Love and Ordinary Creatures

by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  “No kidding?” the girl bubbles. “My name’s Sam, and I’m off on Thursdays and Sundays.”

  “Modeling’s hard work,” Beryl warns her.

  “Kind of like owning a parrot,” Sam says, nodding at Clarissa. “One small black coffee coming up,” she says, the toes of her sneakers digging into the sand as she spins around.

  “Now, where was I?” Beryl says, thinking for a second. “Oh, yeah, I was worried that Mr. Herculean Pecs might morph into your new puck.”

  “My new boyfriend?” Clarissa says. “You, of all people, know my track record with men. Hot or cold, I manage to scare them off. But I must admit this feels different. There’s definitely something going on between us.”

  “Ya fixed him that big fancy meal, didn’t ya?”

  “Where did you hear that?” Clarissa asks.

  “There hain’t no secrets around here.”

  “Pops told you.”

  “Maybe,” Beryl says coyly. “I hear our Oysters Rockefeller weren’t on the menu.”

  “My Oysters Rockefeller,” Clarissa corrects her. “The night I made them he didn’t show, but he came back the next night.”

  “And ate that fancy paella of yours.”

  “It wasn’t that fancy.”

  “You don’t think you went just a wee bit overboard?”

  “What if I did?” Clarissa shoots back. “I don’t care. He bragged on me all evening, said about a zillion times how delicious my paella was. He made me feel special, and I don’t get enough of that.”

  Shocked, Caruso drops the pineapple he is eating. Hasn’t he been making her feel special for years?

  “My family treats me like a sounding board for Randall,” she goes on, “but Joe listens to me. He gives me his full attention.”

  Don’t I always listen to her? Caruso thinks, his crest collapsing.

  “Now, for the million-dollar question,” Beryl says with a naughty grin. “Did you, at any point during the meal, put your big foot in it?”

  “I thought we were going to focus on you and your love life for a change?”

  “Come on,” Beryl persists. “I know you said something. You always do. Tell me what it was.”

  Clarissa takes another swallow of her Very Berry, and, in a soft voice, says, “Nothing too bad this time.”

  “Out with it.”

  “I might’ve insinuated he was a beach bum.”

  “Dumb.”

  “Yeah…” Clarissa says, fidgeting in her chair. “But not as dumb as what came out of my mouth next.”

  “What?”

  “I called him a professional student.”

  “Doubly dumb,” Beryl says, shaking her head.

  “But when I told him I was kidding, he was fine with it.”

  “You still hain’t answered my question. Is Joe your new beau?”

  A cold tingle runs through Caruso’s body.

  “No, my main man’s right here,” Clarissa stresses, lightly touching his crown of feathers. The warmth of her fingertips soothes him.

  “Caruso, are you Clarissa’s main man?”

  Caruso dubiously bobs his head.

  “Black with no sugar,” Sam says, all at once reappearing beside them. “Anything else?” she asks as she sets the Styrofoam cup down.

  “No, we’re just fine,” Beryl says. “Meet me at Biff’s Dockside Store next Sunday around twelve-thirty, and I’ll take you on a tour of my studio. Tell you what you are letting yourself in for when you model.”

  “Great! I’ll be there,” she says. “Holler if ya want anything else,” she adds before heading toward an old man in a green Speedo, sitting on the edge of the deck with his skinny, blue-veined legs dangling over.

  “What is Mr. Herculean Pecs studying?” Beryl wants to know. She snaps the plastic cap off her coffee and sips.

  “You’re not about to let up, are you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, okay…I give up.”

  “So?”

  “Law at UNC in Chapel Hill,” she answers.

  “An ambulance chaser, huh?”

  “No, a defender of the environment.”

  “I like the sound of that,” Beryl says, “but it’s already too late for Nags Head.”

  “Hopefully not for the mountains back home.”

  “Is he out surfing now?” Beryl asks, taking another sip of her coffee.

  “I reckon.”

  “Did ya hear about the shark that washed up yesterday?”

  “No, where?”

  “Up the beach, across from the wild ponies.”

  “Was it a big one?”

  “A sand shark, I heard.”

  “I worry about Joe,” Clarissa murmurs.

