Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “I don’t think it matters whether she had polycystic ovaries, do you? I mean they’re ashes on my father’s bookshelf.”

  When Mina was a teenager, she’d questioned the story of slipping in the bath. She’d fantasized about slit wrists or a bottle of Jameson followed by a drunken stupor. It was all too plausible that the woman left alone with a new baby in a small apartment with cockroaches that crawled up through the toilet had wanted to drown her sorrows in hot water and warm whiskey. Her father had stuck to the slipping story. His face had crumpled when she’d tried to bring it up. She’d wondered what might have been different if her father had come home earlier. But she was over it. Perhaps her mother had had postpartum depression, perhaps she’d had a drinking problem, perhaps she’d slipped. It didn’t matter.

  Dr. Helene looked fuzzy and distant. The list of reasons to be sad was seemingly endless. Dead mother, bullying, messed-up ovaries, the general grind of living. On and on they went. And yet all so small when she thought of the children who walked out of war zones to grow up to be dentists and doctors, to be kind and good and fair. Whereas she, spoilt creature, could sit here on this bed talking to a woman paid to be sympathetic. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

  “And how is the transition going?” Dr. Helene asked. By which she meant the transition from pills to no pills.

  “It’s fine,” Mina said.

  “And the mood log?”

  “A mix,” Mina said. “Ups and downs.”

  “But there have been ups?” Dr. Helene leaned forward encouragingly.

  Eventually, the session ran out. Mina closed the call, shut her computer, and got off the bed. In the main room, the fly had stopped humming. Had it escaped?

  “How was it?” Oscar asked. He was holding some sheets up to the light.

  “Fine,” Mina said.

  “Yellow-white,” he said. “Better to do something than spend all this time deciding.” He looked tall and certain, his posture perfect. Oscar had eyes that changed color in the light. They could be summer-burnt grass or pine-trunk brown. The evening light caught the flecks of gold.

  “Thank you for being here,” she said.

  He pulled her into a hug and pressed a kiss onto the top of her head.

  Mina shrugged on Oscar’s dressing-gown. She had her own but she’d always liked his fuzzy robe better. It fell over her knuckles so that she felt like she was disappearing into it.

  She stepped over the platoon of paint cans that lined the hallway. The liters of yellow-white had arrived yesterday.

  Oscar sat at the kitchen counter. He was playing that Japanese game on his phone again. He pulled his lips together in concentration. A peep from the phone indicated the mini-game was done and he looked up at her. “I got a call from Dad. He needs me to go back to the States for a couple of days. He’s booked me onto a flight tomorrow. An important client wants a meeting.”

  The lemon she took from the fridge was soothing to the touch, but scentless. Her throat was sore and her sinuses were clogged. The damp felt as if it had seeped into her skin. “Isn’t that kind of short notice?” Mina asked.

  “Well, they’re our biggest client . . .” Oscar paused. “Do you want to come?”

  “Won’t it be expensive to get a ticket now?” Mina lined up the knife with the center of the fruit. If she concentrated on doing this task, everything would be fine. She was a thirty-two-year-old woman whose husband was going on a short trip. That was all. There was no need to get upset. Her lungs felt too big for her ribs. She imagined them bursting out, bits of blood and tissue falling everywhere. Breathe, she thought. This is an overreaction. Just another mood that had got disordered and needed putting back on the correct shelf.

  Oscar tapped the edge of the kitchen counter. His fingernail beat a nervy rhythm against the wooden slab. “We can look for ticket discounts,” he said.

  “But?” Juice squirted from the lemon onto her fingers.

  “The plan is that Dad and I are going to share a hotel room, so that might be a little difficult . . .” Oscar trailed off. “Though I’m sure you could crash with Abby or Miranda.” She was confused. Then she remembered that it wasn’t possible to just go home. They were subleasing the apartment.

