So she said, “Hey Eric, Happy Zoo Day.”
And granted that was a lame-o thing to say, but he didn’t make much of an effort in return, just a grimacing smile. “Yeah, same to you.”
She loved his shirt, a pale apricot cotton that reminded her of sherbet. She would have liked to touch it, feel the smoothness of it. She would have liked to unbutton it and slide her hands in between the shirt and his skin. There was a giddy, unbalanced moment when she was afraid she had actually done so. Reeling herself back in, she said, “Nice to see you enjoying yourself,” which made him glower and wonder what she was up to, and then everyone was distracted by Robbie pounding on the glass to try and get the attention of a green heron.
They made their way to the Aviary itself, one of the habitat exhibits the zoo was famous for. Birds flew freely here through a landscape of glossy-leaved plants and ferns and waterfalls and well-engineered branches. The air smelled saturated and loamy, but not unpleasantly so. It was less crowded here, or at least less echoing, and if you worked hard at it, you might convince yourself you were somewhere real. Two splendid macaws with red heads, acid green wings, and blue-violet tails were stationed at the entrance, and they were so large and noisy and self-assured, with their flat, cracked stares, that even Robbie hung back from them.
Bonnie caught up to Jane and Grace. She was tired of having to counterfeit her feelings around Eric, and she was tired of him being tiresome. Next time she saw him, that is, next time they were alone, she was going to give him grief for it, in some way she had not yet determined. Not for the first time, she was glad she wasn’t married to him, at least, glad she wasn’t a wife to be ignored. If he started to treat her the same way, he might find himself surprised.
Jane was pointing out a bird to Grace, a white-crested, sharp-billed bird that looked like a kingfisher or a jay but also entirely unfamiliar. Neither Jane nor Bonnie knew what it was called, but Jane said the bird is what it is, the name was only something that people gave it. No, your father doesn’t know either, don’t ask him, it annoys him when he doesn’t have the answer to things.
Bonnie thought this last was true. Eric did get frustrated and snappish when he couldn’t provide answers, even to things nobody expected him to know, like, yes, this is the rare, white-crowned whoop-de-doo. It had something to do with being a doctor and needing to know everything. If their affair were out in the open, or if she and Jane were Mormon sister-wives, they could gossip about it, prod Eric in his weak places, share a head-shaking laugh. Of course this was making a lot of assumptions about Mormon sister-wives. Maybe they were closed-mouthed, private, jealous.
“How’s it going?” Bonnie asked Jane. For the moment at least she preferred Jane’s company to Eric’s. The old comfort of their shared years.
“Good, fine, yeah,” Jane murmured. “Grace, there is nothing to be afraid of, I promise. These are all friendly birds, that’s why they let them fly around. Robbie, what did we talk about? About the zoo being the animals’ home, and we respect someone else’s home.” To Bonnie she said, “I could drop them off with the gorilla moms, don’t you think? They do a pretty good job.”
“You’d miss them. You’d keep coming back to see them and you’d have to pay admission.”
“Mom! Mom! They have vultures!” Robbie came running up to them, excited that there was something sinister available in the world of birds.
“That’s great, honey. Go tell your dad he has to watch you and Grace for a minute, I’ll be right back. Sinus headache,” she said to Bonnie. “I have to take something. Eric?” Jane flagged him down and made a series of pointing gestures. They both watched as Eric attempted, ineffectually, to give instructions and commands to both children from too far away. “He’s a gorilla dad,” Jane said. “Come help me find a drinking fountain.”
The two of them went through the far door and back out into the echoing hallway. Jane dug in her purse for her headache tablets and stood in line at the fountain. Bonnie thought that Jane looked tired, even frumpish, with her hair skinned back and her damp, freckling skin and her too-long shorts and canvas shoes. Summer was not her season. Bonnie had enough evil vanity to be pleased that she might look better. But what a weariness it was, all this picking, picking, picking at the same scab, what a weariness, her own stupid unworthy base nature.
