Avis’s daughter’s eyes were overwide; she was speaking too loudly. She’d told her mother that she and this Shawn—who was just a friend, nothing else (he looked away, over one narrow shoulder, blinking at the bright lawns. He was fourteen at most, Avis calculated)—had sat on the banks of the Fishbeins’ yard, just above the stone steps to the water, watching this display in the dark. “And it was just, you know, it was all like warm and soft”—Felice had put her hands up to her face, calming a bit—“and we fell asleep. And the next thing we knew, Mrs. Fishbein was out there in her nightie. ‘Your mother’s going crazy!’ ” Felice mimicked.
Avis listened with tears standing in her eyes. Brian was too furious to come out of the house. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Still, they didn’t actually punish Felice: perhaps they should have? Brian wanted to ground her but Avis talked him out of it, saying, That’s the problem—we tried to control her, so she rebelled.
Avis didn’t know what to make of her daughter’s fantastic story. Was she on drugs? Avis stood next to her and ran her fingers through Felice’s silky hair. Her daughter’s breath and hair smelled clean—not a hint of beer or cigarettes.
Felice seemed to ground herself—coming straight home from school, sleeping for hours over the weekend. Stanley moved through the house silently, as if around a convalescent. Gradually they all relaxed, and things seemed mostly normal again. Three months later, when Felice was thirteen, she went to another party. She’d laughed on her way out the door, swearing she’d be home by ten latest, kissing her father and saying, mock-serious, “Don’t worry, Daddy.” She was missing for three nights in a row.
Avis remembers the three nights and days without her daughter—the sheer panic of driving around, searching. At home, she couldn’t sleep more than ten minutes at a time; instead she stood at her marble slab rolling pie crusts that shattered and crumpled, filling the freezer with crusts lined with flour and parchment, stacked in towers. When Felice finally reappeared in the driveway, it felt like taking a breath after being buried alive. Avis recalls how Felice stared out of the backseat of the cruiser, fixing her parents with a sharp, red gaze. She hadn’t meant to come home that time—not ever. The police had found her with some older kids in a nightclub on Hollywood Beach. She was wearing clothes Avis had never seen before—a mesh blouse that adhered to her skin and a pair of faded jeans cinched with a belt of leather petals like a daisy chain. Avis wept while a white-haired officer with a weathered, kindly face stood in their front door talking to her and Brian about social services and family counseling, and their daughter stared out of the police car, over their heads. She begged Felice to tell them why she’d stayed away. Felice stared as if she wasn’t there at all.
Avis had wished desperately at that moment that she’d grown up with a proper mother—a real one—who would’ve shown her what to do—not the shadow figure, muttering over books and papers, two pencils tucked into her hair. Avis’s mother had raised her in a state of benign neglect, and would scarcely have noticed if Avis had stayed out all night for a week or a month. After the police had taken their statements, the officers left and Felice followed her parents back into the house. Avis had closed the front door, and Brian grabbed Felice by one of her winglike arms and swatted her, hard, twice with the flat of his palm against the seat of her jeans.
Avis gulped a high, startled suck of air, and watched her daughter’s face broaden, as if she were about to burst into tears, and then tighten, masklike, into something unfamiliar. Avis didn’t blame Brian exactly—or at least not in the way he assumed she did—not for the spanking. It seemed possible in fact, at times like that, that she really did still love him. She blamed him only for making it so plain to all of them—the gesture so furious and despairing—how ineffectual they were. Felice had started leaving them already: neither one knew how to stop it, neither knew why it was happening.
AVIS LOOKS PAST the waiter’s shoulder. About to surrender the table, she takes a last look at the crowded sidewalk. In that moment, taking in the flux of hair and eyes and talking, the hands and dresses, all at once, a rush of pure, incandescent relief. It floods her body, melting away her bones. There: emerging from the crowd, that brisk, unmistakable, long-boned walk, tall and slim, the fingers curling absently against her sides.
Avis releases the cookie tin and places her hand on the iron chair arms, letting her breath deepen, pushing up, uncurling from her tight hunch. At last. Another electrical cascade of release as she moves forward. At the same moment, the waiter appears, interposing himself between Felice and Avis. “Know what you want yet?”