  Tickets would be expensive. Mina had always thought of the money as their money. Yes, her contributions were uneven. Her adjuncting work had always been precarious. Some semesters she’d been able to pick up three or four classes at universities across the city. In others, one or two. But she’d always contributed everything she had. Now she wasn’t working. Soon the savings would not be theirs but his.

  It made no sense for her to join. She wasn’t needed. Abby or Miranda or any other friend would ask how her research was going and she’d have to smile and smile and smile, and say, “Oh, really great.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, setting the electrical kettle to boil. It chugged earnestly. Oscar was watching her, but she wasn’t sure what to do with her face.

  She was dependent on this man. He was a good man. If she made him a dating profile, women would want him. They would admire the ridges of muscle. They’d love his work ethic. If she made herself one? No one would want that. The guys in her high school had had this graph. On one axis was hotness and on the other craziness. And then there was a forty-five-degree line pointing northeast. Above the line was undateable; under the line was dateable. The hotter you were, the crazier you were allowed to be. They plotted the names of all the girls in their class. Had Oscar’s friends had a graph like that? What would they have made of her?

  “I wanted to come to your next appointment.” Oscar touched her shoulder.

  “It’s okay. I was okay when you went to your mum’s, wasn’t I?” She poured in the boiling water and the lemon bobbed to the surface. She sniffed. The steam carried a citrus tang.

  He tapped the table again, in that same nervous beat. It felt like he was tapping on her skull. Eventually he stopped and walked over, put his arms around her and kissed her shoulder. He said, “Promise me you’ll be okay.” His lips nibbled the tattooed petals on her arms. She let him take her back to bed and unroll her from the dressing gown. She tried to look at him like a contented wife looked at her husband. But thinking about her facial expression made it hard to think about anything else. Eventually she suggested they try another angle. The relief of letting her expression relax was a pleasure itself.

  Afterwards, her lemon water had gone cold. She gulped it.

  “I thought, before I left, we could go to that flower market. The one on Phoebe’s blog.” His voice was kind, like a man apologizing to his child for missing her school play by offering to buy her ice cream. She knew Oscar thought the equation was simple: Mina likes flowers, so flowers make Mina happy. Perhaps that was how it worked for other people.

  After exiting the Tube, they found themselves surrounded by concrete towers and smaller yellow-brick buildings. An English flag, greened and weather-flayed, hung from a window. The air was clammy, like laundry forgotten at the bottom of the machine. Mina followed the blue dot of their bodies moving along her phone map. Was this really where the flower market was?

  Around the corner, Columbia Road materialized. The street was stitched with flowers. Blues and pinks and yellows shone against the October sky.

  “Sunflowers, armful for a fiver,” men bellowed, from behind their stalls. Their gravelly voices would’ve been fit to hawk hot dogs.

  “See the size of our lilies today, two for seven.”

  The street was thick with people. Couples folded hands together. Girls snapped shots of succulents. Olive trees stood erect in their terracotta pots. Thrusting out from beige buckets were enough roses for a wedding.

  Mina’s body glanced against the passing crowd. A huge bunch of tiger lilies licked her face as their owner tramped past her. Surely it was not warm enough in England for all this glory? They must have come from overseas.

  “See anything you like?” her husband asked.

  A fluffy dog squatted
on the street to take a shit. It looked like Benson’s smaller cousin. She examined the stall to her side, careful to avoid the vendor’s gaze. She wasn’t ready to buy yet. Mina’s eye caught on the pink daisies. They were fifty times the size of the white polka dots that crop up in parks and the pink was sherbet-gaudy.

  Pink daisies always made her think of senior year. She’d shared a pink clapboard house with two other girls. The paint had been gentled by the sun to the faint blush found inside a lychee’s skin. On Sundays, she and Oscar would go to the store and choose a watermelon. They’d take their time. Mina would caress the sides of the melon and rub the scar where fruit had broken from vine. By the checkout, they’d choose a handful of pink daisies, the cheapest flowers—their guilty extravagance. They’d leave with a watermelon so heavy that the store’s plastic bag would bulge under its weight.