Jane took her medicine and came back to Bonnie. “I hope these do the trick. We have a lot more animal kingdoms left.”
“Take a break. Let Eric be in charge for a while. Come on, sit.”
There weren’t a lot of places to sit inside, because people were encouraged to keep moving, but they found a shallow step and rested with their backs against a wall. “Oof,” Jane said.
“Double oof,” Bonnie agreed.
“I just want them to have fun. It shouldn’t be so hard.”
“They will. It’s a fun place. They’re getting into it.”
Jane rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “I don’t remember childhood being fun.”
“You were sick a lot. You had to participate in competitive sports.” By now Bonnie knew all of Jane’s growing-up stories. “They got mad when you fainted.”
“It’s more like, they were disappointed.”
“Disappointed, then.”
“I don’t want to do that to my kids. Make them feel like we ordered different children than the ones we got.”
“You don’t. You won’t. Go easy on yourself.”
“It’s harder than it looks, this parenting thing.”
“It looks pretty hard to me.”
Jane began to gather the bits and pieces she’d dragged out of her purse: Kleenex, comb, ChapStick, and tuck them back inside. “Tell me about the actual adult world. I miss it.”
“It’s no big deal,” Bonnie said, cautious now.
“The intrigue. The drama. The passion.”
“You’d be so disappointed.”
“Would I,” Jane said, and for a moment the look in her eye was as flat and cracked and crazed as those of the macaw’s, and in that moment Bonnie’s guilty lying self hung suspended over a chasm, and then Jane’s expression resumed its familiar exasperated, wilted mockery. “Tell me about him.”
“Who?”
“You know. Studly.”
“He’s about the same. His studly self,” Bonnie said.
Because Eric was not her only lover and had not ever been.
“You should have brought him along today.”
“No,” Bonnie said. “I don’t think that would have worked out. You ready? How’s your headache?”
Lover” being perhaps too grand a term. There were other applicable words, but you might not care to use them.
It wasn’t anything Bonnie had planned on, but that was no excuse. A long time ago Jane told her, “The good thing about you is that you own up to all kinds of awful behavior. The bad thing is, you think that owning up is enough. You never actually stop doing stuff.”
Although Patrick, that was his name, was someone she’d known and kept company with a year or more before, that is, before Eric, so you could make some kind of a lame case that she was not transgressing, only failing to make a clean break. Except that she was too aware of her own bad intentions and her own spite, arising from one too many occasions that Eric was unavailable to her, one too many occasions of having her nose rubbed in the realities of their situation. So that if she sought out Patrick, or if he called her, and they picked up where they’d left off a few times—in fact it had been half a dozen—well, you did what you did and you had your reasons.
And if Jane asked who she was seeing these days, and if it would not do to keep saying, nobody, since this was hardly ever the case, then why not make good use of Patrick, whom Jane would never meet?
She didn’t think that Jane would mention any of this to Eric. It wasn’t her habit to share anything they spoke of. But there was a
lways that chance, and Bonnie told herself she wouldn’t be sorry if Jane did.
At other times she thought she should just give up and have herself committed to an institution for depraved females.
It wasn’t as if she and Eric had made each other any promises, it wasn’t as if she had signed over her free will. There were only certain conventions, certain unsaid expectations, namely, that he would still have Jane, for whatever purposes, and Bonnie would be his faithful mistress. Well, perhaps they should have said.
At least with Patrick there weren’t any tragic subtexts. Just the usual aggravations of a certain fallible type of man. He was younger than Bonnie, thirty to her thirty-eight, a bartender at a pub-style bar off of North Kedzie. He was one of those professional Irishmen who make the most of a gabby, expansive persona, this although he’d been born in suburban Oak Lawn, two generations removed from the ould sod. Of course there was plenty of drinking and exuberance and a conscious attempt to charm, followed by more drinking and excess of feeling and the cocaine he no longer used except on celebratory occasions because it got too much of a grip on him and he’d learned his lesson. He had a mobile, handsome face, blue eyes like rolling marbles, and he kept himself from going to fat with a lot of strenuous gym work. He wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good idea but he was available and agreeable. In bed he was enthusiastic, if sometimes sloppy from alcohol, and largely oblivious to his partner’s needs in a way that Bonnie found restful. So many men were intent on demonstrating, in the most exhausting manner, their skill set and well-studied choreography. Patrick was the sexual equivalent of a meal from McDonald’s.
