Parakeet

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  It’s morning and Saturday, technically. I will be married today. At Shop and Save I search for the friendliest-seeming sleeve of peonies. Holding it, I practice. “I’m so, so, so,” I say. “… excited.”

  In the checkout line, I scan the magazines. A celebrity is sad, pregnant. I allow myself to think of Tom for the length of the wait. No matter how wrong or putrid, fucked up or sad, no one except him could make me laugh until my abs ache. He was the least boring person. It was too painful to bear witness to his misery when he was addicted. I think of him in heels, taupe control-top tights, twisting the waistband of his skirt to correct its alignment like women do. The full measure of fluorescent supermarket light hits my thoughts. She is happy. Hard knots shake loose in my shoulders. Happy: like white rice, the word comes with every meal, but in reality, happiness is so elusive it may as well be supernatural. I drag my items down the tacky checkout line. The woman in front of me pays for the makings of a solo dinner and enough food for one adored cat. I’m jealous of whomever gets to see Simone regularly and would pay any amount, wound anyone, skip anything, for a quotidian day with her.

  “What beautiful flowers.” The cashier punches numbers into the machine. “Special occasion?”

  “I’m getting married today.”

  He is so rapturous that for a moment I believe I’ve said the wrong thing. He’s being dramatic and sincere. “I hope I get to do that one day.”

  “Get your flowers at Shop and Save?”

  “No, silly.” He wraps the peonies in brown paper. “Get married.”

  “Marriage is not an achievement,” I say for what feels like the tenth time. No one can imagine an ambivalent bride. Except, I remember, Peaseblossom the parakeet, who hated weddings. The young actor has won. This, plus the cashier’s delight, makes me bratty and capable of damage. I will punch this display of protein powders, I think, but instead I remain silent as tears arrive.

  “You’re so happy!” he says. “Look at you, crying!”

  He hands the flowers to me and says good luck. As I fold bills into my wallet, he tells a girl wearing the unflattering company apron, “She’s getting married today. So happy she’s crying.”

  “Enjoy!” Her tone implies that she wishes something for me, but whatever it is does not include joy. She and Peaseblossom are sisters in dismay. Enjoy: the enthusiasm equivalent of Congrats.

  Those of us jumpy, sensitive, injured, maligned, gaslit as shit, disappeared, panicky, bullied, skin-thin, hyperspecific, de-spined, poorly drugged, weak-willed, fetishized, micro-assaulted, truck-dragged, browbeat insomnimaniacs with unfair bowels and role models, life-ruining kink addictions, and piss-poor familial connections, haremed and hoovered, sealed screaming into closets and shoved under love seats find it hard enough to ease our scraped brains into the compact-only parking spot at the Shop and Save let alone into anything resembling peace without someone threatening, Enjoy!

  I match her blankness. “Thank you.”

  I decide to take the train back to Long Island. The F roars into the station and my reflection in the train doors assures me I am exactly the woman I think I am. A backpacker gets on and pulls a map from the series of pockets on his pack. He notices me staring and moves closer to an older couple with beige luggage stacked in front of them.

  A girl sitting near me who cares deeply says into her phone, “It’s not like I really care.” She wears a cinnamon-colored wig.

  The man from the couple returns my gaze with an almost-smile, which cheers me.

  “Uh-uhn,” says the girl in the cinnamon-colored wig.

  A child leans against her window frame, glaring at the passing train. A bowling pin surrounded by jags of neon that signify a strike. A man delivers a plate of food to a table.

  The girl in the cinnamon wig: “How are you going to tell me who I am? Then when I call you on it, you’ve got nothing to say.”

  The flank of an overpass shines like abalone. The wig, the shine, the warmth of the metro’s heat, like buoys bobbing on the sea of night. Listen. I am moving toward something, even if anyone watching would say I am only going back and forth on the train. I no longer want to keep myself hidden from myself.

