The Milk of Birds

by Sylvia Whitman

  Mom hisses, “Katherine Cannelli,” so I pull it off.

  The lady escorts us to a huge office with a desk as long as an aircraft carrier in front of a huge window. One wall is bookcases, packed tight, and the other has so many diplomas and certificates in frames they look like scales. Show-off. Facing the desk are three very serious chairs, the kind with the seat leather brass-tacked down at the edges. The lady waves us into them, so we sit, Mom and I leaning close and whispering as if we’ve been called in to see the principal. The empty chair reminds me of Dad.

  Dr. Redding enters from an inner door and shakes our hands. There goes my fantasy that he’ll fall in love with Mom and cure me for free and we’ll live happily ever after in a zip code even better than Dad’s. He’s a little younger than Mom and slightly creepy, with oily blond hair that curls around the bottom of his neck. When he was a toddler, it probably looked angelic, but in elementary school someone should have given him a haircut.

  Plus, he has a line of tiny holes along the rim of his ear. One earring looks sexy on a guy, but a whole line? Overkill. The empty lacing card effect grosses me out. Why doesn’t he just wear the earrings? It’s his office. It also makes me wonder just who he is, a principal or an earring guy.

  He asks if we mind if he tape-records the session. Of course Mom agrees.

  “What brings you here?” he asks. He’s looking at me, but I point to Mom.

  She launches into my not living up to my potential, but Dr. Redding stops her. “I’d like to hear K. C. first,” he says.

  I say something about not being college material.

  “That sounds like your mother’s concern,” he says. “What’s yours?”

  I smile the idiot smile. Dr. Redding doesn’t smile back. I give it my impish best.

  Maybe if I keep smiling, everybody will leave me alone and let me grow up in peace. I’ll pay back Mom’s two thousand dollars from my babysitting money.

  And then what? Mom took me to visit the best Head Start preschool in Richmond last week. They were hatching tadpoles and finger-painting to Bach—but all the teachers had graduated from college, and the director had a PhD. So nix that. I could always work at a toy store. Or McDonald’s. Maybe I could get my cosmetology license and give Dr. Redding a trim. Except I find hair slightly gross, especially when it’s detached from someone’s head and all over my clothes. I could be an aide and visit people like my grandma; Mom’s temp firm is opening a new division in elder care since it’s a growing field. But besides fixing sandwiches for nice old ladies, I’d have to give showers to cranky old men.

  Plus, I’m not saying I’m going to marry Parker, but what if I married someone like Parker, and he came home and said, “My book on Civil War surgery just won the Nobel Prize. How was your day, hon?”?

  “Great, darling. I wiped some ninety-year-old butts.”

  With little kids, I honestly don’t mind poop because there’s so much else happening on the other end, but old people’s diapers depress me. If Granny gets to that point, I could take care of her, because she’s mine. But nursing home attendant is one of those noble, underpaid jobs I’m not cut out for.

  Mom and Dr. Redding keep looking at me, and I keep smiling. I can outlast them. I outlasted Mr. Hathaway. Mom folds and refolds her hands in her lap, probably wishing she could chew some of her teeth-whitening sugarless gum. Poor Mom. If not for me, she could be spending her home equity loan on going back to school and getting certified. She’d be a really inspiring teacher, the kind kids come back and visit ten years later to show off how good they turned out. In the winter, she could curl up on the love seat correcting papers, and in the summer we could rent a house by the beach. Or travel. She’s always wanted to go to Brazil.

  Dr. Redding asks, “What do you want for yourself, K. C.?”

  “An iPhone,” I say.

  Mom groans and puts her hand over her face. Dr. Redding doesn’t react. He just looks at me, not smiling, not frowning. He thinks he’s going to outlast me. I smile. My fingers are about to go crazy, though. On the edge of the look-at-me-I’m-so-important desk, just a long reach away, I spot a little blue rubber guy. He’s shaped like a bottom-heavy peanut, leaning slightly, as if he’s about to dive off the edge of the aircraft carrier.

  I have to save him.

