The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  I remember a hotel I stayed in with my mother during her own mother's funeral. Downtown Norfolk, 1986. There was a rotating bucket of chicken on a sign pole below our window. I watched it spin. Even when the lights were off and my mother cried into her pillow, I watched that bucket of chicken rotate like the world itself.

  At the time I thought that moms were not allowed to be sad, that surely women grew out of sadness by the time they had children.

  Mom, Ike says. I don't want to move.

  His eyes flicker and he fades. The news is on. A lipstick-shellacked anchor tells of a new breed of aggressive python in southern Florida that strangled a toddler in his sleep. Maybe one will come to our hotel, I think. And I will have to fight it off with my pocket knife, club it with the glass lamp on the bedside table, offer it my own body.

  On our second date, Ike's father showed me a video of an infant in Andhra Pradesh. The child had rich brown skin and curious eyes. He pulled himself across a grass mat while a cobra, hood spread, hovered above the boy's soft body. The baby grabbed after the cobra's tail while the toothless snake struck him repeatedly on his downy head, snapping down upon his body like a whip.

  This, Ike's father said, is how you cultivate the absence of fear. Don't you wish someone had given you that gift?

  Fear keeps me safe, I said.

  Snakes. Why do I think of these things before I try to fall asleep?

  I put one arm across Ike's chest so that I will know if he moves. I can feel the pattern of his breath, the calm and easy way he sleeps, the simple way he dreams.

  When I moved out, Mom had said, I need you to take Carnie.

  It was the hundredth time she'd asked. We had her bills and bank statements spread out on the coffee table. Her eyesight was failing and we knew she couldn't live alone much longer. It was time to plan.

  Carnie hung upside down in his cage. Empty seed casings and shredded newspaper littered the floor. Occasionally he pecked his image in a foil mirror, rang a bell with his beak.

  I don't want the bird, I said. He hates me. He's drawn blood, for Christ's sake.

  If you loved me, Mom said, you'd take him. I can't sleep without knowing he's safe and taken care of.

  That's what you get, I said, for buying a bird with a life expectancy longer than your own.

  You know, she said. Then she stopped, as if she were afraid of what she'd say next.

  I'd always felt Mom's vision of perfection was outdated. I was never the ruddy-faced, pure-of-heart Girl Scout with 4-H-approved sheep-grooming skills that she'd been. I failed home ec and took a liking to underground hip-hop and traveling jam bands, dyed my hair blue with Kool-Aid one high school summer. In college I got a tattoo of a purple Grateful Dead bear on the back of my neck, which had infuriated Mom when she saw it. When Ike was little, he used to lift my hair until he found the purple bear hiding underneath. At least someone liked it.

  In Mom's eyes, atonement was more than walking the line, more than surfacing from the typical angst-ridden throes of adolescence and early scholastic failures. Atonement included my adoption of a bird I couldn't trust around my son. A bird I'd hated for over a decade.

  I don't trust the bird around Ike, and I can't handle the mess, the noise—

  Mom was silent. I'll give Carnie to the plumber, Mom said, collecting herself. He's always liked Carnie.

  I wish I could take him, I said.

  Lying doesn't help, Mom said.

  ***

  Even before I see it, Ted's Roadside Zoo depresses me. We park outside. The entrance is a plaster lion's face. We walk through its mouth. On the lion's right canine, someone has written, Jenny is a midget whore.

  This place smells like pee, Ike says.

  It's nine A.M., but it feels like Ted's place isn't open. I've yet to see an employee. We walk a sand-and-gravel path, faux palm trees overhead.

  I've heard stories about these places, how they keep big cats in small enclosures. How the animals often have ingrown nails and zero percent body fat.

  I have the urge to call out, Mom?—as if I'm coming home after a long day.

  We find a man feeding a seal.

  Where are your birds? I ask. Specifically, your African gray?

  We have two, he says. Over by the vending machines.

  I need the one named Carnie, I say. The one you received from the Red Oak Bird Sanctuary.

  I think it's the one on the left, he says. They all look alike, you know?

