Birds of America

  “But that’s not the title of anything famous.”

  “It’s a place. I thought we could do names of places.”

  “It’s not a famous place.”

  “So?”

  “I mean, we all could write down the names of streets in our neighborhoods, near where we work, a road we walked down once on the way to a store—”

  “You’re the one who said we could do places.”

  “I did? Well, all right, then, what did I say was the sign for a place? We don’t have a sign for places.”

  “I don’t know. You figure it out,” he says. A saucy rage is all over him now. Is this from childhood? Is this from hair loss? Once, she and Andrew were close. But now, as with Ann, she has no idea who he is anymore. She has only a theory: an electrical engineer worked over years ago by high school guidance counselors paid by the Pentagon to recruit, train, and militarize all the boys with high math SAT scores. “From M.I.T. to MIA,” Andrew once put it himself. “A military-industrial asshole.” But she can’t find that satirical place in him anymore. Last year, at least, they had joked about their upbringing. “I scarcely remember Dad reading to us,” she’d said.

  “Sure he read to us,” said Andrew. “You don’t remember him reading to us? You don’t remember him reading to us silently from the Wall Street Journal?”

  Now she scans his hardening face for a joke, a glimmer, a bit of love. Andrew and Ann have seemed close, and Therese feels a bit wistful, wondering when and how that happened. She is a little jealous. The only expression she can get from Andrew is a derisive one. He is a traffic cop. She is the speeding flower child.

  Don’t you know I’m a judge? she wants to ask. A judge via a fluke political appointment, sure. A judge with a reputation around the courthouse for light sentencing, true. A judge who is having an affair that mildly tarnishes her character—okay. A softy; an easy touch: but a judge nonetheless.

  Instead, she says, “Do you mind if I just pick another one?”

  “Fine by me,” he says, and strides brusquely back into the living room.

  Oh, well, Therese thinks. It is her new mantra. It usually calms her better than ohm, which she also tries. Ohm is where the heart is. Ohm is not here. Oh, well. Oh, well. When she was first practicing law, to combat her courtroom stage fright, she would chant to herself, Everybody loves me. Everybody loves me, and when that didn’t work, she’d switch to Kill! Kill! Kill!

  “We’re doing another one,” announces Andrew, and Therese picks another one.

  A book and a movie. She opens her palms, prayerlike for a book. She cranks one hand in the air for a movie. She pulls on her ear and points at a lamp. “Sounds like light,” Ray says. His expression is open and helpful. “Bite, kite, dite, fight, night—”

  Therese signals yes, that’s it.

  “Night,” repeats Ray.

  “Tender Is the Night,” says her mother.

  “Yes!” says Therese, and bends to kiss her mother on the cheek. Her mother smiles exuberantly, her face in a kind of burst; she loves affection, is hungry and grateful for it. When she was younger, she was a frustrated, mean mother, and so she is pleased when her children act as if they don’t remember.

  It is Andrew’s turn. He stands before his own team, staring at the red scrap in his hand. He ponders it, shakes his head, then looks back toward Therese. “This must be yours,” he says with a smirk that maybe is a good-natured smirk. Is there such a thing? Therese hopes.

  “You need a consultation?” She gets up to look at the writing; it reads, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” “Yup, that’s mine,” she says.

  “Come here,” he says, and the two of them go back down the corridor toward the foyer again. This time, Therese notices the photographs her parents have hung there. Photographs of their children, of weddings and Winnie, though all the ones of Therese seem to her to be aggressively unflattering, advertising an asymmetry in her expression, or the magnified haziness of her eyes, her hair in a dry, peppery frizz. Vanity surges in her: surely there must have been better pictures! The ones of Andrew, of Ann, of Tad, of Pam and Winnie are sunlit, posed, wholesome, pretty. But the ones of Therese seem slightly disturbed, as if her parents were convinced she is insane.

  “We’ll stand here by the demented-looking pictures of me,” says Therese.

  “Ann sent her those,” says Andrew.

  “Really?” says Therese.

  He studies her hair. “Didn’t your hair used to be a different color? I don’t remember it ever being quite that color. What is that color?”

