Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  “Can I help you?” The boy looked like a high schooler. His eyes were the same black as the single hair on his upper lip. There was fear in them.

  Mina looked down to where her thumbs pressed into the meat. In the past, people had told her she looked like a vegetarian, whatever that meant. Did he think she was protesting? Or perhaps he thought she was a crazed carnivore about to rip open the packet and chew. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just shopping.”

  He didn’t leave.

  “I’m fine,” she repeated. Before he could reply, she walked away, turning so quickly her shoes squeaked. The meat was in her hands. She thought of slipping it behind a bank of chocolate bars, but she didn’t like the thought of it festering there so she carried it to the checkout and paid for lipids and blood.

  In the apartment, she slid it to the very back of the fridge and flipped it upside down so only the innocent foam tray showed.

  She opened her mood calendar and carefully, one by one, she tore out all the pages. One by one she dropped them into the mouth of the trash. Each one she watched drift slowly down. She would not, could not, live a life of downward arrows. And if they kept going down then the least she could do was stop drawing them.

  The llama stared at him under white lashes. The eyelashes belonged on a billboard, but the teeth were a gross yellow-brown. Oscar was not a pet person. He thought maybe pet-love was best practiced from a young age, like a foreign language or a violin. His mother had never had an animal. She always said she got more pleasure from wild things. At school some of the boys had had rodents, but all the cool animals were off-limits—snakes, bats, Alaskan wolfhounds.

  Ami had texted from the hospital to say they were keeping his father overnight for observation. That she’d sleep there.

  He had angina in July. Think it may be another. Please feed Ichiro his evening treat. Apples in kitchen. Slice first.

  Angina. His first thought was vagina, a ridiculous thought, the thought of a child. Yet there it was angina, vagina. Mina would know the etymology. Mina . . . he should tell Mina this.

  Oscar googled. It wasn’t like a heart attack. It was a heart attack—the smallest kind. Smaller than an infarction, smaller than cardiac arrest. It wasn’t a stopping of blood to the heart, just a weakening of flow. Oscar thought of his own heart, beating and beating every second he’d been alive, as reliable as the sun or the stars.

  He saw again the way his father and Ami leaned on each other. He wished his wife were there, that she was wrapping her arms around his head, that he could press his nose into her neck and smell her warmth. He’d have to apologize for not calling. He should have called more. It was only that he’d had nothing to say. Why was he thinking about his wife? Shouldn’t he be thinking about his father? They always wrote on Facebook when someone posted sad news, Sending thoughts and prayers. Better just to do what Ami had asked.

  The llama shunted its head between the widely spaced wires of the fence. Steel dug against wool, but Ichiro didn’t seem to notice. The teeth were really very long. He might lose a finger. Oscar thought of all the people who died rafting, mountain climbing, on safari, doing meaningless things for the sake of it. But his father was in hospital. His wife was crazy. If his semi-stepmother wanted the llama fed, he could do that one thing.

  He took the smallest slice. The skin was waxy. He put the apple on the flat of his hand. The tongue was slimy. The lump moved under the short-haired jaw and pulsed down the animal’s neck.

  It was cold in the apartment. The sud-smell from the de-wallpapering misted the air. Her body ached but would not sleep. What time was it? She had kissed Phoebe. She had kissed Phoebe. She had kissed Phoebe. What did it mean? It didn’t feel real. Phoebe would never speak to her again. And she’d have to lie to Oscar. Even if he held her again, she’d never be able to relax against his chest. Because the lie would be a wall between them. She’d know that her mouth had drifted and she’d tasted the salt of Phoebe’s skin. That salt might stay in Mina’s arteries for years. No. No lies. If she lied, then this would be bigger and worse. Maybe he’d mind less, because Phoebe was a woman. Maybe he wouldn’t think it was as big a deal. Even thinking that she felt like a shit. She didn’t want Phoebe because she was a woman, or at least Mina didn’t think so. She wanted her because she was Phoebe. Not that it would help to tell Oscar that. Facts would be best.

