I check. “It’s the right one. I didn’t like the other so I bought a new one.”
“What was wrong with the first one?”
“Nothing,” I say. “It wasn’t my style.”
She swallows an intended remark. This is what friends do, decide not to unravel you.
I undress until I wear only underwear and my grandmother’s locket. I lift my arms and Rose slips the dress over my head. “How would you describe the Internet?” I say. “If you had to?”
She yanks the crinoline underneath the short skirt then massages the eyelet scalloping. “I wouldn’t.”
“Come on,” I say. “Pretend you met a caveman who’d never heard of the Internet. How would you describe it?”
She lines my heels on the carpet and says she’d ask her stepfather.
“What would he say?”
“Put your shoes on.” She kneels so I can lean on her and step into one heel then the other. “He’d say why are you worried about the Internet on your wedding day?” Heeled, I sit on the bed. Rose’s mouth is arranged in the horror of concentration as she reaffirms the veil’s combs pressed against my scalp. She’s checking my moorings and riggings, as she has since high school.
“He is practical,” I say at the same time she says, “He is an idiot.”
Rose stands behind me as I evaluate myself in the kitchenette’s long mirror. “Beautiful,” she decides. “Let’s take a selfie.”
We smile at ourselves and count to three.
“There’s a ghost behind us,” she says, checking the picture. In the mirror the flash has imagined a human form.
“A trick of light,” I say.
The phone rings. We jump.
“Who is Simone?” my mother says, calling from a room on the other side of the Inn that sounds like it is filled with aggressive classical music. Though we’d been maintaining a flimsy truce since I got engaged, I’d asked the concierge to put my room as far away from hers as possible.
“A dear friend,” I say.
“It’s too late to add someone.”
“Mother, why do you sound strange? Are you unwell?” I tap my fingers. Rose mouths, What’s up?
“Why do you keep asking that?” she says. “Worry about yourself. And whoever Simone is.”
“A dear friend, I said,” I say.
“I thought we were finished with the readjusting.”
“I don’t know what that means, Mother. Rose is here. She says hello.”
My mother dons her public voice. “Hello, Rose.” She reminds me only a few minutes remain before everyone is due to meet in the lobby then hangs up.
“If I asked you to lock my mother in a closet for the rest of the day, would you do it?”
“Is this one of your friendship tests?” Rose says. “I would.”
“If I asked you to pull the car up and drive me away from here, would you?”
She considers then rejects concern. “I would,” she says. “There’s a late movie at the Sunshine. I was sorry to miss it.”
I ask if it is Beginners, the movie with the talking dog who is optimistic about romance and I tell her I’ve already seen it.
“Too bad,” she says. “Guess you’ll have to get married.”
She must leave to get ready. “Who is Simone?” she says. “You keep mentioning her. What we love, we mention.” She hugs me and walks to the door. Her curled hair makes a pleasing shape against her shoulder blades that work in tandem underneath her sweater.
“Then I must love you because I mention you all the time.”
Something about her small bones chugging against the thin sweater works up in me what I can only call a realization of the obvious: The floor we’re standing on is the ceiling of the room below. And the floor of that room is the ceiling of another’s. There’s been recent renovation, which always creates friction. We trust so many strangers to build things that won’t shatter. My heels dig into the flimsy synthetic that separates me from disaster. If Rose leaves I will plunge through the floor in an explosion of dust and debris, to the room below that, and below that, until I hit wherever bottom is. My knees will pop like kernels over heat. There is only a moment before everything explodes.
As I normally do when finding myself on the brink of something I don’t understand, I ask an unanswerable question: “What’s going to happen to me?”
Her eyes gain a faraway cast, as if she’s seeing my future on the dense curtains that suffocate this antechamber, this room before a room. She thinks I am asking her to step-by-step me through the day. “You’ll go downstairs, join the bridal party, and we’ll go to the church where you’ll get married. We’ll dance and eat steak. We’ll try to avoid your mother. You’ll endure a few aggravating traditions. You’ll go on your honeymoon and start your life. Like a million other women have done before you.”
