Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “Probably a normal amount of awful. Some things aren’t meant to be.” Mina tried to picture Phoebe with this older man. She envisioned a moustache snuffling against Phoebe’s delicate neck.

  All her adult life Mina had been with Oscar. It was impossible to imagine life without him. She would never be able to finish a bag of spinach.

  Phoebe said, “Ugh. You’re too good a listener. Now I’ve overshared.”

  Mina wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, so she just made a helpless expression.

  “I promise I don’t normally go on about myself like this.”

  “I like listening,” she said.

  “That’s nonsense. Everyone likes talking about themselves. Tell me something about you.”

  Mina considered her options. I want to run my tongue along the dent in your collarbone that your top has made visible. Nope. Sometimes I want to die and sometimes I want to buy a box of tomatoes and stand by the fridge eating them out of a paper carton and I don’t understand how I can hold both desires. Nope.

  “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t taken Oscar’s last name.”

  “Why did you? I mean, lots of women don’t, these days.”

  “I didn’t want him to be alone with it. You see, he had his mom’s name growing up.” Mina stopped, embarrassed. Phoebe would know that. They would have scraped their knees on the same trees. Maybe she even wrote him Christmas cards, addressing Oscar Shepard in wobbling gel-pen script. Mina braved onwards. “It wasn’t till he’d been working for his dad that he got it changed to Umeda. I don’t get it myself. But Oscar’s weird about his dad. I wanted to keep him company.” When he’d asked her to take his name, he had been repotting the cacti. There was soil spread over the table. The little green bodies languished on newspaper. He was lining the glass bowl with pebbles. The way he placed one stone beside the other with such care made her say, “Yes.” And she hadn’t ever taken it back. “I guess I don’t regret it, really. It’s just I never planned on taking a man’s name.”

  “There’s so much I never . . .”

  Mina’s risotto came, crescented with mushrooms. Phoebe ate pink-hearted roast beef. Mina wanted to remember this meal. She wanted to remember the hot porcini on her cold lips and the way Phoebe’s eyes glittered in the cold air. As a child, Mina had kept a diary. The entries were all meals. Tuesday: dumplings. Wednesday: steamed fish. Thursday: chicken nuggets. She supposed that was why so much blogging was about food. It was a child’s diary turned multimedia.

  The bill was more than Mina had calculated. Champagne and orange juice had addled her mathematics. Putting down the bank card, her fingers clenched. This wasn’t a good use of funds. But Oscar had said she was to be happy. It was only one lunch.

  Phoebe stood to go. Dread punched Mina in the stomach. She didn’t want to go back to the empty apartment. She just didn’t. She couldn’t be alone, her only company a phone that Oscar seemed content to ignore.

  “Stay at our place,” Mina said.

  “What?”

  “We have a sofa that’s probably as comfy as your brother’s.”

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “You’re not imposing. Oscar’s away for work. You can keep me company. Unless you have plans, which I guess you probably do.”

  Phoebe tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “Uh, I don’t have anything on. If you’re sure. I’d need to grab a change of clothes. But my brother’s place is only a fifteen-minute walk or so—up Highbury Fields way. Are you sure it’s okay?”

  Mina reassured her yet again that it was fine. It was ridiculous for Phoebe to sit around waiting for her brother to finish fucking when Mina was perfectly happy to have her over. Phoebe smiled. Mina glanced at the crooked tooth and felt her own mouth crook upwards in response.

  As they walked, Phoebe pointed out the place that had the best coffee, the place that had the best cheese, the pub in which her best friend had been broken up with. Mina felt a zip of jealousy that she was not this best friend. Although how could she be?

  Benson jerked forwards into a coven of pigeons, dragging Phoebe behind him. The birds exploded upwards. Phoebe yelped and hid her face with her hands. The pigeons settled on top of the bus stop. But the hands still masked Phoebe’s face.

  “It’s okay,” Mina said. “They’re gone.”

  “Snakes are fine,” Phoebe said. “Or mice. Or rats. But pigeons? They fly. I always feel like they’re going to touch my face.”

