The Home for Wayward Parrots

by Wehm, Darusha;

  “Um,” I eloquently broke into the conversation. “Are you talking about me?”

  “Yeah,” Terry said. “Why? Is there a problem?”

  “No problem,” I said. “I guess I just wasn’t expecting to be invited. I mean, we only met yesterday.”

  “True enough,” Terry said, “but you have to come. You’re family.”

  14

  STEELY DO

  I WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD, still living with my parents and trying to navigate the hardest schoolwork I’d ever imagined. Looking back, it sounds like it should have been hell, but that year was one of the best of my life.

  I’d thought that once I turned nineteen, it would be like something out of a fairy tale. My birthday would roll around, I’d register with the government agency and poof! There my real parents would be. Like magic. It never once occurred to me that it might not be that easy, that it might take a decade of searching. Back then I thought it was just a matter of a few months. It felt kind of like freedom.

  It took Celia-Dee a while to make her move, but that didn’t bother me. It’s not like there was any chance I was going to be the one to take things to the next level, as they say. Even if I’d had the cojones to take the initiative, Seedy made it pretty clear who was in charge. She was the one who’d stolen my sandwich and she was the one who sought me out in the Engineering Building on campus. We’d been hanging out for a couple of weeks before I even found out that she was a Comp Lit major.

  “What exactly is Comparative Literature?” I’d asked one afternoon over coffee.

  “You remember all those horrible essay questions in high school English?” she asked in return. “You know: ‘Compare and contrast the symbolism of birds in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel and Looney Tunes’ Sylvester and Tweety.’ Well, that’s all we do in CL. Compare and contrast.”

  “Sounds like you don’t like it much,” I said, sipping my coffee.

  “Eh,” she shrugged. “It’s okay.” She stirred her tea. “But it’s not that cool, either. I should have been an engineer,” she said. “Too bad I got fifty-five percent in math.”

  I laughed. “That would be an impediment,” I said, and she grinned.

  We must have made a pretty funny-looking pair. I looked like the standard university dork — tan cords bought on sale from the Bay, a tee shirt with nothing cool on it whatsoever and a pair of grubby white runners. Utterly nondescript. Seedy, on the other hand, was a walking fashion bomb. That afternoon she wore a white shirt with tiny military airplanes all over it that she’d gotten from Value Village, with a pair of brown cargo pants with a bazillion pockets. She’d rolled the pants up to her knees and you could just see a mismatched pair of stripy socks peeking between the tops of her boots and the bottom of her pants. On the back of her chair hung her German army surplus jacket. In gold fabric paint she’d painted tiny anarchy symbols on the shoulders where the epaulettes would have been.

  And then there was her hair. It was dark, nearly black, though she never dyed it to get that colour. She wore it short, its length varying from about fifty millimetres to ten centimetres. I never knew whether it was a totally nonchalant home haircut or a hundred-dollar salon job. Most of the time she just let it do whatever it wanted, but when she was dressed up for a gig she gobbed it up with gel and hairspray and who knows what until it stuck out all over like a porcupine and was as hard as a helmet.

  At one of the Scream’s shows, the bassist for the opening band became fascinated with Seedy’s hair. It was a sweatbox in the club that night and everyone looked like a drowned rat after a couple of hours. Except Seedy. Not a single hair moved the whole night. After they were done playing, the bassist — I want to remember his name as Ernest, but that’s probably wrong — poked at Seedy’s hair with his finger every chance he got. He was a bit of a mess. He’d been drinking a lot at the gig and he’d pre-loaded with something beforehand, but Seedy was in a generous mood. She’d let him poke at her hair for half an hour when finally he said, awestruck, “That’s one steely do you got there.”

  The name stuck and many a night Seedy would let me know we were going out by saying, “I’ve got to get my steely do on.” But that was still a ways off.

