Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  The first recipe is ancient, written on a card in her mother’s sloping hand—though her mother never actually made it. A list: eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, flour, chocolate chips. Over the course of the day, Avis and Brian fill the cooling racks with cookies: oatmeal raisin, molasses, butterscotch, peanut butter, and chocolate chip. Humble, crude, lightly crisp and filigreed at the edges, butter, salt, and sweetness at the centers. Avis samples batches with Brian. They stand near each other, immersed in the good, clean silence of work.

  That afternoon, as the sun points low, potent rays across the yards, Avis and Brian pack the cookies into bakery boxes, stack them on the backseat and floor of the SUV, and set off. The traffic lights are still out and intersections are chaotic, drivers interpreting traffic protocol at will. Even though it’s barely a mile away, the narrow, rustic lanes of the Grove are even more backed up and flooded than the streets in the Gables: they have to reverse several times and hunt for a passable route. There’s been a storm of mosquitoes since the hurricane, and the heat makes everything seem slow and elastic, like a recording played at the wrong speed. Several times, they roll down the windows and give cookies wrapped in napkins to people dragging shrubs and limbs, raking lawns, sweeping sidewalks, slicing and sawing through piles of stumps, vines, brackish rafts of debris. A man in a sweat-stained T-shirt drops his garden hose and accepts the cookie, looking as if he might cry. When they finally get to Commodore Plaza, they spot Jean-Françoise in a white butcher’s jacket tending a series of smoking grills in the middle of the street. Before him, a subdued group waits with paper plates, humble as a soup line. People sit on the curb and in battered aluminum lawn chairs. Waiters hand out dinner rolls, assemble small salads, grill fingerling potatoes, onions, and artichokes. The marrow scent of grilling meat mingles with billows of wet leaves, hot tar—someone’s half-finished roof roasting. A glass pitcher is on the pavement, stuffed with curling twenties and fifties and personal checks. Jean-Françoise’s smile is a white spark in his silhouette; he raises the flat of his spatula in a kind of martial greeting. “She arrives!” The late sun fills the street, a translucent mesh of light. He looks almost devilish in the yellow light, turning steaks and guzzling wine from a spotted water glass.

  The people waiting on line murmur, excited by her white boxes. Brian and Avis deliver their stacks and try to refuse dinner, but the waiters bring them glasses of burgundy, porcelain plates with thin, peppery steaks redolent of garlic, scoops of buttery grilled Brussels sprouts, and a salad of beets, walnuts, and Roquefort. They drag a couple of lawn chairs to a quiet spot on the street and they balance the plates on their laps. Some ingredient in the air reminds Avis of the rare delicious trips they used to make to the Keys. Ten years after they’d moved to Miami they’d left Stanley and Felice with family friends and Avis and Brian drove to Key West on a sort of second honeymoon. She remembers how the land dropped back into distance: wetlands, marsh, lazy-legged egrets flapping over the highway, tangled, sulfurous mangroves. And water. Steel-blue plains, celadon translucence.

  She and Brian had rented a vacation cottage in Old Town, ate small meals of fruit, cheese, olives, and crackers, swam in the warm, folding water. Each day stirring into the next, talking about nothing more complicated than the weather, spotting a shark off the pier, a mysterious constellation lowering in the west. Brian sheltered under a celery-green umbrella while Avis swam: the water formed pearls on the film of her sunscreen. They watched the night’s rise, an immense black curtain from the ocean. Up and down the beach they heard the sounds of the outdoor bars, sandy patios switching on, distant strains of laughter, bursts of music. Someone played an instrument—quick runs of notes, arpeggios floating in soft ovals like soap bubbles over the darkening water.

  Now the wind comes up, fanning them with music, laughter carried up from the street, then washing them with silence again. The stars are very gentle, faraway as old thoughts.

  “Good God,” Brian says faintly. He sounds like he’s just reached the life raft, climbed out of a cold sea. He takes a gulp of wine, then rubs at the inner crease of his arm. “I don’t know how you do that. That kind of exertion. And every single day—my God.”

  It had been a long and intense workday, but there was something more to it, Avis thinks—the strain of the day itself, the aftermath of the storm. She’s so tired she feels as if she’s floating just above the chair. “Trust me—not typical. I didn’t even know if I could still push like that.”

