The woman had dip on her forehead and arms, and her hair was full of chips. The man had crumbs all down his front and dip in his beard and hair. I covered my mouth so they wouldn’t see me laugh, but Reyes is always professional.
“What was the dispute about?” he asked them, notepad out and ready.
“Only one beer left,” the woman mumbled, pulling chips out of her hair.
Rebound in the Round
There was a big street party on the next block a week or so after we moved in. Everything was still in boxes, and I wanted to stay home and get things set up. But Jim said we should definitely go to try and meet the neighbours and fit in. He didn’t say “fit in,” but that’s what he meant.
At the block party, I was in line for the potato salad when someone tapped me on the shoulder. She was a slim, pretty lady, the colour of a pale clementine.
“Hi there. Haven’t seen you at one of these things before.”
“We’re new to the neighbourhood.”
“Oh yeah? Where do you live?”
I told her the name of our street.
“Oh, Rebound in the Round. Nice trees over there.”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry. You married?”
“Yeah.”
Jim was standing close to the barbecue with some other guys, beer in his hand.
Jim is tall and handsome in a way that is non-threatening. His nose turns up a little. His hair used to be blond, but it’s mostly grey now. He keeps it shorter than I would like, but you can’t make Jim do things he doesn’t want to do. When all of our city friends started getting married, the women would talk about what they needed to change about their husbands—more gym, less work, more help with the kids, less of the video games, more sex, or less. But Jim is stubborn. I figured there was no changing him, so I took him as is. He must have done the same thing, and so far we’ve been lucky because our flaws haven’t been intolerable enough to fracture us.
I pointed him out to Orangey. Her perfect eyebrows raised, just for a second.
“First marriage?”
That seemed like a weird question to ask somebody when you haven’t exchanged names yet. I guess Orangey must have seen that on my face because she said sorry and told me her name.
“Rhonda,” I said.
“So is it?”
“What?”
“Your first marriage?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s a first. See, it’s called Rebound in the Round (or some of the less educated types call it the Rebound Compound) because everybody there’s on marriage number two. At least.”
“The realtor didn’t mention that,” I said, trying to laugh it off.
“No, she wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t worry about it,” Orangey said. “We should just get a new nickname for your street.”
Shedding a nickname is harder than losing weight. I remember an overweight kid we used to call Smalls in grade school. He was the only kid we called anything other than his name. He went to a different high school, so I don’t know if he ever managed to get rid of the weight or the nickname. I didn’t mention any of this to Orangey, though.
The line for the potato salad was barely moving. They love their carbs in the suburbs, I imagined telling Jim later, and pictured the gentle look he always gives me when I’m being mean.
“What street do you live on?” I asked her.
She pointed behind the barbecuing men.
“Cherry Street.”
“What do people call it?”
“Just Cherry Street.”
“Nobody calls it Virgin Territory?”
Orangey tipped her head to one side like I was a puzzle she was trying to figure out. She didn’t laugh.
“You got kids?” Orangey asked after we’d both plunked scoops of food on our plates and were standing around trying to eat and talk.
When Jim and I were in our twenties and early thirties, people would ask us about kids all the time. I used to give long elaborate answers about being happy with the life we had or sometimes I’d make a joke about my broken biological clock. Sometimes I’d just keep talking until the asker looked pained and I trailed off. But when Orangey asked, I was closing in on forty, and people didn’t ask as often anymore. When they did, I had finally learned to keep it simple.
“Nope,” I told Orangey.
“You’re lucky. If we didn’t have the kids, I’d be living on Rebound in the Round myself.”
She rolled her eyes in the direction of the ice-cream truck parked at the curb. “See that one?” she said, like we were peering under a mattress, looking for bedbugs.
There was a thin, young guy with a raggedy beard paying for a popsicle, and behind him was a square-shaped man without much hair, dog leash looped over his wrist attached to a little rust-coloured dog. The square man was standing on his tiptoes and squinting at the truck’s menu. The dog was yapping and trying to pull in the opposite direction.
“The man with the dog?”
“Yeah, that’s Dave.” Orangey rolled her eyes again. “Kids are over with my sister somewhere,” she said, gesturing behind herself without turning to look.
That night, I told Jim about Rebound in the Round.
“I think I like Rebound Compound better. Not so elitist.”
I kind of agreed with him.
“Don’t you think it’s weird, though? Not one original marriage on the block?”
“The houses all look the same. Why should the marriages be different?”
He moved to the other side of the sectional and stretched out.
“Do you think it’s bad luck?”
“I doubt it,” he said, picking up the remote.
It was Jim’s idea to have a party for the cul-de-sac.
“You’re all about meeting the neighbours these days, aren’t you?”
“It’d be nice, I think, no?”
Jim has always been better at being around people. When we hold each other’s hands at the edge of a party, it’s always mine that’s clammy. On vacation, he chats with the person next to him on the airplane while I read. When we walk by the lake, he goes straight up to strangers and asks them what they’re fishing for. At the end of a trip once, he disappeared into the airport throng while I waited with our stuff at the gate. When he came back, grinning, he handed me a plastic bag with something soft in it. When I opened it, I glared at him. The t-shirt said, All I care about is food and avoiding people. He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, and we both started laughing.
