Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  Racquel said softly but quite plainly, “Well, fuck him with a salty dick.”

  This sentiment startled Sassy so badly that her head jerked up and she started to giggle.

  “I mean it.” Racquel faced her steadily. “Fuck him. He made you feel like dog doo, Sassy.”

  Racquel’s wholehearted sympathy was making Sassy’s eyes go hot and moist. She swallowed hard. “I—I thought it was just part of being a wife.”

  “Oh. Uh-huh. Like a wife isn’t a person?”

  “Well, I felt like, as long as he was faithful …” Sassy turned away to look blindly at feathered chains, because even after a year she found herself still unable to comprehend Frederick’s infidelity. After she had devoted her life to him—which, in hindsight, seemed like a pretty stupid sort of devotion, but she had been doing what she thought she was supposed to. He was supposed to be her prince. Even after she had slowly come to know that he was not a prince but a jackass, still, he was her very own jackass, and she was still willing to give everything she had to the covenant—but it didn’t seem to matter to him. He went and tossed it off like—like spitting out a hawker. How could he do that?

  Sassy still just couldn’t understand.

  Without looking at Racquel she said, “I think the man on horseback might have been King Arthur.” A hero and a faithful husband. “Who the lovers were I don’t know.” But she expected they were faithful too, because she knew what she had lost.

  If the forest was Paradise lost, then the shadowland beneath the trees was Perdition. The place where lost dreams dwelt.

  Racquel said gently enough, “Sassy, stop it.”

  “No. I can’t. Racquel …” Sassy made herself turn to face the tall—woman, half the time she still couldn’t help thinking of Racquel as a woman. A woman and her best friend. Almost her only friend. Looking up to meet his eyes, she asked him, “Are you going to get the mirror fixed?”

  He pressed his lips together in a worried magenta line and shook his head.

  “Get a new mirror put in the same frame, I mean?”

  “Sassy, do you have any idea how much it costs to get an oval mirror cut?”

  She stood looking at him.

  “Anyway, I can’t. The frame’s broken. Sassy—let it go.”

  But she couldn’t. Somehow she had lost her self, and it had gone in there to join the other lost things.

  “I’ve been thinking, it was probably some kind of chemical got in the ventilation system. Trippin’ us. Doesn’t it feel like that to you, too? A brain party? A freaky dream?”

  She couldn’t be angry at him, because he was right, it did. If it had not been for the goofy parakeet looking back at her from the mirror she wouldn’t be here, begging him, because what had happened before did feel like a dream, fading day by day, some of the jewel-bright details dulled, turned to dust, lost, and—all the more reason she had to get back there soon, yesterday was not soon enough, or she would forget, it would all be lost to her.

  Lost.

  She could not face more loss. She turned away.

  “Sassy, honey,” Racquel said, “you’ve got to get over it.”

  There was so much warm concern in his voice that she couldn’t speak or look at him; she could only flee.

  “Sassy,” he called after her as she darted out of the shop, “let it go. Move on.”

  Racquel checked his look in the plate-glass window of Food World. Hair, check. Lipstick, check. Boobs firmly in place, check. Face intact. Dress straight. Chartreuse looked marvelous against his skin. Scanning himself in the glass gave him confidence, and somebody had to do something, obviously, although Racquel had no idea what he expected to accomplish by going here; he just wanted a look at Sassy’s toad of an ex, that was all. Shifting his bustard-trimmed shawl to a more becoming angle around his shoulders and twitching his fitted skirt down around his hips, he sashayed in.

  It didn’t take long to locate Frederick. A man with yam-colored hair was stationed at one of the cash registers. Racquel strolled around and took a look at the tabloids—Boy in Coma Grows Wings, Jacko Nose Heartache, Diana Living in Barbados with Elvis—also taking a couple of glances at the cashier. Freckled all over. Name tag said FRED. It had to be Mr. Hummel.

  Odd-looking dude. Round-shouldered, kind of amorphous. Something about him reminded Racquel of a toy, a stuffed animal, one of those gingery bears with the arms put on with pins so they could move. Racquel couldn’t see why Sassy loved the guy. But then, why did anybody love anybody? Sure as hell Racquel had nobody who loved him.

