“You’re spending too much time with these birds,” she’d say as I waltzed into the office with a bird carrier in hand, a new bundle of feathers inside. “Do you have a life at all? Are you dating?”
Dr. Z had been recently married, and was newly evangelistic about the value of a social life. I’d assure her I was dating, but, in truth, I spent much of my time scribbling formulas for lovebird genetics using Punnett squares and obsessing about creating a variety of rare lovebird colors in my flock. Poppy encouraged me not to date—no surprise there after the Peter fiasco—saying I was too young to be attached to one man. Heeding that advice, I saved most of my energy for the birds.
If I could sleuth out the background colors, patterns, and dominant and recessive traits for lovebirds in my breeding program, I could predict what color babies they’d have, and manipulate those genes to attain colors I wanted to produce. From the obvious genetics of my parent birds—what they looked like on the outside, their dominant genes—I could predict some color mutations in my babies. But I didn’t know the background of most of my birds, so I had to guess about the parents’ genetics based on the colors they threw in each clutch of chicks. Lovebird genetics are complex, because they’re not all about dominant and recessive genes; there are incomplete-dominant traits, sex-linked traits, and dark factors.
New colors and patterns—called mutations—appear every year, and become the color du jour that breeders want in their flocks. Birds with new colors cost upward of four to six hundred dollars—funds I didn’t have. I produced genetic maps to create new mutations within my own flock. It could take me five generations to develop a color I wanted.
As my baby birds matured, I gave Poppy his choice of them, so his flock became nearly as large as mine, and he started breeding lovebirds, too. His birds—my babies—seemed healthier than my birds, bigger and shinier, happier. I didn’t know what we were doing differently. He had a synchronous relationship with the birds that I didn’t have yet.
Bonk and I spent long, lazy days with Poppy on his screened balcony watching his lovebirds eat, drink, and tend to their young in the salt air after he and Nona sold the house with the coop and moved to a fourth-floor condo in Sunny Isles, Miami Beach, our pigeons having long ago flown away. Nona would call us inside for a Greek feast: spiced meat and pine nuts folded into crunchy filo triangles, tangy homemade hummus, grape leaves stuffed with lamb and rice and seasoned with dill and lime juice. Nona had two of every kitchen gadget—blenders, choppers, butter melters—one in the kitchen and one under her bed.
* * *
Bird breeders were plentiful in my area. We shared information and traded birds to broaden the gene pool in our flocks. Having sought acceptance in a group for so long, I felt sheltered by these people, who wanted to teach me what they knew. When Dr. Z started a “flock file” for me at her office, encompassing all my birds, I knew I’d graduated from dabbler to pro. The whole enterprise felt important and exhilarating. Each egg represented a life that hadn’t been there before I put the process in motion. It was an ego-driven venture, for sure, but I learned about life and love from those birds. Their world was like the human world on a smaller scale. The mothers defended their babies fiercely, and the fathers defended the mothers. Sometimes the mothers and fathers mauled the babies, or each other, and there was no way to tell in advance which couple would be doting and which would be deadly. They guarded toys jealously and had frequent infidelities in the large outside aviaries, but the gestures of bonding between pairs resembled love—protecting the other from interlopers, cuddling and preening, and offering gifts, such as a spinach leaf or a palm frond.
Always, always, the birds tried to escape their cages. They became ingenious at escaping. One little green male, Chicky, slipped his cage several times by lifting the cage’s front door and squeezing out of the small space. Or, perhaps, he had his mate, Holly, hold the door up as he unfettered himself of his prison. Once at large in the bird room, he’d fly from cage to cage and release as many other birds as he could.
I’d walk into the bird room to find half the birds out of their cages and Chicky in the middle of it all, delighting in his mischief, hanging on to the edge of a cage, flapping and chirruping wildly. It took me weeks to determine that Chicky was the freewheeling custodian of the bird room—one day I snuck in to find him in the middle of a jailbreak.
