Parakeet: A Novel

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  The bird and I both know he has been the silent member of our conversation all along.

  If it helps, she says, you won’t find him.

  “I won’t find him,” I agree. “Because I’m not going to look.”

  Do you know where he is?

  “I assume in the city somewhere, hiding in a theater.”

  How long has it been since you’ve seen him?

  “Seven years?”

  The last time I saw Tom was at his own wedding, where he lay bloody on a gurney, asking me to hold his hand. It’s just that I’m so deeply unhappy, he says, in memory. I remember the taste of vanilla and his anemic, furtive fiancée, Sara Something.

  You’re not going to find him, but it’s important that you try, she says. You’ll do it.

  “I won’t.”

  Her narrow eyes narrow further, narrow more. Where are we? What’s this murky room with only a couch? It’s like we’re in a stew.

  “It’s called an antechamber. A room before a room.”

  A room before a room, she says in that way she has, that cuts through our tense and familiar squalls. And what is your job? The non sequitur means to stall until she can figure out another way to get what she wants.

  “I work with people who have traumatic brain injury. Normally they’ve been hurt in car accidents or on the job. I tell their life stories in court. Like my client Danny. He drove a big-rig dessert truck and was injured while filling it with gas.”

  I guess somebody doesn’t like Sara Lee. The room’s grip releases. She performs inventory of what on her hurts. Pain is different now, she concludes. It’s more like sound in another part of the house. But I still hate my ass. Asses like ours never leave, even in the afterlife.

  “You don’t have an ass,” I remind her. “You’re a bird.”

  A bird today. Myself again tomorrow. We could disagree for eternity but there’s no one I’d rather sit with. I spread jam onto a scone and hold it out for her. Where does it come from—beat a dead horse?

  “Probably from people who like horses.”

  Or hate them. Her beak cannot find purchase on the pastry. The afterlife is truly cruel. Being a bird is exhausting. I’m obsessed with cleaning these. She runs her beak through her tail feathers.

  I ask what she’s learned about humans by being dead and she says, They ask for signs a lot. They’re always looking for proof like, If you exist, rattle the mailboxes. But you never asked for a sign. She quiets. You never reached out. Why?

  “I asked once and it didn’t happen.”

  And you never asked again. It’s like a song.

  “A song,” I say, and she says, A sad one.

  “What is it like?” I say. “To age and die?”

  A sigh flutters through her corduroy belly. Aging is easy, like falling down a hill. No choice involved. It’s reconciling yourself to loss that’s hard. I was eighty-five when I died. But I felt nineteen. I used to forget how old I was. I’d talk to you for long enough I’d think I was you. Then I’d look in the mirror and think, ack, who’s that old woman? A burst of shivering compels her from one cushion to another. Had I been anything other than a sheltered fool I wouldn’t have worried at all. I had the slut gene. I should have used it more. It’s in the family. You walk across the room, people pay attention. It’s not because we’re beautiful. We’re gnarled things who look like we’ve been pulled from the earth. Root vegetables: potatoes or turnips. Half of us miserable, the other half deluded. You’ve seen pictures of your cousins. However, we are possessed of the self. All arrows point toward us. A blessing and a curse. Not your mother, she was born complaining. Believe me, I was there. No fun at all. That will always be her fault because I made life nice for her. She married a man who couldn’t summon up enough juice to break a glass and lives her life doing cross-stitch, the only thing she’s ever liked. She’s rich enough now that she can afford to be good at only one thing. You kids don’t like your mother and I can’t blame you. But it’s a mistake to assume she doesn’t feel pain.

  The bird warbles, a mournful sound. As a girl, I liked to press her supple lavender cigarette case against my cheek. She was a real bummer, your mother.

  “She still is,” I say.

