Bird

by Noy Holland

  Thinks: How about a week in bed, cowboy? Crème brulee and cocktails? Rose petals floating in the tub?

  Bird is holding her breath, hardly knows it. Her husband settles his glasses on the bridge of his nose. He looks shy almost, smiling sweetly. He gives a little shy-boy wave. Turns away.

  The sun flares in the window. The nose of the lock slides home.

  “We drove a Drive Away out,” Bird announces, fogging the X her boy left on the window glass.

  “I saw a bag of bread on the freeway,” she shouts. “A little flock of shoes.”

  So long, so long. Farewell, my prince.

  They are gone now and now she can miss them.

  Now she can miss herself—who in the world she has been for her husband, who she meant to be to love.

  The baby as a littler baby, her boy trotted off to school. Her mother dead, a broken doll, geese scudding down on the pond. Bird misses everything at once. One thing makes her want all the others—lived or not, still she misses them. She misses lives she has never lived—days issued out of the future, hours that will never be.

  Bird misses her mother. Kisses the baby. She is a dead baby’s mother. She will be her baby’s dead mother, by and by, and her baby will be a dead mother, too. By and by. Best case, the gods willing.

  Bird can see right out to the end of herself: out to the satiny coffin, her children gathered around. She sees them saddled, grown, old orphans—ranting the way she hears herself rant about the lunacy of the news: the frothing for war, the oceans ruined, the babies swiped and murdered. The talk people talk. The daily terrors. The whales deafed, the quiet boys freaked on psychotropics. I want that one. I want you.

  Columbine. Turpentine. Pretty little place near the mountains.

  I want your old place in Brooklyn with screw eyes set in the floor. How about?

  Before they hanged the dog? Before the baby we lost?

  And you can find my mother’s scarves smelling of her still. And you can call me Caroline. Before our little Caroline? Welcome home, little chicken, little bird.

  Bird sinks into it, a bloom of heat, so to feel it: the door swung to, the shrinking stars. A leaf falling. The way her mother spun her ruby on her finger, think of that. The way Mickey hooked his finger in her ear. Berries in the bathtub. Sweetened ferns. The sound of the chain on the asphalt road that the school bus drags behind it. Shall.

  A swell of things: gathered, unsortable, gone.

  Bird misses the one-ton they slept in, the rocks her husband used to bring to her from the places he used to go.

  Salt pillars and clouds. The tamarack needles blown.

  “I had a toothache,” Bird says—too loudly, and to whom?

  “He chewed up a grape for a poultice. He broke his hand slugging a wall.”

  Bird carries the baby upstairs. She lays the baby down on the bathmat. Walks out.

  Out and back and is gone again. Down the stairs for a cup of rum—half a cup by the time the tub fills. Hot: she wants the heat to sink into.

  They sink in. The baby moves through her private baby-phases of alarm and bliss.

  “Boo,” says the baby, then “booa,” a plea, and snatches at Bird’s breast. The left, the right, the foremilk, the hind.

  I want that one.

  “Say may I,” Bird says. “Say please.”

  It won’t be long, it never is. Please and thank you. Soon: Actually, I want that and that one then and could I have that one again? Puh-uh-lee-zah?

  The baby’s nursing, which makes Bird weepy.

  Somebody quick say why.

  They move from tub to rocker, the rocker beside the window, the bus whistling down the hill.

  I want that one.

  Wasn’t that how it felt—not so long ago—looking out over the Lucite bins where all the born babies in the hospital slept or were fed or cried?

  That one.

  “When I was a born baby,” the baby will come to say. “When I was a baby that died.”

  I want that one.

  Say may I. Say please.

  Bird thinks of Doll Doll—picking pups out, picking Tuk. Of picking Mickey, Bird crossing the room with her shoe in her hand. I want that one. Bop you between the eyes.

  Get your lucky bone out, get your talisman.

  That one there is mine. This one?

  In a mood, Bird is, wanting. Like to take off. Like to scream.

  She took her babies out to Coney Island, to the aquarium there beside the sea. Her two.

  Used to light out. Ride out there with the dog, she and Mickey. Let the dog swim. Come the cold months. Get in under the boardwalk, let his pants down. Smell the sea. Little bit. Sit out on a towel by the water.

