Parakeet: A Novel

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  She says, “I wish the whole world was different.”

  We turn and walk in opposite directions. I miss her immediately.

  * * *

  The hotel lobby is empty when I return. In my room, I lay my mother’s body onto the bed. The phone rings. Please be her.

  Simone says, “Were you serious about Granny visiting you?”

  I tell her about the toothpaste, the shoddy elevator, arriving in the suddenly aviated room, the bird, the question about the Internet (“Not bad,” she says, about my explanation), the bellboy who hates birds, Granny’s request, the wedding dress, the doppelgänger (“There is no Northeast Fourth Street in Brooklyn,” she says), the husband. As I speak her gentle mmm-hmmms tick off every point.

  “Why me?” she says when the story is finished. “Why now?” I don’t know, I say, and she says she doesn’t know either.

  “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” I say.

  “Where was she when I went through everything? I could have used a bird, some guidance.”

  A pang of doom. Everything I said the night before led to walls. There must be a way to approach her so that she’ll trust that even if I’m flawed, I have good intentions. “How can I love you?” I say. “Best. How can I love you best?”

  Her tone softens. She says, “One of the women I was at the clinic with, a farm girl from Minnesota, was so delighted to finally be herself, had supportive parents even, holding her hand through all the shots. The surgeries. She moves to the city and she’s finally living. Meets a guy on Tinder who figures out who she is and strangles her. That was a friend of mine. It’s like getting on a plane to fly home. And you’re so excited. But the plane never lands. So you’re just always trying to get there.”

  It is the gentlest movement of a days-long conversation. I lie on the comforter in the unlit room with my eyes closed, receiver pressed against my ear, listening to her tender voice. She tells me she was obsessed with Shakespeare because of the disguises. A man dressed as a woman dressed as a man presents himself to the king. As themselves, the characters are out of sorts, incorrect. But in disguise, they feel most like themselves. “Of course, I didn’t know that’s why I was drawn to Shakespeare,” she says. “I just thought I liked the tights.”

  I tell her I loved the groom deeply and painfully at first, then remember I am speaking to someone who can understand life’s complications. “That’s not true. I never did. I wanted to. He said commitment is as simple as yes or no. Either we date or we don’t stay friends. I said okay and waited for passion to come.”

  “Did it?”

  Once through the coffee shop window I watched a woman say goodbye to her girlfriend. She was leaving for work, or maybe they didn’t live in the same city. They held each other and spoke quietly. I’ll be back, she was saying. It won’t be long. They didn’t conceal their tears, the sorrow too big to stay private. What’s a long time, anyway? If you want to understand how vast two minutes can be, ask anyone separated from their love. Let that be me, I begged myself. Let his absence cancel breath. I tell Simone I can’t imagine crying that way about the groom. The distance between what I was supposed to feel and what I actually felt grew. It opened windows in me, and the windows let the birds in.

  “It’s just like Granny to shit on everything.”

  “Literally,” I say. “We missed out on so many jokes. Being estranged. I’ve been so anxious for so long. Rose says it’s in my head.”

  “You’ve always trusted her too much.”

  “Still,” I say. “Aren’t I supposed to be happy?”

  “Messy is honest. Fine,” she says, “is the word I was looking for. He seems fine.”

  “I think the sun is up,” I say though I don’t check, and she says, “Here, too.”

  “When Gregor Samsa woke up as a bug,” I say, “it was about being useless to society.”

  She says, “What’s more societally useless than a woman in her seventies?”

  This launches us into broad, sweeping laughter, mine in gusts and hers more contained, chugging underneath. I hear the aluminum hum of waves, or maybe steel cars on the highway furred by distance, I climb to reach a windowsill and find myself already over, her voice is the clasped hand pulling me to safety over and over until I don’t know if I’m speaking aloud or if my thoughts are movements and earnest knocking wakes me.