  Her phone tried to predict each word. After k it suggested keep and know but ki got it to kiss. For Phoebe, it required the first four letters. Mina was thankful for that reprieve. It made her feel for a moment as if her desires were not so predictable.

  It hung in the New Message box—I kissed Phoebe. She clicked Send. Oscar knew now. He knew what she had done. The small, hungry thing.

  I’m sorry, she typed and then deleted it. Will you call me? She deleted that too. She wondered if she should claim the message was a typo. But what could she possibly have meant to write? I killed Phoebe? I missed Phoebe? I dissed Phoebe? I kissed peaches? I killed peaches?

  No, it wouldn’t work. The birds stared down at her from the walls. The phone’s light faded from gleam to grey. And he did not call. Although he must be awake.

  She could not sleep in her room surrounded by the birds’ eyes. And so as dawn came up she crashed on the orange sofa, surrounded by scarred plaster.

  The hangover licked Oscar’s eyeballs. He had tried to work, but he’d just ended up drinking. He turned on his phone.

  His wife’s message rose up onto the screen.

  I kissed Phoebe.

  The words sat there as he tried to understand them. Two faces crushed together. Mina’s teeth and tongue shunted into a mouth he’d tasted long ago. What next? It was one thing for Mina to cancel a visit to his mother, to cut him even, and another to throw herself upon the sister of his oldest friend. Did you have to forgive someone everything just because they were depressed?

  He didn’t bother figuring out what time it was over there. He called.

  “What the fuck?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “You told me you wanted me to try to be happy. And my head just feels full of rocks. All the time. All the time.”

  He could see it now—Mina wild-eyed. The way Phoebe’s mouth would twist in shock and she’d shove Mina back. The way Mina’s hair would fall across her face. His wife craven with apologies, saying she was just crazy, saying she was just full of rocks. He could see how she would cross her arms over her chest the way she did when she was worried.

  “It was stupid,” she said.

  In other circumstances, his wife kissing Phoebe might’ve been hot. Now he just wanted peace.

  “Mina, what am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to tell Theo?”

  “That’s what you care about? Theo? I’m sorry. But you weren’t here and . . . and . . .”

  “Mina, do you have any idea what I’m dealing with?”

  “I might if you told me. I’m not stupid. I know you’re avoiding me. What happened? You got tired, so you left. Grow some balls. Tell me that. Tell me you don’t want to see me anymore.”

  Oscar forced himself to be calm. He rolled one deltoid, then the other. Pull himself together. He needed to pull himself together.

  “Oscar, are you there?”

  If he spoke he’d say something awful. Something cruel. “I can’t talk to you,” he said, “not when you’re like this, Mina. I won’t be back for a while.”

  Somewhere in the house a landline began to ring. It bleeped with the shrill importance of a baby crying.

  “Mina, I’ve got to go.”

  With each step he took, Oscar tried to put Mina out of his mind. The ringing was coming from his father’s study in the eaves of the house. It was a small room with a wooden table pressed against the window. There was one chair. One bookshelf. A jar with one pen, two pencils, one ruler, and a pair of orange-handled scissors. He picked up the telephone, and a voice began in polite Japanese.
The beginnings of words made sense but the phrasings were too formal for Oscar to imitate. In the politest Japanese he had, he explained that Umeda-san had been taken ill and asked the man to call later.

  A picture of Ami stood on the windowsill. She looked very young. A purple beret was tucked over her ears. She was sitting on a stone wall, her toes meeting in a point. She was smiling at those shoes like she and they shared a secret understanding. Had his father already fucked his mother when this was taken? He thought of the way Ami had kissed his father’s hand. The way she had held him.

  Oscar had never wanted to cheat on Mina. He found plenty of women attractive. But he hadn’t wanted to be the sort of person who made a promise and broke it. Anyway, the logistics removed any excitement. He’d have to find a cheap room, pack protection, and shower afterwards, then be careful not to come home smelling of hotel shampoo. It was so much to keep track of. Yet his father seemed to have got away with it. Oscar pulled the picture of that baby from his wallet. Why hadn’t his father stayed in England at least? Why give up so easily? What if it was too late to ask? No, angina wasn’t deadly. This wasn’t a heart attack, just a heart glitch. His father would be fine.

