Love and Ordinary Creatures

by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  “He’s beautiful,” the girl says dreamily. “You must take really good care of him.”

  “I try to.”

  “Does he like fruit?”

  “Uh-huh.” Clarissa places the straw on the table, nudges the glass against her lips, and gulps.

  “I could cut up some fresh pineapple for him—free of charge.”

  “That’d be awfully nice of you,” Clarissa says, licking purple froth off her mouth.

  “Might take me a while, though. We’re pretty busy.”

  “There’s no hurry,” Clarissa says as the girl turns to go. “I’m waiting for someone, and I’m here a little early.”

  Waiting for someone. These words resound ominously in Caruso’s ears. “I’ve been leaving you alone too much lately,” Clarissa had told him before they took off this morning, “but I promise to spend more time with you.”

  Then, to keep her promise, she took him for a stroll down the dusty, winding lanes to Iris’s Coffee Shop. Perched snugly on her shoulder, he listened intently to her as they walked. “That fig tree over there is pregnant with fruit,” she said, pointing at it. “Look at the leaves on that crape myrtle. They’re already fainting in the heat.” And he had felt more hopeful about their future together, until he heard her say those words. Waiting for someone.

  Anxiously, he surveys the premises. A line of diners, waiting to be seated, snakes out the entrance and onto the weather-beaten deck. Beside the road, six feet away from their table, are three huge garbage cans overflowing with soiled napkins, Styrofoam cups, and plastic water bottles. A common sparrow, with a dark-brown shield of feathers on his breast, hops toward a solitary french fry lying next to a paper napkin. Another sparrow, the feathered insignia on his chest much smaller, sees it also and flutters over. They meet, beak to beak, the french fry between them, and anyone else observing this scene would expect a skirmish, but Caruso knows there will be no conflict, for the sparrow with the largest patch of brown is the colonel, while the other is the lieutenant. True to form, the lieutenant flies away. The flock life of sparrows is one of rank and order.

  “Here we are,” the girl says, depositing a plate of pineapple chunks on the table.

  “Thank you,” Clarissa says. “Caruso adores pineapple.”

  “Enjoy yourself, Caruso,” the girl says, clapping her eyes, round as tortoise eggs, on him. Her mop of short-cropped brown hair and her pug nose put him in mind of a cuddly koala bear, and he squawks with amusement at her. Startled, she jumps back and then begins to giggle—not deliciously, like Clarissa, but artlessly, like a teenage girl.

  “My friend should be here any minute,” Clarissa tells her.

  “I’ll keep an eye out,” the girl says over her shoulder as she starts for the deck.

  Caruso tightropes down Clarissa’s arm to the table, tweezes up a piece of fruit with his toes, brings it to his beak, and eats it. So sweet, he thinks, remembering the pineapple fields of Australia upon which clouds of cockatoos would descend, then devastate.

  “Over here!” Clarissa shouts, waving her arms high above her head.

  Apprehensive, Caruso looks where she is waving and is relieved to see Beryl, zoom-zooming over the scanty grass.

  “Ya said ten-thirty,” Beryl says defensively, whipping out a chair the way she’d whip out a wet sheet to hang on a clothesline. She plunks herself down, slamming her coin purse on the table.

  “You’re not late,” Clarissa says. “I’m just early—wanted to spend some quality time with my main man.”

  My main man. Caruso feels reassured again. He grabs another morsel of fruit and takes a bite.

  “You’re lookin’ gooooood,” Beryl says, drawing out the word.

  “I’m feelin’ gooooood.”

  “I don’t have to guess why,” Beryl says with a grin, the dimples in her cheeks as deep as toe prints in wet sand, her spiked hair like the steeples on sand castles. “I saw ya two the other day at the Treasure Chest,” she says, pitching forward.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “He’s Mr. Herculean Pecs, all right,” she says, whistling through the crack between her two top front teeth. “That’s what bothers me. I’m happy for you, but I’m also worried.”

  “Worried?” Clarissa says, widening her eyes. “I’d rather hear the I’m happy for you part.”

  Caruso detects a pixel of irritation in Clarissa’s voice.

  “Don’t get your underwear tied in a knot,” Beryl teases her. “Something worrisome came to me last night. That’s all.”

