Phil’s mother was a terrible cook—couldn’t measure, couldn’t see the color or the texture of the food she made, so that, even with Phil’s help in the kitchen, her tuna casserole might turn out as green and soupy as a meal made of swamp, her chicken breasts burnt black in a pan—and Phil ate everything my mother made as if he’d never eaten.
My father, of course, couldn’t tell Hamburger Helper from mignon Alfonse, and I had gotten so used to dieting, back when I was fat, that what I saw when I looked at a plate of food was a graph of calories, a calculation of ounces and grams, how many laps around the neighborhood such a meal would cost.
We were never the eaters she wanted us to be. Too stupid, too selfish, or too afraid. So my mother finally had in Phil the audience she’d always wanted. At these last suppers, which were clearly prepared in Phil’s honor, my father would look down at his plate, confused, fork poised over an inebriated wing, as if he’d just been deported to a foreign country. But Phil would shovel it in, leaning over intently, as if he were washing his face in my mother’s meal.
Once, my mother told me to invite Phil’s mother over, too. But when I did, Mrs. Hillman just shook her head and made the comers of her mouth into little, irritable pyramids. “No,” she said, “I don’t like your mother.”
“The bird’s in a cage in the backseat,” my mother said to Phil. “Be careful carrying it in.”
Phil shrugged and said, “Sure.”
He was wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. His hair was bright, and little slivers of blond shimmered on his chin and upper lip. He hadn’t shaved for a day or two.
“What kind of bird?” I asked.
She said, “You’ll see.”
The bird was a canary. Simple and white. It had quivered in my mother’s palm at the pet store in the mall like a mouse, like a milkweed pod splitting with silk, or a feathered change purse full of blood and hollow bones. Its eyes were black beads, and they darted around the pet store while that bird sat scratch-scratching its wire feet in my mother’s hand, scanning the place for cats, or planning its escape, thinking, Now’s my big chance.
But it couldn’t fly away. The pet store girl had shown my mother how to hold it. “Here,” she said, “like this,” placing my mother’s palm over its wings, “so you can’t cut off his breath.”
The girl was young, wearing a tight dress. Her hair was black, and she had a little, clipped nose.
My mother held the bird the way the pet store girl had shown her, and she could feel its heart against her lifeline, quivering like a little finger in its sleek chest. She popped it back into the cage and said to the pet store girl, “I’ll take it.”
That canary snapped its head mechanically, like a wind-up toy, taking this new information in.
“And a cage?” the girl asked. “Do you have a cage?”
“No. I need a cage, and food, a bird-care book, all that.”
My mother took her credit card out of her purse, and the girl started pulling things off the shelves for her. Rape seed. Millet. Bath dish. Perching stick. It made my mother happy. She gave the girl her credit card with a smile as she rang up the purchases. And as the bird chirped nervously near the cash register in its cage, my mother wandered into the back of the store and watched an aquarium full of small silver fish dart in and out of the ceramic mouth of a shark. She’d let the girl pick out the cage, and it was the most expensive one—the size and shape of a hatbox, a high one, a hatbox made for a hat with feathers and fruit and lilacs on top.
“This is your guarantee that,” the girl said, showing my mother a piece of paper, “the bird is a male. If it doesn’t sing within fourteen days, you can bring it back for an exchange. But,” she said, “if you think you’ll want to do that, we have to mark the bird, so we know it’s the same bird you bought.”
My mother considered it for a moment—the guarantee, the marking.
“No,” she said, looking at her new bird’s pure white wing. It had its head tucked under there. She didn’t know how they marked birds, and didn’t ask. “I won’t be bringing it back.”
The girl threw the guarantee with its gold seal away, and said, “Enjoy your canary, ma’am.”
My mother carried the canary out of the mall like a lantern held in front of her. A hurricane lamp. Perhaps she looked like a Victorian ghost come back to haunt the mall in her wool coat, a thin and mysterious smile on her lips, headed somewhere with her bright urge in a cage. Children stumbled at the ends of their parents’ arms, pointing at the bird, wanting her to stop, but she kept walking.
