by Sara Levine
“Wow,” said Rena on the telephone, after I had explained my plan to immediately move in to Lars’s recently renovated sublet one-bedroom condo. “Did you even—I mean, did you try asking your family for help?”
“Well, duh, because what’s the fourth Core Value, Rena?”
“HORN-BLOWING?”
“That’s four. I meant three. What’s the third Core Value? INDEPENDENCE. Adrianna has no money, only credit card bills. Aunt Boothie already paid for the parrot, and my parents will only loan me money with interest. I still owe them money for the Lasik.”
“Tough love,” Rena said. “Still, what would be the APR?”
“The hell if I know,” I said. “I’m not an economist.”
In the beginning, living with Lars was lovely. It didn’t matter if I was kissing him hello, or kissing him goodbye, or reminding him to pay the bill for cable; there was something sweet in all we did, something fresh and fragrant, as if a spring breeze blew through the apartment, which of course it didn’t because it was autumn and I kept all the windows closed even when it was warm so I could enjoy the central air conditioning.
Rena threw out her skepticism and gave us a box of personalized address labels. My mother sent us a congratulatory note and a three and half gallon bucket of caramel corn. Adrianna came over for spaghetti and did a decent impression of not being jealous that I had a live-in boyfriend and she had a loveless life in which her richest emotional engagements were with third graders. Did I mention that since her debt debacle, Adrianna had been living with my parents?
I hadn’t wanted to take full ownership of Richard, but now that I was living with Lars, it didn’t seem exactly like I had. Richard was our baby. After we discovered that Lars’s gag reflex was weaker than mine, Lars took to cleaning the cage, and I volunteered to do food and water. I found an independent supply shop not far from the apartment, which seemed a remarkable stroke of good fortune, until I discovered it was owned by a drab and lonely lunatic with strong ideas about avian diet. “I won’t sell you vitamins,” she said, flitting about the shop like Ben Gunn, prying bottles from my hand. “You need to be thinking about whole foods. A green vegetable, an orange vegetable, whatever fruits and vegetables are available seasonally! Sprouts? Yes! Loaded with enzymes! Grow organic and just wait till you see the shine of his plumage!” Shine this, I thought and took the bus to PETCO, where I bought a bag of Vita-Mix pellets—and on, second, indulgent thought, a bag of sunflower seeds to motivate Richard during lessons. I now spent my jobless hours training him to speak.
“No, honey, don’t let him out,” I told Lars, “I know more about animal behavior than you. A cage is a bird’s home. It safeguards him from the overwhelming complexity of the world. Letting him out for some exercise would be like throwing a person off a cruise ship for a little swim.”
“People swim off cruise ships all the time,” Lars said and he began to take Richard regularly on his arm. Sometimes Richard made thrumming noises while he clowned around with Lars’s glasses. Sometimes Lars tickled his belly, and Richard made a weird sound like two cups of gravel in a blender, which Lars called laughing.
“See?” said Lars. “Happy bird! See?”
The two of them had such a good time I might have been jealous, except I didn’t want the bird to sit on me. The sharp beak. The black tongue. The scaly claws. Ugh!
“Don’t let him vent on my index cards,” I said. “And if he gets anywhere near my new bag, I’ll kill you.” My calfskin bag boasted two small side pockets and a main compartment exactly big enough for Treasure Island. Rolled leather handles; turn-lock enclosure.
“Maybe you resent him because he cost you your job,” Lars said as he walked around the room in big figure eights.
“That job? Are you kidding?”
I resented Richard for other reasons. He screamed frequently and imitated Lars’s morning cough. A white fungus stippled his beak.
“You can take that off with a little soap and water,” Lars said.
“I don’t want to coddle him, I’m sure birds in the wild have it. But what in the world should I do about the talking?”
Richard had proved to be a fine mimic, but he favored the voices he heard on the television, which I kept on to overcome the tedium of his lessons.
“Steer the boat, girlfriend,” I said.
“It’s big, it’s hot, it’s back!”
“Steer the boat, girlfriend.”
