Birds of a Lesser Paradise

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  A couple in a minivan pulls up in front of the house, followed by the home inspector in a pickup truck. They come to the door, their faces already twisted with scrutiny. She is small and blond and he is thick like an old football player.

  Hi, I say. Welcome. We’re about to head out; the house is all yours.

  I stuff some magazines and soda into a canvas bag and look around for Ike. I hear him running up the basement steps.

  Ike presents a scrap of siding that is covered in glue and cricket exoskeletons. It is not, I suspect, a winning move. Apparently, enough crickets survived the Realtor’s quick fix only to meet their end on our glue board. The couple exchange a glance. The inspector scribbles a note.

  I crouch down to the floor and touch Ike’s cheek. You’re brave, I say. Thank you.

  Ike grins. Together, we can make a solid grilled cheese, prune shrubs, clean house. Together, maybe we’re the housewife this house needs. Maybe we weren’t made for Connecticut’s long winters. Maybe our best life is here. On a good day, we’re just one man short of a catalog-worthy family.

  A week before she left for the nursing home, we packed my mother’s belongings. Ike had just started kindergarten. Leaving him at a friend’s house to spend time with Mom on a Saturday was a miserable trade-off. I wanted to soak up every last bit of innocence he had left, answer every question, scoop him up for hugs when he’d allow it. But I was the only person Mom would allow in the house; there was no one else around to help.

  I held up various tchotchkes for Mom’s approval.

  Take or toss? I asked.

  Mom sat in her recliner. She wore a light blue dress she’d made herself. The fabric was so worn it was nearly transparent. Carnie rested comfortably on her shoulder. I worried that his talons would break her thinning skin, but she moved as if she hardly noticed his weight.

  I held up a box of ornaments, plastic apples I’d hand-painted for her as a child.

  Toss ’em, she said.

  I began to wrap her glassware in newspaper.

  Make sure to leave plenty of print for lining Carnie’s cage, she said.

  My mother cupped Carnie with both hands and brought him to her lap. She crossed her legs, then scratched the finger-wide point between Carnie’s wings. His eyes, like little black seeds, fell to half-mast as she stroked him. They were accustomed to each other, a pair of sad habits. He was more familiar with her voice and touch than I, more dear to her everyday existence. His transgressions—dirty cage, the occasional nip of her finger—were met with gentle understanding.

  Don’t call here again, he said. Don’t call.

  Remember, I told my mother. I’m not obligated to look after that bird.

  Well, she said, I’m not obligated to look after you.

  You are, I thought, her words a splinter in my chest. You have to be.

  In that moment, I withered. I hated her for her coldness, her stubborn rationale, her ability to come up big in a fight even when she was dog-tired and bird-boned and couldn’t see the food on the end of her fork.

  There she sat, outmoded in her homemade dress, bird in her lap, shit on her shoulder. Steamrolled by the world, but in the face of defeat she threatened us all.

  Carnie moved back to her shoulder and buried his head into her thin hair, almost as if he was taking her in, making a memory. It occurred to me that with her voice inside of him he would always have more of her to remember.

  You don’t want to keep these? I asked, giving her a second chance on a box of photographs.

  My heart, she’d said. I can turn it off.

  For years, I’d believed her.

  But I know the truth now. What maniacs we are—sick with love, all of us.

  The Cow That Milked Herself

  First, he showed me his kidney.

  This, Wood said, is the cranial pole. He pointed to the C-shaped edge of his organ.

  My turn, I said.

  He moved the ultrasound probe to my belly, rolling the small tip across my hardening stomach.

  I think we cleaned this after the rottweiler, he said. He squinted at the probe.

  We were in the veterinary clinic after hours, Wood still in his white coat, stethoscope around his neck. I was seated on a steel table, the metal cold against the backs of my knees. Wood had missed my last ob-gyn appointments and wanted to see the fetus for himself.

  Don’t drop it, he said, handing me the probe while he dimmed the exam-room lights and warmed the transmission gel. This thing costs twenty thousand dollars.