  WE’D BEEN HANGING OUT FOR MONTHS; so long that I was convinced she just wanted to be friends. I, of course, was hopelessly in love with her. She was easily the coolest person I’d ever met. She made Angela Hoeffer look boring. She gave me a bunch of mix tapes with all these old bands — Black Flag, the Clash, Iggy and the Stooges, the Ramones. There was newer stuff in there, too — Nomeansno, the Dead Milkmen, NOFX. I’d never heard most of it before and it felt like a real education.

  But she was more than just a punk rock girl who dressed like Minnie Pearl. She talked about books and movies like they were more than just stuff you consumed to escape real life. And she was fascinated by engineering. She made me tell her something new every day from one of my classes, and I even got her kind of understanding linear algebra. She was awesome. I’d finally convinced myself that I was lucky just to get to hang out with her, that I’d be perfectly happy worshipping her from afar, when she kissed me.

  We were in my room, listening to a Johnny Cash album she’d just picked up. I was doing my homework and I thought she was doing hers. Maybe she was and she just got bored. Out of nowhere, she said, “Hey, BeeGee.”

  “Yeah,” I looked up from my problems to find her nose almost touching mine.

  “Do you like me, Brian Gumbo?”

  “Of course I do,” I stammered.

  “I mean, like me like me?” she said, almost menacingly.

  I gulped. My voice came out low. I hoped it sounded sexy, but it was probably just froggy. “Of course I do.” Our mouths met in slow motion. It was easily the best kiss of my life, before or since.

  WE NEVER REALLY TALKED ABOUT IT, but you could say we dated for a few months. It wound down over the summer, but for the last part of first year I was one happy guy.

  Seedy didn’t like labels. When my Dad figured out what was going on, and started badgering me to bring “my girlfriend” over to meet him and Mom, I honestly got to say, “She’s not my girlfriend.” That worked for only a couple of weeks; then he finally said, “Well, whatever she is, bring her over. We’re not going to bite.”

  Of course not. It was Seedy who’d be doing the biting, I figured. Though as it turned out, Mom and Dad liked her well enough. She didn’t try to be anyone other than herself with them, but she kept the F-bombs out of the conversation and seemed to be genuinely interested in both Mom and Dad. She and Mom had a long discussion about all-ages music shows and how to keep rowdy crowds from ruining everyone else’s good time. While they solved that social problem, I helped Dad with the apple pie.

  “Your not-girlfriend is something else,” he said, grinning. I blushed and agreed. “Just be careful,” he added more seriously.

  “Dad,” I said, getting redder in the face. “I’ve known about condoms since seventh grade. I get it, okay?”

  He nodded, then said, “Good. That’s not what I meant, though.” He looked in toward the dining room, where Mom was laughing at something Seedy had said. “I mean she could break your heart. She’s a strong personality, that one, and they are always the hardest to let go.” I followed his eyes and saw him looking at Mom. He looked back at me. “Just remember that things change, Gumbo. But in the long run, it’s usually worth it.” He handed me two plates of apple pie with huge scoops of ice cream and shoved me back into the dining room.

  GUYS LIKE TOM SPINDLE AND RYAN DEVINE didn’t get me and Seedy. They called her things like bad influence and distraction. I don’t know whether they were jealous or just thought I was punching above my weight. Maybe they really were concerned for my grade-point average. I never bothered to try to explain it to them; I just hung out with them less.

  The truth was that when I was with Seedy, I was more than just another gearhead. Sure, she dug my nerdy nature, but she never felt like she couldn’t talk a
bout anything else. On any given day we’d argue about whether Batman was a real superhero (me: yes, because he’s a larger than life hero plus, tights and cape! her: no, because he’s just a normal man with money, gadgets and rage), whether Gabriel García Márquez was a romantic or not (me: no, because he depicts the reality of poverty; her: yes, because love is so palpable in his stories that it’s almost a character in its own right) and whether you’d take the red pill or the blue pill (me: red, for learning the truth; her: red, for learning kung fu).

