She tricked them—Avis thinks—every single time. They’d relax the curfew, relax their vigilance, enjoy a week, a few months, without incident. And just when Avis would tell herself (she wanted to believe it so badly) that their nightmare was ending—it would happen again.
Two months after Felice’s thirteenth birthday, Avis woke in the vinyl rocker in the den with dread like a slickness covering her skin. She knew, even as she was waking, that things weren’t right because she was in the vinyl chair—it sweated and stuck to her skin; it was where she waited and slept whenever Felice was missing. It was an uncomfortable chair so it helped her stay up late and wake early and it was a punishment place—for failing to keep her daughter at home.
Brian materialized out of the powdery dark, a pale face in gray pajamas, like a figure in a nightmare. The house felt hollow to Avis, despite the presence of husband and son. It seemed that some menace was lurking in the hidden corners, something worse than mere emptiness. “Darling,” he whispered. “Please. Bed.”
“Where is she?” Avis asked, almost conversationally. She stared at the blackly glinting night outside: she’d left the windows unshuttered just in case she might catch a hint of someone in the street, a single footfall, a child’s breath.
“You have to rest,” Brian said. “This isn’t helping anything.”
“She’s never stayed away this long before.” Avis’s voice sounded wrong.
“She’ll come back—she always does.”
Avis looked at her husband: it was like nothing she’d ever felt before—almost crystalline in its hardness and acuity. Grains in her blood, between her internal organs: her voice full of slivers as she said, “She’s only thirteen years old.”
Brian tried to put his arms around her, but Avis straightened up, turning deliberately toward the windows. She’d slept for an hour at most—the wall clock said 3 a.m. But Avis was trained to these black morning bakery hours. She went to the kitchen, shook out an apron, and pried the lid from one of the thigh-high canisters of flour. Deep, fluting emotions were a form of weakness. She’d seen the softening in her work over the years, she’d started making the lazy, homey treats like apple crumble, chocolate muffins, butterscotch pudding, and lemon bars. They were fast and cheap and they pleased her children. But she’d trained at one of the best pastry programs in the country. Her teachers were French. She’d learned the classical method of rolling fondant, of making real buttercream with its spun-candy base and beating the precise fraction of egg into the pâte à choux. She knew how to blow sugar into glassine nests and birds and fountains, how to construct seven-tiered wedding cakes draped with sugar curtains copied from the tapestries at Versailles. When the other students interned at the Four Seasons, the French Laundry, and Dean & Deluca, Avis had apprenticed with a botanical illustrator in the department of horticulture at Cornell, learning to steady her hand and eye, to work with the tip of the brush, to dissect and replicate in tinted royal icing and multihued glazes the tiniest pieces of stamen, pistil, and rhizome. She studied Audubon and Redoute. At the end of her apprenticeship, her mentor, who pronounced the work “extraordinary and heartbreaking,” arranged an exhibition of Avis’s pastries at the school. “Remembering the Lost Country” was a series of cakes decorated in perfectly rendered sugar olive branches, cross sections of figs, and frosting replicas of lemon leaves. Her mother attended and pronounced the effect amusant.
It was this training, the discipline, her instructors’ crisply starched linen hats and jackets, which she summoned in that seesawing darkness. She was ill, unbalanced from lack of sleep and food, and raw from crying. Avis yanked the apron strings twice around her waist: she ate a dry scone. She asked Brian, “Please, would you keep the boy out of here?” Then she dusted her pastry slab with jets of flour and began the daylong process of making mille-feuilles. She drove the flour and sugar before her on the slab, drew its vapors into her lungs, knowing that this work—the most challenging and imperial of pastry creation—might have the power to save her.
Avis remembers that time as a feeling, the sensation of entering a long tunnel: her dreams, when she slept, were night-curved; they wound around her. The police had urged them to “carry on” with their lives. Her reimmersion into classical baking stopped her from obsessing over her daughter’s possible whereabouts, whether she was hurt or hungry or in danger. Her peripheral vision burned away cleanly, like the edges of a crème brûlée. She built her business, garnered awards, had her photograph in magazines, was approached by publishers asking for her cookbook. She could charge almost any price and customers seemed to consider it a privilege to pay it. For a year, then two and three, she couldn’t quite see her husband, son, or assistants. It was like being a deep-sea diver—the cold pressure on her body, her hands waving through frigid darkness.
