by Kate Walbert
“Really?” Maggie says. “Yeah?”
“I remember the parrot,” Grace says.
“You brilliant girl.”
“I don’t remember!” Peter says, twisting to accuse her.
“It was gross,” Grace says. “It was covered in fleas. It bit them and chewed them all night long.”
“I don’t remember a parrot!” Peter says.
“You were just months old, Peter. Fleas? Really?”
“Flick, matey!”
“And she had them, too. She scratched her head and had all these little red marks on her hands and I asked her and she said, fleas. I can remember. She said, fleas. You left us with her. She had fleas. So did her parrot. You left. I remember I was really sad.”
The radiator kicks in—the cat, emboldened by Peter’s string beans, jumps onto the table and edges toward the cashew chicken. They have ordered from the place Grace insisted delivered something rancid to Mrs. Palowski though Maggie said nonsense, they have been ordering from there since before Grace was born. I’m not hungry anymore, she said before the food arrived.
“I don’t think that parrot had fleas,” Maggie says.
“It was flea ridden,” Grace says. “A flea bag. A bag of fleas.”
“Blimey!” Peter says.
“So, how is she?” Grace says.
“Who?” Maggie says.
“Aunt Mimi,” Grace says.
“Aunt Mimi?” Maggie says.
“That’s what she said. You don’t remember? She said, ‘Call me Aunt Mimi, as in Me-Me but with an i-i.’ You laughed. You thought that was funny. I remember. You thought she was a riot, and you loved her parrot. You loved everything about her.”
“I did?” Maggie says. “I said all that?”
* * *
How did the Obamas even meet? She’s sure she’s read it but now she can’t recall. Is it important to the story? Is it important to the game? Maybe they met through Michelle’s brother or that saintly mother. Perhaps families were involved, or mutual friends. They seem so perfect for one another—matching like two tall bookends: straight, learned, happy. She and Will met at a frat party: one of those orientation things. He sang with a band called the Urban Worms and wore glasses he called spectacles. He had a pink shirt ripped at the sleeves and a girlfriend back home he still loved or said he did. That summer they typed letters to one another they mailed back and forth. His parents ran an antiques business upstate and his brother smoked pot in a studio apartment in Columbus and he had an uncle and aunt nearby he visited for Sunday dinners of spaghetti and clams and as a kid he looked for arrowheads in the soybean fields when the fields were newly plowed. One night he showed her the collection he kept in a safe he brought to college, stones sharpened by stones into weapons. They lay in his narrow dorm bed and she said she thought the arrowheads in the shoe box looked like shards of graphite, and he said they don’t grow soybeans anymore. I don’t know what they grow anymore, he said.
But what was she saying again?
“Aunt Mimi’s parrot,” Grace says. She spritzes the cat from the cashew chicken and the cat jumps off the table, shivering. Grace has pulled away from her plate and sits more in front of the window, the setting sun piercing her skeletal shoulders, curved spine, sharp jaw. The translucence of her daughter’s skin—ethereal, fading, the child for whom she and Will had waited so long disappearing. At Group many of the other girls appeared just this way, the hospital specializing in girls, their arms and legs thin as matchsticks, their heart rates fast as hummingbirds, their translucent skin—as if the organ intended to protect them had dissolved, or been scrubbed off by ED, the personified acronym.
Mrs. Palowski believed that part absurd, said Grace, the silly acronym for a deadly disease. Grace had returned to tell Mrs. Palowski all the poetic details: the weeks she spent in the room with an heiress from Houston who had been there three times before and was back and whose mother dated both a king and a prime minister, how the window, so high, looked out onto a dogwood with tiny pink blossoms, how one night it rained so hard and the lightning lit the room and in the morning the blossoms were entirely gone. Grounded, said the heiress.
But Maggie thought ED made perfect sense.
Is ED here? Maggie might ask her daughter now. She might grab Grace’s crumbling shoulders and shake her. “Is ED in this fucking kitchen right now?” she might yell.
Let me tell you this, the Group leader had said. “ED is a sneaky asshole. He tells you you’re ugly, you’re fat. He’s a misogynist who wants to control you. He does. You think about him day and night.”