  LESS GOOD THAN OTHERS AT HIDING

  Through the peephole I see a pot of anxious lilies held by the bellboy who is scared of birds (“Good morning,” he says, fearfully). I open the door, dig through my pockets for a dollar. “I’ll find my wallet.”

  I pass in front of the hallway mirror and catch sight of my mussed hair and blurred face. My hair. My face.

  The wallet slips my grasp and lands on the carpet. I test my arms and legs, enjoying the lightness. It’s as if I’ve been relieved of my skin and am a spirit. I reach, bend, lunge.

  “Ma’am?” the bellboy says.

  “Look at me!” I say, in tears. “I’m not my mother anymore!”

  He references the hallway for escape but whether the employees of this hotel like it or not, all of this week’s enormous changes have occurred in front of them.

  “What is your name?” I lean in, anticipating an important, serendipitous moniker.

  “James,” he says.

  “James.” I am disappointed. “I don’t know anyone named that.”

  “Okay.” He wants to leave, a reasonable thought in an unreasonable hotel room. I pull a bill from my wallet.

  “Do you go by Jim?” I say.

  He pockets the bill. “Just James.”

  The lilies are from Aunt Henshaw, who has a tendency to summarize whatever’s going on in unsurprising ways. The note: You are getting married soon. After James leaves I return to my sister on the phone. “Are you there?”

  “Barely,” she says. “I fell asleep.”

  “I’m myself again,” I say. “Me. My self.”

  “Show me. Send a selfie.”

  “I hate selfies.”

  “See your way clear to making an exception this once.”

  I take a picture and message it to her. She is quiet for so long I ask if she’s received it. “Seeing you. I forgot. You’re beautiful. You’re so,” she says, “brown. No one else looks like you.”

  “Better than Mom, right?”

  She doesn’t want to joke. “I’d show your picture to the doctors,” she says. “I’d tell them, as close to her as possible. Simone was the name of my friend who was killed.”

  I make a noise, a protracted oh, as what feels like a million tiny birds I didn’t realize were sitting on my chest fly away.

  HERE TODAY, BIRD TOMORROW

  I stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror, admiring the tuft of cirrus curls that insist around my neck, my shoulders, slim arms, breasts like discouraged lowercase j’s topped with hard tips, the roundness of my belly that complements my hips, black pubic hair I groom with a slim pair of scissors, the generous thighs pocked with cellulite, the paunchy ass that sometimes does well in jeans but most times does not, even the gummed scars that mark my right knee, thigh and hip and torso, on a topographical map these marks would signify a mountain range, once a stranger shoved a knife into me like he was putting it back where it belonged the way you’d cram a book onto a loaded shelf, and the skin over all of it an unending reply the color of coffee and nicotine, things I like, things that are fine in small doses but dangerous in large quantities. I cup my hip bones, savoring their hardness against my palms.

  Welcome back, I say to myself.

  Thinking of my grandmother, I dial my mother. A bird today, she said. Myself again tomorrow. My mother answers on the second ring. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. How are you feeling, Mother?”

  “You’re just calling?”

  A noise behind her like ice in a glass. My stepfather asks, “Who is it?”

  “Do you need something? Is he here?”

  “
Is who here?”

  “The groom, of course!”

  After the loving conversation with Simone, my mother’s words sound unusually sharp. Yet I’ve intimately encountered the private voice that threatens her. “I’m only calling to say hello, to make sure you have everything you need.”

  “Everything I need,” she says, like it’s a riddle. My good intention wilts. “I’ve prayed to your grandparents for sun tomorrow. If the weather’s bad, blame them.”

  “I like rain,” I say. “Mother,” I say. “How can I love you best?” It’s shameful to use the same trick twice but I do it.

  From the Inn’s cavernous expanse, far enough away that I can’t tell if it’s above or below me, I hear an unmistakable, overly dramatic Achoo.

  “Are you on drugs?” my mother says.

  The empathy box slams shut. “Yes. And drunk. I’m several bottles of wine in and smoked a ton of weed.”

