Parakeet: A Novel

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  Desperate Internet searches yield nothing helpful. Transmogrify to mother. “Feminist Nightmares,” reads one article title. “Women at Odds.” Changing into your mother, I try. “The 8 Stages of Realizing You Are Your Mother.” “You Idolized Her, Now You’re Turning into Her.” You’re proud of your Tupperware set, you ask the waiter to box up three bites of food, you don’t recognize celebrities, you hate youth. Whose mother is this? Mine refuses to eat in front of other people, burns rice, prefers the company of young people to anyone.

  You have her body parts, the article reads.

  I can’t imagine what is going on under my pajamas.

  You sound like her, the article reads.

  “Hello?” I ask myself. “Am I here?” It is my mother’s deep, muscled chowl that launches a panic attack whenever I hear it on the phone, revving to ask a series of bruising questions. That stated while we were shopping for wedding dresses: “Better not halter,” the horror, the horror. This throat is not mine but borrowed. I have taken up rent in my mother’s body.

  To complete this existential hemorrhage, I become aware of a third sentience inside me, blinking behind my mother and me—what I can only call “other mother.” An amalgam perhaps of both of us, seen from a distance. Other mother is slower to judge. Perhaps she is from another timeline, the idea of myself as a future mother. She seems separate from my mother and me, contemplative, steady, sitting near but not with us.

  I dress with my eyes shut. The legs of my jeans refuse to cover my new, horrifying calves. The dark voice, an inward sinking, trails me as I force this foreign body across the room. Why bother? it says. The fact that my mother is always pert and bristly makes less sense to me as I propel her into the bathroom, her body fighting me/itself. A loose dress fits.

  Mother, what do you go through? You feel like trudging through mud.

  I leave a message for Rose, then for the groom. I peer at her self in the mirror. I lift my arm and she lifts hers. My mother and I, finally in sync. Her coarse hair is cropped to the ears and the texture of thin wire. I comb it but it won’t stay. She must use hot irons. My/her teeth are bonded. I run my tongue over the smooth porcelain, much better than my badly treated nubs. I’ve always been secretly proud of her complicated profile. I turn her chin in the mirror, admiring the way it cuts light. It is so visceral now that I possess it.

  In addition to the obvious downsides of becoming one’s mother, there is another, subtler loss. The buffering that comes from the slow passing of years turned out to be an essential kindness: adding plates one by one to the tray, instead of shouldering it all at once. Imperceptibly logging time on your waistline, cultivating theories into one impenetrable worldview, gradually developing eye and mouth lines while moving through trends, passions, pursuits that distract. Researching Thailand or new ways to make chicken, tiring of traveling and chicken, desiring evenings reading under a blanket, watching dusk grow in the garden you’ve researched and tended, incapable of thinking of a time when you won’t want to watch a garden darken, until realizing that, too, was a phase, yearning to travel again, away from that chore of a garden, and all the work put into those plants only to have the rabbits outsmart you, the world is so cruel to small things trying to grow over time, under time, through it, years compiling throughout, and inches, replacing old fences, replacing those no longer new fences. Discovering new ways to love and shut love out, and all the while, the map on your face being clarified, but slowly, civilly.

  Aging: revoked! Unmitigated change bears down on me. I collapse against the wall.

  “I know you’re angry,” I say to Simone’s voice mail. “But I’m having a very specific nervous breakdown and I need your help.”

  I throw a coat over her and leave the room. Knowing this elevator, I take the stairs, keeping my eyes trained on the floor as I scuttle over the lobby carpet, stopping to catch my breath every few steps. Mother, are you ill?

  Sit, weakling, the dark voice says.

  I obey and press my cheek against a couch cushion. The elevator doors ding and on the other side of the lobby I watch myself emerge from the elevator. Me, me. Is it supposed to be cold today? she asks the concierge. I wonder if my mother is inside, working my controls and marveling at the ease with which I move. But I sound unaffected, worried in a quotidian way but no more. Is this my voice? As a girl I trained myself into a sexy, breathy allure, but from a distance it sounds donned and embarrassing. High, curved, and citrus. No wonder everyone mocks it.