Maggie had listened as Will shifted in his seat to sneak a look at his phone. For this she will never forgive him.
* * *
“Flea bag,” Grace says, turning to look at her—those eyes, truly gray, huge.
“Right. Fleabag,” Maggie says. “Fleabag was still on her shoulder!”
“I don’t buy it,” Grace says.
“What do you mean?” Maggie says. “Parrots never die,” she says. “They live forever. That’s the thing. They are entirely devoted. They never go anywhere else. That parrot knew exactly everything—it knew me like yesterday.”
“Nope,” Grace says, aiming the spritz bottle at the window like a gun, taking a shot.
Someone shoves some trash down the chute; a phone rings in the upstairs apartment. Out the window the cirrus clouds have disappeared, replaced by a watery twilight. Cirrus clouds move at incredible speeds, Maggie happens to know. They might be halfway across the Atlantic or slicing through the moon.
Maggie should wipe off the dusty sill. She should change that faulty, flickering bulb. She should recaulk the tiles around the sink and throw out the old paper lantern, filthy, purge the cork bulletin board of its menus from restaurants long closed, party invitations, business cards, appointment cards, photographs of the kids as babies, artwork, notes, toss the spices she has never used from the pantry, the boxes of stale, half-unwrapped taco shells, the expired tins of beans, tomato sauce, and chicken stock. Somewhere there, in the recesses, on the floor, she stashed last year’s Easter baskets with last year’s plastic eggs, maybe a few forgotten chocolates and plastic grass, and here, on the white Formica table, she should gather the clutter of wrapped plastic utensils and chopsticks and shove them into the drawer already crammed so full it is difficult to open.
The all of it saved for, what? The day of the great picnic, they used to say when the kids were little-little. On the day of the great picnic, they said, we will need all the plastic forks and spoons, napkins, too. On the day of the great picnic, they said, we will make a huge paper napkin blanket and, just for fun, unwrap the chopsticks and build a chopstick tower to the sky, where the clouds will be not cirrus but the fluffy kind, cumulus, like on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo no fool; he painted the most beautiful clouds to be seen—clouds that meant better weather, clouds to float away on, clouds that hid angels and certain spirits too holy to ground, clouds tinged with a pink pigment of dried blood and crushed statuario, the white marble of Carrara. Crack it open, Michelangelo would say to the quarrymen, prisoners in dirty aprons, dust on their black trousers. Amaze me, he would say.
And they did. They amazed him, and the clouds will amaze you, they told the children, and the picnic will amaze you, they said, laid out on the huge paper napkin blanket underneath the chopstick tower—a feast: red grapes and Brie, strawberries dipped in chocolate, slices of turkey and roast beef and ham on thick baguettes, fried chicken, potato salad, chocolate chip cookies, cheesecake.
“I’ve got one,” Grace says, still turned to the window, her shoulder blades wings picked clean.
“One what?” Maggie says.
“The game—I thought of my rose,” she says.
“You did?” Maggie says. “Wow. That’s fantastic, that’s great. Wonderful. Peter, did you hear? Grace has a rose!”
“Captain Flick,” Peter says.
“Oh, for Chrissakes,” Maggie says, push
ing him off her lap. “Enough already.”
“That hurt,” Peter says, though Maggie barely hears him—she’s turned to Grace, again, she’s waiting on Grace, again, she’s willing Grace, again, who may be gathering her thoughts or just counting heartbeats (please God, Maggie had said, passing all those starving girls in their rooms, some with tubes and others just staring at the ceiling, please God, she had prayed, please), her daughter’s heart recalibrated, staccato, urgent.
“Tell me,” Maggie says, taking Grace’s cold hand, its bundle of bone and nerve. “Tell me.”
DO SOMETHING
The soldiers keep Margaret in view. She carries her tripod, unsteadily, and an extra poncho for a bib. That they have let her come this far might be due to the weather, or possibly the kinds of amusements of which she remains unaware. Still, assume that they watch, tracking her as she stomps along the fence and positions herself by the sign that clearly states: NO TRESPASSING. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. PHOTOGRAPHY FORBIDDEN.
