Birds of America

  “A lot of different reasons. For Ken, mostly. She’s still head of the neighborhood association, and he needs her endorsement. I just wanted to let you know. Listen, you’ve gotta cut me some slack.”

  She grew hot in the face again. “I’ve cut you some slack,” she said. “I’ve cut you a whole forest of slack. The whole global slack forest has been cut for you.” She closed the book. “I don’t know why you cavort with these people. They’re nothing but a bunch of clerks.”

  He’d been trying to look pleasant, but now he winced a little. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Miss High-Minded. You whose father made his living off furs. Furs!” He took two steps toward her, then turned and paced back again. “I can’t believe I’m living with someone who grew up on the proceeds of tortured animals!”

  She was quiet. This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!

  “Don’t drag my father into this.”

  “Look, I’ve spent years of my life working for peace and free expression. I’ve been in prison already. I’ve lived in a cage! I don’t need to live in another one.”

  “You and your free expression! You who can’t listen to me for two minutes!”

  “Listen to you what?”

  “Listen to me when I”—and here she bit her lip a little—“when I tell you that these people you care about, this hateful Erin what’s-her-name, they’re just small, awful, nothing people.”

  “So they don’t read enough books,” he said slowly. “Who the fuck cares.”

  The next day he was off to a meeting with Ken at the Senior Citizens Association. The host from Jeopardy! was going to be there, and Ken wanted to shake a few hands, sign up volunteers. The host from Jeopardy! was going to give a talk.

  “I don’t get it,” Olena said.

  “I know.” He sighed, the pond life treading water in his eyes. “But, well—it’s the American way.” He grabbed up his keys, and the look that quickly passed over his face told her this: she wasn’t pretty enough.

  “I hate America,” she said.

  Nonetheless, he called her at the library during a break. She’d been sitting in the back with Sarah, thinking up Tom Swifties, her brain ready to bleed from the ears, when the phone rang. “You should see this,” he said. “Some old geezer raises his hand, I call on him, and he stands up, and the first thing he says is, ‘I had my hand raised for ten whole minutes and you kept passing over me. I don’t like to be passed over. You can’t just pass over a guy like me, not at my age.’ ”

  She laughed, as he wanted her to.

  This hot dog’s awful, she said frankly.

  “To appeal to the doctors, Ken’s got all these signs up that say ‘Teetlebaum for tort reform.’ ”

  “Sounds like a Wallace Stevens poem,” she said.

  “I don’t know what I expected. But the swirl of this whole event has not felt right.”

  She’s a real dog, he said cattily.

  She was quiet, deciding to let him do the work of this call.

  “Do you realize that Ken’s entire softball team just wrote a letter to The Star, calling him a loudmouth and a cheat?”

  “Well,” she said, “what can you expect from a bunch of grown men who pitch underhand?”

  There was some silence. “I care about us,” he said finally. “I just want you to know that.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I know I’m just a pain in the ass to you,” he said. “But you’re an inspiration to me, you are.”

  I like a good sled dog, she said huskily.

  “Thank you for just—for saying that,” she said.

  “I just sometimes wish you’d get involved in the community, help out with the campaign. Give of yourself. Connect a little with something.”

  · · ·

  At the hospital, she got up on the table and pulled the paper gown tightly around her, her feet in the stirrups. The doctor took a plastic speculum out of a drawer. “Anything particular seem to be the problem today?” asked the doctor.

  “I just want you to look and tell me if there’s anything wrong,” said Olena.

  The doctor studied her carefully. “There’s a class of medical students outside. Do you mind if they come in?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know this is a teaching hospital,” she said. “We hope that our patients won’t mind contributing to the education of our medical students by allowing them in during an examination. It’s a way of contributing to the larger medical community, if you will. But it’s totally up to you. You can say no.”

  Olena clutched at her paper gown. There’s never been an accident, she said recklessly. “How many of them are there?”

  The doctor smiled quickly. “Seven,” she said. “Like dwarfs.”

  “They’ll come in and do what?”

  The doctor was growing impatient and looked at her watch. “They’ll participate in the examination. It’s a learning visit.”

  Olena sank back down on the table. She didn’t feel that she could offer herself up this way. You’re only average, he said meanly.

  “All right,” she said. “Okay.”

  Take a bow, he said sternly.

  The doctor opened up the doorway and called a short way down the corridor. “Class?”

  They were young, more than half of them men, and they gathered around the examination table in a horseshoe shape, looking slightly ashamed, sorry for her, no doubt, the way art students sometimes felt sorry for the shivering model they were about to draw. The doctor pulled up a stool between Olena’s feet and inserted the plastic speculum, the stiff, widening arms of it uncomfortable, embarrassing. “Today we will be doing a routine pelvic examination,” she announced loudly, and then she got up again, went to a drawer, and passed out rubber gloves to everyone.

  Olena went a little blind. A white light, starting at the center, spread to the black edges of her sight. One by one, the hands of the students entered her, or pressed on her abdomen, felt hungrily, innocently, for something to learn from her, in her.

  She missed her mother the most.

