Bird

by Noy Holland

  She finds the rug with her feet, holds her hands out, blind, finds her bed in the dark.

  “Who called?” her husband asks.

  Bird doesn’t answer him. He’ll be down in a beat, in a long-drawn breath—a heavy sleeper, her husband, heavier since the children came.

  Bird slides her cold feet into the heat he makes. She drops off to sleep for a minute, three, for a glimpse of a dream of Mickey, Mickey galloping over the prairie swinging a lariat over his head—roping gophers, roping coyote. Ho doggie. Not another two-legger in sight. But something whimpers, hurt, in the grasses, lost.

  That’s the baby startled awake in her crib.

  Bird moves toward her, the sizzle of panic starting up in her chest: she is too slow, too late, she always will be. The baby sounds like a barking machine. She thrashes in her crib, unboned and blind, good as blind. The weight of her body pins her, strands her in the drift of her sheet: she’s been dropped by the wind, breached from the sea. Shored up here, needing.

  Every living tissue, Bird thinks. She doesn’t want to, but of course she does. Bird wants a shirt that smells of her mother still to ball up in her hands. So to sleep. Sleep and let the phone go, let the school bus pass. Take the day in bed.

  I can’t want that.

  But she does.

  She brings the baby to her breast in bed and tries to sleep. Nothing doing. She’s all stirred up. She smells smoke, or a hurricane coming. Smells the baby’s milky head. She has a tooth already, this baby, a little headstone poking through. A little zing when she nurses. It hurts. If only it would hurt a little more, Bird thinks, maybe she would wake him. Take her man in her mouth and wake him, want him hard again. Gimme gimme.

  She tries to want that, but what she finds to want is the mess of herself, the old dream that Suzie lives. Makes up, or lives, Bird cannot sort it. She cannot sort the news from the wishful, the actual from the dreamed-up muck of what Suzie fears, or Bird does, from what Suzie wants, or Bird does, or half the time what difference there is between wanting at all and fear.

  She will turn a corner and find him there.

  She will never in her life again see him.

  Sacred, she thinks, and narcotic. That’s how it felt to her.

  And now every word Bird utters or hears makes it feel flimsy and dull. But it wasn’t. It was sacred, she thinks, and narcotic. Doomed—but that didn’t matter.

  That Mickey lived for weeks in his ragtop—summer then, the sumac high, down by the Brooklyn Bridge. Didn’t matter to her. They climbed the trusses—in the wind, the rain, the dark of the night they met. They were lit. They were lights in the great swag of lights the river passed beneath with its garbage scows, its freight of darkened souls.

  They kissed, and the air everywhere went sparky.

  Sparky is her boy’s word.

  May he never be a boy like Mickey was. May he never meet a girl the girl Bird was.

  She draws the baby close against her. She can net her whole back with one hand. I will keep you from anything doomed, Bird thinks, and her heart picks up—with wanting, she thinks, and fear.

  Appetite and revulsion.

  Your life swings around, and you survive it. You make something other of it—life from life—keeping what you can. Even when you can’t keep much.

  She would never in her life again see him.

  But she keeps cuttings of Mickey’s hair balled up in a drawer somewhere. She keeps the peel of the first orange they shared and a cruddy bloody tissue. Not much. He had demolished everything else: the little clay pot he had made for her, the painting of a silver-lined cloud. He rode her bicycle into the river. Mickey burned every letter he had written to her and the box he had made to hold them.

  The note he left said, Forgive me. I talked to your mother while I wrecked that stuff. I don’t know why I did.

  Of course Bird kept it.

  The photograph of the dog in the ragtop, Mickey kept. He kept the photograph Bird took of her mother, newly dead, she had shared with him from shame: Bird’s mother in her bed before the coroner came. She looked terrified. She looked to be screaming, still bleeding from her ears.

  Of all the things Mickey might have kept, he kept snapshots of the dead. Think of that, Bird thinks—and count your stars. Count yourself lucky you survived him.

  Or not. Because wasn’t surviving the worst part? The dreadful onset of the cure? There was nothing you couldn’t get over. You could sorrow all your life, but still you lived, you lived. You hoarded. You flew your mother on a string like a kite.