She flinches. For a moment, the day seems to tilt: Avis sees green and silver leaves, a lace of cirrus clouds, a bit of linen-colored umbrella. Her breath and pulse knock in her cranium. Avis lifts her arms, moving toward the girl, but Felice looks so shocked that Avis halts midway, her arms frozen in the air. The girl’s eyes are wide; whites show around the irises—Avis sucks in a tiny sip of air, trying to smile, because (of course!) it seems that this is not Felice after all, but just another lovely wraith of a girl, a stranger minding her own business. Avis’s lips tremble as she smiles; she says, “Oh, I just—I beg your pardon. I thought you were my daughter . . . I’m so—I’m—” But the girl turns her body in a smooth, evasive manuever, flipping her hair through her fingers, reentering the procession of shoppers.
Avis watches her go: blood rushes to her face, stinging as if she’d been slapped. She snaps, “You aren’t even that pretty.”
Two bronzed women, dark, sprayed hair piled on their heads, look up as Avis sinks back to her table. She notices the waiter watching her from several tables away, and returns his stare until he looks away.
AVIS HAD AN IDEA of how things were going to be, of her and her daughter, their fingers in a pâte sucrée, rolling, cutting out the shapes of cupids and sea horses and dragons. But Felice was uninterested. The blithe girl ran around the house, light-spirited as a firefly, calling her friends, lying out by the pool, or playing video games. It was Stanley who came into the kitchen to help Avis shell walnuts and separate eggs.
Her own mother had openly disapproved when Avis had announced that, instead of college, she wanted to attend the culinary institute to become a pastry chef.
“That’s a girls’ slum,” Geraldine had said. “All that sugar and decoration. Just a blue-collar job with a frilly apron. You’ll never get half the respect or the pay of a real chef. If you can’t be bothered with an education, at least learn to cook.”
Years later, Avis sat on the couch, her own daughter’s head in her lap, hair spilling like ink over her leg. They’d had a daylong immersion in shopping at the mall in Pinecrest, then tea cakes (crude, coarsely frosted) at the French-Cuban bakery on the Miracle Mile. Avis combed Felice’s hair with her fingers, murmuring, “Who’s my beautiful girl?”
Felice smiled at her mother, barely shifting her attention from the TV cartoons.
Stanley emerged from the kitchen; his arms like twigs in the oversized oven mitts. At twelve, his hair was glossy, his small face pale with thought. Oh, Avis loved him too, but she’d had other plans for her son: she tried to direct his attention toward his father—a lawyer—she murmured the word to him like an incantation. But Stanley persisted in the kitchen, performing the small yet demanding apprentice’s tasks she set for him—removing the skin from piles of almonds, grating snowy hills of lemon zest, the nightly sweeping of the kitchen floor and sponging of metal shelves. He didn’t seem to mind: every day after school, he’d lean over the counter, watching her experiment with combinations—shifting flavors like the beads in a kaleidoscope—burnt sugar, hibiscus, rum, espresso, pear: dessert as a metaphor for something unresolvable. It was nothing like the slapdashery of cooking. Baking, to Avis, was no less precise than chemistry: an exquisite transfiguration. Every night, she lingered in the kitchen, analyzing her work, jotting notes, describing the way ingredients nestled: a slim layer of black chocolate hidden at the bottom of a praline tart, t
he essence of lavender stirred into a bowl of preserved wild blueberries. Stanley listened to his mother think out loud: he asked her questions and made suggestions—like mounding lemon meringue between layers of crisp pecan wafers—such a success that her corporate customers ordered it for banquets and company retreats.
On the day Avis is thinking of, she sat in the den where they watched TV, letting her hand swim over the silk of her daughter’s hair, imagining a dessert pistou of blackberry, crème fraîche, and nutmeg, in which floated tiny vanilla croutons. Felice was her audience, Avis’s picky eater—difficult to please. Her “favorites” changed capriciously and at times, it seemed, deliberately, so that after Avis set out what once had been, in Felice’s words, “the best ever”—say, a miniature roulade Pavlova with billows of cream and fresh kumquat—Felice would announce that she was now “tired” of kumquats.
