“I can’t do this. This is too social. I have to go,” she says and stands up, putting the still-full tumbler on a piano bench nearby. The cluster of guests nearest to her stop talking and look at her strangely. Two of them glance at her but look away quickly, perhaps afraid her next words will be for them directly. The third man in the group says, “Oh,” and moves out of the way for her to pass. Lee feels a flash of gratitude before the fear comes back. As she pushes again through the crowd, she sees a clock mounted above the doorway, its face soothing white. Like a dancer, she sticks her gaze to this spot, to the clock, to keep herself from falling. She squints to see where the hands are. Halfway across the room, she can read the time. It’s been less than twenty minutes since she followed Anna into the party. Lee is stunned—it feels like hours she’s been trapped in the corner. She thinks of butterflies on pins and wonders if it is the pinning that kills them, an excruciating slow death on display. Lee shivers and shoves.
“Hey, watch it!”
“That’s Lee—leave her—”
The phrases float around her. As she walks past a pair of squat men with scaly skin, she hears one of them muttering: “That face? … Pollock … but she does have a good body.”
But she does have a good body. This is not the first time Lee has overheard this sort of appraisal, and knows it has happened in many conversations she has not heard. The worst is when she is meant to hear it, when Jackson said it in a small room, as if to remind her of her good fortune. How lucky she was to be the one who would go home with him to watch him crash into bedroom furniture and fall asleep half-undressed, his breath rancid and jagged on her neck. She turns back to look at the men. One is fatter than the other and redder in his hairless face. His head, too, is almost entirely bald, and the empty ground of his scalp is flaking away in white bits, as if trying to follow the hair. She decides he is the one who has spoken. She moves up close to him, closer, until she must be breathing on him. He looks startled, his blue eyes blinking. She takes his drink out of his hands and is still for a moment. She imagines pouring it down his head, his blue eyes and flaky skin drowning in brown liquor. Instead, she dumps the drink on the rug at his feet. He looks confused. They both look down and see the brown liquid quickly seeping into the carpet in an ugly, undrinkable stain. Lee turns and walks out of the party, down the hall, and into the crisp, easier air.
At home, Lee moves to the window and opens it wider. At her worst, the one thing she can bear, the only thing that isn’t searing, is the sound of wind. Outside, the trees are slowly undressing themselves for winter. Many of their leaves are already covering the wild garden, and more fall as the wind takes them. She wonders why trees are naked during the coldest months, when everything else does its shedding in summer. She shivers in her thin white dress and lies down on her bed. She curls further into herself instead of shutting the window, sticks her feet under a knitted blanket piled at the foot of the bed. The wind cycles from crescendo to silence, and it seems to her that it grows louder each time it rises. This soothes her, and she slides into half sleep, listening to the wind.
A few hours later, Lee is awake again. The moon peeks in at her. The wind has stopped. Lee turns over, fidgets, rolls over again. Sleep pulls away from her, out of reach. She kicks the blanket from her feet, and it slumps to the floor as she stands up.
Outside, moonlight stains the garden. She smells the pinching air and picks out the scents she can identify: thick, dark dirt and leaves about to disintegrate, the ones hidden under the newest layer. Shaken there by the wind. She wonders how instrumental the wind is in the shifting of the seasons. Without wind, would autumn stay? She thinks of Anna, imagines her fluttering around her living room, knows if Anna hadn’t called, she could have skipped the party completely. Lee sees her gathering highball glasses of melted ice cubes, emptying ashtrays, opening the window to let the cold chase out the tight, stale air. She sees her bending to pick up a scrap of napkin and gasping as she finds a stain, the colour of old blood and now the size of an hors d’oeuvre platter. Anna spits out a gob of curse words in the empty room. Lee smiles.
In the garden, it is quiet except for scritching at the corner of the overgrown vegetable patch. A fat raccoon lifts his head and stares at Lee for a minute before ambling away. She stays still and waits, hoping the animal will return and finish what he was up to in the corner. If she stands completely still, doesn’t even shiver, maybe the raccoon will think she’s gone and will come back to his apple core or garbage or babies. Lee tries to become invisible, still as stone, but she is alone in the dark garden. There is no one to not see her.