  “You think I’ve erred again.”

  “Did I say that?” Beryl says, wrinkling her brow. “Anyhow, we’ve been on this I met a man roller coaster before. By now, you should know I have your best interests at heart.”

  Clarissa clamps her hands on the edge of the table. “Okay,” she says, breathing in deeply through her nose. “Just give me the highlights of the bumpy road ahead.”

  Beryl juts out her chin and tightly presses her lips together, as though daring Clarissa to interrupt her again. “You’ve heard a hundred stories about Savannah,” she says, moments later, “about my years in art school there.”

  Nodding, Clarissa rat-a-tats her fingertips impatiently against the table.

  Beryl ignores her. “Because I was graduating from SCAD, my roommate wanted to treat me to dinner. Anywhere, she said, so I picked The Crab Shack on Tybee Island. I had never eaten there before. You need a car to get there, and she had one.”

  “Her name was Pansy, right?” Clarissa says, bringing her strumming to a stop.

  “Uh-huh,” Beryl says, stubbornly quiet again. A peevish silence between them follows, their chests rising and falling. Caruso imagines their exhalations bumping into each other, refusing to move, producing a thin vibration of tension, until Beryl pushes through, her voice calm and unflappable. “The Crab Shack is celebrated for its—”

  “Eccentricities,” Clarissa says wearily. “‘Eat at The Crab Shack, and get your photo taken with the alligators.’ I’ve heard this story. Spare me, please.”

  “Tell you, or spare you,” Beryl says. “Choose.”

  “Okay. Tell me, but skip the mossy oaks, the dining rooms like boxcars on the edge of the swamp, the plastic plates, the hole in the center of the table, the trash can below it.”

  “Skip the food, too?”

  “Not the food,” Clarissa says. “I can’t ever hear enough about good cooking.”

  Beryl lowers her long lashes until they cuddle her cheeks, thinking, then whips them open and says politely, “Well, Chef, if ya insist.”

  “Of course, I do.”

  “The freshest seafood,” Beryl begins.

  “From the dock to the table.”

  “The shrimp are perfect.”

  “Hot and spicy.”

  “The oysters plumpsome.”

  “Divine.”

  “And the fish is extraordinary.”

  “Manna from heaven.”

  “Ambrosia from the gods.”

  Bored, Caruso flaps his wings, for he has heard this routine before and wants Beryl to hurry up and get to the worrisome part.

  “But wait! We’re talking about Southern cooking,” Clarissa announces grandly.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” they ask in unison, casting their gaze on him. There is a beat of five seconds before they sweetly harmonize, “Nothing is fried.”

  “Only boiled, broiled, baked, or grilled,” Beryl adds.

  “A health-conscious bistro,” Clarissa says, with an amused twinkle in her eyes, “tucked into a moccasin-infested, alligator-ridden swamp.”

  Speechless, they are, basking in their performance, as Caruso looks at Clarissa, then at Beryl, wondering which one of them will finally talk.

  It is Beryl. “Only it wasn’t the food I thought about last night.”

  “What was it?”

  Time for the worrisome part, Caruso thinks with an eager wiggle.

  “The Little Madonna…”

&nb
sp; “The Little Madonna,” Clarissa repeats. “Are we talking here about a great painting or another one of your bizarre encounters with crazy folk?”

  “No, Claaa-risss-a,” Beryl says, elongating each syllable of her name, exaggerating the sound of it before dropping it off, as if each were a rung on a ladder she’s descending. “I’m not talking about a velvet Elvis painting or a weirdo in a gunnysack doing penance in front of a church. This was a real young girl who broke my heart. The Little Madonna of Tybee Island and her birds—”

  “Birds?” Clarissa says.

  Birds, Caruso thinks with interest.

  “Uh-huh, birds,” Beryl repeats. “You’re a-listening to me now, hain’t ya?”

  Clarissa nods thoughtfully and teeters forward in her chair.

  “Yes, the Little Madonna and her parrots were what affected me the most, and I know I’ve never told you about that.”

  “Not a word,” Clarissa says, “but I’m all ears now.”

  “Ya sure?”

  “Absolutely,” Clarissa says, meaning it.