Felice sat up as Stanley approached. Avis had noted that Felice was always pleased to eat whatever her big brother offered. Stanley wasn’t looking at Felice, though, but at Avis. “It’s a castagnaccio—I found some stuff about it online. And I tried a few things . . .” His voice tapered off modestly. He held out a plate with a low, suede-gold cake. Avis had struggled to conjure up a lighter chestnut cake: she realized that—while they’d been shopping—Stanley had reconfigured the laborious recipe. She cut a sliver for Felice and herself and they ate with their fingers while Stanley watched.
The cake had a delicate, nearly vaporous texture that released a startling flavor. There was something, some ingredient, that tugged at the chestnut and lemon and opened the taste on her tongue—the chimera, as Avis thought of it—the secret in the maze of ingredients.
“Mmmm, Stanley—so good.” Felice was already cutting another piece.
Avis took another bite as Stanley waited. She could barely grasp her own response, the plummeting sensation that seemed to plunge through her. Why couldn’t the boy stay out of her kitchen? She wanted him to be more than a food worker. He didn’t realize what punishing work it could be—hot, monotonous, hazardous: it was true manual labor, but magazines and TV dressed it up in glamour. She wanted him to use his mind, not his back. “What is it?” she asked quietly. “A savory herb. Basil?”
“Some basil and some rosemary.” He averted his gaze, still too tentative to smile—as if he were afraid he’d done wrong. Felice was watching her.
Avis nodded, eyes closed. She wanted to praise his ingenuity, to say how proud she was. Why did that simple act elude her? She opened her mouth, struggling for words; she had said finally, “It’s fine, but it isn’t quite right.”
He took the rest of the cake back to the kitchen and disposed of it.
Five years later, after Felice was gone, Stanley built a raised bed in the backyard and grew herbs and vegetables. He worked in grocery stores. He cooked dinner for his parents—vegetable stews and roasted chicken—trying to make sure Avis in particular ate something beside cookies and tarts. He avoided sugar. He stopped baking.
THE CELL RINGS AGAIN Nina. There is the time stamp: she has to read it twice before she understands: 2:53. She’s been waiting for three hours.
Avis lays her hands and phone flat on the iron-grid table, gazing forward like a woman at a séance, staring past the streetlamp post and the gang of stick-shouldered boys with skateboards and the enormous black-and-white mural for Abercrombie & Fitch. When she recognizes the dark bounce of Nina’s hair, she feels mostly numb. Nina is overbearing, even caustic and punitive, but she has never said—like several others, “Oh well! They all eventually leave home, anyway, don’t they?” (Once, at a dinner party, a snow bird from Cincinnati, upon hearing about Felice running away, remarked dryly, “Lucky you.”)
Avis can see her assistant composing herself, chin lifting. Nina approaches the table with one hand on her chest. “I’m so sorry, dear,” she says softly. “When you didn’t answer the phone, I just—I thought I’d better . . .”
“Oh, she didn’t come, I guess.” A tiny smile on her lips. “Oh well.”
“Ah, sweetie.” Nina touches her shoulder, but Avis stands.
“No, it’s . . . No—no. It’s nothing.” Avis glances around for the waiter. “I should have—I don’t know.” Evidently she’d outlasted his shift. She can’t remember if she’d paid for the tea. Avis refuses to say that perhaps her daughter forgot, she got busy. These were the things she’d said last time while Nina looked at her with those kind, terrible eyes. Brian refuses to go to these meetings at all. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, he says, voice bone-dry, desiccated by anger. So it’s been nearly five years since he’s last seen his daughter. Stanley hasn’t seen his sister in that time either, as far as she knows. And ten months, now, for Avis. Not so bad in comparison with five years. Really, not bad.
Ten months, she reflects as she follows Nina. For some reason this is all she can hold in her head, like the refrain to a song. Ten months, as they pass the French bakery franchise, ten months, as they cross the street by the theater. They enter the parking structure, the air dim as a chapel’s. Perhaps if she clings to this clot of thought, it will hold her. Not so bad. She climbs into Nina’s big, empty car. Beyond the open ramparts of the garage, Avis sees the sky lowering, the damp air growing heavier. She will try not to wonder where Felice is: where she goes when it rains. She can’t be that far away.
Felice
OH FUCK THEM, WHAT DO THEY KNOW?