  We told each other everything. She fantasized about being a mad scientist, inventing flying machines and doomsday devices, living with an army of robot servants. I wanted to be a surf bum on a beach in Hawaii. She had barely passed any of her science and math classes, and I’d never swum in the ocean. We could spend hours just imagining each other’s future lives, complete with wardrobes, professional challenges and musical soundtracks.

  We both lived with our parents, so sex was always a challenge. We did it in cars, in the woods, at other people’s houses, behind the library and once in the library. I turned nineteen while we were together and, while she’d gotten me into a lot of her gigs when I was still eighteen, now I could be a real part of the entourage. I became the Technicolor Scream’s primary roadie, in that I was the only roadie. I helped them set up their gear and drove the van when it was my turn to be the designated driver. I was always kind of amazed at how responsible the members of a rock band could be.

  The summer after first year, the Scream broke up. Todd, the drummer, decided to move to Fort McMurray to work on the oil rigs. After he left, the band just broke down. They went through three drummers in as many weeks, then tried to play without a drummer at all. It didn’t take long before they just gave up.

  Todd was always the quietest of the four of them, and I was surprised that his departure made such a difference. After the final blowout (and it was a blowout: you’ve never seen people yell at each other until you’ve seen three slightly drunk members of a punk band yell at each other), Seedy was at my house, crying on the couch over the breakup. “Todd was the glue. He was the fucking glue that held us all together.” I tried to put my arm around her, but she pushed me away with such force that I fell off the couch. After that I just sat there and waited for her to be done.

  We only lasted a couple more weeks ourselves. I don’t know exactly what drove us apart. At the time I blamed Todd and the breakup of the Technicolor Scream. Maybe that was part of it, but it was also just time. On my birthday I’d registered to find my birth parents and I was expecting them to walk through the door any day. Where Seedy and I used to talk about ideas, I talked about finding my roots and she brooded about the band. We’d both changed, but it hadn’t happened together.

  When we actually broke up, it was almost a relief. It was years later before I realized that it also felt like something important had died.

  15

  I WENT TO A GARDEN PARTY

  THE WEEKS AFTER THE CAMPING TRIP to Maple Bay flew past in a daze. I barely had time to think about anything. The weekend after I’d gone up to Kim’s house, I went to my parents’ for the usual Sunday dinner. They were more curious about Kim and the rest of the family than I had ever expected. And, of course, they found the whole bit with the parrots fascinating.

  “So, she just takes all the reject birds home?” my mom asked for the hundredth time. “How can she take care of them all?”

  “Jeannette, that’s her youngest daughter,” I explained, “still lives at home and helps out. But I really got the impression that birds aren’t that hard to take care of. If they live together, which they do, they amuse each other. And Kim supposedly has an amazing ability with birds.”

  “I think it’s great that someone looks after the animals that aren’t nicely domesticated little amusements for people,” Dad said. He’d always been kind of put off by the idea of taking animals out of the wild, so there were never pets in our house. “Just because a bird doesn’t want to play nice with the humans doesn’t mean it has no right to live.”

  Mom and I shared a glance, hoping that Dad wasn’t about to go on another tear about how people destroy nature or some such. She jumped in to change the subject, just in case. “And all the other kids,” she said, “it sounds like they’re a bunch of characters.”

  I nodded. “They are. Everyone is really nice, though, and I was amazed at how cool they all were with me being there. It’s like they’ve been finding long-lost relatives their whole lives or something.”

  Now it was Mom and Dad’s turn to share meaningful eye contact. I took a sip of my beer, and then Dad cleared his throat. “So, you’ll never guess what we heard.”

  “Oh?”

  “Carole McKirk called us the other day. She’s going to be a grandma.”

  “Really?” I said. “Is Jacquie pregnant?” It still felt vaguely sickening to say that phrase, even all these years later.

  “No,” Dad said, shaking his head. “You remember Angela Hoeffer?”

  “Sure,” I said, confused.

  “Well, it turns out that she and Blair McKirk have been living together for a few years now and they’re going to have a baby in December.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Why would they want to do that?”