“A million,” I say.
“A billion,” she says.
“No honeymoon,” I remind her.
“I thought you were going to stay out here, for a day or—”
“He doesn’t want to miss work.”
“Regardless,” she says. “Like a trillion other women.”
“If I told you my grandmother visited me in the form of a bird, what would you say?”
The concern returns. “You’re scared of happiness,” she says. “Consider the dress. Your old one was perfect yet you convinced yourself it wasn’t so you got a new one you didn’t need. You don’t want to fill out the place cards so you invent a story about toothpaste. Or your grandmother. Or a bird. You don’t want to meet the florist so you have a panic attack. You’re scared to get married because you don’t think you deserve marriage because you don’t think you deserve happiness. You do. No matter what you’ve been through. When you find the right dress, stop looking.”
She tells me my groom is handsome with non-thinning hair. His job can support the weight of two people, or more, should we decide to have children. Rose trusts this answer.
“It’ll be over before you know it,” she says.
“That’s what people say about surgery.”
At the doorway, she pauses. “What’s all the stuff about the Internet?”
I borrow her unaffectedness. “Skip it.”
Rose closes the door so it doesn’t slam. For a moment I love her the way I did when we still wore crochet half tops, our brilliant skin hanging over cinched denim waists. To her, my hesitation can be discarded as jitters, a disturbance that people can explain and so allow. Only, it’s not the question I mean, so her answer belongs to another bride in another room who really is wondering what is going to happen to her and imagines that whatever it is might be good.
PARAKEET
That winter in New York was so cold people had begun to fistfight on the train. Every morning the papers reported a new brawl. I’d seen one the week before, two women dressed in office casual, circling like predatory animals, rattling purses. They snatched at each other and fell into a thick slump of coats. Strangers pulled them apart, still hissing intimately. It had been cold for so long you couldn’t remember how to feel at ease. My neck was always stiff because I slept shrimp-curled to contain heat.
People want to hear that foreboding zippered down my back but except for the fistfights, it was a normal Sunday. I was twenty-three, sleeping with a married man, just graduated from state university, and still living in the borough with my mother. I still thought I had a brother named Tom who was still in the city struggling to produce his plays.
I was standing on the platform when the R was taken out of service due to the city’s new inclement-weather plan. I’d never heard of a train being taken out of service because it was cold. My plan was to borrow my grandmother’s car to get to my barista job. The sky was blue. The parakeets were on the power line.
In the 1970s, a cargo ship unloading in the navy yard dropped a crate that cracked against the concrete and exploded into thousands of parakeets. Meant for Argentina, they were accidental immigrants. Unlike the c
ommon budgie preferred by phantom grandmothers, these birds had indigo foreheads, startling blue tail feathers, silvery throats. Every time I saw one as a child was a holiday. I was always pointing them out, to myself, to family, to strangers. Searched for them constellated in the branches. Spread out over the sky in improbable arcs. I giggled alone in my bed thinking of their velvety bellies and read everything possible about them. Parakeets can swivel their heads 360 degrees. They are frightened of whatever is above or behind them. They are passive-aggressive, anxious birds, but tenacious. They figured out a way to stick in New York’s endless gray calendar, building their complicated, multi-unit apartment colonies over the spires and trees of my grandmother’s neighborhood. Mobilizing out of the fog. They signaled other, non-shitty, warmer lands. How many died trying to fly back? Did they ever escape the DNA echo of desire for the bone-deep heat? Did they ever stop wondering, what is this imagination-less palette, this cold like a grudge?
* * *
The mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.
My grandmother is always opening a box of gingersnaps when I am always arriving.
“Perfect timing,” she is always saying.
Like the parakeets, she is an accidental immigrant. Her mother was banished for becoming pregnant with her. Stinking of cows from her muddy mountain town, she carried my grandmother with her on the boat. To come here, the land of aboveground trains and five for a dollar.
