Birds of America

  “Oh, no. You stay here with Eugene,” he says.

  “Yeah. Stay here with me.” Eugene races back from the dog and grabs my leg. The dog barks excitedly.

  “You can show Eugene your video,” Cal suggests as he leaves the room.

  “Show me your dance video,” he says to me in a singsong. “Show me, show me.”

  “Do we have time?”

  “We have fifteen minutes,” he says with great authority. I go upstairs and dig it out of my bag, then come back down. We plug it into the VCR and nestle on the couch together. He huddles close, cold in the drafty house, and I extend my long sweater around him like a shawl. I try to explain a few things, in a grown-up way, how this dance came to be, how movement, repeated, breaks through all resistance into a kind of stratosphere: from recalcitrance to ecstasy; from shoe to bird. The tape is one made earlier in the week. It is a demonstration with fourth graders. They each had to invent a character, then design a mask. They came up with various creatures: Miss Ninja Peacock. Mr. Bicycle Spoke Head. Evil Snowman. Saber-toothed Mom: “Half-girl-half-man-half-cat.” Then I arranged the kids in a phalanx and led them, with their masks on, in an improvised dance to Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It.”

  He watches, rapt. His brown hair hangs in strings in his face, and he chews on it. “There’s Tommy Crowell,” he says. He knows the fourth graders as if they were royalty. When it is over, he looks up at me, smiling, but businesslike. His gaze behind his glasses is brilliant and direct. “That was really a wonderful dance,” he says. He sounds like an agent.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s colorful and has lots of fun, interesting steps.”

  “Will you be my agent?” I ask.

  He scowls, unsure. “I don’t know. Is the agent the person who drives the car?”

  “Dinner’s ready!” Simone calls from two rooms away, the “Wank me with a spoon” room.

  “Coming!” shouts Eugene, and he leaps off the couch and slides into the dining room, falling sideways into his chair. “Whoo,” he says, out of breath. “I almost didn’t make it.”

  “Here,” says Cal. He places a goblet of pills at Eugene’s place setting.

  Eugene makes a face, but in the chair, he gets up on his knees, leans forward, glass of water in one hand, and begins the arduous activity of taking all the pills.

  I sit in the chair opposite him and place my napkin in my lap.

  Simone has made a soup with hard-boiled eggs in it (a regional recipe, she explains), as well as Peking duck, which is ropy and sweet. Cal keeps passing around the basket of bread, anxiously, talking about how modern man has only been around for 45,000 years and probably the bread hasn’t changed much since then.

  “Forty-five thousand years?” says Simone. “That’s all? That can’t be. I feel like we’ve been married for that long.”

  There are people who talk with their hands. Then there are people who talk with their arms. Then there are people who talk with their arms over their head. These are the ones I like best. Simone is one of those.

  “Nope, that’s it,” says Cal, chewing. “Forty-five thousand. Though for about two hundred thousand years before that, early man was going through all kinds of anatomical changes to get where we are today. It was a very exciting time.” He pauses, a little breathlessly. “I wish I could have been there.”

  “Ha!” exclaims Simone.

  “Think of the parties,” I say.

  “Right,” says Simone. “ ‘Joe, how’ve you been? Your head’s so big now, and, well, what is this crazy thing you’re doing with your thumb?’ A lot like the parties in Soda Springs, Idaho.”

  “Simone used to be married to someone in Soda Springs, Idaho,” Cal says to me.

  “You’re kidding!” I say.

  “Oh, it was very brief,” she says. “He was ridiculous. I got rid of him after about six months. Supposedly, he went off and killed himself.” She smiles at me impishly.

  “Who killed himself?” asks Eugene. He has swallowed all the pills but one.

  “Mommy’s first husband,” says Cal.

  “Why did he kill himself?” Eugene is staring at the middle of the table, trying to think about this.

  “Eugene, you’ve lived with your mother for seven years now, and you don’t know why someone close to her would want to kill himself?” Simone and Cal look straight across at each other and laugh brightly.

  Eugene smiles in an abbreviated and vague way. He understands this is his parents’ joke, but he doesn’t like or get it. He is bothered they have turned his serious inquiry into a casual laugh. He wants information! But now, instead, he just digs into the duck, poking and looking.

  Simone asks about the school visits. What am I finding? Are people nice to me? What is my life like back home? Am I married?

  “I’m not married,” I say.

  “But you and Patrick are still together, aren’t you?” Cal says in a concerned way.

  “Uh, no. We broke up.”

  “You broke up?” Cal puts his fork down.

  “Yes,” I say, sighing.

  “Gee, I thought you guys would never break up!” he says in a genuinely flabbergasted tone.

  “Really?” I find this reassuring somehow, that my relationship at least looked good from the outside, at least to someone.

  “Well, not really,” admits Cal. “Actually, I thought you guys would break up long ago.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “So you could marry her?” says the amazing Eugene to his father, and we all laugh loudly, pour more wine into glasses, and hide our faces in them.

