Birds of a Lesser Paradise

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  Some days it scared her to be on the small island. When storms blew in you could watch them approaching for miles, and when they came down it felt as if the ocean could wash right over Whale Cay.

  I could always leave, Georgie thought. I could always go back home when I’ve had enough, and maybe I’ve had enough.

  She sat down at Joe’s desk, an antique secretary still full of pencils and rubber bands Joe had collected as a child, and began to write a letter home. Then she realized she had nothing to say.

  She pictured her house, a small, white-sided square her father had built with the help of his brothers within walking distance of the natural springs. Alligators often sunned themselves on the lawn or found the shade of her mother’s forsythia. Down the road there were boys running glass-bottom boats in the springs and girls with frosted hair and bronzed legs just waiting to be discovered or, if that didn’t work, married.

  And could she go back to it now? Georgie wondered. The bucktoothed boys pressing their faces up against the aquarium glass to get a better look at her legs and breasts? The harsh plastic of the fake mermaid tail? Her mother’s biscuits and her father’s old car and egg salad on Sundays?

  She knew she couldn’t stay at Whale Cay forever. But she sure as hell didn’t want to go home.

  In the early hours of morning, just as the sun was casting an orange wedge of light across the water, Joe climbed into bed, reeking of alcohol and cigarette smoke. She put her arms around Georgie and whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  Georgie didn’t answer, and although she hadn’t planned on responding, began to cry, with Joe’s rough arms across her heaving chest. They fell asleep.

  * * *

  She dreamed of Sarasota.

  * * *

  There was the cinder-block changing room that smelled of bleach and brine. On the door hung a gold star, as if to suggest that the showgirls could claim such status. A bucket of lipsticks sat on the counter, soon to be whisked away to the refrigerator to keep them from melting.

  Georgie pulled on her mermaid tail and slipped into the tank, letting herself fall through the brackish water, down, down to the performance arena. She smiled through the green, salty water and pretended to take a sip of Coca-Cola as customers pressed their noses to the glass walls of the tank. She flipped her rubber fish tail and sucked air from a plastic hose as elegantly as she could, filling her lungs with oxygen until they hurt. A few minnows flitted by, glinting in the hot Florida sun that hung over the water, warming the show tank like a pot of soup.

  Letting the hose drift for just a moment, Georgie executed a series of graceful flips, arching her taut swimmer’s body until it made a circle. She could see the audience clapping and decided she had enough air to flip again. Breathing through the tricks was hard, but a few months into the season, muscle memory took over.

  Next Georgie pretended to brush her long blond hair underwater while one of Sarasota’s many church groups looked on, licking cones of vanilla ice cream, pointing at her.

  How does she use the bathroom? Can she walk in that thing? Hey, sunshine, can I get your number?

  * * *

  The next afternoon, as the sun crested in the cloudless sky, Marlene, Georgie, and Joe had lunch on Femme Beach. Marlene wore an enormous hat and sunglasses and reclined, topless, in a chair. She pushed aside her plate of blackened fish. Joe, after eating her share and some of Marlene’s, kicked off her shoes and joined Georgie in the water, dampening her khaki shorts. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  “Marlene needs a place where she can be herself,” Joe said eventually. “She needs one person she can count on, and I’m that person.”

  “Oh,” Georgie said, placing a palm on top of the calm water. “Is it hard being a movie star?”

  Joe sighed. “She’s been out pushing war bonds, and she’s exhausted. She’s more delicate than she looks. She drinks too much.”

  “You’re worried?”

  “Sometimes she’s not allowed to eat. It’s hard on her nerves.”

  “Is this why the other girls left?” Georgie asked, looking out onto the long stretch of water. “You could have mentioned her, you know. You could have told me.”

  “Try to be open-minded, darling.”

  “I’ll try,” Georgie said, diving into the water, swimming out as far as she ever had, leaving Joe standing knee-deep behind her. Maybe Joe would worry, she thought, but when she looked back, Joe was in a chair, one hand on Marlene’s arm, and their heads were tipped toward each other, oblivious to anything else.