  Before Mom can stop me, I grab him and give a squeeze. His innards pop to the top, and his eyes and mouth bug out. I laugh. Wally and Cilla would love him.

  “K. C.!” Mom says.

  “That’s Mr. Blue,” says Dr. Redding. “You like him?”

  I nod and squeeze. Mr. Blue reminds me of how I feel when Ms. DB lays a foot-thick social studies test facedown on my desk. That squeeze of terror, and then I go bug-eyed.

  I thought it was going to be different in high school—I was going to be different. So much for the fresh person. I just want to be like other kids, able to finish the test. Half of them don’t do the homework, but the ones who do, get it, or get enough of it.

  Nawra said something about lying being a short rope. I can keep smiling, but the truth is frowning. It worries Mom so much she’d give up caffeine.

  “I miss a lot,” I say. “People think I’m stupid, so I’m . . . disenfranchised,” I say. “At school.”

  “So what?” Dr. Redding says.

  “That’s going to make it hard for me to be an anthropologist.”

  “Those are real concerns,” says Dr. Redding. He peers at me with green cat eyes. “We can help you get to the bottom of this.”

  Then he interviews us, both of us, for eons. I’m allowed to get up whenever I need to stretch or get a drink of water or pick up a Koosh ball or something; he has a whole shelf of toys in the back of the room.

  He shows me his personal one, a cross between a furless pipe cleaner and a chain of paper clips. “My fiddlestick,” he says, and he lets me bend it all around.

  Mom does most of the talking. She starts out tiptoeing, but Dr. Redding says, “You’ve noticed things and K. C.’s noticed things, and it’s time we put them together.”

  Mom’s been worrying forever. At first she thought I had some nerve disease because I had meltdowns about itchy clothes, loud hair dryers, and Velcro.

  I shudder. Mom looks at me. “Don’t say the V word,” I tell her.

  “Her dad’s a night owl,” Mom says, “so he’d check on K. C. before coming to bed.” I miss that, hearing him padding around in his slippers. In his new house, Todd and I sleep on a different level from him and Sharon. “Sometimes he’d find her sniffing stuff under the covers.”

  “Like what?” Dr. Redding asks.

  “Pennies,” she says. She turns toward me with an apologetic expression. I smile. Go ahead, describe your little freak of nature. “Markers. Strawberries. She told him certain smells helped her sleep.”

  Dr. Redding nods. His fingers are doing a baton-twirling routine with the fiddlestick.

  All little kids get b’s and d’s mixed up, but that lasted longer for me, Mom says. She thought I was going to be a great writer, but I squeezed pencils to death. My papers were always short and a mess.

  “ ‘Inconsistent,’ the teachers told me,” Mom says.

  “Mrs. Chen was always mad at me,” I say. “ ‘You could do this last week! You’re not trying.’ But I was.”

  The teachers and assistant principal said everyone develops at their own speed. Mom didn’t want to push. Just because Todd had read The Cat in the Hat in kindergarten didn’t mean I had to. She didn’t want to be one of those helicopter parents.

  Ducking, I cup my hands around my mouth and pretend to shout at a whirlybird hovering overhead. “It’s windy down here.”

  “Am I so bad?” Mom asks.

  I hold up Mr. Blue Peanut and give him a squeeze so his eyes bug out.

  Dr. Redding asks Mom why she changed her approach.

  “Grades,” she says. “And those damn standardized tests. Suddenly everyone got so serious. The teachers stopped saying, ‘Give her time.’ One even sugg
ested I pay K. C. to do her homework.”

  “Yes! By the hour. I’d be rich.”

  “Not on the inside,” Mom says.

  Mom says as soon as she confessed that her marriage was falling apart, all the administrators pushed back from the table. It wasn’t like I was failing everything. In fourth grade I even got a B-minus in science. Those were the days. I loved Miss Hale’s class—volcanoes, magnets, static electricity. Every day she had us doing experiments. I practiced at home, trying to give Todd a shock.

  In fifth grade, the school psychologist finally did an evaluation. I remember going off and building things with blocks.

  “You have that?” Dr. Redding asks.