Felice is sick of the Green House, its stink of cat pee and old pot and cooking oil, and a kind of rot—as if losing youth or hope or just some idea of a future would have a smell. All the kids and bums and “musicians” who wander in and out of that place carry that odor somewhere on their clothes or hair. This morning when Felice wakes on the couch in the back bedroom, her stomach tightens and buckles at the smell.
She props herself up, surveying the room: two kids on the floor, another sleeping sitting up at her feet, his skinny neck tipped back against the cushion, mouth sloped open and a thread of saliva escaping from one corner—a skinhead in black jeans and lace-up boots. She’s awakened before to find other kids who’ve stumbled into the same room or corner as her: most of them are just looking for the comfort of another body: someone to crash next to, to feel a little safer through the night.
Some of them sit in circles at night, like around a campfire, in the immense, trashed living room (there’s even a big fireplace where they cook things sometimes, but eventually the room fills with smoke and they have to stop). Mostly they’re kids like Felice—a lot of them even younger—some like eleven and twelve years old. There are a few old people too—guys in their thirties—and those are the worst with all the psychologizing and talk, talk, talk. That’s all those guys like to do, suck on their wet joints, eyes watering, discussing their stupid ideas of how to take down the government or break into the mansions out on Star Island or Key Biscayne or South Gables. And Felice knows that some of them grew up in palatial homes on South Hibiscus Drive with private docks and gates and servants, and that many of the worst and dirtiest and smelliest kids will inherit enormous trust funds in five or ten years.
Not Felice.
She moves slowly, slipping on her backless sneakers, lifting her feet one at a time over the first skinhead, slumped on the floor beside the couch. But then she does something stupid—she knows it’s stupid even as she does it, yet she can’t resist lifting the half-pack of cigarettes from the lap of the propped-up sleeper. She doesn’t even smoke anymore, but it’s taken her longer to break the habit of stealing—every now and then she slips back into it—and smokes are useful and tradable among the street-poor. She might’ve gotten away with it too, but she’s hasty and the flimsy pack crackles in her hand. Instantly the skinhead seizes her hand—fingers, actually—crushing them together. Felice sucks a yelp back, furious with herself for getting caught.
“Look at you.” The skinhead’s name is Axe. These guys all have names like that—“Raver,” “Dread.” They hang out together—a tribe of thir
ty or forty massively stupid and destructive boys—Felice can’t keep track—their names and faces interchangeable. “So what the fuck is going on up in here?”
Pain knifes through the small bones in her fingers; it’s like one of those paper finger traps—the more she struggles, the more tightly he squeezes. “No.” She deliberately keeps her voice low. “Please, just . . . please, please . . .”
He pulls her closer, smiling to reveal gray translucence covering his teeth; she inhales an acrid effluvium—as if he’s been drinking vinegar. “You’re so fucking polite—please, please,” he minces. “Don’t you know not to steal, girlface? Someone might fucking tear your hand off.”
Felice does some brisk calculations: it’s possible he’ll just hassle her awhile if she plays along. But playing along carries its own risks. At that moment of hesitation, he gives a wild bark of laughter, grabs her free hand, and fake-bites it. She feels his teeth graze her knuckles, the slime of his tongue: she yanks her hand away. “My boyfriend won’t like that!” she says breathlessly, resisting the urge to wipe off her hand. Her heart pounds in her voice, but she keeps going. “He’s super jealous. He doesn’t like men touching me.” She used the word “men” deliberately, as a kind of flattery: she doesn’t know if Axe is smart enough to call her bluff or if he’ll just view this as a challenge. He seems to connect with some thought that lifts his features. His shredded lips part, and again, she sees the gray gleam. “What fucking bullshit boyfriend is that now?” he asks loudly enough that one of the other skinheads stirs and groans.
“Emerson,” she says quickly.
He scrutinizes her face for a long moment. “Emerson doesn’t have any girlfriends.” But his voice lowers. “Especially not you.” He releases her crushed hand. The cigarette pack bounces on the floor as she folds her hand against her chest, a furtive slide along her eyes. She backs away, stepping over a fat skinhead sacked out on the floor, his throat vibrating with a snore. She picks open the door and doesn’t look back as she slips out of the room.
Birds of Paradise Page 3