  Mina wanted to hug her, but said instead, “I don’t know. They always make me think of my grandma. She used to feed them. Which I guess is a bit of a thing: old lady plus pigeons. It started because of the Meals on Wheels delivery. That’s this service they have in the States where these people bring food to the elderly. Do you have it here?”

  Phoebe nodded. Mina described how each meal on wheels came in a cardboard tray with a day’s serving of butter, a single serving of milk, a single piece of fruit and a microwaveable entrée. These her grandmother ate at the kitchen table. But she’d ignore the single slice of plastic-wrapped bread. The slices stacked up inside the decrepit refrigerator. The machine had been older than Mina and had a heavy door.

  “I suggested we donate the bread to the homeless. But Grandma thought they might be insulted. She thought bread wouldn’t do them much good. She wouldn’t let me eat it. She’d heard something on the radio about pre-sliced bread lacking nutrition.”

  Nor was Mina allowed to toss it out the day it arrived. Even the suggestion caused her grandmother’s lips to pucker. Her grandmother did not throw things out. She did not dispose of restaurant flyers or old shoes. Inside its packaging the bread seemed cryogenically frozen. It lasted for months. Each day, when Mina got home from high school, she checked for dots of mold. Mold rendered the bread irredeemable and therefore disposable. Mina tried to talk to her father about it, on one of the rare evenings he was home. He said that Grandma grew up in the war. That was why she could not toss out good food.

  “Then I was doing the vacuuming. Grandma’s back wasn’t great by then and my dad was always working. Anyway, I was vacuuming, and Mary Poppins was running on TV in the background. And I looked up to see the pigeon lady sitting on the steps of some British church. I guess you would know which one.”

  “Not a clue,” Phoebe said.

  “Well, that’s what gave me the idea.”

  On a Saturday, they went to the park. Her grandma wore a straw fedora bought on sale at Century 21. It was tilted back on her head, like an old-world gangster’s. Mina tore open the tricky plastic wrappers and her grandmother threw the bread. “That’s when she told me.” Mina tried to capture the half-humorous tone her grandmother had used. “Before I retired, I never saw pigeons. I was busy busy busy. Now, pigeons everywhere.”

  Her grandmother died. The bread had stopped coming. Mina became too busy for pigeons. But the birds remained. “Ugh, sorry, you didn’t ask for my life history.” She chewed the inside of her lip.

  Phoebe said, “Your grandma seems like a cool lady.”

  “She was,” Mina said.

  Phoebe stopped in front of a brass-knockered door and dug around in her bag for a key. The house was one of many in a long terrace. It seemed somewhere that Mary Poppins would have worked, full of scuffed children and Christmas pudding. But the many doorbells indicated it had been split into apartments. Phoebe slipped into the hall, Benson at her heels. Mina followed them up a narrow staircase to Theo’s apartment. Inside, a guitar was strapped to the wall. Iridescent abalone chips jeweled the neck. In front of the lifeboat-sized TV there was a leather couch. Phoebe slept on it. Every night her cheek pressed down on the black seat. Mina let her fingers skim the slippery surface.

  Three large suitcases stood in a corner: one waxed canvas and two nylon, as if divorce was only a very long vacation. Mina sat on the couch while Phoebe unzipped the canvas suitcase. As she bent down, her tight jeans traced the of her ass. In the right pocket a coin pressed its outline in the taut denim. It was a
truly lovely rear end. Odd that such a thing existed, given all asses were fundamentally quite similar, just two slabs of flesh side by side. But there it was: Phoebe’s beautiful behind.

  Perhaps it was Mina’s absorption that meant she didn’t hear feet coming up the stairs or the key in the door.

  “Pheeb,” Theo said. His tie was pulled loose and lay lopsidedly on his shirt.

  “Theo, hi, I was just picking some stuff up. I didn’t think you’d be home now.”

  “I forgot a file.”

  “Good news. I’m getting out of your hair for the night. Mina’s taking me in.”

  “Great.” Theo pulled out his phone and stared briefly at the screen. Mina looked for the sibling resemblance and found it only in the tender pink of the earlobes and the narrowness of the upper lip. On Phoebe the lip was a coy prelude to the modest swell of the lower. On Theo, it was just half an unremarkable mouth.