  “You’re supposed to be worrying about me and Caruso,” Beryl reminds her.

  “I worry about the riptides.”

  “My Lord, girl, either you’re playing with me, or you’re smitten.”

  Clarissa sucks on her bottom lip, then asks uncertainly, “You think I like him more than I think I do?”

  “Naw, you’re just horny,” Beryl says, downing the rest of her coffee in two noisy gulps. “Don’t ya know that love is the greatest aphrodisiac?”

  “In love with love, right?”

  “Right,” Beryl says, looking up at the sky. “I best get going. The light’s not too bright, perfect for painting.” Leaping to her feet, she seizes her coin purse from off the table and unzips it. “For my coffee,” she says, sliding several rumpled dollar bills toward Clarissa.

  “I’m feeling generous today,” Clarissa says, pushing the money back.

  “Love makes you a big spender, huh?” Beryl says, with dimples of merriment in her cheeks. “Now, bring that boyfriend of yours by the store.”

  Boyfriend, Caruso thinks, his spirit sinking. Boyfriend—the sound of it weighs as heavy as a soaking rain on his feathered soul.

  Shifting away from the village and Silver Lake Harbor, he stares meaningfully toward the Atlantic, where deep in the cold darkness the riptides form and grow. Puck or pet? What is he to her? How does she love him? Does she still love him as much as the Little Madonna of Tybee Island loved her birds? he wonders. Does she see him as her pet or—even worse—as her baby? The thought of either makes him queasy.

  He breathes in the salty air, hears the waves rumbling. He is just a small, helpless bird on this large planet. His chest is not Herculean. His wings are not muscular like a man’s arms. He is no match for the likes of Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald. He yearns for some power greater than he is to help him. So spurred on by jealousy and possessive love, he asks the invincible Warramurrungundji to do what he can’t do for himself—to send him a riptide, powerful enough to suck a surfboard beneath the swells and smash it into shards against the ocean floor.

  Eleven

  Upon leaving the coffee shop, they meander down the dusty streets of the village and end up in front of the walkway that leads to the lighthouse. The sun is now high in the sky. Most of the tourists have gone inside to escape the heat or else are baking in it at the beach. She looks, as does he, at the white, rocket-shaped cone gleaming in the distance. The lighthouse property is one of their special places.

  She believes the historic lighthouse has a soul, like Ayers Rock in Australia or the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. “It is the oldest mountain chain in America,” she has told him, “much older than the Rockies, a fact most folk don’t know.” She insists that the fire tower she once climbed as a girl has a soul also, same as the animals, the trees, the stones, the grass, even the plastic bottles that litter the landscape.

  So whenever the stress at home became too much for her, she would visit the fire tower in the deep woods behind her grandmother’s house. Her hands on the railings, she would plant her feet firmly on the rungs and mount the steel staircase, climbing and climbing, until she reached the parapet at the top, where she would lower herself down, swinging her legs over the edge as she absorbed the sights, sounds, and smells above and below her: cl
ean-scented creeks gurgling in ribbons around large rocks, furry creatures scurrying amidst dense hardwoods, turkey vultures circling above the stench of death, reminding her that life was brief, that every moment lived was precious. She wanted to swim with the bream, run with the red-tailed fox, and ride the warm air currents with the raptors. Her awareness of the soul-filled land brought her peace. Yet the instant her eyes fell upon the strip mines—those naked white scars on the mountain face opposite her—her sense of tranquility ceased. She would trace the defacement all the way down to the pond of greenish-black sludge at the bottom. If the slurry overflowed, it would poison the topsoil, the plants, the animals, the insects, the streams, the fish—the soul of every living thing in its pathway—much as her brother had poisoned the peace of their home with his outrage. Save us from soullessness, she would pray.

  If Caruso could, he would endow her with wings. Like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell, they would fly up to the lighthouse parapet—its beacon, like a torch, above them—and from this vantage point they would marvel at the fish, animals, and birds of Ocracoke Island—free of coal, strip mining, and soullessness. But, alas, he is a bird, not a boy, and she is a human being, not a fairy, and they must be satisfied with what they are doing now—sitting on a wooden bench on the lighthouse grounds, following the ripples of heat rising from the sleepy asphalt street in front of them.