  I watch my real self as I hide in my mother’s body behind the lobby couch. Dear god, the ass. Inherited from my grandmother, that immortal spread. The dark voice says I should eat more healthfully, exercise like I mean it.

  Another guest enters the lobby, overloaded with packages. A tiny parcel tumbles to the floor, where it lands by real me’s sneaker, real me stoops to pick it up, returns it to the woman, and smiles in solidarity. Beauty! I am striking in an understated way. I watch myself walk through the lobby, the serious ass careens through the glass doors, and I’m gone.

  I slink my mother’s body into the breakfast room where croissants are stacked in pyramids. There are trays of sausage, grits, baskets filled with English muffins. Cereal vats with silver-tipped dispensers offer three varieties of milk. Speakers play piano music. The room has a honeymoon vibe but I am jumpy, cross. I cull a plate of eggs and bacon from the bottom of serving dishes.

  “If you wait a moment,” the server says, “we’ll bring hot eggs.”

  “No thank you,” I say. “I’m fine with the eggs I have.”

  However, when the new eggs come, their nutty scent compels me. I dish a heap onto my plate, second thought, dish another heap. Normally, I don’t like them but now I am egg-obsessed, not even bothering to swallow before forking more into my mouth.

  “Good.” My stepfather takes the empty chair across from me. “I’ve caught you.” He is tanned and graver close up. A woman at an adjacent table checks him with her eyes. “I understand it’s hard to talk about,” he says. “But I think it’s important that we stay in dialogue. I never meant for it to happen. It was a one-time thing bred from loneliness. Heavy petting, really.” He speaks in his usual infuriating way, as if lecturing recruits. “It’s for the best. We can tell her after this whole thing is over.”

  Her. This whole thing. A waiter applies apples to a pyramid of fruit. “What whole thing?”

  “You’re going to play aloof?” He throws his napkin in disgust. “I’m going up to the gym. Clear my head. You could, too, you know. Take pride in your body.”

  “I could,” I say.

  “You won’t, though, will you? Even though it’s important to me. The smugness is on overload this week and it’s only going to get worse when he arrives.” He pronounces the word with an insider’s inflection. He. “Say something,” my stepfather says.

  “I don’t think the gym has a water cooler.” I squeeze jelly out of a quivering packet. “You’ll probably want to bring your own bottle.”

  He sucks in air, consults the serving dishes with obvious revulsion. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.” He leaves.

  It is my stepfather’s voice she hears, internalized over time like a coastal shelf. My mother’s body is almost immovable and she’s wild for eggs. Her relationship with my fat-shaming stepfather is rotten and possibly over? What a classroom this nightmare is.

  I slide into my coat. I must get her to the car, though every limb is flagged by upsetting gravity. It connects to the voice that says, Don’t, which battles my nature that says, Do. You cannot, the dark one says. You can, my positivity counters. I argue with my mother. I berate ourselves. Just be a human, walking, I bargain with us. We walk outside, stopping to breathe. The lake rejects steam in the cold morning. I push the seat back and readjust the mirrors because I am a few inches taller than the day before.

  I leave another message for Rose and for the groom.

  I drive to the city and notice how the pedals are easier to maneuver w
ith these longer legs.

  “I’m a monster,” I scream, when Simone calls. “I’m Mom.”

  She is calm. “Are you on ketamine?”

  I tell her I woke up as the old lady, our stepfather is cheating, she’s addicted to eggs.

  “This is a twist on a joke, right? You find out I’m trans, you can’t let me have this experience, you have to become an old lady?”

  “I don’t want to discuss the ins and outs of irony,” I say. “I’m in Mom’s breasts.”

  She agrees to meet me at a museum in the city. In the lobby, a well-dressed man hanging an umbrella on a museum-provided hanger activates a dull ache in my subletted pelvis. I compartmentalize this thought as I exchange pleasantries with the woman selling tickets. The fantasy refuses to yield and to my horror unfurls in detail. A bluish hotel room, smoke from cigarettes, his full ass, sliding my underwear down. Is this me or my mother? I like sex but am not prone to vivid fantasy in the middle of the day. I don’t want to be in the mental room as she daydreams, yet I’m swept along as the fantasy persists. I step into the first room of photographs wanting to do the equivalent of boil my brain.

