Parakeet

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  At any opportunity—a penny hurled into a fountain, 11:11, driving by a graveyard—she’s wished to be married. Our ideas of the institution differ; hers involves immutable contentment, me a roll of the dice. I don’t understand why we are talking about her hypothetical wedding when mine is actual. “… an island,” she says, “or maybe New England.”

  “New England is beautiful in the summer.” My voice sounds pinched and alien, as if it’s coming not from me but from the man nearby ridding his sleeve of crumbs.

  “I like warm climates,” she says. “Strapless dresses. One of Nancy’s former coworkers went to a wedding in Barbados I think a few months ago. The pictures were incredible.”

  My wedding is failing against one that a former coworker of Nancy’s attended in what Rose thinks was Barbados. A man on a bench forks noodles out of a plastic box. A girl walks by, clutching her wallet.

  Rose says, “I wish I looked like that in jeans.”

  “You look great in jeans,” I say, then, “Nancy is the one who undermined you in that meeting.”

  I expect a reward for remembering this friend fact, the meeting that angered her for days, but receive none. Are we going to get back to me? Rose speaks in a professional tone. “Nancy’s been a pal, actually. Last week she put me up for a series about psoriasis that would mean a lot of money. She can’t help the fact that she’s had to be tougher to get where she is. Nice girls don’t get the corner office.” She says the last sentence as if referencing a movie we saw together. Disgust ticks her eyebrow.

  My heart thuds then is still for so long I yearn for the thudding.

  “I was always so fierce in saying I didn’t think discrimination existed, that everyone was being judged fairly. I’d pitied other women who had to use things like misogyny to cheer themselves up about not being as talented.”

  “Talented.” My neck stiffens, shot through with sudden cold. I focus on her hand holding the phone, the black squirrel pausing in its work.

  “But recently I’ve seen it—the thing that happens when a less deserving man gets ahead for no reason. It started when Matt was given the article about suicide in Japan to edit when I had been the one who brought the story in. He’d only been there a few weeks. ‘Where’s Kyoto?’ he said, when we first talked about it.”

  “He didn’t know where Kyoto was,” I say. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I have to stop. I’m not feeling well.”

  I sit on a nearby bench. After studying it, she sits next to me.

  “Could we talk about what I mentioned earlier?” I say.

  “Your doubts?” She circles the word.

  I silence my ringing phone. “My anxiety is high,” I say. “A lot of factors and questions. I’m wondering if I should get in touch with my brother.”

  “Tom? Now?”

  Put your hand on your heart and see what’s happening there, I tell my brain. My brain delivers the message. My hand moves to my chest. Underneath the chilly skin my heart flutters.

  “Is that a smart thing to do before the wedding?” Rose says. “He has such a destructive effect.”

  “Maybe not Tom, but Adrian.” Adrian is my brother’s manager and best friend.

  “Adrian?”

  Rose has become a bird whose particular call is to exclaim the name of people she doesn’t like. Press down on your chest, I tell my brain, the pressure will jump-start your heart. Instead, my heart skitters.

  “When was the last time you saw your brother? His wedding? I still can’t get my mind around that catastrophe.” Rose turns as if identifying the source of a bad smell. “What’s going on with you? You look dead.”

  There’ve been several times in our friendship when Rose and I reached what I feared was its conclusion, when an important update to our subscription to each other had lapsed, and we either had to renew or face the tenuousness of our connection. Several years before, I had dated a married man whose cruelty put me in bed for months. In the conversations Rose and I had after the breakup, I’d often been accused of misremembering details and being dramatic. If I tell her the truth, she’ll say that’s what I’m doing now, exaggerating my nerves into the shape of a bird, so instead I arrange my features into a lively smile I hope pleases her.

  “It’s nothing.” My voice comes from the direction of the carousel where ponies with hard hooves and ears shift by. They don’t even go up and down anymore, I think. Just forward. Be positive, I tell my brain. “You would be great at writing about psoriasis.” I hear the dandruff of trash on the curb of the Forever 21 building. If I can find my ChapStick and apply it, the darkness won’t come. I locate the tube in my bag and swipe at my mouth. I steal a few cleansing breaths.