  Perched on the back of the wide bench, Caruso curves his neck down and brushes his beak against her cheek.

  “What a sweet kiss,” Clarissa says, pushing her floppy hat back, glancing up at him.

  Pretender that he is, he chirps like a sparrow.

  “Oh, look at that,” she says, suddenly jolting upright as a couple on a long bike with two seats pedals by. “I’ve never seen the woman in front and the man in back. Must be a feminist statement. We are equals, she’s saying. Proving it by taking the lead.”

  Caruso regards the woman, built like a ferry, then the man, small as a dinghy behind her, and thinks he knows the reason for it. She is simply stronger than he is.

  Only a Homo sapiens female, like Clarissa, would suggest that the woman’s position on the bike was a declaration of her equality. For in a bird’s world, Caruso thinks ironically, it is the cock, not the hen, who does the proving. When he was a fledgling, he had witnessed a male satin bowerbird clearing away brush for hours to make an entrance to his nest. After that, the bowerbird had stacked twigs into walls along the sides of his passageway and later spent days decorating both ends of it with an array of shells, berries, and bones. All this to win the fickle heart of a female!

  Even more pathetic is the African masked weaver bird, Caruso thinks. Henpecked long before he is hitched, he is expected to build in the same tree as the other members of his colony, exposing himself to their ridicule as he seeks out the best spot for his nest—which must be woven tight enough to hold eggs and sturdy enough to handle the weight of growing chicks if he is to impress a potential mate. Should he fail to dazzle her, to command her respect, she will leave him there, dangling upside down from his cone-shaped nest, fluttering his golden wings, shrieking for her approval. A sniveling specimen of a bird is he.

  Is instinct the force behind his own struggle? Caruso wonders. Does instinct compel him to plot and scheme to earn Clarissa’s approval? Is he working his wings to the bone because he is a cock, driven by instinct to win a female, while she is a human being, given a choice instinctually to please or not to please a male? He should let her do some of the pleasing for a change, he thinks haughtily.

  Unexpectedly, she starts to sing, and her lovely soprano recaptures his attention. Did she read his thoughts? he asks himself. Is she trying to please him?

  The song is one of the old tunes her grandmother taught her when she was a girl. As soon as she comes to the last line—

  But you’d look sweet upon the seat

  Of a bicycle built for two

  —he is ready to answer the first: “Caruso, Caruso, give me your answer, do,” which she always returns to.

  “Ye…s, mar…ry…you,” he warbles.

  “Caruso, I give my heart to you, too,” she says sweetly, batting her eyelashes at him, moving on to other old songs—singing, humming, singing some more—while he plays the role of her grandmother, singing back to her on cue. In this way, they keep the memory of Granny alive, she has told him, and he gladly plays along because he wants to be as important to her as her grandmother was.

  It was Granny who had taught her that fresh produce tasted best and that next best were the vegetables from her garden, lined up in Mason jars in the root cellar. During the summer, the two of them would spend hours harvesting tomatoes, green beans, peas, corn, and cucumbers for canning. There were rows of stewed tomatoes in quart jars and pints of cucumber relish. They turned corn into chowchow and picked the peaches off the tree out front and pickled them in a sweet-sour brine spiced with cloves. From the gnarly old fruit tree in the backyard, they made gingery pear preserves. Her grandmother showed her how to gather ripe blackberries without getting scratched and bake them into a lemony, sugary cobbler. It was Granny who insisted that nothing edible be thrown away—transforming watermelon rinds into sweet pickles, making wine from dandelions, using the petals from her roses to garnish their plates. Granny was the one who influenced Clarissa the most because she took the time to see what her granddaughter needed, whereas her parents, so obsessed with her brother, wouldn’t.

  Competing with Joe is onerous enough, Caruso thinks, but how can he, a simple bird, ever compete with Granny? To Clarissa, Granny is no longer flesh and blood but an otherworldly being, radiating selfless, disinterested love. Saintly—that’s how Clarissa describes her. Still, when she forgets to edit herself, Caruso hears the real story. Her grandmother was a compilation of people: a seductive, calculating girl when she set out to catch her husband; a tough mountain woman when she chased strip mine operators off her land with an iron skillet; a passionate cook when she stewed a kettle of burgoo in the kitchen; a shrewd businesswoman when she bargained a price for her jam and eggs at the country store; a loving mother and doting grandmother whenever her girls needed her. Inside her lived all the selves she ever was. She was a woman of many masks—nothing less and nothing more.