  “Next,” the doctor was saying. And then again. “All right. Next?”

  Olena missed her mother the most.

  But it was her father’s face that suddenly loomed before her now, his face at night in the doorway of her bedroom, coming to check on her before he went to bed, his bewildered face, horrified to find her lying there beneath the covers, touching herself and gasping, his whispered “Nell? Are you okay?” and then his vanishing, closing the door loudly, to leave her there, finally forever; to die and leave her there feeling only her own sorrow and disgrace, which she would live in like a coat.

  There were rubber fingers in her, moving, wriggling around, but not like the others. She sat up abruptly and the young student withdrew his hand, moved away. “He didn’t do it right,” she said to the doctor. She pointed at the student. “He didn’t do it correctly!”

  “All right, then,” said the doctor, looking at Olena with concern and alarm. “All right. You may all leave,” she said to the students.

  The doctor herself found nothing. “You are perfectly normal,” she said. But she suggested that Olena take vitamin B and listen quietly to music in the evening.

  Olena staggered out through the hospital parking lot, not finding her car at first. When she found it, she strapped herself in tightly, as if she were something wild—an animal or a star.

  She drove back to the library and sat at her desk. Everyone had gone home already. In the margins of her notepad she wrote, “Alone as a book, alone as a desk, alone as a library, alone as a pencil, alone as a catalog, alone as a number, alone as a notepad.” Then she, too, left, went home, made herself tea. She felt separate from her body, felt herself dragging it up the stairs like a big handbag, its leathery hollowness something you could cut up and give away
or stick things in. She lay between the sheets of her bed, sweating, perhaps from the tea. The world felt over to her, used up, off to one side. There were no more names to live by.

  One should live closer. She had lost her place, as in a book.

  One should live closer to where one’s parents were buried.

  Waiting for Nick’s return, she felt herself grow dizzy, float up toward the ceiling, look down on the handbag. Tomorrow, she would get an organ donor’s card, an eye donor’s card, as many cards as she could get. She would show them all to Nick. “Nick! Look at my cards!”

  And when he didn’t come home, she remained awake through the long night, through the muffled thud of a bird hurling itself against the window, through the thunder leaving and approaching like a voice, through the Frankenstein light of the storm. Over her house, in lieu of stars, she felt the bright heads of her mother and father, searching for her, their eyes beaming down from the sky.

  Oh, there you are, they said. Oh, there you are.

  But then they went away again, and she lay waiting, fist in her spine, for the grace and fatigue that would come, surely it must come, of having given so much to the world.

  AGNES OF IOWA

  Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one. Her mother was named Cyrena, and was beautiful to match, but had always imagined her life would have been more interesting, that she herself would have had a more dramatic, arresting effect on the world and not ended up in Cassell, Iowa, if she had been named Enid or Hagar or Maude. And so she named her first daughter Agnes, and when Agnes turned out not to be attractive at all, but puffy and prone to a rash between her eyebrows, her hair a flat and bilious hue, her mother backpedaled and named her second daughter Linnea Elise (who turned out to be a lovely, sleepy child with excellent bones, a sweet, full mouth, and a rubbery mole above her lip that later in life could be removed without difficulty, everyone was sure).

  Agnes herself had always been a bit at odds with her name. There was a brief period in her life, in her mid-twenties, when she had tried to pass it off as French—she had put in the accent grave and encouraged people to call her “On-yez.” This was when she was living in New York City, and often getting together with her cousin, a painter who took her to parties in TriBeCa lofts or at beach houses or at mansions on lakes upstate. She would meet a lot of not very bright rich people who found the pronunciation of her name intriguing. It was the rest of her they were unclear on. “On-yez, where are you from, dear?” asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. “Originally.” She eyed Agnes’s outfit as if it might be what in fact it was: a couple of blue things purchased in a department store in Cedar Rapids.

  “Where am I from?” Agnes said it softly. “Iowa.” She had a tendency not to speak up.

  “Where?” The woman scowled, bewildered.

  “Iowa,” Agnes repeated loudly.

  The woman in black touched Agnes’s wrist and leaned in confidentially. She moved her mouth in a concerned and exaggerated way, like a facial exercise. “No, dear,” she said. “Here we say O-hi-o.”

  That had been in Agnes’s mishmash decade, after college. She had lived improvisationally then, getting this job or that, in restaurants or offices, taking a class or two, not thinking too far ahead, negotiating the precariousness and subway flus and scrimping for an occasional manicure or a play. Such a life required much exaggerated self-esteem. It engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart. Her days grew messy with contradictions. When she went for walks, for her health, cinders would spot her cheeks and soot would settle in the furled leaf of each ear. Her shoes became unspeakable. Her blouses darkened in a breeze, and a blast of bus exhaust might linger in her hair for hours. Finally, her old asthma returned and, with a hacking, incessant cough, she gave up. “I feel like I’ve got five years to live,” she told people, “so I’m moving back to Iowa so that it’ll feel like fifty.”

  When she packed up to leave, she knew she was saying good-bye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with, which most people in Cassell, Iowa, she felt, could not claim to have done.