“I saw that in a store near the food court. Do you like it?”
“I hate it,” I said and kissed him.
When he asked me what I thought of his idea to have the party, I said the same thing, but I didn’t kiss him.
“I’ll make my lasagna, and we can get a bunch of snack foods. You won’t have to cook anything.”
“Will I have to clean up?”
“Nope. I’ll do everything. All you have to do is be there.” Jim smiled and the sides of his eyes got crinkly, and I couldn’t think of a decent reason to say no.
On the day of the party, I kept dragging the Swiffer around the kitchen and every part of the house that wasn’t carpeted.
“I think it’s probably clean, honey,” Jim said, sliding the second lasagna into the oven.
“What time are they coming again?”
“Seven,” Jim said, as if I hadn’t asked him four times already.
“Who did we invite?”
“Everybody on Rebound Compound, the realtor, those guys I met at the barbecue and their wives, and Orangey and her husband.”
I thought about Dave in line at the ice-cream truck and how he looked like an ant that had fallen into a jar of honey.
“I hope you didn’t call her Orangey when you invited her!”
Jim laughed. He pulled bottles out of a liquor-store box and slid a bottle of white wine into the freezer behind me.
“You always forget that’s in there. It’s going to explode.
Don’t forget this time.”
“Good tip,” Jim said, and patted my butt as he moved around me.
Except for the realtor, everybody at the party kind of looked like everybody else. I kept mixing the husbands up.
“Here’s your whiskey,” I said, handing one what I thought he’d ordered.
“Oh, thanks, but I can’t stomach whiskey.” The husband rubbed his round stomach to demonstrate in a way that made my own stomach feel out of sorts.
“Of course. I’ll bring you a Coke,” I said, figuring his stomach problem was code for drinking problem.
“Put some rum in it, will you?”
I brought the whiskey to a different husband.
“Thanks, but I’m a beer guy,” he said.
After I brought the rum to the first husband and the beer to the second husband, I drank the whiskey myself in the kitchen and gave up on drink orders.
Our realtor, Sinead, seemed to know everybody at the party already. She had dark hair that seemed to get more lush and full and luxurious every time she ran her hands through it, which was a lot. And that accent—when she spoke it sounded like a mourning dove, musical in a way that could be interpreted as haunting or hopeful depending on how you were feeling when you heard it.
Sinead was telling a story about an open house gone wrong.
“From outside, it looked ready. The lawn was cut close, and there were planters full of purple flowers at the entranceway, like the stager had suggested. But inside, everything was a mess. The family hadn’t cleaned anything up, and I didn’t have time to tidy before people started arriving. There was peanut butter all over everything, the kitchen, even the walls in the entranceway. Chip bags crumpled up and thrown down on the carpet like it was a landfill site or a bus-station parking lot. Can you believe it?”
Her laugh rippled out into the room. One or two husbands were standing closer to her than they needed to. One of them was Dave. He was leaning in to listen and laughing when Sinead laughed, but his was kind of wheezy.
Orangey sidled up to where I was, leaning against a wall at the edge of the party.
“She’s something, isn’t she?”
I looked at her to see what kind of something she meant. She was looking at Sinead, but it wasn’t jealous or hostile. It was like she didn’t even see Dave there, or if she did, he didn’t really matter at all.
People started drinking more. Eventually Sinead left, which was okay because some of the guests were starting to get slurry, and I was figuring somebody was either going to paw at her or try to tear her head off, and that was probably not the impression Jim wanted us to make on the neighbourhood. Besides, I liked Sinead. Even though Orangey said that she was the one that turned the cul-de-sac into the Rebound Compound in the first place.
“She hand-picked everybody who lives on this street. She’s got her eye on the husbands, and she knows they’re vulnerable, so she gathered them all up here in one place. Easy pickings,” Orangey said, draining her glass as she walked away. That seemed off to me. For starters, besides Jim, none of the husbands were very good looking or, from what I could tell, very interesting. And even Jim was a step down for Sinead.
The other thing was, what did “vulnerable” mean? Because they had been through divorces or because they were men?
Iris somebody-or-other came over to me to say goodbye. Her face was puffy and pink from booze, but the rest of her was pipe-cleaner thin. Next to her, I felt like a lumpy futon.
“You should come to my yoga class sometime,” she said as she backed down the walk.
“Maybe,” I said, shutting the door as she was still waving.
I was glad Jim was busy talking to some people in the kitchen, so I didn’t have to see that gentle look.
I started to go into the kitchen to make sure Jim had taken the bottle of wine out of the freezer.
Orangey was holding a plastic bag while Jim put shards of glass into it. I backed up and stood just outside the entranceway, out of their sightline, but I could see them.
“We can’t let Rhonda see that I forgot to take this out again,” Jim said. I smiled.