It was only early November, but Muzak Christmas carols were piping down from the ceiling—high up, near the fluorescent lights—saccharine, slippery, frivolous, sounding lubricated and faraway, as if a choir of angels had been shipped to Ohio from heaven in aluminum cans: exhausted containers of angels, like poultry, chicken feathered, passionless, disoriented. They’d been brought here against their wills, forced to spend their days warbling about God from some crawl space above the mall—
With feeling, my mother imagined the maestro of Corporate Christmas Carols screaming, stomping his foot, waving his baton madly over them in the air.
But that languid music, that spiritless serenade, oozed from the ceiling.
And when she left the mall for the parking lot, my mother passed Santa near the entrance. He was smoking a cigarette. His eyes were big, as if he were medicated, or insane. “Good-looking bird,” he said, and wiped his nose on the back of his black glove.
She’d bought a miniskirt, too, before the bird—suede, taupe. It was in a bag with the bird book and bird food, slung over her other arm. She hadn’t even tried it on. She’d just seen it waiting there, and bought it. She pictured herself wearing it, sitting in that fat man’s lap.
She was happy.
She hadn’t had a pet since I’d grown up.
After Phil brought it in, my mother set the bird up handsomely, royally, next to my father’s La-Z-Boy in the den—its little water dish, its lettuce bowl, its perching stick. All day that canary kept its head tucked under its wing. It didn’t sing, but my mother was perfectly willing to wait those fourteen days. She was in no hurry to hear it sing. She had waited longer for more important things.
“YOU LIKE?” SHE ASKED, PRESENTING HER MINISKIRT TO THE den. It was a Sunday. My father and Phil were watching football. I was doodling into a math book with a pencil, legs tucked up under me on the couch. I’d thrown a piece of pale lettuce fringe to the canary, who pecked apathetically at it. That canary had no appetite at all.
She was wearing sheer black panty hose. Black heels. A black turtleneck. And that miniskirt.
“Well?” she said.
My father looked up from the football game like a man who’d been slapped on the ass with a towel. Phil looked sheepishly at my mother’s shoes. I was stunned, looking from her good legs up to her bright face. She was flushed. Her hair was all done up, and she had a dark smear of lipstick on her lips. On the television there was a close-up of a girl with a shredded burst of pom-pom in her fist. Cheering. She must have been shaking it into the cameraman’s face.
“Pretty sexy for forty-six, don’t you think?” my mother asked.
I crossed my arms and looked away.
My father’s mouth was open.
Phil was nodding yes.
“HAVE A SEAT,” DETECTIVE SCIEZIESCIEZ SAYS, HANGING MY coat on a hook near his door, which he’s already shut. He’s wearing a starched white shirt, maroon tie, loosened, and his sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are thick. He has a tattoo on the left one, “USMC.”
The detective’s office is warm, and smells like leather, musky. The office of a man. His desk is cluttered with papers, piles of envelopes torn open, pens, street maps, and a metal box of Band-Aids. He’s wearing a Band-Aid across the knuckles of his right hand. His oak desk chair rocks as he leans backward, and I sit across from him in a plastic chair.
It’s six o’clock in the evening, and I can see the sky behind
him through a window, which is open just a crack. That sky is spatulate and turning blue-black but sparked with small, hard, flakes of snow. We are on the seventeenth floor of his office building in downtown Toledo, and I think I can actually hear the place where the wind starts. We are that close.
Detective Scieziesciez takes out a notepad and a pen, leans forward on his desk, and writes something at the top of a page. The Band-Aid on his knuckles ripples as he writes. “I’m so glad you got in touch and could come down here,” he says. “You don’t mind if I take notes while we talk?”
“No,” I say, and look down at the buttons on my blouse. They are flat and gold, and I can see my face reflected in them. Seven buttons, seven faces. I am wearing the taupe miniskirt my mother bought when she bought her canary.