  “I haven’t told you the specifics,” she says.

  “You’d be great at anything.” If I can swallow a sip of water, the darkness won’t come. “Do you have water?” I say reasonably.

  “You know?” She is annoyed by my sporadic attention. “I should get back to the office.”

  My vision collapses, pinwheels. I can see only the woman near us overturning a lunch bag into a trash can. My heart tries to leap farther than my rib cage.

  Calmly explain to her that you are having a heart attack.

  “I’m having a heart attack,” I say.

  “One of your spells. Even the thought of your brother can bring one on. This is what I mean.” She flattens the back of her hand against my forehead. “It’s your imagination.”

  The buildings that hover over the trees wobble, they will morph into malevolent shapes and descend on us faster than my ability to explain. I can only close my eyes and wait, as she guides my body to a supine position on the bench where pigeons shit. No living thing has a problem living today. The joggers in their bright trunks. A man chuckles into a phone. The crumbs hopping in the breeze, even. Even the crumbs. Meanwhile, my heart and mind are collapsing. Rose traces the length of my arm.

  “Maybe loosen your coat,” she says.

  “I need it to be the way it is.”

  “Breathe then. Pay as much attention to what is leaving your body as what is entering.”

  Focus, brain. The sound I make when I inhale is metal falling into other metal, and it relents for only a moment before my chest sucks whatever it can back in. My breath serrates.

  “In and out.” Rose is penitent. I realize how much she wanted to leave, that my time had been allotted. “You’re having a panic attack. Breathe.” Rose says I’m fine to a stranger asking, “Is she okay?”

  “Who was that?” It’s coming, my brain says. Only you can see it.

  “No one,” Rose says. “It’s in your head. Imagine your breath as a fishing line cast out slowly. Let it go as far as it wants. I knew you should have taken time off.”

  “I have to work.” I don’t say, I’m not like you who can afford anything she wants, but we both hear the unspoken irritant through the magic of best friends.

  “Right,” she says. “Your clients need you. In and out.”

  “Try loosening her coat,” says another stranger. I’m being observed, as if I am a plastic can drummer or a woman painted gold who only moves one millimeter a minute.

  Racked with guilt for delaying her, for making what sounds like a handful of strangers worry, for occupying a bench during a busy weekday, I want to make her laugh. “I am a woman painted in gold who only moves one millimeter a minute,” I say.

  “Sure.” She sounds distant, as if looking in a different direction.

  My heart steadies. My brain calls on the other parts of my body.

  “She’s fine,” Rose says. “She’s about to get up.” Then to me, “You’re causing quite a scene. But now you’re telling jokes. Maybe you’re okay?” She pulls me to a seated position. I open my eyes. Two or three people stand nearby, gaping. One of them takes a picture. “Nice,” he tells himself. He walks off, fiddling with filters and platforms.

  I’m exhausted and sweating but have regained control of my heartbeat. I assume Rose will wait until I trust my b
ody again. “I need to tell you about a bird.”

  “Ugh,” she says. “Birds.” Her gaze is fixed on the stoplight where she will cross to her office. Her entire body points away.

  “I’m fine,” I lie. “Go.”

  “If you’re sure.” She dusts my cheek with a kiss. A waft of vanilla bean before she moves away. “I’ll check up on you later today.”

  “Be safe,” I say. “You always cross on the red. If you do that and get hit—”

  “—I won’t be able to sue,” she finishes. “I know. Don’t worry about me.” She hits the word me in a way that will annoy me for months.

  My phone rings. The florist informs me that I am half an hour late and asks if I know how many days there are until my wedding. I only have to say yes to her final design, but she’d prefer me to be there.

  “We’re not coming,” I say. “Ever.”

  “Ever?”

  Rose allows a group of tourists to pass, then tees up at a curb. The stoplight is red. I watch her wait.

  “I mean today,” I say. “We’re not coming ever today.”