  “You are something else, kid,” Brian says. “But as for me. Boy, you never really expect it. I mean, getting older. It almost seems like you ought to be able to imagine your way out of it. Do something.”

  “Ha. Right. Like what?”

  “It’s nuts. Try to push back against it.” He tilts his glass of wine, then gazes over its lip. “You start to see the edges of your life. It’s like being able to see the curve of the planet.”

  Avis fingers the bowl of her own glass. “I know. Like you always knew it was there but you never believed it?” The night is forming into a dark glittering sky: the world is a bright machine carrying them inside itself. Though she sees Brian every evening, it seems it’s been years since she’s heard this—the actual sound of his voice. Being with him like this is like watching a tiny boat far out on the water, slowly, slowly borne back to shore. Avis turns on her lounge chair and touches his hair with the tips of her fingers. He doesn’t move or speak: his eyes seem open wide. She trails her hand across the nape of his neck. “Let’s go home,” she murmurs. He cups her shoulders, slides his palm across the wings of her shoulder blades; his lips are dry, they taste of sea salt.

  DURING THE COURSE of that week, she avoids the kitchen. She stays outside with Brian, clearing and raking the grass, sweeping the sidewalk, then the street in front of the house. Their power was restored on the afternoon following the hurricane, and for days afterward they’ve been one of the few houses on their block with electricity. The Handels run an extension cord to their house; other neighbors come to fill their coolers with ice or simply to sit in air-conditioning for an hour or two. Ella Regale’s father comes over to watch his favorite Spanish game show. They finally make contact with Stanley, who assures them that he, Nieves, and the market, are all fine—though his voice sounds a bit dark and compressed to Avis, and he rushes off the phone after just a few minutes, promising to call again soon.

  After the front of the property is cleared, Brian and Avis go into the backyard, pulling out fallen branches and fronds. The local businesses have started to reopen and will soon send their bakery orders, for which she is glad. But she isn’t quite ready to go back inside yet. Avis starts cleaning out the sprawling, wasted gardens Stanley had built, gathering brush, then weeding on her hands and knees for hours. The next day she returns to drag a metal trowel through the soil, over and over, until she is turning up fine, dry furrows, the soil sparkling. She leans toward the narrow rows and imagines the warm scent of planted tomatoes—it drifts into her senses as if they grew before her. She remembers the way Solange sat in the grass, the quick flint of her eyes, scanning the earth. It comes to her as she works that gardening is a way of staying put. That evening, Avis calls Stanley again and before he can vanish, she asks, “But Stan? Do you have one more minute?” She tells him about reviving his old gardens, how beautiful the clean plots are, and how she’d imagined the scent of tomatoes. He chuckles. “Oh yeah. That’s how it gets you. One second, you’re fooling around in the dirt, next thing you know you’re up to your ears in squash and parsley.”

  “Could I do that? Squash?” She realizes that is just what she wants to do.

  Stanley is drawn into it, despite himself: she can hear him give way to his old love of gardening. His voice warms with interest as he tells her how to amend the soil, the importance of organic compost, how to determine the best sun exposure, the uses of earthworms. She gets out paper and takes notes. They talk for over an hour, losing themselves in the discussion of vegetables, berries, herbs,
their voices running together, trading ideas, the way they did in the days when Stanley assisted in her kitchen.

  Avis says, “I thought it’d be fun to start from seeds.”

  “Sure, sure, just to make it as hard as possible.”

  “Isn’t that the whole point?” She’s laughing. “Seedlings are for wimps.”

  Then Stanley says, “Yeah, well, why don’t you come here. We’ve got good heirloom seeds at the market. I’ll be around tomorrow. Bring Dad too, why not?”

