She smiles, her irritation thawing. “I’ll bring you a dish of treats as soon as I have a spare moment. But next time, when I tell you to stay put, you better do it. I worry about you, you know.”
She worries about him, he thinks, instantly feeling grateful. She pulls a hairnet from the pocket of her tunic, eases it over her red curls, and leaves him—her footsteps landing resolutely against the bricks.
He knows her better than she knows herself, for he has studied her in action. A spare moment won’t come anytime soon. She can never relax when she’s cooking. At first, she’ll try to stick to her supervisory role, but, within the space of ten minutes, her eyebrows will tent upward, her mouth will twitch, and her index finger will slice through the air as she points out someone’s mistake. It’s hard for her to delegate. Before too long, she’ll lose all self-control and will be taking over completely—washing, peeling, and cutting produce for Jorge while helping his wife, Amelia, with the weighing, grinding, and slicing of meats, the washing of seafood, and later the tidying-up. Eventually, she’ll be breathing down Skeeter’s neck, checking on his salads, terrines, and cold desserts. Once, she even loaded the dishwasher for Manuel, the busboy, whose brown hands flit and quiver with the speed of hummingbirds. She’s as driven and as focused as a crow.
Regardless, she loves her job and is forever reminding him of how lucky she is. Thank God she doesn’t work in a factory, repeating the same mindless tasks every day, she says, or flipping hamburgers at Howard’s Pub and Restaurant. She cooks not because she wants to make a lot of money, she insists, but because she likes to be creative. Even the caveman, she believes, was a chef of sorts, picking the ripest, plumpest berries to eat, hunting for the fleshiest nuts to complement them. “Cooking is a solid, stable, artistic profession,” she constantly reminds him before adding blithely, “It relaxes me,” making him doubt—in those three words—every word that came before, as no part of her is relaxed while she cooks.
Right now, she’s spilling a large spoonful of tomato sauce on her clean jacket. Reaching behind her, she snatches a dishrag off the counter, her tongue and head wagging as she dabs at the splotch. Caruso glances away. From the corner of his eye, he spots Sallie, the patio waitress, ambling toward him with an armload of white tablecloths. It’s her day to set up.
“Hi, Caruso,” she says, plopping the pile on a glass-topped table to his left. With knobby fingers, she pinches up a tablecloth and whips her arms upward, then brings them down. Long and white as a stork’s wings, the linen unfolds, floats in the air, and lands on the surface in front of him. “Say something to me,” she says, circling the table, fiddling with the hem. “Say Sallie. Say sexy Sallie.”
Will she give him a treat, like she would to a performing circus beast, if he says what she wants?
“Say sexy Sallie.”
Can he say it and mean it? he wonders as he studies her from toe to crown. She reminds him of a hodgepodge bird with her cassowary feet, heron legs, emu neck, owlish eyes, and crow hair. She grabs more linen, going from table to table, her arms rising and falling, until she finally returns to where he is, picks up another stack, and repeats the process until every table on the terrace is covered. From a cart beside his cage, she seizes a small vase of zinnias and thunks it in the center of the table where she started.
“I love Catherine’s zinnias,” she says, glancing at him. “Can you say zinnia for me?”
Caruso recalls the last time he saw Catherine O’Neal at her greenhouse on Lighthouse Road, which is where Clarissa buys all of the flowers for the restaurant. As usual, Catherine was wearing her yellow polka-dotted bonnet. “Caruso should’ve been here an hour ago,” she said, wiping her plump, dirty fingers on the bib of her coveralls.
“What happened, Catherine?” Clarissa asked.
“This dingbatter drove up in his fancy car from Ohio, said he heard we talked funny. He kept repeating, ‘Say something. Say something weird and funny.’ I took his head off. ‘Look, mister,’ I said, ‘I hain’t no stupid parrot.’”
“He sounds awful, but parrots are smart, you know,” Clarissa reminded her.
Catherine nodded at Clarissa. “I’m sorry, Caruso,” she said, idling toward him. “You’re not at all stupid. Much smarter than that dingbatter, I’d say. Please accept my apology.”
Her forthrightness was so refreshing. She didn’t hem and haw. She knew she had spoken out of place and went right to the heart of the matter.
“I’m sorry, Caruso,” she had said once more.
