Bird (6 page)

The sun is on him: a man taking on the day.

Bird takes a seat in the ragged chair and makes a curtain of her half-brushed hair. She bends her face to the baby, nuzzles the baby's belly, wets the baby's pilly sleeper with—

“What, Bird? Those are tears?”

“You've had a dream,” he says, “you can't remember. But it's got you all torn up.”

“You need food,” he ventures. “Talk to me. I should have poured your coffee. You want me to brush your hair.”

He keeps at it—he can't leave until he has signed her up.

“It's the dog. You think the dog has Parvo. Have you gotten her shots for Parvo? I think she might have Parvo. Could be she needs her Parvo. Do you think she might be due?”

Helps her get her mind off.

Hiya hiya hiya yeah yeah yeah.

This is your wife with her mind off.

This is the little tissue I kept.

This is the dog the landlord hanged who we took away down to the tidal strait and threw in daisies after. Mickey and I did. You know Mickey.

“You look blasted,” he says. “What is it? Free radicals in french fries? Emissions tests and taxes? Sunscreen in aubergine, in mist and stick and tube?”

“Or it's me,” he says. “Something.”

“Hush.”

She passes her husband the phone book. Baffling to him, a phone book. He can't think what to do.

“The dog?” Bird says. “Parvo?”

He backs away some, shoulders his satchel. Wise move. The baby bubbles and hums.

“Lyme's, could be. Heartworm? She needs her DTP?” Bird says.

Stay,
she thinks, and drives him out.

Thinks:
How about a week in bed, cowboy? Crème brulee and cocktails? Rose petals floating in the tub?

Bird is holding her breath, hardly knows it. Her husband settles his glasses on the bridge of his nose. He looks shy almost, smiling sweetly. He gives a little shy-boy wave. Turns away.

The sun flares in the window. The nose of the lock slides home.

“We drove a Drive Away out,” Bird announces, fogging the X her boy left on the window glass.

“I saw a bag of bread on the freeway,” she shouts. “A little flock of shoes.”

So long, so
long. Farewell, my prince.

They are gone now and now she can miss them.

Now she can miss herself—who in the world she has been for her husband, who she meant to be to love.

The baby as a littler baby, her boy trotted off to school. Her mother dead, a broken doll, geese scudding down on the pond. Bird misses everything at once. One thing makes her want all the others—lived or not, still she misses them. She misses lives she has never lived—days issued out of the future, hours that will never be.

Bird misses her mother. Kisses the baby. She is a dead baby's mother. She will be her baby's dead mother, by and by, and her baby will be a dead mother, too. By and by. Best case, the gods willing.

Bird can see right out to the end of herself: out to the satiny coffin, her children gathered around. She sees them saddled, grown, old orphans—ranting the way she hears herself rant about the lunacy of the news: the frothing for war, the
oceans ruined, the babies swiped and murdered. The talk people talk. The daily terrors. The whales deafed, the quiet boys freaked on psychotropics.
I want that one. I want you.

Columbine. Turpentine. Pretty little place near the mountains.

I want your old place in Brooklyn with screw eyes set in the floor. How about?

Before they hanged the dog? Before the baby we lost?

And you can find my mother's scarves smelling of her still. And you can call me Caroline. Before our little Caroline? Welcome home, little chicken, little bird.

Bird sinks into it, a bloom of heat, so to feel it: the door swung to, the shrinking stars. A leaf falling. The way her mother spun her ruby on her finger, think of that. The way Mickey hooked his finger in her ear. Berries in the bathtub. Sweetened ferns. The sound of the chain on the asphalt road that the school bus drags behind it. Shall.

A swell of things: gathered, unsortable, gone.

Bird misses the one-ton they slept in, the rocks her husband used to bring to her from the places he used to go.

Salt pillars and clouds. The tamarack needles blown.

“I had a toothache,” Bird says—too loudly, and to whom?

“He chewed up a grape for a poultice. He broke his hand slugging a wall.”

Bird carries the baby upstairs. She lays the baby down on the bathmat. Walks out.

