Parakeet: A Novel

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  He grimaces sweetly, as if trying to clear a low ceiling. Being disappointed in Tom brings him physical pain. “If you’d like. I’d just as soon find his drugs and get back.”

  We follow the cousin’s directions to a house in a manicured suburb. Greek columns accent the front porch.

  “The Parthenon?” Adrian says, climbing out of the car.

  We rap on the door and a visored woman answers, holding a baby who glares at us. It feels like an indictment.

  “Sara _______ sent us,” Adrian says.

  The woman yells for Jessica, turns, and disappears into the house.

  I ask Adrian what the name is that he said, and he says, that’s Sara’s last name, and I’m surprised because it is ethnic-sounding and she doesn’t seem capable of anything interesting and then I forget the name wholly in the next moment when a younger woman in workout clothes emerges from a back room and bounds up to the door.

  “You didn’t invite them in, Elizabeth, oh my god.” She ushers us into a gleaming kitchen under a barrage of salutations, apologies, explanations. The original woman, Elizabeth, and the judgmental baby sit at the table eating carrots from a mug. Jessica asks how Sara’s cousin is and oh my god, how’s Sara?

  We say she’s fine. In fact, she’s getting married today.

  “Amazing,” Jessica says. “Whoever would have guessed that Sara would get married. You remember Sara,” she says to Elizabeth. “Sara.” Her exuberance elongates the name to five syllables.

  “Who?” The mother feeds the baby a spoonful.

  “Sara-with-the-leg-braces Sara.”

  Elizabeth shrugs. “Sara,” Jessica says.

  “Have you been living here awhile?” I say.

  “In this house? We don’t live here.” Jessica covers her mouth and giggles. “Can you imagine?” she asks Elizabeth, who pauses feeding the baby to laugh.

  “What about leg braces?” I say.

  “It was the worst,” Jessica says, suddenly reverent. “She couldn’t walk for like a hundred years.”

  The kitchen is lit from orbs sunk into the ceiling and appears to not contain dishes or glasses except for the carrot mug. Jessica says she doesn’t do business in front of the baby and asks if we’d like to go to her room where there are snacks and chairs.

  “Wait.” I pull an envelope from my bag, slide my finger under the seal and wrench it open. Inside is a card with a picture of a brightly colored car, tin cans trailing its bumper. Just Married! Two bills fall out. “Use this,” I say. “It’s a hundred and fifty dollars. Is that enough?”

  Jessica hits a pretty pose against the counter. “Totally.”

  Adrian leaves and I stay in the kitchen with the mother.

  “Is that even your baby?” I say.

  Confused, she looks at the baby as if he has made the remark. I hear the pulsing of music from the back.

  “Right,” she says, seemingly to no one. “That Sara. I just remembered. One of her legs was shorter than the other. So she had to use braces growing up. She had surgery in high school, I think. Straightened her out. She was always kind of a bitch. Did she get any nicer?”

  I shake my head no. I should thank her for her hospitality, but out of some protest having to do with my brother and the position he’s put me in, I don’t.

  “Cute,” I say, about the baby.

  She blinks. “You want to feed him?”

  “Oh,” I say. It’s not an answer, but we both know I mean, no.

  He fights the carrots. I’ve never seen a baby who actually wants to eat. On his bib, a tiny crab holds two mallets like castanets. Fun time, it reads. Is the crab excited to eat or be eaten? The baby is finished with the carrots and with her. He screams as if trying his voice out, collects himself, screams again. Elizabeth pages through a magazine of what looks like doghouses. This baby is scheduleless, it is easy to tell, and must react to the existential dread of life without a map from its mother. A schedule is a gift we give children so when they are adults they can deal with the anxiety of loss. I wonder if the baby will be the kind of adult who always has to be surrounded by people.

  When I consider that once my brother was a baby wearing a bib it becomes painful to look at the baby.

  “They’re taking a while,” I say. “I should check on them.”

  She gestures wordlessly toward the hallway. I follow the music to a room where Jessica and Adrian sit on a couch, touching knees. His hand is on her thigh. When I enter they look up as if emerging from a deep well.