  At home, Oscar would crack open the big-bellied fruit. Mina would scoop out the inside, gobbing melon into the blender the previous renter had left behind. She’d crack ice from trays. Oscar would add a slug of vodka from the bottle they kept on top of the fridge. They’d set out the daisies in a jar and sit at the rickety kitchen table drinking cold pink drinks, with their pink flowers in their pink playhouse, while mosquitoes raised pink mountains on their legs. She’d imagined their grown-up lives were about to begin.

  A woman in rubber boots shoved past her. Everything felt too bright. Mina paused and closed her eyes. Behind the lids she was able to find a calm corner. When she opened them, Oscar was paces ahead of her.

  “Wait,” she shouted.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, when she caught up with him.

  “Nothing,” she said. His face changed, going strange. There was something off about it, like those wax models of celebrities. She tried again, “It’s just I thought our life would be different, you know?”

  She put a hand out towards him. He didn’t take it.

  “I love you,” Oscar said. The silent but hung in the air, like a slowly deflating balloon.

  She sniffed and looked again at her husband. He was wearing the forest-green sweater they’d chosen together. There was a nick in the shoulder revealing his white T-shirt. It was as bright as sunlight breaking through leaves. He must not have noticed. Oscar did not like to keep clothes with mistakes or imperfections.

  “Can you just try,” Oscar said, “a tiny bit harder?”

  “I am trying.” The salt water that was filling her eyes dissolved the flowers into smudges.

  “Okay, except you’re in a flower market. A flower market! And you’re crying at nothing. At literally nothing. Nobody gets the life they thought they would.”

  Had he been rehearsing this speech in his head?

  “What I mean is, nobody’s life is perfect. But most people manage.” Oscar lowered his voice. “How am I supposed to leave you alone when you behave like this?”

  “Like what?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know perfectly well. Like this. Mina, I have to go to New York.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  She tried to act as if this was ridiculous. To have any sort of life, you had to at least fake being all right. She could not ask her husband to stay, stroke her hair, and clean away each ferocious thought. If she said she might not be okay, then he and Dr. Helene and everyone else would say, “Take this pill, take that pill.” And she’d take them each day, waiting for them to stop working. She had to be fine.

  “But you are. You’re crying,” he said.

  “Oscar, I told you I’m fine.”

  “But you’re obviously not. Mina, do you have any idea how tiring it is to always be wondering if you’re okay? I need you to meet me halfway. I’m doing everything I can. What else do you need?”

  “This isn’t all about you. Don’t be so patronizing.” Rage flapped its ragged wings. And she saw herself as if from a great height—this small tattooed woman with the bleached hair crying for her husband’s affection. This small woman dressed to look like a rebel but just begging to be held. Pathetic. Pathetic. So cringingly grateful. There was a lot to be grateful for. These flowers, her health, their marriage, every lucky turn her life had taken. But it was impossible to be forever grateful, forever saying thank you, thank you, thank you, yet to wake up and feel miserable for no reason on earth.

  “I’m not trying to patronize you. I’m worried about you.”

  “Well, you are.”

  “Mina, what do you want me to do? Just tell me what you want me to do.”

  She said, “I’ll be fine by myself. I’ll be fine. I told you I was fine. You don’t need to watch me. It’s pointless. You can’t possibly watch me for the rest of my life. Are we going to be in the old people’s home and you won’t go to bingo without me in case I hop on a jet to Switzerland? What do you want from me? What am I supposed to say?”

  “I don’t know.” Heads turned towards his raised voice. There were too many people and they were too close. She could feel them watching. “Just try to be happy, Mina. Do that for me?” The words were sour.

  “Fuck off, Oscar.”

  “Mina—”

  “Maybe you should have married someone else. Some nice girl who knows all about paint colors. Some nice girl who can play house while you’re away at work. Isn’t that what you wanted? Maybe we never should have got married.”