  I’d been lonely at my OB appointments, but Wood had an obligation to his patients. There were dogs with shattered elbows, cats with failing livers, cows with mastitis. Crying women in the waiting room cradling arthritic shih tzus, one-eyed ferrets. Malamutes with slipped discs, terriers with severe allergies to carpet cleaner. I believed they needed him more than I did.

  He pressed the probe into my abdomen.

  Here is the gestational sac, he said. And this flash here—this is the heart.

  We were speechless then, watching the beginnings of our child thrive on-screen. Two freshly neutered Labradors whined from their cages outside.

  Every week there was a patient at the clinic Wood forbade me from seeing, knowing I’d be unable to resist and would come in anyway, heart bleeding. Last week it had been a cancer-stricken golden-crowned sifaka who was the last of his kind in captivity. Despite the pain he must have been in, he had been gentle with his keeper, raising his bony arm so she could stroke his side. Her touch seemed to comfort him.

  This week it was Cerulean, a tripod rottweiler.

  Too hard on the heartstrings, Wood said.

  Take me to see her, I said.

  She’s not pretty, he said. She’s been self-mutilating. Down there. He raised his eyebrows.

  Cerulean had come in that morning. Wood was an ultrasound specialist, and her owners had hoped he would be able to reveal a tumor or kidney stones—something specific that would explain why she was hurting herself.

  You don’t want it to be behavioral, Wood told me. Always harder to treat the mind than the body.

  But he had found nothing. Her scan was clean.

  No mineralization, no masses, Wood said, disappointed.

  Cerulean sat on the concrete floor and leaned against the cinder-block wall. Her black fur shone in the fluorescent lights. Her ears were small. I could not bring myself to look at her eyes. She had mussed the towels into piles. Her feet made me want to cry, the pads of her three remaining paws plump and worn.

  At three months I just looked fat. Like I had eaten four sandwiches instead of one, I told my mother. I could cup my belly in one hand, swing my forearm underneath the slight mound the book said should be the size of a grapefruit. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word womb.

  Wood came home in his white coat, smelling of formaldehyde and anal glands. He asked “What’s for dinner” but did not listen for the answer. Instead, he stuck his head inside the refrigerator.

  How was your appointment? he asked, peeling off his white coat, pulling off his left shoe with the heel of his right.

  I made three-bean chili, I said, shooing the cat from the stove. I wiped buttered paw prints from the glass.

  Wood cracked open a beer.

  I was palpated today, I said. Like that thing you do to cows, when you feel for lumps in their abdomen.

  I can tell when a woman is pregnant by finding the ridge of her uterus, my OB had bragged. I touch a thousand tummies a year, for God’s sake.

  On the screen, the fetus had doubled over, then stretched, a sun salutation with no sun.

  I couldn’t help thinking, I told Wood, that the nub of his or her vestigial tail looked a lot like the end of a cocker spaniel.

  Incessant waggers, he said. Submissive urinators.

  Loving, I said. Warm on your lap.

  The following day, the picture of my fetus, taped to the kitchen cabinet, made my niece cry.

  I’m scared, too, I said.

&nbs
p; I meant it.

  The black-and-white photograph showed the baby’s skull and vertebrae, eye sockets like moon craters.

  Somehow, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t tell me what I wanted to know about my child, what I needed to know to sleep at night. No photograph could say: Everything will be perfect.

  Later that evening, Wood rubbed my back, sutured the dress straps I had snapped with my swelling bosom. I could feel his breath on my scapula, his needle stitching cottonlike skin.

  Friends came over for dinner that night bearing presents, pop-up books and sock monkeys. I put out a plate of crudités but noticed too late the dog hair wound into the broccoli florets.

  Wood spoke of his upcoming conventions, the paper he’d coauthored on using ultrasound to monitor the morphology of female jaguar reproductive tracts. It was hard to trump frozen jaguar sperm.

  In captivity, the jaguar mother is capable of devouring her own cubs, he said.

  I blushed at Wood’s lack of faith in mothers. It was as if he saw, at the heart of all women, an animal. Primality.

