On the front landing I reposition my bag’s strap to a more amenable place on my shoulder. This seems to signal to the car idling at the farthest part of the lot to turn itself on and drive toward me. Seagulls fan out over the lake. It’s a regular morning for so many people, I think, watching Simone approach. I’ve blown up my life and left a good man. I feel scaled. Bereft. Dangerous. Joyful.
My phone rings.
“You are a terrible person,” the groom’s mother says. “And I always knew it. Disgusting. Brown gypsy scarper.” She pauses for response and when there is none, continues. “There’s something wrong with you. I knew the second I met you.”
It doesn’t seem possible the groom has already called her and explained everything, but I can no longer assume I have a firm grasp on time.
The car pulls up and brakes as the groom’s mother lists my faults. I am a finicky flake who ruins the work good people do.
Simone wears cocktail party makeup. Eggplant lipstick. A crisp scarf is knotted against her throat. Her driving gloves calm me.
“You owe us money,” the groom’s mother says.
I tell her to let me know the amount and I will write a check. “There is something wrong with me,” I say.
This pleases her. “Very wrong,” she corrects.
“Very, very wrong,” I suggest.
“Maybe you two could work it out.” She reconsiders. “You’re not unreasonable.”
“That won’t be possible.” Simone pops the trunk. I place my suitcase inside and hang up.
“That was the groom’s mother,” I say, climbing in. “I am not a good person.”
“Are you saying that or did she?”
“She did but maybe I’m saying it, too.”
“I hope you told her to shove it.” She glances over. “You didn’t. I would have.” Simone pulls the car away from the entrance. “What is a good person? I’ve never been able to figure it out.”
“Depends who you ask,” I say, and she says, “Exactly. So you better be careful who you ask.”
Simone points to the lake. “I saw a sailboat,” she says. “Right before you came out.”
“It’s too cold for sailboats.”
“Not everyone hates the cold like you do. Maybe they’re testing for next season. That happens. They have to test.”
“Where?” I say.
She pulls the car to the water’s edge and brakes. “There. It went into one of those inlets. It’ll be back out in a second. Red with an orange stripe. I swear.”
No one rushes out of the Inn to chase me. No one sits in the cars surrounding us. The lot is empty.
“Hey.” She reacts to my doubt. “Good things still happen.”
I place my hand next to hers though we don’t touch. This is my soul, I think. And this is Simone’s. “I’m glad you didn’t die,” I say. “That time.”
“Thank you.” She pulls out her phone. “I’m going to take a picture of that boat. You’ll see. This lake is stunning. No wonder everyone’s always talking about it.” She’s giddy. “Let’s take a picture together. Like this.” She holds her phone in front of us and I slide closer. Her crispness. Her warmth. She counts, takes it. “Shall we put it on your account?”
“Mine’s not very…” I draw it up on my phone and show her. One picture of a tree at dusk.
She looks at me with pity. “It’s like you’re not even in the world. We’ll use my dummy account.” She scrolls so I can see: forests, houses, city corners, flashes of Adrian. A sign: DO NOT SHELVE ITEMS IN AISLE THREE WITHOUT ASKING JOANNA.
“I’ve seen that before,” I tell her. “But I can’t remember where.”
“It’s from my neighborhood grocery store,” she says. “Who does Joanna think she is? It makes me want to shelve items to spite her. There,” she says. “You’re added.”
We wait by the water. The unseasonably warm weather has delayed the changing of the leaves. Only one tree in the parking lot is going for it.
“It will be Thanksgiving soon,” I say.
“Do you still celebrate that colonialist nonsense?” she says.
“I do,” I admit.
“I do, too.”
“Well then,” I say. “We’re married.”
* * *
When I say I realized the sun goes down in California and that this triggered a vaulting from my life, I don’t mean a photograph was the reason. It was only the last in a series.
I broke a towel rack after an unrepeatable set of events. I re-glued it but after a week it fell again. The old glue built into a deposit that changed the shape of the holding part. Reinjury is worse than injury. We tell ourselves stories about ourselves to try to crack the old glue off. Lord knows if the new part will hold.
“Let’s list everyone we think should shove it,” Simone says. “I’ll start,” she says. “Mom.”
