Birds of a Lesser Paradise

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  I guess you’ll need to get a job, he said.

  Dad, I said. I made a lot of mistakes this year—

  I wanted to give you a good chance, he said, looking down at his fingers.

  I remember feeling relieved that he wasn’t yelling at me. Now I wish he had.

  I’d do it again, he said. But you understand, there just isn’t enough money to take the risk on another year.

  Now I tortured myself imagining each of his hours. He worked at the same plant for twenty-six years making industrial-quality tools—hammers, chisels, knives, clamps. Every day he ate a cold lunch on a bench caked with pigeon shit. I could almost hear the echoes of men moving and talking, their spoken lives bouncing from the plant rafters as their hands worked. The black hole of his effort, the way it would never be enough, or easy—it hung over me, a debt I couldn’t pay.

  Mom ran her fingers over Ike’s cowlick. I emptied the trash can in the kitchen, then the living room.

  While you’re at it, she said, would you change the newspaper in Carnie’s cage? And top off his water?

  As I approached the bird’s cage, he let out a piercing scream, his black beak open. I held my hand up as if to say “stop.” Cut the screaming, I said.

  Put your hand down, Mom said. You’re scaring him.

  Carnie continued to scream. It was a pleading, horrifying sound, like an alarm. He cocked his head and danced across his bar, shrieking. Ike began to cry.

  Never mind, Mom said. I’ll do it.

  She thrust Ike in my arms and marched toward the cage. She opened the door and Carnie scampered onto her finger. She brought him to her shoulder. He was silent. Mom pulled the newsprint from the bottom of his cage with bare hands. Dried bird shit fell to the carpet; she didn’t seem to notice.

  Let me help you, I said. Sit down. I can do this.

  Sit down, Carnie said. Sit down. Sit down.

  Mom ignored me and walked to the kitchen, stuffing the soiled papers into the trash can.

  You should wash your hands, I said.

  Don’t tell me what to do, she said.

  Sit down, Carnie said. Sit down.

  I found Carnie’s high-volume pleas disconcerting and worried they agitated Ike, who clung to my shoulder. There were things, once, that I thought I deserved. My parents’ money, and certainly their unconditional love. But as years passed, our love had turned into a bartering system, a list of complicated IOUs.

  I’m sorry, I said. I don’t know about birds.

  You’ll learn, Mom said. Soon.

  Ike and I arrive in Myrtle Beach at eight p.m. I know the zoo will be closed at this hour, so we find a Days Inn. There’s something about the hum of an ice machine and waterlogged Astroturf that takes me back to childhood.

  Ike face-plants onto the bed before I can remove the comforter.

  Wait a second, baby, I say. Let me get that dirty thing off.

  We get in bed and flip through channels on TV. Ike holds the fabric of my pajama legs with one hand, wraps the other around a blanket my mother crocheted for me when I was in college. His travel blanket. I feel sad every time I see it: the coral and black starbursts, the tight knots. I remember a hotel I stayed in with my mother during her own mother’s funeral. Downtown Norfolk, 1986. There was a rotating bucket of chicken on a sign pole below our window. I watched it spin. Even when the lights were off, and my mother cried into her pillow, I watched that bucket of chicken rotate like the world itself.

  I remember thinking that moms were not allowed to be sad, that surely women grew out of sadness by the time they had children.

  Mom, Ike says. I don’t want to move.

  His eyes flicker and he fades. The news is on. A lipstick-shellacked anchor tells of a new breed of aggressive python in southern Florida that strangled a toddler in his sleep. Maybe one will come to our hotel, I think. I will have to fight it off with my pocketknife, club it with the glass lamp on the bedside table, offer it my own body.

  On our second date, Ike’s father showed me a video of an infant in Andhra Pradesh. The child had rich brown skin and curious eyes. He pulled himself across a grass mat while a cobra, hood spread, hovered above the boy’s soft body. The baby grabbed after the cobra’s tail while the toothless snake struck him repeatedly on his downy head, snapping down upon his body like a whip.

  This, Ike’s father said, is how you cultivate the absence of fear. Don’t you wish someone had given you that gift?

  Fear keeps me safe, I said.