  “Wedding,” I remind him.

  He charms her down the hallway through the kitchen and front door.

  “Sara. Say hi to that girl, okay? And congratulations on her wedding?” She phrases it like a question, which feels correct. She coos at Adrian, says to return when the next delivery comes, she’ll have better shit then.

  “No thank you, darling,” he says. “I don’t touch that stuff.”

  “Don’t like to have fun, Adrian?” In one motion she purrs, pivots.

  “I love fun.” He gazes at her kindly, tone falling off a cliff. “I’m just not a fucking addict.”

  “Goodbye!” My voice is bright.

  Adrian places the paper bag in the back seat of the car.

  “Ouch,” I say. “Rough on her at the end there.”

  “I don’t like people like her,” Adrian says. “Who take advantage of the vulnerable so they can rent mini-mansions built to look like coliseums.”

  “Crazy about Sara though, right? Leg braces.”

  “Not everyone is all one thing.”

  I ask if that means he likes Sara for my brother and he says that’s not what he means. The highway is vivid in summer, oil slicks and rainbows. Queen Anne’s lace frames the road as we drive. A day to read a book by a river.

  “A hundred and fifty dollars is a nice present,” Adrian says.

  “That’s etiquette,” I say.

  He presses on the accelerator.

  I say, “I’d stick to the speed limit.”

  Sara Something is in her wedding dress when we get back. Asymmetrical, one-shoulder, bias cut, with fancy-cheap features like abalone buttons meant to wow. She takes the package into the bedroom. A few minutes later she emerges, followed by Tom.

  “Hello,” he says. “It’s nice to see you. I’m getting married today.” He holds his hand out for me to shake. A tremor pulses in his wrist, climbing his forearms into his shoulders. His panicked eyes swipe the room, and his mouth goes stroke-slack, losing to darkness.

  “What kind of garbage shit did you get him?” Sara says.

  I loosen his tie, unbutton his shirt. “We need to get him to the hospital.”

  “He can’t go to the hospital.” Sara Something is in shock. “We have to get married.”

  Adrian and I carry Tom in his wedding suit to the car. Adrian drives while in the back seat I try to keep my brother awake. He doesn’t hear me screaming instructions. I call the hospital and when we arrive the doctors cut through his shirt. Pearl buttons arc out over the floor. They nick his chest with the scissors, slide him through the doors then through another pair of doors then another. Adrian and I stand in the emergency room, in shock. One of us should return to the mountain retreat and tell them the wedding’s not going to happen. Adrian says he’ll do it and I will stay with my brother. Jobs decided, he doesn’t move. I reach out to steady him, worried that now that we are out of trouble he will keel onto the shining floor. But instead he says, “I keep wondering when the adults are going to show up.”

  “I think we’re here.”

  When I’m allowed to see Tom an hour later, he is sheepish, charming. Relief dulls my anger. We both know that his hand, posed on the sheet a few inches away from his body, is an offering. I do not take it.

  “You are a little shit,” I say.

  He agrees. “But please know it’s only because I’m so deeply unhappy.”

  That is the last thing he says to me the last time I see him. The final time. Pale, in a torn dress shir
t, attached by his wrists and heart to a bleating machine.

  Sara Something sits on a couch in the hallway. “This was supposed to be a happy day.” Her voice is soft. “He blames your mother for everything, you know. What could she have done that was so bad?” I’m surprised to find she is on the outside of my brother’s confidences. This has two effects on me: proud of him that he still understands humans enough to know who not to trust, and sorry for her because I know how cold that ice is.

  I want to escape to my car’s warmth but I say, “My mother had kids because she thought she had to. Then my father died and she didn’t know what to do with us. And she really liked quiet. Tom is not quiet.”

  We share a huff of breath, a half acknowledgment. Her eyes quiver with tears. “Your mother is awful.”

  “She’s just a regular person,” I say, stiff with loyalty. “Not everyone has the same kind of family.” I leave her, baffled, in her fancy-cheap dress.