  A year and a half later, she married a boyish man twelve years her senior, a Cassell realtor named Joe, and together they bought a house on a little street called Birch Court. She taught a night class at the Arts Hall and did volunteer work on the Transportation Commission in town. It was life like a glass of water: half-empty, half-full. Half-full. Half-full. Oops: half-empty. Over the years, she and Joe tried to have a baby, but one night at dinner, looking at each other in a lonely way over the meat loaf, they realized with shock that they probably never would. Nonetheless, after six years, they still tried, vandalizing what romance was left in their marriage.

  “Honey,” she would whisper at night when he was reading under the reading lamp and she had already put her book away and curled toward him, wanting to place the red scarf over the lamp shade but knowing it would annoy him and so not doing it. “Do you want to make love? It would be a good time of month.”

  And Joe would groan. Or he would yawn. Or he would already be asleep. Once, after a long, hard day, he said, “I’m sorry, Agnes. I guess I’m just not in the mood.”

  She grew exasperated. “You think I’m in the mood?” she said. “I don’t want to do this any more than you do,” and he looked at her in a disgusted way, and it was two weeks after that that they had the sad dawning over the meat loaf.

  At the Arts Hall, formerly the Grange Hall, Agnes taught the Great Books class, but taught it loosely, with cookies. She let her students turn in poems and plays and stories that they themselves had written; she let them use the class as their own little time to be creative. Someone once even brought in a sculpture: an electric one with blinking lights.

  After class, she sometimes met with students individually. She recommended things for them to write about or read or consider in their next project. She smiled and asked if things were going well in their lives. She took an interest.

  “You should be stricter,” said Willard Stauffbacher, the head of the Instruction Department; he was a short, balding musician who liked to tape on his door pictures of famous people he thought he looked like. Every third Monday, he conducted the monthly departmental meeting—aptly named, Agnes liked to joke, since she did indeed depart mental. “Just because it’s a night course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t impart standards,” Stauffbacher said in a scolding way. “If it’s piffle, use the word piffle. If it’s meaningless, write meaningless across the top of every page.” He had once taught at an elementary school and once at a prison. “I feel like I do all the real work around here,” he added. He had posted near his office a sign that read RULES FOR THE MUSIC ROOM:

  I will stay in my seat unless [sic] permission to move.

  I will sit up straight.

  I will listen to directions.

  I will not bother my neighbor.

  I will not talk when Mr. Stauffbacher is talking.

  I will be polite to others.

  I will sing as well as I can.

  Agnes stayed after one night with Christa, the only black student in her class. She liked Christa a lot—Christa was smart and funny, and Agnes sometimes liked to stay after with her to chat. Tonight, Agnes had decided to talk Christa out of writing about vampires all the time.

  “Why don’t you write about that thing you told me about that time?” Agnes suggested.

  Christa looked at her skeptically. “What thing?”

  “The time in your childhood, during the Chicago riots, walking with your mother through the police barricades.”

  “Man, I lived that. Why should I want to write about it?”

  Agnes sighed. Maybe Christa had a point. “It’s just that I’m no help to you with this vampire stuff,” Agnes sai
d. “It’s formulaic, genre fiction.”

  “You would be of more help to me with my childhood?”

  “Well, with more serious stories, yes.”

  Christa stood up, perturbed. She grabbed back her vampire story. “You with all your Alice Walker and Zora Hurston. I’m just not interested in that anymore. I’ve done that already. I read those books years ago.”

  “Christa, please don’t be annoyed.” Please do not talk when Mr. Stauffbacher is talking.

  “You’ve got this agenda for me.”

  “Really, I don’t at all,” said Agnes. “It’s just that—you know what it is? It’s that I’m just sick of these vampires. They’re so roaming and repeating.”

  “If you were black, what you’re saying might have a different spin. But the fact is, you’re not,” Christa said, and picked up her coat and strode out—though ten seconds later, she gamely stuck her head back in and said, “See you next week.”

  “We need a visiting writer who’s black,” Agnes said in the next depart mental meeting. “We’ve never had one.” They were looking at their budget, and the readings this year were pitted against Dance Instruction, a program headed up by a redhead named Evergreen.

  “The Joffrey is just so much central casting,” said Evergreen, apropos of nothing. As a vacuum cleaner can start to pull up the actual thread of a carpet, her brains had been sucked dry by too much yoga. No one paid much attention to her.

  “Perhaps we can get Harold Raferson in Chicago,” Agnes suggested.

  “We’ve already got somebody for the visiting writer slot,” said Stauffbacher coyly. “An Afrikaner from Johannesburg.”

  “What?” said Agnes. Was he serious? Even Evergreen barked out a laugh.

  “W. S. Beyerbach. The university’s bringing him in. We pay our five hundred dollars and we get him out here for a day and a half.”

  “Who?” asked Evergreen.

  “This has already been decided?” asked Agnes.

  “Yup.” Stauffbacher looked accusingly at Agnes. “I’ve done a lot of work to arrange for this. I’ve done all the work!”