by Sara Levine
CHAPTER 21
We didn’t have pets as kids. Nobody from prom died in a prom car accident. I didn’t go to camp, so nobody from camp drowned in a lake. My mother’s parents died before I was born, and my father’s parents are still rotting away like apples in some nursing home in Nebraska. I only met them once and can barely remember it. So I was surprised at how complicated it felt to lose somebody. I felt relieved, of course—my room was my own again—but I also felt regret. A touch of disgust. Rage. Confusion. And sweet grief, which I’d never known. Yes, under the hard peanut brittle of my anger at Richard, which, now that he was gone, was fast dissolving, lay a pudding-soft layer of sadness.
“He’s dead. What does it matter that he couldn’t say, ‘Take that, and stand by for trouble’? He’s dead.”
My mother was clearing the table. “Death does give you a different perspective, doesn’t it? It shows you just how trivial some—” But here she picked up the butter dish, and seeing that someone had cut into the butter with a crumb-laden knife, she frowned, and began to shave away the grubby end with a fork.
Richard’s death was a convenience for me, but soon I discovered that his death was a convenience for everyone—a bucket to put under the ceiling’s leaky patch. We were upset; he was dead; now we had a respectable reason for being upset. Much easier to speak of the bird with exaggerated affection than to speak of what was going on between Adrianna and Don Tatum (he appeared to be avoiding Ade’s calls), or Don Tatum and my mother (she appeared to be fending off his calls) or my father and Don Tatum (Mr. Tatum’s tires had been slashed in the school parking lot, and although nobody could prove my father’s involvement, a Taurus was rumored to have been seen speeding crazily away from the crime scene). It was definitely easier to speak of the bird than to speak of what was going on between my mother and my father (still living in their separate spheres and not talking, although I did find a Post-it note on the breakfast bar that said Prunelax, which showed that however big the rift between my parents had been, it had not grown so wide that my mother was disbarred from buying his dietary supplements). Meanwhile Richard’s body remained untended inside the freezer. I should go, I thought; I should go to Cutwater Pets and demand my refund; and yet I avoided him completely, and drank my drinks warm. A week passed.
My mother began to complain. “He was important, I know, but I really miss the freezer space.” She left a brochure on my pillow called Pet Bereavement: When Only the Love Remains.
One day I pulled open the door and, past the ice cube trays, stacked up high like a cemetery wall, I saw him there—a little hoary with frost, but visibly Richard, recumbent on three bags of edamame. His eye, that damnable parrot eye, was frozen wide open. J’accuse!
My first impulse was to fling the Big Bag onto the snow bank under the kitchen sink window; my second impulse was to lie to my mother about why I had left the window open; my third impulse was to get her off my back and just bury him. But the idea of digging his grave in the frozen earth was unthinkable. I hadn’t been raised for hard labor.
Should I call Lars? I could impress him with my aloofness—“I thought you deserved to know”—and inquire respectfully if he wanted to take care of Baby’s remains. But he might say no, or he might say something about him and Rena. No, only one person could be drafted for the job and that was the person who did all the chores in the family that nobody else wanted to do, the particularly unpleasant ones, such as unclogging the toilets and putting in the window-unit air conditioners.
Unfortunately I hadn’t exchanged a word with him since the night I’d ejected him from my room. And my mother wasn’t about to trot out to the garage and put in the request.
“Dad?” I knocked on the driver’s side window. He had cranked back the seat and had fallen asleep in there, reading the newspaper, which had now, thankfully, settled over most of his face.
He startled awake and turned the ignition on, just for a moment, so he could depress the window.
“Do you want to come in?” he asked and began to fuss—clearing papers off the passenger seat, tossing an orange peel onto a dirty plate.
“That’s okay. I’ll stay out here.”
As quickly, and as humbly as possibly, I explained to him my request. I guess nobody had told him that Richard was dead, so there was an inefficient, almost embarrassing, bit of backtracking to do, but he listened hard and seriously, and only when I was done did he sigh and drum his fingers on the dashboard. “Can’t anyone else do it?”
