Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  He dropped to the floor. “Mmm . . . Not yet.”

  The sink was full of last night’s dishes.

  Mina heated the electric kettle and sliced a yellow moon of lemon. “You never told me his sister was so pretty,” she said, dropping the lemon into the bottom of the mug. She sprinkled on a constellation of sugar and poured over the steaming water.

  Oscar’s expression was odd. “Phoebe’s fine,” he said. “She’s not my type. Bit desperate.”

  She’s more than fine, Mina thought. More than pretty too. The lemon had risen to the top of the mug. Mina sipped, and the wedge bobbed against her teeth. There was no reason for Oscar to understate Phoebe’s beauty. He knew that Mina found women as attractive as he did. Sometimes when they sat on the subway, they’d catch each other eyeing the same girl and laugh. Looking was not touching, they both knew that. Oscar had never been jealous and neither had Mina. But then again, since the wedding she hadn’t been in a girl-watching mood.

  “I guess I remember her when she was a kid.” He took a tub of yogurt from the fridge to mix with his protein powder.

  “Do you think Phoebe meant it?” she asked. It had been so long since she’d made a new friend. These days, the girls from her PhD years were busy with assistant professorships or books or babies.

  “Meant what?” Oscar asked.

  “The see-you-soon?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Oscar pushed aside the breakfast things and opened his laptop to his to-do-list program. It was already past nine o’clock. He couldn’t allow the new flat and time zone to trick him into thinking it was a holiday. Exercise was set to a daily repeat. He clicked the task to indicate completion and the font flicked from red to green. Quickly he typed:

  Estate agents—value flats

  Japanese

  Fill orders

  Email Dad update

  Mina

  Mum

  The first should be easy. In this city, estate agents seemed to be as common as Starbucks.

  “Mina? Are you ready?” he called, to the next room. He didn’t want to leave her alone with the four-storey drop more than he had to. A wife was not a dog. You couldn’t lock her inside, even if that would make you feel like she was safer.

  “Almost.”

  “Can you wear a long-sleeved top?” Tattoos were common these days, but why give more information about their lives than was necessary?

  Oscar flipped his phone to the Japanese-language app. Big-eyed animals pranced across the screen carrying kanji. If you read the word correctly, carrots dropped from the sky to feed the animals. If you got it wrong, they cried. He got a score of 95 percent. He’d confused 嘘, a lie, with 盗む, to steal. The animated rabbit didn’t care that he’d been almost right. It wept baby blue tears. Ninety-five percent wasn’t bad but wasn’t good enough. He would practice. Practice every day—that was the trick.

  After a white chef in Williamsburg started reeling off Nihongo, like it was a test of Oscar’s pale eyes, Oscar had signed up to take the JLPT—the Japanese Language Placement Test. It was in December. He aimed to pass level N3. The ability to understand Japanese in everyday situations. He liked the idea of having a certificate.

  Mina appeared wearing a green shirt buttoned at the cuffs. Her unmarked hands flowered innocently out. He smiled at his wife, grateful that she’d understood what he needed.

  He said, “I want a sense of what we might get for the flats and how much work is worth doing.”

  “You really want me tagging along?” she asked.

  “I can’t want to spend time with my wife?” he asked. “Come on, it’s not like you have anything better to do.”

  Something unhappy moved across Mina’s face.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

  “You’re right. It’s not like I’ve been so productive lately.”

  “I love you. Come with me, please. It’d make me happy.”

  Mina was silent in the lift down. She pushed a hand through that frizzy hair. He hadn’t wanted her to dye it but he hadn’t wanted to be the sort of man who tells his wife what to do with her hair. They both stared at the aperture in the door and watched the floors slowly passing by.

  When they reached the door of the estate agency, he said, “Wait a sec.”

  In the window there were glossy photographs of flats with street names in big letters, then details written much smaller. “Lh” for leasehold. “Fh” for freehold. For just under a decade, he had worked for his father. He’d made calls. He’d negotiated deals. But he didn’t think this much had moved between his fingers.

  In the property photographs, the floors were polished wood or carpeted in cream. Gilt-framed mirrors hung above the mantelpieces. There were no creepy birds on the walls.