“Sorry, Caruso,” Sallie says, bumping against his cage as she reaches for another vase of flowers. “I’m kinda clumsy. What do you think, Caruso? Am I sexy Sallie or clumsy Sallie?”
Caruso doesn’t know. Clarissa is a woman, and she’s sexy, he reasons. Does this mean that every woman is sexy? Maybe? But then he envisions the raven beside the crow. Though both are sleek and black and belong to the same family, the raven is beautiful while the crow is not.
“Okay. Okay,” Sallie says. “I’ll answer the question for you. My friends say I look like Olive Oyl. So it seems only Popeye and Bluto find me sexy.”
Caruso knows who these cartoon characters are from watching Saturday morning kiddie shows in the living room with Clarissa. “Popeye…” he trills, mimicking Popeye’s gravelly voice.
“You’re way too much, Caruso.”
“…sailor man.”
“You’re a hoot,” she tells him.
A hoot, he thinks. He never hoots like an owl, but he’ll do it, if she wants him to. He widens his eyes and hoots loudly.
“A scream,” Sallie says, throwing back her long emu neck, laughing. “If Clarissa wasn’t so crazy about you, I’d take you home with me.”
She’s crazy as a loon about me, Caruso thinks, whipping up his yellow crest of feathers.
“But I’m afraid you’ve got some competition,” Sallie says, looking sideways at him.
Instantly, his crown plummets.
“Right now, she’s back there in the kitchen raving about Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald.”
Caruso snaps his beak angrily.
“Yep, she likes the guy, all right.”
With a loud shriek, Caruso rears up on his perch, flapping his wings so fiercely that the powder dust on his feathers flies.
Sallie begins to sneeze—one sneeze after another—until she is wheezing and cupping her hands over her mouth and nose. “Did I upset you?” she asks, when the sneezing fit is over.
Caruso clamps his beak shut and snubs her with his back.
“Caruso, you okay?” she says, inching closer to the cage. “Don’t be mad at me. Please. I was just kidding.”
He makes a mournful, hooing noise.
“Bluto is always trying to steal Olive Oyl away from Popeye, but she’s never unfaithful to him,” she says reassuringly. “Still, though, I think you could do better than Betty Boop.” Slapping her thighs, she guffaws loudly. “Listen to me,” she says. “I’m talking to you like you understand me.”
He hears her big feet shuffling over the terrace. He doesn’t want Sallie, Olive Oyl, or Betty Boop. Whoever Betty Boop is. Doesn’t Sallie know that parrots are monogamous? Yes, he is a one-woman cockatoo, as faithful as the goose, the crow, the swan, the cardinal. He gives her a full minute before he swivels back around. But what man would be faithful to Sallie? he asks himself. The sight of a heron wading through water is poised and graceful, whereas Sallie—vase in hand—resembles an albatross bumping down for a landing or a loon hopping clownishly on the shore. Definitely not sexy, he decides.
Five
The night slow, the diners gone by nine, Clarissa stomps across the terrace toward him. “Lots of leftovers for you,” she says, unlatching the cage door. “Here,” she barks as she dumps into his dish a healthy portion of fruits and vegetables, which he would have gobbled up earlier but refuses to touch now because she neglected his needs to prepare Oysters Rockefeller for a scoundrel who never showed.
“You, too, huh?” she
says, with an edge of sarcasm in her voice. Unlike Catherine O’Neal, Clarissa finds it difficult to say she’s sorry. “If you don’t want it, then don’t eat it…you selfish jerk.”
Selfish jerk. He pivots with the insult, sparing himself the sight of her, the sound of her footsteps like thorns in his skin as she goes. Mosquitoes buzz in the oleander bushes beyond the snuffed-out torches, and frogs peep from an artificially constructed pond next door. A moonflower vine that Rick planted last spring is currently blooming, its white blossoms as round as Clarissa’s crepes. The glass door shuts with an irritating clack.
Caruso doesn’t have to look her way to know she’s busy with those seemingly superfluous tasks that the others never think of and the perfectionist in her remembers. Those little touches that make her entrées more appetizing than Chef Louie’s, that extra care she puts into everything, regardless of the expenditures of time and money. Her perfectionism is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it drives her to do her best and will make her a great chef someday, while Rick will still be experimenting with colors. A curse because she never feels she does anything well enough. She wasn’t good enough to earn her parents’ love, she often says, and most likely won’t be good enough to sustain a healthy relationship with a man. So why does she take her failures with men out on him, the one who loves her as she is? Caruso asks himself.
