by David Jester
“And what is the point?” she wondered. “The duck?”
I nodded firmly.
“You seriously want to buy a duck?”
I grinned at her hopefully. She didn’t seem to be buying it. Even Ben—who had given up on his toys, seemingly finding more entertainment in his parents—didn’t look convinced. But then she shrugged and her expression changed.
“You know what, I’m going to say yes. I’ve learned that disagreeing with you and these ideas of yours gets me nowhere. So, if it’s what you want, and if you’re actually going to go through with it, which I firmly do—” She paused and tilted her head to the side. “Did you hear that?” she asked.
“What?” I asked, although I had definitely heard it.
“It was a quack.”
“I don’t think so.” I looked at Ben. “Did you hear a quack? No? I didn’t think so.”
“It was definitely a quack.” She straightened her head, put her hands on her hips, and frowned at me. “You bought a duck, didn’t you?”
I laughed at her. “No, don’t be stupid.”
“Thank God for—”
“He just sorta … arrived.”
Her jaw dropped open and for a moment her face was devoid of all emotion. I thought I had broken her, but then she erupted with the anger I had been expecting.
“Kieran, tell me what’s going on right now before I get angry with you.”
She had a way of getting angry and then warning me that she was going to get angry. I had always wondered if this was just stage 1 of her anger, a stage so vague and weak that she didn’t even know it existed and was acting purely on a subconscious level. If that was the case, then I never wanted to see stage 2.
“There’s not much to tell,” I said with an apathetic shrug, doing little to calm her anger and avoid stage 2. “He just showed up one day.”
“Where is he?” She stood and I automatically took a step backward. “You didn’t let him in the house, did you?”
“No, no,” I said dismissively. “Of course not.”
She glared at me ferociously.
“I mean, I invited him, but he wasn’t interested.”
She heard the quack again and shoved straight past me, heading for the patio doors. She opened the blinds, and I saw Mickey get excited on the other side of the door. That excitement faded somewhat when he realized that I wasn’t waiting for him with a handful of food and a mouthful of baby talk. But he didn’t back away, so he clearly had high hopes for this new, smaller, prettier, redder human.
I expected Lizzie to shout or to try and shoo him away, and I cringed as I waited, but she didn’t do anything at first. She stared at him for a moment, as if stuck in a trance, and then, after several seconds, realizing that this new human wasn’t carrying any food, Mickey got impatient and quacked some more before tapping his beak on the glass.
“He’s hungry,” I said, sensing that Lizzie had softened.
She turned to me and I could see that the anger had gone. I wanted to jump up and down at that point, but I kept my cool and did everything I could to stop waving my arms about and squealing little a school girl at a One Direction concert. Ben couldn’t hold back, though. As soon as he saw Mickey, he tried to squeeze out of my arms to get to him. I walked him over there and plopped him down in front of the glass, deciding not to tell Lizzie about the little competition they had going.
“What does he eat?”
“Bre—” I paused and then retracted my statement, realizing whose bread he had been eating. I cleared my throat and then said, “Seeds.”
“Go get him some.”
As I fetched a bag of hidden seeds, Lizzie slowly opened the door, making sure Ben didn’t try to make a bolt for it. If you could call a sloppy, drunken crawl a “bolt.” Mickey turned from Ben, ending the game, and as I prepared to be hit with a foul smell, he tilted his head to look at her. He then stared at her hands and at her face, as though asking where his food was. I gave her the bag of seeds, and she took out a handful that she then scattered on the ground beside a very excited and impatient duck.
“Who told you they like seeds?” she said as we both watched Mickey dig into them.
“I Binged it.”
“You Binged it? Who uses Bing? What’s wrong with Google?”
“I don’t like saying Google. I ‘Googled’—it sounds childish. Or worse, ‘I Googled myself.’” I shook my head to indicate that I was above that. “It sounds like a kid explaining masturbation.”
“And ‘Binging’ yourself sounds better?”