Out and back and is gone again. Down the stairs for a cup of rum—half a cup by the time the tub fills. Hot: she wants the heat to sink into.

They sink in. The baby moves through her private baby-phases of alarm and bliss.

“Boo,” says the baby, then “booa,” a plea, and snatches at Bird's breast. The left, the right, the foremilk, the hind.

I want that one.

“Say may I,” Bird says. “Say please.”

It won't be long, it never is. Please and thank you. Soon:
Actually, I want that and that one then and could I have that one again? Puh-uh-lee-zah?

The baby's nursing, which makes Bird weepy.

Somebody quick say why.

They move from tub to rocker, the rocker beside the window, the bus whistling down the hill.

I want that one.

Wasn't that how it felt—not so long ago—looking out over the Lucite bins where all the born babies in the hospital slept or were fed or cried?

That one.

“When I was a born baby,” the baby will come to say. “When I was a baby that died.”

I want that one.

Say may I. Say please.

Bird thinks of Doll Doll—picking pups out, picking
Tuk. Of picking Mickey, Bird crossing the room with her shoe in her hand.
I want that one.
Bop you between the eyes.

Get your lucky bone out, get your talisman.

That one there is mine. This one?

In a mood, Bird is, wanting. Like to take off. Like to scream.

She took her babies out to Coney Island, to the aquarium there beside the sea. Her two.

Used to light out. Ride out there with the dog, she and Mickey. Let the dog swim. Come the cold months. Get in under the boardwalk, let his pants down. Smell the sea. Little bit. Sit out on a towel by the water.

I want that one.

Sweet time. Sweet little way of living.

She's got the
more
always, got the
gimmes
. Wants the old life, wants the new. All the many dips and surges, she wants, the stations of alarm and bliss. The luxury of a day to kill taking a bath with the baby. Kissing on the baby. Kissing her fancy man. Four days, she wants, in bed with him, every meal delivered. Créme brulee and cocktails. Wax paper packets of junk. Have a romp. Ask it in—all the old somebody elses they have been, everything they hoard.

Quick now. You fly through!

Waaaa.
Nothing but heat and sunshine.

Come the cold months, nobody out there. Come the sunshine beside the sea.

She gets the tab of Mickey's zipper down, gets the button
slipped out through the buttonhole and she can't see him yet, she waits to see him, she waits, and he is rising up.
Oh, hi.
Lifting out of his britches.
Pleased to see you, sir. Hello, hi
.

I want that one.

Who boy. Boy do I
, Bird thinks.

She kisses the baby's toes. The bottoms of her feet, wrinkled from the tub, her little wrinkled hands. Bird dresses the baby in her sparkle dress, her little beaded shoes. Props her up among pillows on the couch, takes a picture. Takes a dozen more.

The day passing.
Pfft!

She goes through the Family Album, the snapshots buckled and blotchy between the plastic sleeves. They are orderly, chronological; she has sorted them some by color. Not the old life, but the new. Not the wedding, even, but the babies. Everything else is loose—Bird as a kid among horses, the snapshot of Mickey's dog. The picture she took of Tuk and Doll Doll, Doll Doll on the hood of the Ryder truck with bobby pins in her hair. Her legs bloodied. Her belly rounding up under her culotte.

A mess. The passing of years unrecorded—but Bird records them now.

This then this then this then this. Turns the page.

She finds the one of her boy at Coney Island, the aquarium there beside the sea. Belugas turning circles in the murk, the tank Lucite so they can see.

“They are watching a movie of us and we are watching a movie of them and everybody's happy,” her boy had said.

And it was true, or could seem to be true: the whales had smooth impish faces. They were at play, smiling through the murk, coming around again.

They were never going to get very good at that part, Mickey and Bird weren't: at coming around again. Not at once, she thinks, not together. Not a movie to take your children to, nothing to show your ma: the little gougings, the wreck of the way they lived.

Hot blue bramble of welder's sparks. A boat passing. Everything is blue.

Pretty yourself how you used to, Bird. I'll take you back to Paris. I'll take you to Timbuktu.

Bird slips her hand between her legs and sees his face again. So quick the heat, sweet wandering star that blasts apart in her head.

