Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  “About a thousand years late, Mom.” His voice parched. Stanley sidesteps Avis and offers his hand to the girl to help her up. They behave so formally, like children impersonating adults. Avis finds herself admiring their gravity as they move to the door, a regal height to the girl’s shoulders.

  “I’ll call you later,” Stanley mutters to his father as he ushers his girlfriend through the door. Then pulls it quietly shut.

  Avis stands alone for a moment, staring at the door, not moving.

  “Ah,” Brian says.

  She wraps her arms tightly around her middle. She doesn’t want to talk. All the words have left her. How many times is a person supposed to lose her children? Is this why she went through motherhood? The morning sickness that lasted all day, the swollen ankles, the all-night feedings, the fevers and crying and vomit? The anxiety and the waiting up, and on and on. All for what? A moment where you stand there and watch your child close the door in your face.

  BRIAN FINDS AVIS OUTSIDE, sitting in the backyard on a teak folding chair. He sits beside her and for a few minutes neither of them speaks. Finally he reaches for her hand. “You’re in shock. I know you’re in shock. We both are. It’s a lot to take in. For both of us. But—just imagine, sweetheart? A grandchild.”

  Avis stares at the fluttering palms. “Not my grandchild. You can have her.”

  “You don’t mean that! You’re just overwrought.” He attempts a new, lighter tone, “How do you even know it’s a her?”

  “Don’t you see what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to replace Felice. He was cheated of his old family—we all were—so he’s trying to make a new one. Just like he was always running off to his gardening and his market.”

  “Sweetheart.” Brian presses her palm between his fingers, his voice thin and trembling, as if running through a wire strainer. He sits unusually upright, his face so alert he seems almost frightened. “Isn’t that a good thing? Doesn’t everyone eventually want a family of their own?”

  Avis frowns, smoothing back the short ends of her hair.

  “Maybe we should just give them the money.”

  “It’s too much!” She wraps her arms around her elbows. “Who is this girl he’s with anyway?”

  “Well, the mother of our grandchild, at the very least.”

  She is touched, briefly, by an awareness of her husband’s anxiety, but her own preoccupations are overpowering. She doesn’t respond. The late-afternoon sky is a green watercolor. Everything in the world seems bound to the screen of fronds; everything is breathing, subtly, quietly, barely moving.

  TUESDAY MORNING, AFTER BRIAN—finally, blessedly—leaves for work, Avis leaves her rounds of dough to rise and goes straight outdoors. She’d listened to the mynah’s chatter all through the early morning while kneading the puff pastry (“I swear it—I’m going to report those people to animal control,” Brian had said at the door). When Avis steps through the fronds, pushing aside the nodding spindles, Solange is sitting in the grass, legs folded under, as if at a tea ceremony. She doesn’t exactly smile at Avis but she nods, her face relaxed.

  Solange hands Avis an old-fashioned silver peeler and they cut tiny zucchinis into strips that Solange collects in a pot beside her on the grass. Then they hunt around for a shrub buried in the thickets at the west corner of the yard. It has a frilly, dainty leaf that Solange calls “vervain” and she tells Avis that it’s good for strengthening the “female systems.” She hums as they collect, and the bird grows still, then she sings a few fragments of song, shreds of music, the words floating away like confetti, like tearing a letter into pieces. The long, patient labor reminds Avis of the externships she did in culinary school—visiting different pastry shops and kitchens, listening to the bakers’ philosophies about their work, their approaches and aesthetics. Only Solange speaks little, her thoughts seemingly embedded in the small movements of her hands.

  “My son would be shocked,” Avis says into the silence, vaguely smiling. “Me, in the dirt. Outside! He would be amazed.” She glances at Solange.

  “You don’t go out of doors?”

  “Almost never.”

  “You close yourself in on purpose. It’s not healthy.”

  “I don’t like vegetables, either.” She continues to smile, enjoying the feeling of confession. “I don’t like growing them, cooking them, or eating them.”