  It’s Saturday, technically. Technically means that in every way that matters—emotionally, mentally—it’s Friday, but technically, it’s Saturday, the day I will be married. When I return to my room at the Inn, the Post-it on the lamp reads, DON’T FORGET TO GET MARRIED, the groom’s back moves sweetly in sleep, and I think my head will explode but instead the phone rings and it is Rose, who is still my best friend. It’s time to leave for the salon. Everyone is eating flagels and waiting for me, the hesitating beauty. Do I go? In this moment it is as simple as not wanting to disappoint a lobby of people with whom I share varying degrees of intimacy, some obligatory, some merely sketched out, some rich and entangled. There is no blanket of explanation that could cover them all. Do I go?

  Why did I ever quit smoking, my grandmother said. One of life’s joys.

  I button a new shirt over my bare chest and walk through the antechamber into the hallway. The elevator brings me down to the lobby, where everyone applauds.

  We take two cars to the salon, passing a bakery, a post office, two stoplights. The town is famous for its lake, bagel hybrids, and how little time it takes to drive through. The air is so cold I fear we’ll crack as we run on tiptoes into the hair salon. My mother and my friends, their bodies swelled beyond childhood. Their C-section scars, their fractured attention spans. We were intertwined in college but no longer know who is sick or lonely or scared, as we shake out the cold in the vestibule. The receptionist announces who will go to which chair. I am the last assigned, so I watch my friends retreat to their stations where they explain the weaknesses of their hair, what years of abuse have done to it, ways in which it used to be lovelier. Requesting heat and products that tame.

  I remember the way Simone said the word experiment and the client who fell through improperly laid insulation and now doesn’t understand the idea of a folder. If you can get through your own wedding without an existential breakdown, I’m happy for you.

  I follow the hairdresser to a station by the window and take my seat. I explain where I’m damaged. “Do your best,” I say.

  THE UNCANNY BRIDE

  On the morning of my wedding at an early and incorrect hour that makes good people appear menacing the hairdresser says I am the calmest bride she’s ever done.

  “How do you be a bride?” I say. “This is the first time I’ve been one.”

  Most brides, she says, are filled with words and energy. A few moments later she adds, “Opinions.”

  The room is wide with flaking paint and so cold we summon breath. She winds my hair around an iron and cheers for a chugging coffee maker. She apologizes for the chill, the coffee’s delay. I can hear but not see my friends, sitting on peeling stools and radiators improvised for chairs among stacks of boxes. The coffee maker mutters, a soothing sound. I leave another message for the reception planner.

  “A wedding should exist in its own world,” the hairdresser says. “Undisturbed by the petty crap that goes on in ours.”

  “That hasn’t been my experience,” I say.

  Her lips are colored a shade of red that’s meant to be fun, yet her downturned mouth creates the tributaries of some sad river that deepens her forehead. She’s copying me; the tendency humans have to mirror another’s pain.

  “You’re so calm,” she says, thinking I haven’t heard.

  “I’m calm like a bird is calm.”

  “Ugh,” she says. “Birds.”

  “Why does everyone hate them?” I say, continuing an earlier thought.

  She says she once watched a seagull wrench a sandwich from a woman’s fist. The woman held on. Tug-o’-war. “Eventually she gave up, the woman. The bird flew off with the sandwich.”

  I tell her that I once saw a woman mail her shoes. I don’t mean in a package. She walked up to a mailbox, leaned against it for suppor
t while with a free hand took off one shoe then the other. She opened the box’s door and slid them in, listened to them flack against the metal bottom, checked that they were gone the way you do a letter, and walked away, barefoot.

  The story stops the hairdresser’s talking, the desired effect, so I am free to consult the window and think of birds. I want to see a woman in a flattering trench coat hunched against the cold. I want to see a winter animal. But the day insists on parking lot and this corner of dumpster. Except for a car slugging by carrying its own weather system, the window never varies its point of view. Most people think you need shoes but that woman thought she was fine without them. I’m thinking, trauma is an elevator. A portal, I mean. An Internet.

  The day requires me to get married. From another part of the house where she has been pinned and ironed, Rose arrives to say she is excited. Am I excited?

  The salon has found its heat. Those who can, shuck sweaters to reveal short sleeves.