  How’d we get talking about her? Let’s get back to the main event. Me. And how I didn’t use my body enough. Those of us with able bodies have a responsibility to use them as much as we can. Given another chance, you wouldn’t believe how I’d use it. Threesomes. Foursomes. Moresomes. Smoking is a joy of life. Good lord, why did I ever give it up? My teachers called me disruptive. I should have disrupted more. In 1975 the most stunning man I’d seen up close approached me at a convenience store and asked if I’d go to his hotel room to make love. I’m holding a soup can and a bag of oranges and am not a woman men cross streets for. I say no, because I was married. What a waste of a waistline. What a disappointment life is most of the time. Divinity opened itself up to me in aisle four and I said, nah, I’ll just be taking these oranges. If it came around again, boy, I’d meet it. And I’d smoke like a house on fire. Disrupt! Disrupt! What fucking else are we here for?

  She is a rueful bird endowed with death’s clarity, but she is misremembering her life. It is my mother no one crosses streets for. My grandmother caused car accidents.

  In short, the bird concludes. With regard to aging. Compared to the alternative, I recommend it. But you! Thin eyebrows. Pressed hair. You’ve been trimming yourself like a hedge. Do you realize you’re still alive? Would you recognize yourself if you met you on the street? She flits from cushion to cushion as in life she’d shift from foot to foot. So! You’re getting married! Et cetera! Blood-colored sparks flare from her tufted neck and fade. She burns and spits. You’re thinking there’s no harm to it. There’s no philosophical right or wrong about making bad decisions. You’re correct. Lie, be a shitty friend. No one’s keeping score. Be as much of a dick as you like. Shitheads get as far as the nice. You can wait for justice. She pauses as a hack of shivering overtakes her. It’s not coming. Where it lands is your ability to hear music. You can’t tame yourself over and over and expect your self-worth to keep its shape.

  Her rebukes hammer a tender place only she can access. “Stop,” I say.

  Morning sun emerges through the curtains. Outside, an Inn worker shakes a trash bag into a breeze. I can’t imagine searching for my tornado brother during a regular week, let alone the one in which I marry.

  “I’ve made my choices, Granny. And I’m grateful you’re here,” I say. “Have you ever missed someone so much that the missing gains form, becomes an extra thing welded to you, like a cumbersome limb you must carry?”

  She tacks. Dramatic.

  “I can’t do what you’re asking.”

  Do it, she says, and I say, “I’m sorry. Anything else.”

  She rises from her perch into an eruption of flapping feathers. The commotion grows violent. A loud, clutching whistle. The outline of the beak and feathers wobbles and expands.

  The bird disappears.

  Replacing it is my grandmother-shaped grandmother, frowning with a human mouth, legs crossed at the ankles. Her skin is dewy and hair neat, as if instead of being interred for ten years she’s been at the salon having her hair reaffirmed metal gray. Death has not been a good diet. She is still barrel-shaped due to a lifetime of keeping a chocolate drawer in the refrigerator where others store cold cuts. However, her affectation is gentler, out of focus, as if whatever light is illuminating her is losing wattage. Like the bird, her eyes are lined in blue. Zaftig from sweets. Except for the sour smell, it’s her, undeniably.

  I understand the reasoning of whatever force sent her as a flying thing because when I see the unmistakable thickness of her thighs, the ashiness of her November calves, her herness overwhelms the strand tethering me to calm. Now that she is present I miss her intensely. My throat constricts and issues a sorrowful coughing spasm.

  Emotionless, she waits for me to settle.

  There is no anyt
hing else, she says. If you can’t respect a dead woman’s wishes you’re a disgrace. Mark my words. If you defy me, shit’s going to get fucked up. After it gets fucked up, it’s gonna stay fucked up. And after you can no longer bear it, it’s gonna get more fucked up. The things you do to make it less fucked up are going to fuck it up even more.

  She dims. I hold out my hand. She doesn’t accept but clucks (still bird) in disappointment. Affection, like crying, is a bother and a waste of time. I don’t want you to suffer. Find your brother. Her body vanishes, her neck fades. Dress short or long?

  “Long,” I croak.

  I would have gone short. You have my gams. I always got compliments.

  Her hairline rewinds over her scalp. The painting behind her comes in and out of focus. A pastoral scene of a carriage in a field of corn.

  “Don’t leave,” I say.

  She’s gone. I experience her death a second time. The birdless room carries on with the climbing sun, Band-Aid-colored carpet, carriage and the corn, seeming so undisturbed even I wouldn’t believe there’s been a specter sitting in it. The woman brightening the world has left it again, without ceremony or sound. Not one feather remains. Even the stench is gone.