“For what?” My grandmother cracks a gingersnap in half and chucks the small side.
I am always eating from the pile of discards that collects by her elbow. “So I could get a good job making coffee.”
“How about you make me some coffee,” she says.
I use the silver percolator, tamp the ground beans into the upper chamber, taking care none of the silt slips. My grandmother lifts a pair of binoculars to her eyes. “What’s she doing?” she says about a neighbor. “Hanging clothes in the cold?” She sits, miserable. “Lilian died.”
“Rec center Lilian?” I backhand crumbs into the trash.
“She’s the third one from the old gang,” she says. “I have to buy dresses to take my mind off it. Death is expensive.” The grounds swell. I tip the coffee into her cup and add a cube of sugar. She tries it. Nods.
“Worth it?” I say.
“Nah.” She hands me the keys. She wears two sweaters under a robe and refuses to buy a winter coat. Everything in her nature prefers hot. She is a parakeet.
In the middle of the harbor another immigrant stands in her oxidized dress. I walk to the car under the gaze of several small birds.
* * *
When I get to work the writer is already drunk at a table telling Yuna what he thinks about this writing stuff.
Yuna stands on her tiptoes to change the radio’s channel to a cooking show she likes. The host’s campfire voice makes her want to spend her day off cooking even though she’s terrible at it. We’ve spent whole shifts discussing a meal she’s ruined. I like how she remains baffled by her mistakes. I’m already looking forward to hearing the unexpected way she will botch the macarons she plans to try that weekend.
“You could braise beef in milk, I suppose,” the host says.
“Rose hip,” Yuna says, “and vanilla.”
A man enters. He is average size and wearing a dark coat over dark pants. Yuna plans her grocery list. I plan to return my grandmother’s car. I still have use of both legs. A man enters and hovers in the doorway’s misleading sunlight. Maybe he shivers, the divot between his eyes too deep, or the grimace on his face telltale. But no one notices when the man enters. On him hangs the rest of the afternoon and our lives. He favors his left leg so that shoe’s sole is slanted. A slanted man enters when we still have plans and, after pausing in the doorway, moves toward the counter, allowing the door to shut behind him. The events of his life have brought him into the path of everyone in this coffee shop. Ours, ditto. A man enters like so many men only this one contains a particular curdle. He has already pivoted away from some important principle, has already professed online the things he will do. He believes that immigrants are soiling his bright country. I don’t notice him consult his pocket, the way we check whatever’s wrong with us, patting it, making certain it’s active and dangerous. I froth milk behind the counter, listening to the writer talk about beginnings.
“‘Once upon a time’ is a terrible way to begin a story,” he says. “It’s inexact and trite and a lie. Much more honest to begin a story with ‘This never happened.’”
Another man’s voice on the speaker wonders aloud to his guest about roasts. “How does a classic roast differ from a Yankee pot roast?”
“In a Yankee pot roast,” his guest replies, “you’d add the vegetables as you go so by the time the roast is cooked, the vegetables are tender.”
“Tender,” I say to Yuna, who winks.
The writer says there is nothing being done in modern fiction that is what he would call new. He has been short-listed for a prestigious prize won by a woman whose father works at a famous magazine.
“Nabokov built homes for his readers,” he says. “Every chapter a room.”
“This is definitely not new. You sing this song every day,” I say, and Yuna agrees.
The writer’s cheeks plum. I ask the man who has entered if he has decided what he wants. He shakes his head no.
I say, “Let me know if you have any questions.”
The front door opens and a couple laughs in. Their movement jostles the man who has already entered.
“Excuse me,” they say.
“Yes, in the coq au vin,” the cooking show guest says. “Absolutely in the coq au vin.”
“I’ll sing this song until someone hears me,” the writer says. He is white and working class. I find his cynicism harmless and entertaining during a dull shift.
