How To Kill Daffy

I’m not sure how I got roped into adopting ducks. It probably all began because I mentioned my pond. This one-tenth of an acre, in the middle of my field, is a haven for wild ducks when the seasons change. In spring there’s always one day when the whole backyard seems brighter, and it’s because the ice has broken and the pond reflects the sky again. It has a muskrat, too; a scarcely visible rodent doing the backstroke up and down its borders. It’s a good pond.

At some point I mentioned it to my students. A few days later a senior girl named Gladys sidled up to me. “How would you like some ducks?” I wouldn’t. I didn’t. I had a small flock of chickens to care for; I didn’t need ducks. I had fishers and foxes to worry about, feed to buy, poop to shovel. I was full up. But Gladys was persistent. They were homeless ducks, abandoned by their meth-addict mother, fluffy, helpless. So I agreed. “Great,” Gladys said sunnily. “They’ll be here in about a month.”

Here’s what happened in that month: my husband moved out, for starters. My chickens were decapitated by a weasel. I refinanced my mortgage. Which required me to get a summer job of about seven hundred hours a week selling handcrafted jewelry to women with boob jobs and fat husbands, to whom they would always turn vaguely when the matter of the bill arose. So, yes, silly me. I forgot about the ducks.

I forgot about the ducks until Gladys called me to tell me they’d arrived. There was, of course, a hitch. “The orphaned ducks were already adopted. But I still wanted ducks, so I ordered some baby ducklings.”

This had not been the deal. My ducks were going to be adolescents, cynical and bitchy ducks who would roll their eyes at me, whom I could pop in the pond and watch fly away in the fall, which was mercifully only three months away. I was not equipped for ducklings.

“Can you pick up the ducklings tomorrow after work?” Sure. Absolutely.

First, however, I had another task. The minute Sam moved out, my friend Anne told me that I should start dating. “Just because I don’t want you to be disappointed with the selection when you start actually wanting to date.” Tito didn’t count. I tried to convince her otherwise; I was better around Tito: I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need food. I lost five pounds and was so antsy that my biking speeds were the best they’d ever been. Tito was good for me.

“It is not good for you that he wants to keep sleeping with other women,” Anne said.

Well, yes. There was that. Grumble. Getting over Tito required a certain amount of languishing. But while I languished, Anne insisted that I date. So, oddly, with his gregarious knowledge of every person in the state, did Tito. The last time he left my house, before I’d ended things, he told me, “You should date this guy I know... Mike Shepherd.” The guy Tito knew was a guy everyone else knew, too, and Anne, after we’d cursed Tito good and proper, supported the Tito Proposal. The guidance secretary supported it. The curriculum coordinator supported it. I am a vegetarian, and Mike has hiked the Appalacian Trail. Using these statistics, everyone was convinced that Mike and I were made for each other.

Fine. Who am I to disappoint an entire town.

So I’d asked Mike to coffee, and we’d agreed on the night of the duckling drop.

It didn’t go well. There was, of course, the embarrassing fact that Mike had asked me out when I was still married, oblivious to the ring I kept waving in his face as if swatting blackflies; there was also the total lack of chemistry. It was like a conversation between a nun and a priest, only less sexy. There were silences you could have driven a Mac truck through.

This would have been bad enough had not my phone rung in the middle of the ordeal. My grandmother was alone for the week, my entire family having gone to the Grand Canyon, and I was hesitant to leave calls unanswered. I could not use the screen on the back of my phone to identify the caller, of course, because on a bike ride earlier in the summer, I’d stuck my phone in my bra—when you’re built like me, this is really the main purpose of a bra: carrying stuff—and sweated all over it, ruining the screen. Lovely, no? The mysterious caller was not, however, my grandmother. It was Gloria, a junior girl in whom I had spent the previous school year futilely trying to instill the idea—ironically, given the death of my phone— that one’s self-esteem should not be a result of the one’s breast size. Hell, if Gladys could get my number, if a gaggle of drunken former students could get my number, why not Gloria? “I saw you sitting on the porch of the coffee shop with Mike Shepherd,” Gloria chirped. “So I was wondering how your date went?” I ground my phone as hard into my ear as I could, praying that Mike could not hear her.