Thanksgiving
Aaliyah’s cousin used to be four hundred pounds. Right before Thanksgiving three years ago, he decided to go on a juice fast.
He sipped on green juice at the dinner table and passed the sweet-potato casserole to his aunt, holding it carefully at the edges because the dish was hot, trying not to smell it.
Aaliyah’s cousin served pieces of ham to his little nephew with tongs and topped it with a ring of pineapple. He finished his green juice after that and started on a carrot one.
He scooped whipped cream onto a piece of pecan pie before passing it to his grandmother. The carrot juice was just as delicious.
The next year, Aaliyah’s cousin was only a hundred and fifty pounds. His aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews told him how wonderful he looked. His grandmother frowned and watched him nibble on salad and pass the sweet potato and ham without taking anything except a quarter of a pineapple ring.
“Go to the doctor. And eat some pie,” she said to Aaliyah’s cousin in the kitchen afterwards.
To make his grandmother happy, Aaliyah’s cousin went to the doctor (but he wouldn’t take the pie). The doctor told him to gain a bit of weight back, that he had accomplished so much, but there was such a thing as going too far.
So Aaliyah’s cousin started eating. He went back to eating everything he had been when he was four hundred pounds, and by the next Thanksgiving, he had gained everything back. His grandmother found him in the kitchen, polishing off the pecan pie before the rest of the family arrived for dinner.
“This isn’t good, either,” she told him.
“I know,” said Aaliyah’s cousin, around a bite of pie.
So the next day, Aaliyah’s cousin went back to the doctor, but on the way in, he stumbled on a step and felt his ankle twist and snap as he went down heavily.
In the hospital, they did some tests and X-rays, and they discovered a tumour inside him, huge and menacing, and the family brought him juice in his hospital bed and leftovers from Thanksgiving, spread out like a picnic, but nobody felt much like eating.
Clara and Rosemary
Clara doesn’t notice that Henry is dead until she comes back into their bedroom after her exercises and tea. For months afterwards, awake in the dark early mornings, she will go over and over it in her head. She will wonder how long the room had been too still and blame the dream for making her not see.
Maybe she had the dream because she’d eaten too late, or because Henry had been even quieter than usual. She could have asked him about it before bed, but after fifty-six years, Clara knew when to leave it alone.
It was the kind of dream that felt like it was trying to claw its way out of her sleep and into the room. That’s what Clara tells her cousin Rosemary after the funeral. Rosemary nods, pats Clara’s hand, and steers her toward the cucumber sandwiches.
In the dream, mice were skittering in the walls and racing along the headboard. She looked down and one was draped around her throat like a scarf. She screamed and flung it away, but another ran over her bare ankle. Something was making her hand wet. She lifted her palm off the sheet, and there was a dissected rat, splayed open, red guts spilling onto the bed. She could see the glint of eyes and flicking grey tails everywhere she looked in their room. That was the worst part, she thinks, lying in bed in the dark early mornings. In the dream, she was in their bedroom, exactly
as it was, Henry asleep beside her as she shook off mice and wiped away rat gut. Everything was the same except it was suddenly awful.
Rosemary and her son Michael drive Clara back to the apartment after the funeral. Clara’s feet ache from standing, and someone from Henry’s old office squeezed her hand too hard and the joints in her fingers throb now. Rosemary sits next to her in the back seat and holds Clara’s hand lightly in her small, soft palm. Michael hums as he drives through the slushy streets. It sounds like the wet asphalt is shushing them as the car pushes through leftover snow.
Rosemary is quiet. After Donald died, Rosemary told Clara how awkward people were, how almost everyone rushed to fill the air with talk instead of letting her be. At Henry’s funeral, there were too many people saying too many things. When Clara saw that other people’s mouths had stopped squirming out words, she made hers move, and then the people went away and more replaced them. On the way home, Clara tries to think about who had actually been there—is she supposed to send thank-you cards for this? No, probably she isn’t—but the only one she can remember seeing is Rosemary.