“Okay,” he says happily, leaning forward, looking at me. “Where should we start?”
“Well,” I say, trying to sound serious, and intelligent, and worried, but my voice sounds weightless to me. I feel so far up in the sky. As I rode the elevator here, I felt lightheaded, and tired, as if I were flying for the first time. Now, my voice sounds like tissue caught in my mouth. “I called because I thought maybe I had some information. About my mother.”
“Of course.” He nods professionally. His jaw is dark with the stubble of the beard he must have shaved this morning, growing back already, just like the first time I saw him. A strong jaw. His eyes are also dark, and his eyebrows are raised. I can smell him. Salt and sweat and deodorant soap. And it makes my heart pump as hard as a shark swimming fast in my blood.
I watch the detective’s pen move over his pad of paper as I speak. I say, “I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking my mother might have been having an affair when she left. I’ve remembered some things.”
The detective writes this down. I look at his arms. From the elbows down, they are bare, resting on his desk. He looks up at me, pleased, and says, “Tell me more, sweetheart.”
“I DON’T LIKE THAT CANARY,” MY FATHER SAID. IT WAS perched on my mother’s little finger, feet curled up tightly, and it made nervous pecking motions in my father’s direction, as if it were sewing something invisible between them in the air.
“You don’t like that canary,” my mother sang to the tune of “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “and I don’t care.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, seeming sincerely perplexed.
The canary shivered in her hand, as if a smaller, colder bird had darted across its grave. It looked frail, and my mother laughed out loud at my father in a sudden, cackling snicker.
“And what were you doing wearing that miniskirt?” he asked.
“You didn’t like it?” The canary crept up her blouse, making its way to her dark hair, tiny eye traveling over her enormous blue eye, taking it in, trying to imagine exactly what my mother was:
Not a bird.
Not a plane.
“Get that thing out of here,” my father said, grabbing at it.
The bird began to flap its white wings.
“Get your goddamn paws off my canary,” she said, slapping his hands away. “I’ll wear whatever the hell I want.”
On my father’s face, there was a puzzled expression, cheeks pulled in, a puffy pucker, as if he’d eaten a spoonful of something, and now it was moving around, still alive, in his mouth.
“ARE YOU FUCKING HIM?” SHE ASKED, STANDING IN THE doorway. I was on my back in bed, under the covers, in the dark.
“Jesus Christ,” I hissed in a low whisper, and rolled onto my side, turning my back to her. “Get out of here.”
“No,” she said, stepping into my bedroom and shutting the door behind her. It became pitch black in the room. I closed my eyes. From all the way in the basement, I could hear that canary screeching. Two days earlier, it had learned to warble, then the warbling had turned to horrible shrieking all day and night. We’d put the bird’s cage in the basement to escape it. “Well?” she said. “Is Phil good in bed?”
I said nothing, pulled the covers a little higher. I was naked and cool in my sheets. As a baby, I’d worn zip-up sleepers with feet. As a little girl, she’d dressed me in Victorian nightgowns. Now, whatever I was wearing when I got in bed, I took it off and threw it on the floor. I liked the feeling of nothing but my skin between the sheets and me.
“Well?” she said again. “Is Phil a good fuck?”
“What do you know about fucking?” I said. I could hear her inhale when I said it, as if the words had shocked her, though to me they’d sounded flat, rehearsed, as if I’d read them from a piece of paper someone offstage had just handed me. I didn’t even really know what I meant. For a split second I’d considered saying something about that book in her drawer, the one about achieving orgasms, but I had no idea what to say.
Suddenly, my mother flipped the light switch, and the whole room was exposed. She came to the edge of my bed, yanking the sheets and blankets off. I rolled onto my back, and grabbed them, struggling to pull them up again, but she kept them in her fists.