“You could do something else besides tend bar,” Bonnie told him. “Take some classes, maybe business classes. See what’s out there for you.” Because he wasn’t stupid, just indolent and sunk in his bad habits. Patrick shrugged this and all other advice away, saying didn’t she know what they said about the Irish? They were as common as whale shit on the bottom of the ocean. He knew his limits. He was a working stiff barkeep and that was good enough for him. Bonnie was aware that she might be trying to turn him into one of those comic book heroes she and Jane used to pine after and make fun of back in the day, the lumberjack with the shelf of Great Books. Or maybe she’d just grown up with alcoholics, like her falling-apart brother (now on his second tour of rehab), and she found entirely too much familiar comfort in their antics, and in attempting to prop them up and talk them out of romanticizing their failures.
“Hey girl!” was Patrick’s standard, cheerful greeting across the bar. To Bonnie and to everybody else. Bonnie suspected he used it so that he would not have to remember anyone’s name. “Why haven’t I seen your pretty face in here for so long?” The women ate it up. With Patrick, of course, there was no question of fidelity, no expectation of seriousness. And that too could be restful. From time to time, much younger women attached themselves to him, and then there might be some public pageant of a girl sitting at one end of the bar while Patrick busied himself at the other, and intense conversations and tears and stormings off, as Patrick smiled and attempted to look embarrassed.
And then Bonnie would tease him about being a heartbreaker and Patrick would say, “Ah, but I never thought the heart came with the rest of the goods, darlin’,” and Bonnie would tell him not to talk with a brogue, it was affected.
But she thought he was right about some things, from time to time, namely, that the heart often tagged along in inconvenient ways.
She and Jane headed back to the Aviary, where Eric and the children were waiting for them, ready to move on. Everyone seemed to have gotten a second wind. Jane too looked visibly cheered up. She reached out to smooth Grace’s hair, while Robbie asked his mother if he could get a pet snake since they never did get a dog, and snakes were easier than dogs anyway. Jane said that they would think about it. Robbie said that what she really meant was no, and Jane said that if Robbie found out everything that was needed to know about snakes, they would seriously consider it. Eric said he was pretty sure once Robbie did his research on snakes, he would not want one, and Robbie said he would too, and the four of them enjoyed a little moment then, teasing each other about the snake they knew very well would never take up residence, still believing, some of them, in the possibility of a dog, a wonderful, big-hearted, handsome dog who would love each of them uncritically and forever.
Bonnie knew each of them so well. Perhaps better than she ought to. They were the family she’d chosen, as opposed to the damaged one she’d been born into. She was the closest thing they had to a dog. Or no, that was ludicrous. She might be the closest thing they had to a snake.
Watching them now, she felt that she was not theirs, nor they hers, not really. She might try, in ways both innocent and less so, to attach herself to them, but she was only fooling herself. She was alone, alone, alone, and that never changed.
And then, just as Bonnie was in the middle of these pitiful thoughts, Eric cruised up behind her and lightly cupped her shoulder with one hand, drawing her back in, making her a part of things once more, setting off small star-shaped explosions beneath her skin, and everything was all right, at least for this moment, this precarious balance of happiness.
They visited the reptiles, or rather, Eric and Robbie and Bonnie did so, since Grace was not a big fan of scaly, slithering things, and elected to sit this one out with Jane. They got distant and disappointing glimpses of some of the big cats, lions and snow leopards, since it was too hot for them to leave the shady spots of their enclosures. They watched the polar bears diving into their rocky pools and emerging slicked down and untidy. They took a quick tour of the fornicating monkeys. They viewed giraffes and zebras and, from underwater viewing stations, the sociable bottle-nosed dolphins.