  I want that one.

  Sweet time. Sweet little way of living.

  She’s got the more always, got the gimmes. Wants the old life, wants the new. All the many dips and surges, she wants, the stations of alarm and bliss. The luxury of a day to kill taking a bath with the baby. Kissing on the baby. Kissing her fancy man. Four days, she wants, in bed with him, every meal delivered. Créme brulee and cocktails. Wax paper packets of junk. Have a romp. Ask it in—all the old somebody elses they have been, everything they hoard.

  Quick now. You fly through!

  Waaaa. Nothing but heat and sunshine.

  Come the cold months, nobody out there. Come the sunshine beside the sea.

  She gets the tab of Mickey’s zipper down, gets the button slipped out through the buttonhole and she can’t see him yet, she waits to see him, she waits, and he is rising up. Oh, hi. Lifting out of his britches. Pleased to see you, sir. Hello, hi.

  I want that one.

  Who boy. Boy do I, Bird thinks.

  She kisses the baby’s toes. The bottoms of her feet, wrinkled from the tub, her little wrinkled hands. Bird dresses the baby in her sparkle dress, her little beaded shoes. Props her up among pillows on the couch, takes a picture. Takes a dozen more.

  The day passing. Pfft!

  She goes through the Family Album, the snapshots buckled and blotchy between the plastic sleeves. They are orderly, chronological; she has sorted them some by color. Not the old life, but the new. Not the wedding, even, but the babies. Everything else is loose—Bird as a kid among horses, the snapshot of Mickey’s dog. The picture she took of Tuk and Doll Doll, Doll Doll on the hood of the Ryder truck with bobby pins in her hair. Her legs bloodied. Her belly rounding up under her culotte.

  A mess. The passing of years unrecorded—but Bird records them now.

  This then this then this then this. Turns the page.

  She finds the one of her boy at Coney Island, the aquarium there beside the sea. Belugas turning circles in the murk, the tank Lucite so they can see.

  “They are watching a movie of us and we are watching a movie of them and everybody’s happy,” her boy had said.

  And it was true, or could seem to be true: the whales had smooth impish faces. They were at play, smiling through the murk, coming around again.

  They were never going to get very good at that part, Mickey and Bird weren’t: at coming around again. Not at once, she thinks, not together. Not a movie to take your children to, nothing to show your ma: the little gougings, the wreck of the way they lived.

  Hot blue bramble of welder’s sparks. A boat passing. Everything is blue.

  Pretty yourself how you used to, Bird. I’ll take you back to Paris. I’ll take you to Timbuktu.

  Bird slips her hand between her legs and sees his face again. So quick the heat, sweet wandering star that blasts apart in her head.

  But something’s ringing. It’s the phone.

  Let it go. It rings again.

  That will be Suzie, Bird thinks, but it isn’t. It’s the vet with his friendly reminder: the dog is due for Parvo, Lyme’s, the whole panel, DTP.

  “Can’t get there,” Bird tells him, “no car.”

  A lie. Because who strings flowers around roadside oaks dizzy mothers slam the family car into, driving drunk with their
babies at noon?

  “As you wish,” says the vet. “But she’s due. Overdue, actually. I showed you the heart with the heartworm, yes?”

  “Oh yes,” says Bird. “Awful.”

  And hangs up.

  The dog is gazing at her with its milky eyes. A good old dog, a layabout. You can forget she is even here. She’ll die quietly, Bird wagers, beside the woodstove, considerate to the end. Bird will have time to dig a grave for her before the kids scrabble off the school bus; she will chink words into her headstone: Never to Walk in Sunshine Again.

  For now the dog burns her tail calmly against the buckled wall of the woodstove: dog of their New England hills. Of their quieting life—no Maggie.

  Maggie made herself known every minute. She pawed at your feet if you forgot her.

  Maggie jumped up to take down Bird’s hair. She hooked the hair band with her eyetooth, snuffling, tugged the band free and stood there rolling it in her mouth. You couldn’t talk with that dog. How they said it: You can’t have a conversation with that dog. She whimpered and paced and stewed.