Sometimes, while she worked, she revisited memories of the prelapsarian days with Felice, of shopping and talking. After a morning of strolling through the open-air mall, they went to the café and settled down to cups of consommé and airy popovers with strawberry butter. Felice sat across from Avis, a black velvet choker around her neck, her attention drawn to the young women who entered the tearoom wearing expensive, formfitting clothes. Mother and daughter would discuss the outfits—which styles would look the most becoming on Felice. Avis’s mother was amused by their old-fashioned domesticity. She told Avis, “You’re teaching the girl to be an odalisque!”
After Felice had gone, Avis would admit to herself—much to her shame—that there were occasions when she felt as if she hadn’t known her daughter as she should have. Among the happiest memories were more difficult, even confounding recollections: changes that had come over Felice after the time she’d taken to her bed. How she stopped laughing. How the light had seemed to go out in her face. Depression? Drugs? One night at the dinner table, Avis asked if Felice was feeling all right.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. That was her answer. Avis turns it around and around, this memory. She has considered that tiny exchange many times over the years; each time she does is like running her fingertip along a blade, testing to see if it still draws blood. Because she didn’t ask Felice anything more. She put her daughter to bed and placed a cool washcloth on her head and read to her from The Magic Garden, but she never asked her what was the matter. Why didn’t she—Avis asks herself now. Why didn’t I ask her?
Neither she nor Brian knew what to do with this wordless, unsmiling girl. When she began running away, Brian responded by becoming more rigid, moving up her bedtime, insisting they eat breakfast and dinner together, insisting she continue her violin lessons long after the point she’d lost interest. Brian had great faith in discipline—as if Felice could be saved by principles alone.
SHE STANDS STILL in the kitchen; her head is heavy and a damp warmth starts in the quick of her spine, spreading up through her skin, capillaries dilating. Typically the meetings with Felice turn her jittery, nerves jangling in her body for hours afterward. Now, however, she must physically fight the craving to crawl back into bed. Avis holds on to the wide counter that runs along the north wall: it feels as if microscopic earthquakes run through her arms and legs, and she seems to hear blood move in a rumbling twist through her head. This corner, with its window overlooking the necklace plant and the old avocado and overgrown garden out back, was where Stanley liked to sit while she was working. He was so sensitive as a child. He had too many questions, and he watched her too closely, as if certain that she would try to run away from him. The way she used to watch her own mother escaping into her books. He gave away his toys: once, he came home from school without his shirt and belt. He worried like an old man over people. When he was five, he walked into the kitchen, his voice rusty from crying, and told his mother that Andrew, a boy in his class, was eating rotten cakes.
That was Avis’s term for Ding Dongs, Yodels, Ho Hos, Zingers—any of the artificial desserts that lined supermarket walls. Stanley had always intuitively grasped the difference between s
uch things and, say, a vanilla mousse roulade. He admitted to giving his pastries to Andrew. A year later, he wanted Avis to provision him with enough éclairs for his school. In junior high, he began to scowl at her assistants, complaining that they didn’t knead or measure properly—and it was true, they were sloppy. He often appeared in the kitchen, taking notes, making caramel, at times when he should have been in class.
When he moved out to attend—and drop out of—college, and then to open his market, she began to feel differently about him. She missed him: not in the way she pined for Felice, but quietly, a steadily building sensation. Mostly they talk only when Brian calls him, then she’ll come on the line, her voice furtive and supplicant: conscious of old transgressions. The phone seems to breathe with a kind of crinkling static—the long pauses between them. These days, he is busy and successful. She is proud of him, of course, though there is something in her that holds aloof from the notion of a market—the gulf between a shopkeeper and an artisan.
She places her hand on the phone, breathes deeply, trying to think of a reason for calling him. “Not now,” she tells herself sternly. “Not until you’ve done some solid work.” She will not let herself cry. Crying cracks you open. Better to cry over pointless things, she thinks, like burning the butter, than things that matter. Or things you can’t pin down. “Justify your existence a little.” Her voice is eerie in the still kitchen. Justify your existence—that sounds good and hard, like something Stanley might say to her.