At the apartment building, Rosemary and Michael get out with her. Michael takes her arm and carefully leads her up the sidewalk. Rosemary leans on her cane and follows them slowly. At the door, Clara rummages through her purse with stiff fingers until she finds the keys. Rosemary comes up beside her.
“I’ll come back over around suppertime with a pasta bake, but are you sure you don’t want me to come up with you now?”
Rosemary’s grey eyes look right at hers. Clara feels safe, then afraid.
“I need a little time,” Clara says. “I think I need to lie down.”
“Of course. Michael will bring me back around five, then, all right?”
Clara nods and watches Michael take his mother’s arm as they walk back to the car. Such a good boy he’s always been, taking care of his mother after his father left. He is grown and has his own life now, but he still checks in with his mother every day. For the first time in many years, Clara feels that old tiring ache. Wishes she had a grown child to walk with her back to the car.
The apartment smells like old bacon grease from the suite below them and overripe fruit that Henry bought and did not eat. Clara stands in the doorway in her car coat and rain hat, purse over her arm, and the grief is sand in her throat and glue under her boots and skittering mice in her head. She stands there in the doorway, not knowing what else to do, until Rosemary comes back with the pasta bake at five and gently moves past her, into the empty apartment, clinking around as she begins to make tea.
*
Clara is the first person Rosemary calls when her brother dies.
“Oh, poor Donald,” Clara says. “Want me to come over?”
“Can you meet me at his apartment instead? In two hours?”
“Of course.” As Clara hangs up, Rosemary can hear her calling Henry into the kitchen.
The apartment is only a few minutes’ drive from Rosemary’s place, but she isn’t sure what she will find there. Maybe some things she won’t want anyone to see. Not even Clara.
Michael is still at school. She scribbles him a note that she will be back soon and to wait for her. Part of her wants to leave a note that says, “Uncle Donald died,” but Rosemary hates leaving notes that say anything important. As tough as Michael tries to be these days, she wants to be there beside him when he finds out. When Frank left, Michael couldn’t even read very well yet, but he stood beside her chair as she read the note, his small hand on her shoulder. She sat there for a long time, rereading it, and he didn’t move, his skin warm and making the polyester damp.
Donald’s worker called the ambulance after she found him, and the paramedics called the coroner, and somewhere in there somebody called Rosemary. The worker—it was Maria on Mondays—had apparently found him on the toilet. Rosemary didn’t get details, didn’t want anything to supplement or verify what she could already see in her head and will keep seeing, through the funeral and for a long time after: Donald, pants around his ankles, head leaning against the wall, mouth and eyes open. Skin grey and leathery and the room filled with stink.
*
Clara is seven and Rosemary is eight. They are crouched down, making an elaborate little town in the dirt. Clara is building a library out of small stones and drawing books inside of it with a twig. Rosemary is making houses by scraping piles of dirt together with her fingers and adding bits of leaf for windows and doors. Her nails are dirty, and her palms are red from leaning on them. She’s almost finished with the houses.
“I’m going to do a park next. Here, behind the library.” Rosemary points at the spot with her stick.
Clara nods and keeps working on the library, wishing she’d thought of a park first but knowing the town won’t be complete without it. Rosemary thinks of everything just a little bit faster than Clara does, and her ideas are always good. It was her idea to build the town in the first place, and they’ve been working on it all morning, and it’s not even a little bit boring yet.
“Rosemary! Can you go find your brother and tell him it’s time for lunch?” Rosemary’s mother calls from the house.
Rosemary and Clara stand up and brush the dirt off their tights and skirts. They start off in search of Donald, Rosemary a few steps ahead.
Donald is at the edge of the train tracks, poking at something with a stick.