  “It was still light out when Pansy and I drove up,” Beryl begins, slowly pacing her story, “and when we were finished eating, it was a splendid dusk. The sky, I remember, was awash in rose, deep purple, and gold. The colors—so brilliant—you could see them shining like a rainbow on the surface of the swamp. As soon as we paid our bill, the shrieking and screeching started. Our curiosity up, we followed the racket, and it led us to the gift shop. The Little Madonna was just beyond the door, behind the cash register. Young and pregnant—in her late teens, I guessed—with a cockatoo perched on her forearm. The bird was half the size of you, Caruso,” Beryl says, looking at him, “and nowhere near as handsome.”

  A Cacatua galerita fitzroyi, Caruso thinks, with a supercilious cheep.

  “She was so busy talking to that bird, she didn’t see us. ‘You’re not alone anymore, Ollie,’ she cooed at him. ‘You’re ours now, and we’re the ones who love you.’ She ran her ring finger gently down his neck. There was no wedding band on it. She had swept her hair back tightly in a clasp. Her skin was drained of color. Her brown eyes, lusterless. Fragmented, she seemed, as if she harbored some harmful force that was ripping her into a thousand different pieces, with loneliness being the only trait they had in common, the only thing that kept them glued together. She never ceased caressing the bird’s neck while she spoke to him, and I swear to ya, Clarissa, the affection she lavished upon him was both discomforting and consoling. It was not until I cleared my throat that she finally glanced up.

  “‘This is Ollie,’ she said when she saw us. ‘Only a mindless lowlife would toss a bird out like a piece of trash.’ She lifted up one of his wings and pointed to a bald patch beneath it.”

  Paranoid, Caruso checks to see if there’s a featherless spot on him that they can see—but, no, he’s been careful.

  “‘Feather plucking is a parrot’s way of grieving,’ she explained, her tone so grim it made me shudder. She drew her lips into a thin, tight line, but the next second she was smiling as she showed us the new pinfeathers growing back in. After that, she introduced us to three other parrots in the gift shop. In the cage beside her was an Amazon named Peter Pan, willed to the owners by a longtime customer who had recently died of cancer. And in the next cage over were two red-fronted macaws that the local humane society had given them.

  “Afterward, we followed her and Ollie to a large back room with more cages. I remember a rainbow lorikeet, named Sylvia Plath because of her high-strung temperament; a conure with a loud, piercing voice called Ethel Merman; and Bogart, an African Grey. I can’t recollect the names of all the others, just that she kept calling them her babies. ‘Every one of them has a story,’ she said whenever she paused in front of a cage. ‘Every one of them has felt abandoned and betrayed. But now they belong. Now they feel safe. Don’t you, Ollie?’ she asked him.

  “After a while, Pansy got bored and wandered off to see the alligators, but the desperation in the girl’s voice held me, and although I felt uneasy, I stayed. She went on and on about the birds, as if they were her real babies, not the one she was carrying inside her. Not once did she touch her stomach or acknowledge her pregnancy in any way, and I instinctively knew not to either. In all this time, she had not dealt with the other customers, and I noticed that another woman was now willingly working the register. Still, though, I couldn’t bring myself to leave.

  “Trailing her fingertips down Ollie’s neck, she would lean toward me and stare into my eyes, as if I—alone—had the power to save her, but she never shared with me what she needed saving from. Never uttered a word about herself. Just spoke relentlessly about the birds in a kind of enigmatic code that transformed their heartache into hers. It was disturbing.

  “‘I better go find my friend,’ I made myself say.

  “For several seconds, she didn’t speak. Then, righting her shoulders, she said earnestly, ‘Come back soon, please!’ Words she must have uttered again and again to customers but said with such anguish to me that I left quickly. I never asked her—her name,” Beryl says, slumping forward.

  “That’s sad,” Clarissa says, reaching over to touch her fingers, “but what does that poor girl have to do with me?”

  “Why—can’t you see it?” Beryl says. “This is the worrisome part.”

  At last, the worrisome part, Caruso thinks, taking a step closer to them.

  “You’re obsessed with Joe, the way the Little Madonna was obsessed with her birds. You’re paying more attention to him than to the bird in your life,” Beryl explains.

  Caruso tilts his head to the side and cackles, confused as to whether he should feel consoled by Beryl’s words or concerned.