  I hone in on Carnie's knowing eye, the white mask. He looked like the same bird, though his eyes had yellowed and his gray feathers had worn thin around his neck.

  Carnie, I say. Carnie. Carnie. Good boy. What do you want for dinner? I pull out a pack of sunflower seeds I had purchased at the Zip Mart down the road. I look at the white down on the bird's chest and think, Mom's voice is in there.

  Ike closes in on the cage. He waves his hands in front of the parrot's face. The sign on Carnie's cage reads, African gray parrots are as smart as a three-year-old.

  I don't believe it, Ike says.

  Carnie? I ask. Want to sing some Patsy?

  For a half-hour, Ike and I coo and speak and dance, but the bird doesn't say a word. Beneath this wall of gray feathers is the last shard of my mother, and I feel myself growing increasingly desperate. How thick was her accent? Was her singing as beautiful as I remember? She always spoke sweetly to Carnie, and I wanted to hear that sugary tone, the one she hadn't used with me in her last years.

  How do you know this is the right bird? Ike asks.

  I did my research, I say. And he hates me. He's spiting me with silence.

  Please talk, Ike says to Carnie. Carnie bobs his head up and down and bites his leg, a gesture that strikes me as the bird equivalent of thumbing one's nose.

  Just say something, I think. Anything. Just let me hear her again.

  I'm surprised when I remember phone numbers and the alphabetical listing of all fifty states, the way I can summon Deuteronomy like a song on a long run. But I can't recall the funny way Mom said roof or Clorox. Not the rhyme she used to say about bad breath or the toothpaste jingle she had stuck in her head for two years, not the sound of the way she said good night. The longer Carnie goes without talking, the more I miss her.

  The morning we moved Mom into a home, the plumber came for Carnie. Mom's possessions had been boxed up and her furniture sold. She'd prepared a box for Carnie that contained his food, toys, water dish, spare newsprint, and a fabric square from one of her dresses. So he remembers me, she said.

  The kids are excited, the plumber said. He was tall and large and moved quickly. I was thankful for his efficiency.

  I'll be in the car, Mom said, letting herself out of the house. The screen door shut behind her with metallic resonance, as it had thousands of times. I didn't like letting her descend the steps on her own, but I knew, in this moment, she'd refuse help. I took the box she'd made for Carnie and followed the plumber to his car, dropping a towel over the cage in the back seat of his truck.

  I'm always walking, Carnie sang, after midnight...

  I couldn't look at Mom. I knew she was crying. I was relieved to see Carnie go, to have the burden of his welfare hoisted onto someone else's shoulders. But immediately I was brought back to the sadness of the moment, the fact that this day represented a breaking-off point. There was an air of finality—my mother grieving in the car, our small home empty.

  After the plumber pulled away, I walked through the house one last time. I could almost hear the place settling, breathing a sigh of relief, coming down from a high. Still, there was a palpable residue of our past lives, as if old fights and parrot tirades had left their marks. I paused over my father's plaster fixes and custom molding, things shaped by his hands that I couldn't take with me. Empty, the house reminded me of a tombstone, a commemoration of my childhood. With the shopping center going up next door, I had the feeling no one else would ever live there again.

  I joined Mom in the car. I imagined her stil
lness and set face belied inner fragility, as if beneath the crust lay a deep well of hurt. As I turned onto the highway, I saw her touch her shoulder, the place where Carnie had so often rested, his remembered weight now a phantom presence on her thinning bones.

  We've been driving I-95, toward home, for five hours. Ike has been in and out of naps. We pass a billboard that says, Jesus Is Watching.

  Jesus makes me nervous, Ike says. Jesus is a spy.

  I laugh and then pause, thinking how the statement would have made Mom uncomfortable. The night sets in and Ike gets quiet. I watch his eyes in the rearview. I wonder what he's thinking about.

  Will you love me forever? I think to myself. Will you love me when I'm old? If I go crazy? Will you be embarrassed of me? Avoid my calls? Wash dishes when you talk to me on the phone, roll your eyes, lay the receiver down next to the cat?