Orangey stepped closer to him, reached around, and touched the small of his back with a manicured hand. She was looking at him with Dave’s Sinead expression. My jaw and stomach clenched.
“I won’t say a word,” Orangey said.
Jim reached behind himself, peeled her hand off his back, and put it down by her side. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head no, and turned and walked out of the kitchen. I reached out and grabbed his hand. He saw me then, and I pulled him to me and hugged him around his middle, breathing in his smell of detergent and deodorant, soap and skin.
“You were right about the bottle.”
“Yep,” I said, hugging him tighter.
A few weeks later, I did end up going to yoga with Iris. She showed up at my door, green designer mat under her arm, and I wasn’t busy and I couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough, so I went with her. It was at the community centre on Cherry Street, and we walked there, which no one does in the suburbs, so it made me like Iris a bit more.
“So how did people start calling our street Rebound in the Round?” I asked Iris.
She looked confused.
“What?”
“Okay Rebound Compound then,” I said, taking a guess.
“That’s a cute name. What does it mean?”
“You’ve never heard that before?”
“You made it up, right? It’s cute,” Iris said, folding her fingers in half to check out her nails, painted peach.
“Everyone calls it that.”
“Honey, I’ve lived here fourteen years, and I’ve never heard anybody say that before,” she said, waving at somebody I couldn’t see. When I turned, Dave and the little rust dog were coming over to us.
“Lovely to see you two ladies,” Dave said, but he was talking to Iris, his eyes flicking to the strip of flat stomach showing below her tank top.
“Good to see you, Dave. Say hello to your wife for me,” she said as she walked away.
“I don’t know how that guy stays married,” she said, pulling open the door to the community centre with her wiry arm. I looked back and Dave was standing still, watching Iris as the little dog pulled, trying to get away.
Family
The little boy crawled under the hammock and flipped his uncle’s girlfriend out of it and onto the grass. She put on her sunglasses so he wouldn’t see she was starting to cry.
Later, after board games, he pushed her in the stomach. Hard. She tried not to be bothered and went to look for her sunglasses. The boy’s mother noticed and gave him a timeout.
“You can’t do that. You can’t hurt her,” the mother scolded.
The little boy said: “What? She’s in my family.”
Everything Inside
Most people haven’t come back, and some say they won’t. We didn’t know what else to do. We stayed with George’s parents for a while, in Tallahassee, but in their tiny place, we were all on top of each other. We’re getting older, not too far from fifty now, and they’re old folks. It wasn’t easy. George’s mom started off the day with a bite to her, and his dad looked down at his hands a lot, more than usual, like there was something in those old, rough fingers that would help him get us out.
We couldn’t stand it, anyway, not being home. Even though the city doesn’t look like ours anymore. It seems like there’s never sun, though of course there must be, but since we’ve been back, it feels like the sky is just different versions of grey. Light grey during the day, and at night, black. The electricity’s still out, so we’ve got a lantern and candles for outside and two flashlights for inside the tent. We don’t go out at night, either of us. Sometimes we hear shots or yelling, and George grips my hand. There’s a little bell attached to the zipper on our tent, so if anybody tries to get in again, we’ll hear it.
Right now, there is no sound inside the tent. Outside is pretty quiet too, except for a cat makin
g noise somewhere close by. Cars from the highway. Before, we couldn’t even hear the highway from here, but nothing is the same since the storm. The Superdome looms over that highway, those missing panels leaving big jack-o-lantern gaps in the shell.
It’s early, probably before six. George’s gone out already, biking around town like he does every morning now. I tell him not to, that it’ll just make him feel worse, but he says he has to. When he comes back later in the day, we sit in lawn chairs outside the tent, and he leans towards me till I can smell the beer on him, and he tells me what he saw that day:
On top of a pile of bricks, enough to fill three dump trucks, a wood sign painted red: “Looters will be shot.”
A roof squished in, bent in the middle like a giant put his fist through it. Sand spilling out from what could have been a bedroom or a kitchen.
Concrete steps leading to nowhere, the house gone.
Everywhere, on our street too: red Xs and death tolls spray-painted on boarded up windows. Dates that the houses were checked for corpses, sometimes weeks after the storm hit.
A yellow school bus, half sunk in the dirt so just its end was sticking up.
The Common Ground clothing tent where people mill around looking for things that might fit them. Outside of it, a volunteer sorting through a mountain of cloth.
A stuffed lion, smeared with mud, lying on its back in the road. One ear missing.
The balconies in the French Quarter with their green, lush plants dangling down towards the street.
From what he tells me about what he sees, I’m surprised George isn’t drinking more than he is. I don’t usually leave the yard. I don’t want to see any of it.
Our house is rubble. I’ve already picked through it to see if anything was left to save, and we’ve got what we could find in big plastic boxes beside the tent. There wasn’t much: a sweater I used to like, some dishes and things from the kitchen, a few books, some extra shoes for both of us. And, thank God, a few photos and our important papers and my mother’s earrings. They were in a strongbox. Those are with us in the tent.
The Colours of Birds Page 5