  This is when the eggs re-announce themselves in my gut. In front of a Crewdson photo, my stomach roils and flips. My mother farts. A loud, certain sound, so unexpected I laugh, alone in the room. It settles my stomach. It is intoxicating how satisfying this is. I push to see if I can do it again. But the force needs time to gather. The tang reaches me so I move to another room where a couple leans into an illuminated box where a suburban family sits at a breakfast table. The father spreads margarine onto a roll. The mother passes the daughter a saltshaker. A cartoon sun hangs over the house. The lawn is dotted with toys. The deckle-edged scene is meant to appear ripped from a magazine.

  My stomach activates and she farts again. I glare at the woman, feigning shock. She looks to her partner with alarm as I leave the room.

  Eggs, body, room-clearing gas. Mother.

  Daguerreotype portraits line the hallway. A college-age student is on my observing schedule. If he notices my discomfort, it doesn’t alter his course. We remain in step until the last photo, a bouquet of dead flowers.

  I leave the student and move to the final room, meant to be an exclamation point at the end of the exhibit. It is empty, thank god, because my mother’s stomach is building to climax. A fart issues from me with such force I have to brace against a table of fake brochures. I am so ashamed that tears grow. Mother, what do you go through? The man from the lobby enters. His handsome coat fits him well. He crosses to the far side of the room as if sensing my need for privacy. A gentleman. But he stands between me and the door and I need to get my mother to the bathroom. The man examines a photorealistic painting of Robert Redford. He doesn’t notice my agony. Robert Redford doesn’t do anything but shine. We are all three trapped in this moment together.

  A new movement elicits a sound like a child whining from my stomach. My mother’s pain ceases. I am overcome by exhaustion like the end of a working day. The man is surprised. He’d been coming over to talk, I guess.

  As I limp past, his lips retract over his teeth. His face grows pained.

  I lead my mother down the shallow flight of stairs to the sanctuary of the lobby bathroom and lock us in a stall where we rest. I realize I’ve become her caretaker as empathy unrolls inside me. How has she been handling planning my wedding amid the dissolution of her own marriage? It must have been difficult raising us weird kids alone. It must have been agony when I was injured. When who she thought was her son turned away. This generosity of spirit is unwelcome. I want to continue to disregard her. But her limbs are so heavy, the heart under the borrowed rib cage craving honesty like the rest of us. I can’t help but feel closer to her.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I tell her.

  My sister waits in the lobby. Seeing me, her eyes widen and she takes several steps back.

  “It’s me,” I beg.

  “Prove it.”

  I cover my face. “She has horrible gas and she’s horny, Simone. She had a full-on sexual fantasy about a man in there. She’s humiliating me. I have to go to the emergency room.”

  “Let’s get some water.” She leads me to a bench and pulls a bottle from her bag. She watches as I sip. “If you’re in there, where’s Mom?”

  “She’s in here somewhere, being muffled. I know it’s her because she’s disparaging me.”

  “Sooner or later every woman wakes up and realizes she is her mother.”

  “Simone. Help.”

  My phone rings. It is the groom. “Put it on speaker,” Simone says.

  “Darling,” he says. “I got your message but I don’t have time for theatrics. I have news that isn’t bad and isn’t good. It’s powerful in the long-term, depending on how you see it.”

  “Something has happened,” I say.

  “Something has,” he admits. “The Board wants me to come in. I’ll get time over and another half. Which is good for us.”

  Relief distracts me. I won’t have to see him until the following night.

  “I’ll get there in time for the groom’s dinner,” he says. “I hope everything there is okay.”

  “Everything here is on fire.”

  He gives his warm chuckle, my humor lets him off the hook. “I’ll be there tomorrow night and put out all your fires then.”