“I’d rather Bing myself than Google myself.”
She stared at me for a moment and then shook her head. “Okay, so you ‘Binged it’ and it said—”
“Don’t be stupid,” I cut in with a smile, still watching Mickey make a mess of his seeds. “I Googled it. Who the fuck uses Bing?”
She glared at me and then nodded toward Ben. I put up a hand to apologize and silence her anger, but I could see the smile on her face.
“It said you’re not supposed to feed them bread all the time. They need a little variety. So he’s had white bread, brown bread, a bit of baguette—”
“He ate my baguette?”
“Just a little bit; I had to throw the rest out. Too much white bread isn’t good for him.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
I avoided that question. “He had a wild bird seed mix, as well, but he was very picky, so I bought some parrot seed for him instead. He preferred that. This stuff,” I said, nodding toward the seeds now strewn around the patio, “is an organic fruit, nut, and seed mix from the health shop. The one that smells of sawdust and body odor. Apparently, the guy that works there doesn’t use antiperspirant because it hurts the environment.”
“Organic?”
“Maybe. Maybe he just rubs dog shit under his arms every morning. It certainly smells like it.”
“No, I mean … you bought organic seeds for a duck?”
“Yes,” I said simply, meeting her accusing stare. “If you insist on changing the subject.”
“Why?”
“I told you,” I explained slowly. “Because he needs a varied diet.”
She nodded, opened her mouth to comment, and then shook it off. “You seem to be spending a lot of time with this duck. You realize we have a child, don’t you?”
“I spend a lot of time on the toilet, as well. That doesn’t mean I’m neglecting Ben for the bathroom.”
“No, it means you should stop eating shit.”
Both Lizzie and I tried to avoid swearing around Ben and we also made sure no one else did it. But somewhere along the line we came to an unspoken agreement that “shit” was perfectly acceptable.
“So, can we keep him?”
There were still some seeds remaining, but Mickey had stopped eating. His head was tilted to the side and one of his beady eyes was looking up at us, pleading with Lizzie, or at least that’s probably what she thought. He actually just wanted a drink of water, but I didn’t want to tell her and ruin the moment. Ben was trying to clamber toward the open door, either to make a break for freedom or to strangle Mickey like he strangles his toys. I picked him up to stop him, thankful that he hadn’t ended his staring contest as the loser.
“He’s staying in the yard, though,” she said assuredly. “He’s not coming in the house.”
“Of course not.”
Within two weeks, Mickey was a regular in the house. He became so fond of his morning feeds, and so impatient when they didn’t come, that he often waddled inside and waited for them there. Once or twice, he even followed me through to the kitchen as I poured him a drink of water. I had never been one for indoor pets and the idea had never appealed to me, but Mickey changed that. He was very wary of Ben, but Ben found everything that Mickey did incredibly amusing. I’d never seen a baby laugh or giggle so much. One of our neighbors suggested that we shouldn’t let a “dirty animal” in the house. I agreed, and then told her to get the hell out.
No one insults Mickey. Lizzie was startled, but I suspect she was also a little impressed. She hated that woman.
Lizzie wasn’t as worried about the whole situation as I thought she might be. She didn’t like them getting too close and tried to stop Ben from touching Mickey when she was supervising him. I didn’t mind so much, though. Kids are raised around cats and dogs all the time. The only difference between Mickey and a cat was that while Mickey was flying around, stealing bread, and taking a dip in the local lake, cats were killing anything they came across and picking up all kinds of diseases. As for dogs, they eat their own poop and hump anything that moves, while Mickey seemed to treat his poop as a by-product of walking.
I found Mickey hilarious. He often quacked when he walked, which amused me to no end. It reminded me of the old men I had seen tottering through the park. They had a similar way of walking—shifting their weight and taking small steps—and they often mumbled to themselves as they did. He also began to remind me of my dad, whose fashion sense—a mixture of bland and bright—wasn’t too dissimilar from Mickey’s gray coat and blue markings. My dad also spent his days walking around the house complaining about everything and making no sense.