  Rose doesn’t answer her phone. I consult my face in the mirror to see if it has registered any change but see only the flat cheeks of a woman late for an appointment. I dress. My suitcase is still packed because the honeymoon suite is currently being occupied by another bride and groom. The Inn overbooked and regrets the error in the form of a free bottle of champagne and occasional check-in phone calls that please no one.

  In the main room, I find my wedding dress, strewn across the tablelette, covered in bird dirt. That troublemaker grandmother bird has disseminated her business evenly from its sweetheart neckline to its hem. The piles of gauze are thick with shit, the destruction so complete I marvel. When did she do it? I was with her every moment. No dry cleaner would be able to repair it in time.

  I take the elevator but when I reach the lobby, the doors do not open. The lit panel near the ceiling confirms: lobby. I check the panel, the door again. Stuck. I call the front desk.

  “This has been happening since the renovation,” the concierge says. “Still a few kinks. The new generator doesn’t have the same lid. A bird flew into it. James said it was fixed, but then.”

  James, I think. I think, Joyce, Stewart, Baldwin. “A bird?”

  “Like it had a death wish,” she says. “The weirdest thing.”

  The elevator’s walls are composed of mirrors. I watch myself wait. The box makes a triumphant ding! The doors fly open as if the issue had been only mine.

  In the lobby, the concierge notices my grief-stricken pallor and apologizes. “Getting stuck in an elevator can be so scary.”

  “It’s not that,” I say. “My grandmother died.”

  “I’m so sorry.” She is immediately sorrowful. “When?”

  “Ten years ago.” I cling to the banister for support. The landing knob comes off in my grip. I hand it to her.

  She slides it into her cardigan pocket. “We’re falling apart,” she says. There are still good people living on the Earth. She bears witness to my tears, rests her hand near mine on the banister I’m positive in a month will be garlanded in tinsel because it’s a perfect banister for that. I remember dancing with my brother to the Cars in our socks and one of my clients who was hit by a truck while walking and now doesn’t understand the idea of a face.

  The concierge’s kindness emboldens me to confess. “And she shit on my wedding dress.”

  “Yes.” She whispers, like it’s a password: “Family.”

  DON’T FORGET TO GET MARRIED

  Danny lives in a three-bedroom standalone in Coney Island. Heavy weather and the ocean’s nearness give the house a terrarium feel. When I arrive for our final interview, he is red-eyed from sleeplessness but for once in pleasant spirits. He scuttles ashtrays from the coffee table to make room for my glass of water. Sits on the couch while I sit on the recliner. After a few clarifying questions, I will be finished with him forever. I want to leave and think about birds.

  Danny worked as a big-rig driver for a company that produces the cheap dessert products popular in six-year-olds’ lunch boxes. He was refilling at a truck stop when the apparatus holding the hose cracked. Industrial hoses weigh a ton. This one fell onto his head and pinned him on the pavement, shattering his pelvis against the plinth.

  In the diorama I’ve built of his life, a wife with box-blond hair, a young son in a karate uniform, and a dog named R2-D2 stand in a kitchen covered in Post-it notes. Like many of my clients, Danny uses these strips of paper as surrogates for the parts of his brain clear-cut by that hose. Over the course of several months, I’ve interviewed his family, doctors, fellow truckers, grade school teachers. I’ve plotted their anecdotes on a careful timeline I will present in court, chronologically to elicit more sympathy and a bigger settlement. I will ask the jury to imagine young Danny posed against lockers, popping an orange against his biceps. Studying for his trucker exams at night. I map pain to show what medical charts can’t—how he can no longer coach his son’s karate class, volunteer at church, pet his dog.

  Danny flicks an ashless cigarette and bounces in place on the couch, occasionally checking the door leading to the kitchen. Crates are stacked along the wall, magazines piled on the floor. I smell fish and char. “You baking?”

  He frowns. “Nah.”