  “Aunt Henshaw is complaining again.” She sounds relieved I have returned us to our roles: me the insufferable, she the put-upon. “We’ll need a pillow for her chair.”

  “Who is it?” my stepfather insists.

  “Don’t be late,” she says. “Wear the green.”

  “Sorry to bother,” I say, but she’s already hung up.

  I stare at the receiver in my hand, benevolence deleted, embarrassed by my good intentions and ashamed for an amorphous reason I can’t explain. This comes as a relief—it is the way I always feel after we speak.

  I consider what it would take to bring the wedding to a halt. The Inn, the baker, the waiters, the florist. Would it irreparably damage the tether connecting me to others? Can I articulate the wrongness well enough to make everyone laugh, saying, “Your mother, farting!” Liquid sloshing in cocktail glasses until I tucked into mental bed each person I’d inconvenienced, assured that there was no better option than to discard thousands of dollars of our parents’ money? I cannot. Yet I also cannot imagine the fabric of my life containing both things: my sister folding her hands on her lap (the future) and the groom eating a sandwich and watching a baseball game (the past). Outside a bird chirps, Call it off. No, it is children playing.

  When we met, the stubble on his jawline and above his ears in his close shave was like down, I wanted to make a coat out of him.

  He touches me so gently, I told my friends.

  Until one day I realized, he doesn’t. In fact, he hurls himself at me. I have to brace, waiting for the pummel. What made me think he was gentle? I fought this new idea, refusing to believe I’d been wrong. In bed I asked if he would touch me like he used to. And he said what I’d been fearing, “I’m doing the same thing I always have.” He wasn’t malicious. He was confused. It was I who was mistaken.

  The next night he pulled away then advanced in a performative way. I thought he was soothing a muscle kink, but he did it again. It was some kind of physical system, shying away from himself then moving into me again. He said, “I’m doing what you asked.”

  He thought that’s what it meant to be tender, retreat and advance, retreat and advance.

  * * *

  I craft emoji-rich responses to brunch invitations, remember paper towels, who likes artichokes, then remember deeper: I deliver hellos, concoct opportunities for his intelligence to shine. I am a Post-it. If you do these things while pocketing a part of yourself, if you complete the correct actions with the mental equivalent of a caveat, who is the person engaging in the action, and who is left behind? Fiancée, a location between two states of being. I am no longer what I was. Yet I am not quite. This is a hyphen of time, an antechamber.

  The groom does not deserve to have a wife with a retreating soul. I do not deserve to be gripped in place each time I want to leap. I will go through with the wedding, our life. He will come home from school, I will come home from interviewing clients. We will watch television and grill slabs of chicken. It is not the chicken’s fault, or society’s, or the meticulous florist’s, or the groom’s, that I’ve led us all onto Long Island to witness the beginning of what everyone hopes will be a happy marriage. On what everyone hopes will be a clear day. Everyone has prayed to their ancestors for good weather. If there’s sun, the dead will be praised and, on the occasion of rain, blamed.

  THE GROOM, OF COURSE!

  Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters. The groom walks meekly down the hall. I hear the characteristic sound of a throat being cleared that does not need to be, then a polite “Excuse me,” though he is alone, fumbling with the card in the door.

  He enters the room, holding an arrangement of lilacs and Queen Anne’s lace: my bouquet. It is wilder and larger than I expected, the decision of a woman who craves attention. I hate it immediately.

  “The florist called,” he says. “She was in a state.”

  “So thoughtful of you to pick it up.” We hug and for a moment I am calmed by his familiar, stable bones under my grip. His thoughtfulness.

  “I hit a median in the parking lot but it’s okay.” He says, “I’ll take the car in on Monday to check it out.” He is still speaking to the me I was earlier in the week, who hadn’t yet encountered her avian grandmother, fought herself and lost, been sistered, occupied space within her mother.

  As I dress he navigates through channels on the television, calling out updates. The Henshaws are here. His parents have arrived. Then, “Do you think we could have sex tonight?” His voice is quiet. “It would be nice.”