Avis goes to her desk: there’s a fat folder of work orders for macarons and petits fours for corporate banquets and graduations—tiresome, debilitating, pointless cakes! She lowers her face into the blankness of her palms. It comes to her, clear as thought: a familiar repetitive rasp that swoops into a human register. A woman crying or laughing, but in an eerily regulated way. She lifts her face from her hands, gazing around. Rising like a sleepwalker, she moves through the house, tracking the sound, then opens the French doors at the rear of the dining room. Their backyard was built for children—a grassy expanse containing shaggy old gardens, a kidney-shaped pool, a green rope hammock—bordered by a copse of coconut palms and cycads, dense bamboo, a young palmyra palm, and the rambling avocado. A mild wind has come up, rustling the foliage. The weird repeating noise is louder outside but less objectionable. Avis circles the pool and walks to the limit of their property, to the palms. She pushes the fronds back and peeps between the wicklike trunks. Their backyard looks into the Mastersons’ on the right, the Regaleses’ directly behind, and on the left, the Calvadoses’. The Calvados had retired to Savannah and rented their house to a professor at UM and his family, but the man had confided to Avis last fall that they were sick of the heat and hurricanes and planned to return to Asheville.
It occurs to Avis, as she pushes aside more fronds, that it’s been a long time since she’s been in her own backyard. She steps onto the knuckly base of the Calvadoses’ avocado tree and, looking through the palms into their yard, she sees an array of brilliant orchids, vibrant and implausible as daubs of paint, knobby roots hanging from the eaves of the house in halved coconut husks. A rope clothesline stretches from the corner of the house (Gables code infraction) lipped with hinged and straight wooden pins, displaying white underwear, shirts, and an ecru dress, wash-worn and translucent in the sun. The musty smell of the orchids reaches her along with that of a gardenia—sweetness with a sharp, peppery center. Avis is mesmerized by the lines of the glowing dress, the rustling undulance of the trees. She steps deeper into the shrubbery and palms, nearly into the neighbors’ yard, and then she spots the big cage.
It’s near the rear of the house, maybe six feet high, a bronze birdcage with a domed top—beautiful and baroque yet roughly wrought. Inside, hunkered down, casting back and forth, a wet black shadow. It shifts to and fro, sidestepping. It lifts its head, so Avis catches a flash of beak, and makes its grating prehistoric noise. Its feathers ruffle up, then sleek back into a blue-black reflection. Its rasping elides into eerie human noise—somewhere between a sob and laugh—then rises to a piercing frequency that sails through Avis’s body. The bird breaks off, goes back into that hunkered, mad, side-stepping motion, lifts its feathers, smooths them, and begins to render a pitch-perfect imitation of a little boy shrieking, sounding to Avis like, Non! Non! Donnez-moi! Donnez-moi! Avis flinches, rankled by the screaming. Who keeps such a bird in a cage? Big as a monkey. Huge and slick and oily.
She pushes aside the reedy palms and steps into the Calvadoses’ backyard. The shrieking bird breaks off, apparently shocked into silence by this figure bursting from the trees, then reverts to a frenetic shuffling motion. “Uh, uh, uh, uh!” it cries, as if stumped. It’s hard to see the creature clearly through the curving bars of its cage, but Avis notices a bit of bright orange on the beak: a mynah. “Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!” it goes on, scrabbling and sobbing, a small, desolate minotaur.
Avis strides past the cage, her mind compressed into something murderous. How long has she been listening to this racket anyway? The noise is enough to drive anyone mad . . . she moves along the side of the house, noting the blistered paint, warped windowsills, frowsy, intricate weeds popping up between the bricks of the walkway. She doesn’t remember the house looking so unkempt when the professor was living there.
As she walks to the front of the house, however, it occurs to Avis that this is not the socially accepted way to approach a stranger’s home. If anyone is home—perhaps washing dishes, looking out the back window—they might well notice her creeping around in her apron and clogs. Avis stops in the neighbors’ front yard. Had she been about to walk right up and knock on that door? In that instant, all she can imagine is how horrified Brian would be, his concern with the opinions of others, and how he loves to remind her: “You might not want to deal with the public, but I do.” Unnerved, Avis touches her hair, proceeds to the sidewalk in front of the house, makes a right, and walks all the way down the block to Salzedo as if she’s just out for a stroll. She makes a left on Salzedo, another left onto Viscaya, and goes home.