  “Yes,” I say.

  She is the third friend to scoot around boxes to ask me this question. I’ve answered yes each time, but a particular tilt of the head makes it clear I’ve answered incorrectly. As the others did, Rose ticks through supplementary questions (How excited?) or makes a statement she believes is innocuous (I’d be excited, too, if I were about to marry the greatest man on Long Island), then leaves, shelving her confusion.

  My phone buzzes on the counter. The tables came in, the reception planner says, the linens the correct shade of neutral. We are unaccustomed to talking to each other because I preferred to leave bridal opinions to my mother and mother-in-law. “Will you please add one person to table nine,” I say.

  “One person,” she says in a way that means, At the last minute?

  “Simone,” I say. “A dear friend.”

  I hear the rustling of aggravation as she hums, fusses. “Simone…?”

  “Then it’s set,” I say. “I’m grateful.”

  “Who is Simone?” says Antonia, who has crept behind me during the call.

  “A friend.”

  Antonia asks if I’m excited and I say yes.

  I sit at that vanity for years, my mother and friends orbiting, offering barrettes, bronzers, taking them away, asking if the coffee’s burned, convincing my shoulders down, discussing where they hold stress, Mother fretting over the carpet, referencing their lower backs, offering me a bite of whatever they’re eating, fingertipping a eucalyptus mask over the apples of my cheeks taking care to avoid the vulnerable under-eye area, placing a phone to my ear so I can hear a questioning voice, taking it away, halving a flagel and offering it to me, someone at the door, a mistake, a new delivery, crumbs on my shoulder, this heel or that, this bracelet’s sheen, these stockings have silk in them you can tell, a matter on the other side of the Inn, delicate empty boxes, Mother in new makeup, new Mother, bellboy at the door, something blue and something old (my heart) unable to rise to the occasion (my heart), a forgotten idea winks outside my periphery, can’t catch it, mutterings on the edge of my hearing, don’t tell her, tell her, a bouquet of laughter (my heart) tossed over the carpet, dropped, mother-in-law fretting on the other end of the phone, matter settled, matter unrelated, updated eyelashes, the desire to crawl into one of these boxes and draw vellum over me, with a damp washcloth whisk the mask away, show her the flowers, look at them, look at me, rise, heart, please, these are good people, rise before they see you in the mirror, such a beautiful. Girl, don’t you think? Is that James with more flagels? Flowers hold stress in their stamens. Couches hold stress in their cushions. Barrettes gather hair. Gather the gathering items back into the boxes, offers retreating over the carpet, rejected jewels rewind into their cases, but there is one more commemoration—from a profound box, the hairdresser reveals the veil. Everyone is wild over this dash of lace on pearlized combs that possesses such gravity it pulls all the women from their chairs. All week everyone has been treating me like I am eggshell and the veil is the graduation of that feeling. I have become. So fragile it could be soiled by breath yet the veil persists across the room. Antonia won’t hand it over. I’m not ready to stop touching it, she says. Center the breathless ecru comb at the nape. As the hairdresser presses it against my scalp, they unfold the veil out from underneath itself, look at her eyelashes against it, the rose rising on her dark skin, the scallop flush along my collarbones, black hair against the bone-colored everything, the most correct earrings, eyes in another place no matter, mind in another place no matter, the woman removing her shoes and lifting the door to the mailbox isn’t worried, the bodies of my friends surround me, switch places, smooth the crinoline, what a morning, the sun is here ancestors be praised, couldn’t have wanted, couldn’t have wished for, I’m not ready to have this feeling, this feeling is not finished halving me, the veil is buckled hard against my scalp, such a beautiful. A finished bride brown in the mirror. Lined in striking pencil, articulated in ebony and red.

  Antonia holds up a mirror so I can see myself from every angle. I cannot be mistaken for anyone else. The hairdresser gives a low whistle of approval. “She’s the calmest bride.”

  Several moments pass, perhaps a century, until everyone is called by voices deeper inside the salon to their beautifying processes and I turn into a feather and collapse onto the salon seat maybe I am still there now.