“You’re the strongest, Dad.”
“What about your mother? She’s no kitten.”
“She has a lot on her plate right now.”
He looked at me intently. “Did she tell you to ask me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Does she want me to do it? Did she authorize me to join the family in this capacity?”
I’m not sure when the family had become so bureaucratic, but clearly he needed to feel that my mother had engineered my presence here, that I was in fact her flunky.
“Ain’t too proud to beg, Dad. She wants you to dig the hole and to be a part of the funeral. You know what she’s like.”
“All right,” he said, pulling himself together. “I’ll do it. Are they ready? Let’s not waste time. Let’s do it now.”
And that is how we came to bury Richard—or rather how my father came to bury him while my mother and I watched through the kitchen window, making cheese straws.
“Cheddar or Parmesan?”
“Why not both?” I answered. “And can we open the Merlot?”
“I wish your sister would join us. No, not that Merlot. Here, I have a nicer one.” She took out two wine glasses, then on second thought, two more. “Will you ask her? She would feel terrible later . . . ”
So far the occasion felt both melancholy and snug: the oven’s warmth, my mother’s classical music station, the chipping sound of my father’s shovel. The ground was not frozen, but hard enough that my father satisfied himself with a shallow grave, a choice he regretted a few days later when we saw the neighbor’s German Shepherd, Audrey, trotting the boundary line with a feathery green bundle in her jaws. At that moment, however, the interment seemed just right. I didn’t really want to include Adrianna, but at my mother’s urging, I went and knocked on her door.
“What?” Her muffled voice emanated pain and self-involvement.
I pushed open the door. She was sitting on her bed, looking raddled and sad, cradling her phone and a box of Kleenex.
“Do you want to come to Richard’s funeral?”
“I just got off the phone with Don. He’s dumping me.”
“The old man is dumping you? Does that fool honestly think he can do better?”
My surprise gratified her.
“It’s that business with Mom. He doesn’t want to cope with it. He doesn’t want to process my feelings. I love him, I’m sure if he would just listen to me, we could get past it. It was years ago! But of course, I’m angry and confused, and rather than deal with that, he’s just running.”
“What an asshole.” Men really had very few emotional skills. “Come on.” I returned the phone and the Kleenex to the nightstand and pulled her out of the bed. “You’ll feel better if you come. Get your mind off him. Besides you belong with your family at a time like this.”
In the kitchen I was surprised to discover my father at the sink, washing his hands. My mother stood a few feet away, writing in ball-point pen on the back of a napkin. It appeared that they might have passed a few civil words.
“Oh good,” my mother said, turning.
Adrianna didn’t meet her eye, but my mother’s strategy was to let the formalities of a service carry us through the awkwardness. She poured the wine, distributed glasses, and invited everyone to take a cheese straw while she spoke.
“We’re gathered here today to mark the untimely loss of our family’s pet, whose name was Richard.”
“Little Richard,” I added.
�
�All right,” my mother said, annoyed to be interrupted. “I’ve written a poem in his honor. Please forgive the roughness of the meter.” Every facial feature rippling with self-satisfaction, my mother began to read the tribute she had just “dashed off,” only a portion of which I give here.
Dry his water dish, bag his carrots,
Our Richard is dead, our king of the parrots.
Beware the occasional poet who has lacked an occasion. Out of my eyeshot she had dashed off a sonnet, a villanelle, and a sestina. We had seconds on our wine before she had come to the pantoum.
“Which, just to remind us, consists of a series of quatrains rhyming ABAB in which the first and the third lines of a quatrain recur as the—”
“No,” my father put in, “the second and fourth lines recur as the first and third lines of the succeeding quatrain. Each quatrain introduces a new second line.”
“You’re right, darling. It’s ABAB, BCBC, CDCD. Right? I think I did it right.”
“Shall I have a look?”