  “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “Look,” he says, getting back to the game. “I’ve never heard of this,” and he waves the scrap of paper as if it were a gum wrapper.

  “You haven’t? It’s a song: ‘Geese and chicks and ducks better scurry, when I take you out in the surrey …’ ”

  “No.”

  “No?” She keeps going. She looks up at him romantically, yearningly. “ ‘When I take you out in my surrey, when I take you out in my surrey with the fringe on—’ ”

  “No,” Andrew interrupts emphatically.

  “Hmm. Well, don’t worry. Everyone on your team will know it.”

  The righteous indignation is returning to his face. “If I don’t know it, what makes you think they’ll know it?” Perhaps this is because of his work, the technosecrecy of it. He knows; they don’t.

  “They’ll know it,” Therese says. “I guarantee.” She turns to leave.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says Andrew. The gray-pink of rage is back in his skin. What has he become? She hasn’t a clue. He is successfully top secret. He is classified information. “I’m not doing this,” he says. “I refuse.”

  Therese stares at him. This is the assertiveness he can’t exercise on the job. Perhaps here, where he is no longer a cog-though-a-prized cog, he can insist on certain things. The Cold War is over, she wants to say. But what has replaced it is this: children who have turned on one another, now that the gods—or were they only guards?—have fled. “Okay, fine,” she says. “I’ll make up another.”

  “We’re doing another one,” announces Andrew triumphantly as they go back into the living room. He waves the paper scrap. “Have any of you ever even heard of a song called ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’?”

  “Sure,” says Pam, looking at him in a puzzled way. No doubt he seems different to her around the holidays.

  “You have?” He seems a bit flummoxed. He looks at Ann. “Have you?”

  Ann looks reluctant to break ranks with him but says, quietly, “Yeah.”

  “Tad, how about you?” he asks.

  Tad has been napping off and on, his head thrown back against the sofa, but now he jerks awake. “Uh, yeah,” he says.

  “Tad’s not feeling that well,” says Ann.

  In desperation, Andrew turns toward the other team. “And you all know it, too?”

  “I don’t know it,” says Ray. He is the only one. He doesn’t know a show tune from a chauffeur. In a way, that’s what Therese likes about him.

  Andrew sits back down, refusing to admit defeat. “Ray didn’t know it,” he says.

  Therese can’t think of a song, so she writes “Clarence Thomas” and hands the slip back to Andrew. As he ponders his options, Therese’s mother gets up and comes back holding Dixie cups and a bottle of cranberry drink. “Who would like some cranberry juice?” she says, and starts pouring. She hands the cups out carefully to everyone. “We don’t have the wineglasses unpacked, so we’ll have to make do.”

  “We’ll have to make do” is one of their mother’s favorite expressions, acquired during the Depression and made indelible during the war. When they were little, Therese and Andrew used to look at each other and say, “We’ll have to make do-do,” but when Therese glances over at Andrew now, nothing registers. He has forgotten. He is thinking only of the charade.

  Ray sips his a little sloppily, and a drop spills on the chair. Therese hands him a nap
kin and he dabs at the upholstery with it, but it is Ann who is swiftly up, out to the kitchen, and back with a cold, wet cloth, wiping at Ray’s chair in a kind of rebuke.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” her mother is saying.

  “I think I’ve got it,” says Ann solemnly.

  “I’m doing my clues now,” says Andrew impatiently. Therese looks over at Winnie, who, calm and observant in her mother’s arms, a pink incontinent Buddha who knows all her letters, seems like the sanest person in the room.

  Andrew is making a sweeping gesture with his arm, something meant to include everyone in the room.

  “People,” says Tad.

  “Family,” says Pam.

  Ann has come back from the kitchen and sits down on the sofa. “Us,” she says.

  Andrew smiles and nods.

  “Us. Thom-us,” says Ann. “Clarence Thomas.”

  “Yes,” says Andrew with a clap. “What was the time on that?”

  “Thirty seconds,” says Tad.

  “Well, I guess he’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue,” says Therese’s mother.

  “I guess so,” says Therese.

  “It was interesting to see all those black people from Yale,” says Therese’s mother. “All sitting there in the Senate caucus room. I’ll bet their parents were proud.”