It has turned a wet, wet September, everywhere raining so the leaves, black and slick, paste to the soles of her boots, or Caroline’s: Wellingtons borrowed from the back of the hallway closet where earlier Harry watched as Margaret rummaged, wondering where she could possibly be going in such weather.
She turned, boot in hand.
“It’s raining,” he repeated.
Deaf at most decibels, Harry now cast his voice into the silence, as if hoping for an echo or a nod.
“Nowhere,” she had said, because this is nowhere, or anywhere, or somewhere not particularly known: an hour’s drive from Wilmington if you took the busy roads, and then country, mostly, the drizzle graying the already gray landscape. Ye olde et cetera—cornfields, silos, a ravaged billboard for Daniel’s peas, fresh from California, though this is technically Delaware and the land of soybeans. Ducks, too, the fall season in full swing; the drizzle split by the crack crack crack of the hunters’ guns.
She parked near the drainage ditch that edges the fence, chain link, as if for dogs, though there are no dogs here, only a guard tower, a landing field, and the soldiers who wait for the planes. But that isn’t right, exactly. The place is vast, a city of a place, with barracks—are those called barracks?—and trucks and cul-de-sacs and no doubt children sleeping, Army brats—or is this Marines?—in the two-story housing labyrinth not so far from where she gets out, near the drainage ditch, near the landing field, near the place where the plane will descend. This she knows. The rest—the presence of children, the numbers involved, the ranking, the hierarchy—she truthfully has no idea.
Margaret skewers the tripod in the mud and adjusts the poncho to cover her. Today, she plans to bite skin. She can almost taste it: the salt of it, the flesh; see herself in her resistance: Margaret Morrisey, mother to Caroline and the dead one, James; wife to Harry. She mounts the camera on the track and angles the lens toward where the plane will descend—they come from the east, she has learned, out of Mecca, the bodies mostly wrapped in flags but sometimes carried in a tiny box.
“Christ, Mother,” Caroline said after the first arrest, the fine. “Get a life.”
“Your great-great-grandfather ate horse feed; that was his dinner. He’d soften the oats with spit. He came to this country for food. Literally.”
“Apropos of…?” Caroline said.
“It meant something,” Margaret said. “America.”
“It’s illegal.”
“This is a free country.”
“Please,” Caroline said.
The two sat at Caroline’s kitchen table, Caroline in one of her suits meant for business, her cigarette burning in the misshapen ashtray a ten-year-old James had spun out of clay. Caroline’s children were elsewhere, having reached the age of the disappeared—their voices shouting orders from behind the locked doors of their bedrooms or even standing present, their bodies imperfect, studded casts of their former selves; if they were somewhere within them they were very, very deep.
“I should never have told you I voted for him,” Caroline said.
“I would have guessed.”
“The rules have to do with respect,” Caroline said. “Or something. Anyway, they’re the rules. It’s law. Besides, it’s none of our business. None of your business.”
“Says whom?” Margaret said, to which Caroline had some sort of reply.
Margaret listened for a while, and then she did not; she thought of other things, how she would like to have believed that not so long ago Caroline would have stood beside her at the fence, that her daughter would have carried a sign or at least shouted an obscenity. But this was before Caroline took that job in the Financial District. The Fucked District, she calls it, but the money’s good, she says. It’s serious money.
“Mother?”
“I was listening,” Margaret said.
“Forget it,” Caroline said. She tapped her nails, those nails, on the table, then the buzzer rang—delivery—and the conversation ended.
“Dinnertime,” she yelled in the direction of the doors.
* * *
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The men have had enough. They climb down from their tower to slog through duck country, technically Delaware, the first state, though most have trouble with the history; one can hear their boots, or is that frogs? The sucking. Soon enough they’ll reach her. Margaret records their magnified approach; records them unlocking the gate and stepping to the other side, records their blank expressions. The trouble is she can only pretend to hate them.
“Good morning, Mrs. Morrisey.” This from the one Margaret calls Tweedledee.
