Birds of America

  Perhaps she should have a baby.

  In the morning, she went to visit her parents in Elmhurst. For winter, they had plastic-wrapped their home—the windows, the doors—so that it looked like a piece of avant-garde art. “Saves on heating bills,” they said.

  They had taken to discussing her in front of her. “It was a movie, Don. It was a movie about adventure. Nudity can be art.”

  “That’s not how I saw it! That’s not how I saw it at all!” said her father, red-faced, leaving the room. Naptime.

  “How are you doing?” asked her mother, with what seemed like concern but was really an opening for something else. She had made tea.

  “I’m okay, really,” said Sidra. Everything she said about herself now sounded like a lie. If she was bad, it sounded like a lie; if she was fine—also a lie.

  Her mother fiddled with a spoon. “I was envious of you.” Her mother sighed. “I was always so envious of you! My own daughter!” She was shrieking it, saying it softly at first and then shrieking. It was exactly like Sidra’s childhood: just when she thought life had become simple again, her mother gave her a new portion of the world to organize.

  “I have to go,” said Sidra. She had only just gotten there, but she wanted to go. She didn’t want to visit her parents anymore. She didn’t want to look at their lives.

  She went back to the Days Inn and phoned Tommy. She and Tommy understood each other. “I get you,” he used to say. His childhood had been full of sisters. He’d spent large portions of it drawing pictures of women in bathing suits—Miss Kenya from Nairobi!—and then asking one of the sisters to pick the most beautiful. If he disagreed, he asked another sister.

  The connection was bad, and suddenly she felt too tired. “Darling, are you okay?” he said faintly.

  “I’m okay.”

  “I think I’m hard of hearing,” he said.

  “I think I’m hard of talking,” she said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.”

  She phoned Walter instead. “I need to see you,” she said.

  “Oh, really?” he said skeptically, and then added, with a sweetness he seemed to have plucked expertly from the air like a fly, “Is this a great country or what?”

  She felt grateful to be with him again. “Let’s never be apart,” she whispered, rubbing his stomach. He had the physical inclinations of a dog: he liked stomach, ears, excited greetings.

  “Fine by me,” he said.

  “Tomorrow, let’s go out to dinner somewhere really expensive. My treat.”

  “Uh,” said Walter, “tomorrow’s no good.”

  “Oh.”

  “How about Sunday?”

  “What’s wrong with tomorrow?”

  “I’ve got. Well, I’ve gotta work and I’ll be tired, first of all.”

  “What’s second of all?”

  “I’m getting together with this woman I know.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s no big deal. It’s nothing. It’s not a date or anything.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Someone whose car I fixed. Loose mountings in the exhaust system. She wants to get together and talk about it some more. She wants to know about catalytic converters. You know, women are afraid of getting taken advantage of.”

  “Really!”

  “Yeah, well, so Sunday would be better.”

  “Is she attractive?”

  Walter scrinched up his face and made a sound of unenthusiasm. “Enh,” he said, and placed his hand laterally in the air, rotating it up and down a little.

  Before he left in the morning, she said, “Just don’t sleep with her.”

  “Sidra,” he said, scolding her for lack of trust or for attempted supervision—she wasn’t sure which.

  That night, he didn’t come home. She phoned and phoned and then drank a six-pack and fell asleep. In the morning, she phoned again. Finally, at eleven o’clock, he answered.

  She hung up.

  At 11:30, her phone rang. “Hi,” he said cheerfully. He was in a good mood.

  “So where were you all night?” asked Sidra. This was what she had become. She felt shorter and squatter and badly coiffed.

  There was some silence. “What do you mean?” he said cautiously.

  “You know what I mean.”

  More silence. “Look, I didn’t call this morning to get into a heavy conversation.”

  “Well, then,” said Sidra, “you certainly called the wrong number.” She slammed down the phone.