  Poor Maggie.

  Gone But Not Forgotten.

  I Was out Getting Drunk with You.

  Mickey took to sleeping through the morning. He fell off the bed and kept sleeping through the brief green afternoons.

  He would come around, Bird thought, he had to. Give him a little time.

  Give him time. Given time. Give me time. Forgive me time.

  Amend me my misliving.

  He quit touching her. It was all he could do to look at her.

  “I seem to suffer too much. I can’t say why.”

  The chair Mickey smashed into pay phones the night they found Maggie hanged from the heating duct, Bird kindled stick by stick in the bathtub. They burned what was left of the books they had read. Books they hadn’t.

  Bird fished in a wind for garbage to burn, from the stream blown down their street. On a frozen wad of newsprint, a street collage, among the usual ads—Biggie Size your Coke (piggie is what her boy says, You want to Piggie Size your Coke?), the gimme sheets, the gotcha, the Last Days, Everything Must, Any Midwinter American Meal, was an ad for getting out. Gas money, hotel nights. They would pay you, even, to do it—to drive a Drive Away out.

  Bird came inside from the brace of cold and shook Mickey awake and kissed him. Brought him his steaming coffee. It wouldn’t matter where they went.

  Of course it would. Bird wanted sunshine, a generous sky. She wanted to see the monument of Crazy Horse, his arm as long as twelve elephants, thrust out over the plains.

  “What do you think?” she asked Mickey.

  He thought nothing.

  “We can’t stay here,” Bird said. “We have nothing to eat. The toilet froze.”

  The baby was as big as a walnut now, as a tiny frog, slow in the cold.

  He wouldn’t budge.

  Love. Love was impossible.

  “I have a narrowing sense of joy and somehow I blame you,” he allowed.

  At that, Bird left the bedroom and the bit of heat it offered. She sat on the floor in the kitchen and stroked the newspaper smooth to read. She picked through last year’s leaves, dismissed by the trees, a few still supple and red. She found a bone, bitten clean, and she bit it. She found her wad of curls shorn from Hasidim boys and picked one out to ransom.

  They were killing each other. She could see that. She would have to save herself and go.

  But Bird was better at staying than going. She could conjure every sweetness still—it was all tucked away in her head.

  One last time, she thought—and got right into bed. She kissed him everywhere she could think to. She licked him between his toes. She breathed into the loops and channels of his ears. She wore him down, in short, with every tenderness that was hers to summon.

  They slept afterwards and dreamed the same dream, which is one of the gifts we are given when we are sharp enough to know. They slept touching, and the dream-story shuttled between them, reckoning by friendly stars. The moon passed its light through the window.

  It was the light of the moon Bird saw by when she waked, mercifully dim and blue. She waked screaming. A corkscrew was turning in her navel, how it felt, and their bed was soggy with blood.

  Mickey didn’t wake right away; she had to shake him. Their phone was cut off so they bundled Bird in the dog’s old hairy blanket and went down the stoop into the street. The blood kept coming, pleasant almost, warm at least, for a minute. She wished he would carry her, but this was silly. The bodegas were closed, the pay phones smashed. There was hardly a car on the street. At last a cabbie stopped, took a look at Bird, and peeled off.

  By the time they got to the ER, Bird was shaking with cold and delirious. Mickey had tried to carry her. Blood was matted in his hair, streaked across his face, across Bird’s face, the mark of the dream they shared. Bird whimpered and talked to her mother. She wouldn’t talk to Mickey or look at him. The room flew up if she looked at him and whipped around her head.

  They knocked Bird out to finish up with it, the old D & C, the flush and suck, dilatation, curettage, good to go, up and out. She could have watched if she had wanted but she didn’t. Mickey walked her in in her paisley shift, in stages helped her lie down. A gentle man, good to her. Loving of the lesser animals, good to her and kind.

  They would find a way to speak of it. He would tell her in bits when she wanted to hear and stop should she ask and she didn’t. She waked and slept and when she waked at last, the day was lifting and blue. She kept her head turned away and said nothing. The sun blazed through the murky window and blotted out the room.

  When she spoke, it was to say she was ready to hear whatever Mickey had seen. Hear it all, she insisted, and be finished with it—Bird who was finished with nothing.