Finally they finished up at one of the cafes, eating hot dogs and pizza slices and french fries, all the things that Jane did not usually allow the children, and this was a big hit. The children were tired but not distressed. The day had been a success. Bonnie said good-bye to them in the parking lot. “See?” she said to Jane. “You did it. Fun happened.” She told the kids they were her sweethearts, she waved and said Adios to Eric, keeping everything jaunty and carefree, although it had exhausted her to do so, and she drove home wanting nothing more than a margarita and a spell of oblivion.
But when she turned onto her block, she saw a police cruiser’s revolving blue lights, and an ambulance pulled up in the drive. Neighbors, those she did and did not know, stood around in witnessing clumps.
Bonnie parked on the street and made her way over to the group containing Mr. Hopkins the retired bus driver, the Dumplings, who looked more than ever as if they had begun their existence as a single cell, and a few other people she might have nodded to here and there. “What happened?” she asked, although she thought she already knew.
“Mrs. Popek passed away,” said Mr. Hopkins, in a tone that managed to be both respectful and avid. “The daughter found her.” He nodded at a middle-aged woman with a sturdy blond hairdo, talking to one of the cops. Bonnie thought she recognized the cop from one of her training sessions, but she didn’t feel inclined to go butt in.
“What did she die of?” Bonnie asked. The others didn’t know.
“She was old,” offered Fern Dumpling. She and her husband wore boy and girl versions of the same khaki shorts, which extended down to their unlovely knees.
“Really old,” said Ed Dumpling. “Eighty something. Anything can happen at that age.”
“Well now,” said Mr. Hopkins, “as a senior citizen myself I can tell you, you don’t take it that casual.”
“Oh nobody’s talking about you, Don,” said a man Bonnie didn’t know. She thought he lived across the street in the house with the front yard of green-painted cement.
“You’re indestructible,” a woman, perhaps his wife, added.
“Oh am I,” Mr. Hopkins said. “Good to know. Thanks.”
“Sa
d, her dying alone like that,” Fern said. “Just her and that awful Polish radio.”
“She did like that radio,” said Mr. Hopkins. “A good deal more than I liked hearing it.”
Fern seemed energized by Mrs. Popek’s dying. Already she’d made more conversation than Bonnie had ever heard from her. Now she said, “At least she had the daughter to check on her. Some don’t even have that much.”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Hopkins said. “I’m going to go have a word.” He walked over to the daughter, who was still in conversation with the cop, and touched her elbow. The daughter turned toward him and listened as he spoke, then folded her arms and seemed to crumple into herself.
“Now why did you say that?” Ed Dumpling asked his wife. “You know the guy doesn’t have any family, anything like that.” As he spoke he seemed to become aware that Bonnie too might take offense. “She didn’t mean you,” Ed told Bonnie. “You’re not even close to old.”
“Plus you do have company stopping by,” Fern said.
“I’m heading inside now,” Bonnie said, turning her back on them and walking away so that Fern could gossip about her.
She sat at her dining room table with the bottle of premixed margaritas, drinking them out of a water glass. She heard feet on the stairs and, overhead, someone moving from room to room, doing those things you did when someone died. The Dumplings’ door opened and closed as they shut themselves in to process the day’s excitement. The ambulance pulled away, and the police car, and finally everything was quiet, and the next time she thought to look outside it was dark.
Bonnie didn’t call Eric the next day, or the day after, nor did he call her, which was not unheard of but not their usual pattern. He did call her the next day after work on his drive home, and that had a sense of duty and excuse about it as he detailed all of the impossible pressures and urgencies of his work life. The maddening hospital routines and shortcomings that interfered with the thing you most wanted to do, which was care for your patients. They deserved better than the hurry-up, aggravated, pressurized self he brought to appointments and bedsides. He was going to make a real effort to get on top of this. Focus. Remind himself of all those things he already knew.
She Poured Out Her Heart Page 27