But something's ringing.
It's the phone.

Let it go. It rings again.

That will be Suzie, Bird thinks, but it isn't. It's the vet with his friendly reminder: the dog is due for Parvo, Lyme's, the whole panel, DTP.

“Can't get there,” Bird tells him, “no car.”

A lie. Because who strings flowers around roadside oaks
dizzy mothers slam the family car into, driving drunk with their babies at noon?

“As you wish,” says the vet. “But she's due. Overdue, actually. I showed you the heart with the heartworm, yes?”

“Oh yes,” says Bird. “Awful.”

And hangs up.

The dog is gazing at her with its milky eyes. A good old dog, a layabout. You can forget she is even here. She'll die quietly, Bird wagers, beside the woodstove, considerate to the end. Bird will have time to dig a grave for her before the kids scrabble off the school bus; she will chink words into her headstone:
Never to Walk in Sunshine Again.

For now the dog burns her tail calmly against the buckled wall of the woodstove: dog of their New England hills. Of their quieting life—no Maggie.

Maggie made herself known every minute. She pawed at your feet if you forgot her.

Maggie jumped up to take down Bird's hair. She hooked the hair band with her eyetooth, snuffling, tugged the band free and stood there rolling it in her mouth. You couldn't talk with that dog. How they said it: You can't have a conversation with that dog. She whimpered and paced and stewed.

Poor Maggie.

Gone But Not Forgotten.

I Was out Getting Drunk with You.

Mickey took to
sleeping through the morning. He fell off the bed and kept sleeping through the brief green afternoons.

He would come around, Bird thought, he had to. Give him a little time.

Give him time. Given time. Give me time. Forgive me time.

Amend me my misliving
.

He quit touching her. It was all he could do to look at her.

“I seem to suffer too much. I can't say why.”

The chair Mickey smashed into pay phones the night they found Maggie hanged from the heating duct, Bird kindled stick by stick in the bathtub. They burned what was left of the books they had read. Books they hadn't.

Bird fished in a wind for garbage to burn, from the stream blown down their street. On a frozen wad of newsprint, a street collage, among the usual ads—Biggie Size your Coke (
piggie
is what her boy says,
You want to Piggie Size your Coke?
), the gimme sheets, the gotcha, the Last Days, Everything Must, Any Midwinter American Meal, was an ad for getting out. Gas money, hotel nights. They would pay you, even, to do it—to drive a Drive Away out.

Bird came inside from the brace of cold and shook Mickey awake and kissed him. Brought him his steaming coffee. It wouldn't matter where they went.

Of course it would. Bird wanted sunshine, a generous
sky. She wanted to see the monument of Crazy Horse, his arm as long as twelve elephants, thrust out over the plains.

“What do you think?” she asked Mickey.

He thought nothing.

“We can't stay here,” Bird said. “We have nothing to eat. The toilet froze.”

The baby was as big as a walnut now, as a tiny frog, slow in the cold.

He wouldn't budge.

Love. Love was impossible.

“I have a narrowing sense of joy and somehow I blame you,” he allowed.

At that, Bird left the bedroom and the bit of heat it offered. She sat on the floor in the kitchen and stroked the newspaper smooth to read. She picked through last year's leaves, dismissed by the trees, a few still supple and red. She found a bone, bitten clean, and she bit it. She found her wad of curls shorn from Hasidim boys and picked one out to ransom.

They were killing each other. She could see that. She would have to save herself and go.

But Bird was better at staying than going. She could conjure every sweetness still—it was all tucked away in her head.

One last time,
she thought—and got right into bed. She kissed him everywhere she could think to. She licked him
between his toes. She breathed into the loops and channels of his ears. She wore him down, in short, with every tenderness that was hers to summon.

They slept afterwards and dreamed the same dream, which is one of the gifts we are given when we are sharp enough to know. They slept touching, and the dream-story shuttled between them, reckoning by friendly stars. The moon passed its light through the window.

It was the light of the moon Bird saw by when she waked, mercifully dim and blue. She waked screaming. A corkscrew was turning in her navel, how it felt, and their bed was soggy with blood.