My mother hesitated, then moved aside so that my father could see. They bent over the napkin together, my father murmuring, my mother inclining her head ever so gently so that her forehead rested against his ear. “Yes. Oh yes. Lovely! You have it. And the closing quatrain rhymes ZAZA.”
They looked at each other without intensity, but with affection. I was both relieved and deeply embarrassed, as if I had stumbled upon the primal scene. Then my mother read the pantoum with my father still beside her. “Anybody want to add anything?” she asked when it was done, looking round.
Nobody did. Adrianna began to cry, tears dripping sloppily down her face.
“Did you love him?” my mother said sympathetically.
“Yes!” Adrianna blubbered.
There was a long interval during which Adrianna wept quietly, then raucously, then quietly again, reminding me of the ungainly crescendos of the coffeemaker.
“I miss him,” Adrianna said hoarsely.
“Of course you do. So do I.”
“I love him,” Adrianna croaked.
“Yes, yes,” my mother cooed. “So did I.”
“Are you guys talking about the parrot or about Mr. Tatum?” I said, upon which my mother’s tender expression disintegrated, and the softness in my father’s face congealed, quite suddenly, like yolk on a plate.
After the funeral my father returned to the house. Things between him and my mother still seemed strained, but he slept in their bed and he came to dinner. After a while Adrianna too began to attend dinners, but didn’t make much social effort. Being dumped by Don had obviously hit her hard. She looked angry and disheveled and moony all at the same time. “What’s the matter?” I said a few times. “What do you think’s the matter?” she replied haughtily.
If she didn’t want to confide in me, that was fine. I had my own wounds to lick. After thinking it over many times, I decided, despite the obvious awkwardness, to talk to Patty Pacholewski about what had happened. I figured that if I could see her apart from Sabrina, I could make her understand that you can’t judge a person by her bird.
I left the house well after noon so that I would miss the lunch rush, and yet when I sloped into the sandwich shop, there was an unpleasant line in which I had to wait, unsure of whether Patty even knew I was there. When at last I inched up to the counter, she said hello grimly, adding nothing other than what her job required.
“Was that sandwich for here, or to go?”
“To go,” I said, a trifle testily. (I had said so beforehand.) With an impersonal thrust she removed my sandwich from the red polypropylene basket and dropped it into a greaseproof bag. Never mind that I had revered her for all of fifth grade, she nudged the bag across the counter as if she didn’t give a shit.
I bit the inside of my cheek to staunch my tears. I had planned to tell her that Richard had died. I had planned to say, “If the only thing standing between us as roommates is that embarrassing bird, it might interest you to know that the embarrassment is now biodegrading in the yard.” But instead I flushed bright red and fled from the shop.
At home, my mother was unloading the dishwasher in her introspective way, giving every glass and plate a solemn inspection. I sat down at the breakfast bar, unwrapped my sandwich and made a terrible discovery.
“Not a single red pepper! It’s a grilled chicken and red pepper sandwich, and look, Mom, there’s nothing but chicken inside.”
“There’s some peppers in the fridge.”
“Roasted?”
She made an insufficient clucking noise. Oh, Saturdays, infernal Saturdays, a wilderness of snares! Before I could say anything more, my father came in and began to fling himself noisily about looking for his car keys, and as soon as I saw he meant to enlist me in his petty search, I plumped my sandwich onto a plate and fled to the living room, where Adrianna had decamped on the sofa with a mess of library books. She looked up moodily. I settled myself in the armchair and observed that she was combing through All About Parrots.
“Why’re you reading that?”
“No reason,” she said. “Just curious.”
“Mulling over the past’s not healthy. You’re not thinking of getting another parrot, are you?”
“No, mostly I’m just wondering why he died. He wasn’t all that old, you know.”
I cast about for something plausible. “But he was . . . very negative. That might have hurt him in the long run.”
Adrianna sharpened her gaze. “Did you know birds should never be fed avocado, parsley, chocolate, or caffeine?”