  “There are five days until your wedding,” the florist says. “Long Island is far away. The longer you wait, the less chance you’ll have to veto the design. Already this is an unusually late final appointment.”

  “I know time is passing,” I say. “I know Long Island is far away.”

  “Tomorrow?” she says.

  “Tomorrow,” I agree.

  We hang up. The light is still red. Everything is taking an unusually long time. Through weddings and showers and stoplights. Poor Rose waits.

  Around this time, maybe even this day, a man Rose met through the groom will call. Maybe they talk about a leftover remark from a gathering, a kernel of conversation he’s been nursing like the kitten I found in the backyard and fed with droppers and it yowled so much I feared it was some other wild thing. He asks her out. They arrange to meet at a neighborhood bistro. She’ll tell me that part. Nancy and Rose will travel to Houston on business. Rose will tell Nancy about the neon phone she had as a girl and Nancy will tell her about the woman who stalked her in college, the reason she can’t wear shorts. Nancy’s trust in Rose will bloom and she’ll put Rose in charge of Texas distributors. It will be travel and a few unclarified family obligations that she’ll use as excuses the first few times she ignores my messages. Weeks will go by and I will glow for her job and this new boy. If she’s happy I’m happy. Is she happy? I’ll call again. I’ll e-mail. I’ll catch fractions of conversations at parties, mentions of her like glimpses in a store window. Other friends will hear from her, but I’ll blame unfortunate timing. I won’t ask anyone how she is, because our friendship has never needed outside sources. She and her new boyfriend will spend a long weekend at a mountain house. I’ll see photos online. Only then will I acknowledge a disturbance in our wire. The logical part of me will advise staying calm, and I will, even when I see more photos of her and the boy and new people who wear the statement necklaces we hate. Our mutual friends will act like shuddering horses when I ask if anyone’s heard from her. Antonia will return from a trip to Vietnam where she spent the entire time arguing with her girlfriend. We’ll stay on the phone for hours. The most painful thing was spending a month watching her fall out of love with me. Rose will roll her wheeled suitcase through the airport. Stand in line, wait for coffee. Airports are scrubbed from particulars, you can forget a friend or a family while, from a list of tantalizing options, selecting a sandwich. One day on the phone my mother will say, “She ghosted you,” but I’ll protest: You don’t have friends, Mother, so you don’t know this is merely one of those times in a friendship when you’re the kind of out of touch that dissipates with one visit. Further, she can’t be a ghost because ghosts are present, avian, ghosts have unfinished business and Rose will seem finished with me. The subtraction of her will leave me feeling like the remainder. My entrance into rooms will trigger an easily detectable sealing of conversation. What Rose and I are to each other is the combination to my high school locker, indelible in the muscle memory of my hands. I’ll remember that even though she never joined the girls who made fun of my skin color, she never intervened. That in high school she yearned for a boyfriend so much she’d ditch anyone. My irreversible idea of our friendship will flicker. The times I rescued her will occur to me on nights I will not sleep or eat or read. And then. Antonia, long over the breakup in Vietnam, will call and say, “Have you heard?” Never anything more wonderful or terrible than Have you heard? Something in me will fall from floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor to floor. The boy proposed, Rose and he will marry soon. I want you to hear from someone who cares about you, Antonia will say. Everyone is thrilled. Everyone loves the Rose she is with him. Everyone is invited, almost. I’ll list friendship infractions. I’ll want credit for every canceled dinner, for the affection I failed to receive. Two times around to the right, eight, one full time to the left, thirty-four, one time around to the right, eleven. I thought interest had been accruing. Like Skee-Ball machine tickets several arms long we traded in for a spider ring. The quarters don’t buy you the spider but the time spent trying for it. Eight. Thirty-four. Eleven.

  Of course, in the Grandmother part of me, I’ll have known all along about Rose, maybe since she left me in Union Square with breathing exercises I could learn from the Internet. She was an endlessly ringing phone.

  After I brought that matted, violent, bleeding thing in from the rain and nursed it back to health I swore it was a subway rat, or another terrifying thing I didn’t have the word for but that you don’t bring into your house.