  What exhausted Georgie about Joe’s guests was that they were all-important. And important people made you feel not normal, but unimportant.

  * * *

  That night the other guests went on a dinner cruise on the Mise-en-scène, while Joe entertained Marlene, Georgie, and Phillip. They were seated at a small table on one of the mansion’s many balconies, candles and torches flickering, bugs biting the backs of their necks, wineglasses filled and refilled.

  “How do you like Whale Cay?” Phillip asked Marlene.

  “I prefer the drag balls in Berlin,” she said, in a voice that belied her boredom. “But you know I’ve been coming here longer than you’ve been around?”

  Marlene leaned over her bowl of steamed mussels, inspecting the plate. She pushed them around in the broth with her fork. “Tell me how you got to the island?” she asked Phillip, who, to Georgie, always seemed to be sweating and had a knack for showing up when Joe had her best liquor out.

  “After Yale Divinity School—”

  “He sailed up drunk in a dugout canoe. I threatened to kill him,” Joe interrupted. “Then I built him his own church,” she said proudly, pointing to a small stone temple perched on a cliff, just visible through the brush. It had two rustic windows with pointed arches, almost Gothic, as if it belonged to another century.

  “He sleeps in there,” Joe said.

  “I talk to God,” Phillip said, indignant, spectacles sliding down his nose. He slurped his wine.

  “Is that what you call it?” Joe said, rolling her eyes.

  “What do you have to say about all this?” Marlene asked Georgie.

  “About what?”

  “God.”

  “Why would you ask me?” Georgie felt her face get hot.

  “Why not?”

  Georgie remembered the way sitting in church made her feel pretty, her mother’s hand over hers. She could recall the smell of her mother, the same two dresses she wore to church, her thrifty beauty and dime-store lipstick and rough hands and slow speech and way of life that women like Joe and Marlene didn’t know. Despite Phillip, the church at Whale Cay still had holiness, she thought. Just last week Hannah had sung “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” after Phillip’s sermon, and it had brought tears to Georgie’s eyes, and taken her to a place beyond where she used to go in her hometown church, something past God as she understood Him, something attainable only when living away from everyone and everything she had ever known. Even if He wasn’t a certain thing, He could be a feeling, and maybe she’d felt Him here. That day she’d realized she was happier on Whale Cay than she’d ever been anywhere else. She’d been waiting all her life for something big to happen, and maybe Joe was it.

  “I suppose I don’t know anything about God,” she said. “Nothing I can put into words.”

  “You aren’t old enough to know much yet, are you? You haven’t been pushed to your limits. And you, Joe?” Marlene asked. “What do you know?”

  Joe was quiet. She shook her head, coughed.

  “I guess I had what you’d call a crisis of faith,” she said. “When I drove an ambulance during the First War. I saw things there I didn’t know were possible. I saw—”

  Marlene cupped her hand over Joe’s. “Exactly,” she said. “Those of us who have witnessed the war firsthand—how can you feel another way? We’ve seen the godless landscape.”

  Firsthand, Georgie thought. What was firsthand about seeing a war from a posh hotel room
with security detail, cooing to soldiers from a stage? Firsthand was her brother Hank, sixteen months dead, who’d been found malnourished and shot on the beach in Tarawa.

  “That’s exactly when you need to let Him in,” Phillip said, glassy-eyed.

  “You have a convenient type of righteousness,” Joe said.

  “Perhaps.”

  “I don’t see how a priest can lack commitment in these times,” Marlene said, scratching the back of her neck, eyes flashing.

  Phillip rose, flustered. “If you’ll excuse me, one of our native women is in labor,” he said, “and I must attend.” He turned to Joe. “Celia’s been going for hours now.”

  “Her body knows what to do,” Joe said, lighting a cigarette.

  Joe and Marlene smoked. Georgie poured herself another glass of wine, finding the silence excruciating. Nearby a peahen screamed from a roost in one of the small trees that flanked the balcony. The island had been a bird sanctuary before Joe bought it, and exotic birds still fished from the shore.