Birds are optimists. When I locked my birds in their cages, they didn’t resign themselves to captivity. They didn’t fade into a depression so deep that the sky felt like a stranger. Even flightless birds know there’s a place for them beyond the chicken wire. It’s the birthright birds want more than food, more than love—to escape from the cage, to fly, to soar, to see the earth from the appropriate perspective—above.
Chapter 9
The fall I turned twenty, Nona had a small stroke and lost some movement on her left side. Poppy doted on her, cooking and cleaning, doing exercises with her following illustrations on a photocopy the hospital gave him with her discharge papers. She was mobile, but slower.
Several months later, on a Friday night, Poppy called and asked if I could come over and help him with Nona. I was about to leave the house to meet some friends at a party. Perhaps he could call someone else? I was over an hour away. My parents were out and I had no way of reaching them. There was desperation in his voice, but I didn’t think whatever was happening could be that bad. If it were, wouldn’t he call an ambulance?
At the party, I couldn’t shake Poppy’s voice. “Chérie,” he had said, “I cannot do this myself. I need to get Nona into the car.”
I found a pay phone near the restroom of the restaurant, but Poppy didn’t answer, so I called my house, and my mom told me that Nona had been taken to Doctors Hospital in Coral Gables. I was confused about the distance, because there were many hospitals much closer, but that’s where her primary physician was affiliated.
I teetered into the emergency room in high heels, short skirt, and sequined top, a mint in my mouth to cover the smell of beer, and found Poppy and my parents sitting in the waiting room, gray and anxious.
“Your grandmother had another stroke,” my dad said, the rims of his eyes red and wet.
Nona was parked on a gurney in the hallway next to the nurse’s station, hooked to machines, clear tubing connected to her in strands, buoying her body on the bed, like she’d sink without them.
“Nona?” I said, peering into her face. I grasped her good hand.
“I never thought I would finish in a hospital,” she said in a gravelly voice, tears streaming toward her ears. She was seventy-two. Grandmothers live far longer.
“That’s not what’s going to happen,” I said. “You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” I couldn’t understand why the doctors walked around and joked with one another as if no one there needed a miracle.
I stayed the night with her. We were in a low-ceilinged room by ourselves on the second floor, repetitive, disharmonic beeping emanating from every room and bouncing off the concrete hallways like racquetballs. A nurse brought me a reclining chair, but there was no rest. I sat up watching Nona, rubbing her paralyzed hand and foot as if I could shimmy life back into them, like trying to extract fire from a wet stick and a soft stone.
Early in the evening she could still move her fingers and toes a little. As the night progressed, she lost all use of her left arm and leg, and the left side of her face wilted.
I begged the nurses to call a doctor. At three in the morning I called my parents for help. Maybe the “adults” would have more luck conjuring a doctor. My parents came, asked for a doctor, and received the same reply. “She’s having a stroke, this is what happens,” a nurse said. Researchers were developing thrombolytic drugs to dissolve clots in stroke victims’ brains, but those drugs weren’t available in 1990. All we could do was wait.
After a few days they moved Nona to the rehab facility in Baptist Hospital, the same hospital where I was born. Poppy would be unable to care for her until she reg
ained the use of her arm and leg. The rehab had a fake supermarket with plastic produce in generous piles and empty boxes of macaroni and cheese arranged on an endcap, and mini shopping carts the patients pushed around as part of their physical therapy.
I overheard my dad telling my mom that a therapist said Nona wasn’t going to improve. Weren’t the therapists supposed to help her? I visited Nona every day after my classes and wheeled her around the hospital’s lake in the sunshine, determined to heal her myself.
“Nicole,” she said, tapping her nose, “please tell them to take this out. I don’t want this.” She had trouble swallowing, so they had pushed a tube down into her stomach through her nose and anchored it there with a large piece of white tape. I’m sure it was uncomfortable and embarrassing. This was a woman who never left the house without copious hairspray, cologne, and rouge on her cheeks. When I wheeled her back inside I asked the nurse if she could have the tube removed.
“That’s how we’re feeding her, sweetie,” the nurse said with a white grin. I thought of my baby birds and how I fed them.