  My fires. Theatrics. “You’re right,” I say. “Big deal out of nothing.”

  “Get a massage. Take a bath.” A female voice asks him a sharp question. “My meeting is here. Gotta go. I love love love you.” The phone disconnects.

  Simone says, “He sounds … I can’t think of the word.”

  Museumgoers collect in the lobby to wait out a sudden storm. Simone, my mother, and I watch through giant windows. Trees shake. The weeping against the windows intensifies. The wind makes the evergreen gesture to itself. Points down and over there, over there. A wind gust makes the branches give a collective wave. The tree stills, as if the entire courtyard is thinking. Then the wind kicks up and the tree points to itself again. The lightning glimmers and vanishes. Pauses, glimmers. Me, says the narcissist tree. Now, you. That guy. That guy and me. The storm abates. Short time coming, short time gone. We watch the sky, still gray with light growing behind it of some future, sunny day. This is the most we’ve done together in years. A family, kind of.

  Simone studies me/our mother. “She’s still wearing her hair like the wife of a Midwest preacher, like she has since her thirties. She must have loved that age.”

  “Isn’t that when she was pregnant with you?”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Simone says. “I hate museums.”

  The rain has downgraded to a suggestion as we move our mother down the misted street. I try to avoid my reflection in the windows we pass but I can’t help looking at her disembodied ghosts of hands. The existential ramifications set in and my breathing worsens. The rain falls again.

  “Do you still want to go to a hospital?” Simone says. “There’s one nearby.”

  “What would I tell them? Hello, I’m not myself today.”

  “Patient complains of elderly vagina.”

  My phone rings.

  “You’re fifteen minutes late!” the florist yells. “Your consistent thoughtlessness is almost admirable!”

  “Do you want to pick up a bouquet with me?” I ask Simone.

  “No.” She puts on a delicate pair of sunglasses and says we’ve been in this Beckett catastrophe for too long without food. Being with her levels me, the smooth way she meets chaos with style, matches gazes with questioning men on the street.

  We find a restaurant and order one martini and two steaks.

  “It’s my mother’s birthday,” Simone tells the waiter. “She’s turning one hundred. Can we have free cake?” She turns to me. “You should have ordered her a salad. You’re out of shape, old lady.” She’s having fun criticizing our mother in front of her face.

  I lift my dress and show her the t
highs. I grab a handful and shake.

  “Please put those away. I would like to eat again.”

  Mother craves rye. Mother craves the men at the bar who throw soldierlike nods. The heaviness in mother’s bones spreads. She has to go to bed soon. The dark voice says, rest, idiot.

  “Mom and I both have the slut gene,” I say. “She’s pulled toward every man.”

  “I don’t enjoy that thought.” Simone discards the potatoes from her plate onto a napkin she slides over to me, a leftover tradition from childhood that pleases me.

  Later, I blow out a sputtering candle on a cupcake.

  “This is the first birthday I’ve had with Mom as an adult,” I say.

  “Look at us,” Simone says. “Have you ever seen such fucked-up sisters?”

  “Sisters.” I smile.

  We pay the check, stand on the sidewalk, and say goodbye for the second time in as many days. The wedding guests will arrive the following night, and I’ll have to go to the hospital to take care of this mother aneurysm. Simone knows I’m falling into myself and tries lightness. “You have Mom whiskers,” she says. “What are you going to do?”

  “I wish I knew,” I say.

  “I’m sorry but I can’t hug you in that form.”

  “I wouldn’t want to hug me either.”

  “She never did, did she? Hug us.” She turns to leave. “Call if you need anything.”

  “I never got to say goodbye to him,” I say. My needs are like a child’s, narrow and selfish.

  She sighs. Above our heads a dress is being yanked across the street on a clothing line. We watch until a set of hands pulls it into a window. I think she will say no, but then she places a hand on my shoulder. “All right. Say it.”

  I close my eyes. “Tom,” I say. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Do you have anything you’d like to say to Mom?” I joke.

  Her expression remains humorless. “No.”

  “I wish you could come to the wedding,” I say.