She straightens up, adjusts the poncho.
“We’ll remind you that you’re trespassing. That taking photographs is forbidden.”
“Today,” she says, hand on tripod, “I plan to resist.”
Their arms remain folded. Four pair, as usual; a pack; a team; a unit, perhaps; or would they be a regiment? No, a regiment is bigger, a regiment is many. She tries to remember from soldier days, from mornings James explained the exact order of things—sergeant to lieutenant to captain to king—his miniature warriors arranged throughout the house in oddly purposeful groupings. She would find them everywhere, assaulting a sock, scaling the Ping-Pong table, plastic, molded men with clearly defined weaponry and indistinct faces. When she banished them to his room, fearing someone would break a neck, James had cried and cried.
“That would be more than your usual fine, Mrs. Morrisey.”
He is a horse’s ass, but then again, a boy once James’s age who should be pitied.
“I plan to resist,” she repeats. One of the Mute Ones has his hand out as if to help her across the muddy plain. They are waiting, she knows, for Margaret to do something. Collapse, she thinks, then does, more a buckle than a collapse, knowing full well the ridiculousness of it, how small she’ll become. The big one bends down to help her. Now, she thinks, though it is not until it is done that she understands she has found the courage to do it, biting the soft part of that hand, the hammock of skin between thumb and forefinger.
* * *
Caroline sits next to Harry in the detention waiting room (she must have taken the train!), no question who’s the boss. Our girl could split atoms, Harry once said. We ought to lease her to GE.
Sorry, darling, Margaret mouths to him. He looks at her with his doggy yellow eyes; then Caroline leads them both out.
In the sunshine they blink: “Look at the weather!” Margaret says, reflexively. “What a treat!”
Caroline has opened the car door.
“Get in,” she says.
They sit in silence to home, the radio punched to static and static and static then punched off, again, then the familiar drive, the front door, the hallway, the kitchen. Caroline makes tea and calls a Family Meeting. There’s a hole in the place where James would have been so Margaret steps in and wanders around while Caroline speaks of Responsibility and Reputation and Appropriate Behavior, and, yes, the Germs in Your Mouth, and Patr
iotism, but mostly, mostly, mostly, Mother, Embarrassment.
“Please,” Caroline says. “I’m at wit’s end.”
Margaret would like to cradle Caroline in her arms, Caroline sleepy and hatted and a bit jaundice yellow, but she cannot. Caroline has grown; she’s taller than Margaret and twice divorced and a millionaire, she has confessed. A mill-ion-aire, she said.
“Where are your friends, Mother?” Caroline asks.
Margaret shrugs. She hasn’t thought of friends recently, or her standing Wednesday at Sheer Perfection; her hair’s gone shaggy and gray and her cuticles have grown over their moons.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she says. “I’ll stop.”
How has it come to this? There was Youth, Margaret thinks. Then, Love: a certain indefatigable, copper-colored Spirit. Wasn’t she the one who had convinced Harry to do a U-turn on the GW Bridge? And what of Leonard Nan’s retirement? She’d worn a blond wig and pharmaceutical pearls, hula-hooped her toast gyrating the thing to her knees. She used to leave it all to chance, or Certain Men, actually. Wasn’t she the one with the Robert Kennedy dartboard? Didn’t she support Nixon to the finish?
Now she is blindsided by fury; the tide of her anger rising at certain unpredictable moments (yes, the tide), as if drawn by an internal moon, waxing and waning, though mostly waning.
A disclaimer, first: she lost no one in the Tragedy, no Hero her James, just an ordinary mortal, his (by inference) an unheroic death: cancer of the blood—blah blah blah—one cell fried—blah—and then another—blah blah—until nothing remained but bone and sinew, James’s lungs mechanically pumping, a ring of them singing before they turned off the machine. Godspeed. And the machine stopped. Godspeed. Which is not to say she didn’t know someone who knew someone; which is not to say she forgets we are living under the Cloud of It, that there are Reliable Threats, that Evil Lurks, that there are those who seek to undermine our Way of Life.