“Fall blowout carpet sale!”
“Steer the boat, girlfriend. I’m speaking loud enough, aren’t I?”
“You always do,” Lars said.
“There’s nothing in Treasure Island about how the parrot begins to talk. No tips at all on the learning process.”
“It’s a story, not a user’s manual. But don’t give up, you’ve got time. Parrots can live for a hundred years, you know.”
A hundred years? I glimpsed myself grown old. With a liver-spotted hand, I reached out for the birdseed; an empty house, a funeral procession, Richard on a stranger’s arm, flapping his wings on my grave. These images cooled my fervor for the project. One afternoon when the bird let loose a familiar torrent of enthusiasm about a hot double beef patty stacked with cheese, I threw down my book and glared. It was the middle of the day. I covered his cage with the cloth.
“There. Now you’ll let me read.”
“Scrrraw,” he said softly and then quickly fell asleep.
A few hours later, as I rifled through Lars’s desk in search of photos, letters, and ticket stubs from his previous girlfriends, the quiet apartment began to feel like a tomb in which I had been buried alive. The autumnal light, the sound of Richard grinding his beak. But at six o’clock, the door burst open, and there was my boyfriend with a bag of dinner in hand. How I leapt from the sofa, how I forgot the indeterminate contents of the desk, how we clung to each other like newlyweds! The sofa that had seemed a desolate raft in the sea of his absence now became a schooner in which we glided, watching television, eating fried food, and kissing each other’s ears.
CHAPTER 8
I don’t have the training,” I said to Rena in the coffee house. “I love cake decorating, but to actually get a job, I’d have to go to pastry school and learn fondant and . . . tart doughs and . . . petit fours.”
“Well, maybe you’d like that,” Rena said.
“Right now I’m liking the freedom of being cut loose from the job, and the lease on my studio, and the old expectations! I can’t describe it. When Henry James read Treasure Island, he wrote Stevenson a fan letter and said, ‘I feel like a boy again!’ Exactly how I feel, but I never was a boy. I’m giddy, can you tell?”
“Too much sugar, maybe.” Rena looked down at the bill and flushed. “Speaking of which, I think she forgot to charge us for a coffee. No, there it is. Oh, well.” Gloomily, she slid a twenty-dollar bill on top of the check. “How’s Richard? Did you bring pictures?”
“Was it you who said a pet would be good for me? The responsibility? Maybe it was Adrianna’s half-brained idea. He’s a drag. Every time he fails, it’s like I’m failing. I say, ‘Steer the boat, girlfriend’ twenty times and he looks at me like I’m part of his seed tray.”
“Birds like seeds.”
“I’ve pretty much given up on him for decent conversation. But I don’t like the way he follows me around the apartment with his eyes. It’s creepy, how he always seems to be looking. He sits on his perch and stares—like this.” I goggled my eyes and willed my nose to appear like a sharp hard beak. “I used to read Treasure Island out loud, but he inhibits me.”
Rena took the sugar dispenser out of my hand.
“Pets have to be chosen with care. It’s not like buying a pair of shoes or something. Which reminds me, where’d you get that bag?”
“Anniversary present from Lars.”
A flurry of activity as I showed her the contrast stitching and the side pockets that held my index cards on Treasure Island.
“Don’t think he chose it
, Rena. He was going to get flowers. I redirected him.”
“I’d get a bag like that if it was vegan,” Rena sighed.
“Poor Rena,” I said to Lars as we sat on the couch and pulled apart our chopsticks. “Yesterday she pretended not to like my bag because it wasn’t vegan, when the truth is she can’t afford anything like this because she works as a pet-sitter. Have you ever seen her put on that act? The holier-than-thou voluntary vow of poverty to save the animals thing?”
“She’s always been anxious about money,” Lars observed. He tipped half the carton of egg foo yong onto my plate.
“Next time let’s not bother with the plates,” I said.
“The boat!” said Richard.
Lars and I turned to each other in amazement. I gripped his shoulder.