  I realize how badly I need a piece of my mother. A scrap, a sound, a smell—something.

  I hunger for the person who birthed me, whose body, I realize, after becoming a mother myself, was overrun with nerve endings that ran straight to her heart, until it was numb with overuse, or until, perhaps, she felt nothing.

  One more stop, I say to Ike.

  We pull into the dark gravel driveway to my mother's house. There's no neighborhood, no signage. It's just a deserted, plain house for plain folks on what is now a major highway. The white paint peels from the siding. I remember pulling into this driveway when I was past curfew, the light in my mother's bedroom glowing, the way I could simultaneously dread and love the thought of slipping through the front door, pouring a glass of water, and crafting an elaborate lie to explain my late arrival.

  Ike is sleepy. He's wearing my rain jacket and has the hood cinched tightly to his face, though it's barely raining. RVs are pulling into the Walmart parking lot for the night. The smell of wet leaves makes me sick to my stomach with nostalgia. The boxwoods are overgrown and shapeless.

  Hold my hand, I say to Ike. Stay close.

  The screen door is still intact, though the screen itself is punctured and webbed over. I hold it open, stare into the dirty glass of the front door. I try the knob—locked.

  I have to go in, I say. Close your eyes.

  I break the front door pane with the butt of the knife I carry in my purse and carefully reach in through the mouth of glass teeth to turn the doorknob.

  This is weird, Ike says. I'm scared.

  I clench his wrist. My knuckles are cold and I worry that my grip on Ike's arm is too tight. But I do not let go.

  The damp carpet heaves underneath my feet. The house smells like a cave, and yet like home. Checkered contact paper still lines the pantry shelves. Windows are cracked; sills are covered in dead wasps and crumpled spiders. There is mold on the drywall and water spots on the ceiling. Someone has taken red spray paint to the fireplace and living room wall. The stove and toilet have been ripped out. Ike starts to cry.

  It's okay, I say. I just want to stay here a minute.

  I lead him to the back of the house, down the hallway which still feels more familiar to me than any I know. My bedroom, with its teal carpet and pale pink walls, looks small. Barren. At first, it is so quiet my teeth ache. My ears strain.

  I'm sad that you lived here, Ike says, still crying.

  It wasn't that bad, honey, I say. This was a beautiful house.

  The crown molding my father installed is still up, though one piece is loose and sags. I remember him getting up early so that he could work on it before heading to the factory. It was my mother's birthday present—crown molding for my room.

  My father died on the steps of the tool manufacturing plant, not ten minutes down the road. A heart attack. The doctors said it was a birth defect, that he was born with a weak heart. And now the building is empty, abandoned, as if all his work was for nothing. Mom's grief was as long as a river, endless.

  I walk back to the kitchen and climb onto the green plastic countertop. Ike watches me, curious and confused. I remove the valances Mom made in the early eighties, dried bugs falling from the folds of the fabric into the sink below. These are the things with which she made a home. Her contributions to our sense of place were humble and put forth with great intent, crafts which took weeks of stitching and unstitching, measuring, cutting, gathering. I realize how much in the home was done by hand and sweat. My father had laid the carpeting and linoleum. Mom had painted and reupholstered the same dinner chairs twice, sewed all the window treatments. My parents were quick-fix-averse, always in for the long haul. When the country road in front of their house had been widened to a highway, they complained but never entertained the idea of moving.

  I scan the kitchen and picture Mom paying bills, her perfect script, the way she always listed her occupation with pride: homemaker.

  I pull scraps of peeling wallpaper from unglued seams and corners. It comes off slow and steady like skin after a sunburn; the old adhesive gives easily.

  Mementos, I tell Ike. I close my eyes. Now I can hear my mother everywhere—in the kitchen, in my bedroom, on the front porch.

  Turn off the television.

  Warm up the stove.

  Brush your hair.

  Put your father's shoes where I can't see them. In the trash.

  On Sunday, as promised, my realtor arrives a half-hour before the potential buyers and their home inspector.

  Your house should look as perfect as possible, he'd said before I left for the weekend. Ask yourself, What would Jackie Onassis do?