  What was left was all tatter and thread, he told her. Broth and a bloody dumpling that caught and flinched in the tube.

  “The tube?” she asked. “No, don’t tell me.”

  How the brew splatted out in pickle jars, he told her—tickle jars was what Mickey said, by accident. Everything about it was accident, wantonness, and they laughed at the slip out of habit—hard for a beat and then harder until Mickey couldn’t quit.

  Bird hung back and watched him. She thought, Here is a man drowning, a boy going hopelessly down.

  They had set her big feet hard in stirrups: same for the dead as for the living.

  “This will hurt,” she remembered. “You’re going to feel a bit of a—easy—a bit of a—pinch.” Yes. How they said it.

  A pinch, a breeze, a prod. A leaf on its back with its feet in the air blown dryly down a road. Sort of that. They thought up things to say sort of about it.

  “Time to go to the butcher,” they said, and after that they said nothing at all.

  They found a booth in back of a coffee shop, a heater working feebly against the season. Bird pulled her chair up to it; she was cold and she couldn’t get warm. She tossed toast crumbs into the vent to burn and fed it strands of hair. Bird thought to call Suzie, but Suzie was elsewhere. Suzie was straddling an icy crevasse, rappelling down a palisade of stone. Suzie was hang gliding, you should try it, sugar, off the highest live volcano in the world.

  “We lost our little Caroline,” Bird told the waitress when she came. “We had a baby and now she’s gone.”

  Mickey was gone, too. Bird didn’t know where. She couldn’t think how anything happened.

  “Did he tell you what I should do?” Bird asked the waitress.

  “He said to wait here.”

  Bird had made a mess on the bench she was trying to hide.

  “Not to worry,” the waitress told her. “He’ll be back, sugar.”

  Nobody called her sugar but Suzie.

  A whale is closer to a camel than to a fish, sugar.

  Bird would never speak to Suzie again.

  The bench was Naugahyde, a mottled red, the whole world should be red when you are bleeding. Bird lay down on the bench as if into th
e blood she had lost and sleep carried her away.

  The place was closed by the time Bird waked again, but the waitress was still there, talking to Mickey. Bird feigned sleep and watched them.

  If you touch her, Bird thought, I swear to you—but she couldn’t think what she would do.

  She half knew where she was. She raised her head and knocked into the table and her hair hung up in the flashing that prettified the rim.

  “Hello, sleepy,” Mickey said, and walked Bird through the snow to the buckaroo’s car they were to drive across the country to Cheyenne.

  He opened the door for Bird. “Nice rig.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  He had smoothed a garbage bag out for Bird to sit on. He laid the seat back for her; she bumped it up again. She cranked the heat to high and they turned for the west, toward the last light leaving the sky. Three exits, a bridge, and they were lost, making hard blind turns down quiet streets, squinting into the snow. These were streets without even bodegas, block upon unlit block in collapse, a maze swept of anything living. The snow floated up, spun among leaves and wrappers in the piddly light their headlights cast: the world was flat after all, flipped over, repeating its small features. Bird was queasy; she leaked. Her head was still a mile from her feet and wind blew lightly through it.

  “I give up,” she said, pushed the words from her mouth.

  Bird was asleep before Mickey found a road out and slept through dark and daylight; she waked to a stubble of corn on the plains and the slow-swung heads of oil wells, glad for the clean rim of the land, glad at last to see. She saw the Cross of the Plains in a bean field, the wing—ripped free—of a Cessna lashed to the bed of a truck.

  She said, “My mother appeared in a box in my sleep to bring me a loop of pearls. Quick: before the doctor found out who she was. He was handsome, they are always handsome, with a ringlet of hose and a scissors.”

  They had scraped the mother in Bird out. Her mother was tiny, Thumbelina, set out on a rind of lemon across a bloody stew.

  They drove dirt roads, a farmy grid, the houses high and white.

  “Slow,” she said, “I want to see.”

  A boy sat a log hung from a rope from the generous branch of an elm. Mickey stopped the car; they rolled their windows down. The day smelled of willow and grass, the grass brittle and furred, palomino.