This comparison was ruined somewhat when my father met Mickey.
“You realize he’s a she, right?”
“What? No, don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” he said, grinning at my discomfort. “All ducks that color are females. The green ones are the male ones. That’s why you’ll often see one of each together.”
My image of Mickey as a grumpy old man was ruined, but I was not deterred. Ben began picking up speed at that point, crawling less like a drunk amputee and more like a drunk. He began following Mickey around. At first she was a little freaked out by the drooling chubby human who wanted to follow her around and pull out her feathers, but eventually she seemed to settle into it. Ben looked like a little pink duckling as he waddled after her, and maybe she saw him as the same.
After a few weeks, she had become part of the family. She shit everywhere, she pissed everywhere, and she had a strange obsession with the TV remote. Take away the feathers, add some inappropriate flatulence, and she was Ben. Her shit wasn’t unlike his either. It was just as widespread, just as colorful, and just as nasty, but at least I could wipe hers off the kitchen floor and didn’t have to scrape it from her scrotum like day-old All Bran.
I got into a routine of getting up in the morning and then letting Mickey in through the patio doors, where she was usually waiting expectantly. She followed me through to the kitchen where we had bowls of food and water laid out for her, then for the next thirty minutes she would eat as I cleaned up the mess she inevitably created. Cuteness and random shitting isn’t the only thing that ducks have in common with babies. They’re also very lazy and have a habit of getting in the way. For the rest of the day, she would hover around the house, sitting on the furniture, shitting on the floor, playing with Ben, eating, and then flying away for the night. This continued for a few weeks, but then things changed when I opened the patio door one morning and saw two expectant duck-faces looking up at me.
“And who the fuck are you?” I asked the second duck. He was green, so I knew that he was a he, and he was also pretty protective of Mickey. He wasn’t as forward as her and seemed ill at ease around me, but when she ventured into the house, he followed her, flapping at me as he passed.
I knew ducks were harmless so I wasn’t worried about this new intruder; I figured the worst-case scenario was that he would eat all my food and then shit everywhere, but he’d have strict competition from Ben and Mickey if that’s what he had planned.
As Mickey ate from her bowls, the new duck stood guard and I kept my distance.
“You do realize that this is my house, right?” I told him, feeling like I should point that out.
He didn’t reply. He didn’t even quack. Mickey was very vocal, but he was playing the role of the broken husband at a boring party, keeping his mouth shut and his eyes on his surroundings, waiting for his time to attack the free food before leaving when his wife got drunk and showed him up in front of strangers.
After she’d had her fill, Mickey left and he followed. They went straight out of the back door and, just before they left, he turned and gave me one last look. I wasn’t sure if he was thanking me, warning me, or telling me to shut the door after him, I went straight upstairs and told my wife that we had been burgled and I had been violated.
After she stopped laughing, I told her the whole story, which set her off again.
“You’re imagining things,” she warned me several minutes later, the laughter now a distant memory, but something she ran through her mind over and over again so that she could recite it to her friends later. “Try to be friendly with him; he’s probably just the same as her.”
I believed her, but only because I wanted to believe her. The next day, when the troublesome pair showed up again, I did my best to politely welcome both of them. I offered Mickey’s beau a piece of bread from my hand. He didn’t take it, but he did try to snap my fingers off.
Surprised, I shouted and made a quick movement, nudging Mickey with my leg as I did so. The reaction was enough to send them rushing back out of the door in a flap. I yelled at them to stop, offering my apologies, but they flew away before my words were heeded.
I waited for them to return, hoping that Mickey would come back on her own, but happy to accept them both again if they showed up. They didn’t make an appearance for the rest of the day. The following morning, I laid out a large spread of seeds and bread, my way of telling them I was sorry, but neither of the ducks showed up. Ben was just as disappointed as I was, and he spent a few days crawling around the house looking for her. Lizzie, although she wouldn’t admit it, was also disappointed.