  Solange finishes cutting a zucchini. “When I was growing up, there were two worlds—one was inside the great house and the other was outside with my mother. Inside was very fine and very clean, and a lot of black women to keep it so clean. The lady of the house—Myra—she was light-skinned, but she wasn’t pure white. There were a few drops of Africa in her, so we knew that was why she hated us so much. She worked the women like slaves. But my mother would steal outside when she could. She changed us out of our good house clothes into the old castoffs, and we would go tend to the vegetables and herbs in the patch the gardener gave her.” Solange wiped at the edge of her forehead with one hand. “Sometimes she went foraging too. Inside, I learned the alphabet, but outside, I learned all the plants.” She looks at Avis, holding the peeler aloft.

  They work easily together through the silent hours and heat. A few times during the course of the day, Avis hears the phone ringing inside the house and she knows she should go back inside: she imagines the dough overinflating, the orders unfilled. But there is such rare pleasure in sitting in the grass and sweating, skin pearly with humidity, the sweet chlorophyll stains on her palms: she can almost understand why someone would choose not to live inside a house. She thinks about the hours, whole days on end, Stanley spent working his garden. Outdoors, nothing but the scent of the air. Midafternoon, Solange goes into the house while Avis dozes in the shade near the birdhouse, sweat curling down her neck. After a while, she brings out a soup with a cloudy, briny broth, dashes of the peeled vegetable and chopped greenery they’d collected. They eat it, sitting together on the back step of the house, holding white porcelain bowls. It is ineffably good and restorative. Avis’s knees and back are stiff, but she finds that she’s so hungry she barely notices. When they finish, they put the bowls on the cement step.

  Avis sighs, sitting back. She rubs her hands on her jeans and says, “I guess I’m going to have a grandchild.”

  Solange sits back as well, placing her hands flat on her knees, her stern gaze seemingly drawn into herself. Avis watches her and begins to feel that the other woman is looking at something invisible—a sort of communing—and that the slightest movement could cause her to fly away. Eventually Solange turns her attention to her empty bowl. Her face is hard, her teeth an unearthly white against the purplish color of her inner lip. “It’s a strange thing, how life can roll out in front of you, so nice and welcoming. Like you been promised a trip to a beautiful island, where the trees and gates are full of flowers and the roads are like shining paths and the air smells like sweetness, and all around the ocean’s like a bright blue marble. You reach out for it . . .” Solange lifts the surface of her palm, uncurling her fingers. “You can almost touch it and smell it, you’re practically almost there. And then, just at the moment before you arrive . . .” She closes her hands into a fist, skin over her knuckles turning pale. “You have to understand—after something terrible—insupportable—happens to a person, it’s hard not to feel like the terrible thing is out there, everywhere, inside of every single thing you see and encounter. And it’s hard not to feel this sort of rage against everyone. Sometimes it takes everything a person has, not to let everything turn black, not to feel like everything you touch is scraping off your skin.”

  Avis swallows. She wants to say, I know, I know, I know this, I do. But she doesn’t speak, sensing the size of what Solange is talking about: an enormity, bigger than anything she has known. Too big to look at directly.

  Solange shifts her leg so the mynah steps up onto her knee, its scaly talons carefully opening and curling around her leg. It hunkers like a child in her lap and she stro
kes its head for a while, humming, its neck feathers ruffling up between each stroke. “A grandbaby,” she says at last, “is a stroke of luck.”

  Avis blinks and shades her eyes with her hand. She lowers her chin onto the palm of her hand, studying Solange. “Yes, thank you,” she murmurs.

  Solange lowers her shining lids and runs one finger down the back of the bird’s head. Avis eyes her, afraid that she thinks Avis doesn’t deserve a grandchild, as if believing a thing might be enough to keep a grandchild away.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Avis digs rows of shallow furrows in which Solange drops tiny seeds. They cultivate a garden plot at the far western edge of Solange’s yard—a spot which probably cuts into the Martinezes’ property line next door. Solange amended the soil with her own compost, raised beds sparkling with minerals. From time to time a ghostly ringing from Avis’s house reaches them in whiffs through the trees.

  “That’s Miami, calling for its sugar,” Avis says.

  Solange’s face is traced with dark trails of sweat. She pats mounds of earth carefully over each seed. “You don’t care? You can afford to laugh at your patrons?”