  “It’s the night before our wedding,” I say.

  “I’m so glad.” He starts his electric toothbrush, shuts it off. “You are so hot.” The toothbrush hums across his molars as he switches to a ball game. The canned multitude of a crowd and an announcer proclaims, “Higher and higher, another victory.” The groom’s gums buzz.

  “I have to go down to the front desk to borrow a hair dryer,” I say.

  “Isn’t there one right here?” He yanks it from the wall, shows it to me.

  “I need,” I say, “another one.”

  I take a back staircase to a door leading outside. I sit in the gazebo and spend a long time looking at the lake. In the lobby, the concierge performs the hmmms and okays that signal the end of a phone call and smiles to let me know I’m her priority as soon as she’s finished.

  “Me again,” I say.

  “How’s that toothpaste treating you?”

  I show her my teeth and she gives me a thumbs-up. “Our hair dryer broke,” I lie.

  “I think we have one in the back.” She leaves to get it.

  “I forgot to ask,” I say when she returns. “How old is your daughter?”

  “Seven.” She says the number as if it contains magic. “She lives with me for most of the week but spends weekends with her dad in the city.”

  “You must hate to be without her.”

  “You have no idea,” she says.

  I ask if she likes the current movie every little girl in America is wild over. “Can’t stop dancing to it,” she says. “Me and her father didn’t work out but she’s a good kid.”

  “Most times it’s for the best,” I say.

  “It is with us. He’s a good guy, but two control freaks in one house is too many. She’s an angel, despite it all. And I’d say if she was a jerk. Is your husband finding everything okay?”

  “Fiancé,” I say. “Yes.”

  “He just arrived?”

  “Yes,” I say. “His job takes him away a lot. Even for his wedding.”

  “Now it’s my turn. You must hate to be without him.”

  There is a scrambling sound in the vicinity of the elevator where people have disembarked. The concierge and I turn to see a well-dressed older couple. The man wears a navy suit. The woman is layered in shiny materials the color of lamb or something else easily slaughtered, a blood-colored pin accuses out from her lapel.

  “There she is,” my mother says. “What is she doing? Doesn’t she know she’s late? That everyone is already seated and waiting for her to arrive? Is she even dressed? Is
this what she’s going to wear? Didn’t we agree on the green?”

  This is the first time I’ve seen her since I was her. My stepfather dodders behind, posture arranged in its familiar apologies-in-advance. The concierge and I are still blinking in the pleasant afterthought of her daughter, an angel despite it all.

  I say, “Are we talking to me?”

  My stepfather leaves to tell the others they’ve found me. My mother pulls a small package from her purse. “A gift,” she says.

  Inside, a tiny locket is pinned to delicate fabric. She opens it to reveal a picture of my grandmother, gazing into middle distance beyond the photographer’s shoulder, unimpressed, mouth poised to criticize. The other side is empty. “You can put a picture from the wedding there. You and the groom.”

  I fold her into a hug she does not appreciate. She smells like piles of tea towels in the sun. “Okay,” she says, sounding upset.

  I release her. “Are you well, Mother? Are you enjoying the Inn? The eggs,” I say, “… have been particularly good. I want you to know that I appreciate the money you’ve put into this wedding, and how difficult it must have been to raise us. Essentially alone.”

  “It was fine,” she says, distracted by a noise on the other side of the lobby.

  I hold the locket out. “She looks aggravated.”

  My mother nods. “I didn’t have many pictures to choose from.”

  “Do you ever talk to her?”

  “Your grandmother? She’s dead.”

  “I realize that. But did you ever try? Say hello. Yell at her even.”

  “That sort of thing doesn’t occur to me. We were never what you’d call close,” she admits. “She always wanted me to be more cheerful.”

  My laughter embarrasses her. She smooths her hair and checks who’s watching.

  “That’s almost punk rock,” I say. “Very goth, Mom.”

  “I didn’t know I was able to make you laugh,” she says.

  “You make me laugh.”