  I’m undermining him if I check, but the smell of burning thickens. We enter the kitchen, where hundreds, maybe thousands of reminders blink in the occasional ocean breeze. I never escape the sensation I’m being surveilled, except instead of a penetrating gaze they are commands, observations. DON’T FORGET RICE. PETER IS THE COUSIN WHO STEALS. AN HOUR IS SIXTY MINUTES. CLOVER HATES LILIES. TAKE SHOWER. Some are so old the paper has become cloth soft.

  Danny plucks one from the wall. SALMON IN THE OVEN. “Damn.”

  He opens the oven door, releasing smoke. “Oven mitt,” I warn when he is about to barehand the rack.

  He pulls out a blackened piece of fish, throws it onto an unkind pile of eggy dishes in the sink. “Trying to be healthy. Hopeless.”

  I write: GO EASY ON YOURSELF with a smiley face. I show him before attaching it to the wall where the previous note had been.

  Clouds silver with rain over his cluttered yard. Atmospheric condensation aggravates already aggravated bodies. My clients normally bail on rainy days but Danny never cancels.

  His pelvis healed, but it’s the invisible injuries that make him feel submerged. His friends, flannelled, soft-spoken men, showed up regularly throughout his hospital stay, helped his wife, Clover, fix a makeshift bedroom on the first floor. They were confused when Danny still couldn’t work a few months after returning home. It didn’t matter how many times I explained that brain injury is unseen, they wanted to see it. Injuries, like god, require faith. Clover resents the burden placed on her salary. She takes out-of-town jobs that pay more. Whenever Danny mentions her work, he uses his fingers to place quotes around the word.

  I don’t share anything about my personal life with my clients. Friendship creates an unhelpful bond.

  Danny fills a pitcher with water as R2-D2 gallops into the room to nuzzle my thigh. He is a two-year-old unexercised and panicky Labrador who looks as if he will at any moment speak. Everything in him wants to run. R2-D2 hunts scraps on the floor underneath Danny, who holds the pitcher brimming with water. I worry about his grip, but he wants to tell a story like an intact man about a fair he went to where a man balanced on top of a Ferris wheel. A tremor grows in his forearm.

  I say, “Why don’t you let me hold that?”

  “Are you listening? I’m talking to you.” He sways as if regaining his balance. The pitcher slips silently out of his grip, barely missing the dog as it shatters against the floor. R2-D2 yelps, scrabbles out of the room.

  I collect the chunks of glass. “Was I holding that?” he says.
/>   “Don’t move,” I say.

  He says he won’t but forgets.

  “Don’t.”

  He roots in place. I’ve never raised my voice to him.

  “Did you drop the pitcher?” he says, when I am transferring the large chunks to the trash can.

  “Yes.” I guide him over the mess and into the family room. I motion for him to sit and hand him the remote. I wipe the kitchen floor and take the garbage to the outside patio where several other bags are stacked. The dog jogs beside me, sniffs a tree trunk.

  On the train, I scoured online listings for wedding dresses, and e-mailed the sellers. Shotgun wedding, I joked. One of the brides has written back including her phone number. She signs the e-mail, Yours, Ada. My aggravation with Danny transfers to this woman’s salutation. How dare she be so trusting, personal. How dare my grandmother arrive at the last minute and make demands.

  In the bathroom, I dial the number. I’ve cataloged every item in the sparse medicine cabinet: the knife on the shelf, the jars of baby oil crusted with disuse, Clover’s curlers like bright smacks against the earthen walls.

  “Hello,” I whisper. “I’m the bride who e-mailed about the dress.”

  “Hello,” she whispers. “It’s nice to sort of meet you.”

  “I’m at work,” I apologize. “I have to be quiet.”

  “Why am I whispering?” I hear a giggle. She readjusts to normal volume. “Would tonight be okay to pick it up?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, and she says, “I live on Fourth Street.”

  “Which one?” I say. “East or West?”

  “Northeast,” she says. “By the park.”

  “I didn’t know there was a Northeast.”

  “You’ll have to try it on while you’re here,” she says, as if this thought has just occurred to her. “You’ll want to make sure it fits.”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  “Absolutely,” she says. Our word for the conversation.

  “Is Northeast Fourth Street where the historic brownstones are?”