  “Grab a sweater,” Joe instructed, standing up, stamping out her cigarette. “I want to take you girls racing.”

  The water was shiny and black as Joe pulled Marlene and Georgie onto a small boat shaped like a torpedo. It sat low on the water and had room for only two, but Georgie and Marlene were thin and the three women pressed together across the leather bench seat.

  “Leave your drinks on the dock,” Joe warned. “It’s not that kind of joyride.”

  Not five minutes later they were ripping through the water, Georgie’s hair blown straight back, spit flying from her mouth, her blue eyes watering. At first she was petrified. She felt as if the wind was exploring her body, inflating the fabric of her dress, tunneling through her nostrils, throat, and chest. A small sound escaped her mouth but was thrown backward, lost, muted. She looked down and saw Marlene’s jaw set into a tight line, her knuckles white as her long fingers gripped the edge of the seat. Joe pressed on, speeding through the blackness until it looked like nothingness, and Georgie’s fear became a rush.

  The bottom of the boat slapped the water, skipped over it, cut through it, and it felt as though it might capsize, flip over, skid across the surface, dumping them, breaking their bodies. Georgie’s teeth began to hurt and she bit her tongue by mistake. The taste of blood filled her mouth but she felt nothing but bliss, jarred into another state of being, of forgetting, a kind of high.

  “Enough,” Marlene yelled, grabbing Joe’s shoulder. “Enough! Stop.”

  “Keep going,” Georgie yelled. “Don’t stop.”

  Joe laughed and slowed the boat, cutting the engine until there was silence, only the liquid sound of the water lapping against the side of the craft.

  “Take me back to the shore,” Marlene snapped.

  Georgie stood up, nearly losing her balance.

  “What are you doing?” Joe demanded.

  “Going for a swim,” Georgie said.

  Georgie kicked off her sandals, unbuttoned her sundress, leaving it in a pool on the deck of the boat. She dove into the black water, felt her body cut through it like a missile.

  “We’re a mile offshore! Get back in the boat!” Joe shouted.

  Joe cranked the engine and circled, looking for Georgie, but everything was dark and Georgie stayed still so as not to be found, swimming underwater, splashless.

  “Leave me,” she yelled out. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re being absurd. This is childish!”

  Eventually, after Marlene’s repeated urging, Joe gave up and headed for shore.

  Georgie oriented herself, looking up occasionally at the faint lights on the island, the only thing that kept her from swimming out into the open sea. It felt good to scare Joe. To do what she wanted to do. To scare herself. To do the one thing she was good at, to dull all of her thoughts with the mechanics of swimming, the motion of kicking her feet, rotating her arms, cutting through the water, dipping her face into the warm sea and coming up for air, exerting herself, exhausting her body, giving everything over to heart, blood, muscle, bone.

  Continued. . .

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  Birds of a Lesser Paradise

  Megan Mayhew Bergman

  INTRODUCTION

  Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise captures the surprising moments when the pull of our biology becomes evident, when love collides with good sense, and when our attachments to an animal or wild place can’t be denied. In “Housewifely Arts,” a single mother and her son drive hours to track down an African Gray Parrot that can mimic her dead mother’s voice. A population control activist faces the ultimate conflict between loyalty to the environment and maternal desire in “Yesterday’s Whales.” And in the title story, a lonely naturalist allows an attractive stranger to lead her and her aging father on a hunt for an elusive woodpecker. As intelligent as they are moving, the stories in Birds of a Lesser Paradise are alive with emotion, wit, and insight into the impressive power that nature has over all of us.

  TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. How much of a role does nature play in the lives of the heroines of Mayhew Bergman’s stories? How do their relationships with the natural world affect their decisions?

  2. Whether it is an African Gray parrot or a lemur, animals are central to each of these stories. How do the characters identify with or distinguish themselves from animals? Do any of the characters share certain qualities with the animals described?