  Snakes. Why do I think of these things before I try to fall asleep?

  I put one arm across Ike’s chest so that I will know if he moves. I can feel the pattern of his breath, the calm and easy way he sleeps, the simple way he dreams.

  When I move out, Mom had said, I need you to take Carnie.

  It was the hundredth time she’d asked. We had her bills and bank statements spread out on the coffee table. Her eyesight was failing and we knew she couldn’t live alone much longer. It was time to plan.

  Carnie hung upside down in his cage. Empty seed casings and shredded newspaper littered the floor. Occasionally he pecked at his image in a foil mirror, rang a bell with his beak.

  I don’t want the bird, I said. He hates me. He’s drawn blood, for Christ’s sake.

  If you loved me, Mom said, you’d take him. I can’t sleep without knowing he’s safe and taken care of.

  That’s what you get, I said, for adopting a bird with a life expectancy longer than your own.

  You know, she said. Then she stopped, as if she was afraid of what she’d say next.

  I’d always felt Mom’s vision of perfection was outdated. I was never the ruddy-faced, pure-of-heart Girl Scout with 4-H-approved sheep-grooming skills that she’d been. I failed home ec and took a liking to underground hip-hop and traveling jam bands, dyed my hair blue with Kool-Aid one high school summer. In college I got a tattoo of a purple Grateful Dead bear on the back of my neck that had infuriated Mom when she saw it. When Ike was little, he used to lift my hair to find the purple bear hiding underneath. At least someone liked it.

  In Mom’s eyes, atonement was more than walking the line, more than surfacing from the typical angst-ridden throes of adolescence and early scholastic failures. Atonement included my adoption of a bird I couldn’t trust around my son. A bird I’d hated for over a decade.

  I don’t trust the bird around Ike, and I can’t handle the mess, the noise—

  Mom was silent. I’ll give Carnie to the plumber, Mom said, collecting herself. He’s always liked Carnie. He mentioned he was looking for a bird for his kids.

  I wish I could take him, I said.

  Lying doesn’t help, Mom said.

  Even before I see it, Ted’s Roadside Zoo depresses me. We park outside. The entrance is a plaster lion’s face. We walk through its mouth. On the lion’s right canine, someone has written: Jenny is a midget whore.

  This place smells like pee, Ike says.

  It’s nine a.m., but it feels like Ted’s place isn’t open. I’ve yet to see an employee, not even a ticket seller. We walk a sand and gravel path, faux palm trees overhead.

  I’ve heard stories about these places, how they keep big cats in small enclosures. How the animals often have ingrown nails and zero percent body fat.

  I have the urge to call out, Mom? as if I’m coming home after a long day.

  We find a man feeding a seal.

  Where are your birds? I ask. Specifically, your African gray? We have two, he says. Over by the vending machines.

  I need the one named Carnie, I say. The one you received from the Red Oak Bird Sanctuary.

  I think it’s the one on the left, he says. They all look alike, you know?

  Ike and I find the birds. I can’t help but feel guilty that Carnie ended up in a place like this. There’s gum stuck to the bars of his cage.

  I home in on Carnie’s knowing eye, the white mask. He looked like the same bird, though his gray feathers had worn thin around his neck.

 
Carnie, I say. Carnie. Carnie. Good boy. What do you want for dinner?

  I pull out a pack of sunflower seeds I purchased at the Zip Mart down the road.

  I look at the white down on the bird’s chest and think: Mom’s voice is in there.

  Ike closes in on the cage. He waves his hands in front of the parrot’s face.

  The sign on Carnie’s cage reads: African gray parrots are as smart as a three-year-old.

  I don’t believe it, Ike says.

  Carnie? I ask. Want to sing some Patsy?

  For a half hour, Ike and I coo and speak and dance, but the bird doesn’t say a word. Beneath this wall of gray feathers is the last shard of my mother’s voice, and I feel myself growing increasingly desperate. How thick was her accent? Was her singing voice as beautiful as I remember? She always spoke sweetly to Carnie and I wanted to hear that sugary tone, the one she hadn’t used with me in her last years.

  How do you know this is the right bird? Ike asks.

  I did my research, I say. And he hates me. He’s spiting me with silence.