  These days, he is the one who must take care of Clarissa. These days, it is his time, not Granny’s, to love her. Does loving her mean always putting her dreams before his? he questions. Does unconditional love demand that he do this? If so, how many more years will he need to sacrifice before she chooses him? Will he, desperate to win her love, become as foolish as the male satin bowerbird or as pathetic as the African masked weaver? Will he eventually lose the soul of who he is?

  Upon arriving at Crab Cakes, Clarissa doesn’t take him straightway to his cage, as usual, but heads for the supply room. He casts his eyes over the refrigerator and freezer on the back wall and the floor-to-ceiling metal shelves on either side of him. The shelves to his left are stacked with cans of food, jars of condiments, and large tins of various kinds of cooking oil. Dry goods line the other wall—boxes of dried fruit along with bins of rice, flour, and cornmeal.

  She lowers him onto the stool just inside the doorway. After whipping off her floppy hat and blouse, she drapes them from hooks on the antique coatrack in the corner. Wincing, she readjusts the straps of her bra, which are digging into her shoulders, then grabs a fresh undershirt and chef’s tunic off the rack. After pulling the undershirt over her head, she puts on the tunic, takes a hairnet from one of its pockets, and slips it over her curls. “Do you think I’m getting fat, Caruso?” she asks, zipping the tunic up.

  He swings his head—no.

  “That’s my guy. A chef has to taste what she cooks, and I gladly taste a lot,” she says, holding out her arm to him.

  They walk down the hallway and veer into the kitchen, where she flips on the overhead lights. Breathing rhythmically, she stands there. Centering herself, he knows, for the hours of preparation ahead. “One day,” s
he says, “I’ll be the executive chef of a five-diamond restaurant with a big budget.” He has heard this speech many times. “Where there’ll be enough money for five line cooks. Where I won’t have to ask Rick to double as my sous chef. Or hire someone local to prepare the extra desserts. Or buy bread from a bakery. I’ll have my own pastry chef, sommelier, my own restaurant director, my own chef de partie, and will feel confident that the restaurant will run smoothly if I want to take a few days off.”

  She gulps down three mouthfuls of air before stepping through the back door and onto the terrace with Caruso surfboarding on her shoulder. He spreads out his wings and balances on one foot, then the other. Mr. Herculean Pecs can’t do this, he thinks, proudly holding up his head. For Caruso has mastered the arts of both flying and surfing, whereas Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald is accomplished in only one. Long before the evolution of ape into man, Caruso and his kin were taking to the skies, but Joe can manage flight only if he boards an airplane. If Caruso were free to do as he pleases, he would show Mr. Herculean Pecs just how special he is. He would hover inches above his rival’s surfboard as he rode the waves, then would surf alongside him on the frond of a palm tree, thereby outshining him again. Crouching down on Clarissa’s shoulder, Caruso extends his wings, listing from side to side with the rise and fall of her gait.

  She lets him into his cage. “Let me get things started,” she says after he settles on his perch, “then I’ll come back out here to see you.”

  She never once complimented him on his surfing technique. In truth, she took no notice of him at all. She is harder to impress than any hen of any species of bird. His cage door clacks shut, and he waves good-bye with a fretful flutter of his wings.

  Her demeanor changes on her way to the kitchen. With each step, she forgets a little more about Caruso. Out of sight, out of mind, he thinks while he watches her Reeboks land purposefully against the terrace bricks. She draws open the glass-paneled door and passes through. Deserting him for her own special world of stocks and sauces, condiments and marinades, hors d’oeuvres and stuffings—a universe of flavors distinctly foreign to his provincial tastes. He watches her from his perch while she twirls around the kitchen, her hands as fast-moving as the great dusky swifts of Argentina jetting through the thick curtains of Iguazu Falls to nest on the rocky ledges behind it.