  When she gets off the phone, Avis is still smiling, excited to tell Brian about this invitation—a sense of being readmitted to Stanley’s life. But that night, Avis sits up late in the kitchen, moon glowing in the window, fretting over what to bring them. She feels nervous as a teenager worrying over a prom dress. She lingers over the cards in her notebooks—scraps of recipes tucked behind plastic sleeves—an enormous collection she’s curated for years. She turns the pages slowly, in an agony of indecision, wanting to make them something perfect and beautiful. She considers a tray of flaky jésuites, their centers redolent of frangipani cream, decorated with violet buds preserved in clouds of black crystal sugar. Or dulce de leche tarts—caramelized swirls on a pâte sucrée crust, glowing with chocolate, tiny muted peaks, ruffles of white pastry like Edwardian collars. But nothing seems special enough and nothing seems right. Nothing seems like Stanley. Avis brings out the meticulous botanical illustrations she did in school, pins them all around the kitchen like a room from Audubon’s house. She thinks of slim layers of chocolate interspersed with a vanilla caramel. On top she might paint a frosted forest with hints of white chocolate, dashes of rosemary subtle as déjà vu. A glissando of light spilling in butter-drops from one sweet lime leaf to the next. On a drawing pad she uses for designing wedding cakes, she begins sketching ruby-throated hummingbirds in flecks of raspberry fondant, a sub-equatorial sun depicted in neoclassical butter cream. At the center of the cake top, she draws figures regal and languid as Gauguin’s island dwellers, meant to be Stanley, Nieves, and child. Their skin would be cocoa and coffee and motes of cherry melded with a few drops of cream. Then an icing border of tiny mermaids, nixies, selkies, and seahorses below, Pegasus, Icarus, and phoenix above.

  You are lucky, Avis’s mother told her, if you know what in this life you’re hunting for. Avis has always known her hunt. She believes that her work is hard and essential, like that of nurse, firefighter, carpenter: she’ll be needed after the collapse of civilization. Not the same as building houses, but still a crucial grace note. Avis exerts herself wholly and physically to produce an evanescence of sugar and butter—a phoenix’s wing. She’s proud to bring people the reprieve of a slice of torte, a bite of scone: a sort of remedy. Just enough to keep everyone going.

  But Avis doesn’t move. She’s sunburned from kneeling in the garden and her back and arms ache. She stares at the cake sketches, and now they look gaudy, almost baroque. None of this interests her son. The cake fantasies seem like an indictment of her career: she sees herself drawing sweet vapors through the air, outlining the contours of a sugar castle. A bare, dry place in which to live. Too much sweetness, it occurs to her, is almost worse than too little. Swept by remorse, she presses her knuckles against her mouth. The moon is so bright it seems hot and the streetlights outside burn like match heads. Her eyes film with tears. Finally Brian is at the kitchen door. “Avis?” He comes to her side and slides his arms around her. “Come to bed, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “Leave the cake for now.”

  IT’S BEEN OVER A year since they’ve last visited their son’s market. As they walk through the parking lot they take in a number of improvements. Brian admires the raised garden beds made of cedar planks that flank the sides of the lot. There are stalks of tomatoes, staked beans, baskets of green herbs—oregano, lavender, fragrant blades of lemongrass and pointed curry leaf. The planter of baby lettuces has a chalkboard hung from its side: Just add fork. A wheelbarrow parked by the door is heaped with bright coronas of sunflowers, white daisies, jagged red ginger and birds-of-paradise. Avis feels a leap of pride as they enter the market: the floor of polished bamboo, the sky-blue ceiling, the wooden shelves—like bookshelves in a library. And the smells. Warm, round billows of baking bread, roasting garlic and onions and chicken. The doorframe to Stanley’s office is an inlaid mosaic of seashells—a surprise from three volunteers who’d worked on it through the night.

  Still, Avis feels naked without a bakery box, her arms empty. This is not me, she thinks. Instead they come bearing a cashier’s check: the full amount Stanley and Nieves requested. She feels diminutive and humble inside the vast green world her son has created; timid about making this late offering. At the back of the store, they hear voices through the office door, and for a moment Avis has an anxious impulse, a thought of simply turning and going home. But Brian knocks and calls, “Hey Stan?”

  As they walk into the room, Avis senses something, a frequency of sound or light like an echo chased out of the walls. Before her, a young woman is leaning on Stanley’s big, messy desk, her eyes like sea glass, her hair whip-dark. So lovely she seems impossible—dreamed-up. Avis gazes at her and experiences a rush of sensation as if a river flashed through her body, before she understands who this is.