  “I can’t . . .” He paused. “I can’t talk to you like this. I’ll see you at home.”

  He turned and began walking. His back became just one more green thing, until he vanished among the blooms.

  “Sunflowers, armful for a fiver, three for a tenner. Have you ever seen ’em this big? Andrew—bet you haven’t seen anything this big in a long while?”

  Mina was distantly aware that the man must be shouting to an assistant, co-worker, or stooge. No one seemed to be acknowledging the height of the blooms. The vendor told some iPhone-toting girls they’d have to pay a pound a photo.

  Oscar might be hit by a truck. And her last memory of him would be of his back, rigid and unforgiving. She stared into the crowd trying to see him. He was gone.

  It wasn’t fair. She had a mental illness. You shouldn’t yell at someone who was sick. Except you did. She’d yelled at her grandmother as she began to forget people. It stung to be forgotten. The only grace was that Mina knew her grandmother would forget the rages too.

  She tried to find a path through the crowd. The pavement was littered with petals. “Littered” was the word. They looked like so much colorful trash. How had they been destroyed? A child? An unloading accident? A lovers’ fight? Looking at the yellow drops of flower-flesh, Mina tried to put the bouquet back together in her mind. Shoes had bruised the gold to brown. She stared with such concentration, the petals seemed to wobble. How had she become the sort of person who could go to a river of flowers and come out with nothing? She looked up at the sky. She dared it to rain.

  When she got home, Oscar was packing. On the table, a tall drinking glass was filled with peonies. Each was a bud, the flowers yet to come.

  “Thank you,” she said. When Oscar gave a half-smile, she noticed the faintest wrinkles around the corners of his mouth. It was strange to realize that all the years they’d been together had begun to groove those cheeks.

  “They’re your favorite,” he said.

  “How did you . . . You can’t get them this time of year.”

  “Just saw them in this shop on the way home. And I thought the plan was to get you flowers after all.”

  “They’re beautiful,” she said. And they were, the petals the pale pink of strawberry juice.

  He smiled with half his face. “Is it me?” he asked.

  He placed his skipping rope into the corner of his suitcase. The foam-grip handles lay side by side like a sleeping couple.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Well, if your wife tries to . . . on your wedding night, it’s hard not to take it a little personally.”

  “No . . . that wasn’t it.” Madne
ss had hit her the way lightning strikes a tree. She hadn’t called it down.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t remember. I told you.”

  “You must remember something.”

  She supposed she did: months of cake-tasting, spreadsheet-making, guest-list counting, budgeting. She’d joked to Abby that the greatest gift of death was that you didn’t have to plan your own funeral. When she’d tried on the dress she’d felt beautiful and blessed. Squeezing into the dress on her wedding day, she’d wondered how she ever thought a corset was a blessing. She remembered standing below the pine-cone bower with her feet hurting. She remembered that the ceremony felt as fake as a poorly acted school play. She remembered feeling everyone looking at her, and knowing she should be happy, that she’d been planning this day for so long, and that she’d laid her head on Oscar’s arm so many nights wishing for this day. And yet she’d been numb.

  She strained to remember further into the night, trying yet again to force her brain to give her something concrete. Perhaps if she could make herself remember the exact moment. She pushed against the blankness in her brain. Had she taken the pills with water? She had the glimmer of a memory that bathroom-floor tiles had been cold against her bare feet. Had her makeup blurred? Or was she imagining that? What had she thought she was doing? What had she said to Oscar? What had he said to her? Why didn’t she have an answer for him now, some simple explanation? This happened and therefore my mind did that.

  Oscar was carefully slotting socks into the corners of his suitcase, tucking them under the shirts. His hands were so long and delicate.

  “I wanted to marry you,” she said, “so much.” It was true.

  They spoke very little after that, careful not to bruise the tender peace.