I yawned. “How about a grilled chicken and red pepper sandwich with no grilled peppers?”
“And no peanuts either. Didn’t you used to give him salted peanuts as a treat?”
She began to read aloud from an Optimum Diet chapter in a classroom-specific drone, the custom of lecturing to captive children having eroded her God-given ability to assess a listener’s interest. “Onions, no,” she said. “Butter, no. Salty foods, no. Dairy . . . ”
“He’s dead and buried. Horrors!” I said, pulling open my sandwich for further study. “This chicken was taken off the grill too soon. What is she doing, trying to give me salmonella?”
“Dairy, no. I distinctly remember cottage cheese. Tabbouli. Avocado chunks and even some bite-size Snickers. You couldn’t have fed Richard worse if you’d tried.”
“It was Mom who liked to treat him.” With thumb and reluctant finger, I picked up a book on the floor, Natural Healing for Parrots, and quickly threw it down again. “Why are you reading all this? It’s a moot point.” I handed her my plate. “Would you taste this please and tell me if you think it’s underdone? Do you think it’s an insult, this sandwich?”
“It’s not good, but it’s cooked.”
“Aha! So no intentional harm.” I left the sandwich in her hands and went off to my room, satisfied that although Patty hadn’t yet forgiven me, she wasn’t aiming to kill me. But my sister, in her nest of books, hadn’t been gathering grass and twigs as light entertainment. She had a hunch. And while I took a late afternoon nap—the sleep of the innocent, the sleep of the slightly depressed—she rolled that hunch between her fingers until it grew into a thing of prodigious proportions. For years I have insisted that, despite her serviceable academic track record, Adrianna is not (warning: confidential family information) all that bright. Dogged, she is; organized, yes; pedantic, check; but possessed of a signal, sinuous, investigatory mind?
Ha! Ha! Ha!
And so it seemed incredible, in the highest sense of the word, that such an uninspired person should discover, in her imagination’s underbrush, the secret I had marooned on my desert island heart.
CHAPTER 22
A few nights later when I was sitting at my desk, reading my book, Adrianna knocked: rat-a-tat-tat-BANG (four light knuckle swats, one lead fist).
“Enter,” I said with superb indifference.
Enter she did, rather wildly, tumbling through the door, her face aflame, her
eyes lit up with madness. In her hands she held the T.J.Maxx bag—that oversized, unforgettably useful bag. I should have thrown it away—a murderer always throws away the weapon!—but knowing my mother’s fondness for recycling, I had put it in the pantry.
“I think we should talk,” Adrianna said.
“Can it wait till morning?”
“No, it can’t.”
“If this is about Mr. Tatum, I’ll tell you everything I know.”
That diverted her for a moment. “This isn’t about Don,” she faltered. “But why—what do you know?”
“I know he and Mom have been talking.”
It was true that I had caught wind of some phone calls, but that had been days ago, when the news first broke, and even then I didn’t know for sure what my mother or Mr. Tatum had said. Only that he had been calling her.
“Sit down,” I advised. “I didn’t want to worry you, but the fact is, it’s been worrying me. Do you think—oh, it’s too humiliating to even say it—do you think there’s any chance of Mom and Mr. Tatum getting back together?”
I watched the idea of their union bloom in the great arid desert of her head like a time-lapse video of a blooming cactus. She must have changed color three times as she contemplated it. Then she laughed—her unattractive hyena laugh—and shook it off.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “There’s nothing going on there. That was just a dalliance in their past.”
“Sure it was, but who knows? If Mom isn’t satisfied with Dad—which, how could she be?—maybe your thing with Mr. Tatum wakened her old desires for him. And maybe his contact with you wakened his desires for the woman who got away. You know, there’s nothing like The One Who Got Away!”
“You’re vile.”
“I’m imaginative,” I admitted. “But it could be happening, without us knowing it, and just think! Your affair with Mr. Tatum might’ve been the spark that started it.”