  He went back down to the bedroom. He ordered samples of the red rice beer and a stout that had a coffee-chocolaty aroma to Jimmy’s bar and to George’s place. George managed a fish place in Williamsburg. There were only two menu options. Despite or because of this the restaurant flourished. The tiny shop appealed to Japanese expats and skinny white girls alike. George’s opinion counted.

  The hangover bit another morsel of Oscar’s brain.

  Neither of them wrote to her. Not Phoebe. Not Oscar. On the app, Oscar’s little icon hovered smugly across the world. Her arms itched. She wondered if she was allergic to fabric softener. It was as if her body wanted to be clawed away. Be happy, she thought. That was what Oscar had asked her to do. And she had tried. All wrong. But she had tried.

  Ovid told the story of a girl who fell into a mad lust with her brother. It was a love that kept her rocking awake through the night. The hunger disgusted her but would not end. Finally, she confessed her love in a note scratched onto a tablet. Her brother was horrified. But she hoped with tears to change his mind. She begged and pleaded. He ran from her. And she was left to walk the earth in hunger and sorrow. Many of the women walked. It was a thing they did, pacing out their miseries as if distance might cure them. And sometimes it did. This girl was found by the nymphs, who witnessed her weeping and weeping. They helped in the only way they knew how. They transformed her into a bubbling spring that flowed from dark soil. Sometimes Mina thought the transformed were the lucky ones.

  Mina wept briefly, in a burst as sudden as a sneeze. But her arms and legs did not fold or flow or burst into rivers.

  Can you meet me at the Victoria and Albert Museum cafe at 2:30

  Phoebe’s text was a question but there was no question mark at the end. Did that indicate an assumption of agreement or an indifference to Mina’s sense of grammar? It was a public place. Perhaps she was trying to stop Mina making a scene. Did Mina look like the sort of person who would make a scene? Mina considered waiting to reply. If she waited, Phoebe would wait. And they’d spend weeks and months in artificial silence.

  Okay, she wrote. It seemed more relaxed than OK. Ay added a mellow sway.

  Two-thirty was soon. She’d slept until noon. Every time her eyes opened to the light she’d remembered the tone of Oscar’s voice and dived back into sleep, until finally her body refused.

  What to wear? Out of the window, the smooth sky was pillowcase white. She touched the top of her arm, where she knew the inked peonies wrapped and guarded her. But today they didn’t seem enough. She needed another talisman, but it had to be equally hidden. She couldn’t show up in a red lipstick. She mustn’t look over-the-top. Or like the sort of woman who had affairs often and easily. She’d never done anything like this. Perfume? Had she packed it? The vial was in the plastic bag of toiletry miscellany that she’d shoved under the sink. The glass tube was mostly full. Mina rarely wore perfume. She was convinced the bluster of city life blew it away. She held the tip of the small nozzle under her nose. Orange and cardamom. The top jammed, stiff with lack of use. She hit it harder with her palm and it sprayed. She let the bottle kiss her wrists and the backs of her ears. With her eyes shut, she felt like she was standing in an orange grove somewhere sun-blessed. She’d never been to an orange grove. They were probably rank with pesticides. In spite of this, she thought of nymphs fleet-footing it through the trees.

  The museum’s steps were bloated with tourists. Mina’s eyes caught on a brace of teenagers. A boy slotted his hand neatly into the back of a girl’s jeans. It made them complete in some way, like when two sections of an Ikea kit are slotted together and suddenly a bookshelf emerges.

  Where was Phoebe?

  THE EXCELLENCE OF EVERY ART MUST CONSIST IN THE COMPLETE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF ITS PURPOSE, proclaimed the gold letters above the door. Women had been sculpted to hold the words. Most wore thin drapes that clung to thighs and breasts but the central figures, the ones holding up IN THE, were naked to their belly buttons. There was nothing to indicate the purpose of these women. Or maybe they were nymphs.