  This moment during which I sit on the bench and Rose crosses the park is the last time I’ll be with her in the undisturbed house of our friendship that shelters our old posters, the sound of our living and undivorced parents puttering downstairs, our rides together on country roads we think we’ve named.

  The stoplight is still red. I watch my best friend wait. On this afternoon in Union Square when we are still subscribed to each other. Which is why I breathe like a good girl in a way I hope will make her proud and ignore the fact that she didn’t tell me to stay safe. I’m forever be safe-ing those who don’t care whether I walk into traffic. Rose scrolls through what appears to be several messages on her phone. Maybe one is from him, the new man who will marry her on a gleaming hill far away from this city. I’ll see one photo and close my computer. The light turns green. Rose moves with city purpose toward a side street. The ambition of her gait. The sagging hem of her skirt. My best friend. How can people pass her without realizing how singular she is? The way she holds her wallet in front of her like in the woods you would a lantern. One reliable thing in life is that people carry their wallets when they won’t be gone long from the office. Their heavy pocketbooks left slung on the backs of their chairs. Rose didn’t want to stay. I watch her turn the corner, so vivid when she’s made up her mind. A falling anvil couldn’t delay her and I am delayed by everything. The noise of the city returns and crowds me. I’m thinking how grateful I am for her as I remind myself to breathe in and out and in and out at lunch hour on an otherwise normal day in Union Square.

  THE SHIP

  That evening I take the train to meet the woman who is selling her wedding dress.

  A trumpeter plays in the subway car as we glide through the tunnels. I lean against the window in numbing, post-panic exhaustion. Between songs, the trumpeter adjusts her instrument and the car is silent. Other people board without realizing music has been played moments before, or perhaps the molecules are arranged differently than if there had been no music, so anyone who enters senses it, like they’ve walked into a memory.

  What I first liked about the groom was that he didn’t have to be drunk to dance. He’d pump his elbows like he was winding himself up. This is surprisingly winning. I liked his carefully arranged apartment, a stadium spice rack. His
family are academics, framed certificates on the wall. I’m grateful to be marrying into a simpler enterprise. My family: a complex system of dark islands seen from land.

  It occurs to me as we roar into the tunnel that connects Manhattan to Brooklyn that in less than a week I will be called wife. My wrists feel hollow and I’m relieved when my stop arrives. The trumpeter and I exit at Fort Hamilton Parkway where she practices scales on the platform. On the staircase an overly coated woman halts in between steps to catch up with herself or wait for pain to pass, people grumbling by. What’s easy for others is difficult for her. I walk behind, using my thoughts to help her until she reaches ground level and we part.

  My phone rings, a number I don’t recognize. When I answer, no one responds. “Danny?” I say.

  “Hey,” he says. “It’s Danny.” He pretends to be startled, as if I have called him. “I couldn’t remember. Are you coming Thursday or Friday?”

  “I’m not coming again, Danny.”

  “That’s right,” he says. “We’re done.”

  “Lucky you,” I say. “No more invasive questions.”

  I hear commotion behind him, a second of bar noise. “You say my name a lot. It’s always, Danny this and Danny that.”

  “I guess I have something to work on.” Travelers push through the metallic turnstiles one floor above the trains that arrive and depart dispassionately. I’m late but his voice prompts me to stop. “What’s on your mind? Wanna talk?”

  He laughs, a derisive sound. “Talk,” he says. “Nah.”

  I ask if he’s sure and he says, sure, he’s sure.

  “You take care, okay, Danny?” I say. “There I go again.”

  “Yeah. Okay.” He has trouble hanging up. I hear more bar noise, fumbling, a muted curse, a dull click.

  I find a dim street lined with photocopies of a silt-colored brownstone. One house looks into a mirror and sees its reflection. House and house and house. No one sits on any of the identical stoops. No one peers out the windows. In the distance, two blond women sit on a stoop. No, I realize as I get closer, two sister golden retrievers with large, emotive mouths. I contemplate asking them where I am but then their attention shifts to a woman bustling past, wrapped in a scarf, throwing up a vague scent of lilacs.