“Did you hear that? I’m going to cry!”
“Pay-off time,” Lars said, serenely lifting to his mouth a greasy bundle of noodles.
I peered into the cage. “Again! You can do it!” Richard gazed into the distance and after a moment, raised his tail feathers and excreted something slimy.
I slunk back to the couch and picked up my chopsticks.
“Seeing Rena made me realize I don’t want to rush back into a meaningless job just to pay the utility bill. It isn’t worth it. I have bad dreams about the wrong kind of job.”
“What kind of dreams?”
In one I sat in the secretary pool at Leonard Milkins Middle School, where my father teaches Latin. In another I was making out with my mother when I had been hired to do yard work.
“They’re too boring to describe. I go to work with my dad. When I first read the book I dreamed every night I was Jim Hawkins. Clearly I’ve strayed. I think my unconscious mind is trying to warn me to stay unemployed a while.”
“Boat!” Lars repeated and I thought, Why, he’s as proud as I am.
“To Richard,” I toasted, “our baby bird who’s finally learning!”
“Here’s to ourselves!”
“Here’s to ourselves,” I repeated, “and hold your luff, plenty of prizes and plenty of duff! And here’s to me and my state of creative unrest!”
I expected Lars to say something else, but he only puckered his forehead and drank.
CHAPTER 9
Sometimes I consider BOLDNESS a quality one has or does not have; other times I think of BOLDNESS as a quality one chooses to cultivate or to let wither on the vine. To avoid thinking in that simplest of dichotomies—bold, not bold—I try to imagine a continuum on which persons of varying degrees of BOLDNESS may be arranged. Unfortunately, the longer I lived with Lars, the more clearly it came to my attention, like a hangnail one feels smarting and tries not to bite, that Lars didn’t exemplify even the far far other end of BOLDNESS; in fact on the continuum of BOLDNESS, Lars was off the line.
Boldness Perceived as a Continuum
Boldness—Impudence—Self-Reliance—Timidity—Cowardice—
Every day he trailed off to the same low-paying techie support job he’d done since graduating college.
“Isn’t it time you made your move?”
“What move?” he said.
“Onward! Upward!”
But he never responded well to such suggestions, insisting that he liked his job, liked talking to people and figuring out problems. One morning when I pressed him to seek out opportunities for advancement, cheer-leading him into a state of energy and self-confidence, exhausting myself at the crumby breakfast table in the hope that he would walk out the door with fresh resolve and make us both proud, he revealed (nonchalantly) that he’d been offered a chance to do something at a software company six months before and passed it up.
And why?
He liked that his job left him “free” on the weekends!
Our weekends, of course, I enjoyed prodigiously; Lars did all the things that I arranged—brunches, shopping, movies. On weekdays, I kept myself in a whirl, partly to avoid missing Lars and partly to insure I didn’t stumble back to The Pet Library and beg for my job back. I avoided my parents, knowing they would fail to understand my devotion to Treasure Island and worry instead about my outward appearance of inertia. Sometimes my mother would telephone and say, “What are you doing?” “What are you doing?” I’d answer, but she never registered the sharpness of my reply. Instead she gave me the record of her accomplishments since rising at six in the morning and outlined, with cheerful precision, her tasks for the rest of the day. “You know me, I like to keep my ducks in a row.” I knew what she thought my ducks looked like—scattered round the pond, wings drooping, heads listing; one call to Animal Patrol would confirm they had West Nile virus. “But what were you doing just now when I called?” I am sure she wanted to catch me out in something frivolous—waxing the hair off my kneecaps, let’s say—but I always told her I was studying my book. “And what are you planning to do?” she persisted one day. “Now that you’ve left The Pet Library?” “Who knows,” I said bitterly, “But I will never be a Latin teacher!” She denied that she had ever harbored the expectation; oh yes, she pretended to be amazed. “We never expected you to follow in Daddy’s footsteps. Whatever you want to do, that’s what you should do, darling. We’ve never expected anything from you or Adrianna.” True, in that they certainly never helped me to do anything.