Soon, the two of them will return to their less-than-cozy cottage on Fig Tree Lane, where he will ruminate alone in his cage for hours on the harshness of her words. “Words can be as sharp as daggers,” the old man had warned him, and until now Caruso hadn’t understood how much her words could hurt. “Selfish jerk,” she called him. That gash is deep and wide. Jerk, his mind keeps repeating. Jerk. Jerk. Jerk. She must not love him at all if that’s what she thinks he is, he decides. Stretching out his neck, he parts his beak—poised to pluck out a feather—but then, a conversation he’d heard years ago at the pet store prompts him to reconsider.
According to one of the clerks, a realtor—eager to impress potential clients—bought an expensive green Amazon parrot and put the cage in the waiting room of his business. For weeks, he worked patiently with the bird, teaching him to say, “Welcome, friend,” whenever the front door opened. Unfortunately, the lesson didn’t stick, and the bird shrieked at anyone who came inside. Soon, clients began to gripe about the noise and the mess on the floor around the parrot’s cage. Instead of increased sales, as the realtor had expected, business began to drop off. Angry and disappointed, the realtor locked the bird inside a small, dark closet. Except for feeding him and changing his water daily, he never spoke to or touched the parrot again. Lonely and desperate for affection, the Amazon began to pluck out his beautiful green feathers. When the cleaning woman found him weeks later, he was gouging his beak deep into his naked flesh.
Better not go there, Caruso thinks, clamping his bill shut. Feather plucking is a dangerous, addictive habit.
“Shit!” Clarissa says loudly, as a crash thunders over the terrace toward him.
He spins around to see dozens of white porcelain fragments shattered upon the red-tiled floor. That’s odd, he thinks when she does nothing, only stands there as though lost in thought, staring down at the pieces. A full minute passes before she begins to move again, heading for the light switch by the door. At once, the inside and outside lights blink off. The glass door opens and shuts with a snap behind her. The key complains in the lock. Footsteps clump over the terrace.
“Let’s go, Caruso,” she says as she throws the latch on his cage door. She wraps her fingers tightly around his torso and takes him out. Which—according to every parrot book she has ever read to him—is something she shouldn’t do. Her grasp hurts him, and he squawks. “Don’t give me any of your shit,” she scolds him. “You guys are all the same. Selfish and egotistical.” She presses him too hard against her chest, and he glares at her, but the truth is, he is both angry and pleased. You guys, she had said, lumping both him and Mr. Herculean Pecs together, implying that the same force crushing him now could turn into passion later.
Much to his surprise, they take the shortcut through the backyard, leaving the bike out front. “My Oysters Rockefeller were superb,” she huffs, stomping forward, the parched grass crackling beneath her feet. “Shame he didn’t get a chance to taste them. Men,” she spits out, her fingers still taut around his body. “Lazy, untalented, no-count men.”
“Mel Tormé. Mel Tormé,” he says in protest.
She comes to a sudden stop, jabs his head up with her finger. “Didn’t I tell you to back off?” Her voice scrapes against him like bike wheels scraping against a curve. With a quick twist, he frees his head and shoots her a wounded look. She ignores him, moving on, pounding her feet even harder against the sandy soil. Where the two properties adjoin, she halts again, staring glumly in front of her, not speaking. The stars, thick as whipped cream, light up the night. Lightning bugs blink in the darkness. He hears a humming sound, then spots an emerald luminescence winging toward them. The greenhead fly lights on her wrist and tips forward, ready to bite. Instinctively, he opens his beak and bends over.
“Be still,” she barks.
Vengeful, he freezes.
“Ouch!” she cries, shaking her arm. “I hate this damn island,” she says, storming forward. “Biting flies and jerks.”