“What is this?” My mother was screaming. “What is this?” She tore the covers off completely, and they fell at the foot of my bed in a pile. “Why aren’t you dressed?”
I put my arms across my breasts, sat up, pulled my legs up to my chest, scrambling away from her. Her face was as white as a window shade. My heart was beating hard, and I was crying, shaking. “I was hot.” I said. “What do you care? What difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference to me that my daughter has become a slut.” She spat at me. Hands scratching in my direction, but missing me.
I was gasping. I couldn’t catch my breath.
“Mom.” I sobbed it. “Stop it. Stop.”
But she pummeled my shoulders with her fists—softly. Her fists felt soft. I tried to grab her wrists. Finally, she stopped, but she was panting hard with a dry and hollow sound.
“I know about fucking,” she said—faraway, defeated—before she backed away from my bed.
“What is the matter with you?” I screamed at her back as she left.
WE ATE IN HUMMING SILENCE. MY FATHER MASTICATING, Phil nodding and mmm-ing at my mother as I slid a piece of parsley around and around on my plate.
She’d made crabmeat thermidor over toasted Holland rusk, and the garnish of blanched almonds looked like fingernails burnt to a crisp.
Afterward, I went upstairs to change clothes. Phil and I were going to a movie. My father was on the toilet—his first stop every night right after he ate. He’d get up from the dining room table, say, “Excuse me,” and go directly to the bathroom to eliminate: The king upon his throne, my mother called it.
Phil was helping her clear the table.
He’d taken his sweatshirt off for dinner, as if dinner were a relay race or a basketball scrimmage, as if there were a trophy to win, and eating so much so fast made him sweat. The T-shirt he wore was tight, and his muscles were under it, right there, impossible not to notice. There was blond hair on his arms. You could even see his stomach muscles, how they rode all the way down into his pants.
My mother was wearing jeans, a wine-red sweater, and lipstick to match. She could hear water rush in the toilet, dragging my father’s waste away.
He was pulling up his pants, all done.
She could hear me bump around upstairs.
Phil had a stack of plates and greasy knives.
She blocked his path in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen, and said, “Either I made too much, or you didn’t eat enough.”
He laughed, but he was nervous.
“Half of this is going to end up in Tupperware,” she said, taking the plate of crabmeat thermidor out of his hands.
When I came downstairs, they looked at me. I saw a napkin in my mother’s hand with her lipstick on it. My mother’s smile smeared off and crumpled up.
A ruined fist of it between them. Phil cleared his throat.
“What are you staring at?” she asked.
Many years
before, my mother had been invited to a neighborhood Tupperware party, where she’d bought a whole set of it. The hostess of the party was the wife of one of my father’s golf buddies—a jowly, middle-aged man with the high shine of an alcoholic: rosy nose, buffed cheeks. He was away on business when his wife invited the other wives over to buy stackable plastic, but the smell of the man was all over the house—Listerine and whiskey and cigars. The hostess greeted her guests at the door of her Garden Heights home wearing a black dress and pearls—though she looked exhausted, worried. Her face was as unlined as a mask, skin pulled tight over her skull—the result of too much plastic surgery. As the wives filed in, the hostess ushered them one by one into the kitchen and opened the counters over her sink.
“I guess it’s pretty obvious I love Tupperware,” she said, grinning, painfully it seemed, showing off her perfect teeth along with five shelves of labeled containers brimming with Quaker Oats, white chocolate chips, sugar. “There’s not much I don’t have,” she said.
The guests sat on her floral divan, side by side, as the hostess wheeled out a demonstration for them. She pushed the lid of a clear plastic bowl down, then pulled up the side and let her audience listen to the burp. “Completely airtight,” she said.
At one end of the living room, she’d set out a silver tray of Brie, strawberries, grapes, and water biscuits. On the other, there was a basket filled with crudites, including three colors of bell pepper. But no one touched the food. Indeed, it was never offered. Instead, she gave each of the women a huge brandy snifter, then filled it again and again with white wine.
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