  Mom pulls out a file. I seize the opportunity to go to the bathroom and browse the lobby toys. When I get back, Dr. Redding is asking something about a “processing speed deficit.”

  “Just lower than average,” Mom says. “But they said she was ‘compensating well given the static of the family situation.’ It made sense. There was a lot of static.”

  Poor Mom. I’d been trying to make Todd’s hair stand on end, and Dad was doing the same to her.

  Dr. Redding explains to me that people with processing speed deficits can understand material as well as anyone else, but since they need more time to process information, they often have trouble showing what they know in pressure situations, like on a timed test.

  I should be happy to have an excuse, right? But as Dr. Redding and Mom discuss the rest of my sorry report cards—Mom brought every single one—I hang around the word “deficit.” It means you don’t have what it takes, as in the federal deficit is a billion quadrillion dollars, so we can’t afford to keep the library open Saturday mornings. Emily has a surplus. So does Parker. I have a deficit. I knew that, but never officially.

  So Todd was right about the sievebrain. I’m one of the slow kids. One of those. She’s a few dimes short of a dollar. She’s a few teeth short of a comb.

  I pretty much don’t hear anything else after that.

  In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate

  30 September 2008

  Dear K. C.,

  Peace be upon you. How are you? Are you strong? Now you are fifteen, God conceal you from harm. When I touched the silver heart on your envelope, tiny stars rained in my hand. They stirred in me such a feeling I cannot describe.

  He who sees others’ misfortune finds his own disaster lighter, and so I understand that even if I lived in Richmond USA, troubles would not be a stranger. There is no tree that is not moved by wind. You must not belittle yourself, K. C. You do not know all that you know. Even the sharpest ear cannot hear an ant singing. I have not heard of this Linus Pauling, or Albert Einstein. Every time has its men. Adeeba says Mr. Einstein is famous because he discovered the secret of light. What is it? I ask, but Adeeba does not know. Could he make another sun? The answer is no. All power and strength belong to the Creator.

  And how is your brother? Do not judge him too harshly. He who digs a hole for his brother falls in it. Your brother shares with you the good and the bad, and only a stranger’s mistakes are not forgiven.

  Your beautiful mother—is she well? I see now why divorce is the ugliest of what is allowed in our religion. A woman must be retained in honor or released in kindness, but men find that kindness hard. My father did not divorce his first wife, for she had brought a dowry of many animals; Kareema lived with us like an aunt and helped my mother with the chores. But as we say, A barren woman is a guest in the house.

  I always wanted to be a mother, and now I know the price of that wish. When the baby leaves your body, he grabs a piece of the liver so that something that was hidden and safe inside is now tender and exposed.

  We joke today that Adeeba the midwife was like the barber who learns haircutting on the orphan’s head, but none of us would like to return to that dark night. I do not recall all that happened, except that I did not think I would live to see the light. The pains kept coming, although the baby did not. No midwife was in camp. They often do not come, nor the khawaja, nor their food, because of the rains and the robbers on the roads.

  Adeeba told me there was a magic power that pulls everything down to the earth. She said, Did you ever see a guava fall up? It falls down, from the tree to the ground. We argued about the difference between a guava and a baby, but it passed the time, and I admit I was grateful for her tales.

  Finally I could walk no more. I remember lying down on the plastic sheet, and at one point women’s voices around the hut saying, Do this, do that. Adeeba built a tiny fire inside the hut so the air became smoky in the damp, and we coughed, and soon I wished the smoke would stop as much as the pains. Adeeba cursed the dark. She even cursed my mother.

  What do I do? Adeeba demanded. You have had babies. Tell me what to do.

  Adeeba is shaking her head, but it is true. Many people from Umm Jamila were visiting me in my head, but I heard things around me. Zeinab and Fatna were crying outside. Adeeba hissed at my mother, So you lost your children. You think you were the only one? You did not lose all of them; you have a daughter who needs you. But you are going to lose her too, if you do not help. Soon she is going to be too tired to push this baby out.