  “The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney.”

  “Oh, not the raccoon story,” groans Cal.

  “Yes! The raccoons!” cries Eugene.

  I’m sawing at my duck.

  “We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney,” explains Simone.

  “Hmmm,” I say, not surprised.

  “And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that,” she says. “They all are like that.”

  I’m confused. I glance up at the light, an old brass octopus of a chandelier. All I can think of is how Patrick said, when he left, fed up with my “selfishness,” that if I were worried about staying on alone at the lake house, with its squirrels and call girl-style lamps, I should just rent the place out—perhaps to a nice lesbian couple like myself.

  But Eugene, across from me, nods enthusiastically, looks pleased. He’s heard the raccoon story before and likes it. Once again, it’s been told right, with flames and gore.

  Now there is salad, which we pick and tear at like crows. Afterward, we gaze upon the bowl of fruit at the center of the table, lazily pick a few grapes off their stems. We sip hot tea that Cal brings in from the kitchen. We sip until it’s cool, and then until it’s gone. Already the time is ten o’clock.

  “Dance time, dance time!” says Eugene when we’re through. Every night, before bed, they all go out into the living room and dance until Eugene is tired and falls asleep on the sofa. Then they carry him upstairs and tuck him in.

  He comes over to my chair and takes my hand, leads me out into the living room.

  “What music shall we dance to?” I ask.

  “You choose,” he says, and leads me to the shelf where they keep their compact discs. Perhaps there is some Stravinsky. Perhaps Petrouchka, with its rousing salute to Shrovetide.

  “Will you come see me tomorrow when you visit the fourth graders?” he asks as I’m looking through the selection. Too much Joan Baez. Too much Mahler. “I’m in room one oh four,” he says. “When you visit the fourth graders, you c
an just stop by my classroom and wave to me from the door. I sit between the bulletin board and the window.”

  “Sure!” I say, not knowing that, in a rush, I will forget, and that I’ll be on the plane home already, leafing through some inane airline magazine, before I remember that I forgot to do it. “Look,” I say, finding a Kenny Loggins disc. It has the song he heard earlier, the one from the video. “Let’s play this.”

  “Goody,” he says. “Mom! Dad! Come on!”

  “All right, Eugenie-boy,” says Cal, coming in from the dining room. Simone is behind him.

  “I’m Mercury, I’m Neptune, now I’m Pluto so far away,” says Eugene, dashing around the room, making up his own dance.

  “They’re doing the planets in school,” says Simone.

  “Yes,” says Eugene. “We’re doing the planets!”

  “And which planet,” I ask him, “do you think is the most interesting?” Mars, with its canals? Saturn, with its rings?

  Eugene stands still, looks at me thoughtfully, solemnly. “Earth, of course,” he says.

  Cal laughs. “Well, that’s the right answer!”

  “This is it!” sings Kenny Loggins. “This is it!” We make a phalanx and march, strut, slide to the music. We crouch, move backward, then burst forward again. We’re aiming to create the mildewy, resinous sweat smell of dance, the parsed, repeated movement. Cal and Simone are into it. They jiggle and link arms. “This is it!” In the middle of the song, Eugene suddenly sits down to rest on the sofa, watching the grown-ups. Like the best dancers and audiences in the world, he is determined not to cough until the end.

  “Come here, honey,” I say, going to him. I am thinking not only of my own body here, that unbeguilable, broken basket, that stiff meringue. I am not, Patrick, thinking only of myself, my lost troupe, my empty bed. I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed—this body, these bodies, that body—so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?

  “Stand next to me,” I say, and Eugene does, looking up at me with his orange warrior face. We step in place: knees up, knees down. Knees up, knees down. Dip-glide-slide. Dip-glide-slide. “This is it!” “This is it!” Then we go wild and fling our limbs to the sky.

  COMMUNITY LIFE

  When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories—a vocabulary of arson!—she’d transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls.

  She had learned to read at an early age. Her parents, newly settled in Vermont from Tirgu Mures in Transylvania, were anxious that their daughter learn to speak English, to blend in with the community in a way they felt they probably never would, and so every Saturday they took her to the children’s section of the Rutland library and let her spend time with the librarian, who chose books for her and sometimes even read a page or two out loud, though there was a sign that said PLEASE BE QUIET BOYS AND GIRLS. No comma.

  Which made it seem to Olena that only the boys had to be quiet. She and the librarian could do whatever they wanted.

  She had loved the librarian.

  And when Olena’s Romanian began to recede altogether, and in its stead bloomed a slow, rich English-speaking voice, not unlike the librarian’s, too womanly for a little girl, the other children on her street became even more afraid of her. “Dracula!” they shouted. “Transylvaniess!” they shrieked, and ran.

  “You’ll have a new name now,” her father told her the first day of first grade. He had already changed their last name from Todorescu to Resnick. His shop was called “Resnick’s Furs.” “From here on in, you will no longer be Olena. You will have a nice American name: Nell.”