  Avis drags her fingers into the black soil, reviving a scent memory, distant scrap of childhood—the pleasure of digging in dirt. Does she disdain the people she bakes for?

  Solange pats some of the raked bands of soil. “You might just poison someone that way. If you don’t care very much.”

  She gives a thin smile. “Have you ever done that? Sort of lost your place in things?” She knows she should be worried: there’s a tower of pans growing in her sink, all sorts of tiny unfinished chores: separate eggs for a soufflé; place orders for nutmeg and coconut—tasks Nina had performed, efficiently and automatically. Avis rakes open another seam in the dirt and gestures for a seed, not ready to face her kitchen.

  Solange raises her eyebrows without looking at her. “No, I don’t forget where my place is. I bide my time.”

  Avis shakes her head. “I forgot what this was like.”

  “Myra—the lady my mother worked for—she had no children of her own, so she tried to win me all the time.” Solange cast a sidelong glance at Avis. “She would give me bonbons and treats and dresses. She never wanted me to go outside. I was the only child there and it was a lonely place. The house was built on tall rocks above the water. Miles away from town. Sometimes it was so quiet we heard cars and voices—sometimes shooting. Once I thought I heard a man screaming. Mostly there was the sound of the waves, water the color of blue beads. I learned about France all the time, in the books the lady gave me to study. I read Dumas, Hugo. Later, Proust. The only thing I knew about my own home was what my mother taught me when we were outdoors together. Myra did everything she could think of to keep us apart. She told me terrible things about my mother. She said my mother had tried to smother me in my sleep, after I was born, but that Myra had saved me.”

  Avis fingers the short, curling hairs at the nape of her neck, reflectively. “Do you think it’s true?”

  Solange’s eyes seem to harden, as if she’d forgotten she was speaking out loud. She pauses and there is the wind’s liquid swish through the palm spears, the dark interstices between the fronds. A big sea-green anole watches them, frozen on the Martinezes’ loquat. For a moment, Avis has the oddest feeling, more tangible and familiar even than déjà vu, that all of this—the leaves and Solange and the lizard and the wind—has happened before, in just this way. The sunlight is brassy and lower now, cutting across their faces, and Avis scratches at her wrists: the mosquitoes will be worse soon.

  “You know what I think?” Solange asks coolly. Avis sees again that slim crescent of teeth, her dark purple underlip. “I think my story is not something to wrap up with a bow and hand over. Not to you and not to anyone.”

  THAT EVENING, WHEN AVIS goes back inside, it feels like a deliberate act, a small attempt at return. She moves through the house, switching on the lights and closing the shutters against the evening. Lamb follows her, twining between her ankles. She opens the front door and Lamb comes out on the front step with her: the neighborhood is falling into a velvet green darkness, the advance of the tropical night. A few people—high school students and domestics—are still out, strolling home, most of the commuter cars tucked in their driveways. It’s been a long time since she’s last stood on her front step, watching the neighbors come in.

  Avis goes in to take a shower. While she’s toweling dry, she hears Brian’s key. He’s home early for the first time in ages and this, she realizes, makes her happy.

  Avis pulls on her thin cotton bathrobe and pads out to the living room, barefooted. At first he doesn’t realize she’s there, and she has a moment to observe his unguarded expression as he sorts through the mail. The lines in his face, the pensive eyes—and now he wears glasses—are all stimulating to her. How easy it is—when one lies beside another person for years—to forget to look at them. In the beginning, she’d thought she’d never stop looking.

  Brian glances up; his eyes light on his wife, and there is a moment of hesitation. Then he gives way to a full, helpless smile, and says, “Can you believe it?” Just as if this were an ongoing conversation. And she says, “I know.”

  Brian moves closer, takes her hand, then closes his arms around Avis. She inhales his plain scent, then places her hand at the center of his chest and presses the side of her face against his body. She thinks about the story that Solange almost told her and feels grateful now that Solange had held back from it. Avis wants the world to be clear.