  “Hi, Theo,” she said.

  “Mina, hi, sorry, I’ve just got this work thing. I can’t really talk about it.” He stepped over the coffee table to a translucent plastic box by the window. The lid came off with a violent snap. He grabbed a file. “Look, I have to get back. But, it was, uh, great to see you. Say hi to Oscar for me.”

  Seconds after he shut the door behind him, Phoebe said, “Dickhead. Look at me, I’m a big important barrister.”

  Mina wondered if he’d tell Oscar he’d seen her with Phoebe. Why hadn’t Oscar called to say he’d arrived safely? He hadn’t even texted.

  The buyer’s office was located in a tower so high that Oscar’s neck ached looking up at it. In the one short month he’d been in England he’d lost the habit of height. London had a few tall buildings. New York was a porcupine. This tower was one of its many quills. Beyond the rotating brass door, Oscar and his father had to supply a security guard with their names and ID before being issued with a badge each. It allowed them to swipe through another set of barriers to the elevator banks. A screen the size of a paperback book was embedded in the side of the elevator. On it, Oscar read the wind speed, humidity and temperature of the city outside. Animated clouds bobbed along a digital sky.

  His phone vibrated. It was probably Mina. He visualized a lead wall lining his skull and repelling the non-work-related emotions trying to batter their way inside. He switched the phone to Do Not Disturb. But then, because he couldn’t stop himself, he flicked open his phone’s tracking app. There at home was the little icon of his wife. Inside the bubble was her profile photo, the same one she used for Facebook. Mina in her wedding dress. At home. Safe. Nothing to worry about.

  The lift led into a reception room. Screens attached to the walls glowed with dewy peaches. The displays flicked to a white man holding a whiter lamb. Oscar thought the man was probably an actor. His father approached the receptionist to explain they had an appointment with Eileen Johnson. Oscar’s stomach clenched as the screen flicked to a shot of a man on a yacht drinking red wine. They’d been steadily ordering the IPA. There had been no mess-ups in shipment. Had there been a deterioration in quality? How could he reassure Eileen Johnson?

  The receptionist led them through a narrow hall to a conference room. The window gave a view onto New York’s glassy glory. From this far up the city looked like a sculpture and not a place where humans lived. He could just about see the river that had eaten one of his wife’s flip-flops. He pushed the thought away.

  “Sit,” Eileen Johnson commanded. She was seated at the head of the table, a MacBook flipped open in front of her. A half-drunk cup of coffee rested by her hand. The hand itself was large and heavily ringed in gold. His father took the chair nearest to her. Oscar took the one beside it. Eileen Johnson narrowed her too-green eyes at them.

  He put out a hand towards her. “Oscar, we met before.” Eileen Johnson didn’t reach out to shake it. That was just as well because the Band-Aid was peeling. He tucked the hand into his pocket. Oscar continued, “And this is our CEO, Kenichi Umeda.”

  “Please call me Ken.”

  Eileen Johnson shut her laptop. “We’ve been loving the pale ale. Loving it. The owl thing is cute. But not too, you know, too cute.” The brewery’s logo was a wide-eyed owl with a tubby stomach. The bird was on their bottles.

  Oscar replied, “That’s wonder—”

  Eileen Johnson interrupted, “The thing is Japan was a big deal decades ago. Decades. They eat sushi in Nebraska now. Thai food was five years ago. Mongolian is the thing now. Or Nepali. So I wasn’t sure about your product. But, you know, the people in Nebraska, they need groceries too. Japan is just the right amount of accessible. And we’ve been thinking it’s going to have a second wave. A second tsunami, if you will.” She snorted at her own joke. Oscar gave the smile he always gave when a client mentioned ninjas, samurai or tsunamis. His father nodded and said nothing. “But it’s also got to have something new. Something to get people talking. So, what I’m thinking, what we’re thinking, is that in the spring we’re going to do a big Japan thing. Cherry blossoms and so on. And we’d like you to be part of that. We want products that feel novel. Exciting, but not too challenging. Not too strange. In most households, women buy the groceries. Cute would be good. Something like the ale, but new. Different. Something we can get excited about. We’re rolling this out across the country. So we need to get organized. Get ready. I assume you can prepare me some options.”