  “You make to say ze name,” her mother said. “When ze teacher tell you Olena, you say, ‘No, Nell.’ Say Nell.”

  “Nell,” said Olena. But when she got to school, the teacher, sensing something dreamy and outcast in her, clasped her hand and exclaimed, “Olena! What a beautiful name!” Olena’s heart filled with gratitude and surprise, and she fell in close to the teacher’s hip, adoring and mute.

  From there on in, only her parents, in their throaty Romanian accents, ever called her Nell, her secret, jaunty American self existing only for them.

  “Nell, how are ze ozer children at ze school?”

  “Nell, please to tell us what you do.”

  Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of the sympathy cards she received, discovered what the letters spelled: Olena; Alone. It was a body walled in the cellar of her, a whiff and forecast of doom like an early, rotten spring—and she longed for the Nell-that-never-lived’s return. She wished to start over again, to be someone living coltishly in the world, not someone hidden away, behind books, with a carefully learned voice and a sad past.

  She missed her mother the most.

  · · ·

  The library Olena worked in was one of the most prestigious university libraries in the Midwest. It housed a large collection of rare and foreign books, and she had driven across several states to get there, squinting through the splattered tempera of insects on the windshield, watching for the dark tail of a possible tornado, and getting sick, painfully, in Indiana, in the rest rooms of the dead-Hoosier service plazas along I-80. The ladies’ rooms there had had electric eyes for the toilets, the sinks, the hand dryers, and she’d set them all off by staggering in and out of the stalls or leaning into the sinks. “You the only one in here?” asked a cleaning woman. “You the only one in here making this racket?” Olena had smiled, a dog’s smile; in the yellowish light, everything seemed tragic and ridiculous and unable to stop. The flatness of the terrain gave her vertigo, she decided, that was it. The land was windswept; there were no smells. In Vermont, she had felt cradled by mountains. Now, here, she would have to be brave.

  But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when she gave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.

  She first met Nick at the library in May. She was temporarily positioned at the reference desk, hauled out from her ordinary task as supervisor of foreign cataloging, to replace someone who was ill. Nick was researching statistics on municipal campaign spending in the state. “Haven’t stepped into a library since I was eighteen,” he said. He looked at least forty.

  She showed him where he might look. “Try looking here,” she said, writing down the names of indexes to state records, but he kept looking at her. “Or here.”

  “I’m managing a county board seat campaign,” he said. “The election’s not until the fall, but I’m trying to get a jump on things.” His hair was a coppery brown, threaded through with silver. There was something animated in his eyes, like pond life. “I just wanted to get some comparison figures. Will you have a cup of coffee with me?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  But he came back the next day and asked her again.

  The coffee shop near campus was hot and noisy, crowded with students, and Nick loudly ordered espresso for them both. She usually didn’t like espresso, its gritty, cigarish taste. But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility. She drank the espresso fast, with determination and a sense of adventure. “I guess I’ll have a second,” she said, and wiped her mouth with a napkin.

  “I’ll get it,” said Nick, and when
he came back, he told her some more about the campaign he was running. “It’s important to get the endorsements of the neighborhood associations,” he said. He ran a bratwurst and frozen yogurt stand called Please Squeeze and Bratwursts. He had gotten to know a lot of people that way. “I feel alive and relevant, living my life like this,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’ve sold out.”

  “Sold out to what?” she asked.

  He smiled. “I can tell you’re not from around here,” he said. He raked his hand through the various metals of his hair. “Selling out. Like doing something you really never wanted to do, and getting paid too much for it.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “When I was a kid, my father said to me, ‘Sometimes in life, son, you’re going to find you have to do things you don’t want to do,’ and I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘No fucking way.’ ” Olena laughed. “I mean, you probably always wanted to be a librarian, right?”

  She looked at all the crooked diagonals of his face and couldn’t tell whether he was serious. “Me?” she said. “I first went to graduate school to be an English professor.” She sighed, switched elbows, sinking her chin into her other hand. “I did try,” she said. “I read Derrida. I read Lacan. I read Reading Lacan. I read ‘Reading Reading Lacan’—and that’s when I applied to library school.”

  “I don’t know who Lacan is,” he said.

  “He’s, well—you see? That’s why I like libraries: No whos or whys. Just ‘where is it?’ ”

  “And where are you from?” he asked, his face briefly animated by his own clever change of subject. “Originally.” There was, it seemed, a way of spotting those not native to the town. It was a college town, attractive and dull, and it hurried the transients along—the students, gypsies, visiting scholars and comics—with a motion not unlike peristalsis.

  “Vermont,” she said.

  “Vermont!” Nick exclaimed, as if this were exotic, which made her glad she hadn’t said something like Transylvania. He leaned toward her, confidentially. “I have to tell you: I own one chair from Ethan Allen Furniture.”