  “That’s nice,” Mina said, pointing to a garden shot.

  “There must be something wrong with the house, if all they’re showing is the roses.”

  Inside, a glass-doored fridge was lined with Perrier bottles. A woman approached in a suit the pale grey of a MacBook Pro. Her shoes made sharp clicks on the marble floor. This place must have huge overheads. Then again, cash-rich buyers wouldn’t go to a shabby agency.

  The woman introduced herself. She was smiling widely. They must look like easy targets—a well-dressed young couple about to buy a first home. She shook his hand too tightly, making rigid eye contact. It seemed a trick learnt in a YouTube video about likeability. Oscar had watched those too. He smiled right back into the tiny voids of her eyes.

  In the second estate agency Mina watched her husband. Already, he seemed fast and fluent. He used phrases like “no onward chain” and “looking for a cash buyer” and “competitive commission.” When had he had time to gather up those words? He was handsome in the freshly pressed suit.

  Oscar clearly didn’t need her help. Mina folded her hands in her lap. The lights of the office glowered down. At every desk, agents were emailing, calling, making deals. She stared into a vase of oval peace lilies. The soil was covered with white pebbles, like those after-dinner mints they give away in Chinese restaurants.

  “I’m here on behalf of an individual who is looking into selling some property in this area.” Oscar stood straight-backed. An individual? Mina smiled. It made Oscar’s father sound like a Mafia boss. The first time she’d met the man, he’d been wearing salmon-pink golf shorts and playing with the latest iPhone. He’d reminded her of an older version of the Asian-American guys she’d known in college, who’d gone into Big Data, banks, or start-ups. The guys with the coolest watches, who knew the best bars but who, despite it all, carried a slight air of nervousness, as if their parents might be listening in to their bullshit.

  As they left, Mina said, “I think I need a coffee. You do this next one by yourself. I mean, it’s not like you need me.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “It’s coffee, not intergalactic flight.” Her husband seemed fine leaving her alone, as long as she had some task: buy flowers, pick up the dry-cleaning, go to the supermarket. He seemed to think she’d hurt herself simply because she didn’t have enough to do.

  A mess of kids scrambled past her knees. They were arguing about something that had once belonged to the larger boy and had been stolen by the shortest girl. “We’re blocking the way,” Mina added.

  “Fine. Maybe you can work on the list.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “The list.” She knew he was worried, but she’d tried to die, not become a child in need of worksheets.

  The coffee shop glinted with white hexagonal tiles and varnished wood. She ordered and found a table near the door. It was the last free space. Laptops gaped from every table. In front of her, two young men with beards the size of small dogs bowed over the same screen. They kept jabbing at the display. This was less a coffee place than a fancy open-plan office. A waitress appeared with the coffee in a blue enamel cup. Mina blew across the foam. Enamel cups could go on
the list.

  The list was supposed to be all the things that made her happy, as if happiness were a matter of filling a checklist. But she would write it for Oscar. She wanted to promise him that she would be happy again and be a person capable of making him happy.

  HAPPY, she wrote in the notebook. The capital letters looked hysterical, like the work of a mad woman. In smaller script below she wrote, enamel cups. She glanced around the café. Hexagonal tiles, she thought. Did hexagonal tiles make her happy? Would they make her happy in all scales, or only when they were as big as her palm?

  Did coffee make her happy? It did and it didn’t. This coffee was nice enough. But it brought with it all the other cups she’d ever drunk and all the Minas she’d been when she was drinking them. Blanked-out, head-fogged, Mina drank doughnut-cart coffee on her way to Alfie’s and it felt like nothing would ever have enough caffeine.

  She tried to think of happier coffees. She’d sipped from a thermos sitting on the library steps after a great day’s research. She’d had her own carrel. She’d enjoyed teaching Introductory Latin. It was sad to watch the students tire of the subjunctive and slip away into Econ or Poly-Sci. But a few would stay, their brains adapting to the lap and flow of the language. Though they never wrote to her after the class was over, she was content to have added them to the scholarly stream. She was a ripple in a river that stretched back more than two thousand years. She was so sure she’d found her place in the world. The May that she sat for her thesis defense, cherry blossoms were bursting out all over the campus. She’d written her dissertation about shadows in Ovid and Virgil. The topic was obscure, but she’d enjoyed the obscurity. And the word itself: umbra. Long and low, like a hum.