  Please talk, Ike says to Carnie. Carnie bobs his head up and down and bites his leg, a gesture that strikes me as the bird equivalent of thumbing one’s nose.

  Just say something, I think. Anything. Just let me hear her again.

  I’m surprised when I remember phone numbers and the alphabetical order of all fifty states, the way I can summon Deuteronomy like a song during a long run. But I can’t recall the funny way Mom said “roof” or “Clorox.” Not the rhyme she made up about bad breath or the toothpaste jingle she had stuck in her head for two years, not the sound of the way she said good night. The longer Carnie goes without talking, the more I miss her.

  A month after we decided to move Mom into a home, the plumber came for Carnie. Mom’s possessions had been boxed up and her furniture sold. She’d prepared a box for Carnie that contained his food, toys, water dish, spare newsprint, and a fabric square from one of her dresses. So he remembers me, she said.

  The kids are excited, the plumber said. He was tall and large and moved quickly. I was thankful for his efficiency.

  I’ll be in the car, Mom said, letting herself out of the house. The screen door shut behind her with metallic resonance, as it had thousands of times. I didn’t like letting her descend the steps on her own, but I knew, in this moment, she’d refuse help. I took the box of Carnie’s things and followed the plumber to his car, dropping a towel over the cage in the backseat of his truck.

  I’m always walkin’, Carnie sang, after midnight. . . .

  I couldn’t look at Mom as I turned to wave at the plumber as he pulled away. I knew she was crying. I was relieved to see Carnie go, to have the burden of his welfare hoisted onto someone else’s shoulders. But I couldn’t escape the sadness of the moment. There was an air of finality—my mother grieving in the car, our small home empty.

  After the plumber’s car was out of sight, I walked through the house one last time. I could almost hear the place settling, breathing a sigh of relief, coming down from a high. Still, there was a palpable residue of our past lives, as if old fights and parrot tirades had left their marks. I paused over my father’s plaster fixes and custom molding, things shaped by his hands that I couldn’t take with me. Empty, the house reminded me of a tombstone, a commemoration of my childhood. With the shopping center going up next door, I had the feeling no one else would ever live there again.

  I joined Mom in the car. I imagined that her stillness and set face belied inner fragility, that beneath the crust lay a deep well of hurt. As I turned onto the highway, I saw her touch her shoulder, the place where Carnie had so often rested, his remembered weight now a phantom presence on her thinning bones.

  We’ve been driving on I-95, toward home, for five hours. Ike has been in and out of naps. We pass a billboard that says Jesus Is Watching.

  Jesus makes me nervous, Ike says. Jesus is a spy.

  I laugh and then pause, thinking how the statement would have made Mom uncomfortable. The night sets in and Ike grows quiet. I watch his eyes in the rearview. I wonder what he’s thinking about.

  Will you love me forever? I think to myself. Will you love me when I’m old? If I go crazy? Will you be embarrassed of me? Avoid my calls? Wash dishes when you talk to me on the phone, roll your eyes, lay the receiver down next to the cat?

  I realize how badly I need a piece of my mother. A scrap, a sound, a smell—something.

  I hunger for the person who birthed me, whose body, I realized after becoming a mother myself, was overrun with nerve endings that ran straight to her heart, until it was numb with overuse, or until, perhaps, she felt nothing.

  One more stop, I say to Ike.

  We pull into the dark gravel driveway of my mother’s house. There’s no neighborhood, no signage. It’s just a plain, deserted house for plain folks on what is now a major highway. The white paint peels from the siding. I remember pulling into this driveway when I was past curfew, the light in my mother’s bedroom glowing, the way I could simultaneously dread and love the thought of slipping through the front door, pouring a glass of water, and crafting an elaborate lie to explain my late arrival.

  Ike is sleepy. He’s wearing my rain jacket and has the hood cinched tightly around his face, though it’s barely raining. RVs are pulling into the Walmart parking lot for the night. The smell of wet leaves makes me sick to my stomach with nostalgia. The boxwoods are overgrown and shapeless.

  Hold my hand, I say to Ike. Stay close.

  The screen door is intact, though the screen itself is punctured and webbed over. I hold it open, stare into the dirty glass of the front door. I try the knob—locked.