  Of course it pulled. The kite was enormous. Her mother called down: it was lonely, dying alone.

  But there was always more string to let out, Bird found, to keep from being lifted, to keep her mother lifting away. And Bird was heavy. She felt stuffed with sand when her mother died, the anchor and solace of grief. She couldn’t move; she couldn’t want to. Should she move, Bird moved against a current and the current wore her away. Even sleep wore her away: the dream that her mother still lived. Bird would turn a corner and find her still dying in some darkened room. Bird had forgotten her. She needed peanuts. She smelled of shit. She needed her ears to be cleaned. Daisies, she needed. Tchaikovsky. A nice bowl of kittens and peas.

  I will never die, her mother insisted.

  And died. And died again.

  It would be years before Bird dreamed of her living, the months Bird carried her first child.

  Second child, her mother reminded her, and came to Bird nursing the baby that Mickey and Bird had lost.

  Don’t suffer in silence, her mother insisted.

  Don’t ask is it a boy or a girl.

  Don’t eat around the thing you want most, her mother warned. If it’s pork chop you want, don’t start with peas.

  Her mother sat in a chair and spoke softly. Not until Bird asked to hold the baby did her mother fly up on her string and grow small.

  The spool for the string for the kite was red and shaped to hold as when riding a bike. The dream changed but the spool did not. Bird wore chartreuse or a bra and flip flops. They were seaside, or among the chalky cliffs of the desert, or on the rooftop of Furr’s cafeteria, where Bird has never been. Bird could work that kite, no matter—reel it near to hear her mother whisper, let it out to let her scream.

  Who will die when I die?

  What am I to you?

  Bird carried a rock in her pocket to remember she meant to live: at least she meant to want to.

  I will be your age soon enough, Mother. I want to stay right here.

  Where in the world, her mother asked her, is here?

  She lifted Bird into the blue by the spool.

  I want to stay with Mickey.

  That’s your Mickey down there, watching.

  Bird’s mother flew a loop above him and broke her daughter open on the ridge.

  It was not sand that poured from Bird’s knees as she flew but a thousand tiny kites of herself, as dry and light as leaves. Mickey ran circles to catch them.

  They bedded down together—first night, the night they shimmied up the Brooklyn Bridge.

  He had a flask they drank from, a packet of junk to snort. He rode her home through the dark on her bicycle, Bird on her handlebars shaking, the wet of his breath on her back.

  “Turn here,” she said and he didn’t. He rode her to someplace he knew—a weedy patch on the riverbank, a dirty dark bar on Avenue B with songs he liked on the jukebox.

  Love, love will tear us apart, the song went.

  But it wouldn’t. But it already was.

  There was the way her back dimpled above the belt she wore and the heat of the way she smelled.

  There were her hands, which to Mickey looked borrowed. His hands were shaped like Bird’s hands. Their bodies fit together.

  They danced in the dim reach of the bar in the dance that is like lying together, half a song, the unholy swoon of new humans falling into each other. They would never be more lovely.

  When at last he rode Bird h
ome on her bicycle, Mickey dumped it on a turn swinging off the bridge and they lay in the street laughing, gravel and a spatter of glass driven in under their skin.

  “I love you already,” she told him.

  A car made the turn and missed them.

  He said, “Oh, and I love you.”

  They had knocked the bike out of true and the wheel made a shh, a mother-sound, dependable as a heartbeat, all the way, all the way home.

  Go home, her boy wails when the snowman takes the child’s hand and flies north. Go home, go home, go home.

  He is talking in his sleep down the hall—something about a spoon he needs and one last ravioli—a dream that has lasted all night. For weeks of nights he dreamed his dream of a bad underwater deer.

  He’s a messy sleeper, Bird’s boy. He winds his sheet around his arms and feet and wakes himself by screaming: somebody tied him up. Or he’s up and asleep and walking. He is peeing in the freezer. He opens a drawer in his chest of drawers and pees on his just-laundered clothes.

  Bird’s husband is sleeping softly, his mouth crushed against his pillow. I choose you, she thinks, and moves in. A good man. Dog and hearth and children, the lucky, lucky life they have—a life her mother lived. I choose you.