  Here, Wood, I said. Open this package from your aunt. It isn’t just my baby, you know.

  Wood slipped his finger underneath the wrapping paper.

  A breast pump is an awful lot like a vacuum milking cup, my husband said, untangling the gifted contraption. He held the suction cups to his chest.

  Soon she will be the cow that milked herself, he said.

  Our friends howled.

  A week later, Cerulean came back to the clinic for observation.

  She smells like pepperoni pizza, Wood said over the phone. I can’t explain it.

  I hated the thought of her on the cold cement floor, the cage bars obscuring her view, the indignities of her mysterious condition.

  Can I bring you lunch? I asked.

  I drove to the clinic with sandwiches and a bag of soft dog toys.

  What is this? Wood asked, holding a headless hedgehog.

  Let me put one in, I said.

  Wood placed a hand over his eyes and left me alone with Cerulean.

  Hi, I said to her.

  She looked at me from the corners of her eyes, shy and damaged. I sat on the floor and tucked my legs underneath my body. I wanted to massage lotion into her feet, stroke her back.

  Here, I said, handing her the hedgehog through the bars of the cage, then the stuffed cat.

  I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love. Then—I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.

  Then—I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers. Then—I feel very alone. I do not know what I’m capable of.

  My fetus grew arms, carried a yolk sac like a balloon.

  These, the OB had said, pointing to a white Cheerio on the screen, are the sex cells of your grandchildren.

  Tell them I’m sorry about all the weed I smoked in high school, I said. And that time . . . well, there were a lot of times.

  I wondered if I would fill the shoes of the mythical matriarch, if suddenly my pancakes would become legendary, my dresses tailored, my back rubs soothing.

  When I first told Wood I was pregnant, he had taken off his sweatshirt and placed the cockatiel to which he was administering medication on the exam-room counter.

  I think the bird pooped in my hood, he said.

  Wood’s cheeks were flushed. I touched his shoulder. It was a Saturday morning and I was helping him with his early-morning rounds. I liked those mornings when the clinic was quiet and it was just the two of us feeding schnauzers and ferrets in between sips of coffee and exclamations about the morning paper.

  I am excited, he clarified, minutes later. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed the crown of my head.

  I wanted to be as interesting to Wood as a urinary bladder wall tumor, lab work. I wanted to be pored over, examined by his hands, researched, discussed, diagnosed. I wanted to keep him up late, bring him in early.

  Cerulean likes the stuffed cat, Wood said on the way to our birthing class.

  Then he reminded me that he had to leave class early. Gall bladder infection in a Chesapeake Bay retriever, he said.

  The instructor wore fleece leggings and a purple spaghetti-strap top.

  Some women, she said, hands cupped as if she were holding a beach ball, achieve orgasm during birth.

  I may have to poke out her third eye, I said to Wood.

  Wood did not understand my anxieties—miscarriage, autism, premature delivery.

  I wish it would come out like a goat, I told him. Sturdy, hooved, walking.

  Every spring we helped the veterinary school calve and foal. The meat goats bloated with twins, the petrified sheep with their petrified lambs, limp and gentle on the mud floor. We picked the weak ones up and held them to the mother’s teat, removed the small bodies from the piles of hay when they did not thrive, bottle-feeding them if there was any hope of life.

  You’ll do fine, he said, patting my stomach. Rugged stock.

  But I knew how I would do. I would take my maternity leave and he would come home for dinner at night, late. My milk would let down when the cat cried at the moon from the staircase window. I would wake up sticking to the sheets. I would love and complain with equal vigor.

  I’m sorry I missed the asexual revolution, I said. Aphids, bees, captive hammerhead sharks—they know they’re on their own. They don’t expect understanding.

  What the cape bee gains in martyrdom, she loses in genetic potential, Wood said.

  Self-reliance, I began.

  Take last week’s sifaka, Wood said. He was the last of his kind. He needed others.

  I’d been thinking about nativity scenes. Camels leaning over the manger like my cat nesting in the crib. The way Joseph pretended his hands were tied, that he wasn’t responsible in the first place.