  Ann did not get in to Yale. “What I don’t like,” she says, “is all these black people who don’t like whites. They’re so hostile. I see it all the time in law school. Most white people are more than willing to sit down, be friendly and integrated. But it’s the blacks who are too angry.”

  “Imagine that,” says Ray.

  “Yes. Imagine,” says Therese. “Why would they be angry? You know what else I don’t like? I don’t like all these gay men who have gotten just a little too somber and butch. You know what I mean? They’re so funereal and upset these days! Where is the mincing and high-spiritedness of yesteryear? Where is the gayness in gay? It’s all so confusing and inconvenient! You can’t tell who’s who without a goddamn Playbill!” She stands up and looks at Ray. It is time to go. She has lost her judicial temperament hours ago. She fears she is going to do another pratfall, only this time she will break something. Already she sees herself carted out on a stretcher, taken toward the airport, and toward home, saying the final words she has to say to her family, has always had to say to her family. Sounds like could cry.

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  But first Ray must do his charade, which is Confucius. “Okay. I’m ready,” he says, and begins to wander around the living room in a wild-eyed daze, looking as confused as possible, groping at the bookcases, placing his palm to his brow. And in that moment, Therese thinks how good-looking he is and how kind and strong and how she loves nobody else in the world even half as much.

  FOUR CALLING BIRDS,

  THREE FRENCH HENS

  When the cat died on Veterans Day, his ashes then packed into a cheesy pink-posied tin and placed high upon the mantel, the house seemed lonely and Aileen began to drink. She had lost all her ties to the animal world. She existed now in a solely man-made place: the couch was furless, the carpet dry and unmauled, the kitchen corner where the food dish had been no longer scabby with Mackerel Platter and hazardous for walking.

  Oh, Bert!

  He had been a beautiful cat.

  Her friends interpreted the duration and intensity of her sorrow as a sign of displaced mourning: her grief was for something larger, more appropriate—it was the impending death of her parents; it was the son she and Jack had never had (though wasn’t three-year-old Sofie cute as a zipper?); it was this whole Bosnia, Cambodia, Somalia, Dinkins, Giuliani, NAFTA thing.

  No, really, it was just Bert, Aileen insisted. It was just her sweet, handsome cat, her buddy of ten years. She had been with him longer than she had with either Jack or Sofie or half her friends, and he was such a smart, funny guy—big and loyal and verbal as a dog.

  “What do you mean, verbal as a dog?” Jack scowled.

  “I swear it,” she said.

  “Get a grip,” said Jack, eyeing her glass of blended malt. Puccini’s “Humming Chorus,” the Brahms “Alto Rhapsody,” and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings all murmured in succession from the stereo. He flicked it off. “You’ve got a daughter. There are holidays ahead. That damn cat wouldn’t have shed one tear over you.”

  “I really don’t think that’s true,” she said a little wildly, perhaps with too much fire and malt in her voice. She now spoke that way sometimes, insisted on things, ventured out on a limb, lived dangerously. She had already—carefully, obediently—stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage. Anger to rage—who said she wasn’t making progress? She made a fist but hid it. She got headaches, mostly prickly ones, but sometimes the zigzag of a migraine made its way into her skull and sat like a cheap, crazy tie in her eye.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jack. “Maybe he would have. Fund-raisers. Cards and letters. Who can say? You two were close, I know.”

  She ignored him. “Here,” she said, pointing at her drink. “Have a little festive lift!” She sipped at the amber liquor, and it stung her chapped lips.

  “Dewar’s,” said Jack, looking with chagrin at the bottle.

  “Well,” she said defensively, sitting up straight and buttoning her sweater. “I suppose you’re out of sympathy with Dewar’s. I suppose you’re more of a Do-ee.”

  “That’s right,” said Jack disgustedly. “That’s right! And tomorrow I’m going to wake up and find I’ve been edged out by Truman!” He headed angrily up the stairs, while she listened for the final clomp of his steps and the cracking slam of the door.