“When you cover a pot, it’s going to boil and that sort of rolls the vegetables around and they fragment, become fragrant.”
I bang the silver jug on the counter to create more froth. “I want your life,” I say to the writer. “Drunk at noon. Espousing your bullshit theories to baristas.”
“It’s a hard life,” says the writer. “I don’t have health insurance so I can’t even go to the hospital and complain.”
“Raise your hand if you have health insurance,” I say to Yuna, the couple, the writer, the man.
The couple lean against the counter, deciding on a flavor of ice cream. We’re almost out of turkey, a fact I’ve told Yuna twice. The man reaches into his pocket. A small bird lands on a tree outside the window by the writer’s head.
“Look,” I say. “A parakeet.”
“A parakeet?” the writer says. “A fucking parakeet?”
The man pulls the gun from his pocket, raises it shoulder-high, and fires into the shape the couple make against the counter. The girl slumps into the display case. Time leaves as the silver urn falls to the floor and hot milk splashes against my calves.
“How do you get the crispness?”
“A heavy sear on the outside.”
“What about using guar gum as a thickening agent?”
“I stick to the traditional.”
The man fires again at the woman he has already hit. Her boyfriend turns as if he will reason with the bullet that pushes him back into the display case. The glass splinters. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do, I am behind time. Yuna is underneath the counter then I am underneath the counter. I reach for the phone but don’t know how to use it. Which buttons do I press? Yuna grabs it and dials. I hear her jagged breath, smell charred wood.
The squeak of an overturned chair. Scuffling, and there is another shot. A short, smothered yelp. The writer.
I hear the unmistakable whine of the bathroom door. Another shot.
“Do you have special pots that you use for braising?”
“Dutch ovens are the best. But you can braise in anything.”
“An
ything?”
“Anything. Well, not anything.”
“Come out,” the man says.
“Is he?” Yuna shakes. “Talking. To us?”
“What happens with the leftover braising liquid?”
“You certainly shouldn’t throw it away.”
The man vaults the counter. The full menace of his body is between us. The sound of breaking glass. He drops the gun and Yuna kicks it toward the windows. He scrambles for it. A whimpering that could be human or machine compels the room. We scrabble like crabs. Something explodes near my ear. Yuna is still.
“Use it in risotto?”
“That’s a good idea.”
The man realizes the silverware tray is next to his head, reaches in, and produces a knife in a time that seems impossibly brief.
“No,” I say, as if the moment hovers between happening and not and I can kick it toward the latter by refusing consent.
He brings it down into my thigh, retracts it, and brings it down again. It works. Over and over, he brings it down. I want to tell him that the knife doesn’t go there. He has already hit more times than I can count. One must imagine it brings him relief. I am still responding as if in a normal human situation because pain has not yet arrived so I think maybe there is time to reverse these actions.
This is what they call trauma logic, which is indistinguishable from dream logic.
Violence like snowfall dulls sound.
Blood leaves me. I’m still reconciling this man with the milk and the parakeet and the writer and the machine’s shining wands and my grandmother and the car and the train and the cold. I am still five minutes before, when no one has been shot. Splintering glass and new screaming doesn’t hinder his work on my leg. Time gulps, rewinds. I note the room’s bodies in a part of my brain that is as far away as childhood. A new figure ascends at the end of the counter. Sound returns. A long, colorless scream. I yearn for the internal darkness that beckons and intoxicates me. The figure at the counter raises something above itself and the walls of the room retract. A holdout in my thigh relents—after, I’ll hear it’s my deep femoral artery. The retracted walls move forward and the man’s neck kinks at a troubling angle. He abandons his work, his hand rests on my pulverized side, the knife slides down our bodies balletically, the way a leaf falls onto a lake. He is skin-thick with psoriasis and has a history of pulling his wife through the local bar by her ponytail. I’ll know this later when I stare at the report for days, before I relearn how to walk.
Parakeet: A Novel Page 13