said, “but I can’t say you are wrong. I’ve read a lot of scholarly articles on the topic, but you make more sense.”

“Well, yeah,” Juliet said, “that’s kind of the point, that outsiders won’t get it.” She looked at Dellarobia, moving her head slightly from side to side in some secret girl signal, as if they were in league. Dellarobia felt herself resisting the invitation. Juliet went to yard sales for entertainment. She’d seen the coral reefs. Which according to Ovid were bleaching out and dying fast, all over the world. Preston would never get to see one. Dellarobia felt like taking a tire iron to something, ideally not now, ideally not herself. She got up to clear the plates.

Cordie had been good through most of supper, if lifting her shirt and playing with her navel counted as being good. And squeezing boiled potatoes in her fists, watching white potato mush squirt out between her fingers. “Good” was a euphemism for quiet. But the internal weather of Cordelia always turned quickly, and now suddenly she was fussy, ready for a bath and bed. Cub lifted her by the armpits and retreated, barely nodding good night. Preston meanwhile was getting cranked up. His science buzz, Dellarobia called this. He remembered to ask Dr. Byron about the Perfect Females, the question he’d been nursing for weeks and weeks. Ovid explained they were females that had their full complement of parts.

Preston crossed his arms on the table and rested his chin there, scrutinizing Ovid for sincerity. “You mean like heads and legs?”

“Those, and more,” Ovid said. “All the inside parts too. So they don’t need helpers or auxiliaries to function, the way worker bees do, or soldier ants. A perfect female is the lady that can go out and start a new colony by herself.”

Preston accepted this and moved on. “Just a sec,” he commanded, dashing from the room.

“Excuse me please!” Dellarobia called after him.

“May-I-please-be-excused!” he yelled from the end of the house, and reappeared in a flash, sliding to a halt in his sock feet. He plopped a yellow book on the table: Encyclopedia of Animals, volume 15. “This says monarchs go to Florida in the winter.”

“Florida and the Gulf,” Dellarobia corroborated. She’d read him the monarch entry so often the sight of the page depressed her. It was a deeply unsatisfactory account.

Ovid took the book and found the publication date, nodding. “This was the definitive version of the story in 1952. The monarchs were already a subject of scientific curiosity then. No one knew yet where they went in winter.”

“Not true!” Juliet said. “Woodcutters in Michoacán knew.”

“Outside of a mountain range in Michoacán,” Ovid corrected, “no one knew where. And inside that range, no one knew where they summered.”

“That’s true,” Juliet agreed. “They thought they came there to die.”

“With my wife’s permission, I will put it this way. At the time your book was written, the full story of the monarch migration was unknown to humanity.”

“When did they find it out?” Preston asked.

The answer, to Dellarobia’s astonishment, was within Ovid’s lifetime. He had been just a bit older than Preston when the discovery was announced in the National Geographic, in 1976. A Canadian scientist chased the mystery his whole life, devising a tag that would stick to butterfly wings, recruiting volunteers to help track them, losing the trail many times. And then one winter’s day, as an old man on shaky legs, he climbed a mountain in Michoacán to see what must have looked like his dream of heaven. Dellarobia listened to all this while she finished scraping the roast pan and crammed the leftovers into plastic boxes wedged into the refrigerator. Ovid could still quote passages of the article from memory: They carpeted the ground in their tremulous legions. He said he remembered exactly where he was when he read that article, and how he felt. She left the dishes in the sink and sat back down.

“Where were you?”

“Outside the post office, sitting on a lobster crate. I spent a lot of Saturdays there. My mother let me read the magazines before they went to their subscribers. I was so excited by the photos in that article, I ran all the way down Crown Street, all the way to West End and out a sandy road called Fortuna to the sea. I must have picked up a stick somewhere, because I remember jumping up and whacking every branch I passed, leaving a trail of flying leaves. When I got to the sea I didn’t know what to do, so I threw the stick in Perseverance Bay and ran back. It was the happiest day of my life.”

Dellarobia wanted, of course, to know why.

“Why,” he repeated, thinking about it. “I was just like any schoolboy. I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.”

Juliet reached across the table to pour an inch of Riesling in everyone’s glass. Ovid tapped the yellow volume with his thumb. “The books get rewritten every year, Preston. Someone has to do that.”

“The monarchs are coming out of diapause,” Dellarobia thought to announce.

“We saw them having their family life,” Preston said. “In the road.”

“Really,” Ovid said, with convincing enthusiasm. But Juliet revealed that he already knew, he’d noticed it first thing when they drove in this morning. She claimed he was more excited about the butterflies than about seeing his wife.