  Fancy Man. She wants to smack him. She just could—for sleeping, say, while she isn’t. For shedding a hair on her pillow.

  So Mickey moved.

  So what?

  Thought to marry.

  And if he did?

  What if he went ahead and married and lived a life that looked a little like Bird’s life? Lived a lie, she wants to say—it’s not for him.

  Suppose it is: somebody else would be in it. Prairie Lee. Victorine. Not you, Bird. It isn’t you, Bird: you’ve been married a dozen years.

  So why wake to the man, mussed by dreams, the old miserable pinch and burn? Why wake to Tuk and Doll Doll and driving the Drive Away out—that old saw, the only story of them she would tell?

  She used to tell the story to strangers, in a mood—tell it brightly, from a distance, her husband across the room.

  “Three days from Denver to Pueblo,” she said, “and then these two nuts in a Ryder truck—”

  She would catch her husband watching. Was he proud some? Proudsome, pleased? She thought so. Pleased with her and with the part he had played: he had signed her up, smoothed her out.

  Pleased and also sorry: had he not felt that, too?

  Hadn’t he wanted more of her, all the old somebody-elses she had been, the torn-apart feeling she hoards?

  She blows a spider from her husband’s cheek, a tiny golden fleck ascending its silver thread. Silver, the dew. The cows are eating windfall apples—beyond the window, beyond the sandbox and its rusting toys. Bird hung a swing in the tree—a rope with knots her boy jumped from and broke his arm on the first day of school. The rope bends in the wind, moves toward her. Swallows bicker in the eaves.

  Hello, love, she thinks.

  Hello, Mickey.

  She lays her leg across her husband’s knees, the seam in back where he is stitched together; she draws a knuckle up the groove of his spine. Feels the life in him and, reaching, reaches for everyone at once: her girl, and the boy who Mickey was. For Charlie and Jack and Vladimir, she reaches, Virginia and Horace and Fred.

  A dozen years they have passed together. He is a book she once read. A dying painter. A woman waving goodbye in the street.

  Goodbye, love, Bird thinks.

  She feels her lung clap shut. That old sneak cat.

  “Mama, stay awake with me, Mama. I’m afraid to close my eyes.”

  “I can’t sleep, Bird. I’m sorry to wake you.”

  Trouble: she had seen him coming: come here.

  He put his cigarette out in her layered drink and brought her to bed, too jangly to sleep.

  “I keep thinking if I close my eyes I will never open them again. I’m sorry to wake you. I can’t help it. I want to make you proud of me. I want to fuck you until you can’t bear it anymore until you wear down and cry. I should let you sleep, Bird. Little sparrow. I’m sorry to wake you. I keep dreaming you are up on the bridge in the rain and the city is wet and blue. A boat is passing. I can’t see your face. Everything is blue. You’re all blue. It’s beautiful. You are. And I’m in you. I’m in you and the boat is like a ghost of a boat and the stars are like snow but frantic and burning out in your hair.”

  Later, months, weeks, she didn’t know, Mickey gouged at himself with a penknife.

  Asked, “When do I get to kill you?”

  “Soon, won’t be long.”

  How they felt it. He meant it and she did too.

  Lunacy, yes, stupid—but it had them by the throat, this idea, some spangly shock of narcotic they made, oblivion—out of nothing.

  “When do I get to kill you?”

  “What do I get to use?”

  The answers came to them in the bedroom, sprung from the heat of fucking—bed talk, potty talk, not a plan so much as a feeling, needling, the watery sloppy hum and drift a grief in her, unhelpable. Something had to give. They would fly off a bridge, dusk coming down; they would slam the car into a wall. Nothing lasting. A moment’s impulse, three.

  Still an impulse: wasn’t it as good most days, any old day, as intention?

  The long grown list of intention, the hope of how to be.

  Bird keeps grades on herself, the future school marm: a B day, a D day, details her insufficiencies: too late, too late, forgot. Nice try! The costume hung together with straight pins, the sneakers at the bottom of the pool.