  THE LAST I’D HEARD ABOUT ANGELA, she had taken a year off before university to go volunteer in some Latin American country planting trees or building hospitals or something. Blair had gone to UVic, same as me, but he did something in Arts — Poli Sci or Sociology; something interesting but pointless. I lost track of him long before graduation.

  When I got back to my apartment, I called Johnny Frazier to see if he’d heard the news. He had no idea, so I filled him in on what Dad had said.

  “I wonder how he pulled it off,” Johnny said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, laughing. “You still don’t know where babies come from?”

  “Dumbass,” he said. “I mean, how did he finally convince Ange to go out with him? He’s been mooning over her since we were five years old and she never looked at him twice that way. I wonder what changed.”

  “Beats me,” I said. “But you can’t tell what women will do. They’re like some kind of black-box system with alien programming in there. There’s no rational method to decode it.”

  “Dude,” Johnny said. “You know that’s bullshit, right?”

  “I calls ’em like I sees ’em,” I said and hung up. I often wished I’d kept in better contact with Blair and Ange, and it felt particularly strange to hear about them from my parents. We had been so close once, the four of us, it was hard to imagine that we could ever be so isolated from each other that I didn’t even know where they lived.

  I supposed that I could call Carole McKirk and ask for their number. I’m sure she’d give it to me; she was always nice to us. But it felt like admitting to some kind of weakness of friendship to have to call Blair’s mom to find him. I put it off.

  INSTEAD I SPENT THE EVENINGS OF THE NEXT WEEK cataloguing my contacts. I’d kept every phone book — first paper, then electronic — I’d ever had, and spent the time making a spreadsheet with every person on the lists cross-referenced with all their old phone numbers, addresses and emails. I tried to date everything I could, but I was struck by how easily I’d lost track of so many people. I felt the stabbings of guilt common to all poor correspondents.

  After the camping trip, I’d gotten a Facebook friend request from Jeannette and didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t a Facebooker before; it seemed kind of pointless. I already had my phone books — what did I need a special site to keep in touch with my friends for? But what about Jeannette and the others? We weren’t friends — we hardly knew each other. But we weren’t really family either, not in the sense that we’re in each other’s hair all the time like I was with Mom and Dad. I did know that I wanted some kind of contact with Jeannette and the others, but I didn’t want to seem like a pest.

  I guess this is also what the internet is fo
r.

  The next Sunday afternoon, Mom informed me that Carole McKirk was hosting some kind of neighbourhood party to announce and celebrate her upcoming grandmotherhood. I’d be invited along with Mom and Dad — apparently she was trying to outdo the Wilsons’ daughter’s engagement party from last year. Blair and Angela, the guests of honour, would be there, and it seemed like a good way to find out what was going on. I said I’d go.

  “Any idea if she’s invited the Fraziers?” I asked. Johnny’s parents had moved from the neighbourhood a couple of years back, but I knew they still kept in touch with a lot of the folks. “I know Johnny will want to go.”

  “I don’t know,” Dad said, “but Carole is looking to inflate the guest list anyway. I’ll put a bug in her ear the next time I see her.”

  Johnny called me the next night to tell me about the party at the McKirks’. “I heard,” I said and passed on what my parents had said.

  “Well, were you going to tell me?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you guys were invited first.”

  “You’re a tool,” Johnny said, but I didn’t understand why. He was like that sometimes.

  “You’re going, right?” I said. “It would be weird to be the only one there who didn’t know what was going on.”

  “I doubt you would have been,” Johnny said. “I think Blair and Ange dropped off the radar a long time ago. This is news to everyone.”

  CAROLE MCKIRK WAS ALWAYS AN OVERACHIEVER in the entertainment department. She always kept the best snacks, she let us watch TV in the afternoons and she threw awesome parties. But by the time we were in middle school, birthday parties had long passed being cool, so I forgot how great she was at organizing an afternoon yard party.