  He picked up a basket and made a rapid round of the store, grabbing bagels, rice cakes, boneless chicken breasts, herbal stress tea, nail polish remover, cotton balls, yogurt and, at the register, Cosmopolitan. FRED was still there. Racquel stood in his line and watched him wait on a young couple with a baby, a teenage boy buying gum and popcorn, a middle-aged woman in nursing whites. Somehow FRED managed to run them through the process without once acknowledging their existence as human beings. He scanned their groceries without speaking. He handed them their change and said “Thank you” but his eyes never focused on them.

  Not Mr. Personality, Racquel thought, although willing to make allowances. It had to be hell standing behind a cash register all day. The man was on automatic pilot—

  “Hi, how are you, miss?”

  Startled, Racquel realized that FRED was speaking to him. More specifically, Frederick was bespeaking his boobs. The man’s watery greenish eyes were focused now, for sure—focused on Racquel’s chest, before scanning up to Racquel’s face. “You doing okay today?” Frederick asked brightly.

  “Um, sure. I’m fine.”

  With his freckled hand Frederick selected an item from Racquel’s order. “Oooh, Dannon blueberry yogurt,” he declared as he scanned it. “That’s really good for you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Fresh bakery bagels,” Frederick murmured intensely as he selected the next item. “Have you tried bagels with sugar-free raspberry preserves? They’re yummy.”

  Racquel felt his mouth stiffening into a reflexive smile. He was no stranger to male attention, and usually he liked it, but not this time.

  “Nail polish remover.” Frederick paused before scanning this item and studied Racquel’s hands. “Aaah.” He gazed warmly into Racquel’s face. “You take good care of your nails, don’t you, miss? They’re very attractive.”

  Racquel showed his teeth, nodded, and did not reply.

  Frederick scanned the nail polish remover. “Cotton balls. Oooh. Those are to go with the nail polish remover.”

  The nail polish remover and the cotton balls were for Sassy.

  And her ex-husband was hitting on him.

  Racquel grew aware that a considerable line had formed while Frederick chatted him up, scanning his order in slow motion. Judging by the sardonic looks on the people behind him, nobody was missing what was going on.

  “Rice cakes,” Frederick rhapsodized. “You—”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry,” Racquel interrupted, teeth clenched.

  “Absolutely!” Frederick hopped to it like a fuzzy bunny. “You’re a busy professional girl, and it’s obvious from your appearance that you’re a perfectionist, you’re under a lot of stress,” he babbled. “Herbal stress tea.”

  Blessedly he had little to say about the boneless chicken breasts or the Cosmopolitan. In vibrant tones he informed Racquel of the total. He took Racquel’s money and handed Racquel the change. The groceries stood in a pile on the counter. Frederick stood beaming at Racquel.

  Racquel stared back at him, his teeth aching from smiling.

  Frederick’s face lit up with a stupendous thought. “Would you like them in bags?”

  Racquel nodded.

  “I’ll put them in bags for you!”

  “Please.”

  With a feeling as if he had just encountered a centipede in the basement, Racquel watched Frederick bag his order. What a crotch the man was. Racquel would have staked his bo
obs that Frederick had been hitting on younger women for years. What this man had put Sassy through … Racquel knew what he wanted to do to Frederick. But it was not something he ever permitted himself to do. It was dangerous.

  Frederick held the plastic grocery bags out to him by the handles, leered at him and said, “You come back, miss. Have a nice day.”

  Racquel did it anyway.

  As he took the bags, he leaned closer to FRED—the man caught his breath and ogled in response. Racquel leaned almost close enough to kiss. He bestirred his mouth from its ghastly rictus. He spoke.

  “You look like my kind of guy,” he whispered to Frederick in a deep, gritty voice, unmistakably the voice of a male.

  Without bothering to wait for a response, he minced out, his drop-dead red sling-back heels clicking all the way.

  Just to be doing something, anything, that might help her solve the mystery of her own life, Sassy went to see the woman in the high-rises who had fifty pet birds.

  It was not hard to find her. Just ask, then follow the smell.

  Although distinctive, and whiffable in the hallway, the odor was not unpleasant. It was a warm, lizardy fragrance, as sere and crisp as feathers. It made Sassy think vaguely of sand dunes, palm trees.