  She’d had a side project too, one her adviser had encouraged her to turn into a monograph or at least a series of articles: The Women Who Survived. Few women survived the Greco-Roman myths and legends. The stories were thick with death. Leucothoë was buried alive by her father as punishment for fucking the sun. Eurydice was killed twice, first by a snake and second by her husband’s hungry look. Clytemnestra was murdered by her own children. If not killed, a woman might be transformed. Daphne’s long and lovely arms split into the leaves of the laurel tree when she fled Apollo. Poor Clytie shrank to a violet for love of the same god. Scylla slipped into poisoned water and found her legs, hips and tenderest parts turned into writhing, rabid dogs.

  The women who made it out, alive and intact, seemed worth noting—Penelope, Iphigenia in Aulis, Psyche, Leda. The project had started as a list she kept in a Word doc for her own amusement. Then she thought it might be a book, though feminist theory was out of vogue. But if she could swing a book with a good academic press, it might get her a tenure-track job. But who was she to write about survival? And, in any case, she hadn’t yet found the pattern. What kept these women going?

  Her hands picked up her phone. There were Facebook messages from New York friends, asking if she was having fun in London. It was clear they expected the answer to be yes. She thought of Phoebe holding the champagne in the air. The weight had etched a line of muscle into her arm. In the red of her hair, threads of gold matched the top of the champagne foil. Over the course of the meal, Mina had forgotten to feel tired or nervous: it was as if her selfhood had slipped away and she was only an audience to watch Phoebe’s smile. Would Phoebe survive if this were a myth? Mina considered it. No, probably not. Some god would see her, snatch her up and wreck her with his desire. Or a jealous goddess would curse her for the hair bright as the sun’s rays.

  It came to her that she’d been wrong about Phoebe’s name. The name Phoebe didn’t come from the sun god at all. Phoebus Apollo was the grandson of the female Titan Phoebe. For once it was the woman’s not the man’s name that had come first. Phoebe was a moon goddess. Mina thought of the freckled moon and of Phoebe’s smooth cheeks.

  Mina typed Phoebe into the Search bar before realizing she had no idea what Phoebe’s last name was. Then again, she should be in Oscar’s Friends. Yes. In the profile picture Phoebe hugged a huge dog. Her arms were swallowed by the fur. It was hard to tell from the perspective, but Mina thought the dog must be the size of a fairground prize, those big stuffed animals that hung from the ceiling and were essentially unwinnable. Its fur was the color of the cardamom rolls displayed on the café counter. Mina reconsidered the bearded men bent over their laptop. Phoebe’s dog had enough fur to clad a whole start-up’s worth of chins.

  A dog seemed important. Phoebe had never mentioned it. Mina realized that she couldn’t exactly reconstruct Phoebe’s face. There in the picture were the hair and the big eyes. But the dog covered her chin. What was the chin like? Pointed, Mina thought. It couldn’t have been pointed like a bird’s beak. There must’ve been some softness. How soft? At what angle? It was like Mina had been staring at a light bulb and now its shadow hovered in the center of her vision. It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, Mina decided. It was her energy. Phoebe thrummed, while everything about Mina felt slow and waterlogged.

  Mina sipped coffee while looking into the dog’s round eyes. When the cup was finished, Mina clicked Add Friend. It might’ve been the caffeine but she felt like there was too much blood in her head.

  Oscar visited five agencies, all of which promised to get him the best possible price for the flats. By the time they returned to the apartment, it was his father’s morning. Oscar rang. “Dad, it’s me,” he said.

  He described each agency, their 1.5 percent fees, and their similar showrooms. He wondered if the only real difference was the font of the signs. “A few suggested we stagger the sales, given we’re selling two properties in the same building. And I think it makes sense, especially because of the state 5B’s in. You were right. It’s much worse than 4B. Tenants wrecked the place. One of the kitchen cupboard’s come off its hinges. There’s a weird stain on the bathroom wall. And I think they took the mattress.”