  I buy vanilla wafers and a soda from the vending machine, admiring the macabre designer who put a player piano in the lobby. I sit in my parked car. “You’re welcome, by the way,” I say to no one.

  My family has never been good at joy but in tragedy we excel. We’re skilled at belittling an enemy to entertain a sick person. Birthdays, anniversaries, and other celebrations in which the point is to express delight find us thick and insecure. Not sure what to do with our hands or our reasonable comments that everyone seems to think are morose and irreverent. But if you need a date to a divorce filing, or a partner to choose the headstone … Happy people stand in rooms like balloons. It’s enough to spark a panic attack. So we rebel and puncture the balloons, turning occasion into tragedy, at which we can then excel.

  I wonder what it must be like to be so addicted to something you can’t see it has incinerated the tissue that binds you to others. And then I reject this point of view, jettison the years spent wishing my devotion could make Tom capable of relationship. I’m relieved I will never have to see him or any of these people again.

  How could I have known how incorrect the landscape of his body was? How could I have guessed that instead of dying, he’d write a play about my life?

  I drink the soda and decide to make my home in other places, until what remains in the car is no longer sibling to anyone. The hospital doors slide back and forth, letting in the sick and the well. The sick and the well. The sick and the well. I’ve already spent a year healing in another hospital. That’s all the time I’m willing to sacrifice. A doctor exits. A woman. A family. Over the hospital’s roof, an unfair expanse of stars.

  GHOSTS FROM AN OLD FAILED WEDDING

  Here is my brother, the groom, in his shredded wedding shirt, years later, his irrepressible eyes, all the tousled, nervous parts of him, leaning against a pillar in my reception hall.

  And here are his wedding guests, shimmering beside mine. The anisette of that upstate retreat mixes with the mason-jarred gardenias of this inn. Between my guests I glimpse Sara Something’s mustached cousins. My brother’s guests are dressed for outside, flip-flops and shorts. My guests are for cold weather. Stockinged, suited, coated. Them denimed, faded, hasty hair. Us pressed and dry-cleaned, tamped with pins and lotions. For a moment, the reality of the day shivers and welcomes all possibilities. Sara Something’s mother accepts a mushroom cap from the groom’s first boss.

  The guests from my brother’s failed heroin wedding will ask the guests from mine to dance. The polite staccato introduction to a minuet. Sara Something’s aunt in a sundress veers through a line of partygoers, clasped to my stepfather. He bends her into a dip, her mouth open, gleeful.

  That party then and this one, now. Two sets of invited guests. Close enough that the years of divorces, bad investments, marriages, and other betrayals glimmer and turn friendly, manageable, as if any struggle we’ve ever had with a loved one can collapse if the right song plays.

  My brother beams at the dancing. But it is my sister, Simone, who leans in to whisper, “I’m sorry. I won’t use your life again.”

  “I forgive you.”

  The guests from her wedding fade. Something in this room—me, I suppose—reality, returns to its rigid state.

  “Is there anything you need?” a waiter says. Is he from that time or this? Is his question literal or figurative?

  “Anything like what?” I say.

  He gestures to the area below my left elbow.

  I’m holding a giant knife, flanked by only my wedding guests who gape at me like I owe them violence. Vanilla almond with lemon basil. The groom looks as if he’s watching me take too long to hurl myself above a lake on a rope swing. He yearns to follow. If only I’d jump!

  “Cut,” he says.

  I puncture the top layer of fondant and bear down into the tiers. The flash of cameras and phones. Everyone loves cake so much they can’t stop clapping.

  My mother says, “Cut!”

  The guests yell, “Cut!”

  DING

  Down a hallway punctured by portraits I find another staircase. I climb ten flights before I realize the number of floors doesn’t match the exterior of this inn that has only five.

  The navy carpet here is different from the floors beneath it. I pass several unmarked doors until I find one that bears the silhouette of a woman. Inside, my mother-in-law sits on a chaise, staring at a photo that at my entrance she slides into her purse. I apologize for bothering her and she apologizes for needing a breather.