“Actually,” I murmured, “It’s still going on, Gloria. I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up, offered as urbane a smile as I could muster, and realized that coffee was clearly over. As we made our way up the sidewalk, Mike veered away across the street without a word, and that was the last I saw of him for months. Anne, the guidance secretary, the curriculum coordinator, and, of course, Tito, were wrong. But it didn’t matter, because I had ducklings to get.

Gladys, however, was out to dinner. And she didn’t have a car. Which explains why I was driving around Quaint Coastal Village at ten o’clock at night, with Gladys, wanting nothing more than to chuck my ducklings into my cardboard box and take them home. But first I had to meet Gladys’ mother. Gladys’ mother was extraordinarily pleasant about a stranger showing up to her house after dark, especially given her apparent surprise upon discovery of Gladys’ plan to acquire ducks, said discovery being their arrival at her home. I suppressed a scream at this news, and told her that I would wait outside. I was waiting because Gladys’ boyfriend had the duck food, and Gladys’ boyfriend needed to drive to Gladys’ house to bring me the duck food. I stood on their well-landscaped lawn in the dark for maybe fifteen minutes, then Marlon showed up and helpfully carried the fifty pounds of duck food to my trunk. I strapped in my cardboard box of four peeping ducklings, and we hit the road. I tried to say things to soothe their panicked musical notes, as the sound of my voice seemed to quiet them, but I couldn’t think of much for conversation. I recited them Portia’s speech from The Merchant of Venice, which they seemed to appreciate. Well, who wouldn’t?

My dogs were extremely interested in the ducklings, whom I put in the shed for the night. The shed was big, but all the openings were off the ground and covered by two-inch square fencing. It seemed fine.

It was not fine. In the morning, I was one duckling down. One of the suckers had apparently hopped up onto the ledge, squeezed through the fence, and promptly been eaten by something. I searched, but neither saw him nor heard his peeping. I then set up the remaining three in a plastic under-bed storage container with food, water, and a screened top, and left them to go to work.

We did this for days and days. I decided to name them Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, silently mourning fallen D’Artagnan, but the names didn’t do much good as the ducklings were identical, black and celery-colored, with a shock of fuzz and tiny serrated beaks. Despite my total lack of time for them, I enjoyed giving them fresh newspaper and dry food, watching them splash about and completely ruin the fresh newspaper and dry food, and holding all three at once in my hands. They were nice ducks.

Before I go any further, we have to clarify one thing. What do ducks do?

Well, they quack. They poo everywhere. They… grow feathers.

They also swim. Ducks swim, okay? Mike Shepherd, whom I ran into months later—later enough for the horror of coffee to be an amusing memory—confirmed this, telling me that he’d read that ducks can swim from something like a week old. Ducks swim.

So my ducklings were getting bigger. Their dish of water was too small. So I upgraded them to a medium-sized Tupperware. I gave them a little ramp up the side, a couple of bricks to wade out onto, and filled the new pool a few inches. “Have fun,” I told them as I left that morning.

When I came home, I knew right away that something was wrong. The silence was unbearable; there was no cheery peeping, no splashing sounds. All three were floating, three dead ducks, in a couple inches of water.

After the chickens, this seemed a little much.

I took care of the tiny corpses, and spent the rest of the summer avoiding Gladys. I couldn’t even comfort myself that I’d given them a good home. Granted, it was an upgrade from the mailing crate they arrived in at the post office, but they’d never even gotten to see the pond. I was haunted by these ducks; everywhere went, I heard their ghostly peeping, little Mallard Jacob Marleys, rattling their chains whenever I walked through town. A week later, I discovered that another girl in town had adopted ducklings, and was carrying them around in her purse. So the peeping was not, in fact, ghostly. It was difficult to be perturbed by a Vera Bradley bag, but still, I felt terrible. But I also felt slightly annoyed. Ducks swim.

Perhaps I was living a perverse version of The Ugly Duckling, in which my ducks were actually baby ostriches, or iguanas, or possums, or some heretofore unknown species made of newspaper, or something else that implodes when moistened. All I know is, I’m done with fowl. Nothing could induce me to provide a home for any feathered creature; to paraphrase Benedick in Much Ado, I was not born under an avian planet. My pond welcomes ducks of the self-sufficient variety, and I am happy to welcome the neighborhood heron, who is tall enough to keep his head above water. Otherwise, until I can learn to keep inanimate objects like my phone from drowning, anything feathered is on its own.