Through the dull perches of time and too long since that surge of awakening, on the nights we are certain of the unbearable wrongness of coexistence, the birds get in. Tiny, inconsequential shifts put me in a new position from which I could see unexpected vistas or be approached by unlikely people. One shift leads to another as you make room for yourself again and again. I readjusted several times over the course of years to allow myself to arrive.
I’VE BEEN MARRIED HUNDREDS OF TIMES
If I were to subject myself to that which I subject others, and build a diorama of my life, I’d place a petite, ethnically ambiguous woman at a table in a red kitchen. It would be summer, her favorite season, yet she’d be wearing jeans because she’s ashamed of the plum-colored scarring that maps her right side. It would be her grandmother’s kitchen, on the table a miniature box of gingersnaps and a pair of binoculars used to spy on the neighbors. If I were ambitious, I’d string wire from the outside gutter to a plastic tree, and on it I’d place a few judgmental budgies whose bright colors don’t belong in New York’s palette. The woman’s conversation partner, her grandmother, would be a realistically rendered parakeet, because there can be no accurate representation of my life that doesn’t include an element of oddity that has always been a border between me and the “right-minded” world in which women walk down aisles experiencing simple happinesses. I’d build the bird myself, every gentle feather.
People who know me now don’t know I was ever married, or estranged from my sister. I think about my wedding on nights I want to remind myself of myself. Life has no past tense: To remember something is to relive it. I’m smiling at my sister and I’m also lying prone in the ambulance covered in a thin sheet. I’m watching a woman mail her shoes. I’m with my grandmother in the antechamber. I’m breathing on a bench in Union Square, helping Danny overturn cushions to find the remote on an endless, unremarkable day. My great-grandmother is always curling her hair, gazing over the roiling sea. The parakeets are always blinking into the cracked sunlight and realizing, this is somewhere much harder than Argentina. The street dancer is always looking over her remarkable shoulder. I am always lying on that floor in shared blood, reaching toward Yuna in her last moments and finding myself, as I always do when in fingertip’s distance of connection, lacking.
I’d need dioramas for these watershed moments, too, and when presenting my life to the governing body, I’d say: To understand this woman you must know that each is happening simultaneously.
I’m always sitting in the parked car the day my sister, Simone, drives me away from my life, waiting for a sailboat, making a list of people who can shove it.
“Rodrigo,” I say. “Flagels. Long Island.”
“Christ yes,” she says. “Do you know they say on Long Island? As in, you are on this piece-of-garbage island and it’s going to be for a long time.”
“Above Long Island,” I say. “Outside.”
“Long Island can shove itself on and up its own ass.”
“You really hate this island. Who broke up with you who was from here?”
She smiles. “I broke up with her.”
I’ve grown up wi
th the woman sitting next to me, but I don’t know whether she prefers winter to summer, hates root vegetables, if she gets cold easily. If she’s one of those people who regularly has an unseen hair hanging in front of her eyes she can never grab. I like being nowhere near figuring her out.
“Why didn’t Granny leave me alone after I found you?” I say. “I did what she asked.”
“Who knows with that woman?” She refreshes her lip gloss in the rearview mirror. “Maybe you didn’t do it fast enough, or the way she wanted. Maybe she knew she could count on me to bring the whole enterprise crashing down.”
“Where is the sailboat I’ve been promised?” I say.
“It’ll be here,” Simone says. “Wait.”
It’s true what Rose said about happiness. But it wasn’t that I thought I didn’t deserve it, it’s that I don’t consider her idea happiness. Happiness was only ever on its way as I waited in the peony room, the elevator, the grocery store. When I hear my sister on the line or see her driving gloves, mint colored with roses at the wrist, I am met. When the ship hits, I chase it.
“It’s probably going to take a while to settle everything,” I say. “Apartment. Car.”
“I can’t imagine a thing a woman can go through that can’t be beautiful.”
“You do ruin everything.”
She says, “Family trait.”
Simone and I have time and working arms and legs and are in good moods. I lean forward to see out from under the windshield where she points.
“How do you be a bride?” I asked the hairdresser on the morning of my wedding. “This is the first time I’ve been one.”