  I check myself in the mirror. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “Thank you,” she says. “It’s a. Beautiful dress.” She speaks like she always does, in fits and starts, as if whatever she says has only recently replaced a thought she liked more. “I was sitting here thinking of New Mexico. The houses.”

  “I’ve never been,” I say.

  “The first time we went my husband assured me I’d hate it. He said I wasn’t built to withstand heat and the sauces would be too spicy. I loved it. Loved even more that he was wrong. I ate every green chili I could find. He didn’t know all of me. Even after so many. Years. When you first began dating my son,” she says, “I didn’t like it. You had no family. Only your mother. I couldn’t understand. Where were they? Everyone has family. Christmas, birthdays, you never have anyone. And you never seemed to want anyone. It bothered me. But then my husband explained something and I never thought about it again.”

  She wants an encouraging remark to finish but I remain silent.

  “What he explained was, you probably wished you had a family like ours. And then my heart opened to you.”

  The truth was, I never wanted to attend their family’s gatherings because when I was with them I missed mine so much it set me back days. I longed for my elegant, skittish, fucked-up brother. My razor grandmother. Even my mother. And then I’d have to acknowledge that I was missing incorrect, anxious freaks, and that I was one of them. People with good families can’t fathom those without. Or that we don’t want to borrow theirs. It soothes her to think I envy her, so I don’t correct her.

  Instead, I say, “I do have family. My sister is here. She’s here.”

  “I didn’t know you had a sister!” she says.

  “She’s always traveling because she’s so talented and successful.”

  “I’ll meet her,” she says.

  “You will.”

  She moves to leave. “The last time I was in New Mexico I saw a dog sleeping in the back windshield of a car. As the car was driving! Inside the window, like…” She does the slant of the windshield with her hand, then makes the shape of the dog. “Right in there.”

  When she leaves one of the stalls opens and the other bride emerges. “Hello,” she says, standing next to me in the mirror.

  “Hello,” I say. “I didn’t know anyone else was in here.”

  We speak with the instant intimacy of women who are experiencing profound change simultaneously.

  “Congratulations,” I say, and she says, “You too.”

&nbs
p; I ask how her day has been and she says, “The baker misspelled my name on the cake. After I triple-checked. My husband says I’m making too much of a big deal about it. Still. Best day of my life.” She smiles. “Husband!”

  She says, “I love saying it,” at the same time I say, “It’s weird.”

  “You’re allowed to make a big deal out of whatever you want,” I say.

  “That’s what I said.” She raises her eyebrow to me in the mirror. “My family hates the fact that he’s older than me by fifteen years.”

  “Do you notice the age difference?”

  “Nah.” She replaces the lipstick cap. “Only. I don’t want him to die before me. I couldn’t bear being on this earth without him.”

  “That’s a nice thing to say,” I say.

  “I’m a nice girl. You are, too.”

  “No,” I say. “I’m a mean girl, tired of pretending I’m not.”

  She tells me we don’t have to take the stairs because there’s an elevator. I tell her that I’ve been having problems with them but she says trust her. We get in. Two brides in an elevator. One of them having the best day of her life. Ding! A pang of betrayal when the doors open at the lobby floor.

  “Have you had any trouble with these elevators?” I say.

  “The only trouble I’ve had is my name being spelled wrong on a cake. Which is really no trouble at all.” She pretends to anoint me on my hands, cheeks, forehead. “Energy in you and on you and around you.” She turns and walks to her reception hall. “Goodbye,” she says. “Good luck.”

  IN TRAGEDY WE EXCEL

  In my absence, the Hollywood argument from the limo has reprised and escalated. Groomsmen Chris and Nigel are captains of the disagreement, each side believing the other possesses sociopathic hearts. Chris insists on a minor detail. Nigel believes no one experiences pain like he does. They shove each other. A chin grab. They scuffle on the ground. The groom laughs molar-wide as the bridesmaids pull the men apart. Blood grows on Nigel’s temple. His wife dunks a linen napkin into a wineglass and applies it to his wound.