“Donald! Mum says come home for lunch!” Rosemary yells, but Donald doesn’t move. She sighs. Her brother doesn’t ever seem to see or hear her. She has no idea what he thinks about or cares about. It’s strange to live in the next room to someone for your whole life and not know them at all.
Rosemary and Clara come up behind Donald, and then they can see what he’s doing.
The rat’s belly has been ripped open by something sharp. The dirt around it is bloody. From where they’re standing, they can see one of the rat’s eyes. Clara gasps and Rosemary reaches for her hand. Donald dips the stick into the rat’s stomach and pulls out a knot of its guts, tosses it into the bushes. The rat’s eye flinches.
Clara starts to cry, and Donald turns and sees them at last. His face is red and scary. Rosemary holds tight to Clara’s hand. But Donald doesn’t say anything, just pushes past them and heads back to the house, flinging the stick onto the tracks.
*
When Rosemary finds out she is pregnant, she calls Clara right away.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Clara says, disappointment dragging her down onto the kitchen floor. She can see her reflection in the oven door.
“I’m … sorry,” Rosemary says awkwardly.
“Don’t be. You’ve been trying too. At least one of us is having luck!” Clara tries to laugh, but it comes out more like a cough.
“Really. I’m so happy for you,” Clara says and doesn’t even care if it is convincing. After they hang up, she slides down until she can’t see her reflection in the oven anymore. She lies on the floor, staring at the detritus under the stove—a few kernels of corn, crumbs, something black she doesn’t want to think too hard about.
On top of everything else that is awful, Rosemary’s new little one won’t have her Clara. For years, they have talked about having two little girls who would be best friends. It is starting to look like Clara won’t be able to hold up her end of the bargain. On the linoleum, Clara cries and cries: for the little lonely one growing in Rosemary’s belly, for Henry, and then, for a long time, for herself and the ache that never lets her be, not even when she is sleeping.
Eventually, she pushes herself up to start dinner. Henry will be home soon, and she doesn’t want him to worry about her any more than he already does.
*
Rosemary slides the pasta bake into the oven and puts the kettle on again. She looks over at Clara, sitting by the window and staring out at the street, tea gone cold beside her. She’s been here first and knows the worst part is coming. Rosemary dreamed of rat gut too, when Donald died, but she never told anyone. Th
ere’s something else she’s never told anyone, not even Clara.
When Donald died, she felt relieved. Lighter, and close to glad. But Rosemary has been watching Clara and Henry together for fifty-six years. She knows that Clara is not relieved. She knows she does not feel anything but awful.
The Internet People
Claudia’s job gets mixed reactions on first dates. When she says she is an assessor at a nuclear power plant, the men usually ask what that means, and she says: “Quality assurance. I manage permits and check that we’re up to code. I’m one of the people who make sure everything’s running smoothly.”
“Wow, that’s exciting,” the men say.
Maybe sometimes they mean it. But sometimes they say it with dead eyes, checking their phones under the table or asking if she’s going to finish her tzatziki.
Actually, although she understands it is not fashionable to say so, Claudia finds her work satisfying. Quality assurance work makes her feel responsible and useful. Sometimes the men ask if she is afraid of the radiation.
“Nuclear energy is really very safe these days,” she says, feeling like a human brochure.
Usually the men who ask this change the subject, start talking about their work or an innocuous current event, a hospitalized celebrity or an unusual shift in the weather. Sometimes they order dessert at this point. This time, the man across the table—his name is Leon—signals for the cheque right after she’s said this. Leon is clearly furious.
Leon is very different from Claudia, but she has never been one of those people who end up dating themselves. He found her online and contacted her first, and his attention made her a little more interested than she might have been otherwise. In Leon’s profile, he talked about wanting to change the world in small ways and how he saw surfing as a spiritual experience. In his picture, he was browned by the sun, leaning against his surfboard and narrowing his eyes against the light. She thought he seemed healthy, at peace. When they met outside the restaurant, he looked a bit more like George Costanza than she would have liked, but she wasn’t about to end the date early over it.
The Colours of Birds Page 10