THE NOISE CYCLES through a repertoire. There are the sounds of the child’s cries, sharp as chips of ice. Then, somehow more intolerably, the sounds of a woman’s tremulous laughter that transform into sobbing, then back to laughter: thick, raw sounds. Avis squints into the light.
Propped on a small easel she uses for orders and ingredient lists is a request for a gâteau Saint-Honoré bearing the legend Together, Toujours in scrolling Edwardian script. She attempts to calm herself with her work. It’s a nicely time-consuming cake, though Avis finds it distasteful to deface her pastries with these slogans—even Happy Birthday—using fine creations as billboards. Today’s order, from a Cutler Road matriarch, is an anniversary commandment—till death do us . . . Avis embarks on the journey of the cake which will require both the work of pâte feuilletée and the pâte à choux, a carefully timed caramel, a crème patissière, as well as a crème Chantilly. She has barely begun the long folding and kneading for the puff—her fingers already reddened from the chilled slab—when the bird noise seems to reach a new crescendo. Avis kneads, then overkneads—the sound like a finger rubbing at a sore spot, a fiery shrieking: Fie! Fie! Fie! Fiiiiiiiiiie!
What was it Brian was always talking about? Strategy, organization, plan of attack? “Plan of attack,” she says out loud, staring at the windows. “Plan, plan, plan.”
She goes to the computer on her little desk, switches to New Document, and begins writing:
Dear Neighbor:
Welcome to the neighborhood. Obviously ours is a “close-knit” neighborhood—there isn’t a lot of space between our houses! While I’m certain you mean no harm, I have to tell you, when you put your parrot outside in the morning, it begins making a lot of noise. Surely the bird is just lonely for you—you probably work away from home. I, on the other hand, like many others—have a home business. There is no such “escape” for me. I need some peace and quiet in order to concentrate, and the bird makes this im
possible for me. Its voice is piercing—it can be heard in every room of our house, even with all the doors and windows shut. It is a hideous assault—it starts before dawn and screeches without cease. If you don’t do something immediately to silence the creature, we will be FORCED to contact the authorities and . . .
The noise beats on outside her window, a remorseless, piercing caw.
Avis stops and glares at the screen, fingers trembling, she writes:
Damn DAMNDAMNITALLTOHELL
She prints out the letter, gets up, goes into the bathroom, splashes cold water on her face. Avis returns to the desk and reads what she’s written: she sounds so crazy that it frightens her.
AVIS PUTS ASIDE the Saint-Honoré and decides to embark on a new pastry. She’s assembling ingredients when the phone rings in the next room. She ignores it as she arranges her new mise en place. This recipe is constructed on a foundation of hazelnuts—roasted, then roughed in a towel to help remove skins. These are ground into a gianduja paste with shaved chocolate, which she would normally prepare in her food processor, but today she would rather smash it together by hand, using a meat tenderizer on a chopping block. She pounds away and only stops when she hears something that turns out to be Nina’s voice on the answering machine:
“. . . Ven, Avis, you ignoring me? Contesta el telefono! I know you’re there. Ay, you know what—you’re totally impossible to work for . . .”
Avis starts pounding again. Her assistants never last more than a year or two before something like this happens. They go stale, she thinks: everything needs to be turned over. Composted.
She feels invigorated, punitive and steely as she moves through the steps of the recipe. It was from one of her mother’s relatives, perhaps even Avis’s grandmother—black bittersweets—a kind of cookie requiring slow melting in a double boiler, then baking, layering, and torching, hours of work simply to result in nine dark squares of chocolate and gianduja tucked within pieces of pâte sucrée. The chocolate is a hard, intense flavor against the rich hazelnut and the wisps of sweet crust—a startling cookie. Geraldine theorized that the cookie must have been invented to give to enemies: something exquisitely delicious with a tiny yield. The irony, from Avis’s professional perspective was that while one might torment enemies with too little, it also exacted an enormous labor for such a small revenge.
Birds of Paradise Page 9