  The difference between nymphs and women was vague. They had breasts, thighs, toes. They desired and were desired. Sure, nymphs were of the sea, the woods, and rivers. But it barely seemed to matter. No, the biggest difference was that nymphs did not get old. They were transformed into many things but never into women, mundane and middle-aged. Mina’s back ached. Her shoulders ached. Her neck ached. Oscar would have told her the name of each screaming muscle, but he did not want to talk to her.

  Mina’s eyes fell to Phoebe sitting on the step, her long legs flung out, crossed at their suede booties. A sweater was tossed over one shoulder, as jaunty as a catalogue model’s. She scribbled in that little notebook. Mina stepped quietly. She didn’t say anything until they were positioned as close as old friends.

  “Working on a blog?” Mina asked.

  “Nah,” Phoebe said. “I just like it here and I thought we should talk.”

  Mina put out a hand to help her up. But Phoebe pressed her palm on the dirty step and pushed herself upright. Phoebe would rather touch that much-trodden slab than Mina’s freshly washed fingers.

  “I’m bad at this,” Phoebe said.

  “Okay.” Mina didn’t know what to do with her hands. She crossed them over her chest. That seemed aggressive so she dropped them to her sides. But then they were dangling purposelessly. Phoebe reached into her bag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She put one into her mouth. The lighter took a few clicks before the flame started.

  “I thought you gave up smoking,” Mina said. “Not that it’s any of my business.” Had she sounded sarcastic? She hadn’t meant to. It wasn’t her business.

  “Yeah,” Phoebe said, “I also promised to be married to one person forever and ever and ever, until I died blah-blah.” She puffed a thin streamer of smoke.

  “That makes sense,” Mina said, mostly because it seemed good to agree. She had never kissed a smoker and, for some reason, that seemed much more foreign than kissing a woman. What would Phoebe’s mouth taste like now? She supposed she’d never know.

  “You know the guy who designed the birds on your wallpaper? They have his wife’s wedding ring here.”

  “Okay.” Mina touched her own. The band was molded into a swirl of leaves and few people realized it was a wedding ring.

  “But they also have the jewelry his wife’s lover gave her. And they call those her most interesting pieces. Like the lover’s jewelry was better, as if her husband’s wedding ring wasn’t right there . . .” Phoebe trailed off.

  Mina stepped closer to Phoebe as a river of school kids tumbled out of the museum. She fumbled for what to say. “Women in those days, I mean . . . they didn’t have much of a choice about being married. You can’t really blame her.”

  “Okay, fair. Bu
t my husband did. He chose to be married. He chose to sleep in the same bed. He slept in sheets we chose together. He heard me talk in my sleep. We had a dog together.”

  Where was Benson? Was he just waiting for Phoebe to come home? Were his teeth ripping into the furniture, his bounding heart shredded with anxiety that Phoebe was gone forever? Mina sympathized.

  “I’m not doing what that skank did to me to another person. I’m not going to be that shitty selfish human.”

  Skank. It sounded like the word for some imaginary monster, something with a snake’s face and lion’s claws—or like a jabberwock or bandersnatch. Was Mina a skank? What did it feel like to be a skank?

  “It’s not like you think,” she said.

  “You’re not a married woman?” Phoebe asked, voice sticky with sarcasm.

  “Okay, yes.” There was an awkward pause. Mina ran her tongue over the top of her teeth. “But it’s not like that.”

  I can’t talk to you, those were his words. Not even, I won’t. But, I can’t. You, after all these years, have disappointed me too much.

  “What’s it like, then?” Phoebe seemed confused. “Aren’t you living in his . . .”

  “It’s complicated.” And it was. Mina was cold, and someone was shouting in Italian.

  “Why?”

  “He says he doesn’t want to talk to me. He won’t tell me when he’s coming back from America.” Oscar wanted so much space. At what point should she assume this space was permanent?

  “Because of?” Phoebe made a sweeping gesture with her hand, covering the space between them.