  A Magic-Markered sign on the door said LOOK DOWN, with the OO of LOOK colored into downcast eyeballs and an emphatic arrow pointing floorward. Sassy was looking down, seeing nothing but indoor-outdoor carpeting, when the door was opened by a large, homely woman with complexion problems and stringy hair. At that point it was difficult to look down, because the woman, clad in a clingy T-shirt, had a parakeet walking around on top of each of her generous breasts. It occurred to Sassy that this woman was outdoing Racquel, wearing the living plumage.

  Sassy blinked. “Um, hi. I was wondering, um …”

  At that point Sassy lost her voice, because one of the bosom birds pooped, and the poop ran down the tightly stretched rib-knit of the woman’s shirt, forming a drip in the nipple area.

  “You want to see the birds?” She seemed not to notice at all that she had just been pooped on, and she had a warm smile. “Look down and watch where you step. Come on in.”

  Walking in, Sassy joined a promenade of other bipeds. Birds—parakeets, cockatiels, parrots, and other Psittacidae—swaggered on the floor as well as shrieking from atop the cages which had taken over the apartment. Cages sat on the TV, flanked the shabby sofa, stood in stacks and ranks along walls and on the counter of the kitchenette, but Sassy saw no birds actually occupying any of the cages; instead, budgies whirred through the air and perched on lamp shades, a large scarlet macaw ripped apart a People magazine, a cockatoo monopolized the coffee table.

  “Sit down,” the hostess invited, raising her voice to be heard over squeak whistle chitter squawk screech chirp twitter coo and the relentless dinging of some bird’s bell toy, all counter-pointed against Michael Jackson from a staticky radio. A medium-sized mostly yellow bird landed on the woman’s head as she gestured toward the sofa. “Make yourself comfy. Just make sure ain’t nobody under you.”

  Sassy sat, exchanging glances with the cockatoo. Parakeets clustered on a shelf in front of a mirror hanging on one wall. Two smallish peachy-faced had-to-be-lovebirds pressed against each other, beaks open and interlocked. The parrot dinging the bell stopped and glared at Sassy. “Shut up!” it said. “Who farted?”

  Without appearing to notice, the bird woman settled herself at the other end of the sofa, removing the bird from her head; it perched on her hand. She brought it to her face—Sassy cringed at the sight of the bird’s large black hooked beak an inch from the woman’s eyes; she wouldn’t want that bird so close to her eyes, even though she was wearing glasses. But the bird woman puckered her mouth and let the bird nibble at her lips.

  “Kissy kissy,” she said. “This is Pookie; he’s a conure. I’m Lydia. What’s your name?”

  She was looking cross-eyed down her own nose at the conure exploring her mouth; it took Sassy a moment to realize that Lydia was speaking to her. “Oh! Uh, I’m Sassy. Sassafras.”

  “Who farted? That’s stinky,” said the scowling parrot.

  “That’s Ezekiel. He’s a Congo gray. He’s very intelligent. You can have conversations with him. I mean, he likes to talk dirty and all that, it’s like talking with a three-year-old, but no worse than your average male.” A parakeet had walked up from Lydia’s boob to her shoulder, where it was nibbling at her earlobe. The big woman fit Sassy’s idea of a welfare recipient: Goodwill clothes, skin pasty from a diet of pasta, and maybe not too bright. “Kissy kissy,” she said, tilting her head toward the bird.

  “That looks like it feels good,” Sassy said to be polite.

  “It does.” Lydia transferred the conure to Sassy’s shoulder, where it started at once to preen Sassy’s hair. It better just damn stay on her shoulder and away from her face—but actually its ministrations did feel good. It was more physical attention than Sassy had received anywhere else in years, except—except lately from Racquel, messing with her hair, painting her fingernails.

  “Birds give me more loving than any man ever did,” said Lydia.

  The conure transferred its attentions to Sassy’s ear, nibbling around the edge. This also felt good, until the conure clamped down on her earlobe with its hooked beak. “Ow!” Sassy yelped. “Jeez.” Racquel wasn’t the only one trying to put holes in her ears.

  “No no,” sang Lydia. “Say no no.”

  Sassy put her hand up to remove Pookie from her shoulder; he bit it. At that moment Sassy realized that the bird woman’s complexion problems, which she had taken for menopausal acne or something, were not that at all; all those red spots were bird bites. Blood blisters.