  She spent the day trembling and sad. She felt like a cross between Anna Karenina and Amy Liverhaus, who used to shout from the fourth-grade cloakroom, “I just don’t feel appreciated.” She walked over to Marshall Field’s to buy new makeup. “You’re much more of a cream beige than an ivory,” said the young woman working the cosmetics counter.

  But Sidra clutched at the ivory. “People are always telling me that,” she said, “and it makes me very cross.”

  She phoned him later that night and he was there. “We need to talk,” she said.

  “I want my key back,” he said.

  “Look. Can you just come over here so that we can talk?”

  He arrived bearing flowers—white roses and irises. They seemed wilted and ironic; she leaned them against the wall in a dry glass, no water.

  “All right, I admit it,” he said. “I went out on a date. But I’m not saying I slept with her.”

  She could feel, suddenly, the promiscuity in him. It was a heat, a creature, a tenant twin. “I already know you slept with her.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Get a life! What am I, an idiot?” She glared at him and tried not to cry. She hadn’t loved him enough and he had sensed it. She hadn’t really loved him at all, not really.

  But she had liked him a lot!

  So it still seemed unfair. A bone in her opened up, gleaming and pale, and she held it to the light and spoke from it. “I want to know one thing.” She paused, not really for effect, but it had one. “Did you have oral sex?”

  He looked stunned. “What kind of question is that? I don’t have to answer a question like that.”

  “You don’t have to answer a question like that. You don’t have any rights here!” she began to yell. She was dehydrated. “You’re the one who did this. Now I want the truth. I just want to know. Yes or no!”

  He threw his gloves across the room.

  “Yes or no,” she said.

  He flung himself onto the couch, pounded the cushion with his fist, placed an arm up over his eyes.

  “Yes or no,” she repeated.

  He breathed deeply into his shirtsleeve.

  “Yes or no.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She sat down on the piano bench. Something dark and coagulated moved through her, up from the feet. Something light and breathing fled through her head, the house of her plastic-wrapped and burned down to tar. She heard him give a moan, and some fleeing hope in her, surrounded but alive on the roof, said perhaps he would beg her forgiveness. Promise to be a new man. She might find him attractive as a new, begging man. Though at some point, he would have to stop begging. He would just have to be normal. And then she would dislike him again.

  He stayed on the sofa, did not move to comfort or be comforted, and the darkness in her cleaned her out, hollowed her like acid or a wind.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said, something palsied in her voice. She felt cheated of all the simple things—the radical calm of obscurity, of routine, of blah domestic bliss. “I don’t want to go back to L.A.,” she said. She began to stroke the tops of the piano keys, pushing against one and finding it broken—thudding and pitchless, shiny and mocking like an opened bone. She hated, hated her life. Perhaps she had always hated it.

  He sat up on the sofa, looked distraught and false—his face badly arranged. He should practice in a mirror, she thought. He did not know how to break up with a movie actress. It was boys’ rules: don’t break up with a movie actress. Not in Chicago. If
she left him, he would be better able to explain it, to himself, in the future, to anyone who asked. His voice shifted into something meant to sound imploring. “I know” was what he said, in a tone approximating hope, faith, some charity or other. “I know you might not want to.”

  “For your own good,” he was saying. “Might be willing …” he was saying. But she was already turning into something else, a bird—a flamingo, a hawk, a flamingo-hawk—and was flying up and away, toward the filmy pane of the window, then back again, circling, meanly, with a squint.

  He began, suddenly, to cry—loudly at first, with lots of ohs, then tiredly, as if from a deep sleep, his face buried in the poncho he’d thrown over the couch arm, his body sinking into the plush of the cushions—a man held hostage by the anxious cast of his dream.

  “What can I do?” he asked.

  But his dream had now changed, and she was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.

  WHICH IS MORE THAN I CAN SAY

  ABOUT SOME PEOPLE

  It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines. Death was number four. After mutilation, three, and divorce, two. Number one, the real fear, the one death could not even approach, was public speaking. Abby Mallon knew this too well. Which is why she had liked her job at American Scholastic Tests: she got to work with words in a private way. The speech she made was done in the back, alone, like little shoes cobbled by an elf: spider is to web as weaver is to blank. That one was hers. She was proud of that.