  Felice is talking with someone, joking, when she looks over. Avis thinks, Stanley hadn’t warned her either.

  Brian wavers beside her. “Oh. Daddy.” Her voice is nearly inaudible as she moves away from the desk and hesitates before her father. Her face has a red, streaky quality. Avis is about to warn him: Don’t touch. Because she might run away! But the dream of her seems to become permeable because he walks through it, right through the old rules, of distance and untouchability. He embraces and holds her for a long, silent time. And Avis realizes then that her daughter did know—she’d agreed to this meeting. Brian’s face is tipped to the top of her head, her small hands high on his shoulder blades. Felice seems to be trembling, fragile as a star, and Avis hears her say, as if brokenhearted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And seeing this seal or separation break between Felice and Brian, Avis understands that in some way the world has finally shifted.

  The air feels light and insubstantial; time has pooled around their shoulders. Avis is trying to explain something or ask for something—what is it? She doesn’t know where to look or what to do with her hands or how to speak. She and Felice never used to touch at their meetings: it had seemed like a rule to Avis—the only way her daughter would consent to come near—and now she is still afraid. But there is the light sliding along strands of her daughter’s hair, the scent of lilac, and she can’t help herself, her gaze and her hands are drawn as if by magnetized forces; she brushes aside pieces of hair, cups her cheek, revealing the small, pale face breaking into tears. She takes Felice and holds her as if she’d caught her plummeting out of the air, feels the force of her daughter’s velocity in her arms and rib cage. There’s a sudden, surprising strength in her daughter’s grip—an adult fierceness. Energy runs through Avis, rippling. A rush of indecipherable breath in her ear—Felice is talking to her, trying to claim her in some way with the stream of language, talking too quickly to be understood. Avis tries to calm both of them, saying, “It’s okay, baby. I’ve got you—I’ve got you now.” Until Felice quiets, not letting go, the two of them hanging on, gently, gradually collapsing together into the mutual silence of return.

  Felice

  FELICE WAKES TO THE RISE AND COMPRESSION of Emerson’s chest, the slow wavelength of his sleep in the early morning. She couldn’t sleep last night, twisting, kicking at the sheets, the air like a blanket, pressing her into the thin mattress. It was so dark—so hard to get used to after years of sleeping in an urban light haze—the blackness sank onto her body, lowering from the ceiling. It made her think of the night of the hurricane: they’d spread out on the blankets and let Stanley think they were asleep. The storm was like nothing she could remember, bending the palms nearly to the ground and tearing tiles out of the neigh
bors’ rooftops. Feeling the walls tremble, Felice thought the apartment was about to break apart, that they would all whirl into the black hammer of the wind. Emerson talked softly to her about the strength of the building, the fastness of old structures, the solid foundations left by the old bank downstairs. Eventually he fell asleep, and then she’d lain awake for hours, alone, listening to the howling in the windows, her eyes wide open in the dark.

  Last night was another long passage of staring and thinking, and an awful feeling had come to her, how all these years, she’d clung to an idea of penance, the hope that someday she would be judged—her crime and her self-imposed punishment—and somehow absolved. But now the world seemed immense and lawless and she knew there was no judgment—not the kind she was waiting for. She’d felt a sort of dread, granular and heavy, like a half-dissolved paste; it tasted sweet, like souls, she thought, and she felt she would never be free of it.

  But just the intimation of morning helps Felice to feel lighter. This is the day they’ve decided they will go, because she and Emerson agreed that if they don’t go now, it will become impossible. “We’re getting attached,” Emerson said the other day in the warehouse, surrounded by crates of Valencia oranges. “It’s all right with me if you’d rather we stay.”

  Felice waits in a bed a little longer, eyes burning, but can’t fall back asleep. Eventually she curls out of bed, dresses quietly, uses the bathroom. When she emerges, the door to Stanley and Nieves’s room is still closed, but she hears soft noises in the kitchen. Nieves is there, working at the counter. “Hey.” She turns and pushes the hair from her face with the back of her wrist, a butter knife in her hand. “Go back to bed, weirdo.”

  “What’re you doing?” Felice leans against the counter next to her, steals a piece of yellow cheddar from the cutting board.