  Ike and I had come home to a spare house; some of our chairs, photographs, and Ike's art had been relocated, as the realtor had suggested, to "let the space breathe."

  When I see the realtor's convertible in the driveway, I ask Ike, Think you can box up the mini NASCARs and finger puppets?

  Sorry I'm late, our realtor says. He rushes to the kitchen, as if he has immediately sensed disorder. He strokes the valance over the kitchen window. I remembered last night, as I was hanging it, that Mom had found the pattern in Southern Living.

  Is this velvet? he says. Are these ... cobwebs?

  I have placed scraps of rogue wallpaper next to my stove and another in the bathroom—a repeating pattern of pale brown cornucopias and faded fruit I took from my mother's house.

  These must come down, the realtor says. Now.

  He pinches the curling shreds with his thumb and forefinger.

  Leave it, I say. They add charm.

  You'll never sell this house, he says, shaking his head in despair. Crickets on speed and a valance that Elvis made in home economics class. Get serious.

  Apple pie? I ask, pulling out a day-old pastry I had purchased from the market's discount bread bin that morning.

  I've steeled myself against critique. There are too many things I can't fix.

  A couple in a minivan pulls up in front of the house, followed by the home inspector in a pickup truck. They come to the door, their faces already twisted with scrutiny. She is small and blond and he is thick like an old football player.

  Hi, I say. Welcome. We're about to head out; the house is all yours.

  I stuff some magazines and soda into a canvas bag and look around for Ike. I hear him running up the basement steps. He presents a scrap of siding that is covered in glue and cricket exoskeletons. The couple exchange a glance. The inspector scribbles a note.

  I crouch down to the floor and touch Ike's cheeks. You're brave, I say. Thank you.

  Ike grins. Together, we can make a solid grilled cheese, prune shrubs, clean house. Together, maybe we're the housewife this house needs. Maybe our best life is here. On a good day, we're just one man short of a catalog-worthy family.

  A week before she left for the nursing home, we packed my mother's belongings—robes, slippers, and lotions that could do little good for her sagging face. Her diminished vision made it hard for her to read the labels on the boxes.

  Ike had just started kindergarten. Leaving him at a friend's house to spend time with Mom on a Saturd
ay was a miserable tradeoff. I wanted to soak up every last bit of innocence he had left, answer every question, scoop him up for hugs when he'd allow it. But I was the only person Mom would allow in the house; there was no one else around to help.

  I held up various tchotchkes for Mom's approval.

  Take or toss? I asked.

  Mom sat in her recliner. She wore a light blue dress she'd made herself. The fabric was so worn it was nearly transparent. Carnie rested comfortably on her shoulder. I worried that his talons would break her thinning skin, but she moved as if she hardly noticed his weight.

  I held up a box of ornaments, plastic apples I'd hand-painted for her as a child.

  Toss 'em, she'd said.

  I began to wrap her glassware in newspaper.

  Make sure to leave plenty of print for lining Carnie's cage, she said.

  My mother cupped Carnie with both hands and brought him to her lap. She crossed her legs, then scratched the finger-wide point between Carnie's wings. His eyes, like little black seeds, fell to half-mast as she stroked him. They were accustomed to each other, a pair of sad habits. He was more familiar with her voice and touch than I, more dear to her everyday existence. His transgressions—dirty cage, the occasional nip of her finger—were met with gentle understanding.

  Don't call here again, he said. Don't call.

  Remember, I told my mother. I'm not obligated to look after that bird.

  Well, she said, I'm not obligated to look after you.

  You are, I'd thought at the time, her words a splinter in my chest. You have to be.

  In that moment, I withered. I hated her for her coldness, her stubborn rationale, her ability to come up big in a fight even when she was dog-tired and bird-boned and couldn't see the food on the end of her fork.

  There she sat, outmoded in her homemade dress, bird in her lap, shit on her shoulder. Steamrolled by the world, but in the face of defeat, she threatened us all.

  Carnie moved back to her shoulder and buried his head into her thin hair. It occurred to me that with her voice inside of him, he would always have more of her to remember.