  Also, blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.

  But then one day the supervisor and the AST district coordinator called her upstairs. She was good, they said, but perhaps she had become too good, too creative, they suggested, and gave her a promotion out of the composing room and into the high school auditoriums of America. She would have to travel and give speeches, tell high school faculty how to prepare students for the entrance exams, meet separately with the juniors and seniors and answer their questions unswervingly, with authority and grace. “You may have a vacation first,” they said, and handed her a check.

  “Thank you,” she said doubtfully. In her life, she had been given the gift of solitude, a knack for it, but now it would be of no professional use. She would have to become a people person.

  “A peeper person?” queried her mother on the phone from Pittsburgh.

  “People,” said Abby.

  “Oh, those,” said her mother, and she sighed the sigh of death, though she was strong as a brick.

  Of all Abby’s fanciful ideas for self-improvement (the inspirational video, the breathing exercises, the hypnosis class), the Blarney Stone, with its whoring barter of eloquence for love—O GIFT OF GAB, read the T-shirts—was perhaps the most extreme. Perhaps. There had been, after all, her marriage to Bob, her boyfriend of many years, after her dog, Randolph, had died of kidney failure and marriage to Bob seemed the only way to overcome her grief. Of course, she had always admired the idea of marriage, the citizenship and public speech of it, the innocence rebestowed, and Bob was big and comforting. But he didn’t have a lot to say. He was not a verbal man. Rage gave him syntax—but it just wasn’t enough! Soon Abby had begun to keep him as a kind of pet, while she quietly looked for distractions of depth and consequence. She looked for words. She looked for ways with words. She worked hard to befriend a lyricist from New York—a tepid, fair-haired, violet-eyed bachelor—she and most of the doctors’ wives and arts administrators in town. He was newly arrived, owned no car, and wore the same tan blazer every day. “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink,” said the bachelor lyricist once, listening wanly to the female chirp of his phone messages. In his apartment, there were no novels or bookcases. There was one chair, as well as a large television set, the phone machine, a rhyming dictionary continuously renewed from the library, and a coffee table. Women brought him meals, professional introductions, jingle commissions, and cash grants. In return, he brought them small piebald stones from the beach, or a pretty weed from the park. He would stand behind the coffee table and recite his own songs, then step back and wait fearfully to be seduced. To be lunged at and devoured by the female form was, he believed, something akin to applause. Sometimes he would produce a rented lute and say, “Here, I’ve just composed a melody to go with my Creation verse. Sing along with me.”

  And Abby would stare at him and say, “But I don’t know the tune. I haven’t heard it yet. You just made it up, you said.”

  Oh, the vexations endured by a man of poesy! He stood paralyzed behind the coffee table, and when Abby did at last step forward, just to touch him, to take his pulse, perhaps, to capture one of his arms in an invisible blood-pressure cuff! he crumpled and shrank. “Please don’t think I’m some kind of emotional Epstein-Barr,” he said, quoting from other arguments he’d had with women. “I’m not indifferent or dispassionate. I’m calm. I’m romantic, but I’m calm. I have appetites, but I’m very calm about them.”

  When she went back to her husband—“Honey, you’re home!” Bob exclaimed—she lasted only a week. Shouldn’t it have lasted longer—the mix of loneliness and lust and habit she always felt with Bob, the mix that was surely love, for it so often felt like love, how could it not be love, surely nature intended it to be, surely nature with its hurricanes and hail was counting on this to suffice? Bob smiled at her and said nothing. And the next day, she booked a flight to Ireland.

  How her mother became part of the trip, Abby still couldn’t exactly recall. It had something to do with a stick shift: how Abby had never learned to drive one. “In my day and age,” said her mother, “everyone learned. We all learned. Women had skills. They knew how to cook and sew. Now women have no skills.”