  The birthing class instructor passed around a wooden bowl of mixed berries. Wood held up one hand in protest.

  I don’t need to look, he said. I know how this works.

  In your last weeks of pregnancy, the instructor said to the class, the cervix softens like ripe fruit.

  These women don’t know much about birth, Wood whispered. I’d like to take the class on a field trip. I’d like to take these girls to a farm during calving season.

  This is different, I said. Your child will not be a ruminant.

  Remember, the instructor said. It may take days to fall in love with your newborn.

  The next Saturday Cerulean’s cage was abandoned. The stuffed cat, overturned in the corner, was missing an eye.

  Don’t tell me how this ends, I said to Wood.

  Later, as the sun rose, Wood rolled me onto my side and warmed the transmission gel. The exam table was cold.

  He pressed the probe into the taut skin stretched across my womb like canvas. In the treatment room his fingers were deft and comforting. His eyes focused on the baby beneath my skin. I could feel his anticipation. It washed over me like love.

  The ultrasound excels at imaging the heart, Wood said. The heart is a fluid-filled organ.

  States away, a woman gave birth to octuplets like pups. Perhaps another arched her back in ecstasy as a head fourteen inches in diameter emerged from her cervix. An endangered lemur picked at her barren womb in the confines of the zoo hospital. Me, I watched a heart, small but fast, beat between the shadows of our daughter’s ribs. I hope you never break, I said, though I knew it would, again and again.

  With his finger, Wood traced the outline of our daughter’s organs on the screen.

  Tell me again about jaguar reproduction, I said.

  The baby gestates for a little over ninety days, Wood said. If her cubs are taken from her in the wild, the mother will chase them down for hours, roaring continuously.

  I would do that, too, I said. I promise.

  Birds of a Lesser Paradise

  I fell for Smith the day my father hit his first hole-in-one on his homemade golf course. Dad had spent years shaping the earth in our backyard until he had two
holes that landed somewhere between an extravagant minigolf spread and a Jack Nicklaus par-72.

  Mae! my father yelled, hoisting his nine-iron into the air. I did it!

  He was a couple hundred yards away, and because I didn’t think my voice would carry, I jumped up and down a few times and clapped my hands, trying to appear visibly thrilled. But I was self-conscious with Smith standing behind me, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his army-green cargo pants, an anxious scowl on his almost beautiful face.

  Dad sauntered off to pluck the winning ball from the hole, long, white beard trailing in the wind, his spaniel, Betsy, two steps behind. It was hardly fifty degrees out, but Dad was wearing shorts and hiking boots. He was nearing seventy, but he had the bulging calf muscles of a man half his age.

  I want to see birds no one else has seen, Smith was saying. I printed out the checklist for North Carolina. How soon can we mark these off?

  Slow down, I said, smiling.

  I don’t know if I can tell a common goldeneye from a loon, he said. Is that important?

  He followed me to our picnic table, which was soft from rot and green with moss.

  Smith stuck his fingers into his bramble-thick hair, hair the color of sea grass. It seemed inclined to one side, like a plant reaching for the sun. He wore a paint-flecked T-shirt covered in a school of dolphin fish.

  First, I said, let me tell you what we can see here in the Great Dismal Swamp.

  I opened our brochure, pushed it toward him like a menu. We had a chunk of land outside of town that had been in my father’s family for two generations. We lived in his ancestral home and ran Pocosin Birds, our bird-watching business, from the property.

  In April, I began, birders can expect to sight fifty to one hundred bird species in the swamp.

  Are you reading backward? Smith asked.

  I have it memorized, I said.

  I studied his face. His left eye was deep brown, his right hazel. For a moment, I wondered if he had a glass eye.

  Eyes like David Bowie, I said, nodding my head in approval. Are you going to take me into the swamp? he asked. He smiled. He was lean and dark from the sun. I couldn’t tell if he was twenty-five or just short of forty, impoverished or on the receiving end of a trust fund. When he smiled, he looked like too much fun to be thirty, as if he wasn’t tired of the world yet.