  She tries the PTP, the LEC, the LCC—tries service, attagirl—all the ad hoc this and that. Nurses a tree in the churchyard. Nothing pure about it. She is balancing deed with the failure to do, hoping for a wash. She brokers her little mercies, pre-pays against calamity, the F and D minus days—thinks in averages, bigger pictures, the solid and sustainable C.

  Oiled rusty bike chain

  +

  played guitar at All School

  -

  boy sears chin on cookie sheet

  -

  pup breaks neck on stairs

  Bird wants to be caught. Flung out.

  Her husband moans in his sleep, he twitches—a dog chasing squirrels in a dream.

  Bird resorts to a different tally, to the one she keeps against him. For dreaming, for instance, when she isn’t. For drinking the last drop of coffee. He never lets her use his toothbrush, or his 25-cent comb.

  She wants all of it.

  He tells her nothing. Tells her everything. Tells a good joke, his same good joke, and everybody laughs but her. Goofball, high school stories. Mellow man, man of good cheer. Easy to love, happy even asleep—but anything can be wielded. I was happy and look what you did.

  “Did you see what I did? I washed the dishes. I fed the dog. This is me feeding the dog.”

  Bird loves him best in pictures, but what does this mean?

  And why will he not take pictures—with the baby, her boy growing up? The irretrievable life unrecorded.

  “But I do,” he says. “I took a picture. Look there, there you are. There’s your pretty boy. I took that. That’s a nice little picture.”

  She bought a camera for her husband and he lost it in a week with seven shot frames inside.

  Bird tried holding out her camera her arm’s length away and aiming it down at the three of them, flat on their backs in bed. But she was pissy; she pouted, saw it each time: a woman giving grades out, a woman keeping score.

  She’ll get over it, fine. No matter. She will survive and die and her babies will live without a record of who they have been. Just as Bird lives. Doesn’t matter. It is nothing but a life passing, a day smashed to golden shards.

  Love, she thinks, and duration.

  Sacred and narcotic.

  You could fortify yourself against it. Hedge your bets; heed the signs.

  A young man sleeps in a ragtop, for instance. Duct-tapes his sneakers together. His windshield
is a patch of Lucite, stitched in, that whistles and thrums when he drives. There is a bullet in the defrost vent; a sack of bite-sized hamburgers deliquesces in the trunk. There are paw prints, handprints, smudge of a nose on each windowpane, the Naugahyde seat in shreds.

  Think, girl. Read the signs.

  She thinks of pictures they took—Bird of Mickey and Mickey of Bird. Bird slumped over the wheel of a roadster they found rolled into the weeds along the freeway. Her face wrecked, the windows webbed: Mickey’s favorite.

  Bird’s: Mickey afloat above a trampoline, his hair staticked up, a dorsal horn, a boy in a cape, a man shrieking.

  She hears her boy getting up down the hallway.

  May he be a boy always like Mickey was.

  May he wind a strand of hair around his bedpost.

  May he sleep for months in a ragtop with the sumac high and survive it.

  What an awful word—survive, Bird thinks. Sufficient, Bird thinks. Service.

  Your porpoise is a service animal. Sufficiently intelligent to deactivate unwanted bombs.

  This is before or after they are bleeding out their brains through their ears? Fucking Navy. Bird takes a short loop through her well-worn rant against the military-industrial complex—the terrors she scarcely thought of before she brought children into the world.

  “You mean what’s left of the world,” Bird says out loud, and finds her boy at her shoulder saying, “Mama, don’t be mad, Mama. There is pee all over my bed.”

  He bats at her face gently: that’s an apology. Bird kisses his sweaty head. She rises with the baby still at her breast and steps into the moving day.

  Bird is washing her boy’s pissy sheets and stirring oatmeal on the stovetop when the telephone rings again.

  Suzie again.

  “Can’t talk,” Bird says. “I’m called.”

  “You dope,” Suzie says. “I’m checking in on you. You okay? You won’t be able to reach me. I’ll be in the sack all week, sugar. My poet’s up from New Orleans. It’s all cocktails and crème brulee for us. I’m not budging to pick up the phone.”

  “I’ve been warned,” Bird says. “That should do it.”