I meant, how does one join oneself to another? Thinking of it now, there are many ways. Renting space within my mother, Rose turning at the sound of her name, listening to my sister’s tender voice. There are intimacies that don’t involve marriage just as there are marriages that don’t involve intimacy. The mind provides the only possible privacy so what is more intimate than thought? If intimacy is marriage, I’m married to anyone I’ve carried in my mind. If intimacy is marriage, I’ve felt more married to the EMT who could have left but instead pressed her palm against my heart for the length of several breaths to make sure I was still tethered to the world. That EMT married me, if you will. Will you? If you say I do, these are vows. Will you stay if I change into something you couldn’t anticipate and don’t recognize? Will you be honest with me when I’m present, about me when I’m absent? Will you encourage me to be as much like myself as possible? Will you hide what I use to cause pain? The drugs, the credit card, the words. Will you take my picture in front of every tree I like from now until…? Will you not only look at but delight in what I point to? Look at this sailboat, look at the moon at its brashest, the parakeet, activating out of the dusk. Every day from now until ellipsis? Again? Until? Again? Say yes and we are married. If intimacy is marriage, every time you are my first thought upon waking we marry again.
Simone slips her hand into mine, a simple movement like an afterthought. We peer at the body of water, waiting for something to arrive, willing to believe that whatever does can be good. I hold my sister’s hand, a small, precious bird.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their care with the author and/or the manuscript of Parakeet, a universe of gratitude to:
Claudia Ballard, my agent and hero; the Munster Literature Centre; University College Cork, Cork City; the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; the MacDowell Colony; Hedgebrook Writers in Residence program; the Center for Fiction; Institute of American Indian Arts; New York University; the New School; One Story; Catapult; University of Iowa Press; Mira Jacob, Lauren Groff, and Laura van den Berg for gifting their early, lovely words; Lydia Zoells and the team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and my wise editor, Jenna Johnson.
Tanya Rey, Phyllis Trout and Brian Brooks, Elliott Holt, Halimah Marcus, Steph Opitz, Grace Lavery, Angel Nafis and Shira Erlichman, Manuel Gonzales, Ramona Ausubel, Christine Vines, Derek Palacio, Anne Ray, Shawn-Aileen Clark, Claire Vaye Watkins, Téa Obreht and Dan Sheehan, Charles Hagerty and Pip Pickering, Thomas Morris, Thomas Grattan, Yuka Igarashi, Julia Strayer, the Dodson family, and my students, who help me stay in love with “what every second goes away” (Ross Gay).
Helene Bertino, who allows for me. Adina Talve-Goodman, Mr. Fox, and Sophie, who I carry.
Also available from
MARIE-HELENE BERTINO
“Inventive, gorgeously written and unforgettable.”
—NPR
“Clever, charming and full of life …
Like the best jazz, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas is a marvel of the unexpected, a buoyant, swinging tale of interwoven destinies that Marie-Helene Bertino tells with verve, wit, and warmth. I loved it.”
—MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD, New York Times bestselling author of Astonish Me and Seating Arrangements
Available wherever books are sold
ALSO BY MARIE-HELENE BERTINO
2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas
Safe as Houses
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. Her work has received the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize, and has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Center for Fiction. Formerly an editor at One Story and Catapult, she now teaches at NYU, the New School, and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In spring 2020, she was the Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MFA program at the University of Montana. Visit her website at www.mariehelenebertino.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
What is the Internet?
Don’t Forget to Get Married
Ewan Mcgregor Does His Best
The Ship
A Play Has No Past Tense
The Boys Who Love Priscilla
Enter Mother
Less Good than Others at Hiding
Here Today, Bird Tomorrow
The Groom, of Course!
The Bride Does Not like Almond
What Else Are We Here For?
The Uncanny Bride
A Lot of People Live in Santa Cruz
Parakeet
I Once Saw a Woman Mail Her Shoes
A Wedding Is an Internet Where Everyone Searches for Themselves
What We Love, We Mention
Diner at the End of the World
Lead Us Not onto Long Island
Sara Something
Ghosts from an Old Failed Wedding
Ding
In Tragedy We Excel
Simone Looks at the Lake
A Room After a Room
Do Not Shelve Items in Aisle Three Without Asking Joanna
I’ve Been Married Hundreds of Times
Acknowledgments
Also by Marie-Helene Bertino
A Note About the Author
Copyright
.Net
Parakeet: A Novel Page 19