When this kind of conversation put me into a funk, I bounced around town, picking up niceties for our home and little masculine luxuries for Lars (shaving creams, foot massager, new lizard watch band), and I had time to attend to my own appearance, too, so between the haircuts and eyebrow waxes and cheap Asian manicures, I’d never looked better in my life.
“But listen,” Lars said one morning, “I’ve been looking over the credit card bill and I think we need to cool it a while. Maybe it’s just too many take-outs, and we could cook more. The thing is, this is the first time I haven’t been able to pay off my monthly balance.”
“Lars, you don’t have to pay off the monthly balance!” I kissed his unsmiling mouth. “That’s why they call it credit.”
Lars pulled back from my kiss; we were in the living room and he didn’t like to start anything near Richard. Not that the bedroom was much better; one blood-curdling scream and Lars’s erection would take French leave. As I kissed him again, he responded with demeaning ambivalence. One hand groped me; the other made placating gestures to Richard, who’d begun to scream.
“Lars,” I hissed. “Stop talking to him.”
“Wasn’t talking. Was just, you know, indicating, that everything’s okay. His back feathers ruffled.”
We glared at each other.
“He gets upset,” Lars added.
“Scrrraaaawww!” Richard said.
“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t feel like kissing now.”
“That’s okay. That’s totally cool. No problem.”
“No problem?”
“No problem!” he repeated cheerfully.
Of course, there were problems, but the problems were seated beyond the reach of argument—way out in some rural zone where there isn’t even Internet access. I tried to handle Lars with care, as if civility could make up for the deficits, but time stripped our verdant orchard of its leaves. Picture us on a stage with a skeletal Beckett-like tree. Clearly the underlying issue was that Lars didn’t want me to change.
“I like your hair the way it is,” he said when he heard me on the phone, making a color appointment.
Lars didn’t want me to grow.
“You look great,” he said, often without even looking.
One Saturday when actively weeding through my wardrobe to make the final decision on what to discard, I allowed Lars to come upon me in a butternut squash sweater and a pair of red corduroy pants.
“That’s a nice sweater,” he said. “Is it new?”
“This is a filthy old sweater I’ve had since eleventh grade. It’s made of rayon.”
“Oh.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it with these pants?”
“Yes.”
“Even though the colors clash?”
“Yes.”
“Even though the pants are baggy in the butt?”
“It looks good on you,” he said.
Which was supposed to be a compliment, but in its refusal to engage reality was more accurately the verbal equivalent of a chuck on the chin. I knew very well what Lars meant when he praised me, and held me, and indicated through a caress that he liked me just the way I was; I knew, better than he knew himself, that he wanted to ensure he never be confronted with what, in his own personality, might need pruning or pushing or prodding, that behind every show of support he gave, for me here, for me now, there lurked a terrified refusal to acknowledge his own potential to grow. With each endearment, with each endorsement, he tried to make me slack. Did I buckle? Dear Reader, no. I saw his white-knuckled terror, his toes clenching the edge of a perceived abyss, even when he leaned over the garbage bag of clothes and planted a kiss on my head!!
CHAPTER 10
And now for the secret autobiography, the chamber within the chamber, the revolving bookcase that spins into a red velvet study, the roomy compartment behind the false back of a tiny drawer.
It is possible to think of my life, up to the age of twenty-five, as a series of therapists I successfully dodged.
“A series of therapists!” you will exclaim.
When I began this story, I had thought to keep my counseling history a secret, but the more I write, the more I think of my reader as a friend with whom I can lounge in even the sour-smelling rooms of the family manse. So here they are, all failures!
1) Dee Bissell-Ivy: Wore her hair in a bun, kept dolls on her shelves
2) Peter Johnson: hush-voiced, still in training, borrowed folding chairs
3) Deborah Grady: red-faced, aggressive, hobby-oriented
4) Jennifer Shaftal: Long-legged, deep tan; began each session by asking if I treated my body like a temple, then proceeded to confuse me with another patient whose parents had repeatedly locked her up in an RV