  “To be expected, I suppose.” His father sighed.

  “I thought I’d start pricing the work.”

  “Go ahead,” his father said.

  Then father and son flopped into a gully of silence. After business was concluded, there was never much left. Oscar didn’t know what father-son chats sounded like. Briefly, he considered telling his father about Mina. What should I do about my wife? How do you keep a person safe from themselves? But he tried to sound like a professional when talking to his father. And so far Mina seemed to be doing okay. At dinner, she had acted like her real self. The slump had lifted from her shoulders. Anyway, his father wasn’t exactly an expert in the art of marriage. Only a few years after marrying Ami in a Los Angeles courthouse, he’d knocked up a passing English girl—hence Oscar’s existence.

  “And how’s Ami?” Oscar asked.

  “Ami’s well. She likes the new house.”

  Oh, yes, they’d moved. It was hard to remember when he barely saw the man in person.

  “How is Mina?” his father asked.

  “Mina is fine.”

  Oscar had always known she was ill. She’d told him when they met—at a party on the art school’s campus. The art-school kids with their dip-dyed hair and too-loud voices were playing a song he didn’t recognize. Muzzy charcoal sketches of breasts, asses and dicks were stuck to the wall. There was this girl leaning against the fridge with her eyes shut, and the smallest smile on her lips. He must’ve been wearing the wrong thing because the first thing she asked when he tapped her on the shoulder was, “You don’t go here, do you?” Oscar didn’t learn until much later that neither did she. She was not learning to weld or carve but was kept awake by conjugations of irregular verbs.

  On their first date, she told him that she was bisexual, vegetarian and on meds. The facts spat out in quick succession were almost a challenge to be met. In the years that followed, she had low days, when she canceled their plans and they stayed in to watch old movies, and nights when she woke him up and wanted to be held. But that had been manageable. He’d never guessed she m
ight try to kill herself. It was like finding out the dog you thought was a husky had remembered it was a wolf.

  Mina lay on the couch watching pigeons land and take off from the windowsill. Her whole life she’d been busy. She’d been busy with SAT prep, with AP prep, with college, with the PhD dissertation, with the job hunt, with tutoring spoilt high-schoolers, with networking, with writing articles, with her first adjunct teaching position, with getting married, with trying not to let her Greek slip, with putting together a pitch for the book, with trying always to think of the next thing. Even lying in bed, when her brain sank into viscous darkness, she’d known all the things she wasn’t doing. But at least she’d known how to begin those things. How do you begin being better?

  She balanced the notebook on her stomach, watching it rise up and down with her breath. Her pencil was blunt. She needed to sharpen it. Oscar was sitting at the table with his back to her. The silky tag of his shirt stuck up. Mina put the notebook down and walked to her husband. As she approached he held up a hand, like an air-traffic controller stopping a plane. She didn’t take offense. Oscar was bad at being interrupted mid-thought.

  Mina took a knife from the kitchen. She edged the steel into the pencil. Pressing into the resistance and feeling it give way was pleasurable. When the knife reached graphite, it danced forward. This was always how she sharpened her pencils. She liked the uneven look it gave them. She did this before editing her work. She always edited off-screen. It felt good to put a physical action to all those abstractions. When asking what Virgil meant to symbolize by umbra, it was nice to see the shadow of her pencil angle across the page.

  She opened the notebook. The list she’d written had only two items, enamel coffee cups and hexagonal tiles. A list had to have more than two items. Underneath she added: sharpening pencils. What else made her happy? She looked down at her feet. Those she felt indifferent about. The socks were fine. Could black jeans go on the list? Denim curved into scallops at her knees. She had five pairs. Black jeans were easy, but they’d fade from black to old-newspaper grey. No garment could offer what she wanted. She didn’t want a dress: she wanted a battleship’s hull. She didn’t want a shirt: she wanted the UV-insulated tiles of a space shuttle. She wanted something that protected. Black jeans were merely second best.