  She widened her eyes. The green irises became islands in a milky sea.

  “Yes, of course,” Oscar said. “What sort of time frame were you imagining?”

  A few ideas began to simmer in the back of his head. But he wanted to check prices. His father would need to check which craft breweries had the capacity to meet the grocery store’s vast demand.

  “A month,” she said. “My secretary will email you.”

  The meeting had taken less time than it took the flight attendant to hand out Oscar’s meal on the plane. But clients were clients and big clients were big clients. He didn’t want his face or his father’s to be forgotten. It was better that they stick in her mind.

  As he and his father waited for the elevator, Oscar pulled out his phone. He didn’t have to type in his password. Mina’s messages hovered onscreen.

  Are you alive?

  ?

  ?

  ?

  ?

  Yes, he typed. Busy sorry.

  They stepped out into the sun. Across the street in Bryant Park, office workers used plastic utensils to cram lunches down. As they walked past a woman forking up a terrarium of salad, Oscar asked his father if he wanted to get lunch in the hotel.

  “Is there somewhere fast around here?”

  “Yeah.” Oscar paused. “Are you in a hurry?”

  “I’d like to go back to the hotel and take a nap.”

  He’d never thought of his father as a napper, but the man was getting older. “There’s a Japanese bookstore with lunch bentos on the second floor,” he suggested. He guided his father past bright spines, figurines, manga, and posters of wide-eyed magical girls to the food corner. Inside the black plastic bentos were golden tempura prawns, rectangles of white rice, and katsu pork. His father grabbed a bento and a green triangle of matcha cake. Oscar chose two salmon-stuffed rice balls.

  His father spotted a table next to a group of technicolor-haired teenagers. They were jabbering about exams and someone named Chloë. Their purple and green drinks glittered with ice.

  Oscar said, “That was promising, don’t you think?”

  “Any ideas about what to pitch?” His father snapped open the disposable chopsticks, rubbing them together to remove the chance of a splinter.

  “A few.”

  As he chewed his rice, Oscar tried to construct the customer Eileen Johnson was trying to reach: a woman who wanted a drink that felt Japanese. Given the chain’s demographic, this was a woman with some disposable income who was into health foods. Perhaps he could try the sweet-potato IPA. Sweet potatoes seemed to be cropping up in every vegan, Paleolit
hic, clean-eating health book. He was unsure about the gender implications. Only 25 percent of beer drinkers were female, which some in the industry saw as a law and others saw as an opportunity for expansion. Oscar suspected the owl ales attracted more women.

  Would Mina buy a drink because it had an owl on it? Maybe. He pictured her on tiptoe, reaching upwards, the hem of her dress rising. Mina, do owls make you happy?

  Normally when deciding what product to pitch, Oscar would choose a few possibilities and throw a party. He’d see what was finished and what was ignored. He’d note what his guests asked about and what they Instagrammed. His stock of drinks was in mini-storage. Transporting them to England would be difficult. Midair leaks were not ideal.

  His father had moved on to the cake. He paused, fork holding a scruffy pyramid of sponge. “Would you like some?”

  “I’m fine.” Oscar avoided refined sugars when he could. They fucked up insulin levels and muscle development. He got out his phone and typed in the notes:

  (a) Source drink selection.

  (b) Shortlist—consult industry ppl?

  (c) Pitch

  It was a simple list but it was good to have everything written out.

  His father cleared his throat. “I was talking to Ami, and she was thinking it would be nice to see you. You could work on the pitch at our place. And we should start thinking about next quarter generally. It would be easier to go over the books in person.” Our place meant the new house on a cutesy island near Seattle. He’d never been. The couple had moved there last year. For work Oscar visited their flat in LA, a place with huge windows that let in the disconcerting blue of the Los Angeles sky. He’d kept the trips short. What was it people said? House guests, like fish, go off after three days?