She climbs the wooden steps and crosses the deck, flinging open the screen door, then twisting the doorknob and shoving the other with her shoulder. She flicks on the globe light as she steps inside. “Another boring kitchen,” she says, her gaze disdainful. She goes straight to the sunroom, where she drops him on the T-stand before yanking furiously on the ceiling fan chain above her. The blades ca-chunk slowly through the heavy, hot air while she tortures her Reeboks off, using the toe of one shoe to smash down the heel of the other. She unsnaps her white tunic. With an outward fling of her arm, she whips the tunic off and drops it on the floor.
Choking down a sniffle, she walks over to the chaise longue and sprawls out on top. It is then she begins to sob.
He forgives her. Whenever men make her cry, he can’t help but feel sorry for her. She either comes on too strong with them or else gives way to her bashfulness. The result is always the same—a hot rush of her tears. Last summer, it was a burly, plain man with a bulbous nose and fat lips who had upset her. His name was Burt, but Caruso called him “Burrrppp,” elongating his name, noisily gulping down the p’s like tasty wheat seeds, pretending to admire the oaf, all the while detesting him. Adjust the mask. Play the role well; be convincing, he would remind himself whenever Burt walked through the back door. So much into character did Caruso delve that he actually forgot how he felt about the man. That is, until the brute screamed at her.
She had asked him to taste the new dish she was creating. “It’s baked bluefish,” she said, “with capers, Kalamata olives, fresh basil and oregano, some garlic, a splash of olive oil, and a hint of Madeira. I think you’ll like it,” she told him. “Please, just a little bite.” She’d moved forward, holding up the fork of fish, inching it toward his mouth.
But instead of obliging her, he had yelled, “Stop it, Clarissa! I’m not a baby.”
His words had hit her like a bolt of lightning. Her breathing became shallow, fast, and fearful as the fork plummeted from her fingers and clattered against the floor, splattering fish on the white linoleum. At once, Caruso reared back on his perch and screeched, spreading out his wings, flapping them in fury, and had he not been caged, he would have soared toward the man and taken a big chunk out of his puffy lips. As it was, he flew forward, grabbed the cage door with his claws, and savagely whipped his wings against the bars until Clarissa had asked the beast to leave.
“He frightened me,” she confessed to him later. “When he yelled at me, I wasn’t here anymore. I was back in Kentucky with my brother. My childhood was a battlefield, and Randall’s fists were the weapons,” she said with such sorrow that Caruso wished Burt had treated her better�
�but only momentarily, for he was thrilled with the outcome. Once more, she’d succumbed to her natural shyness and given up on men for a while. Burt faded from her memory, and, same as before, she was all his again.
She closes her eyes and releases a little moan.
Worried, he hurries down the metal stand and wobbles toward her. Her forehead is wet with perspiration, and he feels guilty. She is forever sacrificing her own needs for his. Because he can’t tolerate the cold, she sets the thermostat high so that the air conditioner won’t kick on. She tries hard to protect him not only from unpleasant boyfriends but also from his inquisitive nature—his attraction to bright colors, especially red; his craving for foods that are toxic to his system; his overall talent for getting into trouble. Curious, that’s what he is. Therefore, she locks up poisonous household cleaners, keeps him away from suffocating pots of steam, closes the lid on the toilet to prevent his falling in; she never runs the overhead fan on high to protect him from its blades. The list of potential dangers is lengthy, but she remains as vigilant as the mother of the four-year-old child next door, except that he is not her offspring.
“Caruso,” she says lovingly when she feels him against her stomach. She caresses the back of his neck with her fingers, following the grain of his pinfeathers—up, then down—over and over until they both drift off.
Thirty minutes later, she is wide awake. “I’m finished with men,” she announces in an alert voice as she nudges him off her belly. Groggy, he tousles his feathers. “Love never pans out for me. No matter what I do, nothing seems to work. I give up.”
She twists around and stands quickly. “From now on, cooking will be my only passion,” she vows, weaving her fingers together as she reaches high for the ceiling. Bending her left leg up, she grabs her foot and presses her heel against her buttocks, then does the same with her right. “I need a shower before bed,” she says, striding down the hallway toward the bathroom but, oddly, going past it. He waddles to the head of the chaise longue and curls his toes over the high curved front, leaning forward like an adornment on the prow of a ship. Nosy as always, he listens for her footsteps. Which unexpectedly come to a stop. There is a loud beep, followed by his rival’s deep Southern accent.
Love and Ordinary Creatures Page 5