  3. In “Housewifely Arts,” what did her mother’s parrot represent to the narrator while her mother was still alive? How did the parrot’s importance change after her mother passed away?

  4. How did you react to the veterinarian husband in “The Cow That Milked Herself” examining his pregnant wife in the same way he examines animals? Do you think his clinical take on his wife’s pregnancy reveals any universal truths about motherhood?

  5. “For centuries people had used the swamp to hide from their problems,” says the narrator of the title story. Does Mae use the swamp to hide from her own problems? If so, how? How does her father’s scare in the swamp change her priorities?

  6. Lila feels ugly and damaged after her face is disfigured in “Saving Face,” and goes to great lengths to isolate herself. How do you think her experience with Romulus and the sickly calf will change her? Can she reclaim the person who she was, despite her new challenges?

  7. Lauren, the population control activist in “Yesterday’s Whales,” has a crisis of faith when she becomes pregnant. Have you ever experienced an event that’s challenged your long-held convictions? Is there any way to reconcile two wildly different points of view?

  8. Do you think the narrator of “Another Story She Won’t Believe” realizes the mess she’s made? What do you think propelled her to self-destruct? Do you think her treatment of the lemurs represents an insurmountable character flaw?

  9. What does it take to forgive yourself after an act of negligence? What kind of mother do you think the narrator of “The Urban Coop” will turn out to be, if she can become pregnant?

  10. “My mother once told me: Never underestimate avoidance as an effective coping mechanism,” says the narrator of “The Right Company.” Is her retreat to the small Southern town of Abbet’s Cove an effective way to deal with the collapse of her marriage? When she tries to free Mussolini’s dog, the animal refuses to make an escape. What does this juxtaposition say about the narrator’s circumstances?

  11. In “Night Hunting,” a young girl must come to terms with her mother’s declining health. How does her walk through the cold Vermont night force her to confront her fears? Do the ever-threatening coyotes represent a more primal danger than her mother’s cancer?

  12. Could a hunter and an animal lover ever have a functional relationship? Do you think the woman in “Every Vein a Tooth” uses her relationship with animals to avoid the messiness of human intimacy? Or does her extreme devotion to the animals she rescues come from a purer, more optim
istic place?

  13. “The Artificial Heart” is the only story in Birds of a Lesser Paradise that’s set in the future. How do you think it fits in with the rest of the stories in the collection? Do you think it’s a natural impulse to want to prolong life, even if the quality of that life becomes less than ideal? Or do we become lesser versions of ourselves if we try to cheat death?

  14. The narrator of “The Two-Thousand-Dollar Sock” is a fighter, as is her husband, and ultimately her dog, Vito, who attacks a bear to protect the family. Do you think humans have a similar compulsion to fight and defend?

  ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB

  1. Find a local animal shelter where all members of your book club can volunteer and have some fun in the process.

  2. The swampland setting of the story “Birds of a Lesser Paradise” is exotic, but bird-watching is a fun pastime that can be done just about anywhere. Get a few pairs of binoculars and head into the great outdoors—record what you see and cross- reference with a bird-watching guidebook.

  3. “The Right Company” takes place mostly in a mom-and-pop restaurant in Eastern North Carolina, where the narrator’s food writer friend explores Southern comfort food with glee. Prepare your own Southern-inspired comfort food and invite your book club over for a meal!

  A CONVERSATION WITH MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN

  YOU LIVE WITH A VARIETY OF ANIMALS ON A SMALL FARM IN VERMONT, AND YOUR HUSBAND IS A VETERINARIAN. HOW HAVE YOUR INTERACTIONS WITH ANIMALS INFORMED YOUR WRITING OF THESE STORIES?

  Interacting with animals draws me into a physical world, which is where I want to be. I’ve always been an animal person, and my husband is basically an enabler—now I can get access to all the one-eyed cats and neurotic beagles I want. In fact, we kind of maintain a secular, downtrodden version of Noah’s ark in our farmhouse. But instead of beautiful beasts, we have decrepit, incontinent dogs, rescue goats, and vicious cats marauding around.