  Poor Jack: perhaps she had put him through too much. Just last spring, there had been her bunion situation—the limping, the crutch, and the big blue shoe. Then in September, there had been Mimi Andersen’s dinner party, where Jack, the only non-smoker, was made to go out on the porch while everyone else stayed inside and lit up. And then, there had been Aileen’s one-woman performance of “the housework version of Lysistrata.” “No Sweepie, No Kissie,” Jack had called it. But it had worked. Sort of. For about two weeks. There was, finally, only so much one woman on the vast and wicked stage could do.

  “I’m worried about you,” said Jack in bed. “I’m being earnest here. And not in the Hemingway sense, either.” He screwed up his face. “You see how I’m talking? Things are wacko around here.” Their bookcase headboard was so stacked with novels and sad memoirs, it now resembled a library carrel more than a conjugal bed.

  “You’re fine. I’m fine. Everybody’s fine,” said Aileen. She tried to find his hand under the covers, then just gave up.

  “You’re someplace else,” he said. “Where are you?”

  The birds had become emboldened, slowly reclaiming the yard, filling up the branches, cheeping hungrily in the mornings from the sills and eaves. “What is that shrieking?” Aileen asked. The leaves had fallen, but now jays, ravens, and house finches darkened the trees—some of them flying south, some of them staying on, pecking the hardening ground for seeds. Squirrels moved in poking through the old apples that had dropped from the flowering crab. A possum made a home for himself under the porch, thumping and chewing. Raccoons had discovered Sofie’s little gym set, and one morning Aileen looked out and saw two of them swinging on the swings. She’d wanted animal life? Here was animal life!

  “Not this,” she said. “None of this would be happening if Bert were still here.” Bert had patrolled the place. Bert had kept things in line.

  “Are you talking to me?” asked Jack.

  “I guess not,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think we need to douse this place in repellent.”

  “You mean, like, bug spray?”

 
“Bug spray, Bugs Bunny,” chanted Sofie. “Bug spray, Bugs Bunny.”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” said Aileen.

  At her feminist film-critique group, they were still discussing Cat Man, a movie done entirely in flashback from the moment a man jumps off the ledge of an apartment building. Instead of being divided into acts or chapters, the movie was divided into floor numbers, in descending order. At the end of the movie, the handsome remembering man lands on his feet.

  Oh, Bert!

  One of the women in Aileen’s group—Lila Conch—was angry at the movie. “I just hated the way anytime a woman character said anything of substance, she also happened to be half-naked.”

  Aileen sighed. “Actually, I found those parts the most true to life,” she said. “They were the parts I liked best.”

  The group glared at her. “Aileen,” said Lila, recrossing her legs. “Go to the kitchen for us, dear, and set up the brownies and tea.”

  “Seriously?” asked Aileen.

  “Uh—yes,” said Lila.

  Thanksgiving came and went in a mechanical way. Aileen and Jack, with Sofie, went out to a restaurant and ordered different things, as if the three of them were strangers asserting their ornery tastes. Then they drove home. Only Sofie, who had ordered the child’s Stuffed Squash, was somehow pleased, sitting in the car seat in back and singing a Thanksgiving song she’d learned at day care. “ ‘Oh, a turkey’s not a pig, you doink / He doesn’t says oink / He says gobble, gobble, gobble.’ ” Their last truly good holiday had been Halloween, when Bert was still alive and they had dressed him up as Jack. They’d then dressed Jack as Bert, Aileen as Sofie, and Sofie as Aileen. “Now, I’m you, Mommy,” Sofie had said when Aileen had tied one of her kitchen aprons around her and pressed lipstick onto her mouth. Jack came up and rubbed his Magic Marker whiskers against Aileen, who giggled in her large pink footie pajamas. The only one who wasn’t having that much fun was Bert himself, sporting one of Jack’s ties, and pawing at it to get it off. When he didn’t succeed, he gamely dragged the tie around for a while, trying to ignore it. Then, cross and humiliated, he waddled over to the corner near the piano and lay there, annoyed. Remembering this, a week later—when Bert was dying in an oxygen tent at the vet’s, heart failing, fluid around his lungs (though his ears still pricked up when Aileen came to visit him; she wore her usual perfume so he would know her smell, and hand-fed him cat snacks when no one else could get him to eat)—Aileen had felt overwhelmed with sorrow and regret.