  A LOT OF PEOPLE LIVE IN SANTA CRUZ

  I’ve never made good money but enough to cover pride, so I pay for everyone’s procedures and walk to my car. The car hisses as I bounce in place convincing warmth into my arms and legs. I drive in silence, lit cigarette balanced on my lower lip.

  The concierge calls hello across the lobby. Hello, I holler, and point to my wrist where there is no watch. She shrugs as if to say, There is never enough time.

  Other than my event-worthy hair and veil, I wear jeans and a button-down and carry nothing. A bride that stops at the neck. No attendants. I press the elevator’s button and can sense the concierge debating whether to call out again. Her sincere smile, her hand hovering in the air. The elevator arrives. Simone at the wedding. The elevator lifts but when we three—myself, the elevator, my thoughts—reach my floor, the doors do not open. I’ve come to welcome these elevator delays, guilt-free moments.

  I watch myself in the mirrored walls, veiled, slide down to sit on the floor and dial the reception planner. “Checking to make sure you’ve arranged a place card and seat for Simone.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I’ve put her with the table you’ve labeled ‘one-offs.’”

  “Perfect.” I hang up.

  The doors slide open. The concierge’s voice trails me out of the elevator. “I’ve heard it’s good luck to say a rosary on the morning of your wedding. I have one at my desk if you…”

  Minutes down the tree-lined road, the groom is being mimosa-toasted in his aunt Henshaw’s home. The cake is in the shape of the lake. In the morning we’ll return to the city.

  Alone in the room, I switch the channel to a newscast and slide under the folded coverlet. From the shelf of sleep, I hear local news stories. Henrietta has opened a store during an unfriendly economic climate. Despite everyone’s predictions, she is doing well. In global news, in towns around the world, people prepare for different holidays amid varied architecture.

  The ringing phone wakes me. My armpits are damp, my leg cramped. Many minutes have passed. Possibly enough to comprise a substantial unit of time. Is it strange to take a nap on the morning of your wedding? A move that might land you on one of the lists the bridesmaids have spent the previous six months sending me: “10 Wedding Mistakes You’re Unknowingly Making,” “8 Horrendous Brides,” “7 Trapdoors to Sentient Soul Disrepair,” “4 Damaging Untruths.”

  “Checking in,” my sister says on the other end, faux cheerful. “Are we ourselves today?”

  “Everyone keeps congratulating me and asking if I’m excited.”

  I hear a cigarette being lit. “I read an article last week about a father who married his daugh
ter. She beat out the sister, who also wanted to marry him. Congratulations, folks! You’re in jail.”

  I wipe my underarms with a damp cloth and check my eyes in the mirror. “What do you register for when you marry your father?”

  “Birth control?” she says.

  “Literally everything around me is white. The veil, the comforter. It’s like I’m in an egg.”

  Simone doesn’t laugh. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, hey.” I hear an exhale of smoke. “Take your time.”

  “Are you coming?” I say.

  “No, dear.”

  I hang up and slide out from the covers, immediately cold. I’ve printed out Internet instructions on how to apply smoky eye makeup. My first attempt looks like bruising. I wash it off with soap and a rough towel and try again. The results are not perfect but better. A knock on the door and Rose enters, holding a glass of red wine. She sits on the toilet and watches me brush color onto my cheeks.

  “I took a nap before you came,” I say. “Is that strange?”

  A look of concern passes over her face, but her tone is cheerful. “Anything you do on the morning of your wedding is natural.”

  We pass the wine back and forth. She lights a cigarette, reads messages of congratulations sent by friends who couldn’t attend.

  I curl the eyelashes over my left eye and listen. A friend from my past, a flickering almost boyfriend, has left a message.

  I ask where he’s living and she says California. She googles Santa Cruz and holds out a picture on her phone. Beach and evergreen. A crescent of low-slung houses and shining driveways.

  “Don’t we know someone else who lives there?” I say, and she says, “A lot of people live in Santa Cruz.”

  In the main room, Rose pulls open the closet and pales. “This is the wrong dress. This isn’t the one you bought when I was with you.”