“I’ll feed her with a little spoon,” I said. “I’ll help her, I promise.” The nurse smiled again, all teeth and sparkling eyes, and I had to tell Nona there was nothing they could do.
About a week later I drove to the hospital after school wearing a pair of plain white tennis shoes I had embellished with pink rhinestones and gold glitter glue, and topped off with shiny gold shoelaces that formed a giant bow at the top, like a birthday present. Nona would like them.
In the rehab area, my shoes cast rainbows on the walls as the florescent bulbs flashed on the facets of the rhinestones. I was in a good mood, happy to be done with the day and eager to see Nona.
I walked to Nona’s room. Someone else was in her bed. I asked a nurse where they had moved her.
“Oh, honey, you’d better call home,” she said, rubbing my back, staring at the floor. “Those are some nice shoes.”
I called home from the nurse’s station.
“Nicole, come home,” Poppy said. “Your grandmother is in surgery in a different part of the hospital.” I worried when Poppy didn’t call me Chérie.
“Where? Tell me where she is.”
“Come home.” His voice trailed off as he handed the phone to my mother. She told me to drive carefully, her voice singsongy and tentative, like she was talking a jumper off a ledge.
“What happened to Nona?”
“Just come home. And drive slow, it’s raining.”
I knew Nona was gone. She had finished her life in a hospital, as she had dreaded. The automatic hospital doors opened to the outside with a whoosh and the hot Miami air enveloped me like a sickness. I paused outside for a moment and looked around. The lake was a gray scab and the sodium lights cast buzzy orange reflections onto the growing puddles in the drizzle.
I bent down and untied my shiny gold shoelaces, took off my pink rhinestone studded shoes, walked to the trash can in front of the hospital doors, and tossed them into it.
I walked into the house wearing drenched, dirty socks, tracking mud puddles across the slate floor. The extended family—aunts, uncles, and cousins—had gathered in the living room. Blank faces swiveled toward me. I ran down the hall into my room, Poppy, my dad, and my mom trailing behind me. I slammed the door and locked it. Nona was the first person close to me to die, and I didn’t know what came next.
“Nicole, please let us in,” Poppy urged, knocking on the door.
“Only Poppy,” I said.
“And Daddy,” my dad said, tears in his throat. Somewhere in all this I had forgotten that he had lost his mother, a woman he had either seen or called on the phone every day of his life.
I unlocked the door.
* * *
The day of the funeral, my parents and I dressed in black. Poppy wept when he saw us and asked us to change clothes. He didn’t want us in black—he’d had a sister who died in Egypt at seventeen, and his mother wore black and mourned for the rest of her life. I changed into a blue skirt Poppy had sewn for me, and a starched white collared shirt. I spent the entire funeral with my head buried in Poppy’s jacket. I missed everything except Poppy and my dad scooping dirt with a shovel and tossing it on top of Nona’s plain pine coffin. Poppy asked me if I wanted to toss some dirt on it, too, and I declined, trying to push away the giant, burning stone in my throat, and buried my face into his jacket again.
Every time a funeral was held for one of Poppy’s friends, or even someone in our family, he always said, “Funerals are sad, Chérie. You are too young for funerals. Do not come.” And I didn’t, except for Nona’s. He instilled in me a strong aversion to funerals—even stronger than our shared fear of flying, ironic for two people who felt a kinship with flying creatures. I didn’t know at what age a person was old enough for funerals, because he never told me, but I avoided them no matter who had died, unless I was cornered or guilted into it.
A few days after Nona’s funeral, we moved Poppy’s possessions from his condo and into our home. He and Nona had been living on Social Security, and with Nona gone, it wouldn’t be enough.
Poppy fended off grief by cooking dinner every evening, sometimes two and three dinners a day, putting the next day’s meal into the freezer, baked ziti with béchamel sauce, lasagnas, and spinach pies. We ate at the table as a family every night for the first time in many years. Before that, my parents ate together in front of the TV, and my mom kept a plate for me for whenever I rolled in, or I foraged in the refrigerator for myself.