  I have to go in, I say. Close your eyes.

  I break the front door pane with the butt of the knife I carry in my purse and carefully reach in through a mouth of glass teeth to turn the doorknob.

  This is weird, Ike says. I’m scared.

  I clench his wrist. My knuckles are cold and I worry that my grip on Ike’s arm is too tight. But I do not let go.

  The damp carpet heaves underneath my feet. The house smells like a cave, and yet, like home. I walk around, inspecting things, Ike close behind me. Checkered contact paper still lines the pantry shelves. Windows are cracked; sills are covered in dead wasps and crumpled spiders. There is mold on the drywall and water spots on the ceiling. Someone has taken red spray paint to the fireplace and living room wall. The stove and toilet have been ripped out. Ike starts to cry.

  It’s okay, I say. I just want to stay here a minute.

  I lead him to the back of the house, down the hallway that still feels more familiar to me than any other. My bedroom, with its teal carpet and pale pink walls, looks small. Barren. At first, it is so quiet my teeth ache. My ears strain.

  I’m sad that you lived here, Ike says.

  It wasn’t that bad, honey, I say. This was a beautiful house.

  The crown molding my father installed lines the ceiling, though one loose piece sags. I remember him getting up early so that he could work on it before heading to the plant. It was my mother’s birthday present—crown molding for my room.

  My father died on the steps of the tool manufacturing plant, not ten minutes down the road. A heart attack. The doctors said it was a birth defect, that he was born with a weak heart. Now the building is empty, abandoned, as if all his work was for nothing. Mom’s grief was as long as a river, endless.

  I walk back to the kitchen and climb onto the green plastic countertop. Ike watches me, curious and confused. I remove the valances Mom made in the early eighties; dried bugs fall from the folds of the fabric into the sink below. These are the things with which she made a home. Her contributions to our house were humble, projects that took weeks of stitching and unstitching, measuring, cutting, gathering. I realize now how much of our house was crafted by hand. My father had laid the carpeting and linoleum. Mom had twice painted and reupholstered the dining chairs. My parents were quick-fix averse, always in for the long
haul. When the country road in front of their house had been widened to a highway, they complained but never entertained the idea of moving.

  I scan the kitchen and picture Mom paying bills at the table, her perfect script, the way she always listed her occupation with pride: homemaker.

  I feel a new respect for thrift and permanence.

  Next I pull scraps of peeling wallpaper from unglued seams and corners. I pull it slow and steady like skin after a sunburn; the old adhesive gives easily.

  Mementos, I tell Ike. I close my eyes. Now I can hear my mother everywhere—in the kitchen, in my bedroom, on the front porch.

  Turn off the television.

  Warm up the stove.

  Brush your hair.

  Put your father’s shoes where I can’t see them. In the trash.

  On Sunday, as promised, my Realtor arrives a half hour before the potential buyers and their home inspector.

  Your house should look as perfect as possible, he’d said before I left for the weekend. Ask yourself: What would Jackie Onassis do?

  When I see the Realtor’s convertible in the driveway, I ask Ike: Think you can box up the mini NASCARs and finger puppets?

  Sorry I’m late, our Realtor says. He is a slightly overweight cosmopolitan type who wears ostrich-skin loafers and tonic in his hair.

  He rushes to the kitchen, as if he has immediately sensed disorder. He strokes the valance over the kitchen window. I remembered last night, as I was hanging it, that Mom had found the pattern in Southern Living.

  Is this velvet? he says. Are these . . . cobwebs?

  I have placed scraps of rogue wallpaper next to my stove and another in the bathroom—a repeating pattern of pale brown cornucopias and faded fruit I took from my mother’s house.

  These must come down, the Realtor says. Now.

  He pinches the curling shreds with his thumb and forefinger.

  Leave it, I say. They add charm.

  You’ll never sell this house, he says, shaking his head in despair. Crickets on speed and a curtain that Elvis made in home economics class. Get serious.

  Apple pie? I ask, pulling out a day-old pastry I had purchased from the market’s discount bread bin that morning. I’ve steeled myself against critique. There are too many things I can’t fix.