  “Obsessed?” Clarissa says, arching her eyebrows.

  “You’re not the abandoned little girl you once were. You’ve got Caruso and me and your staff at Crab Cakes. We love you and support you. We’re your family now. Look, I know ya want a beau. I do, too. Just take it easy and go with the flow this time. If you do this, you’ll be able to accept whatever happens between the two of you.” She swallows hard and adds, “Isn’t this the other choice, the acceptance you talked about?” A smile spreads over her face. “Ah, come on, Clarissa,” she blurts out. “I don’t wanna worry about you.”

  Clarissa is quiet for a moment; then, without a trace of meanness in her voice, she says, “So let’s worry about you and your love life for a change.”

  “I hear ya,” Beryl says, tossing back her head, letting out a laugh. “I shouldn’t be going on and on about your roller-coaster ride with men when I got my own lonely trail of tears dogging me. Maybe I should quit obsessing about men, go with the flow, too, and be grateful for you, Caruso, and my own big mess of a family. But—what can I say—I like the opposite sex, and right now I’ve been without a fellow so long they all look yummy to me. Even Pops, who’s old enough to be my granddaddy. It’s scary.”

  “Well, Pops is a good-looking, David Niven type of man.”

  “David Niven. Who’s he?” Beryl asks, ironing a spike of black hair with her fingers.

  “A famous film star from the nineteen-fifties.”

  “Poodle skirts and slicked-back hair,” Beryl says in a voice that is decidedly unimpressed. “I don’t mind older men. President Clinton gives me a little thrill when he does that State of the Union thing on TV, but mid-fifties is as old as I’ll go—although Pops is nice, always bragging on me.”

  “He likes how you paint—the colors you use, the way you play with the light.”

  Beryl nods. “Yeah, that’s what he tells me.” She flashes Clarissa a toothy grin, thrusts out her hands, and says, “See these fingernails. They’re all begombed with oil paint.”

  “Cobalt blue,” Clarissa murmurs, touching the tip of Beryl’s thumb. “Hot pink.” She nudges the pointer. “Vermilion,” she says when she comes to the middle one. “Lemon yellow. Lime green,” she finishes, tapping Beryl’s pinkie with her own. “Gosh, Beryl, they’re all Fr
ida Kahlo colors.”

  “I can’t help myself,” Beryl says with a shrug. “I love the woman’s work.”

  “You’re not from Mexico,” Clarissa states. “Not from some island in the Caribbean but from Ocracoke, and this is a landscape of whites, blues, and grays.”

  “I live on the isle of my dreams, and it’s prettysome,” Beryl says, weaving her fingers together, pushing them away from her small breasts with a crack.

  Clarissa makes a face. “That’ll make your knuckles big.”

  “They ache from too much painting,” she says. “I saw this doctor on TV, and he said that popping your knuckles releases the lactic acid in them, and that’s why you feel relief. Hain’t nothing wrong with it, he said.”

  Relief. A crack of the fingers, a pluck of the feathers, Caruso thinks, tweezing up another bit of pineapple, retrieving it from his toes with his beak.

  “Now back to your roller-coaster ride. Is this thing with Joe serious? Is it Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity?” Beryl asks. “Is it like that incredibly hot kissing scene between them on the beach, with the waves breaking against their bodies? I know some film stars from the fifties, too.”

  Serious. Is she seriously kissing him on the beach? Caruso thinks with a quiver.

  “When I saw you two, eating lunch—outside—on the pizer, you was holding hands,” Beryl says, pressing Clarissa hard with her eyes.

  “So?”

  “So—is this a strong case of physical attraction, or is this something more?”

  “Beryl…” Clarissa says, sighing.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl says, dashing over. “I got waylaid in the kitchen. Do you need a menu?”

  “No,” Beryl says with an upward glance. “All I want is a cup of coffee to go—black with no sugar.”

  “Small, medium, or large?”

  “Small.”

  “Hey, haven’t I seen you painting at the beach?” the girl asks.

  “Most likely,” Beryl says.

  “I really like the way you paint.”

  Beryl slides her eyes up, then down, the girl’s body. “If you model for me,” she says, “I’ll paint a couple of portraits and give you one.”