“I like this change of eating at the table as a family,” my mom told me privately. “But you have to talk to your grandfather about his food. We’re all going to gain a hundred pounds.”
It was peculiar not having Nona around. I knew she had passed away, but I couldn’t get my head around the permanence of death. Poppy spent most of his time either cooking or shut in his room. My mom said he felt guilty, and that deepened his grief. I didn’t know what she meant, and she changed the subject when I asked. I felt guilty, too. I could have saved her. I could have stayed with her twenty-four hours a day, watching, guarding.
Poppy had moved his birds in with us, my babies and grandbabies, and our combined flock grew to more than seventy birds, flying free in one of two outside walk-in aviaries, or living in the bird room in pairs in large cages. We shared bird cleaning and feeding duties. I liked having him across the hall, in spite of the circumstances that had brought him there.
“Did I ever tell you about the sparrow merchants?” Poppy asked one evening as we sat together after dinner.
I shook my head, though he had told me about the sparrow merchants dozens of times.
“I used to sit outside at Café Riche,” Poppy said. “Cairo was like Paris then, everyone strolling arm in arm, a beautiful, clean city. The sparrow vendor pushed a metal cart with a cooking grill on top and burning coals beneath. The cart had long hooks on each corner hung with dozens of small cages, each crammed with tiny sparrows, like a hot dog man, but with birds.”
At this point in the story Poppy’s voice always became quieter and deepened, as if he were revealing the secret to a long-held mystery. “The sparrow merchant speared a dozen brown sparrows alive onto a stick, then roasted them on his coals, plucked off their little feathers, and someone would eat the sparrow kabob for lunch.”
This is the part where I gasped and placed my hand over my mouth. “He didn’t,” I said.
“I swear to you. And every time he passed I bought two cages of sparrows, fifty to a tiny cage, and took them home to your daddy when he was a boy. We opened the cages and let them fly from our balcony, so happy to be free.”
“People ate the birds alive?” I asked, horrified again by the story, unable to envision the scene.
“Not alive. Roasted.”
“What happened to the sparrows you released?”
“I hope they flew far away.”
“What if they didn’t?”
Poppy thought for a minu
te, staring over the waterway through the sliding glass door. “The sparrow merchant would catch them again.”
“I’d rather hear about the bird market of Paris. Did Nona ever go there with you?”
“Of course. Your daddy, too. We went every Sunday, crossing the bridge over the Seine on foot, maybe stopping to have an ice cream. Your daddy loved the birds. Why do you think he allows you to keep so many?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah! We have found something you do not know. Write down the date.” Poppy reached to tickle me and I pushed my chair back on two legs, avoiding his tickling hand by an inch. He pulled my chair back down on four legs, and I laughed.
“Birds are mystical creatures,” he said, still holding down my chair. “Did you know that birds are messengers? Doves mean peace and bring messages of hope. When a dove comes to you, all possibilities are open.”
“What happens if two doves come to you?” I thought about the pair of ring-necked doves who sat together on the asphalt near my car every morning.
“If two doves arrive at your feet you are very lucky. Pigeons are lucky, too. Pigeons mean safety and home. No matter where you take them, they always come home.”
“What do lovebirds mean?”
“Lovebirds mean love, Chérie. What else could they mean? But you have not seen lovebirds until you have gone to the bird market in Paris. Tremendous colors, a living rainbow of feathers, the best birds you have ever seen.”
Part Two
Chapter 10
In a Florida summer, there are oppressive days and rainy days, and days when cookies will bake on the dashboard of a car—but there’s no perfect day. Perfect days are relegated to January and February, when the tropical thunderstorm pattern fizzles, leaving South Florida cool under cloudless skies. But we had one perfect Florida day the summer I was twenty-two years old: August 23, 1992, the date of my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The wind picked up from the east, the palm trees bent their heads west, and the sun steeped everything in golden light. The storm a few hundred miles to the east sucked the bad weather into its whirling eye, leaving us cool, breezy, and flawless.
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