  I felt sorry that my mother would have no children left. Perhaps Zeinab would help, but she is too young to wash my mother’s clothes and massage her legs and carry the water cans from the tap. Then I stopped thinking because of the pain, which takes you to a world separate from this one.

  The next thing I heard was so beautiful I thought perhaps I had died. It was the song my mother sang to all her babies as she rocked them to sleep. The voice singing was like my mother’s, only heavier and scratched, so if I was not dead, I was dreaming. The sound entered not just through my ears but through my whole body.

  Forgive me, Nawra, Adeeba said. In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate. I did not mind, for the cutting was necessary, as long as the singing did not stop. The song was all around but warmest beneath my head, which lay on a pillow. Then I realized it was not a pillow at all but my mother’s lap, and she was stroking my hair.

  Then such a grunt I made, and my mother said, Get her up, and Adeeba hooked her arms under my shoulders. I did not have to think what to do for my body knew, and it was not long before my mother caught the baby. Adeeba eased me down, and I did not know what had happened. It was so quiet I thought the baby was dead, but my mother said, It is a boy. Thanks be to God.

  He cried.

  My mother wiped him and passed him to me. I could not see him in the dark, but I could feel his weight on a new place on my body. He was lighter than a guava. I said, Did he fall from a tree? Adeeba burst out laughing. Then she trilled like a hyena.

  I have named my son Muhammad, for the memory of my brother and for the Prophet, God’s blessing upon him. We say, Patience is the Prophet’s shadow, and patience is the shadow my boy will need. See, I cry as I speak. Adeeba says it is only because I have lost so much blood, and when it comes back I will be as prickly as a thornbush again. Already I have heard one of Halima’s friends whispering that it is abomination to name the son of a criminal after the Messenger of God. When people ask my son about his father, I will instruct Muhammad to say that he did not know him, but we are all children of God.

  Others have come to congratulate me and to talk with my mother, whom they had given up for mute. I am glad for their visits, but the words we say to a new mother do not make sense anymore. I remember when Ishmael was born, many told my mother, A mother of male babies has peace of mind. But I do not think anyone believes that anymore.

  Umm Hakim said, A son is a belt for his mother, yet I could see the tears heavy behind her eyes.

  Walida said, Even a donkey will have some rest in the future if she has a child. When Walida left, Adeeba said, I will thrash the next person who calls my nephew a son of a donkey!

  My mother does not say much, but she sings to Muhammad. He is like a bird, so tiny and delicate. A week
ago a new khawaja nurse arrived from another camp, and she says many Darfur babies are born small; that is one mercy for mothers out of our lack of food. But his body is well formed, thanks to God. My grandmother always said, Appearance is the sign of what is inside.

  Of course a monkey is a gazelle in the eyes of his mother. At first Muhammad was so feeble he could not drink from my breast, but now he is sucking, so he will grow on my milk and my mother’s song, inshallah. That which has no tail, God will drive insects away from it.

  The nurse says I should eat meat so my body will rebuild blood and make milk for Muhammad.

  I thank you again, K. C., for your gift. Adeeba is buying pieces of goat and charcoal. She has threatened to go collect firewood, but she has classes to teach, and I believe the only thing she can carry on her head is a hat. She says I am getting hard as horn now from so much goat in my blood.

  My mother, thanks to God, even carries water cans from the tap. More softhearted than a parent is a deceiver. Because of her legs she cannot stand many hours in line, but Zeinab holds her place.

  Today the saidas held up the line of girls to admire Muhammad, with such fine words I do not want Adeeba to write them all down, for they may attract the evil eye.

  Saida Noor translated as Saida Julie took my hand. In spite of everything, you brought this new life into this world, Saida Julie said. You can accomplish anything.

  The tears come now as they did then. As Adeeba says, I am a cloud with legs. But these words are for you, too, K. C., as you sit your exams. You can accomplish anything with the help of God.

  Your sister, Nawra

  K.C.

  OCTOBER 2008

  “What does ‘asperity’ mean?” I ask Emily. We’re studying at her house, the only place Mom lets me go on a school night to do homework.

  “I don’t know,” she says.