I waited weeks for them to show up again, checking the yard every morning and often several times throughout the day. I jumped to my feet and rushed to the patio door every time I heard anything that resembled a quack. I refused to let Ben watch Daffy Duck in case he had flashbacks. At around nine months, Ben began trying to walk, “trying” being the operative word. I couldn’t help but notice that he walked with the lop-sided, bouncy gait of a duck. At first I worried that he had somehow been influenced by Mickey and that he was even doing it as a way of cheering me up. But Lizzie, as usual, pissed on my parade by telling me that’s just how babies walk.
I stopped ordering duck from the Chinese take-away, instead turning my attentions almost exclusively to pork and praying that no cute piglets ever showed up at my back door asking for food and companionship.
As much as I waited, as much as I checked, Mickey and her companion didn’t show up, and I never saw them again.
6
Teaching the Unteachable
Ben’s diet, his poop, and his antics changed with each passing day. Or at least that’s how it felt. The changes were actually more gradual than that, but in the haze that is early parenthood, when everything seems like a dream—because you’re half-asleep all the way through it—it’s hard to keep track. It did get easier, though. Half-asleep was better than the brain-death I felt during those first few weeks, and it was also great to see him age, to see him crawl, to see him attempt to walk, and to see him reach a point where he found everything funny. Not only was it comforting to see him laugh, but it was a great way to boost my ego. Most people don’t laugh at my jokes, but Ben couldn’t get enough of them.
At any point during the first month of Ben’s life, someone could have swapped him with another baby and I’m not sure I would have noticed. That changed as I slept more and he grew more, but it was still a haze for the most part. Some people can function with little sleep, but I am not one of those people.
As a teenager, I treated sleep like I treated a bowel movement. It wasn’t particularly fun or interesting, nor was it anything to talk about in polite conversation. It was something that could be suppressed if I tried hard enough, and something that
was only interesting when I had suppressed it too long and the resulting release was something to be marveled at. As an adult, sleep was more like urination. It was short-lived, it quickly followed a pint of beer, and if it didn’t happen at least a few times a day, then my body revolted.
Lizzie handled things a little better, despite the fact that she did most of the work with Ben and somehow managed to return to her job as a full-time teacher and a part-time art tutor. She bottled up her angst, her tiredness, and her stress and turned it into sporadic outbursts of neurosis. She’d had mood swings when she was pregnant, crying over insignificant things, but this was different. She once screamed at me for losing her sunglasses, not realizing that she had been wearing them the entire time. I could only assume that she blamed the change in color on a solar eclipse and was surprised she didn’t blame me for that, as well. I had waited for the yelling to stop and the realization to kick in—which didn’t happen in that order—and then calmly continued with my day.
I didn’t get angry with her, I didn’t blame her. I had it easy. I still wasn’t working, and while that meant I was the one spending most of the time with Ben through the day, it was a job I wouldn’t have sacrificed for anything.
Lizzie wasn’t the only crazy one in the house either; it’s a well-known fact that all humans are born manic depressive. One minute they’re happy, smiling, and on top of the world, and the next they’re screaming, crying, scowling, and secretly wishing you were dead. Babies are also very much like old people, or maybe it’s the other way around.
People get to a certain age and just think fuck it, I’ve had it with this adult bullshit. They eat tasteless food, bump into things, and feel the need to tell strangers about their day, even if those strangers have no idea what they’re talking about. They nap constantly, are incredibly bitter to everyone and grumpy about everything, and they have a tendency to soil themselves and to fart inappropriately. Just before his first birthday, I took Ben to the supermarket. As I pushed him down the produce aisle, he proceeded to drop a series of bombs. It sounded like someone was slowly opening a zipper, leaving a trail of stink behind him like a B-2 bomber with a broken exhaust. I was hit with the full force of each and every one of his noxious ass-rockets, all escaping with a seemingly innocuous whiff of air, but creating a stink so strong that even the bananas clambered for an escape route.