  “These birds beat up on you!”

  Lydia smiled, really focusing on Sassy for the first time. “They give me little ol’ love hickeys now and then.” There was something so innocent about her homely-faced gaze that Sassy looked away, feeling somehow abashed.

  The Congo gray parrot who had been ringing the bell, Sassy noticed, was now straddling it and rubbing the nether regions of his belly on it, his eyes shining like silver. The lovebirds were at it too. There seemed to be no place safe to look. Necessarily, Sassy shifted her eyes back to Lydia, reminding herself that she, Sassy, considering the way her life had been lately, had no leeway to think this woman was crazy.

  Lydia, smiling at the world in general, noticed the masturbating parrot but did not alter her smile. “Ezekiel,” she said, “knock it off.”

  “No!” yelled Ezekiel, increasing his tempo.

  Sassy blinked. The bird had not actually understood and responded to Lydia, had he? He had just said a word he happened to know. Coincidence.

  “Ezekiel,” said Lydia just as placidly, “you’re being rude. We have company. Stop it.”

  “Fuck you,” said the parrot, but at the same moment his feathery face achieved an intensely stupid expression. He shuddered, then relaxed. He stopped.

  “Thank you,” Lydia said.

  “You’re welcome,” said Ezekiel.

  Sassy felt her jaw slacken. She blurted, “You really can have conversations with him?”

  “Not just him.” Lydia turned her ineffable smile on Sassy. “But with the others it works better if I speak their language.”

  Sassy did not know what to think or believe.

  “Though I have a terrible human accent,” said Lydia. “And I’m not very bright. I talk bird like a three-year-old.” One of the many budgies whirred over, and Lydia put up her hand for it to land on, clicking a few bird-sounds at it with her tongue. The parakeet chirped back. Lydia nodded and remarked to Sassy, “He just wanted to people perch. They love it and so do I. I love their little warm feet.” She made kissy noises at the budgie. “Parakeets are sweeties,” she told Sassy. “They’re my favorites. They’re clowns, with their little round heads and the way they dress up. They come in more colors than peacocks or anything. And they ain’t as moody as the big birds
.”

  “I should hope not,” Sassy said. Her ear still hurt from where the conure had bitten it. She rubbed it.

  “What I like about parakeets, they lead an active fantasy life,” Lydia said. “Look at them there at that mirror.” Sassy looked. Lined up on the handy perch in front of the looking glass, white yellow lilac green blue gray aquamarine, the parakeets gabbled, each fixated on its own reflection, evidently preferring it to the company of others of its kind. “You would not believe what they think they see in there,” said the bird woman. “They talk and talk.” Sassy could hear this. The parakeets not only talked; they chirped, whistled, cooed, fussed, whispered, tsked, cried out in alarm, attacked their own images or made kissy love to them. Once again Sassy found that she did not wish to witness such nuzzling—or perhaps it should be beakling. Billing. Whatever. She did not want to see such a public display of affection, birds kissing themselves in obvious enjoyment of their own reflections, while she went lacking even her own homely face in the mirror to love. She looked down at her own hands, studying her wetly lustrous fingernails to comfort herself. Damn, the nail polish was already beginning to chip—

  Something looked back at her out of the polished oval nail of her middle finger.

  Sassy gasped. It was—her, the one with wings and a strangely familiar face. Bolder this time. Sexy glance askance, full-lipped Julia-Roberts smile. She seemed to see Sassy, to know that Sassy had seen her, and she tossed her head, sending auburn hair flying, as she turned away, flinging up her arms amid a flutter of gauzy sleeves. Then Sassy was looking at her winged back. Sassy saw her gamboling across a sun-rayed flower-rich forest glade, her feet never touching the ground—if there were feet; Sassy could never remember afterward whether she saw feet. It was all a dancing blur in the tiny blue pool of her fingernail. But one thing she saw quite clearly. The girl, whoever she was, gave her a backward glance and a grin, then flipped up her swirling robe. The brat mooned her.

  Sassy jolted upright, aghast, and lost sight of the vision. She peered at her fingernail, but the girl was gone; she saw nothing but nail polish. “Poop!” she cried.