  The stick shifts were half the rental price of the automatics.

  “If you’re looking for a driver,” hinted her mother, “I can still see the road.”

  “That’s good,” said Abby.

  “And your sister Theda’s spending the summer at your aunt’s camp again.” Theda had Down’s syndrome, and the family adored her. Every time Abby visited, Theda would shout, “Look at you!” and throw her arms around her in a terrific hug. “Theda’s, of course, sweet as ever,” said her mother, “which is more than I can say about some people.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “I’d like to see Ireland while I can. Your father, when he was alive, never wanted to. I’m Irish, you know.”

  “I know. One-sixteenth.”

  “That’s right. Of course, your father was Scottish, which is a totally different thing.”

  Abby sighed. “It seems to me that Japanese would be a totally different thing.”

  “Japanese?” hooted her mother. “Japanese is close.”

  And so in the middle of June, they landed at the Dublin airport together. “We’re going to go all around this island, every last peninsula,” said Mrs. Mallon in the airport parking lot, revving the engine of their rented Ford Fiesta, “because that’s just the kind of crazy Yuppies we are.”

  Abby felt sick from the flight; and sitting on what should be the driver’s side but without a steering wheel suddenly seemed emblematic of something.

  Her mother lurched out of the parking lot and headed for the nearest roundabout, crossing into the other lane only twice. “I’ll get the hang of this,” she said. She pushed her glasses farther up on her nose and Abby could see for the first time that her mother’s eyes were milky with age. Her steering was jerky and her foot jumped around on the floor, trying to find the clutch. Perhaps this had been a mistake.

  “Go straight, Mom,” said Abby, looking at her map.

  They zigged and zagged to the north, up and away from Dublin, planning to return to it at the end, but now heading toward Drogheda, Abby snatching up the guidebook and then the map again and then the guidebook, and Mrs. Mallon shouting, “What?” or “Left?” or “This can’t be right; let me see that thing.” The Irish countryside opened up before them, its pastoral patchwork and stone walls and its chimn
ey aroma of turf fires like some other century, its small stands of trees, abutting fields populated with wildflowers and sheep dung and cut sod and cows with ear tags, beautiful as women. Perhaps fairy folk lived in the trees! Abby saw immediately that to live amid the magic feel of this place would be necessarily to believe in magic. To live here would make you superstitious, warmhearted with secrets, unrealistic. If you were literal, or practical, you would have to move—or you would have to drink.

  They drove uncertainly past signs to places unmarked on the map. They felt lost—but not in an uncharming way. The old narrow roads with their white side markers reminded Abby of the vacations the family had taken when she was little, the cow-country car trips through New England or Virginia—in those days before there were interstates, or plastic cups, or a populace depressed by asphalt and french fries. Ireland was a trip into the past of America. It was years behind, unmarred, like a story or a dream or a clear creek. I’m a child again, Abby thought. I’m back. And just as when she was a child, she suddenly had to go to the bathroom.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. To their left was a sign that said ROAD WORKS AHEAD, and underneath it someone had scrawled, “No, it doesn’t.”

  Mrs. Mallon veered the car to the left and slammed on the brakes. There were some black-faced sheep haunch-marked in bright blue and munching grass near the road.

  “Here?” asked Abby.

  “I don’t want to waste time stopping somewhere else and having to buy something. You can go behind that wall.”

  “Thanks,” said Abby, groping in her pocketbook for Kleenex. She missed her own apartment. She missed her neighborhood. She missed the plentiful U-Pump-Itt’s, where, she often said, at least they spelled pump right! She got out and hiked back down the road a little way. On one of the family road trips thirty years ago, when she and Theda had had to go to the bathroom, their father had stopped the car and told them to “go to the bathroom in the woods.” They had wandered through the woods for twenty minutes, looking for the bathroom, before they came back out to tell him that they hadn’t been able to find it. Her father had looked perplexed, then amused, and then angry—his usual pattern.