  Felice

  WHAT COULD SHE HAVE BEEN THINKING, LISTENING to that fool? How had she become so easy to dupe? Oregon. She shifts her weight forward on her board and feels the salt air on her face and eyes. She is happy—delighted even—to be free of Emerson and his dumb plans. This is the special world, right here. Emerson. His parents gave him that bizarre name to try to make themselves seem clever and special: which is always the sign of the dumbest, most un-special people. She pictures him, the clayey whiteness of his skin, the pink of his scalp showing through his stupid Nazi haircut. Who’s he kidding, anyway? That strongman stuff? How lame and sad. Like that proves anything.

  Felice rolls down to Lincoln Road, then hops off, flips the board up and carries it as she walks along the mall. She doesn’t need to be cautious anymore. The police haven’t eyed her very closely in a year or two, and several times now she’s spotted kids from school—at bars, stores, and the beach—whose eyes glazed over hers without a glimmer of recognition. She turns right onto Washington to Seventeenth Street, past a cloud of Japanese girls with auburn hair and fuzzy animal backpacks, and strolls into the tattoo shop. Recently Duffy’s has been her main source of income. She’ll put her feet up in one of their dentist chairs by the chrome sinks while Kaiyo and Frederick airbrush ornate, brightly colored designs on her back, arms, shoulders, and legs. They pay her two hundred bucks to sit out in front of their store in a halter top and shorts, sipping Frappuccinos and flipping through magazines. German backpackers, Brazilian and Gulfie rich kids all get snagged on her look. She sees them out of the corner of her eyes, blond college kids daring each other to go talk to her—as if she were someone famous. Some go to Duffy’s for the stupid spring-break airbrush that will start to streak off as soon they wade into the surf; most of them get permanent ink. They come out and show her the new illustrations on their skin—tramp-stamps with stock designs—butterflies or boys’ names. Sometimes Felice feels kind of bad about it.

  She’s been scouted by Ford and Elite—real New York agencies. Micah, the agent for Elite—a tall black guy in silver eyeliner—said that Felice was “heart-stopping.” Everyone says that Felice looks like Elizabeth Taylor—all pleased with themselves, as if she were hearing this for the first time. It used to bug Felice: she pictured that squat, henlike woman in her wig and jewels, holding hands with Michael Jackson. But one day, Duffy brought over an old movie magazine while Felice and Berry lounged at their café table. He opened i
t and jabbed at the photo. “There. Look. You kids really are morons. You really don’t know anything, do you? That’s Elizabeth Taylor.”

  Berry craned over the page. “Wow, you really kind of do. Look at her. You guys could be related.”

  A little nearsighted, Felice held the magazine closer, startled to see the resemblance—the straight brow bone, glimmering eyes, the fine jaw; only Felice’s straight hair was self-hacked below the shoulders and Liz’s hair was a sable bob, thick as a paintbrush. She finally realized what a compliment this comparison was.

  Now Duffy smiles at her from behind the front counter. “Hey, Felix, where you been hiding?” She knows she’s his favorite model. He opens the picture notebook, extricates an envelope and pulls out a wad of bills, then starts peeling off twenties: he does this for her once in a while, whether there’s work or not. “Here, scram, go have fun.”

  She tucks the bills into her front pocket. She’s actually disappointed. “Can’t you use me?”

  “We’re closing up tomorrow night—there’s a hurricane watch. You got a place to stay?” He looks over the crowded little store. “Could’ve used you this morning. Bunch of scouts here, talking about another reality show.”

  Felice balances her board on one hip. “Here? How many shows do they need about tattoo stores?”

  “A lot, I guess.” Duffy says, running his petal-tattooed knuckles over his bare scalp. “They do it, this place’ll go nuclear.”

  “Awesome,” Felice says, unaccountably glum.

  “You shouldn’t be working tonight anyway. Isn’t it getting to be your birthday?” He taps at his grubby keyboard. “Yup—there you are,” he says, pointing at the screen. “You and my mama—the same day—August 23rd. Tomorrow!” His lips move silently as he reads. There isn’t a lot on the screen, just a couple of fake names—Felix Moreno—a fraudulent Social Security number and address, some other odds and ends he helped her invent. Apart from the year, the birth date information she gave him is accurate. “Your big two-oh girl! Here.” He peels off a few more bills. “Get indoors and have champagne. You can have a hurricane party.”